fr.anc.is

Talk More. Do Less. Achieve More.

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

You know what is the number one mistake entrepreneurs make? No, it's not building something people don't want. That's just Silicon Valley lore. Building something no one wants is the symptom, not the cause. I want you to go deeper. What is the cause? The cycle goes something like this. You start out super-excited. You create something. But you end up wasting your precious time building something no one wants. Then months later you wake up and find there's a crater in your personal finances. And oh, by the way, your cat has left you. What's the cause behind this cycle of suffering, errrrmm, I mean, learning?

Let's take a walk through our ~~neighborhood~~ Amazon bookstore. Grab a tall latte cappucino with honey & a side of chocolate. Now head over to the small business & entrepreneurship section. Have a closer look at your average bundle of dreams wrapped in advice that is oh-so-common in this part of the aisles. Most business books are a collection of actionable snippets loosely held together by a string of anecdotes. Entertaining? Hell, yeah! Stories sell, no doubt about that. Chock-full of practical, actionable advice? Yep! So what's wrong with this? I'll let you think about that for a sec while we switch locations.

Boom! Jump-cut that camera to a new location! Now I want you to imagine yourself at an average conference for entrepreneurs. Music is blaring. Famous people babbling on-stage in some sort of panel no one really listens to because everyone's prepping their hustle for the next networking opportunity. You run into a fellow entrepreneur you met before & you start the usual bonding ritual. Of course you are both killing it. They just shipped a new product. You've been building, designing. Getting shit done. Oh yes, sir-eee. We are busy-bodies. We are the creative class. We get shit done! Yay!

Entrepreneurs. Sigh. We are culture of doers. We like to read practical books about how to get shit done. We like to go to events to get all pumped up on doing. We do a million things every day to turn our dreams into reality. And that's cool. But it's also dangerous. Because sometimes we get caught up in our own activity.

You see, there's momentum in doing things. It kinda works like a flywheel. Each time you do something new in your business you make the wheel spin a wee bit faster. And that's great. If you are working on the right thing, that is.

What if you need to suddenly change direction? You've invested a lot of (mental) energy in getting that flywheel running hot & fast. Slowing down that wheel to change direction suddenly becomes very hard.

First you ignore it. ("Nah, we don't need to change just yet.") Then you laugh it off ("Probably a dead-end-street anyway!") Then you fight it ("We invested so much in this, we can't change now!") then you lose.

There's a sure-fire way to avoid all of this suffering. Most entrepreneurs already know it. It's simple. Talk to more customers! Because there's a subtle but very important difference between doing and talking.

Each time you do something (write some code, design a few bits, whatever it is you're specialized in) there's a subtle emotional invest you make. Talk is, well, just talk. Easy to ignore. So you can continue talking to customers without becoming attached to a specific idea. Once an idea keeps bubbling up naturally again and again during customer interviews, then (and only then) it is time to start doing!

TLDR; Do Less. Talk to more customers. Don't start pulling all-nighters until you have talked to at least 50 potential customers or you'll end up slouched over your keyboard at 3am like that poor lady in the headline of this blog post. Now, stop reading this & go talk to a potential customer.

My New Book: The Tao of Do

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

While doing research for my Lean Idea Book I stumbled upon something interesting. I noticed that when I talked about customer development, people kept asking me about tactics. How do I create an MVP? How do I do a smoke test? How do I do keyword research?

I've always been very reluctant to answer these types of questions. Because at the very early stage most people should not be bothering with MVPs and smoke tests and keyword research and all that shiz. They should be talking to customers.

Why? Because doing things tends to increase your attachment to the idea. And you want to stay detached & objective at the earliest stages of a venture.

Talk is cheap. It is easy. It does not breed commitment. It takes work, but it is not creative work. You're not doing, not creating things. This is the "Don't" side of the Tao of Do.

Doing on the other hand is expensive. When you work actively on your idea you increase your mental commitment. Hard to drop an idea when you've already created so many things for it. This is the "Do" side of the Tao of Do.

Now, back to the book. The first part, the "Don't" part is finished. It's available for purchase as an eBook at leanideabook.com. There's also a free chapter download. The physical hardcopy version will follow as soon as I raise enough money to offset the (significant) up-front printing costs. Proceeds of the eBook sales will go towards this. I'm also working on some sponsorship deals to get the lean idea book in your hands as soon as possible.

I've decided to write an addendum to the book. The "Do" part. It will be an inventory of practical methods to validate ideas. The "Do" part will focus heavily on quantitative validation of ideas. Thing like MVP's, smoke tests, keyword research, etc ... Stick these two parts together & you get the full book I am working on: The Tao of Do (codename, I'd never publish something with such a ridiculous name ;-)

Lean Idea Book Contributor Ranking

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

The first edition of the lean idea book sold out in 24h. I'm well into taking orders for the second edition now. Yesterday's blog post was frontpaged for a couple of hours on Hacker News. What this tells me is that I'm onto something here. But I'm far from break-even on this, so every extra order is welcome. I promised to reveal the ranking of the contributors to the first edition of the Lean Idea Book. So here are the Top-10 contributors from the first 24h, calculated based on a simple weighted formula taking into account time & quantity of orders.

Mike van Hoenselaar
Peter Schreck
Stefanie Weidner
Michael Bumann
Felix Müller-Irion
Oliver Thylmann
Ben Sulfiani
Juan Sebastian Tobon Conde
Thomas Müller
Miguel Plucquet

How I Sold Out the Lean Idea Book in 24h

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

I was teaching a customer development workshop a little over 3 weeks ago when a thought struck me: "Why don't I take my old Moleskines with business ideas & create some business model canvases for them. Just for practice".

TLDR; In this post I explain how I MVP'd a book project. Why it is important to start a conversation with your audience. Why exclusivity works. And why people paid me 30 euros for a friggin' notebook that doesn't exist yet.

So on a beautiful Saturday morning I did just that. I shut down the interwebz, cracked open my crusty old Moleskines & started drawing business model canvas grids by the dozen. Turns out adding that business model canvas to my existing paper-based idea workflow was pretty useful. Because it forced me to consider all aspects of the business idea in a systematic way. My old notes about the idea always seemed to skip some important parts like, e.g., oh, channels (I seem to be notoriously bad at that particular one) & cost structure.

That made me wonder. "What does the idea workflow of other entrepreneurs look like?". So I posted up a thread on one of my favorite forum for Entrepreneurs: "How do you keep track of your ideas?". Boom! Featured post. Dozens of replies. "Wow, people are passionate about this."

A vocal minority in that thread was pretty passionate about using paper, just like me. I love paper. Time for an experiment: "What if I created a Moleskine-like notebook with pre-printed business model canvas grids? Would you buy it?" I pumped out a nice little landing page for the fictitious product & hooked it up to a Mailchimp form. Leanideabook.com was born.

So on April 1st I sent out a message on Facebook explaining the concept & started driving traffic to leanideabook.com. There was a bit of buzz. "Is this an April's fool, or what?" My goal was to get to a launch list of 50 people quickly & then immediately follow up with an order form on the landing page.

That didn't happen. Instead I started a conversation with some of the people on the list. Did a couple of customer interviews & quickly found out that "A shitty notebook with a pre-printed grid." is not exactly an appealing value proposition. Back to the basics: customer interviews.

I shut up about the lean idea book during my conversations with potential customers & started listening. I asked questions like "What does your workflow look like?" and "What do you value most in a paper notebook?"

This is what I learned. First, people don't mind paying a big premium for best-quality notebooks because as knowledge workers they care a lot about their ideas. Your ideas are worth it seemed to resonate pretty well. Second, most people do customer development in a haphazard way. There is room for some editorial content here, explaining exactly how to do customer development. Third, there's a common pattern in how most people work with ideas. Capture, Refine, Validate. Finally, almost everyone needs to make the switch from paper to digital at some stage in their idea workflow.

Next I made a few calls to printers to get some numbers on what it'd cost to create this thing. Moleskines retail for 20 euro & cost maybe a few euros to produce. But as always in the printing business, volume is king. Turns out that with small print runs it'd cost me at least 25 euros if I wanted high quality.

While doing my own customer development I kept the conversation alive on the mailing list, wrote a couple of blog posts, did a short interview about the project. Then the day before yesterday I created a secret order page & gave people on the list a 12h lead to get their orders in before I'd make the link public. The reasoning behind this was that the kind of people who pay top dollar for Moleskines value exclusivity & scarcity. Plus, if you put up with my barrage of annoying questions & emails, you deserve to cut in line.

I put up the pre-order link on a Tuesday evening. Something you're absolutely not supposed to do, right? Always send out marketing messages at 11AM on Tuesdays is pretty much the standard these days. The reasoning behind this was again the 12h lead-time I wanted to give to people on the list. Plus, for plenty of people this was going to be a private purchase, so why bother them during business hours?

I sold about a dozen in the first 5 minutes & then I went to bed. I'm an early to bed early to rise type of person so you can imagine my surprise when I woke up at 5AM the next morning to around 30 pre-sales. This is gonna be fun. At that point I was pretty sure I was going to make 50 sales in the first day, so I queued up two more emails in Mailchimp. One at 9AM to tell that the pre-order link would go public at 12 & one around 12 to tell that the pre-order link now was public. Why so many emails? Even on a warm mailing list you can assume that less than 50% will actually read your message. But not always the same 50%. If people are going to unsubscribe on a launch day because you're sending out too many messages, let them, they were probably not the best leads anyway.

Why did I go for only 50 pre-sales? Why not 100? Or 25? 50 happens to be the point where my wallet will stop screaming bloody murder for ordering so many friggin' notebooks. And getting 50 notebooks in the hands of people is enough for a first MVP.

Let's look at who bought the notebooks. The 80/20 rule seems to apply. 80% bought in bulk to give away as gifts. 20% bought single copies. This is an MVP, so I'm really interested in observing how people are using those notebooks. I'm going to include a registration card so that I can get feedback even from the gifted books.

Finally, a couple of take-aways from this mini-launch / crowdfunding effort. First, exclusivity works. Scarcity is a surprisingly strong emotional driver. Second, doing a conversational launch really works. People want to be part of the story. So don't let your launch list rot in some corner while you work on your product. Keep it warm by sending regular updates & use it to ask questions to your audience. Third, competition works. I added a competitive element by turning the thank you page into a leaderboard. Ordering early & in bulk got you higher in the rankings.

So what's next for the lean idea book? First of all, more conversations. I'll be doing more Skype interviews with customers to exactly define the feature set. Then next week I will drive to the printer & take some pictures of what the final product will look like. I'm keeping the order page open for a second & less exclusive edition. If you're not quire ready to order but want to be part of the story, subscribe to the mailing list.

Lean Idea Book First Edition

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

So last sunday I described the idea workflow used in the lean idea book. Today I want to give you a quick update on the actual book. What's it going to look like, what kind of perks you can expect for pre-ordering. Answer you questions. That sort of thing.

I'm going to start by printing a first "Limited Edition". 50 pieces only. Signed. Numbered. If you pre-order your name will be featured on the "thank you" page in the book. If you order multiple copies you can have your logo & website featured in the book & on the site.

The pre-order link will go out to the mailing list today, to give the earliest supporters a chance to get in first. I expect these to sell out quickly. So if you're not on the list already, subscribe now!

ETA is approximately 6 weeks after I have received the first 50 orders. In the unlikely case that I don't get 50 pre-orders, you'll get your money back.

What do I get for pre-ordering? The book, of course. Also. If you pre-order your name will be mentioned on the thank-you page. If you pre-order 5 copies you can get your logo on the thank-you page. If you pre-order 10 copies you can get your name, logo, url, slogan & short text blurb included in the book.

What's the price going to be? The Limited Edition will be priced at 30 euros & 25 euros (volume orders). I'm aiming for pricing akin to Moleskine (20 euro range) for future versions of the book.

Can I pre-order multiple copies Yes. Please do. Several people have already committed to multiple pre-orders. This makes a perfect gift! If you're a co-working space, accelerator, or just anyone who wants to see more people apply lean methodologies, buy multiple copies & hand them out like candy!

How will they be delivered? I'll hand-deliver pre-orders in the Cologne area to a coworking space of your choice. For International pre-orders I will take on the postage costs.

Will you use white or cream-colored paper like Moleskin? White. Why? Because it makes it easier to scan into e.g. Evernote. Also, when you want to draw illustrations white just makes everything more crisp.

Will the labels of the lean canvas be pre-printed? No. There will be a specific section of the book where you will have a bunch of empty lean canvas grids pre-printed. Some people prefer the business model canvas, some prefer the lean canvas. The book will explain the differences & leave it up to you which one to use.

What if I don't want to use the grids? I've found a very subtle printing process which means that if you don't need the grid, you can simply write over it.

Will there be a lean canvas grid on every page? No. After talking to a bunch of people about their idea workflow, I found out that while there needs to be lots of space for capturing initial ideas, most people don't need a grid on every page. The grids will be pre-printed in the center section of the page to support the capture/refine/validate workflow.

Will the book be available outside of Germany? Yes. Designed in Germany. Manufactured in Germany. Distributed worldwide. What's more, I'll take on the shipping cost for the Limited Edition.

Will there be a way to scan my idea book I'm working on that. I found a neat way to help you scan the pages & import them into e.g. Evernote. Think Evernote Smart Moleskine, but with a twist. I'll include the paper things that need to make this happen in the Limited Edition, but I can't guarantee that the app will be ready.

Will the book's paged be ruled, squared or dotted? None of the above. I'm leaving the pages pristine white for now. I did think about adding a tiny isometric dotted grid, but only in the appropriate parts of the book (capture). But not in the first limited edition.

What about the editorial content, what will that be like? The idea is to create a notebook you can give to someone who is not familiar with lean methods & get them up-to-speed in a matter of days. Not by having them read an academic textbook. But by doing customer development. Expect real, practical, actionable advice on customer development techniques scattered throughout the Lean Idea Book. Here are some of the questions what will be answered: How do I use the business model canvas grid? What is the difference between the lean canvas & the business model canvas? Which parts of the grid should I work on first? How do I conduct customer interviews? What should I be paying attention to? What should I do before, during & after the interviews. How many interviews should I conduct? Which other kinds of experiments can I conduct to validate a business hypothesis? How do I setup a smoke test? What should a good experiment look like?

What about the howto's & checklists? I'll include checklists for the following: how to capture ideas, how to use the lean canvas, how to conduct customer interviews.

When will I be able to see pictures of the actual product? As soon as I hit 50 pre-orders I'll jump in my Volkswagen, hit the Autobahn & head over to the Buchdrucker (printer) to take pictures. Can you tell this product has "Made in Germany" written all over it?

This product is too expensive! A book with the lean canvas grid pre-printed is not worth that kind of money! Yep, couldn't agree more. But there's more to it. Read this blog to get a better idea of what the book will be like. It's an ongoing story & I'll blog extensively about the development of the book. You'll also get a best-quality notebook; e.g. I'm aiming for paper quality that is far superior to your typical Moleskine. You're also getting something rather unique: the book is half notebook, half textbook. The idea is to build a book that you can give someone who is not familiar with customer development & get them up-to-speed quickly by having them DO customer development. The 30 euro introductory price is also for the limited edition only. As volume goes up, prices will come down. I'm aiming for a final product price similar to Moleskine. But to get there I need your help, so pre-order now!

Why only PayPal? It's the easiest way to accept payments early & assess demand for this product. That being said, if you're in Germany you can also pay by wire transfer. Just shoot me an email & I'll fill you in on the details: francis.dierick@gmail.com

Lean Idea Book Update

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Quite a few things have changed since my last post about the Lean Idea Book project. So I want to give you a quick update. First of all: great news. Looks like this is going to happen. And here's how.

The pre-order link will go out to the mailing list first, to give the earliest supporters a chance to get in first. I expect these to sell out quickly. So if you're not on the list already, subscribe now!

ETA is approximately 6 weeks after I have received the first 50 orders. In the unlikely case that I don't get 50 pre-orders, you'll get your money back.

So I've been talking to people & dogfooding the product. Here's what I learned. Most entrepreneurs have similar idea workflows even though the details (paper vs. digital) may differ. Most have an idea list of some kind (on paper, in Evernote, in Omnifocus) & revisit that list periodically to filter out the good ones. Those that make the cut receive some kind of "reality check" treatment. Do the numbers add up? Is this a real problem customers have? How can I reach those customers? The best entrepreneurs will then design experiments or conduct customer interviews to validate their hypotheses about the idea.

This workflow will have a direct impact on how the idea book will be designed. I've started to call this workflow Capture, Refine, Validate. So the book will roughly be split in three parts.

Step 1: Capture There will be plenty of space for you to capture, draw, mindmap, doodle & brainstorm your ideas. Every day. The idea is to build the book in such a way that you can use it as an everyday notebook. The thinking behind this resonated with plenty of people I talked to: capture your ideas quickly so they are out of your brain. This gives your unconscious mind a chance to mull them over.

Step 2: Refine This is where the lean canvas / business model canvas shines. Maybe once a week you filter out the most promising ideas & build your initial lean canvas. This forces you to think things through a bit in a structured way & helps you prepare for the next step. The Lean Idea Book will come with pre-printed lean canvas grids. I've discovered a very subtle printing process that will allow you to see the grid, but simply write over it if you don't need it on a page. I've also discovered that not every page needs a grid, only your best ideas make it to the lean canvas stage, after all.

I've also learned a few things from dogfooding my own product. First, Moleskine paper sucks for this. You're going to be using pencil & eraser to keep your grid updated. Do this enough and Moleskine's paper will warp & wrinkle. And when you want to use a fountain pen on a Moleskine, the ink bleeds through the paper. What do you expect? Designed in Italy, Manufactured in China it says after all. So I'm stocking up on heavier paper for the Lean Idea Book.

Another thing I've learned from is that there is actually a real need for simple HowTo's explaining how to use the lean canvas. That's why the book is going to be part notebook, part editorial content. Especially over here in Germany, entrepreneurs aren't necessarily familiar with customer development. Expect real, practical, actionable advice on customer development techniques scattered throughout the Lean Idea Book.

Step 3: Validate Roughly a third of the book will be dedicated to your experiments and customer interviews. Again, especially for customer interviews, there is a real need for explaining how to conduct experiments. Expect checklists & howto's for the pre-flight, during & after stage of doing customer interviews.

So overall, the lean idea book will be comprised of three parts. First, unstructured scratchpad to capture your initial ideas. This doubles as a normal notebook just to guarantee that you will actually carry it in your daily life. Second, a structured pre-printed lean canvas to help you organize your best ideas. Third, a structured area for you to use while you conduct customer interviews.

Want one? Note sure yet? If you're not on the mailing list yet, you should add yourself here to get all the latest updates first!

Your pitch most likely sucks

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

BREAKING: I'm giving away 5 free pitch reviews to you and your favorite startup buddies in the next 24 hours. Enter now and help share the news for your chance to get this awesome freebie for you and a friend!

Pitchcademy teaches you how to pitch like a pro. Record a video of your pitch directly in your browser, get reviewed and scored by a network of professional coaches within 24 hrs. Rinse, lather & repeat!

If you're a startup entrepreneur, chances are you've already been to a lot of pitching events and you may even have pitched investors yourself already. You may have noticed that most pitches at these events - especially if you're in Europe - suck!

Now take a minute and think about your own pitch: Are you completely confident that your pitch doesn't suck? It's always the others that suck - riiiiiiiiight?

Well, Vidar Andersen and I certainly have made our fair share of bad pitches. We've been around. But along the way we picked up a couple of tricks on how to improve our pitches and learned a lot. At least enough to win several competitions and get invited to events as pitch coaches.

So we thought that we should share the secrets we picked up. We think everybody should have the chance to nail that perfect pitch. That's why we decided to introduce Pitchcademy.

To kick it off, we're giving away 5 free pitch reviews to you and your favorite startup buddies in the next 24 hours. Enter now for your chance to get this awesome freebie for you and a friend!

Startup Deck for Windows Phone

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Some projects just never seem to die nor to take off wildly. They're happy to remain in limbo. My silly little startup pitch preparation app, Startup Deck is a prime example of that. The story begins in 2011 when I was doing an interview with Ycombinator. I built a quick & dirty little iPhone App to help me prepare. Just a flashcard app with the right questions for startups. Used it myself, put it up on the AppStore & forgot about it.

Then in 2012 it gets mentioned in a techcrunch article and a guy called Pranay contacts me & tells me he wants to port it to Android. "Sure, go ahead" I went and a week later it was in the Google Play Store. Then a few months later I was at a Startup Weekend in Poland and a guy walks up to me & says "Hey, do you know Startup Deck, it's a great way to prepare your pitch". Awkward. "Ummm, yeah, I built that"

Fast-forward to 2013. Someone I met at that very event in Poland has ported the app to Windows Phone. I'm happy to announce Startup Deck for Windows, made by Piotr Biegun. It's a simple app. But when people come & ask if they can port it, it probably means it's a useful app. So if you're preparing for an accelerator or investor interview, download Startup Deck for iPhone, Android and now also Windows Phone.

Oliver Gassner interviews me about the Lean Idea Book

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

So I did a quick interview together with Oliver Gassner about the Lean Idea Book project today. You can find the original interview here. My favorite one-liner "At least it's a website where you can't lose your way on" ... Yeah, the whole thing is lean, lean, lean. If you want to be part of the conversation & hear updates about the project, add your name to the list over at leanideabook.com

A new kind of paper notebook

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0100

This is a post about paper. Later on I'm going to try to sell you on a new kind of paper notebook. A notebook that is perfect for startup people. But first we need to have a little talk about good old-fashioned paper. You see, paper is an integral, messy, problematic, wonderful, passionate & gorgeous part of my working life. Like many of us digital natives I have a love/hate relationship with dead trees. I can hear the right side of my brain whisper "It' so nice. Real. Haptic. If you work on paper you can touch your ideas." My more rational left hemisphere simply denounces paper as "What a mess, get your shit together!".

One thing I know for sure. I tend to start my best work on paper. No matter if it's a product idea, blog post or piece of code. So like many creatives I've been carrying around paper notebooks. My favorite is a Moleskine Plain Soft Notebook (Extra Large). It's roughly iPad-sized, has a sturdy yet flexible cover & I just love how the high-quality paper begs for ideas.

There's something about paper that just brings out the creative juices in me. I find that I tend to commit less to ideas when I work on paper. I'm less dogmatic. More flexible. I like to work out nearly everything on paper before switching to a digital medium. Donald Knuth said it best: "My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine."

