Google, Marvel, Lost.

Q. What does Google, Marvel, and Lost have in common?

A. I love all of them.

OK. Aside from my love, there is a better answer: they all have/had long term visions.

Google is the defining company of the Internet era. It has also always acted with a long-term vision from before the IPO through their 2004 founder’s IPO letter describing their long-term decision making to public shareholders. And it continues with Google Glass, self-driving cars, Project Loon, etc.

The Marvel comics have always told epic stories through their comics. Most recently, they’ve moved into movies and are doing something I haven’t seen any other movie makers do: plan a span of movies that may take decades to finish. Each of their movies tell their own story, but are weaved into the much larger vision encompassing the entire Marvel universe.

As long as I’ve been alive (or at least watched TV), there hasn’t been a series like Lost. The first seasons felt like an introduction to each of the characters. There is no way the first season could stand on its own (IMHO), but it was never meant to. It  was the beginning of an epic story, and that is much better.

As people get older, they always seem to lament the fact that society is losing its long term focus. When I was younger, I heard parents talk about this. It was usually about how TV and video games was killing our attention spans. Now that I am getting older, I hear friends saying it. Usually it has to do with the crappy apps and social networks that kill our time.

Yet, with each generation complaining about the loss of long-term vision, and the loss of long-term attention, it seems that it isn’t true.

The world is as it should be. We get better at creating distractions, but we also get better at creating epic art.

As a consumer, I can choose both distractions and epic art if I’d like to. I can watch 7 seasons of a bubble gum pop show as easily as I can watch the 7 seasons of Lost. It doesn’t take me any less time, and there is a time and place for both.

As a creator, things are different. Creating something epic takes time and dedication. By nature, it seems mutually exclusive with working for the short term. You don’t get to choose both. So, which do you choose? Just remember that it is still the epic art with a long-term vision that has the best chance of standing the test of time.

–

P.S. This is post number #46 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.

Why I write

This essay is inspired by this week’s Startup Edition topic, “Why do you write?”.

Why-I-Write.jpg

In my 18 months of blogging, I’ve gone through two phases.

The first phase was right after I quit my job. I used to be a computer systems researcher, and took to blogging as an experiment in web publishing. The main goal was to understand what it was like to share on the Internet, and how web traffic worked.

The second phase started at the 100 day blogging challenge a little over a month ago. I took the challenge because I wanted to write more, but since then I have really started to narrow in on why I blog, and why it matters to me. I thought I’d share a little about it in this post.

First, let me start off with some reasons that don’t motivate me to write.

I don’t write for web traffic. In my first phase of blogging, I wrote with the goal of driving some web traffic. I wanted to learn what made posts go viral, and ended up writing a few relatively popular posts on the most important lesson I’ve ever learned, the unbundling of reddit, and why titles suck on the Internet. Driving traffic was a fun game, but I had a tough time publishing on a regular basis. I learned that driving traffic, and building a web presence isn’t enough motivation for me to continually blog.

I don’t write for content marketing. This blog is pretty crappy as far as entrepreneur blogs go. It uses a default theme. I don’t target any particular keywords. I don’t target a particular topic to gain notoriety for one particular thing. I don’t use link-bait titles very often, even though I know many of the tricks. I don’t push my products much (although I do link to them). I feel good about this blog when it reflects who I am. However, I should say that I do appreciate content marketing. I may try it one day, but it isn’t the purpose of this blog.

I don’t write to be right. If I did, I would probably never hit the publish button. I might be right, wrong, or somewhere in between. Some of my writing may be ridiculously stupid. If it is… oh well. I wouldn’t be the first person to be wrong on the internet.

I don’t write to be a writer. I don’t expect the writing to be awesome. I just hope the writing is good enough to get my thoughts across. I don’t want to be seen as a writer. I judge myself by the other stuff I create. Writing is an auxiliary thing that helps my thought process. If my writing ever gets too “good”, please tell me to stop focusing on writing and get on with my actual work.

I don’t write for ego.  I probably won’t ever blog about being successful (if I reach some point one could deem as successful). I don’t write regular “how to” posts because I don’t claim to know the right way to do something. If I write a “how to”, I try to preface it by saying that it is one strategy that has worked for me. In general, I’d rather blog about how things are hard because real challenges in life and hard, and figuring out how to tackle challenges is what is interesting to me.

