Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements: It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; and it’s highly demanding mentally. It is far different than the general notion of “practice makes perfect.” Instead of repeating a task over and over again in your comfort zone, deliberate practice requires that you identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be advanced and then work intently on them.

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Seth advice for start ups

• Prepare for the dip. Starting a business is far easier than making it successful. You need to see a path and have the resources to get through it.
• Cliff businesses are glamorous but dangerous.
• Projects exist in an eco-system. Who are the other players? How do you fit in?
• Being the dumbest partner in a room of smart people is exactly where you want to be.
• And the biggest of all: persist. Do the next one.

full article here

What we learned from Fashmatch

We are 300k shy of the 1million user generated outfit suggestions at Fashmatch, a personal goal of mine, but we won´t be able to make it. As of today, we will be forced to close our shop and with it to halt this project that aimed to revolutionize the way people get conductive to purchase fashion advice.
I am tempted by my ego to put all the blame on the economic crisis and say that Fashmatch is just one of those small shops victims of risk aversion and illiquidity, but that is simply not true. The external factors are just one in many determinants and at the moment it is the least instructive and valuable for me. I rather focus on what I could have done different in order to build a company that although immersed in uncertainty, could effectively coup with risk and deliver the goods regardless of the external adversities.
Here are some of the main reasons I think we failed to take Fashmatch to the next step:
1. Fine tuning versus exploring new grounds: At fashmatch we had, as I constantly repeated to anyone who would listen, a small but very active early adopter user base. With over 20 page views per user, close to 2 million page views, an average of 3 outfit suggestions per user and close to 20 minutes per session, users clearly enjoyed Fashmatch. Our challenge from early on was to move from this point to critical mass adoption, but we failed to accomplish this goal. The reason, I think, is because we decided to give priority to creating new features rather than fine tuning the ones we had. We said to ourselves that in order to leapfrog into a massive audience we needed easier to use features that will attract less engaged yet more mainstream users. But what happened is that the same old users kept coming back to our main application while the new applications barely brought new users. Underlying this decision was the notion that we had maxed out our early adopter audience. After watching how things played out at some of our competitors’ sites, that assumption proved to be false. In retrospective, I believe that our reasoning was supported by a “stronger leg” logic: we were better and felt more comfortable creating new features for the site than we were on fine tuning it. Every time we tried a fine tuning tactic we failed (that was our weak leg), while every time we tackle a “new features” tactic we had limited and small yet measurable success. Even though the strategy was not the right one, the tactics results kept pushing us the other way.
2. Lack of patience: As I have said in another post, we tend to confuse the speed at which tactics yields results on the Web with the speed at which strategy can yield its results. Tactics works fast: you can add an “invite friends” button and right then and there see if it’s working or not. Strategy always takes time: to move buyers from offline to online shops, to move communication from one medium to the other, all of these efforts take time to play out. I believe we were unable to commit to our fine tuning strategy also in part because we submitted it on an unrealistic (appropriate for tactics) timeframe. Persistence does not immediately include patience and without it, it can turn into disoriented efforts.
3. To get US funding, you need to be in the US: We set up a development office in South America and the idea was for me to stay in the US, doing Biz.Dev and capital rising. I never quite managed to make this work. I had to spend lots of time with the coders to make sure things worked out the way we needed. From abroad it became increasingly difficult to raise money.
4. More likely than not, you need more than one founder, or an early employee that complements you strategically: point no.2 was greatly reinforced by the fact that I had to run both operation and business. If I had a co founder who could take care of ops, I would have had more time to focus on fund raising which, as everyone will tell you, consumes more resources that you might think.

On the other hand, I started Fashmatch with a set of preconceptions that have been validated and that I believe also deserved to be shared:

1. Social media can empower a more conductive to purchase experience
2. Great web products don´t need lots of money to get off the ground and in front of users/consumers
3. Frugality has always proved to be a good business practice
4. Hard work is more important than knowledge and whit and often is the best way to acquire and preserve both.
5. Listening is more difficult and more important than talking. Listening to your consumers and understand what they want (this includes analytics) is the key ability of any business person.
6. Determination, hard work, flexibility and optimism are the key character features of any great entrepreneur.

Thanks everyone for sharing Fashmatch with us. These are times of reflection, but they won’t last long. Sooner than later the lessons learned need to be put in good use.