Until recently my idea workflow was pretty simple. New idea? Quickly capture it in my notebook! The structure was always pretty similar. I use the right-hand page to write down the parts of the idea that have been validated, while the left page is kept for notes & more speculative thoughts. I'd give the idea a name, then regularly revisit the pages & write down a score in the bottom-right corner.

But then I started spending most of my time knee-deep in business model canvases. I appreciate the value of structuring & communicating your ideas through lean canvases. No doubts there. But it also kind of broke my workflow. What do I do now? Print out a BMC on A4 & insert it in my notebook? Messy. Use an online tool to keep the canonical version of my BMC & keep a separate paper notebook? Inelegant!

Then last week I was giving a customer development workshop when an idea dawned on me. The purpose of a central BMC is to be able to easily keep it up-to-date when assumptions change. That's why we typically use Post-It's, right? I was already using pencil & eraser in my notebook for that very reason ... What if we could combine the best of both worlds? A BMC, on paper, that fits into a paper notebook. Easy to update. Easy to share. With a nifty transition from the paper to the digital world.

That's when the "Lean Idea Book" was born. What if you had a high-quality notebook with a pre-printed BMC grid on the left page & plenty of space to elaborate on your hypotheses on the right-hand page?

So I started sketching out the properties of such a notebook. High-quality, heavy paper so you can easily erase & rework your ideas. A solid & flexible cover because you're going to be carrying this sucker everywhere. Enough space to work with the business model canvas, but not too big; probably roughly iPad-sized. High-quality thread binding because you want your ideas to last. Beautiful plain pages so you have a beautiful canvas to draw upon, maybe add a very subtle dotted isometric grid to help you align things. And I'd want the BMC grid printed on the left-hand page of course. Preferably in very subtle ink, so that I can simply write over it when I don't need it. I want this to be my "lean" notebook, but I also want to be able to treat it as just-another-notebook, just to make sure I'll always carry it on me.

I have found a local craftsman printer over here in Germany who can deliver on all of the above. I'm confident that I can deliver a product that is as good or better than a Moleskine. I just need enough people to band together & pre-order to make this a reality! That's where you come in! Head over to leanideabook.com & enter your email. I'll get in touch with you with the next steps needed to make this reality!

And here's the kicker! I have discovered a way to make the switch from the paper to the digital world a no-brainer. If you want to learn how, head over to leanideabook.com & enter your email. I'll reveal it soon. And you can be the first to hear about it!

Three Reasons Why I Liked Startup Weekend Cologne

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Last weekend I attended Startup Weekend Cologne. I quickly want to outline three reasons why I'm particularly excited about this brand of startup events.

First. Just look at it! Here we have a group of highly-talented people. Most of them holding demanding 9-5 jobs. Yet they come together on a weekend. Not to party. But to work for 48 hours straight. And they're paying for the privilege to do it! How freakin' amazing is that?!

Second. I really think we can see the future at work here. No, it's not about the "startup" part in startup weekend. Most teams who participate will fall apart. Most startups will fail. What I'm excited about is that each weekend hundreds of people worldwide learn how to create their own job. A pretty useful skill to have in a world where technology is destroying jobs.

Third. I'm a strong believer in the power of 10x. When you bring together the right people in the right environment, productivity can increase by orders of magnitude. More than once I heard people say things like "I got more done this weekend than in one month at INSERT BIGCO HERE". 10x productivity is about managing your energy & environment, not your time. And it's awesome to see so many people get a taste of that!

PitchPhone will soon be relaunching as Pitchcademy

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

PitchPhone launched on August 17th, 2012. It quickly made a bit of a buzz with a Techcrunch article, plenty of interested users and more feedback in my mailbox than I could handle.

My first take-away was that, yes, budding entrepreneurs want to improve their pitch. My second take-away quickly became "Okaaaaay ... , but making phone calls is clearly not the right way to help entrepreneurs practice said pitches".

So I did a little more digging & experimenting. I came up with one use case where "talk on the phone to improve your pitch" really does work. Just not for startuppey people. I also found a different way to improve your pitch that I knew entrepreneurs would love. But it meant ditching the "phone" in PitchPhone.

So I was faced with a bit of a dilemma: keep the "phone" in PitchPhone & sell it to a different market. Or staying with a market I am truly passionate about & change the product. I chose the latter because I just love entrepreneurs. If you want a hint about what's coming: Manuel was right ;-)

As of today I'm discontinuing PitchPhone. Refunds to existing users have been made. Drop me a mail if you want to learn more about the new service or would like to try it out.

PitchPhone will be back with a better service, exciting new partners & one cause: to help entrepreneurs improve their pitch.

Startup Weekend Poznan from the other side of the table

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Last weekend I had the chance to attend Startup Weekend Poznan. I've been to startup weekends & hackathons before, but this time things were a bit different. I helped out with mentoring some of the teams, particularly helping out with pitching. Here are some of the lessons I learned.

The big take-away for me was that events like Startup Weekend prove that the process of building a startup can be formalized & taught. Shameless plug: I'll be coaching startup teams for NEXT Cologne in December. Still a few days to sign up, seats are limited!

NEXT is a 3-week intensive follow-on course to Startup Weekend. It's your chance to experience the world's most effective entrepreneurship curriculum: Steve Blank's Lean Launch Pad. It's a combo of studying entrepreneurship on Udacity & applying that knowledge in real-life situations together with local coaches like yours truly.

Back to Startup Weekend Poznan. Let me illustrate a couple of lessons I learned in Poland. Here's the summary for the TL;DR crowd: Always keep challenging your own assumptions. Bringing a developer is good, bringing a designer is better. Use the power of modern API's. Use the system. Use a startup event to channel your team's energy.

The best example I saw of a team challenging their own assumptions was SaveTrender. When I first met them on Saturday they had an all too common problem: a pretty complex product & no developer on the team. Over the weekend they managed to seriously change & simplify the user interface by doing paper prototyping & talking to people. They came up with an assumption & a clear way to test it with a very polished landing page.

Developers & Designers are hot property at startup events. But I'd say that it's probably better to bring a good designer than a developer. The presentation at the end of the weekend is everything. And it's nearly always better to present a small but polished product than a working but ugly one. The BabyCarrots pulled this off in great style because their team consisted mostly of designers. Design & UX are real competitive advantages in consumer startups & the time pressure of a Startup Weekend amplifies this.

The TrailerHero team really made great use of an existing powerful API. "Let's build something on top of API X" is a very valid way to approach a Startup Weekend. There was one moment on saturday where I really feared for the team though. They started out with this obvious, simple, powerful idea: take a picture of a movie poster to see the trailer. But then on saturday they started tacking on features and UI elements. By saturday night they had a pretty bloated UI. But the core of the app just worked because of the API. So on sunday they did a really impressive 'save' by kicking out half of the UI. In the end they delivered a working, polished, beautiful, simple product. The fact that you can build an app which uses pretty advanced vision AI in 48 is simply amazing.

I was really blown away by the KidGifter team. It's amazing to watch an 11-year-old kid talking "business model canvas" & "customer validation" like the best. It's the best proof that building a startup is a craft & can be taught. This team was also a great example of the power of youth. If You Don't Know It's Impossible, It's Easier to Do.

Finally, the winning team, MarkAndPark, did a great job of channelling the energy of a startup weekend. They were solving a hair-on-fire problem: how to find a parking space? They had a clear business case. And most of all: they did an impressive follow-up after the weekend. Parry Sondhi has been bugging me to vote for their startup in the Global Startup Battle every single day. And that's great: I'm a big fan of hustle.

If you've been mentioned in this blog post, consider this an open invitation to get in touch with me if you want to talk about your progress since the event.

If you're on the fence whether you should attend events like Startup Weekend: you should. If you're in the Cologne area your next opportunity is NEXT Cologne and then Startup Weekend Cologne in January.

Next Hacker News Cologne Meetup: Nov 28th @ 1900 in Solution Space

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0100

As you may know, today the Hacker News Cologne Meetup.com group got hijacked. That doesn't mean it's not business as usual, though: The next meetup is scheduled for 1900 hrs CET @ Solution Space on Nov 28th and we have a new exciting special guest from the US on Skype and a YCombinator alum who will be joining us IRL to share from his experiences with us.

We're resolving the meetup.com hijacking farce in a civilized manner, so it would be cool if:

1) We all refrain from personal attacks on the hijacker

2) We all help spread this message far & wide. We personally can’t reach everyone directly, but hey, this is the intarwebs and you know better than us how to get the word out to the right people.

We will discuss and decide on an alternative to Meetup.com during our next IRL meetup.

Cheers, The Crew (Francis, Vidar & Maik … the original HN Meetup Cologne Organizers)

In which I show my ❤ for homo entrepreneurius

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Sometime this summer I decided that the biggest issue in startup-land for someone like me is not tech, but marketing. I can build pretty much anything but like many tech-oriented people I struggle with marketing. (Shameless plug: I'm an iOS freelance moonshiner on the side, so if you need an app done, get in touch!)

So since summer I've been reading up a whole lot on marketing. I did a few courses & joined an awesome private group of online marketers. The verdict: writing & tech are my strengths so I probably should leverage those in my marketing efforts.

I came up with this dead-simple plan. Stay in touch on this blog to see how it pans out. It goes like this. 1) Create products for the people you know best (startup entrepreneurs). 2) Write about & for the startup world 3) ??? 4) Profit! Pitchphone is my first product for entrepreneurs. Today it's time to talk about the writing bit.

People have been telling me again and again that they enjoy my writing on this blog. But one thing always bugged me about it. Just look at the url. Totally self-centered, right? And I guess that's ok. For a personal blog. Not so much if your goal is to reach a broader startup audience.

That's why today I am launching a weekly newsletter that is 1% about me & 99% about that rare & beautiful species you belong to: homo entrepreneurius. Tales of Creation will feature an interview with a startup entrepreneur each week. The focus will be on the people & the story behind the project. And I'll also try to include some practical startup tips I learned from talking to these wonderful people every week.

Today is the day I'm sending out the first real issue to subscribers. But I've been working on this for a while. I started doing interviews in early September & the response has been amazing. I posted them on this blog, so hit the archives to read up on them. Then head over to www.talesofcreation.com and ...

SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER

(Trust me, this is going to be awesome! No spam, strictly once a week & you can unsubscribe at any time!)

Always stay on the lookout for phase shifts in technology

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

A long time ago I naively committed blasphemy by suggesting that the operating system is a dependency of the app straight to the face of a graybeard sysadmin who was in charge of running the servers at a rather large research institution. This was in the days before virtualization when one server was expected to run multiple web applications. Yeah, the ass-whooping I got for that burned for a few days.

How things have changed. On platforms like Heroku this really has become true: the OS really is a dependency of the app. Turns out the way out of dependency hell was running a custom OS for each app after all. But once again this kind of setup has become old-school. The pendulum has swung again. We're back to writing our code to fit the platform instead of the other way around.

With the advent of large-scale Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) providers we're once again tailoring our apps to the specifications of a certain backend provider. Why? Because the development speedup of fitting your mobile app into, say, the Parse model of doing things, is so ridiculous that it becomes a competitive disadvantage not to use these services.

I'm talking at least 10x speedups in development time here folks. Just a little over a year ago I built a fairly complicated iPhone app on top of CouchBase & ran it on my own servers. Took a few weeks. Today I could probably rewrite the backend for that app in a day using Parse.

I like to think of software development as a pendulum swinging between high & low levels of abstraction. Writing web code in Perl that only executes in cgi-bin on shared machines in the 90's? Low abstraction. Writing a RoR app that executes on a custom VM running heroku? High abstraction. These alternating tick/tock motions are the common waves on which technology surfs.

The interesting thing about technology is that from time to time a phase shift occurs. A technology change so big that it effectively shifts everything forward, resulting in a speedup of several orders of magnitude. I'd say the last big ones in the software world were web frameworks & cloud computing. I feel like a new phase shift is happening with BaaS options like Parse.

Tales of Creation: A Pocketful of Poland, an interview with Polish Entrepreneur Piotr Biegun

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

In the next few weeks I will be posting interviews with people who create stuff online. I'm calling them Tales of Creation. I'm interviewing a bunch of interesting characters. Entrepreneurs, hackers, artists. The kind of people who build stuff & put it out there for the world to see. These people deserve to be featured. No matter if their goal is building a nice lifestyle business, sharing a good quick hack or world domination. Because in my experience there's always an interesting story or person behind a project.

This week's tale of creation features Piotr Biegun from Whalla, a company coming out of the Huge Thing accelerator. I met him at the Pirate Summit where he displayed a genius strategy for connecting with people: bring cases and cases of free vodka.

Your startup is called Whalla. Tell me, what's it about?

Let me give you an example. I just got back from a startup event in Cologne called The Pirate Summit. I met a lot of people taking photos over there. And everyone ended up uploading photos to their own favorite services. But I don't know most people who were at the event. So I need to spend a lot of time to find all those photos in the different services. The same is true for private events like vacations. Everyone is shooting photos & posting them everywhere but in the end we still rely on email to exchange the pics.

We can do better! And that's what Whalla, is about: helping people to share, collect & discover photos from events that are important to them. Whalla integrates with popular services like Flickr & Picasa and makes it easy to share & find photos of events. We connect people, events & photos. And we take the hard work out of syncing those pics. We will start out with limited free accounts for private events, unlimited B2C accounts and B2B accounts with more features for professionnal event organizers.

I first met you at the Pirate Summit in Germany. What are the differences between Germany and Poland?

Poland is pretty different from Germany. The main difference is one of mentality. People in Poland are very technical and creative but they also tend to not challenge the status quo. In Poland people don't know the words startup or entrepreneur. Most often we're seen as thieves just because we earn money. What people don't understand in Poland is that you can earn honest money by just working hard and not necessarily for a major corporation.

So it's a cultural problem. Any other symptoms of that?

Yes, in Poland the startup world is just beginning because until now the only successful stories were very local ones like Allegro.pl. We need to think more globally but that's hard. E.g. it's not uncommon to give 49.9% of your company in a first round with local VC's because of a focus on short-term profitability. Another example is that in Poland people don't have a culture of going out & talking about their ideas early. Instead they'll build their product for 12 months & then be surprised when no one uses their product.

Did you also notice that Geeks-On-A-Plane counts Berlin as Eastern Europe?

No way - #polishmafia, #balticmafia - we differ a lot from Berlin. We need to be creative because we don't have the possibilities offered in the US or even Berlin. We are more dynamic because our homeland markets are smaller and this forces us to find different ways of making money. I think of Poland as a connector between Western and Eastern Europe. We should profit a lot from this position in the near future. Remember that entrepreneurship simply did not exist 20 years ago in a lot of Eastern European countries. This makes us rising stars & that is maybe why we are perceived as being more dynamic.

You're working 100% on Whalla now. What changed after you quit your job & went full-time?

I started to think differently. I changed my focus to doing & shipping instead of continuously looking for holes in the whole thing. I worked at lot & was pretty dedicated at my previous job, but the difference is that now it is my business and my vision. I know exactly what I have to do to move this forward. This translates into a 24/7/365 working regime. No excuses. Just work! Sleep is for losers anyway.

Can you even do a startup when you're not 100% in?

For me it's 1000% right now. If you're doing both the technical and business side at the same time like I am right now you need to be all-in. If you're like my confounder Wojtek who is mostly helping by connecting us with people you could do it part-time. And that's just fine. I guess it depends on the role you play in your startup.

You mentioned "sleep is for losers". Any tips on how to improve performance for entrepreneurs?

Start your day with a good breakfast and move a lot. A good English-style breakfast may not be healthy, but it will do the job. It's all about energy, proteins and oil. Move as much as you can, do some sports, run, swim. For me it's playing squash with my friends.

I said sleep is for losers but I'm still an early bird. I tend to wake up before everyone. I go to bed at 12 and rise at 6. You need your rest because after a few days of hard work your efficiency will be gone. At that point it doesn't matter if you work 1 or 16 hours, the effect of your work will be the same. So get some sleep!

I understand you had to kill other side-projects to be able to work full-time on Whalla. Can you tell me a little more about those?

Yes, it was a startup in the fashion world. It offered offline analytics for brick and mortar stores using NFC and smart tags. Think Google Analytics but for clothes. The market was not for me. I didn't have any connections. I didn't have the team. I didn't have the money.

What software is running your startup?

Microsoft's Bizspark program is working pretty well for us. The main benefit is that it helps us build our product faster without having to worry about the legality of our software. In Poland software is still very expensive compared to salaries, so that definitely helps a lot. Especially since we were already working with MS technologies. Bizspark gave us access to Windows OS, the Developer Tools & Office. And we're switching to Azure in a few days.

Some other must-haves for us: Skype for calls, Google Analytics for tracking, Mailchimp for newsletters, Buffer for scheduling tweets, Dropbox for sharing files, TweetDeck for the Twitter events and TFS Preview for managing code and tasks.

What does your work setup look like?

I work on an ASUS N53SV Laptop which is not exactly my dream device. It's fast but too bulky for traveling. I'm running Windows 8 & the usual suspects like MS Office for typical business work and Visual Studio to stay up-to-date with Whalla,'s code. I also have an iPad and Galaxy S2. My favorite app is Pocket.

What are you reading?

I really do have a lot of books in my backlog. I recommend Getting Real and Rework when you're a technical guy and need an introduction to basic business development. Then I recommend the usual suspects for startups: Running Lean, The Startup Owner's Manual, Delivering Happiness & The Art Of The Start. I'm in love with psychology and trying to understand how people make decisions. Here I recommend Influence by Robert Cialdini and Brain Sex by Anne Moir. For managing your books you could use an app like BookLikes, which launched at Disrupt last year.

Do you have any parting tips for our readers?

Yes. Above all, talk to people. Try to understand their problems and then do your best to help them. Entrepreneurship is that simple. It's all about compassion & understanding your customers. Also, always be selling your vision and your product. Doing a startup is about seduction, so treat it like as if you were dating.

PitchPhone ❤ Startup Weekend

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

PitchPhone is sponsoring Startup Weekend Boulder - Education. With a custom demo of the service & a coupon worth $19.99 to participants of Startup Weekend. Yay! Free monies! So what's the thinking behind this?

One of the reasons why I started PitchPhone is because in the last 2 years of working on startups I learned how important it is to perfect your pitch. The thing is, most startups don't practice pitching nearly enough. Not even close. Most startups are a big bucket of FAIL in this department. What I learned from observing a world-class sales guy is that you need to be breathing your pitch day & night.

But that's not typically something your average geek likes to do. Sure, we'll pay lip service to pitching when we have to, like when we attend a conference. I know because I used to be like that. Then I found a ninja hack to break the bad habit of only building and never pitching. Here it is:

Whatever you are working on, submit it to every accelerator, startup competition & event you can find. The goal here is not to get invited, but forcing yourself to answer the right questions about your startup. No matter if it's YC, Seedcamp, BlackBox, Geeks-On-A-Plane or The Pirate Summit, most of these types of events will come with a questionnaire to fill out & a chance to pitch your idea. This strategy will give you a chance to work on your pitch every few weeks, because accelerators & events are popping up like the bubbles in the overcarbonated energy drinks fueling our late-night coding sessions. Did I just mention bubble? ... Practice makes perfect, so get on it alright!

Pitch competitions are a staple of startup events. E.g. at a typical Startup Weekend you'll get a chance to deliver your pitch twice: once at the beginning to convince participants to join your project and once at the end to impress the jury. The reason PitchPhone is a perfect match for this type of event is that it takes pitching one step further: PitchPhone forces you to think about your pitch every day, even after the big event is over.

If you are organizing a startup weekend or similar event with a pitch competition, get in touch with me if you want to offer a special deal on PitchPhone to your participants.

On being blocked in China, Part 2

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Every year I spend about 1 month in Shanghai, China. Over the years I've seen the city grow in impressive and bewildering ways. Each year I try to assess how internet-friendly China has become.

The good. Fast broadband access has become easy. So easy in fact that I would rate the consumer internet connection plugged into this typical newly built apartment block better than the one I have back home in Germany. The speed difference is so visible that a Skype call from Shanghai to Belgium was clearer than one from Germany to Belgium. So, up yours, Alice. Communist-style China Telekom vs. capitalist-style Alice Internet: 1 - 0.

The bad. If you rely on Western internet tools you're S.O.L. Previously the usual suspects like Youtube & Google would be blocked but it seems like now a lot of the services that are an integral part of our internet experience are blocked or throttled. Case in point: I operate a service called PitchPhone. When you load that page from Shanghai, the Vimeo product video does not load, the SnapEngage user feedback widget does not work & the AddThis sharing widget at the bottom of the page only loads partially.

This is an interesting failure mode to think about: as our pages start to rely more and more on external services for e.g content delivery, javascript serving or just plain old embeds; the potential for a 'rogue' state breaking the interwebs increases.

VPN's to the rescue, you say! Yes, a decent VPN provider will still get you out of most tricky situations, but be aware that techniques like VPN throttling may render this escape hatch obsolete as soon as the establishment deems that social stability > foreigner's comfort. I've seen a (private) VPN throttled & it's ugly. The tools are in place, they're merely not being used on a broad scale right now.

The ugly. VPN has become a must because if you're not securing your connection suddenly things will start to break randomly. Oh, you want to install a fresh debian distro? Sorry, can't do that, the ftp server is blocked. You upgraded to Mountain Lion because of the Twitter & Facebook integration? Here, let me break your OS for you! Need to activate your iPhone with Apple's servers? Can't do that: they're blacklisted.

The deep integration of the internet into our digital lives and devices has made us very vulnerable to random breakage. Previously it was pretty obvious when you were being censored because the breakage was mostly limited to the browser. Nowadays your phone may brick because of censorship and it can be pretty tricky to pinpoint the exact reason. And unless you're an expert who can proxy like a foxy to solve the problem, you're out of luck.

And it's our fault (software devs, that is). It's like the Apple Maps fiasco: caused by devs not looking further than their Californian backyard. Except this time our backyard is the whole Western world. When network connectivity dies because of censorship it tends to look quite different from a usual 'dead link'. And since we don't experience this kind of network breakage in our daily lives the software we bake does not really know how to deal with these failure modes. So start writing unit-tests against censorship-induced failures. They may prove to be useful on the day when our oh-so-benevolent Western governmental or corporate overlords turn on us.

A letter to Tim Cook on maps

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

To our Corporate Overlords. As Apple followers, we strive to use world-class products to solve our very mundane first-world problems. Like finding the nearest Starbucks. With the launch of Apple's new Maps app last week, we felt abandoned at first, but then we understood.

