I have seen so many young entrepreneurs and intelligent, experienced engineers come through the door with “great products that will change the way people and businesses function” and most of them fail. They fail because the mentality towards what a business should be and how it should be run is different now. Years ago when you opened a business you had fixed costs and you hustled each month to cover bills and grow so that you could do more than just cover bills soon. Technology is not an industry, in my opinion, it is a tool that is used to make an industry more efficient and effective… now I know this means that the production of these tools is an industry, but how many companies today really create tools and how many create cool crap that is dead in 6 months?
Investors use terms like “sexy” and “viral” and 22 year old CEOs use buzz terms like scalable, robust and enterprise but there is no meat to anything anyone is saying. No one asks “how do you make money, how quickly, how much, what are your CPCA…” oh and 22 and you are a CEO… really… get over yourself…
The illusion of success, the delusion of being the next Zuckerberg… are we fostering great minds or setting the next generation up for failure and disappointment?
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In this episode: Jason discusses his new CEO office hours and the most surprising call he’s received so far. David takes us behind the scenes of Haystack, the recently launched 37signals site that brings together web designers and clients. The discussion touches on why the site was created, how it works, and changes made to initial feedback. Then Jason discusses how nature can make you a better designer.
When’s the last time you read your site or web app aloud? Not just the big text blocks and the about page, but the headlines, field labels, buttons, error messages, and confirmation emails?
Kelly Flatley and Brendan Synnott were two high school friends who wanted to sell their homemade nutty granola. So they launched Bear Naked in 2002. Here’s the story of how they landed their first big account:
Our first big retail break was landing an account with Stew Leonard’s, the four-store Connecticut grocery chain. For months we bugged the buyer via phone. He ignored us. To get his attention, we decided to bring him breakfast one day.
We woke up at 6 a.m. and dressed in Bear Naked T-shirts. We borrowed china from Kelly’s mom, which we used to display fresh fruit, our granola, and Stew Leonard’s brand of yogurt. We were the first car in the lot at the chain’s headquarters. After we climbed the stairs to the office, the receptionist told us the buyer was on vacation. We were deflated!
But then, as we were walking away, we recognized Stew Leonard Jr. “Stew!” we yelled. “We brought you breakfast!”
He seemed impressed by our youth and enthusiasm and asked us into his office. He said he was used to brokers pitching 55 products at a time and that it was refreshing to meet young kids so eager to sell a bag of granola. After talking with us for two hours, he said he wanted to help us out. He decided to place our granola in his stores.
The article provides good inspiration for how you have to DIY it starting out. For the first few years, the duo ran the company out of Kelly’s parents’ home, bought ingredients at CostCo when distributors wouldn’t fill their undersized orders, crashed triathlons to give out samples, and worked as the company’s distributors, producers, and kitchen cleaners.
A great way to figure out the weak spots in your product is to demo it live in front of an audience (not just a couple people at an office). Talk through it and read the UI out loud as you click around and do stuff. You’ll notice all sorts of little things that can be improved.
Lately I’ve been seeing more speakers hop up on stage at a conference and say “I didn’t prepare anything so I’m just gonna wing it.” Or they’ll let you know that they’re “Sorry about the quality of the slides – I put them together quickly on the flight over here this morning.”
I’m all for winging it, but when you say “I’m not really prepared” in front of an audience you’re showing them the ultimate disrespect.
People take days off of work, spend hundreds on a conference ticket, travel for thousands of miles, and pay hefty rates for flights and hotels to come hear you speak, and you tell them you didn’t have time to prepare a talk? What’s cool about that? The audience is busy too, but they found time to come to the conference. You can’t find time to properly prepare a presentation for them?
Now… Some of these unprepared talks have been wonderful. The spontaneity is great, and if a speaker knows their topic they don’t really have to prepare in the traditional sense. So it’s not the quality of the talks, it’s the qualifier. If you aren’t prepared, or if you hastily put together your presentation, just don’t tell the audience. Just perform at your best and keep the pity and embarrassment to yourself.
UI that looked sexy in Photoshop almost always looks overdesigned when we try it for real in the browser. Here’s a hypothesis. Simple and useful designs just don’t seem good enough when they are dead pixels. They need to be brought to life before they can be appreciated. Until that happens we overcompensate with garnish.
Danish designer Jens Risom, who designed the first-ever Knoll chair, built a gorgeous weekend getaway home that was profiled years ago in Life Magazine. Check out the shots of the interior too (starts halfway down at linked page).
Last week we launched Haystack, a new way for clients and web designers to find each other. We designed early concepts for Haystack this past spring/summer. I thought you’d be interested to see some of the designs that we didn’t use, but helped get us to the final launch.
The Webdev Pages
Initially the idea was to base Haystack on the Yellow Pages. Designers, Programmers, and Agencies could create a free text-only listing. There would be multiple tiers of ad space that would sit prominently above those free listings. The consensus: Too broad: let’s focus on Web Designers. Not visual enough.
Company Cards
The design started to gel once we decided to focus on Web Designers. We created the company card. A quick glance gives you an idea about the designer’s work, location, and typical budget range. The company cards in a grid looked great, but all the cards were the same. We needed a way to differentiate Pro accounts from Free accounts.
