Patrick Dobson

Thoughts on Christ, Technology, and Entrepreneurship from the Rust Belt in the Warren-Youngstown region of Ohio. var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-27443894-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[patrickdobson]

Love and Entrepreneurship

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. - 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

I recently finished reading How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's a classic book not just about business but about life. Carnegie uses a conversational style and a hefty dose of anecdotes to teach the reader the most valuable skill a business person can ever learn - how to handle relationships. From Carnegie's intro:

...investigations revealed that even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering - to personality and the ability to lead people.

Carnegie's book reads more like a book on etiquette than a book on achieving business success. Some of the chapter names include A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression, How to Interest People, A Drop of Honey, and What Everybody Wants. If those chapters sound like they might lead to overly simple answers, then you're thinking right. The book preaches the importance of smiling, listening closely to people, asking questions, leading the conversation towards the interests of others, and attempting to learn different points of view.

The answers are so simple, that its almost hard to believe them. As a software developer, I love unraveling complexity. The code that I dive into on daily basis satiates my desire to create elegant and automated solutions to complex tasks. To think that my ability to write a database query that joins 40 tables, returns 10,000 records, and executes in less than 100ms is less valuable than my ability to make eye contact during a conversation is completely counter intuitive.

It's also completely true.

As I dove into Carnegie's book and found insights amazing both for their value and their simplicity, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had encountered the same gravity and simplicity elsewhere. Of course, whenever I get an unshakable rumination, I know the source. So I went to my bible and opened to the verse that clearly inspired Carnegie's laws on winning friends:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” - Matthew 22:34-40

All of the laws of Christendom and all of the laws of winning friends and influencing people can be distilled down into a one-word, imperative sentence: Love.

What is it you are trying to accomplish? Are you writing software that you want millions of people to pay few bucks to use? Or maybe you're building something you want a few people to pay millions of bucks to use. Are you convincing a manager or recruiter to get you a job at Apple, Google, or Facebook? Or are you trying to build a startup that will disrupt an industry and free customers from the oppression of the incumbents?

Every single goal you have, whether you realize it or not, involves people. It doesn't matter what you're doing - if you're writing a new compiler or tweaking an SEO tactic or writing an iPhone app that sells condoms to the Amish - you're trying to inspire some action in people that will positively affect your goals.

There's a piece of advice that the apostle Paul gives in the bible that is sure to give you an edge in accomplishing these goals: Love never fails - 1 Corinthians 13:8.

And it shouldn't be hard to see why loving people is the best way to inspire them to act.

The love gap is the competitive advantage that every entrepreneur can most easily exploit. No matter what industry or market you're trying to enter, there is a massive love deficit. Customers are unloved. Employees are unloved. Co-founders are unloved. Love is probably the most under-served demand in industry today, and yet every single person on the planet instinctively yearns for it.

Google's mantra is "Don't be evil". Facebook's maxim is "Don't be lame". Presumably, both of these statements are about people - Don't be evil to the user, Don't be lame to employees, Don't be evil to our customers, Don't be lame with our partners. These are all negative calls to action for these companies - things not to do. When I read positive calls to action from companies, they're all selfish, vanilla, morale killing slogans like "Is this right for the company?".

The only message I've heard from a company that struck a cord with my love sensibilities came from Apple:

[Mike] Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company  - pg. 78, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Empathy is definitely a means of showing love, and being that Apple is the most successful business in the world right now, I'd say it's working for them. Still, there are many other aspects to love that Apple does not employ, and few companies do. What are some other ways that love can be used? Well, my home dog Paul has some more insights on that:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

So from now on, my business philosophy is a one-word, imperative sentence: Love.

I will love my clients. I will love my partners. I will love my recruiters. I will love my readers. I will love my co-founders. I will love my users.

This idea is simple, but it's not easy. Smiling and making eye contact, presenting a warm demeanor, using soft, inviting language is just the beginning - whether its an investor meeting or a landing page. Once you've inspired someone to open up to you, you need to carefully listen and ask the questions that will lead you to their pain points - and then you have to doggedly and unselfishly identify how to solve those pain points while sacrificing whatever you logically believe to be the most advantageous path for you. That's how you love.

Because of the difficulty, building a product or a business around this is terribly unpopular. This is why it's the most unexploited strategy in business. It's why all of the legacy code you pour over doesn't have any comments in it. It's why Facebook won't give you the data they collect on you. It's why Apple uses the patent system to kill innovation. It's why Google cozies up to copyright trolls rather than fight oppressive laws. It's why you can't get any of your pull requests on GitHub accepted.

It's a difficult strategy, but it is completely unexploited. So I'm moving into the love marketplace. I want to meet the demand for love that is not being met. It's great business - and it can't fail.

[patrickdobson]

Why Do We Let Politics Suck in the Information Age?

I know you hate politics. I know you would rather sit at your computer and read about the BHC or write a python script that organizes your music collection or build your own utopia in Sid Meier's Civilization. I would too. All of those things sound like more fun than following the farce that is the United States election process.

The problem is, the MPAA and the RIAA know you would rather do those things too. Comcast and Time Warner cable know that SXSW and TechCrunch Disrupt are far more interesting to you than the RNC and the DNC. Apple and Samsung's patent attorneys know that you could care less if Barack Obama or Mitt Romney was elected and that they'll get rich because of it. They all know that you don't want to participate in politics, and so they're going to use that to figure out how to eliminate Net Neutrality, workable copyright laws, a sane patent system, and a chance for foreign-born entrepreneurs to build startups in America.

So maybe it's time for developers and technophiles to start caring about politics.

When I watch the political theater of our election system play out, I can't help but wonder - in a country that has diverse centers of innovation like Silicon Valley, New York City, Austin, TX, and Pittsburgh, PA - how have politics have become so stagnated?