You see, we initially glanced at the Apple Maps app when the first version of our beloved iOS launched. At the time, it was a decent mapping app alright. Life was good. As time progressed, we tried hard to ignore that new kid on the block with snazzy features like turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, vector-based maps and street view. Not because we expected a fuck-up like MobileMe or iTunes Ping. We'd never say that, that'd be blasphemy. Like true believers we waited until in your infinite wisdom you deemed us ready to receive those sacred features.

We understand that this is a test of faith for this small congregation of nary 100 million followers. We are a small community of underdogs & revolutionaries. Or so your teachings tell us. That is why we are patient. That is why we sent half a billion of incantations of support your way, while you go about your hard task of releasing us from bad mapping. In the meantime, we'll continue using the app & giving you feedback. We trust you will continue to treat our daily prayers as well as you have treated our bug reports in the past.

While you're improving Maps, true followers will refrain from using inferior alternatives like Bing & That Other App. Because we can read between the lines. Because we understand. We really do. You sacrificed yourself to educate & elevate us. To each us mortal sinners what is best for us. We are grateful for that & we expect no less in the future. Now where's that nearest Starbucks?

Tales of Creation: An Interview With Stu Green From Project Bubble

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I first met Stu online about a year ago when I first heard about fowndr. I was on it for a while then I honestly forgot all about it. Until it was brought back to my attention in a Show HN thread. I got back in touch with him & I quickly unearthed an interesting & typical founder story.

So tell me about Fowndr?

Can I talk about Project Bubble instead? That's my main startup.

Sure. Seems like you're a busy bee. Focus is good. So what's Bubble about?

Project Bubble was founded in 2009 out of frustrations of not being able to find a simple project and task management tool which worked the way I wanted it to. I was stressed out with 10-15 different projects going around in my head, that I needed a way of seeing them all on one page and being able to mark them as active and inactive, like the lights on a traffic light. So I built the tool just like I wanted. A few months later I released it to the public to see if anyone else would find it useful. They did. Within 3 months we had 5000 users and a product that I knew could be profitable if I was to start charging. So I did. 3 years later I'm now working full time along with 3 others for a company that was once just a small side project, now a profitable and successful business.

So you started out by charging your customers early. How do you feel about bootstrapping it vs. taking funding?

We never took financing because I wanted to be in control of the business fully. In the future it's a possibility because I'd like to scale the business up much more now. It was a lifestyle business and it was fun at the time, now it's much more in the realms of scaling big - so yes it's definitely a possibility.

What's your story?

I built my first website when I was 18 years old. My Dad ran a computer shop so I was always around computers. My friend, who was a bit older, told me that he made £600 a day doing website consultation and believed in me enough to give me one of his books. It was a huge book on HTML, so big in fact that I actually looked pretty stupid carrying it around with me when we went to restaurants and social occasions with the family. My first website was for one of my Dad's customers who was a cricket scorer. He paid me £99 to build a site all about cricket scoring, pretty much taken from his book. I built it in a few days and soon realised that this could be a pretty good deal for me. 10 years later I decided to stop building websites for other people and decided I wanted a business with regular recurring revenue. To cut a long story short, I then went on to build Project Bubble.

What is the single best thing you learned while building Project Bubble?

The single best thing I've learnt is that customer service is everything. The customer is your world. They give you their money, they give you their feedback which makes the product better, and they give you word of mouth which leads to other customers doing the same thing. It's like a wheel. If you take great customer service away, then the wheel does not go around and you're left with problems. They won't give you their money, they won't give you their business, so therefore they won't give you their feedback and sure as heck they won't give you their word of mouth. I want the customer to always feel valued and special. It's something I've been working on for a long time and am still learning, but the better you do that then the better the wheel will turn around.

What's your biggest mistake?

My biggest mistake has to be undervaluing my product. I never used to think my work was that good, when compared to others. So when it came to pricing I would always put a low price on it. I've done this with freelancing, and I've done it with software as a service. The key is to not think about what your product is worth to you, but think about what value it brings to your customer. When you do that then you can put a price tag on your services. You'll often be surprised at how much you value your work or product at when you think like this.

Sounds like typical geek-think. Another thing geeks seem to do a lot is having side-projects. How do you handle running multiple projects at the same time?

I think it depend on how much time you are committing to each project. If you are running each one and also doing development and marketing then that's bad. If you are right at the top managing others and making top level decisions its ok. I was running 4 projects at the same time a while ago and it took its toll on me. I was losing focus on the one that was actually bringing in the most income and it was affecting the business. I had to let the others go and focus on the one thing. Since then it's been a lot easier, a lot less stressful and the business had flourished. So it's important to keep the focus, particularly if you are heavily involved in the project.

Did you do any other sites before starting Project Bubble?

My only other project was Musofinder.com which was a musician search engine. I built that in 2003 and it ended up with 40,000+ users when I sold it in 2005. It gave me a good learning platform for Project Bubble 4 years later.

Hacker News vs. TechCrunch:a traffic comparison

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Yesterday I made frontpage on Hacker News with my little the6pct app based on Paul Graham's Startup = Growth essay. Just like last time when a little attention came my way, I want to share the numbers. And just like last time the traffic numbers are for a fresh domain, so let's do a little comparison. HN vs. Techcrunch on launch day.

The big picture: the6pct rose to about position 25 (bottom of the homepage) and got 1257 visits in 24 hours. This generated 39 signups (3%). The first big wave of traffic lasted about 5h. Unlike last time with Techcrunch I didn't keep track of Twitter mentions and Facebook likes. Because I didn't have to. HN just doesn't generate many social mentions. More than 24h later & we're still at 27 tweets and 12 likes. Techcrunch will bring orders of magnitude more social mentions.

8,152,112,286,307,96,40 Both the HN and Techcrunch attention generated about 1000 views but HN traffic was a lot more spiky. In the hourly graph at the beginning of this paragaph you can clearly see the second spike after hitting homepage after lingering in 'new' for a while. HN traffic will send a short burst of traffic your way & basically die out the next day. Techcrunch traffic is slower but more sustained. 3 days after being on Techcrunch I could still see the influence while once you drop off the homepage on HN all traffic dies.

57,25,18 Traffic Sources: 57% of the traffic came directly from Hacker News. 25% of traffic was direct traffic and the majority of other referral traffic I saw was from feed services.

70,30 Social Referrals are low compared to Techcrunch overall but one interesting thing I noted in the traffic is that Facebook (70%) is significantly less popular than Twitter (30%) with the HN crowd.

Secondary Effects. One of the most useful things I learned from the PitchPhone launch is that a good launch can be a great conversation starter. What happened back then is that people randomly contacted me with suggestions & feature requests. That didn't happen at all with the6pct. I'll take this as a further signal that PitchPhone can be turned into a real product while the6pct will never be a whole lot more than a feature. Maybe a feature services like Instahero can incorporate?

The 6 Percent: a weekly growth tool based on Paul Graham's essay

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Paul Graham's Startup = Growth essay caused quite a stir on teh interwebs. In it PG redefines startups as tools for generating rapid growth and proposes a method to achieve rapid growth. It's pretty simple: you pick a weekly target, say, 6 pct growth. That is your only weekly goal. You either hit it, in which case you've done everything you need to do for that week, or you don't.

To make things even simpler I created a service called The 6 Percent. It does one thing: show you a graph of your weekly growth. I figured that if you are ready to play the high-growth game it makes sense to provide a simple little tool to help you focus even more.

Here's how it works. When you signup at the6pct.com you'll be asked to setup a simple JSON url. The 6 Percent will hit it once a day & create a single page with a nice weekly growth graph. You decide who you share that page with & you can of course delete the page at any time.

Sidenote. I think PG's essay timing is great. It is YC submission season, after all. Makes me wonder if it's just a sly plot to filter out the lifestyle business submissions. Well played, Sir!

Tales of Creation: Hacking The Paleo Diet with Lou Franco

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

This week's tale of creation features Lou Franco. I got in touch with Lou after reading about his PaleoViz app on Hacker News. PaleoViz is a tracking app for the iPhone that helps you stick to a Paleo diet. I have this totally biased theory that about every decade or so a new standard programming exercise emerges. A bit like jazz standards. To hone their skils, developers will code up endless variations on the same theme. Early on that theme was text editors. Then last decade the cool thing seemed to be To-Do apps. Now tracking apps seem to be the theme du jour. PaleoViz is a beautiful variation on that tracking theme. So let's ask Lou all about it.

How did PaleoViz get started?

PaleoViz is a side project, not meant to be a full-blown business yet. Mainly it's a playground for me to get better at product marketing and specifically study jobs-to-be-done theory.

Jobs-to-be-done theory? What's that about?

It comes from Clay Christensen's Innovator's Solution. It's a theory of why people buy products. Basically, jobs arise in our lives that need to get done and we hire products to do them. If we understand the jobs our customers need to get done, it helps us make better product decisions.

So how does that apply to PaleoViz?

My theory is that people want to lose fat and hire the Paleo Diet. My app is then hired to help reach this goal. Most developers would approach this kind of app from a "food diary" angle. With typical features that would make it look more and more like e.g. Lose It. But if you approach it from a jobs-to-be-done angle you quickly understand that in reality you are not competing with food diary apps but with nutritionist coaches. Just like a food nutritionist the app gives you recommendations based on the Paleo Diet.

Can you summarize the Paleo Diet for people who don't know about it yet?

The Paleo Diet is inspired by the idea that human bodies evolved before modern agriculture, which is incompatible with our physiology. We try to optimize food for nutrition, insulin level management, and minimizing gut irritation. So this means lots of lean meat and fish, eggs, non-starch, non-legume vegetables, and fruit, nuts, and non-seed oils (olive and coconut are ok) form the core. We avoid sugar and gluten nearly completely. There are lots of variations.

What are some good resources to learn more?

I recommend Practical Paleo, Balanced Bites and Paleo Hacks for more information.

Paleo seems to be big among the Quantified Self crowd. What is needed to make self-tracking go mainstream?

I think it's very hard for me to judge this because I am definitely part of the fringe and can't really relate to those outside of it well enough to know what would make it more mainstream. It's something I am trying to figure out.

The one thing lesson I learned is to try to tap into a behavior that is already being done with passion or automatically gather it somehow. For me, there are a lot of people that like to take pictures of their food and post on twitter/facebook. In future versions I will be offering more and more features that tap into that and then incidentally build you a food journal you can analyze.

How did you start coding?

In 1983, my Junior High offered "computers" as a shop class, which was BASIC programming on a Commodore PET. My first program was an animated laughing skull made with ASCII art. My mom got me a Color TRS-80 from Radio Shack for X-Mas that year.

Wow, 1983! Got any tips for the young 'uns?

Short answer: Ship and get better at shipping. You don't need permission to get experience in software. Get stuff out there. On Github, the App Store, Facebook Apps, Websites, whatever. For absolute beginners, go look at Learn Code The Hard Way. My book "Hello iOS" is for absolute beginners as well, and tries to keep it light, step-by-step, and complete. If you know nothing about iOS programming (or even any kind of programming) check out Hello iOS.

Seems overwhelming? Go find an open-source project and start finding and reporting bugs. When they get fixed, go look at the diffs. At some point, fork, fix, and make a pull request. Still too hard? Write sample-code/docs for an SDK or framework you want to know more about! I blogged about this 2 years ago.

You're also writing an iOS book. What's your number one tip for a budding iOS developer?

Technical: Don't obsess over the language (Objective-C). It's weird, but not horrible. Obviously, use Automated Reference Counting.

Business: It's hard to stand out in the App Store no matter how good your app is, so don't let that discourage you. There are many advantages to having an App beyond money. If you are planning for it to be a sustainable business, you need to treat this as seriously (actually, probably 10x as much more seriously) as the technical side.

You mentioned Objective-C is weird. Got any insights on the HTML5 vs. native debate?

I'm native all the way. The best thing about the web is deployment, which the App Store solves as long as your app meets the criteria. I don't personally care about portability, but even if I did, I'd be looking at Mono, not HTML5. I don't find HTML to be easier to develop in than Objective-C. I find it completely frustrating, and the apps I want to write are much harder in HTML. If you want HTML for development advantages or portability, I'd look at PhoneGap and plan to write plugins.

Back to the app. What is the worst mistake you made while developing the app?

98% of the released app was done in April. I should have just released it, but I really wanted to launch with some social features. So, I spent a lot of time thinking, designing and building out server support. With no real handle on what to expect for user-adoption, it was hard to know if I was going overboard. Finally, I just decided to ship without it. The features are coming, but the app is actually pretty useful without them. More importantly, I'll have some data to use for planning next steps.

Congrats on releasing the app & keep us updated on your next steps!

Tales of Creation: Incredibly Incrediblue

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

This week's tale of creation features Theodoros Orfanidis. Theodoros is the creator of Incrediblue, a service best described as AirBnB for boats. I met Theodoros at the awesome Pirate Summit & learned that he flew in all the way from Greece. Greece? Yes, you heard that right. It takes a lot of guts to quit your job to work on a startup in a country that is not exactly known for stability right now.

So what's your story?

I was born 30 years ago in a small town called Veria in northern Greece. I grew up and went to school there. I had a chance to lay my hands on an 8-bit home computer very early in my life. That must have been when I was 8-10 years old. The computer was an Amstrad CPC6128 with a green monitor and belonged to my 2 older brothers. Like most kids, I was hooked on video games.

What were some of your favorite games?

I mostly played arcade classics, games like Double Dragon, Shinobi and Bubble Bobble. These were all ported on the CPC but they were awful compared to the originals. My personal favorite on the CPC was (and still is) Head over Heels.

How did you move from playing the computer to programming it?

I just started reading the computer's huge manual. It turned out that this Amstrad had a BASIC interpreter built-in and a pretty powerful one too. So that was it, I wanted to write my own games and programs. I was so excited with my newly found power to command the computer to do whatever I wanted. I've been programming since then.

Did you write any games of your own?

A few, and I quickly realized that you had to learn assembly to write a real game on 8-bit computers. I mostly wrote simple stuff, like card, dice or backgammon games. They weren't very demanding and CPC's implementation of BASIC could draw decent graphics, although smooth animation was out of the question.

So you're a self-taught programmer?

Indeed. I also have a CS degree, but I had already taught myself the basics by the time I went to University. Teaching yourself is much easier now that broadband internet has become common. There's an abundance of videos, tutorials and sites like Codecademy and Code School. Back then, we only had manuals and magazines with program listings and that was it. Programs like Codecademy are a great way to get you started. I really enjoy the gamification of the learning process and some of them are really well designed. I actually tried Code School's Rails for Zombies just for the fun of it, even though I'm quite experienced in Ruby on Rails.

Let's fast-forward to today for a second. What's it like to be an entrepreneur right now in Greece?

Living in Greece is... stressful. With the Greek economy in a recession, becoming an entrepreneur is considered madness. However, it's this same crisis that forces people to innovate and even start their own business. We have a huge bureaucratic government, which seems to put obstacles to all business owners. With exceptions for a select few, of course ... Even with these obstacles though, I still think we can make it. There are even a few successful startups which started here, like Taxibeat and Bugsense. So yes, it's hard, but nothing in life is easy, is it?

So what do Greek entrepreneurs do to help each other?

The startup scene has been growing strong lately. There are more talks and events about startups than ever. We have regular OpenCoffee meetings in 6 cities around Greece. There are 5 co-working spaces in Athens, 2 in Thessaloniki (2nd largest city) and other smaller cities like Patras and Heraklion. We also host Startup Weekend events. Many initiatives such as the Hellenic Startup Association and the Hellenic Association of Mobile Companies support the ecosystem. OpenFund has been the only accelerator up until now. New ICT seed funds have been introduced this year to invest up to 750k in Greek Startups.

So your company is called Incrediblue. Pitch me!

Incrediblue is the social marketplace connecting boat owners and crew, with travelers globally. Hosts can efficiently manage and significantly monetize their boats & skills; and guests can finally make buying decisions according to price, real photos, location, availability & reviews.

How did Incrediblue start? What did you do before it?

Incrediblue started when I met Antonios through a common friend of ours, around a year ago. He pitched the idea to me and I was quickly sold. I had been working professionally as a web developer for 6 years and I've always been interested in starting up a business of my own. A few months later, we decided to start working on the project, part-time. Until recently, I was working as a full time developer for various companies. I recently quit and decided to commit full time to the project. Another partner also joined the project in the meanwhile, now working full time, so we're pretty committed to turn this into a real business.

What excites you most about Incrediblue?

Yachting is a huge market around the world. We have the opportunity to standardize this market and bring it up to modern standards. That's the most exciting thing about our business. My biggest doubt was whether we could build a great team, so we could finally start building our product. My previous startup attempt failed because of that reason. My biggest fear is that of failing. But we have received such positive feedback and encouragement. We're determined to do our best, so I think we'll do just fine.

Do you think it is impossible to run a business "on the side" or do you feel like you need to focus 100%?

You can definitely start working on a project part-time. That's probably a necessity, if you're bootstrapping, since you need a source of income to pay the bills. But eventually, you have to commit to it fully. It's hard to tell the right time for the leap, but at some point, you just can't focus on your day job anymore when the side project needs all your energy. In our case, all 3 of our team decided to go full time this September.

Is Incrediblue the hardest thing you have done in your life?

I wouldn't say the hardest one, but certainly the riskiest one. I've been through harder moments in my personal life and I came out stronger. I'm not afraid of hard work and I know all of us will do whatever it takes to make Incrediblue successful. It may sound weird, but I don't think I've ever felt despair. Sure, lots of things can go bad, but I always keep up hopes up.

Show HN: Tales of Creation

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Meta. That's what this post is going to be. At least a little. And I apologize for that. You see, I like Show Hacker News. I really do. But sometimes the comments make me cringe. What happens too often is something like this: some poor schlob pours his heart & soul in a project. He then musters up the courage to post it up on "Show HN". Only to be destroyed in the comments.

Ideas are fragile. Like kittens. Especially newborn ideas. Every time you tear apart an idea on Show HN a kitten dies. Have you ever seen a little kitten die? Me neither. No one wants to watch ideas die. So ~~show some constraint~~ be constructive. Criticize, sure. But support your arguments with facts, etc ... You know ... the usual drill. Let's keep the Show HN threads a place of inspiration & learning.

Because that's what I find so fascinating about Show HN: behind every idea there's a person & a story. Inspiration was found. Decisions were made. Shit got done. It's fascinating to watch the guts & glory of creation so early on in the process. Sometimes I learn something on Show HN. Sometimes I get inspired.

That's why I started contacting some of the people behind "Show HN" stories a few weeks ago. Would you do an interview about yourself & the creative process behind the project? It doesn't really matter if what you are building is life-changing or life-style. If you built it & showed it, there's always an interesting story to be told. Even if they didn't come. I want to tell those stories.

And that's how Tales Of Creation was born. It's a newsletter about people who build things. Inspiration & learnings right in your inbox. Once a week. Three fascinating interviews are ready. One interview is already online on this very blog. All stories will be published in the newsletter. Check it out: TalesOfCreation.com

Tales of Creation: an interview with Phil Sharp

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

This week's tale of creation features Phil Sharp. I got in touch with him after spotting his MyLifeThroughBooks post on HN and quickly figured out he's passionate about creation & MyLifeThroughBooks was not the only thing he was working on. Let's hear him out.

So what are you working on right now?

GoodDeedTime.com

Okay, pitch me in a tweet!

When you sign up for GoodDeedTime.com you get a weekly email with a good deed to accomplish. No ads, no spam, just a single good deed.

Got an example of such a good deed?

Handing out free candy.

No shit, everyone likes free candy!

Yes. Here's a story from 8 years ago when I was in college. I finished my finals before most other people so there was a week where I had nothing to do and everyone else was studying. My best friend Jason happened to be visiting and had the idea to buy as much candy as we could carry, and then walk around the libraries handing it out. We did it, had a ton of fun, started great conversations, and hopefully made some students really happy with the random surprise.

Sounds like pure altruism, no?

The goal of GoodDeedTime.com really is just to make a difference and make people happy. With a large group of people taking 5-30 minutes a week focused on helping others, we're able to (slowly but surely) make the world a slightly better place.

However, as an added benefit, researchers at Harvard, Yale and Wharton have recently found that when you're pressed for time, a great way to feel more productive is to help others. So there's a good chance that signing up to do a good deed every week also makes you get more done.

Where did you learn about that?

I read an article in the New York Times that mentioned doing good deeds can make you feel more productive. Around that same time I had also signed up for Dan Shapiro's email list The Best Thing This Year so it's fair to say I had email on my mind. By putting those two ideas together I came up with the basis for Good Deed Time: a weekly email with a good deed to accomplish so you can be more productive.

So how did GoodDeedTime grow?

Within a few hours of having the idea, the site was up and running (which probably explains why it's not the most beautiful site in the world). There were no user groups, no white boarding, no grand plans...I just took the idea and ran with it and have made slight edits along the way as I've gotten feedback from users. So far 584 people have subscribed.

What kinds of things has GoodDeedTime done?

Just some examples. So far we've written letters to a sick young girl, donated supplies to an animal shelter, left money in random vending machines, and donated to provide a scholarship to a high school student.

I heard you have a bit of a GTD obsession?

If I have an idea, then I have to do it. There's very little filter between Phil having an idea, and Phil implementing the idea. Basically, I become obsessed, don't let any excuse stop me, work as fast as possible, and see what happens. Even when I totally flop (check out InstaPlan.me or InstaGrahamCracker.com) I have a good laugh and learn a ton along the way.

You seem to do a lot of projects. How many projects did you start last year?

In the past year I've started 5 projects (in addition to my regular work with Practice Fusion and Headsets.com) and have finished 4 of them. I consider 3 of them a success but I've learned a great deal from each.

Talking of success, what's your definition of it?

My definition of success depends on what I'm working on. In general, I'd say success looks like being part of a loving family and surrounded by great friends. However, on a lot of my individual projects, success looks like helping other people and (at the very least) bringing a smile to someone's face.

Got any final recommendations for our readers?

I'm a huge fan of my Fitbit and my Kindle. Talking of books, I just finished Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson and it just might be the best business book I've ever read. Plus, I'm a big fan of Triggers by Joe Sugarman. To check out other things I've read recently head on over to MyLifeThroughBooks.

Conversation-Driven Development

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Exactly one week ago I launched www.pitchphone.com with a little help from Techcrunch. I already posted updates on the traffic numbers and how it compares to other crunchings. What I haven't talked about yet is what a little media coverage can do to your understanding of your own product & market. So what did the article bring to PitchPhone besides traffic?

