Rev2.org

As you might have noticed, VOIS.com recently acquired Rev2.org, and Craig Agranoff, who has been filling in for me for the last year or so, has now taken on the blog full-time as Editor.

The decision to sell Rev2 came as a difficult one seeing it has been a part of my life for the last five or so years, but given my lack of time and neglect for it, it was either a case of watching it die a slow death with the lack of content and missed hosting bills, or hand it over to Craig who would attempt to resurrect it with fresh, regular content, with the freedom for me to move on freely with other projects.

Rev2’s history has been an unconventional one, and there have been too many ups and downs to count over its existence. In 2005, I decided to evolve my personal blog at the time, The Daily Rundown, to review web apps and services and cover note-worthy web news. Something I found after I started my personal blog was that I was much more in touch with particular happenings when I got to write about it, so having it evolve to Rev2 was my own way of saying to myself, “this web 2.0 thing is going to be big, and I need to start keeping up with it.”

I wrote around 3 posts a week throughout 2005, reviewing some of the apps that released over the week. While there were other, better blogs such as ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch budding at that time, I could never find myself doing what I did full-time, so I was happy with learning a thing or two by covering something I was passionate about, and informing a couple readers along the way.

As things got serious through 2005 with services like MySpace and YouTube just getting traction, I noticed TechCrunch and some of the big blogs at the time putting out 125×125 ad inventories on their websites and having it full within days. First reluctant about putting advertising on the blog (this was a big point of debate back then), I decided to offer a couple myself and was able to attract a couple of sponsors within the following weeks.

The financial support allowed me to look for writers, as some of the other blogs started to do at the time, and by 2007, Rev2 had around five to six part-time writers posting fantastic content, with a traffic graph relatively small but up-hilling (at our peak, we were close to doing 260,000 pageviews for a month, FWIW.) Through the writers I hired for Rev2, I got to meet and work with exciting and fascinating people, most of whom I’m still in touch with and one of whom is my business partner on a startup I’m working on.

Obviously, great things don’t last forever, so by the end of 2007, things started to get a little hectic on the financial side, with me having to let-go writers and the flow of content coming to a halt. After my one month-long trip to U.S. at the end of the year, I found it difficult to return to blogging having little or no chance to do so in that couple of months. After some months of writing on-and-off, Craig stepped in, and he’s been at it since then.

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you would have noticed Craig’s writing style grow in the past year or so, and with the content he’s been putting out lately, I have no doubt in believing that Rev2 is in capable hands and here to stay. There’s no question that Craig has taken the blog much more seriously than I have in the last year, so his taking over only reflects what has been true all this time.

This is my final official post on Rev2, but I have always found the blog a fantastic place to talk about my achievements, or scramble out a 2,000-word essay on a topic I know little about, so as long as Craig allows me, I’ll hopefully be able to step in once in a while and give the Rev2 audience their much-missed (or much-loathed) words of wisdom.

Meanwhile, you can check out my personal blog, follow me on Twitter, use my micro-diary service Memiary, and keep up with my startup-in-stealth Nincha (we’ll be launching soon, I promise.)

To keep up with updates from this blog, I also recommend you follow @Rev2 and @Vois.

Editor’s note: this post is 100% biased. Please take it for what it is.

Hello folks! I haven’t moved to Mars. Or at least, yet. I’ve just been busy, as I’m sure you’re used to hearing by now. So before I inform you about my latest launch, Memiary, I guess I should give you a quick lowdown of what’s been happening with Nincha: we are close to completion, really excited about the economic downturn, and have lots and lots of bug/beta testing to do (passionate testers welcome) — we will be likely launching publicly at the end end of this year, or maybe start of next.

So with that, it’s time to talk about my latest launch, Memiary (pronounced ‘memory.’) What is it? As the homepage explains: “Don’t you wish you could remember five interesting things you did last Friday? Meet Memiary. Record up to five memories of your day and make them memorable forever. Memiary is the weightless pocket diary.”

I guess I could review it, but I think what you are looking for in these biased situations are insights, not opinions, so I’ll cover the problem, the story, the idea, and then tell you about what I’ve learned in the process. But before I do that, feel free to go to it, sign up, and try it out. (Biased: Easiest. Sign up. Process. Ever. Believe me, I’ve been through a thousand.) If you’ve tried it out and want to skip directly to what I’ve learned, click here.

