3 New Tools

1. Get the Linkspank toolbar for Firefox at http://www.linkspank.com/toolbar. It is far and away the fastest way to share links on the web. You also have the option to view a news ticker and you can save pages with a click for later browsing.

You can send your spanks to Facebook and to Twitter at the same time as individual email addresses! Use these tools:

2. Add the facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/linkspank The app is not super pretty right now, and the page to import your friends takes about fifteen seconds. But once you have the app in, you can spank individual facebook friends, and post links to your facebook wall at the same time as you send them to email or facebook people. Plus you'll enjoy better features as I improve the facebook app.

3. Add your twitter account at http://www.linkspank.com/twitter You can see what spanky tweets look like on my Twitter profile: http://www.twitter.com/bitchell.

A few hours creating a tiny image

Despite the spartan layout on Linkspank, some spankers are confused about where the menu is, or what they can or should do when they receive a spank from another (slightly savvier) user of the site.

a picture of the menu

I've tried various tactics to address this issue. For a while, the "spank" and other links were formatted as big red buttons. Some people liked that, but it started to drive me nuts with all the red on the page. I felt that red as a highlight color was being overused and abused.

Today I decided to try creating an image that would go at the left of the spank and call attention to the links. My first idea was to create a little icon with the hand in it. Some work led to this icon:

first stab at the icon (bigger size)

But when I shrunk the icon to 40 x 40 pixels, it looked crappy. I decided ultimately that it wasn't my lack of skill that was causing the problem, so much as the fact that the hand is a fairly intricate shape to be presented at such a small resolution.

After despairing briefly, I got the idea to use a caret-shaped image to call out the menu:

the spanky caret

This took me about two seconds to make, and I like it so far. All I wanted was something that says, "Yo! Look here. This is the spot," and the caret does a pretty good job of that. It also looks a little like a command prompt, or an arrow, both of which make sense in this context. It's also a use of red that seems to be in line with the usage of red on the rest of the page.

Finished product:

Drew Barrymore yech!

That is all. As for the Seal of Spankiness, I'm using it for the time being at the side of the page to promote the Linkspank Toolbar, which is getting high reviews so far.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into random minutiae. Have a nice day.

The blackjack table and startup marketing/investing

Gambling with More Money Means Better Chances of Winning

If you're a good blackjack player, you can win 55% of the time. You ought to be able to make some serious money in the long run, but you could still go into the casino and lose all your money. The reason is that wins and losses can come in streaks -- they don't have to, but they occur naturally in a long sequence of coin tosses (or blackjack plays). A streak of losses could take away all the money you're playing with, and in that case you have no money to play with and you have to go home.

One solution, as gamblers have observed, is to bring massive sums of money to the casino. It's still possible that a long losing streak could take you out. But the bigger your pile of money, the less likely you are to hit a big losing streak that takes you out. Then, if you're able to stay in the game, you can play on and your slight edge in winning (that 55%) can manifest in money.

Playing with more money increases your chances of winning.

(More technically, that 55% is a statistical average based on a large number of games. For that 55% to end up being the case, you have to be able to play a lot of games. The imaginary mathematician who's calculating that 55% is imagining that you have an infinite amount of money to play with.)


Investing with More Money Means Better Chances of Winning

Consider that this means for another type of gamble, the business venture. Playing a bit fast and loose with the analogy, we can think of the venture as something that has an unknown outcome, which won't necessarily work, but which has a good idea and "should" work given a good chance (that's the 55%), an opportunity to try different things, a little tweaking, a little luck, and so forth.

For the worthy but uncertain venture in question, investing MORE can make the venture more valuable (better chance that it won't run out of money and that it will succeed).

Corollary: size of investment affects valuation in a fashion that is not merely additive.

Corollary: from a risk and payoff perspective, the proper size of an investment isn't how much money the startup "needs" or how much the company is worth from a discounted cash flow perspective. The proper size of investment is the amount of money that will make sure that the startup isn't left at the blackjack table with no money.

Corollary: these considerations make one big round of investment much more valuable than a few smaller rounds, even if they add up to the same dollar amount.

Corollary: these financing questions don't view whether a startup runs out of money as a particularly good indicator of the quality of the idea or of the execution. Although naturally your likelihood of running out of money at the table depends on the quality of your edge (5% or whatever), it also depends on the number of hands you play and the size of the stakes of an individual hand relative to your total financing (and these factors more depend on your type of business, industry, etc).

