danieltenner.com

The Death of the Web?

2010-10-29T21:00:00+01:00

Everyone agrees that the App Store for the Mac is a “Really Big Deal”, as Marco Arment puts it.

One thing that I think most analysis is still missing is the huge impact that it will have on the world of web apps and startups. Here’s how it will happen.

A sensible choice

Currently, the most sensible way to develop software and make money from it is as a web application. It gets around the problems of piracy, distribution of updates, and it makes use of the awesome platform that is the web. Sure, it is possible to make money (even large amounts of money) selling one-off software licences, but compared to selling recurring licences for a web app, it’s a dying model.

That’s very sensible, and I expect people to continue developing web applications in the future. There’s a whole class of applications which can only exist as web applications. And many of those applications can only be sold as SaaS. But, for a number of applications, the SaaS model is only viable because it eliminates piracy and distribution problems.

Enter the App Store

Who’s developing all those iOS apps? Obviously, a lot of iOS developers are former Mac developers. But, if you poke around web developer communities, you’ll see one obvious trend: almost everyone is either very interested in building some kind of iOS app, or is already doing so. This seems to affect almost every web developer community, from Flash/Flex to RoR including Python along the way. A lot of bleeding edge web developers use Macs, and a lot of them are lusting over iOS and want to build apps for it.

So a lot of iOS apps are likely to be developed (in the past and in the future) by web developers, if only because they make a nice mobile client for their existing web application.

Enter the Mac App Store

Why would you deal with all the angst of writing a billing system, why would you maintain servers, deal with hairy scalability issues, deal with the craptastic reality of Internet Explorer, why would you do all this if you can just plug into the App Store and let it handle all the headaches? Why would you go through the pain of scaling severs when you can just distribute bits and bytes for free?¹

Sure, for some apps, it will still make sense to be on the web, or even to be only or mostly on the web. But for many, the web is a shortcut to avoid the problems of piracy and distribution. And the web is a shortcut with a lot of headaches. It’s a lot simpler to build an iOS/MacOS app and distribute it through the App Store than to run web servers and keep them up to date and build billing systems and maintain mailing lists and so on².

To put a final nail in the web-coffin, a lot of web developers have already gotten acquainted with the fundamental tools for building Mac OS apps while building their iOS satellite apps. It’ll be an easy transition for them to build their next app solely in the Mac ecosystem and avoid all the headaches of the web world.

I expect that Marco Arment is completely right in his article. The Mac App store will dwarf the existing mac software world (which is already sizeable). More than that, I also expect that the main source of developers for that brave new world will be the web (to the online world’s expense).

Death or no death, it looks like the Mac App Store is on its way to becoming the largest disruption to the web for this decade.

¹ Yes, of course, the Mac App Store doesn’t run on Windows. And the iOS app store doesn’t run on Android. That hasn’t stopped anyone.

² Another side-effect I expect is that the Apple ecosystem will get even more of an edge over the Microsoft ecosystem, since people who would otherwise have built cross-browser applications will often build applications that work as Apple-only products.

How to lose weight

2010-06-21T00:00:00+01:00

This article presents just one method of losing weight. It’s worked very, very well for me. It doesn’t require an extreme diet, it doesn’t require much money (you’ll save money, in fact), and it doesn’t require extreme amounts of willpower. All it requires is a bit of method and preparation.

I’ve gone through this “diet” three times (see graphs). The first time I went from 83kg to 75.5kg over about 3 months. The second time, from 80kg to 71kg over 4 months. My latest iteration of this diet has me down from 75kg to 68.5kg in about 2 months. When I started my first version of this diet, two and a half years ago, I was, according to my scale, at about 22% body fat (well into “overweight”). I am now at 14.3%, which is just below the middle of the “normal” range for men. I still have a little bit of belly fat, but considerably less than I used to.

Usual disclaimers: this worked for me, it may not work for you. I provide it with no suggestion that it will do you any good. It is not a way to get fit, or a way to get a six-pack, or a way to get healthy. I have no idea if it will work for obese people, because I’ve never been obese. I suspect it won’t hurt to try, and I’d love to hear about any successes, but I provide this information as-is. Make whatever use of it you like.

Willpower

Before I tried this approach, I tried to “diet” in a number of ways, mostly by telling myself that I’d be eating less, and making a concerted effort to not heap huge amounts of food onto my plate at every occasion¹. None of those “dieting efforts” paid off, even though I really wanted to lose weight.

Fundamentally, losing weight is extremely simple: eat less than you spend. No diet can side-step this fundamental fact. If you eat a lot less than you spend, you’ll probably lose weight in an unhealthy way (your body will eat through your muscle tissue and even your organs if you push it hard enough – even if you still have fat left). If you eat a little less than you spend, you will lose weight in a slow and relatively predictable fashion².

