The web enables us to listen to music, watch tv shows and follow the latest news all without paying a cent. But while things are slowly but surely becoming free, I still believe people are willing to pay for certain value propositions.
Image courtesy of laffy4k
I believe the following 5 things are uniquely profitable in a world of free:
1. Convenience
People are inherently lazy. If you make their lives easier, they will pay you for it.
There are several ways to listen or download music for free, yet people are still paying for songs via iTunes or amazon.com. Why? Because of how easy it is to find and download music on those sites. People value their time more than the 99 cents per download. If you make things convenient and easy people will pay.
2. Quality
Price ensures a more serious and interested clientele. There are many online forums that are free (i.e. Sitepoint, DPreview), but there are also a handful you need to pay for to access (i.e. Webmasterworld, SomethingAwful, metafilter). I believe the reason people are willing to pay for those online communities is because the quality of the content is better. There is a higher signal to noise ratio. This same premise applies to dating sites. People will pay for membership to online dating sites, as opposed to finding dates through any number of free social networks.
3. Additional Functionality
Many websites give consumers just enough services to whet their pallets, and then charge for more functionality or more services, also called the "freemium model." Notable examples include the 37 Signals' product offering, Flickr's Pro Account, and Skype.
4. Customization
Wordpress.com is a great example of this. They provide anyone the ability to have their own personal blog for free however they charge for the ability to customize the CSS or a the blogs domain name for additional fees. Smugmug is another example.
5. Privacy
People still value keeping their private information private. To protect their identity people are willing to pay GoDaddy an extra fee when registering a domain name to ensure the address remains undisclosed.
What do you value enough that you are willing to open your wallet for?
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Note 1: I would like to delve into this further and have proposed a talk for next year's SXSW conference on this topic. If this discussion is of interest to you, I welcome any feedback and would appreciate your vote.
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Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine's cofounder, has a really great list of attributes he asserts are "better than free." These qualities people will pay for in a digital age and include:
1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability
I asked my twitter followers and received some interesting suggestions:
* accessibility
* silence
* beauty
* freedom
* peace of mind
* respect
* attention
Any other ideas?
Almost all of us have our own weaknesses when it comes to illustrating particular subjects. I, personally, can not draw a horse to save my life. I can't imagine a situation where the difference between my life and death depends on my ability to draw a horse, but still, it's haunted me for years.
I've talked about my lack of ability to draw horses to many of my artist friends and peers. To my surprise, many of them recounted me their own secret, shameful inabilities to draw all sorts of subjects including hands, proportions, machinery etc...
I then realized I was not alone in this. We all have our Achille's heel, and I wanted to help all of us.
So a while back, I asked users here to email me illustrations they just could not finish due to their own personal weaknesses, or to send me any illustrations for general critique on areas that could use improvement. So that maybe I could find a common thread in all of our inabilities.
And it dawned on me. All of our problems could be solved with one simple technique:
Practice? No.
How To Draw Anything in One Step
You may be asking, "How could you possibly learn how to draw anything and everything in just one step? Are you a moron?" And if you are, there is no need for childish name-calling. Let's be civilized adults here.
Follow along as I teach you how to draw everything, in this tutorial.
Step 1. Draw a dog covering the thing you can't draw.
Don't believe this works?
Remember how I asked users to send me their problem illustrations? Well, let's test it out firsthand, shall we?
Brandon Kobayashi from Burnaby, Canada sent me this email and his illustration of a woman sitting on a tree stump:
"I often find myself having difficulties drawing human feet. Do you have any tips on how to improve my ability (or lack thereof) in that department?"
Sure there is, Brandon. Just follow my tutorial and you will be set.
Step 1. When finding you can't draw feet, conveniently enough, a dog decided to rest at the woman's feet the day the portrait was painted.
Melanie Goode of Auburn, WA, wrote me asking for help on this particular image:
"I don't seem to have problems drawing bodies, but I am mystified when it comes to getting the proportions of a human face just right."
Well, Melanie, I see you're off to the conventional start by adding in the guidelines for the facial features. Most art instructors teach this very method. But I find it's a lot easier if you follow my tutorial.
Step 1. Pretend a dog ran across the woman's face the day she decided to lay in the grass.
At this point you're probably wondering, "Wow, this is great! But will this technique work in different illustrative styles, as well?" Why, thank you for the compliment! And yes, it will work in all illustration styles.
For example, Ken Tanaka from San Diego, CA sent me a cartoon image of a solider he wanted depicting an M-16 machine gun.
