Diets, Politics and Movies — What do they have in common?
Posted by Anthony
- Diet regimens
- Political campaigns
- Disney movies
What do all 3 of these things have in common?
As it turns out, a lot; They all promise you that at the end of a predictably-structured process, there will be a reward waiting for you.
In short, they all sell you hope. Hope that, above all odds, you will get a result you would never be able to achieve without some outside assistance.
And when you begin looking around, you begin to realize you can apply this newfound observation to nearly everything.
There's a valuable lesson here:
If you're looking to make it big in life or business alike, then understand that hope is craved. If you can effectively sell it, you will capture an audience. And if that hope leads to an honest-to-goodness result, you'll have that audience forever. That audience will tell others; it will grow virally, with fervor.
The intersection of hope & result is home to a number of the best minds, corporations and products in the history of mankind.
So next time you're wondering how to elevate your game - how to get more people on your side, or become more successful - the formula is really quite simple: identify a problem, find a way to instill hope, and begin proving better things are possible. It won't take long before others take notice.
As basic as it sounds, it's easy to forget. And so, whatever walk of life you come from, it's worth reminding yourself regularly:
Create true value. Instill hope. Prosper.
3 Business Lessons from “The Social Network”
Posted by Anthony
The Social Network is an intriguing story about the early beginnings of Facebook. Although certain facts are in dispute, the movie is largely based in reality. And while many people are currently flocking to theaters for entertainment value, this film is filled with juicy business lessons. My top three:
1. Ideas are important. Execution more so.
The movie focuses quite a bit on a feud between Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, and the Winklevoss brothers. All being students at Harvard at the time, the Winklevoss brothers claimed that Mark stole their idea. The Winklevoss's had the idea to create an exclusive, Harvard-only social network. Mark got wind of this, and within months, executed on this idea on his own. The Winklevoss brothers then spent the next few years of their lives pursuing every possible course of action to halt Mark's progress. All the while, Mark was too busy concentrating on making sure Facebook would be the biggest thing since sliced bread.
Ethically speaking, Mark could have gone about the situation in a more respectable manner. But from a business standpoint, it goes to show that while ideas are a dime a dozen, proper & efficient execution is rare. Some people, like the Winklevoss's, spend far too long focusing on the things that don't matter - like refining the idea, or chasing down people that do them wrong - while others, like Mark Zuckerberg, spend every minute focusing on the things that do matter - like making good ideas amazing realities. The people that win - hell, the people that deserve to win - are the ones that bring ideas to life. Even if those ideas are ripped off.
2. Love of the game is the only way to succeed at a massive scale
A lot of people think they can have a great idea and get rich executing on it. Problem is, if you don't love the idea yourself - if you don't live and breathe the idea - it will show. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the team were Facebook. That's why, during legal meetings, Mark cared more about what was going on back at his office than the lawyer's. And that's why his programmers were "wired in" to their work, ignoring the outside world for hours on end. Without those sorts of personalities, Facebook would have never gained this level of notoriety.
3. Acquiring a ton of sudden venture capital funding is more exciting than achieving slow and modest profit, but is not to be mistaken for building a real business
The movie wasn't intending to make this point, but I certainly saw it sitting there, clear as day. There is a relatively new problem in business. Modern tech companies are built to gain valuation, and eventually sell. They're not built to be sustainable, long-term operations. Think Twitter, MySpace and nearly every other "fun" web 2.0 company.
Facebook's valuation is through the roof. And it's achieved vast amounts of VC funding. But from a profitability standpoint, their expenses are sky high, and they have virtually nothing to show for any of it. They're more transparent about the number of active users they have (500 million) than how much revenue they bring in. The reason is simple: the latter statistic isn't as overwhelming. They have a huge asset in their astounding user base, but fail to capitalize on that asset in any kind of significant way.
As it turns out, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook's original CFO, was onto something. He had a lot of intense debates with Mark Zuckerberg early on, claiming that it was important to get Facebook to begin paying for itself by exploring advertising opportunities. It's true that Facebook needed to "stay cool" and advertising could have potentially hurt that. And it's also easy to assume that Mark Zuckerberg was right and Eduardo was wrong. After all, look at Facebook's success thus far.
