Ariel Seidman

File this under small things that matter. I searched my apps...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:46:45 -0700

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.

lilly: Tumblr & Human-scale Design Lots of the chatter this...

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:00:31 -0700

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.

"Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:53:34 -0700

“Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.”

- daringfireball.net/2013/05/facebook_home_dogfooding

Tech news coverage will have you believe that both the App Store...

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:12:00 -0700

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.

While we are busy cooking up something new I have not had the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:40:36 -0700

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.

The shift from mobile limited to mobile abundance

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:59:00 -0700

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:-)

Given these profits you would think one would be able to...

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:19:00 -0700

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.

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.

Adventures in apps with normal people

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:46:00 -0700

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.

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?

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.

"It (Galaxy S 4) still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android. I found..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:53:26 -0700

“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.

dishingdirty: Eating Organic is like giving Monsanto the...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:21:15 -0700

dishingdirty:

Eating Organic is like giving Monsanto the finger

Last year I ate like shit. The food choices we make are very personal but they are also driven by the clever marketing of some larger corporations who market and sell us crappy food.

If people actually knew what they were buying at the grocery store they would be shocked. So, when Abesmarket.com (run by my good friend Richard) shared this piece with me it struck a cord.

"Large amounts of small media > small amounts of large media"

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:46:00 -0700

“Large amounts of small media > small amounts of large media”

- Omar Hamoui - founder of AdMob - once shared this idea with me. It really stuck with me. Almost everybody ignores this simple idea (including myself for awhile), yet it’s simple and spot-on advice.

We’ve been programmed to think about PR in terms of announcements and conferences. PR planning often begins with questions - what upcoming conferences can I present at? What panels can I talk on? What announcement can we make this quarter? When I hear these questions I revert to my conversation with Omar — large amounts of small media is better than small amounts of large media.

So, I ask myself what can I do every single week - not each month or quarter - to tell our story? Ultimately, I would prefer twenty-five small outlets (including Twitter accounts with large followings) talking about our product and story this month rather than one CNN story this month. The CNN story may play better with my mom — “Oh look at my son, he’s on CNN!” but likely came at a significant opportunity cost.

So, why is large amount of small media better than small amounts of large media?

1) If a small outlets gets passionate about your story they are more likely to do follow-ups. Large media organizations don’t get passionate about early stage products and they tend to move on quickly to the next thing rarely coming back to do follow-ups.

2) You get lots of varied opinions and perspectives that help inform your product.

3) You are building a wide and excited fan base. Think of it as band traveling from city-to-city. In each city they attract 50 people to their gig - these hard core fans are their promoters in that city.

4) The web is a big place - having thousands of small sites and social media talking about you is better than a few articles in big media.

5) Small media leads to large media. Overtime, if your story catches on the large media guys will find you.

6) More consistent feedback. More stories means more feedback. Feedback is oxygen for your product.

When it comes to telling a story I try to find unique ways to deliver the message and then do that consistently each and every week.

"Silicon Valley is famous for its belief that it is a pure meritocracy, but I’ve noticed that most of..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:39:00 -0700

“Silicon Valley is famous for its belief that it is a pure meritocracy, but I’ve noticed that most of the loudest advocates for this belief are young white men, and most of its other advocates are older white men.”

- Reid Hoffman

Make your app ugly

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:14:00 -0700

First make your app ugly. Don’t get caught up in the silly little game of who can make the prettiest app. If the app you are creating is ugly and you still really want to use it imagine what it will be like when its pretty.

Yet, pretty for the sake of being pretty is mostly a big waste of time. Back in the day at Yahoo we made a bunch of pretty apps that basically sucked. We had five visual designers dedicated to a single iPad app. A huge waste of time.

When you add visual design the real question you are trying to answer is what is the personality of this product? It’s often hard to know that the moment the product is born. Give yourself some time to use your new baby and give it a chance to reveal its personality to you.

lilly: Invisible Waves I spend a lot of time thinking about how...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:41:14 -0700

lilly:

Invisible Waves

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we communicate with each other — at work, at play, at home, at school — everywhere. Our communication modes are changing pretty quickly — more and more short burst conversations, more and more context switching. Texts from family during meetings. Messages from co-workers during kids’ soccer games. Everything piling up on top of each other, as we’re expected to be always on, anywhere.

One of the great pleasures of my life is communicating, at high fidelity, with my kids. As they develop, they learn new & different ways to communicate and connect. Just lately, our 10 month old son has learned to wave, which is just a joyous thing to behold when you get home from work, or even in the inky darkness of a 4 am wake up — you see the little guy, and he starts waving at you. It’s a connection, and human and wonderful.

But it’s sort of a sometimes thing. He’s still learning to do the physical motions. And how to aim it. And when to use it. So sometimes he’ll wave at himself unintentionally (I suppose). Sometimes he’ll sort of scrunch up his hand instead of opening and closing it. And a lot of times he’ll wave to you when you’re not really looking.

