Month: May 2011

This is a goldmine. @somethingtoread is a Twitter stream for “a hand-picked selection of the finest articles and essays saved with Instapaper.”

Follow immediately.

You know what’s common among the “How I Work”s of  Jason Fried or Matt Mullenweg or anyone who’s building ‘cool’ software today?

Take Fried, for instance:

Of the 16 people at the company, eight of us live here in Chicago. Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Or Mullenweg:

…my preference is to work from home. We’re very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty.

But chances are you spend two hours commuting to and two hours from work. Or have to punch in and punch out. Or have to spend a minimum of 8 or 8 1/2 hours at work. Or have a limited number of holidays. Or have to take permission to work from home. Or all of these one-size-fits-all policies.

And but still, but yet, Management would concede that the folks at 37signals and Automattic are, by any measure, more productive than their employees.  And also that there’s a positive causal relationship between autonomy and productivity. So why aren’t more companies… why do policies at your average co overwhelmingly SQUELCH autonomy?

Management is uncomfortable with issues of autonomy [1], but they will tell you (sotto voce) they don’t trust their employees to be productive without a nurturing environment, oh forget it, without external control and supervision [2].  That’s tragic. Whyever hire people you can’t trust, watched over by supervisor watched over by supersupervisor watched over by all the way up to top management?

Because if every employee was someone you could trust, was as good as the best employee, there’d be no problem.  So why not hire everyone who’s as good? Because, <impatient shake of head>, because you can’t afford to pay everybody what you pay your best employees.

And then, doggedly you ask, but then would you need as many people? Wouldn’t you have fewer people, better people, autonomous people, sensible productive happy people, if you hired just the really good ones? And Management responds, reflex-like, <check!>, and where am I going to find these people?

There.

What Management has is a problem of time. Finding these people, these really good people, wooing them, getting them excited, selling the role to them and selling them on the role is intense, time-consuming work.

And but running co is a daily operation. That moment when co becomes too big for Founders (the very who metamorphose into Management) to run effectively, that moment is the moment when Founders need to spend time, emotion, effort finding and netting those good people and it is also the moment when they can least spare that time, emotion, effort.

So it goes. From Founders to first-rung Management to middle Management to all the way down, supervisoring and supersupervisoring. So then what do you do?

What indeed?

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[1] or with any issue involving people except for the stuff the people produce for the co.

[2] Except for their best. And they can’t make exceptions for those they can trust because that’d make the rest resentful.

Some great ideas for operators to better utilize (and monetize) their assets: expose users’ location data, expose their social graph, building micro-payment systems that make sense, become verified ID providers. Just reading the article will set your head abuzz.

These are solid, solid ideas. But they require operators to think of themselves as platforms, making money off access to APIs. And that is just not in their DNA. Rather, in their rush to corner every buck there is to be made in the mobile space, they have tried to integrate vertically – running businesses from cell phone towers to handset applications, doing only a few things well.

They’ve attempted to jump from being a pipe to building applications bypassing the development of platforms in between – for identity, social, location, payments – to build good applications, not one-offs.

Too bad. That’s stunting the development of an entire, first-of-its-kind-in-the-world mobile ecosystem in India.

Speaking of threats to freedoms from government, the “Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011” describe what content may not be published online, in terms so vague that anything could be considered to be in violation of these rules. Medianama has commentary:

… these rules give the Indian government the ability to gag free speech, and block any website it deems fit, without publicly disclosing why sites have been blocked, who took the decision to block it, and just as importantly, providing adequate recourse to blogs, sites and online and mobile businesses, for getting the block removed. These rules are applicable to intermediaries, through which access to content will be controlled.

Examples include forbidding blasphemous content without a blasphemy law in place, having ISPs remove content within 36 hours of receipt of a complaint (without proof of violation), and forcing disclosure of private information to any agency dealing with ‘cyber security activity’.

Every so often comes a reminder that government over-reach and license raj is still very much alive. Last week, BookMyShow was instructed by the Andhra Pradesh state government to stop selling tickets online because it (the government) had ‘passed an order’ allowing only a single entity (not BookMyShow) to do so (for the next ten years, extendable).