The Problem
So here’s my problem: I have a bad memory. A really bad one. If you asked me what happened five hours ago, I couldn’t tell you to save my wallet, let alone day, week, month, year. I forget fast, and the pictures I take on occasional trips and my daily tweets are not enough for me to catalog my life. I can feel the ten-year-later Sid hating himself for not preserving the events, moments, and actions which surrounded his life in 2008.

The Story
Last weekend on a really really rainy Saturday night, I was sipping a cup of hot chocolate and staring at the latest copy of Fast Company magazine. And then I had this idea. But it didn’t just come to me in an instant — it was the result of constant subconcious pondering of the problem I stated in the above paragraph. I really had been thinking about this for months. I just didn’t know it.

As soon as I got the idea, I sent out a e-mail to a couple close friends of mine and asked for feedback. In this time, I got the chance to put it on ‘paper’ for the first time, and boy did it look promising. After getting some quick feedback, I started to work on it, spent all of Sunday drinking Coke Zero and writing code, and I had a pretty simple product built within 25 hours of conceiving the idea. On Monday, I launched it, let my friends and family know, gained a ton of feedback, have been perfecting it for the last week, and I am finally getting the chance to talk about it to the world here at Rev2. In other words: I became an entrepreneur over the weekend. And what was supposed to be a weekend project ended up occupying my whole week.

The Idea
Before I get to the idea, and before you tell me how bad it is, let me just debunk all the alternative solutions to my problem I mentioned above. I will lift this with great pride from the Memiary about page:

• Diaries are for 10 year-old girls and those with ample time and commitment.
• Twitter is too broad, current, and you can’t sort through timeframes or jump to a date.
• Text documents are too messy, insecure, and lack usefulness.
• Todo lists and calendars are there to plan your future, not remember your past.
• Blogging has evolved into journalism, demands commitment, and doesn’t feel personal.

So now with that settled, here’s my attempt to sum it up without copying the homepage pitch and trying to sound stylishly terse:

A minimal/simple/easy/quick way to catolog/remember/preserve/record five interesting/important/notable/memorable moments/thoughts/events/experiences that take place in your day-to-date life. Like a diary, but much, much better.

How it works: you enter an e-mail, choose a password, and list up to five interesting moments of your day that you would like to remember forever. You’re answering this question: What did you do today?. Your canvas: a 1 – 5 list with textboxes. These are saved, and you can come back and edit/delete them anytime today. But chances are, you are doing this at 11am, so you probably won’t need to. Tomorrow, you’ll have a fresh blank list, and you can do the same to things which happened to you or you did tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. These will take two minutes to do each day, and a year later when you look back, you’ll be glad you did.

What I’ve Learned
Typically, like last year, I would be writing about a tool like Memiary. But this time, I created it. And it’s been out for about a week, in which time I have tried to get every family member/friend/colleague of mine to try it out (as I said, I am talking about it for the first time to the public.) So obviously, there are things I’ve learned.

First Lesson: You Are Your Bestest User.
I created Memiary for me. Only for me. I wanted this to exist, and since it didn’t, I made it happen. I believe a lot of entrepreneurs work this way, and for the ‘quick and scrappy’ kind of a project it was, it only seems appropriate that I did it just for myself. I don’t think this is selfish, I think it’s natural. Who else would you be able to better judge the wants, needs, desires of than yourself?

In your life, the only person you get to know best is yourself, and if you want something, chances are, so do many others in the world. But if they don’t, that’s more than okay. You spent a weekend creating something you want. What could be more productive than that?

Second Lesson: Quick + Scrappy != Year’s Work + Perfect
The process of building Memiary was extremely different, and in many ways opposite, of the way we have been working at Nincha. Nincha is something I have been working on for the past year and a half, and other than my co-founder and myself, nobody in the world has seen it yet. We purposely chose to work this way as we’ve believed from the start that our duty is to deploy to the world a perfect product, not something half-baked. Having written about 1,000 startups at Rev2, I have seen a lot of half-baked products fail, and my goal with Nincha from the start has been not to make it one of those.

I still believe in the philosophy I have been following with Nincha, but Memiary was different. Unlike Nincha, it is not a grande idea, it is a personal tool; a weekend project, and I intentially kept it as simple as possible. So in this case, I wanted to be a weekend entrepreneur, and this is the only way I could have best done it. And I did it. And I can tell you, no one way I described is better than the other. Infact, they don’t even compete. It all depends on the scale of the idea and the amount of time you are willing to spend on it. If it’s big, you want to do it right, if it’s personal or something you thought of over the weekend, you might as well deploy it to the world, start collecting feedback, and reiterate like crazy over the following weekends.

