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Blog postEvery now and then, I go down a weird rathole. With the news of the Ever Given stuck in the Suez, and the fact that I live next to one of the world’s great historical waterways, I looked at the history of marine transportation.
It’s a story that involves the British love of tea, the standardization of firearms, mass production, and lots more. I guess it’s sort of inspired by James Burke’s Connections series. I’m not used to producing video content like this—and it could definitely use -
Blog postPredictions about the future are seldom accurate, but often useful.
In the last few months, the “creator economy” has hit the mainstream. While creators have been around forever, creation, particularly digital, is undergoing a renaissance. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a recap:
Early on, platforms like Patreon (primarily for performers) and Kickstarter (primarily for makers) let creators connect directly with their audiences, eliminating the middleman and putting -
Blog postLast night, I played a video on my TV from my phone. It was a bit loud, so I turned it down. That might seem unremarkable, but it led to a Twitter thread I thought I’d expand on here.
Decades ago, I was a product manager for dial-up access concentrators. When you put an AOL CD-ROM in your PC and dialed out, my product picked up the phone on the other end. That product was called the Data Network Gateway/IP, and it was made by Primary Access Corporation in San Diego. We affectionately p -
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Blog postThe short version: Emily Ross and I are writing a book on subversive go-to-market strategy called Just Evil Enough. We’ve been asked to create a live online course to go with it, and we’re doing some research.
Take me to the survey!
One respondent will win a keynote talk or workshop, to use as they see fit—something we normally charge a lot for. And access to the course, absolutely free.
If you want some context, read on.
When Lean Analytics was first published in -
Blog postIt’s easy to separate politics into “left” and “right.” Left-leaning policies focus on equality, inclusion, and the sharing of risk and reward. Parties that push these policies have a “progressive” platform. Right-leaning policies focus on equity, independence, and self-reliance. Parties that push these policies have a “conservative” platform. These parties go by many names—Tories, Republicans, Liberals, Democrats, and so on.
In theory, one can be conservative, but still want a habitab -
Blog postI chair a conference called FWD50. Launched in 2017, it’s about digital government. The name comes from the idea that it’s nonpartisan, but progressive (“neither left, nor right, but forward”) and that speakers are encouraged to consider three timeframes:
What policies we should enact in 50 days
What platforms we should build in 50 months
What society we want in 50 years
We ask our speakers to do this, but it’s not an easy task. I was recently asked to share my vis -
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Blog postI’ve been thinking a lot about the sinister threads of 2020. I haven’t worked out a coherent narrative yet, but perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I wanted to share my notes so far. Briefly:
I have an incredibly privileged vantage point.
The inequalities of capitalist democracy mean that, for many people, the online world is more real than the physical one.
If I still believed in government, I’d be fighting for my team, rather than the policies I wanted to see.
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Blog postHey there! Before we get started down a rabbithole of old computers and the legal system: Finally, on Friday, June 12, I’ll be talking with behavioural economist Supriya Syal about how people form communities and meet others, which seems particularly relevant given our socially distant lifestyles.
Sign up for the live event
Do you want to play a game? My first computer was a Golden ][, a thinly-veiled knockoff of an Apple ][ with manuals that had been mangled from English to Chin -
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Blog postBefore I dive into a rant on memory, forgetting, implants and biology—here’s a quick update.
I learned so much running a couple of sessions on the future events that I’ve decided to make this a regular thing. I’m going to be talking with some fascinating people in the coming weeks. You can listen in and ask questions by registering below; as always, I promise to spend your time wisely.
Reinventing a restaurant Randy Smerik, a close friend and serial entrepreneur, turned his fine- -
Blog post“Back to normal” is a dangerous nostalgia. Like a fire that liberates pinecones lying in wait on the forest floor, this crisis is both a great tragedy, and a chance for rebirth.
I am not a fan of glib Chicken-Soup-For-The-Entrepreneur’s-Soul platitudes. I try to avoid saying things that might wind up embroidered on pillows, or emblazoned on a painting in an AirBnB (remember those?)
