SEO Werkt!

Someone took it upon themselves to experiment with a redesign for American Airlines with an interesting retro approach. After filing bankruptcy protection in 2011, reinventing themselves could potentially help the airline. The question now is, would this design persuade you to travel with them?

Editor’s note: Paul Stamatiou is Co-founder of Picplum, a Y Combinator-backed photo printing service, where he obsesses over both design and development. He also co-founded Notifo (YC W10) and Skribit. Follow him on his blog, PaulStamatiou.com, and on Twitter: @Stammy.

Reminisce with me for a bit. Do you remember the first time you got an Internet connection? Before your computer was always connected and when going online was a thing you had to plan. The joys of seeing new browsers like Phoenix emerge. Your excitement when you first experienced the Web with your new high-speed connection. It was a time when sites rarely had any JavaScript and DHTML was the buzzword of the year. Now it’s hard to believe that Chrome is just a few years old.

When I first visited California for my Yahoo! internship (news of which immediately hit Valleywag, remember that site?) I knew I had to move out here eventually. I came back every year visiting friends and checking out startups.

Every time I drive into San Francisco and see the skyline, it’s a strong reminder that I’m fortunate to be in a time and place where I have wanted to be for so long, with such a vibrant and strong tech community. And that Ibetter not fuck it up wasting time and being unproductive. I’m not here to talk about your startup idea, offer Backbone.js tips, discuss how to find your first customers or offer tips to pimp out your AngelList profile. I just want to say a few words on how to work. This is a post to new entrepreneurs about getting shit done.

This is all started with a tweet of mine. I was annoyed some friends that just began working on a startup were slacking off. Over 150 retweets later, I decided to elaborate on my thoughts here.

i’m going to teach a course for first-time startup entrepreneurs called stop fucking around and get back to work.

— Paul Stamatiou (@Stammy) April 23, 2012

We are in an amazing time right now — perhaps the perfect time to build companies. And it pains me to see first-time entrepreneurs flush away this huge opportunity getting caught in the hype of how cool it is to do a startup, going to endless meetups and spending entirely too much time on Maserati problems when they’re not busy cargo cult coding. Startups are a grind. It may end with having to get a job, or it may end with a big smile and a Section 280G, but either way you’ll have learned a ton.

Your workdays are sacred

Think about the opportunity cost here. You could be off making six figures but you decided to swing for the fences with your startup. That takes guts. So why would you slack off and waste time? This is not a 9-5 job. You’re only hurting yourself if you don’t suck it up and work your ass off. So please avoid all those endless meetups you go to for the sake of meeting up. Like Michael Arrington says, “use all that free time to start spending time with the serious people, doing serious things.”

Someone wants to meet during the week? Unless its actually business-related, turn it down or move it to the weekend. If they really want to meet, they will sacrifice some of their weekend too.

I will make one exception though. I’m a big believer in paying it forward. If someone needs genuine help I’m always down to lend a hand. It’s my way of returning the favor that people like George Zachary, Dan Martell, Hiten Shah and Noah Kagan that have spent countless hours helping entrepreneurs like me for as long as I can remember.

Get ready for ups and downs

You will have days that suck. Getting accustomed to this will be a challenge for any new entrepreneur. I once tracked my mood everyday for a few months while I was working on my last startup (this was when we were fundraising).

Find Your Thing

This is one of the things Marissa Mayer has mentioned for how to prevent burnout and I have found it to ring exceptionally true. What do you need to do for yourself every week to keep your sanity? For me that’s running a few hours per week and seeing the occasional electronic dance music show with my cofounder. These things leave me feeling more energized and happier, something you can’t often say about attending lots of tech meetups and conferences.

What’s your plan?

Picplum is my third startup and if there’s one main difference between my last startups, it’s definitely our planning. I’ll be the first to say that I have a bad habit of always wanting to build first. New idea? Start with javascript. Wrong! Fortunately I have a great cofounder that keeps me in check and reminds me to spec things out first. Unless you are blessed with building a product that is solving your own problem and you are your target user, chances are you need to take a step back to throw away all of your assumptions.

Pick some sort of task/project management tool and use it. Whether it’s Trello, Hackpad, Asana, Flow, Sprintly or what have you — just pick one. Keep track of every idea, feature request or bug but rigorously prioritize. Do not allow anyone else to use their own system, because they’ll never check the company Asana and always be one step behind.

Not sure if it’s worth your time to fix something right now? Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics once told me something a few years ago that stuck:

For those customers that email about small feature requests or tweaks: Don’t fix it until you get one passionate user complaining about it/emailing you an essay.

One thing I learned about myself is that if we set an amount of time a new feature or update should take, I’m more likely to think through everything involved and spec out all the steps. This applies for at least anything that touches the UI. For example, we recently designed and built a new share page for the new Picplum. When I first started working on it, I was in the mindset that this was going to be a simple afternoon project that I would just hook up with current layouts and maybe extending one Backbone view. Easy.

