Do you plan to quit?
Comments (2)I recently read the dip by Seth Godin and highly recommend it as real eye opener. Great book about the dip everyone goes through, the hard part that sorts out the men from the mice so that those who make it through get the rewards. This book teaches you how to see dips before you are in them and assess whether or not it’s worth the effort. Seth explains that quitting the dead ends is a must so you can focus on the dips that are really worth your time. One of the best take outs for this book is to plan to quit before you even get started, plan under what criteria/circumstances you will quit so that when it gets tough you don’t let you emotions get the better of you and make a rash decision.
One of my favourite quotes in the book
“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we are never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.” Sergey Brin, co founder of Google.
Also I love the line ”We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit”
I really liked this book and Seth has kept it short and to the point. As he said “Write less”
Well designed site – Coudal Partners
I checked out this site Coudal Partners on a recommendation from 37 Signals. The design is really clean and easy to read. It has a very blog style feel about it which I think is the way to go with site design. Making your home page a blog ensures that the site will look different and fresh every time someone visits.
Another great thing about this site is the products these guys are selling. Simple back to basic field note journals, jewel cases and Tee shirts. Nothing new and ground breaking or over the top just simple well designed (existing) products done well.
Their about page has a very interesting sentence
Thanks for visiting. If browsing around here while at work has had a negative effect on your productivity we’re sorry but imagine what it’s done to ours.
How true, by you and I just browsing the web and checking out this great sites like Coudal may not have been that productive for us but I’m sure it has really given the guys at Coudal a lift not only in traffic but positive drive to keep things going.
No rules
There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.
—Thomas Edison
Great designs – Skateboards
I really like this post by 37 Signals for a couple of reasons. Firstly I have always been a fan of just how cool Skateboard deck designs are especially old school Tony Hawk and Chocolate. I use to love riding my skateboard as a kid and thought those decks were like a piece of art and probably couldn’t ride it in case it got scratched. Secondly you have to admire 37 Signals for thinking way outside the box and drawing on all areas of life such as the skateboarding culture and bringing that back into the work place. What a way to really open up the minds of your staff, to stop thinking in their business as usual minds and take in other elements fueling creativity and inspiration. Nice job.
Here is the deck Jamie presented Summary of Skateboard Design
By the way this video of Ray Barbee is very cool, even the sound track is cool. I hope some day my little man Josh has a go at Skateboarding, hey I’ll probably join him for a cruise down the street.
Clean simple design
I was looking for a nice restaurant and stumbled across this really cool site for the restaurant “North Bondi Italian Food”. This is so simple and clean I love it, just a simple font and a couple of strong colours which work very well. The additional plus is that a site like this would be super cheap to build and maintain. Only two minor negative elements that could be improved.
1. its built in flash and would have been better in just straight HTML/CSS with a little javascript thrown in
2. the font of the actual menu/food list spoils it as its not consistent but I would say it has been done like this so that the restaurant could easily update the menu items (another drawback of flash).
Getting things done with Jott
I’ve read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done (GTD) and practise the GTD methodology in my daily routine managing work at kmsystems. I find that GTD works well in an agile environment similar methodology to first identifying your to do list or back log and then just work through the actions to clear it or burn it down as the agile folk call it.
I just read this post “Getting things done in the enterprise” which points out that there are a lot of tools available for assisting individuals maintain GTD methodology and one that David Allen uses is Jott (turn your words into actions) which is perfect for the mobile travelling person who on the road a lot. Unfortunately not available here is Aus.
My team and I are remote most of the time and to help us plan our day GTD style and also know what each person is doing we developed our own application called “Whos doin wot”. Whos doin wot allows each person to plan their work in advanced and have it pop up on the day it needs to be done also it helps other team members see who’s swamped and could do with a helping hand.
Design your own great looking website the easy way
In a previous post I wrote about Good Barry which is an excellent simple easy to use content management system (CMS) that has made building a professional website a snap. I was able to set up an exact version of my www.kmsystems.com.au website using Good Barry in around an hour which I think is pretty fast.
Now I’ve discovered two other amazing web site building tools that are just as impressive as Good Barry. http://www.snappages.com/ and http://www.squarespace.com/. They are both super easy to use and have some very well designed templates that you can use to base your new web site design on. I really like the artistic designs available in Snappages and the visual way you can change just about anything in Squarespace. Both feature full reporting capabilities for the all important site stats and both a very reasonably priced. Why would you try to set up and pay for your own hosting when service as cool as these exist.
The only thing I think Good Barry has over these two (apart form having a base here in Australia, I always love to support home grown) is the ecommerce module, which means no mucking around trying to integrate in a third party shopping cart. Good Barry does all of the hard work for you.
If you have any feedback on these CMS platforms please drop me a comment and share your thoughts.
Enterprise twitter with Yammer
I just checked out the presentation by Yammer at TechCrunch50 and love the new twitter based enterprise tool they have built. Similar to when Facebook first started by only allowing education email addresses access Yammer works in a similar fashion by only allowing people that share the same company email address such as @yourcompany.com to view tweets from the same group.
CEO’s using twitter
Great article on CEO’s who use twitter. The article discusses how CEO’s and bosses are using twitter to share a bit of their daily routine and reduce the gap between them and their staff. Some use twitter as a way to run an instant poll and find out how the community (staff and customers) feel about certain things.
One of may favourites is this profile:
Jack Dorsey
Chief Executive, Twitter
How Twitter helps him run Twitter: ”It’s the fastest and best way to get feedback on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what we should do next, both from users and my co-workers. Speaking to the latter point, Twitter makes our company feel smaller and more cohesive. There is something to be said about sharing the small details of your life with those you work with daily.”
Some great learnings about running a web start up
Mike over at Freshbooks has been humble enough to admit that he’s made mistakes and kind enough to share his learning with the rest of us in his post “7 ways I’ve almost killed Freshbooks”.
All of the points are extremely valid and important but my favourite is:
5. Underestimating word of mouth
This one is sort of tied to number one. It takes *years* to generate word of mouth – it’s a slow build, but slow burning fires burn the hottest. So be patient and do your best to take care of your customers/users even if you can’t find a way to measure the ROI.