Use this Software: OpenOffice and GIMP

As of a week ago, I thought "Vista" and "open source" were incompatible words. But now I'm an experiment to use only open source. Here are a few results:

OpenOffice has been great over the last week. I actually like it better than Word. I've used it to edit large documents and formatting-heavy documents. After one crash upon installation, it has worked perfectly. I've edited documents created in Word, and saved documents in Word format, as well as pdf. As of now, I trust it both with important documents of my own editing and documents that I need other people to be able to open in Word. No need for Word anymore.

I just installed GIMP to replace my aging version of Photoshop, which I was afraid to install on Vista. I see Photoshop as an indispensible tool for any entrepreneur. So far, I like GIMP a lot. I've just been messing around. It's not a Photoshop clone, but as a Photoshop user I find it pretty easy to get around (given the background fact that Photoshop may be the hardest-to-figure-out piece of software I've ever touched).

As I argued, the best software isn't just free - it's also open source. Firefox is open source (good); Google Chrome is not (less good). Google Chrome is the Ralph Nader of browsers - don't let it mess up the election results.

Hours worked, telecommuting, and goals

Why you (or anyone) shouldn't think about how many hours you work.

The more you think about hours, the less you think about results. Success hinges on a single-minded focus on results. Therefore, you shouldn't think about hours at all. (How's that for a syllogism.)

Corollary: telecommuting. Telecommuting is good for any organization. It involves thinking about hours less. That's good.

Corollary: goals. If you stop thinking about hours, you'll find out really fast if you have any goals. If managers suddenly panic because they don't know whether anyone is doing any work, then your organization has no goals. That's a reason to go to telecommuting / no hours immediately – you need goals in a hurry.

Google's product development mantra and the Tipping Point

I've been thinking about when and how to release and push out Linkspank's new toolbar / Firefox extension, which is really cool and quite well received by its small number of users so far. The question is “when and how to launch.”

For at least a few years, Google has advocated an approach to product development whereby you release your product at an early stage and then “iterate” - make improvements as users demand them and improve the process. Google has been voicing this mantra for a few years. This approach to designing a piece of software works best when you're building something simple and you can change it easily (the web is good for that). The philosophy is not too far off of the ideas espoused by 37Signals.

But also taken as a truism is what Malcolm Gladwell has to say in The Tipping Point. Small changes (say, in an Internet site) can make a big difference. Tipping-point thinking implies that your average cool website with a couple thousand users, like Linkspank, may be just a few crucial changes away from explosive growth.

Google's product philosophy and the tipping point meesage have something in common: tweaking. When you iteratively develop a product you have released, you're making pretty small changes. And in searching for the tipping point, you are trying to find the devilishly minor changes in your product that can take it from zero to sixty. You can think of iterative development as a way to search for the tipping point.

Here's a flipside, though. Part of the underlying message of the release-and-iterate idea is that people overestimate the risk of release. “If you get fairly close to the right product,” Google means, “your users will help you close the gap more efficiently than you would have done otherwise.” IF, that is, the customers know what they want; but as traditional marketing does a good job of showing, customers generally don't. And as the tipping point argues, it can be tough for anyone (designer or user) to identify that the small changes that are going to be crucial. That's in contradiction with Google's idea.

Moreover, the mere fact that small changes are critical according to the Tipping Point undermines one of Google's messages: that there is a low cost to release. Who are we kidding? Releasing a product always has a risk. Any potential user who turns away from your product may not turn back, so any time you to go them there is a risk.

It's easy for Google to proclaim iterate-and-release now that the company has a huge user base and a pervasive brand: they can easily tap into pre-zealous users, and if they alienate some users on some products, there are still billions of Google users out there for the following iterations.

The early days of Google – the development of search – was similar to release-and-iterate in some ways, and different in others. The founding duo was informal and agile when it came to making a product and trying it out. Nevertheless, the “releasing” they did in the early years was pretty cautious.

Release-and-iterate is not an answer in and of itself; you have to think about the risk of launching in terms of your resouces, and what you hope to find or achieve in your iteration (perhaps the tipping point).

Beware of mantras - Wittgenstein taught us that.

Anyway, the toolbar is coming soon and it's sweet!