Soundcloud is a great service that allows musicians to easily share their creations and have listeners leave in-line comments on the music. But I’ve recently discovered an alternative use case of the service that’s very useful: it removes all the friction associated with “marinating” your music.
By “marinating” I mean that period after you’ve recorded something when you sit back and absorb it in different settings hearing the different sounds that present in different environments. If you’ve ever seen the movie Once with Glen Hansard this is “the car test.” Having interacted with a piece exclusively via your recording setup you’ll hear new facets to the song once you take it in jogging with an iPod, driving around via your car stereo or listening full blast on your buddy’s entertainment center.
In the past to get this kind of diversity of perspective one had to burn a CD, save it to iTunes, put it on the iPod, etc. There was just enough friction that you’d only do this once you had mastered the final mix as a sanity check. But Soundcloud has made it so easy that exporting the track and uploading (~2min of work depending on the length of the piece) is entirely frictionless. I find myself using the service to iteratively get more insight into the track I just recorded which helps me incorporate drastic changes. Here’s a case in point:
I was just tinkering with my buddy Nate’s song “Somewhere Safe.” I love the outro to this song so I pulled it into my music editor and started messing around remixing it. I came up with this:
But driving around listening to that I heard the refrain of another song by the band Snow Patrol so I went back, tweaked some things and made this:
This is kind of a silly example but It was only through driving around and letting that song “marinate” that I heard the other refrain. The takeaway here is that Soundcloud operates not just at a “sharing what’s finished” level but also works earlier in the formative stages of constructing songs. And it’s not that it enables anything you couldn’t do before, it just removes enough of the friction so that you will do it. Anyways, neat.
This weekend the Startup Weekend tradition continues in Northern Arizona at SWNAZ. Not that you should need any excuse to leave Hades, ahem, I mean Phoenix right now but here are five reasons you should make the trip.
Avoid spontaneous combustion.
‘Nuff said.
Meet cool people The people that attend Startup Weekends are the do’ers. Talkers stay home for these events. The participants here are the folks who make stuff happen and from experience, these people are the ones worth knowing. This will be my 5th Startup Weekend and each one has hands-down had some of the awesomest people I’ve met. Oh and the guy who invented Startup Weekend is flying all the way from Zurich coming out of retirement to facilitate this event. No big deal.
Learn while building There is simply no better way to learn than by doing. You will be exposed to folks from all disciplines including business folk, engineers, designers, SEO experts, social media gurus, investors. Startup Weekend is basically a cauldron that forges friendships and skills at an impossible pace. The first one I went to in San Francisco blew my mind, as did the subsequent one in Chandler and then once again in Los Angeles.
Put some wheels to your idea This is probably the single best chance to take that business idea you’ve had collecting dust and finally get it built. You’ll have the opportunity to convince a room full of people with the talents and drive to make your concept a reality. More than a handful of companies have launched at these events and gone on to raise funding as venture-backed startups. Not only is this an opportunity to get your idea developed but it’s a stage to get attention and get that initial PR to get it noticed.
Have fun on the cheap. Seriously, for the price of a modest dinner date in Old Town Scottsdale you’ll get transportation up on a bus with the fun folks from CO+Hoots, meals throughout the weekend, free stuff like a copy of Andrew Hyde’s Travel Book plus rumor has it we’re taking this bad biscuit out on the town Saturday night. I guarantee that nowhere in AZ this weekend will people be having as much fun as the attendees at Startup Weekend.
There’s still a handful of seats left and when they sell out attendance is capped. If you’re ready to lock in your seat, escape the heat and have one of the most memorable weekends of the summer, register here and we’ll see you up in Flag.
Three months ago became the newest customer of Infusionsoft. I’ve learned a ton about this product during this time and wanted to offer a brain dump of thoughts. These are directed both to potential users of the software as well as Infusionsoft the company.
What it is: CRM + automation fabric
Describing this product concisely is difficult because it’s more of a “fabric” than an application geared towards a specific use case. As far as I know it’s the first system to bring the capabilities of something like Eloqua and Marketo within reach of the small business, only better because it combines CRM. Think of it like a pliable Silly Putty for marketing & CRM automation that allows you to set your marketing material up like one of those “Choose your own Adventure” books from back in the day. It’s tempting to call this system “a nerve center of customer communications for a SMB” but that too would be pigeon-holing it to customer communications when it can be equally valuable for vendors, partners & resellers. I like the “moldable marketing fabric” analogy because it captures the right essence of the flexibility of it. My friend Eric who works there calls it “the OS of small business” and I think that’s an interesting and valid way to put it.
