Category Archives: The Hawaii Project

Books, Startups, The Hawaii Project

William Gibson, Startups and Verbs

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So, I’m reading Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years, Gibson is novelist who famously spawned the Cyberpunk movement and coined the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer, 30 years ago. And gone on to write many thoughtful, wonderful books. While he’s inspired a generation of technologists, he doesn’t focus on startups. But Distrust That Particular Flavor (his only non-fiction book) has some interesting insights on the startup process (it’s packed with non-startupy insights as well!).

Why do serial entrepreneurs do it? Who puts themself through all that pain by choice, knowing the odds are they’ll fail? Gibson, although he’s writing about writing for a living, has the answer, which utterly captures the joy of a piece of working code or a business that’s starting to work:

The distinction I was making wasn’t between paid versus unpaid, exactly. It wasn’t about whatever sum might be involved. It was about a certain demonstration of agency. ….. Either someone whose rent was paid by their job of selecting stories, someone for whom it actually mattered, could be induced by my words on a page to buy my story, or they couldn’t. This seemed like magic to me, and still does. As if the right runes, scratched in the dirt, could produce a bag of groceries. Once you’ve managed to do this successfully, doing it again isn’t quite so much about the groceries as about the peculiar wonder of it.

So if we want to produce that wonder, we need a startup that resonates with people. That they readily associate with your service. I once advised a fellow entrepreneur that he needed to remove all the actions from his startup, except for one button. One key action. The ultimate in clarity for the user. That is what this thing does. Hard to achieve, but the right goal. Gibson has a take on that (this is in 1989, mind you).

A BBC executive working on another vision of interactive television offered me a tour of a small research facility in San Francisco. He was interested in having me ”do” something with this new technology. The lab we visited was devoted to… well, there weren’t verbs. I looked at things, watched consoles as they were poked and prodded, and nobody there, it seemed, could even begin to explain what it was I might be doing if I were to, uh, do, one of these projects, whatever it was. It wasn’t writing, and it wasn’t directing. It was definitely something, though, and they were certainly keen to do it, but they needed those verbs.

You’ve heard it said that startups are a search for a business model. And that’s not a bad way to look at it. But for a consumer startup, ubiquity is all. To become ubiquitous, people need a “verb” for you. Or at least a one word mental construct they associate with you, even if they don’t say it out loud. Google is famously a verb now. Foursquare is “check in”. Pinterest “Pins” things.

What’s your verb?

(btw: The Hawaii Project is demoing at Mass Innovation Nights. If you like what we’re up to, we can use your vote, here: http://buff.ly/1hWR6Ay).

Books, The Hawaii Project

The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi

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wThe Water Knife is an extremely interesting near-future, post-apocalyptic take on the water problems faced by the American Southwest.

Angel Velasquez is a Water Knife – a vicious and not-quite-amoral enforcer who helps Catherine Case control the water supply from the Colorado river, on which everyone downriver depends. Lucy Monroe is a Pultizer-nominated investigative journalist poking all the wrong people in Phoenix and California. Maria is a desperately poor migrant who’s made her way to Phoenix. When Angel is sent from Vegas to Phoenix to get his hands on some water rights, their paths collide in a brutal and violent exploration of what people will do to each other because of poverty, desperation,  extreme conditions or just plain evil.

While The Water Knife lays this water shortage at the feet of man’s development and climate change, it turns out this isn’t the first time the Southwest has undergone drought. In fact drought led to the migration and eventual disappearance of the ancient Anasazi, the creators of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. That drought created enormous social upheaval, migration and violence (a subject I covered a bit here  and here, including extremely brutal mass killings and cannibalism).

The Water Knife is a great read, no matter your point of view about climate change, urban development or water usage in the California and the southwest. It recalls the best of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer (is Catherine Case named after Case, the anti-hero of Neuromancer?). It’s an all-too-plausible extrapolation of the challenges facing California (often mis-reported as saying California will be out of water in a year). It’s a classic sci-fi/noir with a Southwestern flair. It’s an exploration of whether mankind is inherently evil, and a reminder that civilization might be a thin veneer over our violent natures. And it’s a fast, enjoyable read.

Bacigalupi’s characters occasional veer a little to close to stereotypes (the bad guy redeemed by a woman, the muckraking journalist), but those are minor quibbles. Great read, and thought provoking.

If you’re wondering what to read next after The Water Knife, head over to this page: http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/what-should-I-read-next-after–The-Water-Knife–46654. And in the non-fiction category, consider Cadillac Desert, a history of water in the southwest which features prominently in The Water Knife.

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.