I finally finished reading The Lean Startup. The main gist is that we need to be creating fast feedback looks for products/changes we make, so that we can quickly see what is and isn’t working. It’s a good extension of what to do once you have you minimum-viable product up and running, as it’s easy to fall into the trap of just adding features, without actually adding any value. I especially liked the parts on doing a cohort study of your users. Instead of measuring figures like engagement as a total for a specific time, you would track engagement for people who signed up in January only, then sign ups in February, then March, etc. This gives you a better picture of whether you’re actually improving your service or only appearing to improve because of growing figures.

Overall the book wasn’t too bad. I felt that perhaps the first half was a lot more “actionable” and my interest fell off once past the half way point, so I ended up just steaming through after that. Definitely worth reading if you’re in the startup arena though.

I’ll be getting another copy soon anyways as I’ll be seeing Eric talk when he comes to London in January.

Iceberg features are where on the surface they seem small and simple while backed by a huge un-seeable chunks of functionality and processes. Like their real counterpart they come in many different shapes and sizes. From the “Oh, just add an extra field to this form”, which in-fact impacts the business logic, to “Just copy this feature on site X”, without taking into consideration the processes that go on behind the scenes. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the first sort of “small change” problem before, but the second one is a lot more subtle and easy to miss.

A lot of sites successful implement a “invite your friends” feature, which grabs a user’s address book and messages each of them asking them to join. The simplistic way of copying the functionality is to think that the road to success is simply grabbing the needed details and messaging them, thinking that what makes the functionality successful starts with the form and stops with the initial message. That’s just the tip of the feature iceberg. Is it successful for another site as they have a planned out set of campaign emails they send out to an invited person, with timed followups and different possible campaign routes depending on a user’s reactions. It may well be that having a naive imitation of the feature is better than not having one at all, but it’s the compromise of deciding what to do. Is a poorly imitated, half implemented and thought out feature better than a smaller, but more complete and well thought out one.

Five monkeys are caged together and there are some bananas hanging from the top of the cage. Some scientists attach an automated device for sensing if the bananas are moved; once a monkey tries to get any, an electric shock travels through the cage so that all monkeys get shocked. In the beginning, a single monkey climbs up to the bananas, touches them and every monkey gets shocked. So he doesn’t try anymore, but the other four monkeys try the same thing and the result comes to be the same. Therefore, the monkeys learn something in common: that is, do not get the bananas! You’ll get a painful electric shock! The scientists then replace one of the original monkeys with a new one. This new monkey sees the bananas and wants to get them right away, but the other four monkeys beat it when they see its actions. Since these original four monkeys think the new monkey will make them get shocked, they stop the new monkey from getting the bananas. This monkey tries a few times and the others beat it every time without it ever getting the bananas. Of course, all five monkeys don’t get shocked. The scientists then replace another of the original monkeys with a new one. This second new monkey sees the bananas and you bet it wants to get them immediately. But, sadly, the others beat it and the first new monkey beats the newest one even harder then the others (for the newest one is the rookie and has the lowest social status). Just like before, the newest monkey tries several times to get the bananas and is stopped by the others when they attack him. The scientists continue to replace all the original monkeys until no monkeys who actually felt the electric shock remain. Now none of the five new monkeys dare to touch the bananas yet none of them know why. They only know whomever wants to get the bananas will be beaten.

Frequently I write about doing what matters most and not getting caught up in the stuff that makes the least amount of difference. The tale above is a great story that leads on from that; Making sure you know why you’re doing something.

This recently came up in a conversation about re-designing the homepage of viewshound.com. One person thought the front page should be laid out one way, while another thought it should be laid out another way. The problem was, neither answered the question of firstly, why the homepage needed to change and secondly, what did we want to achieve by changing it. The naive answer to the second point is that we want to “increase page views”, but really in essence the answer is a lot more in-depth than that. Are we looking to drive first time visitors to individual articles or are we looking to drive people to category pages? Are we optimising for new arrivals or optimising for frequent readers? Once you rule out these sort of low-level questions, the route you take becomes a lot clearer, and changes for the sake of making changes becomes a problem of the past.

Imagine your business is a lovely big garden. You tend to the flowers, water the plants, and place your seeds carefully in the hope that a few months down the line they’ll blossom into a beautiful array of colours. But you don’t mow the lawn. As time goes by, your lawn gets overgrown and filled with weeds, eventually swallowing up all the hard work you put into your flower beds. Would you do this? Of course not, so why do we run our business like this then?

The lawn is the heart and soul of your garden. It’s plainest and simplest to maintain, but it is the easiest to neglect in favour of working on the things that are more attractive. Are you neglecting the core of what makes your business run, in favour of what’s more exciting? Blogs, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, Affiliates, Promotions are not your core concern. You need to be making sales. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is how sales are made. They are fillers for an already churning sales engine. Pick up the phone, go and meet potential buyers. Start the engine of your lawn mower and mow your lawn.

A while back I turned down working on an idea some acquaintances had because I didn’t have time. It ended up that someone else I knew took up the project. When first going over it myself I remember thinking a pretty much complete MVP could be done in a month or so, but last I heard, the other developer was still working on the project backend framework a few months in, with no basic site or anything in sight.

This is a common problem with starting a new site. It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical aspects while missing out on delivering actual usable software. I always remind myself of the General Patton quote “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week” and so the same stands for programming. Better to launch something sloppy today, than something perfect in the future. If the project is successful you can alway incrementally improve the code you rushed in. If the project’s a flop, you’ll know a lot sooner.

