Product on Dan Goldin

Instacart price markup

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 15:53:06 -0500

Last year I looked at the markup of a few different food delivery services by comparing their prices against the ones on the restaurant’s menu. I got the chance to do the same thing for Instacart a few days ago when the receipt was included alongside the delivery.

The markup wasn’t as significant or variable as the food delivery apps and was just over 9% for the majority of items. I imagine the intention was to keep it single digit in case anyone did the math and 10% does seem like a reasonable markup - even with the additional tip.

Slack Idea: Hierarchical Channels

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:32:14 -0500

While there are a lot of strong opinions about Slack on both sides, it clearly changed the way work gets done. I’m mixed. I appreciate the ability to quickly drop a question or response asynchronous yet acknowledge how disruptive it is and prevents deep work.

The one thing that I did notice in our usage of Slack is that quite often the same message ends up being posted across multiple channels due to relevance for multiple groups. Yet many members exist in both groups and the repetition is redundant and inefficient. What if Slack had a way to have hierarchical channels?

Clubhouse as a solution to Deepfakes

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 23:37:18 -0500

My mind started wandering while half-listening to a Clubhouse discussion and I had the thought that Clubhouse - and generally any real time communication app - can end up being a solution to Deepfakes. At some point Deepfakes will be good enough to render in real time but until then having synchronous communication is a way to confirm the authenticity of the participants. On top of that I’m sure you can find some blockchain way to authenticate the session to prove that it was done live and was unaltered.

Billion dollar features

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There’s an old story of Steve Jobs meeting Drew Houston in order to acquire Dropbox but after being refused calling Dropbox a feature. Dropbox kept innovating, building a great product, went public and is currently a $9 billion company. Clearly Dropbox proved Steve Jobs wrong. But did it really? Dropbox recently announced a round of layoffs and their stock has dropped 20% since they went public. Even on a personal note I plan on moving my files from Dropbox to Google Drive.

Stop charging for support plans

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My latest rant is against support plans for enterprise software. It’s frustrating to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a contract and yet be forced to pay an additional fee for support. Even worse, this additional fee is usually a function of your existing spend.

I understand the rationale - there needs to be a cost to support otherwise everyone has an incentive to escalate and spend is likely correlated with complexity and volume of services used but it just feels as if I’m being nickel and dimed.

Blame the algorithm

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Stanford Medicine is in the news for using an “algorithm” and allocating minimal COVID vaccines to those actually on the frontlines. Instead it supposedly prioritized senior administrators who are working from home. I’m sure there’s some truth to the algorithm biasing allocation to those who are older but whenever I see someone blame an algorithm my spidey-sense goes off. The algorithm in this case was likely some extremely simple calculation in Excel that could have been easily verified by a human - both before it was run as well as a quick analysis of the results.

What do adtech and BGP have in common?

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Despite writing web applications many engineers are not familiar with the infrastructure side of the internet - DNS, BGP, TCP/IP - and yet depend on it all working. Over the years I’ve gotten a better understanding of the guts of the internet but only in the past few weeks have I discovered Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) on top of BGP. RPKI is meant to add a layer of trust on top of the existing infrastructure which was designed many decades ago without worrying about malicious actors.

Substack can evolve into a marketplace

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I first heard of Substack I wasn’t too impressed. I fell into the usual engineering trick of thinking it’s something that could be “built in a weekend” but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Last week I listened to an interview with Substack’s CEO, Chris Best, which made me realize the scale and scope of Substack’s ambitions.

At the most fundamental level it’s a product that allows writers to publish a newsletter - taking care of all the mechanics to let writers write. Yet I naively assumed this was just a text editor (think Medium), coupled with payments (Stripe), all hooked up to email (Sendgrid).

Do your users delete or archive your email?

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been following this blog you likely know that I subscribe to the Inbox Zero approach to email management. I treat my inbox as a todo list and strive to get it down to zero with varying success. In any case, I spend a lot of time in my email and I noticed an odd pattern to how I deal with handled messages. Some I will delete while I others I’ll archive but it happens naturally. It’s not entirely subconscious but it’s a very quick decision I make as I run through my messages. The obvious rule is that anything I expect to search or reference later on I’ll archive while the truly useless emails I’ll simply delete.

Medium is a shopping mall

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I empathize with Medium’s need to make money while avoiding ads but as an author it’s a bad deal. Medium has great editing and writing tools and a built in audience but if your goal is to share your articles with as broad of an audience as possible the fact that Medium throws up a paywall is a non-starter. Sure you can avoid it by going incognito but how many readers know that?

Google and the Apple Watch

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you were to summarize my personal tech stack it would be Google software and Apple hardware. There are a few exceptions but those two companies likely cover the bulk of my technology usage. They’re great at what they do within their domains yet the intersection is lacking, especially on the Apple Watch. I suspect Apple is to blame for some of this but it doesn’t seem as if Google doesn’t even try to build for the Apple Watch.

iOS 14 and local network access

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I installed the iOS 14 beta since I’m curious about what’s coming - even if it ends up bricking my phone. I expected it to come with more privacy features but one that surprised me was an alert that apps wanted to “find and connect to devices on your local network.” This is an obvious one Apple covered this functionality during WWDC. It’s interesting seeing which apps request this permission and speculate why.

Big money, not big data

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s common for companies to complain about the challenges of running big data and how difficult it is. The reality is that unless you’re running at massive scale (Google or Facebook) your problems are more to do with big money rather than big data. It’s expensive to store, process, and expose terabytes and the difficulty is in doing it cost effectively, not in simply doing it. There are enough modern tools out there across all the cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and vendors (Snowflake, Databricks) that it’s possible to do nearly everything you want but you’ll just have to pay for it.

Products change, humans stay the same

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While on a quick driving errand a few days ago I decided to listen to the radio for the first time in years. I was quickly hit with a bit of nostalgia - the radio show that was on had one of those “First caller to answer this correctly gets Y” sessions. I’ve heard this thousands of times growing up but this was the first time in a very long time and for whatever reason I immediately thought of both how modern music streaming services no longer have these contests and that a similar need is being met by HQ Trivia.

Quibi's problem

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone loves to bash on Quibi, including me, and yet I feel guilty. We should applaud those who try something new rather than mock it in hindsight. Sure, Quibi raised a ton of money and has an illustrious team but they still deserve respect for attempting to build something from scratch.

Earlier this week I received a Quibi survey and decided to do my part to give them honest feedback. As I was going through the survey that was attempting to understand my usage (or lack of) I developed a personal theory of why it’s failing.

Dark Mode is for when you run out of real features

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of apps launch dark mode and I just don’t get it. I’m sure part of it is that I mostly stick to the default settings but I can’t help but think that if someone is prioritizing dark mode then they must have run out of actually useful features to build. I’m being a bit unfair since dark mode can also be a fun side project that someone picks up and may only require changing a few colors around but if it’s anything more than that it’s an indicator that something is off with their prioritization. Unless a product has reached the mature stage there are incredibly valuable things that the team can be investing in that actually improve the workflow and experience for their customers - dark mode is rarely that.

Shopify for food delivery

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote about the idea of a service that aggregates delivery drivers back in 2018 but given the latest wave of food delivery service bashing I couldn’t help but think of it again. This time around my thoughts are a bit more refined about how to actually build a business but do think there’s a real opportunity here, especially after seeing the challenges with the current model.

The existing food delivery apps charge high fees because food delivery is one of the highest costs. That’s the part that needs to be improved in order for the companies to make sense. As many people note restaurants have been delivering food on their own for decades while maintaining profitability so it’s clearly possible. Yet these online services struggle. Instead of focusing on the delivery side they’re in a race to capture as much of the demand as possible.

A TikTok experience for streaming services

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

During an interview with Ben Thomson, Eugene Wei has the following response to a question digging into Netflix solving the “I just want something on in the background” use case:

Yeah, that’s a great point. I also do hope that this macro shock forces the streaming companies to think a little bit harder about innovating on their user interfaces. I still think it’s a little bit of a shame that most of them still present the grid of icons. Everybody has probably had that experience of just paralysis where you’re just scrolling around, you’re like, “What do I watch? I don’t know what to choose.”

Zoom's blow up and their financials

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Zoom has had an incredible rise in the past few weeks as the tech world has shifted to remote work with nearly all meetings occurring over video conferencing. The stock is up 30% over the past month and it’s the top app in Apple’s app store - all great things! What I’m curious about is their current financial performance. Zoom makes money by charging a flat fee per user per month. And that fee was set based on both the value delivered but also some assumptions around usage. What happens to their margin if customers go from using Zoom for a few hours a week to multiple hours in day?

Paying for improved productivity

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago I used to prioritize cost when it came to developer tools. I’d resist paying for anything if I could find an open source alternative that worked reasonably well. These days I prioritize my effectiveness and am much more likely to pay for the right tool. A great example of this is my search for a database IDE. I started using Sequel Pro (when I was on a mac) for MySQL and SQuirreL for everything else. Sequel Pro was great - it was smooth, responsive, and felt optimized for MySQL. SQuirreL, on the other hand, was designed to support nearly all databases which made it worse across all of them.

Software comparison done right

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There are a variety of sites out there that exist solely to do comparisons of enterprise software - just type “product A vs product B” in Google and the first few pages will be littered with results. They all generally follow the same format: a side by side table comparing them feature by feature. Some of the values are factual - for example pricing - while others are based on user reviews.

Instagram targeting ads based on likes

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed a new type of ad targeting behavior on Instagram I haven’t seen before - liking someone’s shot containing a product leads to a targeted ad containing that product. In my case, a friend posted a picture of an order from the Milk Bar and I gave it a friendly like. A few days later I started seeing ads for the Milk Bar Store. I know it may seem like a manifestation of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon but I tend to notice ads and am pretty certain I have not seen any Milk Bar ad until I liked that image.

Whatever happened to fast software?

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe it’s just me but it feels as if modern software has been getting slower and slower. My computer is the fastest it has ever been and yet I’m more frustrated by the actual performance more than ever. Websites seem slower than they’ve ever been and I often find myself typing faster than the letters appear on the screen. Part of the problem is that everything seems to be web-based; in fact, many “desktop” apps are powered by Electron which is a wrapper around Chromium that makes it easy to write desktop apps. Unfortunately, easy doesn’t mean fast and we get the performance of a browser tab in standalone tab.

Build for optionality

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a company wide email back in September titled “Building for optionality” that describes how our engineering team maintains its impact despite the growing complexity of the business. There are a few TripleLift-specific concepts that I stripped away to make it more approachable but the theme is the same.

For a company that’s growing and changing as quickly as TripleLift, it’s critical to make sure our code is as impactful as possible. One way we do this is by building for optionality.

Advertising an Airbnb on Instagram

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I saw an ad for a specific Airbnb on Instagram and just don’t understand the economics. It seems unlikely that running this sort of campaign ends up being profitable. I’d expect the overlap between the audience targeted and those interested in booking the Airbnb to be extremely low and potentially non-existent.

This Airbnb has a nightly rate of ~$350 and a cleaning fee of $199. If we assume that the average guest books for 3 nights the host is getting ~$1,220 after Airbnb fees ($350 * 0.97 * 3 + $199). Let’s also assume that the mortgage, maintenance, and utilities are $5,000/month with an aggressive occupancy rate of 75%. That leads us to an actual monthly profit of $2,638 ($350 * 30 * 0.97 * 0.75 - $5000) across 7.5 (30 * 0.75/3) guests, or a per guest profit of $351.73 ($2,638 / 7.5).

Self hosted, externally managed

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I wrote about two questions one can ask when it comes to working with a technology vendor: who’s hosting and who’s managing?

I find the externally managed but self hosted one interesting. You’re giving another company access to your accounts and have full visibility into what they’re doing yet you still pay them. An example of this is Databricks. They offer a product akin to Spark-as-a-service along with a variety of bells and whistles that make it much easier to run and manage.

Finding parked cars: AWS vs Google computer vision

Sun, 29 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the newly rebooted Parking Spot Finder project I started poking around the cloud computer vision services to see how well they’d do at identifying parked cars from an “apartment view.” The image is pretty straightforward and shows two intersecting streets with a single available parking spot. I didn’t expect these services to identify the spot but my hope was that they’d be able to identify the cars themselves. For this test I tried both Google’s Vision and Amazon Rekognition. Google worked much better but still required a few tweaks to get what I wanted.

Gboard vs iOS swipe keyboard

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I’ve been blogging left-handed on my phone for the post week I got the chance to try out multiple iOS keyboards all with the hope of improving my typing speed. So far the best one had been Gboard using the swipe. It’s pretty similar to the native swipe keyboard offered within iOS but it’s just a tad more accurate - especially for shorter words.

Who's hosting? Who's managing?

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The end of the year is when companies get inundated with a ton of vendors trying to hit their sales goals. Given this volume comparisons start to become easier and patterns start to emerge. One that I noticed is the gamut of hosting options as well as managed options.

For hosting options, you can choose either the self-hosted option where the software is deployed to your own infrastructure. Alternatively, you can pay the vendor to deploy the code to their infrastructure and expose it through the necessary interfaces.

In praise of the simple tech stack

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

These days it’s so easy to feel as if you’re falling behind the tech curve. There’s a new tool or technology being released every day and there’s a strong temptation to try everything lest you fall behind.

That’s why it was so refreshing to come across “The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company.” It’s a post written by Wenbin Fang, the founder and CEO of ListenNotes.com, and is exactly what you think it is.

