Inkling Prediction Markets: News + Musings

Your 5 Bullet Points

2012-01-21T16:30:00.003-06:00

Last weekend I attended a funeral for a wonderful woman in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. While funerals are of course sad affairs, when they're for someone who has died of "natural causes" at an old age, I tend to be less sad and more contemplative about how they lived their lives and what I can learn from them.

At the funeral, person after person got up to speak about the generosity of this woman. She was a loving grandmother and great-grandmother. She was a teacher and a librarian. She was an elder in her church and she welcomed new community members with open arms, often being the first "node" they met. She served as a starting point to make them feel more comfortable in their new surroundings.

A 23 year old grandchild got up to speak about how she was his life's exemplar. The career he is pursuing and the values which he lives by are a direct result of his grandmother's influence.

After the graveside service, I was driving with my Dad and we discussed how we've all thought of our own funerals. What will people say about us when we're gone? When the definition of our lives must be condensed down to a 30 minute memorial service, what are our 5 bullet points going to be?

Everyone has heard the adage "no one wishes at the end of their life they had worked more," but what does that phrase really mean? For some it means they wished they had spent more time with their family. For others, more time having fun, or more time with their kids, or giving more of themselves to others.

Among people I know, most earnestly want to achieve a balanced lifestyle (isn't that really what that adage is getting at? A lack of balance?) They want to take care of themselves financially, then they'll begin donating time and money to others. I know until recently this is the attitude I carried, focusing almost exclusively on work and just trying to be a decent friend and family member. After I've "made it" is when I'll start to truly give back.

But then my attitude(?), maturity level(?), begun to change. In my reading I found myself more attracted to the stories about people giving of themselves vs. those whose companies just got bought or earned investments. Sermons reminding me about "giving back" were resonating more. The plight of others in need begun having a more profound impact on me.

Do I still want to "get mine?" Of course. But I've already begun altering my schedule in fits and starts the last year through volunteering. And I know by doing so I've already had a tangible impact on several people's lives. And those few hours of volunteering felt damn better than any deal we won or compliment we received for our software. Some might say I should therefore find something else to work on. But I think the answer is instead to give even more.

We work. We make salaries. We live in comfort. In turn we have the ability to help others. I realize it's all somewhat symbiotic. But when does one shift the balance? Instead of waiting until a magical time when there are seven figures in my bank account which may never come, why not start spending more of my time giving now? Isn't that simply another way of achieving wealth?

I guess that is why there is so much attention at the end of someone's life about what they gave of themselves. Because despite the incessant focus on money and achievement in our society, in the end, that's how we still judge you. What did you give of yourself?

"Gamifying" everything can backfire

2012-01-17T22:10:00.000-06:00

Gamification has been all the rage recently. It's assumed now that any social app and even new business app needs some form of gaming associated with them to incentivize people to do something.

A prediction market, in a sense, is gamification personified. The existence of a virtual currency drives you, just like in real life, to start comparing yourself with others and competing with them. We exacerbate that competition by adding leader boards showing who has made the most money.

Conventional wisdom says you lavish the top money makers with prizes and praise.

Unfortunately prizes and an over-emphasis on certain leader boards can incentivize exactly the type of behavior you don't want. In most applications, leader boards are simply meant to drive action: add or edit content, check in somewhere, or perform some task. But in a prediction market, we want people's actions to be more nuanced. We want them to make predictions, but ideally we want the right mindset behind those predictions.

Too much emphasis on leader boards and the virtual currency and you have someone asking themselves: "what prediction is going to make me the most money?" Instead we want people to be asking: "what prediction is going to be right or wrong?"

It's a fine line to walk which is why we've been removing focus from our leader board showing who the top money earners are and emphasizing other activities more focused on participation like making good comments and submitting new questions to be published.

In fact we've been redesigning our dashboard where people track their portfolio and in its current iteration we've omitted leader board information altogether. Instead we're trying to draw people more to how their individual predictions are doing and if there is new information that would drive them to change their mind.

TL;DR It's easy to jump on the band wagon to "gamify" everything but you may inadvertently be incentivizing exactly the type of behavior you don't want.

What the Bagel Man Saw - An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature

2012-01-13T08:56:00.001-06:00

I saw this old Stephen Dubner article from the New York Times Magazine pop up on Longform this week and thought it was a great story.

A former economist decides to quit his job and start selling bagels on the honor system at a few hundred offices in the Washington, DC area. He leaves a couple dozen bagels and a money box, then comes back at the end of the day to collect.

In the process he learns quite a bit about what kinds of offices are more honest in paying for the bagels than others and what external factors affect payment (weather, holidays, etc.) He collected so much data he can now fairly reliably predict what the payment rate will be for any kind of office he sells his bagels at.

Will you remember me?

2011-12-07T14:21:00.000-06:00

A couple small updates to any Inkling site that is public (including our public site) that were long overdue.

We've added a "remember me" checkbox to the login page. Selecting it means you won't have to login again for a month. Just be sure if you're using Inkling on a public computer to log out!

We've also added some social network buttons to every question so you can "like" the question on Facebook, tweet about it, and email it.

Using the crowd to predict TV show failure

2011-10-27T17:26:00.000-05:00

The NYTimes has a nice implementation of a crowdsourced app to try and predict which television shows will get cancelled this season. It reminds me of something Brent Stinski of MediaPredict told me once, that if a show makes it past 5 episodes, it will usually survive but if it's going to get cancelled, it's going to happen before the 5th episode.

Judging from the results so far, his theory seems pretty accurate. Check it out:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/arts/television/2011-fall-tv-cancellations.html

Inkling Now Fully Internationalized

2011-09-30T13:25:00.000-05:00

A few months ago we announced that Inkling had gone international and we could support any language. One of our clients immediately took us up on the post and asked for Inkling in two additional languages to support their international rollout of the platform.

We quickly realized the translation work we had done thus far was totally insufficient (we had only internationalized the trading interface) and we needed to bite the bullet and go all the way, giving us the ability to translate absolutely every piece of text on the site.

Thanks to what admittedly was some really tedious work by one of our contract developers Brian Leslie, this U.S. based company has since launched in two more countries and we can finally announce that Inkling is now fully internationalized and the entire application can now be translated in to any language.

For now if you want a language other than English, functionally we need to make the switch for you, but soon we'll make that part of any administrator's settings, and eventually any user can choose the language they want on an individual basis.

Crowdsourced approach to criminal justice analysis

2011-09-30T13:17:00.000-05:00

We've been working with some Professors at Seattle University's Department of Criminal Justice for a little while now and wanted to highlight some nice pub they recently got for their project.

Excerpt and link to article:

http://www.jrsa.org/pubs/forum/forum_issues/for29_3.pdf

The Criminal Justice Prediction Market (CJPM; www.cjmarkets.net) was created by professors Matthew J. Hickman and Stephen K. Rice of Seattle University with the following goals: (1) to provide a marketplace in which interested academics, criminal justice practitioners, and others can "trade" (i.e., take positions on) interesting questions/issues in criminology and criminal justice and contribute to collective prediction; (2) to provide a pedagogical tool for criminal justice educators and students who wish to explore the utility of prediction markets with regard to criminal justice topics; and (3) to address the quality and timeliness of crime statistics by exploring the potential for creating market-based incentives for their improvement.

Politics and projects gone bad

2011-09-08T15:43:00.001-05:00

Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite software engineering books, Peopleware, by DeMarco and Lister. They set the stage for the rest of the book with an alarming statistic – 15% of software projects, and they have tracked hundreds since the late 1970’s, never see the light of day. The numbers are even worse for the largest projects. For those over 25 work-years, nearly 25% failed. No one publishes the costs of these failures, let alone all of the projects that finish but take longer and cost more than originally planned. The numbers would be staggering.

What I found interesting was the author's explanation for these failures. Where they could find people to talk about these failed projects, the overwhelming cause was politics. DeMarco's and Lister's interpretation of this was that it was not necessarily office politics in the traditional sense, although there was some of that, but what they called sociology - the management of people and groups. Understanding people and their motivations and finding ways to get people and teams to communicate and work together better is hard. Managers are not good at this generally, and software engineers in particular are pretty bad. They typically start their careers as programmers and, let's face it, technical people, myself included, are not very good at figuring out people. It is much easier to figure out why the router is not talking to the switch than why John is not teaming well with Carol.

So what can we do to get better? Lister and DeMarco have a number of excellent suggestions. I heartily recommend Peopleware and their follow-up publications. What struck me though reading the book this time was that politics , or sociology using their terms, was exactly the problem we set out to solve in building Inkling. We had seen over and over in our previous work experiences where communication and information flow on large projects was broken. No one wanted to stand up and tell the boss the project was a bad idea. The true risks and status of a project got watered down as the information made its way up through layers of management. Politics drove decisions, not data. It was so dis-heartening we knew there had to be a better way.

Which is how we got to prediction markets. We thought the ability of the technology to harness the wisdom of the crowd was a great way to free up critical information within organizations. And this is exactly what our customers have found. They also found an additional benefit we did not anticipate. Customers such as Ford tell us the market gets the crowd talking, and that the collaboration the platform fosters across organizational silos is as valuable as the ability to quantify business questions. We have written about this describing how Inkling has been used to address Project Risk Management. The concepts covered there are just as applicable to project management in general, whether it is software or any large, people intensive project.

Of course prediction markets, like any technology, are not a silver bullet. Ultimately it will take individual and organizational commitments to focus on and get better at people management. Prediction markets can be a catalyst for that organizational change: when information is more transparent and people are allowed to communicate without fear of repercussion, that changes the dynamic of how projects and organizations function.

Let us know what you think. Is it politics, or sociology, that bring down large software projects? Or are there other factors that DeMarco and Lister missed?

For those who have to be a part of EVERYTHING

2011-09-01T23:29:00.000-05:00

With several hundred questions going on our public marketplace at any given time, I'm not sure this new feature has that much utility, but for marketplaces that only have a few dozen questions, this will likely come in handy.

We've built a new search filter for questions to show which you are NOT participating in yet. So if you're the kind of person who wants to be involved in every question, we've just made it easier. :)

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!

Manage your questions

2011-08-11T11:44:00.001-05:00

We love to get rid of links off the navigation bar. It just feels so...liberating. :) It's a rare occurrence that we get to do it, but this is one of them. There used to be two links on the right side of the nav: "Manage questions" and "Ask a question."

With the introduction of our new discussion capability, things were getting tight. We also felt like the "manage questions" link was pretty redundant with what's already in the "questions" link - the only thing missing were a couple additional sorts to show you your pending or submitted questions.

So instead of keeping that link around, we've removed it and now if you go to to the questions page, you'll see a new link:

This will now list all your questions and discussions that are currently running or you've submitted. Click on any of them and go to admin/edit to do whatever you want with them.

For administrators, there's still a manage questions link, but it's moved up in to the "admin options" menu item in the top right:

Have a discussion!

2011-08-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

In watching companies run a lot of marketplaces, we've noticed that a key success factor is to have a healthy bit of back and forth in the discussion threads associated with each question. While many players are competitive and want to be accurate predictors, most of us are also social animals and like to engage in a good back and forth. We decided to build on this and introduce the ability to JUST start a discussion thread on its own without being associated with a question.

Publishing a discussion is a familiar process. You are asked the topic/question you'd like people to discuss, fill out some details and any background information you'd like to provide and submit for publication. The discussions themselves look just like the discussion threads we already have so they'll be familiar to everyone.

Prediction Markets and Market Research

2011-07-25T17:39:00.000-05:00

We are seeing an increasing number of market research professionals and companies exploring how prediction markets can improve market research. While there are still a number of important questions to address, we are seeing some very promising early work, in particular around using the prediction market to narrow down the funnel of new ideas or product features that are then run through more traditional (and expensive) research methods.

But don't take my word for it. Roxana Strohmenger of Forrester wrote about this trend recently on her blog: http://tinyurl.com/3uh9rfk

Enjoy!
Scott

Risk, probability and how our brains are easily misled

2011-06-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

Some interesting discussion at The World Science Festival's panel on Probability and Risk that is relevant to how we ask questions in prediction markets and how we might expect a "crowd" to respond given certain uses of language or preconceptions:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/risk-probability-and-how-our-brains-are-easily-misled.ars

Inkling and Risk Management - IAFS Webinar

2011-06-02T17:34:00.001-05:00

On June 3rd I will be participating in an online webinar sponsored by the Intangible Asset Finance Society on risk management to talk about how prediction markets allow an organization to better identify and more accurately predict the probability of specific risks. This is an open (and free!) seminar, details below. If you can not join us live please check the link for recording and materials.

-Scott

To register for the seminar, or access materials later, please go to

http://www.iafinance.org/events.html#event110603

Tweet-able Conference Talks

2011-05-20T11:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Planning-ness conference - a loosely organized conference geared towards media planners and strategists held this year in Minneapolis.

As has been the norm for quite some time now at conferences, most people in attendance were either tweeting during the sessions or simply lurking and seeing what other people were saying. In the morning sessions I attended, I watched as a steady stream of tweets came through about each session - a talkative - sometimes useful - back channel to the conference.

I've found a good way to get feedback on your own talk is to review the conference hashtag afterwards and see what people said. Often it's simply quotes, but other times it's agreement or disagreement with statements you shared or snippets from your slides. Occasionally I'll respond, connections are made, you know the drill.

The people attending this conference create buzz for a living. They work at ad agencies, design agencies, and marketing and communication firms so I'm expecting a lot of twitter traffic just like everyone else is getting.

On comes the afternoon sessions and I give my talk. When I'm done, I get on twitter. Woah - only 6 or 7 tweets about my talk and about 40 from the other room where another session was going on. Did my talk suck? Did everyone have screen-face with their phones? The after-lunch sleepies? I had roughly half the attendees at the conference in my session and got lots of questions and participation from my audience. Several people came up afterwards and said they found the talk fascinating and wanted to follow up. For all intents and purposes, I qualified the talk as a success. So what happened on twitter?

I realized after taking a second look at tweets about other people's talks and looking back at my own presentation, as opposed to other presentations I saw, I really had no twitter-bites in my presentation. No platitudes that will make the tweeter look insightful to their followers if they repeated them. No controversial proclamations that will raise eyebrows like "X is dead" or the cliche "it's all about the people, not the technology."

Frack! It feels a little like selling out if I start to put this kind of stuff in my presentations just to get twitter love. On the other hand, the value of conferences is spreading the word about what you're doing and twitter is vital in doing that.

Is there a balance to be struck? Looking at my slides, I definitely could work harder to have things that are digestible by the 140-character crowd. For example, when I talk about the accuracy of prediction markets, I simply show a graph. I could have a statement proclaiming how well prediction markets do that is easily quotable. When I cite case studies, they're divided up by business problem, key questions, and lessons learned/value. In other words, dense. I should probably create a headline for each one, like "Ford saved $X million by canceling a project based on feedback from their prediction market."

Also I've given similar talks to this so often that I've taken it for granted I'm conveying my messages clearly. I need to go back with a fresh eye at my slides with presenting 101 in mind. Does each slide make a key point? What are the 3 things I want people to take away from my presentation if nothing else?

I will likely always qualify success at a conference by how many new connections and business leads I generate, but a tangential metric I should be much more aware of is how much chatter my talks generate online. Besides the obvious benefit of more people talking about me and my business, it's an additional signal of how well my presentation is being digested in nice, chewable tweet-bites.

How prediction markets impact risk management programs

2011-03-15T15:25:00.001-05:00

MITRE Corporation, working in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force, has published an analysis of the impact their Inkling prediction market had on a particular risk management program they manage on behalf of the Air Force.

While their research is continuing in to this year, MITRE has already proven a direct correlation between activity in the prediction market and:

1) an increase in overall database activity logging and managing risks; and
2) an increase in the rate of newly identified risks

What they hope to analyze in the coming months is to better understand if risks are being identified earlier because of the existence of the prediction market, and do risks get mitigated or closed more quickly?

Here is a link to the report by Jon Schuler that has been made publicly available.

Small company selling to the enterprise? How to pass the initial “smell test"

2011-03-04T18:13:00.000-06:00

As a small software company of only a few people that sells a product to multi-billion dollar corporations and governments, we have to make sure we pass what I fondly call the “smell test” when having an initial conversation about our product and services. Smell good and you get another meeting. Smell bad and they don't come anywhere near you again.

Let's assume since they've started to talk to you that they're already interested in your product and think it will do something positive for their company. That's the hardest part, so congratulations, you've gotten past the first part of the smell test. But now you have to help whomever is "sponsoring" you inside the company to convince others that it's ok to be working with a small company and this is the right thing to do.

So with that in mind, here’s our list of stuff we’ve developed over time to help us pass the smell test.

Business Stuff

Ability to competently facilitate an initial conference call and demo. Send an agenda ahead of time. Don’t be afraid to write an email before the meeting and ask some questions about what they want to cover and what their problem is that has led them to begin this dialogue. Know your demo well. If it’s easy, create some custom content for your demos that really give them the understanding of how your product would be used in their context. If you’ve got a little spare cash, get a subscription to gotomeeting or adobe connect or webex. If you don’t have money, use one of the free services. And try to have these conversations from a landline. A conference call they’ve gotten 7 people on their side to join and you keep dropping the call because your cell service is spotty from your house gets old fast.

A mutual NDA that you can send. Typically they’ll want to use their own, but sometimes it’s just quicker to use yours and having one at the ready makes it feel like you've been here before.

A well thought out and easy to understand price list for your business model. Having to talk through pricing or having a wordy email describing it will make it seem like this is the first time your product has ever been bought. Having a price list feels more professional.

A 7-10 page slide powerpoint deck giving an overview of your company and product offering. Most companies typically ask for “follow-up” information to send to other people to get approval for your project and they want to be able to email something. For whatever reason just sending along a URL is usually not sufficient.