I've said before that I consider the media attention a perfect conversation starter. What happened is that after launch plenty of people started contacting me with suggestions & requests. So I spent most of last week glued to my inbox. Here's what I learned from those conversations.

Market Validation. Yes, PitchPhone is something people will use. What's more, it is something people will pay for. So far, so good. But I also learned that I got the initial pricing model completely wrong. Not that I'm charging too much. Plenty of people confirmed (by paying me!) that $5 ~ $25 per month to improve a startup pitch is a fine price to pay. But I'm charging the wrong people. I ran into plenty of people saying "Boy, I wish I could buy PitchPhone for my sales teams, clients, students, etc ...". Expect an update to PitchPhone to cater to that sentiment soon.

Audience Validation. Techcrunch readers seem to be the right audience for this kind of product. While I could've gotten more traffic (like 20x more) from e.g. Hacker News, I doubt I would've had the quality conversations I had with that crowd. As a direct result of the article I talked to media consultants, sales people & conference organizers, not exactly l33t coders but just normal business people. And the feedback I got was far more useful than the feedback you'd typically get from the usual startup crowd.

Use Cases. By far the most useful result of all those conversations has been a renewed focus on use cases instead of features. Before the launch I'd already planned a whole bunch of features for the "Pro" version of PitchPhone. Guess what? Scrap all that, my users need other stuff first! No business plan survives contact with a customer indeed!

All in all it has been a pretty exciting week of conversation-driven-development. Not a single feature was added. But I now have a bunch of validated use cases I can use to shape PitchPhone development. Expect a new & improved PitchPhone 2 weeks from now!

OneSec: A Call To Action

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

You are needed. Our IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign is pretty much in dire straits. 6 days to go & we're not getting closer to our goal. Yes, it's time to talk frankly. A great many of you have told us you think the idea is awesome. Some have shared our campaign with their friends or helped us get press coverage. A few even contributed. For which we grovelingly thank you.

But we need more. As it stands now, we reached less than 10% of our campaign goal. Yet at the same time people walk up to me and ask "When can I download the app?" I won't blame it on you, dear reader, but on AppStore pricing's race to the bottom.

OneSec is a very speculative idea, the kind of idea you'd normally talk to investors about. But we wanted to do this differently. We set up the campaign to figure out if it's possible to crowdfund a "high-risk" & innovative idea. We set up the campaign to test the market. And if it doesn't succeed we'll take it as a sign that the world is not ready yet for OneSec.

So what exactly happens when we don't reach the goal? Of course all our contributors will receive their perks. But we'll have to re-think the app. At the very least it will mean a delayed & feature-limited release of the app. Worst case it will mean no app.

The good news is that a great many innovative things follow a non-linear path to success. So spread the message about OneSec wide & far. Help us reach our goal!

The Startup Compile Cycle

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

About 2 months ago I was working on something neat. A nice little iPhone app. I was even getting ready to submit it to the AppStore. And then Tim Cook announced Passbook in all it's couponing-app destroying furor. Uh-Oh. Back to the drawing board. So I took the time to port my app to iOS6 to take advantage of the new features. And then the waiting started. Waiting for ~~Godot~~ Cook. To launch iOS6. So I could finally submit the app.

I've experienced this waiting as excruciatingly painful. Ridiculous, right? I ought to just relax & wait out the launch. It's just an app & it will get launched in due time. Like many developers, my reaction to this kind of waiting is pretty visceral. Devs hate to wait for stupid things like AppStore approval, getting the landing page ready, getting the press release ready, etc ... And I think I found out why.

You see, in the last 10 years or so we got spoiled by our compilers. Before the web most software development looked something like this: write code ~ hit compile ~ wait ~ see results. Nowadays most frameworks & practices like continuous deployment have eliminated the "Please wait, compiling" phase of software development. We got instant feedback and instant gratification instead.

A short compile cycle and instant feedback are good things ™. Applied to software it tends to accelerate software development in non-linear ways. Applied to companies it got us the practices associated with lean startups. The faster you can push out a chance & observe the results, the faster you can improve and scale in non-linear ways.

But I'm not sure the instant gratification we got is so good after all. Any competent dev can now cram out a simple app & launch it at scale in a matter of days, hours, minutes. And instantly get that hit of instant gratification and empowerment you get when you see people using your system. It's the source of those "How I launched a startup while picking my teeth after dinner last night." posts. And somewhere along the way this has become the new norm in our minds. Except that it's not. The Norm.

We tend to forget that most of the world is pretty linear. While the compile cycle for startups has shrunk significantly, that's not the case for other industries. Our industry is an outlier. You can't scale doctor visits. Or plumbing. Or a landscaping business. Something like journalistic writing doesn't get better exponentially when you do more of it, faster.

Maybe it is our understanding of the software is eating the world meme that makes us so impatient when faced with challenges that don't have a non-linear solution. Like waiting for AppStore approval. So next time this happens, I'll try to drop the impatience & just remind myself: some things simply don't scale.

Crunching the numbers on a Techcrunching Part 2

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Here's a quick followup on last week's Techcrunching. Like any good numbers-driven hacker I was curious to find out if the numbers I got were above or below average for coverage on Techcrunch. So I did what good geeks do: build a dataset. It consists of 18996 articles Techcrunch has published in the last 658 days. For each article I calculated number of tweets and number of facebook likes as a proxy for popularity.

2, 5, 10, 23, 36, 33, 30, 29, 3, 9, 26, 36, 35, 36, 22, 11, 7, 36, 37, 38, 29, 22, 8, 10, 31, 23, 24, 15, 13, 6, 6, 25, 34, 43, 31, 22, 14, 5, 29, 33, 28, 26, 13, 9, 5, 23, 33, 28, 33, 26, 8, 5, 30, 26, 26, 17, 13, 6, 4, 15, 17, 20, 14, 15, 6, 8, 22, 27, 39, 33, 27, 9, 8, 35, 42, 31, 33, 29, 7, 9, 23, 48, 38, 33, 31, 9, 11, 37, 41, 39, 33, 26, 9, 5, 29, 41, 37, 34, 23, 8, 14, 28, 29, 23, 41, 35, 10, 14, 31, 31, 30, 27, 21, 8, 9, 17, 25, 23, 36, 28, 7, 12, 32, 37, 28, 30, 19, 8, 9, 29, 29, 36, 32, 30, 9, 12, 27, 24, 23, 32, 25, 11, 11, 33, 26, 30, 20, 22, 7, 8, 35, 33, 31, 25, 21, 5, 8, 37, 28, 32, 31, 27, 9, 11, 27, 34, 27, 30, 18, 11, 7, 30, 28, 32, 28, 21, 6, 13, 27, 35, 38, 38, 22, 5, 7, 26, 40, 26, 26, 24, 8, 4, 16, 32, 36, 21, 20, 7, 8, 31, 28, 27, 27, 15, 7, 19, 52, 39, 37, 18, 19, 8, 7, 12, 27, 35, 28, 27, 11, 12, 29, 39, 33, 32, 24, 10, 4, 22, 24, 36, 34, 22, 8, 7, 29, 31, 32, 27, 22, 7, 10, 25, 35, 35, 21, 19, 5, 9, 14, 22, 24, 33, 25, 9, 9, 28, 49, 48, 34, 32, 6, 7, 29, 45, 46, 37, 35, 8, 12, 32, 38, 34, 37, 27, 6, 9, 37, 38, 35, 47, 30, 8, 5, 27, 48, 46, 31, 34, 11, 8, 43, 39, 37, 38, 28, 6, 14, 26, 16, 34, 39, 28, 12, 6, 35, 34, 40, 35, 30, 7, 7, 18, 33, 42, 50, 28, 11, 12, 53, 55, 44, 28, 26, 8, 10, 31, 47, 47, 54, 27, 8, 8, 50, 43, 46, 44, 20, 9, 10, 42, 50, 39, 29, 35, 6, 8, 36, 45, 42, 41, 29, 10, 7, 43, 57, 43, 31, 38, 1, 14, 46, 41, 51, 40, 28, 18, 14, 57, 46, 37, 35, 34, 11, 9, 49, 56, 55, 40, 41, 59, 52, 46, 31, 8, 11, 42, 38, 36, 16, 21, 9, 13, 40, 40, 50, 35, 40, 10, 15, 42, 52, 51, 54, 40, 12, 9, 45, 59, 47, 57, 35, 10, 16, 40, 53, 51, 33, 23, 12, 6, 21, 24, 32, 26, 19, 11, 12, 23, 38, 40, 45, 26, 14, 10, 69, 42, 44, 41, 32, 9, 10, 32, 51, 51, 58, 41, 8, 6, 45, 47, 44, 40, 33, 16, 13, 36, 40, 50, 33, 22, 10, 15, 38, 45, 59, 41, 22, 9, 9, 38, 46, 44, 35, 30, 7, 8, 28, 42, 49, 53, 26, 16, 19, 53, 46, 38, 50, 37, 14, 13, 37, 42, 41, 62, 27, 14, 11, 41, 31, 29, 50, 31, 13, 11, 49, 38, 47, 40, 26, 16, 18, 45, 44, 35, 50, 23, 14, 18, 40, 43, 50, 44, 28, 9, 17, 36, 37, 53, 33, 30, 15, 17, 42, 46, 42, 37, 35, 17, 23, 39, 51, 44, 48, 37, 13, 10, 28, 60, 49, 58, 29, 12, 12, 46, 50, 49, 48, 36, 13, 14, 45, 56, 41, 52, 40, 14, 19, 49, 57, 47, 20, 22, 7, 10, 18, 52, 53, 46, 26, 12, 11, 43, 45, 35, 51, 27, 11, 15, 41, 30, 48, 57, 35, 12, 17, 42, 55, 50, 42, 28, 13, 9, 40, 47, 64, 60, 34, 15, 12, 34, 36, 20, 27, 22, 13, 16, 46, 43, 45, 44, 26, 15, 16, 45, 61, 60, 58, 34, 14, 16, 33, 71, 61, 69, 30, 15, 13, 45, 65, 56, 54, 32, 9, 17, 43, 39, 46, 47, 31, 9, 15, 40, 62, 48, 53, 37, 12, 10 2, 5, 10, 23, 36, 33, 30, 29, 3, 9, 26, 36, 35, 36, 22, 11, 7, 36, 37, 38, 29, 22, 8, 10, 31, 23, 24, 15, 13, 6, 6, 25, 34, 43, 31, 22, 14, 5, 29, 33, 28, 26, 13, 9, 5, 23, 33, 28, 33, 26, 8, 5, 30, 26, 26, 17, 13, 6, 4, 15, 17, 20, 14, 15, 6, 8, 22, 27, 39, 33, 27, 9, 8, 35, 42, 31, 33, 29, 7, 9, 23, 48, 38, 33, 31, 9, 11, 37, 41, 39, 33, 26, 9, 5, 29, 41, 37, 34, 23, 8, 14, 28, 29, 23, 41, 35, 10, 14, 31, 31, 30, 27, 21, 8, 9, 17, 25, 23, 36, 28, 7, 12, 32, 37, 28, 30, 19, 8, 9, 29, 29, 36, 32, 30, 9, 12, 27, 24, 23, 32, 25, 11, 11, 33, 26, 30, 20, 22, 7, 8, 35, 33, 31, 25, 21, 5, 8, 37, 28, 32, 31, 27, 9, 11, 27, 34, 27, 30, 18, 11, 7, 30, 28, 32, 28, 21, 6, 13, 27, 35, 38, 38, 22, 5, 7, 26, 40, 26, 26, 24, 8, 4, 16, 32, 36, 21, 20, 7, 8, 31, 28, 27, 27, 15, 7, 19, 52, 39, 37, 18, 19, 8, 7, 12, 27, 35, 28, 27, 11, 12, 29, 39, 33, 32, 24, 10, 4, 22, 24, 36, 34, 22, 8, 7, 29, 31, 32, 27, 22, 7, 10, 25, 35, 35, 21, 19, 5, 9, 14, 22, 24, 33, 25, 9, 9, 28, 49, 48, 34, 32, 6, 7, 29, 45, 46, 37, 35, 8, 12, 32, 38, 34, 37, 27, 6, 9, 37, 38, 35, 47, 30, 8, 5, 27, 48, 46, 31, 34, 11, 8, 43, 39, 37, 38, 28, 6, 14, 26, 16, 34, 39, 28, 12, 6, 35, 34, 40, 35, 30, 7, 7, 18, 33, 42, 50, 28, 11, 12, 53, 55, 44, 28, 26, 8, 10, 31, 47, 47, 54, 27, 8, 8, 50, 43, 46, 44, 20, 9, 10, 42, 50, 39, 29, 35, 6, 8, 36, 45, 42, 41, 29, 10, 7, 43, 57, 43, 31, 38, 1, 14, 46, 41, 51, 40, 28, 18, 14, 57, 46, 37, 35, 34, 11, 9, 49, 56, 55, 40, 41, 59, 52, 46, 31, 8, 11, 42, 38, 36, 16, 21, 9, 13, 40, 40, 50, 35, 40, 10, 15, 42, 52, 51, 54, 40, 12, 9, 45, 59, 47, 57, 35, 10, 16, 40, 53, 51, 33, 23, 12, 6, 21, 24, 32, 26, 19, 11, 12, 23, 38, 40, 45, 26, 14, 10, 69, 42, 44, 41, 32, 9, 10, 32, 51, 51, 58, 41, 8, 6, 45, 47, 44, 40, 33, 16, 13, 36, 40, 50, 33, 22, 10, 15, 38, 45, 59, 41, 22, 9, 9, 38, 46, 44, 35, 30, 7, 8, 28, 42, 49, 53, 26, 16, 19, 53, 46, 38, 50, 37, 14, 13, 37, 42, 41, 62, 27, 14, 11, 41, 31, 29, 50, 31, 13, 11, 49, 38, 47, 40, 26, 16, 18, 45, 44, 35, 50, 23, 14, 18, 40, 43, 50, 44, 28, 9, 17, 36, 37, 53, 33, 30, 15, 17, 42, 46, 42, 37, 35, 17, 23, 39, 51, 44, 48, 37, 13, 10, 28, 60, 49, 58, 29, 12, 12, 46, 50, 49, 48, 36, 13, 14, 45, 56, 41, 52, 40, 14, 19, 49, 57, 47, 20, 22, 7, 10, 18, 52, 53, 46, 26, 12, 11, 43, 45, 35, 51, 27, 11, 15, 41, 30, 48, 57, 35, 12, 17, 42, 55, 50, 42, 28, 13, 9, 40, 47, 64, 60, 34, 15, 12, 34, 36, 20, 27, 22, 13, 16, 46, 43, 45, 44, 26, 15, 16, 45, 61, 60, 58, 34, 14, 16, 33, 71, 61, 69, 30, 15, 13, 45, 65, 56, 54, 32, 9, 17, 43, 39, 46, 47, 31, 9, 15, 40, 62, 48, 53, 37, 12, 10 Techcrunch seems to publish a little less than 30 articles per day with a maximum of 71. Mean (28) & median (29) are pretty close so nothing really interesting here. Over time there does not seem to be a significant increase in the number of articles. If there is growth, it's pretty steady & linear.

779, 505, 689, 192, 165, 208, 293, 211, 500, 463, 235, 226, 227, 310, 288, 653, 437, 220, 193, 204, 263, 233, 542, 388, 345, 205, 240, 353, 314, 276, 251, 291, 231, 212, 257, 286, 329, 345, 211, 226, 255, 210, 259, 208, 335, 299, 200, 168, 218, 286, 324, 435, 249, 131, 131, 266, 264, 470, 1166, 309, 247, 311, 290, 369, 752, 1448, 747, 630, 594, 597, 637, 708, 705, 421, 448, 597, 528, 578, 765, 874, 864, 587, 658, 720, 747, 712, 792, 750, 1006, 602, 634, 655, 761, 1281, 677, 634, 669, 637, 609, 869, 810, 669, 462, 851, 620, 770, 934, 810, 572, 561, 632, 772, 987, 1464, 998, 835, 744, 391, 304, 741, 797, 960, 647, 651, 606, 607, 716, 1366, 1032, 612, 477, 631, 627, 896, 724, 889, 931, 694, 622, 689, 827, 841, 1746, 787, 785, 848, 801, 664, 955, 1194, 651, 689, 824, 743, 889, 961, 996, 666, 692, 691, 616, 710, 883, 1678, 623, 708, 679, 630, 392, 936, 1258, 710, 598, 645, 637, 787, 885, 1037, 853, 716, 877, 667, 777, 1014, 1046, 1216, 666, 758, 687, 742, 1358, 1425, 758, 666, 817, 898, 826, 845, 1289, 597, 839, 824, 698, 935, 874, 729, 762, 625, 760, 929, 707, 1027, 994, 1117, 596, 542, 446, 479, 457, 831, 556, 432, 330, 456, 347, 452, 431, 839, 419, 481, 339, 536, 535, 484, 456, 323, 357, 441, 403, 502, 579, 484, 505, 436, 535, 734, 691, 927, 768, 499, 649, 303, 424, 762, 785, 403, 362, 370, 364, 465, 775, 983, 499, 396, 357, 450, 464, 538, 507, 543, 293, 374, 393, 427, 1047, 502, 338, 308, 405, 320, 436, 1063, 1041, 544, 424, 390, 398, 335, 772, 637, 708, 286, 228, 516, 445, 543, 649, 330, 354, 400, 353, 560, 588, 776, 414, 471, 349, 348, 523, 529, 789, 380, 565, 317, 399, 397, 546, 526, 358, 338, 402, 433, 447, 161, 635, 499, 380, 379, 544, 411, 751, 657, 410, 302, 366, 391, 415, 632, 637, 424, 374, 463, 344, 447, 468, 668, 341, 324, 425, 509, 458, 717, 845, 470, 391, 399, 373, 388, 556, 677, 358, 444, 298, 393, 438, 614, 713, 328, 352, 419, 486, 528, 689, 780, 410, 453, 400, 451, 475, 370, 406, 390, 443, 835, 621, 224, 386, 410, 561, 543, 777, 943, 457, 496, 405, 414, 400, 944, 580, 425, 433, 420, 424, 415, 564, 826, 404, 419, 392, 407, 389, 784, 777, 452, 463, 437, 548, 627, 718, 858, 701, 583, 490, 596, 585, 346, 909, 624, 486, 527, 437, 437, 629, 914, 361, 448, 395, 426, 439, 1098, 1220, 518, 506, 462, 562, 507, 827, 849, 423, 490, 455, 501, 423, 789, 758, 531, 388, 495, 475, 443, 993, 721, 344, 484, 316, 446, 405, 688, 691, 438, 396, 375, 355, 374, 573, 1176, 379, 400, 349, 372, 510, 515, 525, 350, 434, 439, 336, 398, 542, 592, 385, 381, 294, 352, 384, 625, 630, 379, 477, 455, 343, 484, 650, 784, 320, 433, 389, 444, 407, 674, 671, 314, 453, 352, 329, 443, 515, 879, 397, 384, 449, 364, 410, 836, 713, 802, 447, 401, 428, 458, 472, 864, 399, 387, 455, 357, 393, 583, 649, 400, 379, 372, 376, 403, 701, 625, 430, 360, 355, 404, 426, 636, 619, 407, 338, 397, 382, 618, 723, 626, 454, 362, 358, 340, 377, 540, 496, 321, 273, 326, 492, 360, 786, 690, 442, 376, 325, 393, 507, 643, 738, 379, 392, 479, 369, 413, 559, 698, 353, 428, 418, 394, 417, 680, 595, 418, 404, 358, 409, 372, 765, 753, 443, 351, 390, 323, 411, 954, 740, 468, 450, 492, 448, 588, 629, 758, 450, 372, 432, 402, 483, 561, 854, 436, 351, 396, 359, 401, 506, 621, 383, 339, 391, 345, 495, 666, 802, 492, 440, 388, 379, 390, 681, 714, 468, 468, 426, 480, 462, 603, 611, 446, 450, 381, 348, 399, 728, 403 779, 505, 689, 192, 165, 208, 293, 211, 500, 463, 235, 226, 227, 310, 288, 653, 437, 220, 193, 204, 263, 233, 542, 388, 345, 205, 240, 353, 314, 276, 251, 291, 231, 212, 257, 286, 329, 345, 211, 226, 255, 210, 259, 208, 335, 299, 200, 168, 218, 286, 324, 435, 249, 131, 131, 266, 264, 470, 1166, 309, 247, 311, 290, 369, 752, 1448, 747, 630, 594, 597, 637, 708, 705, 421, 448, 597, 528, 578, 765, 874, 864, 587, 658, 720, 747, 712, 792, 750, 1006, 602, 634, 655, 761, 1281, 677, 634, 669, 637, 609, 869, 810, 669, 462, 851, 620, 770, 934, 810, 572, 561, 632, 772, 987, 1464, 998, 835, 744, 391, 304, 741, 797, 960, 647, 651, 606, 607, 716, 1366, 1032, 612, 477, 631, 627, 896, 724, 889, 931, 694, 622, 689, 827, 841, 1746, 787, 785, 848, 801, 664, 955, 1194, 651, 689, 824, 743, 889, 961, 996, 666, 692, 691, 616, 710, 883, 1678, 623, 708, 679, 630, 392, 936, 1258, 710, 598, 645, 637, 787, 885, 1037, 853, 716, 877, 667, 777, 1014, 1046, 1216, 666, 758, 687, 742, 1358, 1425, 758, 666, 817, 898, 826, 845, 1289, 597, 839, 824, 698, 935, 874, 729, 762, 625, 760, 929, 707, 1027, 994, 1117, 596, 542, 446, 479, 457, 831, 556, 432, 330, 456, 347, 452, 431, 839, 419, 481, 339, 536, 535, 484, 456, 323, 357, 441, 403, 502, 579, 484, 505, 436, 535, 734, 691, 927, 768, 499, 649, 303, 424, 762, 785, 403, 362, 370, 364, 465, 775, 983, 499, 396, 357, 450, 464, 538, 507, 543, 293, 374, 393, 427, 1047, 502, 338, 308, 405, 320, 436, 1063, 1041, 544, 424, 390, 398, 335, 772, 637, 708, 286, 228, 516, 445, 543, 649, 330, 354, 400, 353, 560, 588, 776, 414, 471, 349, 348, 523, 529, 789, 380, 565, 317, 399, 397, 546, 526, 358, 338, 402, 433, 447, 161, 635, 499, 380, 379, 544, 411, 751, 657, 410, 302, 366, 391, 415, 632, 637, 424, 374, 463, 344, 447, 468, 668, 341, 324, 425, 509, 458, 717, 845, 470, 391, 399, 373, 388, 556, 677, 358, 444, 298, 393, 438, 614, 713, 328, 352, 419, 486, 528, 689, 780, 410, 453, 400, 451, 475, 370, 406, 390, 443, 835, 621, 224, 386, 410, 561, 543, 777, 943, 457, 496, 405, 414, 400, 944, 580, 425, 433, 420, 424, 415, 564, 826, 404, 419, 392, 407, 389, 784, 777, 452, 463, 437, 548, 627, 718, 858, 701, 583, 490, 596, 585, 346, 909, 624, 486, 527, 437, 437, 629, 914, 361, 448, 395, 426, 439, 1098, 1220, 518, 506, 462, 562, 507, 827, 849, 423, 490, 455, 501, 423, 789, 758, 531, 388, 495, 475, 443, 993, 721, 344, 484, 316, 446, 405, 688, 691, 438, 396, 375, 355, 374, 573, 1176, 379, 400, 349, 372, 510, 515, 525, 350, 434, 439, 336, 398, 542, 592, 385, 381, 294, 352, 384, 625, 630, 379, 477, 455, 343, 484, 650, 784, 320, 433, 389, 444, 407, 674, 671, 314, 453, 352, 329, 443, 515, 879, 397, 384, 449, 364, 410, 836, 713, 802, 447, 401, 428, 458, 472, 864, 399, 387, 455, 357, 393, 583, 649, 400, 379, 372, 376, 403, 701, 625, 430, 360, 355, 404, 426, 636, 619, 407, 338, 397, 382, 618, 723, 626, 454, 362, 358, 340, 377, 540, 496, 321, 273, 326, 492, 360, 786, 690, 442, 376, 325, 393, 507, 643, 738, 379, 392, 479, 369, 413, 559, 698, 353, 428, 418, 394, 417, 680, 595, 418, 404, 358, 409, 372, 765, 753, 443, 351, 390, 323, 411, 954, 740, 468, 450, 492, 448, 588, 629, 758, 450, 372, 432, 402, 483, 561, 854, 436, 351, 396, 359, 401, 506, 621, 383, 339, 391, 345, 495, 666, 802, 492, 440, 388, 379, 390, 681, 714, 468, 468, 426, 480, 462, 603, 611, 446, 450, 381, 348, 399, 728, 403 Let's look at how many tweets an article gets on any given day. On average, a Techcrunch article will net you about 480 tweets. My techcrunching was spot on in the tweet department. Totally being median here.

