The Trouble With Social

When Seattle hip-hop duo, Common Market, penned Trouble Is, they defiantly asked "...this is hustle biz, what the trouble is?" While for them, the "...trouble is love don't want you," in social, the trouble is the hustle has been focused on all the wrong things. Paul Kedrosky said it best in a recent tweet and judging by the number of favorites and retweets, it obviously struck a chord.

Whether the payload is news, apps, games, or search results, the prevailing approach today is to mine someone's friends, apply some simplistic model that presupposes that we are like our friends, and call it good. While it's well established that similarity breeds connection, it's worth remembering that our homophily merely occurs at a higher rate than between dissimilar people. In other words, while our friends are similar to us in many ways, we all have outliers, and it's these outliers that social search has done a really poor job of addressing so far. This is true of not just friends but also interests.

The question though is how hard someone like Paul is willing to work for his content? Most techies believe that curation is the answer and the frustration expressed by Paul is solvable with more data and better algorithms. However, what they tend to discount is that curation is always going to be imperfect because no algorithm can anticipate my need without fail. Hypothetically, if such an algorithm were possible, would a tech company even implement it? If we found what we wanted 100% of the time on Google's first page of results, what would happen to their revenue? Could any increased CPC compensate for the loss of impressions on subsequent results pages? I doubt it. I believe Google's in the business of optimizing, but not too much. Speculation aside, the problem is that we're complex and sometimes unpredictable. Our needs are fluid and we push ourselves to discover the unknown. 

So, if curation nor search are the silver bullets, might social search be? Facebook would have the world believe that we are like our friends because that's the sandbox they currently have to play with and they need brands to believe that. Almost everyone else in the space is following them with their friend based recommendation engines. Bing, anyone? At Harnu, we're taking a different approach by trying to encourage new connections. Want to know what's going on in Syria right now? Talk to a Syrian. Get a local's perspective. I don't know about you, but my friends are not useful for this class of discovery. That's why we built Harnu. 

For us, while we may be taking a novel approach to social discovery, our uphill battle is going to be achieving scale for the foreseeable future. Facebook obviously has the scale. The question is whether they'll take a novel approach to social search or serve up the same old friend recommendations as everyone else. If they expand results to consider people that are not friends and let people connect with these strangers, then folks like Paul Kedrosky may get their wish as a massively long tail of people and content starts to come into play with the trade-off that Paul would have to do a some content sifting himself.

Most likely though, this would have the potential to alienate a lot of Facebook users unless they specifically opted in to that sort of feature. However, it'd also have the potential to dramatically expand Facebook's social graph. In my case, instead of the 460-something friends I have today, I'd set out to add at least one friend from every country in the world - something I'm able to do today on Harnu in the quest for perspective and knowledge that none of my friends is talking about.

As an example, on Harnu, I learned from someone in Belarus last week that it's now illegal there for anyone to gather information without accreditation. Crazy but true...

В последнее время дошло до того, что в стране запрещено незаконно собирать информацию. Только при аккредитации. Вам будет смешно, но это так.

Ask The Hard Questions Before Integrating

I love Etsy. That might sound strange coming from a guy who cringes every time he steps into a store, but I do. I love the site's aesthetic, I love the community they've empowered, and I love the brand they've created for themselves. What I don't love, however, was Harnu's integration with Etsy.

This statement has nothing to do with Etsy's technology or any other short-coming, and instead has everything to do with our not fully thinking through the implications of that integration.

When we launched Harnu in August, we had built a web app that showed Etsy products from around the world on the map. Anyone could then find products from around the world and start a discussion with people in the country of the product's origin. This followed the same format that we have done with news that enables you to seek a local's opinion, or with music that enables you to get a local's recommendations.

Upon completing the integration, our app was listed in the Etsy gallery - on the front page, actually.

What happened next should not have been a surprise, but we were pushing hard to just get Harnu launched, and although we were not crazy about the Etsy integration, we thought it was kind of cool, and would give our users another way to learn about the world. However, instead of our users discovering Etsy products, the opposite happened - the sellers on Etsy discovered our users. Upon launching the app, we were seeing quite a number of new user signups that were obviously Etsy shop names. Initially, we thought that'd be good so they could participate in the conversations around their products. Our opinion quickly soured though when the Etsy shop owners started creating posts that basically said, "Visit my shop!" with a link to their shop.

For any new service that's building a community and relies on user-generated content, it was a nightmare. We tried at first to just coach them that our users would find their products and to instead participate in the conversations about their country. The coaching didn't work though, and we continued to see these random posts advertising Etsy shops. Eventually, we shut the whole integration down, and de-listed our app from the Etsy gallery.