So why is it so bloody hard to lose weight? My theory is, the hardest thing with losing weight is not figuring out what to eat (or not eat). It’s actually not eating when you’re hungry.

When my body wants food, it is extremely good at convincing me to eat.

So really, losing weight is much more about willpower than about preparing and eating meals. This is why most of the advice below is about generating and sustaining willpower, rather than about eating. I firmly believe that anyone who wants to lose weight enough and is smart enough about sustaining the willpower to do so, will lose however much weight they want to lose.

Without further ado, onto the method.

Step 1: Weigh yourself every day

The first piece of advice is to weigh yourself every morning. Wake up, go to the toilet, and then step on the scale. Record that weight (more on this in step 2). Do this every day, at the same time every day. If you do it later than usual, you’ll be lighter. If you do it after eating breakfast, you’ll be (potentially a lot) heavier. If you wake up really early, you will be lighter.

A lot of weight-loss guides claim that you should only weigh yourself every week or two, because “the weight loss is not that visible otherwise”. Bullcrap. Weighing yourself first thing in the morning helps put you in the right state of mind to sustain your diet. Thinking about your weight every morning means that you’ll keep on thinking about your weight loss and stay motivated about it. The surest sign that my diet was failing was when I “forgot” to weigh myself for a week or two.

This is the most important step, and has nothing to do with what you eat.

Buy a body fat percentage scale. They are wildly inaccurate, but if you weigh yourself at the same time every day, you will get a rough idea of the trend of your body fat percentage. This is important because not all weight loss is equal. You want to lose mostly fat, not mostly muscle. A body fat percentage scale will keep reminding you that starving yourself is no good, since your body fat percentage will go up or stay steady when you do that, but it will go down along with your weight when you diet healthily.

Weigh yourself every day.

Step 2: Graph your weight

You might feel silly at first. You will feel delighted once you see how well this works.

During your weight loss, you will inevitably have some slips. Someone will sweet-talk you into having a big dinner. There’ll be that one day of actual real summer (with genuine sunshine) in London, and so you’ll have to have a bbq or wait for the next one (a year later). These things happen. Errare humanum est (to err is human).

If you only weigh yourself every morning without graphing it, then when you slip you will feel demoralised, because you will have gone up by a kilo and a half. That feels really harsh when it took you two weeks to lose that weight, and it might sap your willpower enough to give up.

A graph of your weight will give you perspective. When you can see a lovely straight line from 81kg to 76kg, an unfortunate bounce back up to 77.5kg isn’t such a drama. Thanks to the graph, you’ll see the mishap for what it is – a temporary mistake. It will also be hugely heartening to see the “bump” go straight back down over the next couple of days (assuming you don’t continue stuffing yourself!).

Have a look at my graphs – what do you see? The dead cat bounces along the way, or the irresistible, stock-market-like slide downwards?

Graph your weight every day.

Step 3: Eat less

There has to be one step about eating, eh?

You won’t lose weight unless you eat less. Any number of systems work, but I recommend a system that doesn’t involve starving yourself of essential nutrients. Continue to eat balanced. That includes fat, protein, carbs, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, plenty of water, and nothing in excess (even water is deadly in large quantities).

For me, the method that worked best and with the least expenditure of will-power was what I called “front-loading the day”, or the “big breakfast” diet. For the first two stints of this diet, I had my meals in reverse. My breakfast would involve stuffing myself with as much food as I could fit in my morning stomach. I followed that with a light lunch around 2-3pm, and then almost no dinner (or a low-calorie snack if I was hungry – examples in the appendix).

This “big breakfast” diet worked for me because I need to feel full once a day to be satisfied. But at breakfast, you’re more easily filled up. An 800-1000 calorie breakfast feels huge and very satisfying, whereas you can easily engulf one and a half times as many calories for dinner and feel only a bit full. Having one meal a day where you know you’ll be feeling stuffed also means it’s easier to last through the food-less evening, since you have a nice massive breakfast to look forward to.

For my latest weight-loss campaign, I’m having a small breakfast and a bigger lunch. That’s clearly working too, but I think the “big breakfast” variant was definitely easier. Another advantage I have nowadays is that I have less pressure to eat a proper dinner, since my girlfriend also skips dinner³.

It’s worth pointing out that for the first 3 to 5 days, you will feel very hungry in the evening. Have plenty of low-calorie snacks at hand (see appendix). Take heart: after the first few days, you don’t feel all that hungry in the evening anymore. You can eat if you must, but you’re not devoured by hunger anymore. I have actually sat by while others ate a delicious dinner and not felt hungry.

