fantasy founder - UNsubscribe

What if, every month, instead of having something sent — you had something taken away?

How much would you spend to receive a bin in the mail every month that you fill up with things and leave on your doorstep to be taken away? So you have one less box-full of stuff. Every month. Would you do it? Could you do it? Could you do with less? Would you be willing to let go of the things you don’t need, don’t really want, don’t have any use for, don’t do anything with, take up space, take up part of your brain.. ?

What is having less worth?

There’s been an explosion of subscription services: razors, cookies, menswear, jerky, makeup, socks, and on and on. How many of those things actually get put to use and if not, sent back? How many of them end up a in a junk pile, at home or at the dump? Are we so wealthy, as a people, that we’re willing to continuously turn our resources into goods which do only one thing: accumulate? Is it possible to arrive at some stable amount of goods we own, at any point in our lives, such that the amount we acquire is matched by the amount we give away? What impact would that have on our mental and physical lives?

UNsubscribe wouldn’t be a storage service. It would be removal, donation, reduce, reuse, recycle as a service. The value created would be lightness. I doubt there’s a business model there. Would you be able to charge enough and would the tax write-offs and pittance made from donations, recycling, reuse or resale be enough such that the overhead of running the business would be covered? Could you turn a profit? Could it survive as a non-prof or a B corp? 

Better to want less, demand less, make less, and accumulate less in the first place. Our culture won’t allow it.

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This is part of an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to see built, or build.

fantasy founder - elder interfaces

Continuing an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to see built, or build.

Over the years, I’ve tried to teach my grandmother to use computers, dumb phones, smart phones and tablets--with no success. She will learn one or two things (command sequences) to get something done for a little while, but nothing sticks.

Facts:

• English is her 5th language (depending on how you count subcontinental languages).
• She hasn’t had much schooling, up to 5th grade maybe.
• But she’s sharper than most people I know, having cogent conversations about geopolitics and doing relatively complex financial math in her head.
• Her formative years were in a developing country, traumatized by mob rule, lynchings and the like.
• Her first personal exposure to computers was in her 40s, and her first attempt at using computers was in her 60s.
• Recently, she had a stroke and lost some significant English comprehension circuitry.

Desktops, folders, files, that there are different kinds of files, applications, trees of objects, windows, visual controls, input controls, control contexts, focus, local vs remote, online vs offline, different affordances in different mediums, different affordances in different contexts on the same medium, contextual clues built into small variances in visual presentation, the boundaries that separate one object from another, the different kinds of boundaries presented for different kinds of objects in different mediums or contexts—are all bound to and presume a certain cultural context and assume a certain set of preexisting models of how the world is organized and works.

The cultural assumptions built into our interfaces render them incomprehensible.

How we might overcome them:

• No files: If you didn’t grow up with computers or with desks and file folders, the metaphor doesn’t work. It doesn’t translate into the model which tells you that this thing is an object and the same form of object can have different content, etc. Better would be just apps which find and organize related content, the Apple way — stepping away from having to know how things are made and work to only needing to know what it is you want to do.
• No exposure of the filesystem: An extension of the last point: no folders, no browsing, no object tree, no files—just actions. That’s what the machine exists for and that’s why we go to it, to do something. Tool and action are fundamental enough concepts to transcend cultural context.
• Feedback on every action: I noticed that my grandmother would frequently do something on a computer or tablet and not know that she had done it or not believe that it had happend, especially things that are ephemeral like copying text. When you don’t have a model for how the system works, you need explicit feedback that the thing you’re trying to do was done or that you’ve done a thing, period. Strong visual, tactile and/or audio feedback for every action taken to tell you not just that you have actually done it, but that the intent has been registered by the system.
• Larger tolerances: Because fine motor skills deteriorate with age, getting shaky fingers right on a button is an unreasonable expectation, soclose enough has to be sufficient.
• Space between things: Corollary to the last point, what defines close enough should be consistent and big enough that it becomes intuitive (as an affordance) and feels easy. Which means sufficient space between all control elements to allow for not getting right on the button — as in, the whole grid square where the button is present is an active control.
• No menus: Big buttons with big words and/or big icons, all the way; because glaucoma, macular degeneration, etc.
• Less distractions: Wallpapers with objects in them or that could be confused for objects, window-dressing, flashy-visual-effects that look pretty but don’t help in navigation, orientation, or feedback create noise that makes it harder to adapt to a new environment. It’s like when you’re learning a foreign language—it’s much harder to understand what’s being said in a crowded, noisy cafe than it is in a quiet setting where you can focus on the one signal that matters instead of on trying to filter out the dozens that don’t.
• Click or no click: The whole overloaded clicking — left, right, middle, double, triple, click+drag, blah blah blah — imposes a significant burden on the user to understand and remember all the things that can be done with a single input element. Pair that with deteriorating fine motor skills, deteriorating sight, and lack of clear feedback on whether or not an action was taken and you have a recipe for confusion. Better: there is just click, or no click.
• Limit controls and contexts: Even when I would teach my grandmother something successful, frequently how I showed her to do something in one application would not translate at all to a different application or to a different context, like manipulating files. This is challenging in the extreme when you have no way of knowing that the context has even changed because you don’t have a mental model for the thing you’re looking at. The number of controls available in any given app should be stripped to the minimum, so there’s less to remember; the number of contexts (app vs app vs system) stripped to the minimum so there’s less to remember; and the variances between contexts (different control in different contexts) stripped to a minimum so there’s less to remember.
• Fullscreen everything: That apps need to be opened or closed may even be an unnecessary metaphor. If every app took up the whole screen, was open all the time, and there was an ever-present mechanism to switch between them—then that’s a few more things that don’t have to be remembered. We could reduce the cognitive burden down to: which of these dozen things do I want to do right now/next -> select.