National conventions have been held to select a nominee for President since 1832 for the Democrats and 1856 for the Republicans. In the convention system, delegates from each state are chosen according to that state's rules, and those delegates convene at the Convention to vote for their party's Presidential nominee and for the ideological platform that will determine that Party's stance on the various issues.

Since about 1980, this selection process has been farcical at best. Once the primary system has declared a mathematical winner in the nomination process, every state delegation convenes and votes for that winner, regardless of how the people of that state voted. From Wikipedia:

A criticism of the current presidential primary election schedule is that it gives undue weight to the few states with early primaries, as those states often build momentum for leading candidates and rule out trailing candidates long before the rest of the country has even had a chance to weigh in, leaving the last states with virtually no actual input on the process. - Presidential Primaries

But, apparently, no one told the delegation from Maine at this year's Republican National Convention that they were supposed to fall in line with what was decided in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Maine State Convention chose Ron Paul as their nominee, and the delegates showed up to vote for him, and were then thrown out of the convention for their trouble:

I'm not sure what's funnier in that video - the overly dramatic behavior of the delegates or the sham the Republicans are intent on protecting.

Another example of political farce occurred at the Democratic National Convention when the party powers decided to amend the Party Platform without regard for the actual votes of the delegates.

So I get why we're all averse to politics - nothing I saw at the conventions made me want to participate. It's all a big sham.

But here's the thing: nothing that occurred at the political conventions was illegal. These are not government sanctioned events, and the US Constitution doesn't demand that they take place - political parties themselves aren't even mentioned in the US Constitution. If you think that they're ridiculous, then you're right for thinking that. Like so many crumbling roads and bridges throughout this country, like so many COBOL-driven, legacy government mainframes, like so many features of the patent and copyright system, political parties were created out of necessity in a time that has long-since passed and are no longer relevant in the Information Age.

Why is it that we would rely on conventions like these to select our candidates for us? How is it that the creativity that started Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is unable to find a better way to pick a President? Why are we focusing our collective development abilities on photo-sharing, date-finding, and spam filters when we could be using them to ensure that the internet remains free, innovation is protected rather than discouraged, and para-military forces aren't breaking into some entrepreneur's home to confiscate servers and hard drives?

We deserve something better, and in an era where technology has helped topple governments in Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, I have every belief that the same technology can fix our government. Those of us who know how to create and wield that technology should have far more say in how our political process works.

If you want to join the conversation on how to do this, use the comments in this post, discuss with me on Hacker News, tweet @PatrickDobson on Twitter, or email me at pat *at* pdobson *dot* com

[patrickdobson]

Facebook Should Not Fire Sheryl Sandberg - A Retraction

What is the value in having a conversation? In being part of a large conversation?

Well, I wanted to be a part of a big conversation, so I wrote an inflammatory blog piece last week to see if I could elbow my way into it. And I was successful at that.

After getting into the conversation, I have been convinced some of my thoughts were wrong - while other thoughts I have are emboldened. That is the great thing about peer review - it allows you to separate the chaff of your lousy ideas from the wheat of your good ones.

What I Got Wrong

Let's list out some facts:

I am a consultant developer from Warren, OH.

I have a B.S. in IT from The Rochester Institute of Technology

I earn a middle class income.

I have never had any employees, ever.

I have attempted to co-found 7 startups - all failures.

I have never met a single executive that works at Facebook.

Before Saturday (8/25/2012), I could not spell Sheryl Sandberg's name (Cheryl Sanberg)

Sheryl Sandberg is a Silicon Valley executive

She has a B.A. and an MBA from Harvard University

She made $30mm in 2011 and is a billionaire

She is partially responsible for over 3000 employees

She has helped build the ad business at Google and Facebook.

She has been called warm, nurturing, hardworking, and effective by many people.

So this begs the question - in what universe would I be given any authority to decide the employment future of Ms. Sandberg?

Thankfully, not this one.

So why did I write an article stating that she should be fired? The same reason that the tech blogosphere and the web in general is littered with inflammatory pieces like mine everyday:

The Fire Sandberg piece was by far the most trafficked article I've ever written. I've had probably a dozen blogs over the years on a myriad of topics from Nintendo to politics to TV and Movies, sports, technology, and creative writing. Nothing, so far, has been as effective at attracting eyeballs as calling for the corporate head of technology's favorite daughter.

So now I understand the temptation to be inflammatory, and I'm sorry to say that I have given in to that temptation. I pride myself on my integrity, but the piece that I wrote was not intellectually honest. The ideas were half baked, and the execution was sloppy. It's a shame that an article like that, of all the ones that I have written, was the most trafficked.

Another item that I got wrong was not making it clear that I don't think Facebook should just abandon their advertising business at the drop of a hat. They need to start running experiments with a developer friendly API for which they charge an access fee. If those experiments don't work, they should stick with advertising. If they do work, and the business grows, then they won't be a slave to advertising anymore - and that would be a good thing because advertising, no matter how unobtrusive, weakens the product.

What I Got Right

Some quotes from the piece that I am very proud of:

I agree with Zuckerberg completely. The true value that Facebook provides is not its ability to attract eyeballs or organize your photos or create pages to promote how pretty your cat is. The true value of Facebook is to create user experiences set within the backdrop of the social graph - something nobody else can do without Facebook’s permission.

[...]

When a company lacks a customer, the product is built for the user. The selection of a customer is the most important user experience decision a company makes. Pick the wrong customer, like advertisers, and the user experience is destined to get worse. Pick the right customer, and your business will grow to the delight of your users, instead of to their despair.

[...]