Another way to think of it is via the phrase coined by one of their star customers, Jermaine Griggs. He did a stellar webinar about a week ago that is a must-watch for people getting started with Infusionsoft. He cites the main benefit as enabling the “scaling of personal attention” – basically gaining the ability to render customer experiences you’d expect of a small mom & pop shop only on web scale supporting hundreds of thousands of customers with the same level of intimacy. This guy has a truly incredible story having come up from nothing – he’s worth listening to just for his humility alone but he also has a brilliant mindset of how he approaches marketing and relationship building online.
How this can benefit SMB’s
Again it’s tough to reduce the benefit to a sound byte here because it really depends on how one uses the fabric. What would you do if you could imbue your selling knowledge into your web app so it intelligently did things the way you would do if you were standing there in person talking with the prospective customers? How might that change both their experience as well as your insight into what they want/need? I find it find Dave McClure’s AARRR pirate metrics framework useful when examining online businesses – Infusionsoft can basically help in 4/5 phases (activation, retention, revenue and referral).
We “hired” Infusionsoft for two main reasons: 1) on the back end there’s simply no way for us as two people to stay on top of all the deals handled by our network. We had tried using Google Docs, Longjump, a custom WordPress app and Basecamp and while those each sufficed on the CRM front, none gave us a way to intervene and actively and intelligently babysit transactions. 2) On the front end our leadgen apparatus was very static. We had a single linear funnel for on-ramping new customers. While Mailchimp auto responders are better than nothing, you’re still highly constrained by how adaptive you can make your marketing and it’s not unified with CRM so there’s no straightforward way to pull up contacts and get a clear picture where everyone stands.
What it’s lacking
Infusionsoft has been great at addressing these issues so far but I feel like maybe I’m fawning over this product a bit much; it’s definitely not perfect. The difficulty of setup is its Achilles’ heel right now impeding mainstream usage. It took us roughly two months to implement and we are moderately-technical and highly motivated. While they’ve made strides with their new visual campaign builder, it’s still missing the mark in a couple fundamental ways. There are IMO two separate shortcomings with their current onboarding process:
They ask customers to make the leap to wiring up a solution before mapping the current landscape. The campaign builder put some sanity to an extremely unintuitive implementation process that involved jumping amongst many screens to wire up templates, action sets, rules, web forms and follow-up sequences. But it doesn’t solve the intermediary step needed wherein the customer visually maps out their existing processes, identifies the opportunities to fix the funnel and thereby establishes the plan. For those with a background in software development, think of it like parachuting into a programming scenario and trying to leap to writing code to solve a problem before you’ve mapped out the current process and hashed out the user stories for what you’re trying to build.
I think even if they were to add this intermediary step, it’s still going to a far stretch to ask the average SMB owner to complete this process on his/her own. There’s real artistry and skill involved in identifying the biggest opportunities and then taking the knowledge of the software and translating the business objectives into implementation. I believe their model needs to shift from a DIY solution for the end consumer to incorporate an agent as the intermediary. These “marketing architects” would have a thorough understanding of both online marketing best practices as well as detailed understanding of Infusionsoft and be bridge builders to close the current gap. In fairness, they do pair you up with a “success coach” employee who helps get you through the initial onboarding process (big shout out to ours, Brett was instrumental in our implementation). But IMO this is a band-aid fix to symptoms which would go away if the consultant ecosystem were made to be a more integral role.
It’s impressive how many people they have using the system in spite of these impediments. It’s a testament to how useful it is that folks want it badly enough to figure out how to bushwhack their way through it all to get it working.
What I would do if I were Infusionsoft
So I hate criticizing things and not offering solution suggestions. Here’s what I would be doing if I were Infusionsoft to remedy these issues:
Create an “assembly exchange” They’ve already got what appears to be the equivalent of an AppExchange for vendors to market plugins to users but what I propose is actually making it so I as a user can turn my configured instance into a template I can sell other people. Think the way AWS allows EC2 users to convert a running instance into an AMI that can be made available to others – it opens up a whole new ecosystem. A bicycle store owner in Tampa who has developed a successful marketing framework in Infusonsoft should be able to productize his/her instance and sell it to bicycle store owners elsewhere. This would do some miraculous things, namely a) create a new revenue stream for that Tampa bicycle store owner without cannibalizing his/her local business b) help the new Infusionsoft user expedite her bicycle store marketing implementation and get a proven system unique to her vertical c) reduce customer attrition for Infusionsoft by reducing frustration and failed on boarding d) potentially spawn a whole new class of companies like how WPMU and Thesis grew around WordPress.
