Start-Up Chronicles

A Better User Interface for Math

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:22:12 -0400

Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

I recently stumbled upon this amazing article on how an ex-Apple developer is using the iPad to create a better user interface for math.

Better than what?
Better than numbers and symbols and equations.

It’s quite an insight really — symbolic systems as a “user interface” — and it’s absolutely true.

I’ve been noodling on this one for quite some time now. I have always been “good at math” — good enough that I was always a step ahead of my teachers in high school when we were learning calculus or geometry, and I later majored in math in undergrad. However, I’ve always sucked at arithmetic. Give me a bill and it will take me several minutes and a pencil to calculate and add up the tip.

If you ask me why, I’ll tell you that my brain has a bad user interface when it comes to math.

I just don’t think about it the right way. I can add double digits intuitively, and then I have rely on a small set of memorized facts to get me the rest of the way… simple multiplication tables, adding zeros to multiply by 10… Armed with this limited tool box, I try to break down complicated problems into smaller ones and then recombine them. But the process is inefficient and requires a lot of working memory. I keep forgetting where I was and having to start over.

Math needs a better user interface. A visual one.
And we should teach it to kids early in school so that they get into the habit of using it.

Indeed, several people with exceptional arithmetic abilities report interpreting numbers as having visual qualities that might seem strange or foreign to ordinary people like me. A former colleague of mine was like that — he could multiply 3-digit numbers without difficulty. When I asked him how he did that, he said that numbers in his mind were organized in a huge visual grid and that he used it to solve complex calculations.

I wish I carried around a visual math grid in my head at all times.

Some people go even further. Check out the Wikipedia article on Daniel Tammet who has high-functioning autism, synesthesia, and savant-like math abilities:

“Tammet’s unusually vivid and complex synesthesia has been widely reported. In his mind, he says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He can intuitively “see” results of calculations as synaesthetic landscapes without using conscious mental effort and can “sense” whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and Pi as beautiful. The number 6 apparently has no distinct image yet what he describes as an almost small nothingness, opposite to the number 9 which he calls large and towering.”

How fascinating is that?

Not all of us are gifted with natural synesthesia to supplement our math skills (most synesthetes aren’t either), but how amazing would it be if an outside tool or a piece of software like an iPad app could provide that synesthesia-like interface for us, turning numbers into something that we can instinctively understand and manipulate?

That is an innovation I would love to see happen, and a company I would be thrilled to work for.

What NOT to do after you ship that MVP

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:10:00 -0400

MVP, MVP, MVP… For the uninitiated, that’s “minimum viable product” and it’s something that every entrepreneur should always keep in mind.

Always look to ship the minimum viable product that you can possibly go to market with. Then iterate and improve based on real customer feedback and usage data.

But here’s what not to do, and I admit I am guilty of it. Don’t be tempted to move onto the next shiny thing.

Yes, it’s tempting.

While before you launched, your MVP seemed just barely adequate to you, somehow none of your users seem to mind so much.

It’s not like users are complaining… And then there’s that other exciting (though only marginally related) feature that we’ve been meaning to build… Maybe the MVP is really good enough as it is and we can just move onto the next thing… Maybe it’s time to pivot already…

Stop. Don’t go there. Resist temptation.

On my first start-up, I was practically cringing with embarrassment when we launched our beta product. It seemed slow and clunky, and some of its features didn’t have the polish that we wanted them to have.

But we rightly launched with what we had and, guess what, nobody complained. We had some early sales, and some good reviews, and in no time all those issues and unfinished details that once seemed to weigh so heavily on our product consciences started to fade away.

In their place were thoughts about new features, new markets to tackle, new directions to go in. And that was a bad thing.

Big changes, and the trendy myth of “pivoting”, can be dramatically distracting in the early stages of a company. You’re still proving your market, and while your hunch might be that you need to refine and improve your current product to see if it sticks, every start-up blog out there is telling you that all successful start-ups pivoted… So maybe it’s pivoting that you need — changing your model, addressing a different market, building a different UI entirely.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. You need both. You need to refine your product while considering different possible directions to determine which will be most fruitful.

But definitely don’t abandon your MVP and get lost in idle talks about pivoting.

If you do that you risk doing what we did at my start-up: let 6 months pass without a single release. Or, if you’re good at executing, you’ll simply spend the next 6 months building a bunch of other MVP’s without ever giving one enough attention to really gain traction.