Case studies: even if they are very general, it goes a long way towards making them feel like they aren’t the first to try your product. If you don’t have any yet, write up a generic one for a fictitious company and call it a "sample use case."

The ability to offer up references at other well-known companies they've heard of. Don’t have any yet? Can you put out a public demo of your software for people to try out?

White papers – anyone at any universities do any related research to what you’re selling that you can send as more background? If not, could you write a 3-5 pager that sounds relatively academic about the benefit your product is providing?

A security FAQ. How will you manage their data? What precautions do you take against various types of exploits? What steps will you take if you’re hacked?

Templates for service level agreements their lawyers or procurement teams can start to review.

Well-defined and documented customer support process. An email inbox for all inquiries. A phone number to leave voicemail inquiries. Live chat. A knowledge base with a ton of information on it. A ticketing system. Just make sure it’s easy to understand how they get support. And keep it simple. No pay per request or anything that limits their ability to get help. If you have a well-built product, there won’t be a lot of support requests anyway but psychologically they’ll feel better.

Technical Stuff

Application hosted at a reputable datacenter that is SAS70/II audited. We’re at Rackspace. Corporate IT has heard of Rackspace and knows they run a quality shop. The premium we pay to be there saves a lot of heartache. Corporate IT can be assured Rackspace is doing a whole lot of things process-wise, probably in an even more diligent fashion than at their own datacenter.

SAML compliance or token services for use with their Single Sign-On credentialing system. Managing new usernames/passwords for a 3rd party app is like poison for lots of employees and just serves as an excuse for them not to use your stuff. 1Password and other localized credential management systems are not part of standard builds in large companies.

An API: usage may vary, but knowing it’s there makes people feel more comfortable they will be able to expand and customize and integrate if/when the time is right.

Well rehearsed answers to whatever negative conventional wisdom is out there about your underlying framework. We still get people telling us they’ve heard “Ruby doesn’t scale.”

Ability to host a “sandbox” for them to try out before making any commitments. They love demos, but they also want to be able to try things out for themselves. Make this seamless and easy.

I’m sure some of this sounds old school and arcane, but that’s just the price of doing business with large companies. Some things can be mind numbing, but remember they’re not asking for this stuff purely to be pains, they’re asking because their procurement processes are designed to mitigate risk. The more you can do right from the beginning to assuage any irrational fears generated because you're a small company, the better. And besides, when it’s all said and done, hopefully you’re raising your glasses in triumph after winning that nice contract.

Getting Inspiration

2011-02-21T13:28:00.001-06:00

I loved this quote:

"The advice I like to give to young artists, or really anybody, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens."

-- Chuck Close (artist)

A nice collection of failed predictions

2011-02-19T07:44:00.000-06:00

In an office building I used to work in they had quotes like this all over the place as inspiration. Here is a nice collection of outrageously wrong predictions made by the seminal experts of the time:

It'll Never Work!

Are famous people too media savvy today to make these kinds of proclamations anymore in public?

Cityposh, our second company

2011-02-10T10:36:00.000-06:00

Nate and I "soft" launched a second company a couple weeks ago called Cityposh.

On Cityposh we'll be offering up products, services, and experiences to be auctioned off in a "penny auction" format. Winners of auctions we've been running are typically saving 70-90%+ on the items being auctioned.

Here's how it works:

Signup with an email address and you'll be sent an email when an auction is beginning.

To participate, you'll first buy some bids. Bids cost 50¢ each.

Use a bid to move yourself in to first place to win the auction.

Each time someone bids, the price of the auctioned item goes up 1¢

If you're in first place when time runs out, you win the auction!

There are other sites doing a similar auction format, but they mostly focus on selling products like iPads, watches, sunglasses, etc. After our "soft launch period" of the next couple months, our focus will turn to auctioning "experiences" that you can do in your local area (we'll be starting with Chicago, our hometown.)

For example, we recently auctioned off a gift certificate at Rick Bayless' restaurants here in Chicago that someone got for less than $1 plus the cost of their bids. We've auctioned off a "movie and dessert night" in a local Chicago neighborhood, and we've auctioned off gift certificates from national brands like Whole Foods and Target. Today in fact we're auctioning $50 at Banana Republic.

We've only told a small network of people and they've been really excited about it and having a lot of fun. But we think we're ready to start to grow. And if you sign up and buy some bids (you can spend as little as $5 to get started) you can then refer other people and start to build up a war chest of free bids. Each friend you get to sign up we'll put 5 free bids in their account.

And what does this mean for Inkling? Nothing! Like other projects outside of Inkling we've worked on in the past, we've built something quickly to test to see if it sticks. This is no different, and our dedication to Inkling is unwavering.

Anyways, we look forward to you trying out Cityposh and letting us know what you think!

Good Luck, Javan

2011-01-28T08:44:00.000-06:00

Some sad news to report today. Javan Makhmali, the first developer we ever hired, is leaving us to go work for 37signals.

Javan has been an amazing help to us over the past 2 years. There isn't a single aspect of our application he has not touched at some point and he has taught us all quite a bit. He has been a pleasure to work with and always brought some wit and humor to our chat room conversations, starting off with a simple "Morning" each and every day. It's a testament to Javan's skillset and character that he's going to work for 37signals. We know they only hire the very best.

We're looking forward to staying in touch with Javan for years to come. He wasn't just an employee to us. We think of him as a friend.

Now as my mother used to say when people quit my Dad's department at the University of Illinois to go work someplace else, "may fruit flies infest his home!"

Seriously - good luck Javan, you'll be missed.

Inkling now supporting multiple languages (German done, more to come)

2011-01-25T19:28:00.000-06:00

Some good news for those who want to run an Inkling marketplace in a language other than English.

In preparation for working with one of our German consulting partners on delivering Inkling to one of their clients, we've just completed the grunt work of "internationalizing" a vast majority of the Inkling experience. While we just have the German translation complete, it's trivial for us to now introduce new languages.

If you are running a pilot site or are thinking about introducing Inkling to your company or community in your native language, we should be able to work with you to quickly get a translation done. Just contact us to get started and we'll continue to update this blog as we get more languages complete.

New trading interface is live

2011-01-25T19:21:00.000-06:00

At 5pm CT today we took Inkling down for 2 minutes to push out our new simple and advanced trading interface. Everything seemed to go smoothly as we witnessed trading immediately start again as soon as we came back online. All hosted marketplaces are now running the new capability and we're anxious to begin hearing what you think. Even more importantly, if you find any oddities, let us know and we'll investigate them right away.

We'll also be updating our "on-premise" version and pushing out these changes to those running Inkling in their own corporate datacenter within the next few weeks.

Improved Trading Interface Coming Soon

2011-01-20T11:31:00.000-06:00

Based on lots of feedback and our own use of Inkling, we've been working on some long needed improvements to our trading interface. Amazingly, the trading interface has not changed significantly since we first introduced it in 2006. Some things have been streamlined and functionality added here and there, but for the most part, the trading process is the same as it was when we first designed the application. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? :)

But we've known for awhile some things could be done better. Going in to the re-design process, we knew we wanted to address a few issues:

Make trading a one-step process. One screen, minimal clicking and decision making

Introduce two trading interfaces: a "simple" interface and an "advanced" interface

For the simple interface, we wanted the thought process to be dead simple: "I can spend x to change the chances to y"

In the "advanced" interface, introduce more transparency of information and control of what can be done

Instead of trying to explain things with lots of pictures and words, we've cut a screen capture video that will walk you through what the new interface is like to use:

We will be transitioning to this new trading interface next Tuesday (27 Jan) early evening, Chicago time.

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please don't hesitate to use the "contact" links in your marketplaces to write to us and your marketplace administrators. Or you can always send email to support@inklingmarkets.com.

Andrew Bird's one man orchestra of the imagination

2010-12-23T14:15:00.000-06:00

We can tell the number of people going on vacation is steadily increasing by the number of Out of Offices we're getting for various notifications sent out from Inkling sites, so nothing about prediction markets or business today, just a wish to everyone to enjoy the holidays and some downtime over the next couple weeks. We'll leave you with this wonderful video of Andrew Bird making music at Ted:

Monetary incentives don't work for tasks requiring cognitive skills

2010-12-01T09:17:00.000-06:00

An excellent video sent to us from Professor Ricardo Valerdi at MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative about a study at MIT funded by the Federal Reserve about the effectiveness of monetary incentives (preview: monetary incentives don't work for any task requiring basic cognitive function.) The video also discusses what they founddoes work to incentivize people to perform knowledge-based tasks.

Bonus - great white board animation technique in the video!

There is also a TED talk:

Pioneer Institute Announces Winner of 2010 Ultimate Citizen Award

2010-11-30T15:49:00.000-06:00

We've been working with John Michitson at MITRE Corporation as part of his "day job" for awhile now, but in addition have supported his efforts in some local community work he's passionate about. Well John's efforts were recently recognized by the Pioneer Institute and we'd like to congratulate him for his efforts.

Here's the text of the press release Pioneer issued:

Pioneer Institute Announces Winner of 2010 Ultimate Citizen Award

Pioneer Institute congratulates Mr. John A. Michitson of Haverhill, Massachusetts, winner of our 2010 Ultimate Citizen Award.

Mr. Michitson and his team developed the Haverhill Prediction Market, an online, information-gathering tool for citizens seeking useful and objective city data. Some possible uses for the site include: budget projections using real-time data, details about union contracts and salaries, restaurant ratings that include information on health code violations, interactive city-crime maps, and much more.

This annual competition is designed to encourage civic engagement. For this year’s theme, “Apps for Transparency,” Pioneer called for citizens' ideas about how to facilitate government transparency and accountability through technology. The competition was open to anyone who lives or works in Massachusetts. We were interested in hearing responses to three basic questions:

What government information do you think people should have access to?

In what format do you think this information should be delivered?

How do you think technology can be used to make government more transparent and accountable to citizens?

Participants were asked to collect responses through blog posts, email surveys, video testimonials, phone calls, Twitter update submissions, and/or in-person focus groups. The individual/team that captured the deepest and broadest insights possible received a $1,000 "Ultimate Citizen Award" and public recognition.

Pioneer commends Mr. Michitson and his team for their thoughtful, innovative, and practical entry to this year’s Ultimate Citizen Competition, and wishes the team well in implementing the product.

###

Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.

www.pioneerinstitute.org

For additional information please contact: Micaela Dawson, Director of Communications
T: 617.723.2277 ext. 203 - e-mail: mdawson@pioneerinstitute.org

In defense of (some) meetings

2010-11-29T11:56:00.000-06:00

These days the easiest way to try and get some business rebel street cred is to blog about how wasteful meetings are. But if you are a vendor or consultant who has to work with large companies, you already understand or need to understand the culture that drives the scheduling of all these meetings and use it to your advantage.

As someone who (fortunately or unfortunately - take your pick) ascended to a management role in my previous job and had his calendar fill with meetings while "real work" had to be done at night, I understand the call for less meetings. Meetings were easily the single biggest work/life balance killer I experienced.

What drives all these meetings? I would argue it's because of a classic, decade's old, command and control culture, pure and simple. Command and control tends to breed mild paranoia, politicalization of decision making, and a cover your ass mentality. The result being the need to have meetings to discuss absolutely everything of any consequence (or cc: 20 people on practically every email you send.)

Understanding this reality is the key to successfully working with a large company on your project.

When a company engages us for a consulting gig in addition to buying our software, we know we are one of several activities the people we're working with have going on. So we too have to use meetings. Minimally we do three things:

Create a workplan with tasks and assignments for each task and update it and distribute it regularly;

Insist on a weekly status meeting which we usually facilitate;

Don't let more than 2-3 days go by without useful communication with the team we're working with, either via email or phone meeting. "Useful" can be proactively helping with some of the work they've been assigned or providing an interesting insight.

This is total overkill for any internal projects in a small company, but they help us exist within the command and control structure of a larger one. Because what we're really doing is:

Making people accountable on a document everyone can see;

Creating a mild fear of someone having to say they haven't gotten something done in front of their peers by having the live weekly meetings. This means things get done and it's harder to blow you off;

Keeping us top of mind and making their lives easier, not more difficult.

Eventually the day will come when corporate culture does not dictate this level of interaction with its business partners and working on projects with your Fortune 500 clients will feel more like working on your own internal projects. Until that day comes however, you'll need to take off your "no more meetings" t-shirt, adapt, and try and use meetings to your advantage. In fact, we've found it's critical to understand this culture to have a successful project. Attempts to stray far from this reality and take ourselves out of the "control" part of the equation have largely failed.

Inkling's German Partner Predicat Launches a Marketplace on eMobility

2010-10-29T08:46:00.000-05:00

Our partner in Germany, Predicat, has launched a prediction market on a pressing subject for the world auto industry: electric mobility. You only need to watch a Tesla blow by you on the freeway to know that having volts instead of oil under the hood can still be a lot of fun apart from being ecologically sensible.

Before we can call electric cars our future however, there are some key problems to solve. Predicat is working with the auto industry in Germany to help address these issues and is gathering the input of auto industry insiders, enthusiasts, engineers, and casual drivers alike to predict the outcome of key questions.

You can go now to e-mobility.predict.net to get your fantasy €5000 and begin making predictions.

And it's not just a one way street (no pun intended.) Predicat and the auto industry are sponsoring this initiative with prizes. Background on the initiative and more information about Predicat's prediction marketplace are available in this video:

Get famous for predicting the toss up races in the 2010 elections

2010-10-28T21:32:00.001-05:00

A friend of ours at the Huffington Post, Keith Thomson, has written an article about polls and prediction markets and the never ending argument about which are better.

We'll stay out of that fight in this post and just say that in support of the article we've agreed to stand up a separate marketplace and chose a few close races to let people trade in. Keith said whoever does the best money-wise after the elections are over, he'll interview and try to get them featured in another article. Just think, you can brag to your kids about how you were in the "papers" for your skills.

Sounds like a decent incentive to get over there and see what you're made of: http://elections2010.inklingmarkets.com.

Inkling Public Prediction Market Projections on U.S. Senate Races

2010-10-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

On our public marketplace, there are a series of questions running about the 2010 Congressional elections. All the Senate races are running, the Governor's races, and a smattering of House races. I pulled the numbers for all the Senate races this evening to see what our traders were saying about each race. Here's a summary:

Inkling projects the Democrats to hold the Senate with 54 seats (52 Democrats + 2 Independents who caucus with the D's) while the Republicans will have 44 seats + 2 Independents who will caucus with the R's.

The way to read the chart below is different than reading poll numbers. We're predicting the likelihood of someone winning, not the actual percentage of the vote they'll receive. So if a candidate is at 85, that means Inkling thinks there is an 85% chance they'll win and a 15% chance the other candidate will win, not that they'll receive 85% of the vote. And unlike polls, people can change their mind or add to the predictions at any time based on new information they have or their opinions changing, so these numbers will be changing right up until election time. For the latest Senate predictions, go here.

Tomorrow we'll cover the projections for all Governor races.

Inkling International

2010-09-25T06:22:00.000-05:00

A few days ago we rolled out a small but significant feature that should make our increasingly global user-base happy: local timezone support. Since Inkling was built almost 5 years ago, we've only shown times in the application in one timezone: Pacific. But with expanding usage in to Europe, Asia, and Australia (and an insanely active contingent of Dutch users on our public marketplace,) we decided it was time to let people feel more at home.

All existing users can now go in to their settings and adjust the "region" settings. Once saved, all times will be displayed in your local timezone. All new users will be asked to select a region during the registration process.

For administrators of private marketplaces, a default timezone can be set in the marketplace configuration to save your users a little work if you're all in the same timezone.

Wisdom from Andy Rooney

2010-09-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

"For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don't enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are you're not going to be very happy. If someone bases his [or her] happiness on major events like a great job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn't going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness."

-Andy Rooney

New Speaker for Using Prediction Markets in Government Seminar on September 22

2010-09-09T09:56:00.000-05:00

We're excited to announce that Ford Motor Company will be presenting at the seminar we're conducting with MIT, MITRE, and Iowa State about Using Prediction Markets in Government. We know they've seen some interesting results from their marketplace and look forward to hearing their talk.

As a reminder, the seminar is free and will take place at the MITRE campus in McLean, VA.

Seminar Announcement: Using Prediction Markets in Government

2010-08-31T10:02:00.001-05:00

Together with MITRE, the MIT Lean Advancement Initiative, and Iowa State University, we're hosting a day long seminar September 22nd in McLean, VA about using prediction markets in the Federal Government.

Registration is free and we're pretty excited about the agenda we've assembled:

The Lean Enterprise: a vision for collective intelligence in Government
Ricardo Valerdi, MIT
Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University

Using prediction markets to mitigate procurement risk
John Michitson, MITRE

Aggregative Contingency Estimation Program at IARPA
Jason Matheny, IARPA

Prediction markets at Ford Motors
Tom Montgomery, Ford

Using prediction markets to enhance agency open government initiatives
David Rejeski, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

How to measure the effectiveness of a prediction market
Jon Schuler, MITRE

Getting started: applications and lessons learned
Adam Siegel, Inkling

New Feature - Give someone else karma by "liking" their question or comment

2010-08-26T15:17:00.000-05:00

A few months ago we introduced the concept of "karma" to Inkling. We had a lot of ideas at the time, but had quickly moved on to some more pressing things. Unfortunately, the only way to earn karma thus far has been to answer free polls, which some marketplaces have been using, some have not.

Now there's a new way to earn karma - have people "like" your comments and questions. If you're on Facebook, you're already familiar with this concept with the main difference being that we keep what you like anonymous to your peers vs. sharing it with your friends, your friend's friends, your friend's friend's friends. You get the idea. :)

Each time someone "likes" a question you've asked or a comment you've written you earn one karma point. It's as simple as that. Just start looking for the like button and click it to give someone else a karma point.

If this proves to be popular, we'll add the like button in more places and may even introduce a "most liked" leaderboard, but we'll try not to make it too clique-y.