Contrast that experience with this week, where Harnu is now chock full of students and educators posting content, finding collaboration partners, sharing music, and discussing the world, and it's fair to say we've learned a lot in recent weeks.

I don't fault Etsy sellers at all. They have their own motivations which is to sell their products, and that I think is the key point when you're seeding a community.

Take a moment to ask yourself the right questions:

• Who are you targeting and why? 
• What are the use cases?
• What are the actors' motivations? 

Not exhaustively examining these questions will almost certainly result in unintended consequences that could set your startup back. The list above is just an example. You of course need to ask a whole host of other things not least of which is acquisition strategy for that channel and monetization opportunities

As for us? We quickly recovered, and we're having a blast seeing people share their favorite sounds and genuinely expressing a sincere curiosity to learn more about each other's culture.

The Press

Last week, Härnu received its first press exposure, and I'm happy to say that it was really favorable. In fact, the headline was:

http://ventureburn.com/2012/08/harnu-is-map-based-social-networking-and-its-brilliant/

Now, I should point out that the publication wasn't a giant like TechCrunch or one of the other respected blogs like PandoDaily, KernelMag, or even a traditional media source such as BBC's Click program. Instead, this article appeared in a tech blog called Ventureburn. Never heard of it? Well, if you were an entrepreneur in South Africa or any other emerging market in Africa, perhaps you would have!

So, how did we end up in a South African tech blog? Well, while favorable coverage in TechCrunch is probably every startup's dream, for us, at this moment, we're probably not ready for it yet for three main reasons:

• MVP has yet to be attained - While we have a product out there that's gaining users, our key metrics indicate that we have yet to reach minimum viable product status - one that can sustain the community we're working so hard to build. We also simply know that there are obvious things we've yet to "hook up" to the core product. This has two potentially negative consequences if we approached a large media outlet and they actually decided to write about us; 1) A negative review - we're new, we're bootstrapped, and we're an unknown quantity. All of this points to us needing a really killer product to get anyone's attention and earn a positive review and 2) Churn - it does us little good to see a big spike in traffic from a big press piece only for that traffic to leave as quickly as it came because the product hasn't been dialed in yet.

• Geographical imbalances - Being based in the U.S., most of our users are also from the U.S. right now. For Harnu to live up to its potential as a global conversation platform, we need people from all over the world participating and that needs to be true from Day 1. Unlike most other startups, we're not rolling out one micro-market at a time such as Seattle, San Francisco, New York, etc. So, for us a great piece in TechCrunch and a bunch of traffic concentrated in the U.S. may not be ideal until we have a critical mass of people around the world using Harnu.

• We're not sexy - This is completely subjective, but our goal is cross-cultural discovery & communication. Most other startups in the space of connecting you with people you don't know are usually iPhone apps that want to tell you about interesting people around you for casual hookups or professional networking. Some call it elastic networking, ambient networking, or even contextual indicators. Either way, we're far off to the other end of the spectrum focusing on distal networking. Who's talking about that? So far, only us it seems :-)

Given that, our bias is to spend time developing relationships with great tech blogs from around the world, work hard to help produce content that's relevant to their publication (more on that in a moment), and revisit the big U.S. blogs / publications in the future when we're a bit further along.

So, if your strategy is to find global tech blogs, here's what I think I've learned:

1. Research your target list - There are a number of posts about Middle East, Africa, Asia and other emerging market blogs and Quora is a good resource e.g. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-Asian-technology-blogs
2. Don't send a form letter - these blogs are like you. They're scrappy, they have their own ambitions and motivations, and they're out to change the world in their own way. Take the time to read their content, know who writes for them, and understand their submission process. e.g. http://ventureburn.com/contribute/
3. Know your goal - For us, we knew that Ventureburn wouldn't deliver thousands of users, but that wasn't our goal. Instead, it was simply to understand the process, and float a trial balloon as it were. We of course got lucky in that the reporter actually liked Harnu and decided to publish something favorable. We've since been able to use that article as a reference point when contacting potential partners which has been very valuable to us - something about Harnu that was written by an objective 3rd party.

Since then, we've seen an edited version of the original blog piece pop up on another site with the headline, "Is this the new Facebook?" I'm not sure there'll ever be another Facebook and that's not our goal anyway, but what's giving us cause for optimism is that real people are starting to use the service and talk about it in a mostly favorable way. We've got a long road ahead of us to deliver a product that repays the faith these early adopters have shown, but with a bit of luck we'll get there.

