Product Reinforcement

Kelly Abbott | August 19, 2010 - 7:30 am

It’s a pleasure to work with dedicated people. It’s also a pleasure to work with smart people. But often, smarts and dedication are not enough. No matter what our goal, a sense of purpose is necessary. It’s not our love for the game that makes us win, it’s our desire to win. Winning is the defining moment.

In product development, winning is hard to define. We have a desire to sell products, so in a sense outselling your competitors could be the defining moment. Or exceeding our sales expectations. Maybe being profitable is your goal. Great. Goals are not always financial. I’ve helped friends get into the game, develop and launch their own products, and for them that was enough.

Products should be used to reinforce, not define who a company is.

I have Simon Sinek to thank for that. Simon writes for AskMen.com and keeps a company blog about inspired action here. I first heard about him when Aaron Fulkerson asked me to watch his TedX video where he presents the central tenet of his book, Start With The Why.

Of course, it’s become cliché to cite Apple as an example of greatness in business, which he does in this video. But if we’re going to take his message to heart, we have to get past the clichés and understand the true meaning of Product Reinforcement. It had never occurred to me to ask clients “why” before. On the surface, I have always asked “why” but only to understand the why they reasoned the way that they do. In other words, to help me understand their rational for developing a product the way they do, but not to understand “why” they exist in the first place.

If you ask why, the fundamental why, then you start to understand more clearly what the goals are. The answer becomes your defining moment. The bigger, the hairier and the more audacious your “Why,” the harder to define. But you’ll know it when you see it.

Have a look a the video. Buy the book. And someday, we’ll have a talk about our Why’s.

Aaron's Leg - A Tattoo of His Company's Logo with Pirate Theme

Simon's Book - Start With Why

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How do I get a book on the iPad’s iBooks bookstore and app?

Kelly Abbott | April 7, 2010 - 3:36 pm

There is no short answer to this question (yet). But we did figure out a way to get our books on the iPad and in the iBooks app library. Here’s how…

But first, an overview:

1. Apple’s iBooks app supports the ePub format. Therefore  you cannot just add a PDF or Mobi file. You have to create the ePub format.

2. The ePub format is 99% HTML. So if you’re comfortable editing HTML, you’ll do fine. If not, then get comfortable by practicing, perhaps, on your book. Programming HTML is the entry level skill needed for programming Web pages too.

3. Apple has still not granted access to their iBooks bookstore to independent publishers. That said, there are companies that can help you get your book for sale on the iBooks app. Namely Smashwords and Lulu.

OK, now for the tutorial.

Create the Master Template

Create an HTML template that you’ll use to add the content of your book. Keep it simple. You can get more complicated with your formatting later. For now, we just want to get chapters created and bind the virtual book. Here’s what I start with:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Template</title>
</head>
<body>
</body
</html>

Duplicate the Template for Each Chapter

Each HTML page you create will eventually be a whole chapter in the book once you’ve converted it. So in advance of getting your content into the chapters, you need to create those HTML pages. You can name them what you want, but I recommend giving them names like chapter1.html and introduction.html depending on what content they represent. This will help you later when you compile the pages into the ePub format later. Here’s a screenshot of the pages I included in our book. Notice that there is an images directory. If you have any images, it doesn’t matter where you put them, but if you include them all in one directory it makes the compilation process later a little easier.

Pages in the book

Add Content to Each Chapter

This part looks a lot like old school HTML editing. It’s easiest to describe by showing a sample from our book:
<body>
<H1>Chapter 1</H1>
<H2>Meet Google Wave</H2>
<p>Chapter 1 is an overview of what Google Wave is and the problems it solves. To dive straight into using Wave, skip ahead to Chapter 2, Get Started with Wave. </p>

<p>Google Wave is a web-based collaboration tool that helps groups of people grow documents out of conversations. Google created Wave to alleviate the problems that have plagued email for over 40 years. In this chapter, you’ll see how Wave combines features from several different modern web applications into a single interface, and how it distinguishes itself from existing collaboration software. See the most common uses of Wave, how Wave got its name, and why you won’t have to depend solely on Google to wave for long.</p>

<p>Come on in and meet Wave. </p>

<h2>“What email would look like if it were invented today”</h2>

<p> Google Wave is a group collaboration tool that makes it easy for several people to work together on a single document on the web. Wave combines some of the best features from modern web applications you already know and love—such as email, instant messenger, wikis, and forums—into a single, hybrid interface. As such, it’s difficult to describe Wave in only a few words. The Google Wave team bills Wave as “what email would look like if it were invented today.”[1]</p>

<p>Why does email need a reinvention? </p>

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet as we know it—and in fact was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. Despite its age, email hasn’t evolved much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail, a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. Wave makes a bet: surely there must be a better way to send, receive, preserve, and grow shared communiqués than via email.

