Adam Smith's Blog

Always Add Polish!

Polish is often the difference between success and failure when getting stuff done.  Literally, this is one of the top ten reasons ideas fail.

Products

Polish is why PostScript lost to Adobe PDF.  Postscript had an eleven year head start on PDF, not to mention it's free and open source.  Try to use it, though, and you'll end up on the command line and downloading extra programs that are GUI wrappers.

I ran into this failure mode again last week when I downloaded Microsoft Sandcastle, a documentation system for .NET libraries.  It's as powerful as LaTeX but just as user unfriendly.  I finally found an open source project called the Sandcastle Help File Builder, which provides a nice UI.  There's no doubt in my mind that the extra step costs Sandcastle 80% of its potential users.

It's always sad to see a product fail just because the experience lacked polish.

I haven't seen Google Android yet but my first reaction when I heard about it was that It will lack the polish of the iPhone, and fail because of it.

Emails

Imagine you work at a software company and your mom sends over a feature idea for your product.  When forwarding the email to your product manager, you could add

"fyi"

or you could write

"My mother, bless her soul, thinks about our product in the shower.  She came up with the idea below.  It could be a useful addition to the next release.  I think our eskimo users would appreciate this feature."

We all understand, I think, that adding these short thoughts to your email makes it more likely to be read and reacted to.

Yet we all, myself included, get lazy and stick to the easy "fyi."  It's just easier to not invest the emotional energy to add value.

Data Versus Polish

I suppose robots would be fine with the PostScript command line or the "fyi" email.  You could send all of your source code to the Microsoft HR robot and get a rejection or offer leter in ten minutes.  No resume needed!

The truth is that we're all human, and adding polish lowers the amount of emotional energy needed to grok and respond to emails, user interfaces, ideas, etc.

The concept is remarkably right brained for someone like me, but I think that's why engineeers often fail at adding polish.

We don't learn this stuff in college.  But we should.

Character in Blogs

I was thinking this morning about blogs and the pictures adorn their home pages.  They must reflect what's important to the authors, I suspected.

I started going through them in my head....

Me: I climb in trees and enjoy nature.  (truth: I do enjoy nature but not often enough!)

Fred Wilson: I enjoy my family.

 

Jeff Atwood: This is a silly blog!

 

Jeff Bonforte (Xobni CEO): I love my dog.

Dharmesh Shah: where's your photo man?!  you need a karate photo of you versus an old, wise kung fu master!

 

Paul Graham: Here's some good art.  (home page)

 

Mini Microsoft: Microsoft-ish blocks-on-blocks image; needs a ninja.

 

Auren Hoffman: don't mess with me.

 

Rick Segal: (more to the point than Auren) better watch out!...

Steve Ballmer, International Security, and Us Little Folk

Here's a snip of consciousness from a late night last week...

It was the first week of my first semester at MIT.  At the time every class was full of excitement from the pass/fail grading, new friends, and fresh love interests.  I went to my political science class, American Foreign Policy, and this one was no different.  I spotted the cute girl from my dorm and took a seat.

The brilliant aprofessor, Stephen Van Evera, started talking about political science as a science.  It’s a different kind of science, he said.  In contrast to physics or chemistry, we’re dealing with:

• Low “n” (few data points),
• We cannot perform experiments,
• Our independent and dependent variables are often qualitative, and not to mention
• If accidents, personalities, and serendipity shape history, how can general theories explain the past?

“Consider Annie Oakley’s central role in world history,” our notes said.  Annie Oakley was a famed rifle shooter; probably the best in the world in the early twentieth century.  She was in Europe and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany challenged her to shoot out a cigarette he was going to put in his mouth.  She hit it right on target but supposedly regretted for the rest of her life not taking him out.  He was largely responsible for World War I.

In such a science we’re basically left with history to learn from, and history is noisy.  It’s a primitive science.