By the way. all of these are all perfectly good reasons to write. Others on the Internet do a great job of writing for all these reasons I don’t write. They just don’t work for me.

So let’s get to the reasons that I do write.

I write to understand life. Many of my posts are random thoughts on life and personal development. They may be about internal/external reflections, identity, or dreams. To me, the most interesting thing about life is life itself. It is one thing to think about things; it is another to organize them in some form and get them out on paper. I highly prefer getting things out on paper.

I write to share my thoughts. I believe that humans are meant to connect, and thoughts are meant to be shared. Some people are talkers. I’m not one of those people. So, I share  through written word. Plus, sharing by writing is scalable. I can write once, and it is on the web for anyone to read at anytime at the speed of their liking. As an example, I have many thoughts on how the academic system could be improved: from incorporating startup accelerators, to shifting some of the publication system to online publishing. Who knows if I am right, but I think they ideas worth sharing with the world.

I write to understand entrepreneurship.  When I quit my job, I had the feeling that something within he entrepreneurial world would be right for me. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be an entrepreneur, and what I am looking for.

I write to figure out product. I am working in the consumer web space because I like the idea of building something that is accessible to the general public. However, my background has nothing to do with product. Again, it is one thing to think; it is another to write. Blogging has helped me tremendously with boiling down product decisions. In fact, my two recent posts on simplicity and unboundedness in good consumer products caused me to do a full pivot on Soulmix last week. I am now in the process of reworking the entire product.

I write to make creating and shipping a way of life. I wrote earlier on why entrepreneurs should blog. In short, the job of an entrepreneur is to create and ship things of value for the world. Building products can be tough. You can’t always ship on a daily basis, and even if you can, it doesn’t always have value. However, you can write and ship your thoughts on a regular basis.

I write to motivate myself. If you follow my blog, you may notice many of the posts have to do with perseverance or staying on course. I’ve written on treating all steps as the first step, on surviving the startup roller coaster, and on playing the long game. Those posts were really for me. They are how I inject and imprint the “right” thoughts into my mind, and how I survive this entrepreneurial roller coaster (which can be damn tough!).

As a side note, there are definitely benefits to regular blogging. Through it, I have connected with other bloggers and entrepreneurs, I have started to gain more WordPress followers, and I can see an SEO effect starting to build as traffic from Google increases. These are great side effects, but if I was blogging for these purposes, I wouldn’t be able to maintain the habit.

It wasn’t until I did the 100 day blogging challenge that I was forced to find a sustainable reason to write, and in retrospect I am really glad I took on the challenge. The reasons above are the reasons that work for me. They make it fun, rewarding, and easy to sit down on a regular basis and bang out a blog post.

Your turn. Do you write? Do you want to? What motivates you? I would love to hear from other bloggers, or would-be bloggers.

–

P.S. This is post number #45 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.

Entrepreneurship and life

When I first created this blog 18 months ago, I randomly named it “On startups and life”. Turns out that although it sounds like two topics, I’ve started to find that they often blend together.

Startups/entrepreneurship is a great analogy for life. In general, we often define life by the challenges that we face. Hopefully, we face them head on, and figure out how to overcome them. When we don’t, we learn a lot, and strengthen ourselves for the next challenge.

Entrepreneurship and startups are the same way; especially early on. No matter what any early entrepreneur tells you (and possibly older ones also), they don’t know what the hell they are doing. If they did, they would succeed much faster, and with much more predictability than they are right now. Instead, we face our challenges head on and hope to tackle them. When we don’t, we learn a lot, and then hope that we have enough in the tank to keep moving on. Sometimes it means money. Sometimes it means emotional will and strength.

In the end, what matters is figuring out how to create an entity that has some kind of value in the world.

With life, the question is how do I create myself as a person of value? In entrepreneurship, it is how do I create something of value? The questions are almost one and the same. And so it helps me make sense of the blog.

As I think about (and write about) life and startups, I’m really just writing about life.

–

P.S. This is post number #44 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.

My dreams, deferred

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

—

The makings of a dream.

From 2000 to 2011, my dream was to become a professor.

Prior to 2000, I had been a slacker. In high school, I mostly focused on track & field, and in my first few years of college, I played basketball and Starcraft like they were two full time jobs.

It wasn’t until my junior year when I decided it was time to figure out my future.

I was fortunate to be taking a computer architecture course with an awesome professor. For the first time, I became genuinely excited about an undergraduate course. I went to all the lectures, and actually did the homework assignments and labs.

