My Very Own Year in Ideas
Blog Preface: I’ve been an independent consultant for a year now. I made the decision to work for myself for a variety of reasons. The timing for me was very important. I had gotten to a point where I had consumed enough information over the years to do what I was doing full-time, on my own. I felt experienced enough and even had a small base of clients in the tech community from moonlighting over the past few years. I was also really fed up with working for companies; not doing the type of work I really wanted to be doing, being underutilized and generally unhappy with how the UX process was implemented within the company. I was ready to put my skills to work for start-ups, which allowed me to be in control of the UX process and along the way help companies.
Aside from this and the fact that Crista and I were planning on launching our ice cream company this year, one of the other major reasons I decided to work for myself is so I would have more time to work on my own ideas, my own experiments. In my opinion when an idea strikes, that’s the best time to explore it. Do some research, put a quick “mock-up” together to run some quick tests with. Since we spend most of our time at our jobs, most of my ideas would come to me while I was at work. I was unable to ignore them. The more I became dissatisfied with my job, the more determined I became to “make” something. I would find myself hiding my computer screen so I could do research, I would use my lunch break to talk to my friends about ideas or even sometimes have a meeting with a client. I was obsessed and at a certain point, there was a tipping point. The obsession became so great that I literally could not bring myself to go to work anymore. This was the best thing to ever happen to me.
On a side note: working for yourself is the best way to learn. I’ve done a lot of great work and I’ve also made some mistakes along the way. Mistakes are never fun but they are very valuable.
Ideas = Experiments
An idea is only an idea until you do something about it. 2011 was one of the most significant (if not THE most significant) year in for tech in New York. New York is the new Silicon Valley. If you walk down the street in Union Square, you’re bound to bump into various people doing various things in tech. You can literally overhear people’s conversations in the streets. 2011 was amazing but I think 2012 will be even more exciting. Specifically because I think people are realizing how hard it is to make a product that is successful. It’s hard to make something that is profitable, that will attract thousands and millions of people. It’s hard to nail a single pain point that a large group of people share. I think 2012 will represent a turning point and people will think more about business models and will spend less time working on projects that don’t gain traction. This is also a great time for the field of User Experience because this is also what UX aims to do. I hope that people think less about launching a company around their “big idea” and think more about launching some experiments to test their idea(s). I’ve spent a good amount of time doing experiments this past year, some of which I’ll show you in a few more paragraphs! Vinicius Vacanti (also one of my clients) just highlighted this train of thought in a recent blog post called “Have Idea for a Startup? Don’t Launch a Company, Launch an Experiment.” Vin is one of those rare people you meet that just “gets it.” He’s been through the trenches and spent a lot of time working through ideas with his business partner James that didn’t gain traction before launching Yipit.
Think Big, Build Small
One of the main principles of User Experience is in order to test ideas, “build the smallest thing you can and put it out into the world as a test.” This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think big it just means don’t build big…right away. Trying to think of the smallest version of your big idea is actually a really fun exercise to go through and you should do it as much as possible. This type of practice will change how you think about things.
Some of My Experiments From 2011
I have to preface this part of the post by telling you, my goal for these experiments was not to start a company. I was not looking for funding, I’m a firm believer in bootstrapping until you gain some real traction and just can’t bootstrap anymore. My goal with these experiments were really just to do experiments and test some ideas. If you’re a big thinker you know that if you don’t take action on an idea it will nag the hell out of you until you do. Some of these experiments helped to get rid of that nagging feeling and were key in seeing how people reacted to the idea in general.
#1 Hunt & Gather (Codename)
I started working on this idea in the Spring of 2010 with my friend Patrick. If you live in New York you know how complicated the process of apartment hunting can be. Many people including myself use Craigslist as their main source for apartment listings. Craigslist, for this purpose is pretty terrible although this is how I’ve found almost every apartment I’ve ever lived in. It’s great in terms of volume, it’s not great in terms of the experience. I would design an alternative solution to Craigslist in a heartbeat if I thought there was any way I could actually attract that audience to use my service instead. It’s not as simple as just designing a better solution that does the same thing, everyone’s not going to switch over to your new service tomorrow just because it exists. This was too complicated so the train of thinking shifted to: what if there’s another way to simplify the apartment hunting process? Wouldn’t it be great if I could save all the listings I’m interested in and share them with the person(s) I’m looking for an apartment with.
