Archive | July, 2010
Jul 28
2010 

Elevator pitches, weddings and babies

At OpenPlans, we’re busy signing up new clients for our products & services, and we’re also spending a lot of time fundraising (from individual donors, foundations, etc.).  As such, I’ve been thinking about how we pitch our organization, and have recently spent some time over the past few days reading some of the great stuff over at VentureHacks. Their book, Pitching Hacks covers the fundamentals, from what matter to investors (traction), to how to get introductions, to how to structure your pitches (whether high-concept, elevator, or slide deck).

Then, this morning while reading Hacker News (or more specifically Nirmal J. Patel’s full-content RSS of Hacker News), I came across this posting which caught my eye:

Technical co-founder wanted for disrupting the wedding industry.

Hi, my name is Tracy. The wedding industry is huge, overpriced, and with insane profit margins. I’m looking to disrupt it with WeddingType.

In wedding invitations alone, there are two options: spend hundreds of dollars for custom designed invitations (expensive but pretty), or do-it-yourself (cheap but ugly). I want to build a web application catering to the price sensitive couples who have an aversion to Comic Sans.

A do-it-yourself wedding invitation kit costs $45, while professional wedding invitations are hundreds or thousands of dollars. With WeddingType, the service will guide the user through a constrained flow of inputs which will populate a set of pre-designed templates with professional typography that they can print out and get hitched. The completely automated service will charge $25 and send the user a PDF by email.

My goal is to get this out really fast and start making revenue from the start, then see how big we can grow it. From here, there are multiple ways of increasing value and revenue — licensing to wedding invitation template manufacturers, selling custom design solutions, offering templates through the site, etc. Large scale, could sell templates through the site, printing and mailing like Moo.com.

I freelanced and worked at a startup for five years as the primary designer/jack-of-all-trades for everything relating to their web properties, including analytics, usability, design, HTML/CSS, and multivariate/AB testing. I need a technical partner who is enthusiastic about the business and a web programming whiz. Preferably in the Bay Area, and if everything goes right, we’ll apply to Y Combinator for the next Winter session.

Intrigued? I’d love to meet you, perhaps work on a small project together.

This is not a perfect pitch, by my or VentureHacks’ standards — in fact, I am not fully convinced by it after the first paragraph. However, I think the title and first line are good, and they are what drew me in.

Speaking from recent experience of getting married (in 2005) and having a baby (last year), I can say with absolute certainty that these are both huge markets where there’s an opportunity to be smart and offer products that will serve people well, save them money, and be profitable.  In this pitch, it was the problem/opportunity statement (“The wedding industry is huge, overpriced, and with insane profit margins”) that got me.  I certainly agree with that part.  Wedding invitations are one piece, and there are many others.  My wife has a million ideas for businesses in this space.  If I were an investor in XX Combinator, I’d definitely start here.

Jul 21
2010 

Missed Connections

In her bathroom, a friend of mine has some really beautiful illustrations of posts from the Craigslist Missed Connections section.  If you’ve never looked at missed connections, you should — there are some really wonderful notes in there (also some sketchy ones).  Here’s a beautiful one from today:

7 train glances on monday – w4m – 20 (7 train Queensbound)

We were sitting opposite each other on the train. We caught eyes early in the ride, but you nodded off through most of it, but looked up as I was getting off. As the train moved you kept looking at me walking to the stairs.

All I want to tell you is that you have the most beautiful clear blue grey eyes.

What’s striking is how many of the missed connections take place in the subway.  I’ve said before that transit is a uniter not a divider; these posts confirm that, and are a really nice view into that slice of NYC life.

The “ad hoc groupings” that take place on the subway also really resonate with the ideas in Dave Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which I’m reading right now.  Dave talks about how on the web, groups take on a new meaning — they form and unform quickly, and can be formed by very loose connections (such as commenters on a blog post).  The city is the same way — the people I’m standing with on the subway are an ad-hoc group that unforms just as fast as it forms.  But there’s definitely a connection. Typically, it takes an event of some kind, like a man talking into a banana phone or two people having a loud argument, to draw more outward communications among riders.  But underneath it all, there’s a hidden set of communications going on, and it’s really beautiful to see it unearthed through Missed Connections.

It turns out the posters are by a Brooklyn-based artist named Sophie Blackall, who has a whole poster series + a blog on Missed Connections.  Really nice.

Jul 17
2010 

Wanted: Aggregated Group Playlist

Wanted: Aggregated Group Playlist

I love music, but I am really bad about keeping up with new stuff.  My iTunes library is only so-so, so I spend most of my time listening to playlists on 8tracks.  This is good for variety, and great for finding the right background music for a BBQ or party, but there’s something missing: my friends.

I have a few friends who have great taste in music, and who are totally on top of what’s new and good.  As it works now, every once in a while I’ll get a recommendation from one of them, I’ll buy the album on Amazon, and then I’ll listen to it non-stop for a few weeks.  It’s great when it happens, but it doesn’t happen that often.  I want something more automated and frequent.