328, 248, 626, 63, 101, 158, 380, 152, 347, 232, 131, 159, 464, 470, 192, 395, 396, 174, 100, 76, 186, 103, 276, 255, 206, 159, 163, 174, 115, 97, 83, 778, 118, 111, 169, 232, 195, 60, 148, 99, 194, 192, 212, 142, 302, 374, 191, 195, 325, 117, 96, 264, 187, 69, 86, 126, 108, 102, 704, 157, 113, 180, 125, 201, 528, 604, 168, 75, 157, 75, 206, 292, 194, 162, 142, 201, 102, 158, 138, 180, 348, 109, 165, 152, 130, 183, 111, 127, 214, 125, 166, 208, 262, 587, 201, 288, 213, 168, 104, 146, 148, 211, 115, 256, 189, 240, 262, 228, 132, 113, 137, 159, 250, 1554, 149, 584, 197, 156, 142, 162, 125, 329, 114, 272, 213, 152, 153, 348, 849, 95, 110, 209, 105, 320, 62, 198, 314, 686, 140, 240, 282, 271, 1127, 508, 184, 275, 208, 133, 909, 374, 182, 221, 261, 217, 410, 157, 283, 100, 149, 149, 132, 144, 101, 3003, 113, 225, 102, 362, 120, 153, 332, 171, 133, 137, 138, 143, 217, 368, 280, 527, 194, 235, 173, 289, 528, 216, 176, 293, 191, 180, 949, 508, 179, 243, 358, 804, 288, 225, 528, 136, 218, 222, 227, 283, 212, 198, 186, 114, 160, 292, 164, 429, 90, 314, 132, 149, 183, 191, 87, 302, 449, 380, 233, 287, 166, 357, 127, 951, 188, 353, 284, 444, 252, 249, 253, 278, 219, 372, 196, 438, 282, 368, 542, 283, 313, 928, 242, 564, 471, 233, 625, 166, 271, 348, 439, 175, 296, 187, 137, 213, 366, 352, 245, 249, 238, 214, 189, 222, 212, 430, 136, 266, 128, 171, 520, 90, 124, 147, 276, 129, 308, 850, 371, 210, 244, 266, 218, 100, 918, 129, 701, 126, 138, 316, 231, 145, 337, 112, 127, 1660, 178, 414, 273, 282, 149, 562, 131, 152, 324, 166, 419, 124, 222, 233, 176, 170, 221, 196, 145, 159, 236, 283, 172, 226, 412, 428, 240, 300, 1965, 179, 366, 341, 201, 230, 208, 244, 344, 368, 522, 434, 335, 602, 206, 386, 111, 305, 182, 177, 297, 630, 211, 377, 361, 347, 171, 245, 123, 179, 47, 352, 266, 194, 112, 157, 230, 184, 459, 105, 186, 195, 319, 179, 209, 384, 182, 200, 152, 187, 251, 131, 117, 228, 178, 454, 221, 108, 153, 140, 347, 219, 165, 299, 233, 249, 153, 177, 111, 516, 340, 158, 209, 206, 153, 186, 220, 496, 148, 223, 176, 274, 92, 290, 253, 165, 139, 115, 196, 166, 226, 441, 137, 111, 86, 175, 145, 55, 302, 158, 94, 106, 68, 53, 123, 151, 48, 78, 53, 69, 46, 274, 265, 138, 144, 131, 199, 163, 145, 182, 52, 132, 73, 82, 52, 210, 80, 111, 64, 118, 69, 49, 479, 89, 43, 115, 56, 121, 82, 164, 111, 119, 71, 85, 37, 59, 108, 310, 47, 73, 54, 71, 171, 91, 175, 84, 112, 154, 55, 93, 112, 151, 73, 96, 67, 69, 73, 139, 150, 76, 171, 180, 108, 297, 260, 110, 160, 357, 244, 333, 295, 385, 661, 285, 177, 203, 225, 121, 238, 747, 160, 222, 534, 169, 261, 523, 277, 1298, 258, 192, 257, 250, 298, 432, 248, 275, 259, 213, 154, 279, 258, 246, 142, 187, 208, 213, 816, 598, 309, 193, 252, 202, 290, 1277, 310, 147, 153, 225, 339, 356, 220, 326, 168, 189, 213, 168, 403, 404, 241, 122, 103, 156, 264, 167, 567, 241, 152, 172, 104, 212, 270, 167, 236, 158, 225, 410, 120, 182, 265, 194, 227, 145, 251, 234, 140, 168, 199, 249, 175, 265, 246, 127, 280, 367, 390, 101, 245, 106, 130, 365, 146, 141, 80, 69, 90, 189, 83, 146, 135, 67, 134, 202, 175, 175, 351, 326, 130, 173, 169, 150, 104, 196, 109, 66, 79, 72, 126, 151, 184, 193, 164, 166, 169, 124, 332, 385, 150, 255, 154, 117, 157, 223, 155, 135, 108, 112, 82, 74, 133, 36 328, 248, 626, 63, 101, 158, 380, 152, 347, 232, 131, 159, 464, 470, 192, 395, 396, 174, 100, 76, 186, 103, 276, 255, 206, 159, 163, 174, 115, 97, 83, 778, 118, 111, 169, 232, 195, 60, 148, 99, 194, 192, 212, 142, 302, 374, 191, 195, 325, 117, 96, 264, 187, 69, 86, 126, 108, 102, 704, 157, 113, 180, 125, 201, 528, 604, 168, 75, 157, 75, 206, 292, 194, 162, 142, 201, 102, 158, 138, 180, 348, 109, 165, 152, 130, 183, 111, 127, 214, 125, 166, 208, 262, 587, 201, 288, 213, 168, 104, 146, 148, 211, 115, 256, 189, 240, 262, 228, 132, 113, 137, 159, 250, 1554, 149, 584, 197, 156, 142, 162, 125, 329, 114, 272, 213, 152, 153, 348, 849, 95, 110, 209, 105, 320, 62, 198, 314, 686, 140, 240, 282, 271, 1127, 508, 184, 275, 208, 133, 909, 374, 182, 221, 261, 217, 410, 157, 283, 100, 149, 149, 132, 144, 101, 3003, 113, 225, 102, 362, 120, 153, 332, 171, 133, 137, 138, 143, 217, 368, 280, 527, 194, 235, 173, 289, 528, 216, 176, 293, 191, 180, 949, 508, 179, 243, 358, 804, 288, 225, 528, 136, 218, 222, 227, 283, 212, 198, 186, 114, 160, 292, 164, 429, 90, 314, 132, 149, 183, 191, 87, 302, 449, 380, 233, 287, 166, 357, 127, 951, 188, 353, 284, 444, 252, 249, 253, 278, 219, 372, 196, 438, 282, 368, 542, 283, 313, 928, 242, 564, 471, 233, 625, 166, 271, 348, 439, 175, 296, 187, 137, 213, 366, 352, 245, 249, 238, 214, 189, 222, 212, 430, 136, 266, 128, 171, 520, 90, 124, 147, 276, 129, 308, 850, 371, 210, 244, 266, 218, 100, 918, 129, 701, 126, 138, 316, 231, 145, 337, 112, 127, 1660, 178, 414, 273, 282, 149, 562, 131, 152, 324, 166, 419, 124, 222, 233, 176, 170, 221, 196, 145, 159, 236, 283, 172, 226, 412, 428, 240, 300, 1965, 179, 366, 341, 201, 230, 208, 244, 344, 368, 522, 434, 335, 602, 206, 386, 111, 305, 182, 177, 297, 630, 211, 377, 361, 347, 171, 245, 123, 179, 47, 352, 266, 194, 112, 157, 230, 184, 459, 105, 186, 195, 319, 179, 209, 384, 182, 200, 152, 187, 251, 131, 117, 228, 178, 454, 221, 108, 153, 140, 347, 219, 165, 299, 233, 249, 153, 177, 111, 516, 340, 158, 209, 206, 153, 186, 220, 496, 148, 223, 176, 274, 92, 290, 253, 165, 139, 115, 196, 166, 226, 441, 137, 111, 86, 175, 145, 55, 302, 158, 94, 106, 68, 53, 123, 151, 48, 78, 53, 69, 46, 274, 265, 138, 144, 131, 199, 163, 145, 182, 52, 132, 73, 82, 52, 210, 80, 111, 64, 118, 69, 49, 479, 89, 43, 115, 56, 121, 82, 164, 111, 119, 71, 85, 37, 59, 108, 310, 47, 73, 54, 71, 171, 91, 175, 84, 112, 154, 55, 93, 112, 151, 73, 96, 67, 69, 73, 139, 150, 76, 171, 180, 108, 297, 260, 110, 160, 357, 244, 333, 295, 385, 661, 285, 177, 203, 225, 121, 238, 747, 160, 222, 534, 169, 261, 523, 277, 1298, 258, 192, 257, 250, 298, 432, 248, 275, 259, 213, 154, 279, 258, 246, 142, 187, 208, 213, 816, 598, 309, 193, 252, 202, 290, 1277, 310, 147, 153, 225, 339, 356, 220, 326, 168, 189, 213, 168, 403, 404, 241, 122, 103, 156, 264, 167, 567, 241, 152, 172, 104, 212, 270, 167, 236, 158, 225, 410, 120, 182, 265, 194, 227, 145, 251, 234, 140, 168, 199, 249, 175, 265, 246, 127, 280, 367, 390, 101, 245, 106, 130, 365, 146, 141, 80, 69, 90, 189, 83, 146, 135, 67, 134, 202, 175, 175, 351, 326, 130, 173, 169, 150, 104, 196, 109, 66, 79, 72, 126, 151, 184, 193, 164, 166, 169, 124, 332, 385, 150, 255, 154, 117, 157, 223, 155, 135, 108, 112, 82, 74, 133, 36 For Facebook we have a slightly different story: due to a few massive outliers the distribution is quite different & it clearly shows in the box plot. There are some posts with a ridiculously high amount of likes, often stories about ... drumroll ... Facebook itself. This pushes up the daily avg. likes per story.

However, if we look at the raw data without grouping by day, we get a clearer picture. For twitter we get mean: 482, median: 380 & standard deviation: 429. For Facebook it's more like mean: 217, median: 67, standard deviation: 924. Holy outlying number-skewing madness!

To come back to my initial motivation for running these numbers: how did my techcrunching stack up against others? Are my techcrunch numbers 'normal'? If we assume likes|tweets can be used as a proxy for popularity and if we throw out the outliers in the facebook data set, then yes: at 463 tweets and 79 likes PitchPhone was a pretty median techcrunch article.

1,1,1,1,1,2,3,3,3,10 Maybe the take-away message here is a simple reminder that those epic launch stories of servers buckling under the slashdot | reddit | HN | Techcrunch effect are outliers. But then again, the startup world is all about non-linearity. Being median is not good enough. Are you in the middle or on the right of the plot I began this paragraph with? Are you aiming to be in the top 10% of your field?

Crunching the numbers on a Techcrunching

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Last Friday I got Techcrunched on launch day. Pretty much a dream start for a service that specifically targets the startup crowd, right. I thought I'd share the numbers to cut through the hype. But first a little word about the service I launched.

PitchPhone is a phone hotline for entrepreneurs. When you call it, it will ask you a tough question about your startup & give you 30 seconds to answer. The first 1000 callers get a free call. When you register for the free trial you can call toll-free. The paid plans (starting at $4.99) turn the tables: PitchPhone calls YOU at random times during the day to keep you on edge. The idea is to turn pitching into a daily habit.

Enough with the pitching alright, you came for the numbers, eh? Here they are, clean, crips & unambiguous since the site had 0 traffic before being mentioned on Techcrunch. Traffic numbers come from Google Analytics. Call & Signup numbers come from my own measurements.

The big picture: the site got 997 visits in 36 hours. This generated 43 trial signups (4%) & 2 paid signups (0.2%). The first big wave of traffic lasted about 4h. During those 4h I measured a couple of metrics at 30-minute intervals: Twitter mentions, FB likes, Calls & Trial Signups.

0, 92, 164, 236, 180, 124, 93, 63, 55 Visits quickly peaked at about 236 visits per 30 minutes. Realtime visits peaked at about 30 concurrent visits. Hardly the kind of traffic to bring a modern server to its knees. The inner geek in me was a bit bored: no fires to put out. 0 error messages. No drama here.

0,200,300,335,350,360,362,372,372 Twitter mentions started off high immediately with 200 tweets about the article in the first 30 minutes. My guess is there are lots of ~~people~~ bots out there retweeting anything published by TC.

0, 25, 40, 45, 50, 50, 53, 55, 55 Facebook likes followed a similar pattern with the absolute number of likes being significantly lower than tweets though. We'll see later that this is compensated by the relatively high impact of a single like.

0, 20, 40, 90, 106, 115, 130, 150, 160 Phone Calls show a slightly more linear growth pattern, which at the time I took as a good sign for the service: an initial Techcrunched-induced traffic spike is nice, but ultimately useless if it doesn't carry over to word-of-mouth.

0, 1, 10, 15, 17, 20, 20, 20, 22 I feel like I totally flunked the Signup flow. At launchtime the landing page was confusing & there was really no reason to sign up, even for the free trial. After all, why signup when you can just grab the phone & call for free? D'Oh. After that initial traffic spike I ended up with 1 paid subscriber. A few hours later I'd get my second one. I have now overhauled the landing page & signups have definitely improved for trial users after the change (2% ~ 6%).

53,20,27Traffic Sources: while 53% of the traffic came directly from Techcrunch I'm very pleased to see that nearly 20% of the traffic is direct traffic, here's to hoping that the word-of-mouth effect lasts.

71,24,5 Social referrals are kind of interesting: while there have been far more tweets than likes, Facebook still drives the vast majority of social traffic (71%) with Twitter a distant second (24%).

Secondary Effects I also received a few collaboration offers & got contacted for a few freelance development gigs. (Shameless plug: If you're looking for a freelance iOS dev, I'm your man!). And of course there was the usual spike in spam & outright scammy proposals.

Overall, I can't help but feel that these numbers are low. ( Update: Simon Tabor calls them pathetic.) So if your startup's launch plan is "Get on Techcrunch & get rich", think again. I'm basically treating this techcrunching as a conversation starter: it helped me have long talks with dozens of potential customers & partners, flesh out a better product & get me closer to product/market fit. There still is a TechCrunch effect, but it's not the server-melting spike lots of people seem to think it is. I'm starting to treat PR as a beginning: if it helps me to start a conversation, build a product & charge my customers, that's fine with me!

Social Proof

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

One thing I learned in the last year or so is the value of social proof. Getting press coverage & accolades is important, not because of the sheer number of clicks & signups a typical slashdotting will bring (remember that?). But simply because it allows you to add a little "as seen on" logo to your website. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book & a great growth hack.

You can see this kind of social proof in action on most projects I've been involved with: Quantter, DidThis, OneSec, PitchPhone ... Hell, maybe you even ended up on this page because you clicked one of those banners. So here's where I do the explaining. In no particular order & I'm probably missing some stuff:

Seedcamp: In 2011 I participated in Seedcamp Berlin with my first startup, Quantter. Ycombinator: I got invited to the YCW11 interview with DidThis. Venturekick: with DidThis we made it to the second round of Swiss startup accelerator VentureKick (30K CHF, yay!). LeWeb'10 : I was invited to speak onstage at LeWeb'10 as part of an ignite session. TechCrunch Europe: Mike Butcher mentioned my iPhone app Startup Deck. TechCrunch US: Sarah Perez wrote an article about my PitchPhone hotline for entrepreneurs.

Here's the full list of articles about my projects:

August 17, 2012 : Techcrunch covers PitchPhone
August 15, 2012 : BuzzPatrol features OneSec
August 14, 2012 : DVICE features OneSec
August 13, 2012 : Trendhunter features OneSec
April 27, 2012 : Techcrunch mentions my iPhone App Startup Deck
February 13, 2023 : Netzwertig covers DidThis (German)
February 11, 2012 : Robert Scoble covers DidThis
March 24, 2011 : Business Insider mentions Quantter
March 14, 2011 : Inc. Magazine mentions Quantter
March 11, 2011 : Interview about Quantter I did at SXSW11
March 6, 2011 : Time Magazine mentions Quantter
March 6, 2011 : Quantter mentioned in The Sunday Times
December 10, 2010 : I gave a talk onstage at LeWeb '10
July 10, 2010 : The New York Times mentions my app BibleThumper

Three things you can do to help a crowdfunding campaign

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

So you heard about our crowdfunding campaign & you're wondering how you can help out? Maybe you are running your own crowdfunding campaign & would like to know how to make it better? Boy, do I have a treat for you! Here are the three most important things you can do to help any crowdfunding campaign:

Contribute. Every dollar counts. It's the best way to make sure the product gets built. In our case this means we'll build the app and put it in the AppStore, FREE for you to download. The cool thing about Indiegogo is that you can pick any amount you want.

Like. Like the campaign on Facebook, Tweet about it, Plus it on G+. Why is this important? The Indiegogo crowdfunding platform uses social media for ranking the campaigns. More buzz means a higher rank!

Talk & Talk Again. We found out the hard way that it requires a lot of exposure to the idea before people fund it. So talk about it, write about it, tweet about it. Then a few days later do it again. This is the single most important lesson we took so far from crowdfunding: talk, talk & talk some more about it. Crowdfunding is the kind of thing people tend to mull over in their heads. So keep exposing them to your idea!

Perkiness Check

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We've been running an Indiegogo campaign for this super-awesome video sharing app we're working on. It's called OneSec. Check it out! So far the feedback has been great. People seem to want this, in theory. In practice however, the nitty-gritty, funding side of this has been a struggle. So let's summarize the perks we've got so far. A perkiness check, if you want to call it that way. I know you love perkiness checks!

This is very much an MVP-like proposal. The perkiest perk of them all is the app itself. When this fundraiser succeeds we vow to make it a FREE app in the iTunes AppStore. Share the Love!

$5 A Tweetin' Thank YOU ... We'll tweet your name as a thank you. It will float on a log down our twitter stream past all of our followers to see. Every buck counts!

$25 Handwritten Postcard from CGN ... Viva Colonia! Dom, Koelsch, Carnival - The People! OneSec is made in vibrant Cologne, Germany with love. For a quarter of a Benjamin, we'll send you an actual physical handwritten and personalized postcard (remember those?) right from the heart thanking you. (Of course you'll get all the sub-$25 perks too!)

$50 App-Yourself ... For fifty bucks we'll shoot a one second video segment with your name, twitter handle or domain in it. This will be the default demo video for the app - It's your chance to achieve eternal Internet fame! Grab it!

$100 VIP Access + T-Shirt ... As an Early Bird Supporter you'll gain access to the app a full two weeks prior to the AppStore release! And of course you'll get all the sub-$100 swag to boot! And we throw in a T-shirt for good measure. Now you too can feel like a VIP! And dress like one! Yay!

$500 Your own 30 Sec Video Pitch ... For $500 Vidar "the unstoppable pitching machine", will create a unique 30 second video pimping you or your product and we'll post it on the web and tweet it to our followers.

Zuckerberg's Law

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Let me introduce you to a new law in the social media sphere: Zuckerberg's Law. Okay, maybe Zuckerberg's Second Law. It's based on a few stunning observations & I'm sure you'll find it begins to explain the social media madness quite well.

You should apply it whenever a social media company claims numbers & it goes something like this: "Whatever I say, divide by four".

20~25% of ad clicks on Facebook are bots ( The Facebook Coefficient ). Only a quarter of Twitter accounts are active. The actual FB share value is $10 instead of the opening $40. Ok, I don't know about the last one, but FB's stock price is still in freefall.

It's the same scam we saw in the nineties: something new is created, but no one really understands the value of it just yet. Meaningless numbers are inflated until inevitably the bubble pops. Then after a while we realize there was value in the whole thing after all. Social media has value, we just haven't discovered a good way to quantify it yet.