By the end of the course, I thought to myself:

“My professor is cool, and this material is really cool.. why not become a professor?”

That was it. Nothing fancy happened. I just took a course, and decided that I had a new goal in life.

The long journey.

The funny thing is, this ended up defining the next 10 years of my life.

In the last year of undergrad, I began reading research papers, and sat in the graduate-level course of college. I hit a barrier getting funded in early in graduate school, but I ended up learning the most important lesson I have ever learned, working my ass off, and overcoming this barrier. I continued through a PhD program, published in several top-tier conferences, and when time came for graduation in 2010, I was all set to be applying for faculty positions.

I was unfortunate to apply during the recession. The job market was more competitive than usual, and I didn’t get any faculty offers that I was excited about. I then moved out to Silicon Valley, and took a research position at Qualcomm Research.

And then something unexpected happened.

A strange thing happens when you near reaching a dream.

When you are along the path, it can be easy to go heads down and drive forward towards the dream. As you near the end, you know you’ve already made it a great deal of the way there.

You start thinking, is this what I really want? If I achieve this, then what?

As I asked myself these questions, I knew I couldn’t answer them with something I would be happy about. I had set the goal 10+ years ago, and in those 10+ years, I learned enough to get an idea of whether I would actually want the position. The dream wasn’t so shiny any more. I saw the downsides of academia. I imagined jumping on the publishing treadmill for the next 5-10 years and it didn’t sound exciting to me at all.

I had to re-evaluate what I really wanted. And as I searched my soul, it became increasingly clear that a faculty position wasn’t what I wanted… at least not now.

And so I left the dream dangling… unfinished.

Some days, I’m really glad I did my PhD. I know I learned a lot in it, and had a great experience attending various schools, taking part in different internships, and meeting great friends.

Other days, I wish I didn’t do my PhD at all. It wasn’t necessary to join the startup world. But I didn’t have the foresight back then to know this.

Some days I believe that one day I’ll still try to become a professor. In theory, I like the idea of academia. I like the idea of being part of education. I also had my opinions on how academia could education students for entrepreneurship/startups, and it would be great to give it a shot.

Other days, I’m fairly sure I never will want to be a professor. I love my job now. If I could only find a way to make money, I could do it forever.

What happens to a dream deferred?

I have no idea. I suppose only time will tell.

Has something similar happened to you? How has it turned out?

–

(Photo credit: wave-finder.com)

P.S. This is post number #43 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Go big

I’ve already written about how I was a little too focused on publishing during grad school. However, as I focused on publishing, I learned an important lesson about going big.

At the start of grad school, I viewed myself as a newbie. So, I set small goals, and then gradually made them bigger and bigger. My first goal was to get a workshop paper published. The next was to publish a small conference paper. And then, a top-tier conference paper.

One of my biggest realizations were that each paper was a lot of work. The top-tier paper didn’t require much more work than the workshop paper. The main difference was the size of the idea that I was working on. Given X hours to work, I realized I was much better off working on something that could be a top-tier paper.

This extends to much of what we work on in life.

Are you trying to get by? Are you simply working to finish the job? Are you trying to complete small goals? Or are do you see something big in your work? Do you see how you’ll gain leverage, and move towards even greater things?

We all only have 24 hours in a day. We all work hard. Yes, luck and talent are important. But in my opinion, at any particular level of luck+talent+skill, the main differentiating factor is simply how big one thinks.

Since quitting my job, I have apparently forgotten this lesson. That is, until last week.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on Soulmix, which was a social news sharing site on the topic of good living. It was interesting, and there was a steady number of repeat visitors to the site. It seemed like there was some promise, and I was happy about it.

Last week, while I was writing about simplicity and unboundedness in consumer web products, I had an epiphany. The ideas in the blog posts directly applied to my work! I realized that the site I was building could actually be something bigger. There was a larger vision, if only I would let myself see it, and then let myself work towards it. So, I’m shifting things around, and working hard on changing Soulmix to allow it to become something bigger.

It is one thing to write about life and startups. It is another to be taking my own advice at the same time. Fortunately, I am, and I’m super excited to see where things go 🙂

–

(Photo credit: wave-finder.com)

P.S. This is post number #42 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

The unbundling of Craigslist and reddit: the flip side

Reddit-Gold-Added-Membership-Benefits

Earlier this year, I wrote on how I believe reddit may be (or is being) unbundled. In the post, I draw similarities to how Craiglist is being unbundled, and provide several examples of startups that are within verticals of reddit.

