Ariel Seidman

Hi! I'm Ariel.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am a creator, builder, optimist, and dad. Thank you for visiting.
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  • Jony Ive's new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over

    iOS visuals are nice and all.  They are important, but they are not the critical issues that Apple has to solve this year.  If you were the PM for Apple / iOS they would be considered P2 items.  The P1 issues for Apple are:

    • Fix iCloud.
    • Better app developer tools.
    • Tools for launching apps - alpha testing, beta launches.
    • App discovery that does not rely on top free / paid lists.
    • Deeper app-to-app handshakes and linking.
    • Remove friction of app installs and updates (e.g. no passwords).
    • Larger iPhone screen (after using the HTC One it’s clear that a larger screen opens up new scenarios — especially productivity and entertainment).
    • An iPhone for people who can only afford $175 for their iPhone (instead of the current $650) with no contract subsidies. 
    • 5 hours ago
    • #tech
    • #apple

  • What Apps do you have installed?

    How many times has somebody asked you what apps you have on your iPhone.  Perhaps I hang out with super geeky folks but I feel like I get this question about once a month.  Wouldn’t it be neat to see all the apps your friends have installed and see what their home screen looks like.  Our devices are a bit like our bedrooms — we decorate them and take pride in the apps we collect.

    The app will do only 2 things:

    1. Capture & Publish my Apps: Each day the app will screenshot my home screen and then index all the apps I have installed on my device and publish this content to my friends. I can hide the apps I don’t want to publish and/or make my apps public.  
    2. Show me my friends home screen & apps:  I can browse my friends and/or public home screens and see which apps they recently installed.  If one of the apps seems interesting I can install the app or even the wallpaper they use on their homescreen.

    App discovery is a huge problem.  Hunter Walk has a series of good ideas here.  It is a tweak of the social app discovery Hunter recommends.  This is one small way to start solving it.  It’s an entirely free service and perhaps at some point provide a similar sponsored apps ad product. 

    I hope somebody builds this. 

    ———————————-

    Update:  Bryan correctly points out that this cannot be done in iOS.  At a minimum you could screenshot their homescreen and then run OCR to extract the app names.

    • 6 hours ago
    • 3 notes
    • #startup
    • #ideas

  • Ever wonder what apps looked like four years ago?  Here are some of the most popular free apps of 2008 — they include AIM, SnapTell, Shazam, and BeeJiveIM.  Shazam is the only one that remains relevant.  Here is the full list of the most popular free and paid apps according to Apple.  

    While we now have some very popular products each reaching 150M+ users like Instagram, WhatsApp mobile is hardly settled.  

    • 8 hours ago
    • 1 notes

  • A well told story using excellent cinematography and ryhtmm. The music was good, but as my wife pointed out perhaps more maudlin than needed given the subject matter. After a series of poor ads Apple is showing us they still got it.

    • 19 hours ago

  • How to use Excel in early stage startups

    Excel gets a bad rap in early stage startups.  So there is no confusion here; it is impossible to build a great product in Excel.  And many confused entrepreneurs torture themselves in Excel for much too long.  Yet, after all Excel is just a tool and if used properly can be helpful.  So, how should you use Excel when building a startup?

    1) What are my levers?  Each business model and product distribution strategy has unique levers.  They are not all created equal.  The process of building a good Excel model can help you see these levers far more clearly than simply talking about them.  It’s like product design.  You can talk about it but until you see it it’s hard to react.  Once you’ve spent the time to build the model it’s fairly trivial to prioritize your distribution features, as the numbers will be staring at you.  I’ve done this numerous times and it is usually one or two distribution features that contribute 75% plus to your monthly growth. Obviously, you need to get those ones right.

    2) Does it pass the smell test?  Let’s say you are targeting the App Store business category. Assume $1 billion of annual spend happens in this category. If the model you develop has your product generating $200M in revenues by month 10 that translates to ~20% marketshare.  Clearly, that fails a basic smell test.  While this an extreme example the key to this process is playing.  The more you play you’ll find that it generates rather unlikely outputs that fail a smell test.  This is very helpful as you think about managing your burn.

    So, now you know the why let’s focus on how to build a good model:

    1)  Assumptions and Outputs - You are constantly learning so build the model with a set of assumptions that you can constantly tweak.  An assumption is a monthly growth rate, a price you charge for your product, a conversion rate on a freemium product, etc. you get the idea.    Your assumptions drive your monthly metrics.  Now create a set of outputs.  I like to think of these just as a set of questions I want answers to.  How many units do I need to sell to hit $500K net revenue, what % of marketshare does this mean I will have, or what month will I hit cash flow positive in?  

