Ariel Seidman

Men at Work really didn’t build a foundational audience. We came in as a pop band with enormous radio success; once that goes away and the band breaks up the audience tends to go away with it.  - Colin Hay, lead singer for Men at Work.

This past weekend I was at a Colin Hay concert.  If you enjoyed the soundtrack to Garden State you’ll enjoy Colin’s music (as a bonus he’s a super funny dude).  I digress.  

His quote above got me thinking about the App landscape these days.  We are seeing “radio hit” apps.  They initially grow rapidly.  Then the App Store moves onto the next hit, and six months later they are left serving a far smaller audience.  It’s painful as they need to go and find their real customers.  

In the early days I like to think of a startup as a touring band playing to thirty or so people at dive bars.  These early customers are your true fans.  Get to know them really well.  Many of the products we use today started off serving a small niche user base.  In fact, Tumblr (the product I am writing this on) is a great example of such a product.  They developed a loyal and niche fan base of artists and creatives before extending into the mainstream.  So, if you don’t jump up the App Store charts to the top fifty in the first few months this is a blessing in disguise.  This is your opportunity to find your real customer.

When I first saw Colin Hay live six years ago he was playing a San Francisco bar.  Twenty five of us packed into this tiny bar.  We were all standing for two hours having a total blast.  This past weekend Colin played to over 600 people at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts.  

Every so often I’ll do a double take on some product or service and wonder how the heck that thing is still in business.  Here are my top five:

5.  CA aka Computer Associates.  Who still buys their stuff? 

4.  Checks — One of my favorite taco spots still accepts checks!

3.  AOL Dialup service - They still have a few million subscribers.  

3.  Payroll Administrators - I recently got a call from our outsourced payroll administrator.  She asked me a series of questions that could have been processed faster and more precisely by a machine.  Sadly, when I hung up the phone it was clear that she won’t be doing this job in two years.  I hope she realizes this and begins developing new skills.

1.  US Postal Service - Dealing with physical paper in 2013 is absurd.  We could save tax payers lots billions by shutting it down and in the process would improve our environment and personal productivity.

Surprised it still exists…what’s on your list?

The uproar over the impending Google Reader shutdown is still going strong.  John Gruber took a shot at Google…

I read it and instinctively agreed with his point.  But then I realized we were all looking at this through the wrong lens.  

There are literally 10,000+ companies and teams that could build a version of Google Reader filling a clear market need.  Yet, only three or four companies have the financial resources, audience, and leadership patience to build a global same day delivery service.  Google is one of them.  Think about what this could look like for a moment.  Search for Tylenol and toothbrush, select buy, and have it at your door a few hours later.  Now repeat that transaction 25 million times a day.  Interesting.

Google is one of the few companies thinking and executing on big ideas (Amazon is the other one).  So, lets look at the Google Reader using a different lens — one that I will call the big idea lens.  Looking at Reader through that lens it’s hard to see how it fits within Google anymore.  While building a local same day local delivery service across 50 countries is obviously a big idea that is worthy of Google’s resources.

I’ve raised venture financing for my own startup.  Yet I only came to fully appreciate the role taste plays in early stage venture financing when I began investing my own personal money.

When you are out fundraising for your own startup anybody who passes on you by default “doesn’t get it!” I used to think that way (in a few rare cases I still do).

However, usually they do get it.  What is really at play here is personal taste.  As my old friend Mo (and now a VC at Spark) says when it comes to investing some people like sushi, others like pizza.  Some investors like products that help people tell stories.  Others like marketplaces for people to do sell each other stuff.  Unless you are doing some form of startup index investing you are going to develop a personal taste for the kinds of products you want to invest in.    That means you’ll inevitably pass on companies that will be successful and that’s OK (as long as the taste you develop makes money).

If you are building the kind of business that requires venture money instead of looking for money (which many people have) think about fundraising as finding somebody who shares your taste.  If an investor just sees you as a way to make money or add a hot deal to their website it’s not going to make for a good relationship. 

If you find yourself saying “we need to hire a growth hacker” please stop.  Today’s growth hacking is mostly a big waste of time. Growth hacking has devolved into taking other people’s products distributions strategies or tactics and bolting them onto your own product creating some form of spam or odd product monster.

Distribution only works when the feature actually makes your product better.  Product distribution is hard.  There are no shortcuts and to be successul you need to find your own unique distribution feature(s) that make your product better for everybody.  Let’s look at some examples:

• YouTube - allowed MySpace users to enhance their pages by embedding YouTube videos.
• LinkedIn - allowed you to build and expand your professional network by adding inviting people to join your network.
• Dropbox - allowed you to give friends and co-workers easy access to important files.
• Instagram - allowed anybody with a web browser to enjoy the pictures you took with your mobile phone.

Notice that in each example the existing user and potential new user of the product benefit from this distribution feature.  Embedding video helps the MySpace page owner (existing YouTube user) and the person viewing the video (potential new YouTube user) on the MySpace page.