The point is simply this: Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. He was never interested in devising a way for Facebook to make money on the social graph. His instinct was to avoid the problem of monetization and focus on the Facebook product. So he empowered Sandberg to solve the problem. His instinct was correct - he needed to have someone else find a solution. However, he should have been empowering the developers building apps on the social graph to fix the problem - even if they had to pay for the right to do so. Those developers can then figure out if advertising, or micro transactions, or payed access is the best way to monetize the social graph.

The belief that selling access to the social graph cannot generate the revenue that advertising can is terribly misinformed. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Amazon, Gillette, Standard Oil, and Comcast are all examples of companies that invested heavily in user bases only to extract value from those user bases another way. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo sell their gaming hardware at a low margin or a loss so that they can make money on their own software sales and the licensing fees of the developers on their platform. Amazon uses their enormous web traffic to enable 3rd party sellers to sell into that traffic. Standard Oil gave away lamps in China to increase the demand for kerosene.

What all of these examples show is the massive variety of methods available to monetize a large user base. The methods mentioned in the Facebook Effect during the monetization bull sessions only began to scratch the surface. If the conversations at Facebook about monetization never got any deeper than that, then everyone involved in those meetings plus Zuckerberg should feel ashamed of themselves. That includes Sheryl Sandberg.

Can I sit here and say, absolutely, that Facebook would be better off selling access to their API for a business model? No, I can't. But that's the startup game - there are very few absolutes. What I can say with certainty is that they owe it to their investors, their employees, their users, and their industry to find out. And if the passages I quoted in my last piece are an exhaustive list of their ideas for monetization, then Sandberg, Zuckerberg, and everyone at Facebook has failed those stakeholders.

[patrickdobson]

Facebook Should Fire Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg became the chief operating officer of Facebook in March 2008. She came to the company at a time when it was still experiencing rapid growth and had yet to find an exacting monetization strategy. At Google she had excelled at selling online advertisements and growing Google into a cash gushing behemoth.

Having built an impressive resume at Google and charming the then 23-year old Mark Zuckerberg into making her COO, Sandberg took control of the monetization strategy at Facebook:

She had come to the company to turn it into an advertising powerhouse. She needed all her staff and peers on the [top management] team to work in synch. There was no question in her mind that Facebook represented one of the great advertising environments of all time. - The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick, pg. 256

Though she was brought to Facebook to help develop a monetization strategy, it was clear she came with her own pre-conceived biases. None the less, she assembled the top leadership at Facebook and they had meetings about the best path to monetization for Facebook:

On the white-board Sandberg wrote, in big letters, "What business are we in?"

These were bull sessions at first, giving everyone a chance to express their views. As they continued, the meetings grew steadily in size. Word spread that you shouldn't miss these conversations. Pretty soon the entire [top management] team and a larger swath of ad people were making it, a total of fifteen to twenty on a typical evening. - The Facebook Effect, pg. 257

"What business are we in?" To me, that is a question that incites creativity. In an environment like Facebook in 2008, imagination should have been the dominant force in deciding monetization. But from what I can tell, not only were the ceremonies at these meetings heavily tilted toward one business model, that business model was predetermined:

On the whiteboard Sandberg listed options. Facebook could be in the advertising business. It could sell data about its users. It could sell avatars and other virtual goods to those users. Or it could enable transactions and take a small cut, like PayPal. [...] After weeks of this, at the final meeting Sandberg went deliberately around the room and asked each person what percentage of Facebook's revenue would ultimately come from each category. Virtually everyone said 70 percent or more would be adverstising in some form. - The Facebook Effect, pg. 258

Do these sound like the creative monetization solutions that the best minds in Silicon Valley could muster?

The most interesting thing about these meetings was that Mark Zuckerberg was on vacation while Sandberg was leading the charge to turn Facebook from a social network into a media conglomerate. She had his blessing, of course, but its interesting that maybe the most important turn in the company's history happened when Sandberg was captaining the ship.

So why did Facebook make this decision, perhaps their most important, this way? It was clear from past experiences that Zuckerberg and Co. made decisions on the future of Facebook by looking for hidden meaning in their various successes, both intentional and accidental.

Examples of this type of reasoning came after the implementation of photo sharing and event invites into Facebook:

"Our photo site lacks features anyone else would build," Zuckerberg told me in early May 2007. [...] "Yet somehow, this application became the most trafficked photo site on the Internet, by far." And something similar was going on with the application Facebook engineers had quickly thrown together to allow users to invite friends to events. It was garnering more usage than Evite.com, which had been for years the leading website for invitations.

"So why were photos and events so good?" he asked. "It was because despite all their shortcomings they had one thing no one else had. And that was integration with the social graph." - The Facebook Effect, pg 216 (emphasis mine)

So after coming to all of these excellent conclusions, Zuckerberg hires Sandberg and puts her in charge of deciding how Facebook makes money, even though she wasn't at Facebook to develop any of these insights.

I agree with Zuckerberg completely. The true value that Facebook provides is not its ability to attract eyeballs or organize your photos or create pages to promote how pretty your cat is. The true value of Facebook is to create user experiences set within the backdrop of the social graph - something nobody else can do without Facebook's permission.

So what did Zuckerberg do with this insight? Why, he did the smartest thing he could do:

In the fall of 2006 Zuckerberg set out to realize his long-held vision of a platform for others to build applications on top of Facebook. He wanted to do for the Web what Gates did for the personal computer: create a standard software infrastructure that made it easier to build applications - this time, applications that had a social component. "We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system, so you can run full applications" he explained. - The Facebook Effect, pg. 217

And with that, an entire industry was born. But two years later, Sandberg promptly killed it.