Of course, where there is an argument, there is also a counter-argument. And in this this case, there is clearly a counter argument.

I’ll kick if off with a great comment left by Christian Puricelli:

Great post! But I think the unbundling of Reddit is more challenging of the unbundling of Craigslist, because there is one fundamental difference: on Reddit there is no financial transaction (I mean between the users). 3 key success factors of platforms are: the network effect, the curation of content, and especially on platforms that involves financial risky transaction the curation of users and trust (see also http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/26/platform-thinking-how-to-disrupt-craigslist/). A horizontal platform like Craigslist is weak on this 3rd point, allowing vertical competitors like Airbnb that can provide the trust for the transaction to grow. For a non transactional platform like Reddit, this trust factor could not be used by competing verticals for a competitive advantage. So the playing field is more even. Of course this does not mean that it’s impossible as the examples you wrote about show, just that it’s a little be more challenging.

Christian hits the nail on the head.

A fundamental difference is that there are monetary transactions within marketplaces. Where there is a transfer of money, there is a cut of that transaction to be made.

Also, because there is a monetary transaction, trust is also important; important enough that is can be a major differentiating factor. Discussion sites could play up trust also. For example, everyone on Quibb uses their real identity. So do many on Inbound and USV’s new front page. It makes a large difference in the quality of discussions (IMHO). But is trust is online discussion as important as the trust between people when money is exchanged? Probably not.

There is also the difference between need and want. People go to Craigslist to spend money on a service/product they often need. They will take the time for search for that thing they need, and then spend hard-earned dollars on it. People go to reddit to chat with people, which is usually a want (and fairly often, just to procrastinate or kill time). There is a big difference here.

Craigslist monetizes fairly easily. reddit is having a tough time.

Billion dollar companies lay within the verticals of Craigslist (i.e., AirBnb).

Do billion dollar companies lay within the verticals of reddit? If I had to guess, the answer would be “no”, but I would love to be proven wrong 🙂

–

P.S. This is post number #41 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

How I learned to track my habits

Creating and tracking good habits sounds great, but can be a really difficult thing to do. The most difficult thing for me has simply been remembering. When I want to create a new habit, I often forget to do it. And, when I do it, I often forget to actually track it. Not good.

Lately, I’ve come up with a system that has seemed to work very well.

Here is what works for me.

Plan around the timing.

Remembering to do a new habit can be tough. The easiest way to ensure you do something new is to tie the habit to a particular time in the day.

The problem is that all days are different. Some days you have lots of meetings. Some days you have lots of errands. Some days are for family, and some are for work.

I realized that the two times in the day I have the most control over are (1) right after a wake up, and (2) before I go to bed. I try as hard as I can to tie my new habits to these times.

Simplify the habits.

Don’t make a large list of habits to maintain.

The key is to boil things down to what really matters to you. For me, I want to create lifestyle habits. I never focus on creating new work-related habits. I already work so much that I don’t need to focus on those habits. What I need to focus on is staying healthy in the mind and body.

Currently, I only have 4 habits I track:

  1. Drink more water: I drink lots of coffee, and want to drink more water. I accomplish this by drinking a glass when I wake up and a glass before going to bed.
  2. Yoga or stretching: Working at a computer is hell on your body. After I drink my morning cup of water, I brew a cup of coffee, and do yoga for 10-15 minutes. It is a great way to start the day, and the time right there. Plus, I am rewarded with coffee!
  3. Exercise: This is the random one. I exercise when I can, but this habit gets put off more than the other four. At the very least, hopefully I did some yoga.
  4. Write: I blog every night before I go to bed. My rule is that I can’t sleep until I press publish, and it seems to work.

Simple right? 2 when I wake up, and 1 when I go to bed. I don’t get these done everyday, but keeping it simple has helped me a lot.

Simplify the tracking.

There are tons of different ways to track. You can use notebooks, or different web and mobile apps.

Personally, I’ve been using the Lift app on my iPhone. It is a super simple app that looks beautiful, and does just what I want: it gives me a place to check off my small list of habits. When I’m doing well, it keeps track of my streaks, which provides encouragement.

Building the habits around the habits.

That’s it!