    2) Build Scenarios - I like sets of three, so I build three different scenarios.  Why three? Two seems too few and five seems unwieldily, it’s mostly a personal choice.  The important thing is to build out dramatically different scenarios to open your mind. For example, a scenario could be a business model that requires a single upfront payment and another scenario could be a freemium model.  

    3) Limit your model to 8 - 10 months - Why?  First, exponential growth models behave in unnatural ways the further out they go.  For now it’s not critical to apply drag factors to your model (unless you really understand what they may be).  Secondly and more importantly you only have 8 to 12 months to build revenue or you die, so it’s far more important what happens in month 8 than month 24.

    4) Don’t Forget…do not torture yourself.  No great product was ever created in Excel.  The reason it’s a startup and not just another project at Cisco, Apple, or LinkedIn is because there are lots of cells in your spreadsheet that simply don’t have an answer.  

    Below is an overview of an actual model I helped somebody develop.  Unfortunately this meant I had to hide much of the actual data (if you want to help me turn it into a generic template contact me).

    image

    • 1 day ago
    • 7 notes
    • #startup

  • Two Biggies

    I ask entrepreneurs what the biggest mistake they make and without fail it’s one of these two:

    1. Focus.  Everything from the Crunchies to munchies is distracting.  With so many startup related events it’s easy to trick yourself into believing you are working on getting to product/market fit, when you are just feeding your hungry ego.  To avoid these traps we at least one full-day with our customers every two weeks.  Customers don’t care whether you were on AllThingsD last week or what you wore to the Crunchies.  They simply have a problem to solve, and if you can solve it for them they’ll use your product and tell your friends.  Customers don’t care about your grand vision that you have in your head.  They care about solving a problem they have right now.
    2. Too much money.  We’ve seen a lot of this over the past 2 years.  Early stage startups with $15M in the bank do not make good resource allocation decisions.  Sure, if you are Uber and need to open up 25 markets and fight local corrupt politicians I can see why you need a bunch of money.   But raising money just because you can is almost always a bad idea.

     

    • 1 day ago
  • File this under small things that matter. I searched my apps for Foursquare and the result came up empty. OK, no biggie I must have not installed the app yet on my new Android device. Yet why doesn’t it pass the query to Google Play store and return “Would you like to install the Foursquare app”. Of course I do. I went looking for the app so I want it. Give it to me.

    File this under small things that matter. I searched my apps for Foursquare and the result came up empty. OK, no biggie I must have not installed the app yet on my new Android device. Yet why doesn’t it pass the query to Google Play store and return “Would you like to install the Foursquare app”. Of course I do. I went looking for the app so I want it. Give it to me.

    • 3 days ago
    • 1 notes
  • lilly: Tumblr & Human-scale Design Lots of the chatter this morning is on the $1.1B headline, or the story of Marissa’s Yahoo, or Tumblr’s massive growth & relevance to youth, or New York’s continuing emergence on the world’s tech stage. But I want to talk about something else that I find remarkable about Tumblr, even today, after about 2 years of working with the team there. What I find remarkable about the company is that it continues to design and build products that are human scale. I’ll describe what I mean with an architecture analogy — most of the houses that we all live in are human scale. They’re built to fit the way we live. As you build bigger & bigger buildings, sometimes houses, sometimes public structures, they tend to focus more on “being architecture” or accommodating very large groups of people, or showing off. It’s the rare big public space that can relate to normal humans — they just outgrow us at some point. That’s why we love the buildings that can relate — one of which, appropriately enough, is Grand Central Station in New York. With digital interfaces, as you get big — and Tumblr, with it’s 105 million blogs and 300 million visitors each month is, decidedly, massive — you tend to lose your human scale, too. Interfaces get cluttered with new features & competing priorities — they tend to let the organization of the builders show through as opposed to the primacy of the user. Or they can become super precious, designed for hanging in a museum instead of daily use.  What I’ve loved about working with Tumblr is that they’ve kept this human scale in every aspect of the product. You can see it in the dashboard UI, you can see it in the creation tools, you can see it in the way they communicate with users, and most of all you can see it in their lineup of mobile products. It’s all just fundamentally more human in aspect than anything I’ve ever seen at this scale. Here’s an example (of something they shipped today!) in their mobile interface: The wonderful thing about that very small interaction (creating a new post) is that it matches the way your thumb moves across the screen, from bottom right to top left. It’s a tiny nuance that just fits right. There are hundreds of touches like this across everything that Tumblr makes. It’s a testament not only to David, who’s a wonderfully smart & thoughtful designer & builder, but the whole team there, including folks I’ve been lucky to work with like Derek, Ari, Peter, Bryan, John & others. And also to Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, who first convinced David to really go for it, and really grokked the product very early (like he’s done many times at this point!) — thanks for the introduction to the team, Bijan! The picture above sort of sums it up for me — I took that picture in Tumblr’s elevator lobby when I was there for December’s board meeting. It was just so perfect, so understated, so elegant — so human.  For those who don’t know the reference, it’s from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) — Charlie Brown is sent out to get a Christmas tree, and this is what he brings back, despite the fact that the lot was full of bigger, shinier, nicer trees: But Charlie & Linus took a chance on the smaller, more organic, more human tree. They got a lot of grief from their friends for not picking the shinier ones, naturally. But Linus put his blanket around the tree, and they all started taking care of it, decorating it, coaxing it into life.  And what they got at the end was this: Clearly superior, in my view, and clearly human.  Congratulations to the whole team at Tumblr for the accomplishment, and for building such a massive global phenomenon, but in a way that’s so fundamentally human scale. That’s something to be awfully proud of. Looking forward to watching you humanize even more of our digital lives. Thoughtful piece by John about building products that are still for people even when the product serves very large numbers of people.

    lilly:

    Tumblr & Human-scale Design

    Lots of the chatter this morning is on the $1.1B headline, or the story of Marissa’s Yahoo, or Tumblr’s massive growth & relevance to youth, or New York’s continuing emergence on the world’s tech stage.

    But I want to talk about something else that I find remarkable about Tumblr, even today, after about 2 years of working with the team there. What I find remarkable about the company is that it continues to design and build products that are human scale.

    I’ll describe what I mean with an architecture analogy — most of the houses that we all live in are human scale. They’re built to fit the way we live. As you build bigger & bigger buildings, sometimes houses, sometimes public structures, they tend to focus more on “being architecture” or accommodating very large groups of people, or showing off. It’s the rare big public space that can relate to normal humans — they just outgrow us at some point.

    That’s why we love the buildings that can relate — one of which, appropriately enough, is Grand Central Station in New York.

    With digital interfaces, as you get big — and Tumblr, with it’s 105 million blogs and 300 million visitors each month is, decidedly, massive — you tend to lose your human scale, too. Interfaces get cluttered with new features & competing priorities — they tend to let the organization of the builders show through as opposed to the primacy of the user. Or they can become super precious, designed for hanging in a museum instead of daily use. 

    What I’ve loved about working with Tumblr is that they’ve kept this human scale in every aspect of the product. You can see it in the dashboard UI, you can see it in the creation tools, you can see it in the way they communicate with users, and most of all you can see it in their lineup of mobile products. It’s all just fundamentally more human in aspect than anything I’ve ever seen at this scale.

    Here’s an example (of something they shipped today!) in their mobile interface:

    The wonderful thing about that very small interaction (creating a new post) is that it matches the way your thumb moves across the screen, from bottom right to top left. It’s a tiny nuance that just fits right. There are hundreds of touches like this across everything that Tumblr makes.

    It’s a testament not only to David, who’s a wonderfully smart & thoughtful designer & builder, but the whole team there, including folks I’ve been lucky to work with like Derek, Ari, Peter, Bryan, John & others. And also to Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, who first convinced David to really go for it, and really grokked the product very early (like he’s done many times at this point!) — thanks for the introduction to the team, Bijan!

    The picture above sort of sums it up for me — I took that picture in Tumblr’s elevator lobby when I was there for December’s board meeting. It was just so perfect, so understated, so elegant — so human. 

    For those who don’t know the reference, it’s from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) — Charlie Brown is sent out to get a Christmas tree, and this is what he brings back, despite the fact that the lot was full of bigger, shinier, nicer trees:

    But Charlie & Linus took a chance on the smaller, more organic, more human tree. They got a lot of grief from their friends for not picking the shinier ones, naturally. But Linus put his blanket around the tree, and they all started taking care of it, decorating it, coaxing it into life. 

    And what they got at the end was this:

    Clearly superior, in my view, and clearly human. 

    Congratulations to the whole team at Tumblr for the accomplishment, and for building such a massive global phenomenon, but in a way that’s so fundamentally human scale. That’s something to be awfully proud of. Looking forward to watching you humanize even more of our digital lives.

    Thoughtful piece by John about building products that are still for people even when the product serves very large numbers of people.

    Source: lilly
    • 4 days ago
    • 60 notes
  • “Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.”
    — Daring Fireball
    • 1 week ago
  • Tech news coverage will have you believe that both the App Store and Google Play store are closing in on 1 million apps.   This number is mostly useless. It’s a bit like asking how many websites have been published.  The answer is plenty but most websites are visited only by the person who created it.   In the search engine wars era Google and Yahoo used to boast about the size of their index.  When in reality this number was not very important.  It sounds important when the Wall Street Journal says Google has a larger index than Yahoo.  But in reality both search engines had the websites that mattered well indexed. Yet, here we are again bragging about the size of this store versus that one.  Before we go too far let’s recall that most apps fall into one of these categories: Orphaned - nobody is actively managing these apps.  How many of us created apps in college or when learning to code for iOS and published an app as part of that process.  Clearly we are not looking after these apps any more. Spam Apps - these come in various forms.  One manifestation of these is content slicing e.g. creating an airport guide app where each airport is a different app.  That’s a rather extreme example yet the point is that an app title is generated and published for niche content when it could have been included in a single app.   Duplicate apps - we are Instagram but only with black and white photos:-) Crappy App - lots of apps are just not very good at all.  You have either lazy or inept large brands publishing rather crappy apps.   Many popular apps with crappy apps are just living off their PC world brand.  So, the question is how many original and well executed apps have been published.  My guess is that it’s in the 4%-6% range of the total number of published apps.  That mean’s if the Google Play store had 1 million published apps the competitive set of apps is more like 40,000 to 60,000 apps.  Across an installed base of 800 million Android users that is actually not very many good apps.

    Tech news coverage will have you believe that both the App Store and Google Play store are closing in on 1 million apps.  

    This number is mostly useless. It’s a bit like asking how many websites have been published.  The answer is plenty but most websites are visited only by the person who created it.   In the search engine wars era Google and Yahoo used to boast about the size of their index.  When in reality this number was not very important.  It sounds important when the Wall Street Journal says Google has a larger index than Yahoo.  But in reality both search engines had the websites that mattered well indexed.

    Yet, here we are again bragging about the size of this store versus that one.  Before we go too far let’s recall that most apps fall into one of these categories:

    • Orphaned - nobody is actively managing these apps.  How many of us created apps in college or when learning to code for iOS and published an app as part of that process.  Clearly we are not looking after these apps any more.
    • Spam Apps - these come in various forms.  One manifestation of these is content slicing e.g. creating an airport guide app where each airport is a different app.  That’s a rather extreme example yet the point is that an app title is generated and published for niche content when it could have been included in a single app.  
    • Duplicate apps - we are Instagram but only with black and white photos:-)
    • Crappy App - lots of apps are just not very good at all.  You have either lazy or inept large brands publishing rather crappy apps.   Many popular apps with crappy apps are just living off their PC world brand. 

    So, the question is how many original and well executed apps have been published.  My guess is that it’s in the 4%-6% range of the total number of published apps.  That mean’s if the Google Play store had 1 million published apps the competitive set of apps is more like 40,000 to 60,000 apps.  Across an installed base of 800 million Android users that is actually not very many good apps.

    • 1 week ago
    • #tech

  • While we are busy cooking up something new I have not had the time to blog.  Blogging to me is like exercise.  The more I do, the better I feel.  And like exercise the first 10 minutes are always very tough.  Then you get into a zone, and it starts feeling good.

    When writing I listen to Colin Hay.  It keeps me it helps gets me and keeps me in the zone.  

    • 1 week ago

  • The shift from mobile limited to mobile abundance

    image

    Not too long ago (circa 2010) building an app meant designing around limitations.

    • Embedding browsers into your app would likely crash it when loading image heavy webpages.
    • Most users were on EDGE network.  At just 75-135Kbps it is excruciating slow.
    • Screens were tiny.  With only 3.5 inches of display to play with apps had to perform a single task per screen.  
    • Apps were foreign concepts to many.  I recall early Gigwalk users giving me weird looks when I told them they could download an app from the App Store and earn money by doing small tasks.  

    Successful apps of this generation understood these limitations.  WhatsApp -  the #1 messaging app - is boring but good boring.  They understood that people don’t want to learn snazzy user interfaces.   Instagram understood the issues with uploading photos on slow networks so they used a series of smart tactics to make it feel faster.