You may ask why, but the answer is simple. It's the reason that Facebook treats its users privacy like a play thing, and the reason that Twitter has started down the path of injecting unwanted content into their user experience. It's the reason that App.net exists, and the reason that this is an Internet meme:

If you are building an advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all 3rd-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the “content”. - Dalton Caldwell

When a company lacks a customer, the product is built for the user. The selection of a customer is the most important user experience decision a company makes. Pick the wrong customer, like advertisers, and the user experience is destined to get worse. Pick the right customer, and your business will grow to the delight of your users, instead of to their despair.

So who was the right customer for Facebook? It certainly wasn't advertisers. Let's have a look at what that business model has done for them lately:

The blogging of Dalton Caldwell and the success of the App.net Kickstarter shows that there is clearly a more creative solution to generating money from social networks.

However, I'm convinced Mark Zuckerberg already had it figured out, but he stopped short and hired an advertising incumbent to deal with the problem while he went off to an ashram in India.

While App.net seeks to charge both users and API developers for an ad-free social ecosystem, and Facebook continues to flounder in advertising hell because of Sheryl Sandberg's influence at the company, a middle ground exists that I admit I have not seen anyone mention, but it seems too obvious to have not been considered.

That middle ground is to allow users to have free access to the consumer facing product on the home site, and to charge API developers for access to the social graph that you create.

As Zuckerberg made abundantly clear, there is massive value in the social graph and the ability to build applications on top of it. I believe the value is greater than all of the advertising revenue generated on the web to date.

What is the best way to monetize the social graph? To sell access to the social graph!

While Zuckerberg had been forced by circumstance to accept advertising, he did so only so he could pay the bills. Whenever anyone asked about his priorities, he was unequivocal - growth and continue improvement in the customer experience were more important than monetization. - The Facebook Effect, pg. 258

The point is simply this: Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. He was never interested in devising a way for Facebook to make money on the social graph. His instinct was to avoid the problem of monetization and focus on the Facebook product. So he empowered Sandberg to solve the problem. His instinct was correct - he needed to have someone else find a solution. However, he should have been empowering the developers building apps on the social graph to fix the problem - even if they had to pay for the right to do so. Those developers can then figure out if advertising, or micro transactions, or payed access is the best way to monetize the social graph.

Zuckerberg's move should be to fire Sandberg, and give her a generous severance package. Thereafter, he should slowly phase in an incredibly developer-friendly API to access to the social graph. Then, as the revenue from the API grows, he should slowly phase advertising out of Facebook's ecosystem.

Sandberg should start an ad agency on the East Coast. Miami is nice. That's a job she's qualified to do. Her rampant lack of business creativity should have no place in centers of innovation.

[patrickdobson]

UPC Items as a Service

I just reblogged Fred Wilson quoting Chris Dixon. Dixon's point was that mass produced items like books and DVDs will always be cheaper at and delivered faster from Amazon than any startup could hope to achieve.

In my response, I used Dollar Shave Club as one of the examples of companies that could beat Amazon because they are providing an item (razers and blades) that has a UPC in a way that provides more value to the customer than Amazon can presently do - and doesn't seem like they want to move into that space.

Dollar Shave Club is providing a consumable product as a service. I'm proud to call myself a member, and I haven't had to think about buying razer blades since. I also haven't had to think about the cost of razer blades since. Every month, 3 dollars is taken out of my bank account, and 5 blades arrive in the mail. I use a blade for a week (maybe 3 shaves?), and then I throw it away. I'm actually shaving more because of the service, I love it for that reason, but I love it mostly because it has solved a problem for me in a way that I never have to think about again.

ManPacks is another example of a startup providing items that their customers go through pretty quickly. If you often find yourself getting low on socks, undershirts, underwear, or condoms, than ManPacks is solving your problem.

These aren't the only items that could be turned into a subscription service so we never have to think about it again. The winner at this year's SXSW was Cerealize. They want to make sure your shelf is always stocked with a custom made cereal of your choosing.

Diapers.com was the first that I can think of to enter into this space, and I think the space come a long way since then, but it still has a long way to go, before it really starts solving a lot of problems.

Whenever I finish making a sandwich, I go into the snacks cabinet in my kitchen looking for a handful (ok, maybe two) of chips to put on my plate. Imagine the torment when I open the snacks cabinet and all I find is granola bars and despair? Chips are vacuum packed! Why isn't there a service that is sending me two bags of chips every week?

The home run in this department occurs when someone figures out how to do this legitimately for milk and eggs and bread, but those items are highly perishable and it's probably not the best place for this nascent industry to go to.

Take a moment, though, and look around your house. How many non-perishable or semi-non-perishable consumables do you see? Light bulbs? Plastic cups? Laundry soap? Shoe laces? Break-pads? Golf balls? Printer paper? Duct-tape?

If you think e-commerce is where you want to be, and you're looking for a way to beat Amazon, then pick a single product and solve your customer's need for that product forever.

[fred-wilson]

If it has a UPC code, Amazon will beat you [Unless it's a computer part and you're NewEgg or TigerDirect. Unless its a food item and you're a local grocery store. Unless it's a razor blade and you're Dollar Shave Club. Unless it's a resold item and you're eBay or Craigslist. Unless it's a high fashion item and you've got a contract with Chanel or Louis Vuitton or Burberry.]

E-commerce startups - Chris Dixon (via fred-wilson) sounding too much like a defender of incumbents. I added everything in the brackets.

[stephendenunzio]

You’re scared to fail?!?….Im scared NOT to!!

Fail : (v) to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved.

Notice that it doesn’t say anything about being humiliated or embarrassed. It doesn’t say anything about it being your final attempt. It...

[patrickdobson]

When I sit down and to write a piece of software, I come up with a plan, write some code, and then I compile it or go to the web address or run it............and it breaks. Everytime. I don't remember writing a piece of software that worked just the way I wanted the first time I tried to run it.