If you read on, I hope you’ll find a less breathless, and more rational, explanation for my optimi -
Blog postThanks for signing up for Interesting Bits.
Way back in the 1970s, an economist, scientist, and philosopher by the name of Herbert Simon heard everyone around him talk about the “information age.” While the amount of data people had to deal with in an era of rotary phones and black-and-white TV might seem laughable today, computers were just entering the public psyche, and there was no turning back.
But Simon chafed at the term. Economies are powered by supply and demand—and the -
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Blog postA toss of a perfect coin is pure randomness. And by perfect, I mean unflawed coin, ideal conditions, perfect 50/50. Similarly, a game that involves only rolling one perfect dice has total randomness. 1/6 chance of a six-sided result.
Photo by Riho Kroll on Unsplash.
Games with multiple dice are still random, but within predictable patterns: the Central Limit Theorem says that a pair of 6-sided dice are most likely to add up to 7, simply because there are more possible combinatio -
Blog postHi, I’m Alistair! I like to organize, write, and build outrageously interesting things, and help others to do the same.
For some context: I run conferences (including FWD50, Startupfest, and Scaletech, and previously Strata and Cloud Connect.) I’ve written a few books, most notably Lean Analytics; and I co-founded Coradiant with friends a while back.
I’ve been posting stuff online since the early days of BBSes. It’s wound up on Solve For Interesting, Medium, Tilt the Windmill, a -
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Blog postI got an Oculus Quest for Christmas.
I’ve been a fan of consumer VR for decades, ever since Snow Crash planted the seed. I was an early backer of Oculus (I still have the Developer Edition hardware) and bought both a Rift and an HTC Vive to see where they were headed, because I firmly believe it’s the future.
The Quest is so close to ready—in an Apple, it-just-works kind of way. So much so that it’s suddenly easy for me to believe that Apple will launch truly consumer-ready, pho -
Blog postA couple of weeks ago, I spent a wonderful weekend in Berlin with friends. In between a hidden gem of Indonesian food one night, and a “textile-free” visit to Spa Vabali, I roamed the city searching for a guilty pleasure of mine—Christmas Markets.
What’s not to love? Not pictured: A giant disco ball on an iconic building.
If you don’t know what these are, let’s just say they’re everything bad for you in the best way. Spatleze. Raclette. Roasted chestnuts. Marzipan. Candied nuts. -
Blog postScience fiction authors like to start with the world as we know it, and then change one aspect of that world: Aliens exist; time travel is possible. These stories tickle our brains because they dwell on how one fundamental shift has widespread consequences, creating a world almost unrecognizable from our own.
Imagine that one day, you woke up and a universal constant had changed. Maybe the speed of light was slower; maybe gravity had been cut in half. Assuming you were even still alive -
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Blog postFor the last few years, my daughter and I have made boardgames together. It’s become something of a tradition, and along the way I realized it’s an amazing educational tool. So here’s some of what we made, what I learned, and some tips to make your first game.
We started with something she entitled The Great Diamond Quest (in which players have to travel around the board getting gems and magical items, then defeat the dragon in the middle):
We drew this with sharpie then added w -
Blog postNPR has a podcast called More Perfect, about the amendments to the US constitution, that I’ve been listening to lately. It’s fascinating, and full of metaphor, example, and quirk that help unpack the US constitution.
In the first episode, Norman Dorsen professor in civil liberties at New York University Law School Burt Neuborne explains the first amendment. If you don’t know these 45 words by heart, they are:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or -
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Blog postIn the new Google Duplex demo, the software agent calls a restaurant. At the start of the call, the agent says, “this call will be recorded.”
I found that jarring. We are accustomed to the business we call recording everything “for quality control and training purposes.” The business is centralized; it has the technology. Training sounds nice (even though those tapes will probably be used in arbitration, or as evidence for HR.)
One of the things we often overlook is the decentra -
Blog postScience fiction author Arthur C. Clarke proposed three laws, the most famous of which is that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In 1991, Barry Gehm proposed a corollary to this law: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
This is a critical flinch test for founders. If your product doesn’t seem like magic to your target market, something’s got to change. A magical product means the difference between a long, costly s -
Blog postWhen you run an experiment, as Alistair and I did with the Lean Analytics Backchannel, you have to be prepared for it to fail. In fact, if you run an experiment that can’t fail, it’s not really an experiment.
