#startuple

[startuple]

Dining on Arduino

This little bundle of fun has been sitting on our shelf since September, and gazing reproachfully at us all the while. So, in the dark days of January, we blew the dust off it, and finally got round to unboxing.

The Arduino Starter Kit teaches you everything you ever wanted to know about electronic tinkering. Basically, it's Lego for grown ups. After about 20 minutes of fiddling about: success! On/off.

[startuple]

Tabulating the tabs

The results of our rigorous research...

*drumroll*

So, what did we learn?

We have way more "to-do" tabs than "keep" tabs 

Tabs tend to persist either one day, or stay open for ages

About half our tabs relate to a current project, the rest are evenly split between reading/watching/listening/booking/buying

It looks like we need help prioritizing our non-urgent to-dos. The urgent stuff tends to get done after a day or so, but the less urgent tasks slide.  If we can plan a time to do these tasks, and set some reminders, maybe we can keep on top of all the tabs?

[startuple]

'Keep' tabs. Keep. Tabs. Keep tabs? Keep Tabs?! KeepTabs™

SD

[startuple]

Our first MVH for Gif It To Me

We decided to give Gif It To Me a test! We made our first Minimum Viable Hack (MVH). Our rules for an MVH are that it should be made in a day and have the essence of the product. It should be so simple that each user flow can fit in a 2 MB gif!

Gif It To Me is an app that allows you to request a gif from your friend. When your friend receives the invitation he can then find an appropriate gif and send it to you.

Here are the two user flows of Gif It To Me:

Requesting a gif:

Responding to a request:

We tested between friends and it seems to be addictive. It's not perfect because the flow is too slow (copy and paste the link, refresh to see the gif).

We were thinking about how we can push this hack further. When using Gif It To Me you signal to your friends that you are bored, sad or that you are thinking of them. This request for attention can be delightful and make you both happy. How could we extend that? Some ideas...

GIFting. Allow people to include a real gift with the gif. For example every week we could select a product we like and let people buy and give it to their friend. We thought about doing something with itch.io. I like the idea of curating small digital gifts that people are likely to send to their friends or ask their friends to buy for them.

GIF generously. When responding to a gif request we could allow users to include a small donation to a charity of their choice.

[startuple]

If it doesn't fit in a gif it's not worth shipping it.

FH

[startuple]

Tracking the tabs

We had lunch at Mr Buckley's - a fine dining establishment on Hackney Road.

Over a delicious Sunday roast, we discussed how we could get more insight into why our tabs stay open. Is it a matter of filing information, or doing our to-dos? The interviews helped, but we need to better understand our behaviour and motives.

We decided to do a 5 day study of our tab lifecycle. At the end of each day, we will record, for each new tab:

URL

Date opened

Date closed (when we finally close it)

Category (e.g. music, work, holidays etc.)

Label (keep or do)

Comments (why it is still open)

Hopefully this will help us discover which problem is more pressing: filing or doing. In the meantime, we'll take a look at the other tools available to manage our tabs, to work out if there is space for a new solution.

[startuple]

First Dinner

Very warm evening. We had some fried carrots with lavender buds, broad beans with bacon and chicken bits marinated with ginger and soy sauce. My co-founder said that everything tastes good with bacon. This doesn’t really tell me if the dish is good or not. Just that it tastes of bacon. Would the internet taste better with bacon?

Over dinner we discovered a situation we both have: tabs. Too many browsers, too many windows, too many tabs. Every day, we end up with more tabs open than we started with. Tabs are the things we want to play, learn, watch or listen to. They act also as a reminder for things to attend or buy. But 500+ tabs is not easy to manage or search. Enough! This enormous problem is the first mission for Startuple.