My favorite products (2017)

Inspired by Steve Schlafman’s list of favorite products, I’m going to start keeping tabs on my favorite products on a yearly basis. As a product nerd, I’m always checking out new products and evaluating them against the tried-and-true products in my life. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve over a few years. Which products stick, and why products get replaced? We’ll see!

Consumer software products

The easiest way to see this is via my home screen. I’ve recently been carrying around both an iPhone 6s and OnePlus One, so we’ve got two of them!

#Homescreen2016

Homescreen 2016

• Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive – Absolutely necessary for both work and life. Couldn’t function without these. Google Search goes here too.
• Slack – My favorite work-related app. It may be the only work-related app where I routinely use the word “delight” while describing it.
• Trello, JIRA – Task management tools always feel burdensome and clunky. Is it just the nature of the problem? Still, I couldn’t do my job without these.
• Facebook – Absolutely necessary as a social utility.
• Whatsapp – My connection to loved ones.
• Twitter – My favorite app. I spend more time on Twitter than any other app.
• Timehop – This recently popped back into my life. After years of social media activity, Timehop is now super valuable. It is pure nostalgia. However, I agree with the many current 1-star reviews — not a fan of the new design.
• Snapchat – Authentic, fleeting, fun. I admire how quickly Snapchat innovates, and how they’ve pioneered a new form of design that is truly native to mobile. I only wish more of my friends used Snapchat.
• Venture News – A personal side project that surfaces trending links in the VC community. Under the hood, I’ve hacked in some hidden features which I should make public one day 🙂
• Instagram – A visual magazine that is beautiful and easy to use.
• Pinterest – My go-to for recipe search.
• Product Hunt – Major FOMO, all day, every day. So many cool things being built.
• Panda – One-stop shop for Hacker News, Inbound, Growth Hackers, Designer News, and Dribbble on mobile.
• Pocket – Satisfies the packrat in me. I have to admit that I rarely go back to these links though.
• Live BART – The perfect simple, single-use-case app.
• Yelp – I’d welcome a better alternative, but until then, Yelp is for the foodie in me. And man do I love food.
• Flixster – Easiest way to find movies playing nearby.
• Waze – I trust it will save me time on any drive.

Other consumer software products

• Momentum – Helps for maintaining focus, but I primarily use it because it makes my new tabs beautiful.
• Github – Best place for code to live.
• vim – THE text editor.
• Medium – I’ve found myself moving some Twitter time over to Medium. It is becoming a daily destination for long-form content.
• Stitcher – So many great podcasts.
• Chrome / Safari – Chrome on desktop and Android, Safari on iOS.
• Pandora – Most people I know prefer Spotify. I like having a few themed radio stations and then just letting them play.
• Hype Machine: Random trending stuff.
• Shazam: When a good new song pops on the radio… or when a familiar song comes on, but I just can’t remember the name or artist.
• Netflix – Stranger Things, House of Cards, Bloodline.. Netflix is killing it with exclusive content.
• Hulu – When I can’t wait for the whole season of something to appear on Netflix. I’ve been using Hulu less frequently this year because binge watching on Netflix is too good.
• HBO GO – Westworld. Game of Thrones.
• Showtime Anytime – Homeland.
• Lyft / Uber – Almost interchangeable, but every driver I talk to says that they like Lyft more. So, if the cost is in the same ballpark, I’ll almost always Lyft.
• Airbnb – I can’t even remember that last time I booked a hotel aside from recent weddings.

Consumer hardware products

• iPhone 6s – So nice, although it has battery life issues 😦
• Apple Watch – Most helpful for the notifications, but the killer app is still unclear. Folks say fitness tracking, but I hate working out with a watch on.
• Macbook Pro – Has been my go-to laptop for 10 years but the keyboard is getting worse with each iteration. The newest Macbook’s keyboard is so terrible that I refuse to “upgrade” to it. The missing ESC key is also no good. Perhaps it is time to give Lenovo a try.
• Apple TV (4rth generation) – Makes TV great again.
• Apple iPod Nano 6th generation – For running. I don’t like wearing or carrying any devices when I run. This little clip-on device is perfect.
• OnePlus One – My Android test device. Great for testing, and getting acquainted with that other mobile OS.
• Bose Soundlink Mini II – I always take this when I travel for on-demand tunes.

Physical products

• MUJI pen and notepad – High enough quality that I enjoy using them, yet cheap enough where they feel relatively disposable. Pens and notepads should be used generously, and I don’t like when they feel too nice or I’m unlikely to use them as much as I should (I have this problem with Moleskine notebooks).
• DSPTCH Bookpack – After 9 years with my Northface backpack, I replaced it with the Bookpack. I needed a backpack for everyday commuting, and this is everything I need. Simple. Solid construction. Just big enough to fit a laptop, notebook, a few books, an umbrella, and a thin hoodie. Nice.
• Davek Solo umbrella – Got it in an online sale 6-7 years ago and it feels as good as ever. Built to last with a lifetime warranty.
• Rain Design mStand – Is there a better laptop stand? Still searching for a cordless keyboard and mouse that I love.
• Ray Ban Aviator Classic (Silver) – Love these. Hoping to add Snap Spectacles here next year!
• American Giant Classic Full Zip Hoodie – Heard the buzz about this hoodie years ago and ignored the hype. After trying one on this year, I get it. This is a good hoodie. I wear it every day.
• ECCO Helsinki shoes – I’ve gone through pairs of these for at least 10 years. Comfortable, slip-on, and don’t look too bad.
• Rainbow Single Layer sandals – Terrible for a week, and then the most comfortable pair of sandals ever.
• ASICS Gel-Cumulus 18 – Simple, cushioned, no support. Just what I need in a running shoe.

Newsletters

• Axios AM – Currently, my favorite newsletter.
• The Lefsetz Letter – This guy just gets media, music, and culture. He also writes with attitude. I don’t always agree, but I respect the point of view. Always a good read.
• Mattermark Daily – Nick Frost does an excellent job of curating a few reads every day. Probably the email newsletter that I most frequently open.
• Data Driven Daily: Organized, small nuggets of data-driven wisdom. It is like someone is writing a seminal book on being a data-driven, and sharing it small section at a time.
• The Skimm – Fun and informing.

Blogs

• Stratechery – I subscribed finally subscribed this year. Great insight and commentary.
• Benedict Evans – Insightful. Also, subscribe to the newsletter.
• AVC – A classic. The daily posts and engaged community make it one of the best places for water cooler talk in the startup community.

…besides that, I get a smattering of blog posts on Twitter and Venture News

Podcasts

• This Week in Startups – Jason is my favorite interviewer in tech.
• Reboot – I love how Jerry touches on the personal and psychological side of tech. Given the need the atmosphere of always needing to be “absolutely killing it”, this stuff is absolutely necessary.
• 20 Minute VC – Great quick listens for the commute.
• The Tim Ferriss Show – Interesting lifehacker-ish stuff.

Hello, Venture News

I have to admit it: I’m a news junky. I’m addicted to my Twitter timeline, RSS feed, and often frequent the comment sections of Hacker News, Quora, Reddit, AVC, etc. I love it all. There is so much great stuff out there.

My news habit comes with great rewards. Building startups is such a difficult task, it helps to be a sponge and soak in the knowledge people are sharing across product, design, development, growth, marketing, community, data science, analytics, industry trends, etc. Everyday, I come across awesome stuff that alters my perspective, teaches me valuable lessons, or even solves my current problem of the day!

The only problem is that all of this requires a significant amount of time and effort. Let’s take Twitter as an example. It takes time to learn how Twitter works. It takes time to find the right people to follow, as well as discover who to unfollow. And, it takes time to sift through 1000+ tweets for the golden nuggets that invariably appear. RSS, HN, Quora, and Reddit are different, but time consuming in other ways.

So how do I keep the rewards, but save myself the time and effort?

A simple experiment.

This summer, while rifling through ideas and hacks with my friend Leslie in the Pejman Mar Summer Founders Program, we stumbled across something. Among the hacks was a little tool to discover frequently-shared links by 300+ venture capitalists on Twitter. It started super simple, but proved useful as an instant way to capture the daily conversation in the venture capital community.

We hopped into Gmail and sent the top 10 links of the day to two people at Pejman Mar. The next day, after positive reviews from our sample set of two, we created a Mailchimp account and began adding more friends, colleagues, and advisors to the mailing list. After playing around with so many ideas, it was cool to be able to send out this daily email that people we knew enjoyed.

In the following days and weeks, people began trickling into the mailing list from word of mouth. Our friends continually let us know that they loved the email, and wanted us to keep them coming. New users would email in to tell us how it covered much of their startup news needs. Mailchimp analytics showed us awesome email open and click through rates.

Great! So, why not make this the start of a thing?

Venture News

We registered a domain at http://www.venturenews.co, and put up our mailing list signup, as well as a live version of the links. Soon after that, Chris Messina posted Venture News to Product Hunt, which was relatively well received.

What now? Leslie and I are experimenting on the newsletter and on the website. We’re balancing new product features, talking with subscribers, and developing a broader vision for the future. It’s exciting, and feels like the seed of a news experience that includes just the gold nuggets without requiring much time or effort.

If you’re interested in a quick fix of startup news with minimum hassle, please give Venture News a spin. Even better, sign up for the mailing list to get a curated daily digest delivered directly to your inbox. Hopefully we can help simplify your daily tech startup news habit 🙂

 

If Twitter was your personal newspaper

Since Twitter has gone public, we’ve frequently heard about their growth problems; in particular, their trouble converting new users into active users. These problems aren’t difficult to believe. As a new user, what do you tweet about? With zero followers, why begin tweeting? And, who do you follow? Your timeline is useless until you follow enough of the right people.

I’ve been mulling over this problem for fun, and thought I’d play armchair quarterback for a blog post.

Back to basics: what is Twitter?

First, it is important to understand the core product that is Twitter. What is it? Some might call it a social network. Others might call it a micro-blogging platform. These might have been somewhat accurate in the early years, but at scale, I believe Twitter to be something else.

Twitter is the world’s democratized newswire.

Anyone can add to the newswire by tweeting. And anyone read the newswire by following users who tweet.

From newswire to newspaper.

There’s just one problem with being the world’s newswire: most people have little to no use for a newswire.

Most people don’t create news to add to a newswire. And, most people don’t keep up with real-time news. This presents a big problem for Twitter. The only way to grow is provide value to a mass audience, and in the history of news, the newswire has never been widely used by the masses.

The good news for Twitter is that the masses do want the news: they just want an easily accessible form of the news. They want a great newspaper. Or a great news report on the TV.

If Twitter understand this, the next steps are clear: Twitter needs to become the world’s best personal newspaper.

Twitter power-users might say that Twitter is already their personal newspaper. I would be inclined to agree. I check it everyday and use it as my personal newspaper. But if that was the goal of the current product, Twitter would be doing a poor job of it.

The New York Times, Twitter style.

As a fun thought exercise, lets imagine a Twitter-like New York Times experience:

1. A friend raves about their version of the NYT. You go online to check it out, and can’t read it.
2. You subscribe to an empty paper, and are prompted to follow your favorite reporters and columnists.
3. You are given a reverse-chronological feed of stories, and need to figure out what is important for yourself.

Sound like a terrible newspaper experience?

A Twitter that could be.

Fortunately, these points lead directly to product suggestions:

1. Let us see other newspapers. If I have a friend that loves Twitter, I want to know why. The easiest way to do that is to let me see what my friend sees.
2. Let us subscribe to someone else’s newspaper. If I think my friend’s Twitter feed is interesting, I’d like to start with it. If I’m into startups, and find that @pmarca has an interesting newspaper, I’d like to merge it into my newspaper.
3. Tell us what matters. If there are a few important stories, tweets, or tweet-storms from the past 24 hours, I want them to be easily accessible.

And this is just the beginning; the newspaper analogy can be taken further. As an example, The New York Times has various sections including International, Technology, Weather, Sports, etc. Perhaps my personal newspaper should have sections for my interests. These might be generalized Twitter lists, or something else.

Obviously, these are high level suggestions. Designing specific mechanisms for enabling these interactions isn’t trivial. For example, suggestion 2 might change how following works on Twitter, potentially breaking Twitter’s follow limits and increasing follow spam. Suggestion 3 would change Twitter’s relationship with some apps built on top of Twitter (which has always been a shaky relationship anyways).

Twitter for non-tweeters.

In a recent interview, Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, acknowledges this, saying that it is OK for users not to tweet (excerpted below).

Farhad Manjoo: Do you ever meet people who don’t use it or don’t know why they would use it? What is your pitch to them?

Dick Costolo: I meet people who way, “Oh, I don’t tweet.” I think there’s still a misconception that the reason they’d sign up is to tweet. When I meet then, I tell them, “No, you don’t have to.”

Twitter seems like they are beginning to understand the importance of the news consumption experience, although they haven’t been good getting this across, and they haven’t been good about designing for it.

There is one startup seems to get it. Their product isn’t glitzy, fast, or beautiful, but it solves a need. Nuzzel takes your Twitter account, and generates a daily newspaper of frequently shared links from the people that you follow. This is great for Twitter users who are busy and can’t keep up with the barrage of tweets in their timeline every day.

The Nuzzel landing page

If you check out their home page (above), you’ll also see that Nuzzel lets you see the links frequently shared within other people’s newsfeeds (just like suggestion 1 earlier).

If I were Twitter, I would think about acquiring Nuzzel.

On the limits of constrained media and self expression

After writing my last post on easing content creation, I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about constrained media.

Here is the excerpt that got me thinking (with the most salient part of it bolded):

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

• Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
• Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
• Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
• Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you follow this line of thought, it naturally leads to some interesting questions. Are there limits to constrained media? At what point do you lose the potential for infinite self expression?

Coincidentally, the YO app has just recently exploded and raised $1.2M. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is a stupidly simple app: press a contact’s name, and the app will send the a push notification which says ‘YO’. Did I mention that it is stupidly simple?

Whatever you may think about it, the YO app is gaining traction and gaining in usage. And from a constrained media perspective, it is fascinating. The YO app is about constrained as you can get from media creation. It is effectively a 1-bit creation app. You either get a ‘yo’, or you don’t.

So what are the limits of self expression for a single bit of information?

It turns out that there still aren’t any limits: the potential for self expression is still infinite. Why? Because all of the context around the ‘yo’ matters: the sender, the receiver, the timing, and the situation.

A ‘yo’ could mean:

• Yo, whats up?
• Are you free?
• I’m free now.
• (from your SO) Love you — just thinking about you.
• (from your annoying friend who send you 50 yo’s today) I’m going to continue bugging the shit out of you
• (after a date, from a friend) How was that date last night?
• (after a date, from the date) I had a good time. Would like to see you again.
• (a week after a date, from the date) Why haven’t you called me back?
• you could go on and on varying people and situations…

This is exciting.

The Internet has been around for quite a while and we are still inventing new ways to create content and express ourselves. On one end of the spectrum, we have apps like Medium and Storehouse who are letting users create elaborate stories using multimedia. At the other end of the spectrum we have apps like YO. And in between, there is a ton of possibilities.

When it comes to content and self expression, there are no limits.

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Photo credit: paintingsthatmove

Content creation for all: 8 ways to simplify online publishing

 

The World Wide Web enables publishing at an unprecedented scale. Anyone can create content, and any piece of content can be instantaneously distributed to anyone in the world.

Pretty awesome, right?

There is just one thing: although content creation has never been easier, the number of people who create is surprisingly small. This has become known as the 1% rule: 1% of people create the content, 99% of people consume.

There isn’t anything wrong with the 1% rule, but it isn’t ideal. The web enables everyone to have a voice, yet 99% of people don’t take advantage of it. If more people created content online, we would have more shared perspectives, more communication, and in general, more people connecting over their passions and interests. You have to believe that the world would be a better place.

Content creation should be easier, and fortunately, it can be. Seemingly small product design decisions can make a big impact for encouraging content creation.

As a thought experiment, let us start with this blog post. Long form blogging turns out to be a particularly difficult form of content creation. If we study what makes this post difficult to create, we can uncover several ways to simplify and ease content creation.

 

1. Strip away identity.

If you look at the top of this blog, you’ll see my real name. Do you know how difficult it is to write under my real name? I’m afraid of publicly being wrong, sounding like an idiot, or even worse, coming off as a complete jackass.

If we separate my real identity from my online identity, writing becomes easier. I become less fearful of what others think, and may write things that I otherwise wouldn’t.

Historically, handles (or user names) have been used for anonymity. They were used back in the days of IRC and forums, and are still used today on many popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Handles help with anonymity, but don’t ensure it. As time goes by, users leak information which can often be pieced together. With enough time, a motivated third party may learn the real identity behind a handle.

You could go further with anonymity by dissolving the idea of an online identity. For example, Secret uses transient handles. You have an identity, but it is a weak identity, a random icon that lives within a single conversation. Or, you could go all the way and completely dissolve online identity (e.g., Startups Anonymous).

The more you strip away identity, the easier it gets to create content about anything. And the more honest people get. It isn’t surprising some of the juiciest secrets are surfaced in anonymous social networks.

 

2. Constrain the audience.

This blog is public. That means that anyone anywhere in the world can read any bit of this blog and catch me looking like an idiot. As I continue to write, the chances of looking like an idiot increases. Doesn’t sound too good, huh?

Writing for the world is hard. There are things I will publicly announce to the world on this blog or on Twitter, but it is a small subset of the things that are on my mind. If we constrain the audience to my Facebook friends, things get easier. I’m more likely to share my current status. If we limit the audience my close friends and family on Whatsapp, I may share a rumor, a racy joke, or what is actually on my mind.

Audience matters, and the more comfortable the audience is, the easier it is to create honest and authentic content.

 

3. Constrain the media format.

The content in this blog is unconstrained. A post may be of arbitrary length and include any combination of images, videos, and text.

The unconstrained nature of a blog post makes it flexible and expressive, but also brings up many questions for content creators. How long should a post be? Should I add images? How many images? Where should they be placed? What about a video? Or a GIF? Should I have split this post into two posts or leave it as one? There are many questions to ask, and each question makes it less likely that the ‘publish’ button will be pressed.

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

• Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
• Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
• Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
• Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you can simplify the media format while still allowing for infinite self expression, it is probably a win.

 

4. Remove the feeling of permanent publishing.

Most bloggers have a complex relationship with the ‘publish’ button. I definitely do. The button is the source of accomplishment (it feels great to ship a post into the real world!), but it is also a source of stress.

Blog posts feels final in two ways.

First, publishing a blog post feels like a one-time action. Once I hit that ‘publish’ button, it gets sent out to the blogosphere to RSS, my WordPress followers, and email subscribers. Most likely, if it is going to be read, it will be read at this point. Later on, someone may stumble upon it through a Google search, but old blog posts quickly loses interest as well as discoverability on the Internet. Second, the post feels final because it kind of is final. Once it gets cached in a search engine, or archived by archive.org, it is accessible forever.

Removing the feeling of publishing makes content creation much easier, and there are several ways to do this.

The first way has already been mentioned in (2) constraining the audience. A Facebook startus or a Whatsapp message doesn’t feel like publishing because it is relatively private (compared to this blog post).

Second, you can also remove by feeling of publishing by encouraging works-in-progress. In college, I used to manually write HTML for websites. I wouldn’t have any problem leaving my work online for people to see because it was a work-in-progress. Wikis are the same way. You can easily add to them because it is expected that the content will be edited/removed at some point in the future.

Third, you can delete by design. This has become a big thing with ephemeral content. Snapchat and Frankly are two great examples here; your content lives for only a few seconds, and then it disappears. Or, it feels like it disappears. I would bet that the content lives on their servers forever, but what matters is the ephemeral feeling.

 

5. Enable references to existing work.

This post includes original content. Original content is difficult to create.

You know what is easier to create? Existing content.

It sounds a little funny, but people do this everyday sharing links on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Or, sharing images on Pinterest, imgfave, weheartit, etc. Or quotes from other websites.

“Creating” such content isn’t as much creating as it is identifying with content. There is so much content out there on the web, and more gets churned out on a daily basis. While we consume existing content, it isn’t difficult to find something that we identify with and want to share.

It turns out there is an extra big benefit to sharing existing content: it is simple from an interaction standpoint. Websites have employed one-click buttons for resharing, reblogging, repinning, etc.

 

6. Add context.

This post started with an empty text input field. There was no context. Just an intimidating blank canvas.

Creating content within a vacuum is difficult. Adding context makes creation easier.

A common way to create context is to add a prompt, such as an image to caption or a URL to comment on. Creating content within a context tends to be an emotional response, a sign of agreement/disagreement, or a perspective/comment. Sites like Quora, Quibb and Reddit lets users create prompts for other users to react to. Sites like Pinterest and Tumblr let users write a note within the context of an image, video, etc.

Oftentimes, a reaction to a prompt becomes another prompt. For example, a message which requires a response. Or a comment that invites a reply.

 

7. Constrain reactions of others.

Allowing others to comment on your content can be intimidating. Unconstrained commenting allows anyone to come along and shit on your thoughts.

Because of this, it is often a good idea to constrain the reactions of others. Products do this in different ways. Quibb constrains its membership, only allowing vetted members to comment. Secret constrains comments to your friends and friends of friends, effectively removing the vast majority of trolls on the Internet. Tumblr is designed to encourage likes and doesn’t emphasize comments. Medium and many other blogging platforms require comments to be OK’ed by the original poster. Some bloggers implement a timeout functionality where the comments section for posts become closed after a fixed number of days.

Most people enjoy thoughtful comments and reactions, but this is the Internet, and there be trolls everywhere. Finding a way to limit reactions to content can be a big win.

 

8. Watch the content container.

This blog post doesn’t exist on it’s own: it lives within a blog called ‘On life and startups’.

Blogging isn’t easy. If you’ve ever started a blog, you’ll know friction involved here. There are a lot of question involved with creating a blog. Which platform should I use? What should the tagline of the blog be? Will the tagline be too restricting? Should I blog about everything on my mind, or specific topics? How often should I update the blog? What if I stop writing? What if I run out of ideas?

Giving users a single container often has these problems. For example, I have the same problems on Twitter. My twitter stream has become the startup version of Alex. I don’t share many other things on there, even though I have other interests in my life outside of startups.

One approach is to give users multiple containers. A great example is Pinterest, which gives users the ability to create multiple boards. The boards allow a user to be their full selves. They can share DIY stuff in one board, good recipes in another, and their favorite infographics in yet another board.

Another approach is to free containers from user accounts. Medium makes posts and collections feel independent. I can curate multiple collections, and my posts can be syndicated on all collections that want to contain them.

Yet another approach is to simply free content from containers. Secret does this by making each secret independent. Secrets don’t live within a user profile. And since user identities only exist within a single secret, all secrets feel independent.

It may seem like a small thing, but the relationship between the user, content, and the container makes a difference when it comes to content creation.

 

Enable content creation, change the world.

Did you notice a trend throughout this post?

Some of the largest and most successful social media sites are defined by their methods for simplifying content creation. Twitter is defined by its 140-character tweets. Pinterest is defined by allows users to curate multiple collections of images. Snapchat is defined by images that self-destruct. Medium has been purposefully vague about intentions, but it is clear that it changes the relationship between users, content, and collections.

One of the biggest promises of the web is that is allows anyone to publish. Anything that makes this process easier is a huge win for the world.

Have some other ideas on how to simplify content creation? I would love to hear them in the comments.

Better yet, build the idea and get it out there. If you discover a new way to simplify publishing, or create a new combination from the examples above, you just might change the world.

 

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Photo credit: want2scrap

All that matters..

 

Pretty awesome huh?

It is funny how all that matters in many products is the feeling of progress.. the feeling of leveling up. It doesn’t have to actually mean anything. It just needs to feel meaningful.

And the best way to indicate progress is a number:

• Your like count
• Your follower count
• Your karma score
• Your experience points
• …whatever…

Gamification baby!

Now, please don’t mind me. I’m going to hit the publish button, and see if the follower count goes up on this blog 😉

People do all kinds of awesome, exciting, inspiring stuff

Amazing.. watched all 10 minutes and my heart was racing.

The only thing they missed was someone in front of their computer 😉

Blogging everything you know

I came across this awesome and hilarious picture today on Twitter. After laughing a bit at the picture, I immediately began thinking about blogging.

Specifically, I was thinking about bloggers in the startup world. Is it possible that with the seemingly endless supply of startup-related blog posts, the best secrets to success are still unpublished? It makes some sense, right? If you have knowledge that puts you at a competitive advantage, why would you risk that advantage by revealing it in a blog post?

My guess is that for the most part, this isn’t true in the startup world.

Founders, entrepreneurs, and VCs could write everything they know, and it probably wouldn’t hurt their chances of success when compared to others. One, startups are all different; there is no recipe for success. Two, even with the best advisors/mentors, startups still seem to have a ridiculously high failure rate. Three, most startup advice isn’t 100% right or 100% wrong. There is a gray area, and they may apply in certain situations but not in others. Four, entrepreneurs tend to be the kind of people who forge their own path. They have their own ideas, vision, and strategy. Even if provided “perfect” advice, many probably wouldn’t follow it exactly.

There is probably more to say, but you get my point.

I’m not sure how to feel about this as a blogger. It means that no matter what I write, it probably won’t hurt my chances of success. But it also means that no matter what I write, there is no guarantee that the writing will be useful to others. Chances are, what I write is flat-out wrong, or wrong for many people.

I suppose that is OK.

Earlier, I wrote about my reasons for why I write. In retrospect, I still very much agree with it.

I write for myself. I can’t guarantee that what I say is right. And I can’t guarantee it is right for the reader. But I can guarantee that the thought process is useful to myself.

Kid President: Letter to a person on their first day here.

There is something awesome about hearing wise life advice from a cute little kid.

FYI: If you would like more writing, please bear with me a moment. I don’t want to spam email followers with more than one email a day, but am experimenting with what it feels like to share great content on different platforms (specifically, comparing this to remixing this content on Soulmix).

Optimist Prime :)

Don’t have much to add here: was a huge Transformers fan when I was young and this is just golden 🙂