Stephen makes a great point here that you shouldn't be afraid of failure, and that maybe we should redefine it. I say, let's get rid of the word failure all together.

When the software doesn't run, I debug, and then I run it again. It may work a little better the second time, and I'll make a few changes, debug, and run it again. It may be twenty or thirty or a hundred tries before it works exactly the way I want it to.

So don't call it failure. Call it a bug. Debug, and run it again.

[patrickdobson]

Adversarial Customer Relationships and the NBA Finals

Last fall, I got a piece of mail from Time Warner Cable. It was a bill. The same bill I had gotten twelve times earlier since I started my relationship with them. Or so I thought. Tearing the left side of the envelope away, and puckering my lips to open the Carsonian slot I had created, I had no idea that the corner of the envelope falling to the ground was a gauntlet that TWC was dropping at my feet. They were no longer satisfied receiving the standard rate for their services. The bill that I held in my hand declared that they wanted an additional ten dollars a month. No increase in services. No expiring specials. No warning. No explanation. No apology.

In April, I moved a lot of money around for the same reason a lot of people were moving a lot of money around - the federal government wanted my contribution to the United States Treasury for the protection, services, and leadership they provide me. In moving that money around, I made a few miscalculations in our family spending habits. One of our accounts overdrafted by $5.00. That temporary five dollar loan from Pittsburgh National Corporation Financial Services cost me  $41.00 to pay back, or 820%. A thirty second transfer before 12am that night could have saved me from the draconian, punitive loan-sharking PNC imposed upon me. A heads-up email. A 10pm SMS. A push notification to their app on my phone would have given me the chance to make it right, and not miss out on a chance to take my wife to the movies or treat my daughter to a baseball game. When I logged in the next day it was there, in the transaction log. Five dollars overdrafted. Thirty-six dollars charged. A letter in the mail three days later explained how I had been fleeced.

On July 8th, 2010, Lebron James sat down in front of a camera in Greenwich, Connecticut to announce he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat. I sat and watched in a bar in Niles, OH with my fiance, 16 days before our wedding day. Darkness had surrounded Cleveland sports since 1964 when Jim Brown walked off the field for the Cleveland Browns a champion, and out of football for good, prematurely chased off the team and out of the league by owner Art Modell. Lebron James was chosen to cut through that darkness. Annointed to be the greatest basketball player of all time, every fan in Cleveland knew that this was the man who could bring a championship to Cleveland. The problem was that Lebron did not know that. He left and took his considerable talents to South Beach. Today he did what every fan in Cleveland knew he could do 9 years ago - exert his will for two months and dominate the NBA playoffs and finish a champion. Only he did it for another city. For another team. For another group of fans.

The legal team at Time Warner Cable would tell me that they have the right to raise their rates at any time without notice. I have the right to discontinue services at any time. Nevermind that I live in suburban Ohio and there are no other broadband providers around. Nevermind that I as a web application developer I need internet access to make my living.

My grandfather, your grandfather, and the proverbial grandfather would tell me that if I managed my money better, I wouldn't have to pay PNC 800% on my money when I made some clerical errors. Nevermind that I'm running a business and raising a family and have limited time to disect balance sheets. Nevermind that any of a hundred simple algorithms well within the ability of PNC to provide could have saved me a date night with my wife.

ESPN talking heads will tell you that sports are a business, and that NBA free agents have the right to do what they want. That they can play for whatever team that they want for whatever reason that they want, and that if the fans don't get it, that's their problem, and they shouldn't be so naive. Nevermind that Lebron's dumping Cleveland (a suffering, sports-crazed, cold-weather city whose basketball team made every effort to build its superstar a championship team) for Miami (a vibrant, tropical destinantion where sports are priority #217 whose basketball team just finished wasting 4 years of its superstar's prime) was the greatest injustice in the history of sports. Nevermind that the business you're talking about is the business of selling tickets and merchandise to the very fans you claim don't get it.

I do business with these three companies. Regularly. Time Warner, PNC, and Lebron James are brands that I gain value from. Broadband internet access, finacial services, and sports entertainment have strong value propositions in my life, and I want to continue to gain access to that value.

But I hate that those three brands treat me as an adversary.

The unfortunate position I find myself in is that most professional athletes are prima donnas. Most cable companies raise their rates without warning or explanation. Most banks charge fees to their customers when they make mistakes.

So I have no choice.

And if you're running a business, and your customer has no choice, then it makes sense to annoy them. It makes sense to pad your bottom line with their frustrations. It makes sense to glorify yourself with their suffering.

It makes sense, to not love them.

That is, until someone in your industry decides they're going to love them. Then they've got a problem.

So the lesson for entrepreneurs is simple. Are you going after Time Warner? Do you want to take down PNC? Do you think you have what it takes to compete with Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, Apple, or Facebook?

Well, then all you have to do is make sure to do one thing that large companies seem to forget to do every now and again - love your customer.

Eventually, the incumbents in the industry you're trying to disrupt will forget to love the customers you're trying to steal from them. You don't have to hate your competition, you just have to love your customer. If that's your motto, your mission statement, and your modus operandi, then you'll never fail. You'll always be successful, and your customers will never feel like Time Warner customers, PNC clients, or Cleveland Cavaliers fans. Your customers will love you, and they'll happily give you their money.

And that's what every entrepreneur should be shooting for.

[patrickdobson]

Lebron James 2012 Finals MVP Acceptance Speech

I'd first like to thank my teamates who were by my side, every step of the way. Dwayne Wade, who's been like a brother to me through these past two seasons, you've made this journey one of the best of my life, and I am so thankful to be a part of the starting lineup of the Miami Heat with you. Eric Spoelestra, thanks coach, for getting the most out of me. I could never have achieved this without you. And Pat Riley, thank you, for having the vision to put this team together and the fortitude to turn that vision into a reality.

