What did I do today?

Takeaways and Todos for today

Yesterday after I posted day #1, I read again my post. Obviously I left many typos. It must have been hard to read. More important: I felt that my idea lacked punch, stickiness and virality. If I do again the same errors it’s really not worth your attention. I need to ramp up on the project definition to makeit really attractive and fix a need. My todo list for today was

• Find more ideas around the same set of features
• Get some mojo in my description of the product.
• Find a first element of virality
• Imagine a landing page

I’m happy I was able to write the first post yesterday so quickly and publish without procrastinating. It was not an easy decision and an easy moment to share. It was liberating to do it. Instead of over-thinking consequences and what could people think, it’s done, it’s behind me. Now I have only to focus on the future.

Iterating

Iterating around an idea until it really becomes brilliant is the essence of innovation and startups. The idea may be decent and have some potential at the start, but it’s how it can be developed and expanded that gives its true value. Either it’s harder and harder and the niche becomes even smaller or it can be generalized or bring multiple levels of service. So I started my day with an hour of brainstorming away from my desk to find how I could add value to my idea.

Virality

To make the idea viral, some kind of propagation mechanism should exist between users. Since we are on Twitter, it has to be twitter based. The maximum effect occurs when other users are invited in the service to see something left for them. This is the case of Facebook. You want to see what your friends shared? You need an account and signing in. It’s not true for Twitter or a blog. The middle would be when users recommend and endorse the service visibly by their actions.. This is what we see in a very obvious and annoying way when some friends thank us as being best contributors to their conversations, or for being a new follower. It’s also used by Storify and paper.li : “you have been quoted”, “best stories via” etc. Behind the mention of a friend, you have also the name of the service and a link back to them. Personally I dislike this kind of messages when they are automated and come again and again. The very minimum that can exists is when this signal is send unknowingly of others. This is the case when you are added to “my audience” list, or your tweets are “liked”. It works well because it triggers the curiosity of the person listed. However such a list must be public and my intent is to help people to build private lists. If they wish to make them public it’s possible but not a requirement. My first choice so far is to encourage users to share when they subscribed and adapted a list using the app. It’s voluntary so it will not be repetitive, it’s in the open so it brings more exposure. The person who designed the list will be grateful that his list is being shared. The name of the app will appear showing others how to adopt and make lists their own. ‘I copied/adopted/subscribed this list _____ and tuned it/adapt it to my need using @Kneaver” If you click on the link you will reach the landing page of the app, with the list ready to be placed in your Twitter account. It will be almost faster as doing it on Twitter plus you can adapt it right away. My second choice is to encourage users to manage a list of their most valuated tweeps. Could be used for a #FF or by turning the list public. Both a be taken care of by the app.

My 5 minutes of Internet

Helen posted a long comment on my Facebook post. Besides feeling some communality in her experience of entrepreneurship, she added “No one has time or motivation to learn anything for work, unless they are passionate about”. It’s a bit realistic but I ended up with the same conclusion yesterday night. Learning must be absolutely necessary or fun. Note taking, reflective thinking, connecting ideas, and building experiments is not so fun. Selling a product people are little motivated to use is a guaranteed failure. There are only few people willing to walk the mile and spend hours in front of a screen to reach a higher level of learning and understanding. A similar statement was shared during #PKMChat last Friday. It’s not that learning must be hard but the fact is that it requires concentration, motivation and time. As such it competes with everything else we are tempted to do: walking in the nature, chatting with friends, watching movies. I’m not done with this but it’s not the fastest way to make money. So let’s not do this error again. I feel a bit disturbed to write a product aimed solely at making money and serving people’s vanity. So I’ll stay on the ethical part of information and relation management: preserve people attention. To help them dedicate attention to what is worth it.

Playing game of social marketing

I imagined a story with two personas: Elisa is using Twitter to learn and develop her career. She has some goals.

• She wants find people who can help her by sharing interesting stuff.
• She wants also to enjoy conversations and building a network of like minded people.
• She’s not against gaining a bit of notoriety, authority and get some attention for her writing.

Tanya is more interested to hustle on Twitter. She’s a growth-hacker (like me). She creates a constant stream of tweets to attract attention on her and her services. For this purpose she will use all the tricks well know on social marketing (unlike me).