Third Lesson: Define Success
For Nincha, I am not going to lie and tell you that my definition of success is to be a bootique service used by mother. My definition of success for it is high, and probably higher than what is humanly achievable. But for Memiary, I have no shame in telling you that my definition of success was strictly restricted, from the start, to two things: make a service that I use everyday and love, love, love, and make a service that my mother uses everyday without me having to remind her about it.

And I am delighted to say this: I have succeeded. I love the service, have used it for the past six days, and so has my mother. What happens to it from this point on is purely unintentional and beyond my wildest imagination. My only focus is for me and my mother to keep using it for the next ten months, and I have no benchmark to reach on Alexa or Google Analytics. By seeing even 10 pageviews per day, I have surpassed it. Bottom-line: different ideas, different scales, different amounts of effort, different definitions of success.

Conclusion
I recommend each and every developer to become a weekend entrepreneur. If you’re not one, learn PHP or Ruby on Rails and become one! It will teach you most things entrepreneurs spend their lives discovering, and it will do so in a week. Additionally, you will have intellectual property that you yourself created, own, and are extremely proud of, and something to tell and show your friends, family, and anyone you meet with great pride. When you wake up in the mornings, you will get a tingly feeling as you check your Google Analytics account and see whether anyone new has signed up to try it out, or if a blogger has covered it. It will make your life better in ways unimaginable, and more importantly, lives of people you never intended to ever affect. And your mom will be proud. Go for it.

Full disclosure: TapSmack is joining Rev2 as a new sponsor, but since we haven’t covered them before, we figured even our sponsors needed to hear what we think. My attempt is to be as un-biased as possible, so take it for what it is.

Artist-centric communities have been around for quite some time in Internet space. Years before things like Flickr existed, I remember mindlessly browsing around deviantART and sharing a couple creations of my own. But while these communities encourage creators creating and sharing, something they don’t encourage is collaborating. And as we know, the best things in life are done by more than one person. That’s where TapSmack comes in, introducing a concept of ‘co-creation.’

With TapSmack, artists, designers, Photoshoppers, illustrators and the like don’t just create and share their work, they co-create with each other, building upon one and another, to achieve a specific vision, idea or goal in mind. For example, user banzaibear posted a idea on August 14th, with the request “I’d like Micheal Phelps T-shirt as the Aquaman Superhero.” Since then, users have added their own submissions, which others have rated and commented upon. And as a viewer or idea-submitter, you can go ahead and buy prints, create t-shirts, mugs, and sticks and a lot more with the ones you like.

Collaboration in art and design has worked in the past only in small groups (i.e. a company or a department or a bunch of friends) and most of the web-based applications have been really geared towards that. TapSmack opens this out to the world, and lets everyone participate in the creation process. But by far what I love about TapSmack is that not everyone has to be an artist. You can have just an idea and submitted (as with the example above), and some of the best artists can contribute. Or you can be an artist without ideas and just work on some of the neat ones you come across.

I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in the community-creation space — only the hints of which is indicated by deviantART, which is among the Alexa 100. Here’s the thing about artists — they’re passionate people, and they’re willing to work together without any kind of monetary, financial, market incentive. And the sites that target these types of audiences can really use this to the core of their concept and work, unlike a lot of attempts where sites fail to garner a passionate userbase.

Following up to the inaugral post of my new focus for Rev2 — the entrepreneur — I received a great suggestion from Gonzalo Arzuago of KillerStartups: the entrepreneur and the deadline/time/launch date. Yes, any entrepreneur who is reading this knows what I am talking about, and if you haven’t worked on your own company yet, chances are that you’ve experienced this problem in at least some form of your life.

The Deal
So, here’s the deal: you have a huge idea — the company, the product, the business. There are some key components to this idea — the features, the legalities, the human resources, etc. — and thousands of little tasks or ‘ideas’ within them. Initially, you, as the entrepreuner, are responsible and accountable for every task — big or small — and every decision. The problem: you have a launch date. You have to complete something sooner or later, and you have to ship or launch something tangible for the world to see.