But we must remember that the story of "the social network" isn't over. What happens when the all the funding and inflated valuation disappears? Call Eduardo. He may have some ideas.
Technology Overload
Posted by Anthony
Don't blink. You may miss the latest must-have gadget, piece of software or technological convention. And without a doubt, you and your business will suffer because of it. Right?
Maybe. But probably not.
I know. A bit of an unexpected stance, coming from an entrepreneur in the web development industry. But in the past few years, I've been extremely in tune to the fact that most adults these days share a weakness - they obsess over new technology in about as levelheaded a manner as a child lusts for a new toy. Every time we see a new innovation, we immediately need to find a reason to have it and/or use it. And that's a problem.
We shouldn't be wasting resources buying, learning or implementing new things because they're cool. Technology should fill a need.
Now, that's not to say we can't have fun every once in a while. I bought a Droid X because it's a grownup toy that I enjoy. I mess around with new web technologies from time to time because they're fun. And every once in a while, those fun things turn out to legitimately help advance my knowledge and/or my business in a significant way. But most of the time, they don't. Most of the time, we're blinded by too much form and not enough function. Or by a technology that's 5-10 years too early to matter.
From a business standpoint - especially as a startup entrepreneur - what you need to do is focus. And it's hard to do that when you spend more time upgrading to 2.0 and 3.0 than taking full advantage of all 1.0 had to offer in the first place.
I see this everywhere. ERP systems are upgraded every year because they're "supposed to be". Phones are upgraded because 2 years are up. New web technologies are used because they're "more standard", despite the fact that current standards can usually get the same job done with less effort and more compatibility.
From now on, I encourage you to follow this rule: Buy new gadgets... for yourself. Try new technology... on your own watch. And stay up on the times... using side projects to learn your way. By all means, do these things because the kid in you wants to. But recognize where the kid should leave and the adult should enter. Once you step foot in your office, on the money-making clock, make decisions on the basis of what will be a sound decision from that standpoint. You just may find that Facebook apps, Droids, HTML5, and [insert latest crazes here] are nothing more than fun (but dangerous) distractions from real business.
All of this being said, you need to stay on top of new technology, because eventually these things do become relevant, obvious, cost-effective choices that you absolutely should make. But there is a difference between constantly learning and constantly adopting. Early adopters are rarely rewarded. While they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off, other people are utilizing "old" technology in perfectly efficient and effective ways, and making profits. Profits that will help them re-invest in new technology, when the time is right, with the satisfaction that the old technology was given enough time to realize a positive ROI. After all, that's the point of it, right?
It’s About the Talent, Not the Tools
Posted by Anthony
Back in my high school and college days, I was big into playing guitar and singing. And I was also fascinated by the idea of recording music. Especially for fairly competent yet entirely mediocre artists like myself, recording offered the opportunity to take the songs that were impossible to play live and bring them to life. Countless hours were spent tweaking and futzing trying to get small pieces of songs to sound just right. It was a very long, unnatural process, all in the name of trying to create something that sounded great.
Fast forward a few years and I've lost touch with music and recording. While I still dabble in it from time to time, it's been a while since I've recorded a serious track. So when I saw Groupon offering a one-day music recording crash course in Philadelphia, I jumped at the opportunity. After becoming a bit of a self-proclaimed recording pro a few years back, I figured it'd be nice to approach everything I thought I knew with a fresh mind.
After attending the course today, something funny happened. I re-discovered a fact I'd known all along, deep down, but managed to remain in denial about for years; I realized that no amount of tools can trump great talent - that despite this studio's insanely expensive production equipment, the best recordings were made by the best artists, not the best sound editing software. Who would have thought?
For years, I thought I could "trick" reality - that maybe if I edited my music enough, it'd magically go from "just OK" to "brilliant". To be fair, I was mimicking most modern artists who try to compensate for a complete lack of natural brilliance by overusing and abusing production tools. But I was ignoring the fact that the audience knows the difference between something naturally great and something that's gimmicky and forced.