 

I noticed a parallel when watching Steve Ballmer’s talk to Stanford student entrepreneurs.  Ballmer was talking about business strategy and mentioned a case study about the Kodak-Polaroid wars in the 1970s:

We studied some case about Kodak and Polaroid. And it talked about what the market leader should do versus the weak number two player in terms of how you vary cost and investment, and expenses and business models. I still quote from the darn case all the time to our people in high share businesses and our people in low share businesses.

It’s an interesting case.  If you read it, think through your thoughts and then you can read on the web about what actually happened after 1976 where the case study leaves off.

But more than not I just get the sense that business strategy and international policy are both hard.

For example, I wonder if Ballmer thought he could easily kill Google in 2005.  Again, low n.  Microsoft has killed many companies in the past, but Netscape seems to be the only one of recent memory that was a sizable competitor.  Microsoft was able to beat Netscape but largely because Netscape self destructed with a complete code rewrite and misguided aspirations to kills the Windows franchise.

Well Google isn’t biting that bait.

But most of this doesn’t matter for small time software entrepreneurs like us.  In a USA versus USSR situation you better believe people are doing their game theory and acting at least somewhat rational.

Same thing with MSFT – if they’re doing a bear hug you better believe they’ve crossed their t’s.

Okay, okay – certainly all governments are stupid in some ways and big companies can be too.  But you don’t see countries like the USA running 500% daily inflation rates or razing whole neighborhoods and leaving people homeless, as we see in smaller regimes like Zimbabwe.

That’s where we are, my friends!  We’re in the millions not the billions.  Polaroid and Kodak case studies are less likely to be helpful than making a good product and waiting for your competition to self destruct.

User Counts Considered Apples and Oranges

Pop quiz time!  Sharpen your pencils and put on those reading glasses.

    1. Would you rather have...
 
        A. A company that has 1.5 million active users
        B. A company that has 110 million active
        C. Two million dollars

Smells like a trick question, doesn't it?

In this case (A) is Salesforce, a company with 1.5 million users, all of whom are paying about $60 per month.  They're a public company and currently valued at $5 billion.

Behind door (B) is Myspace, which is probably worth somewhat less, even though they have 73x the number of users.

Behind door (C) was just a distraction meant to throw off your spider senses.

The truth is that unless two companies are in the same space it can be distorting to compare their user counts.  I know everyone knows this in theory, but can't tell you how many times I've heard people compare user base sizes at the meetups we have in San Francisco that we call "parties."

The truth is there are lots of ingredients that mix together to give an approximation of how a company is doing.  The biggest ones include:

• Number of users,
• Value of user demographic,
• Engagement,
• Type of engagement (e.g. work versus entertainment),
• Attrition rate, and
• Growth rate.

Once a company matures and has gone through a few iterations of its revenue generating products, there's another metric that boils down lots of these indicators into a common demoninator.  It is:

• Revenue!

Xobni has many users but is pretty great at many of the other pre-revenue metrics too.  That's why I'm excited to get started with generating revenue!  It's too bad all good things take time; my inner child at christmas is anxious and excited!!

Over and out,
Adam

Why Good Products Matter

Good products make a philosophically positive difference.

Good products mean, by definition, giving people what they want.

For example: Now you can talk to your grandparents, who are a hundred miles away, IN REAL TIME!  Now you can see a picture to help you relive the moment with your niece was born.  And so on.

Should you care about giving people what they want?

Well, how about the opposite: should you care about taking away something people already have and enjoy?  This is called stealing, interestingly.  Steve Jobs is the opposite of a robber.

Which is probably why successful societies reward these opposite-of-a-robbers.  As Paul Graham has said, "Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world."

In fact, the US takes it up one level further: innovators aren't only rewarded financially; they also receive social capital.  That's why, for example, Steve Jobs was able to wake up one day and just "give" Leslie Feist citizenship.

Paul Graham essentially bootstrapped Y Combinator with the social capital he received from his successful writings.  Now, of course, it's clear that was an investment not an expenditure.  He has more social capital now than before YC!

This is a great system!