Step 1. I have never personally been interested in drawing weaponry, but even with my lack of experience I was able to use my own tutorial to complete the image of a soldier holding an M-16 machine gun. (Who just happened to be walking along the direct path of a leaping golden retriever.)
And people of all ages can do it, too.
Wendy Lee of (address undisclosed) sent me a drawing by her 6 year old son and told me how he loved to draw dinosaurs and wants to learn to draw them more realistically.
Well, first off, dinosaurs do not talk, smile, nor has there ever been (in any official documented report) a dinosaur that existed labeled a Kevinsaurus.
So how will my system work on a 6 year olds drawing? Very well, actually!
Step 1. As we can add multiple dogs to cover the child's numerous, major technical flaws.
So, there you have it: The be-all, end-all of illustration tutorials.
With my method, I guarantee you'll find yourself with a newfound ability to draw anything and everything you can imagine on this big, round Earth. Including the Earth.
Q: "What if my weakness IS drawing dogs?"
A: It's time to change hobbies.
Like just about everyone else I know, I'd been meaning to join a gym for quite some time. Until a few months ago I'd run the gamut of excuses: "I don't have enough time;" "I can't afford to join right now;" "I don't have enough energy after the long commute;" etc, etc...
Image courtesy of PhillipC
A few months ago, after complaining about how I never have the energy to do anything, friend of mine who had been going through a similar predicament told me that she had just joined a gym and was paying only $5 a month. Whaaa? $5 a month in the city? How can that be? Apparently her health insurance offered a gym reimbursement plan.
For every 6 month period, they'd reimburse her $200 if she attended a gym with cardiovascular equipment 50 times. (That comes out to slightly more than 2 times a week). "I can do that!" I thought, and off I went to determine if I too was entitled to such a reimbursement. Indeed I was, and after another 2 weeks of procrastination, I got off my lazy bum, waddled to the nearest gym and signed up on the spot.
Inspirational video courtesy of OK Go
For a while, the only motivation I had to keep going was the desire to burn off the pounds earned from 9 hours in front of a computer screen with only a 15 minute interruption in the middle of the day for a pizza break. That and the fact that if I wanted that $200 reimbursement, I'd have to earn it. After 2 weeks of this I noticed that the effort required to get off my couch and work out had lessened. In fact, if I missed a day, I'd start to feel antsy. For the first time in a long time, I had too much energy. That's when I realized that I had somehow formed a health "inducing" habit. Wierd.
You're probably wondering what this has to do with tech, or even productivity in general. Well, in short, nothing. Not directly anyway. Indirectly, it's done a heck of a lot. The simple act of injecting something new and productive into my daily schedule has a positive impact on my daily routine.
I now tend to look at new things in a more positive light. I overcame one adversity (laziness), and other life challenges seem more manageable because of it. When I go to the gym in the morning I find myself with a lot more energy earlier in the day. Instead of stumbling into work in the morning and staring blankly at my monitor for 20 minutes waiting for my brain to boot up, I spring into the office ready for action.
I know it's a common theme because people have been offering me similar advice all my life. I've only just set out on my path to an ordered existence, but clearly it's important enough to reiterate some of the tricks I've used to help keep me on track. More to come.
Editor's Note:Here are some helpful links for you to save money on gym memberships, depending on your insurance provider. Check with your specific provider for exact details on what you're entitled to:
- Oxford Health Plans Up to $200 off, every 6 months for attending a gym with cardiovascular 50 times. Spouses can receive $100 off.
- BlueCross BlueShield $20 off your bill, per month. This varies from state to state (this particular link was for Minnesota). You'll need to call the number on the back of your insurance card to find your local policy on reimbursements.
- Aetna (see page 23) They offer 30%-60% off discounts on some gym memberships.
- United Healthcare (see page 6) Save 10-60% on gym memberships.
- Tufts Save 20-60% on gym memberships.
- Cigna Up to 62% discounts on gym memberships.
- On a somewhat related note, if you are 55 or older, you may be eligible for a separate reimbursement program called Silver Sneakers. Check your state for eligible health plans.
The more members you add to a team the harder communication becomes. To that end, it's sometimes hard for me to understand why startups are so focused on growing their teams out during the early stages.
For all the talk about how good communication is key for a team's success, I have a counter idea: Avoid having to communicate in the first place. Communication is not the ideal to a team's success; less team members to communicate with is.
The closer a team size moves to one, the more efficient its productivity.
Jeff Bezos likes to refer to the ideal team size as "two-pizza teams:" any team that is small enough that they can be fed by a couple of pizza pies, is a model of efficiency and accomplishment. Anything larger is not.
