Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

This is a fascinating talk by Jack Dorsey, Co-founder of Twitter and Square talks about his four core takeaways from his experiences building and launching Twitter  and Square. A must watch video of 16 minutes. Completely worth it if you are someone who gets lots of ideas and want to build companies around them. These are the essential steps that you would follow to achieve that -

1. Draw your ideas: Get your idea out of your head by drawing it and share it with people around it.
2. Recognize the luck is happening around you: Assess when the time (and the market) is right to execute your idea.
3. Iterate your product: Take in the feedback, be a rigorous editor, and refine your idea.
4. Know when to stop: Realize if your idea is working or not. If not, then stop and put it away, and move on.

Here is a video -

I totally agree with these points -

Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job.

- via Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers by Mark Cuban

I’ve been arguing about this whole philosophy of “you innovating or inventing something” Vs “asking customers for what they want and building that” with my other friend who is a huge customer development and lean startup fan. Apparently I’ve different views about whole customer development and lean startup approach than his views. I think people are just taking extreme stance for these approaches and blindly following it since it’s kind of a buzz word in the web startup world. I don’t buy these approaches fully. I believe there are certain flaws with those approaches. I agree that it’s important to be lean, but I don’t want to stop innovating and thinking next interesting ideas and just build what’s needed today. I listen to all these lean startup and customer development theories, but I execute what makes sense to me, and ignore the rest.

I’ll write a detailed post on my experience while working with a lean startup approach, and also my experience with ignoring that advice, but for now read this post by Mark Cuban – which highlights my philosophy really well – Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers.

Hot market

(Image via – Flickr)

I was discussing with one of my friends about our temptation about starting a startup in hot markets. Here are my brief thoughts on it -

In my opinion, at any given time, there are always more than 1 hot markets. “Real-time web” is one, so is “social-gaming”, and so is “iPhone apps”, and so there are many. The key is – you pick one market, and keep pushing your idea in that market. It’s easy to get distracted by other hot markets all the time. It’s very tempting to switch to other hot market just because few others became successful in that market. But when we notice such successes, and realize that it’s a hot market, there are many others who also notice it and realize that it’s a hot market. Also, after we switch to that market and before we really start making our impression into that market, it might be over competitive and too late, unless we’ve that kind of expertise and speed of execution.

I think the key to win based on hot market approach is – we need to be pioneers or early adopters of that market. We can’t be too late in the game. I think 2-3 years is late. But just being pioneers or early adopters of any hot market does not guarantee any success. It’s our relentless belief and persistence to stick into that market until people start believing that market might make us successful. We can’t just hop-around to hot markets before we really execute for long and well in one market.

On the other hand, I’m not saying we should completely ignore the trends of hot markets. The best strategy might be to see how can we leverage those trends for our existing idea and market. We need to see what we can learn from other hot markets, and how can we bring similar experience to current ideas. There would be more innovative opportunities on the intersection of two or more hot markets.

What do you think? Do you believe it’s a right strategy to go after such emerging hot markets to grab the opportunities?

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I generally like Google’s products by default. They are less intrusive, very subtle in colors, and they take care of the usability aspect quite appropriately. I agree, they don’t have great design taste, but they do have great usability taste. In general, I’m not much fan of flashy graphic designs. It hurts my eyes more than it helps me in any way. That’s why I don’t appreciate Microsoft or Yahoo’s many web-based products much. They give too much stress on glossy images to make their UIs very eye-candy. Whereas, Google’s products are easy on colors in general, but lot of emphasis is given on usability. Their UIs don’t bother me much. They work in the browser very quietly. If you notice my blog’s theme, you’ll find that I kept this theme as plain as possible to enhance your reading experience. I didn’t want to add too many images and distract you from your reading.

But Google Buzz is different. I just didn’t like it that much. I understand it’s usefulness and future potential, I agree they have taken care of usability in many ways, but I still feel that they just didn’t deliver the subtle product. Buzz hurts my eyes. It distracts me. It’s not helping me, rather it’s hurting me. So finally I disabled it.

But here are few things that I didn’t like about Buzz -

1. Unread Buzz count

Why another count to show me that I’m slacking? Why another count to tell me that I need to complete another task – clear the unread Buzz count?