The best artists understand this fact. And they understand that the studio is a place to trap natural brilliance in time, and not a place to manipulate mediocrity into something better. The Beatles understood this better than most. Their songs were simple yet profound. At their core, they were brilliant. And The Beatles used the studio to enhance these already outstanding songs, not create them.
The moral of the story is that talent can't be manufactured with tools, and true brilliance is impossible to fake. Whether you are recording music, developing a web application or starting a business - you need to feel it, you need to believe in it and you need to have the raw talent to execute on it. Meeting these prerequisites is the only chance you have of winning over your audience and making a long-lasting impression. The tools you use to help you get there should be fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
A New Corporate Identity
Posted by Anthony
We've been undergoing a corporate identity refresh with DistiSuite over the summer, all culminating in the launch of our new sales site today!
Our Logo
First, we decided to get our logo re-designed. We vetted a lot of different designers for the task, but frankly, most didn't fit the bill. We wanted something clean, sleek modern, and professional. And to my surprise, most of the designers we spoke with didn't have the type of portfolio to suggest they could meet our unique requirements and were exorbitantly expensive, to boot. Then we learned about a website called LogoMyWay.com. LogoMyWay hosts a logo contest for you. You tell them exactly what you're looking for, set a fair price, and specify a timeline. From there, the contest is under way, and you rank submissions as they come in so designers get a feel for what you like and what you don't.
As we came to find, there are people out there - many professional designers - that detest these types of contest sites for many reasons. Frankly, I have no interest in debating the merits of those arguments. Capitalism is all about who can provide the best (legal!) goods & services at the most reasonable rate, and as far as I'm concerned, the contest strategy worked out great for us in that regard. We couldn't be happier with the results.
Our Website
Next up was the website. It was extremely outdated and desperately needed a refresh. While we are decent at web design, we are, by and large, web developers. Our focus is on functionality, not form. So we figured rather than spending a bunch of our time to come up with something "OK" ourselves, we'd instead seek out a proper designer for the job. It wasn't easy, but after a few weeks, we found somebody and were off to the races. The site launched today and we are very proud of our new home on the web. It's designed with only two goals in mind:
- Make it as obvious as possible to the visitor what we do
- Encourage them to contact us
That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. The old website had a lot of content. Useful content, but it detracted from the core message, nonetheless. At the end of the day, the sales website is supposed to bring in sales. So we tried as hard as possible to optimize it for that purpose.
A Sales/Marketing Video
We created a brand new video using some great audio recording equipment and a piece of software called Camtasia. It's at the top of our website's homepage and we are also able to pass it around on the web via email or any other medium we want. It's a great tool which will help potential clients understand what we do in less than 3 minutes. And oftentimes, that's half the battle.
Making Commitments to Yourself
Posted by Anthony
I just finished reading Switch, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. It's a pretty comprehensive book about "how to change things when change is hard". There are a lot of great concepts discussed in this book, but one simple, effective trick they recommended really stuck out to me. I know it works because I do it on a daily basis.
This trick is what they call an "action trigger". An action trigger is nothing more than a small promise to yourself that when "Thing A" happens, you are committing yourself to then do "Thing B". We're all familiar with action triggers, although we may not realize they're deserving of a name:
- We set an alarm in the morning so that we wake up on time.
- We leaves a note on the fridge because we know we'll see it next time we get some food.
- We put doctors appointments on the calendar so that when that day comes, we're sure we won't forget.
These are all action triggers. They're simple, but they're extremely effective.
Getting things done throughout the day is all about momentum. And unfortunately, we become overwhelmed by to-do lists because we don't know where to start, or in what order we should continue. That's where action triggers come in. Action triggers force us to imagine how & when we will get something done. By simply imagining it, we are committing ourselves to doing it.
Action triggers don't always need to be centered around events; they can even be focused on dates & times. Think: "When the clock strikes 10am, I better be doing such-and-such". In other words, it's quite simply better to use your calendar than your to-do list. A to-do list is open-ended, but when you put a to-do on the calendar - that's a commitment.