Those are the few things that have helped me be more consistent with drinking water, practicing yoga, exercising, and blogging.

The funny thing is that the habits are OK, and habit tracking apps are OK, but what has really helped me is to build habits around the habits I want. Once I develop the habit of doing things at certain times, and habits fall into the place. As does the habit tracking.

How do you create and track new habits? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks!

–

P.S. This is post number #40 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Life lessons from Ender’s Game (the movie)

I recently got the chance to watch the Ender’s Game move.

I loved the book as a child, and greatly enjoyed seeing the book adapted to the big screen. Still, I left wishing that it spent more time on Battle School. In my opinion, the lessons from Battle School were most interesting parts of the book, and were the funnest to read. They would have been great to see, although they would have stretched the move to 3+ hours (I would have been OK with it though!).

Even with much of Battle School missing, I still found myself noting important life and leadership lessons during the movie.

Here are a few:

*** Warning ***: There will be a few spoilers so if you intend on watching the move, you may want to stop reading.

1) Isolation must never be broken.

Early in Battle School, Ender is constantly singled out on purpose. This isolation is lonely, but is essential for grooming Ender into a leader. The leader isn’t the same as the others. The leader needs to be different, adjust to it. A good way to kickstart this is just to be treated differently.

I immediately thought about the lonely journey as an entrepreneur. As I’ve written on earlier, there is power in being different: the only way you can hope to attain something extraordinary is to break free from the regular. Breaking free is lonely, so maybe it is right that the entrepreneurial journey is lonely. It wouldn’t work any other way.

2) No distraction.

Ender continually tries to email his sister during the early days of Battle School. He doesn’t receive any replies. When he asks Colonel Graff, he is told the email is shut off. There is no space for distraction in Battle School.

Any significant challenge requires focus. Watch the email.. and Facebook.. and other distractions.

3) Allow others to shine.

When Ender begins to be singled out in the classroom, he tells the teacher that two others students would be great at answering the question. He could have answered it, but as the singled-out student already, it serves him no purpose to be a know-it-all. You gain allies and friends by deferring the limelight and allowing others to shine.

4) Let others save face.

When toon leader Bonzo tells Ender that he can’t practice in front of the team, Ender asks to speak to Bonzo in private. He tells Bonzo that he will practice, and that he won’t be stopped. But, he will lay low for the day, and allow Bonzo to give him permission the next day.

When fighting someone, you are still better off if you find a way to get your way without harming them.

5) Don’t just win the battle, win the future battles.

If there is going to be a fight, Ender will literally end you. He doesn’t just win the battle. He fights to win the future battles. It is the best way to avoid future conflicts.

If you have a problem, don’t go for the quick solution. Don’t go for the one-time fix. Get to the core of the thing, and take care of business.

6) Do things your own way.

When Ender becomes leader of the Dragon Army, he immediately tells the troops that the youngest sleep by the door, and the oldest sleep away from it. Usually, the older troops get to sleep by the door. It is Ender’s way to telling them he intends to run his army his way. It isn’t described in detail within the movie, but he also runs the Dragon Army his own way, and is wildly successful for it.

There is always a “regular” way of doing things. Is it really necessary? Think about it, and do things your own way if it seems right.

7) Take the misfits.

Ender’s Dragon Army contains misfits from all of the teams. Historically, the Dragon Army has never won a battle, so when they resurrect this army name for Ender, it seems fitting that it take in the misfits.

Yet Colonel Graff knows that with the right leader, the Dragon Army can be great. The misfits are only misfits because they haven’t found their place on their team. In a different team, with a great leader, the misfits can be great.

8) Love for you enemy.

Early in Battle School, Bernard bullies Ender whenever he can. When Ender gets the Dragon Army, he accepts Bernard as one of the team. As the leader, Ender could have made Bernard’s life more difficult, but he didn’t. Showing your enemies respect can be powerful, especially when you don’t need to show the respect.

Ender is known for loving his enemies. He uses both intelligence and empathy to understand his enemy. With this understanding comes love for the enemy. It also turns out that the best way to crush an enemy is to truly understand them.

9) The importance of family.

Battle School can be brutal. As Ender is continually isolated without email and outside contact, he eventually gets sick of it. When Ender quits Battle School, the first thing he does is see his sister Valentine, who successfully talks him into going back to Battle School.

We aren’t machines. Minimizing distraction is great, but in the end, we really to be around people we care about. Family matters.