Disney's hostile takeover

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While watching The Imagineering Story I discovered that Disney was the target of a hostile takeover attempt in the 1980s. This is shocking given how dominant Disney currently is and it’s incredible that it came that close to being broken up and sold as individual pieces. Luckily, Disney withstood the attempt but this was a wakeup call that led to Michael Eisner rekindling the Disney magic.

There’s a ton written about the attempt by people better suited but what I find fascinating is that the entire breakup attempt goes against the entire strategy Walt Disney put together in 1957. The entire strategy is incredible and is still in play right now. The core are the movies and shows that Disney produces which then drive every other channel. The power of strong and compelling content creates adjacent opportunities that then feed the next generation of great content. It’s sad and scary to think what would have happened had Disney been broken up.

TabNine

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a heavy Visual Studio Code user and one of my favorite plugins has been TabNine. I use VS Code to hack around across a variety of languages in addition to note-taking and TabNine makes me significantly more productive. It’s a language-agnostic autocompleter that relies on machine learning rather than predefined heuristics and analyzes whatever you type in order to offer you a variety of suggestions. It’s similar to GMail’s new autocomplete functionality but in your editor.

Disney+

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I signed up for the Disney+ account as soon as it launched. The primary reason was for The Mandalorian but I’m also enjoying The Imagineering Story and access to The Simpsons archive. My biggest surprise was how polished it all was. It’s a brand new product and it’s impressive what the team has done. It had a few hiccups at launch has but has been extremely smooth since then.

I use it on the Fire TV Stick so can’t speak to the other platforms but it’s simpler, and yet more polished than Netflix. It doesn’t have any of the autoplay nonsense that Netflix and Amazon Prime shove down your throat. It also keeps the order of shows consistent across sessions which makes navigation a breeze. Yet my favorite feature so far is the keyboard less login and being able to do it solely from your phone. It’s such a simple thing but makes the onboarding experience orders of magnitude better versus Netflix where you’re forced to type on a TV keyboard through a remote. I’m honestly surprised Netflix still hasn’t implemented this given how often the Netflix app decides to log me out.

Search within Google search

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Google Search has evolved quite a bit from a single search bar and now contains a ton of modules to give users what they want as quickly as they can. This manifests itself in sections optimized for different verticals: sports, travel, shopping, weather, Wikipedia, and really anything that can be somewhat structured.

I discovered a new module yesterday when doing a search for an online thesaurus. Rather than just have a link to thesaurus.com, Google showed a search field that is hooked up directly to the thesaraus.com search. I don’t know if this was done solely by Google or required some collaboration but it’s another way Google is delivering more immediate answers and further capturing user attention.

Improving product reviews

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Modern ecommerce is predicated on having proper product reviews. Every site that sells online depends on them and yet they’re still far from what they can be. The reviews I’ve seen tend to be done when a product arrives rather than after years of use. Similarly, manufactures may change and shift production over time so early reviews will highlight the high quality of a product while latter reviews will bemoan the lack of quality.

Rebirth of digital piracy?

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The best jokes have an element of truth to them and earlier today I came across a comic that was a great example.

Source: Hoppy_Doodle @ reddit.com

It’s surprising how true that is. Many of us have been cable TV free for years and were content paying a monthly internet bill along with Netflix and maybe one or two additional subscriptions. Now it feels as if there’s a new streaming service launching every few months with the costs adding up to be equivalent to a traditional cable TV bill.

GitHub's security automation

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have a variety of old projects up on GitHub and recently noticed pull requests being opened from “dependabot” to fix security vulnerabilities in old requirements files. Turns out it’s a new feature offered by GitHub that scans repos and submits patches to upgrade insecure versions. This is a great idea - there’s very little chance that I’d go through my old and unmaintained repos to upgrade their dependencies but I’d definitely approve and merge a PR that upgrades a few of my libraries.

SSO and SAAS pricing

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For a very long time I wondered why SSO was always listed as a premium feature across nearly every enterprise software pricing page but no more! When you’re small it’s simple to manage permissions and the costs of screwing up are far smaller. Large companies, on the other hand, have complex organization structures with hundreds of employees that use a wide range of applications and access controls are a real concern. It’s possible to manage that through a herculean manual effort but it’s so much easier to just pay someone to solve the problem for you. Along similar lines, it’s valuable to minimize the amount of SAAS services used across the organization to reduce both the complexity and the cost although these days it feels like a fool’s errand.

Where's the new iPhone SE?

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After the new iPhone announcement there’s been a bunch of commentary around the desire to come up with a new version of the SE, a smaller factor phone. Fred Wilson posted a short post about it and it was quickly picked up and spread across various forums, such as Hacker News. The discussions generally ranged around the market size and how it’s not just worth it but I suspect a big part is the hardware.

Disney+

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the internet blew up after Disney’s announcement of a new series, The Mandalorian, that would be available as a part of their new streaming service, Disney+. I watched the trailer and as expected it hit all the right Star Wars nostalgia points. The show itself wasn’t what stood out. Instead it was the closing scene where Disney highlights what Disney+ includes: Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic.

What do airlines and LinkedIn have in common?

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Supposedly airlines could make the economy seats much better than they are without a significant investment but purposefully do not in order to encourage people that can afford business or first class to choose business or first class. Perversely, this makes sense. If economy is only slightly worse than business then I’d be willing to save quite a bit of money by choosing economy for a worse experience. Yet if the economy seats were significantly worse then I’d pay a premium for business. The art is in figuring out what that threshold should be to fill every seat.

A more efficient Google Calendar

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Google Calendar is starting to become one of my favorite Google products. They’re constantly shipping new features that keep on making it easier and more efficient to use. One of the most recent improvements is the ability to create a fully featured event directly from the calendar screen. One of my biggest use cases is to schedule a meeting with someone which requires knowing both their availability and the availability of a room. In the past, this required going into the full screen edit page which caused a bit of friction. Earlier this week while creating an event from the calendar page I was able to also enter a name and see their schedules appear on the calendar. Similarly, there’s a room field that also offers suggestions for free rooms with the desired capacity.

A more efficient Google Calendar backup

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Why is your Confluence in Polish?

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Despite not speaking any Polish, I changed my Confluence language to Polish earlier this week to finally fix a problem that’s been bugging me for years. Confluence has the concept of a “date lozenge” which allows you to add a date via a helpful calendar and gives it a nice looking format. We decided to use these lozenges to track dates in our system since it improves consistency and they do get special treatment in Confluence and lead to a few neat features - for example being able to use them as due dates in tasks.

Substack vs Medium

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I heard about Substack for the first time today while reading the Stratechery newsletter. For those not familiar (like me before today!), Substack is a startup that makes it easier for individual content creators to create and monetize newsletters with the goal of empowering them to build their own media empires.

As I read the article I couldn’t help but think about the struggles Medium has had since its founding. It started as a blogging platform and had a variety of challenges with monetization over the years. At one point they had advertising but gave up on it in 2017. Since then they’ve shifted to a subscription model where once you hit a limit some articles end up being put up behind a paywall, very similar to a traditional publisher. I don’t know how Medium is doing but I doubt this is where they wanted to be - monetizing in the same way as the NY Times.

Credit card merchant fees

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A Stratechery post covering Facebook’s cryptocurrency launch mentions that credit card merchant fees are generally a flat $0.29 fee plus 1.5~3.5% of the transaction. The argument is that the market is efficient and if there was a way to drop them one of the credit card providers would have to gain an advantage.

I don’t buy this argument. I don’t have the history of merchant fees but my suspicion is that they changed minimally, if at all, over the past few decades despite the massive amount of data being collected and the processing capability to go with it. The rates could be much lower but there’s limited incentive to get there since credit card companies can charge on both the consumer and merchant side. There’s a big incentive to optimize on the consumer side since they’re the ones spending the money and understanding the default and fraud risk are major drivers of profitability. On the merchant side it’s a stable rate with little reason to change it.

Combine registration and sign in

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of nearly every site or app is to get users to engage as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s surprising that so many sites have a separate flow for registration versus sign in. There’s no good reason that these two flows shouldn’t be combined.

A part of nearly every registration is entering an email and password so why not make them the first step of the sign up process? If that email and password are already in the system just log her in. And if not then you have the email address of a to-be-registered user. The only real risk is if someone thought they had an account and wanted to sign in but instead signed up - and that’s a good problem to have from the application side since you have the contact info of an interested user.

Sign In with Apple

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Apple recently made the announcement that apps that provide third party login will also be required to offer a Sign in with Apple option. Apple will then, in turn, anonymize the email address and thus anomyze the user. The idea here being that the app will only have access to the random email generated by Apple and all email will have to be proxied through the email address generated by Apple.

Polaroid and Dr. Edwin Land

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War which starts with a wonderful biography of Edwin Land and ends with a ton of detail about the Polaroid/Kodak lawsuit. Polaroid was a remarkable company and it’s both amazing that it’s no longer around and remarkable that the modern tech world doesn’t seem to appreciate Polaroid and Edwin Land. We put Steve Jobs on a pedestal but Edwin Land was the precursor. He leveraged technology to create incredible consumer products and made Polaroid the Apple of its day.

Free as in puppy

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve known about “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” for a while now but only recently have I learned about “free as in puppy.” I came across the phrase while reading a Stratechery article describing various ways of thinking about regulation. The idea is that just like getting a free puppy, you get it for free but it comes with a significant long term cost.

I’m a big fan of the phrase and it highlights a very common tradeoff we make, especially in engineering. We often get carried away solving a problem but fail to consider the long term cost of maintenance and support. By the time we discover these long term costs the product is entrenched and we’re on the hook for maintaining it in its current form. It’s important to slow down and realize that nearly all software we write is in the “free as in puppy” camp. Writing the code to work is the easy part - writing it to work with no ongoing cost is the challenge.

Airbnb and HotelTonight

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago Airbnb announced that they would be acquiring Hotel Tonight. This was a surprise - throughout its history Airbnb has made a point to compete with hotels and my gut was that hotels would not be too happy to partner with a competitor. I understand that Airbnb is trying to grow before their inevitable IPO and to do so they need to invest in growth. I also subscribe to the argument that from their standpoint they’re focused on giving people a place to stay and not necessarily that concerned with the exact medium - private rental or hotel or whatever else.

LinkedIn's terrible messaging experience

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a bit of a ranty post but it’s incredible how poor the LinkedIn messaging experience is. If anyone sends me a LinkedIn message I get an email telling me that so-and-so sent me a message. To read the actual message I need to clickthrough to get to the LinkedIn site. I get it, they want to increase engagement and have me access the site and show me something new. It’s just a ridiculously poor user experience. They could easily include the message text and then I can decide whether it’s something I need to respond to and when. Instead I get a useless notification telling me that I have a new message. It’s as if the LinkedIn message experience was modeled after AOL’s “you’ve got mail.”

Dropbox should drop the freemium model

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a bit heretical but I suspect Dropbox would make more money if it moved away from a freemium model. I have been a user of the free Dropbox account for multiple years now and due to their various promotions have gotten my free storage up to 6GB and yet I use just under 4GB. I don’t use it to store images but instead use it to store important documents that I want to both keep safe but also frequently access across multiple devices. It’s unlikely I’m going to upgrade to a new plan. The only reason would be for photo storage but there are a ton of free or cheaper options.

Netflix recommendation system failure

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have zero interest in horror or drama and have never watched any of them on Netflix yet Netflix decided to automatically start playing the gory intro to their new Ted Bundy series. I understand their desire to highlight their shows but autoplaying something that gory just seems like a terrible decision, especially given my viewing history.

Many people will launch Netflix with their families around and having something so graphically violent greet you is a surefire way to lose fans and subscribers. It seems obvious that a company should not be autoplaying violence and I’m surprised that Netflix, a company that takes pride in its recommendation system, managed to do something this tone-deaf.

A personal DSP

Sat, 09 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A common refrain from people who use adblock is that they’d be willing to pay for the content if it were an option and only use adblock to avoid the tracking and slow site speed. The desire is to have a way to see how much a website is generating from their visit and give the publisher that money directly. That way the publisher gets the equivalent amount of money as they would otherwise and the user gets to avoid ads.

Finally, some price increases

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For as long as I can remember it felt that there was this hidden rule that companies cannot raise prices or risk mass customer abandonment. Yet the past few few months we’ve seen two major companies increase prices - Atlassian and Netflix - without any adverse effects. The products are improving and are offering more functionality so it’s only fair that the prices increase. This is a welcome sign and I hope it leads to companies starting to invest significantly more in improving their existing products with the expectation that they’ll be able to raise prices in line with the additional value they’re bringing. Imagine what sort of investments companies would be making if they knew they’d be able to raise the price of their products.

Buying Kindle books on iOS

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week I finished an ebook on the train and wanted to purchase another one for the way back while waiting in the station. Remarkably, Apple, a company that emphasizes and takes pride in its user experience, does not make this easy. It turns out that the Kindle app on iOS does not allow you to actually purchase a book and isn’t even allowed to link to a page where it can be purchased. I understand the business rationale - Apple wants the 30% of the digital sale and Amazon doesn’t want to give it up - but it leads to an awful experience, especially when only the station has service and I know I will be signalless once I board the train.

GitHub's new plan

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today GitHub announced that they would make a significant change to their plans: a free plan would now be able to have private repos. I’m likely one of the many GitHub users who host their personal projects on GitHub with many being private. Some of these are projects I’m just not ready to release while others are proprietary scripts or private DevOps code. I was on the $7/mo Pro plan and downgraded to the free plan. I lost the advanced collaboration tools which I wasn’t using for my personal projects in the first place and it feels good to be $7 richer each month.