The past two years have been a long maturation process for me, both as a basketball player and as a man. I made a lot of mistakes and I tried to take shortcuts that don't exist. It was a hard lesson learned, and I hurt a lot of people along the way. For that, I'm sorry.

So, in accepting this MVP trophy today, I don't just want to share it with my great teamates, my coach, my general manager, and the fans of the Miami Heat. A piece of this trophy also belongs to the great state of Ohio, the City of Akron, the City of Cleveland, the fans of the Cavaliers, and everyone who worked so hard to enrich me as a basketball player and a man during my seven years there. I know that I handled the end of my time in Cleveland in the worst possible way, but I want to make amends, starting right now. This is your trophy, too, Cleveland, and I want to share it with you both as a thanks for the love that you showed me for my seven years as a player, and as an apology for the mistakes I made when I left.

Thank you, Miami. Thank you, Cleveland.

[ifttt]

Over the past few months, our team has been working hard to improve your experience with IFTTT. We’re proud to announce a new look, new language, new Channels, and speedier Triggers!

A New Look

Our new logo and wordmark come from the idea that the combination of two basic elements can...

[patrickdobson]

Switches and motion detectors work with IFTTT? Nice!

I wish they had added some sort of webhooks though. I want to write my own scripts that hook into IFTTT recipes!

[patrickdobson]

Researching Landing Page Solutions

Lately, I've been doing a fair amount of research on landing pages and services that provide them. My requirements for the landing page are thus:

It provides an offer that can be redeemed at a storefront

It has a trackable phone number

It contains a code generated from the referring page

It has copy and design that provokes the user to act

What I'm looking to do is generate campaigns for clients who depend on foot traffic for their business. If the customer needs to be inside your store to do business, then I want to to be solving that problem for you.

To do this, I want to generate landing pages that contain a coupon. The coupon will provide a special, promotional offer for the customer. It will also contain a code that will refer back to that original customer and a phone number that can be tracked to determine how many phone calls made to the storefront are attributed to the campaign.

The landing page is the cornerstone of the campaign. I am planning to generate traffic to the landing page from social media, organic search, Google PPC ads, and Facebook PPC ads.

The data generated by the landing page will allow me to determine which of these channels is the most effective in reaching our target market and mold campaign to maximum efficiency.

Before building this landing page myself, I decided to see some of the solutions that were already out there.

The first one I came across was Unbounce.

Unbounce does a lot of cool things if you're simply trying to flesh out an idea and gauge interest in an idea or a promotion. It does a good job of generating leads, and it makes analytics and testing like A/B and multivariate testing much easier than coding your own from scratch. It also has a number of templates and a wysiwyg editor to change the design of the landing page - a nice feature, but uncessary for me as a web developer.

However, Unbounce didn't meet my needs for driving foot traffic. If I provided a special offer on an Unbounce landing page that allowed the user to print a coupon to come into the store, there was no way for me to generate a specific coupon for each individual customer. This meant I would need a second page that the unbounce page prompted the user to visit. This second page would need to be coded up by me so I could custom generate the code and promotional materials to get the user into the store. At that point, it makes more sense just to build my own landing page.

My research for a ready-made solution led me to Dukky.

Dukky does 80% of what I want it to do. It creates landing pages for me, but allows me to customize the design myself. These landing pages are organized around a campaign that hinge on collecting names, emails, and other data from potential customers. Dukky will generate custom URLs that point to the campaign landing page that can be deployed specifically to social media, ppc ads, or organic search results. It also generates coupons with custom barcodes so that users can be tracked from the original referer to the landing page all the way to the storefront. That is exactly what I needed with my analytics. Here's a great video about how it works:

The problem with Dukky is that it forces the user to fill out a form. Now, a good number of my landing pages will require potential customers to fill out information so my clients can understand more about their leads, but for the purposes of generating foot traffic, a customer's specifics are not completely necessary. Filling out a form with sensitive information like name and email is just one more obstacle to getting that customer into the store.

Also, Dukky doesn't provide trackable phone numbers. There are certainly services that would be compatible with Dukky to this end, but if I wanted to generate a phone number for a subset of potential customers, I would need to do it all myself. Another reason to just build my own.

Dukky also forces you to buy and use a different url for each campaign. This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but I would much rather use subdomains of domains that I already own or that my customers already own. Something like promotionname.clientdomain.com instead of promotionnameclient.com.

Finally, Dukky is expensive compared to similar solutions. I fully believe its worth the price, but Unbounce, for comparison, is $50/month for the base package and free for the 30 days. To run my first Dukky experiment would have cost me nearly 10 times that. Not bad if the campaign is generating $2,500-$15,000 in sales, but not good for just running a landing page experiment.

Unbounce and Dukky both provide excellent solutions for building and tracking landing pages. Both tools seem to be fully worth the money if they meet your specific needs. However, neither of them met mine. Ultimately, I decided to run my first landing page experiment myself. I'll be documenting my process in a future post.

[staff]

If you’re a fan of Tumblr’s recently updated Android app, consider the wisdom of Tumblr’s own Android expert Chris Haseman. He recently released his second book, Creating Android Applications: Develop and Design. Available for Kindle download and paperback purchase via Amazon, Chris shows you how to use the powerful set of Android tools to begin creating the next generation of Android applications.

“I wrote the book because learning Android is hard in a few ways,” he says. “Doing a bunch of searches on how to write an Android application gives you information without knowledge.”