Find that balance, and unless it’s an obvious flop, don’t abandon your MVP.

Image credit: Vator News.

Why eBooks Are Cheap and Kindles Are Not

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:37:08 -0400

For a while there was something I didn’t understand about Amazon’s e-book strategy. Why make Kindles expensive and e-books cheap?

The way I saw it, it made more sense to opt for the traditional razor-and-blades model: sell the hardware cheap and make all your money on the software. Had Amazon charged $29.99 for the Kindle, we would all have bought it (after all, why not) and then it could have made up whatever loss it generated on the sale of the hardware by selling us e-books at a premium. It seemed to me like the most sensible way of establishing a large installed base and then growing profitably.

But Mr Bezos, as it turns out (see: Amazon Web Services), is pretty smart… and he had a plan.

Going with the razor-and-blades model with the Kindle would have been a bad idea, and that’s because building a large installed base of cheap hardware is worth very little. It has no staying power, especially if the books are expensive. If you bought a cheap e-reader and then found that the books were too expensive to be worth it, you’d probably toss it without a second thought.

What creates switching cost and loyalty to a piece of hardware like the Kindle is all the content on it. It’s the books.

So Amazon’s plan, as I think I finally understand it, is designed to work on two levels:

Expensive hardware creates a sunk cost fallacy in people’s minds – i.e. “Since I spent so much on this thing, now I’d better use it.”
Cheap e-books entice users to build up a large content library on their Kindle, which in turn will make them less willing to switch.

The e-reader battles are far from over, but I’m starting to think that Amazon has a good plan.

startupquote: Do what you love and the rest will come. - Dennis...

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:57:14 -0400

startupquote:

Do what you love and the rest will come.

- Dennis Crowley

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn... The Talent Wars

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:51:00 -0400

Here’s an amazing infographic, posted by Fast Company, showing the winners and losers of the Bay Area talent wars.

Facebook > LinkedIn > Apple > Google > Microsoft > Yahoo

My hunch is this might be a better metric for future growth and success than just about anything else out there.

It’s also interesting to see what company draws talent from where.

Definitely worth checking out the whole article. It’s a good read.

NYC Supports Immigrant Founders through THRIVE Competition

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:19:32 -0400

NYC Supports Immigrant Founders through THRIVE Competition:

startupvisa:

NYCEDC, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, And Baruch College Launch Competition THRIVE, A Business Plan Competition to Help Reach Immigrant Ventures And Entrepreneurs

“New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, and Baruch College today launched the Competition To Help Reach Immigrant Ventures and Entrepreneurs (THRIVE). The purpose of Competition THRIVE is to generate proposals which will assist immigrant entrepreneurs to start, operate, and expand their businesses in New York City. All organizations which have ideas of how to facilitate entrepreneurial business and better serve the immigrant community are encouraged to enter a proposal. Organizations will be able to submit their proposals to the competition through August 31, after which a judging panel will select five finalists to receive seed funding of $25,000 to pilot their program. The pilot period will last 6 months after which, the program recognized as the most scalable and sustainable by the panel of judges will be selected as the winner and receive funding of $100,000 to further implement their program.”

Farewell to space, I hope, just for now

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:56:21 -0400

Today the last shuttle launched and I feel sad. It feels like the beginning of some sort of end. What end, I’m not yet use of.

A tweet came my way today:

It rang so true.

I’m not American. I’m an Italian immigrant. I came here for undergrad and the U.S. — even with all its faults and shortcomings — has always maintained some sort of magical quality in my mind. And somehow that has always been linked with space.

My father moved to U.S. for a year when he was in his late 20s to work as an astrophysicist at NASA. He remembers it as an amazing time. Unfortunately it didn’t last — pressured by his family and worried about the risk he thought he was taking by staying in the U.S. (sounds crazy in retrospect to think of it as a risk…) he returned to Italy, pursued an evening program in business administration, and got a management consulting job.

I think he still regrets it. I somehow empathize very deeply with him.

The U.S. for me is like NASA for my dad. It’s about dreams and ideas so big that in most other places don’t even dare to think them, let alone pursue them.

I am sad that we’re abandoning space. It’s like my father returning to Italy. It’s a choice to stop looking skyward and to turn our gazes downward and inward.

Did something just end here?

How to Beat Groupon

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:31:20 -0400

Network effects, network effects, network effect… oh, and the tipping point.

