rahul gaitonde dot org

Your division starts off on a new project with a bang. And months later ends with a whimper. You shut the thing down, your folks are terribly frustrated but you don’t really know what went wrong. From my experience, here’s probably what happened:

First, there’s the idea.

Then, there’s the productization of that idea.

Finally, there’s the business built around that product.

But you cannot make money off an idea. You can only make money from a business. And you cannot take an idea to market. You can only take a product to market.

Too often, Management doesn’t see the difference between the three and misses asking the right questions at the stage those questions need to be asked. The result is usually a shoddy product, reactive execution, management by crisis, a demoralized team and money down the drain.

Been there before?

If you rush to build a business around nothing more than an idea, you’ll probably find that

Your audience doesn’t understand your product because you don’t understand the audience. Or you spent so much time early on thinking about monetization you didn’t think enough about adoption.  Or by the time you launched, your product was a year behind its competition. Or you built your mobile app for a platform your early adopters don’t use. Or you launched without customer support or the ability to collect feedback.  Or you give up on the product too quickly because it didn’t really really excite you to begin with.

Seem familiar?

Here’s what I think might help avoid these holes:

When evaluating an idea you’d ask

• Has this problem already been solved?
• Does our organization – firm, company, startup – understand this space?
• Is this way of doing business in our DNA?
• Does it personally excite you, o ringmaster?
• When the product will be ready, will it still be relevant?

And then, once the idea’s passed evaluation and you’ve begun to build,

• Who are your early adopters?
• How do we put together the talent needed to get this out the door?
• What platform do we develop for? (mobile platform, web platform)
• What features do we bake in/leave out?
• What is our go-to-market plan?
• What kind of customer support should we have (phone/email/in-app form)
• How will we collect feedback?
• What parameters will we monitor?

Once you’ve launched, gotten traction, feedback and momentum,

• How do we make money?
• What does our product roadmap look like? How often do we release?

You’re likely better off asking these questions when they really matter. Not too early, not too late. #Ilearntthehardway.

… is this (at the very start of building a new product):

Assume your product’s already been built. Now think about how you’re going to get adoption and usage among your audience.

Too often you get so caught up in the excitement of building something cool, you don’t tackle the hard problem of seeding it and getting usage among early adopters until you’re very close to – or at – launch. Then you’ve got a product that’s ready and no one but yourselves using it. Your go-to-market guy’s under tremendous pressure and your developer’s twiddling his/her thumbs. Your team can run out of momentum and enthusiasm really quickly and it’s very hard to get your mojo back.

This has happened to us before. And I’m still working on that advice.

The tech staff and I just exchanged email about the updated list of browsers that MyToday and Phone.cc should support.

Reading back, I noticed that for PC web, we essentially supported Firefox, Chrome and IE. We explicitly excluded Safari and Opera.

But mobile web? For maximum coverage, we needed to support – yes – Mobile Safari and Opera Mini.

Such is the disconnect between the Webs.

From a friend who recently purchased the iPad 2 (no previous iOS devices):

When I considered purchasing the iPad, I was reading too little. Almost nothing in paper form (with good reason too). And nothing online, cos at work it would be a distraction and when I came back home I would pay to not have to look at my laptop. I was feeling a steady intellectual decay overcoming me. With that background, I thought, even if the iPad can’t do anything else, but enable me to read more, it will be money well spent. And it is.

He’s not the only one. So many more among my friends have begun reading and sharing great stuff recently. In each case, three things have come together well:

The first is services like Twitter, (and Facebook) which have improved discovery tremendously. Unlike in the era of search, you don’t find good stuff as much as the good stuff/people find you. More people can be human filters now with Twitter and Facebook than with, say Google Reader [1].

The second is services like Flipboard, Pulse and Instapaper, which (in different ways) improve readability. You could include Mobile Safari as well, with its simple tap-to-zoom-to-column-view function that cuts out cruft & distractions. That would also include the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps.

The third, final and most important is devices like iPhone and iPad (and the Kindle, to some limited degree) which have revolutionized mobility. Twitter and Flipboard would never have gotten traction as PC services, even on laptops [2]. With these devices, you are in control of when, where and how you read – just like with a real book or magazine.

