Steve Jobs: The Most Important Thing

We can change life into whatever we imagine.  (via Farnam Street and 37 Signals)


When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. 

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. 

And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. 

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail... (maybe) Win!

#Life of a #Startup #Entrepreneur

Kiss Your Boss Goodbye. It’s Time to Be An Entrepreneur!

I'm building a mobile app and I'm doing some research about startups and entrepreneurship. 

The market can be defined in one word: Huge!

Here are the references that I used for this slide:

1. Entrepreneurs Now Numbering Near 400 Million In 54 Countries (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor – January 19, 2012)
2. Who's Starting America's New Businesses? And Why? (Forbes.com – July 22, 2012)
3. How many start-ups in the US get seed/VC funding per year? (Gust.com – November 22, 2012)

Its interesting to see that 5.7% of the world's population are entrepreneurs, while in the US. the average is about 3.8%. Every year only 2% of US. startups raise capital from angels and VC's. For every startup that gets money from a VC another 400 were rejected, while the ratio for angels is 1 in 40.  

I'll be posting more as make progress. In the meantime you can signup to be notified when app goes live: http://bigfish.io

Mobile is a One Way Street

I'm back in the US. a few months now and I'm amazed at how crazed everyone is with mobile. For years Europe was far ahead of the US., but the iPhone and apps have changed everything.

Its on everyone's radar, and its not just about creating an app, but making it part of an overall strategy. It feels like the Internet of the mid-late '90s, everyone wants to get on board. But its more mature and the mobile is bigger, a much bigger opportunity.

If you look at some of the numbers, you'll see its a one way street. The world's population is about 7 billion people: 2 billion people are connected to the Internet, 6 billion have cell phone and about 1.2 billion have a smartphone.

• China and India account for 30% of this growth.
• About 800,000 apps are available in IOS and Android app stores.
• Google earns $2.5 billion in mobile ad revenue annually.
• Mobile devices account for 8.5% of global website hits.

The first thing most people do when they wake up in the morning is check their phones. We check our phones about 150 times a day, spending about 2.7 hours per day on our phones. We do so many things with our phones, for example half of all local searches are from mobile devices.

This growth is going to continue to be strong. In the next two years, more people will access the Internet through their cell phones, instead of their desktops.

Mobile is clearly the right thing, but to compete companies will have to redefine how they serve their content and how they offer their services and products. Mobile is not about apps. Its about creating content and commerce opportunities that are relevant and geo-targeted. Its about engaging people in real-time, while they are on the move.

As desktops, smartphones and tablets merge, we'll see a convergence, because of technologies like HTML5, on how we design user experiences. The process of how we think about websites will change, becoming mobile, consistent and coherent across devices.

Mobile Apps missing the Marketing Train

Over the past month I've been in touch with developers at two mobile app teams, and thinking about how to help them build traction and drive more downloads. What I find strange is that they're collecting so much content from their users but they're not doing anything with it, to use it and build an inbound marketing strategy.

Looking at most app sites, you'll see the same thing: very basic, just sending users to their App Store page. It looks like they all believe that its enough to get organic traffic through the App Store. But if you want to build a business, you can’t ignore search, especially when ninety percent of web traffic is driven by search engines. To rely solely on the App Store for discovery is not a strategy, especially now, when hundreds of thousands of apps are competing for visibility in IOS and Andoid stores.

Most app publishers don't realize that if they want to drive downloads, they need to build trust, which will stem from building content and engaging in conversations. They need to take user content and social actions and put them on the web. They need to develop inbound content marketing machine. Best of all, its all measurable allowing them to try different things and focus on what drives conversions.

Never Let go of the Fear of Failure

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Tolstoy’s comment applies to failed entrepreneurial ventures. The reasons entrepreneurs fail varies as the entrepreneurs themselves.

Last October on Linkedin Answers someone started a thread: "What is the ONE fear you had to let go of to become successful in your line of business?". Most people answered something about overcoming the fear of failure.

Overcoming the fear of failure is the formula to success?
I never want to let go of the fear of failure, because it drives us to succeed. Its the only thing that will keep you alive in the jungle!

