Lots of changes going on in 2012. One of the big ones for this here blog is it’s moving. I’m going to be doing my personal blogging over at:
It’s part of Dustin Curtis’ new blog network, SVBTLE. It’s got a great focus, and has re-upped my commitment to writing. Hope you have some time to check it out.
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This isn’t meant as a troll or a rant. Or meant to spark any outrage.
And it feels like I need to preface this with:
I do believe design (informational and stylistic) is insanely important in many situations to early businesses. It’s just that I get confused when.
Look at the Clear app that sold 350,000 downloads in the iPhone app store practically overnight. The only reason that early product works is because of insanely awesome style and design.
But when is style and information design going to matter to the core of your business or you can just put anything up there? I don’t think it’s always “clear”. (Hehehe. See what i did there? :D )
This post was inspired when noticing an interesting situation where a lack of design (stylistic AND informational) doesn’t seem to be hindering their business.
I needed to figure out some parking at Midway airport in Chicago. So I find these guys:
http://www.parkrideflyusa.com/mdw-chicago-midway-airport-parking/
Mother of god is this site confusing. I wanted to book a reservation. My eyes were drawn immediately to this thing:
I must be able to click that “outdoor parking” to get to the reservation form for outdoor parking…
But no. You get this:
I didn’t scan the paragraph quick enough to find the link at the end of the test to make a reservation. I completely missed it for 10 seconds or so. Ok there it is.
Ok, reservation dates selected. Now I need to pay. This is where it gets really interesting. It took me 3-4 times longer than normal to fill in my address and payment information:
If you look at the address information. Zip code comes before City. Country comes in between City and State. The state drop down menu isn’t wide enough to display the directions from the first entry: “Selec…”. Country isn’t wide enough either. I’ve never encountered a payment form in this order before.
Simply because of the way these things seem like they were haphazardly thrown together it was very awkward to fill this thing out.
Bonus for the Canucks: If you select Canada as your billing country, that State/Province drop down doesn’t contain any provinces. :)
One last treat on the payment details screen:
The expiration fields aren’t wide enough. You can’t tell what month or year you’ve ended up selecting. I had to double check before I clicked submit on this page.
Ok, so this site “sucks”. And I generally judge a business by it’s cover. I can’t help it. I distrust business often when their websites are left to rot. But here’s the interesting part. Go look at their yelp page:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/midway-park-ride-and-fly-chicago-2#query:midway%20airport%20parking
50 reviews. 4.5 stars. Tons and tons of glowing reviews of how much they love this business.
Instead of complaining about these forms and their confusing content you read “Easy, easy online booking” type reviews. People are thrilled by the online experience :)
Maybe it’s easy for you to decide. Oh, Clear is doing todo apps so they need to use style and information to set themselves apart, and parking companies are atrocious usually in technology and service, so you don’t need to worry about website design yet. Maybe it’s that easy sometimes.
But then you see projects like 37signals Highrise redesign. They had tested a long page sales letter that looked pretty ick to many folks. And it out performed their original design:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2977-behind-the-scenes-highrise-marketing-site-ab-testing-part-1
Or have you seen the Pinboard website? That guy is awesome, and his service seems extremely useful for folks. But man, bookmarking? That’s a pretty flooded area of business. Surely you need KILLER design to stand out:
Really? That’s it? And a neon green button to pay? Awesome.
Or the contrast between
and
I can’t believe many of us would predict Drudge Report would be as successful as it is looking like this.
How do you guys decide? You have a new business idea or your working on a new project. What inside you tells you you need to sweat the information and the style of your app or your homepage before pushing it out there? Or is it instinct? Just dumb luck?
So I’m working on this new thing. I’m not going to reveal it yet, because it’s still getting figured out before I want to promote it too much.
The gist is, I’m doing some very unscalable things to test out some conceptual product ideas. If you want to read a great article about achieving scale by doing things that don’t scale, you should read this:
http://joel.is/post/12790799237/achieving-scale-by-doing-things-that-dont-scale
I’m basically doing some very manual things that I hope I can automate. If not, I’m probably and hopefully exploring an idea space where I’ll eventually discover something.