Bolting these distribution features onto your product means you’ll be mediocre at best.  At Mango Labs Tom, Ben, and me talk a lot about distribution but we try to constantly ask ourselves how can we make the product better for existing and potential new users.   If we can answer that question then we think we’ll be able to efficiently distribute the product.

Once you find the distribution feature that propels the growth of your product most of the work after that involves optimizing those features for maximum effect.   For that don’t hire a growth hacker instead hire a really good product manager.

This weekend is the first few rounds of the college basketball tournament - aka March Madness. It is the best weekend in sports.

The reason is simple - passion. It’s raw passion on full display for 40 minutes. If you lose you go home. For many players their career is done when they lose.

They are not paid to play — well some of they are:( — so they play because they love the game and love to compete.

Professional NBA games by contrast are often boring. Sure the players are 10x better, yet many of them have lost the passion for the game. It shows.

When people are passionate about what they are doing its easy to root for them. Even if they are not the very best at what they do.

In your own job - what kind of player are you?

As Om writes the reality of the next thirty years is that most people’s job performance will trend towards an Uber like rating system.  

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

As society adapts to this new reality of daily performance reviews people will learn how to optimize their 5 star rating reviews.  Unless we adapt these rating systems they are going to become as meaningless as college GPAs.  Or worse yet, discourage risk taking.

First a quick refresher on how these rating systems work. Across on-demand labor systems like Uber, Postmates, and Gigwalk for each task you do the buyer rates your performance using a 1-5 star rating system.  Ultimately, 4 and 5 star workers get more work and the 1-4 star workers are removed from the labor pool.  Uber is now dealing with the fallout of ejecting low performing drivers. 

These performance rating systems are blunt objects.  All tasks are created equal and you basically either pass or fail.  Yet, in reality all tasks are not created equal.  Even for fairly basic tasks that exist across Uber, Postmates, and Gigwalk some are challenging and complex while others are simple and quick.  Yet, to the rating system they all look the same.  

As an Uber driver optimizing to maintain a 5 star rating which job would you rather do?   Drive four drunk and angry customers to a club at 1AM or drive a kind and generous venture capitalist from downtown Palo Alto to Sand Hill Road at 2PM.  Uber has no idea that your customers were drunk and nasty.  All they know is that you got a 1 star rating.   

College students optimize their GPAs by taking ‘easy A’ classes and it contributes to meaningless GPAs.  Now imagine if people start to optimize their careers against maintaining a 5 star rating.  We’ll have thousands of Googlers signing up to build the next Calendar feature rather than developing self-driving cars.    That calendar feature is a sure thing 5 star review to show on your LinkedIn profile, while the self-driving car thing could be a 1 star flop. 

We are going to have to adapt our performance review systems for this new labor reality as we need people taking on risky ‘moon shot’ projects.

[Disclosure:  I founded Gigwalk]

A few months ago my co-founder Tom Chi created an avatar for me as part of a project we are working on. I posted it to Facebook and Twitter and got more questions about this avatar than any other profile picture I’ve ever posted. After a long hiatus avatars got my full attention.

Over the past few months as I poked around Twitter and other social networks I started to collect avatars. Below are just a few of the hundreds of avatars I collected. You’ll notice folks like Hunter Walk, Fred Wilson, and Jason Goldman.

Besides growing to adore this form of expression I noticed a few things about these avatars:

Goodbye cheesy Yahoo avatars

Thankfully, the style of these avatars has progressed from the cheesy Yahoo avatars circa 2004. The art form has matured. As you can see there is a broad range of styles — from the alternative hipster to the more serious look.

Avatars speak to your personality

The style, colors, and head position you choose for your avatar speaks to your personality in a way that a profile picture rarely captures. I usually struggle to find a picture of myself that I both like and captures my personality. With avatars you have the control to fashion one that either goes for a more serious Wall Street Journal portrait look, or a more mysterious look, or a fun and quirky look. You have a canvas to capture different parts of your personality.

Avatars are for the social media rich class

The social media rich class are far more likely to invest in avatars than the social media middle class (based on my anecdotal data). I wish there was a place where you could create a unique high quality avatar (not the silly Yahoo kind) for free. People like tinkering and we don’t give people simple tools to create and tinker anymore. Remember, tens of millions of people used to tinker with HTML and CSS on their MySpace profiles. Sadly most of that world is gone.

They are safe conversation starters

Avatars are safe conversation starters. Asking a question or commenting on somebody’s profile picture is a risky affair - tons of landmines. An avatar looks like you, but it’s not you, so its safer territory to strike up a conversation.

How will mobile change our relationship with avatars?

The nature of our interaction with our mobile devices is distinctly different than our PC. There plenty of reasons for this but at the top of that list is direct manipulation of content. If we gave people easy mobile tools to manipulate / tinker with their avatars we would see some entertaining forms of self expression.