Stumbling on Happiness...as an Entrepreneur

I've been reading Stumbling on Happiness. I won't review the book, but merely apply some of its observations to entrepreneurship.

Finding #1: Control, rather than outcomes, is key to happiness.

Corollary #1: To be happy, be an entrepreneur.

Finding #2: We are happier with irreversible decisions than reversible ones.

Corollary #2: When applying Corollary #1, do it boldly.

What Took So Long? (news feeds pt 1)

News on the Homepage

One of the motivating ideas behind Linkspank is that, when it comes to finding and sharing new stuff on the web, too many things are harder than they need to be. One of these way-too-hard things is reading news from a variety of sources by the use of feeds.

I could speak for an hour about news feeds (RSS feeds), sharing my relatively unique views. But suffice it to say that today we threw up a test of an original idea: give the user feeds! Don't make it just "easy" (because there is no easy way to choose a bunch of feeds), make it "done." With better versions of done to come.

We'll see how that goes. Not a huge change but I am excited about it as I am about everything.

Customer Service: MySpace's Tom, Pandora's Tim, and a robot

As part of my quest to sign up for every free service available on the Internet, I joined Pandora yesterday and checked it out.

On joining, I received this email:



An interestingly uber-personal, reply-right-to-this email approach to serving your customers. I personally thought it was really cool to receive Tim's email...but I am not sure that a similar approach would make sense for Linkspank. Pandora, after all, is not really about befriending people.

When linkspank was getting set up I thought a lot about Tom on MySpace. The idea of having a real person at the company automatically be your friend is a pretty brilliant one, I think. But the idea seemed (and still seems) a little passe to me now. People are less psyched than they used to be about friending someone online who they don't know.

Out of all this came the Spankdroid - an admittedly bizarre creation. Basically, we decided to have a mascot, rather than an actual person, be our spokesperson. This idea is little used on social networks!



The idea is that if you make friends with the Spankdroid, you then get messages from him about contests and so forth. Spankdroid is also like a little helper whom you can email with questions.

We did a lot of consumer research and determined that a robot wearing an Uncle Sam hat resonated perfectly with our users. Ok, maybe not :-). Rather, we do know that Linkspank is different, and it prides itself on doing things that big sites are afraid to do.... so we have a robot spokesperson.

Just some musings on this subject... :-)

Reactions to Google Presentation

Google released its version of PowerPoint this week, which you can try out with your Gmail account at http://docs.google.com. I jumped on the opportunity to try it, because I use the other docs services and also because I was doing some remote collaboration with people in Russia, India, everywhere this week and it seemed like this could be really useful.



My reactions, in order of appearance:

1. It's pretty cool
2. Not enough keyboard shortcuts, or I didn't know what they were
3. Default template SUCKS. The bullet points suck - too small, no spacing. Don't they know the 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki?
4. Line spacing and font size - probably THE key formatting issue in a presentation - is difficult and sucky.
   
5. I had a little trouble publishing, in that I'd publish, then edit my doc, and the published version didn't change, so I had to keep unpublishing and publishing.
6. Download to a zip file is cool. You can view your preso on your desktop or publish to a site.
7. Not everyone could view the file! In conjunction with #8 this put a huge damper on my experience.
8. You can't convert to microsoft ppt. In conjunction with #7, it means that I made a presentation and had no way of sharing it with one of my team members without REDOING the whole thing in PowerPoint. Not good.
9. On the flip side, this worked really well in IM collaboration with people working in India - I just IM'd them the link and they checked out the presentation. Cool.

Summary: it's good for collaboration, which is the key to any document. But its strength is ease of access on the web, and this is undermined by the inability to put into .ppt, especially given that it's new and has bugs. Secondly, it's easy to use, but still falling short on some of the usability basics of making a simple preso.

Will I use it again? Not sure. Maybe. I have spent lots of effort in the past getting team members onto Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs. They usually have lots of trouble getting their accounts set up and getting to the file. Sometimes it seems like it's worth it, but definitely not always. I believe in the product though and certainly it has a bright future.

I think their team should think more about Guy Kawasaki - a simpler online presentation tool is perfect for the 10/20/30 rule. It should be the strategy one-liner for their product, because it informs not just how you give presentations, but you sit down to create them.