Creating Android Applications provides a complete introduction to developing for Google’s mobile OS, offering tons of insights and hard-earned advice. After a tour of how to install and configure the Android SDK and Eclipse IDE, you jump right in to build your first Android project.

“Android has several traps for beginners all of which I’ve fallen into. The book, in a way, is my best attempt to help new people avoid them,” Chris says. “Plus, I’ve always wanted to dedicate a book to my wife, and this seemed like the shortest path to get there.”

[patrickdobson]

This is something I have fantasized about doing. Lowering commitment, freedom from consumerism, cuttings costs. There's nothing bad about getting creative with thrift stores.

[patrickdobson]

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

Jules Renard

Much thanks to Ken P Duddl for introducing me to Renard.

[patrickdobson]

POST Tunneling: HTTP DELETE and PUT requests with JQuery and Django-Piston

Note: This post assumes some knowledge of Django. Everyone should have some knowledge of Django, so go get some!

Writing code in the Warren and Youngstown area is probably a lot like selling fertilizer to New Yorkers. Nobody cares how exactly it works, just so long as they don't have to touch it themselves and it does the job they want it to do. I've had a couple of clients lately who have asked me to build them a REST API for their web applications without asking me to build a REST API for their web applications. One of them wanted a simpler user experience ("I want it to be more user friendly, on one page, and I don't want all these forms jumbled up in different places"), and the other wanted a more maintainable codebase (somebody had all but re-written the Django Forms API in some of the ugliest code you've ever seen).

Both clients (customers, not browsers) had a very similar problem - their applications called for all of the data to be input on the same web page in the same context, and too many forms were either confusing the user, or the maintenance programmers. The client (browser, not customer) needed to be communicating to the server throughout the data creation process.

So I decided to build REST APIs for the both of them using Django-Piston.

The great thing about Piston is that it provides classes with methods that correspond to HTTP methods, and those classes and methods can be overriden. The classes can be turned into resources that URLs can be pointed to, which means that one URL can point to one class and different HTTP methods requested at a URL can execute different code on the server.

If you didn't catch all of that, don't worry - here's an example.

Let's say you have two URLs for blog posts in Django:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns('',

    url(r'^blog/post/$', 'blog.handlers.blog_post'),

    url(r'^blog/post/(?P<post_id>[\d]+)/$', 'blog.handlers.blog_post'),

)

So when a GET request is made to "http://hostname/blog/post/", the response is a list of blog posts in JSON. When a GET request is more specifically made to "http://hostname/blog/post/118/", JSON for that specific blog post is returned.

To provide this functionality, we'll have to write handlers to return responses to requests to these urls. Our blog.handlers module (referenced in the URLs above) will take care of that:

    from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404

    from piston.handler import BaseHandler     from piston.utils import rc     from piston.resource import Resource     from blog.models import Post     class BlogPost(BaseHandler):         allowed_methods = ('GET',)         def read(self, request, post_id=None):             if post_id is None:                 return Post.objects.all()             else:                 return get_object_or_404(Post, pk=post_id)

Let's break this down a bit:

The BlogPost class inherits from the Django-Piston BaseHandler class.

The allowed_methods field is a tuple that contains strings that correspond to HTTP methods. Allowed values are 'GET', 'POST', 'PUT', 'DELETE'

The read method overrides the base class method. It corresponds to the GET HTTP method.

Because two different URLs point to this handler, the post_id parameter may or may not be available, so its optional.

An if statement here checks if post_id is set. If it isn't, it returns all of the posts. If post_id is available, the method returns that specific record, or a 404 if the record doesn't exist.

Note that Piston takes care of the JSON serialization.

That takes care of retrieving blog posts, but what if we wanted to create a new one, update a current blog post, or delete a blog post? Well any good REST developer would know that you'd use the same URL and a different HTTP method to achieve the specific functionality. Let's have a peak at the code:

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404 from piston.handler import BaseHandler from piston.utils import rc from piston.resource import Resource from blog.models import Post class BlogPost(BaseHandler):     allowed_methods = ('GET', 'POST', 'PUT', 'DELETE')

    def read(self, request, post_id=None):         if post_id is None:             return Post.objects.all()         else:             return get_object_or_404(Post, pk=post_id)     def create(self, request):         blogpost = request.POST['blogpost_data']         post, created = Post.objects.get_or_create(blogpost)             if created:             return post         else:             response = rc.BAD_REQUEST             response.write('Record already exists')             return response     def update(self, request, post_id):         post = get_object_or_404(Post, pk=post_id)         post.blogpost = request.POST['blogpost_data']         post.save()         return post     def delete(self, request, post_id):         post = get_object_or_404(Post, pk=post_id)         post.delete()         return rc.DELETED

A few things to notice here:

allowed_methods has been updated to accept all of the possible values.

The create, update, and delete methods correspond to the HTTP methods 'POST', 'PUT', and 'DELETE' respectively.

For anyone unfamiliar with Django - I'm taking some very large liberties with model instance creation here. Conceivably, Django model instances could be created and updated this way, but I wouldn't recommend it.

As an example, a POST request to 'http://hostname/blog/post/' will use the POST payload to create a new record for the Post model. A PUT request to 'http://hostname/blog/post/118/' will update the Post that has an id of 118. A DELETE request to the same address will delete record id 118.

POST Tunneling

When my web apps consume the APIs that I write, I like to do so with Javascript. Why should my server have to handle the load of consumption when I can have the users' computers do it? 

The problem with consuming a REST API with client-side Javascript with AJAX is that most browsers only give access to two HTTP request methods - GET and POST. We definitely still want to be able to update and delete records in our example. We could just stuff more data into POST requests and do all the handling inside the create method, but that wouldn't be RESTful or very elegant.