Amazon vs Walmart

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most exciting business battles is Amazon vs Walmart and I’m interested in seeing what happens in 2019. As I’m writing this Amazon has a market cap of $723B while Walmart is at $268. At the same time, Amazon’s 2017 revenue was $178B while Walmart’s was $486B. The market views them as two completely different businesses and that’s fair - Walmart is a traditional retailer while Amazon has its hands in a variety of businesses - ranging from retail, to a marketplace, to a cloud hosting provider. Walmart is still trying to figure out ecommerce: they acquired Jet.com in 2016 and this past year bought Flipkart. Amazon, on the other hand, seems to be playing a very different game. They acquired Whole Foods in 2017 and Ring the past year. In the first case Amazon is going deeper into traditional retail while the latter feels like an entry into the home. It looks as if Walmart is fighting yesterday’s battle while Amazon continues plowing ahead into the future. I don’t know how this will play out but I am an Amazon shareholder so can’t help but feel optimistic.

Twenty seconds makes all the difference

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently switched from a 2015 Macbook Pro to a new ThinkPad with Ubuntu and one of the most noticeable differences is how much faster this blog builds. A few years ago I moved this blog over to AMP to improve its load times. I don’t want to go into the details of AMP but in order to get the performance wins all styling is inlined - that means that instead of linking to a CSS file the CSS rules are explicitly defined on each page. That means the build system is not simply generating an HTML page off of a template but also inlining the CSS rules onto every generated page.

Wired headphones

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I left my Bluetooth headphones at home this morning and ended up borrowing a wired pair during the day. I forgot how easy it is to just be able to plug in and go - no waiting for the headphones to turn on, no waiting for the Bluetooth to connect, and no having to deal with selecting the proper audio out channel. The convenience of Bluetooth outweighs the costs but it was a stark reminder of how much more robust and simpler tools used to be. To be indistinguishable from “magic” our products need to have a lot of magic inside them. Almost always the magic works but every once in a while we end up stuck. It seems to be the natural way of things. When cars were first created they were extremely mechanical and owners had the skillset and ability to fix them. Now they’re all digital and require a licensed mechanic. Computers are the same way - I grew up being able to do some quick repairs and replacements but good luck trying to replace components in modern computers or phones: it’s doable but not very enjoyable. There is a part of me that yearns for the simpler days but I’m realistic enough to know that I don’t really want to go back.

Calendly

Fri, 28 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years I’ve received a ton of Calendly links - it’s an application that integrates with your calendar and hosts a personal page that allows others to book time on your calendar. As a user it’s great since it offloads scheduling responsibility from you to others. At the same time, I was was always bothered by the fact that that effort was externalized to me despite it actually being more efficient for both sides. In any case, I had a real need to actually use it in order to help an external recruiter find time on my calendar to conduct some phone screens and the onboarding process was extremely slick. It was as simple as authenticating with my Google account, granting a few permissions, and then receiving a public link that could be shared with others. I wish more products had as simple of an onboarding - you get the basic functionality with minimal effort yet have the option to customize it as you become comfortable with the product and your use case expands.

Happy holidays from Visual Studio Code

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Visual Studio Code has been my go-to editor since the beginning of 2017 and I’m a huge fan. They reinforced my belief with a little Easter egg earlier today to celebrate Christmas. The settings icon in the bottom right corner got a special Santa hat and clicking on it gives you an additional menu option labeled “Happy Holidays!” which gives you a friendly holiday message along with some falling snow.

Quora's revenue model

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

While browsing a Hacker News thread about Quora I came across the following exchange:

I had always assumed Quora made money through ads and didn’t even consider that they had another revenue stream. The Hacker News thread indicates that they have a substantial revenue stream coming from selling the Q&A data to AI/ML companies but I haven’t been able to find anything else that supports this. Part of the difficulty in searching for results is that just by typing in “Quora” the results are biased towards Quora itself.

Edge moving to Chromium

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a bit late to the party but it’s unbelievable that Microsoft is going to move future versions of Edge to be built on top of Chromium. This is shocking. I can’t separate Internet Explorer from Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft built, launched, and bundled Internet Explorer to drive Netscape into the ground which led to the famous Microsoft antitrust case. It feels as if Microsoft is giving up on Internet Explorer and it’s incredibly surprising. This is bigger than any of the other moves Microsoft has done to show they are a very different company. This is more significant than the GitHub acquisition. This is more significant than supporting their applications on operating systems other than windows. This is moving away from 20 years of history and it shows how different the current Microsoft is from the one of the past. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when this decision was discussed - there must have been so much passion in that room. There must have been so many viewpoints: ranging from those that have been working on IE for the past 20 years, to the product team that’s responsible for the future of IE, to the executive team that needed to make the call. It really is surprising that they had the strength and conviction to be able to acknowledge that they’d be better off using Chromium.

I finally tried an electric scooter

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I live in the NYC area which has Citi Bike but doesn’t allow any scooter companies to operate. In fact it actually disallows any electric bikes/scooters/skateboards/hoverboards and only makes an exception for pedal-assisted bikes. And since I haven’t been traveling much the closest I could get to trying an electric scooter was reading the endless series of articles about them.

Luckily for me I went on a vacation to Mexico City and got the chance to try a Lime scooter. It was great. I use Citi Bike whenever I can in NYC so I didn’t expect the scooters to be that much different but it felt much more liberating with significantly less friction. The big difference is that there is no docking station which is always a concern in NYC: a station may be empty when I’m looking for a bike or a station is full and I need to dock a bike. The electric powered also makes it much easier to just hop on and go. I don’t mind the Citi Bike pedaling but the scooter only needed a small kick-start and then quickly accelerated to over 14 mph. The scooter was also much smaller and lighter than a Citi Bike which added to the feeling.

Scenepeek

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Way back when as I was just leaving the finance world to go into tech I attempted a startup with a friend called Scenepeek. The goal was to constantly aggregate all of a city’s events and make them easily searchable and discoverable by people who were looking to do something. Since both of us were in NYC and there are always a ton of events we decided that it would be the perfect candidate. We built a ton of scrapers optimized for all sorts of different sites, created a data model that was able to support nearly any type of event, and ended up launching a pretty crude but functional site. It never succeeded but we learned a ton throughout the process.

Automatic login

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is somewhat heretical but whenever I receive an email that has a link behind a login I wish clicking the link would automatically log me in. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit typing my username and password on various sites and too often have had to do it multiple times to get the password right. It would be amazing if clicking a link on an email would automatically log me in and navigate to the linked page.

Fat specs, light stories

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Most modern software companies use some form of agile as their software development process. There are a variety of different approaches and forms out there and each company ends up with a style that works for them. One of the core beliefs I’ve developed is that stories should be kept light and that time and effort should be spent on the product requirement documents and specs. Investing in the PRDs and specs encourages everyone to understand the high level problem being solved and how the various pieces of the solutions fit together. Otherwise you run the risk of mistaking the forest for the trees where each ticket is done as written but when combined they don’t actually work to make the proper whole.

A delivery aggregation service

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Full disclosure: I know very little about the food delivery space so this is more speculative than anything rooted in reality.

Given how many companies are doing food delivery it seems there should be a single delivery aggregation service that combines all of them to act as the perfect dispatcher for drivers. If I’m delivering food on behalf of Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, and the countless others I missed it would make sense for me to be able to pick up from as many nearby restaurants as possible and then deliver to as many colocated locations as possible. The ideal situation would be that I’m able to pick up all my deliveries from a single restaurant and then deliver them all to the same floor of an apartment building.

An ad on the Google search homepage

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Turns out not even Google is immune from the pressures of Cyber Monday. As minimal as the Google search homepage is they still made the effort to have a callout, however slight, to promote their Cyber Monday deals. A while back I read an article that calculated how much additional revenue Google would be able to generate if they put ads on their homepage. I don’t recall the exact number or the details but I imagine it’s a massive amount. Yet Google never took the step of putting ads on the search homepage so it’s interesting to see them doing it for their own store. The revenue here must be significantly less than what they’d see through traditional advertising but at the same time it’s a very minimal hit to the user experience. I can only imagine how many people needed to be involved in this decision though.

Adding optionality to products

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Building products involves making countless decisions. One of the biggest is defining the functionality and how it should be exposed to the users. In my mind, answers to this question like on a spectrum. On one extreme you have the “take what you can get” approach where the functionality is exposed with no customization and no advanced features but the experience is optimized for one specific use case. As an example of this think of the original Google search - a single search field, minimal search functionality, and two buttons. On the other extreme you have the “customize everything” approach where you think of all possible use cases and provide options to allow users to do what they want. An example of this is Microsoft Word - most people use a fraction of all the functionality yet there’s a ton hidden away behind some menu.

What messaging war?

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently there’s a “messaging war” going on among the dozens of apps and social networks, all competing to be the dominant messaging app. There really are a ton of these. I have a folder on my phone dedicated to messaging and it contains Apple Messages, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Signal. In addition, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat all have messaging functionality. Adding these up I have 10 messaging apps on my phone.

A UX gem in Google Slides

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a sucker for subtle UX gems and Google continues to amaze me. While working on a presentation using the Slides product I had to modify the colors of a few objects. The UX for this is usually pretty normal - you select the object, hit the icon to modify the color, and choose a new color. Usually it’s slightly better and you get to see the existing color. What surprised me with the Google Slides experience is that I didn’t just see the existing color but also saw the previously picked color. Since I was modifying a series of objects to the same color this was a pleasant experience, especially since I was working off of a series of color shades that looked too similar. It would have been even better if I was able to bulk change the objects but a win’s a win.

Gmail's autocomplete

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I’ve been managing I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in my inbox. What’s both sad and amazing is how accurate the new Gmail autocompletions (officially called Smart Compose) have gotten. They’re incredibly accurate for common phrases and are likely leveraging very similar technology to what Google is using for their autocomplete search. It’s great for finishing off that last sentence and even acts as a real time phrase thesaurus that helps suggest alternate phrasing.

Just ship it

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know whether it’s the pace of modern life or something else but I no longer have a good intuition for recent events. Things that happened a few months ago feel as if they happened a year ago and things that happened a year ago feel as if they happened multiple years ago. An example of this was Twitter increasing a tweet’s character limit to 280. Try to guess when they increased the limit?

Google Calendar: Constantly shipping

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s impressive when companies constantly churn out products and features and it’s even more impressive the larger the company. In my mind this used to be Amazon but lately I’ve been surprised by how often Google Calendar is updated. It feels as if every month there’s at least one update that I accidentally discover and get a pleasant surprise.

Google Calendar underwent a major redesign earlier this year and it seemed to have been the foundation for the recent improvements. I’m sure I’m not capturing everything but just in the past few months the following features were launched:

Privacy vs user experience

Sun, 29 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

These days it feels as if every tech behemoth is competing with every other tech behemoth but one of the more interesting battles has been between Google and Apple. Google is the accepted leader in ML and AI and they leverage it to offer a better and constantly improving user experience. Apple, on the other hand, has been stressing that unlike Google it doesn’t make money off of data mining your data and is instead focused on privacy.

Bulk discounts hurt competition

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

While reading yet another article about scooter startups I came across an obvious quote by Gao Lufeng, CEO of Segway-Ninebot, the leading scooter manufacturer: “As one of the biggest battery buyers, we have the bargaining power to get the lowest price in the market.”

This is obvious and we see it everywhere: buying in bulk gets you a discount. As a consumer I can go to Amazon and look at any item and the per unit price when buying a single item is going to be higher than when buying a pack. And the more I buy the more the discount on a per unit basis. The business world is no different and it’s not surprising since both sides benefit in this situation: the buyer is able to get a cheaper product and the seller is able to get guaranteed sales while hopefully getting more efficiencies of scale and which further reduces the manufacturing cost.

Rise of microbrands

Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

While browsing Instagram the other day I saw an ad for Optimum. Despite it being for Optimum the ad showed a sports clip that could have just as easily been on a highlight real or a a trailer for a sports movie. In fact, if it weren’t associated with Optimum maybe I would have even clicked on it.

Having a strong brand is incredibly valuable - think Coca Cola. A weak brand (think amy ISP), on the other hand, is incredibly damaging. If a company has a strong brand they should definitely flaunt it but I’m surprised that in this day and age poorly branded companies still operate under their primary brand. There’s nothing stopping them from launching dozens of unique brands each designed to appeal to a particular audience.

Retrieving Kindle highlights

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At this point I’ve moved most the majority of my reading to a Kindle. If I want to read a book I’ll only get a physical version if the Kindle version is unavailable. It’s often cheaper, immediately available, takes up no space, and comes with a variety of annotation abilities. My biggest frustration has been how difficult it’s been to export my highlights. I will often highlight interesting passages and quotes and every few weeks will dump them into a giant text file that I will occasionally reference or search.

Optimize for keyboard shortcuts

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big believer of offering keyboard-only experiences to your power users. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to build a loved productivity application without keyboard shortcuts. Productivity applications are all about productivity and keyboard shortcuts are what give your users power and speed. The mouse and menus are easier for newcomers but those that stick with the application inevitably need the speed that comes from shortcuts.

The ultimate example of this is Excel. If you watch any power user of Excel they rarely, if ever, use the mouse. Instead, they’re able to do everything they need using the keyboard and significantly quicker than if they were force the mouse. There’s some functionality that’s not even possible to do with a mouse alone - for example array formulas.