Image courtesy of Randy son of Robert
The medium is the mess
Communication is actually bad. It inherently involves a loss of information. The more communication that is needed, the less of the product plan will be efficiently implemented according to the original vision.
Consider the impossibility of trying to tell a friend about a wierd dream you had the previous night. Can you convey every single detail of the dream before it fades? Of course not. You have constraints (like time and memory), so you cut out anything which is "insignificant."
The same holds true for any project plan. The larger the amount of people to convey information to, the less efficient you can be at it. Explaining to one person every detail of the plan is tedious enough. Imagine having to do the same for multiple people. Daisy chaining the information so that it is passed on from executives to managers to smaller groups has its own problems: Information loss and corruption at multiple points. It's the age-old game of "operator," only with results that are not nearly so funny.
When there is one person both running and operating the entire show, you have 0% communication efficiency loss. The vision is designed and implemented exactly as it was originally conceived. Add a second teammate and you automatically introduce inefficiency into the equation. With each new person added to a team, the potential for communication efficiency loss gets worse as each person creates failure points with every other person. Once you start getting beyond 8 team members, the efficiency loss becomes so great that it can only be made up by throwing additional resources at the problem. In other words, you are not going to see double the output from a team of 15 people as you will with a team of 8 (even though you'd expect it on paper). In fact, you'd be lucky to see even a 25% increase in output, even though your team size has doubled.
Keeping your team small
So what's the overarching lesson? You don't need a huge team to successfully launch a start up. In fact, your chances of succeeding are better, the smaller your team size. You cut out as many communication points of failure as possible and keep your startup costs down.
So how do you keep your team small?
* Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don't try to create a complex suite of applications. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite). Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible.
* Choose people that can wear multiple hats. Can your designer code? Can your programmer manage a community? Can your marketing guru fund raise? Can one guy do it all?
Image courtesy of Mike Burns
* Document everything. It's obvious that you will need a business plan. What's not so obvious is that you should also document the seemingly mundane; methods used for team communication, methods used for integrating with potential partners, methods used for keeping a company blog up-to-date and interesting. All documentation should be available via a central location. A wiki can work really well for this purpose. Good documentation lessens the loss from communication failures.
* Arrange your workspace in common areas. Segregating your team in different offices is a recipe for lost communication data and with it, a need for additional people. You'd be surprised at how many roles can be shared by multiple people, so long as they have the ability to communicate instantly and unimpeded with each other. Put people between walls, and those shared tasks will need to be managed by additional team members.
Examples
The following are examples of two-pizza teams that generated some of the most popular community content sites online:
* Fark
* Worth1000
* Newgrounds
* SomethingAwful
* Delicious
* Metafilter
* Etsy
* Reddit
* Flickr
Know any others?
There is nothing quite like the feeling of watching someone realize for the first time that they really can do something new. You know - that moment when someone finally figures it out after weeks of trying, when their eyes light up, they smile big and practically run to try it again; to prove to themselves that they didn't dream the whole thing. That moment.
Image courtesy of headcase
I love that moment, and I guess I've made a lifelong habit of seeking it out wherever I can. When I taught piano to small children, this was a near-daily event, either in my students' lessons themselves, or in the stories they told me in our downtime. For children, a constant stream of new learning is a regular event and something they don't seem to question ever, as natural as breathing and a normal part of every day life. But at some point, most of us lose that momentum. We forget our ability to devour new information and the emotional rewards that come along with it. We get complacent and stale, and subsequently, stuck in a rut that can be very hard to escape from.
I know that if you can convince someone to learn ONE new skill, they are twice as likely to try to tackle a second one. So, as the manager of a creative community, my biggest challenge is always to find new ways to encourage people to boldly attempt new things. Here are three things that I find help:
1. Start at the basics. If you want to build a house, you need a foundation. Always assume that the people you are teaching are very smart but totally new to the subject. Give them tutorials that illustrate concepts, not just steps or tricks, and they will surprise YOU with the ways they apply those concepts. Always strive for genuine learning instead of mimicry.
2. Don't show off. You know how at karaoke night, nobody wants to be next up after the really awesome singer? This applies all over the place, but especially in a creative space. There is a lot to be said for presenting something that's solid but not entirely polished, and a lot more to be said about how people act when they feel they are learning alongside other people, instead of being taught individually. It's hard to get up and make mistakes in front of a bunch of perfect and talented strangers, so make some of your own, loud and proud, and break through that stigma. 
