sarp centel

Jason Fried and David H. Hansson of 37signals have been an inspiration to the startup community with their strong stand on how they do business. Their first book “Getting Real” targeted developers of web-based software. Rework, their latest book, contains more generic ideas that could be useful for any small business. It consists of 100 ideas, each 2-3 pages long. If you have been following their talks and blog, you’ll see many ideas repeated over and over. I bought this book knowing that I won’t find many new ideas, however it’s nice to have all these gems distilled together in one book. You’ll be reading things you already know, but the important thing is to apply these ideas to your life. I’ll leave you with 10 of my favorite ideas extracted from this book:

1. Workaholism
   Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. Workaholics try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done. Send people home at 5. They get their work done at the office because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to. If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know. You want busy people.
2. Marketing is not a department
   Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. Every time you answer the phone, send an email, someone uses your product, every error message, after-dinner mint, checkout counter, your invoice is marketing.
3. Draw a line in the sand
   Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. A strong stand is how you attract superfans. When you stand for something, decisions are obvious
4. Start at the epicenter
   The stuff you have to do is where you should begin. Start at the epicenter. To find the epicenter is to ask yourself this question: “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” You can take away the onions, the redish, the mustard etc. from a hot dog. Some people may not like your toppings-less dogs, but you’d still have a hot dog stand.
5. Outside money is Plan Z
   Are you starting your own business to take orders from someone else? You wind up building what investors want instead of what customers want. You give up control. They want to cash out as soon as they can. When you’re just beginning, you have no leverage. That’s a terrible time to enter any financial transaction.  It’s just no worth it.
6. You need less than you think
   Do you really need six months or can you make something in just two? Do you really need a big office or can you share space or work from home for a while?
7. Building to flip is building to flop
   You need a commitment strategy, not an exit strategy. If your whole strategy is based on leaving, chances are you won’t get far in the first place
8. Making the call is making progress
   When you put off decisions, they pile up. And piles end up ignored, dealt with haste or thrown out. Commit to making decisions. Decide and move forward.  When you get in that flow of making decisions, you build momentum and boost morale. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow. It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong any way. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch.
9. Build an audience
   An audience can be your secret weapon. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.
10. Nobody likes plastic flowers
    Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. Show the latest version of what you’re working even if you’re not done yet. It’s OK if it’s not perfect.

It’s been 1.5 year since I attended Atlanta Startup Weekend. Among startup events taking place in Istanbul such as etohum, webrazzi meetups etc. Startup Weekend Istanbul was the best in terms of bringing a diverse set of high quality people together. The selection process to attend the event combined with great sponsors to make it free resulted in a great Startup Weekend. Short meetings are only good for “networking“, these long events allow you to make stronger connections.

The lesson I learned last time was to choose a good team instead of a good idea. I faced the same dilemma this time, I had to choose between:

1. Great people, not so exciting idea
2. Exciting idea, weak team

My goal was to meet interesting people and have fun so I chose the first option. I’m glad I did.  What made our team great were these little moments: Ilyas pulling out a Vodka bottle out of his bag and offering team members his redbull-vodka mix on the first night… Selin bringing Turkish pastry and flowers on Saturday morning, Erdem going to Eminonu to buy horns for the team, Emrah with his dial-up modem ringtone, loud applauses for the team on every occasion… I remembered how it is to work in a fun environment!

Here’s the pattern I’ve seen about what makes a good team for a startup weekend event:

• There are a lot of developers on the team, and there is a great designer
• Core of the team consists of friends that already knew each other before the event
• People who pitch the idea have done preparation in advance (buying the domain, printing cards)

What was the result of the event? The team with the exciting idea won the best project award, and our project was the runner-up with the best design prize. The fun we had as a team during this weekend was priceless.

I met extraordinary people and had a superb time! I’m looking forward to the next event …

Predictably Irrational is a book about human behavior and our decision making process from a behavioral economics perspective. Each chapter describes a force that affects our decision making process, such as social norms, emotions, relativity etc. The author presents a different perspective compared to standard economics, where we assume that all agents are rational.

• We make our decisions by comparing each option with another, and end up choosing the relatively best option. Companies use this fact to manipulate our decision making process by putting decoy options. We also anchor ourselves to initial prices.
• We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open.
• Free is irresistable, when choosing among two products, we overreact to the free one. You can offer a great product for a very cheap price, but people would still prefer the inferior product that is free.
• Social norms make people do things for free that they wouldn’t do otherwise for a small amount of money. Open-source software is a great example.