The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting

2010-08-23T13:53:00.000-05:00

An article on Friday in the New York Times highlighted a peculiar problem we've heard about as well. A few of our clients who have studied the responses of different strata in their organization say that upper management who participate in their prediction markets have been proven to have a more optimistic forecast than what reality dictated. And those in the lower levels of the organization tended to have a more pessimistic outlook than reality dictated.

Richard Thayer from the Chicago Booth School of Business discusses the problem on a larger scale here:
NYTimes: The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting

Show and hide categories of questions

2010-07-27T14:38:00.000-05:00

A couple notable feature enhancements were released yesterday:

First, you can now hide and show categories from the list of questions and Inkling will remember your preferences automatically. For example if you ONLY like to see questions related to your department vs. another, or one topic vs. another, you can switch them on and off. And every time you log out those preferences will be saved. Just click on the category names to toggle them.

We've also made some minor changes to the trading interface:

Your available to trade has been moved directly above the trading interface;
When you are trading in a possible answer your previous activity is now also shown so you don't have to remember what you've done or refer back to your dashboard;
If there is background information, it's now one click away from the trading interface in addition to its inclusion at the bottom of the screen;
Avatars are now included for each creator

The character count for questions has also been increased - we got some feedback that the need to spell out corporate acronyms required more characters. :)

Finally, we're heavily leaning towards removing the confirmation step from the trading interface. It served its purpose at one point but seems redundant and somewhat burdensome now. The text box to accept a trading rationale would simply move back a step to the trading screen. Any input one way or the other? Going once...

Meeting their numbers

2010-07-20T22:06:00.000-05:00

As a small business, we're regularly being pitched by the "small business" segment of much larger companies. Their tactics range from simple emails announcing a new product release, to incessant phone calls urging us to get back to them as soon as possible because their VP is going to be in Chicago and he needs to meet with us. My favorite is the "we spoke several weeks ago and you were quite interested in following up on outsourcing all your development to us." Sorry, I don't know you.

Recently I've noticed an uptick in the blatant "help me meet my numbers" or the crazy car salesman-esque "it's the end of the quarter and my management's gone nuts - call me back before they come to their senses!" There is no pitch about the product or any kind of argument about why I need whatever is being sold. It's simply - "I'm really trying to meet my numbers, can you help me out?"

I got this one today from a Cisco WebEx guy:

I've never spoken to this person before. I don't even think he's one of the guys who has left 25+ messages on my voicemail over the last year. Does this type of sales psychology actually work?

Persistence at 17 - trading a cell phone for a porsche

2010-07-20T11:05:00.000-05:00

Great story of a 17 year old kid putting in 2 years of bartering to turn a cell phone into a porsche. If you want to hear a similar tale that kind of started this type of behavior on the internet there's the guy that traded a paperclip for a house.

I love hearing about folks sticking through with things that require some hard work over a long period of time. Because, more often than not, that's how it's going to be.

New and improved: stats page for each question

2010-07-09T08:08:00.000-05:00

With the release of our new stats page a few weeks ago, we introduced the concept of an "Inkling expert" - someone that had traded in the right direction on several questions in any given topic. Building on this concept and a few others we've been talking about internally, we've released a new stats page for individual questions.

In thinking about how to enhance what was previously just a leaderboard, we thought about the additional signals we'd like to give people to provide further context of what's going on in the market. We already deliver a probabilistic forecast, rationale about why people are trading the way they are, and long form additional context in the form of discussion threads. But we felt it would be useful if the "decider" who has to do something with this information, had more insights at their disposal to enhance what's delivered with each question.

With that goal in mind, with this first iteration of new stats there are three main pieces of information we're conveying. First is an improved earnings leaderboard for the individual question. You can see how much money people who have ever expressed an opinion have made or lost. This means rewarding people for their participation in individual questions is now a click away.

Second, and perhaps most useful, is a breakdown of how strongly people feel about their opinions. We show that strength of opinion by amount of money spent and also by percentage of portfolio spent. Clicking on the magnifying glass next to each person's name lets you view their individual trades.

What's interesting about this view is you can clearly see who the outliers are. And if there are no outliers and the trading is spread across a lot of people, that's a pretty strong signal alongside the probability of that being the correct answer or not. Similarly, you can see if the answer has been dominated by one or two traders in which case you know the results may be skewed.

In this same view we allow you to filter by the experts in that question category. For example, if we're looking at the results of "How many banks will fail in the U.S. in 2010?" you can select a view only showing the people who have proven to be experts in Finance. Again, the name of the game here is looking for signals about the trading activity and enabling easy follow-up work to query the experts or at least report on their activity separately.

Finally we're providing conversion data for use of the trading widget. If you put our trading widget somewhere on your internal portal (or on the Internet somewhere,) you can now track where it was used, how many people have used it, and if they converted to full users.

Stats for all questions can be seen by administrators. Stats for their respective questions can be seen by individual question makers.

Feedback on those we've showed this to already has been really positive which is encouraging. If you have other ideas for what we should be including for these kinds of stats, let us know.

A couple other things:

For administrators: when you send announcements, the full announcement will now appear in the email alert vs. just a snippet. Also, we've added the quick trade option to everyone's dashboards so you can trade directly from there.

Choo Choo: Railinc launches their internal Inkling marketplace

2010-06-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

Railinc is an IT Consultancy for the Rail industry. They support business processes and provide business intelligence that help railroads and rail equipment owners increase productivity, achieve operational efficiencies and keep their assets moving.

After running a trial, Railinc has decided to move forward in formally launching an Inkling marketplace. The person running it for them has a blog post about it here. We've been learning some interesting things about the rail industry and related technologies from the rest of his blog too!

Hustle, a gift from my father.

2010-06-21T09:23:00.000-05:00

Father's Day brought some things to mind.

A close friend lost his father recently. He sent me a letter he wrote to his dad, and the whole letter is remarkable. But this really caught my attention

"I look back at my childhood and I remember all those nights. You would come home and eat dinner, help me with my homework and then return to work. You would work until hours after my bedtime and then get home, sleep for a few hours and get up and do it again. What drives that behavior? Love for the job? This work ethic is not found today. When I worked retail I would work similar hours. I would work 10-12 hours a day, get off at midnight and be back at work at 6 or seven in the morning. That was the job. No questions. You work until the work is done. Period."

One of the most powerful things my father taught me that I'll never forget is hustle.

I'm not exactly sure at what age. Sometime in grade school. It was definitely a lesson that came along with playing sports as a kid.

It was a lesson taught over and over through things like baseball and basketball.

After seeing way too many baseballs pass through my legs as an infielder as I grew to fear the baseball getting hit by stronger and stronger kids, my Dad taught me, "the pain won't last. So what if the ball hits you in the chest. Make the play, and rub the pain out afterwards. You'll feel better"

He was right. I mean, what would you rather choose: look like a goof because you were too afraid and let a ball go through your legs or let a ground ball hit you in the chest, pick it up, throw the man out at first, then rub your chest a little afterwards.

You might have a few more bruises playing this way, but you're gonna swallow those down with two huge spoonfuls of pride.

I became an awesome third baseman. I didn't have the greatest arm, but I can't even remember a baseball getting past me when I decided that I'd rather get hit than let a baseball get past me. I took quite a few on the chest and off the shins, but the feeling of making a play completely trumped the sting.

My dad taught me the joy of doing well, and not giving up felt better than avoiding a couple bumps and bruises.

Same lesson in basketball. I learned that it feels so much better to dive on the floor to get a loose ball and leave some actual skin on the court than it is to just stand their looking around.

Floor burns don't hurt forever. Giving up does.

I played with everything I had. I even broke my wrist in one game. But went back out to finish the game, until I was forced to leave the game with a bloody nose :)

Yeah, a little like that.

Hustle is something that's followed me through my whole life. And it's been incredibly valuable to me.

School was hard. Took a bunch of sacrifice and all nighters. But I hustled through it and it's gotten me far.

Quitting my job and starting this business took some major hustle. And still does. There are still long nights and some painful experiences.

But so what. Walk it off.

You might lose some skin, you might start wearing some black and blue marks. But you don't give up. You keep hustling. You might not even win the game every time. You might not even make the play in the end. But you don't give up because you're scared. And you don't give up because you're lazy. You're gonna feel good playing.

Talk to Yourself

2010-06-18T10:36:00.000-05:00

I recently read a great list of things to do to write better blog posts by John Graham-Cumming. Or rather it's really just about writing better in general.

If you are reading our blog right now, you may have noticed we've been working a bit harder on it. And I personally am working really hard to be a better writer. I believe it's paying off, as we have a good number of posts that get anywhere from 2 to 10 thousand people show up and read them. And our clients and potential clients are starting to reference some of this writing in our conversations.

I'm not trying to brag though. I feel like it's not too terribly hard to achieve this with some work.

There's a few more tips I'd like to eventually share about being a better blogger or writer that I started mentioning in a comment on John's post. Here's probably the most important tip to expound on:

Talk to yourself.

It's kind of a mashup of some things John was talking about. He mentioned spending time offline thinking about your post, and also reading your post aloud.

Similarly I've started talking to myself. Like a lot. :)

I'll just stand in the shower or walk around the house giving improv presentations to no one.

I'll pace around like I'm on stage for 15 or 30 minutes just arguing to the invisible crowd about how to do something better, or how to get off their ass, or how stupid something is, whatever.

Some of the reasons why this is so awesome include:

Writing more naturally

For some reason people, myself included, can start sounding wooden when writing. But for whatever that reason is, it tends to disappear when I'm talking about that same subject to someone or to no one.

A few months ago I was helping some high school kids prepare for their college applications. These are kids who are the first in their families to be able to go to college, so they tend to need a little additional help with getting prepared.

These kids are friggin smart and motivated and accomplished. And yet, when I'd read a few of these essays for these college apps, they were robotic. You could probably write a computer application to spit this stuff out, just by scanning their college transcript.

So I would just ask them, "dude, you are doing some really cool stuff, just tell me about it". And out of their mouths comes this stuff that over and over again gave me chills. These kids were kicking ass. One kid couldn't even speak english when he was a Freshman. Now he's an A student and in charge of the tutoring program for kids in school that need help in Math and Science. Awesome accomplishment.

But it's forgettable in his current essay. So I just started typing stuff the kid was saying out loud to me. A totally different essay emerged, and one the kid now was super pumped about.

You get to argue with yourself

Face it, some stuff you write or think about shouldn't see the light of day. Because it's terrible or wrong. But sometimes you write it and realize that later.

I find having a talk to an invisible audience actually gets a bunch more of those naive thoughts out there for debate in my own head better. I'll get through talking about such and such, and now all of a sudden I find I can punch 10 holes through all of it. Or realize, you know that's not really how I think of this topic most of the time.

I don't know enough about brain science, but I do know that different parts of the brain obviously do different things. And it sounds like the part of the brain that makes speech is different than the part that interprets speech. Maybe it's even a different part of the brain that interprets writing too? Who knows, obviously people learn to understand speech before they understand how to read. Maybe that makes us much better at being able to take in even our own thoughts if they come through our ears rather than our eyes.

Writers block be gone

One last point is that, I've definitely felt like I have nothing to write about. Lot's of people get to that point. But I guarantee if I called someone with writers block on the phone, I doubt they are also mute at that point :)

See? People can talk much more fluently and prolifically than they can write. Usually.

Just doing a talk to the aether, can do wonders creatively.

So I dare you. For the next week, give the air a lecture on something. Whatever you're thinking about. Just improv 15 minutes out and really listen to your words.

Then go write that stuff down. I think your going to like the results.

New Feature - Stats Page Completely Revamped

2010-06-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

One of the big draws of social networks is the ability to see what other people are up to. Another is to feel like you are part of a community - part of something bigger than yourself. That's from the user's perspective. In a business context, decision makers also want to have actionable information, not just "interesting" information. Building on those ideals, we've completely redesigned the stats page in all our marketplaces to give everyone much more insight in to what's going on.

We've broken down the information in two ways: insights about individual users, and insights about the marketplace as a whole. For an example, check out the stats on our public marketplace.

People
We've always known we have lots of data about users but it's always been available in a raw format only. Now we're trying to expose some of it.

First off was some low hanging fruit. Having a leaderboard to keep track of how people are doing monetarily was a no-brainer and something we've had since day 1. But what about some of the other activity on the marketplace that we'd like to encourage: making comments, asking questions, and earning karma? So we created more leaderboards for those:

Things get more interesting from there. We started to look at how "accurate" people are in their trading. We didn't want to focus on money made, but simply if they traded in the right direction in a particular answer. Then we broke that down even further to see who was the most accurate per question category and per tag, in essence identifying the experts in the trading pool in different topics: "competition" or "financials" or "project x"

Trying to identify who the experts are in your company is not new, but those expert networks are typically based on what you say you're an expert in in some profile you create. Now we're identifying expert networks too, but we're making you prove it through the predictions you make and not basing it on your title or previous experience. You want to know who in your company you should be talking to about some problem or strategy in a given area? Look at your Inkling stats where that list has been generated not by HR or from what you think you know, but by what you've proven you know. Pure meritocracy and empowerment.

Marketplace
Our new marketplace stats are geared to helping everyone understand the health of the marketplace. How active is it? How many users are there and how many have completed the registration process? How accurate is the marketplace overall?

One question we often get is "how are we doing compared to some of your other clients?" So in almost every one of our new stats pages, we include a comparison between your marketplace, the global average, and the "best" in any given area.

We're already working on providing additional stats in some other parts of the marketplace which we'll announce in the next few weeks. If you have suggestions or questions for what's there already or what we should be including, don't hesitate to let us know at support@inklingmarkets.com

"It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve."

2010-06-16T15:22:00.001-05:00

-John Gruber (via Daring Fireball)

Don't think outside the box. Just think inside different boxes.

2010-06-16T10:07:00.000-05:00

I can't stand the term "think outside the box".

Most managers or leaders use it as some kind of cure all expression. Some super smart way to charge their workers to innovate. "Hey guys we need some fresh ideas to make money, think outside the box."

Problem is, even telling your employees to do something like this is the exact opposite of what you want to do.

Here's 4 great reasons why.

Name things that are white

The book Made to Stick brought up the example of:

1. Give yourself 15 seconds to name as many things that are white that you can think of.
2. Now give yourself 15 seconds to name as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.

Most people find the second one easier. I've tried it with just naming foods.

1. Just start naming foods. Go.

And people start to get stuck at like 20 foods.

2. Tell them to list food in their fridge, and now they have a breakthrough.

It's neat, but it goes to show you that people need some kind of constraint or anchor before their brain can start to rev up and get creative or start contributing.

Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This

I've brought up this book before. I highly recommend it as a book to understand creativity better. In one section the author, Luke Sullivan, describes a process he would use to come up with headlines for an ad.

So here's a guy often challenged probably to "think outside the box". But instead of just sitting their staring into space thinking about the killer headline or two. He comes up with hundreds of headlines for one product.

But he does it with constraints.

Bourbon was an example. He had to come up with a headline.

So he started with the constraint of aging bourbon. This bourbon takes 9 years. So he creates dozens of headlines and false starts just about "9 years". "Order a drink that takes 9 years to get", "Like to hear how it's made? Do you have 9 years?", and on and on

What about 9 years can be altered? He then makes it about the slow passage of time. "Continental drift happens faster than this whiskey".

Then more exploration of age happens. How long has the brand been on the market. And that's dozens of more ideas about the history of the company.

Then they change the age angle to where is the bourbon made. So they go off on Kentucky for dozens of other ideas. Then they move to how people drink bourbon and what time of day.

And they come up with hundreds of ideas that he couldn't have gotten if he just sat there thinking about whiskey. He was thinking about whiskey sometimes, but really he was thinking inside a new box he had given himself over and over and over again.

Coudal

Jim Coudal has a great talk at South by Southwest about the creative process. A thing he's grown to realize is that the creative process is matching something that's constant with something that's variable.

He describes a fun game they came up with to get the creative brain working. Booking bands.

"The idea is to mash up the name of a book with the name of a band"

It's just a good example of how people can come up with some really creative ideas with the constants of "band name" and "book title" but still manage to be wildly creative.

Corporate brainstorming sessions

I've been in plenty of corporate brainstorming sessions. And the problem is, the room usually doesn't contain a single person who's studied how to help people get more creative.

Sure we all know we are supposed to write down whatever ideas come up no matter how off the wall they are, and whittle them down later. But that's usually the only idea to help the group get going.

A lesson similar to all the examples above I've learned is to start giving people even random constraints.

You want people to get unstuck? Just open up a dictionary to a random page and pick a random word. And now tell your colleagues that all the ideas for the next 15 minutes have to be related to that word.

Say we're at NASA trying to come up with better food available to astronauts. And the word is zebra. You could go all over the place. Zebras remind me of black and white, stripes, animals, zoo, food at the zoo. They also remind me of referees and umpires and food at baseball and basketball games. Yum. Maybe zebras make you think of temperature or binary possibilities of cooking.

Regardless, the list could go on and on, just because of the mashup of what seems to be two totally non related things.

I was in the car with my wife who works at an insurance company. I thought lets try this trick and see if we come up with any crazy ideas for what this insurance company could do to generate even more business.

We passed by Long John Silvers and I said the constraint is "fast food". So ideas started rolling like well they could sponsor happy meals at McDonalds. They could make little action type figures. If kids love an insurance company their parents have to. Look at Geico and their lizard and it's ringtones.

On and on this could go.

The point is, stop staring out into space hoping you come up with some revolutionary idea just because you think you can start thinking about anything and everything.

Instead, keep giving yourself a new constraint or two to think within. Then do that over and over and over again. You'll be amazed at how many more ideas you can arm yourself with.

Enterprise 2.0 - Tiger Woods would kick your ass with 3 golf clubs

2010-06-14T11:29:00.000-05:00

I got an email from InformationWeek about the Enterprise 2.0 Conference happening in Boston this week.