As for the presentation I was working on today - a storyboard for a flash animation to replace our 1996 preview. So far I am PUMPED about it.

Banner Ads: 6 lessons; 3 winners

I'm calling the banner ad experiment to a halt. I give it a while and various experiments but here is the deal according to me.

The top performing ad: It's the shizzle, but still fizzling expensizzle

On Ad Placement

1. Network-wide banner ads suck. They are like sending everyone on the planet junk mail - it has some return, but you are essentially polluting. <1% can make money but it is pollution.

2. Domain targeting makes a difference. Your banner ads will consistently perform better on some sites than others. You have to experiment to find the right ones.

3. Search advertising is great, but it only works if you can offer something in a language that people are looking for on a search engine. (Sometimes people don't know what they want, or don't look for it on a search engine.)

Performer #2: The reason I tried banner ads, and as usual, someone else's idea at a bar.

On Copy

4. Some of my ads had the linkspank logo; others were clever and obscure; others were in-your-face. The best combination seemed to be "in-your-face, but slightly obscure."

5. White text on black background wins. I learned this in Ogilvy on Advertising and I recommend the book.

Performer #3: Maybe visionaries click ads more often than other people.

Summary

6. It's too expensive, and doesn't feel good, compared to other methods of promotion - like the contests.

What does it all mean to you?

I don't know, but I'll offer an opinion in an area that is interesting to many people right now - mobile phone advertising -- and especially mobile-phone promotions and contests.

Google has launched "Adsense for Mobile" -- namely, banner ads for mobile, so you want to know, should I be putting my banner ads on people's phones?

I would say, try going to the mirror and saying to yourself, "I run a junk mail business." If that sounds accurate, go for it! ;-)

People also have a blithe notion these days that by offering customers the opportunity to win something, you are immediately their friend and they won't mind constant contact from you. (E.g., constant text messages.) My dos centavos is that you should keep in mind that a good chunk of people - possibly 100% of your target market - will assume that it will be impossible for them to win, even if it is not that difficult (I learned this in the case of linkspank).

AdWords/the search context is just a way way better way to reach people, if it makes sense for your medium. Otherwise, go for some PR stunts and work on using your consumer evangelists - they WANT to receive your text messages. :-)

The Lost User, and Allegories of Gmail

What is Gmail's "value proposition"?

Try to tell me, right now, in ten seconds, what supposedly makes Gmail better than Hotmail or Yahoo!.

If you can do it, then in my opinion you are a rare individual. Because I have rarely heard Gmail's value proposition explained well. That would include Gmail's site:

Big list, little meaning

These four things about Gmail are not particularly unique, compared to Yahoo! and Hotmail (although some of them used to be).

Here's my answer: "Gmail, the first web service that allows a layperson to be as fast and efficient as an expert user of pine and other tools in a Linux environment."

It's a pretty simple idea, but it's hard to explain to people. Pine is very geeky:

Comparing something to Pine may not be desirable

Sometimes simple things are hard to explain to people, if they aren't familiar where you're coming from. And if you're coming from a different place from your users (and as the designer of a technical product for laypeople, that's always true), it's hard to know what will be clear to people.


Lost Features, Lost Users

I'm not picking on Gmail - I like Gmail a lot, and so I'm writing from experience. I have a lot of experience explaining keyboard shortcuts, search syntax, and filters to people in Gmail.

Also, I remember what it was like to first start using Gmail. It was a new environment. Yet now, it's so simple... to people who know it ;-).


Parlez vous Spank?

I've been thinking about the old "Gmail challenge" because I keep discovering how many Linkspank users - even people who obediently, regularly check their inboxes - don't understand what a spank is or how to do it.

(So if you're among them, don't feel bad.)

As I always do, I'm blaming it in part on UI issues, and a solution is in the works. But the challenge does not disappear with a good UI. (After all, Gmail's UI is pretty good.)

It's really a new concept, which savvy UI and tutorials can educate on, but which is still new... even if it's very simple.

My new mission: get people to understand what a Linkspank is.

Like I said, new UI is on the way. Until then, the best way is to try :-), and maybe refer to our primitive tutorials (especially the first two):

How to Spank

How to Spank Faster

How to Earn Points