In the meantime, we just improvise. And if you want to play it safe, you follow Zuckerberg's Second Law of Social Dynamics.

The Facebook Coefficient

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

So last weekend I ran a very small Facebook Ad campaign to drive some traffic to the MVP of PitchPhone. I knew Facebook was a source of cheap & crappy traffic and at first I didn't really mind. The idea was to simply test if the PitchPhone message resonates with the kind of people I am targeting the service at. And Facebook does targeting like no other.

But when I started digging a little deeper into the numbers reported by Facebook & compared them to what showed up in Google Analytics I got madder and madder. Only 25% of the "clicks" reported by the Facebook Ads tool were showing up in Google Analytics, echoing what has been discussed before. Let's call 25% the Facebook Coefficient & from now on we'll use it to offset any numbers reported by that lying little bastard.

Now, there can be all kinds of reasons why these "clicks" didn't make it to the target page. Accidental clicks. Fake profiles. Or, god forbid, bots. And we could spend a whole day discussing that. And it'd be interesting.

But the truth is none of that matters because the real action advertisers are interested in comes after the click. They want the "clicker" to buy something, download something, engage with something.

When you stay in Facebook's ecosystem & buy ads for FB Pages, it's easy to believe the charade. In there it's all smoke & mirrors anyway. What's a user anyway? A fan? A like? But once you get out of that world & start to do your own conversion tracking, the lie becomes blatantly clear.

All it takes to uncover the scam is to buy some ads pointing to your own domain, setup tracking & compare the numbers. Then you calculate your Facebook coefficient. What's yours?

B(u)y the Numbers

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We're doing a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo & since we're geeks we'd thought it'd be fun to make it a play on numbers. So that's why we decided to raise $12358 in 42 days. You see, there's meaning in numbers, or at least it's fun to think there is. We received our first donation with a meaningful number today: Nikolay pledged $101. You can pledge any amount you want, so get creative! Here are 7 funny numbers you could grab, tell us if you come up with other cool ones!

42 : The Answer

69 : I know you want it

101 : Funding 101

135 : Feisty Fibo

161 : The Golden Ratio

314 : Tasty Pi

404 : Funds Not Found

666 : ~~Santa~~ Satan's Little Helper

So head over to the campaign pledge page , pick your favorite number & pledge! Get your geek on!

The Problem With Mobile Video

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

How come we haven't seen a runaway success like Instagram in Social Video? There have been a few great contenders but they had to pull every dirty trick in the book to s(t)imulate growth. And while there has been at least one exit in the space, many agree something is missing. But what? What is it in the nature of video that makes it so much harder to build a great mobile video app?

First, a shameless plug: I'm doing an Indiegogo fundraising campaign in this space. Check it out!

Aspect ratio This may seem trivial, but Instagram's decision to force the user to take square pics is actually pure genius. Square-ish pics are a whole lot easier to manage from a design standpoint. Why do you think avatar pics have been mostly square since the '90s? Instagram was able to pull this off for still images because Polaroid is still in our collective memory. While video started out with a square aspect ratio most popular film formats for the last 100 years have been 1.33~1.66. Simply because up until recently a dedicated device (projector, television) was required to consume film. It's easy to cut up paper into different formats. Televisions? Not so much! Maybe simpler aspect ratios will become popular again in the digital age?

Covert shooting A side-effect of the aspect ratio decision is that you only ever need to hold your camera in portrait mode to shoot pics. The effect is subtle: it makes inconspicuous shooting a whole lot easier. And it reduces cognitive load: "Portrait or Landscape?" is yet another thing I don't need to think about.

Montage Good video editing is hard. It requires subtle non-technical skills to compose a good movie. It takes taste. And time. Lots of time. And retakes. And it's generally a PITA to do, even with a powerful desktop editing suite, let alone on a crummy little mobile screen. Video editing is not a matter of just adding filters.

Consumption There's no "Play" button for images. I just need to glance down to my phone & scroll through the feed of images to get a general idea of what is worth looking at. Unlike video, photos are tailored for instant consumption: the pic is the preview. It's subtle, but the "Play" button on video adds yet another think to think about to my cognitive load.

Communication The way Instagram does photos is all about communication. The pics are just a vehicle to talk about your life. Each additional hurdle video adds makes it exponentially harder to use video as a pure communicative tool. That's why social video is hard.

And that's why it's worth doing! Vidar & myself teamed up this summer to tackle exactly this problem! And you can help out! We started an indiegogo fundraising campaign! Check it out!

Startup Momentum

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

To me at least, momentum is one of the most important startup metrics. Momentum is what will keep you coasting along even after you run out of runway. Momentum allows you to project continuity. To yourself and to others. For yourself it's important to keep the milestones you have reached at the top of your mind, just to stay motivated. To others momentum will appear like solid continuity.

And it pisses me off to no end when I lose momentum. So if I seem frustrated these days, now you know why! I can live with outright killing a project when I know it won't work or when I simply run out of ideas to make it work. That kind of failure is ok in my book. Live & Learn. But running out of runway on a project that is not fully explored yet is just a royal PITA. Why?

Switching cost You see, ever since I quit my fulltime job over a year ago, I have almost religiously believed in focus. 100%. Do or don't do, there is no try. Simply because the switching cost of shuttling between projects is too high.

And that's where momentum comes in. If you're forced to work on something else, and this tends to happen a lot when you're bootstrapping, it's your momentum that will carry you over that gap. At least in my experience, high momentum tends to diminish the switching cost. Running out of runway kills, but lacking momentum kills even more!

Don't build, discover!

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We only went live a little more than 24h ago with our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign & one thing is clear already: going public was the best thing we could have done for OneSec.

We received great feedback on both the campaign & the product. We've already modified the campaign a bit & will continue adjusting course along the way. So keep the feedback coming!

But the most interesting take-away came on the product side of things. It's the realization that good products are discovered, not built. I started working on OneSec based on a gut feeling of "this just might work". Nothing more, really. I quickly built a kinda-functioning app but in reality I didn't get very far. I didn't know how to pitch the app. I wasn't able to define the exact feature set. It's only now that I started showing it to Vidar & other people that I'm discovering the required feature set. D'oh!

So keep the donations, campaign feedback & product ideas coming! Here's the crowdfunding page. Check it out!

Crowdfunding Assumptions

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Yesterday Vidar & me launched our first crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Check it out! A good deal of thought & research went into the creation of this campaign. Let me share my assumptions about this whole crowdfunding thing & in a few weeks I'll revisit them and tell you what went wrong & right. I'll shortly explain each assumption & tell how you can help out.

It takes multiple interactions before people open up their wallets. I've read that on average it takes 7 (!) interactions before someone funds a campaign. So going on this assumption it's important to have lots of campaign updates. E.g. For the OneSec campaign we've got a total of 12 perks in store but only 3 online right now. Expect a barrage of updates about new perks at different price points. How can you help? Sharing the initial launch announcement is not enough: Like & Tweet our updates to increase the total surface area of the campaign.

Crowdfunding is about people & storytelling. There's no story in perfection. If you wait until your campaign is just right there's no interesting story to tell. We bet that it's better to open up early. Show our energy & show our weaknesses. For us, the story is pretty simple: Vidar & Francis have done pretty neat things in the past. Imagine what they could achieve when they join up forces. They're totally psyched about this project but there's a lot of hard work ahead. How can you help? Be part of the story: fund us! Tell our story! Retweeting & linking is nice, but why don't you go out & talk about our struggle to friends in-real-life?

Crowdfunding is about perks. There's two types of people who want to pledge: the people who just want to help you succeed & those who simply want their perks. We've done 3 things to make the perks interesting. Our perks are cumulative, exclusive & real. In the next few days we'll be rolling out new perks at different price points. Of course each perk includes all perks from lower price points. That's the cumulative part. We make the perks exclusive by allowing your name to be part of the campaign & product. And soon there will be real-life perks. How can you help? Even if right now you don't see a perk at the right price point for you, share the perks with your friends because maybe one of the current perks is just right for them!

Crowdfunding is a great way to finetune your product. This is the big one for me. I started working on OneSec several months ago but struggled with whipping it into a shape people would actually like to use. I knew from feedback that there was something to this idea, but I couldn't completely put my finger on it. That's why I put the project in hibernation for a while. Now that Vidar is involved I hope to turn this idea into an awesome app. How can you help? By giving feedback on the idea & funding of course!

Shameless plug: I'm doing a crowdfunding campaign for my next iPhone app on Indiegogo. Check it out!

Launch when you feel comfortably uncomfortable

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Over the last week I've been working with my friend Vidar on an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to breathe new life into a side-project. Check it out! We've been previewing the campaign with friends over the last few days. Reactions have been split about 50/50 between 'awesome' & 'wtf'. So, even though this project is not perfect yet, it's time to launch today. Here's why.

I'd call the feeling I have right now 'comfortably uncomfortable'. So what is that feeling? It's the pit in your stomach as you parachute out of a plane. The giddy nervousness as you watch your newborn come into the world. That internal monologue asking 'Wtf do you think you are doing?'. You are ready to go when you start to think "I'm not ready for this, but let's do it anyway!".

Why launch when you feel "comfortably uncomfortable"? Because Perfection is the name of the city where projects go to die. You need to be comfortable enough to show your baby to people. Yet uncomfortable enough to muster the nervous energy needed to pull through. Be comfortably uncomfortable. Launch. Stay alert.

I'm doing a crowdfunding campaign to fund development of my latest iPhone App on IndieGogo. If you want to support this blog, check it out

Email for MVPs

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Here's a neat startup trick for you: you can build a decent MVP on top of email. A while ago I invalidated an idea for a mobile app by building a very simple email version of it.

Web development is significantly faster than mobile development. Still faster is email-based development. If you're a wee bit technical then setting up a system that will accept incoming emails & send out responses is trivial. Especially with services like Heroku + Sendgrid.

In my case I set up a system that sent out a daily email asking "What made your day?" to figure out what kinds of responses I'd get & whether this is an idea worth pursuing. (No, it was not!)

Email is great for quickly testing ideas: you can get away with less design work. You don't need to worry about creating user accounts & stuff since email has (weak) identity baked in.

But the biggest advantage is that users don't expect interaction with email to be realtime. Email is like a turn-based boardgame: it's ok when your response takes a while. This allows you to start out by faking the 'server response' by simply manually processing emails.

Crowdfunding is the new MVP

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I was in the middle of preparing a campaign on Indiegogo when this thought struck me: "This crowdfunding process is very similar to the steps you'd take to discover product-market fit."

Doing a crowdfunder forces you to get out of the building & talk to people early. Because there's no way that your first campaign draft is going to make the cut. For mine I quickly threw together a description & mailed it to a bunch of friends & acquaintances. I learned that the idea had value, but the pitch was way off.

Most crowdfunding platforms encourage you to produce a short video pimping your product. Turns out that this is a whole lot easier if you have something more than just wireframes. It encourages you to go out & build a minimal version just so you can shoot the demo vid. Because let's face it, if you can't shoot a decent & honest product video you don't have an MVP yet.

I found that applying for crowdfunding forces you to think clearly about the value proposition. After all, you're not talking to investors, you're pitching to normal people like you & me. Customers who want real product value, no startup bullshit. An equity stake & a chance to hit the jackpot is not enough. You don't want to disappoint them.

According to Indiegogo, campaigns with a team raise significantly more money than solo founders. So one of the best things I did so far was to join up with my pal Vidar. It forced me to go outside of the building & on a long walk through beautiful Cologne I convinced him to join up with me.

What struck me most about the crowdfunding process is how similar it is to applying to an accelerator program or courting an investor. Like I've written before, the value of applying to an accelerator lies in the process, not the goal. So from now on I'll consider crowdfunding as yet another tool in my startup toolchain. Just another way of validating ideas.

I'm doing a crowdfunding campaign to fund development of my latest iPhone App on IndieGogo. If you want to support this blog, check it out

Side Projects Kill

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I am very ambivalent about side-projects these days. I used to be a big fan of them when I was still working for BigCo's. I'm a firm believer of the "No Side-Projects? No Hire!" school of hiring & firing. But once your start working on your own dime you quickly learn that a lack of focus can kill you. That's why I recently shelved two side-projects even though people keep asking me about them. It's awkward & painful. Let me explain.

As an employee it totally makes sense to do side projects but as an entrepreneur, not so much. Side-projects look great on resumes & backed up with a good portfolio or github account it may even land you a job. E.g. I know for sure Google is contacting people for hire based on their github profiles. If side-projects are the new resumes, then why am I being such a hypocrite and keep shelving them as an entrepreneur?

If you're self-funded doing anything that will shorten your runway is a net negative. After all, you could have spent that "side-project" time consulting, right? If you're working with someone else's money you better have a damn good reason why this side-project will grow the company. And if you're just starting out with a couple of friends, nothing too formal yet, working on side-projects can signal a lack of faith in the actual product you're building. I learned all of that the hard way.

So you're an entrepreneur & still get that side-project itch? Here's an alternative: hackathons. Hackathons enforce an artificial time-limit so you can still get your geek on while limiting the damage done. Makes it easier to switch back to your real startup work come monday.

I keep hearing this little bird telling me that there may be a startup weekend coming to Cologne soon. So while startup weekend is not exactly a hackathon, maybe that will be a good place to channel some of that side-project energy!

The Fail Fund

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Last week at the HN Meetup there was a discussion about what is needed to bring the local startup scene to the next level. I half-jokingly suggested that we need a "Fail Fund". It's basically an early-stage investment fund where you can only apply if you have failed before. The bigger & more public your failure the greater the chance to get in. This morning the idea came up again in a chat with my pal, Vidar. He suggested we'd call the startups coming out of such a fund "The Unfundables".

Yes, yes. I can hear you mutter "But wait, such a fund already exists! It's called Hartz-IV! (That's Teutonic for you; it means: unemployment, taking a fakation, being on the dole ...)". And yes, in most of ~~Western~~ Welfare Europe that's an option. But it's hardly entrepreneurial, now, is it? And it sends a terribly wrong message: that a failed venture is the end of the road.

Here's how it would work. Instead of sending in a business plan, you'd send in a postmortem. Something along the lines of "This is what I tried. This is why it failed". You basically pitch your failure, what you learned from it & what you will do different next time. This counts as proof that you are actually able to learn and crazy enough to try it all over again!

I encourage you to think about this for a few minutes: what kind of questions would you like to see on the Fail Fund's application form? Tell me!

There's upside for investors: they can filter out a whole bunch of half-assed ideas on the grounds that the founder is inexperienced. There's upside for founders: they now can pursue entrepreneurship as a true career path, knowing that when they work hard the Fail Fund maybe will scrape them out of the gutter. There's upside for you: making the applicants' failures public should provide an infinite stream of learning and entertainment. Hell, you could totally turn this into a Reality TV Show!

The Startup Investment Funnel

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

There's been a lot of discussion lately about what needs to be done to bring the Cologne startup scene to the next level. The whole thing reminds me of the "Let's clone Silicon Valley in city X" meme that seems to pop in a new spot on the globe every few months. I have a theory for why every single time that turns out to be an elusive goal. It's simple, really: just follow the money.

I call it the "funnel theory of early stage investment". Schematically, it goes like this: Big Exit > Re-Invest > Smart Money.

Basically, you need people who had a big exit, who are willing to re-invest instead of retiring & who turn out to be actually smart rather than lucky. At the top of the funnel you throw in a colorful bunch of entrepreneurs. Most of them fail & never make it past the Big Exit step. Of those who exit a good number simply retire because you have to be a little crazy to stay in the startup scene. Finally, as a startup you want to avoid taking money from those who were lucky rather than smart.

If you treat the investment ecosystem as a funnel like the one outlined above you quickly see how sheer volume gives Silicon Valley a head-start of approximately 50 years. Barring another spark of massive cold-war-style military spending I can't see how you can get so many generations of people who had a big exit together in one place.

And having multiple generations of entrepreneurs in one place turns out to be important. The single biggest differentiator between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world is culture. It's not about office space. It's not about universities. It's not about money. It's about the people in SV, their attitudes, their culture. And culture grows organically when you put people in the same place for an extended period of time. Let's look at three of those attitudes & how they map to the startup investment funnel.

Again, schematically, it's all about: taking risks + working hard + being smart.

Taking Risks. When you have people around who took big risks to get big exits it becomes a whole lot easier to work on your own risky projects. Failure becomes accepted, if not rewarded! To put it in Steve Blank's words: "Do you know what we call a failed entrepreneur in SV? Experienced!" When you see entrepreneurs fail big-time without ending up in the gutter, your own failure suddenly becomes a whole lot less frightening.

Working Hard. In SV entrepreneurship is a valid career path. It goes something like this: entrepreneur > angel > philanthropist. Working hard at your startup is a given, not something you need to defend to the people who would prefer you to take a steady job. Since there's a respected career path suddenly it becomes a whole lot easier not to retire to Hawaii after your first exit. Why retire when you can work on something bigger & better? And still be respected for it!

Being Smart. Sure, you'll meet a good share of hustlers & bullshitters in SV. But you'll also meet some seriously smart people working on startups. I've met these kinds of frighteningly smart people in Europe, but they tend to hide in universities or consult for BigCo's. The rewards system in Europe is just set up all wrong. We tend to live by the adage "Judge a society by how it treats it's weak". While that is fine & dandy, don't forget to give big rewards to those who take disproportional risks. Otherwise you'll just wake up in a nation where your smartest are working on freakin' Prozessoptimierung.

So you're not going to see a new Silicon Valley in Europe anytime soon. But you're a pirate. You're ambitious. You want to tackle big problems. You want to build new things rather than clones. What are your options?

Bootstrap. With the technical cost of doing a startup coming down dramatically, this has become a viable option. But beware the consulting trap: if you're not 100% focussed on your startup you'll be moving slower than your deep-pocketed competitors.

Take Stupid Money. Sure, you can take money from people who were lucky rather than smart. This may help you kick off your project. Or ruin it in the long run. It takes a lot of self-confidence & experience to spend someone else's money while ignoring their input. Even if you know their advice is wrong.

Look into Crowdfunding. While crowdfunding is starting to take off in Europe it's not nearly as easy as putting up a Kickstarter is in the US. This is mostly due to fragmentation & regulation. Still, a good option for an early second round.

Jump on a jet-plane. Silicon Valley is only a short jet-ride away & there are plenty of organizations that will help you settle in. This is the option I'm exploring right now. I'll be attending Blackbox right in the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'll try to get some funding. I know it's going to be ~~hard~~ nigh impossible to pull off. But if it's not hard, it's not worth doing! Ask me again about this option in September!

8th Hacker News Meetup

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Last night we had our 8th Hacker News Meetup at Solution Space in Cologne. I was pleasantly surprised to see new faces. HN Cologne is still growing, just like the rest of the Cologne startup world.

First came our usual round of startup speed-dating. Still mostly bizpeople decrying the difficulty of finding developers. This time there were plenty of devs in the room however. So get together, folks! Yours truly for example is looking for freelance iOS dev work.

We kicked off the night by diving deep into a discussion about "What's needed in the Cologne startup scene", inspired by the discussion on Facebook. It was weird to see that quite a few of those present were not in the FB group yet. Ping me, Vidar or Alex to change that! Here's my biased summary:

There is a lack of early-stage funding. Or at least a lack of funding at non-extortionate conditions. We need an attitude change: it needs to become acceptable to fail. We need more people working on crazy ideas & that's only possible if there's a safety net for failed startups. Which means funding. But funding from people who didn't forget that the V in VC stands for adVenture capital. Sure, there's money around, but in typical German style, none of that money wants to take a risk. No wonder then, that Germany is still known mostly for me-too startups.

Thomas Bachem came over to explain why he wants to start a coding university. Great to see there are still people around with ambitious goals! Sad to see that his ambitions are stymied by the bureaucracy involved in getting accreditation. Awesome to observe he's forging ahead anyway! Truly inspiring!

I quickly showed the demo video of my project & then Vidar wrapped up the evening announcing the upcoming Cologne Startup Weekend. Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups! It's basically like a hackathon but with the specific goal of building a startup in a weekend. Stay tuned for more info!

I hope to see you next month at the HN Cologne Meetup!

Planting the flag for Addy!

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away! ~ Dr. Seuss

Last Tuesday I "planted the flag" for Addy! The opening of Cologne's Clusterhaus & Online Stammtisch Koln seemed like a good opportunity to announce that this is what I'll be working on from now on.

You see, two months ago I vowed to show something publicly before July, warts & all. I distinctly remember the day because I started working on Addy on the first of May. I guess that makes me a bad communist. Whatever.

Now introducing: Addy! A pretty easy way to give out your contact info at networking events. The version that's in the AppStore now has 5% of the features I want to build, but it's something, a start. Download it, add your email to the mailing list. Keep an eye on this blog. This is going to be awesome!

The best way to explain where Addy is heading is to tell you a story. In 2010 I was invited to give a short Ignite talk at LeWeb in Paris. That was an awesome opportunity to be in front of thousands of people. But attached to that was something even better: an invite-only networking event with the brightest minds in tech. So my mind quickly turned to how to make the best of my limited time there. The problem boiled down to: Who should I talk to? Who should I follow up with & meet again?

My solution was pretty old-school: I asked my VPA to create a big list of who was going to be there. For each person it had a big portrait, a name & why we should meet. I made a paper printout & studied it a bit on my subway ride to the event.

That approach worked. But I remember thinking on my way back home "Damn, I wish I had something like this on my phone". So I guess that was the first spark of Addy: what if I built a highly visual app to help people meetup at networking events. In-Real-Life. Helping people make REAL connections. None of this online social networking bullshit. Because networking is not about adding someone on Facebook, Xing or LinkedIn. Networking is about meeting IRL, looking each other in the eye. And then meeting again. That's what I want to do with Addy: helping people meet again.

Startup Deck is now available for Android thanks to iPG

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Build stuff. Talk about it. Good things will happen. Seems like this mantra works! Last week my little entrepreneur pitching app "Startup Deck" caught a tiny press wave after Colin Hayhurst & James Cunnigham's iPG made it big first on HN & then on techcrunch. I was in the middle of a hackathon so I didn't really follow up on the discussions.

Then something awesome happened: out of the blue Pranay contacted me & asked to port it to Android. "Hi Francis, I am a hobbyist android developer, was reading a post on techcrunch about YC interviews and stumbled upon your app Startup Deck, I would like to port that on Android."

Without further ado, I present: Startup Deck for Android.