Luckily, there's an HTTP Header that was dreamt up for just such an occasion: HTTP_X_METHODOVERRIDE. You can add it to your JQuery ajax requests like so:

$.ajax({     type: 'POST',     url: 'http://hostname/blog/post/118',     data: {BlogPost: 'some data'},     success: function(){ alert('Post Deleted'); },     headers: {'X_METHODOVERRIDE': 'DELETE'} });

This is known as POST Tunneling - making a POST request act like a different type of HTTP request. Of course, without some modifications, your Django server application is still going to handle this as if its a POST request. What you want to do is change the request.method for every incoming request that contains the HTTP_X_METHODOVERRIDE header. To do that, we'll create a new file in our blog app called middleware.py. See the documentation for more information on creating middleware. Here's the one we'll create:

class TunnelingMiddleware(object):     def process_request(self, request):         if request.META.has_key('HTTP_X_METHODOVERRIDE'):             http_method = request.META['HTTP_X_METHODOVERRIDE']             if http_method.lower() == 'put':                 request.method = 'PUT'                 request.META['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'PUT'             if http_method.lower() == 'delete':                 request.method = 'DELETE'                 request.META['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'DELETE'         return None

Now every HTTP Method is available to our Piston Handler and each one of its corresponding methods from any type of JQuery AJAX request we want to make.

[patrickdobson]

Happy Valentines Day to Me. It appears life is a happy song after all.

[patrickdobson]

Squeezing the Lemon: Tech needs more Bees and Flowers, Fewer Wasps and Lemons

Symbiosis is a natural phenomenon. It describes the various types of biological interactions that occur between species. In Mutualism, it works to the benefit of all the organisms involved - services and resources are exchanged and life flourishes on all sides. In Parasitism, it works to the benefit of one organism and to the detriment of the other - it is a one-sided relationship that, if allowed to continue, leaves the host species drained and lifeless.

Technology, along with all other human endeavors, has evolved an ecosystem comprised of symbiotic relationships. The Builders in tech envision products and services that improve our quality of life and diligitently craft these wares for a populus that wants and needs them. Like the industrious bee, Builders work tirelessly to see a vision realized and the manifestation of their labor advances the species.

But bees cannot build their impressive hives and make delicious honey without help. They require a mutualistic relationship with those in their environment to gain resources and carve out a position therein. So the noble bees go to flowers for nectar in exchange for transporting pollen to neighboring flowers where further nectar is exchanged. The flowers of Tech are able to both catch our attention and pool our resources.

Venture capitalists gather funds from dozens or even hundreds of investors and re-channel them into startups that build hives like Facebook or Google. When the VC-startup relationship mutualistically flourishes, great wealth and great technology are created and the environment blossoms.

Technology journalists report on startups and direct the flow of more eyeballs to their startup subjects (and their advertisers) than any tulip or rose ever could. When the journalism reports on daring new endeavors, or constructively criticizes the bold moves of the Builders of our industry, then they stoke the fires of innovation and inspire intellectual discourse about a myriad of problems - problems they are helping solve. The ecosystem thrives.

The problem in Tech is that neither the bees nor the flowers are very loud. The bee makes no more noise than it needs to do its work, and the flowers portray the beauty of the bee's diligence without needing so much as a throat clear.

The problem in Tech is that there is another organism in this environment making more noise than it warrants.

Not all of the relationships a bee has our mutualistic. It's relationship to the wasp is decidedly parasitic. The wasp lays its eggs on bee cocoons, and the young of the wasp eat the bees from the inside out.

One cannot escape thinking about the Lemon.

I'm sorry but I have to say it: The Grammys suck.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) February 13, 2012

Nothing like bashing something you could never create yourself to really fuel that ego.

The parasites in Technology include VCs, Journalists, executives, engineers, patent attorneys and marketers. Like bees and wasps, you can barely tell them from their counterparts at first glance, but each of them have evolved without a core trait: integrity.

No where has this been highlighted better lately than the ramblings of the Lemon. His foray into Venture Capital has morphed his "journalism" from a biased chasm into an integrity blackhole.

A Diagram of the Lemon's Integrity

We are long removed from a time when the Lemon wrote about new technology mutualistically - to increase his eyeball flow while influencing and fostering innovation in technology. That Lemon shriveled and dryed up years ago. Unfortunately, we've also had to say goodbye to the rabid, Apple troll who garnered pageviews for TechCrunch and filled his pockets with cash payed by advertisers hungry for eyeballs. That Lemon is also dead - given way to a much more evolved form that no longer possesses any remaining integrity genes.

Blogger-Venture Capitalist Siegler is on the Path (pun intended) to being the biggest wasp in Silicon Valley. He outted himself yesterday in his limp response to Dan Lyon's scathing exposure of the new Lemon:

They get to take a break from reporting about Yahoo personnel news that no one actually cares about to writing passionately about “too insidery” things that no one actually cares about. But with flair!

http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy

Which should be read as:

Wait! Stop! Don't look to closely behind the curtain! What's back there isn't important! Just keep listening to the pomp and garbage I'm spewing at you! 

Journalism is about exposing inside information. The idea that Siegler is calling out Lyons for writing about integrity issues in journalism speaks volumes to how bad his integrity has gotten.

Any true journalist would be praising Lyons for brining into sharp relief what the Lemon has a vested interest in keeping blurry - bloggers that command a lot of page views cannot keep their integrity as technology reporters AND become technology venture capitalists at the same time.

Instead, he tries to sweep his own lack of integrity under the rug as something that is "to insidery" for anyone to care about.

Shameful.

I would caution any startup considering CrunchFund as an investor to beware. At least one of their partners is a wasp, and you don't want to let the Lemon turn your business into a hollow cocoon.