There has never been a better time to build a company or more tools to help you do it. Over the last 12 months, the Yarnee Team has built up a seriously sharp and pointy armoury of startup weapons that help us hack and slash our way through sprints, redesigns, betas and launches with gusto. Here’s the full breakdown of our most important tools and why we love them.
Within hours of Brazil’s heart-wrenching 7-1 defeat during the World Cup, our CEO Dan Kelly posted a Yarn about it. It was the most shared piece of content on any of our social channels for that week. We’ve had similar results since with the other pieces of real time marketing.
Planning and executing real-time content marketing is an emerging, somewhat dark, art. This is our hit list for leveraging those social spikes to deliver marketing hits that your audience will devour and re-share.
The trouble with the entrepreneurial personality is it has a sort of ideas Tourettes. You might be in the middle of a delicate conversation about the passing of a beloved family pet, when the entrepreneur in the room uncontrollably bellows “THE UBER FOR DOG COFFINS!”.
The hallowed focus everyone obsesses over finding and sticking to puts the average entrepreneur at war with themselves. So it’s unsurprising that many of the world’s leading product minds talk themselves into working on more than one project at a time.
The trouble is, not everyone is Elon Musk and in the perilously fragile realm of startup economics where every penny you spend potentially puts you closer to redrafting your CV, side projects are as risky as they are tempting. But it needn’t be the case that side projects always jeopardise your main mission - there are many ways in which side projects, if handled the right way, can do your company lots of good.
Here’s a breakdown of how we try to keep things in check at Yarnee when something comes along that we just can’t resist spending time on.
Does an entrepreneur need to be a core user for the product they are building? Is it possible to build something for the mass market when you yourself are clearly not a member of your core target demographic? Does Pedigree Chum really taste like braised steak and gravy?
We’re very lucky at Yarnee. Our founder, Dan Kelly, is a keen user of Twitter and Facebook and so understands the importance of fostering social DNA within a startup. It’s an attitude that has benefitted Yarnee as a company in many ways, both small and profound.
But we’re not special (well, we are kind of special, but not in the ways I’m about to explain), a social media mindset should exist from the top down within any company. Here are five reasons why:
Recently at the Yarnee office, while reviewing a few candidates for a position, it became clear they had very different kinds of value. Pitting their disparate qualities against each other was proving unwieldy.
When The Lean Startup by Eric Reis was published in 2011 it was like a neutron bomb had been dropped on the startup landscape. It’s hard to imagine anything in the startup world that has had such a sudden and drastic effect on how people think about innovation. It’s hard to imagine anything in the startup world that people agree on so unanimously. So we’re probably crazy for flagrantly ignoring one of its core tenets - right?
This is a long story so I’ll begin, as is traditional, somewhere just after the beginning…
Some time ago, Dan Kelly, (Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former CEO of Bleacher Report) burst giddily into our new office in Heidelberg Germany where I, Fraser MacInnes, (games industry stalwart, occasional blogger and ambitious braggart) was already sat. He proceeded to show me something he’d created with his kids the night before. It was one of those things that results in an unexpected and irresistible change in direction that hits with faint inducing g-force.
In the 80s, 90s and 00s it was always bigger better faster more. It’s still true in the consumer electronics world but with apps, the trend is towards doing less. The received wisdom is, do one thing really well, but that’s not where an app’s unique value comes from. It’s easy for there to be multiple apps that all do an equally amazing job of solving consumer problem x in isolation. The value comes from the audacity to omit features that have been writ as standards of whatever solving consumer problem x might be.
It was a standard in messaging that you had 160 characters to play with. Not so with twitter. It was a standard in messaging that you could go back through your chat history. Not so with Snapchat. It was a standard in messaging that you knew who you were interacting with. Not so with Secret/Whisper. It was a standard of messaging apps that you could at the very least, write whatever text you wanted. Not so with Yo.
It’s not that Yo is a profoundly great messaging platform or that Flappy Wings is an amazingly well balanced game or even that Vine is a great way to record video — it’s that they have each chosen judiciously what not to include — that’s what they’re good at. They are good at brazen omission — the ability to see past what has become accepted wisdom, slice it out wholesale with a cavalier abandon and then cattle-prod, tase and otherwise brutalise whatever’s left into oddly compelling new shapes.
I think that some people mistake this trend of creative omission for simplicity. The truth is, adding seemingly novel constraints doesn’t make things more simple, removing those constraints does. Imagine not having to tame your perfectly formed 153 character thought into something Twitter could swallow. Think of the extra laughs you could wring out of your followers if Vine granted you enough seconds to justly capture the majesty of your roommate’s psychotic expression when they sneeze. The truth is, the content would get worse, not better.
Constraints force us to make difficult editorial choices. There is a temptation when designing any kind of communication experience, that constraints are friction inducing barriers to be removed and that anything that slows your user’s expressive potential should be lacquered with choice varnish.
Choice. We think we want it, we think it gives us the freedom to fully explain ourselves to the world. Not true. We are far too good at bad choices to create things that people will enjoy without a guiding hand. Medium’s inability to automatically excise my bizarre home-improvement metaphor from the above paragraph serves as a case in point, but let’s move on.