I hate failing, everyone does. I don't think I've ever learned anything from failure.
The important thing about failure is not what we learned, but finding the courage to pick ourselves up and do it again.

If there's a good thing about failure, I guess its that we know which way not to go, what didn't work and what decisions were wrong. Failure is only a process to eliminate the wrong. It certainly cannot teach us what works. Vulcans and computers use the process of elimination to work out solutions :)

Past success cannot guarantee that our future endeavors will be successful. We just have better odds, because we've done it before and we have a sense of moving in the right direction.

Never get too comfortable. Never let go of the fear of failure.

Programmers are the Wizards of the Future

My family always placed a high value on education. I got a good one. In 1984 I didn't know anything about computers, most people in Greece didn't know anything about computers and confused them with calculators. Everyone I knew was telling me to become a chemical engineer, so I was leaning in that direction.

But when I came to the US., Boston University didn't offer a chemical engineering program. In my misfortune I was lucky, because I decided to study computer engineering.

The first real program I wrote was a postfix calculator for a freshman Pascal course. I spent my first summer learning Assembler, while working as a student operator filing output at VPS/VM.

I loved to code, but having my own computer was difficult at the time. I used the university's servers, with limited access, a few hours per week. In 1988 when I graduated, I got my first two computers. I got the best of both worlds: a Mac SE as a gift, and a brand new PC i386 which I found in the hotel parking lot where I worked as an attendant for the summer.

Learning to code changed my life in so many ways. Mostly it taught me how to think, how to organize a thoughts and how approach solutions.

When I read about initiatives like Code.org, TEALS, Codeclub.co.uk I get excited. The digital revolution is only getting started and we need more people that understand how to code. Not just to imagine future innovations in technology, but to come up with solutions to the world's important problems.

WolframAlpha’s New Facebook Graph

WolframAlpha just released its new Facebook graph product. The image is based on word frequency of my status updates: Great, Entrepreneur, Social, Gifting, Startup, Good, Digital, Innovation, Athens, Boston.

There's so much information packed in the report: top posts, top commenters, most liked photo or post, most commented photo etc.

You should check it out here.

Looking for the Social Currency in Search

Linkedin's recent marketing activity got me thinking again about search and social.
In recent headlines you'll read:

• Facebook and Bing’s Plan to Make Search Social
• Search me
• What should Google do about Facebook Graph Search?

Everyone is trying to figure out how to make search more social. I think whats missing is a metric, something similar to "likes" or "follows" that will drive people to share from search, because they get some value in return.

Whether you agree or not, in the mind of users "likes" and "follows" are today's social currency, the more the better. Even though big search engines have already embedded sharing functionality in their SERPs, being able to share doesn't mean that people will share. Why should they, what's in it for them? How does search increase their self-worth? What emotional rewards or visible rewards do they receive?

Most people on social networks  don't produce content, instead they synthesize and curate content. A few years back Bradley Horowitz's posted the content production pyramid. It still holds true today.

In order to make search more social, we need to allow for synthesis to take place on search page. I'm certain that posting to social networks or pulling in data from social networks on SERPs is a not the right way to approach this.

We need a social currency that is native to search.

People's vanity is a great driver for marketing

I just got a message from Linkedin.com thanking me for being part of their community and informing me that I was one of the top 1% most viewed profiles.

Sounds like I just made the dean's list.
What a great piece of marketing!

In today's digital media everyone is interested in likes, follows, pins and any other metrics that measure the reach of their profiles and the content they post. With this marketing activity, Linkedin has recruited 2 million people to spread the word. It will be no surprise, when we hear they grew from 200 million to 1 billion.

People's vanity is a great driver. All these metrics are about vanity combined with direct response, just like the click-though for online ads. Regardless of the audience you're targeting, any new online service needs a "self gratification" metric for what they're doing! A metric that feeds people's need for self promotion and drives service adoption, usage & sales.

I hope Linkedin didn't count the number of times I've viewed my own profile, when putting me on this list :)