Image courtesy of mecredis
3. Give genuine feedback. Positivity is absolutely necessary, but nothing stales a creative community faster than false compliments. Try to encourage constructive criticism at all points, to help people improve and feel more secure about the work they are creating. Ask for feedback on your own work as often as possible. Applaud people's effort, especially when their results aren't quite what they'd hoped for. Remember to reward people for participating - not just for being popular.
What do you find stops you from learning new things? What do you do to overcome this?
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Mo, and I am the newest bird to join the Aviary. I'm thrilled to be part of a team of such superstars, and am excited to once again be working with Iz and Avi whom I have worked with previously during the early stages of Worth1000, where I helped design the architecture.
Image courtesy of Vincent Maher
I love starting new jobs. The promise and potential of a new role is exciting. There's something that makes me feel good when I sit down at my new desk and the surface is still visible. I actually get a little turned on using a new computer with a clean desktop before all of these random files and folders named "New Requirements Version 1a - old.doc", "New Folder 2" and "Do Not Delete" clutter it up.
Joining as a new team member in the middle of a large project can be difficult. It would be great if on day one you could show up and start doing your thing. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Especially at a company like Aviary where the company strategy and website concepts are so complex and unique, seemingly there is so much you need to know before you can start being a productive team member.
But there are some contributions you can make *only* as a new team member.
On your first day you are a perfect focus group. You are in a unique position in that you don't really know how things are supposed to work. So take out a notebook and be a first time user - without documentation, FAQ's or anyone doing a demo for you. Can you easily navigate the functionality? A well designed and implemented interface should not require explanation. If you have trouble, so will other first time users. This needs to be addressed, and you are in a unique position to notice the problem.
On your first day, you are not jaded by how things already work. The people who have been working on the product for a while are already in a certain mindset about how the application looks and behaves. They have been programmed to expect the result of action A is behavior B. But does that make sense? Not fully understanding the application can help you give the group a fresh perspective on expected behavior.
I'd love to hear any of your thoughts or experiences as a new team member.
I've been watching the steady decline of journalism since the Internet began replacing print and television as the main provider of news, with a seething disgust.
Today's CNN top story put me over the edge.
Here's the title and article summary for those of you without images in their feed readers:
6-year-olds forced into sex for food, group finds
A poor Haitian girl could get $2.80 and some chocolate, she told a European charity. All she had to do was perform a sex act on a humanitarian worker. She refused. Her impoverished friends did not. Her story is one of many in a report titled "No One To Turn To" -- which chronicles allegations of charity and U.N. workers abusing children.
But if you read the actual article you see not a story about a 6-year-old being raped (it's a mere footnote in the article), but the following:
In the report, "No One To Turn To" a 15-year-old girl from Haiti told researchers: "My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises.
"They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes ($2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said, 'No,' but some of the girls did it and got the money."
This bait-and-switch is so misrepresentative as to be grotesque. The story changes from "Humanitarian workers pay teenagers for sex" to the more sensationalist "6-year-olds forced into sex for food."
The biggest problem with news being disseminated online is that there is no geographic isolation (as is the case with both print and tv), which means that every local news network is in competition with every other news site on the planet. Ratings are driven by attracting as large an audience as possible... and most people care more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's married life than how many people vanished from a Darfur town this week (hint: all 30,000).
Blue = Angelina Jolie, Red = Darfur.
Newspapers can't help but take notice.
Accurate facts used to be the hallmark of professionalism in newspapers. Editors would strive for it. Now even the most respected newspapers on the planet are feeling the creep of ratings greed and with it, an end to an era of accurate, informative news.
I'm not the first to make this complaint and I have no connection to the journalism world except for some past memories of running my university newspaper. More important people than I have used larger podiums to disseminate the same message (and gotten flak for it).
I understand newspapers are a business to run and profits are driven by advertising. I also understand that newspapers are the fourth estate, keeping world governments in check through the power of disseminating information. With every sensationalist article they run, every inaccurate headline, every news story that breaks the papers' traditional format because of a previous story's high Digg count: they are relinquishing that power in the name of profit. There has to be a balance.
As maddening as watching reputable brands peddle sensationalism might be, I actually have a bigger worry: Newspapers are clearly noticing how much Digg traffic certain articles are receiving; a fact that is certain to play a role in influencing the editorial direction of future stories (or at least their headlines).
I predict a future in which USAToday announces America's next president with the formulaic made-for-Digg headline, "The #1 Most Elected President Ever, in the 2008 Election."
The following are some random tips that I've learned through my experience founding and working at several startups. Take the opportunity to learn from other people's mistakes -- the best advice is that which is learned on someone else's time!