<H4>Email’s Problems</H4>
<p>Email is simple, wildly popular, and works well—or else it wouldn’t have stayed in such widespread use as long as it has. But email has serious drawbacks when used to manage a conversation within a group. </p>

<p>Email propagates multiple copies and versions of messages. As soon as email is sent, the message’s contents are locked in. You can only copy, paste, edit, and send yet another copy of that message. As a result, email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a filing system of “boxes.”</p>

You’re simply entering in the content. Use standard tags H1-H6, P, EM, STRONG, A, and IMG as needed. Your markup works like HTML does in that H1 will be given semantic priority over H6. EM will be italicized. STRONG will be emboldened. Etc.

Compile with eCub

When you’ve finished creating the content and formatting lightly with your HTML markup, you’ll want to compile all of these assets into a single ePub file. Luckily there’s an app for that. eCub is that utility. Its available for use on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. Download it. Install it.
This is a multistep process. I’ll summarize it in words first and show more detail in pictures below.
  1. Start a new project and import all of your HTML files into that project.
  2. Select each page and rename them, add them to your table of contents, and give them a chapter type.
  3. Compile the project into the ePub format.

Select each page, rename it and give it a "type"

The various types of chapters you can assign each HTML page

Before you compile your ePub book, you need to name each chapter, give it a type and also make sure the order of your book’s chapters is correct. The order they appear in your files menu above is how they will appear to the reader.
Tip: you don’t need a table of contents. The ePub format handles that for you.

Compile your book into the ePub format

Look in your publish directory to find your ePub file.

Import into iTunes

This part’s easy. Just drag your file into iTunes. Right here:

Import the ePub file into iTunes

Sync and Enjoy!

The book imported into iBooks

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How Do I Get My Book Published on Amazon.com?

Kelly Abbott | April 5, 2010 - 8:32 am

This is a short, quick post about how to get your book published independently on Amazon.com. Amazon does a poor job of explaining this and in my research there did not seem to be a consensus answer for this one simple question:

How do I get my book published on Amazon.com?

There are three ways.

  1. Createspace
  2. Digital Text Platform
  3. Advantage

Here are their key differences:

Createspace is the “atoms and bits” solution to getting your creative works for sale on Amazon.com. Caters to books, music and film.

Digital Text Platform is the Kindle channel only. If you want your book on the Kindle and that’s all you care about, use DTP.

Amazon Advantage is the place where a publisher would go to selling and distributing their physical books on Amazon.com – you can ship from your own warehouse and ship them a palette of books to ship for you.

In all solutions, you as the publisher set the price, but Amazon takes 45% of the retail price.

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Aunt Mary’s Haikus

Kelly Abbott | March 10, 2010 - 4:25 pm

When the death knell of newspapers was but an echo in the valleys of the Internet along comes Apple. Apple doing the Apple thing by at once re-inventing a market and resurrecting its potential. The print world – itself in shambles – was the first Apple courtier. As an independent publisher, we’re still waiting for our seat at the table. Until then, we have Kindle; we have PDF. But the real winner here are consumers.

Whether you’re Tina Brown pitting the Daily Beast against The Establishment or Gina Trapani giving completely in to the idea of copyleft, consumers are clearly getting better, faster, cheaper access to high quality written work. This is the point that publishers and the literary world lament the most. We saw what consumers did to network news – they brought us Twitter and Chelsea Lately, where low brow rules.

I understand the highbrow lament. Or at least I think I do. In a world where anyone can publish, then who’s to decide what deserves our attention? That’s the lament, right? Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books puts it better:

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

The argument can be made that readers don’t give a crap either way. They want Aunt Mary and Keats both. Each is creative in their own right. There is a time for everything, after all. But where does that leave the industry? First, we can agree that even from a supplier perspective, the printed word is in a kind of free-fall. Here’s a graph for US print revenue growth in the last five years:

Even still, I see some hope for printed matter. We have a bias here because we are publishers. Our book is available in both electronic and dead tree formats. One is decidedly more expensive than the other. But both are imminently sharable. Whether you’re downloading or thumbing through the content we’ve got, we want you to share it. Indeed, to compete with Daily Beast, we need both a good product AND open access to it. We just don’t have the eyeballs they do. Nor do we have the distribution of The Establishment.

Which brings me back to Apple. It’s great that they’re breathing some life back into The Establishment. I love my LA Times and will buy the iPad subscription as soon as it’s available. I love the books I get at Borders but I may find myself buying fewer of them at Borders after all. Which is only fair. Did you know that Borders and Amazon get 50% of every book sold? Are they adding equal value as the publisher? What about the writer – whose revenues are only a portion of the half the publisher receives. Apple Bookstore and Kindle Editions take a smaller percentage, which is a start, but not what makes publishing really valuable for the writer today.