Mobile interfaces are moving in the right direction.

If I put my product hat on and make my grandmother the target user, what she really wants out of a computer comes down to a managed communications experience which empower her to:

• Get in touch with the family and friends easily. Contacts as actions, the faces of the people she wants to contact as buttons on a screen that get in touch with them via video, phone or text. We, as relatives, need a way to remotely keep those contacts up to date via push to her device or a centralized service that propagates to her device.
• Keep up with loved ones when we’re not talking. Facebook without the Facebook, a timeline of updates from loved ones, pictures and videos and text, shared directly to her device, in a single app, blown up full screen. A feed that any of us can push content to or that can consume and present content from things like Facebook.
• Have important information and reminders without having to look for it. Emergency and medical information as collaborative app, pushed to the device by doctors and loved ones for consumption by all parties involved in care, including her for things like “Hey it’s 10am, take the blue pill!”.
• Let loved ones help. Shared calendar that loved ones and caregivers can push events onto, like appointments and birthdays. Delegation of control for all apps and services so she can say to her banking app that I am designated to make sure her bills get paid. Or, so I can have an Uber pick her up to take her to the airport and have the notifications go to her device instead of mine. Or, so a caregiver cantake over her device and it’s capabilities (like the camera) and show her things on it remotely or check in on her.
• Stay in touch with the world. News and entertainment, in one of the languages she understands, including: newspapers, streaming tv and movies, and games. The usual stuff that everyone enjoys. ☺

Why this doesn’t exist is beyond me. There’s a fortune to be made for someone with the single-mindedness to build interfaces for people who are older or didn't grow up with computers or lack our cultural metaphors or have zero exposure to computers outside of phones etc. 

fantasy founder - identify me

Continuing an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to build or see built someday.

This is a recurring idea that’s been bouncing around my brain (and written about) since the days of using ICQ plugins to talk to every messaging system there was (irc, usenet, email, aim), more or less consolidating identity into that one application. 

This would only be useful in the case where you want or need to be identified. 

Consider this:

• Most of us have multiple online identities that don’t serve a purpose, other than there’s no infrastructure to do otherwise in a way that’s satisfactory to everyone who wants to be identified or everyone who wants to identify us
• Centralized password control exists through things like OnePass, but then we’re dependent on OnePass to stay up, serve our interests etc
• Services like Facebook let us log in to other things using our FB identity, which is convenient but gives FB ever more data about what we do, where we do it, etc.. all for purposes that aren’t necessarily in our interests
• What if we could have consolidated virtual identities that all services, including things like Google and FB, used but that were under our control?
• What if it was completely decentralized and could be run on our phones, with the actual profile itself encrypted and replicated across multiple cloud services (DropBox, Google Drive, S3 bucket, etc) or our own servers (VPS, colo, net-attached-Drobo, etc) for storage?
• Plus a password or passphrase to decrypt the profile for modifications and an (or any) editor to modify it
• We could have a standard (extensible) profile format that could be mapped to/from any given service
• And a way, like with Facebook application security settings, to allow/disallow access to specific parts of the profile on a per-service basis—so maybe Facebook can see your name, birthday, company, home city but LiinkedIn can only see your name and company
• We could have elements of the profile tagged so one could say something like: name is ok for handing out to social networks but home address only goes to merchants that have to verify credit cards--thus having a mapping or filter by service type
• Services could request certain profile elements and we could either auto-approve based on the above tagging or individually allow/disallow usage or allow creation of if they don't exist or maybe only send back acceptance of a subset of what was asked for

This would require some kind of protocol for asking for and finding an identity that would route the request to the right place. Something like DNS. We could call it ID-NS!