This is not apathy; this is a government actively working against its people. And whether driven by incompetence or rent-seeking, this act showcases just how easily your freedoms – as an individual or business – can be taken away by the government of a free country.

In the past two months, I’ve read 37signals’ ‘Getting Real‘ and (re)read Tim Ferriss’ ‘The Four Hour Work Week‘. The overarching takeaway, seems to be the fanatical application of the Pareto principle.

A variant of 80-20, much easier to apply to mundane, near-subconscious situations every day is to ask ‘does it matter in the larger scheme of things?’ (define ‘larger scheme’ as applicable). Do I overtake that slowcoach in the fast lane from the left? Does it matter in the larger scheme of things? Should I microwave the water first so I can set up the coffee filter in parallel? Does it matter in the larger scheme of things? Should I boot up my computer first so it downloads email while I check up on the team? And on and on. It gets easier if you ask yourself.

Discovered in the last 24 hours: LongReads.com “The best long-form stories on the web“, and from the May issue of The Atlantic, “Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism“.

Instapaper for iPhone is a simple concept, but simply beautifully executed. It is a joy to use.

It is where I spend most of my reading time on the iPhone.

So it made sense to think about how I use the application, what my reading workflow is on the iPhone. And here’s what it looks like:

I send articles and pages to Instapaper via one of
1. emailing the link to my private Instapaper email address
2. using the ‘send to Instapaper’ menu item in several iPhone apps
3. using the ‘send to Instapaper’ bookmarklet on my PC browser

Email to Instapaper is a fantastic idea. There is just so much that I browse on Mobile Safari and don’t want to read immediately. This includes links from Twitter that I open, scan and email. I doubt I’d use Instapaper as much if I couldn’t email articles to it. [1]

And I share articles I like to Twitter from within Instapaper. The app automatically appends a short URL to the article at the end of the tweet. So far, I’ve sent around 50 articles to Twitter from Instapaper.

[1] Yes, there’s the Mobile Safari bookmarklet, but it’s inconvenient to set up; I’ve never gotten around to it. Emailing is so much easier.

I learnt recently that even when all indications are that your business (or life. or city. or whatever) is running fine, something could be wrong – in plain view – that those indicators can’t tell you.

The only way to discover these problems is to tinker around with data. Ask questions of it.

Here’s what happened.

Ours is a prepaid subscriptions business. You sign up, put money into your account and pick your subscriptions.

Our signups, payments and new subscriptions – the three primary indicators of our health [1] – were growing at expected rates relative to each other. Nothing seemed to be wrong.

Until one day, I discovered that many new signups didn’t have any subscriptions. That was unexpected. It meant that most of our new subscriptions were via older subscribers.

That meant – and this was quickly confirmed – that most of our payments were also made by older subscribers. This is a problem, and we commissioned a quick survey to find out what was wrong with our new signups.

But then we tinkered further. We plotted a histogram of (normalized) new subscriptions started (all of this is excluding renewals) versus how long ago the subscribers had signed up, and we found this:

 

 

Astonishing. The older the subscriber, the more the number of new subscriptions they started recently [2]. We had a larger problem than we expected; our older subscribers were so active, they’d hidden how un-engaged our newer subscribers were for several months.

While we took immediate steps to fix this, we also realized that it’s hard to build a dashboard for stuff like this. You can – and should – track primary measures of success, results of specific campaigns, and suchlike. But under-the-surface stuff like this – we’d never have figured it out if we hadn’t tinkered with data.

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[1] There’s also ARPU and churn, but they aren’t material to this discussion.

[2] The data for months 8 and 9 is skewed by a small set of people with a lot of subscriptions each, but they’re still much higher than any other month, and the trend is the same

(Cross posted from the MyToday blog.)

From “Groupon and the value of copywriting”

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Groupon I received for a deal on a dentist:

The Tooth Fairy is a burglarizing fetishist specializing in black-market ivory trade, and she must be stopped. Today’s Groupon helps keep teeth in mouths and out of the hands of maniacal, winged phantasms: for $49, you get a cleaning, an exam, and x-rays at Longwood Dental Group in Brookline (a $356 value). The office is easily reachable from the C Line’s Englewood Avenue stop on Beacon Street.