Value vs. Time
Now, the dilemma: you can launch with the sucky product in 5 weeks. Or you can launch with a super fantastic perfect product in 5 years. Or you can take an approach between, and try and launch at a point where your product is good enough, the time is soon enough (so the market doesn’t deteriorate and a competitor doesn’t beat you to it), and where the feedback loop of your users/customers can act to your advantage to better your product in the time after launch and give you a growing sense of what they want vs. what YOU think they want and what YOU are willing and able to give to them.

So, as any rational entrepreneur would figure, the third option would be ideal. Here, if you’re able to master the balancing act, you’ll have the best product in the shortest and most appropriate time (for the market) and a feedback loop is going to kick in that is going to keep you going and innovating forwards.

But unfortunately, this is where most entrepreneurs lose touch. You can’t launch a crappy product in 5 weeks, because you passed on that decision, and you can’t launch a fantastic product in 5 years, because you gave up that too. So, when do you launch? This becomes yours — and the team’s — problem. But assuming you are able to agree on a deadline — whatever that is — the real trouble comes when you have to follow up on it.

The Due Date
A Problem of the Universe: you can’t predict how long it will take for you to take an action, or complete a task. It is impossible. Unfortunately, god overlooked this little “feature” when he was building the world, and left it to us humans to deal with it. And as entrepreneurs, deal we have to. A “side” feature can hold you back for months and make you skip and reschedule 10 deadlines, where as that monster of a product-killer can be completed over a Coke Zero-fueled weekend.

If there parts of your product you complete in less time than you expected, that’s great, but where you have to plan for — and look towards — is when that thing you and your team have been intending to complete for sometime gets pushed and even pushed. This is tougher for the smaller startups — some with even fewer than 3 members (like ours has been) — where we have no solution other than completing something ourselves — within launch date or beyond it.

Living in Disneyland
As entrepreneurs, the problem in the way we predict when we intend to have something complete is that we live in Disneyland. The Disneyland is our product — the potential outcome, opportunity, result, suffice to say a “place where dreams come true.” That Disneyland, while based in real time and space, unfortunately doesn’t seem to follow the traditional laws of rules and rationality. Since we live there, we’re delved so deeply into our ideas and what’s beyond the horizon, that we simply can’t compute realistic time-frames and things the market needs at a particular time vs. how soon we can provide it to them.

In Disneyland, we see the world like it should be, not what it is. This is our perfect world, and whether that correlates to the real world or not is something we don’t care about — after all, we are, as entrepreneurs, here to create the future — that perfect world — not live in state and ideals of today. And that, suffice to say, hinders our ability to predict and to deliver immensely.

The Cure
As I said in my inaugural post, I intend to pose questions rather than offer definite advice in my thought pieces. My idea is to get you thinking — not for you to copy my one-time-proven advice, or anyone whose I may have copied. Personally, I think the cure is to spend your days in Disneyland but your nights in the world outside. Of course, I mean this is an analogy — I think by staying focused on your product when you should be, and examining and analyzing the world when you should be, you can strike a good balance of innovating vs. creating real market solutions at the time they are needed and having them, over time, turn into that vision you had in Disneyland. The key is to have a good grasp on the state of market, and on your own abilities, skills, and resources.

But of course, that’s just what I think. A lot of entrepreneurs I know live in Disneyland and are happy there — they can churn out the best stuff and take all the time they can to do it. They’re not worried about being “on time” or entering the market before it’s seemingly too late. And that’s a fine approach. It can work for many. On the other hand, the Google guys launched the crappiest product they could ASAP and improved it over the years, and look where they’ve come to. They cared about the market so deeply that their “Disneyland” would only appear in their dreams once every fortnight. They spent their days working out something the market needs right now, not the world-changing, patent-pending search technology they could potentially provide in 10 years. And 10 years later, we have the Google we know right now, and it’s been active and making billions every quarter for the last few years. This approach has also worked for Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Digg, and others in their early days.

As the famous Steve Jobs quote goes: “great artists ship.”

A brief change over here at Rev2: While Craig is busy churning out awesome news-reviews-and-what’s-cool posts (which is what Rev2 has always been about), I have decided — instead of procrastinating when I have the time and hunting for inches of spare time when I don’t — to focus my Rev2 energy on writing about something which I am truly, truly passionate about (even so than perhaps than technically in-depth review about cool things) and have a million thoughts to share on, conveniently eliminating the need to hunt for topics, a certain kind of “pressure” that comes with the regular day-to-day tech blogging, and my personal laziness to write exclusively about something that doesn’t really excite me that much (X company launches Y feature? Great.)