Put them all together, and you have a reading experience no newsstand or library can even come close to matching.

[1] Of course, an important part of discovery is also easy shareability.

[2] Specifically, iPhone and iPad are important because they have, through their design and the App Store, enabled developers to create mobile experiences for Pulse and Flipboard. As the original digital reader, this should probably count as a missed opportunity for the Kindle.

I like dense walking cities like New York because they allow for serendipity. In Los Angeles serendipity is hard; you’re essentially teleporting from one place to another (slowly) in your car. There’s no deviation from the path, no unplanned, found awesomeness.

- Nathan Bowers, UX Hero

Tim Bray of Google, about Google+:

Circles are, mathematically speaking, sets, and I think set arithmetic would come in real handy: “Post this to the intersection of my Photogeeks circle and my Vancouver circle”. I can think of lots of other amusing permutations. The reason I bring this up is because I smile, envisioning a future in which math teachers use social-network constructs to explain Set Theory.

If nothing else, I’d like a tool that’d display intersections and identify subset relationships among my circles. Just for my amusement. How many intersections are null sets, how many have just one member; to be surprised by who the people are in intersections; how close the memberships of two circles are…

TRAI’s new guidelines, as reported by Medianama yesterday:

… where a consumer dials a specified telephone number or short code or a telephone number providing interactive session for subscribing to a Value Added Service, the service provider shall obtain confirmation from the consumer through consumer originated SMS or e-mail or FAX or in writing within twenty four hours of activation of the value added service and charge the consumer only if the confirmation is received from him for such value added service…

Way overdue. Better late than never.

While the monstrosity is gone, we had a chance to take a gander last week:

I wrote the following the next morning:

Well we had to see it. It’s there. And reports of how it didn’t miss the BWSL by much, relatively speaking. From the spot on Juhu beach where the damn thing is, you can easily see the towers of the BWSL.

But it’s big. Driving down Juhu Tara from Santacruz, near the Ramada curve, I told Jean to “keep a watch out; we don’t want to miss it”. I thought it’d be about 100 feet off the beach or suchlike. Watch out my ass. It’s like the Worli TV tower while coming off the BWSL – in your damn face. It’s on the sand. For something this massive to come this close to the shore it’d have to be not just crazy, but Charlie-Sheen-stark-raving-nuts-berserk-crazy. This helicopter shot is straight out of a disaster movie – the damn vessel-from-hell is headed straight for the Juhu Centaur:

So we pay-and-parked in front of the Ramada and walked towards it. Few analogies, really. Dinosaur? Gulliver? Space ship? None come close. It’s ancient. Filthy. Tired. Rusting. The last vestiges of dignity seeping out of it. And yet disinterested in its fate, just as long as there’s one in store. So there’s a massive loneliness, sadness around it:

And yet it utterly dominates the horizon around it. Standing close to it gives you a sense of creeping agoraphobia, until you just have to look away. It’s arguably smaller than the Centaur and the Ramada in front of it but unmatched in sheer presence. No shacks, palm groves, seafront bungalows, miscellaneous other construction and crumbling walls around it. It stands alone. Off to its left there’s nothing until Madh, far into the distance. On its right, the Sea-link,the only comparable superstructure, is obscured by the hump of land at Juhu Koliwada. So it stands, despicable, unwelcome, but unchallenged as emperor of its stretch of land.

So there.

Pleasantly surprised it’s still around. Addictive. Youhavebeenwarned. Spent many a post-lunch hour at IBM 2004-05 playing GTG followed by fantastically productive afternoons.

On BBC Entertainment (program schedule). Rageh Omaar attempts to document the ‘lives of ordinary Iranians’ (yawn?) but does a very good job.

The documentary is 5 years old, but very watchable. If you follow Iran’s domestic and foreign politics, this is a great change:

Omaar’s journey takes him under the skin of the city and he meets with local people who share with him their personal stories and feelings about the current state of affairs in Iran.

There are stories of taxi drivers; wrestlers; business women; people working with drug addicts and the country’s leading pop star and his manager – the Simon Cowell of Iran – who drove Omaar around Tehran in his Mercedes-Benz.