I. Relax
Image courtesy of audi_insperation
Work time should end at a certain point during the day. Period. Just because you are focused and energized by a specific task doesn't mean that you should continue to work on it until you conk out on your keyboard at 4 a.m.. The rest of your productive week will be completely ruined. Instead, stopping work on a project you are really into will give you a jump start on your work the following morning, and your energy will hopefully last through the day. Finally, turn off your cellphone / blackberry and switch gears: kick back to spend some time with family, read a book or watch (something intelligent on) TV.
Now, obviously, this doesn't apply to deadline days. If you have a project due the following day, you should never blow it. But, as general rules to live by, budget your work and plan ahead so you don't work into the late hours of the night, and always set aside time for non-work related activities.
Your work hours will be more productive if you are well-rested and well-rounded.
[Note: If my wife sees this tip, she will, of course smirk, because this is the one tip I break repeatedly, every single night (including right now).]
The full list after the jump...
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Shuttling between tech meetups, VC meetings and conferences, I realized that there are so many types of entrepreneurs that it would be a mistake to group them all under one general umbrella. So I tried to correct that horrible wrong with this list of all entrepreneur types from A-Z.
Classic example of a fantrepreneur photo courtesy of Phil Hawksworth
ALL ENTREPRENEURS FROM A - Z
Againtrepreneur
Just sold their 5th company in 3 years.
Bumtrepreneur
They litter the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in doorways and begging for spare change. They individually make more money in a month than most Web2.0 companies.
Can'trepreneur
5 failed startups and it's probably worth revisiting that 9-5 deskjob.
Don-trepreneur
The Godfather of investors for Entrepreneurs. You probably want to check your termsheets carefully for the clause on broken kneecaps.
Entrepreneur
General class that accurately describes only 5% of the groups on this page.
Fantrepreneur
HOLY CRAP KEVIN ROSE JUST WALKED INTO THE ROOM HAI KEVIN I LOVE DIGG CAN YOU GIVE ME TIPZ FOR MY STARTUP PLEAZE?
G-Z available after the jump...
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There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.
Almost everyone working on Aviary is an obsessive gamer. Besides for offering us a convenient (and violent) way to deflate, we also find a lot of inspiration in the underlying design. That's how I justify it to my wife, anyway.
Valve Software
Two games we are currently obsessed with are Team Fortress 2 and Portal, both created by Valve Software (most famous for its Half-Life series).
Valve's success as a software company stems from their philosophy of not compromising their story narrative for the sake of interactive gaming elements. Ironically enough, by forcing their game developers to work within more difficult parameters, they end up building better interactive elements as well!
Robin Walker, Valve employee and creator of Team Fortress 2 puts it best in the in-game commentary:
Holding ourselves to strong design principals can often force us to come up with better solutions than taking the easy route.
Lesson Learned: Limitations generate creative solutions.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is a game where users can choose between becoming one of nine different characters, each with unique abilities and limitations. Players will adopt different characters so that their team will be balanced properly. Having 9 different types of players running around on a field is plenty confusing. Teammates would have a hard time identifying and working with each other and finding certain characters they need (for example, a medic to recharge their health). That's not a problem in TF2 though, because Valve took the novel approach of designing the characters to be physical caricatures of their abilities, instantly recognizable by their silhouettes. Confusion is completely minimized.
Andrea Wicklund, another Valve employee, says:
The more your art direction can use well-understood visual representations the less work you have to do to explain you game elements.
Lesson Learned: Good design lies in the shapes.
How to apply it: Make sure your applications interactive elements (i.e. button icons) are all identifiable by their shapes alone. Exaggerated shapes are easier for people to identify and understand. Here's a great reference point.
Portal
Portal is a first-person shooter game where users are given an obstacle course and a single weapon: a gun that shoots portals. A user can open two portals simultaneously, and walking through one makes the user exit the other. The brilliance of Portal is in understanding that physics continues to operate normally in the background and must be used in helping navigate the obstacle course. For example, shoot one portal in the ceiling above you and one portal in the floor below you and you will begin to fall straight down between the portals (ad infinitum), increasing speed as you hurtle towards terminal velocity... pretty useful if you are trying to generate speed to hurtle yourself to a previously unreachable platform! 
What's amazing about Portal is that there are no true enemies or weapons in this first person shooter. It's nothing more than a mental challenge that defies you to solve puzzles by throwing away everything that feels right to you about physical interaction with the world. It is a completely new form of interaction with a previously existing genre of gaming.
Lesson Learned: Innovation can be found in minor refactoring.
In layman's terms: You don't need to reinvent the wheel to produce something completely novel.
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