I’ll be heading to Vegas twice in the next six weeks for two different conferences. The first one is the Digital Signage Expo February 24-26 where my boss at Treefort and I will be showing off Screenfeed, a new service we’ve developed to deliver fresh content to digital signage networks.
The second conference I’ll be attending is MIX. I was lucky enough to win one of Scott Hanselman’s Twitter contests for a free pass and after getting the necessary approvals from my boss and wife, I booked the trip. I’m extremely excited for it. If you’re going to be at MIX and you read this blog, let me know in the comments so we can meet.
I was lucky enough to be able attend Startup School last April. If you don’t know what Startup School is, it’s a yearly conference put on by Y Combinator (an early-stage seed funding company) dedicated to covering all the topics related to running a startup. While my company doesn’t necessarily qualify for the Y Combinator definition of ‘startup’, there’s a lot of startup-like qualities to it, so I was hoping to learn some useful things to help me run a better business.
Some of the talks immediately resonated with me. David Heinemeier Hansson’s now legendary talk was the perfect blend of funny, practical and inspiring. If you haven’t watched, you should stop reading this and go watch it right now. I was eagerly looking forward to Paul Graham’s talk (watch the video or read the essay derived from the talk) but, at the time, ended up being a little disappointed. It didn’t hit home with me. Oh well, the rest of the conference was excellent.
Ten months later, I can’t shake the Paul Graham talk. I re-watched it. I’m not sure what it was, but I missed the point the first time. Paul’s point was simply “be good.” His first example was Craigslist. If you look at the way their web site and company is structured, Craigslist is run the way you would run a classifieds site as a charity. Yet Craigslist is immensely successful. In essence, Paul is saying that your goal should be to build things people want that only exist to serve their needs and not yours and if you do this well, you’re inevitably going to be successful anyway.
This got me thinking about past projects I’ve worked on. And guess what? The most successful web site I’ve ever built was made out of the desire to be good. I built it in my spare time, for an organization I volunteered for, with no intentions of ever making any money from it. Relative to the size of the organization, the site has incredible traffic. I get constant compliments on it. It helped me land every web development job I’ve had. It was the prototype for my company’s first product. For my career, its the most important site I’ve ever built. And it’s for a softball league.
I haven’t done a very good job of translating the success of that site into a successful product. I’m fanatical about trying to build user-friendly applications. Even still, when I turned the softball site into something other people could use in exchange for money, too many times I made a decision favoring making money instead of making users’ lives better. Now I’m spending time going back and fixing those things instead of spending my time building new features.
Every day I deal with clients who want a web site built or enhanced to meet a business requirement. Too often though (actually, almost always) their motivations are misguided. They want to change X and Y to sell more product or register more users under the guise of improving the user’s experience with their site. In actuality they only want the changes made for the purpose of achieving some end game that benefits only the company and not the user. Except that it doesn’t end up benefitting anyone; if you’re not providing real value to the user, you won’t have users for very long. Thankfully though, if you’re a consulting company, this can be a very profitable cycle (so long as the client doesn’t blame you for the lack of success).
I’ve previously mentioned a side project I’m working on (more details coming very, very soon) that I’m building for a very specific community of users that are very near and dear to me (and if you’re reading this blog, probably you too). With this project, and any changes I make to my products, I’m constantly reminding myself to “be good.” When I encounter a difficult decision, trying to be good makes it surprisingly easy to decide which direction to go. Now if I could only convince clients.