If you’ve noticed in above image, I try to keep my inbox count as low as possible. That doesn’t mean I necessarily read all emails, but I delete many not relevant emails when know I’m not going to have time to read them. I just don’t keep them there in my inbox with the false hope that I’ll read it some time in the future. You know, you never go back to your inbox to read the unread emails. Then why keep it there? The unread emails in my inbox are shown in the bold format, and it distracts my eyes. It tells me – give me your attention. Those unread email count, that is even more disturbing. I feel the bigger the count, the more burden I have. So I like to keep it simple – just keep that count as small as possible.

And now they added another count? Sorry, I don’t need that. But, an option to just hide that count will solve my problem.

2. Confused “Already following”

I totally believe in not re-inventing the social graph. We already have our social graphs on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It doesn’t make sense for newer applications to ask users to create another social graph starting from scratch. Let’s just leverage existing social graphs.

The good part is, Buzz has exactly done that, and that’s exactly what we’ve also done at Shopalize. But the bad part is, Buzz has made it even more confusing. As soon as you signup, you’re already following certain people. But you’re not following all. I didn’t see any obvious relation in people whom I’m already following, and people I need to follow explicitly. It’s very confusing how they decide whom I’m following and whom I’m not.

3. Popular activity view

I think this is the worst experience. Buzz count shows me that I’ve new unread activities, but when I click on it to see latest activities, I just don’t understand what’s new. I don’t get if the activity itself is a new one, or the comments or likes on an activity are new, or something else? It shows me the same Buzz activity with 100 comments again at the top. It’s very confusing to find the recent new activities. They should have highlighted these new activities.

Sorting activities based on it’s popularity is not a bad idea. But that should be an alternate option. The default option should be recent activities first. Sorting based on chronological order is a norm now. Aren’t we a Twitter generation now?

In general, I wasn’t really excited with Buzz when I first used it. I’m sure, they will get better in coming days. But I still didn’t find that it’s solving my information overload problem in anyway, but in fact it’s making it even worse. So sorry Buzz, I’ve to disable you until I’ve enough bandwidth to consume another stream of noise err…activities.

I attended a startup event the other day. As a part of an event, there was a talk by a successful entrepreneur about PR and Marketing. This entrepreneur had recently launched his new startup and had received great buzz in the media within a short span of time. So his talk was mainly focused on – how he launched that startup with such a great buzz in such a short amount of time.

I was interested in this topic, but was disappointed at the end of the talk.

The thing is – this guy talked about how he launched a bare minimum application with some controversial idea and got the press members and tech bloggers to talk about it within few weeks. This controversial introduction apparently helped him to get more buzz from other press members and bloggers, and also from social media community. He showed more than 2 dozens press members and bloggers talked about his idea and new startup – and that helped them to get many users in early days because people were curious to see what it is. He also managed to let influential startup people talk about his startup (because they are his friends).

I’m not against of this approach. If it worked for him, great! As they say, any kind of publicity is a good publicity. But I’m against of advising this approach as a technique to first-time entrepreneurs to launch their startups to get more traction early on.

Using your brand to promote something is not a technique, it’s a leverage. So my request to such successful entrepreneurs is – please do not advice any techniques which were possible because of your successful brand. Not everyone who is just starting has that kind of brand. PR or tech bloggers won’t even entertain the first-time entrepreneurs, and especially if the idea is so controversial or early stage (without any traction). So please, don’t advice it as a technique – it’s not going to work for everyone.

I read this great paragraph from Paul Graham’s essay about why having MBA is not essential to start a technology business. I completely agree with this philosophy, so posting his thoughts again -

I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don’t need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

via How to Start a Startup.

Again, the most important piece of advice – learn how to hack than get an MBA.

Fascinating talk by Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation at TED.

Watch it -

I received a clever pamphlet in the mail today as shown in a picture below. I hope you can read it clearly.

What’s clever about this marketing mail?

1. It has a physical object in it, which you can feel by hand. So you are most likely not going to throw it away without opening it.

Marketer’s first objective is achieved – you opened a junk mail!

2. Then it has above campaign -

“Tech CU has sent one member the winning key. It may be you! If the key in this invitation turns the ignition of the lock box at the car sale, the vehicle is yours.”

Now tell me – will you throw away that key now? Aren’t you thinking – what if that key is really the lucky one? You might think – “I really didn’t have to do anything to receive this lucky key. Now all I have to do is to go there once and confirm if this key is really the lucky one or not.”

