All posts by Mark

I’m the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Previously I was responsible for Product Strategy and Product Management at Telenav, after they acquired goby. Prior to that I was the ceo of Goby, since acquired by Telenav. Before that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music. (What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Books, Travel

House of Rain, by Craig Childs

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Not long ago, I returned from a fantastic trip to the Southwest with old friends. We hiked and explored many of the key ruins of the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as is the currently accepted term) — Mesa Verde, Hovenweep and Chimney Rock, one of the northernmost outposts of the Chacoan empire. You can read more about our trip here.

Inspired by our trip and on the recommendation of my friend Thomas, I went after House of Rain, by Craig Childs, to gain more perspective on what we’d seen. House of Rain is ~500 page exploration of the world of the Anasazi. The Anasazi built a vast empire in the American Southwest with a complex culture, amazing cliff dwellings and stunning pottery, only to mysteriously disappear from the scene around 1300AD. Childs set out to explore, and perhaps solve, this mystery.

Awhile back there was a management school of thought called “Management by Walking Around”. Childs is from the “Archaeology by Walking Around” school. His (and others’) theory is that the Anasazi were an inherently nomadic people, in spite of the magnificent cliff dwellings they built. And his further assertion is that you can only really understand them by following them through the terrain. If you’ve ever been in the southwest, you know it’s a bleak, harsh, byzantine, but ultimately stunningly beautiful land, filled with mountains, rivers and a maze-like set of canyons littering the landscape. House of Rain is Child’s travelogue as he explores the vast landscape of the Southwest, mostly on foot and often at real personal danger. He starts at Chaco Canyon, the epicenter of the Chaco culture, then moves north to Colorado, east to Utah, South to Arizona, and eventually into Mexico. Along the way we’re treated to equal parts nature travelogue and deeply scholarly archaeology.

Childs is a modern day Indiana Jones — one moment he’s swimming a flash flood in Chaco Canyon, the next exploring the evolution of pottery patterns over time in a museum. One of the more recent discoveries is that the Chaco empire built roads in the desert running fifty miles or more in a straight line, connecting settlements with both roads as well as mountain-top signal fires straight out of a scene from the Lord of the Rings movie. Childs walks these roads and explores the canyons, and the beauty and desolation of the Southwest comes to light.

Along with his athletic explorations, Childs brings a deep knowledge of the scholarship of the southwest to bear on his tale. As he travels the southwest, he’s moving both through the migration paths of the Anasazi as well as moving through time. The Anasazi periods have very distinct pottery styles that identify region of origin, time of origin, even individual potters. Childs tells the story of the evolution of pottery and architecture over time and shows how it documents the migrations of the time. Materials sampling of pottery and human remains show pots and human remains that came from hundreds of miles away.

As the drought of the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made life ever more difficult for the Anasazi, migration and social upheaval increased greatly. It’s well documented that were mass murders, religious warfare and ritual cannibalism during that time. Childs relates the studies of Ernandes, that have shown a corn-only diet can lead to malnutrition, and in the extreme to OCD, aggression and even mystical states of ecstasy. It’s considered a possibility that the corn-only diet of religious priests may have led to documented mass sacrifices amongst the Aztecs, Toltecs, and the Anasazi. To quote Childs:

Ernandes did not leave the Southwest out of the study, mention-
ting a fervor that swept the Anasazi landscape. Terribly disfigured
human skeletons have been found from that time, bones polished by
cooking, heads severed. The authors of this study believe that corn
could have been a factor — that dementia could have occurred on a
cultural level.

(The upheaval of the Southwest during this time of drought is an interesting phenomena given the drought that’s occurring today in the Southwest and California in particular.)

Childs book is a fascinating exploration of a little-known time and place in the history of the Americas. And if you live anywhere in the southwest, it’s right under your nose. As for Child’s solution to the mystery of the disappearance of the Anasazi? Well, you’ll have to read the book.

