Stay foolish. Stay hungry. -Steve Jobs

Couple years ago I participated in a book cover design competition. 

When I made the design, I thought the concept would be obvious to people. And the little bit of mystery can only be a good thing, I told myself.

WRONG.

I just ran into the design again. It made me go "WTH????". My own design made very little sense to me. It looked boring. The so-called mystery seemed way out of context.

Aah, if only I could get my two-year perspective two years ago.

It's purposely made to suck. So facebook does not become insecure about google. Meanwhile google can keep working on its secret social networking stuff. It's a lot easier to get stuff done when everyone has written you off.

You are telling me Google would unintentionally launch a SUPER HYPED product that 90% of the people hate? Uh, no chance. Zero. 

Let's talk about games. I haven't ever really gotten into playing video games. We did look up "cricket games" way back when my brother and I first learned how to use a computer. Still, it was more of our love for cricket(the real life sport) than playing a game on the computer. That is why I feel very disconnected with the gaming industry. And at times, even a teeeeny bit envious. 

Playing games can be a huge timekill. But being passionate about making games can be rewarding--both financially and career-wise. That is why I have mixed feelings when I see cousin after cousin in the 6-15 age range, get hooked to playing games on the computer.

A part of me feels sorry for them and wants to tell them all about HTML and photoshop and programming. But really, is that the only path to not wasting time on the computer just because it worked for me? I don't know. There is the other part of me that wants to believe that these kids can grow up and do what I cannot and thus I should let them find their own way. BUT WAIT, most kids that grow up playing games on the computer rarely end up producing games or becoming more than a consumer. What do I do?

Often I have parents that ask me to give a tip or two to their kids so "they stop playing games all day." When this happens, I cannot help but put myself in the kid's shoes. If I had someone aggressively pushing programming to me, I would hate that person and programming.

What I can tell with certainty is if you are a parent of a child that is addicted to playing games, you cannot forcibly take away the addiction. My parents wouldn't be able to do it for me. What you can try doing is introducing your kids to productive things that can possibly compete with the games. You have to literally find something more addictive than the online games! For me, designing and programming was always more fun than playing games. No one had to lock me in a room and take away any consoles from me. If you are a parent and find yourself doing that, do share how it's working(genuine request!). 

Awesome leadership lessons!

One of the big mysteries I had pertaining to branding was "just how do you gauge success?". Last semester I attended a talk by the VP of Global Marketing at Lenovo. Part of his presentation was a clip where they went around asking people on the street if they had heard of something called "Lenovo". Some said yes, some said no, some talked about where they'd seen it. This was a huge aha moment for me. 

Fast forward to couple months ago after we'd launched Blinkness, I wanted to find out how many people could recall Blinkness, as a brand, from our outpouring marketing efforts in the initial weeks. I made a quick one question su rvey and passed it around the Student Union.

Within an hour, I had the results: three out of thirty people surveyed had heard of Blinkness. We had ~10% brand recognition.

This was not over though. We continued to pour in more marketing. And the real magic, I knew, would be in seeing that brand recognition number change in response to our marketing. 

A couple weeks later when I went around to do this again, I had another idea: why not use my iPhone to do the survey? I hacked up a quick page. 

Once I had this, I literally just passed around my iPhone to  40 people sitting around the UNC Student Union. People not only took the survey, many enjoyed it! Here are samples of comments I've recieved since from respondents...

• "wow that's it?" (most common)
• "you really meant one second"
• "what do i do now??" (thinking there were more questions)

They take too many words to express too many ideas in too confusing ways.

I think this problem is so deeply entrenched in society. It probably carries over from the newspaper world where...

more words = more paper = more ad space = more money = better. 

But it is absolutely killing nonfiction genres like business and self-help books. I can see my sister arguing for more words for her fiction masterpiece but that is fiction and perhaps they need more words simply because fiction is read to enjoy the words. Non-fiction is often read to get a meaning out of it and put the book down.

Too many people with great ideas babble on and on. Just make your point. Your goal should not be to get me to read 300 pages.

Your goal should be for me to read your two or three points and ponder it for the rest of the week, and talk about it with friends and blog about it and put it to practical use. Trust me, as a reader, that is more challenging than scanning my eyes across a zillion words!

The fingers on my two hands are not enough to count the number of projects I have launched--and shut down--because no one went to it.

During that phase of my life, I would get an idea, build it and launch it.

These days, almost every idea I get is accompanied by a concrete means of marketing. This didn't happen overnight. But as I saw failure after failure due to one repeated problem, I started adjusting and filtering ideas. I like to think that I am at a point where my mind automatically shuts down any idea from concious thought until there is a concrete, guaranteed way to get enough traffic to validate or invalidate the product. Nothing stinks as bad as launching something and having to shut it down prematurely. Never again!

At iJigg this meant signing up beta members one at a time before launch. At blinkness, it means flooding the campus with 10,000 flyers.Both have paid off big time in their relative ways!

Have an idea? I encourage you to be OCD about how you're gonna get traffic from the second you launch.

You know that one thing you're really good at? Such that 99.99% of the time you're better at that thing than anyone else in the room. That one thing can be very specific. You might know more about Kobe Bryant than anyone else in a 100 mile radius. Or you might know more about telling good dope from bad dope...better than anyone else. 

We all have that one thing.

After a decade of computer programming, for me it is very easy to map out a new idea in my head within seconds. Literally. When I get an awesome idea, I can see the code, the UI screens, the database structures almost all at once in an instant.

That is what I am good at.

Here's something I was not good at: making deals happen. Few years ago, for weeks at length I would try to imagine what the so-called bizdev guys do. It was sooo out there for me. "How do they come up with the deal?" "How do they make sure it happens? And succeed ?" lt;/em>I was equally amazed by how Chief of Marketing folks at big corps actually make stuff happen so predictably, quarter after quarter, year after year. As someone from startup-land, I was full of envy of the folks who, despite working for The Man, could deliver consistent results. The lack of consistency in getting users, making money, keeping the lights almost defines a startup.

Two years since I initially got thinking about this, I reached the conclusion that this is a mystery to me. But there is nothing inherently mysterious about sales and marketing. It is just another way of thinking that I have never invested much concentrated effort towards.

When I returned to UNC earlier this year, I made it a point to understand how this shit works. Last semester I took a Marketing Analysis class at the b-school by Tarun Kushwaha(an awesome professor, btw). It was eye opening to say the least. I learned not only the theory behind segmentation, targeting and positioning but saw firsthand how to do those things in Excel and apply them in the field. I learned about taking survey data, putting it through the mixer and being able to mine new product ideas off it. Very eye opening stuff again!

Resnick Montania 2003 Perceptions of Customer Service Information Privacy and Product Quality From Semiotic...