By the end of each day, I have (at the very least) my schedule planned out for the next day - down to when I will eat lunch, work on Mary Jane's website feature, call John Doe, do some paperwork, and get to the gym. This helps me understand the importance of time. When every single time-slot on my calendar is filled, and something comes up, I'm forced to ask myself, "is this really more important than that?" Most of the time, the answer is a resounding "no". But without a strict schedule, it's tougher to say "no"; you have no sense of what's at stake.
In addition, I have rules and boundaries for myself, based on my weaknesses. For example, I better not be sending followup emails (Thing B) before I eat breakfast (Thing A). This is important because I know my weaknesses. I know that if I get to the computer before I eat breakfast, I won't have breakfast till 11. Amazingly, it's far simpler to avoid your weaknesses entirely than to try to change who you are. And the same end goal is accomplished.
In a sense, action triggers are all about thinking of our brains as the parents, and our hearts as the children. When we were young, our parents did everything for us - they scheduled our days, set rules and boundaries, and made sure we stayed on track. Hopefully, anyway. Our adult selves need structure too. Action triggers are a way for us to achieve that. Because as it turns out, us grown-ups have just about as much discipline and self-control as when we were children. Without structure, we're lost.
The Catch-22 of Seeking Help During a Breaking Point
Posted by Anthony
When people are short on time, they tend to look for outside help in order to complete complicated projects as quickly and efficiently as possible. Money becomes less important than time. It's capitalism at its best.
In the past year, our business found and worked with a CPA, a lawyer, two freelance designers, one web hosting company, and a server administrator. That's a lot of time saved and tasks done right, without any nonsense... right?
Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. I won't get into individual case studies (I'm sure none of the people who have helped us this past year would appreciate public report cards). But one thing I can say is that we've learned some lessons the hard way; a lot of time needs to be put into the vetting process in order to find a service provider that can truly save you time and make your life easier. This process should consist of a few different stages:
- Explore what you actually need done. You may think you know. But write it down. Discuss it with a business partner, peer, etc. Is it one time, or is it actually an ongoing need? You may find that what you ultimately need differs from your cursory assessment.
- Decide how you will seek these services. You can use your relationship network, a certain website, etc. The medium you use needs to match the type of individual/firm you are looking to find. Don't go on craigslist for a professional, and don't expect high profile contacts to link you up with value (read: cheap) providers.
- Spend a decent amount of time vetting a good number of service providers. Ask them relevant questions and try to determine if they're truly the right fit for your needs. This isn't a time to judge. It's time to write down the facts of your findings, thank the potential service providers for their time, and inform them you'll be getting back to them in the near future.
- Begin to formulate a decision. Don't fall in love with one and ignore the fact that another provider may be a better fit on paper. Don't get overwhelmed by all the options and pick one randomly.
- Realize that you usually pay for what you get. Generally speaking, a good rule of thumb is that if you can't figure out how a particular provider is able to stay in business at the rate being asked, there are probably a lot of corners being cut and quality being sacrificed to make it happen. Once you get over that hump, there are providers that are charging anywhere from fairly to exorbitantly. At that point it's a crapshoot and cost isn't necessarily indicative of how good of a match you have on your hands. You need to know what you want (see step 1), and choose a provider from this group that you trust will competently carry out your vision for you.
These steps may seem obvious. But they are counter to how most people decide to seek out professional services. Most people tend to seek help at some sort of breaking point. When there's absolutely no more time to do a task, your first inclination is to call a service provider who can do it more efficiently. The problem is you end up ignoring a majority of the steps above. You assume you know exactly what you need, you seek services via the simplest medium possible, you talk to two or three people, convince yourself one is perfect (and somehow extremely affordable!), and move forward.
Then comes the disappointment. Hundreds or thousands of dollars later, you realize you spent almost as much time managing & fixing the project as you would have just doing it yourself. You realize that not only did you waste time, but money as well. Completely counterintuitive.
