Even if it’s a product, sell it like a service

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(Unfinished)

Which would you rather have:

  • An app that, based on preferences you enter about cuisine, price, experience, etc., comes up with a list of restaurants in your neighborhood that fit your criteria?
  • A friend who’s been to every single restaurant in town that you can always count on to come up with a great suggestion for food, no matter what you’re in the mood for?

With some exceptions (and there are always exceptions), I’d rather go to the person first, then the app. Yelp has plenty of suggestions for coffee and wi-fi in the city, but I still check Cafe Talk. Amazon has great reviews, but I’ll often still look at the page of that one blogger who writes a 20 page article just to talk about the pros and cons of one set of headphones.

Why pick one person’s opinion over the wisdom of crowds and a 200 million dollar company?*

Simple: The person cares, and the person is a person.

*Note: Yelp is actually an exception, to the extent that its full of people. But the people all care about different things.

Products are utilities, services are solutions

First off: this doesn’t apply everywhere.

I don’t need a personal assistant to read me my emails or backup my files. I’m OK with large warehouses of computers doing that, because I know exactly what needs to be done and there isn’t anything surprising or complicated about it. When I know what I need, I look for a utility.

What separates utilities from solutions? Uncertainty.

If I’m looking for a website designer, who would think it was acceptable to hand me a copy of Photoshop, a book on HTML, and say, “here’s your app, go for it?”

A utility is designed to take things we know we need and get them. The best utilities tend to be well targeted and have a specific function. No one has to ask Instagram what he does at a party; it’s pretty ______ obvious.

But even there – how did you get introduced to Instagram?

Did a friend tell you about it? Did you read about it in a blog? Did you see someone using it?

Instagram started out as something unknown, and when it comes to unknowns, we need a personal introduction.

Even if it’s a product, start out with a service

I know the eventual goal of a product-driven startup is to build something that “scales” out–the definition of scale being that we can go out and have a picnic while our software makes monkey.

Nonetheless, I see lots of people who start out with the picnic. Oh, they may be working hard on their product, but there’s no relationship to the customer. They build the system and throw it over the wall and hope it goes viral. Starting a connection to your customers through an impersonal, on-stage launch is how you get casual interest. At the beginning, there will be no one but you to give a personal introduction to your gadget.

It can be as simple as telling the story of what it does and letting them use it, but you have to provide that service the first few times around. Even in the greatest product driven businesses, it’s people who are telling the story, not the product. The eventual goal of scale is not to stop telling the story, but to have others tell it for you.

Final Fantasy VI is several games

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(no spoilers)

In most games, there’s a specific role to play. In Serious Sam, I control a wise cracking uber muscled super soldier with absurd amounts of ammunition. In GTA, I’m a city dweller only interested in cars, and perhaps an aspiring criminal lowlife.

When I play FFVI, what am I playing exactly? On the one hand, I’m an explorer, flying around a continent, discovering caves and towns and places, and solving the errant puzzle. I’m also one of a rotating cast of characters, each with their own motivations and personalities, an actor in a vast, world-transforming narrative. On top of that, I’m also playing a mini-tactical combat simulator every 30 seconds.

I’ll bet that most people playing a JRPG play it somewhat more holistically than that. We don’t separate the different parts of the experience unless they break immersion (the Bioshock hacking minigame comes to mind). The trouble with JRPGs is that they’re often so well made that the seams don’t show, but they’re still there. (Now that I think about it, Myst, for all its foibles, is remarkably cohesive for a story game…)

Exercise: What if you actually broke all the different pieces apart? What if there was a game that was completely wandering around a map picking up things and making dialogue choices? And another game that was nothing but fighting through a big arena?

It seems, at least superficially, that both of these games would be much worse than FFVI, but it could just be that we don’t imagine those games polished on the level that FFVI is.

Exceptions

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The scenario: A simple prototype in JavaScript, so I could test play an MVP of my new game.

The problem: Why is this d_mn thing taking so long?

 

Ever since I started working on my own, I’ve spend far more time figuring out how to motivate myself. Because I’m working in a startup, I make sure to do just the minimum amount of work to make a viable product, so that I can save time and work on other things.

And yet, I find myself staring into space, going on Google Reader, Hacker News, playing games, or anything I can find aside from work.

As I’m talking with a friend online, we make some observations:

  • While the eventual result is interesting, the work I’m doing is boring.
  • The reason I’m bored is because the work is easy.
  • Therefore, if I want to be more productive, I need to make my work harder.

I throw out the disorderly, simple, get it done code that everyone says you should write for a prototype. I make things organized. I put all my variables into neat, sensible structures that follow design principles. I use a regular expression to replace 6 lines that I could’ve done by hand in five minutes.

All of a sudden, I’m getting work done again.

What gives?

–

I’ve talked with scores of startups over the years, and they consistently err on the side of overbuilding rather than underbuilding. Fancy prototypes take months to code, months that are wasted if your idea of a customer is the two people you told at the startup meetup you went to last week that said it looked kind of cool; people create entire frameworks to build sites that could be done in the time it takes to write a shell script (that installs WordPress).

Thus, the rule to build fast and build cheap was born.

Am I some kind of unlikely exception? Perhaps. But after giving it more thought, I realized that the need to make some things hard is not surprising, and not unique.

–

Are you working at a startup?

Why?

The pay is (sometimes) lower and the responsibilities are (often) greater. Most of the programmers I know working on their own projects are exceptionally good at programming. The hackers aren’t hanging out at the back of the bell curve. They can pass FizzBuzz, they know it, and that’s exactly why they’re finding a place where they live or die by their skills.

So it’s not entirely surprising that, if you pick people who are fairly competent at coding, so competent that they want to go to a place where they may be solely responsible for the technical success of the product they build, that they might just prefer not to always have simple, somnambulist-friendly code assignments.

Now, as with any essay that argues a point, you can poke holes in this thesis. Perhaps, you might say, the original rule isn’t against giving yourself a technical challenge from time to time, but rather as a safety railing to stop the people who want to make Pandora Craigslist Farmville with an extra layer on top so you can tag your singing cows with pictures from your last missed connection. And that’s a fair point.

What we do thrives on exceptions. I wouldn’t be able to think of a good example, but by chance, I read of one in the NYT yesterday:

When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Do what works.

Sometimes, semi consciousness = discipline

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When most fully aware, we often have a voice running in our head (no, not that kind of voice) that thinks through things verbally. Usually that’s the best time to think about stuff, but when we have to work, sometimes it’s better to have our internal monologue be off.

Are there psychological terms for this?