• On procrastination: He lets students choose their own deadlines for assignments, and compares results with where the professor sets deadlines
• On ownership: Students at Duke go through a very difficult process to obtain football tickets. Those who win the tickets value them at $2,000 to sell them, whereas losers offer $150 for the same experience
• On social norms: They experiment with giving parents fines for picking up their children late, but it doesn’t work as well as guilt does
• On relativity: Same circle looks larger when it’s surrounded by smaller circles
• On cost of zero cost: People prefer $10 coupon for free rather than taking a $20 coupon for $7

Admitting the problem is the first step to a solution. I’ve been exercising on and off for 6 years and given the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it, I’m very far away from the body I deserve. I’ve come up with several conclusions:

i) You can not improve what you don’t measure
For years, I kept going to our local gym where they provided you with all the equipment, but didn’t really measure your progress or keep an eye on you. I kept exercising, without considering if I was improving or not. I was guilt free, thinking that I’m taking action to improve, but I was missing an important piece: diet. I was eating relentlessly, taking more calories than needed, eating desserts and drinking alcohol.

My new gym measures my weight and body fat every 6 weeks. After the first measurement, my body fat was the same, and I had lost some muscle mass. It was a disaster and I was very disappointed. I realized that going to the gym is only 30-40% of losing weight. Your diet, on the other hand, is what is most important.

ii) Working hard is deceiving
I’ve worked hard, but I haven’t worked smart. Working hard is deceiving, it prevents you from achieving your true potential. Little progress you make due to working hard conceals all the mistakes you are making. Don’t fall into this trap!

iii) Exercising is counter-intuitive
To burn fat, you don’t need to run as fast you can. Instead, you should run slowly for a longer period of time, maintaining a certain heart rate. To build muscle mass, you shouldn’t go to gym everyday. Instead, your muscles grow as you rest, so you should exercise every other day. And if you’d like to have 6-packs, doing thousands of crunches won’t help you much if you have a lot of body fat. Those aren’t done in the gym, it’s all about your diet and body fat percentage.

Now that the Netflix Prize is over, Github has a new competition for those interested in recommendation systems. GitHub wants to recommend its users repositories to watch. They have a data set that tells which user is watching which repository. They have removed one watched repository from 4788 users in this data set, so your job is to guess which repositories were removed. Here are some reasons to check this competition out:

• It’s a tractable problem:  Unlike Netflix prize, GitHub has a small dataset that you can experiment with on your own machine. It’s is 4.5 megabytes, with ~450,000 records (120,867 unique repositories and 56,555 unique users). It’s a good chance to learn about collaborative filtering and machine learning methods.
• It doesn’t last long: This competition might not attract researchers with PhDs with the prize: a bottle of whiskey. Odds are you’ll be competing with other hobbyists for one month, so you can’t spend too much time on it anyways (unlike Netflix Prize that lasted for years).
• You can master a scripting language: GitHub has a strong Ruby community, and since you’ll be prototyping a lot and trying different ideas, scripting languages such as Ruby, Python etc. will be very suitable for this task. Writing code is a good way to learn a new language, so here you go…
• It’s a fun learning experience: After the competition is over, participants will be required to share their source codes. If you get yourself familiar with this competition by participating, you’ll be able to learn a lot by looking at other solutions at the end.

Let the fun begin!

Click is a book by Bill Tancer, founder of Hitwise – a company that tracks online usage. This book is about understanding human behavior and drawing conclusions from aggregate online behavior such as search trends. It has a very interesting start talking about adult sites:

• Throughout the year, Thanksgiving is the day with least visits to adult sites since family members are around.
• On a daily basis, adult sites receive most visitors on Fridays, and least on Sundays. Having least visitors on Sunday is explained by religious beliefs but Friday is pretty counter-intuitive.
• 70% of the visitors are male, female visitors prefer erotic literature, whereas male counterparts prefer pictures and videos.

Another interesting claim is that the competitors of adult sites are social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook because their traffic trends show strong negative correlation.

Another counter-intuitive conclusion from this book is about prom dresses. Since proms are usually in May or June, one would expect people to look for dresses during May or April. However, search traffic for prom dresses starts peaking in January, showing a change in our behavior over the years.