A few of these friends publish their music on the web (see Piecemaker and My Brooklyn is Better).  Problem is, they each use different platforms to publish, and as far as I can tell, there’s not a great way to combine these into one stream.  Piecemaker uses WordPress and outputs a standard podcast feed, and My Brooklyn is Better uses Tumblr, which embeds a flash player and forbids linking directly to the audio file.  I’m sure I have other friends who are publishing on platforms (Last.fm, 8tracks, Facebook?) that I don’t know about yet).

So, what I want is a way to take these streams, regardless of platform or format, and create a mixed feed or webpage.  I don’t care about actually downloading the music; I just want to be able to listen on the web, keep track of the ones I like, and have the option to buy the albums later.

I’m sure this is possible using some combination of tools that are already out there.  For starters, I’m playing around with Yahoo Pipes to see if I can mash something up to my liking, with an eye towards playing it on the web using StreamPad.  We’ll see if that works.  But is there something out there that I’m missing that already does this in a more straightforward way?  Seems like there must be, but I haven’t found it yet.

Jul 14
2010 

Unplugging (sort of)

This week, we’re on vacation in Cape Cod with my wife’s family.  They’ve been renting the same tiny cabin by the beach for the past 35 years, and coming here is pretty much the highlight of our summer each year.  Last summer, we brought Theo here when he was just three weeks old.  This morning, he and I took a walk along the harbor in Provincetown at low tide — he thinks of each beached boat as a giant bucket, just waiting to be filled with sand.

The problem is, whenever we’re on vacation, I have a hard time finding the right balance between “unplugging” and staying engaged with the real world.  One the one hand, I want to remain connected with work and friends, on the other, I just want to tune out, relax, and be with the people I’m with.  Inevitably, I end up fighting the struggle each day, carving out some time for the important stuff at work, and forcing myself (with limited success) not to stress about it too much the rest of the time.  It’s tough, and to some extent I feel like I achieve the worst of both worlds: neither able to fully enjoy my break, nor be fully present for important happenings at the office.

This has become more of an issue as technology has evolved.  Here at the cabin there’s never been any phone or TV.  Then there were cell phones.  Next, internet down the road at the town library. Then, iPhone and blackberries.  Now, this year we have a mobile broadband connection for our laptops, so we’re as connected as we can be.  For certain things, it’s great: we watched the World Cup final online last weekend, and yesterday my father-in-law did an interview via Skype, which saved him a day-long trip up to Maine.  But, work email and things to do are now within arms reach at all times.

I suppose the vacation case is just a microcosm of the larger question of how to balance real-world face time with online time.  Fred Wilson, one of my favorite bloggers, covers this topic frequently, and I’m really amazed the extent to which he’s able to stay engaged with the networked world without driving his family crazy.  In our case, the family is only semi-digitally integrated; it’s just not part of our culture to always be connected.  Maybe getting an iPad would push that culture change in a good way.

Lastly, I think it also comes back to information fitness — using online (all?) time to do the most important and productive things, and not just consume endlessly as you might in a less online constrained environment.  And of course, one of these days I’ll be able to plan ahead enough so that everything is under control at the office and I don’t have to worry about anything.  But I’m sure if I did that, I’d find reasons to plug back in…

Jul 11
2010 

The optimism of the traveler

This morning, I drove from Boston to Cape Cod, alone with my thoughts except for Theo sleeping in the back seat.  Once we were out of the city and smoothly on the highway, I got to thinking about work, and things really started clicking.  I found myself reaching for my iPhone to record voice memos about once every minute.  I may have even cracked an important nut; we’ll see.

I can’t remember where, but I once heard the phrase the optimism of the traveler, and the idea has really stuck with me.  For me, this manifests itself in the fit of ideastorming I usually find myself in whenever I’m on a plane or train (and sometimes when I’m in a car).  Some of my most creative and productive times have been in these situations.  And it’s not just about volume of ideas — there’s a different sort of excitement and hopefulness that happens during these times.

So, what is it about traveling that produces such excitement?

Is it being away from the internet, and therefore being forced to digest some ideas and not just consume at will?  Or maybe it’s less about attention, and more about being in that middle place between destinations, where anything is possible? Whatever it is, it’s really great.  Of course, the hard part is putting those ideas into motion once you’re feet are back on the ground…

// Photo by Tjeerd on Flickr

Jul 9
2010 

Fitness

I’ve been thinking a lot about fitness lately, mostly spurred on by the great stuff coming out of Clay Johnson’s new blog, InfoVegan. Clay has been drawing a parallel between physical obesity and information obesity, and has been diving deep on what it means to have a “healthy information diet.”  It’s inspiring stuff, and definitely worth keeping up on.

The takeaway for me is that fitness (of any type) is largely about producing, not just consuming.  You need to write to properly digest what you’ve read, and you need to exercise to properly digest what you’ve eaten.  My favorite characterization of this is David Eaves’ “if writing is a muscle, this is my gym” tagline on his blog.

So in the spirit of fitness, yesterday I went for a run and today I wrote this post :)