"IT pros attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, June 14-17 in Boston, will get a chance to learn about and weigh in on a number of crucial new technologies, from social networking to cloud computing, that promise to change the way businesses access and use information."

Looks like there's going to be a lot of talk about technology. And how's the conference going to start?

"SAP chief of new products Franz Aman opens the conference portion of the event Tuesday, 10:50 a.m., with a keynote address that looks at "Collaboration within Context." Aman will spell out the possibilities that can emerge when social networks and enterprise collaboration tools are married to traditional enterprise software applications."

Tools, tools and more tools.

Our obsession with tools isn't new. But this obsession with tools for Enterprise 2.0 may be a little worse because of its attachment to Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is also a term muddied up with an obsession of technologies: ajax, blogs, tags, rss, mashups, etc.

But Web 2.0 could have probably just been defined as:

"it doesn't take a lot of money anymore to start a software business".

2.0 could be the time when we realized a couple guys in a garage (even OUTSIDE of Silicon Valley) with $0 could start a business on the web. They could start the business, get customers, and prove that this is a viable business BEFORE getting funding, if they even needed it at that point.

The 2.0 label might be about the time when people started to realize "VC money is hard to get, let's start a business anyway. Computers and technology are cheap. We don't need bosses with money. We're smart and can do this on our own. Let's make something".

For me, Oddpost marks the start of Web 2.0 because the 2 founders had a working business from just working "homelessly". They worked in libraries and cafes with a wireless internet connection. One guy sold his car to fund the business. It wasn't until they had customers coming in and paying for their service that they took on some additional funding a couple years after getting started.

And so here we are now with Enterprise 2.0 and it sounds like it has an unhealthy obsession about tools.

Here's the thing about tools.

Tiger Woods could walk into Kmart, grab 3 clubs from the cheapest, shittiest bag of golf clubs in the store and still kick your ass on the course.

Why?

Because it's not about the tools.

The dude practices every single day and has an incredible knack and talent for the game.

Success is about the method not the tools. But we get so caught up in buying our way to success.

unfortunately our brains seem to be wired like this. We have a hard time associating cause and effect. We know Tiger is one of the best ever and he plays with Nike equipment. We also know about his diligent practice routine. But our brain has a hard time making a strong causal link to only the reason of practice instead of the equipment he uses.

Similarly, this is why Joel Spolsky gives a presentation and he opens with a picture of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. He delivers a great presentation regardless, but finds more people remember the presentation when he shows the picture of the pretty people.

The pretty people make our heart beat just a little faster. And our brains have a hard time filtering out that data point.

That's why women should be asking men out after they walk across dangerous bridges, or you should be taking your first date out for coffee.

So what should Enterprise 2.0 be all about?

Just like Web 2.0 was the realization that 2 people with very little resources could create a lot of value for the world, Enterprise 2.0 should be about what company employees can accomplish with very little.

Without any fancy collaboration tools like internal social networks, internal twitter, and yes, even prediction markets, a couple of your employees with very little time and resources could create a whole lot of innovation if you just get out of their way.

Zappos is a company that really gets Enterprise 2.0.

And it's not because of any tools. It's because if you took the Zappos customer service department and stuck them in the same room of phones as any other customer service department. The Zappos guys will run circles around everyone else in there making customers happy.

Their employees aren't any different than your employees. They don't need tools. Instead they've been given the freedom to do whatever it takes to make those customers happy. It doesn't matter how long they have to talk on the phone. It doesn't matter if they even make the sale. Zappos customer service reps may even help lose a sale by helping a customer buy shoes from a competitor.

Zappos gives its employees a mission and then gets out of their way. Any tools they buy just helps make this process more efficient.

The concept of the wisdom of crowds and its derivatives is a cornerstone of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

But here's a dirty secret we've discovered selling an "Enterprise 2.0" tool. A lot of companies, especially technology companies(!) aren't ready for these tools. They don't need to buy a single thing to have better collaboration, or better ideation, or better Enterprise 2.0 buzzword du jour.

They just need changes in their culture. It could start with scribbles on paper and a peg board in a common area. With phone calls. With email groups. With spreadsheets. They can use what they already have to start getting to the holy grail of "wisdom of the crowd". On a visit to Google we noticed they have an entire wall made of white board where there was all sorts of graffiti about ideas made by hundreds of people. At Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, many of the conference room walls are made of white board material, floor to ceiling.

So instead of just asking one guy for his forecast, ask 10. Ask 30. Send around a spreadsheet or just tell them to get back to you over email. Let this be a start and see if people take to it versus immediately deciding you need to bring in a new tool. Instead of telling your employees what they should be working on for the next quarter, give them some time to tell you what to do. Let them boss you around. Instead of starting with more blogs and tools to hear what your employees are saying on the front line, go spend a week working as a Target checkout clerk, or flipping burgers at White Castle, or cleaning the floor at 7-11, or wherever your company is actually spending time with customers.

When you realize there is a lot of value asking groups of your employees for help on the decisions and forecasts you make every day as a company, then LISTENING and USING the information, only then is it the right time for tools that make that process easier.

Enterprise 2.0 is about getting out of the way. It's about tapping the potential your employees have to run your business better and produce awesome things without you.

In essence, it's about letting go.

And once you've done that, all the guys wanting to sell you tools will still be there. :)

Don't Be Like Seinfeld - Break the Chain

2010-06-11T09:38:00.000-05:00

"Don't break the chain," - Seinfeld

There was a popular meme floating around a few years ago about how Seinfeld increased his productivity. He basically put Xs on a calendar for each day he wrote. And made himself feel like shit if he broke the chain of X's. The guilt encouraged him to write every day.

I call bullshit. Who knows though. Maybe it's true, maybe it helped him write and write and write. But I can't help also take in the evidence that if you want to improve at something or perform your best you shouldn't be doing the same thing every day.

Athletes

They don't run and run and run.

Look up marathon schedules on Google. You'll find hundreds of schedules and training plans. 99% of them have one thing in common. Some days you run long, some days you run faster, some days you run short, some days you just don't do anything.

Here's a podcast of Jim Coudal at South by Southwest. He talks about "A General Theory of Creative Relativity". The whole hour long is good, which is a whole other blog post. But fast forward this thing to the last 50 seconds.

The comment maker brings up how an athlete can peak on a Saturday. Train normal on Monday, walk on Tuesday, nothing on Wed, medium on Thursday, and a short hard workout on Friday.

p90x

I'm doing p90x. You've probably seen the infomercial. It's this crazy home fitness thing.

"P90X is a revolutionary system of 12 sweat-inducing, muscle-pumping workouts, designed to transform your body from regular to ripped in just 90 days." Blah blah.

This thing has been working. And it's not magic. It's just hard friggin work for 90 days.

I get one day off a week. The other 6 days, it's a different workout every single day. Yoga, resistance, cardio, abs, plyometrics. It's all over the place.

p90x likes to call this "muscle confusion" :) Fine, muscle confusion. Seriously though, I've been doing some kind of fitness training for years and years now and if you meet with a trainer, I doubt you'll find a single one that would tell you to do the same thing every day without taking a day of rest.

Ad Copywriters

I've been reading a book recently called Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This, by Luke Sullivan. Amazon will tell you it's a "A Guide to Creating Great Ads". It's not. It's a book about: creativity, working better, working with constraints, being simple.

Luke mentions:

A guy named James Web Young, a copywriter from the 1940's, laid out a five step process of idea generation that still holds water today.

1. You gather as much information on the problem as you can. You read, you underline stuff, you ask questions, you visit the factory.

2. You sit down and actively attack the problem.

3. You drop the whole thing and go do something else while your subconcious mind works on the problem.

4. "Eureka!"

5. You figure out how to implement your idea.

Inkling

So Inkling is now encrypting all our sensitive data (market questions, comments, etc.) for clients who want it in our database. One thing we use to do that is a plugin a guy named Sean Huber wrote for Ruby.

We had tested extensively but the night it was released. Bang, broken. But not broken all the time. Just randomly it was broken. We couldn't figure it out.

I spent the next 3 days just staring at this code every single day. I had no idea what was wrong. But I had a weekend at my in laws. Weekends at my in-laws I appreciate for a lot of reasons, but a huge one is that I rarely even crack open the laptop for 2 days.

As I was driving back home staring at the car in front of me, I decided to let my mind wonder on our problem again.

But since I had worked already so hard on the problem, I could see the code in my head. And sure enough, just sitting there in the car thinking about the code, it came to me why we were seeing such random bugs we couldn't reproduce. I could see in my head the exact line of Sean's code that was causing the problem.

And on Monday morning, I patched up the plugin to handle the problem.

------------

There's tons of different takes on this. But the point is, if you want to play at a peak or you want to avoid reaching a plateau, you don't do the same thing every day.

Maybe for the Seinfeld thing, my issue isn't so much about just not breaking the chain, but you give this advice to someone and their likely to go out and work on the same project every day, on the same thing. Develop, develop, develop.

And how come we do this at our jobs?

How come when I worked for other people, all I got told is tasks that needed to get done, and I was expected to develop develop and develop.

I worked on moving a pretty large Java application from Weblogic to Oracle's application server. I worked on this day after day. After day. For months. Maybe that works well for routine work, but this wasn't routine. It might have done a lot better had someone been like "yo, don't work on that every day, it's not right".

Go look for a formula somewhere else. But the point of all of this is that for some reason most workplaces just don't get that if you want creativity and optimal awesomeness, you can't expect people to work and work and work.

And not just workplaces and your boss, but I don't think individually we really get this either.

When we started Inkling I remember coding 12 hours almost every single day, every day of the week for many months. We got great stuff done. But I can't help wonder if I could have performed even better had I made sure I was taking at least one day a week to not work, and some days I only code 4 hours, some days I work on SEO, and some days I talk to clients, some days I work on something I've never even considered working on before, variety variety, etc.

I'll leave this subject with this (found on Kitsune Noir):

Get Up Earlier and Do More Work

2010-06-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

"One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that if you drive into London at 6am, half of the cars on the roads are Porsches and Astons. Whereas if you go in at ten to nine, they’re all Renaults. Simple solution, then. You want a nice car? Get up earlier and do more work."

— Jeremy Clarkson reviews the Porsche 911 GT3 (via Nick Cernis)

Email Marketing Disobedience. Some great tips on doing the opposite of conventional wisdom.

2010-06-08T10:48:00.000-05:00

Whether you give a crap or not about email marketing, this blog post from MadMimi is an interesting take on a field filled with conventional wisdom.

Some gems:

1. Share expertise

Wrong—share ignorance. Consider the old Zen adage "the more I know, the less I know."

2. Tell a success story

Wrong—tell a failure story. It humanizes your company and demonstrates your high standards.

3. Conduct a relevant interview

Wrong—conduct a gloriously irrelevant interview.

Much more at the full article.

It's a great example of taking inspriation from doing the exact opposite of what you think you need to be doing.

You can apply this to anything you need some new thinking about. You might not come up with a list of things to do 100%, but I'm sure you'll get some ideas on how to do things that stand out or are better than the routine you were following before.

--
Related: Ignore Everybody, but take a shower.

Mike McDerment of FreshBooks on what a web based business should be measuring (and how)

2010-06-02T13:07:00.000-05:00

from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Inkling About Town

2010-06-01T09:45:00.000-05:00

Here are some recent articles and mentions about Inkling.

--

We helped contribute to an article at Six Revisions on "How to Grow a Community: Insights From Experts". The articles tackles questions like:

- What are some successful methods you use to grow your community?
- What are a few strategies you use to engage your community, encourage participation and keep them coming back?
- What advice do you have for people just starting out and trying to develop an active community?

If you're thinking about or currently building a community you'll probably find some food for thought in there.

--

"Chicago May Be the Next Silicon Valley http://bit.ly/b0xu81 @prepme @songza @tgethr @threadless @37signals @jasonfried @feedburner @groupon" - Seth Kravtiz

Woah, we are totally pumped that Inkling and tgethr got a mention alongside Groupon, Threadless, and 37signals.

--

"If there is a better writer for entrepreneurs than @natekontny I am unaware of who they are. Another brilliant post. http://bit.ly/bQZYVb" - Andrew Wicklander

Well of course, that really made my day.

Andrew is the founder of the Ideal Project Group and is doing something pretty cool and inspiring with the ThirtyDayProject.org. "What can you do in 30 days?"

You know you have too many meetings when...

2010-05-28T09:12:00.000-05:00

Friend: I just looked at my calendar for monday and thought, hey, that's not bad... only 4 meetings, at least one of which I don't need to attend

Friend: and then i realized its a holiday :)

--
Her whole office is closed on Monday for this holiday.

"Good yesterday. Better today. Still better tomorrow."

2010-05-27T12:17:00.000-05:00

Inspiration from....?

White Castle. :) From an old school poster of theirs.

Don't keep yourself DRY; be REAL instead

2010-05-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

If you look up DRY in Google you'll probably get as a first result the Wikipedia entry for:

Don't Repeat Yourself

"Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system."

It's an excellent principle for software development and comes from an awesome book called The Pragmatic Programmer that I highly recommend to anyone in the software industry.

But a problem with this principle for developers and non-developers alike is that people (even unwittingly) apply it to all situations in their life.

They decide they should never repeat themselves or anyone else.

If they've already written a blog post about a topic, the topic is dead. If someone else has attacked a problem with a business, there's no way they can can start a business to handle the same problem.

I want to specifically tackle the teaching/written aspect today. I see a lot of bloggers write once and then give up on the topic. Like it's a dead issue now to them and their readers.

Sure a minority of an audience can get a little cranky when they want more material and to be learning something new (see the 37signals example below). But a huge part of an audience needs to keep hearing a message continually. There's all sorts of evidence as to why you should be considering exploring the same topics over and over.

Look at this example from Richard Feynman

That's a perfect example of how one person gets a message by being told about it a certain way, and someone needs something else.

Another common "stat" brought up is how someone needs to see an ad or a message 7-9 times before they can recall it or are aware of it. I can't find where this type of research originated, but check out this recent study done by Nielsen and Facebook:

"Taking the look at organic impressions one step further, recall, awareness and purchase intent were still rising after 10 or more exposures to the message. These results stand in strong contrast to the scant four impressions that usually influence growth in these dimensions for standard display campaigns. What’s more, the jump in awareness between the consumers who were exposed to between three and nine organic messages and those were exposed to 10 or more was a considerable 15 points."

Awareness about a brand jumped from 13% to 28% when someone was exposed to a message 10 or more times on Facebook.

Now that's advertising, and just goes to show you how inundated we are with marketing and noise.

But I bet it's a similar problem just trying to get teaching across.

You want to blog about something you think can make your readers lives better? You are competing against all the other information they are churning through all day. So I suspect your luck in making them aware of your message is about on par with how often someone needs to advertise to someone on Facebook before someone is even aware that they exist.

Now here are a couple examples of how some folks benefit by repeating themselves.

37signals

They've just launched a best selling book Rework. It so happens that Rework is pretty much a polished up retelling of stuff they've been blogging and speaking about for years. Sure, a minority of folks are disappointed, but they do already have a ton of messages that ring very true and are very useful for a lot more people in this world who has never heard of them. Here's their take (a podcast) on that criticism.

They repeat themselves constantly. And it works. New audience members and old, get their messages. Their messages are even more polished than they were before. New analogies are found. New ways of pitching an idea are found.

Tim Ash

Tim is an expert at website optimization. He's even written a very well reviewed book on the subject.

I've recently seen two articles pop up from Tim: one on the ClickZ website and one in Website Magazine.

They're both about Influence and what he's learned from Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. as well as his own experiences. And if you read them you'll see that there is some duplicate content in the articles, but they aren't identical.

And why shouldn't he do this? I'm probably the only one who even noticed this. Especially if it's a message he feels is worth spreading to more people who haven't seen it.

So next time you're blogging, writing, or thinking about reaching an audience. Don't sweat repeating yourself. If you have some opinions or beliefs go out and share them even if you feel like you've shared them before. At some point and for some parts of your audience, you are probably going to feel you need to polish and find new ways of teaching that message like Feynman discovered, but just because the core of the message remains the same shouldn't stop you from revisiting the topic.

As a teacher, as a blogger, as a speaker, as someone who is trying to grow an audience, don't keep yourself DRY but keep it REAL.

--
What does REAL stand for? This is where I had some trouble. I wanted to find a kick ass acronym and I don't think I'm good at this exercise.

Repeat Everything Awesome and Legendary? :)

Anyone have anything better for an acronym? Was trying to play with WARM. Wisdom Always Repeats ... ummm Meatballs. Or WET?

"How are you doing? I mean, I don't really give a crap, let's talk business."

2010-05-25T09:56:00.000-05:00

In DK (Denmark) we'd greet with "hi" or "hello" instead of the US novels of "how are you doing? good, thanks, how about you? doing good, thank you".

- David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals had that to say about the common words we use to start a conversation here in the US.

That's sad. I don't disagree with the observation though. It's just sad that we waste our time on this insincere boilerplate.

We shouldn't be all business and skip the desire to find out the well being of the person we are about to greet.

I argue we should actually give a shit.

Have some sincerity in actually finding out how your friend, acquaintance, customer, neighbor, etc. is doing. As well share how you're actually doing.

I've started a habit of spending 150 words or less letting someone know how "I'm doing". They aren't going to get an earful. But if someone bothers to ask me, I spend 30 seconds or so actually telling them.

If someone ask's how I'm doing before asking me for customer support I might say:

"Hey there. I'm good, my wife and I started dance lessons a few weeks ago, and they've been fun, but I think we need to find a new dance studio as this one is all about the upsell. How's it going there? Oh, I see what you need to fix there..."

"Hello. Things are great, but I'm real sore. I started doing p90x about a month ago. It's this crazy home fitness thing that leaves me super sore every day. Great program, just needs a lot of time and commitment. What's been new with you? Thanks the for alert on XYZ..."