I'm not a fan of over-optimizing or wasting time on non-issues. That can kill a small business. But the fact is, the most successful small businesses understand there's a fine balance between over-optimizing and waiting too long. You need to anticipate your need for help, and should be able to identify when you're close to a breaking point. When you are there, begin exploring and vetting immediately. Because by the time the breaking point comes, you will be in no place to be making sound decisions; you need to be on auto-pilot.
The Importance of Vacation
Posted by Anthony
I'm currently in Wildwood, NJ spending some quality time with my family and fiancée. Wildwood is a beach town, and is one of the rare ones left that doesn't have corporate names splattered everywhere, paid beaches and chain hotels. It's a town that's forever stuck in the 50s - in a good way. From the style of the buildings to the vibe in general, you feel removed from the fast-paced nature of modern society.
Ah yes, modern society. Where workaholics are revered, and vacation days are frowned upon. Why is this? What cosmic shift has occurred that has given everyone the notion that the more we constantly work, the more productive, creative and innovative we are? It's a fallacy.
Businesses should strongly encourage vacation time, not honor those who underutilize it. Periods of vacation have historially lead to some of my best ideas and shifts in mindsets. I've read books that have changed the way I do everything from organizing my daily schedule to planning my future. I've explored concepts that lead to groundbreaking initiaitves, such as my first forray into Amazon EC2 and "cloud technologies" a few years back. And more generally, I come back from vacation with a new perspective on who I am, what I do and why I do it. It's not just a reset button; it's a stop, re-program, and re-start routine -- one that fundamentally improves the work I do and makes me more productive for months after returning. That's a week well invested, in my opinion.
With all of that in mind, Cheyne and I are now trying to organize working vacations approximately two times per year. A working vacation means that we go somewhere remote for about a week, and use that week to get a good chunk of key projects and initiatives completed. Our first such working vacation was May of this year, when we used Homeaway.com to rent a full house just a few miles off the Las Vegas strip. Cheyne used a few of the days to meet with clients at a major industry trade show on the strip, and we used the rest of the time to simply work out of the house - strategizing, collaborating, and hammering away at the type of work we'd previously be too bogged down to devote mindshare to. At least 25% of DistiSuite 2.0 is a result of that week.
A working vacation accomplishes two main goals for us:
- Provides a change of scenery, and a welcome break from the mundane
- Forces us to finish any reactive tasks the week before in preparation for doing some more proactive work the week following. There's nothing quite like an expensive trip and a physical displacement; it forces you to finish what you were doing and focus on the reason you're leaving
Fact is, whether it's a normal vacation or a working vacation, you need to be doing something - especially if you own a small business - to break from the chains of your daily workflow. You need to constantly re-program so that you remain creative, innovative and interested in what you do. And ironically, there's no greater way to do that than to put aside what you do on a daily basis for just one week, and focus on the bigger picture - or maybe on nothing at all.
A Can['t] Do Attitude
Posted by Anthony
I tend to think with the left side of my brain. Whereas some people prefer to form opinions from palatable and memorable case studies, I prefer to analyze data, look for patterns & trends, and determine my opinion based on cold, hard, macro-level evidence. Neither approach is right or wrong, but both have some major costs & benefits that at this point in my career, I am only beginning to understand.
The vast difference in these two approaches has become evident these last few months, as my business partner, Cheyne, and I, discuss and debate the merits of certain ideas surrounding the sales and featureset of DistiSuite. You see, he is the voice of our company - our sales, marketing & customer service departments all rolled into one. I, on the other hand, focus more on our general business direction, finances and the actual product development -- ah yes, to be multi-hat-wearing small business owners...
Naturally, Cheyne receives a lot of client feedback about the positives and negatives of our system. And when he receives complaints/suggestions, his first reaction is to enthusiastically say "yes, we can fix/do that", and come to me with an interesting new problem or idea that requires feedback. And there's nothing wrong with that. After all, no great company was built on the premise that new ideas & feedback were disregarded.
However, I increasingly find myself saying "no". It's not that I don't want to improve. But the reality is that most ideas aren't all that great. And even when they are, they're not usually scalable - in other words, if all of our clients can't benefit from an idea, then it's a one-off time sink, which either needs to be billed for accordingly, or ignored.