Books, Startups, The Hawaii Project

Introducing What Should I Read Next

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So, I’m currently reading The Water Knife, an extremely interesting near-future take on the water problems faced by the American Southwest. (The ancient Anasazi has the same problems but that’s a different blog post). Post-apocalyptic climate change fiction with a healthy dose of William Gibson-esque cyberpunk. Great read, no matter your point of view about climate change. Shortly I’ll be done with it, and facing the inevitable “what should I read next” question.

Well here at The Hawaii Project you know we’re all about great book recommendations, finding great books you’d never find on your own. We’re excited today to introduce a new feature, “What Should I Read Next”. Now, to be honest, this has been done before. But not well. Let’s show you in action how different and better our results are.

The most well known approach is Amazon’s “Customers who bought this also bought that”. For the Water Knife, Amazon tells me

  • buy other books by the same author (BORING! + I’ve already read his earlier books!), or
  • get Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (a space disaster movie, nothing to do with climate change, and so well-promoted, if you read Science Fiction you’ve heard about this book already).

Goodreads at least doesn’t show me books by the same author, but does show me 4 or 5 space operas with nothing in common with The Water Knife. None of these recommendations is really very interesting or relevant.

Let’s check out The Hawaii Project. If you want to know what to read after The Water Knife, we’ve got you covered.

We’re recommending Rivers, by Michael Farris Smith. (“In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy, Larry Brown, and James Lee Burke, Rivers is an enthralling, darkly beautiful novel set in Mississippi against the backdrop of a series of devastating storms that pummeled the American South in the years since Hurricane Katrina. In the near future, a climate shift has caused massive damage to the Southeastern United States…”).

Now we’re talking. A near future climate change adventure story. Spot on. And totally generated by the system, so this same quality of recommendation is available for any book, without human intervention.

And we’re recommending Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch, a near future cyperpunk post-apocalyptic novel you probably haven’t heard of, but which is getting nominated for awards and getting rave reviews from other authors. And we’re recommending Jonathan Lethem’s near-future classic, Gun, With Occasional Music — it’s not just new books, or books we want to sell you, it’s the right books.

So much more interesting and valuable.

What makes our approach different? The Hawaii Project is unique in that it identifies what books the influencers and tastemakers are writing about, and so we can identify when two books are written about together — a very strong signal that the two books are related to each other. We also take into account what the book is about, rather than simply whether people who bought this also bought that — a very weak signal that the books are related.

Give it a whirl with your favorite book. What Should I Read Next?

Books, Favorites, Music, Startups, The Hawaii Project

The Limits of Social Discovery

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This is the second post in our continuing series on how and why The Hawaii Project recommends great books, and more broadly the key ingredients in a good discovery or recommendation system.

In our last post, we argued that the “ratings & review” model for decision making and discovery is corrupt and broken.

Today we’ll explore the limits of another common approach, Social Discovery.

Social Discovery is in use across the web. TripAdvisor will tell me if one of my friends has stayed at a hotel I might be considering. Spotify will show me a continuous stream of what music my friends are listening to. Quibb is doing interesting things with social news reading. This approach can be quite helpful — if for nothing more than a bit of reassurance that the thing in question doesn’t suck.

And yet…..

Let’s have a look at my Spotify page and what my friends are listening to.

spotify

Foo Fighters (not interested). Radiohead (know all about it). Counting Crows (meh). Buffalo Springfield (nope). Sara Bareilles (nope). Epic Score (no clue who this is, and no context so I’d have to listen). Knowing what music my friends are listening to satisfies a certain voyeuristic tendency, and showing off what music I am listening to feeds my vanity and helps establish a “personal brand”. But it’s not that helpful for discovery — my friends don’t listen to the kind of music I do! (which is why Spotify leans harder on the personalized Browse feature for discovery).

What is a “discovery”? The key ingredients of a discovery are that it is personally relevant, interesting and surprising. That music above might have been interesting but it wasn’t relevant. Current discovery systems often don’t deliver on these key requirements.

