Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
“It’s really important to view your life as an entrepreneur as a long journey that consists of many short-term cycles.”
Brad Feld, On Not Mourning Your Failures & Overcoming Burn-Out
Pricing has far more to do with physiology and the built in perception of value than simply going with an amount people are willing to pay.
People were offered 2 kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer.
Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80 beer and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option.
Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and arounf 10% opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price.
You can influence people’s choice by offering different options. Old school sales people also say that offering different price point options will make people choose between your plans, instead of choosing whether to buy your product or not.
You know what is fun? Making things. Turning a spark of creative insight into a thing that you can show people — a thing that people can use and from which they can derive some iota of pleasure or utility. Start with a simple website. Basic HTML and CSS. No product is too small. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t know how to build the first version of your product in a weekend — a usable working version, don’t try to build it. Programming is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You should be trying to do as little of it as possible to make the thing that you want.
The fastest way to make something is to simply start. Don’t get caught in the never ending process of learning, researching, and over-thinking your idea.
Repeat after me: big things start small!
If you try to tackle too much in the beginning, you’ll get overwhelmed. Not only that, but you’ll lose precious time optimizing your product with too little data. This is, after all, the main reason you should always start with a minimum viable product.
“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”
(via brycedotvc)
Fantastic post by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham on the process of noticing startup ideas.
Goldeneye 64 was one of those games that I spent countless hours timing guards’ paths for flawless missions and rocket launcher only multiplayer matches. When the team at Rare was first approached with the opportunity for they game they nearly turned it down, and faced challenges with a still in development platform. Their startup success story is inspiring to say the least.
Despite everything, the game went on to become the third highest selling N64 game, inspire console shooting games, and win a crazy amount of awards. Next time you’re heading down the wrong way of the entrepreneurial rollercoaster, take a deep breath, make a cup of tea, and remember that you can make it happen. Persevere and dominate.
If you’re part of a startup, I believe that your success might actually be defined by whether you are willing to be inconsistent. This means that actually changing your mind is not just a good trait as Jeff Bezos has mentioned, but “staying consistent” might actually be the reason your startup fails. I think this also probably applies to a much wider context than startups: I think your success might be determined by how willing you are to be inconsistent.
A well thought out response to 37signals’ “Some Advice from Jeff Bezos” post by Joel Gascoigne founder of Buffer.
Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:
- Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
- Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
- Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
- Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
Via Kottke
Congrats to Matthew Buchanan, Mike Harding and team on launching Letterboxd to the public!
Letterboxd is a social site for sharing your taste in film. Use it as a diary to record your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying. Keep a watchlist of films you’d like to see, and make lists about any aspect of film, for example: favorite heist films. Import historic data from several popular apps, and add films to your US Netflix instant queue directly from the site.
To top it all of the design and user interaction is beyond beautiful.
Fantastic interview of Kevin Systrom by Kevin Rose taking you through his upbringing and background leading up his first startup Burbn which eventually became instagr.am.
“We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we’d say “they can take care of themselves.” The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they’ll close it, whatever type of lead it is.”
— Paul Graham on the correlation between resourcefulness and success in startups.
I am incredibly thankful for my years at 2Advanced back in the fast-paced, mid-2000s Flash era. Everyone who worked on that team during that period of time learned the value of resourcefulness as you were expected to often single handedly art direct, animate, and develop large campaigns all while managing the clients. The level of expectation, stress and demand was high, but whether or not it was the best approach to it developed a character of resourcefulness by fire.
Square’s front door to customers is a smartphone application. Square has to provide the simplest experience possible, Mr. Dorsey believes, because, along with good design, it will evoke trust and confidence in a new financial institution that lives in a smartphone.
Yet another example that strategic differentiation begins with design.
Color is a live broadcast from your phone. Unlike videos, there’s no audio, editing, or uploading. You got 30 seconds to tell your story. Up to 5,000 friends can simultaneously visit your broadcast from their phone and Facebook.
So after rehashing the complete flop of the first version of Color, they’re putting their $41,000,000 in funding to use to launch a platform to broadcast 30 seconds of boring, soundless video to Facebook. Isn’t audio half the magic of video?
Ever since I started working in startup land, I’ve felt the need to ingratiate myself in the ever-buzzing world of *tech*. This means staying up on other companies, the blogs, and the general Silicon Valley scene. This can be very repetitive. People get funded, apps get released, and companies buy things. Sometimes a conference happens. Having spent the better part of the last few years neck-deep in this hullabaloo, I figured it was time to parody it.
A parody from the creators of Nosh and the most amazing 404 page on the internet. Read more on the ISO50 blog about the creation of the video and the 15x increase in signup for Nosh as a result of the parody social network.
