Time for an obligatory ‘predictions’ blog post – I polished off my crystal ball, started a sketchy 900 number (Mister Greg’s Psychic Line), and am here with my first set of predictions. Have a great year everyone!
Time for an obligatory ‘predictions’ blog post – I polished off my crystal ball, started a sketchy 900 number (Mister Greg’s Psychic Line), and am here with my first set of predictions. Have a great year everyone!
Time for something a little new on this blog. I’ve noticed that lots of writers I respect have a weekly roundup of interesting articles from around the web. Rather than truly innovate, I’m going to steal a page from them and start doing my own roundups. Here are some of my favourite articles from the last week:
First off, on July 28, antivirus maker Avast released an interesting article on the state of rootkit infections. Their findings really shouldn’t be much of a surprise – pirated versions of Windows XP are a major attack vector for rootkit infections. This simple (and fairly obvious) fact leaves me wondering something very important – why don’t the people who use pirated versions of Windows XP switch to a modern (free and more secure) operating system like Ubuntu?
I have been closely following the Airbnb saga for the past week. It began when a relatively old article reached the front page of Hacker News, continued through some awkward TechCrunch coverage, and culminated in a little blowup between Paul Graham and Michael Arrington. I am a huge fan of both Mr. Graham and Mr. Arrington, so reading them spar was difficult, yet utterly fascinating. Then, another similar case came forward and finally, Airbnb did the right thing. Founders – this whole episode is a wonderful learning experience!
Chris Dixon (the co-founder of Hunch/Founder Collective) released a really wonderful article called “The downside of accelerated investment decisions“. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, getting a quick term sheet from an investor sounds like a dream, but Dixon shows how going too fast is bad for both parties. I admire any person who can take my beliefs, urinate on them, and leave me feeling a whole lot smarter for the process.
Finally, my favourite webcomic released an incredibly poignant strip about cancer. Randall Munroe’s (the author of XKCD) fiance was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. My family has been ravaged by cancer and, frankly, this strip is the first time that I have ever read anything that has made any sense. Mr. Munroe nailed what it is like seeing people you love suffer with that vile disease, and for that, I thank him.
I want you to imagine yourself in the following situation:
You released a web application six weeks ago. You subscribe to leading theories of startup success, meaning that you released quickly and iterate even faster. Over the six weeks your application has been live, you have pushed out 18 major updates. You introduced the application on Hacker News two weeks ago and got a wonderful response with an upsurge in traffic, but most importantly, you are discovering that many of those users keep coming back. Moreover, when you analyze your analytics, you discover two things – your mentions on social channels are constantly increasing, and your traffic from social channels is increasing just as quickly.
An enviable position, don’t you think? You have attracted users who keep coming back and your application is already generating buzz after only six weeks of operations. However, you are starting to get emails from customers wondering if you are ever going to release a mobile app. What do you do?
On Saturday night, I was sitting at home chilling out on Hacker News, when I came across a particularly interesting article. Titled “Why social marketing doesn’t work“, this article (by Tim Harford who is an author/columnist for the Financial Times), looks at social marketing with a very critical eye.
Social media marketing does not work and I am very happy that Harford came out and said this on his blog. Sites like Twitter are awash with ‘social media gurus’ who dish out questionable advice laced in SMS speak. Marketing types are falling over themselves to secure social media presences, major brands are spending huge amounts of money, and nobody is being terribly successful. So, why do brands keep putting money into social marketing?
Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine why so many business owners choose to host their own email. Try as i might, I can’t figure out a single economic benefit to a small organization hosting its own email. About six weeks ago, I set up email hosting for a small organization I started up. Rather than hosting in myself, I chose to let Google host it for me. So, I set up a Google Apps account, spent ten minutes setting everything up/verifying that I own the domain, pointed my MX records and…done.
Now, I don’t have to update my on mail server software, nor do I have to set up any backups – Google handles all of that for me. That leaves me a whole lot of extra time to deal with important things – like building cool products, attracting users, and learning from them.
Business is about allocating resources – I would rather allocate my resources to important people like my users than to administrative tasks on a mail server!
While checking out Hacker News, I came across an article by the founders of a company called Grinnit. Titled “Five Takeaways from Folding a Startup“, this article was seriously thought provoking and got me thinking about my own failed startup. I have been carrying the ghost of my own failed startup around for three years now and I think this gives me a great opportunity to exorcise it.
I went back to University in my late 20s after a fairly long hiatus away. When I returned, I realized that several things had changed. First, I was usually one of the oldest people in every class. This meant that my peers were usually the professionals who were taking classes to upgrade their skills or for pure recreation. Second, because of my age, I found it easier to make friends with grad students and professors instead of undergrads. Third, I realized that I was a little too old to be on student loans – the experience of incredible poverty (after having worked full-time for several years) was a huge shock to my system.