Random Acts of Kindness (#Call4Palestine)

I was going to write this post about a recent mis-step we made and tell you what we learned.

Instead though, I'd rather write about something much more important, and much more uplifting. That something is a trending topic on Twitter called #Call4Palestine. What's it all about? Well, at the end of Ramadan, there's a muslim holiday called Eid al-Fitr.

Being a random Scottish guy in Seattle, how do I know this? Well, someone from Indonesia told me about it on Härnu (see image to the left).

#Call4Palestine is simply an idea for people to randomly call numbers in Palestine and pass good wishes on to those on the other end during Eid al-Fitr:

"Happy Eid, next year in a free Palestine, from the river to the sea!" 

You can read more about the details here. There's also a Facebook page chronicling stories of people making the calls and the resultant conversations.

Well, not speaking Arabic, and fearful of offending anyone, I was a bit hesitant to actually call someone there. So, I did what any geek would do - I made a Soundcloud recording and then sent that message to Palestine via the map on Härnu for any and all Palestinians to discover it! Härnu will then auto-translate the text into Arabic if that's their preferred language. Of course, they're stuck with my Scottish brogue on the Soundcloud recording :-)

I have no idea if anyone from Palestine will hear it, but I really hope so, and it'd be great if more people here in the West would do this too. I'm not talking about politics or religion here - I'm talking about humanity.

A random act of kindness from a stranger goes a long way to restoring our faith in each other. So, go ahead, what are you waiting for?!

** Update **

Any doubt I had about what I was doing just evaporated with this awesome message from someone in Nablus, Palestine (which is a twin city of Dundee, Scotland by the way :-)

Ride Like Everyone is Trying to Kill You

Until we had kids, I used to get around on a motorbike - it was a lot cheaper & convenient than a car, although in Seattle, it was also a lot wetter :-) For a while, I had my dream ride - a Ducati Multistrada. It was an incredible machine and I absolutely loved that bike. However, as a motorbike rider, I followed two simple rules; 1) Never impair my senses by mixing alcohol and riding, and 2) Ride like everyone is trying to kill you.

Whether it was dumb luck or adherence to those two cardinal rules, I fortunately never had an accident. And so it goes with startups. We could get knocked off our metaphorical bike at any time by a wayward driver in a big SUV. More likely though, it's not a large competitor that'll kill us, it's that no-one gives a shit. At this stage, we have no competitors - we may as well not exist. My cardinal rule for this startup is that no-one cares - we're invisible and could get killed at any second.

When you're bootstrapping and you're a first time entrepreneur, you're flying under the radar. There are no celebrity launches, no tech press fawning over your insanely cool idea, no Twitterati re-tweeting your every brain fart acting like your the prophet incarnate, and no legion of third-party developers queuing up to partner with you. In fact, even people that have been friends with you forever just don't give a shit. That's not indicative of the value of your friendships. It's just a hard reality of life. Everyone's got their own stuff going on, and if your product isn't good enough, it's not going to break through the noise. Period. Even if it is good enough, it's not going to break through the noise of 90% of the people that encounter it for the first time.

So, you push your product out there and all the academic conversations you've had with your co-founders about your startup having the potential to change the world, get x million users, or being worth this that and the other have just had a cold dose of reality poured all over them. Now what? You start executing your user acquisition plan and it's not panning out like you had computed on your spreadsheet. Now what? You make tweaks to the product based on what limited data you have and maybe a few anecdotal conversations with respected friends that tried it out. Still the mythical hockey stick eludes you. Now what? You attend some startup incubator's talk on Mechanical Turk thinking that might be what'll get you there but that turns out to not be the silver bullet you seek either. Now what? I'll tell you what...

You grind it out.

Plain and simple. Don't bitch and whine about not being afforded the benefit of the doubt. You don't deserve it. Everything you've accomplished in your professional life until this point is in the past. Value you've created elsewhere is not transferable to the startup that you just helped hatch.

Fortunately for me, this is the game I know. Always been the underdog. My belief isn't unshakable but I know how to hustle and that's what we're doing.

You grind it out.

What does that even mean? Well, that means you get to know your target audience as well as you know your wife / husband / partner, and you do your damnedest to convince them that you've got something special. At this point, you can't fake it. You gotta believe that yourself. You email, you call, you Skype, you blog, you comment, you post, you tweet, you strike up a conversation with everyone you meet on the off chance that they might become a convert. That's what it takes.

My co-founder relayed a conversation he had with Andy Liu (he of BuddyTV fame) where Andy told him that at this stage of most consumer startups, there are three options available on the path to minimum viable community (his magical number is 10,000 users).