What to eat for breakfast? Anything you want, but I’ve had good luck with a full english breakfast (boiled+fried potatoes, eggs, bacon, the lot – no hash browns though), french-style crèpes (with ham and cheese – 5 small crèpes make for a very filling breakfast), and massive ham-and-cheese toasties (cooked in the oven).

If you don’t have any better ideas, I recommend you do what I did. Big breakfast (eat as much as you can!), light lunch, no dinner.

That’s it.

With those three simple principles I went from 83kg/22% two and a half years ago to 68.5kg/14.3% today (and it’s still dropping, I’m not done with this yet). All my friends will tell you that I have an extremely healthy appetite – I used to eat large portions of everything. I still do, sometimes. I love food, and consider it one of the pleasures of life. Eating less without the steps above is pretty much impossible for me.

And yet, I have done all this without ever feeling like I was making a titanic effort. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but the hardest step was really to do what most people consider downright weird: i.e. chart my weight, and decline to eat dinner⁴.

Thanks to this approach, I feel in control of my weight, which is nice. I’ve never really fancied getting fat, and it looks like I’ll be able to avoid that for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading this far. The rest of the article contains some additional tips that don’t fit within the three steps of the method. It’s helpful advice, I think, but not critical.

Summary:

Successful weight loss is about willpower, not food
Step 1: Weigh yourself every day, including body fat percentage
Step 2: Chart your weight and BF%, update every day
Step 3: Eat less, for example, by eating a big breakfast, light lunch, and no dinner

Enjoy your new lower weight! It feels great.

¹ I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health. If you’re looking to lose a lot of weight quickly and don’t care about the health implication, just try amputation. It’ll be quick and the weight is guaranteed not to come back.

² A good rate to aim for is between 0.5kg and 1kg a week. Whenever I observe myself losing more than that, I eat a little more to slow down the weight loss.

³ Don’t eat dinner on this diet. If you eat a proper dinner even twice a week, that’ll be enough to negate any weight loss. Dinners, especially in restaurants, often have huge amounts of calories. They also cost a lot – skipping dinner will save you lots of money.

⁴ It can be really hard to decline eating dinner, particularly if you have a partner. In fact, if you have a partner, I don’t recommend this diet, because it will put a huge strain on your relationship (it did for mine – to breaking point and beyond).

Appendix – further tips and thoughts

Initial dip

If you do the “Big Breakfast” approach, you will lose 2-3kg in the first week. That’s not real weight loss – most of it is due to the fact that you’re not eating dinner anymore, which makes morning a really light time for you. Once you start eating dinner again, you will regain 1-2kg of morning weight.

Weight variations

Your weight varies because of more than food. The average human breathes 11,000 liters of air a day. At 36 grams a liter, that’s over 400 kilograms of air. And we drink about 2-3 liters a day (2-3kg). In comparison, 2,500 calories of carbohydrates weigh about 500 grams. It’s no surprise that small differences in what you eat are swamped out on a daily basis. Trends, however, don’t lie.

Calorie counting

I did calorie counting for a couple of weeks once. I don’t think it’s worthwhile in the long term (and it will drive most people nuts), but it’s a good idea to do so just to get a good idea of what foods contain lots of calories. You will be shocked at just how many calories are contained in just one table-spoon of oil. It will change your stir-frying habits forever (hint: a bit of water works just as well to prevent stuff from burning).

Cooking

Learn to cook. It’s easy, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s by far the best way to eat healthy, satisfying meals that have the right amount of calories for your lifestyle.

Exercise

You’ll notice this plan says nothing of exercise. That’s because you don’t need to exercise to lose weight. In my case, I’ve found that exercise, by stimulating hunger, actually makes it harder to eat less. Whereas the weighing and charting generates motivation, exercise sucks it away. In the context of a healthy lifestyle, of course, exercise is very important. I just don’t think it’s that helpful for weight loss. Some notable publications agree with me.

Processed foods / pre-made meals

Avoid processed foods. They usually contain more calories and fewer nutrients. The closer you can get to “whole-grain”, the better. Brown rice beats white rice any day.

Pre-made meals are often the same, but you can find some exceptions. Examine the labelling carefully before eating.

Sugary drinks

Avoid. Until you’re in control of your weight, stay away from those altogether. They contain stupid amounts of calories. One little can of Coke contains 140 calories, all of it sugar. That’s like 7 teaspoons of sugar, for just one drink.

Soda drinks from junk food shops (e.g. McDonald’s) are even worse. They are sugared up to the max. If you really really want to treat yourself to a junk burger, have it without the soft drink.