I don't need to go on a rant, or tell the people what I had for lunch. But if someone asks me how I'm doing, I go ahead and tell them.

The conversations that result from practicing this have been great.

There's a connection that gets made that's so much more rewarding than just the boilerplate "How are you. [Insert what I really want to talk to you about]" New things are uncovered and new friends are made.

And on the flip side, if I ask someone how they are doing? I mean it. I try and listen. If I don't get anything, I ask again. We've been programmed to feel like "you don't really care how I feel, and we're all in this on our own, so I'll get this question over with 'Good, how are you'."

So I try and help my conversation partner break out of this with some sincere interest in what they've been doing.

It might not be universally appreciated, but I know I enjoy connecting with the people around me a lot more when my conversations aren't just about what someone thinks they need or want on the business end.

Just be famous

2010-05-21T12:41:00.001-05:00

What a 3 year old can teach you about improving your business or career

2010-05-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

audience - noun
the part of the general public interested in a source of information or entertainment

It's not a surprise, but forming an audience is a huge way in order to grow a business or career.

An audience chooses to be there because they are interested in what you have to say. They are there giving you permission to give them knowledge and help.

And for a business, they may even buy something you're selling to make their lives better.

One trouble though that plagues most people about the audience angle is they feel they have nothing to say.

I can't believe how many people I know who want to improve their business or careers but then get stuck finding an audience. And they're stuck because they feel like they don't possibly have anything to say and can't possibly help anyone more than someone else can.

"There's so many more people who know so much more than I do" is the popular lament.

Guess what. There will always be someone doing what you want to be doing better than you.

But that's not the point. The point is even a 3 year old can have an audience.

I was at a friend's birthday party the other night, and had a great conversation with another friend I hadn't seen in a while. He's been a newish dad with a 1 year old and 3 year old.

This guy was just gushing about his kids. Friggin loves them!

One thing that he was amazed by was how much his 1 year old looks up to the 3 year old. The dad could see it in the 1 year old's expressions and face. The 1 year old would just glue his attention onto the 3 year old like he was some kind of celebrity living in this house.

Because to this 1 year old he is.

To the 1 year old, here's a little person who's just a little bigger than him, totally kicking ass around this place. To the 1 year old, his brother is a king and has figured out how to conquer all these challenges in the 1 year old's path. He can walk, and make good use of communication. He's probably able to use a bathroom. :) And on and on in that list of accomplishments.

Why is this important? Because it should teach us, that we don't have to be Steve Jobs or Michael Jordan to teach people and find an audience.

There's something about us that we know more than a bunch of other people, and those people are probably looking for some help, and we are in a great place to do that. We can still relate to the people that need teaching.

The 1 year old doesn't look up to his dad like he looks up to his 3 year old brother, even though his dad could easily kick both their assess in a painting contest.

"I am better than your kids." If you've never seen this painting before, you're welcome. :)

He looks up to his brother because they can relate to each other.

If you're in a struggle to grow a business, think about this 3 year old.

You have a wealth of knowledge at your disposal. You have so much to teach people who want to follow in your footsteps and who'd look up to you.

You don't need to have enormous fame and accomplishments to be able to teach and form an audience. You don't even have to be that much further ahead than those that could use some help.

You just need to be able to help. Of course you should still be humble and recognize there is a lot you don't know.

But I guarantee someone could use your help today and would love to be your audience.

Treasure in my parents' basement

2010-05-20T09:22:00.000-05:00

My parents are moving soon, and I helped a bit with packing and sorting through some of my old things in their basement last night.

I found some treasure.

The first thing that caught my attention was my very first Entrepreneur magazine.

I bought this thing on a flight to one of my first interviews for a full time job. :) Ahh the irony.

I remember sitting near a Chemical Engineering professor on the plane, and he spotted the magazine apparently. Because off the plane he was asking if I own a business.

"One day I hope."

Took awhile to get here from there, but some stuff finally clicked.

The world was a lot different in 1998 :) For the best software for small business: Windows 98, Word 97, Access 97, Netscape Communicator.

Nice keepsake.

A few things that have some real practical value: books.

I've been reading and blogging a little about psychology and persuasion. And one of the books on my Amazon Wishlist is Influence by Robert Cialdini. Looks like my sister read this in college perhaps, because there it was on the bookshelf.

Looks like she also read Flow by Csikzentmihalya. Which is another book I see coming up a lot in discussions of lean startups.

And finally, a book that I remember influencing me a great deal in college Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

"In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for the contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life - the beginning of suffering, rejection, peaces and, finally, wisdom."

I think it requires a reread.

"You gotta play this game with fear and arrogance."

2010-05-19T09:05:00.001-05:00

- Crash Davis (Kevin Costner's character in Bull Durham)

You need to find a balance between total confidence and the beginner's mind. You can apply this to everything?

Picasso was a failure

2010-05-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

photo by: J. Crocker

How many works did Picasso create in his lifetime?

50,000

Now.

How many works of Picasso's could you name or describe?

2? 5?

Take an art history course? Maybe you know 12?

Looking at those kinds of numbers, you might think Picasso was a failure.

But you know better.

It takes a lot of work. A lot of practice to become a master. Picasso just kept making shit. It sounds like much of Picasso's early work was even set on fire by the guy himself to keep his apartment warm because he was broke. We don't even know the totality of what he created.

Another example of a company who's constantly failing is 37signals. They don't talk about it all the time, but they keep failing. You might think they are doing gangbusters with their very popular book Rework out there on bestseller lists, Jason Fried writing an article in Inc magazine each month, or their products making millions.

But they keep failing.

Don't believe me?

Listen to their latest podcast.

"We tried out these ideas in public, we tried them out on the blog, and we took the ones that were the best...The shit that nobody cared about, or we didn't care about anymore or that bombed out is not going to make it in."

-David at 37signals (in the first few minutes)

They keep making stuff. They keep practicing. Not everything works. Not everything gets into the best selling book or gets repeated.

More failures of 37signals? Highrise version 1. You didn't even get to see it. They blew 3 months on it. Then they had to throw it out because they were on the wrong track. But then they created the Highrise you see today.

Remember the 37signal's Gig Board? Yeah, they have the Job Board. They used to have the Gig Board too. Doesn't exist anymore. I suspect because it wasn't doing what they first imagined it would do. Not enough gigs to have a separate place for them. So it got canned and now sort of rolls up into the Job Board.

On a similar note, Olivia Wilde of House fame had this to say about being more confident because you will get there:

I get asked a lot what motivates me. Practice. I'm going to fail at a lot of things. I'm going to keep trying to not let them fail of course, but they'll fail. I'll keep writing blog posts no one cares about. Making features that don't work out like I want them too. Trying new ways to grow our company that fails to reach a single person.

A bunch of them are going to bomb out. But a few won't.

A few might be remembered and make a big difference. A few already have, and for that I know the odds are high that if I keep going. If I keep practicing. If I keep working on being better than yesterday. I'll be able to make a few more works of art.

10 Observations on Duct Tape Marketing's Dirty Little Marketing Research Secret

2010-05-11T10:07:00.000-05:00

"the one place I turn to keep myself rooted in how the world thinks and buys, you know, marketing research, is PEOPLE magazine." - John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing)

Interesting. I was taking a gander at the book Duct Tape Marketing, and this advice about People magazine was kind of unique.

After all, often, we are what we read, and so as someone who helps run a company, writes software, does customer support, does marketing, writes more software, etc. I'm constantly reading the likes of Hacker News, Wired, Reddit, technology and marketing blogs.

But I'd probably bet a good majority of customers of popular software on the web (like say Basecamp) haven't even heard of Hacker News. But I bet they've at least skimmed a People magazine more than once.

"My teeth are so white and I don't like them to feel too slippery, but I do use Listerine and I do floss everyday. But I don’t brush them everyday. I’ll use a shirt or something ... I know it's gross, but I always have fresh breath." - Jessica Simpson on Ellen Degeneres

Ha. Found on People.com

So I thought I'd take John's advice and buy my first People and give it a look and write down any observations. They don't all probably have any kind of application to what I want to do, but they do spark some ideas.

1) First of all, I was embarrassed to buy this magazine at the 7-11. Rolled it up immediately under my arm after leaving the store. :)

2) Before even buying the magazine I ran a tool called Term Extractor from SEOMoz (a search engine marketing company) over the People.com website to see what kinds of terms stood out.

Some that stood out to me: style, baby, watch, star style, celebrity site, sightings. And of course Sandra Bullock, Sandra Bullock, Sandra Bullock.

3) Pictures trump copy.

I know People is half celebrity gawking, but I was still surprised at how much larger and more promninent pictures are to text in this magazine. A bunch of the text is even tough to read against the photos.

There was even a section I saw that had Jessica Simpson's face next to it, but had nothing to do with Jessica Simpson. It was a little blurb about the games section of People.com. Makes you think you could/should spend a lot more time picking images/photos for a website rather than the text describing what your product does.

4) The magazine has an incredible amount of ads about food. Why this surprised me was because the magazine is a lot about pictures of people that look a lot hungrier than me. If you were to tear out all the pages without ads, you'd swear this was some kind of Food Network magazine. And not just healthy food so you can look like the celebs. A lot of chocolate, ice cream and even cream cheese.

There's even an ad for a Google Android phone and the copy of the ad is "Locate stars, planets or a decent taco".

Still a fair share of calorie cutting food. All with enormous pics again. And when the ads aren't about "people food", they are about pet food.

Does looking at skinny celebs make us hungry and easily persuaded to eat something?

5) The strong correlation to food remains with the two books that are featured in the magazine's ads. But not like you think. They aren't cookbooks. But the very first book advertised has a headline of a testimonial with one word: "Delicious". And the title of the other one is "Women Food and God".

6) The Sandra Bullock news is probably obvious. People magazine and the rest of the world is obsessed about celebrity infidelity. There's even an ad for something called Maghound that takes advantage of this with a headline "Desperate Housewives Caught With Handyman". And the ad features two of the "Desperate Housewives" characters on the covers of different magazines laying on a table with Handyman magazine.

There's also a strange contrast with the other ad on this page for children's book. Weird.

7) Another ad tries to tap into the magazine's obsession with movies by making the ad look like a typical movie poster advertisement. It was for kitty litter :)

8) Not even sure what to say about this Snicker's ad. Kind of clever. Sort of a fake celebrity endorsement. Snicker's is the best selling chocolate bar by the way with annual global sales of $2 billion.

9) An article that caught my eye is about a cat that has 1.5 million Twitter followers! That's 3 times as many as Tom Cruise.

10) Another article profiles 3 "Extreme Job Hunters". All 3 are doing some pretty atypical things to find jobs. Lawson Clarke really stands out. He created a pretty crazy portfolio site, with the homepage inspired by a centerfold of Burt Reynolds in a 1972 Cosmopolitan magazine.

--

So regardless of your opinion of the content of People magazine, there's a whole lot of folks, many of whom you know, work with, sell to, etc, that are reading things like this. Keeping an eye on People just might generate some ideas on how to create products, advertising and writing in a language or style your users are likely very comfortable with.

Psychological manipulation - what I learned trying to save money on a sandwich

2010-05-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

I've got a soft spot in my heart for psychological stuff. Especially the stuff that triggers us to do things. I'm not sure why. I think I just really like to understand my brain more, because it can be an awfully weird place.

How's this for weird?

"Studies 1–5 showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis)... Studies 7–10 suggested that people disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names (e.g., people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among dentists)."

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/susie.pdf

I picked up a book again I hadn't read for a long time called Triggers by Joseph Sugarman. I hear he was the guy that came up with the advertising selling those Blublocker sunglasses, and it sounds like they sold an insane amount of them. I even remember buying a pair :)

There's a trigger in there that I remember using a couple times at my old job. Well it was specifically to help this girl Stephanie save a little money at lunch.

A bunch of us at work would go to this sub shop constantly. Stephanie would only get the veggie sub. The veggie sub was $5. But Stephanie also noticed that the place had a Special sub every day for $2.75. And the veggie sub was just the Special with the meat not added. But every time Stephanie ordered the veggie sub and tried to explain her point, she was met with "we can't do that, it's $5".

So we tried a technique that I had learned in Triggers.

In Triggers, Joe explains a very similar situation where he is trying to order ice cream. He asks the waitress for chocolate ice cream with whipped cream. The waitress translated that for herself and for him and said "well, that's a sundae without the syrup, which is extra". Joe would get frustrated and begrudgingly pay the extra.

But one day Joe decided to not order the whipped cream to save a little money. However, as she was leaving with his order he gave into his whipped cream addiction, and asked her as she was walking away if she could add whipped cream. This time he was only charged for just the ice cream. Not the extra amount of a sundae.

He experimented with this over and over. He even had a friend try this with him. During the exact same meal, he ordered the original way "chocolate ice cream with whipped cream", but his friend ordered just "chocolate ice cream" and then asked for whipped cream as she was talking away.

Sure enough, Joe was charged for a sundae, and the friend was only charged for chocolate ice cream.

We felt that Stephanie was stuck in a weird situation because we knew that this veggie sub was just the Special without the meat. Why should the veggie cost more?

I noticed Stephanie was doing something similar to Joe. She'd go up to the order counter and say "veggie sub please".

So one day I had Stephanie ask for the Special. But as they were about to make the sub, she just asked as an afterthought "Can you hold the meat please?". And they gladly did it every time.

In commerce this is the psychology used to get people to keep adding upgrades onto their orders. You get someone to commit to an initial purchase at a simple/cheaper price, and then you ask them if they want more. It's easier now to get them to say yes.

This is what GoDaddy does in spades. Love or hate GoDaddy, they are kicking ass at it.

Harper Reed, the previous CTO of Threadless, was telling me about buying the magicJack. Here's an awesome photo of Harper and the mayor of Chicago that I thoroughly enjoy.

The magicJack is that phone device on the informercial that's a way to make calls using your computer and current phones. It's pretty cheap. But at the end of buying the thing, Harper was surprised at all the add ons he'd added to his cart and gladly paid for.

Use this knowledge as you see fit. It obviously can help some marketing and sales campaigns make more money. It also can help you understand how you're manipulated a little bit to buy more stuff.

And it might even save you a couple bucks at a sandwich shop.

If at first you don't succeed, send them some crazy handwritten envelope & note.

2010-05-06T09:39:00.000-05:00

About a couple years ago Lynette and I visited a restaurant called Sapori with my partner here at Inkling, Adam, and his wife. Adam had some fond memories of this place.

Trouble was, I didn't like my meal. Lynette's wasn't any great shakes either. So there wasn't any draw to really go back to this place and give it a second chance. Lynette and I have an endless list of restaurants we still want to try for a first chance in Chicago.

But then 12 months ago, almost exactly, since my half birthday is in May, I got an envelope in the mail just like this

This wasn't fake handwriting like the AT&T example I blogged about before, this was some real person writing all over the front and back of this envelope.

It immediately got my attention. Who on earth is personally writing me like this, and celebrating my half birthday? The Chef at Sapori!?

Inside was a gift certificate. I forget the denomination. It might have been like $19.30 or something. (I've seen him use some uneven looking numbers for his gift certificates/coupons before as well.)

And sure enough, this little marketing gimmick got Lynette and I to have dinner at Sapori again, and this time we thoroughly enjoyed it. And it had nothing to do with the gimmick anymore. This time the food kicked some ass.

Whoever this guy Chef Anthony is he's got a great little marketing tactic going on in celebrating people's half birthdays as well as getting his direct mail marketing noticed.

It worked on me 12 months ago, and now I was excited to get my second half birthday certificate from the guy this month. I can't wait to go back to Sapori again.

I've got an email out to him to see if he wouldn't mind sharing anything he's learned about this campaign he's been running. How was he inspired to do this? Who does he learn from? Who's doing all the writing on these certificates and envelopes since it must be somewhat time consuming? And how successful has it been for him? I'll follow up this post to let you know if I hear back.

Here's a couple more shots of the back of the envelope and the inside letter he sent.

--

44 stamps

I've been reading about guerrilla marketing tactics. And saw one I've seen before, but seemed fitting considering the one above seems to work on me. Instead of using a single stamp on your envelope, use 44 1 cent stamps. If someone got an envelope plastered in stamps, they probably are going to notice it, and might open that thing up.

--

I might try a bit of snail mail marketing myself. It seems that most web based companies are only thinking about web based ways of marketing themselves, and that would seem to miss all the great offline opportunities to get yourself noticed.

Here's an example of a postcard I plan on trying to market our collaboration tool for small businesses.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Find your own ocean

2010-04-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

This is an inspiring tale of a kid, Clay Marzo, who has autism and struggles to deal with life as it's usually led - on land. But when he's in the ocean he thrives.

We give up too quick trying to find our oceans. Places where, like this kid, we feel free to create things, help people, and still enjoy ourselves.

When I was in college I found out that doing chemical engineering and working at a chemical plant wasn't my ocean, and I worked my ass off to find some new things. That led me to working at Accenture, which was also not my ocean. I didn't enjoy the lifestyle of being constantly away from home. So I kept looking.

It wasn't overnight. It took me years of working at night, learning how to do software development and experimenting with weird things. 10 years ago, I tried to apply to Thoughtworks. They had this computer science problem to solve to get an interview. It was something that was pretty tough for me at the time, but I thought it would be a great learning experience. I thought I'd impress them if I ran the solution to the problem off of a server in my home and they can access it over the web. That might have been cool, but I'm not so sure I did a very good job writing code for that thing because they didn't call me in for an interview.

Who cares. I kept looking.

I've also gotten my fair share of "no thank you"s after dozens and dozens of interviews at other software companies. Once I didn't get the job because I didn't have "Weblogic" experience, even though I had experience with every other Java app server on the planet. The guy just couldn't get past the keyword "Weblogic" :) Very frustrating. But.

Who cares. I kept looking.