MoviePass: A fascinating business model

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Given my lack of cultural knowledge the fact that I’ve heard of MoviePass should be a sign that it’s a big deal. I came across a fascinating article today about MoviePass’s revenue model - they charge just under $10/month and in return you get unlimited access to movies in theaters. What’s remarkable is that it seems MoviePass doesn’t actually have a subsidized relationship with theaters and just pays theaters the full ticket price.

Send a shirt, get a shirt

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Despite being an early tech adopter I avoid buying clothes online. At first the justification was that I didn’t want to deal with the cost of returns but these days nearly every retailer offers free returns. At this point it’s more habit than anything else and given how infrequently I buy clothes I’d rather just do it in person when necessary.

The one service that I wish existed, and I’m sure it does somewhere, is a place where I can send some existing clothes that I know fit me perfectly and then have them used as the basis for new, custom made clothes. I have a great dress shirt that I’ve had for many years and it shows - there’s a giant rip on the elbow and the colors are starting to fade yet I love the fit. I refuse to throw it out and instead keep rolling up the sleeves to hide the tear. If I could get the same shirt in a variety of styles and colors but with the same perfect fit I’d be glad to throw it out.

More intelligent credit card merchant rates

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

While reading today’s Stratechery update on Patreon changing their pricing model I came across the following passage:

Of course this wasn’t great for creators: payments made for a creation released on November 2 wouldn’t land in creators’ bank accounts until some time after December 1; the reasoning, though, was clear — credit card fees. Here I can certainly bring personal experience to bear: credit card fees are really expensive (they are by far Stratechery’s largest expense)! While the exact amount varies by network (that is, American Express is the most expensive), most credit card fees are ~$0.30/charge plus anywhere from 1.5% to 3.5% of the total amount charged.

Ride sharing ride bailing

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

One of the more frustrating modern, first-world problems is booking a Lyft or an Uber ride and having the driver cancel the ride a soon as they find out where you’re going. While against policy it is a rational decision by the driver. Why agree to a trip somewhere where it’ll be difficult to pick up another passenger and then have to return to where you started and incur a toll? Of course you run the risk of a complaint but I suspect most people will silently accept the misjustice so the expected value of canceling the ride is in your favor.

Scaling meal kit distribution

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today I read a neat article covering the meal-kit delivery space and how give Blue Apron’s lackluster performance on the public market the still-private competitors are exploring alternative options, including partnering with grocery stores and general CPG companies. I hadn’t thought much about the space but it’s a great idea.

Fresh food is a difficult business that benefits heavily from scale. Buying in bulk gives you significant price discounts and being able to have high throughput reduces the amount of food that spoils. One of the simplest ways to increase your scale is to increase the amount of distribution channels you have. These meal-kit delivery companies started by doing delivery to the home but there’s nothing stopping them from offering the same meal kits at grocery stores. In fact, maybe it makes sense to not even have an exclusive partnership with any single chain but try to get them into as many stores as possible. They’d have to do an accurate job modeling the demand but they’d likely be able to drop the price enough to make it attractive to customers. The biggest price reduction would come from not having to ship individual orders but instead deliver them in bulk to a single store. A more interesting version of this would be to actually allow the grocery store to contribute some of the ingredients - benefiting both.

Google Docs vs Confluence

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a happy user of Google Docs for years now and have yet to find another product that makes collaboration that easy or simple. It’s a well designed product with a ton of shortcuts that make it incredibly easy to be exceptionally productive. I can dive in and quickly leave a few comments as well as assign some todos knowing that the relevant folk will be notified. And for a very long time I’ve been using it for the bulk of my writing - including specs, design documents, and general note taking.

A Google Docs efficiency win

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Old Google Docs behavior

I’m an efficiency fiend and love seeing my heavily used products updated with any and all functionality that make them a tad easier to use. A few weeks ago, Google Docs, one of my most heavily used applications - in fact where I’m writing this very post - made a minor change to the “Move to” functionality that created one of these small efficiency wins. Before the change, clicking the small folder icon while in a document would show a menu with the item’s current location and a “Move this item” option. Clicking that behavior would enable move mode and would require the user to navigate to the appropriate folder and then confirming the move.

Apple's ARKit

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

During this year’s WWDC Apple announced ARKit, a development framework that simplifies the ability of incorporating augmented reality into your app. I’ve been fascinated by this for a while and took a stab at getting their code running. I’ve only dabbled in iOS development so the bulk of the effort involved getting the latest Xcode beta and then discovering to run the full example I needed to upgrade my phone to run the iOS 11 beta. After this the included ARKit example worked perfectly and left me pleasantly surprised. It worked remarkably well and highlighted how powerful ARKit can be; I’ve included some sample screenshots below. Snapchat had to invest the time and effort to develop their filters but ARKit will make that significantly easier for future developers. This is an extremely powerful move by Apple since it’s all about the apps and this gives app developers a tool unique to iOS. I have a lot to learn here but I’m excited to get deeper into the augmented reality world. I remember playing with VRML in the 90s and I consider this an extension of my childhood interests.

Engineering, product, and design

Sat, 27 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The best products are built when engineering, product, and designers work together. When things are running smoothly each brings skill, knowledge, and experience the others cannot. When things are running poorly the teams do not respect or trust each other and question the others’ approach and decision making. Inevitably this leads to a flawed product that doesn’t solve customer needs and gets replaced by one that does. It’s possible to ride previous success through inertia, marketing, and price but to grow in the modern era you need to focus on product.

IVR to SMS

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Seems it’s all about messaging now and yet we somehow still have the ridiculous automated call systems which the industry calls interactive voice response. Every single person I know hates having to call a customer support number only to hear a robotic voice that requires a series of frustrated enunciations to get what you wanted. I understand that it’s a huge win in terms of cost savings since you’re replacing people with software but moving over to SMS and asynchronous messaging would make it a better experience at an even lower cost.

AMP and subscription paywalls

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A variety of publishers are adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to speed up the performance of their sites on mobile. In fact, I’m using AMP to power my entire blog on both desktop and mobile and it’s significantly faster than my old, heavyweight site. But I’m a small time blogger and to get real publishers on board AMP needs to support a variety of monetization options - including ads and subscriptions - that are able to generate the same revenue they’re getting without AMP.

Quality over quantity: NextDoor vs Craigslist

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend my wife and decided that we needed to upgrade our couch and in our eagerness decided that we wanted it delivered as soon as possible which happened to be Friday (yesterday). This led us to the question of what to do with our existing couch. The pragmatist in me decided that we should list it on Craigslist and NextDoor for $300 and see who would bite but after a few days without any response it became clear that if we wanted it gone soon it would need to be free. So this past Wednesday I relisted as a free and started receiving bites - just under a dozen on Craigslist and one via NextDoor.

Fulfillment by Amazon counterfeiting

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve come across a few articles describing the supposedly massive amount of counterfeiting happening on Amazon. The way it works is that Amazon offers a Fulfillment by Amazon (called FBA) option where a merchant sends their items to Amazon’s warehouse which is then eligible for Prime shipping since it’s just going to be shipped by Amazon. The way Amazon implements this is by commingling the items - so if two merchants send Amazon the same item Amazon will treat it as the same item when it comes to consumers. A merchant is able to opt out of this commingling but only with a higher fee.

Amazon's peer to peer marketplace

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It looks as if Amazon is entering yet another market - the local peer to peer marketplace. They just launched a peer to peer marketplace in Bangalore. The pitch is incredibly simple - you create a listing and it’s listed on Amazon. As soon as it’s sold Amazon will pick up the item and deliver it to the buyer. I’ve used Craigslist a ton in the past and coordinating the delivery and handoff was always a frustrating experience. There doesn’t seem to be much information on how quality is measured - what happens if the time you get isn’t in the shape it was listed or just doesn’t work?

The NFL abroad

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

NFL viewership is down 10% this season and I understand the desire to grow the brand and the sport abroad. It seems misguided to take a product that’s declining in popularity and rather than fixing the core problems to try to grow it as is. This is akin to a tech startup marketing the hell out of a product that’s unable to retain its existing customers. The proper approach is to nail the product before trying to push it into the market.

NFL Thursdays on Twitter

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In April, Twitter announced a deal with the NFL to broadcast Thursday night games and I gave it a shot this past Thursday via the Twitter app on my FireTV. The primary motivation was to watch the game but I was also curious to see Twitter’s implementation. I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth and clean the overall experience was: you could watch the entire game without knowing it was via Twitter but the tweets added a please, yet optional, touch. The only real difference between the Twitter app and any other FireTV streaming app was that Twitter augmented the experience with twitter content - tweets, images, and scopes.

A smarter Touch ID

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Apple’s Touch ID is great but one thing it doesn’t handle well is wet fingers. Even if my hands are a little bit sweaty or not completely dry it’s difficult to unlock the phone. Yet as soon as they’re dry the phone immediately unlocks. What’s surprising, especially given Apple’s focus on delivering the perfect user experience, is that this is still a problem. I’m not familiar with the hardware behind Touch ID but even if there’s some sort of warped fingerprint it should be good enough. The fact that there are a few unsuccessful attempts with the wet thumb followed by successful attempt should be enough to develop a profile for the wet version which can be used on future attempts. Modern products succeed by delivering optimized experiences; future products will need to adapt and grow along with us until they become eerily predictive.

Smarter geographic ad targeting

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Targeting is one of the best ways to improve the return on an advertising campaign. By identifying potential customers you’re able to focus your advertising on them rather than someone random. And one of the best simplest ways is to set up your advertising campaigns to focus on a specific geography. Maybe your product is only sold in the United States and advertising it elsewhere is a waste. Or maybe your product is sold everywhere but the messaging and copy needs to vary by region. Or maybe it’s sold everywhere with the same exact copy but the price varies by region. Being able to change your campaigns by geography is a simple way to improve the performance of any campaign.

Double down on your brand and IP

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Pokemon Go is huge right now. People across all age ranges, demographics, and geographies are getting involved and it’s hard to imagine this sort of adoption for any other game. What I find fascinating is that Pokemon Go was based on the same augmented reality mechanics as Ingress, another game developed by Niantic Labs. Ingress has a loyal following but pales in comparison against Pokemon Go when looking at the user numbers, despite Pokemon Go being less than 2 weeks old while Ingress has been around for almost 4 years.

Whatever happened to automatic login?

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When I started building sites one of the accepted principles was to give customers what they want as soon as you can. This manifested itself by taking users to the logged in view whenever they navigated to the site’s homepage. This makes sense - if you know a user’s logged in why waste their time by showing them a homepage that’s designed to sell the product?

Yet recently I encountered two sites, Greenhouse and Tallie, that will default to the homepage and only load the logged in view when I click the sign in link. One argument is that they both have separate domains for the logged in experience - app.greenhouse.io rather than www.greenhouse.io and usetallie.com rather than tallie.com - but there’s nothing stopping them from redirecting to those as soon as they recognize that a user is logged in.

A Twitter Moments fail

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge Twitter fan so it’s especially frustrating when I encounter issues. The latest one was discovering a “This content is not available in your country” message when trying to catch up on some Euro Cup highlights in a moment. I understand that in today’s digital rights world there’s always a chance for some content to be unavailable but there’s no reason it should have been included in Twitter’s flagship product that’s supposed to attract and engage new users. The fact that it’s manually curated makes it even worse - how could this have slipped through? One explanation is that the curator was not based in the US and had access to the video. The other is that the video was available initially but was pulled later on. In both cases Twitter should have had the appropriate safeguards to identify this was happening and amend the moment. An even better approach would have been to have different versions of the moment depending on the user’s location. The current implementation just feels sloppy and I can’t stand to see it in a product I love using.

Snapchat's massive potential

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The more I use Snapchat the more obvious the potential. The way the product has evolved reminds me of Facebook’s history. Facebook started simply as a profile page for Ivy League college students but due to strong execution and brilliant product decisions has grown into the current behemoth. Snapchat is on a similar path - the initial version was a simple ephemeral photo sharing app but the recent updates seem frequent and massively impactful.

Low cost at small scale

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Wall Street Journal had a great piece on why produce is so cheap in Chinatown. The conclusion:

Her discovery: Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.

Most of the city’s fruits and vegetables come from wholesalers at the Hunts Point Produce Market, the South Bronx distribution hub boasting all the color and accessibility of La Guardia Airport. Chinatown’s green grocers, in contrast, buy their stock from a handful of small wholesalers operating from tiny warehouses right in the neighborhood.

The Brave browser

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to launch a new browser seems like a fool’s errand and yet if there’s anyone that can do it it’s Brendan Eich, who in addition to creating JavaScript also ran Mozilla. Given his pedigree I decided to give his new browser, Brave, a shot. It’s definitely a bit on the rough side compared to the mainstream browsers but it’s surprisingly fast. The speed improvement comes from a built in adblocker rather than having it implemented via slower browser extensions. At the same time Brave wants to pay publishers for their content by partnering with higher quality advertisers in order to serve benevolent ads that should also be priced at a premium.

Messaging app fragmentation

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The messaging space is fascinating. There are probably hundreds of apps available with pretty massive fragmentation. Onavo collected the following data to indicate the reach of the various messaging apps by country and while WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) is clearly dominant there are some countries that WhatsApp is a fringe player, especially among Asian countries.

via TechCrunch

AWS, Stripe, and WeWork

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have been subscribed to Stratechery for almost a year now but have recently started listening to the Exponent podcasts. One of them, titled Pickaxe Retailers, makes the case that WeWork has an appropriate valuation due to their ability to leverage their strong brand and become the utility layer for real estate as well as provide a slew of products to their tenants. Similar to the way AWS has eliminated the need to run your own data center and Stripe has eliminated the need to acquire merchant accounts and negotiate with vendors, WeWork may do the same for physical space - both commercial and residential.