Disentangle planning from implementation. Right now the “architecture” and “brick laying” are intermingled when setting up a new instance. It would be beneficial to have a separation that allows one to articulate the current business processes, then map out the ideal new flow after Infusionsoft. This document could then be handed off to a commodity implementation resource via oDesk or Elance and the tedious grunt work of implementing stuff could be offloaded. I haven’t formed a strong picture of how this looks but my hunch is they don’t need to reinvent the wheel here – this format already exists either as a specialized sequence diagram in UML or via BPM with an open source tool like Intalio. The sharp consultants are probably using a homegrown tool of their own to achieve this step – I would start by asking them how they’re doing it.
Consultant ecosystem of brick layers v. architects I realize there’s already a consultant community for Infusionsoft but as best I can tell there’s no commonly accepted format for mapping out the vision with one “marketing architect” and then taking portable definition to a more commodity “infusionsoft implementor.” In my mind that first piece is what they should give away free: a way for any visitor to come and sketch out their funnel and current vs. proposed marketing interactions. Then simply charge for translating the proposed version into reality. Once the architecture can be partitioned from the implementation it opens it up to be able to commoditize the brick laying aspect and drives the architectural role to be more about formulating valuable constructs for the funnel rather than worrying about nuts & bolts of implementation.
Sandboxed dev v. staging v. prod environments I would love to outsource some of the grunt work I’m doing now but I’m also very hesitant to give access to our system over to a stranger in the Philippines. The way we do this with our site now is by cloning our WordPress instance with BackupBuddy and spinning up a duplicate instance on EC2 and giving the contractor access to that system. They can break it all they want and there’s no damage. What’s better, I can spin up 5 instances and compare 5 different contractors apples-to-apples in parallel for two hours of trial work to see who gets the furthest and does the best work. It would be great if there were a way to clone our Infusionsoft environment and run sandboxed versions that could be promoted to staging and ultimately production. If the above separation of “architects vs. brick layers” is to be achieved this will be an important capability.
An offline IDE This is perhaps too demanding to ask for this now but I will anyways- it’d be great to have a non-web-based way of building stuff. In the same way that Quickbooks online is cumbersome to accountants who are used to flying through screens on the desktop product, when you’re building a bunch of sequences and emails and whatnot, the latency of the web even on a fast connection is annoying. I totally get why it’s all web-based now (I would do the same) but perhaps there’s opportunity to do an Eclipse-based IDE that would generate a file which could be uploaded to Infusionsoft and provide an easier way for building a system?
Other random thoughts
So this is my random catch all for other things I wanted to mention that would be useful:
Bizspark equivalent the $2-3k initial startup cost is going to be preclusive for most startups even though they stand to benefit dramatically from this software. If Infusionsoft can stomach giving away some super-cheap accounts they should strive to offer a no-support, self-serve, feature-dilluted option for startups and take a longer-arc view harboring people who can’t afford it today but represent prospective future customers. Those folks are also typically more vocal startuppy types so there is likely some marketing benefit to serving them even though they’re free accounts today.
The gmail core plugin rocks This is missing functionality in the core Infusionsoft app but I’m happy to see that someone nailed the plugin that provides it. This plugin makes it so Infusionsoft will automatically monitor your Gmail and append communications that happen there to their corresponding contacts in IS. The benefit is multiple people can be working how they normally work and a centralized record of communications is retained in Infusionsoft for all to see. I would love to see the option in Gmail Automation Core to do attachments via filebox as well as the ability to do a one-time retroactive pull of past communications from a gmail account.
Global & shared dashboards There’s no way I can see for me to create a dashboard which gets shared amongst other members of my team. It’d be neat if they made it possible to have tabbed dashboard pages and possible for one to mark his/her page as “shared” so others could use it.
Past emails should be snapshotted by value rather than by reference There’s a glaring issue IMO right now with how past automated emails are preserved: currently it stores the variable names instead of the actual communication to the client. This needs to be a snapshot of what exactly was sent at that point in time. Think of changing prices, new sales reps, etc. There’s no good reason to store it by reference with variable names- it really needs to be snapshotted.