We spent a long time working on this idea and I ended up breaking many of my own rules. We actually got to the point where we had an 80% functional prototype but it had taken so much time to get there that along the way we lost steam and momentum. The reality is, we bit off more than we could chew, spent too much time perfecting and didn’t build “the smallest thing possible,” we tried to build the whole thing. Coincidentally around the same time there was another company called Nest.io building exactly the same thing who have since raised something like $750,000 in funding.
#2 Share Hub (Codename)
I had this vague idea for a service that would allow you to share links with groups and have a conversation thread around them. I know this probably sounds similar to an existing service you might have heard called “Twitter” but in my mind this approach was different. For example maybe there’s a great article that I want to share with my “UX Group” of friends or my “Foodies” group of friends. I could do this as well as have a private conversation thread around each link, like comments on a blog post for example.
The way people share content today is so broad it made the up-front research required to really figure this out, more time consuming than I could spare at the time. In turn it was impossible to figure out if any new type of service in this space would be valuable to people or if it would be yet another place to post stuff and thereby just overhead. In the end I really didn’t have the time to give this the kind of thought it needed and didn’t get past what you see above. Similarly though, there are some really cool articles about how Twitter is being used in the classroom: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/06/23/how-to-use-twitter-in-the-classroom
#3 Now or Later
I’m always trying to think of better ways to be efficient. How I organize my daily tasks is a big part of that. There are so many task apps out there, I didn’t want to create another one but I wanted a better way to organize the immediate. This idea centered around the ability to organize what I need to do now and what I need to do later.
I idea has since morphed into a different approach. After doing some user testing I found a different way of organizing the “immediate” that seemed to appeal to people. I’m working on a prototype with a developer in England.
#4 Twitter User Acquisition App
This idea was born out of the need to connect your business with people on Twitter who might be interested in it. This idea could be considered “spammy” but that wasn’t the intention. When we launched Tweat.it – one of our main ways that people discovered our service was because we started following them on Twitter. In turn I spent a lot of time doing this. The value it added vs. the amount of time it took was just not worth it. If the process could be automated though, then maybe it would be worth it. I ended up working on this idea with a developer for bit but pretty quickly we learned that the solutions we had in mind violated Twitter’s terms of service so we let the idea go. The good part? It required very little time investment up front to figure this out.
#5 Facebook Birthday Reminder
This is a great example of thinking big and building small. This idea was born out of the bigger pain point of it’s hard to remember all your friends and families birthdays. In the beginning I had a much bigger vision of a calendar app that would allow you to visualize all birthdays in a really cool, interactive way. Applying lean thinking I asked myself what the smallest thing I could build was. Using Facebook as the platform, I then designed a service you could sign up with that you send you daily email reminders of whose birthday it was today.
I floated this idea past a few of my developer friends and got a couple bites. This ended up getting passed around to three different developers. The third one, Richard from London ended up spending enough time on it (half a day or so) to find out more information about the type of implementation this would require. As many of you know building a service around a Facebook API is risky business because they can change their API or the regulations around they can be used at anytime thereby possibly annihilating your service in the process. We figured out that even Facebook’s real-time API could not achieve what we were trying to do, there was no way to automatically know if an existing friend changed their birthday (not a big deal, this would be rare) but more importantly we could not grab birthday data for new friends that join Facebook. We decided that given this, our service lost its core value so we killed it.
#6 Recipe Curators
I have one business and one Web service that centers around food. You could say it’s a big part of my life. When I have time I love to cook and there are so many great places on the Internet to find recipes it got me thinking – what are the best places to get recipes? This really depends on the source and there are some great people on the Internet that are really great curators. This made me think of an idea for a site that focused on curators for food or recipes. Anybody could be a curator including you. I could save my own recipes from anywhere and I could see other recipes that other curators had saved.
I spent a minimal amount of time throwing these mocks ups together. Alexis Lamster (of Tumblr fame) was one of my main user testing participants. We exchanged a few emails, talked about the overhead in having to copy over each recipe I find to my own curated list. This made me think that OK, maybe you just enter the URL and we can parse the title and grab the photo – still quite a bit of work to do on the back-end. Then Alexis pointed out this very similar site that I did not know about called “Punchfork” http://punchfork.com. This site was pretty great and enough to convince myself that I didn’t really want to spend time working on a very similar concept.
I hope you enjoyed reading about some of my experiments. This post is not to say that any of these ideas in a different incarnation couldn’t have worked – it’s quite possible that many of them could if I had spent more time on them. However sometimes you have to ask yourself how much time it’s worth spending on something – is there really value there?
I’m already working on more this year with some great people. Lessons from 2011 definitely learned!