Irrationality of the markets: Amazon up, Netflix down

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last night, Amazon announced that in addition to the annual plan they’re going to start offering Prime as a monthly service. Sure enough, investors interpreted this as good move by Amazon (up 1.51% at end of day) while hurting Netflix (down 2.79% at end of day and even more post earnings). These percentages translate into a $1.34B decrease to the Netflix valuation and a $4.49B increase in valuation for Amazon. As a shareholder of both I find this behavior interesting for its irrationality.

The corporate email signup design pattern

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of the latest trends I’ve noticed is B2B companies is allowing you to sign up with a company email address and automatically linking you with the rest of the organization. This is a definite no-brainer and a really simple way of getting new users setup without having to be bottlenecked by a burdensome administrative process. No one on the HR team has to enter employees into the system nor send anyone their username or account info. Instead they just provide a link to the service and have people sign up with their company email address. Once this is done they immediately have access to whatever the base employee account should have. Only later one does an admin need to grant additional permissions and privileges.

Ben Thompson's “laddering up” and building bigger moats

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I finished the The Everything Store, which details the rise of Amazon from a fledgling online book retailer to its current form. One pattern that stood out for me was how Amazon was able to continuously push into new business areas due to the infrastructure that they had in place based on previous decisions and commitments.

They started with books but were able to grow into other smaller products once they figured out the logistics behind shipping smaller items. Once Amazon had that in place they kept tweaking their distribution system to expand the variety of products offered while improving the speed of delivery. This allowed them to keep amassing a list of products which they used to open up their platform to third party sellers. And as Amazon improved their infrastructure they were able to open that up to these third party sellers as well. In parallel, they built AWS to provide computer services to internal Amazon teams but were able to turn it into a brand new line of business that powers the majority of new startups. And now their are rumors of Amazon building out a shipping service to bypass FedEx and UPS.

Airbnb, Uber, and local laws

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I read an interesting piece on Airbnb in New Orleans. The content itself isn’t new - it highlights the typical conflict between those that view Airbnb as violating local ordinances and ruining the city and others who believe that Airbnb brings value and is helping New Orleans rebuild after Katrina.

But what was interesting was the repeated claims of Airbnb and the other rental marketplaces that it’s just not scalable to follow local policies for every city and it’s up to the users to know their local regulations and follow them. I understand it’s difficult to localize complex products but these responses just feel like an excuse.

Don't build a Homer

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago, one of my projects at Yodle involved building out an automated reporting system that would consolidate all the existing reports being run via SQL queries and consolidate them into a unified application that would take care of the execution and the delivery. During the design process I spoke with existing users to see what else they’d like and it quickly morphed from a cron-job like application that just emailed CSV files based on SQL queries into a full fledged business intelligence tool that users could use to pull arbitrary data formatted in a multitude of ways. While thinking through the design of this application I spoke with the CTO and he gave me a phrase I keep going back to: “To get the expressiveness of SQL you have to write SQL.”

Know what's mission critical

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The accepted belief is that startups should move quickly and err on the side of speed rather than quality. This makes sense. Startups are so risky that they won’t fail due to making a few mistakes but will fail if they get out maneuvered and out innovated. The big advantage startups have is speed and that needs be leveraged.

The one caveat I’d make is that every company, big and small, should have mission critical elements that need to be maintained when pushing new features and updates. I was reminded of this last week when an unnamed corporate feedback startup sent out the private one-on-one notes people jotted down in preparation for their meeting to everyone within the company. This was a huge betrayal of trust and ruined the good will people had for the company and the product. If they weren’t able to get this basic piece right how are they expected to do the rest? Every company has these mission critical components that everyone needs to be aware of and great care must be taken to ensure they work before every deploying or change. In the adtech case it’s serving ads - if ads aren’t working then publishers aren’t making any money and losing money during each impression. For cloud productivity applications it’s critical that they don’t lose your data - downtime is annoying but at least you can switch to another task while they get back up. If you lose your data and documents you have to figure out exactly what you lost and decide whether it’s worth recreating. Everyone in the company should know what these these mission critical components are and it’s everyone’s job to make sure they’re working as expected since failure carries existential risk for the customer relationship. It’s unlikely that a single bad event will ruin things but as soon as it becomes a pattern it’s likely that that customer will be lost forever and never return due to the faulty first impression.

Why are Netflix and Spotify so different?

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The news that Adele was not going to put her new album on the streaming services got me thinking about the differences between the way music and video are consumed. Just last week Rdio announced that it’s selling its assets to Pandora which is a reminder of how hard it is to start a music company - music labels wield all the control and are able to dictate the terms they want. Even Spotify is not yet profitable despite having millions of subscribers.

Internalizing externalities

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve adopted the practice of having the engineering team support other team when the core technology can support it - even if hasn’t been fully built in to the product. This may require manually adding entries to a series of database tables that or manually pulling reports that aren’t yet availabe via the UI. Despite being an inefficiency for the engineering team it provides a variety of benefits that outweigh this minor inconvenience.

Workaround driven product development

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As engineers, it’s easy to get focused on technical problems and lose sight of the business. We realize our code will be used externally but we have a tendency to focus on what’s close to home rather than the actual real world usage. One of the biggest eye openers for me has been seeing people interact with our products.

We like to think of ourselves as “hackers” but it’s amazing to see the length people go to “hack” our products to do what they want. Whether it’s someone keeping multiple tabs open to be able to reference information back and forth and avoid losing data or someone registering multiple accounts to bypass a database uniquness constraint - it’s a way for people to bypass the intended design and I’d argue that these “hackers” are a sign of a useful product. In fact, I’d argue that if people aren’t hacking around a product’s limitations it’s not a good one. These workarounds are a sign that the product is so useful that people are willing to go through additional manual effort to use it for a different use case. If that’s not a sign of new functionality to support I don’t know what is.

Smart OSes

Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It feels as if Google has been getting better and better at what I call search inference. I’ll oftentimes do a search for a particular place on either Google Maps or the general site and see it automatically show up in Google Now. Or I will start with a simple search query that needs to be refined with Google able to offer perfect suggestions. Given how much data they’re collecting it’s not a surprise but it’s an easy way to realize I’m not that unique.

Come on Twitter

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Eugene Wei published a great post on the power of networks and how Twitter hasn’t been taking advantage of their core product - a public messaging protocol. Given this thesis, Twitter should move away from the artificial 140 character limit and innovate on top of the protocol rather than be bound by it.

I’m not nearly as eloquent but I also have my gripes with Twitter that his post motivated me to write. It just feels they don’t care about the user experience. Cross device sync is still a problem - if I clear a notification on my phone why do I see it again on my computer? People are still complaining about the OS X app not being as functional as the other versions. Even on my phone the navigation feels inconsistent - sometimes I get taken out of the app and sometimes a screen is loaded inside. This causes me to hit the back button at the wrong time and randomly leave the app which resets my location. I’m a big fan of Twitter and it’s pretty much the only social network I actually use but I’m frustrated by how poor it is.

Properly handling text based two factor authentication

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of two factor authentication is to prevent unauthorized access to your accounts by requiring a device other than a password to verify that it’s actually you. Usually this is a text message to a phone or an app such as Authy or Google Authenticator. Being paranoid and despite the inconvenience I chose to do it for the vast majority of my accounts that support it but some are significantly more secure than others.

The Edmunds API

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the RelayRides analysis I needed to estimate the price of a car and stumbled across the Edmunds API. I came in with some low expectations but was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. I thought I’d need to go through a data cleanup process to make sure I was using the correct arguments in the HTTP requests but somewhat remarkably the Edmunds API was able to properly handle nearly every request.

The uncanny valley of advertising

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Old Spice ad mocking the uncanny valley (Credit: Gizmodo)

The uncanny valley is this idea that although we keep getting better at depicting people through technology, a few small kinks ruin everything and make people feel repulsed compared to an obvious imitation. Another way to explain it is that we’re a lot more comfortable with cartoon characters that are obviously fake than pseudo-realistic video game characters that look real but have non-human behavior or expressions.

iOS first and username claiming

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Both Meerkat and Periscope launched on iOS first. That doesn’t bother me despite have an Android phone. They’re running a business and it’s up to them to decide where they want to invest the time they have. What bothers me is that I’ve been using a specific username across the various services, dangoldin, and now run the risk of losing it on these newer networks. A simple fix would be to at least allow me to preregister my username without requiring an iOS device. This would also encourage me, and a lot of other Android users, to download the app when it finally does make its way to Android.

Why login after resetting your password?

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t figure out why nearly every website forces you to login after resetting your password. It’s an extra step that adds nothing to security and introduces friction into the experience. The fact that I just entered my password into a form field should be enough to trigger the authentication flow and get me back into the app. The only reasons I can think of that it’s a way to confirm that the person actually remembers their new password or that the functionality just hasn’t been built. The former case doesn’t make sense - the fact that they forgot their password indicates they rarely use the site and will just forget it again by their next login attempt. It’s easier to just give them the immediate access and have them reset their password later. An even better approach would be to just have them enter the same password twice to make sure they match. The latter reason is just sloth - the engineering effort would be minimal and it would improve the experience and mood of the users who are already frustrated after multiple failed login attempts.

Introducing jsonify.me

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with Node.js and wanted to share the project I’ve been working on, jsonify.me. It’s an “API only” product without an interface other than a documentation page. The idea is to allow anyone to have a publicly accessible URL endpoint that can contain whatever information they want as long as it can be stored as a JSON object. In my case, I have all sorts of semi-structured data that I want to make accessible and keeping it under my domain (json.dangoldin.com) makes it easy to access for whoever is savvy enough to figure it out.

Amazon's Fire TV Stick

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Rancho de la Luna

Earlier this week I set up Amazon’s Fire TV Stick and wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re still fresh. For the $20 promotion price, it’s a great deal. My alternative was an Xbox 360 along with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC. The Xbox would be used for streaming shows on Netflix and watching older DVDs while the Raspberry Pi would let me watch various files off of a USB stick. I’ve never tried a Chromecast so don’t know how the Fire Stick compares but so far it’s been much quicker to startup and navigate than either the Xbox or the Raspberry Pi. When all you want to do is watch a quick show during dinner it’s a bit frustrating when you’re done eating by the time the Netflix app is ready to use on the Xbox.

AWS: Always shipping

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I never thought about this until Shaun brought it up but now I see it all the time: AWS ships code quicker than any other company that size. Some are simple feature improvements to existing products, such as an advanced instance search, additional configuration options for ELBs, and new instance types, but others are entirely new products, such as Lambda, EC2 Container Service, and the newly announced code management suite.

Paying publishers without ads

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Google recently launched a program, Contributor, that offers an ad-free monetization model to publishers. The idea is that a user pays Google up to $3 a month and in return Google will not show that user any display ads on a website that’s a participant in the program. The monthly payment will then be distributed across the participating sites - most likely based on how many times you’ve visited that site.

Luxury for cheap

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently read a FiveThirtyEight article on the sneaker resale market. The concept is extremely foreign to me since I tend to not collect anything other than old notes and have a tendency of grossly mistreating my shoes and clothes. Nonetheless, I found it fascinating as it discusses the incentives of the various parties involved and comparing them against standard economic theory. One passage in particular was so insightful that I had to save it:

Tools as tools, not products

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I keep on discovering new use cases for Markdown the more I use it. My first exposure was when I migrated my blog to GitHub pages from Wordpress and Tumblr. Since then I’ve discovered GitHub flavored markdown which supports syntax highlighting which has been amazingly useful when blogging on tech topics or putting together notes for a tech talk. Just recently I wanted to include some MySQL snippets in a Keynote presentation and discovered the Remark.js library which lets you generate in-browser slideshows in Markdown with syntax highlighting.

Link bait titles are a race to zero

Sat, 18 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I saw a mic.com article with the title “A European country is now offering free college education to Americans” but the only way to find out which country this was (Germany) was by clicking through to the actual page.

I understand that content sites make the bulk of their revenue through advertising but resorting to a link-bait approach seems like a terrible idea. It’s a shortsighted attempt that increases page views at the cost of insulting your audience and cheapening your effort that will not work as a sustainable strategy. Relying on headlines to generate traffic without any meaningful content is a great way to get to become a commodity. I hope that there are enough people out there that care about the content they’re producing and have a passionate audience that can be monetized based on quality of engagement rather than on quantity of page views. Otherwise we’ll all end up in a race to zero.

Mobile web browsing and Javelin

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Something that’s bothered me ever since I started using a smartphone is the link opening behavior. Whenever I’m in an app and click on a web link it would immediately open up that page in a browser window. And when I’m already in a mobile browser and click on a link it would open that page up in a new tab. Compare this with the desktop environment. Clicking on a link within an app does open up a new browser window immediately but since there are shortcuts to quickly switch between programs it’s not a huge deal. And when I’m already looking at a webpage and want to open a new link it’s possible to open it in the background using command+click.

Dev tools matter

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s amazing the impact tools have on productivity and enjoyment. I remember my first foray into Java using a combination of text editors and Ant. Setting up and configuring a simple project was a nightmare and without the internet I don’t know how I would have figured it out. This initial experience made me associate Java with an unnecessarily complicated approach that I wanted to avoid.