Tags and follow-ups listed in search results I would imagine they’ll add this soon but it’d be useful to be able to see sortable search results with the tags appearing in columns separated by tag category. Likewise it’d be nice to scan a bunch of results and see what follow-up sequences they’re in.
Calculated fields This is the one thing I really miss from Longjump: the ability to have fields on the contact record that are derived from other fields. Consider adding the ability to make a field that is simply a formula builder consisting of other fields on the record.
Lead origin tracking We’re likely going to do a bit of a tap dance on our site to get what I want in terms of tracking all the data on how customers originated (ie. which ad channel, campaign version, landing page, keywords, etc). This is fundamental and important enough that I believe this belongs in the core product. For now we’re planning to roll a cookie with all this info and then pass it via hidden fields on form submissions.
Snooze button on follow-up sequences It’d sure be nice to be able to click on the date of a follow-up sequence and just override it for that contact record. We end up doing a hoaky process now whereby we remove the sequence, create a scheduled task to remind ourselves to start that sequence over again at a later date. It’d be much preferable to be able to have a “snooze button” that would let you manually override the date of the follow-up sequence and push the whole thing out X days.
File-type form field to upload attachments The form builder tool is very good but it’s missing an obvious field type: there’s on ability to do file attachments. This one shouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement but there should be a new type of form field for attachments and they should be sent to the filebox for that contact.
No split testing I’ve seen the recommendations for how to implement split testing in Infusionsoft and unfortunately it’s pretty ghetto. I understand people are working on IS plugins that will lend this functionality but A/B testing is so integral to online marketing now that I would argue it belongs in the core product. If this is too peripheral to be in the core product today I would suggest making a one-click option for integrating something like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. We’ve used Optimizely for awhile now and it’s excellent.
No funnel visualization There’s no way I’ve seen to visualize the various funnel interactions and run cohort analysis. Likewise this is pretty core to online marketing and if it’s not something they want to bake into the product itself I’d lobby for making it easy to enable KissMetrics or MixPanel by just entering in your acct ID for those products. I’ve used KissMetrics for about two years and it’s great for determining which section of your funnel demands attention.
Anyways, in summary, Infusionsoft is a really promising product and I’m excited to finally have our v.1 implementation in place. I’ll report back here on what I learn as we go. It’s great to see a local AZ company delivering a service that’s represents so much promise and has customers around the world. I look forward to seeing it evolve. If you’re interested in potentially using Infusionsoft for your business request a demo or check out some of their past client case studies.
Big thanks to the folks at NACET for inviting me to present to their people on the basics of outsourcing. Here’s the Ustream of that talk:
You can get the slide deck here. Many of the graphics in the deck are linked to their corresponding remote resources. NACET is a great resource for entrepreneurs in AZ and at 75deg the temp is right especially this time in AZ. We just carved out a new cowork space at their facility and it’s now open for folks who want to beat the heat and work up there for the day. Also put the weekend of Aug 11th on your calendar as they’re hosting Startup Weekend Flagstaff. Should be a great time to get out of Phx and build stuff up in the pines. Rumor has it they’re sponsoring a shuttle up there leaving from CO+Hoots and they’re mixing in fun night activities like a guided tour of the famous local breweries – stay tuned.
Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that
there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
-Morpheus from Matrix
If the skill of Preparation exists on the “can you?” side of the equation, the skill of Divergence sits squarely on the “will you?” side. The book covers some interesting stories in this chapter (the Cornell anti-creativity uncertainty study, the cautionary Borders Books vs. Barnes & Noble tale and Jeff Bezo’s bet on AWS, a business which would single-handedly trailblaze an entire industry now called cloud computing). The main message with Divergence is that it does us no good to practice the other skills if we confine ourselves familiar territory. It’s only when we break from the well-worn path and explore the side streets that the magic occurs. I want to share two personal stories of Divergence but first I want to talk about a guy who embodies a concept of Divergence: Iceman:
Wait a minute, not that Iceman. This Iceman:
This was by far the coolest Marvel comic character. His super power was his ability to shoot ice crystals out of his hands and manifest an ice platform wherever he went allowing him to skate anywhere he chose. We’re entering borderline foofoo metaphysical territory now but Divergence (from personal experience) seems to endow muggles like ourselves with a bit of this same super power to “pave our own roads as we go.” Here are two personal stories that illustrate what I’m talking about.