That’s what makes Groupon tick right?

They can bring together enough people to make a steep discount worthwhile for customer-starved venues. They have the user base, and that’s their source of competitive advantage. Nobody can match their scale.

But just how big does that network have to be? The tipping point for a local restaurant or store is probably just a hundred people, a few hundred at most. Too many and it starts to cannibalize existing business if only because the place is too crowded with Groupon-holders to accommodate customers willing to pay full price.

Slap a conversion rate on that (even a really low one) and it would seem you need only a few hundred thousand users to reach the tipping point. Probably less. And at those rates there are more than enough people in most big cities to sustain not one social coupon company, but dozens, especially since people can sign up for more than one.

Groupon will argue that copycats are no threat to it, but I think that’s just the party line. The myriad copycats might agree.

Here’s how other social discount sites can beat Groupon:

Better curation — I’ll sooner buy a deal from Daily Candy than Groupon if I don’t know the venue
Better deal for the venues — 3rd party distributors (agents, like Groupon, who provide access to customers) in other industries usually get more like 10%-20%… not 50%

Question is, how many copycats will it take to undo Groupon? What’s the tipping point there?

"So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your..."

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:56:00 -0400

“So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn. Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.””

- Robert Krulwich,
2010 commencement speech at the Berkley Journalism School

The clouds are doing some crazy things in Chicago today…...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:06:27 -0400

The clouds are doing some crazy things in Chicago today… Looks foreboding!

"Good judgment comes with experience, but experience comes from bad judgment."

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:25:03 -0400

“Good judgment comes with experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.”

- Mark Suster

Amazon made it happen!

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:13:21 -0400

Great post by Mark Suster this week on how Amazon (“that little online book company”), with its open cloud platform, was really what got every 20-something starting web businesses and ultimately led to the rise of the super angels, incubators and micro-VCs…

Word.

Did you ever see the picture of Google’s first servers?

If I had to buy that and stick it in my bedroom and operate it I would never have started a company.

But being able to use AWS, on a cheap pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need, basis… that made it possible.

“Amazon changed our industry. This is mind boggling. That little online book company. Not Google. Not Microsoft. Not IBM, HP, Accenture, Cisco, Salesforce.com or anybody else. Amazon. 100% of the credit. And 9 years after they launched AWS there are still no credible competitors.”

And yes, I also agree with Suster that Jeff Bezos doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves for the disruption and innovation he’s delivered us. But I’m glad he did it.

Google Calendar has a new look!

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:03:46 -0400

I love Google. It’s friendly and usable (mostly), but it’s not f-ing Apple. Most of the time it looks like it was designed by a child with crayons.

But I will say that I like the new Google Calendar design. It’s clean and professional. I think the colors work together. The UI does not seem significantly different, but overall it’s pleasing to the eye.

Also, seems to me like the Interwebs are taking a more professional looking turn… Those friendly rounded corners are getting retired in favor of a more linear and minimalist look. I’m down with that.

Other Google properties I’d like to see getting a makeover:

Google reader — cluttered as shit
iGoogle — that UI never really worked… and it feels like not much work has gone into improving it since launch
Google Buzz — haha does that still exist?

The "Yes, and..." philosophy for entrepreneurs

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:07:04 -0400

In her memoir Tina Fey talks about how improvisational comedy changed her life. I’ve never stood on a stage and improvised a line, but I’m starting to think there’s something about the ethos of improvisational comedy that every entrepreneur should learn.

It’s called “Yes, and…”

“Yes, and” is a mentality, and it’s the operating principle that makes improvisational comedy works. It’s the idea that when someone presents you with something (or, in the case of comedy, your partner throws out a line) you are not allowed to shoot it down. You have to agree with it, to accept it – that’s the “yes” bit. And beyond that, you have to build upon it – that’s the “and” bit.

Here’s how this is important for entrepreneurs.

I’m currently an MBA student, and contrary to popular belief, MBA programs are quite the hotbed of innovative thought, especially when it comes to new business ideas.

Among the many I’ve heard:

Studio models for university education
Online retirement planning for the masses
Bracelets to help you keep count on how many drinks you’ve had (I’m afraid this one might have been inspired by my own drunken antics)
OpenTable for salons
An online shoebox of e-memories
A collaborative platform or comedy writers
e-business cards

Sounds fun right? Well… yes, but somehow much less than it could be given what we’re working with. And it was one very smart friend of mine who pointed out why.