Sugar

There’s truly astounding amounts of sugar in a lot of foods. In moderate quantities, though, sugar is not that bad. Don’t feel bad about putting a couple of teaspoons of sugar in your morning coffee if it makes your day a lot better. You can have three of those coffees and still not make up for a single can of Coke.

Beer

A whole pint of beer contains about 180 calories. That might sound like a lot, and it is, if you drink a lot of beer. However, in the greater scheme of things, I’ve found beer to be less of a problem – particularly on a no-dinner diet, where you get drunk really quickly and will rarely have more than two or three pints. Don’t make it a daily habit, but don’t feel too bad about having a couple of pints on friday after work, especially if you’ve earned it!

Anorexia

Don’t use a mirror to gauge your weight. That’s the surest way to anorexia. Lose weight to look better if you want (I do), but use an objective measure. Human beings are really bad at judging how fat they are using mirrors. They consistently over-estimate by a huge margin.

Healthy, very-low-calorie foods

What can you eat if you’re really hungry but it’s dinner time? Try one of these:

Instant miso soup (should be about 20 calories and very filling)
Cucumber, sliced lengthwise, drizzled with soy sauce (about 50 calories)
Red peppers, sliced, with some salt ground on top (about 50 calories)
Rice crackers (about 16 calories each)
Low-fat yoghurt (about 60 calories for the Danone Activia ones)
Two big glasses of water (0 calories!)

Typically, the hunger will go away within half an hour. If no, wait another half hour, then have another snack.

Low-fat / Low-sugar

A lot of scumbags in the food industry label high-fat foods “low sugar” and high-sugar foods “low fat”. Even a low-fat and low-sugar food can be high-calorie. Always check the label properly.

Fat

Fat is great for you. Don’t cut down on fat, cut down on overall food intake. Great sources of fat: olive oil, fish, nuts. I also like whole milk, and freshly cooked meat, but the general wisdom says that animal fats are not as good for you. It’s worth pointing out that most of my breakfasts through my first two weight-loss stints involved copious amounts of animal fat. The point is, fat might be good or bad for your health, but it’s neutral as far as weight loss is concerned: only calories count.

Dense, unfilling foods

Some types of food are very calorie-dense but not very filling. Oil and butter are the obvious examples (though they can be filling when used right). Other examples include processed fried foods (like pre-fried hash browns or french fries), dried fruits and nuts (see lower), sweets, chocolate bars, fruit juices (sadly), and so on. Always check the label. If it’s high-calorie but doesn’t seem very filling, it’ll probably leave you wanting.

Water

Often, when you think you want to eat something, you’re just thirsty. Before eating a snack, ask yourself whether you’re thirsty. If so, try a glass of water first, then eat half an hour later if still hungry.

Dried fruit and nuts

This has quite a bit of calories and isn’t very filling. It’s nice and healthy, but don’t abuse it. Remember, what counts is not how healthy it is, but how many calories it has.

Fresh fruit

Some fruit has lots of calories (e.g. grapes), but in general I’ve made it a rule never to forbid myself to eat fresh fruit, if I have some at hand. I’m beginning to think that it’s almost impossible to overeat on fresh fruit.

What about after the diet?

Keep recording and charting your weight pretty much forever, but return to a normal diet, making small adjustments based on the general trends that you observe on your graphs. So far, my observation has been that as long as I continued charting my weight, I did not regain any weight. I only ever gain weight when not charting my weight.

Starting up with a friend

2009-03-11T11:00:00+00:00

[ Russian translation ]

It seems like a fool-proof plan: start up with a close friend. You’ll get along (obviously), and you’ll get to share the exciting, fantastic, scary experience of starting up with someone you care about. It’s not a bad idea, but there are a few caveats that you should be aware of before you proceed¹.

When I started my first company with one of my closest friends, I expected things would go very well between us. We understood each other in ways that would take years to build up (and did take 10 years). We knew each other, and we knew we could rely on each other. We were prepared to have many surprises along the way — starting a business is always going to be a scary adventure.

What we weren’t prepared for was that the main problem would come from us and the dynamic between us.

What happened, in brief

I’m not going to go into all the details of what exactly went wrong, for a number of reasons (among them, it would be a one-sided account and inherently unfair on my friend and first cofounder). The long and short of it is, we had different expectations about the business. I left my safe, comfortable corporate job to work on it, so I needed it to succeed, or else I would find myself back in the corporate world. By contrast, my friend had already started several companies and was comfortably well off, so he didn’t have the same expectations and requirements.