I've gone one step further & set up a github repository to share the set of questions. I'm in the middle of raising some money for a new project (Talk to Me!) & I'm more convinced than ever that forcing yourself to answer these questions is one of the best things you can do at the earliest stages of a startup. Now go forth & pitch! ;-)

Advance Hackathon Proposal: BookHack (ex-ExtractoSmackto)

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

When I first decided to participate in the Advance Hackathon I didn't really have a project idea. Then last week I did something really stupid. I proposed the ExtractoSmackto project.

Now is the time to apologize for that move. I am sorry. The proposed project is stupid, lame & fucking boring. It's the kind of stuff I'm sure plenty of you peeps are writing at work. And you have come for a weekend of creative fun, right? So it's time to bin ExtractoSmackto. ( mv extractosmackto /dev/null ) There, done!

Enter: BookHack. Pretty ambitious. Let's turn all of the raw creation going on at the hackathon into a book, printed in 48 hours! Goal: Create a physical book to document the creative process of this hackathon.

Most of the time when we digital creators build something we accumulate a mass of by-products: github commits, wireframes, datamodels, documentation (haha!), whiteboard drawings, sketches. I love that shit. But most of the time we throw that away. Let's not do that this weekend, ok?

I believe every hackathon participant is not only a digital creator but an artist. Steve Jobs said "Real artists ship". I say: "Real artists sign" ... let's turn the hackathon into a physical book & sign it, all of us!

Think this is nuts? Think we're never going to be able to create & publish a book in 48 hours? That's an excellent reason to do it anyway! Here's to the crazy ones ...

Footnote: inspiration comes from @craigmod's Flipboard book. Read his essay! I also wrote a previous blog post about this kind of thing.

6th Hacker News Cologne Meetup

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Theme of the night was "Hacker News meets Gruenderabend" which might explain the higher-than-usual headcount. Stefanie seemed mighty impressed when 47 hackers invaded Solution Space for the night.

Timoor Taufig kicked off the evening by giving away some of the secrets of how to raise money on crowdfunding platform Seedmatch. Definitely the kind of thing we like to see more of at HN Meetups: a detailed in-depth tale of how they raised nearly 100K in less than 5 days.

Sebastian Deutsch from 9elements pitched in with practical tips on how to improve your SEO. Even in a world ruled by Apps & Social Media SEO remains crucial for growing your business. Case in point: even a pure 'app' like WatchLater benefited greatly from SEO.

Impromptu talks are always a bit of a surprise & that's why we love & encourage 'em at HN Meetups. The 3D guy told a spirited tale about the weird world of open source hardware where the only way to make money seems to be to give away your blueprints. Esayas Gebremedhin attempted to explain how he took his iWish project from idea to product in Cologne.

Overall I feel like the startup world is picking up speed in and around Cologne. More people are showing up at meetups. More people are sharing their stories. I hope the HN Cologne Meetup can continue to be at the crossroads between technology and business. That, and beer ...

Tupac & artifical popstars

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I first became interested in the phenomenon of artificial popstars when I shared the stage with Fumi Yamazaki at LeWeb '10. I had read Gibson's Idoru before but just written it off as sci-fi. Then about a year ago I had the good fortune to discuss a weird idea with a very bright futurist: what would it take to create a completely artificial "American Idol" show? Teams of CGI artists would compete with each other to see who could create the best artificial popstar. We concluded that this was very much doable with today's technology. So I'm not that surprised by Tupac's postmortem performance.

But now I realize we didn't take the idea of an artificial music show far enough. "An artificial popstar isn't cool, a popstar generated by AI, that's cool!" If you want to "Kill Hollywood / Big Content" it's not enough to have a crack team of artists meticulously create an illusion good enough to enthrall a crowd at Coachella. Tupac's performance was an amazing display of technology & craftsmanship by a movie FX company, showcasing all the things Hollywood excels at: using storytelling, casting & FX to create suspension of disbelief. But even at a comparatively cheap $100~$500K per performance it's still not a very scalable business & that's what we techies like to create, right?

Automation of suspension of disbelief, that's the game! Can we imagine AI that is good enough to create a feature-length movie or music performance from scratch? Or failing that, can we build AI-assisted editing tools that allow a single artist to create things that until now required a whole army of Hollywood craftsmen?

We're actually a whole lot closer to reaching this goal than most people suspect. A whole bunch of the required components actually already exist. There's a decent digital robot music composer (EMI). AI-assisted game level design is not unheard of. Sites like weavrs show that artificial persona creation is feasible. So how hard can it be to create AI that generates popsongs & artificial performers? Think about it as "American Idol" meets "Battle Bots". I'd watch that show!

Want to kill Hollywood? Start building tools that help artists to automate suspension of disbelief! Make it a scalable process.

Handmade is the new black

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Etsy is now worth over a quarter Billion dollars. Handmade items pop up on Pinterest all the time. Seems like "handmade" is back. My guess is this stems from a frustration with our fleeting digital world.

From travel planning to healthcare, education & anything, really, our default choice has become digital. We download movies, music, books & newspapers. Seemingly overnight everything has become digital. For many, the internet has become the homepage to their lives.

But I guess a lot of people feel there's something missing. There's nothing real about what we consume. No brand to flaunt. Nothing tangible we can put on display in our homes.

Maybe for us creators this has become even more clear. Previous generations had their books in print. Their movies on celluloid. Their paintings on canvas. All we can show for our efforts is a shiny 57x57 app icon.

And even this is a pretty new thing. Software used to be tangible too. It came in cardboard boxes. On disks you could hold in your hand. Software got 'shipped'. Most of the time it came with a manual the size of a phonebook. When I buy something in an AppStore nowadays it really feels as if I bought nothing.

No wonder then that we hark back to the days when you could still produce something tangible. And it seems like creators have started to take action. Facebook now has an analog research lab. One of the flipboard creators self-published a gorgeous book about the process of creating the app. There's beauty in what we create online but sometimes that beauty is best expressed in tangible form.

Preserve the Process

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I now make it a habit of keeping an open sketchbook next to my computer when I'm coding. Not that I'm a great draftsman or anything but having a scrap of paper nearby comes in handy when you need to write down some pseudocode or sketch an interface. I used to discard these random scraps of paper but having them bound in a notebook comes with a benefit: it becomes a sort of external memory of your work.

A few days ago I was leafing through my last year of notes, doodles & sketches when I was reminded of a sad realization. I guess all digital creators struggle with this. Much of what we produce will ultimately be lost. Lost through obsolescence. Lost in the glut of information we live in. Lost because we simply don't know how to read a particular stream of bits anymore.

There's a good chance that 5 years from now this silly little notebook will be all that's left of the four-odd iphone apps that I helped create in the last year or so. It'll be the only artifact left documenting the agony, decisions, sweat & tears that went into building these apps.

Much of what we do is ephemeral. It's all in our heads and that's what makes programming such a kick. Dreaming it up. Constructing things out of nothing. Shuffling bits until that dream becomes reality. Most digital creators will agree that it's this process that makes our craft so interesting.

Yes this very process tends to get lost again and again. Don't we all hate to write documentation? Sure, there's a git commit here. A Balsamiq mockup there. A Basecamp discussion. Some emails. Some build scripts & some code. But we rarely make a concerted effort to document & preserve the thought process that went into building an app.

We're result-oriented craftsmen. Who really takes the time to do a proper post-mortem of a project? Most of the time we get bored with the end-result even before we're finished & then we're off to build the next shiny thing!

I want to do a better job at preserving the creative process. That's why I put all assets for my last project in a folder called "The Process". It's the only one on my desktop. Every day it stares me in the face. I hope to turn that into something tangible soon. Preferably something hand-made. Maybe an infograph. Maybe a poster. Maybe a (very thin) book.

What are you doing to preserve your creative process?

Instagram for non-believers

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

When I discovered Instagram 2 years ago I was immediately hooked even though as a techie I totally grokked the concerns brought up against it: Why throw away all those precious raw pixels just to apply a filter & make it a bit easier to share over slow networks? I'm not sure that is what makes it worth 1 billion but I'll try to explain Instagram for non-believers.

Just like the iPad was not for the techie crowd, Instagram was never meant for traditional shutterbugs. You know the kind: carrying the latest model Nikon SLR, a bag full of lenses & a strobe or two. Instead, it was made for lomo-afficionados. Remember that craze from the 90's? Lomography was about taking a crappy soviet camera, sticking the cheapest analog film you could find in it & reveling in the weird off-color distorted prints that'd come back a few days later from the lab.

Sounds familiar? Yep, Instagram brought a lomo-like approach to photography to the iphone & to the masses. Focus on the process, not the result. Take your camera everywhere you go. Use it any time. Don't worry about any rules. Don't think. It's ok to use cheap tricks to make pics more interesting. Just create. Damn the quality. Damn the cheap lenses & film. Translated to the digital age: damn the heavy compression, damn the crappy filters, 600px is just fine!

If picking crappy filters is what it takes to turn on the creative bit in people's brains & make them share slightly more interesting pics, that's fine with me! For non-believers: Instagram made the process of taking pictures fun again so people ended up sharing more pics.

And now we come to the crux: Instagram made sharing pics fun again. Sure, there were plenty of photo-sharing sites before Instagram, but in many ways they were over-engineered. In it's tour Flickr describes itself as "the best online management and sharing application in the world". Who wants to add yet another thing to 'manage' to their lives? Who cares if the pic is improperly tagged or has no geolocation info, most people just want to send it to their friends.

Think about it this way: Flickr was about building the perfect album, Instagram was about taking out that oh-so-imperfect album out of the drawer & showing it to people. For non-believers: Instagram removed features to make sharing pics simple again.

Looking for OneSec.me beta testers

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I'm launching a little experiment today. It's an iPhone app called OneSec.me. It allows you to make videos like this. Thank you Cesar for being so awesome & inspiring!

With the OneSec video app you can share one (& only ONE!) moment of your life everyday. The app then stitches these moments together in one long video capturing your best experiences. I firmly believe in "less is more" & "curation is creation". This app is an extension of that line of thought.

The app is still very rough. An experiment to see if this kind of thing will catch on. Right now, I'm full-on in hypothesis-testing mode. 2 weeks ago we submitted to YC with an idea which had one hypothesis confirmed & another one for which we are still collecting data.

But after submitting to YC I had one tiny problem: I knew I'd have no reliable internet connection over the Easter period so I switched from Web to offline iOS development. That's how OneSec happened.

My guess is this will appeal to the self-tracking / lifelapsing crowd, so please spread the word! The app is almost ready for a TestFlight & I'm looking for beta-testers. Email me

Instagram & the pecking order of social behavior

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I believe we're in the middle of discovering a 'pecking order' of startups based on the prevalence of the social behaviors they appeal to. So far I think we can safely say that Generic Social App (Facebook) > Photo Social App (Instagram) > Video Social App (Winner to be determined).

How do I know? A while back I did a fun little experiment on my Facebook feed. I wanted to figure out how frequently people posted about stuff they did on Facebook. After all, I was doing a startup called DidThis & it seemed like a useful thing to do. So I manually categorized the last few hundred status updates & counted occurrences in each category. Besides finding out that no one really posts about things they do (ouch!) I found a few other interesting things.

First, most people don't really post their own content, they primarily re-share. Second, there's a clear pecking order in the kinds of things they share or re-share: pictures before videos before links. Third, the traditional status update is not about what people do but about how they experience things. Fifth, sharing pics is far, far ahead of everything else combined.

No wonder then that Instagram gets handsomely rewarded. They built on top of one of the strongest pre-existing social behaviors, sharing pics. Right at the top of the pecking order. Think about it like this: sharing pics around the coffee table is something your great-grandmother already did. She probably even got them retouched or hand-colored.

Ask yourself: is your social startup appealing to a pre-existing social behavior? Is it something that your great-grandmother used to do? If not, I worry. Because you'll have a whole lot of explaining to do before your user groks your product. It's damn easy to bypass the explaining & just build on top of pre-existing behavior. If you can do this for something all the way at the top of the pecking order, you may end up winning the internet like Instagram did!

Instagram, please let me pay you!

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I guess it's too late now but I was one of those users who would have gladly paid for Instagram. At one point I would even have paid for Facebook. I sure as hell would pay for Gmail right now. But there's a condition attached: stop abusing my freakin' data & give me some privacy! Oh, and in the case of Instagram: don't sell out & throw your early userbase to the lions. I hate it when startups treat their earliest users to a 'grow & flip'.

Let's do some funky math. How much revenue would you need to clone services like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter as SaaS operations? Here we go:

Facebook should have about 1 billion users when it goes for IPO at a 100B$ valuation sometime in 2012. (Aside: did you notice that billion dollars almost spells like BS?) Instagram just sold 30 million users for 1B$. This gives us 1B$ / 0.03Bu = 33$ per user for Instagram and 100B$ / 1Bu = 100$ per user for Facebook.

That's over the lifetime of the product. Let's be generous here & say that we'll use these services for only two years before we move on to something new & shiny. Seems to be about the lifespan of an average Apple product, works for me. That's 4.16$ / month for Facebook, let's make it a fiver. For Instagram that makes 1.375$ / month, let's call it an even 2$. Throw in 3$ for twitter & another fiver for the Google suite.

We're now paying 15$ / month for a slightly more privacy-aware and abuse-free social experience. Let me go check my wallet. Yep, I can afford that & I'm sure plenty of you can as well. "Free as in freedom" doesn't seem to work for social. The only thing we ever get is "Free as in beer". And in that case I'd rather just pay, thank you. So why can't we live in a world of user-funded social services?

Blame it on network effects & lock-in. The calculations above are BS because they're based on growth numbers that cannot be achieved with SaaS / paid services. Social is a winner-takes-all world where growing your userbase sustainably is akin' to suicide in slow-motion. You simply die before you reach the point where you can make a nice big 'exit' on your SaaS business. The fast way to riches is the good old grow & flip.

But still, one can dream. Maybe the time is right to clone some of these social services as SaaS businesses & scoop up the disgruntled users after each 'flip'. I heard about some bros in Germany. They're supposed to be pretty good at this kind of thing. How hard can it be?

So, you're in it for the long run & not just for the 'flip'? Fancy building a solid Instagram clone? I'll be your first paying customer. 5$ a month. It won't give you a big exit but it'll be one hell of a lifestyle business.

Challenge: explain what you do without words

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0200

My previous post, Writing Counts, & the look of this blog are pretty big give-aways of the the importance I attach to writing. I'm a decent writer but you gotta keep challenging yourself & the best challenges are often the really scary ones. And what could possibly be more scary to a writer than this: "Can you explain what you do without words"?

I'm working on a new online product. Not quite ready for launch but I'm submitting to YC. Again. To stir things up a bit I decided to try to capture what it feels like to use this new product without using words & without showing it.

Here goes, I put it on Youtube. Watch it here ... I think it does a decent job of capturing what it feels like to use my app. You be the judge of it.

Can you explain what you do without words?

What a Ride!

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Just a little over a year ago it became clear to me that after years of building digital products for other people I wanted to start for myself. Time to light out, quit my job & start working full-time on a startup. That was the easy part.

What followed was the ride of a lifetime. We got into Seedcamp. We built & launched a product. Twice! We pivoted on the product but our vision of the "internet of actions" always remained strong. Maybe that's why we got an invitation to the YC interview. In the process we gathered some really passionate fans & met awesome people. I think I learned more in the last year than in the previous 10 years combined. Wow!

But at least for me, there was one thing that took me far too long to understand: the meaning of the word serial in serial entrepreneur. Because at heart, that's what I am. I just can't sit still. Gotta start something new.

Earlier this year I realized I was slowly burning out on DidThis, so at least for me, it was time to get out. DidThis continues the quest with a great team, but from now on I'll only be part of DidThis in an advising role.

There's good stuff coming up, both from myself and from DidThis. Stay tuned!

What made your year?

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I'm sitting here in my quiet little studio licking the wounds of yet another failed online venture. I'm writing code and prepping myself for launching a new one. But for some reason I'm in a contemplative mood. I'm trying to figure out the single best work-related thing that happened to me last year. I'm lurking on my friends' twitter streams and keep coming back to SXSW '11 and how something that happened over there made my year. "What made your year?" is a question worth asking yourself from time to time. So let me explain why freakin' SXSW made my year in 2011.

You see, my best startup memories of 2011 are not tied up to the supposed 'successes'. Sure, the YC Interview was great, I learned a lot & am submitting again in the YCS12 batch. Getting into Seedcamp was enlightening. Launching and getting mentioned by Robert Scoble was cool.

Yet the single best thing I did professionally last year was joining up with a friend to build a stupid doomed little app called "FreeFreeBeer" at SXSW11. It was a location-based beer-finding app. (Don't ask ...)

The reason that stupid little app is so important to me is because it's the first thing I built for the sheer creative joy of building something. You see, at the time I felt SXSW Interactive was a place with a lot of bravado & talk but surprisingly little creativity. It got a bit frustrating. That's why we set out to build & launch something, anything in the 3 days we had left of SXSW.

There was not a whole lot of plotting and scheming involved. No meetings. No corporate bullshit or startup politics. Just "Let's build a free beer app" & going for it.

My decision to quit my job & work full-time on my own projects was grounded in that experience of raw creation at SXSW. I tasted the freedom & responsibility of building my own thing. I overcame the fear of showing it to people and saying "I made this". Once you've done that, even with only modest success, there is no going back to the corporate world.

I told you I was in a contemplative mood at the beginning of this post. Let's see if some of that rubs off on you, so let me ask: "What made your year?" & "What made you quit corporate slavery to join the startup world?"

5th Hacker News Cologne Meetup

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Last night the 5th Hacker News Cologne Meetup took place at Solution Space. The informal mission of these Meetups: connect hackers, business people & angels in and around Cologne.

To my knowledge this is the second Hacker News meetup in Germany, after Munich. So why a HN meetup in Cologne & not Berlin? Maybe it's the Pirate thing? Maybe it's something in the beer? We had people coming over from all around Cologne, all the way up to Maastricht. So maybe it's really just because Cologne is central & easily accessible? That, and the awesome crowd these Meetups seem to attract. Plenty of hackers in & around Cologne. Once again Hacker News proved to be an awesome quality filter for startup people.

We started off with a simple show & tell session, where everyone in the room just explained the projects they were working on. One of those sessions about hardware hacking turned into an impromptu talk & set the tone for the evening: founders spontaneously getting up & showing off the products they are working on. We had the Dropwall team who want to change social networking for colleges. We had a guy who wants to disrupt startup conferences. There were at least two people in the room applying to YC this batch & at least one guy violently opposed to the idea of YC as a gatekeeper to SV. We even had an exclusive movie screening.

In or around Cologne? Like beer? Like Hacker News? Let's meet up again next month! Join the Meetup group & keep reading HN to find out when the next one will happen.

It's that time of year again

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I'm talking about YC submission season. One week to go, peeps! You already submitted, right? No? You should have! I mean it says right at the top of the form: "Groups that submit early have a significant advantage because we have more time to read their applications."

Besides that silly tactical reason to submit early here's a real one: the YC form is a pretty good reality check for your idea. It simply asks all the right questions. (Shameless plug: if you want more questions download my iPhone app Startup Deck)

If you can give simple, concise, plain, down-to-earth answers to those questions you're well on your way to getting invited & what's more important: you're forcing yourself to write down your idea.

Because one nice side-effect of putting your idea in writing is that it's a lot harder to bullshit on paper than in-real-life. In a real-life conversation it's very tempting to cover up your weaknesses with an excess of enthusiasm. This is especially true at startup events: frantic talk about 'killing it' seems to be the norm ... until everyone gets shitfaced at 3am & the truth emerges.

Enthusiasm is great, but you're not doing yourself a favor if you don't force yourself to do regular reality checks. For me, the YC form has become such a bi-annual brainstorming and reality-checking tool. Simple as that. Got me invited to the YC interview once & even if I blow this submission I'll at least learn from it.

So. Let's all submit early this season & give the alumni sifting through it all a break.

Writing Counts

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

If you catch me in a bad mood, chances are that I'm just having a shitty creative day. The single thing that gets me pissed off the most is finishing a day & not being able to say I created something.

I've been a developer for most of my life, so creating something has traditionally meant checking in some code into a repo. There's something satisfying about wrapping up the day, writing a commit message & knowing that you created this thing out of thin air. It's magic!

And as you take on less code-to-the-metal, more visionary 'product' roles there's a kick to be had out of creating a great user experience. I have no trouble at all finding my creative spark in product development. And when all goes well, it's magic, once again!

But not all days are like that, some are filled with tedium & nonsense & no creativity at all. Too many of those in a row & I know I have to change something. Ya know, the whole Steve Jobs look-into-a-mirror thing.

This is where the danger lurks. This is why so many developers seem to be so prone to ADD. This is the moment when 'side-projects' are born & promising ideas are abandoned. Unsatisfied creative urge is the unspoken destroyer of startups.

Sure, we'll say things like "They died because of lack of focus" or "They just stopped iterating" but in reality it often simply means that the people inside the startup just stopped getting their daily creative high & as a result of that moved on to something else.

I have a simple cure: writing. Putting pen to paper satisfies my creative urges & it's something I can do from anywhere. Hell, I'm doing it right now because the internet is down & the bit of code I'm working can't be tested without the intertubes.

One of the things I regret about the past year or so is that I stopped writing prose in favor of writing code. When you're the only techie in a startup this is an easy trap to fall into. The reasoning goes like this: "I'm the one most apt to writing code, so I'll focus exclusively on that & forget about blogging for now."

Even as a developer, writing counts! Crafting prose is very much like crafting code: an analytical & creative process with a clear yet elusive end product. Good coders are good writers. Good product people are good writers.

Writing skill has become a bit of a limus test for judging startup people for me. If you can't explain your product in writing in a concise & straightforward way you need to go back to the drawing board. It means something is wrong with your idea or you yourself don't understand it well enough.

Writing is important in online business because you'll be doing so much of it: writing copy for your landing pages, help pages, email messages, etc ... Your first contact with your customers will probably be in writing. Even if it's just a tweet. So you better make sure you know how to write well.

And writing well starts with writing ... a lot ... regularly ... in public. Writing solves two problems for me: creative frustration & improving my writing. So excuse me while I hit my head against the wall for not seeing the correlation between my creative frustration and lack of writing. Writing counts, you dummy!

The gentleman's agreement

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Right now, the holy grail of startup entrepreneurship seems to be user engagement at all cost. Unlike a few years ago it's no longer enough to sell plain-old eyeballs to advertisers, you need to sell engaged eyeballs. And you better be sure that the eyeballs you're hawking are part of the happy clickin' likin' tweetin' commentin' crowd.