Today I'm in an environment where I thrive. I get to find new problems every day if I want and solve them. I can write code or do marketing. There's no end to stuff I get to create. It's not always perfect, but there wasn't a lot of magic finding this. It took a bunch of work, persistence and experimentation. And faith that one day all my work would lead me to an ocean.

Very cool conference speaker gift

2010-04-28T10:31:00.001-05:00

I spoke about Achieving Less at a conference a couple weekends ago here at the University of Chicago.

The crew (Minogi and iFoundry) that put together the conference sent me the coolest gift I've gotten as a speaker: a plant. It's awesome for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones is that it's alive. Great idea guys and thanks!

If anyone is looking for a unique gift, they ordered my bamboo plant from Easter Leaf.

How long can you go without saying "I want"?

2010-04-27T10:43:00.000-05:00

He who desires is always poor. -Claudianus

I've been trying a little experiment, and it's not going so well.

I was attempting to see if I could go one week without saying the words "I want ...". I thought it wouldn't be that bad.

Look, don't get me wrong. I don't want to be an ascetic. I don't want to live in a monastery only eating rice and wearing my only possession.

But I thought, too many of us can probably go a week without saying things like "I love you" or "Thank you", which sucks. So maybe saying "I want" for a tiny little while wouldn't be so bad and would be good for me.

I couldn't go 24 hours.

Now, I wasn't breaking it like a kid in a toy store. But I was breaking it. There'd be things I'd say like "Oh, I want to eat there, maybe we should plan that next week". Or "I want to fix that bug in the software".

I bet you can't do it for a week either :) But it would be neat if you could. So try.

Try, for just one week to not say "I want something". That doesn't mean you have to not want things. It just means you can't talk about your wants using the typical language with people. You can still tell people you plan on purchasing an iPad one day, just don't tell them you want one.

And leave a comment here in our blog please to let us know how it's going.

I think what this might accomplish is point out actually how often you want things. How often you're sitting around on a perfectly fine sunny day with your very best friend around you and you still want something.

I think recognizing how often we want things might help us temper that desire a bit. And tempering desire probably leads to feeling much more content. And contentment seems to be everyone's ultimate desire.

Getting inspiration from touring bands

2010-04-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

In the last two weeks I've been fortunate enough to see two of my favorite bands live here in Chicago. These weren't well known bands, having what I can tell only a small but loyal following. And due to that, they didn't play at the larger venues like the Congress or Aragon Ballroom, but instead in one of Chicago's dozens of quaint, ~250 person venues.

Last night's concert was by a band called Horse Feathers who played at a bar called Schuba's. It was one of the best concerts I've seen in a long time. They played a rousing hour long set and before that, Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps (sans the Goodnight Sleeps) opened.

There are few experiences that match seeing a band who you are mildly obsessed about live and up close in a candle-lit intimate venue. I parked myself in the front row of a standing room only crowd and stayed there all night.

Why do I bring this up on our Inkling blog? While the music was great, what made the evening transition from special to inspiring was seeing the band themselves do all their own setup, their own tuning, everything. Before they played they just walked in from the bar through the crowd to the front of the stage. And outside wasn't a big bus with a cool graphic of a western sunset on the side, with equipment trucks trailing. There were no roadies, not even a band manager. Instead I spotted a cargo van outside with an Oregon license plate that the band drives themselves and their equipment around in.

The money they're making touring can't be great based on the ticket prices. Looking at their aggressive tour schedule they're driving several hours a day or night to make their next venue. They're away from their homes and families. But they're out there doing what they love.

We should all be so lucky.

"I'm confronted with my own ignorance all the time"

2010-04-23T11:05:00.000-05:00

I’d rather be challenged by somebody, rather than have somebody say, ‘Dude, where are you going to have drinks after the show?’ I love a spirited debate as much as anybody. I even like being wrong, if something can make a good case … on something. In a lot of ways, that’s what I do professionally, traveling. I’m confronted by my own ignorance or misunderstandings all the time.

- Anthony Bourdain, Chicago Tribune interview by Kevin Pang (via 37signals)

Oddly coincidental quote, since I was just going to blog about my own ignorance.

I was amusingly reminded of my own ignorance when I watched a little mini-marthon of Chucks yesterday. Chuck is a TV show on NBC. It's in its 3rd season, and has a modicum of success. And might get picked up for a 4th, even though its ratings have been dropping.

But the funny thing is, I ridiculed this show when NBC was advertising for it originally. I thought it looked like a waste of money and these actor's talents. I predicted it wouldn't run a whole season.

What's funny about that is not that I made a terrible prediction.

What's funny is that it's now one of my favorite shows. :)

It had me at the first episode.

Just a nice humbling reminder to me, that we can be certain of very few things. "Certainty is the mother of fools" for sure. And it's also a reminder to me about why it's so important to keep putting stuff out there just to see what happens. I can't predict the next best iPhone app on my own. I can't even predict which of my blog posts are going to do well.

Some days I spend a good chunk of time writing, thinking that this is really going to resonate with folks, and I end up getting 50 people to read that post. Other days I spend 15 minutes writing something I think no one but myself is going to care about, and 7,000 people show up to check it out.

It's another good reason to still believe something like prediction markets can come in handy.

--

"One day you'll be dead."

2010-04-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

As Hugh MacLeod explains:

--
Earlier this year, I was working at home, sitting in my backyard. My landlord, Martin was over, fixing something in the back,so we were chatting.

He could tell I was kinda agitated that day. I was stressing over some, minor, short-term business issue that just wasn't getting resolved as quickly as I would like.

He asked me what was bothering me. I told him. He then told me verbatim what is written in this cartoon.

Marty wasn't wrong, either.

I like my landlord...
--

I've blogged about Hugh and his awesome book before, Ignore Everybody. But I also highly recommend signing up for his daily cartoon newsletter.

Do we really want our lives to mirror video games like Farmville?

2010-04-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

Farmville is a very popular Facebook game. Game players build virtual farms they have to constantly tend and grow. And if you look at the game, it mirrors a lot of the things we get addicted to in real life.

One of the reasons for Farmville's popularity is their thorough knowledge of game mechanics. Game mechanics is a fancy term for a collection of things that game designers know people enjoy doing and get addicted to in games.

For example, game designers understand that people love to Level Up. That's why games have levels. We get addicted to constantly trying to get to the next level of something.

Game designers also introduce concepts of collecting coins, points, gifts, and treasures. People also love to show these collections off. So game designers allow you to compete transparently with other people. Or allow you ways to show off your treasures to all your friends. And if you don't want to do all that work, many games have shortcuts you need to discover or use. Farmville makes a ton of money helping people shortcut the way to achieving more with their game. Sounds like everyone's favorite phrase Do Less, Achieve More.

So people get attached to all this stuff and leveling up for completely worthless virtual objects in a game. But do we really want to play this game all day every day in our lives?

Do we really want to be constantly looking to level up our jobs with promotions or level up with bigger houses. Most of us are constantly looking for the next level of whatever we are doing today. Look at CEOs trapped at leveling up even though they are making 10 million a year and their companies are having layoffs.

We have this need to collect and collect stuff. Stuff that obviously doesn't even need to be worth anything for us to NEED to start hoarding it. And we like to show it all off. Even if you don't find yourself to be much of a braggart, I bet a good chunk of you feels great to have all the stuff you've accomplished celebrated or envied by other people.

Sure this is fun in video games when you can satisfy your hoarding and leveling up addiction for an hour and then it's easy to turn off. It's a lot harder to turn these things off in real life.

Recognizing where your life resembles Farmville is probably a start.

Tolstoy today

2010-04-20T13:57:00.000-05:00

I opened up the new book I'm reading by Michael Lewis called "The Big Short" and felt the opening quote before the prologue was so appropriate; not only for what the book is about to discuss (the few contrarians who bucked Wall Street's conventional wisdom and shorted the real estate derivative markets to make billions,) but also to the personality characteristics of certain people we all deal with on a daily basis who think because they are considered experts, they know, without question, the answer. Legends in their own minds.

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
--Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Brag about being small

2010-04-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

This is a great commercial by Sam Adam's beer company. They are doing what most businesses are absolutely petrified of doing. They are bragging about how small they are. (You might want to turn up the volume)

In the video, folks are asked how big do you think Sam Adams is. Responses come from people like "huge, 30% of the beer market", "10% of the market?". They come back with the clarification that "no, we are less than 1% of the beer market"!

I'm always taken aback when I see a small company, especially one that just started, decide they need to proclaim they are some kind of Leader of something. They obsess over some kind of dominance over the competition.

Running a business doesn't have to be about being Big or being a Leader or being competitive. It really can just be about making something great.

There's another great example of this I learned when I first started taking Aikido in college. Aikido is like the martial art of peace. There aren't offensive moves. If your "opponent" decides not to fight, there will be no fight. Aikido is about existing peacefully, but if someone attacks you or encroaches upon you, there are ways to remain balanced and redirect the attackers aggression.

One of the most famous Aikido experts is Steven Seagal. And though Steven Seagal is actually an awesome martial artist, sometimes his ego has gotten the best of him. My Aikido teacher had once been part of Steven's school and taken classes from him, and in the process learned of this story he shared with us.

This was when Steven was at the pinnacle of his movie career. He was on top of the world. And he was doing some fight choreography in a movie studio with a guy who was very well versed in Judo. Steven was talking up a storm about how he himself was the greatest martial artist on the planet right now, and he was pretty much untouchable. The Judo guy, a small, 50 year old man, told Steven that he should hold his tongue and be careful with his ego.

Steven didn't take the advice very well, and challenged the Judo guy to a "friendly" fight.

Not much long after that, Steven found himself waking up after going unconscious from a wrestling move the Judo guy put on Steven called the Rubber Ducky.

You don't have to be big to be good.

You matter more than you will ever know

2010-04-16T09:33:00.000-05:00

"I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump."

A story that has always stayed with me since grade school that might be part fiction, but might very well be true is of the guy who left a suicide note that was found after he killed himself by jumping off a bridge.

A topic that interests me a great deal is how little people realize their effect on other people. Here's a few recent cases.

Mark Hayward - performance artist

I attended ORD Camp (like Foo Camp but in Chicago) a few months ago and heard a talk from Mark Hayward, a yo-yo performer and comedy juggler. He talked about performing on stage. I asked him how he obtains feedback about his performances.

He mentioned that it's tough, because sometimes a crowd of faces just isn't honestly portraying how they feel. For example, one performance he gave had a bunch of people that looked stoic and unimpressed all night. But after the show, someone came up to Mark and said that was the best yo-yo performance he'd ever seen. This happens more than you know it about yourself. You rely on the unspoken feedback you think you are getting from other people while often silently they think you are being a whole lot of awesome.

A volunteer program

I volunteered with a program this last fall and winter helping high school seniors apply to college. These are kids who are the first in their families to go to college, so this is quite a challenge for them to get through this process. We get teamed up with a buddy at the beginning of the program.

Well, my kid decided to not show up anymore after the first day :) without ever officially quitting. So I filled in as a floater helping a kid one week whose mentor couldn't show up, and a different kid another week.

I didn't feel like I made much of a difference in this program since I was just filling in a tiny bit. So when a follow up panel discussion was being done this spring with the seniors about what college and careers are like, I really hesitated about attending. Everyone else had spent a good chunk of time getting to know their buddies and help out, and I can't even remember my kids' names since my relationship with them was so fleeting.

But then out of nowhere I get an email from one of the kids I helped for just a few hours one day, asking me if I'd be at the panel. Wow, I didn't expect that at all.

A talk to students

I gave a talk a few months ago down at my alma mater, the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana). It was a talk about starting a business to mostly a room of students. I thought the talk went fair, but just like Mark above, there wasn't a ton of visual feedback. And there were kids yawning already and I was the second talk. It was early in the morning on a weekend, but still, kind of gets you feeling blah about whether or not this talk even matters. But then I've gotten follow up emails from some students about the talk and wanting more information, and blog comments like

"Nate, I am one of those students at the University of Illinois that you showed the video to. Your presentation was fantastic!" - Loren Burton

So there's just a few examples of the impact that some people have on others that you're lucky to even find out about. Think about all the people you impact that you don't get this feedback from. The people on your blog that get stuff from your writing that never write a blog comment. The people who you inspire at work who you'll maybe never actually converse with.

Or the person you smile to on your way out the door for work.

Happiness from jumping off the corporate ladder

2010-04-15T09:58:00.000-05:00

One of the most interesting people I ever met at Accenture was a lady named Joan. She also was one of the happiest people I met there.

She was interesting because she was an anomaly.

You see, Accenture, like many many companies, puts people on a plan. You're expected, and you in turn expect, to be promoted at methodical intervals. Analyst to start, Consultant 2-3 years after that, Manager 2-3 years after that, Senior Manager, and onward (or some timeline like that).

"Up or out" is the motto many of these companies share about their career paths.

Well Joan was an anomaly because she just didn't give a shit about getting promoted.

Joan had remained an Analyst for something like 10 years. She just bounced around the company finding things that interested her. She'd work on this for awhile, then work on something else.

I'm pretty sure you think she must have been a "bad" employee or had Uncle Joe at a high level keeping her at the company. Nope. She was a great employee. Happy to do her work and take on stuff she's never done before and work hard at it. I have no idea how she finagled her way out of the "up or out" path, but it's likely she just opened her mouth and asked for radically different assignments.

And she couldn't be promoted though because she wouldn't stay long enough in any spot for anyone to sponsor her promotion. She was always doing something very new with new people.

I bring this up, because I can't help notice that most people I've ever met at any company aren't truly happy about their promotions. They get excited about the raise it brings. And they get excited to check off another goal that's expected of them off their list.

But most people I've met end up more stressed after their promotion. A new promotion means more "responsibility". More responsibility means, really, more stuff to do in the same amount of time. After the promotion, it doesn't usually mean just thinking at a higher level and applying the things you've learned to help enable the people below you. I'm obviously not the only one to have noticed this either.

"British researchers found that when people get promoted, they suffer on average about 10 percent more mental strain and are less likely to find the time to go to the doctor." - Live Science

While I knew Joan, she was eventually promoted to Consultant. I believe mainly so that her bosses could justify in print her getting another raise. But I hope she's remained happy and stayed on the right path for her.

I don't have a 12 step program for a better organizational structure that everyone needs to adopt. But I do think we should take notice that the carrot & stick approach to encouraging employees, and using "promotions" as one of those carrots has gotten us off track of finding out what could really make our organizations happier.

I also think it's a great lesson that we can already want we have, and find happiness without achieving what we think we are supposed to achieve.

Yesterday would have been different

2010-04-13T08:35:00.000-05:00

House: "...we die alone. Model Husband, father of the year, tomorrow will be the same for you.”

Patient: "But yesterday would have been different."

- A conversation on last night's House

I was looking through some old email to find a phone number I needed. In the course of my search I found an email thread with an old friend of mine, David Efergan.

David was my boss at Digital River (DR). I worked at DR for 2 years before starting Inkling.

Before starting that job, David was a friend of a friend who needed software developers in his Chicago office. It was an awesome change in my life to join DR. Mostly because it got me off the road. I traveled a great deal for work before that and I hated it.

(75% of the business travelers are miserable because of the travel. I think more people have to figure out how to abolish all these constant weekly trips for work. We aren't like George Clooney. I know there's a percentage of people that dig it, but it's a lot smaller than we want to admit.)

But the point of this is, David left DR a little after I left to run his own startup, Amadesa. In the email, David and I were planning on having lunch soon to catch up, and talk about these new adventures of ours.

David died 2.5 years ago at 42.

We never got that lunch. We just always had too much to do running our businesses.

There's really not that much to it than that. We're all on our deathbed. Entropy is ravaging the cells in our body this very second. Some of us have longer than others.

I think about how many people are excited about their new iPads and the never ceasing output of reviews. On top of that there's the never ceasing output of rage filled content about Apple's new policies. I'm not judging those or Apple. Just makes me think for a second.

If I was dying today, tomorrow or next week, would I be running to the Apple store to get this thing, or would I be on the phone talking and making plans to JUST BE in the same room with people that I cared about and who cared about me.

We all have our wants and our rewards. But temper that constantly with the thought that one day soon you too might have wanted to make yesterday different.

Things of the past

2010-04-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

Things of the past are already gone
And things to be, distant beyond imagining.
The Tao is just this moment, these words:
Plum blossoms fallen.
Gardenia just opening.

- Ch'ing Kung

"Certainty is the mother of fools"

2010-04-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

-Patrick Jane on The Mentalist

There's a bunch of "mother of fools" quotes. Pick something you don't like and stick it on the beginning of that :) But I like this one a lot.

I definitely like decisions. But I try and pepper decisions with the knowledge that often things don't quite happen like I think or want them to. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. Sometimes just different.

Where does being "certain" get you anyways? You don't need to be certain to make a decision or to act quickly. It is possible to make a choice about something and lead people to do something, but keep your eyes, ears, and mind open to the possibility that your choice needs to be changed or reversed.

Certainty provides a bit of comfort for people who don't want to think too long about something. Afterall, once you are certain, you no longer need to process that information. Thinking can be hard. Thinking can be tiring. But it's also a friggin miracle that we can think long and hard about things and also reevaluate our choices. It's a shame when people piss that away.

Inkling in the classroom

2010-04-08T13:44:00.000-05:00

I love it when I hear about MBA classes using Inkling to help teach about prediction markets. A few weeks ago I did a midnight skype session with a business class in Hong Kong to answer their questions and I just received this about a professor at American University who has made trading in Inkling and asking a question an actual assignment:

"Participate in http://home.inklingmarkets.com prediction market.
Objective: gain basic familiarity. Steps: sign-up. It is free. Use your
inkling money to make predictions. Set up one question of your own. Let the
rest of the class know so we can make predictions on it. Generate at least
10 transactions on your question. Print out your question on paper. Hand it
in."

Every semester we have lots of professors setting up marketplaces for their classes. If you're a professor out there who's interested in doing the same, let us know or just go ahead and set one up.

