When I first discovered Turntable.fm last month, I didn’t get a damn bit of work done for 3 hours. After that evening I banned myself from DJing. I’ve since gone back in to the Dubstep room as a fun, serendipitous “radio”, but concluded that 8tracks is a simpler solution for that use case. That said,… Continue reading
Date Archives June 2011
Failing Lean (Lean Ignite NYC talk)
How to talk about failure without killing the mood of a room? That was my dilemma leading up to last night’s amazing Lean Startup Ignite event (and I loved the Ignite format!). Lane Halley suggested that focusing on what I would do differently next time would keep it positive, and I hoped that my drawings… Continue reading
Making Ad Agencies Lean
I was intrigued by the article “Why Ad Agencies Should Act More Like Tech Startups” that was just on FastCompany. Now, before I go on, let me just state that I’ve never worked within an ad agency, but I’ve sold plenty of projects/services to them and their brand clients while with The Electric Sheep Company…. Continue reading
Choosing your most important metrics
Matt Meeker, co-founder of Meetup and now with Polaris running Dogpatch NYC, gave a Skillshare class tonight on metrics. He stressed the need to combine and balance quantitative data, qualitative sources and entrepreneurial gut/judgement. My favorite tidbit came when he was discussing how to prioritize your top metrics. His advice for picking your “driving metric”,… Continue reading
Problem > UX > UI
Jason Cohen’s recent post got me thinking about the difference between UX and UI and the order in which I think about design when coming up with something new. Here is my rough order (and tomorrow I will post a concrete example): 1. The Problem Understand the customer’s problem and ask yourself if you are… Continue reading
Money Raised is a Terrible Comparative Metric for Success
Since Steve Blank publicized the findings of the startup genome project, I have seen references to the study in multiple places. The one thing that drives me nuts is the recurring phrase, “startups that did A raised Bx more money”, like this is such a great thing. I would love for our ecosystem to purge… Continue reading
Getting in the Way in a Good Way
As a general rule, I believe that you want to get users to the “goods” quickly and easily, reducing friction wherever possible. However, sometimes this can go too far, and sacrifice the needs of the business. I thought I would share an example from Aprizi where we did exactly that. First, for context: Aprizi was… Continue reading
When UI Innovation Isn’t Progress
As a visual person, I have always fantasized about being part, even a small part, of the creation of a major UI innovation on par with what Apple/PARC did for the modern desktop. I have learned some lessons the hard way about how skeptical one must be with UI “innovations”. I fell for 3D twice… Continue reading
Waiting for Perfection
My former colleague Jerry Paffendorf, who is off re-inventing Detroit, shared a great clip of Pixar’s Ed Catmull talking at Stanford, via Protoshare’s blog. At around the 6 min mark, Catmull is discussing Pixar’s constant “peer sharing” process: “In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive… Continue reading