The left side of my brain tells me that most problems are fluff. They are random, fleeting complaints. One-off improvements for individual clients that don't better the system as a whole. And so, my visceral reaction is to ignore them. That's actually an important skill, because when you run a small business, it's important to dedicate as much focus and mindshare as possible to what actually matters; if you can't concentrate on the big picture, you'll get stuck solving a bunch of insignificant problems that don't ultimately put you in the black.
But lately, this "skill" has gotten me in trouble. I've been brushing off so many problems as distractions that I fear I may be losing sight of the fact that some of them are indeed legitimate. I'm turning into Microsoft post-Windows XP. Yahoo circa 2003. Negligent, and not willing to accept that there may be some issues on the horizon worth paying attention to.
At the same time, if I'm Microsoft or Yahoo 7 years ago, Cheyne very well may be [insert-dot-com-bubble-domain-here].com circa 1999 -- focused so feverishly on the long-term valuation of the service that it's almost forgotten there's a short-term cashflow to generate. Now, a yin-yang business relationship is pretty great, most of the time. It leads to compromise. But when simple discussions begin turning into 3-hour standoffs, there's an issue. Instead of spending hours walking towards a middle-ground, we should be meeting closer to it in the first place. And so we are changing our thought processes and behaviors.
Lately, Cheyne has been filtering a bit more, where possible. If a client has a request that is legitimate yet ultimately small fish in the grand scheme of things, he attempts to figure out a quick fix on his own, or even just brush the issue aside completely. But on my end, that means that when Cheyne does come to me with an issue, I treat it seriously, respectfully, and with implicit trust. In other words, I am doing my best to use the right side of my brain - to empathize with problems, and to trust that most ideas presented to me are worth at least a few minutes of discussion, even if prior data & patterns nag at me otherwise.
And I think we're onto something. Not only are we concentrating more on the big picture lately, but we're also improving our service at a swifter pace than ever before. A true win-win.
How does this relate to your business and/or personal life? Are you a "can" or "can't do" type of person? How has that historically benefited or burned you?
A Long Time Coming
Posted by Anthony
I'm baaack...
It's a bit shameful that it's been so long since my last post, but I'm going to do my best to make sure that doesn't happen again. To be (somewhat) fair, there has been a lot of going on these last few months. In chronological order:
- Xonatek participated in the completion of a mammoth project for one of its more noteworthy clients, House Party. We helped rebuild the backend of the site from the ground up, pushed and pulled on the scaling limits of CakePHP and MySQL, and learned a whole lot about our trade and ourselves in the process.
- I proposed to Donna, my girlfriend of three years, and she happily said yes. To think about where I was before I met her, how I grew and matured once I did, and where we are, together, now -- well, the changes are mind-boggling, frankly. We are now beginning to go through the grueling yet joyful process of planning our wedding, which will in all likelihood be taking place sometime in September of 2012.
For the first time in my life, I went on a (much needed!) cruise. Donna and I set sail from New York for 9 days on the Caribbean Princess and had a great time. Highlights included sightseeing (and visiting the local bars!) in Old San Juan, and snorkeling amongst the turtles in St Thomas.- After a couple years of customer feedback and many months of hard work, we released DistiSuite version 2.0 with overwhelming success. Not only is our service much better for it, but we learned a lot in the process about how to successfully deploy large scale changes to a traffic-heavy web application with minimal downtime & errors, and seamless rollback capability in case things go wrong. No easy feat.
- DistiSuite finished integrating its web marketing service with a prominent inventory software provider in the industry. This will allow our customers to automatically syncronize inventory items, orders, and quote requests between their customer-facing website and the software they use to run their business. After a year of highs and lows with this project, we are looking forward to offering clients easier & more effective ways to use our services.
As you can see, it's been quite a long few months of busy progression, from both a personal and business standpoint. Most milestones above are just just that - closed chapters in ongoing stories. As these stories progress, I'll be sure to keep everyone posted. I look forward to staying in touch. Until next time, internet...
- Anthony