The Great SF Roadtrip of ’07
In November of 2007 I embarked on what would prove to be an epic 31-day road trip around Silicon Valley. You can read the series of blog posts from that trip here. This trip was one massive case study in Divergence. It was largely unplanned and with the primary goal being to increase our surface area and compensate for JumpBox’s lack of contacts in the Bay Area.
In the course of that trip one thing led to another and I wound up meeting people who have since become friends and extended family of the Phoenix startup community- people like Jeremy Tanner, Andrew Hyde, Jasmine Antonick and Sarah Blue. I would end up staying on seventeen different couches during the course of that trip. Through an ex-relationship of a sister of a friend I would wind up having beers with one of my startup heroes, Mark Fletcher from the book Founders At Work. And then lunch with author of the book and wife of Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston. And then… you get the point. In the end we found ourselves in talks with seven different top-tier Sand Hill Road venture capitalists (having not one meeting planned in advance of departing).
When I examine what worked on that trip and try to identify the secret sauce I’m left with a dissatisfying answer: chance. But having now read Get Lucky I realize that I inadvertently practiced most of the skills advocated in the book. Each day I scouted for some peripherally-related event that might have a group of likeminded strangers in attendance and purposefully put myself in foreign situations. I accepted invitations to dinner from folks I had just met. I never stayed in one place more than three days and always I was open to changing the plan and going wherever the next encounter led. In short, I decidedly diverged from my element and in so doing paved an ice bridge in realtime that carried me wonderful places.
Here’s another story of some friends who are masters of Divergence.
Life at ten miles per hour
Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell weren’t always world class film makers. When I knew them in 2003 they were my roommates in Scottsdale, AZ and co-workers at Initech, ahem I mean Saleslogix. About a week or two after I quit that company they did the same to pursue a life changing road trip of their own. They would drive the length of the United States at 10mph on a segway scooter and film what would later become a film-festival-winning documentary of their journey. Almost a decade later their movie just last month debuted on Netflix’s and held the top slot for viewer’s choice documentaries. Their story was picked up by just about every major news outlet and their trip concluded with them driving their segway onstage to a public speaking event where Segway inventor Dean Kamen greeted them and had them share their story.
Of course at the time they began their journey they had no media connections, no ties with Dean Kamen, no plan other than to head east starting at Pike’s place in Seattle with the hope of getting to the east coast before it got too cold. The uniqueness of their story enabled them to talk with any and everyone they met along the way and manifest an “ice bridge” they would use to ride into film success. They were masters at capitalizing on chance encounter upon chance encounter and building an unstoppable momentum with the press around what they were doing. If you were to ask them today what they attribute the success of that film to, undoubtedly there would be 3 parts hard work but at least one part serendipity. And it all stemmed from a conscious decision to stray the path and do something decidedly out of the norm viewing the world at the uniquely slow pace of ten miles per hour.
The commonality of these two stories is that the act itself of diverging can pave the road in front of you as you go in a way that isn’t possible via planning. Or as my favorite quote of my favorite author says: “When you go after your Personal Legend with all your heart, the whole universe conspires to help you.”
On another note, I was fortunate last week to catch up with Lane and Thor while they were in Phoenix and record this podcast with them talking about their book. Check it out and change your tune: Bassnectar – Lights Remix
We are volcanoes, making new land,
Transcending borders with seeds in our hands.
Natural killers perfectly planned,
But all is entirely out of our hands.
-Sleeping at Last
We’re nearly halfway through May but only 1/4 through the book. In the interest of staying on track I’m declaring posting bankruptcy on this chapter and doing a quick brain dump of my thoughts in this single post. Some random ideas:
Diverse vocabulary : rich writing :: diverse experiences : abductive reasoning If you’re trying to become a good writer you’re well served by gaining exposure to the most diverse set of raw materials (unique writing styles and a broad vocabulary). Likewise if you’re seeking to become a serendiplomat and improve the likelihood of making more mental leaps, you are well served to relentlessly seek out diverse experiences.
Unearth the meta: I believe an unaddressed aspect of preparedness is developing the instinct to seek the meta in what you’re doing. The authors share a neat story on the genesis of their company Get Satisfaciton and how it emerged from solving support challenges for their Valley Schwag hobby business in a social way. I just posed this question on Quora on this topic and there’s already a few interesting responses.
The explained variance of success: if luck truly plays as pivotal a role in successful outcomes as founders credit it, then a framework for courting it more reliably is the modern day philosopher’s stone. It’s a tricky thing to quantify but it would be great to see some studies done that attempt A/B test the impact of implementing the skills suggested in this book.
