This was one of my favorite books 2009. The book was written in 2002 by Adrian Slywotzky. It’s an unusual business book, written in a storytelling style.
It’s a classic teacher-student story where we get to follow a young man being tutored by an experienced entrepreneur. A very light read filled with nuggets of wisdom.
The Art of Profitability januari 21, 2010
Browsing. Searching. Recommending. januari 3, 2010
Yesterday I tweeted a little prediction about the coming decade.
(I also posted it on Hacker News and a good discussion followed.)
This got me thinking about the web and what is the default action taken by most people on the web. The thing people do when they’re on the web. Of course people do many things on the net but there’s one activity that’s sort of the main task and this activity has changed over the lifetime of the web. The company that best provides the platform for this activity is the company that defines the web at the time.
I think you can simplify things a bit by saying that during the first few years of the web the main activity was browsing then it became searching and now we’re moving in to a web where what you do is recommending stuff to other people (or follow other people’s recommendations).
The era of browsing was the era of the portals and the browsers. The start page of the browser was the place to be. Netscape was first out but it was Microsoft (followed by Yahoo!) that ended up the winner by becoming the default platform where people did the browsing.
Then of course Google entered the stage and before you knew it we stopped browsing the web and started googling it – search was king.
I think we’re currently on the brink of the next phase: recommendation. This is the era of retweets, mobile social gaming and reputation systems. That’s why I think Facebook is in the best position to become the defining company on the web the coming decade. The entire web will become a reputation system and at the core of this is the successor to the Google Pagerank – the Peoplerank. To do this well you need the social graph that Facebook controls.
Of course we will still be both browsing and searching but the main activity will be recommending or be recommended stuff. We will walk around in a recommendation cloud bombarding us with information that people we trust think we should know about.
Perhaps I’m wrong about Facebook becoming the web leader this decade but I got a feeling the next phase of the web is recommending. The PeopleRank will come. Be ready.
You can recommend this blog post by tweeting about it.
Stealth Disease and First Mover Paranoia december 21, 2009
Lean Startup-guru Eric Ries talks about a common ailment amongst the startups he meets: Stealth Disease:
They are too afraid to show something imperfect to the world or are afraid that a competitor will steal their idea.
I would like to highlight another common sickness that is sort of the flip side to the Stealth Disease: the First Mover Paranoia – the idea that your product has to be absolutely unique or else you will fail. Any sign of a competitor doing the same thing or something similar will immediately kill the startup idea as the founders become morally defused.
You would have thought that examples such as Google (not the first search engine), Facebook (not the first social network) or Amazon (not the first online book store) would eradicate this disease, but no, it is still very much present and viral. I see the symptoms of it all the time – and yes, I have myself also been infected from time to time.
I wonder how many startups or potential startups fall victim to these two diseases. The First Mover Paranoia is extra vicious since it strikes so early. Often long before the execution of the startup idea is even started.
The cure for the First Mover Paranoia is to not view competitors as impassable roadblocks but as a verification that the idea actually works and has a market. That is in fact great news! Now the challenge becomes to find holes in the existing market (geographic, pricing, quality etc.) or to improve on what the competitor is doing.
Tough, but less tough than trying to bring something completely new to the market.
The anatomy of being Hacker Newsed december 12, 2009
Hacker News is one of my favorite news sites. Together with Twitter it has almost replaced by RSS reader as my main source for finding interesting stuff to read.
For those of you not familiar with the site, it’s sort of like Digg but focused on technology startups and, well, ”hacker” news. Links can be submitted by anyone and every registered member can vote on a link. The links with the most votes end up on the front page.
That’s what happened to this blog post last weekend. The result can be seen above.
Since my traffic to this blog is modest to say the least (I’m not writing very often), the effect of the Hacker News front page appearance is pretty obvious…
But Hacker News was just the first wave of traffic. The second wave came from Twitter. Derek Sivers was kind enough to tweet my blog post and with roughly 200′000 (!) followers the link was mentioned and retweeted 96 times.
Best of all was all the comments and discussions around the post.
The link ”only” got 32 votes on Hacker News but that was enough to stay on the front page for about half a day. I posted it Saturday late after noon, central European time so the timing probably wasn’t perfect if you want to maximize traffic (on the other hand it’s more difficult to get to the front page on a more busy time).
This blog is hosted on wordpress.com so unfortunately I can’t dig deeper into the visitor statistics but at least I can say with certainty that the amount of traffic coming from Twitter by far surpasses the traffic from Google, at least for now.
I’ve been on the Hacker News front page before but that time I ”only” got about 800-1000 visits. As a comparision, I once had a Youtube video on the front page of Digg. It got about 35000 views, so Hacker News is still relatively small. On the other hand, it has exactly the kind of readers I want with this blog.
I’m really sorry for not having had the time to reply to everyone and thank everyone who retweeted but believe me, I’ve read it all and my heart is warmed by the response! Thanks everyone!
Btw, here I am studying the visitor stats together with a friend:
Build a system, not a product december 5, 2009
The turtle has an idea. He thinks it is so great he doesn’t tell anyone about it because he is afraid they might steal it. He keeps it locked in a box, waiting for the perfect opportunity to get funding and make the idea reality. He is waiting and he is waiting and he is waiting…
The grasshopper builds a product. He knows that the idea in the box will never build itself. What matters is action and getting started. So he builds and he builds and he builds…
The master grows a system. She knows that no matter how good she thinks her idea is, what matters is only what the customer thinks. That is why the master builds her startup as a learning system that can adapt to new findings – evolve. She knows that in a startup, both the problem and the solution are unknowns. The idea is useless until proven otherwise. The product is useless until proven otherwise. So you must always be learning.
Unlike the turtle, the master is not afraid to talk about her idea because that is how you learn.
Unlike the grasshopper, the master is not afraid to release an early beta product because that is how you learn.
The master is not afraid of failure because that is how you learn.
The master builds her product and her entire company like a living system, an organism with eyes and ears, agile and adaptive.
Because that is how you learn.
Hello Sweden, where are you? .se FAIL oktober 13, 2009
How stable is the foundation that the web is built on? You kind of wonder after the incident last night where the entire .se-domain was unreachable for about 30 minutes. I still had problems accessing some sites this morning.
Apparently something went wrong during a maintenance routine at the Swedish Internet Foundation.
”For an unknown reason, an extra .se was added to the end of web addresses.”
I wonder what the cost of that little ”woops, hey, it worked before” is. Considering how our lives are weaved in to the web to an ever larger degree, it is worrisome that things can go so utterly wrong.
Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast. oktober 4, 2009
That’s my priority when I build stuff: Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast.
Work: it does what it’s supposed to do and adds value to the user.
Pretty: it’s easy to use and looks good.
Fast: there’s no performance bottlenecks and the software is scalable and easy to extend.
I’m a programmer but I also want my software to look good and be easy to use. The last thing I worry about these days is performance. Not because performance isn’t important but because it’s usually not a problem until you have enough users and you will never get enough users unless you focus first on the other two.
Ten years ago my list would probably have been: Make it work. Make it fast. Make it pretty. Or even with ”fast” being number one.
Not that I’ve ever been a performance freak, tweaking stuff to win an extra millisecond, but there was a time when I was obsessed with doing the Perfect Extendible and Reusable Software Design. My education is software engineering (I have a masters degree) and when I was fresh out of school (which I was 10 years ago) I used to spend a lot of time drawing class diagrams and object interaction flows and lots of other paper stuff that didn’t take me anywhere closer to a working program. I even wrote huge requirement specifications.
Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast. That’s my list. What’s yours?
Money is failure september 25, 2009
It used to be so simple.
You paid someone to build your product. Then you bought broadcasted advertising to market it. Finally, your product was sold in a store.
No matter what you sold, cars or toothbrushes, this worked and money made it happen.
Then came the internet.
The internet has this magic ability to pull people together across geographical distances (note how I even have to use the word ”geographical” to highlight the type of distance I’m talking about – you didn’t have to do that before the web). When people can communicate with each other they start doing things. They talk about things. They explore and share ideas. They build things.
And they do it out of love. Out of passion.
This changes a lot of things, including advertising and how products are created.
People talk about things they like. People build on stuff they like, they add value to products they like.
This means that if your competitor has a product that ignites passion and love in their users, they will get a lot of marketing and product development done for free.
If you are stuck in the traditional way of thinking (pay for product development, pay for advertising) you will end up with a more expensive product that is evolving and innovating slower than your competitors.
Needless to say, you will fail.
Yepp, that’s right, money will make you fail.
I told you things had changed!
Now, I’m not saying you should leave all your product development and all your marketing to your users. Every product and every market has its’ own optimal balance of love and money and you have to find that yourself (in tight competition – or cooperation – with your competitors, of course).
How much love is there in your product?
What I am saying, though, is that you should start looking at your product development and advertising costs as failures.
Paid advertising is failure to ignite the love in your users that make them talk about your product.
Paid development is failure to ignite the love in your users that make them build on and innovate on your product.
The Golden Scarcities september 10, 2009
Time.
Attention
Trust.
Love.
Health.
Joy.
When everything else is free, these are not.
This is the Internet: Sweden Social Web Camp augusti 25, 2009
- Erik, my friend. Can you explain what the Internet is?
- The Internet?
- Yes, the Internet. You see, I read about in the newspaper and watch people talk about it on TV but I just don’t get it. How does it work?
- Well, OK. The Internet is sort of like a big, big island where anyone can make their voice heard simply by gathering people around them and start talking. People tend to trust people who don’t just talk but also listens more so if you want many people to listen to you, you can’t just talk but start a conversation.
- But won’t you run out of places where people can gather to converse?
- No, it’s a very big island.
- But how do people find where the interesting conversations are.
- Ah, that’s the beauty of it: there’s a big index table keeping track of all the places. Anyone can add to this index simply by creating a new post. Then there are numerous recommendation engines you can use to find the best conversations. These recommendation engines are also built on trust.
- Wow, that’s really cool! But does it scale?
- So far it seems to have scaled pretty well.
- Hm, OK, so there’s an index keeping track of the places where the conversations are. Anyone can start a conversation and the good conversations are found using a recommendation engine. You know, I read about something like that in the paper. A bunch of nerds met on this island in Blekinge and did exactly that. It was called the Sweden Social Web Camp.
- Yeah, I know. I was there! I took some photos:
(Flickr.) This was the first evening, the guy on the stage is Tomas Wennström. He was sort of the coordinator of the whole thing. That means he posted a blog post and then everything happened by itself. No, not really, but almost. 
(Flickr.) This is my friend Björn Falkevik. He was one of the people who started a conversation. This one took place under an oak.
(Flickr). Here’s the index table. On the ”real” Internet this is called DNS and Google (sort of). Anyone could create a new session and if you ran out of places to be (the top column), you simply added a new column with a new place. The island was so big.
- Like the Internet!
- Well, not that big. But big enough.
(Flickr). Even as it got dark people kept on talking to each other, but it was less formalized.
- Yeah, I read about that. That’s the darknet, right?
- Haha, not really. The darknet is… something else.
There was also some dancing:
(Flickr).
- Seems like you had a great time!
- It was super!
- Imagine that… someone building a conference about the net using the same basic architecture as the net itself. That’s really cool.
- Yeah, I know, but I think this is what most events will be like in the future. Not just events but also prouct development, companies, brands, maybe even countries! Everything will be driven by engines of trust.
- Sounds like this Sweden Social Web Camp should not be missed next year.
- That’s very, very true. Trust me on that!