After Java, Python felt like a breath of fresh air. The code was simpler, more compact, and I was able to just dive in. Discovering pip and virtualenv made me enjoy it even more. But no language is perfect and with enough you uncover the imperfections. Performance became a bottleneck when I started working on serious code and I missed the benefits of static typing - especially when refactoring a large projects.

Curated Twitter timelines and the tech stack

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently Twitter is considering curation user’s timelines. A perspective people haven’t really discussed is the impact on the tech side. Right now each user has a unique timeline that needs to be presented in near-real time in case they need to see it. This results in a massive storage operation using Redis where these timelines are continuously generated and cached. By moving to a model where every user can be categorized into a group that sees a particular set of tweets Twitter can drastically reduce the amount of data they need to store per user. I’m sure Twitter already has a way of categorizing users in order to support the ad product and this approach would extend it to the “stream” product. In a way it’s akin to how compression works - find repeated patterns and replace every occurrence with something shorter. Then when you want to uncompress you just reverse the process.

API first startups

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When building a SAAS product geared towards developers the quickest way to start is to build an API. One can even make the argument that the MVP should just be the API documentation. This benefits both sides. Potential users of the API will know exactly what to expect and have a clear understanding of the functionality and limitations and you can quickly see if there are any issues or inconsistencies in what you’re building. Some non-fiction authors will share a table of contents with potential readers in order to get feedback and this extends that idea to companies and their products. Especially when your primary users are developers this is a simple way to share your idea and approach without resorting to buzzwords or even relying on a beautiful site design.

Trick your users into staying

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s just too easy to rant against LinkedIn but I can’t help it. They recently offered me a free month of business plus so I took them up on it. Little did I know (although I should have expected it) that canceling would be a maze that I still may not have escaped.

The cancel screen hides the downgrade to free option and automatically chooses a paid “recommended account” with a bright clickable “Downgrade Account” button. And then, when you actually do manage to downgrade, it’s not clear from the account settings page that you downgraded since it still displays as the premium account option. Maybe when my free month is up it will downgrade or maybe I’ll get charged - how am I supposed to know? I do see a note that says canceled and I suspect I’m in the clear but there’s no way to actually confirm other than contacting support.

Amazon courting app developers for the Fire phone

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a bit late to the Amazon Fire Phone party but wanted to chime in with a perspective I haven’t seen written about. Amazon is offering a $6 CPM to mobile app developers that launch an Amazon app during Auguster and September. Given that typical CPMs are less than a dollar with premium publishers like Facebook and Twitter getting close to $6, this is a very aggressive move by Amazon to build out their ecosystem.

On Google Now

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As much as it pains me to admit it I’m really enjoying Google Now. I’m aware of how much information I’m sharing with Google to make it helpful but at the moment I find the tradeoff worth it.

It came in especially useful as I’ve been traveling over the past couple of weeks:

Show the official exchange rate when traveling. This may not be perfect, especially in the case of “blue markets,” but it’s nice having a rough idea of how much a US dollar is worth.
Flight information. Since my flight details get sent to my Gmail account, I can quickly tell whether my flight’s delayed and what terminal and gate it’s scheduled to depart from and arrive to. This is useful to have when I need to make a transfer since I can quickly see where my next flight departs from.
Flight boarding passes. In addition to the flight information Google Now also shows the boarding passes for my checked in flights. I didn’t have to do anything to board a plane other than activate my home screen and place it against a scanner.
Hotel information. Similar to flight information, I get a card telling me where my hotel is and how to get there.
Google calendar integration. This is an obvious one but I run my life through Google calendar. This gives me constant notifications of what I have to do when and as long as I enter an address for my events I also get an estimate for when I should leave.

A concern is that to actually make it useful I have to integrate more and more of my world with Google and I expect this to get worse as more Google Now cards are developed. The optimist in me hopes that Google Now will be opened up to third party developers in a future version of Android but the cynic suspects it’s not going to happen.

On Fab's latest move

Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Fab recently laid off a third of their staff as they transition from designer flash sales into customized goods and their own private label. The business is tough and reminded me of our experiences building Makers Alley. We initially set out to build a place where people can buy customized, personal furniture from local designers. The idea was was consumers would benefit from being able to get items that are custom made and can be customized to fit individual styles while supporting a local business and makers would have a new avenue to sell their products and build their brand.

Logging in through your inbox

Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

MixPanel has a clever way of handling failed login attempts. Instead of locking the user out of the account or forcing a password reset they send an email with two links - one to log in to the account directly and another to reset the password. I don’t recall ever seeing this approach before and wish more sites started doing it. This approach also obviates the need to even have a password - a site can just send a “login link” for an entered email address and the user can login via their inbox. This is similar to the way we login via the various social networks but instead of being sent to a social network for confirmation we are sent to our inbox. The only friction is having to go to your inbox to click on the link but since most people keep their inboxes open all day I don’t see this as a huge problem. The other advantage is security - most people use the same password across multiple sites so if one is compromised the others become vulnerable. Under this approach each site will have its own security controls and it becomes impossible for one site’s shoddy security to affect another’s. This is probably too drastic of a change for most users but I’d love to see sites start embracing this model.

System knowledge and human creativity

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I read an interesting article about humans replacing robots in Toyota’s factory. The thesis being that only humans are creative enough (right now at least) to develop new skills and processes to deal with production inefficiencies. This rings true - in order to improve a manufacturing system you need to understand the entire process, from the raw ingredients up to the way consumers end up using the product. It’s more difficult to do these days as products become more complicated with an increasing number of specialized components and I’m glad to see companies taking a longer term view and focusing on the value of human creativity rather than short term cost cutting.

Craigslist: the web's fertilizer

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Craigslist has become the fertilizer of the web. This realization came to me last week when I needed to get a replacement phone and decided to search for one on Craigslist.Filtering past the obvious scams I thought I find a legitimate offer and reached out. Within a few minutes I received the following response from “Kyle”:

Hi a guy bought this from me, but I can tell you where I got it from. I got 3 of these from http://enetcweb.com/dibzees and I resold them for some extra money. The trick is to watch for bidding to slow down and then put in a bid. That's what I do and I win most of the time.

And this was from a listing that seemed legitimate! The vast majority of listings were clearly fraudulent that promised either amazing deals or was the same posting duplicated a dozen times with slightly different wording. Even beyond the fraud and scams there are probably tons of startups trying to take advantage of the network that Craigslist offers. Some are listing their products and services to validate their market and others are reaching out to owners of various listings trying to sell them on something.

Self hosted services

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It never bothered me when apps were acquired and shut down but the Readmill news hit me hard. It was one of the truly “free” ebook readers and never got in my way. It fit my behavior perfectly - I would download my books from wherever, drag them into the Readmill web app, and have them permanently accessible on my iPad after a quick sync.

My first reaction was wishing that it would be open sourced but that got me thinking about third party services. Numerous people have been saying how dangerous it is to rely on third party services but until Readmill it never really mattered to me. Sure, in the abstract it’s better to have everything hosted on your own but in reality it’s impossible to get to the same level of quality and experience for everything we use. We’re constantly balancing tradeoffs and we’re biased to favor the short term factors, such as ease of use and simplicity of set up, rather than long term ones, such as privacy, control, and data ownership.

Goodbye Gmail

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Over the course of the past year I’ve become more and more pissed off at Gmail. I loved using Gmail when it launched - it made writing and reading email a pleasure. It was simple, clean, and responsive. Now it’s the opposite. All actions feel slow. The initial page load takes a substantial amount of time and then I get to wait for the various page elements to load - including a chat list that I’m almost never signed into and integration with a slew of other Google products. Loading emails or new tabs is noticeably slow and the search is sluggish for a company whose main product is a search engine.

Follow the WhatsApp money

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week I received the following email from imo.im:

It’s amazing what $19 billion can do. For years imo.im has supported third party chat clients but within a couple of weeks of the WhatsApp acquisition they’ve abandoned that support to focus on their own network and become the next WhatsApp. For a while now they’ve been building features to support this move - videos in August, stickers in January - and I wonder what would have happened if they focused on their platform earlier. Now they’re just playing catch up to WhatsApp, Kik, Line, and countless others. Timing is critical and I suspect it’s too late for imo.im to be entering the first party messaging fray.

Foursquare as a contact book

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I discovered a new use case for Foursquare when I was meeting up with a friend. We were catching up and during the course of the conversation I realized I needed to introduce him to someone I had met earlier. Unfortunately, I completely blanked on his name and company. All I recalled was that he frequently checked into his company on Foursquare. Sure enough, when I opened up Foursquare I saw that he had checked in there that morning.

Why I manage my own blog

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Given the recent news of Medium raising $25M and Svbtle opening up to the public I thought it would be an appropriate time to explain why I’m not using either of them. They’re both simple, clean products that allow writers to concentrate on their writing rather than configuring the dozens of options available in other blogging platforms. They’ve also done a great job with the typography that makes the content enjoyable to read. Compared to the other content websites out there, they’re incredible fast - they have a minimal structure and don’t load a ton of external content - especially when compared to the major publishers out there now such as the news sites and the social networks.

Emotional products

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In 2013, I gave myself a goal of running 1000 miles. I used RunKeeper to record my runs and used its goal feature to track my progress and quickly see how much I had left. Two days before the new year, I was able to hit my goal and got a little notification from RunKeeper congratulating me on achieving my goal. This small notification got me thinking about how emotion is built into our products. RunKeeper doesn’t care whether it was a 1 mile or 1000 mile goal - the reaction I get would be the same. Yet if I shared these two achievements with my friends, the reactions I get would be completely different. Sure, an algorithm could be designed to treat accomplishments of various difficulties differently and can even be adapted to take into account that to some people, running one mile is equivalent to others running 1000 miles.

Ebook readers

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an avid reader and have embraced the move to digital. An internet connection gives me access to thousands of books with a device that’s thinner than a single book. What I grapple with are the reading apps - I can’t find one that does everything I want.

On my iPad, I have iBooks, Readmill, Oyster, Kindle, and ShuBook with each having a separate use case. iBooks and the Kindle app are for books that I purchased from iTunes and Amazon, respectively. Oyster is a great ebook subscription service but I’m limited to the books available in their library. I discovered ShuBook when I wanted to host my own ebook server but have switched to Readmill due to the much nicer reading experience, a web interface to manage my library, and cross-device syncing.

Surge pricing ideas

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every time there’s a big event or terrible weather, there’s a slew of complaints about Uber’s surge pricing. By now, you’d think that Uber customers would expect this to happen and yet they’re surprised when a $10 cab ride turns into a $100 Uber ride. I suspect Uber’s already done as much as it can on the messaging side; psychologically it’s just tough for someone to take a $10 ride one day and then a day later pay an order of magnitude more.

Global products

Wed, 25 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The trip to India got me thinking about “global products” that work the same wherever they are. It’s surprisingly difficult to find tech products that fit this description. Cell phones will almost always work internationally but roaming charges make it impractical. Having an unlocked phone helps but you still need to get a SIM card which is a hassle in many countries.

Even something as standard as a laptop isn’t as easy to use as it should be. Wifi connectivity varies depending where you are with most cities being great fickle elsewhere. Dealing with voltage conversion and plug adapters is something that always comes up. I’ve learned to travel with an adapter kit that includes enough combinations to be able to charge my laptop wherever I go.

CSV powered products

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Something that I’ve been thinking about ever since I worked as a product manager focused on internal tools is being able to run a product entirely through CSV file uploads. Instead of building a UX designed to handle bulk operations and complicated workflows you build support for file uploads and handle the business logic entirely on the backend. The motivation is that it’s extremely difficult to build a UI that’s going to be as powerful and flexible as a simple CSV file, especially when outside tools, such as Excel, can help generate these files.

Why are there so many cleaning startups?

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The recent rise of marketplace startups is great and benefits all except the incumbent. They provide much needed liquidity and transparency to markets that helpfully reduce costs to the consumer and increase volume to the provider.

Yet I’m surprised by the number of home cleaning service startups out there. I’m aware of HomeJoy, Exec, GetMaid, MyClean, and HandyBook, but am sure there are countless other copycats. The Uber approach works because it’s for an immediate service with a one time transaction where the value provided is somewhat of a commodity. This is not the case with home cleaning services. The range of quality among cleaners varies significantly more than the quality among drivers and I’d be willing to have a good cleaner come in at a slightly inconvenient time rather than a poor cleaner at the perfect time. And once I find a cleaner I like I’d want to book them directly rather than go through the company again. This way I can get a lower rate while also giving a cleaner more than they’d otherwise make from using the service. This would violate the company’s terms but I don’t see how they can be enforced.

A Twitter flashback

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was going through my drafts and stumbled onto one that was going to criticize Twitter’s API changes that they announced last August. In light of last week’s IPO I thought I’d finally finish it up.

The blog post described the changes Twitter planned on making with the intent of taking control of the developer ecosystem. The changes included being a lot more strict with their API by limiting the number of users a client could authenticate, reducing the volume of API calls, and requiring all Twitter content to be displayed the same way. The post also included a matrix indicating that Twitter did not want anyone developing on the consumer/engagement side but the rest being open.

Is Excel on a Mac intentionally hobbled?

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The longer I’ve been involved in tech the fewer Windows laptops I’ve been seeing. It seems that to even be considered a startup you need to be giving your employees MacBooks. My conversion came years ago when I made the move from Linux in order to be able to run Excel since neither OpenOffice nor Google Spreadsheet were cutting it. Unfortunately, even after years of effort, I still can’t get to the same level of productivity as I had when using Windows during my consulting days. It’s entirely due to the shortcuts. Some of the shortcuts just changed while others simply disappeared.