Marketer’s second objective is achieved – you are thinking about that offer.

3. Even if I know that I’m not lucky enough to receive the lucky key and even if I know that I will not have time to go to that car sale to check if that key is really lucky one or not, I will be reluctant to throw that key away. I’m thinking – what if I may have time and I may go to that area? Why throw key now? Why not throw afterward when we really can’t go?

Marketer’s third objective is achieved – you got hooked to that offer.

Now marketer’s fourth objective is – you show up at that car sale place. I’m not sure if that objective will be achieved or not. Irrespective of that, I think this was a clever marketing campaign.

What do you think? Do you treat this clever marketing or spam? Or do you think this was a clever spam?

This is a fascinating post – You Can’t Do What You Want By Doing Something Else. Some thoughts from that post are as below -

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.

Although we admire when someone can do something unique and creative, society is set up to resist such attempts. Your parents, with all the love and best intentions, will urge you to do something that “makes a good living.” Your friends and coworkers resist behaviors that might take you away from them, and will tell you stories of how this or that person tried and failed. And hardest of all, when you are ready to make your leap of faith, the temptations appear; the tremendous opportunities that for some reason only come out of the woodwork when you are ready to walk out the door.

There’s a quote that appears again and again in various forms: “close one door, another opens.” It seems like magical thinking until you see it happen. And it only happens when you don’t leave the door partially open, but instead firmly close it. For some reason, being certain that you’re ready to move on does cause some kind of magic to happen, and I don’t know why.

I’ve to admit that I’m in the exact same situation and I should be doing something about it. Coming from an Indian background, I can assert that most of the Indians fall into this “practical” and “society pressure” traps. Very few of us actually take a different route and explore their dreams. The rest of us just follow the herd. We’ll typically go for high-salaried jobs in Engineering, Medicine or Management profession. We hardly go for Music, Theatre or Sports career paths. Even in Engineering career, we’ll go for Computer Science and IT jobs – irrespective of if we really love that or not.

We hardly take risks. And we justify (read as give excuse) that we’re taking calculated risks by doing practical things now, and planning to take leap in future once we achieve some stability. On top of other social pressures, we immigrate to other countries for better career opportunities and loose our freedom and risk potential even more. We now also have visa and residency issues and we keep traveling other paths that we really do not want to. Everyday, we keep traveling away from our dreams. But we do it because everybody else is also doing the same. And we just keep doing it. Few days ago I posted a similar thought on Twitter -

But this article is a good eye-opener. I’m not sure even after reading this I’ll be taking corrective actions. You see, I’ve so many practical things to take care of first…

I use Vim Editor every single day and really like it. Few years ago when I started learning Vim editor, I found it very daunting to learn all those commands and tricks, and then remember those commands, and most importantly – apply those commands for day-to-day tasks. Over the past years, I learned a lot, step by step. But I’m still not there yet. I’m not master yet. I’ve seen few my colleagues doing magic with Vim, which I can just appreciate but not understand and apply. I always wanted to learn more tricks and tips and master the editing with Vim. Finally I found some great articles compiled together to master Vim editor on this blog post – Vim is a great text editor.

Following are the useful links that you can peruse to master the Vim Editor -

• Find the appropriate version of Vim for your OS and install.
• Start learning the ropes with these tutorials:
  • Using Vi/Vim: A Brief Tutorial
  • Efficient Editing With vim
  • Splits and multi-file editing
  • The Vim commands cheat sheet – 1.2
  • Graphical cheat sheet
  • Vim Tips wiki
• Vim is very customizable, the settings are stored in the vimrc file which resides in the install’s directory:
  • Select colour scheme and font
  • Secrets of tabs in vim (set indent type and depth)
  • vimrc tips
  • Example .vimrc
  • Vim plugins

I found these links very useful, and I hope you’ll find them useful too. You may not be able to digest this all information at once. You’ll have to learn few things, and then practice it, and then master it. But now you have all the resources to master Vim at one place!

I was always curious to know some stats and today I stumbled on this great blog post “What do I mean, by ‘next four billion’?“. Following are some numbers that I found very interesting -

There are 480 million newspapers printed daily; 800 million automobiles registered on the planet; 1.1 billion personal computers including all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks; 1.2 billion fixed landine phones; 1.4 billion internet users; 1.5 billion TV sets; 1.7 billion unique holders of a credit card of any type; and 2.1 billion unique holders of a banking account of any kind. But 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

…

So, that is what was the first four billion. The rapid growth of what has become the most widely adopted technology on the planet. Now, what about the topic of the “next 4 billion”, that does sound a bit strange. The world total human population is only 6.7 billion people. Shouldn’t I be saying, “the next 2.7 billion”.

…

So here is the big news. The next 4 Billion will not be like you and me. They will not be wealthy enough to own a PC and have a broadband connection and read blogs or do any Twittering on a PC. Over 95% of the next 4 billion will be in the Developing World, and while there will be of course an emerging middle class who may aspire to own a netbook, those tend to be wealthy enough to already have a subscription today. Those next four billion will be either those who do not have any connection today, at all, or else are second and third subscriptions to those who already have one today.

Read the entire post if you want to learn more about the mobile phone market potential. The numbers are really interesting!

I think we often confuse efforts and results. Efforts and results are not always proportional. It’s a different story that we expect they should, but in reality, they are not. Why we confuse them?

When we confuse them, we tend to recognize efforts, and reward results. Instead it should be other way around. We should respect and reward people who are putting efforts, and recognize results if those efforts turn into good results.

We need to understand that results are not always guaranteed. They not only depend on amount of efforts put, but also on many other things, which are most of the times not under control of a person putting efforts. Irrespective of the amount of efforts put, results can go wrong because of bad decisions, bad ideas, bad timing, bad market, or bad luck!

Once again, don’t confuse the efforts and results. Reward efforts and recognize results. Not other way around.

I really liked how Rypple.com has implemented movable and actionable signup flow. For most of the web-services, we see these links to make our signup action as an easy process – “Learn More”, “Signup for Free”, or “Take a Tour”. Now a days these links are shown in big boxes or buttons to make them more visible and prominent, such that you can see them very clearly and take the signup action quickly.

But most of the times, these links appear at the top section of the screen when you land up on that page. Generally to learn more about that web-service, you tend to scroll down to see what features they provide, what their existing customers said, etc. When we scroll down, the links to take signup action are lost from our visibility. And the purpose of making them more visible is no longer applicable unless you remember those big buttons and decide to scroll up again to signup.

I liked how Rypple has fixed that problem. They made those signup buttons movable. If you scroll down, those buttons also scroll down. If you scroll up again, they will also scroll up again. Basically they will just stay with you all the time as shown below -

When you land up on front page -

When you scroll down -

It’s a very clever way to make sure those actionable buttons are never lost from your visibility. You see that button all the time so chances might be higher that you’ll not forget to signup. Also, if you’ve scrolled down, Rypple has made your job even easier by removing the need of scrolling up again to just signup. I’m sure they must be seeing some increase in number of signups using this clever signup flow.

Suggest if you have seen such clever signup flows.

I love Facebook’s usability. But I found their email notification implementation highly unusable or rather annoying at some times.

1. Commented on which status?

The common use case is – you post some status update and your friends comment on it. Now, as an average user, I generally post 2-3 updates on my Facebook profile. But when Facebook sends me email notification, it sends me a message something like this -

Facebook Status Comment Notification Email

As shown above, all it says – “<Your friend> commented on your status: <Friend’s comment>”. But I’ve no idea on which status my friend commented on. They deliberately made sure that I’ve no clue about which status it was, and I better login to their site and give them some pageviews. I hate it. All they have to send me -

“<Your friend> commented on <Your status>: <Friends’ comment>” – just fill in the value of your actual status! So simple! I just get it on which status my friend commented on, and that comment starts making sense to me. Otherwise without the context, I’ve no way to understand what that comment means.

2. Follow the link to reply?

Another use case is – if I receive comment, then I can’t reply that comment by sending “Reply” button of my email program. Why I’ve to login to their site just to reply to that comment thread? My comment thread is actually right now in my email inbox. It tells me what comment my friend posted, then if I’ve to reply to it, I’ll just hit the reply button and will send my comment via email. It should get posted directly to the status thread on Facebook.

Though, this not an annoying issue, but sometimes if I receive 3-4 comments during day time, then I read those comments in my email, but generally postpone replying to it on Facebook till evening – and most likely, I’ll forget what was my instant reaction to friend’s comment was and will lose its continuation.

But having this ability will increase the instant communication. And I don’t think it’s that hard to implement this feature – especially when it makes users’ life more convenient.

If you have different observations, then please let me know your views in the comment section!

It’s been few weeks that I haven’t updated on the progress of Shopialize, a part-time project I’m working on. Not to mention, lots of things were happening – and so hardly got some leisure time to write a blog post peacefully. Anyways, here are the things that kept me busy in the last few weeks -

More feedback

I talked to many people – friends, advisors, entrepreneurs, mentors, etc. Got amazing feedback from everybody. Many have raised few concerns about certain aspects of my idea. Luckily, many people identified the same issue, so it was easy to figure out what to fix in the idea. At the same time, everybody seemed to be excited about the idea and its potential given that I’ll execute it brilliantly.

The more I talked to people, the better I started getting at pitching my idea. One of the things I’ve done is – practiced pitching Shopialize in 60 seconds. It was a great experience to come up with a 60 seconds pitch with key bullet points –

• founder’s background explaining his ability to execute the idea
• the idea itself
• it’s market
• it’s monetization strategy

– all in 60 seconds.

Also, talking with more people helped me to clarify my assumptions about particular market, and got few new ideas and suggestions which I was not necessarily focussing initially.

Product plan

Based on the received feedback from these different people, now I’ve more thoughts and ideas about what to build in Shopialize and how to build it. Many thoughts are still juggling in my head. So need to put these thoughts down on to paper. Haven’t done much progress on this front except writing down with few user work-flows, paper-based sketches, database schemas, etc. Need to document these things clearly.

Customer development

This was the best part in last few weeks. I attended one conference and met few customers there. I discussed the Shopialize idea with them and how it would benefit them. I also asked them questions about how they are solving their current problems, and then suggested how I can improve that experience with Shopialize. Also asked their feedback about what do they would like to see additionally in the service. It was one the best experience to validate and get affirmation for your idea by directly talking to customers.

Also had interactions with fellow entrepreneurs and social media gurus there. Got good affirmation about market potential and it’s growth opportunities. This also helped me to do some market research, identify size, market pattern, and its potential growth rate. In short, the conference was worth every penny.

By the way, though it was a paid conference, and wasn’t affordable for me initially, I tried convincing organizers to give me an entry with discounted rates. Thankfully my request worked, and got the tickets at 1/6th price. So lessons learned – don’t hesitate to ask or negotiate.

Technology development

This part was slow compared to what I was expecting. Done reasonable progress, but I was hoping to do more and do faster. But unfortunately couldn’t devote much time due to other tasks at hand. But in next few weeks now this will be the main focus – developing the product prototype. I’m hoping that within a month from now I should have something working. Let’s see how I do on my promise.

Co-founder and advisor search

This was one of the prime tasks I was working on in the last few weeks. I met few entrepreneurial people, talked with them, discussed the opportunities but unfortunately nothing worked out concretely on a co-founder front. Nevertheless, the search is still on, and I’ll be continuing to meet more people to see if they can join me in this venture.

The good news is that I’ve received confirmation from one advisor that he’ll be advising me for this venture. I was extremely happy that day when I learned that the person I highly respect for his entrepreneurial success will be advising me. Now I’ve to give my best to meet his expectations and deliver as promised to him. But it’s a great support mentally to have someone believing in you.

I tried requesting one more advisor, but unfortunately due to his time bandwidth, he denied the request. I’ll be requesting few more advisors in the next few weeks and will see if they are willing to guide me.

Legal stuff

Lot of people gave feedback that Shopialize name represents the meaning perfectly, but is little harder in spelling. And suggested to see if I can have some other brand. I spent lot of time in thinking about it, but couldn’t finalized on anything new primarily due to domain name unavailability or not having catchy or good-sounding name. Email me at <aditya dot kothadiya at gmail dot com> if you happen to think of some good catchy name, or want to sell any domain name that you’ve but not using it now.

Also working on Trademarking few things and identifying if I can patent the idea or not. Yeah, in this Web 2.0 world, it’s really hard to patent anything, but I’m still giving it a thought. It’s good to develope intellectual property driven culture in startup from day one.

Beta Signup

Don’t forget to signup at Shopialize for it’s beta launch. I’ll keep sharing more details on this blog so stay tuned.