Does self promotion cause heart disease?

2010-04-08T09:52:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite parts of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers was the very first part about the town of Roseto, PA. People had discovered that the people of Roseto in the 1950s had some kind of super human trait of being able to NOT get heart disease.

Researchers studied this town like crazy. Was it the food, the weather, what? It turned out, the researchers surmised, that it was because of the culture of the town. It was because the town and everyone in it was extremely close knit. People cooking for neighbors. Everyone chatting with everyone else on the street. 3 generations of family living under one roof. And an "egalitarian ethos".

"They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures." - Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers

That doesn't sound like our world, especially in the US, at all.

Egalitarianism: "a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people." - Wikipedia.

Every day there's someone on places like Twitter or Hacker News mentioning the latest greatest thing that happened to them. Their latest book review, their latest multimillion dollar acquisition. Like Jason Fried mentioning in Inc that their company makes millions in profit. And us blogging about our BusinessWeek mention.

We do it to self promote. It's a big part of marketing ourselves. By mentioning these things we hope to raise our credibility for our potential clients, fans, readers, etc. A mention about how much money 37signals makes, just solidifies how well they know what they are doing, so you'll trust that they aren't bullshitting you in the book they want you to buy. Our BusinessWeek mention helps solidify for a potential client, "hey these guys aren't some folks fooling around with a website".

I completely see the non-evil benefits of doing this. I think our business is doing a lot of good for people. I absolutely know our blog has inspired some folks. But I also absolutely know it has the reverse effect on some others. A minority probably. But still a negative effect I wish it didn't.

I guarantee that someone who read our blog post about that BW mention, came away from it a little worse. A little more depressed about their lot in life. They looked at this, and was like, "uggh, why can't I achieve that. I work so damn hard at everything, and something like this is beyond my grasp".

I don't have a solution here. It's just a puzzling topic for me. I HATE BRAGGING. I'm super proud of what we do here, but I cringe a little bit anytime we mention something good that's going on. I recognize though that self-promotion seems important to marketing our businesses, but tries to completely tear down equality amongst others. "This good thing happened to us, so you should read my stuff, not theirs. You should buy my stuff, not theirs".

It's a consequence of capitalism probably? But also leads to stress, ills, and unhappiness that didn't exist in Roseto. Well, until Roseto became just like every other town years later.

How do you guys feel about this? Achieving egalitarianism and wanting it is probably just the same as trying to be socialist. Which clearly hasn't worked and has it's own problems. Any awesome examples of folks who have balanced being capitalist without having to be at all self-promoting?

Tom's Shoes might fall into that example a bit. I don't see that guy writing about how much money he makes, but rather the good they do for the world. Maybe he does bring up revenue somewhere, but that point seems to be lost amongst his greater point that his for-profit business exists to give away shoes.

Life and work aren't as bitter as you think

2010-04-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

The Tao of Pooh is an awesome introduction to Taoism. Taoism in a nutshell: your life, your job, the roller coaster of starting a business, etc. isn't as bitter as sometimes we think.

The book starts with the parable of The Vinegar Tasters.

The 3 men in the picture from left to right are Confucius, Buddha and Lao Tzu (the recognized father of Taoism). Confucius and Buddha have sour and bitter looks on their faces after tasting the vinegar, while Lao Tzu remains smiling. It's a bit of a dig on Confucianism and Buddhism.

According to the parable: Confucianism typically views man as something that needs lots of rituals and training in order to become perfect. Buddhism also views life as pretty imperfect, and to improve on that we have to meditate to achieve Nirvana or enlightenment by stepping outside of our imperfect selves.

Lao Tzu remains happy though because life with all its complications is still pretty damn awesome.

Taoism isn't a philosophy about being lazy. But it does try and find the balance in what feels like a paradox to most of us. Working hard shouldn't equal unhappiness with what you already have.

As we sat around in January talking about what we want for ourselves in 2010, we started thinking about the number of readers we REALLY WANT to get to read this blog. The users we REALLY WANT to get to use our new collaboration tool. The conversion rate that we REALLY WANT to improve. And so I glue myself to our metrics and just keep working and working to get something that doesn't even exist yet.

That behavior makes me forget just how much I want what I already have. I forget how awesome just the act of blogging or working on a feature is. I forget that even if no one read or used whatever I'm working on, I actually love writing and building this stuff for it's own sake.

I believe I'm happiest (and most successful) not when we follow some insane need to accomplish goals we've laid out. But when we just enjoy the act of trying this, trying that. Learning something new. Keeping our ears open. Having fun making something somebody mentioned they needed. It feels a lot more like enjoying a series David Chang's accidents than stressing about the next thing we want to achieve.

--

I'll be exploring this topic more in a discussion I'm leading called "Achieving Less" at the Creative Entrepreneurship Conference coming up on Saturday April 17.

A corporate elliptical machine

2010-04-06T08:14:00.000-05:00

Recently I was told about another CEO who got a raise this year to increase his 10 million dollar salary while his company has recently announced layoffs. I was struck with the realization that even after all the years this CEO has been climbing to get to the top, he's still trying to find a bigger payday.

The CEO of a company represents the top of a corporate ladder many of us think we are (or were) on. I remember getting out of college thinking about the number of years it would take me to climb a corporate ladder and become "Partner". After all, Partner is the top of something. Something pretty special sounding, and big-money making.

Even though the CEO above has been climbing all these years, even though he's done all this work his entire life, and "succeeded" at all sorts of goals he and others have set out for him, he's still climbing. He's still probably stressing about his next raise. The next monetary bump. The next promotion.

Most of us reading this have seen, or are on, or have at least considered climbing a corporate ladder. And sure many of us still concern ourselves with becoming better leaders and mentors to younger employees. But the first thing most of us want to hear with that promotion, is how much do I get paid.

My dreams have often gotten soured with thoughts of raises and promotions. When I got out of college my dream of Partner had as its top priority some kind of goal of "financial independence". I was pretty focused on raises and promotions and saw most everyone else was too. Everyone was climbing and climbing and buying more stuff their new finances allowed them too.

But this isn't a ladder for this guy. There is no end to it. This is a treadmill or a stair machine. A corporate elliptical machine. But calling this an exercise machine doesn't do this justice. Because this isn't exercise.

His version of climbing leads to stress and heart attacks. Stress that's passed onto everyone else around him. Stress that hides all the awesome things he's already accomplished and the people and events that matter in his life today.

How's work for you? Are you on a ladder, or have you stepped onto the elliptical machine?

If we could never have started Inkling, dayenu (it would have been enough)

2010-04-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

I was fortunate enough to attend my first Passover Seder this weekend.

A very poignant part of the meal for me was the reciting of the song Dayenu. Dayenu means "it would have been sufficient" or "it would have been enough".

It's a song about thanksgiving, and an attempt to realize that even if none of the great things that have happened to us constantly actually happen to us, there are STILL things to be thankful for.

The song Dayenu traces a series of miracles and successes that happened to the Jews after they left their captors in Egypt. The song exists to help remind people that after freedom, even if all these extra things didn't occur, there is even so much more to be thankful for. Being free would have been enough.

Thankfulness is one of the first things that we completely throw out the window. Especially those of us who are constantly reaching for the next goal, the next promotion, the next award, or the next big sale. We constantly want more, and it's fabulous when we get it, but we forget that even if we hadn't gotten that next success, all the blessings and gifts that we already have, would have been enough.

I personally relate to needing to be more thankful for what I already have. I've constantly worked hard to achieve more with Inkling and my whole life. But really, Inkling has already been a gift to me.

The people it's allowed me to become friends with. The freedom it's helped me achieve in my career. The crazy amount of things I've learned.

It's hard to say this actually. It would be much easier just to pay lip service to this, and just say "we" should be thankful for what we already have while I continue to HAVE TO GET MORE.

But seriously, if Inkling couldn't get another customer after today and we had to shut down. If Inkling had only lasted the first 3 months of Y Combinator and never went on to be a lasting company. If we had never had the courage to quit our jobs and start Inkling. If I had never had the ambition to change my career path after college. If I had never had the chance to go to college. It would have been enough.

I'm lucky enough to have never had a captor. Everything else I'm given is a gift I need to enjoy and be grateful for like it could be gone tomorrow. Dayenu.

Technical support over online chat is available

2010-04-02T19:21:00.000-05:00

We launched a new feature today that adds to our other technical support channels: online chat.

We've been testing the waters with running a support chat room over at our collaboration tool service, tgethr.

The input in that chat room has been awesome. It doesn't get used so much that it overwhelms us, but instead we've uncovered features people have wanted, fixed bugs we didn't know about, won a couple customers after steering them through some of the things still hanging them up, and met some very nice people.

We feel we've made ourselves pretty easy to get a hold of over email and other channels before, but we've found that some of the things coming into the chat room might have just been lost forever if the experience took any more effort than just finding someone online, right now, to help.

So we'd like to try this out with our sites for prediction markets. On any Inkling site, there is now a "chat with support" button:

Anyone can click that button, admin or otherwise, and get help from the folks working on Inkling. We don't have set hours for the room. Often we are there during typical business hours and sometimes you might find one of us there at 1AM. So if we aren't there please continue to use the normal support channels you have available, especially our help desk. Also any questions specific to the marketplace we'll redirect back to the specific administrators of the marketplace to be asked.

For those interested, the chat room is powered by 37signals' Campfire. We've been using it for a few years as a business as well as personally, and have been very happy with it. We'll see how it holds up as a support channel.

Hope you find it a handy way to interact with us if you need something. Thanks a ton for using Inkling!

--
Administrators of Inkling also will notice that there is now an admin drop down menu.

The list of things admins can do from creating groups to managing the marketplace was getting a bit long. So we polished it up into this great looking menu. :)

PRESS RELEASE: INKLING NOW THE LEADING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY COMPANY IN THE UNIVERSE

2010-04-01T09:32:00.000-05:00

CHICAGO—April 1, 2010—Inkling is now the Leading Information Technology Company in the Universe. They have also announced plans to complete a purchase of Google in 2010.

"We felt really terrible when we saw brand new companies and our competitors labeling themselves the Leading Provider of Prediction Markets or The Leader in Whatever They Want.", said Nathan Kontny founder and CTO of Inkling. "So we decided to take matters into our own hands. We think these 3 announcements of ours puts us on top again."

Adam Siegel, co-founder and CEO of Inkling announced to staff and shareholders on Monday that Inkling has been bestowed the label of the Leading Information Technology Company in the Universe. When asked how that had been determined, he continued to repeat "I'm the Wiz, I'm the Wiz. And nobody beats me."

Inkling also had a couple other announcements that it shared with employees and shareholders this week.

Their most important announcement was that Inkling will work to complete a purchase of Google in 2010. "We are working very aggressively on this deal. We can't disclose the exact sum, but we will give Google all the money in our bank account for this purchase. We like what we see over there. So we are willing to do away with the formalities and overhead. No lawyers. No due diligence. No escrow.".

Siegel added, “We really like the breadth of the talent those guys bring. We’ll likely open source or shut down most of their projects. It’s the engineering talent we are most interested in bringing on. I'm sure given their track record of doing the same, they'll understand and be appreciative of our needs"

To help grow the company Inkling also announced a new component to their flagship product, Inkling Prediction Markets. The name for their new project is the Leading Universal Dashboard In Crowdsourcing Reconnaissance Of Unimaginable Seriousness .

"It's an add-on to our current offerings, but can be used separately as well. We are very excited to bring this to market, as we are sure this is the first time anyone has ever even thought of launching something like this", Kontny explained. "Keep an eye on us in 2010 and 2011 as we continue to launch things no one has ever done before or thought was even physically possible on earth."

--

A professional reenactment of the interview with Mr. Siegel was produced by NBC and is available on youtube.

BusinessWeek names Inkling one of America's most promising startups

2010-03-31T11:03:00.000-05:00

"How can companies the size of Microsoft (MSFT), Ford (F), and Cisco (CSCO) use their massive workforces' knowledge to improve performance? Nathan Kontny and Adam Siegel think the answer is in prediction markets." - John Tozzi at BusinessWeek

Wow, I actually remember reading my first BusinessWeek in highschool when I was in a public speaking/debate club. Yes, I was and still am a geek. Today I can wear that as a badge :)

BusinessWeek was an extremely important tool to us doing Extemporaneous Speaking (Extemp). We'd carry around a giant briefcase of BusinessWeeks that we'd collect in order to do any quick research for topics we were given to talk about.

So this is very awesome to see our names and something I've helped build mentioned by these guys.

Here's the link to the article.

New profile pages

2010-03-30T22:21:00.000-05:00

Last week we completely revamped our user profile pages and think they're much more useful now for both yourself and those who like to be voyeurs. I've certainly found myself spending a lot more time clicking on people's names than I have in the past.

First off, the layout is completely different. We had an issue we wanted to address where these profile pages looked pretty bad if someone was new to a site or hadn't done much. Now we're bringing in more data and granular activity about each user to minimize this problem.

Second, we've added a lot more data points about each person while still maintaining their anonymity. The one we're most excited about is the data under the "Track Record" section. To give people a better sense of how they're performing, we've introduced the concept of accuracy: looking at people's historical performance for trading in the "right direction." We're then taking this one step further to see the specific categories and tags the person was most accurate on. For example, this person is considered an Inkling expert in Movies, Sports, and Politics:

And doesn't everyone want to know how they're doing compared to the rest of the world? So we now show a bar graph comparing your level of activity vs. everyone else in your site vs. the average activity across all Inkling sites.

We've also introduced the ability to earn badges for doing things in Inkling. Make a certain number of trades? Get a badge! Ask a certain number of questions or make a certain amount of comments? Get a badge. Those are some of the obvious ones but there are others people can earn that will just happen when they happen. :)

Finally, we've imported our activity feed from the homepage to each individual profile to see a stream of items only related to you. Everything from the questions you've participated in to comments you've made and badges you've won.

This is just a start for what we have planned related to profiles and other data-related insights, but hopefully everyone agrees these changes go a long way in making profiles more interesting to view (and more useful for those who care about enhancing what a business knows about its people!)

Achieve Less

2010-03-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

I learned a lesson when I was 15 that I continue to forget, and remember, and forget, and remember. :)

I've always been a pretty hard worker especially at school. Did plenty of all-nighters even in grade school. High school started no differently. I got put in all honors classes due to my grades and my entrance test scores. I was pretty surprised by how well I did.

I didn't realize I could compete with so many people at getting good grades.

In fact, Sophomore year, I was with some students in the auditorium and to my surprise they awarded me a friggin' medal for the top GPA for freshman year. So all of a sudden Sophomore year, I realized I'm ranked #1. Absolute craziness. And this is where things start to turn.

Sophomore year sucked. I had my first AP class in Art History and Appreciation and I had an insanely hard time getting a good grade in that class. Above that class, work was starting to really pile up. And I still had extracurricular activities like volleyball every evening almost all year long.

I knew my grades weren't what they were Freshman year, and I could see a couple other kids were about to achieve a higher GPA that year, and I was stressed. The stress continued on to Junior year. Even more work and AP classes, and this insane desire to compete. Life was insanely not fun and making me nuts.

Until I just decided to forget about it. Not sure how it happened. I just decided to start slacking. Maybe because I had no choice. But on a few homework assignments that were stressing me out because it was tough to get them done by the deadline, I just didn't do them. :) The teacher would sometimes give me an extension on the project for a lower grade, or just fail me for that project all together.

I got an F for a big paper in AP English because I didn't bother doing it. Didn't make a fuss for the teacher. I just didn't turn it in. Does it make a bit of difference today? Nope. Still got a 5 on the AP test, the highest grade on an AP test you can get.

Still got other good grades on some stuff, and bad grades on other things. And it doesn't really matter today. I still got into the school I applied to. I slacked there too and didn't feel like filling out multiple school applications. I filled out one to a good school, a good program, and one that was going to be my most affordable choice, the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana).

My point is, I realized so many of the things I was trying to achieve were stressful and useless in the grand scheme of things. My mood about school and life changed completely Junior and Senior year when I decided to just start achieving less.

Great things still happened to me, for so many other reasons than me stating some lofty goals of getting this grade, or that rank, or doing better than that kid. Great things happened probably because I still worked hard, but just started enjoying it for its own sake.

I fell in love with physics, and reading all the cool stuff we were reading in English class. The grades stopped mattering. It was the act of learning that became more enjoyable.

This is a lesson most of us don't seem to learn or keep in our heads too long. We create artificial goals of getting promotions or more money or buying things and it causes us an insane amount of stress. And all it takes is a bit of a change in perspective that all that stuff likely doesn't matter as much as you think it does. And you could really just enjoy the act of whatever it is you're doing. Life becomes a lot more fun.

I'll be writing some more stuff about achieving less soon. But let me know what you guys think. Have there been times you've let go of lofty goals because those goals were eventually unrealistic and not very useful? Anyone studying Taosim? Just picked up the Tao of Pooh which I haven't read for about 10 years, but seems to be a decent introduction to a philosophy I'd like to learn a lot more about.

The Psychological Need to Promote Your Company (Even if it Annoys Everyone Around You)

2010-03-25T17:38:00.000-05:00

Recently David Heinemeier Hansson published a blog post about the fact they're never selling their company, 37signals. "37signals for life!" is their proverbial battle cry. Subsequently "DHH" took some fairly universal flaming about over-promoting themselves and over-generalizing. At first I was right alongside these folks. "Another post about how great 37signals is and how we should all be like them," I lamented.