In the context of book recommendations, if I read the first Game of Thrones book, Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought that” algorithm will happily tell me I should read the 2nd book in the series. Probably relevant but hardly surprising. Not a discovery. And the Goodreads model of “your friends read this so we’ll tell you about it” fails the “relevant” test. In large measure, my friends don’t read what I read.

It’s like the GEICO commercial: “Huh. did you know you can save 15% in 15 minutes?” “Everybody knows that!” (perhaps relevant but unsurprising). “well did you know the ancient pyramids were a mistake?” (the surprise). Discovery systems need to create that feeling of serendipity, creating that emotion of “wow, I never would have found that on my own”, and today’s engines often don’t.

Social discovery works when:

  1. my social graph and I have high alignment in interests, and/or
  2. the investment required to evaluate or consume is low.

Many services piggy-back their social networks off Facebook. That’s pretty much guaranteed to produce a social graph not aligned with my tastes. Just because I work with you doesn’t mean I like your movies, books or music. Quibb works because they are doing professional tech news, and the network itself is curated and piggy backs on Twitter. The graph is much more aligned to my professional news interests than my Facebook friends, and the news they read/share is therefore highly likely to be relevant. And the feed is high enough velocity the articles will likely be a surprise (that’s why they call it “news” folks — it’s new!). Further, it’s low-investment to take advantage of the articles. I just scan the headlines and click on what is interesting.

Spotify’s “social discovery” may not be highly relevant, but it does satisfy the second point — it’s low investment to taste some of that random stuff my friends listen to — I just push the play button and it’s free.

Social Discovery also requires the “velocity” of activity to be in a fairly narrow range. If the velocity is too low (I might only stay in a hotel a few times a year), the recommendations stream is too old or empty to be relevant. If the velocity is too high (say, Facebook posts), the stream rapidly becomes too big to manage and the items stop being interesting (sound like your Facebook feed?).

Lastly, socially-driven recommendations tend to be static. That recommendation for Book 2 of Game of Thrones is never going to change. If I go back to the Amazon page for Book 1 a year from now, I’ll get no new fresh insight — it’ll still be recommending Book 2 to me, although I knew that a year ago. What you want is a surprising recommendation, so if you come back a few days later you can get new ideas, and one you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.

If socially driven discovery systems have these challenges, what’s the alternative?

I am a big fan of curation. There are people (curators) who spend their time looking for interesting things and writing about them. Robert Scoble for Startups. Maria Popova for intellectual ideas and books. Jason Hirschhorn for Media. Pitchfork for Music. Aggregating their streams can produce something that is satisfies our last two requirements: that the items be interesting (because they’re curated) and surprising (because curators are always writing about something fresh and we’re aggregating those interesting items into a time-based stream that’s constantly renewed). But that aggregation won’t be sufficiently relevant. Not everything a given curator writes about will match your personal interests.

If we take those streams and layer on top of it a “picker” that grabs the personally relevant things, you will get a much more interesting, high quality stream of discoveries. I call this approach “Personalized Curation”. That is the approach we’re taking to book recommendations on The Hawaii Project, and you can see similar approaches happening in Music (Shuffler.FM and Apple Music), News (Flipboard, Quibb) and other areas.

Personally Relevant. Interesting. Surprising. Deliver on all three and you’ll get and keep your audience.

A personalized stream of Books & Articles from The Hawaii Project
Favorites, Goby, Startups, The Hawaii Project

Doing a consumer startup? You won’t make it without a daily use case.

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(this first appeared as a guest post on BostInno)

Common startup stories go something like this: the founder has a problem in their life, and creates a product to address it. Maybe they had trouble planning their vacation or couldn’t find a vegan restaurant. An example I encounter a lot is the so-called “things to do” problem. “I’m bored, I want to find something to do this weekend.” It’s alluring and sexy to tackle problems like this. They’re fun.

Here’s the harsh reality: Unless your product has a daily use case, you won’t make it.

I learned this the hard way. I was the co-founder of goby, a moderately successful “things to do” app. (Note: Consumer startups are “winner take all” – you either have tens of millions of users or you run out of money. A “moderately successful” consumer startup is one that doesn’t make it.) I’d like to share a bit of our path in hopes others can learn from it.