1. You Quit - you didn't realize it'd be this tough and you doubt you can get there.
2. You Panic - you didn't realize it'd be this tough and you try to build your way to 10K users by tweaking the product over and over and over without any sort of meaningful data to back up your bets.
3. You Work - it's war. Hand-to-hand combat. You work all hours to get everybody you possibly can to try your product and to get them back on it. It takes asking the same people over and over and over again to give it a go. 

So, here we are. A week into the redesigned Härnu and the highlight of my day was talking to a blogger / journalist from Brazil on Skype and giving her a demo of Härnu. It was awesome and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Ride like everyone is trying to kill you and take the time to see the situation for what it is - even on your worst days, you're still riding a Ducati. Life ain't that bad...

Foster the People

Last weekend, I spent time with an old friend who's the founder of a successful and growing primarily online specialty retailer with a smaller brick & mortar footprint.

After an evening of paddle-boarding around a peaceful bay in Puget Sound, we rustled up some dinner,  cracked open a bottle of plonk, and animated conversations ensued.

With the inevitable catching up on how everyone was doing out of the way, the topic turned to retail and specifically Amazon's recent foray into outdoor sports (the same space my friend works in). When asked if he was concerned about this development, my friend responded that, in his opinion, any retailer, whether they're online or offline, that hasn't gone to the trouble of building a community around their brand will die since there is no point of differentiation.

Rather than fret about Amazon's encroachment into his space, he's betting that they'll clean it up and at one end of the spectrum, you'll have Amazon - the online behemoth vending outdoor equipment, and at the other end of the spectrum you'll have companies like his that have spent years building a brand that's 100% focused on a community of action sports enthusiasts. Everyone else who sits in the middle - neither an absolute lowest-cost provider nor a brand that people care about will be gone.

I should point out that his assertion that people care about the experiential aspect of buying products does not come at the expense of eschewing the benefit of analytics. Rather, analytical prowess for any retailer is just table stakes these days. If you don't have that competency you don't exist. Simple as that.

What we both agree though is that unless you're Walmart or Amazon, your point of differentiation has to center around your customers or users. So many retailers these days are struggling because they want to compete on price, they want to compete on local assortment, they want to compete on analytics, etc. The list goes on and on. In the end, they lose on all fronts against more disciplined competitors.

Coming back to tech - the parallels are just as relevant for us as we build the Härnu brand. That algorithms will automate more of our lives is inevitable. Their utility in helping to remove friction is tremendous. However, while the chorus of geeks imagining a fully-automated world surrounded by contextually relevant data cues grows daily, I instead imagine something a bit more nuanced - a world where dispassionate algorithms give us what they've been programmed to think we want in some situations, and in other situations we'll seek out the messy, irrational, and fun experience of human-led interactions.

The War of Art

I spent much of last week skulking around Seattle area coffee shops intending to be productive, trying to be productive, willing myself to be productive but mostly failing. Our much anticipated (at least among us founders) new version of Härnu is inching closer to production and instead of unbridled excitement, I was mostly being consumed by fear. Specifically, fear of failure. That thing that I've allowed to hold me back for so long crept into my sphere of optimism and paralyzed my ability to think and work unhindered.


I found myself accepting defeat - that the next version will fail, that the idea is iffy, that entrenched incumbents offer a good enough alternative, that I'm not competent enough etc. The list goes on and on.

Talking to people about it didn't help. The natural reaction of loved ones is to help you find a solution - try this..., have you thought about..?, what about...? The self-pitying response from me was always that yes, I have thought of that and here's 10 reasons why that won't work.

Breaking out of these despondent episodes can be tough but I don't think they should be ignored entirely. Rather than roll over, I spent the time trying to get at the core of my angst, and asking myself what the alternatives are if indeed things don't go as we hope. The Lean Startup principles have an answer for all of this, but in among the dispassionate multi-variate A/B tests and subsequent pivots are imperfect, emotional, and sometimes irrational people that have laid it all on the line to build something of their own and find meaning.

Steven Pressfield wrote a book called the War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle for those trying to deal with what he calls the Resistance. We may be trying to build a company, but it has always been a product of our imagination, and its future depends on our creativity. For Pressfield, the answer to combatting the resistance is to do the work, and that's exactly what I intend to do.

So, here we are - another week, a new version rolling out to production very shortly, a set of plausible alternatives, AND a desk in a downtown Seattle office gratis courtesy of my next-door neighbor who's a co-founder of a successful startup and took pity on the old guy shooting for the moon.

No more morose coffee shop music to get me down - an all-night bug-bash awaits. It's time to dance ;-)