A quick refresher. The social startup deal is the following: get people to create content, then get them to interact with each other around it. Chop up your userbase in segments according to behavior. Harvest the now nicely targeted eyeballs & sell them to the highest bidder. Profit!

That's why software built by startups is more about social engineering than software engineering. That's why we end up with borderline psychopathic behavior from the likes of Zynga. And that's why we'll just do about anything short of selling our mother into mturk-style slavery in order to keep user engagement up. There's money to be made in the engaged eyeballs business & that's why you're working on cat pictures.

But here's the problem: people are inherently lazy. Creating good content is hard. And only a tiny fraction of any userbase are creators in the first place. So we've done everything to reduce friction in the content creation process. We went from journalism to blogging to microblogging. We went for minimalistic design to make content creation as simple as possible. Hell, we even redefined 'content' to include things like checkins & automatic sensor output.

And the scheme worked! People are creating 'content' like never before. Everyone I talk to seems to be drowning in a sea of Tweets, Facebook updates & other user-generated content. Yet I feel something is missing. Something simple. Something elusive. A thing called quality.

I'm not too snobbish to admit there is a lot of great content out there. But damn it's hard to filter out the good stuff in my social feeds. (Your definition of 'good stuff' may vary of course & that's part of the issue here.)

I feel like the social web now is a lot like the oldskool web before Google. You know there's good stuff out there but there's no practical way to find it. The closest we've come is the Facebook 'like' button so 'friends' can recommend things to each other. But that doesn't work since most people are upvoting crap like batshit crazy squirrels on speed collecting acorns. You just can't trust your 'friends' anymore, you know ...

What I want is a place where I can go to meet my friends & where I know they will only recommend me the very best things they know about. I want a place without meta, without 'filler' content, without the garbage social startups have engineered us to produce in their perennial quest for user engagement. I want a place where everyone follows a simple gentleman's agreement:

Think twice before you share
Only share your best stuff
Strictly one share per day

Today's sysadmin todo list

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

This one's been doing the rounds on the interwebs & I think it's worth pointing to the original discussion. It's sad to think that even though the better people & the better startups can still be found in Silicon Valley, all of that talent is wasted because of greedy dinosaurs & stupid politicians. Here's a copy of the To-Do list for US-based sysadmins:

Get corporate membership with EFF. Identify all applications with user-generated content. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

Startup Deck is Free for Evar

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

So yesterday I gave a short little talk at the HN meetup in Cologne. One of the things I mentioned was the list of questions I like to use to think about startup opportunities. And of course I mentioned my little iPhone version of that list. Which I made free for the evening as a little gesture of goodwill.

Seems people liked it so much that I got more downloads than there were members in the audience. So I'm keeping it free. You can download it from the iTunes Store

Pirate Gone To Heaven

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Plenty of people know about www.depiraatbaai.be to bypass internet censorship. But there's another way: set your DNS server to the 4 holy numbers: 8.8.8.8. Works in Belgium to access The Pirate Bay & I guess it should work for you Dutchies too, now that your government has joined the dark side.

(*) my excuses to the Pixies

Freedom.txt ~ Take Three

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I'm writing this for a very specific person in a very specific place. Let's say he's in 'neutral country' in the SOPA war. So R, if you're reading this: I think the ~~robots.txt~~ freedom.txt idea is a very powerful one & I need your help to promote it. You're in the right place at the right time. Spread this idea!

This week's ACTA shenanigans show that the war is never over. That's why I urge every techie in control of a domain to create their own ~~robots.txt~~ freedom.txt file to protest internet censorship. It's personal, low-profile & will act as a reminder to keep fighting.

This is how you do it:

Step 1: Copy my ~~robots.txt~~ freedom.txt, modify it & save it to your server's root.
Step 2: KEEP the file there
Step 3: Spread the word on FB, TW etc ...
Step 4: Freedom! Never forget what they tried to pull on us!

Freedom.txt ~ Take Two

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I feel very strongly about internet censorship. I think the SOPA protests don't go nearly far enough and should last long after January 18th. But we can't keep blacking out the internet forever, can we? Kinda defeats the purpose.

So I have a deliciously nerdy solution to let he enemy know that we'll keep watching them & to remind ourselves to keep up our guards. Here's how you can make a statement: copy the paragraph below & save it as freedom.txt in the root of your servers.

Hi, my name is INSERT-NAME, I am the creator of this website and I oppose internet censorship. I created this freedom.txt file to protest recent attempts at censoring the internet. Censorship is never a legitimate solution because the cure is always worse than the illness. We, the internet, will not tolerate censorship. Do not mess with us. A closed internet is a tool of oppression. An open internet is a weapon of mass creation. Pick your sides. Adapt this text and create your very own freedom.txt on your websites.

I ~~really~~ truly badly suck at promoting things on Reddit, HN & co so I'll need your help spreading this. Create your own freedom.txt and do that social thang!

Step 1: Copy the paragraph above & save it as freedom.txt in you server's root.
Step 2: Keep the file there after January 18th.
Step 3: ...
Step 4: Freedom!

Coding? Stuck? Read a book!

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Every ~~coder~~ creative type will get stuck. In a slump. And as Dr. Seuss said: "When your in a slump you're not in for much fun, un-slumping yourself is not easily done".

I've seen coders deal with this in some pretty damn funny ways. One of the weirder ones was the guy who'd get up from his workstation & go stand in a corner of the room. He'd just blankly stare at the wall. Punishing himself like a little boy for writing bad code.

Conventional wisdom tells you to make a switch when you're stuck. Go do something else & your brain will snap right back into it & subconsciously come up with a solution.

Unfortunately making a switch to clear the head often translates into a tab-switch. After all, infinite entertainment is only a tab away on teh intertubes. And, admit it, most of the time a promise of "I'll get right back to it, pinky swear" ends in your browser's tab bar looking like the aftermath of a cluster-bombing campaign directed by a hyperactive baboon on speed.

Conventional wisdom said 'go do something else'. Not go do a million other things all at the same time. You see, just like cluster ammo, open tabs remain dangerous long after the battle is over & the crazed baboon has gone home. Close your unused tabs right now or you'll end up tripping over them sometime in the future anyway. It's ok, I'll wait. You can do it now.

Still here? OK. So next time we're stuck, let's do something different, shall we? We will close the browser. We will shut down the computer. For good measure we'll also shuck away the cell phone. Our next part of 'Mission Unslump' will be to find a real book. It roughly looks like two thin iPads fused together by a stack of paper. You'll recognize it when you see it.

Seriously, next time you're stuck: resist the temptation to switch tabs. Don't let your mind dance to the beat of teh interwebs. Shut down your machine. Pick up a book. Start reading. Slowly. Deliberately. Now get the fuck out of here!

A Kind Act of Randomness

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The other day I was playing around with recommender systems. Nothing fancy, just some googling around. Trying to figure out if there's anything happening in this space. Just doing research, minding my own business.

Then something creepy happened. I noticed this cute asian girl following me around wherever I went. She was in my Gmail sidebar, popped up on the Google SERPS & on YouTube. Then she hit the Q&A sites: "find your asian bride" ... on StackOverflow of all places ...

Thing is, I don't need an asian bride, I already have one. Thank you very much. You see, my significant other is from Shanghai so our household computers end up Googling quite a bit of asianess. Somehow this got lodged in Google's brain. Combine this with a clueless AdSense advertiser and the power of retargeting & you end up with this whole bag of silly.

The creepy thing is not that Google makes mistakes, but that these recommender systems are starting to drive everything. The news you read. The webpages Google selects for you. The things you buy. The food you eat. Everything cherry-picked for you through robotic or social recommendations. Your life, personalized, for your maximum comfort!

We've never had more access to information than now. But the paradox is that the very tools we created to help us sort through this mess end up decreasing the diversity of information we consume. It's perfectly possible to live your life without having to confront a dissenting opinion. This makes us weak.

What I took away from this for the product I'm developing is that I'm going to add a healthy dose of /dev/random to my recommendations. I'm also going to stop calling that specific feed 'recommended'. Ultimately, if you're trying to build a good feed, the goal is to make 'interesting' things float to the top. And often 'interesting' and 'personalized' do not overlap.

So thank god for false positives! And asian brides! Next time you build a recommender, don't overdo it. Make sure you introduce a kind act of randomness. Your users will thank you.

Apple vs. Samsung Ads: Show, don't tell

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

So Samsung used the same actress as Apple to create a tablet commercial? I guess I'll have to watch both commercials in sequence now. Yeah, yeah ... same girl ... giggly goes my OSS-loving brain. Neat. +1 for you, Samsung.

Wait a minute ... do you see what I see? For the product peeps in the audience: I think this is a prime example of good vs. bad demo style. At first sight, both ads seem pretty similar. Go ahead. Watch 'em. Don't forget to turn off the sound for maximum effect.

Exhibit One: Samsung

Exhibit Two: Apple

Yep, same face. Yep, both trying to sell a fun-encrusted slab of silicon & glass. Yep, both playing to our base instincts. Tonight's pitch seems to be: buy our slab of silicon and your daughter will love you again. Both do a decent job in the storytelling department. Cute.

Now, let's take a look at execution. After all, that's what us startup geeks keep telling matters, right? Right? Which one is the better ad? Which one tells me most about the actual product? The key thing to remember here is: Show, don't tell

Apple shows me I can use the camera from the unlock screen. I can do that funky pinch-to-zoom thingy with my fingers. I can use the hardware button to take a picture. Swipety-swipe. Funky red-eye reduction. Tweetaleet is built right in. Contrast this with Samsung's ad: it does games, it does newspapers, it does video. Dammit, don't you just hate it when the forces of evil hire the better ad guy?

This reminds me of how many startups seem to approach their product demo. They will tell a great story of how this product is going to change the world instead of simply showing how it can improve my life right now.

Memo to self: next time I do a product demo, repeat this mantra: "Show, don't tell"

freedom.txt

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Hi, my name is Francis Dierick and I own this website. I no longer wish to stay Anonymous in the fight against internet censorship and those who want to close down our internet.

An open internet is more important than the interests of nation states. Governments have failed us because of ignorance & corruption. They must be fought.

An open internet is more important than corporations. They have failed us because of their natural greed. They must be changed.

An open internet is more important than security, copyright infringement, terrorism or child pornography. We will not be fooled by the strategies of fear employed by those who wish to censor us.

A closed internet is a tool of oppression. An open internet is a weapon of mass creation. Pick your sides. Create your own freedom.txt on your websites.

8 Dirty Startup Tricks from #SCS11

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Last saturday I went to Startup Camp Switzerland in Basel and decided on the spur of the moment that I wanted to lead a panel. There I was, right in the middle of a room with the assembled Swiss internet intelligentsia. Brains everywhere.

And the zombie in me was thinking: “Oh, how I’d love to pick all those tasty smart brains.” All I needed now was an excuse. And “Dirty Startup Tricks” it was: “What can you do to run your business faster, simpler, cheaper?”.

You see, startups move at a different speed. If you’re moonlighting a startup you can’t do things the same way you’d do them at your BigCo day job. There are some fancy memes describing this approach. Agile. Customer Development. Lean Startups. Business models vs. Business plans. Whatever.

Here are 8 random dirty startup tricks I learned at SCS11:

It’s ok to hire cheap at first. One of the fundamental startup skills is being able to focus on your core competencies and delegating everything else. But that can be hard when you are cash-strapped. One solution is to hire a VPA. We’re doing it at Quantter for research tasks, data input, simple image processing and “human functional testing”. One step up is hiring students / interns. You can get lucky with the last approach: it seemed to work out well for at least one startup in the room. But always make sure that you never oursource core tasks.

Buy Facebook Fans. This is stricly against the FB guidelines and can get you banned, but I’m mentioning it anyway. You read the “dirty” startup tricks at the entrance, right? One person in the room pulled this off & the going rate seems to be 100$ for 100K Swiss fans.

Buy and Adword on someone’s name. Want to meet someone? Maybe an investor? Or a CEO? Buy a Google Ad on his name so that when he Googles himself he’ll notice you!

Being a little spammy is ok. The topic of SPAM, opt-in vs. opt-out came up several times in the room. What surprised me most about the discussion was a new attitude towards spam. The vibe I got was that being a little spammy is ok (about 50/50 split when asked to raise hands). Doing opt-out seemed to be an accepted practice.

Check Darkpatterns.org Dirty tricks can backfire. There’s a community of people out there checking websites for dirty sales / usability tricks. So if you think about doing something that is slightly ‘edgy’, check out darkpatterns to avoid having the internet community go all 4chan on you.

Build FREE throw-away services. We had one audience member suggesting building simple little tools (e.g. a website uptime checker) that preferably send out notifications so that you can then later insert a marketing message for your paid product.

Double-sided signup incentives. Referral/Affiliate programs are quite common. One trick to take the “trafficking your friends” edge out of this approach is to give something to both the new signup and the referrer. Dropbox does this. Don’t do this with cash. Offer a digital product for signup / referral.

Being a little sneaky is ok. There’s a reason why plenty of entrepreneurs have a naughty/sneaky secret: the mindset of pranksters is a great mindset to have. Wozniak & Jobs started out building blue boxes. Y Combinator explicitly asks for something “naughty” you’ve done on the signup form. The pranks at MIT are the stuff of legend.

I came to this session with only 1 “Dirty Trick” to offer but I learned a lot more. So I guess that makes me a little sneaky, which I am totally ok with. I revealed my dirty trick “Joker” card all the way at the end of the session. Those who were there know what it was, the others will have to wait for the blog post. Remember: Stay Hungry, Stay Naughty!

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. This one is to remind myself to stay a little naughty ;-)

On Being blocked in China

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0100

A few days ago I tweeted that Quantter was blocked in China and I was ‘flying over’ to investigate the issue. I’m writing this from Shanghai inbetween New Year festivities and I can confirm: not only www.quantter.com but also blog.quantter.com & tumblr.com are blocked, in addition to the usual suspects like Facebook & Twitter.

So what went wrong? My guess is that quantter is too closely affiliated witch that well-known chinese arch-enemy twitter. We use twitter for login & rely pretty heavily on the twitter API. The quantter domain probably just scores too high for the ‘twitter’ keyword and hence we have become an enemy of the state.

Whatever. Here’s how to bypass the Firewall in China. Every expat is doing it, so don’t worry. No one is coming for you. For the purists there’s always Tor, but I prefer the far simpler approach of using a VPN provider. Go to http://www.freedur.net (the domain is not blocked from within China) and signup for an account. It’s 14.95$ / month and they only accept Paypal. I used them when I was in China last time and their service is pretty good. I’m using the L2VPN option to surf the “real” web from my iPhone and iPad.

Being blocked in China is something that the mischievous little boy in me may appreciate, but it’s just plain bad for business. There’s a massive market for apps out here (seems like everyone I know in China has bought an iPhone in the last 6 months) and missing out on that is just a big mistake. Bringing Quantter to China may be pretty low on our list of priorities, but I’m going to make damn sure that the (warning! spoiler alert) soon-to-be-launched iPhone app will be in the Chinese AppStore.

China has by far the largest internet population (estimated at 500mio), about half of which are mobile users. Let’s say that this puts the iPhone app market at a conservative 200mio. Just too big of an opportunity to pass up on.

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I kept this post because being censored sucks & seeing Western governments emulate China scares me shitless.

Cold Water Swimming @ LeWeb

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100

A few weeks ago I did a last-minute submission to the Ignite! competition at LeWeb. The prize is a chance to talk for 5 minutes in front of a 2000-strong assembly of digerati at the LeWeb conference. There’s a catch though: you’re not allowed to pitch your startup, so talking about Quantter was out of the question.

I submitted a pretty weird idea: let’s turn this 5 minutes in a fundraiser for charity:water & see how much money we can raise by talking about my cold water swimming efforts.

1 billion people don’t have access to clean water. Without clean water no health. And without health you can’t afford luxuries like education & innovation we technologists so often take for granted. I strongly believe that education & innovation can change the world for good. 20$ will give clean water to 1 person for 20 years. Each time you donate $20 to charity:water you directly change a life & plant a little seed that has the potential to grow into an education & a chance at prosperity.

Imagine my surprise last week when Geraldine Lemeur mailed me back to tell me my proposal was accepted. I freaked out & posted on HN because I am not a good public speaker. The response has been overwhelmingly positive & I thank you all for the great advice. I’m still scared shitless, but I’ve learned to enjoy the preparations & am actually looking forward to next week.

The fundraising pitch is pretty simple: “Donate to charity:water & get a chance to see your name in a swimming video like this one.”

If you like my effort, donate, retweet & reblog this: let’s try to raise as much money for charity:water as we can at #LeWeb! See you there!

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. Speaking at LeWeb was just awesome ;-)

Radio Silence

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

I'm working on an exciting new project that isn't directly related to iPhone/iPad so I'll be toning down my posting on Fakepad a bit.

The AppStore has been good to me, especially after the NYT mention of Biblethumper. While I'll be maintaining my existing apps, I expect the new project to take up most of my nighttime coding sessions.

A new app is on the horizon, but right now that looks to be 2-3 months in the future. In the meantime I'll be writing a lot of Python infrastructure code. So expect me to get started writing about iPhone development again in a few weeks, but right now ... radio silence ...

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I keep this one as a personal reminder of when exactly I started working on Quantter/DidThis

Dr. StrangePad: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Mobile development is having a major “Dr. Strangelove” moment right now: we are learning to accept the fact that we can and will learn to live within the confines of Apple’s mad AppStore world. What makes “Dr. Stangelove” so compelling is that it describes a world which remains eerily coherent despite the madness of its foundations. Apple’s AppStore ecosystem is similar to the world depicted in “Dr. Strangelove” in both its madness and coherence. Let’s start with the madness.

A Plea of Insanity

To most developers, the AppStore world does not make a whole lot of sense. We know open systems are better, yet we jump at the first opportunity to play in Apple’s walled garden. We’re encouraging the users of our software to give up massive amounts of freedom for a mirage of convenience. We know as developers that handing over so much control to a single company is probably not a good idea. We know that by developing for the platform we’re fostering the creation of yet another monopolist.

Sounds familiar? Yep. In a previous post I described this behavior in terms of addiction but I was never quite satisfied with that writeup: it described the symptoms, not the causes of our illness. If we’re going to plead insanity to defend our actions, we should at least try to understand the roots our madness.

A Method to Our Madness : The Network

I firmly believe that the root of many of our tech society’s illnesses can be traced back to the network effects that seem to be ingrained in almost anything we do online. Network effects play a tremendous role in the growth of monopolies like Google (selling ads to the greatest network of eyeballs), Facebook (mining privacy for profit) and now Apple (marketing software as consumer instead of high-tech goods).

As developers and early adopters we hold great responsibility in influencing which services will become popular and which ones will wither away: by joining an early network we cause it to grow exponentially. So we’d better choose our networks wisely, but most of the time we don’t. We happily joined the Facebook gold-rush and now we are riding out this AppStore wave. Despite the fact that Facebook is probably a looming privacy nightmare and the AppStore’s approach of software distribution is probably encouraging users to give away more freedoms than is strictly needed.

In markets dominated by network effects there is often a point of no return & I believe we have reached this point with the iPhone AppStore. Even if as developers we’d like to live in a different, beautiful & more open world; network effects dictate that AppStore-like software distribution is here to stay.

A Coherent Kind of Madness

Within the confines of the AppStore developer network, the unwritten internal rules make sense. Don’t do stuff that Apple won’t like (they pay your bills). Follow the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (they exist to help your user). Follow the API rules (ditto). Obey the downward price pressure (it’s an artifact of the consumerist distribution model). Once you’re in, once the money starts flowing your way, it’s not that hard to justify the tradeoffs of developing for a closed network like the AppStore. Just look at those numbers:

120K: the number of iPads sold in the first day of pre-orders. 150K the number of applications available in the AppStore. 1 million: the number of pre-order sales Apple is likely to announce on April 3. 4.8 million: the number of iPads Apple is likely to sell in the first year. 50 million: the market for tablet-like devices Apple is expected to create by 2015. 1 billion: number of apps Apple already has sold for the iPhone.

Network effects & Apple’s understanding of consumer nature created this AppStore monster. The sheer size of it made us developers surrender. After all, we get to share a little in the benefits, so it’s not all that hard to justify & defend it’s existence. Once you’re in, it is a very coherent world indeed.

Technology Creep as the Source of our Madness

These days a lot of technological monopolies get created unwittingly by us developers: every few years we seem to be more than willing to join yet another gold-rush on closed platforms. Each time we do that we reinforce the network effects at play in favor of the fashionable platform of the day. Once that platform size gets big enough it reaches a point of no return due to network effects. Once a technology has reached this stage it doesn’t matter whether you refuse to join: if you will not, another dev will happily take your spot.

The growth & adoption of new technology is a gradual process: it literally creeps up on us & most of the time we adopt new tech before we fully understand the consequences. And that’s when I think of Dr. Strangelove: technology has a way of creeping up on us and creating a world of madness when we least expect it.

I like the iPad, but I don’t like the consequences for software development if the closed AppStore model gains more traction. There has to be a better way!

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I'm keeping this one to remind myself to choose my technologies wisely.

The iPad is about Touch, not Tech

francis.dierick@gmail.com (Francis Dierick) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

When Steve jobs presented the iPad to the world now almost a month ago, it was a divisive event: there were those who ‘got it’ ( MuleDesign, Paul Buchheit, OhSnapSon ) and those who didn’t (Satoru Iwata, Gizmodo). The initial reception was mixed at best. In a few hours the “No Flash, No MultiTasking, Lame.” meme was going around the internet, reflecting the infamous “No wireless, Less space than a nomad, Lame.” moment of the 2001 iPod launch.

The traditional technology press was having a hard time. There were no impressive tech specs to quote. The device was hard to pigeonhole: was it a tablet, an oversized iTouch, a Kindle-killer? And why all the restrictions (no Flash, multitasking)? Lots of open questions.

While everyone was speculating on Twitter & trying to grasp the impact of this device, one clear trend emerged: those who actually held the device & used it in-real-life were raving about it. That is because the iPad is fundamentally a sensual device: you have to hold it & touch it to understand it. And that was exactly why so many tech reviewers didn’t get it: Apple’s infamous secrecy prevented 99.99% of pundits from getting a real feeling for the device. Even now, one month later, most developers haven’t been able to touch a real device.

P.S.: I'm copying some old posts from my previous blogs here when I feel they are either insightful or personally significant. I'm keeping this one to remind myself to keep the 'touch' in mind when building things.