Start with a note memo. Boil down to 140 chars, tweet it and see if I get engagement. Outline. Research for related writing. Write too much against outline. Edit to 500 words. Add links. Promote on Twitter, Facebook.
I prefer G+, but the onboarding - actually getting disparate folks easily invited and notified has been inscrutably hard. Part of the prob is that I have multiple gmail accts and address books as do the folks I'm inviting, but another prob seems to be the less than ideal invite workflow. When Goog gets calendars, gmail, docs and hangouts well integrated, Skype will have a serious threat on its hands.
If iOS is Betamax to Android's VHS, then we should expect a competitor to come with a less elegant, more open experience at half the cost and corner the market. Never would've expected Amazon, but maybe the sponsored data model will be enough to get the costs down for mass adoption.
They solved a problem for a highly engaged network, making it simple to post and share an image in formats necessary for forums and not tied to identity. The first time I used Imgur, it was so simple, so delightful and so not monetized I wondered how it would last.
Man I love food. I love the engagement with the senses, the stories about its origin ingredients, the way those ingredients get put together into a meal that can be enjoyed with more than one person. Soylent strikes me as something I would've been into before I learned all that.
Ben's perspective is strongly influenced by his experiences at Netscape and Loudcloud and looking for and funding rocket ships. Are these cultural artifacts - working w/ jerks, hiring young, working 72 hours in a row - the inevitable outcome of venture funded tech? Are there strong counter examples?
Find a way to make the deal work for him so he wins instead of loses. Don't take his employees. Don't charge him. Give him generous advisor shares. Make him want to help you raise money and build the idea.
They didn't have to sell to FB they chose to. They had a history of flipping to paid versions of the app to cover costs and reduce growth. Their actual competitors were carriers who charge exorbitant SMS fees internationally. At ~500M users their plan to simply charge $1/yr would have covered their costs.
Google+ could still win by exploiting a simple heuristic: Don't be Facebook. Allow for privacy, allow for handles, integrate seamlessly with platforms that have traction already (including Facebook). Remember how Instagram let you take a photo and publish it to multiple services (Twitter, Flickr etc)? It was a free, useful tool that made your life easier and made you look great. It had a feed and following on top, but it wasn't clear in the beginning it would even be a social network on its own.
I agree, but I also think investors have bought a narrative of a young organization that breaks things and learns. Part of that narrative is great and it keeps tech fresh and young. I just wish there were a way to have a better dialog or working relationship between generations. Historically humans have been able to work well intergenerationally, so I think there's something endemic to our culture that prevents this from happening.
Hmm. I wonder if one of Facebook's competitors would be interested in funding the professor that invented this tech to start a competing company? Or is it that the implemented tech, team and market awareness are the thing that's valuable?
Agreed. I'd pay a couple bucks more a month for twice the selection. I'm a film nut and love a lot of old titles that aren't available. My Disc queue is way more interesting than my streaming queue
With such a huge middle class in the 20th century in the U.S. and the collapse of the Soviet empire, I think a lot of politicians, economists and media pundits felt that class was no longer an issue. I suspect it will become more widely discussed again if our current economic trends continue.
Maybe try Lean methodology? Make sure you're clear on the problem you're solving and who you're solving it for. Then come up with a hypothesis and ask specific questions validate or invalidate the hypothesis. https://www.leanstartupmachine.com/validationboard/
I had the good fortune to study the films (made and unmade) of Stanley Kubrick for a semester in college. If ever a filmmaker embodied the hacker spirit it was Kubrick - he taught himself still photography, dropped out of high school to successfully pursue the career, hustled chess, bootstrapped his first film, licensed the rights to a book, put together a round of funding, and built a career in Hollywood. Then left Hollywood and the U.S. and took huge chances with his career to pursue his art, hack innovative tech for his films, and change the history of cinema. Many years after college, I'm still inspired by Kubrick's life. But man was Eyes Wide Shut a clunker.