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Now: The creator of Vooza, "the Spinal Tap of startups." Previously: Employee #1 at 37signals and co-author of the books Rework and Getting Real.
This new animated YouTube logo is super distracting. How are you supposed to concentrate on a video when there’s this flashing static/rainbow thing in the corner? It’s like the site is trying to force you to go fullscreen mode now. If your branding gives customers a headache, it’s not really such great branding.
Update: Apparently it’s a one-day thing to commemorate the change of TV from analog to digital. But still…
Click “Continued” to see the animation.
Continued…We blame bureaucracy for being wasteful and taking too long when things like the Denver International Airport or Boston’s Big Dig arrive years overdue and billions over budget. But it’s not just huge organizations and the government that mess up planning. Everyone does. It’s the “planning fallacy.” We think we can plan, but we can’t.
Studies show it doesn’t matter whether you ask people for their realistic best guess or a hoped-for best case scenario. Either way, they give you the best case scenario. It’s true on a big scale and it’s true on a small scale too.
We just aren’t good at being realistic. We envision everything going exactly as planned. We never factor in unexpected illnesses, hard drive failures, or other Murphy’s Law-type stuff.
If you believe 100% in some big upfront advance plan, you’re just lying to yourself. There’s a good side to this too though: You’re liberated. That messy planning stage that delays things and prevents you from getting real is, in large part, a waste of time. So skip it. If you really want to know how much time/resources a project will take, start doing it.
How the term “trial balloon” originated: The Montgolfiere brothers came up with a design for the hot air balloon but wanted to make sure it would really work before getting in one themselves. So they first released several unmanned trial hot air balloons. Then they sent up several farm animals to make sure the air at higher levels was safe to breathe. After that, they tried a manned expedition.
It’s a smart approach. But in the business world, a lot of people think the opposite is the way to go. They want to launch big. They want a huge PR splash right away. They want the big bang.
Too bad. You don’t need a big bang – slow evolution is what you want. Unless you absolutely must “open wide,” abandon the mass introduction strategy. Instead, launch softly.
Restaurants start off by serving friends and family before they invite the media.
Movie studios use test screenings to fine tune movies. The people behind the scenes know that until you get into the test screenings and see what people really think, you just never know.
Likewise, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock try out jokes in small clubs before hitting arenas.
Authors test out material by writing magazine articles, ebooks, and/or releasing chapters online. Michael Pollan started off an article in the New York Times with these words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Those same words appeared as the main theme of his book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” published a year later.
You don’t have to paint a finished picture before launching. Customers can connect the dots.
Soft launching lets you tweak and revise. You get the word out there and you gauge interest. You know what works and what doesn’t.
Plus, you get to make mistakes while you’re still in the shadows. Messing up in front of a smaller crowd means you’ll be better off when the bright lights eventually do shine upon you.
Big, as a business model (let alone as an expression of the national mood), seems bound for obsolescence.
People want to know how I started Teach For America straight out of college, and honestly, my greatest asset was my inexperience. It proved absolutely critical at many junctures. When I declared in my thesis that I would try to create this corps myself, my thesis adviser pronounced me “deranged.” When he looked at my budget of $2.5 million for the first year, he asked me if I knew how hard it was to raise $2,500, let alone two and a half million dollars. But aided by my inexperience, I was unfazed by these reactions. When school district officials literally laughed at the notion that the Me Generation — this was the label for my generation — would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural communities, their concerns, too, went unheard. My very greatest asset was that I simply did not understand what was impossible.
The Pied Piper of Pay [Forbes] is a piece that profiles David…
You can tell a lot about a culture by the sort of person it ostracizes. David Heinemeier Hansson, 29, a successful tech entrepreneur, is something of an outcast in Silicon Valley. Here are the pronouncements that have earned him his banishment: Companies should not be ashamed to charge for their products. They should expect to be able to make money off their customers. Finally, they can’t use volume to turn losses into profits…
“Startups these days are getting all the wrong lessons,” says Hansson. “[They think] that all that matters are users, that they should take on plenty of debt from venture capital investments because something magical will come along at some point and everything will be okay. But you can’t make up something in bulk that is a losing prospect to begin with. Isn’t that self-evident?”
Read the rest of the piece to see what DHH thinks of Twitter and Facebook.
(Note: There are a few inaccuracies in the piece, most notably that Ruby on Rails is a 37signals product which impacts our financial success. Not so, it is an open source framework.)