10) Play the big game. Try.

As Valentine convinces Ender to go back to Battle School, she says she believes that Ender is afraid of the future. He may be afraid of the unknown enemy. Still, in order to save the humans on Earth, he has to try.

11) You’re never ready.

Before the graduation battle, Mazer Rackham tells Colonel Graff that Ender isn’t ready. And it isn’t a big surprise. Ender isn’t ready. He is young, and is still in training.

Colonel Graff simply replies, “you’re never ready.”

12) The way we win matters. * Big spoiler alert *

Ender wants to win. And when he does, he wants to win on his own terms. He fights to win all future battles, but first seeks to understand.

When he unexpectedly wipes out the buggers at the end, he is overcome with grief. That is not the way he wanted to win. He never got to learn about his enemy before destroying them.

This is one of the big differences between Peter and Ender. Ender cares. He values life, humanity, and whatever you call it for other species.

The book is better.

The movie was enjoyable. Without a doubt, the book is better. If this post was on the book, the list would probably be two times longer.

If you haven’t read the book yet, you should! It is a fun read, and is chock full of lessons on life, leadership, management, and empathy. I also suggest the other two in the series (Speaker for the Dead and Xenophobia), both of which are much more somber in nature, but great in a different way.

–

P.S. This is post number #39 in a 100 day blogging challenge. Was late on this post, but my Internet went out last night halfway through writing. Should have another post by the end of the day 🙂

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

What’s in an identity?

When I was in high school, I was an athlete.

I was a slacker of a student, but a pretty darn good athlete. Most days, I wore a track suit or sweats to school. I put my energy into track workouts and the weight room. For fun, I hit the basketball courts, tennis courts, or soccer field.

I thought I was an athlete, but I wasn’t.

At the end of college, I decided that I had to do something with my life. I took a computer architecture course which enthralled me, and proceeded to jump into grad school. I went full steam ahead with research and academia, on track to become a professor. In the meantime, I also fell out of shape.

In grad school, I became an academic.

And, I thought I’d be an academic, until I realized that I wasn’t.

Two years ago, I did soul searching and realized that I wanted to get out into the world and build something. I quit my job, and ventured out on my own. Shortly after, I went to my LinkedIn profile, removed ‘Senior Researcher’ and replaced it with ‘Entrepreneur’.

I became an entrepreneur, and remain an entrepreneur to this day.

Except if history repeats itself, the lesson to learn is that I am not an entrepreneur.

What is in these identities? Why do we label ourselves, and label others?

I only know that we aren’t our labels. We are simply what we are thinking, what we are doing, and what we aspire to be at a particular moment. And in the next moment, everything might change.

–

P.S. This is post number #38 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter: @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Unboundedness in consumer web products

Recently, I wrote about the importance of simplicity in consumer web design. Most big consumer web apps seem to have only a few concepts at their core. This makes some sense. The simplicity focuses a product, and makes it easy for new users to understand.

Simplicity is great, but what other properties make a great consumer product?

Another interesting property could be the boundedness of the product. Looking through the Alexa Top Sites, many top consumer web products have an unbounded feeling as you use them.

Here are some examples:

  • Google/Baidu/Live/Bing: unbounded search queries
  • Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter: unbounded potential connections & messages
  • Youtube: unbounded videos to watch
  • Yahoo/QQ: unbounded portal of news
  • Wikipedia: unbounded portal of knowledge
  • Amazon/Taobao/eBay: unbounded marketplace of products and/or reviews
  • Blogger/Wordpress: unbounded content to read
  • Tumblr/Pinterest: unbounded content to explore and repost
  • Instagram/Snapchat: unbounded images to create

Obviously, having a useful/interesting/fun app is first priority. But beyond that, the feeling of unboundedness is very important. It means unbounded future engagement with the product, something any product designer strives for. Combine this will simplicity, you have a killer product: one that is simple to understand but allows for infinite possibilities.

Are you designing a web app?

Here are three good questions to ask yourself:

  1. Do users find your app useful, interesting, and/or fun?
  2. Is the app built around a small set of simple concepts? Even better, is the combinations of simple concepts new?
  3. Do these simple concepts enable unbounded engagement?

If you answer ‘yes’ to all three, you might be in good shape

I’ve love to add to this list. If anyone has any good suggestions, let me know!

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P.S. This is post number #37 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Check out my current project Soulmix.