In business school, people are all too ready to shoot down ideas.

Not brashly or unpleasantly. Not to put you down or make you feel stupid. It’s never “Well, that’s a dumb idea!”

Usually these shoot-downs sound more like “Well… what about this issue?”…or “Have you thought about this roadblock?” …or “That company failed doing the same thing… don’t you think that’s something you should worry about?”

Which is all well and good. In fact, I have no doubt that every single one of these comments is well-intentioned and motivated by a genuine desire to be constructive.

But here’s the problem: People seem to believe that the only way to be constructive is to offer constructive criticism.

Well, I beg to differ. There is another way, and that way is “Yes, and…”

Especially at the earliest stages, when ideas need watering much more than they need stomping on with a pair of heavy constructively-critical boots, how about we first try to build upon ideas, before we start worrying about why they might not work?

It’s great that we’re all so aware of the potential pitfalls of our ideas. It helps shield us from confirmation bias, enables us to manage expectations, saves us from investing all our money on far-fetched pipe-dreams, and might prevent us from making over-confidence fueled mistakes down the road.

But when someone presents us with a new idea, let’s try instead to first say “yes, and…” and then see where that takes us. My guess is it will take us someplace interesting.

The wabi-sabi entrepreneur

Tue, 31 May 2011 15:05:47 -0400

Wabi-sabi is a traditional Japanese aesthetic or worldview, centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.”

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

It’s fascinating to me how much of the wabi-sabi worldview can be applied to entrepreneurship. Much of it seems taken straight from the lips of the lean startup movement, but really it can and should be applied to almost everything.

Nothing lasts.
Nothing is finished.
Nothing is perfect.

So keep shipping, keep innovating, and keep learning. And appreciate the imperfect beauty of everything you build.

Massively collaborative environments... and is anything better than Dropbox?

Wed, 25 May 2011 17:20:19 -0400

I’ve used a few collaboration tools in my time and so far, Dropbox has been by far the best in terms of convenience, usability, and sheer speed. It also has the considerable advantage that you don’t actually have to be online to use it if you’re working on a document that you’ve already opened.

So I wonder… what other collaborative file-sharing tools are really worth it?

Google Docs has always exasperated me due to its slowness. I used to enjoy PBWorks and recently set up a workspace on it for a group that I’m in, but I’m starting to doubt whether it’s really that useful. Or, more to the point, whether it has any meaningful advantages to Dropbox…

My other question is, what are the collaboration limits of these tools?

In any collaborative framework, the big problem that emerges is version control. Who changed what when and OMG what happened to all my edits??? I’ve not encountered these issues yet with Dropbox or any of the tools I’ve used, but I have definitely sat around meetings going “are you in the document?” … “oh, okay. can you get out of the document?” … “are you out? okay.” … “alright done. you can get back into it.”

Not so much fun…

How do we scale into massively collaborative environments? Are there any? If there aren’t, then what might they look like?

Should I keep my business idea secret?

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:31:59 -0400

I should have been worried when we started treating finding the right lawyer as one of our most important business decisions. Soon after that we became a confidentiality agreement machine — we churned that sh*t out like it was our job. And the lawyers praised our devotion to protecting out IP.

Since then, my opinions around maintaining the secrecy of business ideas has definitely changed. I learned over the past several months of being an entrepreneur that when ideas are openly shared, they aren’t stolen — instead they grow.

I imagine ideas as entities that can grow and thrive, or wither and die.

Within your head, an idea is not worth much. Think of how many good ideas you have and then forget a moment later.

Things get a little better if, for example, you commit an idea to paper. Writing down an idea, or in some other way creating a tangible record of it, seals that idea into existence. Seriously — if you think I sound hokey, I would suggest that you try it. Take an idea and write it down. Immediately the idea will feel clearer — if only because you made the effort to crystallize it into a transcribeable form — and most likely it will begin to grow and evolve.

The real magic happens when you start sharing the idea. That’s when it really comes to life. People have theorized that a major catalyst for the Age of Enlightenment in 18th century Europe was the emergence of a “coffee culture” that provided an open forum — in “salons” and coffee houses — for people to congregate and exchange ideas. The Café Procope in Paris was frequented by intellectual luminaries like Voltaire and Rousseau, and it was where Diderot and D’Alembert decided to create the Encyclopédie. More modern examples might include the Homebrew Computer Club, when Apple got started in the 1970s, or startup incubators like Y Combinator.