Amazon, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter’s auth services could work like this. But the problem is that all those services value our identities and the ability to tie actions to those. I want a service who’s single and only utility is to hold and distribute identity per my authorization. 

If such a utility existed and gained mass popularity, I’d bet we as end users wouldn’t have to pay for it. Vendors would pay 1) to access it and 2) to be allowed to tie your actions to it.

I'd call it IdenitfyMe (points if you catch the reference!).

It’s interesting that the SSA hasn’t already built this, given that they more or less serve as the identity clearinghouse for the government.

//Side note: There are plenty of providers that do federated identity for federated authentication (single sign on), though no one talks about it that way. I really don’t think SSO matters. It’s a different problem altogether from having a single virtual identity. Authentication != Identification. How you authenticate someone’s virtual identity to arrange for SSO across multiple services is a related, but distinct, problem with it’s own set of hurdles.

fantasy founder - beta club

Continuing an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to build or see built someday.

Tech decision making does not scale. The last mile of commitment always comes at the price of actual use and trial. That’s why we have pilots, proof of concepts, bake-offs.

If that last mile is the part we have to do, then the rest needs to be compressed—both the front end of qualification-to-selection to the back end of implementation-to-operation. Why some companies buy things that take months-to-years to get up and running baffles me. Why some companies spend months to figure out what to try (with generally worthless RFx processes), when ultimately those things may not even work in practice, also baffles me.

Analysts help a little bit. One of the decision support roles they're supposed to serve is answering whether a particular technology or vendor is the right fit for an organization and problem. There are some that do this with startup tech, like 451, Redmonk, Jonah or Lydia. But very few have insight or access to tech before it hits the market. That takes personal networks, connections to investors and the concerted efforts of dedicated people employed for just that.

What if that was taken care of? And you could just join a buyers’ club of sorts?

Something like this:

• Be dedicated to experimentation and actually trying things, because we’ve accepted that there’s no shortcut
• Believe that tech is worth investing in, can render a competitive advantage, and want to try new things when they’re new
• Once a quarter, answer a short questionnaire about 3-4 pressing tech problems that are unserved or underserved by existing vendors
• Get matched to a startup product, on the market or stealth, released product or pilot/alpha/beta—matching not just for capability, but for technological fit
• One followup meeting, within a month, to get the best fit and work out details
• Shortly thereafter, have licenses, code, etc., from the best matches in hand to get cranking in test
• There could be packages, free to try, support and feedback arrangements, good terms for logos and press releases, etc.

Highly personalized, curated new tech? Something like that. Sounds hipster-tastic, but oh well. 

It could manifest as just a mailing list. It could be blind, so neither the startup nor the member knows who the other party is until things get in the lab—to make it purely about solving the problem.

I’m guessing it would be most useful for non startups, non large financial services, non large tech co’s, non already-big web/social/mobile. Aside from communication, the whole thing would be done manually by someone. thus naturally limiting absolute scale at any given point in time and speed of scaling over time. Which is ok. 

I call it Beta Club. 

If it provides a steady stream of real, useful pilot opportunities and pre-launch logos—investors and founders would bite. If it provided a steady stream of real, useful early access to game changers—tech buyers would bite.

fantasy founder - relationship management is engagement management

Continuing an occasional series about products and companies that I’d like to build or see built someday.

There’s a natural cadence to communication. We meet or talk or email or txt or whatever. And we do it over some topic, even if it’s just catching up. The mixture of who we are to each other, the last time we connected, how often we connect, and what we connect over plus our personal contexts (and some other stuff) make up how much of an impression is left and for how long. At least for a moment, you get to front of mind. 

Nothing new there. We can maintain different sizes of connections in our brains. Social butterflies are great at wide swaths of shallow relationships. Most people are good at small numbers of deep relationships, bigger number of casual or business relationships, etc. See Dunbar.

But social networking and freelancing blow all the numbers away. How do you both organize the people you want to keep in touch with and maintain the connection? How do you deal with the fact that relationships wax and wane and change?

