Colin Plamondon

People who don’t whine are punching bags. They just go about their days, their jobs, their lives, knowing there is nothing they can do to change a darn thing, so why say a word? They see no reason to whine because they know they are incapable of effecting change. Call me a whiner any day.

Over the past month we’ve built a killer new ePUB reader in our core product, Free Books for iPad/Classicly. It’s our first whack at it, but, in the process of recreating our roadmap we’ve spent a lot of time discussing how we can improve the social experience around highlights.

While discussing it, I pulled up my Amazon Kindle highlights. Turns out I have a lot.  514 highlights, a lot. And, in those highlights, I usually draw out a lot of the value in a book. Here’s the most recent.

Mark Cuban’s How to Win at the Sport of Business

The books I recommend books to folks just getting into startups are Founders at Work, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Getting Real, and Losing My Virginity.

I’m adding How to Win at the Sport of Business to that list.

It’s  short – I read it in under an hour. In that under-an-hour read time it’s all about sales, bootstrapping a business, scaling an organization, focus, and generally just getting shit done.

The best stories are where Cuban’s talking about getting his initial business off the ground- selling computers without even having a computer after getting fired for closing a deal instead of sweeping the floors. Splurging his first big check on a set of four ridiculously fluffy towels. Working late into the night, wrapping into daylight, reading every single manual for every single piece of software. Everything. Cover to cover. Database manuals, accounting packages, hardware systems, you name it.

Boom. Cuban was then more knowledgeable about the various products than “real” experts. The “real” experts hadn’t put in as much effort as he had. Cuban outlapped them.

This isn’t an autobiography, it isn’t a memoir- it’s a quarter of a greatest hits. It’s what a autobiography is if you extract the best parts and then remove 3/4 of it. You’re left with an incomplete idea of someone’s life, but you get the pleasure of reading back to back to back gems.

No-brainer. Buy it.

My Highlights

One particular year, I was on my way to having a memorable night. I had met some very, very attractive women (I swear they were). Got them some tickets to come with me to the big party. All is good. I’m having fun. They’re having fun. Then we see him. Bill G. As in Bill Gates. Dancing up a storm. I’m a Bill Gates fan, so I won’t describe his dancing, but he was definitely having fun. At that point in time, Microsoft had gone public and Bill Gates was Bill Gates. If you were in the business you knew him or knew of him. The girls I was with were in the business. Long story short, I go to the bar to get some drinks for all us and when I come back, they aren’t there. Come to find out the next day, Bill stole my girls. As I would learn later in life, money makes you extremely handsome.

Turns out, Gates was a bit of a player in his day. Awesome? Awesome.

In sports, the only thing a player can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

Personally, I think that if I do everything right, things work out right. When things don’t work out right, and I honestly look at my planning and execution, there’s always something I boned.

Maybe something small, maybe something large, doesn’t matter.

In seeing that something went wrong, I have no excuse- the reason that something went wrong was that I didn’t work hard enough. And, when I double down and give it enough goes, eventually something does work.

People who don’t whine are punching bags. They just go about their days, their jobs, their lives, knowing there is nothing they can do to change a darn thing, so why say a word? They see no reason to whine because they know they are incapable of effecting change. Call me a whiner any day.

This is a great distillation of an idea I always fumbled around, but couldn’t articulate well enough. If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap.

A big startup challenge is defining a core competency in the first place.

Most businesses happen upon their product with iteration. When they hit product/market fit it’s not always entirely deliberate- they’re trying different things, trying different things, then one thing takes off. Whoa! That worked! Awesome! Money’s coming in! Aaaand now we’re building a business around it.

Companies that iterate to success only define their core competency 1-2 years into the business -and only once that core competency is defined can a business can really start scaling.

“I don’t think it’s good that Apple is perceived as different. I think it’s important that Apple is perceived as much better.

If being different is central to doing that, then we have to do that. But if we can be much better without being different then that’s fine with me. I want to be much better. I don’t care about being different. We’ll have to be different in some ways to be much better. But that’s the prize. Wouldn’t you agree?” – Steve Jobs

I’m an automated pessimist.

Most of humanity sucks at estimating- I usually do pretty damn well. I know my multiple.

Most people are always off by a multiple.  2x, 3x- each person has their own personal margin of wrongness, and boy, is it consistent.

What I’ve found in financial projections, product plans, growth numbers, and thinking up new ventures is that I’m a 2x person. I’m incredibly accurate as soon as I halve my internal estimate.

Two $100/day new products? Divide by two, two $50/day new products! Update should take two weeks? It’ll take four! Revenue should X by Y?

Double it!

Entrepreneurs are always optimistic- that’s how you get a product from idea to protype to release and, eventually, success. However, that optimism also makes for shit planning processes.

Take your optimism, find your multiple, and process your optimism into accuracy.