Security in the wake of MongoHQ

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few days my inbox has been filled with security alert emails caused by the MongoHQ database hack. I’m impressed by the number of customers MongoHQ was able to sign up - they spanned the gamut from sites that I don’t even recall signing up for to startups that have been getting significant buzz.

If a database as a service company is able to get hacked it doesn’t leave me optimistic about the way other companies are securing our data. As much as these “as a service” products make our lives easier they bring an increased risk to our business and more importantly our customers. Sure their security will be better than someone who’s setting up a MongoDB instance for the first time but that has to be balanced against the fact that a hosting site offers a much higher reward for a hacking attempt. Access to the infrastructure provides a lot more information than hacking an individual site.

What the SEO? Followup

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I posted about a site my mom discovered that had copied the content from her site and has been positioning as their business. I had no clue what the motivation behind it was other than thinking it was just a sketchy way to either blackmail the real business owner or use black hat SEO tactics to increase traffic and monetize using AdSense.

After sharing my problem and getting a ton of advice, I sent a DMCA request to the host, Colocation America, and received a surprisingly quick reply. Within a few days I was on the phone with a representative from the site claiming that my mom had signed up for a service that was offering free mobile websites and that’s why my mom’s business information and content had been appearing on the other site. My mom doesn’t recall signing up for any site and I believe her - she’s been sending me nearly every offer she receives asking whether it’s legitimate and worth doing and I don’t recall ever seeing this one.

What the SEO?

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My mom owns a small local business in suburban NJ, The Do Re Mi School, that’s akin to an after-school program where music, dance, art, language and math is taught. Being surrounded by a family of engineers, we’ve been helping her on the tech side and my brother created the web site she’s been using it for the past couple of years. It’s based on Drupal and allows her to make changes without having to dive into the tech details. This approach has been working well she’s recently started using YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to help with her marketing and social efforts.

Why's the iPhone 5C so expensive?

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Many people expected the iPhone 5C to be priced low in order to compete with the cheaper Android phones in countries without carrier subsidies. The news that the 5C’s starting price was $549 left many in the tech community surprised and concerned with many believing that the price needed to be lower than $400 in order to compete worldwide.

I'm definitely speculating but I believe the reason for such a high price for the 5C was to avoid cannibalizing the sales of the 5S while also framing the comparison to be iPhone vs iPhone instead of iPhone vs Android. When people go smartphone shopping they see that the 5S is “only” $100 more than the 5C and pay the difference for the more premium product. If the 5C were significantly cheaper people would be comparing it to a similarly priced Android phone which may encourage them to go with the Android or they'd compare it against the 5S which would get many to purchase the much cheaper 5C instead.

Going rate for an email address

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I started noticing popups on various ecommerce sites offering a first purchase discounts in exchange for entering an email address. Every time I noticed this happening I took a screenshot to track the offer and compile a list of the retailers using this approach. I’m still collecting examples and would more of them but so far the going rate seems to be anywhere from 10 to 25% off the first order. The pitch is pretty compelling and I think most people would gladly give up their email for the possibility of a discount. I’d also love to know what impact the magnitude of the discount has on the sign up rates; I suspect it’s minimal but definitely better than gaining entry to a sweepstakes or a lottery.

Pricing small consulting projects

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some consulting work over the few months and wanted to share a pricing model that’s been working well for smaller projects. I’ll sit down with the client to understand the scope of the project and work with them to break it down into smaller, more manageable components. Based on this break down, I’ll estimate the time required for each piece and come up with an estimated total time. I charge my usual hourly rate for the work that falls within the estimated time but will charge a steeply discounted rate for every hour that goes over.

Startups aren't black and white

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I was making the leap into the startup world I read every post I came across that talked about people’s experiences and guides in running a startup. The goal was to learn as much as I could form others and apply these hard-fought lessons my own startup. Now that I’ve been working on a startup for almost two years I realize how much startups differ from one another and how black and white these guides tend to be. You can read two posts that will promote contradictory approaches. Should you focus on revenue or growth? Should you raise money or bootstrap? Should you go with a freemium model or paid only? Should you go solo or get a cofounder? Should you focus on consumers or the enterprise?

Netflix profiles, why now?

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Netflix recently reintroduced profiles so now each household member can get their own recommendations, recently watched items, and instant queue rather than being forced to share the same polluted profile. This is an awesome win for Netflix customers but it’s been bugging me that they didn’t do this sooner; it’s such an obvious feature that it should have been built as soon as Netflix realized that multiple family members would be sharing their account.

Introducing Better 404

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t understand why websites try to compete on having the cleverest 404 page. The fact that someone ended up on a 404 page is a sign that something is broken but instead of trying to fix the problem they try to distract their visitors by making them laugh. It’s equivalent to getting to a restaurant and seeing an amazing menu only to discover that it’s closed.

We can’t always control which URLs our visitors will type in or click on but we can control what they see when they get there. Instead of trying to distract them with humor why not offer suggestions for what they may have wanted to see? The majority of 404 visits are the result of typos which could be fixed with a simple spell check and the remainder are due to moved pages which can be solved by notifying the linker or providing a redirect.

The power inbox

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are only a few tabs I consistently keep open all day on my computer - Gmail, Google Calendar, Hacker News, and New Relic. Out of these, Gmail is the most important with my entire day running through it. The value of having a presence in the inbox hasn’t been lost on companies and there are a ton of third party apps that make Gmail more useful - Rapportive, YesWare, ToutApp, and Boomerang. Even Google itself has been providing “Lab features” to augment the default inbox behavior.

Marketplaces are hard

Sat, 13 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There are countless posts discussing the business and marketing challenges when building a marketplace but I wanted to discuss the issues on the tech side. While we ran into technical challenges building Pressi they were mostly issues with scaling and dealing with the various social network APIs. With Makers Alley, we didn’t run into scaling or API issues but had to deal with a ton of functionality in order to be seen as a credible marketplace. Individually, the features are simple for an intermediate developer to build but there are a lot of them with varying degrees of nuance and logic that need to be worked out.

Externalizing externalities in brick and mortar

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I had a morning flight out of Laguardia Airport and being into all things tech decided to grab a coffee at a place called Biergarten since they had iPads at every seat. Turned out that the only way to order and pay was by using the provided iPad with the attached credit card reader. I had 30 minutes to kill before my flight and decided to spend it observing the interactions others had with this ordering system.

Business frameworks are actually useful

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Tunguz wrote a great post yesterday sharing the frameworks he uses to evaluate and analyze startups. For this post, I’m not interested in the content (which is great for anyone building a company) but I am interested in the concept of business frameworks and their application. When I was younger and came across a “business” framework I would dismiss it as obvious and move on. Now, I’m aware of how valuable a good framework can be. A good framework imposes structure that leads to a clearer though process with better results. At the same time, it needs to be simple to apply but be expressive enough to describe the complexity of a business. Being human, we also don’t want to think about our own fallibility and weaknesses which makes it difficult to critique our businesses. We also want to solve problems on our own rather than share our uncertainties with others. A framework serves as an impartial third party where you go through and fill in the blanks until you discover you aren’t in as good of a shape as you thought. Now you can work on growing your company instead of avoiding self-criticism.

Netflix, bundling, and the future of video

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Something that’s been stuck in my head is the relationship between Netflix and bundling. On one hand, we’ve been wishing that cable came unbundled so we’d be able to just pay for the shows we want to watch. On the other hand, we have Netflix which is striving to let us stream every TV show and movie whenever and wherever we want. Why don’t we care that Netflix is actually a bundled product?

Follow through on that personal welcome email

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve been receiving many startups sending out “personal emails” from the CEO or cofounder around 30 minutes after signing up. The idea is to engage the new user by showing them that there’s a real person behind the service that cares and to offer any help that they may need. There’s a great article on Segment.io about this tactic as well as a few other emails that can be sent to improve retention. This technique is called “drip marketing” and there are a bunch of companies offering it as a service - the ones I can immediately think of are Vero and Intercom; and Mixpanel is moving into this space as well with their Notifications product. There are also a variety of open source packages available, I’m familiar with django-drip for Django and Dan Shipper’s Faucet for RoR.

Smart software; dumb hardware

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, three isolated events gave me a glimpse of how powerful mobile can be. Tech pundits have been saying that for a while now but experiencing it firsthand is definitely more convincing.

I went for a run with only my phone to keep me company. After my run was done, I wanted to grab a cup of iced coffee and realized that Starbucks gave me a free drink on my birthday. Downloading the app on my phone allowed me to get a drink without having cash or a wallet.
While checking out at a grocery store, a friend showed me CardStar which allowed him to store all his loyalty cards on his phone. Since then, I’ve imported all my loyalty cards that have just been sitting in a drawer into my phone.
After getting a Raspberry Pi and installing Raspbmc, I was able to use my phone as a remote control just by downloading an app.

These behaviors are different and yet they’re all converging on the phone. What they have in common is that software is replacing hardware. Hardware doesn’t need to become smarter, it just needs to be able to sync with our phones which can do the heavy lifting. The functionality then becomes limited by software which can be updated more cheaply and quickly than the hardware. It also solves the problem of hardware companies trying to develop software that results in a terrible user experience. Do cars really need the ability to read a Twitter feed? And if they do, why not just do it via a simple Bluetooth connection and an audio streaming app on a phone?

Coke, Pepsi and Passover

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

During Passover, Coke and Pepsi sell sugar based versions of their sodas in order to stay kosher for Passover. These high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) free sodas are extremely popular and people stock up while they can. I don’t know whether this is due to the better taste, the nostalgia, or the limited supply but these sugar based versions are definitely more popular. I wonder what would happen if either Coke or Pepsi decided to go “all in” on sugar and launch a marketing campaign against HFCS based food and drinks. I’d love to look at the margins of sugar vs HFCS based sodas and see what the market share increase would need to be in order to offset the switch to sugar. My gut tells me that pursuing this strategy would be a win but the companies are too entrenched in their current process that it’s just not going to happen. Smaller soda manufacturers, such as Boylan, GuS, and Moxie, are growing by differentiating themselves from the big guys and are emphasizing the healthier ingredients. I’m hopeful that this will pressure Coke and Pepsi to make their soda healthier. Unfortunately, what’s more likely to happen is that they will just acquire the niche manufacturers position them to appeal to the more concious consumer, similar to what’s happening to craft breweries.

Mailbox: Is the server required?

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After a couple of weeks on the waiting list I finally got access to the Mailbox App. It’s a huge improvement over the standard mail app and my mobile email consumption habits have improved significantly. I’m still not at “inbox zero” but am making my way there.

I don’t know much about iOS development but one thing I’ve been wondering about is whether they could have written it to not use a remote server. Regarding scaling Mailbox, they wrote:

Welcoming the long, single webpage

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A recent trend in website design I’ve been seeing is the long single page. My first distinct memory of seeing it is from Karma but I’ve started noticing it everywhere. It runs the gamut from non-profit causes to video game PR firms. In fact, we’re even using this approach for the Makers Alley homepage.

Surprisingly, it’s starting to make inroads on news sites as well. Whereas before news sites would have an article spread across 20 pages (looking at you Business Insider) in order to increase page views and show more ads, some news outlets are actually improving the user experience. Both NPR and the Washington Post have posted pieces that leverage this approach and it creates a significantly more engaging read. It’s a pleasure reading long form content this way, richer media adds to the experience and minimizing mouse clicks avoids the disruption of a page load.

Makers Alley v2

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A brief one today.

This past week, Sandy and I have been super busy getting a new version of Makers Alley out that allows you to customize and buy furniture. We’re launching with two makers that have items for sale but we’re busy adding more. Withers & Grain specialize in using reclaimed wood from the 5 boroughs and do their own wood and metal work. Mark Grattan is a furniture designer who has designed a furniture collection for Makers Alley in a geometry-inspired style. Take a look at their pages, watch their videos, and customize their pieces. If you have any feedback let me know.

Account management madness

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past year, I cofounded two startups and launched a bunch of side projects. Since they all had potential, I wanted to make each as standalone as possible and ended up with dedicated accounts for each. This meant that I had a flood of accounts for each, ranging from the various Google products to Sendgrid and AWS to Freshbooks and Quickbooks. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an unmanageable pain in the ass.

Vacationing with Foursquare

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, my wife and I took a vacation to New Orleans and it was the first time we used Foursquare to plan a trip. I asked friends for suggestions, looked at other Foursquare lists, and did some online research to create my list of 25 places that I wanted to visit while there. These places ranged from tourist magnets such as Bourbon Street and Cafe Du Monde to the more local places like Cafe Envie and Port of Call. Our typical approach in New Orleans was to go to a neighborhood we wanted to explore and then visit the places that were nearby on our Foursquare lists. Out of the 25 places I had on my list, I ended up visiting 16 which is a bit low but I made up for that by visiting a bunch of local places that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

What do Fab and Groupon have in common?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Groupon has fascinated me since they’ve launched. It popularized an entirely new business model, encouraged the launch of hundreds of competitors, and was able to IPO three years after being founded. This sounds great until you look at the performance after the IPO: the stock is down 80% and it’s consistently missing the quarterly goals.

The daily deals space isn’t as profitable as it used to be and they’re trying to become a tool platform for small businesses. To grow beyond daily deals, they’ve been on an acquisition spree. Over the past two years they’ve acquired a scheduling startup, a social shopping startup, POS system, and a restaurant reservation system. I don’t think this will be enough for them to get seen as something bigger than daily deals.

