-
A Week with the Jawbone UP
It’s been a while since there was a product that got me as excited for its release as the Jawbone UP did. When they teased it last summer, I knew I’d be getting one—and last Sunday, when they came out, I did just that. I’ve had a week to play around with this eagerly-anticipated gadget and, to be honest, I’ve got mixed feelings about the UP. It appears that I’m not the only one, either. My friend Natasha Eng also got one and seems to agree (see her first week’s review here). All in all, I’d have to say that the UP is a good product, which could be a great product if a few things were changed/added.
-
The Unfortunate, Impending (Purely Speculative and Probably Exaggerated) Death of Kickstarter
Kickstarter is awesome. You don’t need me to tell you that. However, is it just me or does it seem to be getting increasingly less awesome?
This Gothamist post got me thinking. It raises the notion that Kickstarter is doing itself a disservice by, effectively, allowing people to bankroll pointless projects. And, while I concede that a grilled cheese maker that burns an image of Jesus into your bread is a really, irritatingly, almost headscratchingly stupid idea1, I don’t actually think that’s the problem.
Kickstarter’s a meritocracy. The ideas that the community determines are “good” get funded; the bad ones don’t. I’d like to say that for every “Grilled Chesus,” there’s a TikTok, (a fantastic project that’s raised nearly a million dollars), but that’s not really the case. The number of bad ideas will always outnumber the good ideas. However, the point remains: The community decides what gets funded.
That said: The way I see it, there are two potential problems brewing:
1) Searchability
It’s not that someone can pitch a bad idea on Kickstarter. It’s that anyone can pitch any number of bad ideas on Kickstarter. The issue has to do with scaling (something being tackled by Sarah Judd Welch in her blog). Kickstarter’s scaling issues aren’t macro—they’re not about opening new offices, or strategically attacking emerging markets. They’re dealing with what I’ll call “microscaling.” By this, I mean: How do they deliver as good an experience to 20,000 users as they did for 200? How can they produce a consistently good user experience that can survive a ramp-up? How can they ensure that I, as a user/customer have just as much return on engagement when the site is 4X as big as is it now?
As I said, Kickstarter is a meritocracy. But that only works if you keep the community engaged, which is easier to do when they don’t have to sift through a bunch of pages of crap to find something that’s actually, well, engaging.
If there are too many uninspiring concepts on Kickstarter, the consequences end up being exponential. Sure, the lousy projects won’t get funded, but they’re also going to make it absurdly time consuming to find the fantastic ideas. This has the potential to lead to a higher bounce rate and a less likely chance that the good ideas will get found, funded, and produced.
(Note: It should be pointed out that Kickstarter is already attempting to combat this with the inclusion of curated pages, which I quite like.)
2) Fatigue
It’s a simple concept: The more you hear about something, the less impact it has. The first time one of your friends sent you a link to their Kickstarter project, it was pretty interesting, right? Maybe you even browsed around the site for a while and found one or two other projects that captivated you. I’m wondering how long it is before the conversation becomes:
“I just put my project up on kickstarter!”
“…..and?”Now, don’t get me wrong: These issues aren’t Kickstarter’s fault. In fact, they’re a direct result of how great the site has been. But they’re issues nonetheless and they’re important to the future of the company. What makes Kickstarter great is the ability to discover and fund unique and interesting projects from across the globe—helping people you’ve never met purely because you believe in what they’re doing. If that becomes more difficult to accomplish, the site basically becomes a place where people go simply to fund their friends’ film, or band, or zine. And there are already sites like IndieGogo, for that.
Maybe these issues won’t prove as detrimental as I’m supposing. Maybe we—early fans of Kickstarter—are just whining, like the longtime fans of a band that just went mainstream. It’s always nice to feel like you’ve discovered something. It gives you a sense of ownership.
Or maybe an increased reach will just change the product’s use cases. Early adopters of Twitter will remember when it resembled the early days of AOL chat rooms. It was a neat new mechanism through which to interact with people. Since then, it’s evolved into a trusted news source, a marketing tool, and—in some cases—an agent for change. This happens all the time. Companies morph, pivot, and expand based on how people interact with their products. Perhaps the Kickstarter we know now is far different than where Perry and the gang will take it.
Regardless, it’s going to be an interesting story. Maybe someone should make a documentary about it. We could fund it on Kickstarter—provided, of course, that we can find it.
-
But it’s at least a little funny, no? I mean, c’mon. ↩
-
-
365 of 28: How a potential problem turned into an unexpected benefit.
When I started the 365 of 28 project, two of the questions I asked people were “What, if anything, struck you as the most positive thing about our interaction?” and “what, if anything, struck you as the most negative thing about our interaction?” Initially, I thought that this had the potential to throw a bit of a wrench in things. Here’s why:
I’ll be honest. I’m not sure about you, but I personally was more interested in the answers to the second question. It’s not about focusing on the negative, it’s about the opportunity to do something with that knowledge. If someone says you’re smart or funny, it’s nice to hear—but the experience kind of ends there. There’s not much you can do but say thanks and move on. On the other hand, if people seem to think you’re obnoxious, or a jerk, or whatever, that information is useful. You can take that new-found knowledge and do something about it.