Lots of startupy folks talk about ‘Minimum Viable Products’, helpfully capitalized and abbreviated to ‘MVP’. This confuses sports people.

Whatever.

The idea is that your first version should be the REALLY first version. Anything that isn’t crucial to your core concept should be jettisoned into Version Infinity.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that it’s easy to talk a good game about MVPs, but incredibly difficult to followthrough.

If you have a good idea, though, you have enormous margin to play around with. In fact, that’s how I would define a great idea. A great idea is something so awesome, you can’t screw it up.

We’ve never released a first version of Free Books with font resizing or night mode. The first version on iPad didn’t even have search. Why? We already had collections!

Free Books = the easiest way to discover, download, and read books on the planet. Everything else? Screw it! That’s what updates are for.

With Browser+ we set out to build a full-screen browser that doesn’t suck. All our competitors take desktop browsers, throw em on a multitouch screen, and call it a day. Lazy, boring, and slow. We decided to focus on building a great fullscreen browsing experience.

Toolbar is hidden on the side of the screen- swipe from the side to pull it out! Want Most Visited and Visual History? Just pull the toolbar farther. Where’s the address bar? Swipe from the bottom! It’s just you and the internet- no interruptions. See a link you want to read? Long hold it, and it’ll come up in an Overlay. Read it, close it, you’re right back where you were, no loading, no refreshing.

That clarity of purpose let us jettison basic features like tabs and even bookmarking. The very first version of Internet Explorer had that! Yup. It’s a great feature. But it’s also not integral to making a great full-screen browsing experience. That’s why it’s going in our first update! Just not in the first version.

By making the decision to cut things as basic as search in a book app and bookmarking in a browser, we prove our ideas. If it’s really a great idea, people will put up with a lot- and let you know what sucks! With that feedback you can prioritize. We thought people would want tabs more than bookmarking. Turns out, by a margin of 400 emails, the answer is a resounding ‘bookmarking first!’.

That saves us time, that saves us energy, and it lets us start generating revenue while working on implementing bookmarking first.

Bottom line- Minimum Viable Products are supposed to suck. If you can’t identify a key way in which your first release blows, you haven’t cut enough. Cut more. Cut deep. Cut until you’re embarrassed. If 40% of people don’t hate your product in the first version, you launched too late.

If 100% of people hate your product in the first version now you know the problem- your idea sucks!

The best most profitable progress is without fail, boring.

Whenever’s something’s in the labs and there’s a video of it, it’s whiz-bang. A monkey controlling a computer… with its mind! Cool! You can imagine, though, that in reality that would mostly be used to send SMS messages in a meeting while zoning out.

There was a great TED video a while back about turning the internet into a Sixth Sense- you wear a necklace around your neck with a projector, and then interact with that projection in real life. Whoa! Cool! Ooh and aah!

The reality of it is a lot more mundane- no one’s going to wear a freaking internet projecting necklace. It’s hard enough to get someone to buy your stuff, it’s a whole other ballgame when your product makes it harder to get laid.

Evolutionary imperatives places pretty strict limits on hardware design.

There was another TED video, this one for multitouch- again, oohs and aahs all over the place. The demo was drawing with multiple fingers, resizing images, all the generic touch-screen-that-doesn’t-suck demo gestures. That was 2006, and it’s now been productized into the iPad. And, truth be told, it’s a pretty boring device. Nothing flying around in space, no table of images scattered all over the place, no built-in drawing app with the express purpose of painting with all of your fingers at once. The reality is, organization is good when browsing large amounts of pictures, and it’s hard enough to draw with one finger at a time.

To my right is a Magic Trackpad. It recognizes ten fingers of input in real-time and has completely replaced my use of the mouse. I have software that lets me tie gestures to hotkeys, creating massive potential for customizing the hell out of my work environment. Things flying around? A new multitouch language to replace the keyboard? Conversations taking place in tap-speak?

Nah, I mostly use it for tab navigation. Three fingers to the right to tab right, three to the left to tab left, three up to open a tab, three down to close the tab. It’s freaking amazing. I love it! It speeds up browsing like crazy, and I can’t imagine going back to a mouse. Years of massive research and development, all so I can manage my tabs in Safari a bit better.

The real products and real businesses occur at 30% of the demo- when you see folks ooh and aah’ing there’s always a great business to be had by making that advancement more mundane– and useful.

Our business isn’t amazing page turning algorithms, gyroscopic 3D book browsing, or breakthrough real time machine-learning book recommendation algorithms. Its taking books that have been digital for 20 years and making them way easier to browse, download, and read. That’s it. It’s what’s lead to our apps being in the Top 10 of Books for a year straight, and having a Top 100 iPad app since the day of launch.

While competitors made sweet page turning animations, we put together collections to make book browsing easier. Instead of making our own animation, we just used Apple’s built-in one. Guess what? Most folks don’t care. By focusing on nailing the 30% of demo we’ve succeeded- and profited.