But going back and reading the post again, I think I know where sentiments like these are coming from. Where all the self promotion and very public lessons learned are originating. I think I have a sense of their souls. :)

Besides a small investment from Jeff Bezos, 37signals built their company from scratch. They've also been at it for 10 years. 10 years of worrying how they're going to pay the bills, 10 years of worrying about if their customers are going to buy their product, and 10 years of constant strategizing. 10 years of ups, downs, and everything in between to try and figure out how to make money and be a successful business. For the past few it has looked easy, but unless you've lived it, it's also easy to forget that for the majority of those 10 years I'm sure it felt slow and long and sometimes painful. The fact now that they're rolling in dough, have a best selling book, and have complete control of their own destiny has to feel pretty damn good. And they did it without a lot of outside help, without a heavy infusion of cash and a bunch of people trying to guide their destinies for their own benefit. In every business sense, they've "made it."

When you start a company and decide to live and die for any period of time by your revenues vs. investment, it's practically the only thing in your life that is completely yours. You control it. If you make a decision and it works out, you reap the rewards. If you make a decision and it doesn't go your way, you suffer. You created this beast, you guide it, you own it. That level of freedom is unparalleled in practically any other aspect of your life and psychologically, they must feel the need to promote it to continue to sustain themselves.

We've had some pretty nice wins recently ourselves. But instead of celebrating those accomplishments, I find myself just worrying more, being perpetually paranoid about what comes next. The best analogy I can paint is like being a junky. I need the next hit of success; each previous one never quite being enough to satisfy me for long. My friends and family don't get it when I tell them for example that Microsoft is a new client, yet I'm still listing 5 other things that aren't so good. In some ways these caveats and lack of satisfaction are strong drivers. But I've begun to realize it's also quite damaging at a personal level to never celebrate your success.

This is it. This is what running your own company is all about. Celebrating successes whether large or small is all you have. If you don't honor success in some way either publicly or privately and just bask in it, even for 5 minutes, what's left?

Hugh MacLeod on VC funding

2010-03-23T09:36:00.000-05:00

A cartoon from Hugh MacLeod

Are affiliate links dirty?

2010-03-22T09:58:00.000-05:00

I'll preface this with saying I have respect for Tim Ferris, and dig most of what the guy does. I've enjoyed some stuff out of 4 hour work week, his blog, and am looking forward to reading his next book.

But I observed something I'm not sure how to feel about the other day.

I was reading his blog and saw this review of 37signals latest book Rework. But whenever you click on one of the links to Rework it takes you to Amazon with his affiliate link (tag=offsitoftimfe). So he gets a little bit of money any time someone buys that book from his link.

I'm not trying to flame Tim Ferris here, and please don't think I expect insulting comments about Tim here either as those will be deleted.

What I am trying to do is figure out what I should be doing with this gray area of education + marketing + capitalism here on this blog.

I review excerpts and link to Amazon all the time. I read an insane amount of books. Here's a post from the other day about a book about Game design where I link to Amazon.

Sometimes those posts generate a ton of traffic for our blog, and a fair number go check out Amazon. But I've never used an Amazon affiliate link. It's dawned on me to try, but if I do, doesn't that taint the review a little? Does't the review look a little forced and biased in your eyes then?

There's a similar area of grayness that happens when people buy things like eBooks. A ton of the eBooks out there (maybe not the Kindle versions of non-eBook books), are loaded with affiliate links to other people's products.

So you get this feeling that you bought someone's book to be educated about a certain subject, but that education is soured, because the whole time this person is trying to make some more money from you peddling someone else's stuff. You get left thinking, would these people even be recommending these tools, services, or strategies, if they weren't getting this extra cash on the back end?

If I wanted to see a ton of ads and read something, I'd buy a magazine. But even a magazine has sections that when it looks "educational" but is actually sponsored they have to say "Special Advertising Section". And even tweets now can be bought but those tweets are required to say "sponsored tweet" inside them.

So if that's the right spirit of things (and sometimes the law), when you tweet or mention a book you should check out, shouldn't that mention say something like "affiliate link" or "sponsored link" or something?

I hate more rules though myself, so maybe this is nice that one doesn't have to do this.

What do you guys do or like to see done? I'm a capitalist, and want to increase the money Inkling makes as well. So should I get over my weirdness of adding affiliate links to posts here, or am I onto something and you guys get weirded out too by someone trying to make money on the exact product they are recommending or reviewing?

Envy is a lousy partner

2010-03-19T09:26:00.000-05:00

"I've never read a biography of someone and then wanted to be that person" - Lynette Kontny

Some thought provoking words my wife spoke last night. Has there been any biographies of people you've read and you wanted to "bear their cross" instead of your own? My wife commutes a ton for work so listens to an insane amount of audio books. She's gone through quite a few biographies of famous politicians, rich people and nobel prize winners. In the end she wants to be herself.

Reminded me of envy I used to have of Corey Feldman and Corey Haim in gradeschool for all the attention and fame those two had. Obviously the belief that they were on a better path than me was wrong and misplaced.

The grass is greener for someone else largely because you have absolutely no idea who that someone else is. Especially these days when we "follow" people. We follow their blogs and their tweets. Little tiny slices of exactly what that person has decided to share with us today.

At least a biography is longer and people are encouraged to share the bad with the good.

But all too often these days, we all still envy our colleagues at work or friends with other jobs or other entrepreneurs. The guy with the book deal telling us he's making more money than we are making, surely must have it better then me?

I doubt it. You have no idea what demons that person has. The things they desire and can't have. The things that keep them up at night and make them feel like shit. Mostly because they choose not to share it with you. That's a story they feel wouldn't help them sell whatever it is they are selling today.

Be careful with envy. She's a lousy partner. She can sometimes fuel you to keep working at achieving the things you have your heart set on, but she'll also seduce you to overlook all the awesome things you already have today.

New Feature: Group Management

2010-03-17T16:40:00.000-05:00

Most of the time when you ask a question in Inkling, you want everyone possible who has some perspective to answer. But sometimes because of the sensitivity of a question or because of the danger of excessive "noise," you only want that question to be sent and viewed by certain people: a single department, or people at a certain level in your organization, for example.

For a long time Inkling has had the concept of private questions - the ability to define an invite list to expose the question to a subset of people. The problem was you couldn't save that list and use it over again. So we recently introduced the concept of groups. Here's how it works:

When you log in to an Inkling marketplace, you'll see a new link called "manage groups"

If you click that link, then click to make a new group, you'll see this:

You can search for people to be included or enter a bunch of email addresses. You can give your group a name, a description, and even start assigning questions to your group. Once you assign questions to a group, they will only be available to this group.

You can also assign questions to a group (only ones you wrote if you're not an adminsitrator) as you're proceeding through our question wizard. Once you get to the privacy tab, just click to limit access, then choose the groups you want to limit access to.

Right now group functionality is limited to access to questions, but we're thinking more about how we might have public groups too with more capabilities, so for example you could have an NCAA Tournament group where there is a separate discussion area, a list of questions related to the tournament, etc.

"You're stupid looking, do something else" - one man's persistence

2010-03-17T09:46:00.000-05:00

I'm constantly surprised by how quickly people want to give up on their projects. Our company started with 18k in a 3 month "startup camp". But 3 months is ridiculously short to try and make revenue, and I've seen a lot of people just have this expectation that they'll start this thing and in 3 months it's either going to be making a ton of money or it's going to be acquired for a lot of money.

Trouble is, that's not how it usually works.

It took us 8 months for us to start making enough money to begin paying ourselves salaries.

Building a business takes time, and it's something that when you sign up should be something you're marrying. I get it that one day you might want to start something else, but 3 months? Even 3 years, before most people want to give up?

I loved Sylvester Stallone's story told by Tony Robbins. A story of just pure perseverance.

--
This post is related to another post I've read recently.

"It’s going to take five years"

Look everywhere else for inspiration

2010-03-15T10:03:00.000-05:00

I'm reading a neat book by Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design.

He had an awesome section on inspiration and a lesson he learned from his juggling days.

He was at a juggling festival when he was 14 and saw someone in a powder blue jumpsuit juggling there who really stood out from all the other professional jugglers. Not because of his suit, or because the guy was doing anything complicated, but because he had a style about him that was very unique and remarkable. This impressive juggler saw that Jesse was watching him and they had this conversation.

Powder blue jumpsuit: "Know why my tricks look so different?"

Jesse: "Uh, practice".

Jumpsuit: "No - everybody practices. Look around! They're all practicing. No, my tricks look different because of where I get them. These guys, they get their tricks from each other. Which is fine - you can learn a lot that way. But it will never make you stand out."

Jesse: "So where do you get them? Books?"

Jumpsuit: "Ha! Books. That's a good one. No, not books. You wanna know my secret? The secret is: don't look to other jugglers for inspiration - look everywhere else. I learned this one watching a ballet in New York (as he does a trick) And this one I learned from a flock of geese I saw take off from a lake up in Maine... See, these guys can copy my moves, but they can't copy my inspiration (After pointing out someone copying a move but looking bad in the process)."

You also see this type of copying Jesse saw at the festival all the time in this industry of ours of selling online software. Application after application looks like a knock off of someone else's design. Which is great for learning, but as pale blue jumpsuit pointed out, these things will never look as good as the original because they lack inspiration.

An example from our business that might fit this lesson of where to find inspiration is one of the reasons we created tgethr, an online project management application we use.

I threw a potluck dinner party of about 10 people and realized how much I enjoyed these small groups of friends sitting together enjoying a meal instead of trying to mingle with these same people at a much larger and louder party. Or even trying to eat at a much louder restaurant with hordes of other people.

I also realized that Facebook and Twitter felt like huge loud parties too me, and the conversations I have there are short and choppy because of the noise. The people who I hear in those places are the ones that are yelling the loudest and most often.

We wanted to create a space online where people felt more like they were at a small dinner party sitting around the table with family and friends to have a conversation without yelling in short sentences. And now today we think we've accomplished that somewhat. I end up having much better conversations with friends and family online than I was having before. Of course, these conversations aren't like the real thing, but they feel like we accomplished something great, when people tell us what tgethr feels like to them, and it matches what we were inspired to do.

"i love it. unlike facebook and twitter, i don’t feel like i’m broadcasting my business out to hundreds of my ‘friends’, making sure it’s generic and non-offensive… and even more important not getting random blurts from people i barely remember. tgethr feels more like sitting around a table chatting with your peoples." - Isaac K., Chicago

Here's the Google Book's snippet of the inspiration section from Jesse's book. I haven't finished the book yet, but there's a lot more great stuff in here.

Chicago startup extravaganza

2010-03-12T14:58:00.000-06:00

Last night I had the pleasure of being a judge at a start-up competition/meet up put together by MidVentures here in Chicago. 25 local start-ups were chosen to be in the running for some cash and prizes, and several in addition to that just came and set up tables anyway. Myself and the other judges (the founders of GroupOn and OpenTable, a Google executive, the founder of an options trading house, and a VC partner from OCA Ventures) got to walk around for 3 hours talking to all these start-ups, then compiled our scores to come up with a top 5, and ultimately our top 1 after hearing the top 5 pitch to the crowd for 3 minutes each and answer questions from the judges.

Some random thoughts I wrote in my moleskine on my train ride home after the event:

These were mostly early stage companies, so lots of people bootstrapping vs. having taken funding. Being largely bootstrapped ourselves, I obviously have a lot of respect for this approach but also recognize it's a tougher road.
Because of all the bootstrapping, lots of focus in the start up pitches about how they're going to make money, customer acquisition costs, etc. There was no "we'll figure out the business model later."
Related, I didn't meet a single team who was trying to use advertising as a primary revenue model.
Disappointing number of founders lacking the actual skills to build and design stuff themselves. Lots of business people "outsourcing" the technology development.
I saw very few name tags of people from big companies in the area. No Boeing, no Motorola, no McDonalds, no Kraft. Maybe they were there, but from this and other evidence I've seen, there seems to be a disconnect between the entrepreneur community and big Chicago business which is unfortunate. I think those companies would have been interested in some of the companies there last night.
Lots of discussion about the lack of respect Chicago gets as a start up hub even though some incredibly successful companies got their start and operate here. Time to get over it though and just keep pushing ahead - there were over 400 people that showed up last night which is testament to the promotion job MidVentures did but also for the enthusiasm that already exists locally.
The influence of Paul Graham and a few other luminaries we all read is pretty evident. Heard many "just trying to get to ramen profitable" quotes.

The winner, by the way was g2.fm.

Other start ups I saw that I really liked:

Rent Monitor - Beautiful management software for landlords
JoeMetric - Mobile platform for conducting market research
Genlighten - Outsourced genealogy research using qualified librarians all around the US
Give Forward - Personal campaign software to raise money for medical expenses of sick relatives

Finding the fundamentals. A lesson an old friend taught me about searching for too much advice

2010-03-10T09:23:00.001-06:00

There's been some new debate around how to run a business and manage projects, especially caused by new efforts from Joel Spolsky of FogCreek and Jason Fried of 37signals. These two are very successful business owners and effective managers, but have many differences in how they run their businesses.

For example, Joel's given up blogging, but of course Jason thinks it's critical to building an audience. Or their views on VC funding, Joel's working on getting some and Jason's pretty anti-VC. Frequently they have their differences and different teachings.

Made me think of a lesson I learned many years ago from observing a great friend of my father's. His name was Roy Bystrom.

Mr. Bystrom was an awesome inventor. He was dyslexic and largely self taught in everything he did. But he was also awesome at everything he seemed to touch. First of all, he's like a household name in go karting. He had a company that made clutches that many karters would use. Here's some people remembering their karting stories of Mr. Bystrom.

Here's a patent he had on clutches too.

But Mr. Bystrom also fixed microscopes and sold things like thermocouples he'd build and sell to the government. Not only was he this great engineer, but he was an award winning photographer.

Where am I going with this?

Well Mr. Bystrom also had a hobby that consumed him. Golf.

But the thing is, Mr. Bystrom never mastered golf like he did the other things. And his problem was that he constantly overanalyzed how to play golf rather than just playing his own game of golf.

He had every book, every magazine, every gadget. He even built his own.

And he'd practice like a mad man. But whenever he practiced, he tried a new way to swing. A new way to putt. One day he'd be trying to bring the golf club slowly back, one day he'd do it quickly, one day he'd try and start with his weight on this foot, one day he'd do this and that.

He once took a lesson with a golf pro who was my boss at the time, and an awesome golfer himself, O.B. Sanders. When Mr. Bystrom was taking this lesson, he asked "O.B., so I have these two different Golf Digest magazines, and one article says you should start with your weight on your right foot. But this Golf Digest says to start with your weight on the left foot. Which is right?"

O.B.'s advice was: it doesn't matter. What matters is what works for you, what your comfortable with, and what you can learn to do without even thinking about it.

Running a business is a lot like that. So many people read every friggin business book ever written. They go to every blog and question and answer site. They are constantly asking the same question over and over and over again, looking for a secret.

And guess what? People are going to have different opinions on raising money, managing employees, developing code and prototypes, and on and on. And if you read enough of them, you'll find people that you hold in the very highest respects, who are more successful running their business than you think you'll ever be, but who have completely different opinions on being successful.

The lesson though from Mr. Bystrom's experience, is that it just doesn't matter. What feels right to you? Joel and Jason clearly show that you have multiple options on this path. So what feels natural and good to you? You like making paper mockups and having meetings and getting more and more partners in VCs to help you run your business. Than bingo. That's not my way, but if it's what you like doing just go and run it, that way.

Sure, you need advice and education. But you need to figure out what you feel are the fundamentals. All the debate and all the worry about the one correct golden secret formula someone else has to running your project or business is just going to lead you to playing a poor game. You'll be spending more time wavering and changing and working against how you naturally want to work, that you'll never be comfortable, and neither will your employees, or your customers.

Be a comedian

2010-03-09T11:20:00.001-06:00

Lately I've been inspired by what comedians do.

Not the school or office clown.

But the guy that gets paid to share his view of the world.

I very much believe that building an audience through a blog and through teaching are an important aspect to marketing yourself and your business. And a great way to build an audience and teach is to develop a point of view that other people don't have yet.

Comedians spend all day doing this.

Comedians also spend a great deal of time pointing out things that don't make sense. Things that are hilarious because of our foolishness. Things that need fixing.

One huge favorite of mine is Louis C.K. Here's a bit about him being broke and some of the absurdity that follows from it. Or how we take life and technology for granted to the point of feeling entitled to things: "Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy."

Another comedian that I've been following a bit, who most people don't even realize is a comedian is Matt Linderman who works for 37signals. For many of the people reading this blog, Matt is recognizable from his gig at 37. But Matt also does standup under a pseudonym. Here's some of his stuff on youtube.

What stands out to me is that Matt is one of the most prolific writers on the 37signals blog which is a pretty important tool for them to market their business.

Matt also cowrote the first book with Jason Fried at 37signals, and I believe is a big part of the second, Getting Real. (Oddly his name doesn't appear on their latest book Rework that was just released which I'm a bit surprised by. Maybe this was more an effort just from Jason and David this time. )

Any time he spends, opening up his mind to observe the world from different angles for use in finding comedy, exercises part of the brain that too often goes unused for most of us. The part of our brain that works on forming our unique opinions of the world.

We are good about coming up with opinions when we know other people already have had them. But most of us have a hard time sifting through our thoughts finding the things that are different and unique. And we also have a hard time sifting through and finding the things that we should be teaching others.

Matt and many of his fellow comedians though are working constantly at this, and I think a lot more can be learned from studying them.

Comedy is also a way of story telling that invokes a physical reaction. Which as writers and teachers we strive to accomplish and improve even if our material is a bit more... cerebral?

To study comedy a bit more as a way of expanding my mind and thinking, I've picked up a Groupon to take a class at Chicago's ComedySportz. I'll let you know how it goes.

Funny, in researching this post, I found Matt's favorite comedian is Louis CK :)

And here's another great one about standing up to failure.

Inkling in 50 of the Best Websites Developed Using Ruby on Rails

2010-03-08T13:23:00.001-06:00

Andy Boyd of Setfire Media created a list of "some of the best rails sites out there", and Inkling Prediction Markets got a spot amongst some big ones like Basecamp, Github and Hulu.

"A highly original site with a unique take on question asking and answering."

Thanks Andy!