Ideas grow and evolve every time they are shared. They take on a life of their own and can propel massive, far-reaching, intellectual advancement.

There is an important lesson in here for entrepreneurs, which is that it is unwise to be secretive about your ideas. Share your ideas, and they will come to life. As you talk about them, you will grow to understand them better, and people around you will build upon them in ways you never could have expected.

Of course the inevitable reality here is that you lose control of your ideas. But this is why you should not worry about this.

First of all, it’s inevitable, so you shouldn’t fight it. I really believe that ideas are living entities and they deserve to be free. The minute an idea is externalized, it acquires an existence outside of its originator.

Trapped inside people’s heads, ideas whither. It is only outside in the big wide world that ideas can grow and thrive, evolving, taking shape, and coming into visible clarity to those around them.

It’s no news that it’s harder to have clarity and perspective around yourself, than around someone else. It’s the same with ideas. When an idea is just inside your head, you might think you understand it, but really you don’t. Your understanding of it is in fact extremely limited, and by no means encompasses the full scale of the idea. Once you’ve externalized the idea by sharing it, you are able to observe it outside of yourself in the broad light of day, and it immediately becomes clearer. All the work that everyone around you puts into thinking and elaborating around it adds to it, until you can all see it and it becomes clear.

Oftentimes it becomes so clear that someone will create something tangible around it — like a start-up, a life-saving drug, a novel, a new system of government… As an entrepreneur, you would want that person to be you, which is what motivates you to secrecy, but you have to accept that the benefit you get from growing and understanding your idea far outweighs your risk of having someone beat you to it.

Of course, this lesson is by no means new. Yet it’s surprising how long it can take to really click.

I’ve been proclaiming my manifesto on the imperative of sharing ideas for years, and yet on some level I was still scared of losing control of my ideas. I hadn’t yet fully grasped that ideas are nothing — execution is everything.

It really is.

I finally realized it a few days ago, when a friend referenced an article, written by an entrepreneur, on how to weed out the “bad” kind of non-technical co-founder. You can read the whole thing here.

I’m a non-technical co-founder so immediately I was intrigued. Was I of the “bad” variety? The writer proposed a test, a single question:

The Filter:

“Have you seen the movie, The Social Network?” [They likely say yes] “Do you think the Winklevoss brothers were right or wrong?”

If they sympathize with the Winklevii it’s a dealbreaker. They fail the test. Politely end the meeting and move on.

Okay… full disclosure: I’ve never seen The Social Network and I’m not well-versed in Facebook history, so I had to do some research to understand this. But basically it comes to this, if you sympathize at all with the perspective that Zuckerberg “stole” the social network idea from ConnectU, then you are too secretive about ideas, you overvalue IP and undervalue execution, and you will be in serious trouble as an entrepreneur.

As I did the research, at first I was a little taken aback. When the Winklevoss brothers approached Zuckerberg to work on ConnectU in 2003, ConnectU was part-built and Facebook wasn’t even a twinkle in Zuckerberg’s eye. There’s no two ways about it — Zuckerberg took the ConnectU idea and used it to build Facebook. Shouldn’t I feel sympathy toward the Winklevoss brothers?

The article most definitely didn’t think so… and the Hacker News community who discussed the article overwhelmingly agreed.

Their response provides a huge information shortcut; if they’re Pro-Winklevii it lets me know that they don’t understand tech startups. It means they overvalue ideas and undervalue execution. They overvalue business savvy and undervalue hackers. They simply don’t get it. They’re not who I would want to work with.

Yikes, I thought as I read those words! I’m a bad co-founder! I’m a stupid business person who fails to understand start-ups! I am doomed to a future in corporate hell!

It was a wake-up call, and it made me rethink my opinions and underlying ethical assumptions about ideas. And ultimately I came around.

It’s not an easy reality to deal with. It’s a scary reality where you have to accept that you don’t have control over ideas. Being the first person to name an idea does not give you ownership of it. Ideas exist independently of people. They are not created — they are discovered. And they cannot be owned.

Once you realize that, then the ethical questions around “stealing” ideas melt away. The very notion of “stealing” an idea becomes meaningless.

Then you can really accept that ideas are nothing, and execution is everything. Or, to put it more accurately, ideas are everything, but control is earned only through execution.