Food for thought

Om shares this great quote from Jeff Bezos:

“Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible”

• willingness to be misunderstood: Do not let yourself be defined by trends.
• Long term orientation: Strategic clarity is a must.
• Willingness to repeatedly fail: Failing is good. Find a way to finance failure from the get go.

Why we need content curators and who should do it

There may be more, but at as far as I can tell, the main reason we need to curate content is because of information overload, and the main factor that makes it possible is social media.

According to Steve Rubel,

Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.(-link)

According to the OLPC wiki page,

Comparison and critique of shared work leads naturally to grouping and curation

The current model assumes that digital content curators must be people driven to curate content. Again, according to Steve Rubel;

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.

I for one, disagree with this view, which assumes there is some sort of collective action problem around curatnig content because the curated content is a public good. In short, a public good is one where the individual has little to no incentive to create because he cannot exclude other from using it and hence he cannot charge for it, so is all cost and very little benefit. That it is usually at the heart of collective action problems, where a group want to get a problem solved (let say consumer want a lower price from milk) but the insentives are rather low to organize in comparison to the counterpart (the small group of milk producers).There is of course a solution to the low incentives and that is to pay people to curate content the way Mahalo does. But, as I said, I don´t believe that content curation need to be treated like a public good.

On the contrary, I believe that since we all suffer from information overload, we all have an incentive to solve our little island of information overload. And what´s more, we would all gain from exchanging our own curated work because from it we gain a less costly access to other domains of information. In this issue the key is to make an  easy to use tool to curate content and a close to zero cost information exchange platform.

Of course, there will be some that will free ride, but their freeriding will be proportional to their information overload so my take is that it would be marginal.

The task then is to create the curating tools and the exchange platform in order to combat information overload by re organizing content.

We´re Not Gossiping. We´re Networking

Why Mag.nolia and Reddit are going distribuited?

Muhammad Saleem of Mashable thinks that Mag.nolia open source move is a clear sign that bookmarks are dying. Saleen carries his claim as far as to saying that “all that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past”. However, for him social news sites like Digg and Reddit should do better:

“As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious”.

But then news came that Reddit also is taking the open source route. According to Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman, users are demanding more transparency: “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page” (via – mashable). So now what we have are the two second place players in each sector going open source. They both bet on a distributed model to generate the critical mass that way two leads, Digg and Delicious, have. Clearly, Mag.nolia going open social cannot be in itself a sign of social bookmarking decline.

Yet, the discussion between social news and social bookmarking is still pertinent. Evidently Digg, the lead in social news is significantly bigger than Delicious, the lead on social bookmarking. There are probably several reasons why this is the case, but as far as I can tell this are the main ones:

1. It is easier to consume content at Digg that it is at Delicious. On the long run one must expect 1% of users creating content, 2% interacting with it (voting, commenting) and 97% reading it/consuming it. Unlike Delicious, at Digg content can be partially read on the site and comments are one click away. Also at Digg the interface makes it easy to scan and skim through various headlines.
2. The primary purpose to “digging” a story is to have it read by a wide audience. I have the impression that the primary reason people bookmark on delicious is to (a) keep their bookmarks online (not social related) and (b) to share it with their friends. At the most you may want to check out someone´s delicious page if you think he is a qualified influencer, but that´s about it.
3. People can game Digg easier that they can game Delicious. There is a clear and strong structure of incentives to ask others to “Digg” your stories, hence driving traffic.

None of the handicaps Delicious suffers are structural in a technical level. Rather, the first two are user interface related while the third one is “in-built viral mechanisms” related. All of them can be added to the Delicious without changing their core offering. Hence, we don´t see Digg size as a strong enough proof that social news will thrive and social bookmarking will be doomed.

Still, if Delicious where to upgrade making it easy to “consume” content, could Delicious generate the critical mass the Digg has amassed? Other way of putting this is: what is the value differentiator of social bookmarking when we compared it to social news sites?

Digg is a popularity contest while Delicious is re organizing the web. The first has the challenge to remain a cool way to find interesting news while the second has the challenge of adding value to the “passive” user. The value differentiator for Delicious is that it is simple and more versatile. Digg, as it is now conceived, is restricted to novelty and freshness. Delicious, if widely adopted not only as a bookmarking site but as a content (source) discovery destination, it can provide an alternative “information organizer” on the web.

