The Ninth Degree of Boyhood
Also known as this year’s installment of my annual music mix for the twins’ birthday. Been on a total electro-trip with these mixes this year. Poppy, happy, electronic stuff. This is already one of my favorites:
- “The Grid” - Daft Punk
- “Get it Together” - The Go! Team
- “Lazy Eye (Jason Bentley Remix)” - Silversun Pickups
- “Little Secrets” - Passion Pit
- “Raindrops” - Basement Jaxx
- “Strange Condition” - Morgan Page
- “Move Your Feet” - Junior Senior
- “D.A.N.C.E.” - Justice
- “Around the World & Praise You (DJDL Remix)” - Daft Punk vs. Fatboy Slim
- “Crazy” - Gnarls Barkley
- “Sweet Disposition” - The Temper Trap
- “Dirty Harry” - Gorrilaz
- “Animal (Mark Ronson Extended Remix)” - Miike Snow
I’ve got myself totally into moms for two big reasons this week.
First, I’ve been thinking about how much I’ve missed both blogging and reading blogs. My feed reader is always empty. So few in the web dev or design communities do it anymore. People aren’t even tweeting much. Maybe commenting on Dribbble or Hacker News is taking all our energies. There’s not a lot of original content or thought circulating. So I’ve been checking to see where content is circulating, and wouldn’t you know, the moms are all over it.
Second, I have a hunch that mom blogs would be the perfect target audience for my new advertising ideas. If I can appeal to moms and make the system work for them, nerds will be a cinch. So I’ve been doing my research.
And I found moms have this communication and networking thing down solid. Way better than we nerds do. Yes, dear reader, I’ll show you.
They’re super creative
Almost all these blogs are on Blogger of all things, but they totally make it work for them. They take pride in every graphic, every image and nav, and they are constantly producing new cute little things to post. Each blog is uniquely their own. See A Beautiful Mess with her hand-cut lettered header, or Rockstar Diaries photoblogging every bite of ice cream, every outfit and every outing. So many of our sites are just templates and themes with tiny type and rounded beveled corners and no personality. When we do customize our themes we only post boring words and code. These girls see everything as a creative opportunity to reflect their personalities and that’s really inspiring.
They update every day
At first you may think daily updates about 16 month birthdays or what’s in my shoe closet are trivial and boring. And they probably are to you nerds. But in between all the talk of babies and husband crushes, these girls are doing something we don’t understand. They’re sharing personal details and they’re bonding. Even the most trivial details help build relationships and give people something to bond to. And that builds your brand or personality as a human and grows your network to like-minded people who have the same shoes or same age kid. Most of these women have networks in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, and they’re real connections, not Linkedin connections. It works.
They wear business socks
Almost every one of these blogs sells advertising and most of them aren’t part of a big ad network. They sell it themselves. For $6 or $50 or $750 you can get space on one of these blogs and enjoy 10-50,000 unique visitors a month. Some are pulling down $5k a month. Most cash in for a few hundred, which is a few hundred more than my blog makes.
You’ll also be hard pressed to find a mom blog who doesn’t also have an Etsy or BigCartel store. Like Opal Vintage & Things or Bleubird Vintage or Paper Mama Boutique. Their style and personality is way too big to be contained by blogs. They’re reaching out and finding opportunities to expand their reach and put more of themselves out into the world.
They have tentacles
Each one of these blogs is heavily networked into the others. They often guest post on each other’s blogs. They link to each other liberally. They’re all on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and constantly retweeting and follow-fridaying and including eachother in everything they post.
They also swap these little link badges. They design little buttons with their names and personalities and you’ll see those buttons on all their friends sites. It’s a nice little self promotional touch. Give people the tools to promote you. Rad.
It’s nice to see the tools we have on the web used so resourcefully. Communication, networking, friendships are all happening. Just not so much in the web community. We’re building these tools and we suck at using them. The moms are getting it right and I’m finally gonna take a few notes.
Top images courtesy Harper’s Happenings and Team Mandy.
You’ve probably heard of the term “minimally viable product,” or MVP. People use the term differently, but the best description I’ve heard was at SXSW 2011 in a Lean Startup session hosted by PayPal mafioso Dave McClure.
He said the MVP is shipping the shittiest possible product that people will pay for. That one sentence is full of awesomeness and has had immediate impact on my design process. For starters, “maximally shitty,” or MSP, is a term I’ve been using constantly while developing Passionfruit, my new advertising startup. Here’s what it means.
Emphasis on Ship
The MSP is about shipping. Shipping software means getting it in the hands of users. This isn’t a full release. Get something in front of a few key users and do it fast. Find the people that are most likely to be your power users, your huge fans or your early adopters and ship to them.
Keeping your user base small will also let you fail in obscurity. Try something out. If it fails, no sweat. Adjust, redeploy and test it again.
When you drive to shipping your product, you can identify what the key features are and skip everything that doesn’t matter yet. Boil your idea or your product down to the bare minimum and get it out the door.
You know nothing about your product until people are using it. With my project, it’s been incredibly freeing to constantly ask myself if what I’m working on is getting me to ship. Who cares if the footer is a little off. Or that form could look better. What matters is functionality is broken and that’s what needs my attention.
And by the way, the only way to learn anything about how they’re using this piece of shit is to measure measure measure. If they sneeze on the third click, you want to know.
Emphasis on Sell
McClure said even if you’re planning a free product or have no idea what the business model is, figure out a way to sell it up front. This is a key measurement of your product. If people will pay for it, it’s sufficiently shitty. If they won’t, it’s too shitty! Some products will always be too shitty to sell and you need to know that as soon as possible.
There’s something magic about when someone pays money for something you’ve created. Make it happen as soon as possible and with the shittiest possible product and you know you really have something.
For this reason I’m rejecting any rollout or scenario with my new product that doesn’t involve charging people for it. I won’t learn anything from testing it with people who get to use it for free.
Emphasis on Shit
And here’s the mother of the whole idea. Make your product the shittiest possible product you can, but find the right things to make awesome and the right things to cut. Cut everything that doesn’t make it on your minimum functionality list. Cut everything that won’t lead to valuable measurement of your idea. Cut everything that won’t lead users to fall in love with you.
The bottom line is ship the shittiest possible product that your key money users will pay for.
The best part is you can ship complete pieces of shit to a few people and if you’re measuring right you’ll know really quickly that you’ve cut too much.
Memorize the Lean Startup mantra: Build, Measure, Learn. Only your customers can decide what your MSP or MVP is. Not you. So build, ship, and repeat. Just make sure it’s shitty.
(Photo credit: mikerowan)
Never a failure, always a lesson
Love this Rihanna quote, tattooed backwards so she can read it in the mirror: ”Never a failure, always a lesson.”
Reminded me of this quote yesterday from heyamberrae, whose blog is full of little tidbits like this and has fueled a few late nights of scheming and dreaming lately:
life evolves. we don’t succeed or fail. that’s too black & white. we experience, we learn, we grow, we evolve.
If you look at experiences as lessons instead of risks of failure, it frees you up to make decisions that are more in line with your own dreams and personality. I’d much rather learn from an experience full of my own “ness” than something I did to avoid failure. In other words, stay true to your personality and vision and stop worrying about what you think other people want.
Holy
I was looking up some information about my favorite drink, Red Bull Cola (which contains Lemon/lime, Clove, Cinnamon, Vanilla, Ginger, Cocoa, Liquorice, Orange, and even trace amounts of cocaine), when I noticed an interesting item in their little subnav up there. Holy Shit!
(BTW how bad is that site design?)