What makes publishing interesting for the writer is that there are fewer barriers to entry. And with fewer obstructions also come fewer ass-kissers. Not fewer fans. But fewer people who are paid to prop up the talent and prove the industry experience. Ask any writer not named Steven King and they’ll tell you they love having a publisher but wish they weren’t at their mercy. Which is to say, they want the marketing and distribution a publisher can offer. But do they have to make so little money?

And there are academics. If anyone can self-publish, then is the “publish or perish” model still valid?

So many questions not even the likes of Steve Jobs can answer. What we do know for certain is that where there is disruption there will be innovation. Not just technical innovation either. I mean literary innovation. I foresee the rise of flash fiction (i.e. very, very short stories) and poetry in this new digital paradigm. I see writers taking distribution into their own hands – spending more time on Amazon, Goodreads, and Apple’s iBookstore interacting with readers. I see them tweeting. Even if it is low-brow.

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, on publishing, the internet as we see it | 1 Comment

"Harder to scale"

Kelly Abbott | February 7, 2010 - 8:45 am

I opened up the LA Times this morning and turned to my favorite Sunday section: books. Having little time to indulge in the art of the written word, instead I like to read about what other people are reading. Today, I happened up on an Essay by Dani Shapiro where she extolls the virtues of being a writer. Writing, she concludes, is a way of being; not an occupation so much an obsession. I love this line:

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

It can be said of all the creative arts. substitute photography or painting or dance and you have new legions of nodding heads. Can the same be said of the entrepreneur?

via A writing career becomes harder to scale – latimes.com.

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1,000 Books Sold

Kelly Abbott | January 19, 2010 - 3:10 pm

We realized going into this that the gain was not profit. We thought we’d learn something and that, to us, was something we couldn’t quite put a value on. Nevertheless, we didn’t go into it without wanting to make money. We just didn’t know where to set our expectations. After all, publishing a book first as a wiki, licensing it for free distribution and making it available as an eBook to download is not a business model widely known.

In just two months, we’ve sold over 1,000 copies of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

When Gina first approached us to help her, we put together some preliminary numbers anyway. In true scientific method, we formed a hypothesis (sell X number of books) and tested it (go out and sell them). For the preview edition, we anticipated selling between 100 and 1000 copies but really figured we’d sell around 500-700 copies. We hit our high mark of 1,000 and we did it in exactly two months. Net revenues for the book have been $5300 (we lose about 50 cents per copy to google checkout and 10 cents to docmonk). Our peak day was November 20 (Day 3) when the book was announced; we sold 85 copies that day.

Sales pattern for the (now 9) weeks since it went on sale:

Complete Guide to Google Wave sales by week

Complete Guide to Google Wave sales by week

On the horizon, we will have the First Edition (not a preview edition) for sale by March 12 (when SXSW begins). It will be a higher price. With it we will also have a Print-on-Demand version that we can drop-ship as well (for a slightly higher price). We got our first preview copy of that last week. Here’s a peek at me showing it off excitedly.

Our print preview

Our print preview

stacked books

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Core Market, Core Values

Kelly Abbott | November 13, 2009 - 9:34 pm

Core Market

There comes a time in the life cycle of a failing product where the progenitors, in spite of their best intentions to develop a strong set of features the customer wants, find themselves scratching their heads asking the million-dollar question: “Why won’t you come?”

“Look at all these features. Now, why won’t you use them?”


There’s a misconception in product development that the feature makes the market. Most entrepreneurs — myself included — invent products that solve problems. Therefore the market for any given product is loosely defined as anyone with that problem in the area I can ship that product to. Looked at another way, products developed in this way have features that address the market that desires these features. Nice work if you can find a large market with a hitherto unmet needed solution. Good luck!

Looked at that way, it’s easy to see that  features make a market no more than a market makes features. The key is to find a small market with a small unmet need their willing to pay for a good solution to. This small market is a core market. The produces of a product with a core market doesn’t just say, “I know who I serve best,” but more importantly says, “I know who not to serve.”

Core value

At the heart of understanding how features and markets are loosely coupled is the concept of core value. Core value is a term that gets thrown out a lot in meetings with investors. Investors want entrepreneurs to distill their vision into a single core value. There’s logic in this thought experiment. It’s a values statement for the proposed company where the investor sizes up the entrepreneur’s intent. By the same token, the entrepreneur uses a core value as a shield from those who would have them stray from essence for being in business: adding value at a fair price.

