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 -

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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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 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 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.

Watch it -

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?

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…

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!