Other parts of the book talk about our fascination about celebrities, failed resolutions, what people are afraid of etc.

Not all parts of the book are equally interesting, but there are a lot of counter-intuitive findings mentioned that makes us question our intuitions and beliefs. Overall, it’s worth reading if you are interested in learning more about humans via our online actions.

I like reading/learning more than thinking/imagining. But this is a learned habit, and I’d like to change that. So here’s a little thought exercise:

Imagine you are living in a smart home where all your electronic appliances are connected to the Internet. Just like web sites do, your home appliances have APIs that let you programmatically access and control them. Not just yours, but all your neighbors are connected to this home appliance network as well, so you can interact with your neighbor’s devices as well. What kind of mashups would you create?

• You can’t improve what you don’t measure: I’d like to have a real-time panel showing electric consumption of each device in terms of cost per minute, as well as aggregated measures, cost by room etc.
• Event based actions: While moving around the house, lights should go on an off automatically using sensors, no more light switches! I’d build a web based remote control panel that shows you the status of each device (temperature, on/off, time remaining etc.) and let’s you control them. When you exit the house, you should get a warning of devices you’ve forgotten to turn off.
• Smart control: Heating and air conditioning devices should retrieve local weather data from the internet and adjust the temperature accordingly.
• More interactive TV: You can see your friends’ text-based comments on the side while watching your favorite show. Or you can see related articles that help you better understand things referred in the show. I’d request a recording from my TV directly to my computer. Subtitles for shows in foreign languages. Reviews for movies I’d like to purchase…

There are definitely more interesting things to come …

I don’t read a lot of marketing books but somehow I got interested in this one via recommendations on Friendfeed. But wait, this isn’t a marketing book. I would call it a book on strategy with marketing theme. It’s an old book, written in 1993, but it was very surprising to find most of the examples and brands relevant and still in existince. Somehow the world doesn’t change as rapidly as we think.

What makes this book interesting is that it supports each law with a lot of examples from popular brands. Moreover, it’s pleasing to understand the reason behind recent campaigns in the Turkish market. For instance, Pegasus Airlines, a Turkish airline company, used a campaign that advocated their 2nd place in the market and tried to communicate that they are trying harder. This campaign created a lot of sympathy for Pegasus Airlines on my end, which is no surprise because they’re using a lot of laws mentioned in this book: Rule #7: The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder. Apparently, Avis uses a similar strategy, claiming that they were No 2. in rent-a-cars. Rule #15: When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in strategy and marketing.

Reading mostly non-fiction, Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. I feel as if he’s a writer of my generation since he published his books in 2000 (The Tipping Point) and 2005 (Blink). Both of them were best-sellers, and very good reads. This time, he’s arguing that “there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.” in his new book Outliers. Gladwell makes several arguments that I found interesting:

• Accumulative advantage: “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities to further success. It’s the best students who get best teaching and most attention.”
• Importance of working hard: “Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or he works.”
  “Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.”
• Satisfactory work: “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

This post is intended for people who will attend a Startup Weekend event for the first time.

Why attend a Startup Weekend?

• It’s a better networking event compared to daily events. You’ll cooperate together to achieve a common goal, you’ll suffer together, you’ll have fun together. Overall, you’ll spend more time together, and form stronger connections.
• If you have acquaintances that you think highly of, but never worked with before, Startup Weekend is the perfect opportunity. You can think of it as a laid-back 54 hour interview for identifying possible startup partners.
• You’ll meet like-minded people. You’ll have fun. You might even start a company!

So, how do I choose which team to work with?

• Don’t choose an idea, choose a team: Even the brightest idea will not get far if there isn’t a good team behind it. Make a good compromise between an interesting idea and a good team. Make sure you team has enough back-end & front-end developers, as well as graphic designers if you’re building a web application. 
• Think twice before joining a large team: (More than 10-15 people) These teams are like large companies, they are not agile. It’s harder to coordinate, reach consensus and make decisions. You’ll also be working on a very small part of the whole, which might not be as exciting.
• Make sure that others are committed: All participants should share the same vision about the product. If you see people throwing in ideas that will take the product to a different direction, it’s a bad sign. Try to anticipate if people will still want to work on this idea the next day.
• Hold up to your ideals: There will boring ideas with huge business potential. Unless your only goal is to earn money, don’t be fooled by them. Life is too short to work on boring ideas!