And this non-scalable thing, I’m charging for it. I put out a shingle of a website, and took out a Pay per click (PPC) campaign. And bam. 2 sales on Friday. I was pumped. Making a sale on something completely new that you have just a tiny bit of confidence will resonate with folks is a major high. I talked about those 2 sales all weekend.
I decided to make some tweaks. I raised my prices by just $10 and added some other pricing plans. If this thing will eventually scale, I really need to be able to charge more. So I got the new plans and pricing out there early on Saturday.
Come on sales!
Nothing on Saturday. That’s fine. Traffic was lighter than on Friday.
Nothing on Sunday. Crap. Ok, well maybe it’s because it’s the weekend.
Nothing on Monday. Fack!
Ok, maybe those first sales were flukes and 1) this isn’t resonating like I thought it would with customers as being a big pain to solve or 2) I can’t end up charging what I’m charging which is really going to make future revenue goals tough.
Back to the drawing board. Turn off all the PPC ads.
Then I get an email today, Wednesday. It says:
“Trying to sign up for the XYZ plan, but the form is giving me an error and won’t pass me onto the payment page”.
Wait what? Lemme check. You must be wrong, friend…
God damnit! He’s right. Friggin form doesn’t work anymore. I screwed it up when I increased prices and added the new plans, and I never bothered to check it again.
Looking at my logs, I’ve had other folks in the last three days make it past my pricing page to this form. It seems highly plausible someone else got this form error too trying to make a purchase, and just never bothered to email me.
Two lessons from this:
1) In the desire to be a lean startup, and make quick experiments, don’t be so hasty that you miss details like testing your payment form. I’m usually a very detail oriented guy, but I flaked out on this. Do quick experiments, but sweat those details.
2) PPC campaigns don’t always result in immediate sales. There was a guy yesterday who emailed me about my service and the guy today trying to use my screwed up payment form that only discovered me through these PPC ads. But they had clicked on these ads at least 3 days ago. And just now are getting back to me.
Folks are busy. Don’t assume your PPC experiments are a failure after just 24 hours. Or even 72 hours.
Ok, back to work on this thing. But I’m curious.
Is there something you gave up on too soon? Did you discover you gave up on it too soon, or just have a nagging feeling you might have?
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“THEN WHY HAVEN’T YOU DONE IT YET?? Do you realize how easy it is to do something, ANYTHING, that you can be proud of? Fuck man, put up a fucking blog. Try to write a novel. Shit, just read a book a week and write a review of each! It doesn’t have to be good…” —
A great quote from Tucker Max as he reviews some job applications.
Recap of round two responses — TuckerMax.me
It’s crazy to me that I’ve been “dealing with” open source licenses for what seems to be my entire professional career. 13 years. And I still can’t definitively tell someone what is or is not allowed under something as popular as the GNU General Public License, or GPL.
The latest example is about some stuff I was researching about Wordpress themes. A few theme providers I’ve noticed are following along with Wordpress and licensing their themes under the same license as Wordpress. Which is the GPL version 2.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
So I’m checking out a particular vendor and perusing their FAQ. They mention they are licensing under the GPL.
But then mention this bit a little later on:
Reproduction, copying, or redistribution for commercial purposes of any materials or design elements on the themes is prohibited.
If I understand the GPL, that prohibition doesn’t make sense. Right?
I know I can’t claim ownership of the product, and I need to mention if I make a change, but as long as I distribute the source code that I modify, I can copy and commercially redistribute these things as I please.
Looking at the GPL’s own FAQ, we see:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially
If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL, am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then distribute and sell that new program commercially?
You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL. These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own.
I must disclaim of course, I am not a lawyer. So don’t use anything in this post that looks like “advice”. It’s not. I’ll likely remain confused about bits about open source licenses for my entire life.
But I think these guys have their use of the license wrong. Thoughts?
UPDATE:
As some commenters have pointed out in regards to assets:
Looking at the GPL/Wordpress/Thesis/WooTheme controversy from awhile ago I noticed this:
http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/
Looks like even if a Theme has to be GPL’d it doesn’t necessarily mean the images and the css are or need to be.
Great documentary on IDEO’s process. It’s funny though. Doesn’t seem too surprising. Just give some smart diverse people a few constraints and let them run their brains all over the place. A few other take aways: