There’s nothing wrong with having a plan
Plans are great.
But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.
Six questions for analyzing a website
It's tempting to believe that any website can become a perpetual motion machine of profit. But before you start one, invest in one or go to work for one, a few things to ask:
- What's the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?
- What's the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what's the yield?
- Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it's less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter's co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.
- What's the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?
- Are there members/users? There's a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?
- What's the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.
Do the math on successful companies online and compare it to those that are struggling and these six metrics will help you understand the difference. For example, if the RPM is less than the cost of getting a new visitor, you've got trouble. If the site is relying on fads and occasional PR but isn't building a permission base, that's trouble too.
The good news is that each of them can be changed if you're alert and willing to do surgery on the business model and structure of the site.
The ideal structure is a business that's a platform, not merely a place to stop by. Once people move in and become members, they're hesitant to leave, they share permission over time, they tell their friends, their RPM goes up and the cost of acquiring and hosting members goes down. The real question is: are you on that path?
What do you do when you don’t know the answer?
"Nothing" is the most common response.
Do nothing until you do know the answer. Study and practice and wait for approval and then do something.
Which is fine (for a surgeon) but what happens most of the time? Most of the time there's something that needs to be done where the answer is unknowable until you do it…
That's what we're waiting for you to do.
When “minimal viable product” doesn’t work
One of my favorite ideas in the new wave of programming is the notion of minimal viable product. The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world and see how people react to it, then improve from there.
For drill bits and other tools, this makes perfect sense. Put it out there, get it used, improve it. The definition of "minimal" is obvious.
Often, for software we use in public, this definition leads to failure. Why? Two reasons:
1. Marketing plays by different rules than engineering. Many products depend on community, on adoption within a tribe, on buzz–these products aren't viable when they first launch, precisely because they haven't been adopted. "Being used by my peers," is a key element of what makes something like a fax machine a viable product, and of course, your new tool isn't.
With enough patience and push and consistent enthusiasm, these products have a shot at crossing the threshhold. But if the mindset is "see what works and do it more," you'll often discover yourself giving up long before that happens.
2. There's a burst of energy and attention and effort that accompanies a launch, even a minimally viable one. If there's a delay in pick up from the community, though (see #1) it's easy to move on to the next thing, the next launch, the next hoopla, as opposed to doing the insanely hard work of sticking with that thing you already launched.
Inherent in the process of minimal viable product, then, is a trusting, large permission base that will eagerly listen to you, try your new work and let you know what they think. And you don't have the option of building that audience once the product is ready–that's too late.
What good interview questions are actually trying to discover
How long are you willing to keep pushing on a good project until you give up?
How hard is it to get you to change your mind when you're wrong?
How much do you learn from failing?
How long does it take you to learn something new?
How hard is it for you to let someone else take the lead?
How much do you care?
The rest is merely commentary, either that or they're interviewing you for a job that's not as good as you deserve. For those jobs, the only question they're really focusing on is, "will she fit in around here?"
Invitation to a three-day session with me in New York
This is my last public event of the year.
I'm hoping you will consider coming to the Medicine Ball session, which I'll be holding in a loft outside of New York on December 7, 8 and 9, 2011.
I've discovered a few things about the spread of ideas: first, in-person interaction really can't be beat. While digital ideas spread far and fast, there's something really powerful about being in the same room. And second, it often takes more than an hour or two to really dig in and discover not just who else is in the room with you, but what's holding you back and what's available to move you forward. This session is an experiment in generating both skills and breakthroughs over three intensely-focused days.
Applications are processed first-come, first-reviewed, so if you're interested, I hope you'll check it out soon. Feel free to share this invite with anyone on your team who might benefit. Looking forward to seeing you.
Are you doing math or arithmetic?
I have enormous respect for mathematicians. They're doing work on the edge, a cross between art and science and music.
Arithmeticians, not so much. They are merely whacking at a calculator, doing repetitive work better done by a computer or someone cheaper.
Many fields have precisely this same division. There's a chasm between the proven, repetitive work that can be farmed out and the cutting edge risky work that might just change everything.
When someone asks you what you do all day and you respond, "I take what comes into this basket, do a standard process to it and then put it in that basket," it sounds a lot like you're doing arithmetic, doesn't it? Far better to have a job where there are equal parts magic and art involved in processing the stuff in that basket.
Sure, it's harder to figure out the values of the Ramsey numbers, particularly R(5,5), than it is to add together 318 numbers, repeatedly. It's harder to create an original tweet than it is to retweet. It's harder to find metaphor than it is to work through a to do list. Hard work, true. But worth it.
The fall reading list
A semi-regular feature, here are a bunch of books I've been reading that might change the way you do your work and see the world.
Since posting these lists, my Squidoo pages have earned more than $20,000 for charities like the Acumen Fund. Thanks for that. Feel free to start your own.
Accentuating differences
The easiest way to describe your product (or service or candidate or cause) is to outline how it's different from the competition.
"This is just like Brand X, but 5% cheaper, 10% faster, 20% easier to use and it comes in chocolate…"
We do this so often and so naturally that often, we forget to talk about why we made the thing in the first place.
When selling A against B, we might do a great job of explaining why A is better than B, but it's easy to forget that the prospects you are pitching have another option: doing nothing.
How many baskets?
For many organizations, power and growth come from the idea of having lots of customers and even more potential customers. Lots of eggs, lots of baskets.
When one gets annoyed or leaves for a lower price or goes out of business, no big deal, there's always more where he came from. Believing you have an abundance of alternatives means that you can mistreat, ignore or reject any individual if you like. Or make something that merely delights a few, instead of all.
Even a frequent flyer with 100,000 miles on his account is disposable when you have millions of them.
For a few organizations, the opposite is true. One basket, cared for and watched carefully. When no one else can focus on and serve that customer as well as you (because you have no choice, it's your only basket) you have a huge obligation but you also have a platform to do great work.