Goby started life at MIT with serious tech that produced highly structured, semantic data from the unstructured jungle that is the web. We set out to build a travel startup with a focus on events and activities – from concerts to beaches to hot air balloon rides. Events and activities is a multi-billion dollar market with no brand owning it. Our economic case was built on the affiliate/lead-gen model – we’d refer people to providers, be they hotels or tour operators, and take a 5-10 percent cut of the booking. And maybe run some ads.

We launched the company and had solid early success – press from Robert Scoble, TechCrunch, theNew York Times, you name it. We raised a reasonable amount of funding, and grew our audience to over one million monthly app/web visits. Not bad. Not enough. Even at that scale we couldn’t generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining, or to raise financing to keep the company going. Eventually we were acquired by Telenav, a publicly traded GPS Navigation company. It was a great run, but ultimately not a success.

The biggest challenge for a consumer company isn’t building a great product, it’s acquiring users.

A full post-mortem of those years is outside the scope of this article. I want to focus on one topic: the customer/product adoption lifecycle and what it means for your startup.

The biggest challenge for a consumer company isn’t building a great product, it’s acquiring users. Product, as hard as it seems, is the easy part. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to get a million people using your product. To get a consumer A round done, you need millions (plural) of users (or have proven monetization).

This is how early adopters experience your product: they read about it on, say, a BostInno article, or hear about it from an enthusiastic friend, and try it out. In our case, they’d say, “Oh, a cool new travel planner!” They try it out, then say to themselves, “next time I plan a trip, I’ll use that.” Here’s what we encountered: People travel twice a year (often to a place they already know). So when they had a need for goby, it’s been six months since they heard about us and they’ve forgotten!

Watching our analytics we saw people were searching for things to do in their local area, not travel destinations. So, we pivoted out of travel and into a local “weekend recommendations” angle. Our use case became more frequent, but still not daily. In principle people have free time every weekend. In practice, it’s often time spoken for – housework, family obligations and so on.

People are busy. They have a problem and want a solution quickly. If you’re top of mind when they have that need, you stand a chance. If your use case is twice a year, or even once a month or every other week, they’ll have forgotten about you by the time they need you. Ben Yoskovitz captured this “attention economy” admirably in his post Grabbing Attention and Holding Onto It.

If you’re doing a consumer startup with no clear revenue model and without a daily use case, just stop.

Look at the “unicorn” consumer companies; there’s a common thread. Snapchat? I communicate with my friends every day. Instagram? I take photos all the time. Dropbox? I save files every day. Pinterest? I bookmark things every day. Foursquare & Yelp? Yes I eat every day, and go places every day. Concerts? I go to a lot of concerts, but it’s still one every other month or so. By the time I want that information, I’ve forgotten about that cool new concert finder …

Are there exceptions? Yes. Do you have a clear and proven monetization path? You might be able to arbitrage (buy) your way to success, if your cost of acquisition is less than your revenue per customer.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re doing a consumer startup with no clear revenue model and without a daily use case, just stop. Pick a new problem, or find a way to convert your problem into something closer to daily. My new startup, The Hawaii Project, discovers great books for you to read. I know people don’t pick new books every day. So I’m focusing on providing topical, interest-driven news on a daily basis driven by your reading interests, to stay top-of-mind until that time comes. Find an angle where you have a reason to be in touch with your customer every day.

More broadly, it’s common to think of your product as your mobile app or website. In today’s context-driven world, this is the wrong way to think about it. Your real product is your first-time user experience and your contextual notifications and alerts. That is how people will engage with you and remember your app.

Deliver real value on a first time visit, proactively re-engage with them and you’ll earn their attention.

Books, Favorites, Search, Startups, The Hawaii Project

The “Ratings & Reviews” model is broken. There’s a better way.

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Reviews2
From restaurants (Yelp) to hotels (TripAdvisor) to books (Goodreads) to household goods (Amazon), the “ratings and reviews” model is everywhere. So much so that The Onion wrote a satiric article about a woman who dared to eat at a restaurant without reading the Yelp reviews.