• Personal social networks let you organize people and give you the updates about them that are prompts to connect
• Professional CRM systems let you organize people and track communication for the purpose of getting someone through the funnel and keeping the money flowing
• Professional social networks (taking LinkedIn as the only example that matters) don’t really do either
• Contact managers let you organize people
• Communications apps let you connect
• We need to keep track of who matters to us and why
• We need to keep track of when we talked to them
• We need to remember to talk to them again
• We need to be true and authentic to actually have real relationships (nothing’s going to do that part for us!)
• We forget to stay in touch with people we want to
• We want some relationships to grow
• We don’t care if others drift off
• Some relationships change without us even noticing

So what do you do? Actively manage relationships? There’s prior art here: Nimble, Mingly, Contactually, fellowup, Promptivate, CRUMBtrail, Highrise, Google Plus, ICQ (way ahead of it’s time). And I pitched the idea a few years ago to ___, which didn’t work out. But the idea of personal relationship management hasn’t really taken off. Everyone either charges too much, doesn’t have a functional enough (or any) free tier, or is just a poor man’s CRM.

The things I want:

• Integration with email, messaging, contact lists, social networking for both comms recording and metadata acquisition
• Inferring relationship tiers in terms of depth and frequency of communication, but not assigning any meaning—example: you talk to someone infrequently but consistently, which might mean a great old friend or a casual connection you see at a conference every year
• Arbitrary tagging or categorization, because real life is full of Venn diagrams
• Indicators that say, “hey, you’re normally in touch with this person every week and now you’ve dropped off to every month.. is that what you want?”
• Reminders that say “hey, you’ve said you want to be in touch with this person every week, so go talk to them”
• Unobtrusivity
• Refusal to turn into a CRM replacement, integrate with SFDC, Marketo, etc.. if it gets to that point, make another product**
• Freemium, with either a contact number limit or some feature based limitation

**And now it gets interesting. There’s a generalized application here, that for some reason is missing. In a world of SaaS, social networks, and mobile apps—the same relationship persists between the app and the user. Any user has some attentional budget and the same cadence of communication applies with the app. We call this “engagement”. The same ideas and algorithms that are needed for a good PRM would work well for a kind of engagement management (EM). You could set engagement targets (this many high value touches a month, that many low value touches a week), infer engagement quality and relationships status, prompt the user to engage, prompt the app to engage, prompt sales/marketing/account/whatever to engage, etc.

Added Feb 12th: P.S. The CEO of Nimble got in touch after reading the post. Check it out. Although it is targeted at professional use without a fremium model, it does go a long way towards what I'm talking about here. 

fantasy founder - what if your eyeballs make you (not google) money?

Kicking off an occasional series (like fantasy vc) about products or companies that I’d like to build or see built someday.

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Two thoughts:

• Thought One (from fantasy vc - cumulus)— Either you disrupt by doing something new. Or you disrupt by changing the supply chain, removing middlemen, disintermediation (or consolidation of intermediaries unto yourself?).
• Thought Two (from facebook, instagram, snapchat and you the product)— The cost of everything Facebook does to create and run Facebook is the cost of acquiring the product—your attention. Facebook sells your attention to advertisers.

Here’s the idea:

• If your attention is the product being sold by some third party to the highest bidding advertiser, why aren’t you getting the proceeds from that sale? 
• What if you had a way to sell your units of attention directly to the advertiser and get paid? 
• And what if nothing about how you use the web changed? 
• Except that now you get a check in the mail or money deposited in your bank account every month.

So, how might this work? An easy (in the sense that we’re not inventing anything new) approach: use ad block technology to strip out everyone else’s ads and insert ours. Have a plugin for each major browser. Create (or jack into an existing) an ad network to source the ads. And give users (for example) 65-75% of the transaction, claiming the rest as a transaction fee to run the business.

The point would be to give you most of the profit being made off your attention.

It should be profitable. But mainly, I’d like to see if  something sustainable can survive that puts a noticeable dent in advetising-driven business models. 

Why? Because I don’t care to have my attention sold. Because it’s grossly inefficient to pay for, say Google searches, by maybe being made more likely to buy some product part of the profit for which turns into the operating cost of some company that in turn spends that money on advertising on the web. There are tons of middlemen in that chain taking their cut of the money I could just pay Google for the damn search capability without fueling the consumerism, growthism, more-ism that prevails.

P.S. Prior art: AttentionTrust