Certainly the buzz has gone from social bookmarking to other places, but I still hold high hopes for this sector.

All we need is just a little patience

Seth Godin has a great post about what it takes to make it on the web. His take is that, as with everything else in life, it takes persistence and patience. I often here from entrepreneurs, bloggers and investors that success on the web is all about persistence and endurance. I myself feel that is the case. But I also feel that results must come fast and that if the fail to come promptly, then what we have is a looming failure. The truth is that great companies with life changing products take time to build. According to Seth, the reason we feel the web must deliver quick successes or failures is because tactics works pretty fast in this industry of ours. Tactics are the “meat” of the strategy, which itself refer to the general game plan you are following. In the game Risk, strategy is the goal you set to conquer one specific continent first, while your tactics are every move you make in order to fulfill that goal. A good “tactics on the web” example Seth shares on his post is: “You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.” Tactic on the web work like that. That makes it easy for bloggers and investors to spot fast rising stars. But it is also a warning sign that we must not confuse good tactics with the right strategy for our business. To get the strategy right…well…it takes time. To change from one strategy to the other well…it take a lot of effort and determination. But if you want to go from the next 100 user that may or may not stick around to the next million users that stay along for the ride one need to give a good deep though at the overall strategy of the business.

What´s cool and what´s not cool about Digg

One of the coolest Digg.com features is the non duplicate control on submissions. The way it works is that Digg check submissions against already submitted content and sees if yours is significantly similar to anything that is already up. If it is, Digg will show you what that content is, letting you decide whether to post it or not. From that point on, Digg could put you on a watch list and match the submission (I have submission way too much, haven´t I?) against spam complains to “burry” the story or delete your account.

Duplicate content is all around us, including at Google. News search for example often return several links from different sources with the same news just because all of them are more popular (PageRank and all other criteria they might use) then the next news.  Digg solution to duplicate content makes it way more easy to read and digest.

What I don´t like about Digg is that It focuses on popularity rather than on quality of content and hence it is subject to gaming.

What Digg and Google have in common is that they are both content aggregators and those are not doing a great job at dealing with information overload.

Content needs a curator. Mahalo is a man powered army of curators focusing on various niches. Wikipedia is non profit venture on the same vein. Delicious is a curator of content sources but not of content. The question is whether content can be curated in both a decentralized as well as for profit way.

The problem with tags

I have been reading for a while various post on tags and bookmarking sites. As far as I can tell there are two main objections to tagging and in particular to the bookmarking sites that rely on them: the first one concerns the folksonomy method of content organization and the other the structure of incentives to add and share tags (think about bookmarking services like delicious, magnolia, et al). Let’s start with the first.

Folksonomy is a non hierarchical organization system based on common usage of words. A taxonomy made by the regular folks like you and me. The main advantage of using tags is that people can organize content in a way that is both personalized as well as constructed on popular and common usage. The problem is that tags might be too loose for an organizational format. Among other things, content ordered by loose tags often has problems of polysemy, synonymy, and depth (specificity) of tagging.

Lets imagine someone tags a specific content with “apple”: are they talking about the fruit, the company or The Beatles record label? In this case we face a problem of polysemy. But even if there are a clear univocal definitions available, different people may use different synonymous to tag content. For example, I might use “car” while someone else use “automobile”. Finally, levels of specificity may very across tags. I might tag something as “technology” while others might tag it “microprocessor”. Other challenges include acronyms as well as plural/singular tags.

The other main issue is the structure of incentives to collect (e.g., bookmark) and tag content. In short, when bookmarking sites become popular, people bookmark and tag content not according to their surfing habits using relevant tags but rather with the purpose of “gaming” the bookmarking system in order to provide relevance to links they want to drive traffic to. This renders the bookmarking system irrelevant.

More to the point, even if people where not gaming the system and even if we could agree on a level of hierarchy so that some sort of pre define structure can be provided to tags, tags and bookmarks still remain sob optimal methods to deal with information overload. At some point, we are going to get more content per tag that we can digest.

Clearly dealing with the challenges tags and bookmarks face can go a long way, but certainly at some point there we are going to face more content that that we could possible digest.

As far as I can see, if we can get tags to deal seamlessly with the challenges I just described then they are bound to add great value in the efforts to deal with information overload. But the story won´t end there. We need a more fundamental approach to the problem in order to provide a more sustainable solution.