Seeing that I based this blog — since its conception in 2005 — on the “next revolution”, I hope to be talking more about the people behind this revolution: entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. If you read Rev2, you may know that I have been busy working on my startup, Nincha, and for the past year, doing so has been a huge learning experience for me as a first-time entrepreneur. As I continue to learn, I hope to share occasional insights on Rev2 that I hope interest other ‘learning’ entrepreneurs such as myself, and together, we are able to build a conversation around it.

Unlike others who seek to provide definite answers, I’ll happy admit that I won’t have any answers, or any success stories, but what I do hope to do is to raise questions. Having read through about a dozen business memoirs over the last year — about successes, failures, eBay, Kinkos, Apple, Microsoft, 90s dot-bombs, the lot — something I have learned is that there is no definite pathway or answers to problems which we, as entrepreneurs face. There are only circumstances and proven methods and unproven methods, and for every proven method, there is an opposite proven method which has resulted in a similar consequence, and vice-versa. The only definite medicine we can carry is ourselves, and the values/ideas/beliefs/philosophies we base our companies and everything around ourselves on.

So, it is important that what we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and I think the best way to do it is to ask questions and learn, not by 5 dictated “guaranteed success tips” by a one-time-lucky millionaire, but by noticing every possible potential answer around the question, scanning the consequence, and seeing for yourself what really works and what doesn’t, and what’s best to believe in. Additionally, the best way to learn is through failure, so nothing — NOTHING — beats trying things yourself and learning from that. And believe me, this doesn’t apply just to startups, but mostly life in general.

I have a bunch of ideas I want to discuss, but I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line or leave a comment and tell me what you’d like to learn, ask, seek, discover, explore, and what interests you as an entrepreneur. I hope to be checking in a little more frequently than I have, and thought-provoking you next-revolutioners.

Having tried every to-do list, calendar, note-taking, task-managing tool out there, I had almost given up on flashy AJAX tools that were supposed to make you more productivity and accepted that there was no solution to my lack of potential productivity. It’s not that I’m a slacker and don’t do much work, it’s that I hadn’t found a working way to note down the tasks I intend to complete — as they came to me — for the next hour, six, or day, and as a result ended up doing a lot less than I intended to in a given period of time. And then I met NowDoThis.

Created by Jakob Lodwick of Vimeo fame (and currently music honcho of The Normative Music Company), NowDoThis is the simplest thing you will ever see, let alone the simplest productivity app out there. It shows a given task (i.e. “buy milk”), a “done.” button, and “edit list”. Clicking on edit list brings you a simple textbox where you add, or edit, your tasks in the order that you intend to complete them, line-by-line. Save the list, and NowDoThis flashes you each task, one by one, which disappear as you mark each one as they’re done, hence acting as a boss telling you to do things.

Having used it for the last couple of weeks, I can tell you this: it works. These days, I use basically any or all of my Internet time to work on my startup, Nincha. Before, I’d have a mental to-do list of six things I plan to complete for the day, and I’d barely end up getting through one of them, having forgot the other three and being carried away with the first one. Now with NowDoThis, I write them down before I start, add as more come to me, and just follow it through, one by one. At the end of five days out of seven, I’m able to get to the very satisfactory “all done.”, which gives me so much pleasure that I’m actually able to get on with other ‘normal’ things in life without feeling the guilt or weight of having five remaining tasks in my head.

An extremely helpful tip to anyone who intends to use NowDoThis, is to put it in your Firefox Sidebar (pictured right). Here are the steps, as taken from the NowDoThis blog:

• Bookmark NowDoThis.
• Choose “Organize Bookmarks” from the “Bookmarks” menu.
• Select the NowDoThis bookmark.
• Click “More”.
• Select “Load this bookmark in sidebar.”

Extra tip: place that bookmark in your bookmarks toolbar, so you don’t have to scroll through your bookmarks list every time you want to load it. To do this, choose “Organized Bookmarks” and drag it to your toolbar.

There are some things I have to review which feel almost too good to let anyone else know about. NowDoThis is, sadly, one of them, but I think I’m inlined to share it with others given the productivity increase it has brought in me.