• Attract influencers in her following by flattering them.
• Schedule tweets all over the day to make sure there is always one recent.
• Share content designed by others, made to capture attention. Content surely very interesting but rarely needed at this exact point of time.
• Add a little bit of noise like automated mentions, random favorites.
• Follow aggressively in the hope that people follow back blindly.

It’s a bit exaggerated but it sets the scene. Tanya has plenty of tools at her disposal: buffer, Hootsuite, sumome etc. All well funded companies offering the tools marketers desire. Technically it’s pretty simple. Most services have a entry rate accessible to individuals.

It’s not new

The same happened in the past with TV shows. People ended up using TV ads to visit the rest room. Post signed along the roads, people don’t see them after a while. For people like Elisa really wanting to use Twitter there is a need to stay concentrate on our tasks and yet to stay informed.

Let’s give some help to Elisa

Elisa don’t have much at her disposal to avoid the flow of information that Tanya is willing to share with her. Let’s change this.

The right weapons for the right fight

Or the right tools for the right job to take a less bellicuous approach. The fight against Information overload and being distracted can’t be won at the end of the firehose. It has to take place at the root cause of it. No need of apps to force us to work or stay focused, just the right moves to make us better at taming the distractions, temptations and cognitive fatigue.

What motivates us:

• Our desire to please people we appreciate by reading what they share
• Our curiosity to discover new ideas, new tricks, justified by the possibly it could help us in our work. Rarely observed.
• Our desire to learn in general.
• Our social taste that makes us willing to engage in conversations. Especially true when a re a bit bored or in search of a dopamine reward after a long concentration effort.
• Our desire to be recognized as competent and worth consideration
• Our desire to gain attention on our work

What can be done:

I did a separate post for the needs and ideas I have. Feel free to comment if you see needs on this topic I didn’t address or if you think my order of priorities is not proper.

I spend time reading again my notes

I attended 3 trainings start of this year

• 7 days startup. Plenty of the material shared was not applicable to me because I was already more advanced on Kneaver. However with this new project I’m perfectly aligned with it. I was pleased to see that some ideas are now applicable ad will be done.
• CopyBlogger challenge on Cornerstone. Some goods ideas to reuse. All the posts I’m writing now will serve as material for content marketing.
• Performance summit. A set of conferences during 3 days from all the major writers on self development, performance, professional development. It’s a great source of inspiration and it’s all very recent: 3 months old only. While I was reading my notes, I found some applications for this new app. I wrote sentences I wish to use, questions I need to answer. This will form the material for the landing page.

I draw a wireframe of the app

It takes the form of small vignettes in a storyboard. The goal is to picture the progression of the complete user journey. It’s not very detailed and nicely drawn but it’s enough to force me to see the shortcoming of my first ideas and helps ideating of alternatives. Writing down and drawing sketch helps to make progress and let go of original ideas faster. It seems counter intuitive as we spent time writing and drawing. Once saved ideas can be left behind without fear of missing a good idea. It’s better to just jot down a sketch to actually start building it or prototyping it. In the time it takes to draw or write several iterations can already be done.

My methodology goes from hand-drawing to test driven development.

It’s a combination of coding and hand drawing. The more I code, the more the hand-drawing will be replaced by actual screen shots of the prototype. The text will become the text used in the tests. I’m a developer. It’s faster for me to assemble real web elements than to use photoshop. For the creative part I use hand drawing. The extra benefit is that I will have a working prototype faster. Because I’m use to think in term of components, features can be replaced or moved around screens very easily. As opposed to the regular Kneaver it’s a one page app. This means it’s loaded once for all and everything happens behind the scene using very short updates. On need it can be wrapped into a real IOS or Android app using Phonegap. I’m using tools I learned very recently, it’s very exciting.

What I plan for tomorrow

• Start my landing page and the MVP.
• I will not be able to make it available at once but it should be visible Tuesday.
• I’ll share some screen shots and copy tomorrow.

PS: Post was not published on time cuz connection was down again. Being in the mountains the mobile connection is very slow and unstable. Made me empathize with Helen’s constant disconnection from WordPress. Nw I have the same issue :) I didn’t wrote a day #3 because it was not very productive. I spent time in a local initiative of spring cleaning the roads sides. Day #4 will be about landing page design.