    The times are- a changin.  The era of a limited mobile world is quickly fading.  The most popular devices including the iPhone 5, HTC One, and Samsung Galaxy S4 include:

    • 3 to 15x more RAM.  That’s a lot of horsepower to play with.
    • Displays are 15 to 42% larger.  You can show and do more on each screen.
    • LTE networks are 30 to 100x faster than EDGE networks.  This may be the single most important change.

    App Stores still have structural issues that I’ve written about yet with 50 billion app downloaded I think we can agree they are not foreign to users.

    Why is all of this important?  Well, the types of apps that can be built for this new era are different than the ones we’ve been building so far.  A service like YouTube could not exist prior to the rollout of broadband to the majority of US households.  

    In the new era of mobile abundance app developers need to shift their mindset and start taking advantage of these new found toys.  Just to be clear that is not a license to overload apps with gimmicky Samsung style features:-)

    • 2 weeks ago
    • #mobile

  • Given these profits you would think one would be able to…

    If you are a CEO who has some large, profitable project you are shelving because of short-term worries, call Berkshire Let us unburden you - Warren Buffett

    Companies are enjoying historic profits and sitting on massive cash piles.

    image

     

    Given such profits you would think that you would be able to…

    • Move your medical files from one doctor to another with a click of a button (nope).  
    • Deposit a check of yours on a mobile phone for $1,000 (nope)
    • Reserve a check-up appointment for your car from your iPhone (nope).
    • Get a 100Mb internet connection to your house (nope)
    • Fly from SF to NYC without average delays of 2 hrs (nope)
    • Buy a car (that doesn’t feel like a little toy) for $20,000 that gets 50 mpg (nope)
    • Fly from San Francisco to Sao Paulo in 4 hours (nope)

    With the exception of Google the vast majority of companies across industries are just optimizing their existing worlds to maximize profits.  We live in a world of capital abundance yet we have lost imagination and determination to make new things.

     

    • 3 weeks ago
    • 3 notes
    • #tech
    • #Business

  • Adventures in apps with normal people

    This weekend I was trying to help a friend visiting from out of town use the native Apple Maps app get directions (this is not a post about Apple Maps data shortcomings).   The entire experience served as a wonderful reminder that the things we create are still far too complex for normal people.  

    Before jumping into the issues it’s important to point out that we are not talking about a newly minted iPhone user. They have been an iPhone user for 1+ years and have ~10 installed apps.  Here are the issues they ran into simply trying to get directions for a 25 mile trip from Palo Alto to Los Gatos.

    1) Accidental Taps Led to Big Confusion.  They had somehow accidentally tapped on Walking Directions - obviously not useful for a 25 mile trip.  When looking at the directions they were confused.  Since they aren’t familiar with the area they spent a few more moments digesting. Once I pointed out that they were looking at walking directions they could not figure out how to request driving directions as they had never intentionally selected walking directions.   

    image

    2) Confusing Icons  The icon in the upper left hand corner is how you switch to get directions mode.  Compare that to the Google desktop experience for getting directions in Google Maps (below).  Which one is more clear?

    image

    image

    3) Install Google Maps from the App Store dead end:  Since I know that Google Maps app has significantly better data than Apple Maps I started to install Google Maps.   The App Store does what it does — asks you for a password.  Guess what?  They couldn’t remember their iTunes password.

    Google Maps is a free app and they were in a rush.   The last thing they wanted to do is reset their password. The fact that Apple still requires passwords for free apps is rather absurd. 

    Many of you reading this may be saying — huh! how could they not figure this simple stuff out???  It’s obvious to you because it’s basically what you do for a living.  

    Apps have the potential to be wonderful things.  We have only begun to rewrite most experiences for our new mobile platforms.  Yet, many of the apps we are creating remain far too complex for people who don’t make a living building, designing, or reviewing apps.  Building great mobile apps is hard stuff.  As you can see even Apple gets lots of stuff wrong — I smell some opportunity.

    • 3 weeks ago
    • 2 notes
    • #design
    • #app
  • “It (Galaxy S 4) still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android. I found Samsung’s software often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional.”
    —

    This Walt Mossberg review serves as a good reminder that building great mobile software is in fact really hard.  The throw lots of stuff at the wall strategy that may work in hardware doesn’t work well in software.  

    As the focus shifts from hardware to services (iTunes/App Store revenues at $4.1B/quarter and 30% y/y growth) it’s pretty clear that Samsung will lose significant influence and power. 

    • 1 month ago
    • 1 notes
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