Ideation sans criticism: pondering Thor’s consultant story where he is able to salvage a meeting on a downhill slide and turn it around into a productive session by creating a “Geneva of ideation” – this reminded me something I suggested long ago for why mind mapping works in that a subtle tweak to how we remove friction while expanding on ideas can have such a massive impact on the output.
A new accounting system? On this thread of subtle tweaks to systems having dramatic effects, we tend to think of accounting as a fairly well-established practice. But could there be an as-of-yet-undiscovered new form of accounting that satisfies the fundamental financial insight needs while taking into account serendipity costs and value? Almost unquestionably our political system could be revamped with today’s minds and technology to better achieve the original Constitutional values. Could the field of accounting be ripe for such a revamp to emphasize the values proposed in this book?
The real value of playtime: the authors point out that the floppy rabbit ear discovery gives us a rare look at the closest thing we have to a controlled study in serendipity. I would say Google and their “20% time” practice gives us a rare opportunity to calculate the ROI of encouraging employees to follow geekish pursuits. Being a public company one could take last year’s financial report, break out profit on the products that can be directly attributed to the 20% time projects (profit of serendipity), divide by 1/5th of the total engineering salary line item (expense of serendipity) and calculate a dollar-for-dollar ROI.
No result is a result: the authors’ concept of “arrest the exception” is powerful. This post was in the headlines a few weeks back regarding a project that aims to replicate the results of past published psychology experiments and determine whether they can reliably produce the reported results. The theory is that aspiring scientists are so heavily incentivized to see their work published that they might conduct an experiment nine times with failed results and only publish the tenth iteration because it supports their work, and that this if true, is a very harmful thing for science. What however if scientists were commended for publishing results that disproved their own work and revealed some other truth? One person’s trash is another’s treasure and the absence of my expected finding might be a pearl for you when taken in aggregate with other failed studies.
Sadly, looking at the calendar, my workload and the remaining chapters left to cover in the book I need to limit my writing to exactly one day on each remaining chapter to pull off this project.
With that said, I want to spend the rest of this post exploring one of these frivolous thought experiments that grabbed me awhile back. Very simply my question was this:
Are rain storms good for carwashes?
It seems straightforward. Of course they’re good, without them we’d almost never have a reason to wash our car and car washes go out of business. But as you start playing with the sliders it’s not a black and white question, it’s an optimization problem. If it rained all the time there would be no car washes either. So my geek mind immediately turned it into:
What is the optimal rain storm frequency that generates the most business for a car wash?
I sat down one night with the intent to answer this question and got as far as looking up the NAICS code for car washes (811192), getting the economic census data for this industry nation-wide, downloading the historical precipitation reports from the national weather service and comparing per capita revenue for car washes relative to yearly precipitation by state. Geek. Flag. Unfurled…
The result of this effort ultimately was a big dead end. There was no immediately discernible correlation. But I realized some obvious flaws with the experiment methodology:
Needs to account for storm frequency as opposed to annual precip amount.
Needs to have more granular data at the city level – precision issue by having only state data.
Potentially confounded by cultural and SES biases in how much residents of different areas value having a clean car.
Prices need to be normalized on cost of living.
I ended up dropping the experiment because it mushroomed into challenge that was too complex to justify the effort. But I have no doubt that pursuing it further would be hugely interesting and yield all kinds of unexpected awesomeness which leads me to…
The Takeaway
On any given day you can go to Hacker News and find half a dozen geeks publishing posts on their frivolous experiments like this one. These are people motivated out of pure curiosity. Like a detective following a hunch on off-hours, they go out of their way chase down a curiosity. Yet there’s no villain to be caught or bounty to be won. The motive here is just “climbing the mountain because it was there.” And these are the people I would hire.
Imagine the result if more companies and schools were to follow Google’s lead and embrace this kind of open-ended playtime with their members. Could a microformat emerge that lets these experimenters publish their findings in a more structured way that makes them more immediately discoverable and useful to others? And could that then help recirculate the product of these efforts amongst circles that could then take the torch and carry the experimentation forward in unexpected meaningful ways? What would a Github of frivolous experimentation look like? Kickstarter is doing miracles for microfinancing artistic and creative for-profit endeavors- is there perhaps room for a “Kickstarter for whimsical experimentation” that would encourage and curate this type of side work? Things to ponder…
Next post we’ll delve into the skill of Divergence.