The great thing about apps like Yo and Snapchat is that their success stimulates a wave of creative riffing in their wake. I guarantee that following the news of Yo’s explosion of downloads, a thousand lunch times at a thousand startups have been mottled by the sound of entrepreneurs taking its omission (in Yo’s case, the ability to communicate anything other than one pre-defined two letter word) and applying it to other ideas between mouthfuls of yellow tail and quinoa salad.
This is where people usually make the hallowed Steve Jobs reference and eulogise about Apple’s unique talent for omission. Balls. When it comes to leaving core features off the table Apple is a soggy, quivering dog in a tin bath during a lightening storm in comparison to the founders of a handful of successful startup entrepreneurs I could care to mention in any given month. Admittedly apps to consumer electronics is an apples to oranges comparison (ahem) but Apple is > everything because of what they don’t ship, is a tired trope worth calling out all the same.
The point is, smart omission often inspires new product sub-categories (and in rare cases, whole new categories) in the software world and that’s something to consider when speccing out a feature set for any new idea.
The other great thing about surprise hits like Snapchat, Yo and Vine (don’t even bother — just admit you didn’t see them coming until they were already bearing down on you like angry bears with knives for teeth) is that they give us all the false impression of accidental heroes. Though these companies are anything but accidental heroes of their industry, with each carefully plotting then executing their successful attack on stagnant product niches, their feature omission inspires incredulity among onlookers.
Who’d have thought it, we say. Maybe my idea for a subscription based dog-toothbrush delivery service isn’t the product of a broken mind after all, we hope.
If the misguided perception of accidental heroes gets more of us trying to make things, irrespective of how ill-conceived our ideas may be, then that’s a good thing, assuming any endeavour is conducted under the mitigating doctrine of lean methodology and in particular, validated learning).
Speaking of which, one final thought. Lean methodology has never been more important in realising the idea that is worth working on than it is now, but that does not mean that smart omission is achieved solely through the methodical process of crafting an MVP.
Smart omission is much more than omitting features in order to efficiently get to validation of a core idea — it’s about a little magic and misdirection. It’s about flaunting conventions and honing an ability to question or ignore accepted wisdom about user needs and desires. It’s about inspiration and a freedom from what has come before. It’s about notions so contrary to expectation that users will try it out of sheer morbid curiosity before they’ve even understood if they want it or not.
It’s about an infinitesimal but nevertheless crucial sense of the absurd.
The internet spends a lot of time implying that you are not productive enough. It guilts us with lists of things we’re not doing, but should. It parades famous examples of super productive people in-front of us telling us we should be more like them and offering little recipe’s to become them. The over-riding message is, you are not good enough, do more, be better.
Much as it sounds like a horrible buzz-term, I’m a great believer in the power of ‘the quantified self’, but it feels as though the modern burden of productivity comes with an inertia inducing weight.
Goals not behaviours
One problem is that the productivity burden pushes us skittishly in a dozen directions at once - we stop thinking about what we actually want to achieve and focus exclusively on behaviours and habits that connote success. The big picture is lost in a frenzy of blogging, tweeting, planning, documenting, running, dieting, negotiating, work-life balancing, life-hacking, growth-pirating, round-raising, pitching, researching and reading top ten lists of things you should do to be more productive-ing.
Faced with such a heavy burden of productivity responsibility, we turn towards easy answers and forget about prioritising for the goals that really matter to us. We stop thinking about the best user experience, the features that matter, the company culture you aspire to have, the launch, the wedding, the family, the personal character foibles you want to be more mindful of. In the maze of guilt and advice, we give into the crazy notion that it’s possible to click our way to success.
Addicted to easy answers
We read article after article telling us what Steve Jobs did every day before breakfast, what Henry Ford did five minutes before and after every meeting and why Mark Zuckerberg never wears green on a Thursday.
The irony is, those people did not seek out productive behaviours in order to become a success, their success was doing something they cared about and enjoyed so much that the productive behaviours were merely a happy by-product of maximising that enjoyment. The productivity burden is the requirement to be productive irrespective of whether your efficiency gains really add genuine fulfilment to what you spend the majority of your time doing.
Busy fools
The other big problem is that we confuse busy-ness and output with productivity. We imagine the most successful people to be those that work sadistic hours and only pause to eat a bowl of kale soup once a decade. We need to be seen to be insanely busy because we have learnt that the only way to be valuable is to demonstrate impressive volume.
But busy-ness is not a currency - you can’t bank it for success - no amount of productivity in the world will make you into the internet tycoon of your dreams if you’re not doing something you care about.
Slack off and care more
The best way to shed the productivity burden and start being genuinely productive is to find what you have to do, not what you feel you ought to do, and that in my experience is often only stumbled across after a decent amount of slacking off and messing around.
So if you’re one of those people that feels guilt every time you come across another vertigo-inducing catalogue of things you need to do to measure up in this world, do yourself a favour and go for a three hour lunch, lose an afternoon to Vine or whittle a stick into a convincing likeness of your favorite Beatle. It might end up being the most productive thing you do all week.