But increasingly, the “ratings & reviews” model is perceived as broken and corrupt.

People believe reviews are manipulated on all fronts. They think businesses write bad reviews about their competitors. That businesses write good (but fake) reviews about their own businesses. That Yelp, for example, asks for money to suppress bad reviews (Yelp has been found not guilty in court). Businesses are at odds with customers over reviews: Fed-up restaurant owners fight back over Yelp reviews. Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor wage continual warfare over bad or fake reviews: Yelp Starts Showing Evidence Of Review Fraud.

There’s a lot of money at stake based on the outcome and incentives are skewed. This isn’t lost on consumers, who are increasingly cynical about the ratings and reviews they see online.

As a result, the “ratings & reviews” method of discovery and decision making is breaking down.

It’s not just restaurants and hotels. Closer to home for The Hawaii Project, the Books world has seen a number of scandals around purchased or fake book reviews, with a number of companies in the business of getting more reviews for a book (and they’re not going to be bad reviews!).

And even if the reviews aren’t fake, there’s an even deeper issue. They just aren’t that helpful in the end. Unless I have a relationship with the reviewer, I don’t know how to evaluate their review — do they share my tastes and values? No way to tell. They may not like something, not because it’s intrinsically bad, but just because it’s not for them (in the hotel space, studies have shown that most 1-star reviews are for bad service, but that most people value location and comfort much more than “service”). In the world of books, JoJo Moyes’ book Me Before You is rated 4.3/5.0 on Goodreads, with over 215,000 ratings and 30,000 reviews. Is it a good book? Probably so. Will I like it? Probably not. But I’m sure as hell not going to read 30,000 reviews to find out!

This isn’t helpful. The ratings and reviews decision-making model is busted. Too much noise, not enough signal. It’s time to replace it with something better.

In the music world, people often discover new music by listening to the curators.Pitchfork. Rolling Stone. The Radio. Your favorite DJ. Gramaphone Magazine.Apple’s new Beats music service leans hard on Curators. There are some great curators out there in other areas. Robert Scoble for Startups. Maria Popova for intellectual ideas and books. Jason Hirschhorn for Media. Even Kanye once called himself a curator! But who has time to keep up with all that?

The additional problem with books is that the curators’ tastes often don’t agree with your own, and the volume of books is so much larger. One minute The New York Times Review of Books is reviewing ‘‘Great Men Die Twice,’ a Collection of Sports Reporting by Mark Kram’, the next they are reviewing ‘Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing’ (a study of 17th century Dutch painting). Nothing whatsoever to do with each other, and neither interesting to me, personally. Imagine trying to figure out what to read by wading through all that!

Ratings and Reviews work when there is Trust and Context. Consumer Reports is useful because I trust them to be unbiased. My friend’s review of a restaurant works, not necessarily because I share their taste, but rather I have context for their opinion. I know them and how they think and what they like. On most major review sites in any domain, either Trust or Context (or both) are missing.

There’s a better way. I call it Personalized Curation.

Imagine if every day you had time to read what all the great curators and reviewers were recommending in your areas of interest, skipping the irrelevant things and highlighting the most personally interesting to you.

Systems that perform this “Personalized Curation” for you will become the norm over the next few years. People don’t have time to ready everything — there’s an explosion of content out there. You need some kind of agent who can assimilate all of that, and bring you the relevant bits. Because of the complexity of the problem, these agents will be domain specific. Music. Books. Movies. News. Hotels. And they will be contextual and pro-active. They’ll know you’re at the airport and need a great book for the flight, and bring it to you. They’ll know your wife’s birthday is coming up and bring you some great restaurant ideas.

This is beginning to happen. You can see the beginnings of it in music with Apple Beats and Shuffler.FM. Flipboard has been nosing around this for News for some time. And at The Hawaii Project, we’re doing it for books. If you’re looking for great books read, give us a whirl!

The Hawaii Project