While that could have been the route we took, we decided to take a step back and define the goal of this page. What was the first thing we wanted the user to do? Did it need to use the same layout as other pages? What followed was a productive 30 minute product chat with some sketches that resulted in a much better idea of what we wanted the user to experience. I mocked up 5 variations in Photoshop, had quick back & forths on the designs then built the one we decided on.

By mentally setting the length of this task from a hasty “I need to push this tonight” to a more effective “lets plan this out and take more time if necessary” the end result was much more robust. A better product and better code that you won’t have to end up rewriting twice later on.

The opposite of this is spending days or weeks “planning” a single feature and feeling like that is actual work. Thinking about how to do something won’t actually get it built. I’ve seen one too many startups that are way too happy about all the notes they’ve scribbled down over the last week about what they want to do. Just go do them, and surprise me when you’re making real progress.

Get more feedback

I used to do this all the time: I’d spend hours or days building what I thought was the perfect feature only to realize my cofounder and I had different thoughts on how it should all piece together.

Get more feedback, more often.

But how do you get quick feedback without sounding condescending and nagging for status updates from your cofounders? Just make it a habit. Anytime one of us asks “What are you working on?” or “How is X going?” it’s not a translation for “WTF is he doing” but rather just some friendly accountability and an offer to help. Make sure you and your cofounders keep each other in check with this simple habit.

The best part about these tiny status updates here and there? Less meetings.

Keep it light and iterative. For me this is often sharing a screenshot in Campfire with Akshay or flipping my monitor around to talk through something. One thing that stuck with me is Jeffrey Veen’s talk Designing for Disaster. He talked about how to conduct product reviews and keep them constructive:

The review is not a forum for expressing opinions. It is a forum for solving problems.

Instead of I don’t like blue, ask “what is the reason this is blue?”. Ask if this is a convergent discussion or a divergent discussion. If you need a decision made, make it. If you need ideas make that clear, and have a divergent conversation.

Be Decisive

There’s nothing worse than trying to spec out that new feature or product and ending up with more questions. “Yeah we could do that” is not an acceptable answer. Entrepreneurs need to be able to make quick decisions and move forward with them. Delaying will not make the decision any easier (unless of course you’re waiting a few days for more data on that A/B test or more visitor metrics for your data-driven decision). Make a decision, put it in your Asana, assign people to it and get back to work.

When you get stuck

If you can’t figure something out in 20 minutes, move on if it’s not blocking or ask your cofounders. My cofounder Akshay is big on this “20 minute rule” of his. If you’re spending 2 hours trying to properly bind events on a collection or figure out why your RequireJS optimized build isn’t working on production, you are both wasting time and not putting your resources to good use. By resources I mean your smart cofounders. A pair of fresh eyes always helps.

Respect the Zone

Find out how you work best. It may be a bit eccentric but when I really want to get work done I do things like hide the clock in OS X, close anything that can make sound (except Spotify of course), close all unrelated browser tabs, and make sure nothing else is cluttering my mind, like any small nagging tasks that I should probably finish first. Perhaps you need to perfect your coding cave.

Make sure you know what you and your cofounders need to be productive. If that means designating a specific “wired in” work period every day when there are no distractions, then so be it.

Good luck!

You can be so bad at so many things… and as long as you stay focused on how you’re providing value to your users and customers, and you have something that is unique and valuable… you get through all that stuff.

- Mark Zuckerberg

As Kara Swisher notes, Marissa Mayer has brought the first Google staffer to join her at Yahoo: Anne Espiritu, who ran consumer technology PR for Google. In other words, not a geek.

Espiritu seems happy about the move, if we can take her most recent tweet seriously:

Someone please pinch me. Just to make sure I'm currently not in a state of dream. #overthemoon

—
Anne Espiritu (@Anne_Espiritu) July 29, 2012

Espiritu has not yet updated any of her social media accounts. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ still show her as employed by Google, where she has worked since 2005 on projects including “proactive consumer media outreach for Google’s new social platform, Google+.”

Source: LinkedIn

Anne Espiritu

Espiritu also worked with Google Maps and various local initiatives for Google, which probably accounts for at least part of the Mayer connection. Mayer was most recently VP for maps, local, and location services at Google.

The obvious question: Does Yahoo really need help in the PR department?

OK, that was a stupid question.

Let me re-phrase: Does Yahoo need help getting its message out more than it needs help actually creating something cool? That’s perhaps a better question.

But it’s one that Mayer will have some time — and more than one hire — to answer.

Image credit: Eric Broder Van Dyke / Shutterstock.com

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

It looks like someone made the colossally silly decision to buy Mitt Romney Twitter followers. Earlier this month, Romney saw an implausible spike of 150,000 Twitter followers, and many of these likely fake accounts had less than 2 followers, according to some crack reporting by The Atlantic. It is unknown whether the purchase was made by someone at Camp Romney, a clueless PR flack, or a conspirator trying to make him look bad. Regardless, fibbing politicians are a serious affront to democracy, and someone owes the American people an explanation.