Self hosted Instagram export

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I just hacked together a quick app to help download Instagram photos. At first, I tried using Instaport and OpenPhoto but both of them were backed up with others trying to do the same so I decided to create my own. It’s basically a really simple python web app that allows you do a quick authentication with Instagram and then lets you downloads all your images to your hard drive.

Entrepreneurship is not a job

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s start with a joke:

An American consultant was at a pier in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied "Only a little while." The consultant then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish? The fisherman said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. Then the American asked how he spent the rest of his time.

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, and then stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American consultant scoffed, "I am a very successful business consultant and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and, with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York City where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?"

The consultant replied, "Probably 15 to 20 years."

"But what then, senor?" asked the fisherman.

The consultant laughed, and said, "That's the best part! When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public. You'll become very rich, you would make millions!"

"Millions, senor?" replied the Mexican. "Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

Other than the chuckle, this joke got me thinking about how people view work. The joke suggests that you should only work to support your life outside of work. If you work more than that then the joke’s on you since you’re sacrificing your personal life. This is view that you can’t have if you’re starting a company. Entrepreneurs need to combine their personal and professional lives. If you’re running a startup and aren’t thinking about the market, your product, or your users when you’re in the shower or in bed you’re doing it wrong. More importantly, this should be natural and not forced. If you don’t enjoy thinking about your startup when times are good, how will you be able to do it when times are tough (which they will be)? We need our passion to get over the humps so if you’re not passionate about your startup when you’re starting out, you will abandon it when facing challenges. Your startup will end up consuming you so why not pick something that you care about?

Eating Yourself - Innovation & Cannibalization

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was rereading the HBR paper on Strategies for Two Sided Markets and came across a passage describing Apple’s mistake of trying to monetize both sides of their market, the consumers and the developers, rather than focusing on one like Microsoft did by giving away the SDK for free.

It got me thinking about Apple’s recovery. Many people credit the iPod with revitalizing Apple but I think there’s more than that. I suspect the bigger reason was the decline of desktop software and the ability to be productive on the web. Suddenly the network effects that existed by having software that only worked on Windows no longer existed. Software started migrating to the web and people were more willing to try new operating systems out. In 2006, I switched to Linux without too much trouble. It was also simple to find help online to deal with the various issues I ran into which made the transition easier. In some ways, Google helped Apple recover by speeding up the move to the web with a more accurate search and a good set of productivity apps.

In Defense of Yahoo

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Reading recent tech coverage makes you think that each newly startup is more valuable than Yahoo. Yahoo is the 4th most visited site in the world with over 300 million users on Yahoo mail. This is a problem every startup should hope to have.

User acquisition is the most difficult task for a consumer startup. User attrition is an easier problem to solve than user acquisition. Yahoo doesn’t need to build a product that’s 10 times better than the competition, they just need to simplify and improve what they already have. Yahoo also has massive usage among the mass market with millions of people having Yahoo as their home page. These are not the same people that sign up for every startup featured on TechCrunch. Yahoo has challenges but worrying about user acquisition is not one of them. Yahoo will need to develop a vision and relentlessly pursue it. The culture will need to change and vested interests will need to be broken.

The Startup Advantage - Details, Details, Details

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A frustration I’ve been experiencing more and more is having to reload a webpage in order to change the date range in the options. If a company expects me to keep a site open for more than a day they should make it easy for me to update the options. The big example is Google Analytics - I open up a page, choose a date range, and get to see my charts. If I keep the tab open and want to want to run the same analysis the next day, I’m forced to reload the page to even be able to include today in the date range. It’s an unnecessary action for the user and it would be easy to correct this behavior with some simple Javascript.

Race to 0 - RIM vs IE

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I read an article earlier today about how companies are preparing for a possible demise of RIM and couldn’t help but compare RIM’s decline over only a few years compared to how long it’s taking IE to disappear.

To confirm that there is in fact a difference in behavior, we can compare the RIM share among smartphones and IE share among browsers. Turns out that they are noticeably different: IE is on a linear decline with close to 70% in Q3 2008 but around 36% in Q1 2012 while RIM starts at 16% in Q3 2008, goes up to a high of 21% in 2009 and then drops to 7% in Q1 2012. Plotting their % decline since the data starting point highlights this further. If we calculate the average decline per quarter from their highest levels and try to see how long it will take to hit 0% share, IE will take almost 4 years while RIM will take less than 5 quarters.

Achieving browser autocomplete

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about habits. How do they form? How do they change? And the selfish one - how can you build a product that is habit forming? My cofunder sent me a great Nir & Far blog post that goes into detail about generating desire which is a great read to anyone building a consumer product.

Selling to the enterprise? Target the consumer

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A trend I’ve been noticing more and more is enterprise sales being done bottoms up. The typical approach is to offer a free trials or have some sort of freemium product. Each sign up is then treated as an inbound lead that is assigned an account manager. Within two weeks of signing up for New Relic I was contacted by an account manager who helped answer my questions and helped me get New Relic set up for Glossi. Working with him, we were able to get a longer trial period and a discounted price for when we’re ready to upgrade. HubSpot found that inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. If having a strong SEO and Social Media presence drops acquisition costs that much imagine the drop caused by having a usable product. Although we’re a small, scrappy startup that’s quick to try new products and services, I believe this approach will become the standard way of selling SAAS in the enterprise. It’s much easier to get a person to try something new and if you can turn him into a fan, you’re one step closer to getting the company signed up.

Draw Something Zyngafied

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’re aware of Zynga’s purchase of Draw Something and Zynga’s emphasis on analytics and metrics to drive product features and decisions. I’m a bit late to the party but I tried brainstorming to put together a Zyngafied version of Draw Something:

Favor drawings that require colors that a user does not have to encourage the user to buy new colors.
Leverage the priming effect by picking words that will encourage users to spend more. For example using the words “gold”, “coin”, and “rich” would put users in a buying mood.
Charge more for the more popular color packs.
Include “limited edition” color and word packs.
Reward active users with free color packs, bombs, etc.

I, for one, am glad that I got to play Draw Something before it turns into this money extraction machine.

Future of Startups - Small Teams, Big Profit

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The big news today was that Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B in cash and stock. I don’t want to debate whether that was a good price but I am amazed that Instagram was able to get to over 30 million users with 13 employees, of which 3 are engineers. I see a few factors combining to make this an ideal model for the future tech startup.

Open source tools and the cloud have made starting easier than ever and a few motivated, talented people can build a marketable product over a weekend.
Social networks simplify distribution and allow a good product to stand out and succeed without heavy marketing.
People are comfortable with technology and can start using a product without any dedicated support.

They are converging to provide a massive increase in leverage. A small team is able to quickly and cheaply build a product that can spread organically to millions of users. The enterprise space will also be impacted as people start expecting their personal tools in their corporate environments. It’s definitely an exciting time to be building a tech startup.

Where are the event recommendation startups?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I worked on a startup with the goal of providing local event recommendations. Unfortunately, we were never able to make it work. We focused too much on building new features, didn’t simplify our product enough, didn’t have a focused vision, and didn’t spend time understanding the market. After reading Mark Hendrickson’s Plancast’s postmortem, I started thinking about the problem again and what a successful approach would look like. As Mark pointed out, it’s difficult to incent people to consistently broadcast their plans. Most people will only plan major events in advance and even fewer will log into a website to note that they’re going to grab beers with a friend in a few hours. One thing people are starting to do is checking in to a venue. Knowing the present is a lot simpler than thinking about the future and smartphones have reinforced this behavior. Foursquare has been riding this wave and apps like GroupMe and Fast Society have also taken advantage.

Overcoming the Build Bias

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

An issue I’ve been trying to overcome is what I like to call the “build bias.” Whenever I’d run into a technical problem, I’d want to solve it on my own - whether it’s by writing some code or by installing and configuring various libraries and packages. I remember the time I needed to collect feedback for a website but instead of just using an off the shelf product like GetSatisfaction, I decided to create my own. Although I was able to get it working, it took me longer than expected to get it into a usable state and distracted me from the other improvements I wanted to make.

As a developer, it’s very easy to convince yourself to build from scratch every time you need something rather than using an existing solution. It’s exciting to work on something new and it’s annoying integrating someone else’s code. It’s even worse when they’re charging a few dollars a month for something that you can build in a few hours.

More often than not we underestimate the cost of building something of sufficient quality and don’t include the ongoing maintenance cost we’ll most likely be doing. More importantly, we are no longer focusing on the highest leverage activity. As they teach in business schools, you shouldn’t outsource your core competency but everything else is fair game. This is also supported by the lean startup approach which encourages getting your product to market as soon as possible so you can validate your market hypotheses. Why spend time building features when you don’t even know you have a marketable product? If it does turn out that you have a successful product you can always go back and develop your own solution then.

My new process is to first make sure that the feature is even needed. If it is, I check out the open source alternatives to see if anything can be used. If not, I look at the available paid solutions. For many small projects, it turns out that you can ride the trial/basic version enough to validate your idea. This approach has led Glossi to use MongoHQ to host my database, SendGrid as my email system, and GetSatisfaction as a feedback widget in addition to ton of open source libraries. With every new project, I’m offloading more and more of my auxiliary features to cloud based services and feel much more productive. Makes me wonder how many other services there are out there that can be leveraged.

GroupOn Scheduler

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I'm not surprised that someone came out with an online scheduling tool for SMBs. I am a bit surprised that it was GroupOn though. I suspect many smaller companies have tried doing it but found selling to the SMB much more difficult than they expected. Since GroupOn already has penetration in the SMB space they may find it a lot easier, especially if, as it looks, they will be offering it free to any business that runs a GroupOn promotion.

Google Giving Employees Free Adwords?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

According to this [http://agtb.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/my-1day-adwords-account/](blog post), Gogole gives their employees $1 a day to advertise on Google. The intent is to give employees the perspective of an Adwords user in order to improve the product. In addition to giving employees exposure to Adwords, this also has potential to increase the competition in Adword auctions by causing bids to increase and leading to more revenue for Google. Given that Google has more than 10,000 employees worldwide this can have an effect on smaller advertisers.

Power of Twitter

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I may be a bit late to the party but I was finally able to see the power of Twitter this afternoon.

I kept on getting an "Authentication failed" message when trying to log in to AIM. A few years ago I would not know what to do except ask my friends if they were having any trouble. Right now, I went to searched for "AIM" on Twitter and discovered that other people were having the same problem. Turns out it was a systematic problem and I wasn't the only one affected. Being able to know more about this problem is a great benefit. There has been a lot of talk of the power of real time search and real time news but this was my first real glimpse into the power of Twitter.

Some thoughts on innovation

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled unto an article written in 1968 that tries to predict what the world of 2008 will be like. Usually, these types of predictions are completely off and tend to predict a future far more advanced than what it actually becomes.

As expected, the article had it’s exaggerations (automatic cars driving at 250 miles per hour, inter-continental rockets, average work day of 4 hours ) but what struck me the most is how accurate the predictions about computers are:

On Microsoft walking away from Yahoo

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A little unexpected but I think this was the right decision for Microsoft for a couple of reasons:

Jerry Yang was doing everything in his power to prevent MS from acquiring Yahoo - what type of message does that send and how must the employees of Yahoo feel if their CEO is acting this way.
In order to compete with Google, the merger must have gotten done quickly and smoothly, this would not have been the case in the case of a hostile takeover.
There have been rumors that many of Yahoo’s employees were just waiting for the merger to happen in order to cash in on their new accelerated vesting and compensation packages, immediately leaving Yahoo there after.
A lot of the Yahoo employees and MSFT employees and investors did not want the merger to go through. From what I know the largest group that wanted the merger to go through were the Yahoo investors, albeit at a higher price.
Yahoo will now have to deal with a variety of problems: shareholder lawsuits, talk of Jerry’s management ability, sudden price drop. All these may in fact lead to another Microsoft offer in maybe a few months at a much lower price - in which case it will probably be accepted.

The only downside that just immediately to my mind is that MS and Yahoo are in deep water and do need to do something in order to compete with Google - but I do not think the merger would have necessarily helped them, given the merging difficulties and the corporate culture clash.

Why does EA want Take Two?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure why no one is pointing this out but it seems that as soon as EA acquires T2, the T2 folks would just leave to create a new studio. They seem independent and I doubt that they’d want to work for EA. And although EA would get the rights to all of the T2 games and may try to develop the series, they might not have the imagination or the guys to do it. In addition, I don’t know whether EA would even want to develop such products as GTA and Bully given the violence and public relations ordeal that T2 has been going through the past few years.

On Apple buying PA Semiconductor

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a response to Robert Cringely’s PBS Post. He’s giving 2 reasons for the acquisition and I wanted to add to two of his points.

The short term reason is to force Intel to give Apple price cuts for fear that Apple will make their own chips: I do not think that Intel needs to worry about Apple manufacturing their own PC chips as Apple already went through that phase and AMD already provides the necessary pressure on Intel to lower their prices.
In the future, software and OSes will not be tied down to a specific chip so Apple will start manufacturing their own processors to increase their margins: I think the author is on to something regarding the future of processors but I do not think the PC market will change that drastically. Apple will probably start making their own chips for the iPhone and their new gadgets but I doubt they will do the same for the PC market.

Edit: Just found out that Apple already makes a server (Thanks Brian). I have to start doing some research from now on.