Press Release... post mortem

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:03:00 -0400

So an update on my press release…

I ended up using PR Web with their $200 package. What sold me was the access to “premium” news sites… though maybe I should have been warned by the fact that their examples of “premium” news sites are Scottrade and StreetInsider.

Are those leading business publications? They seem a little “niche”… Not exactly the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.

But even if they were, perhaps I should have asked myself if a top publication would actually be interested in my press release. After all, my start up is pretty niche itself. It’s like… if you could spend $200 to email Steve Jobs you pay it? It’s unlikely he’s write back. In fact, you can probably find a way to email Steve Jobs for free if you really try, but you still don’t do it because it won’t get you anywhere.

I guess what PR Web is selling, at least to some extent, is the appearance that by going through them, you’ll have a slightly better “in” within these publications. Of course, that’s an illusion.

What you’re really paying for with $200 or whatever you choose to pay is efficiency — the ability to blast a whole host of sites in one fell swoop.

Had I broken it down like that I might not have paid $200… but then again, hindsight is always 20/20.

The real question that I think any cash-strapped start-up needs to seriously consider before spending money on a formal press release is this: Is my story newsworthy? Really newsworthy?

It seems obvious, but I think in practice it’s a question that as entrepreneurs we don’t really want to deal with, and therefore the instinct is to brush it off. I certainly did.

In my defense of course, this was my first press release, and my first press-worthy moment… or at least my first press-worthy moment since I started even considering the possibility of doing press releases. You’ve got to start somewhere, and this was my trial run. We got picked up by a few small news sites, but nothing major. Net benefit? Pretty close to negative $200.

Next time I’ll do things differently, and unless my news involves a funding round, I’ll probably opt to email select sites that are in my space and that I have cultivated a relationship with, than doing a generic press blast.

Next time…

Oh, one more thing before I forget… I challenge PR Web’s promise that issuing press releases improves SEO. Their argument is that all their press-releases have your link, so that’s additional links to your site that improve your search ranking.

I disagree for a number of reasons — and would be interested in thoughts from someone who actually is an expert in the matter. Admittedly, I am not.

Don’t search engines to a great extend discount duplicated content? Every instance of your press release is the same, so I don’t see how that can help much
I doubt the content is live forever, so at best you get a short spike
It’s still way too small to move the needle

So yeah… I feel like PR Web is a bit of a scam. You either have something truly newsworthy, and in that case it can save you some time… but otherwise, you’re better off without it.

Learning to let go

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:10:00 -0400

How do you figure out when to let go of something you’ve devoted your every waking moment to for years?

Think I’m talking about a relationship?

I agree that it sounds like it, but it’s not. Or maybe it is… I’m talking about leaving a start-up you’ve founded, and really that’s not unlike a relationship at all.

Leave your start-up when:

You’ve fallen out of love
It’s making you both unhappy — yes both of you. There are unhappy startups just as there are unhappy people, and unhappy people tend to make unhappy startups.
It’s making you both ineffective
It is making you bitter
It is beginning to hurt those around you, even beyond the startup itself

Yes, leaving a startup really is like breaking up.

Le press... Le sigh

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:43:55 -0400

I have to write a press release… it’s my first ever. To be honest I don’t quite know where to start.

Business Insider has a good step-by-step guide on writing press releases. Their suggestions:

Learn the format - i.e. start with the “Five W’s”: who, what, where, when and why.
Keep it short and on point
Set a professional yet engaging tone (oxymoron)
Don’t just think about your clients - think about your media audience
Make sure it’s accessible on multiple technologies and platforms - okay, so include a Word doc, PDF, and a link
Optimize for SEO (Does anyone even know what that means? It’s starting to sound like a punch line…)
Keep fluffiness to a minimum
Timing is everything - apparently people read emails between 2pm and 3pm… good to know.
Include a quote
Include your name and contact info
Follow up with the media, but without being annoying (fine line indeed)

I still have questions though…

For example, what services should I use to disseminate the press release? Should I email any personal media contacts separately? When? I feel like there are practices out there that are clear to everyone “in the know” but not really accessible to outsiders looking to learn them.

Quora has a decent thread on whether or not press releases are useful… but the answer in essence is “yes and no.” What a surprise.

Business Insider has another piece on what they are good for… namely:

Growing incoming links
Targeting the right audience (although this sounds more like a directive than a benefit…)
Raising your profile
Building reputation
Improving SEO (see above)

Oh well… going to give it a shot.