It’s those invisible waves — the ones he’s making but we don’t always see — that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. In my work as a VC, we have lots and lots and lots of meetings, often with folks we’re just getting introduced to for the first time. That’s in contrast with operating relationships that span years and years. Those operating relationships are neat because you develop an intuition about things, and a sense for when communication is happening or not. But with lots of these first, second, third time interactions — with entrepreneurs or reporters or other investors — well, with those, I think there are lots of invisible waves happening. Where one party thinks they’re communicating in a crystal clear way, but the other party might not be picking up on it.

I think about this a lot. One of my favorite sayings that I’ve heard about this is that the biggest misconception about communication is that it actually happened. How we communicate, and how we understand, plays a big part in how we see the world.

For myself, I’m trying hard to make sure that I’m as clear & direct in my communications as possible, but also trying harder than ever to watch for an notice the invisible waves all around me. Pretty nice to learn lessons from your 10 month old. :-)

A piece by John that will most definitely get you thinking how you communicate with the people in your life.

Telling your story

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:42:00 -0700

Now that it is cheap to build your first product we are spawning more creators. These creators in turn are generating noise as they enter the marketplace and start telling the world about their product. We are left with a very noisy world.

As the cost of creating a product continues to decline the world will generate more creators thereby making markets even noisier. For example, in the mobile world there are 1 million apps. Waiting on the App Store to feature you or buying mobile ads to drive installs isn’t much of a strategy.

Before you get too depressed about this noisy world remember that there is always a different way to tell your story. Between 1998 and 2004 many people thought telling the story of your website required a minimum buy of $10M+ on TV ads. As a young Yahoo Product Manager I was meeting with the VP of Sales and VP of Marketing for Yahoo! HotJobs. They basically told me it doesn’t matter what you build for Yahoo! HotJobs because Yahoo isn’t going to pour $15 million into TV ads to compete with Monster. Prior to Yahoo acquiring HotJobs it established itself with a Super Bowl ad in the 90’s so they instinctively reverted to that tactic.

If you have fifty million dollars to play with then maybe TV ads can work. Yet, we’ve seen far more interesting and cost effective ways of story-telling, here are a few…

37Signals - they tell their story of simplicity through provocative and well written blog posts, contributed pieces to the likes of Inc. magazine, and now books. It’s cheap and effective.
GetFirefox launched an authentic community driven campaign - “Hey, the web is getting slow and messy Let’s clean this place up together by joining the Firefox movement” — as a participant in the movement all you had to do is download the browser and if you had a blog or website stick a little Firefox button on it.
Product Videos - Twitter and Dropbox produced quirky product videos that explained their products in a unique way. Lots of people jumped on this bandwagon and flooded the market with product videos. Unfortunately, many of them are just flat out boring or just not very funny.
Chrome - released a comic book explaining how Chrome is different. It was certainly a unique approach yet they missed opportunity to develop the comic into a series - a weekly comic strips highlighting new features or just poking fun at competitors.

The story you tell is obviously critical. Yet, as my co-founder Tom Chi says just as important is choosing the right format to advance your story. Mobile is a new tool and format for artists and storytellers, so it’s going to be exciting to see how its used to tell stories.

The latest version of Foursquare serves as a good reminder in...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:34:00 -0700

Foursquare (older and more complex version)

Foursquare - April 2013

The latest version of Foursquare serves as a good reminder in product management. It’s always harder to rip out features than to add features. So, think hard about what you put into your product. Kudos to Foursquare for having the balls to simplify their product.

Radio Hit Apps

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:19:00 -0700

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.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day....

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:59:00 -0700

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. We’ve all seen plenty of pictures from the Holocaust.

I prefer to look forward than dwell on the past, so this story hit the right spot for me. Above is Gary Lenzer. He is an 85 year-old Holocaust survivor who went skydiving with his grandson. I love it because no matter your age or your past we all have room to grow and enjoy new experiences.

It’s also nice because it feels like a big F-you to Hitler.

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you, and you can..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:08:13 -0700

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you, and you can change it…you can build your own things - Steve Jobs”

There are plenty of project management tools to choose from. In...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 15:38:00 -0700

There are plenty of project management tools to choose from. In the past I’ve used Basecamp and Asana. They are perfectly fine. Yet, for me the visual approach of Trello really works. It reminds me of the Tumblr archive view. In the picture above is the Tumblr archive view for this blog and directly below it is a Trello project.

I have no idea whether or not the Trello team was inspired by the Tumblr archive view. Regardless, Trello made this visual all-in-one view work beautifully for project management. Trello is a perfect example of a team contributing a fresh new approach to a rather old and competitive category. Kudos.