But here’s the rub.
In an experiment like 365 of 28, I didn’t know exactly how much useful information I’d be able to get. The truth is, if someone really thinks you’re a jerk, they’re probably not going to take ten minutes to fill out your survey just to tell you so.
What ended up happening, however, was interesting (and, I should say, pretty rewarding). I got a ton of useful feedback. And, it turns out, most of it was from people I knew fairly well. What the project did was give them a forum to tell me what exactly what they thought (even anonymously, if they so chose), which is actually a fairly rare opportunity.
Think about it: With even our closest friends, whom we of course love dearly, there are always things that we wish they’d improve or do differently. But how often do we tell them? Usually, we don’t. It’s not exactly easy to give people unsolicited feedback like “I think your new startup is going to fail” or “I don’t think he’s the right one for you” or “That soul patch really needs to go.” What I’d done was give my friends the chance to tell me anything that they felt would help me out. They took that opportunity seriously and, as a result, they gave me a whole lot of things to consider.
In the end, the aspect of the project about which I had the most reservations ended up yielding some of the most valuable insights.
-
Spotify’s Ad Model: Stupidity or Genius?
Like many of you, I’ve been using Spotify a lot since it’s U.S. launch a couple of months ago and, overall, I really like the product. It’s simple, intuitive, and offers consistent high-quality performance.
Now, because I’m not a premium subscriber, I’m subjected to advertising (a tradeoff I’m completely comfortable with). However, the advertising to which I’m subjected is almost entirely not to my particular tastes. Best as I can tell, a record company pays for advertising, and those ads are served fairly indiscriminately.
Why, if I’m listening to Sam Cooke’s greatest hits, would you ever think I’d be interested in the new single by David Guerra? I mean, they’re both guys that sing, but that’s pretty much where the commonalities end.
Would it really be hard for Spotify to install a recommendation engine? If I’ve been listening to Sam Cooke all day, you might want to try to sell me a new collection of Motown’s greatest hits, rather than some pop star. At first, I thought this was a fairly idiotic method of advertising. After all, it certainly wasn’t going to make me buy any additional music.
And then I realized something.
Spotify doesn’t necessarily want me to buy music; they want me to buy a premium subscription. If they served me ads introducing me to music I actually might like, I might come to even embrace the ads as a way of discovering new music geared to my taste (a sort of in-app Pandora). But if they serve me ads that are mildly annoying while providing me an otherwise great product, I might just pony up for a premium subscription.
Of course, they’d be risking the chance that I might just quit the service entirely and go back to Rdio…. but it’s interesting nonetheless.
-
Location-Based Services: The Advantage of Building for New York
Obviously, in the past few years, there have been a ton of location-based/location-aware services coming out of the usual tech hotbeds (SF, Austin, New York).1 You knew this. However, I’ve noticed something recently and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. The ones coming out of New York are, on the whole, just better. Granted, better is a completely subjective concept. Obviously, it probably stands to reason that New York-based apps have proven “better” or more useful to me, a New Yorker. However, I think it goes deeper than that. I think New York is the perfect proving ground for these sorts of applications.
It has a lot to do with geography. New York is an interesting sort of geographic amalgam that tests our definition of what “nearby” really means. Think about it. You can get from 34th Street to Long Island City in five minutes (and to Greenpoint, Brooklyn in ten) via the ferry. But, despite the close proximity, I don’t think anyone would say that Queens and Midtown Manhattan are “nearby.” Because New York is such a pedestrian-centric city, we deal with distance in incredibly minute degrees. Manhattan, in total, is only ~23 miles long. For much of the country, that’s a trip to the grocery store. In New York, it’s not nearby unless it’s less that ten or so blocks away.
This is something that foursquare has positively nailed. Take a look at this snapshot of this “explore” screen.
As you can see, I was about a block from the East River at the time. Now, despite the fact that—geographically—locations in Queens were just as close (or, in some cases, closer) than some on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not a single one was recommended. And, seeing as I don’t own a boat, that makes me happy. While Queens is technically close, it’s really not.
On the other side of things, where miscalculations in proximity had led to a poor user experience, I thought about my first experience with Yobongo. Yobongo basically creates chat rooms of people in close proximity. In fact, on their homepage, they claim that the app makes it “easy to get started communicating with people around you.” However, when I launched the app from Bryant Park, most of the people “close to me” were in New Jersey. Not quite what I was looking for. Now, there’s certainly a possibility that Yobongo’s gotten better with fine-tuning their proximity, but I wouldn’t know, because I deleted it almost immediately after that first experience—and I’m sure I’m not the only one. That’s sort of the point: If you’re not going to do it well, you’re often not going to get a chance to try again.
That’s precisely why New York works as a testing ground: It’s hard to do it well. It takes smarter engineers and better algorithms. If you blow it, you’re losing a valuable audience (young, tech-savvy folks). But if you nail it, it’s not like someone in another city is going to complain about your app being too precise.