Having a core value is not a vision statement but well articulated a Core Value does serve as a kind of corporate mantra. It helps the entrepreneur make decisions and serves as a touchstone for so much of the trial and error learning involved in both developing the product and articulating the market for that product.

A product with a core value says, “I know what I do best.”

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The Startup Pyramid

Kelly Abbott | July 29, 2009 - 8:01 am
Like the food pyramid, only richer.

The Startup Pyramid - Like the Food Pyramid, Only Richer

Achieve “market fit” product status before worrying about the rest. Which is to say, prove that there is a market for what you offer by getting a small but dedicated audience willing to pay to use it.
The most compelling KPI for market fit products is essentially customer satisfaction: the number of users who feel that they would be very disappointed if the product/site no longer existed should be north of 40%. That’s a pretty lofty goal. It’s hard to know if this measurement is applicable to media destinations as much as utilities (i.e. Huffington Post vs. Google Reader). That said, it’s something most start-ups would do well to insert front and center on their morning dashboard.
On a tangential note, have I ever shared my go-to list of entrepreneur blogs I read every day? Here they are:
You might think I’m being original when I  talk about failing fast, but I’m not. It all comes from these guys.

Read more: The Startup Pyramid.

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The Ultimate Taste Test: Validation

Kelly Abbott | April 15, 2009 - 9:57 pm

Just because the food has gone off it doesn’t mean you have a bum taster. On the contrary, your tastebuds are doing what they should. So what does taste testing have to do with product development?

When tests fail, the test is doing its job. Finding “fails” fast is why we create tests in the first place. This is why we validate.

I recently had a conversation with a client about why validation exposing “fails” should not be seen as application failure per se. It exposed a couple of misconceptions non-developers often have of the development process. It took a while to get my point across. I guess you can say this logic is an acquired taste. One that comes from years of developing products.

Some of those misconceptions are described below.

Code should be perfect.
Not all code can be perfect. In fact, often code is imperfect. Even if it’s flawlessly executed, it may in fact solve a different problem than the one we expected it to solve. Such code cannot be classified as “buggy.” It can, however, be classified as producing unintended results.

When tests fail, the code being tested is “buggy.”
Not necessarily. When tests fail, the only proof is that the test is producing the desired result – not necessarily that the code is buggy. The code could be doing exactly what it was designed to do. But the result, being unexpected, helped us uncover how the application should be coded differently.

Once we realize the flaw in the application design, it’s always worth it to “fix” the problem.
Not so. It wouldn’t make sense to fix things that only affect a small percentage of users. These edge cases can be so seldom that certain levels of risk in failure rates become acceptable.

All technology questions have technology answers.
Again, not so. In order to choose to fix a problem, we must first assess it. A management question arises: how much risk are we willing to accept? How much work will this take? What does that cost? What’s the upside once the work is complete?

“Fixing” the “problem” is the only real solution.
Adaptation is often a suitable alternative to re-writes. Many types of applications are designed to be flexible enough to handle “errors” elegantly and themselves become handy workarounds to “problems.”

What happens very frequently in our business is that products are created and expectations are either met or not met based on what’s created. Perfection for both the entrepreneur and the programmer or goals we expect to attain. However perfection is asymptotic. We can never have the perfect business. By the same token, it’s impossible to build the perfect product. If I buy a bottle of wine, it’s based on a number of factors. Quality is only one of those factors. Price, convenience, prestige, color, varietal, region, all factor into the decision. For the vintner, the challenge is always not to make the perfect wine (though a laudable goal that may be) but to price it correctly given the other factors inherent to it. If its tastes don’t meat the vintner’s expectations but that doesn’t mean the bottle’s bad and can’t be sold.

Bon appetit!

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What is Fail Whale?

Kelly Abbott | April 13, 2009 - 12:00 pm


What is Fail Whale?.

This page is a collection of a lot of user generated images for the Twitter Fail Whale. It also answers the question above. I think this is a great example of two measures we have an eye for when we help companies develop products.

First: failure is a means to the goal and should not be avoided per se. Failures help you carve out your market because it is through failing (and failing fast, as I like to say) that we learn the correct path to success.

Second: spreadability. This is a term that Henry Jenkins uses frequently to describe how users generate content. It’s a term that most people mean when they say “UGC” or “Viral Content” and it simply refers to the ability of a meme to be spread without the encoded original message getting distorted. Not only is Twitter “spreadable” but even its longstanding “fails” are worth sharing. 

What we as product developers can glean from this lesson is that once a product makes it into pop culture, expect to lose direct control of the message. And that even a culture that gently pokes fun at the product by highlighting its shortcomings is in its own way a loving culture. We tease those we love, after all. Why should it be any different for products we love?

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