Ben Damman's personal blog. Serial entrepreneur. Google fiber fanatic. Hacker. Person.
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It has been exactly a year since we launched RubyMotion. Yep, this is right, RubyMotion is one year old!
We released over the year a total of 35 software updates fixing countless bugs reported by our beloved users. That’s almost 3 updates per month on average!
We shipped significant…
Taken seriously
In June of 1973, spurred on by the recent discovery of a dying bird in his garden, 9-year-old Anthony Hollander wrote to the presenters of Blue Peter — the BBC’s much-loved children’s television show — and asked for assistance in his quest to “make people or animals alive.”
If [Biddy Baxter’s] letter had shown any hint of ridicule or disbelief I might perhaps never have trained to become a medical scientist or been driven to achieve the impossible dream, and really make a difference to a human being’s life. I remember being thrilled at the time to have been taken seriously. Actually, even nowadays I am thrilled when people take my ideas seriously. — Anthony Hollander
Minnesota nice is the stereotypical behavior of people born and raised in Minnesota, to be courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered.
The cultural characteristics of Minnesota nice include a polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out, emotional restraint, and self-deprecation; while at the same time envying and speaking poorly of people behind their backs.
Critics have pointed out negative qualities, such as passive aggressiveness and resistance to change.
Right now, someone is tinkering with a billion dollar secret — they just don’t know it yet.
In fact, the person most likely to build the next great tech business will likely be a scrappy entrepreneur with a big dream, a sharp mind, and a valuable secret.
I believe secrets about human behavior, which provide insights into the way people act even though they can’t tell you why, are levers for creating user habits and competitive advantage. These kinds of secrets are also relatively cheap to uncover but can be the basis of massive enterprises.
As software continues to eat the world, service industries are being upended by upstarts. A new crop of companies like AirBnB, DropBox, and Square exploits secrets gleaned not from industrial design, but from interaction and systems design. These companies remedy old problems by designing interfaces to create new user behaviors.
Whenever a massive change occurs in the way people interact with technology, expect to find plenty of secrets ripe for harvesting. Changes in interface suddenly make all sorts of behaviors easier. Subsequently, when the effort required to accomplish an action decreases, usage tends to explode.
Consumer web startups…must quickly create habitual users and build a network effect before their competitors do; it’s their only hope.
The kind of secrets that build big businesses today must support a plan to build a network effect business. Without a network effect strategy, secrets don’t stay valuable for long.
Someone is Coming to Eat You
You have a hit. Congratulations, you’ve built something that is perceived as being best of class. Seminal moment - go you. What’s your next move?
Your success is a battle plan for your competition. Your success is a public acknowledgement of a strategy that works, and while I appreciate that you and your team are tired, I’m going to be a buzz kill. Your success is your worst enemy. Your success, while hard earned, is a curse.
Your enticing success has your competition chasing you, and that means that, by definition, that they need to run harder and faster than you so they can catch up. Yes, many potential competitors are going to bungle the execution and vanish before they pose a legitimate threat but there’s a chance someone will catch up, and when they do, what’s their velocity? Faster than yours.
Shit.
The reward for winning is the perception that you’ve won. In your celebration of your awesomeness, you are no longer focused on the finish line, you now lack a clear next goal, and while you sit there comfortably monetizing eyeballs, you’re becoming strategically dull. You’ve forgotten that someone is coming to eat you and if you wait until you can see them coming, you’re too late. Just ask Nokia or RIM.
[Tim] Cook’s larger contribution is an operations team that enables them to build and ship new products with increasingly ferocious regularity.
Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.
You have to get back on the horse. The universe needs you. It really does.
You have to get back on the horse. Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on: these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror.
Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does.
Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.
— Tycho, Penny Arcade