Most dreams are driven by our desire to be like our idols. We all want to achieve what they have, whether that’s to be as successful/famous/rich/fit/etc as they are. So to do that, we naturally look at what they do and imitate that. If that’s what you’re doing, STOP! Imitating them as they are right now, is not going to get you to where you need to get to. To achieve the same, you need to go back and copy your idols as they were, not as they are right now.

What they do now does not make them successful, it only serves to fuel the success they have already created. The essence of what got them there, is totally different. It’s easy to look at a person or business and think “If it works for them it must work for me!”, but the difference between them and you is that they are at the stage where they are looking for small edges they can gain, where as you still need to get all the fundamentals down before you can work on the same things.

It’s the difference between having a painting that’s 99% finished and one that’s only 10% complete. The painting that’s almost finished needs only fine strokes to finish it off, where as the other still needs broad strokes to even make it meaningful.

So think about what your doing now to achieve goals and see if you’re working on the broad or fine details. If you’re working on the details and neglecting the bigger picture then reassess what it is you need to do and do it!

They always says don’t trade stocks off the recommendations in the newspapers, because by then you’ve already missed out. This is exactly the same. If you want to swing for the fences, create something visionary that no-one else has thought of yet, or better yet, something so boring in an arena where competition will be sparse now and the foreseeable future. Yes, perhaps there’s someone else secretly working on the same thing as you right now, but if either of you turn out to be right, the other could be in a prime position to ride the other’s coat-tail to success.

Everyone has grand ideas and dreams. The dream of being the match winning goal scorer in the World Cup final. The dream of being richest man on Earth. The dream of being a great husband, great father, great friend. Then comes a time when we realise we’re a million miles away from the things we set out to achieve, we freeze and resign ourselves to the fact that we’ll probably never get there. Some will carry on regardless, and of those few, only a small handful will reach that end goal. But we don’t need to be in the majority of those that fall away at the way side. We just need to understand that to reach that final goal, requires us to achieve smaller ones first.

Weight lifting is the perfect example of this. If you want to squat 200kg, don’t load on 200kg and try, because you’ll most probably fail, injure yourself and never try again. To reach that goal, load on what you can manage, then each week come back and add some more. Some weeks you’ll lift it, some weeks you wont. But the more and more you come back and try to add just a little bit more weight, the closer and closer you’ll get to lifting  your final goal. Then one day  you’ll turn up and lift 200kg. You’ll look through your notebook, full of all your previous session’s numbers, and see all the steps it took to get there.

And that’s the same principal for anything in life. If you want to achieve something great, start with something small. Want to lose 100lbs? Then start with the first pound. Want to run a marathon? Then start by running just a single mile. Want to be amazing guitarist? Then start by learning a single chord.

This all applies so much to business. We see all these big businesses offering loads of products and services, or huge web applications packed with functionality, and we strive for that. But the burden will be too great. You’ll fail, your ego will be bruised and you’ll never try again. You never hear the story of how these businesses started by doing one thing and how they all built their empires from there. You need that first step to be sure that you can take the next. You can’t be everything to everybody, and if you try, you’ll be nothing to nobody. Don’t be sucked in by business porn. Don’t rush into a thousand things in the hope of achieving something or that something will stick, because you can’t apply enough stickiness to that many things at once. The humble beginnings are boring, that’s why you never hear about them. You read about startups on TechCrunch and don’t realise that people have been using and hashing out the issues on those sites for ages. If you’ve been around long enough, you get to experience the wonder of seeing someone truly launch their site for the first time and needing beta testers, then a year later seeing them doing their “real” launch. Only then can you really appreciate how these things evolve and how the subsequent success was down to focusing on a single idea/concept/function and executing that perfectly right at the very start.

This applies to everything, including business, and relates to my previous post “Professional Procrastination“. Of all the things you can do, if you only have 15 minutes to do it in, do what’s going to give you the best results. Don’t neglect the big picture items for the sake of the small ones. Don’t neglect your entire body for the sake of flexing your biceps.

When a business is going nowhere, or even worse, going downhill, the temptation is to blame the idea or to blame customers. Rarely do we have the courage to admit the problem is really with ourselves. Potential sales are lost because people “just don’t get it”. We say that they’re stupid, brain dead and missing the opportunity of a lifetime. When business dries up we blame market conditions. When the lights are turned off for the last time we say the timing just wasn’t right.

Before we point the finger we should be asking if there is something we did wrong. Businesses are not limited by customers or market conditions, they are limited only by those that run them. Sometimes that can’t be helped, after all, there are only so many hours in a day and the limitations may be that of time or resources. More often than not, the problem is that of realisations. We don’t realise that we’re doing the wrong thing. We believe in the wrong ideals. We hope for X or Y to happen. We wait for feature X or Y to be ready. We blame everyone but ourselves.

Only when it’s too late, do we look back and see where we went wrong. How if we’d only done this instead of that, we could have made a break through. We’re so caught up in the moment of our business that we can’t see the wood for the trees. Imagine yourself three, six or twelve months from now. Imagine your business has failed from no traction or no revenue (or whatever factor determines your business a success or not). If you could spend that time again to get your business really going, would you do what you’re doing right now? If the urgency of surviving was hanging over your head, would you do what you’re doing right now?

Don’t limit your business or your life because you’re following the motions of what someone in your position should be doing. Don’t do something because you read it in a book. Don’t do it because someone told you to. Do the right thing. Your opportunity may not last.