Last week we had a 37signals retreat in Kohler, Wisconsin (the company that makes faucets and plumbing fixtures also has a resort). We got to catch up, plan ahead, meet the newest members of the team, took the Kohler factory tour (some pretty amazing stuff happens to get those faucets, tubs, and toilets made), dined at a cabin in the woods, made lots of trips to Sheboygan to eat at the excellent restaurants of chef Stefano Viglietti, and went canoeing.
And by the way, contrary to popular belief, this is NOT how 37signals handles feature requests…
How you do anything is how you do everything. Your “character” or “nature” just refers to how you handle all the day-to-day things in life, no matter how small.
Gizmodo ran a post saying ThinkGeek’s New Dreamcasts Aren’t Looking So New.
According to one Destructoid tipster, that new stock of $100 Dreamcasts offered by ThinkGeek may not be so new after all. His console was “roughed up — the barcode has been scratched, the console’s plastic has gunk on it.”
And here’s the thoughtful response ThinkGeek gave in the comments:
First, a little backstory: We came upon an amazing cache of new-in-box Dreamcasts not too long ago. We had a bunch of units shipped to us to inspect them, and indeed, though the boxes were a little worse for the wear on the outside, the consoles had nary a scratch and even the wire twists that bundled the cables had never been undone. It was like magic—magic that had been hiding in a warehouse, unknown, for years.
So we asked our source from whence these beautiful Dreamcasts came, and they didn’t know—could’ve been a liquidator, or a Circuit City that had closed shop. (Hear that? It’s the sound of a plot thickening.)
But we’d seen them with our own eyes and figured it was best to share our discovery with the world. Hundreds were snatched up quickly and squees were heard ‘round the internets.
So far we’ve had 2 instances of not-so-new-in-box Dreamcasts. The individual who received the one reported here contacted us via email (which never appeared in our inbox, for some reason) and Twitter (through which we’ve taken care of the situation) has already been issued a return shipping label. We’re more than happy to refund him for the Dreamcast as well as shipping.
We’re very sorry about the whole thing—we never meant to ship used Dreamcasts. We know our customers are smarty pants and could tell if they’d been duped with a stale Dreamcast; we’d never get away with taking advantage of you guys, so why would we try?
And now we have 3 options: 1. Stop sharing the gift of new Dreamcasts; 2. Have them all shipped to us and inspect each one individually and then ship back to the warehouse; and 3. Continue spreading the (mostly) untainted Dreamcast love and working with the very few customers who get lemons.
We hope you’ll understand why we’re continuing to offer them on our site (when we get our grubby little paws on more, of course). And again, we apologize to the 2 customers who ended up with what appears to be returned merchandise.
SvN reader Daniel Øhrgaard spotted the exchange and gives ThinkGeek high marks for its response:
ThinkGeek just handled some customer complaints perfectly over on Gizmodo...
My vote: Highest marks for ThinkGeek.
Granted, I’m not among those who bought a Dreamcast from them, so I didn’t harbor any ill will toward them before I read the apology. But even I felt like a (for real) “valued customer” when I read it.
I’ve read many other stories on Gizmodo that’d been updated carried had a link to some company’s response to a widespread issue, but they were just that: links to the apology. For most of those stories, I never bothered reading the company response, because I couldn’t be bothered to go to the company’s home turf to read it. So when I saw “ThinkGeek responds in the comments below” I had to see it; they came to the reader to apologize, giving up the control over content their own site would offer, and allowing the generally bawdy Gizmodo flock to judge them.
As one other commenter said: Respect.
Larry Cheng in “How Can We Double Down?”...
[During an MFG.com board meeting,] Jeff Bezos asked the question, “Is there anything big or small, that is working better than you expected? Is there any where we could double down?” Jeff’s point was that we spend a lot of time focusing on what’s not working in Board meetings (especially in times like these), and not enough time focusing on what is surpassing expectations and how we can “double down” on those areas. Often times the key levers in businesses are found in little things that are really outperforming whether by intention or not (often not, actually). Sometimes these are things that are either adjacent enough or small enough that they wouldn’t make a board presentation or be an obvious discussion point because they’re just seedlings that need to be watered. I appreciate how Jeff wanted to bring these seedlings to the forefront to see if they deserved some real investment.
Reminiscent of Jason’s recent post here about how failure is overrated. What’s working is where the gold is. Focus and learn from that instead of fixating on the negative.
FYI, if you’re not a big blackjack fan already, here’s “doubling down” explained.