Alistair and I launched the Backchannel because we believe that there’s an opportunity to help people over time and consistently with Lean Analytics; the book is great (and we know it’s helped people), but not enough. It’s a reference guide to get you started, but everyone needs -
Blog postLean Analytics has been out for 3 years. It still amazes me how often people reach out to let us know that they’ve enjoyed the book. More importantly, people tell us that it’s helped them. And that’s awesome. Alistair and I wrote Lean Analytics to help people. We weren’t quite sure how good a job we would do, but I think it’s turned out fairly well.
Having said that, we’ve always felt like there’s more to this story than the book. We’ve done a lot of speaking engagements (and continue -
Blog postRecently, Bayram Annakov of Appintheair wrote to us about how he’d used analytics and Lean approaches to improve his user onboarding, with some pretty dramatic results. He was kind enough to outline them here for all of us.
We build great apps, we solve critical problems, and we help our users achieve their goals. But you know what the real problem is? Despite all that, sometimes users simply don’t use our product—because we failed to get them on board. All that hard work goes to was -
Blog post“To reiterate, the biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development.”
That’s a great quote from a new book called Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It emphasizes something we talk a lot about in Lean Analytics–you can’t just build a product in a vacuum without early and frequent customer feedback/engagement. Early traction in Lean Analytics is about proving wh -
Blog postLast year, Ben and I presented a workshop at the International Startup Festival with Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovitz, the co-authors of The Lean Entrepreneur. It was a highlight of the festival for us, and we realized the four of us have a lot in common—and a lot to learn from one another.
Fast-forward a year, and a couple of weeks ago, I got on a Google Hangout with the team from Move The Needle. The brainchild of Brant and Aaron Eden, MTN helps companies implement Lean stra -
Blog postBack in December, Roger Huffstetler of Zillabyte contacted us to say he’d applied some of Lean Analytics to his startup, and wanted to fill us in on what happened. At the time, by his own admission, he was “Up to my ass in alligators” But now, a few months later, is his story.
I had just completed my 30th demo of our product, and I remember leaving the feedback session on cloud nine. As I wrapped up showing our API to the potential customer, he suggested what we were building was “ama -
Blog postThis is a guest post from Eric Klaassen of Bloom, a consulting firm that helps companies grow online. We first met Bloom late last year in South Africa, and they’ve been pushing the envelope of applying Lean Startup concepts to big, established companies.
The success of the lean start-up methodology is increasingly resonating in large enterprises. Companies like Intuit, Amazon, GE and many others are implementing key principles of the lean start-up in order to deal with the compl -
Blog postWe’ve seen copies of the Polish and Korean versions of Lean Analytics in the wild, and spoken with a few of the other translators. We’re excited to see the book reach so many new readers. In the meantime, we’ve been doing a bit of translation of our own!
Photo of the WAQ stage from way up high, by Andréanne Beaulieu
Last week, I spoke at Web A Québec, a conference on web technologies that happens in Québec City. I speak French (but far from perfectly) -
Blog postOver the last few months, we’ve talked with many startups looking for tactics they can use to try out new ideas quickly. These aren’t strictly Minimum Viable Products, but rather features they think might work—because of a hunch, anecdotal user feedback, a pattern in their data, or a competitor’s feature set.
But what’s the right way to confirm or deny this hypothesis? Here are a few tactics you can try out to test whether a feature has legs, without investing a lot of time and e -
Blog postLater today, I’ll be speaking at the Lean Startup conference in San Francisco. It seems like only yesterday that Ben and I first taught a workshop on Lean Analytics, prior to the book’s launch. Since that time, we’ve visited a dozen countries, spoken with hundreds of founders, and found out that it’s being translated into eight languages. To say we were surprised by the progress is an understatement.
Rather than repeat last year’s content—which is widely available on Slideshare, on Ud
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