Up until Romney’s Twitter spike, his account had been growing at a slow-but-steady 3,500 followers a day, prompting widespread speculation of fraud after the surge occurred in a few weeks ago.

To test whether or not the media had unearthed something legitimate, or were just aching for a cheap corruption story, The Atlantic performed a simple statistical analysis on Romney’s new followers to test if they somehow differed from both Barack Obama’s followers.

Humans typically have more followers than automated accounts, since they Tweet more interesting information and they share similar interests with other netizens. More sophisticated automated accounts will boost their follower account by following one another, but they do so in a (statistically) recognizable way, and can be ferreted out by comparing the way humans cluster together. The study concluded:

“The median number of followers for Romney’s new followers was 5, whereas the median for the comparison group was 27. This represents a stark, and statistically significant difference… the p-value on this was 0.0000.”

The “p-value”, if readers recall from their college Statistics class, is how likely an event could have happened by chance. A coin flipping heads has a p-value of 0.5, for instance. A p-value of <0.0000 means that Romney is about as likely to get hit by a meteor as his is to get 150,000 followers in a few days.

Earlier in the campaign, Romney’s fellow Republican colleague, Newt Gingrich, got in hot water for buying Twitter popularity. “Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater,” a staffer admitted to Gawker.

Now, we’ve argued that social media is an over-hyped asset for political campaigns. If no one under the age of 30 had voted for Obama in 2008, he still would have won every state but two. The fact that Obama has 17 million more followers than Romney is probably inconsequential. But, truthfulness from someone who could be the most powerful man in the world is important. Zach Moffatt, Romney’s otherwise impressive digital director, has denied that the campaign is involved in inflating its Twitter account.

But, someone is buying followers. It’d be a win for the Romney campaign and for the integrity of the office of the President if they were honest about who is responsible.

When an emergency arises in a large crowd, the bystander effect dictates that despite plenty of onlookers, your probability of getting help decreases. The solution? Pick a specific person from the crowd and explicitly command him or her to dial 911 instead of just yelling for someone to call for help. More »

Task management startup Exec launched with a pretty simple premise — let users rent someone else’s spare time for a small fee of $25 an hour. That has enabled San Francisco-based users to outsource any number of tasks through its easy-to-use mobile interface, from having Ikea furniture put together to delivering various office supplies to cleaning someone’s apartment to dropping off dry cleaning. But now Exec is trying to use its system for good, by enabling users to outsource volunteer work to one of three local charities.

This isn’t the first charity drive that Exec has put forth: In April, the startup lined up a number of popular startup founders who volunteered to let users rent their time. Over the course of a weekend, founders from companies like Parse, Reddit, Hipmunk, Sincerely, and yes, even Exec itself, took phone calls and Skype chats from interested users, who mainly asked them about, well, startup stuff. That fundraiser brought in more than $3,000 for DonorsChoose.

But this time, instead of just sending money to various charities, the startup is proposing a novel way for its users to give back, by letting them pay for its Execs to stand in and volunteer their time. In other words, for those who want to volunteer but might not be able to find the time, Exec has got your back. They need only pick a charity, determine how much time they’d like to “volunteer,” and an Exec will stand in for them. They’ll do whatever needs to be done — whether it be updating donor records, to helping to plan fundraising events, or mentoring kids.

For this campaign, Exec has picked three charities that users can contribute to: Mission Graduates, which aims to help local kids get into college; Appleseeds, a film that attempts to raise awareness of domestic violence; and Kids Enjoy Exercise Now, which sponsors sports for kids with disabilities.

When asked why Exec chose those particular charities, founder Justin Kan responded by email: “We researched and contacted a bunch of SF charities and found ones addressing a range of issues that felt that they could utilize Exec hours at the charities. We wanted to pick local SF charities because we’re still completely SF-centric and wanted to give back to the community the customers are in.”

San Francisco-based Exec was part of last year’s Y Combinator class — the third that Kan participated in. The startup recently raised a $3.3 million seed round of funding which included investors like Loopt co-founder Sam Altman, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam, Gmail creator and Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, Google board member Ram Shriram, Matt Ocko, Delicious creator Josh Schachter, and others.

Ever needed to quickly convince a friend to go to your favorite restaurant instead of theirs? Or maybe you’re trying to sell an idea to someone? A well crafted pitch can convince people in a short amount of time, and Forbes outlines exactly how to do it with a message map. More »

Yesterday Bing announced they have added Foursquare data to the Bing social bar.

It works pretty well.

You search for something local, be it movie theaters, places to eat, barber shops and so on and if someone has something to say about it on Foursquare, Bing may show it…

Was It Viewed? is a simple webapp that creates trackable links to you can find out if any URL has been viewed. If you sent in an online resume, asked someone to check out a video, or want to know if a friend downloaded a file, it’ll let you create a simple, trackable link that’ll let you know when someone is checking it out. More »