It turned out we have a different definition of “the business isn’t working out”. For me, it was working out if it was making enough money to cover my expenses. For my friend, it wasn’t working out unless it was making enough money to also add to his existing wealth and thus justify the time and effort which he poured into it. Both those views were correct, but because we knew that we understood each other, we didn’t realise that our views were different until that difference had grown into a huge misunderstanding.

This core divergence of views could have been resolved easily if we’d known about it and discussed it ahead of time, but we didn’t know about it, so it festered and turned into dozens of other misunderstandings, so that by the time it finally became clear what our main divergence was, much of the damage was already done and it was entangled in a huge mass of emotional misunderstandings².

This almost cost us our friendship. We got through this thanks to the help and mediation of another very good friend, who helped us to communicate to each other how we felt, so that we could move forward together rather than against each other.

I’m glad to say the mediation worked, and we’re still friends (perhaps even stronger than before). Nevertheless, I learned some important lessons from this.

1. Make your agreements explicit

The first lesson is to keep agreements explicit. It’s not enough to think that your friend understands what you think: make sure he does by discussing it openly with him. As my mediating friend phrased it, “unspoken promises” have a tendency to turn into broken promises (which are always hard to swallow). Avoid unspoken promises.

Here’s an example of a really bad thing to keep implicit: “We’ll only call it quits if the business is bankrupt and can’t raise any more money.” The promise here is that we’ll keep going until the very end. This may seem obvious to one party in the business, but it may not be so to the other. One partner could, for instance, feel that the time to call it quits is when the business has 3 months of cash flow left. Another may feel that it’s worth going deep into credit card debt territory before giving up.

Don’t make this mistake: keep those agreements explicit.

2. Detail your agreements

Once you make some agreements explicit, it should become clear that you need further discussion to figure out exactly what your explicit agreement is. Don’t be afraid to do this. It’s not “too early to discuss this”.

Here’s an explicit agreement that’s not detailed enough: “We want the business to make a lot of money”. Really? How much are you happy with? 10’000 pounds a month? A million? What is the definition of success? It’s almost certain that you and your business partner have different views as to what “a lot of money” is. Being on the same page about what you expect out of your business will ensure that you don’t pull in different directions when things are going well. Think of how mortifying it would be to find out that your partner wants to pull the plug when you think that the business is successful.

3. Don’t be afraid of discussing the bad stuff

There are a number of subjects which seem almost embarrassing to discuss when things are going well. For example, “What if one of us decides to pull out?” Your first reaction to this topic might be “What? We’re barely getting started, and already we’re talking about what happens if one of us pulls out?”

The reality is that people’s life circumstances change through time. They get married, or decide to leave the country, or get engrossed in a different pursuit, etc. Many things can get in between a founder and his start-up. Similarly, many things can go very wrong with a start-up. When those things do go wrong, or when one of the founders decides to pull out, is not the time to discuss these things. You need to discuss them with a clear head when no one is thinking of pulling out and the business looks healthy and hopeful.

When you discuss your start-up’s future, do not be afraid to talk about the disaster scenarios. Also, when you negotiate what will happen if a partner quits, don’t be so sure that it won’t be you.

4. Write things down

There are two reasons to write things down: first, people’s memories of conversations are faulty. Writing things down also ensures that there is no disagreement, later, about what was decided. You don’t need a long document for this — even just one or two pages describing your agreement is enough to avoid later misunderstandings.

The second reason is that people may think they have reached an agreement when in reality they never agreed about the details. Once you put something in writing, you give it a certain air of finality that teases out those last remaining disagreement. Basically, putting an agreement in writing is like putting a new piece of functionality in code. Until it exists in that form, it’s just vapour.

Halfway through my misunderstanding with my friend, we thought we’d figured out a way forward. I wasn’t sure that we were both thinking the same thing, so I made the effort to put it in writing, in the form of a business plan. When my friend read it, and understood more clearly what I meant, he recanted, and the agreement fell through. It’s a good thing that it fell through, because it would likely have resulted in even more problems later on if we’d gone through with it based on our flawed understanding of each other.

5. Don’t make it work at all costs

Yes, I know this is your friend that you’re starting up with, and this is your great opportunity to start your own business. However, if, in those discussions, you find that there’s an intractable disagreement, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the most important thing is to smooth things over and start the business.

Starting up with someone is almost like marrying them (temporarily), in a way. You’ll be talking to them almost everyday, and possibly even more than with your significant other. You’ll be working on a “baby” (your business) for many months. It’s a big commitment, basically, and much like any other kind of significant commitment, you shouldn’t go into it if you think there are major problems, because those problems will only get worse.

6. Don’t assume things will get better with time

It’s easy to rationalise away big problems by assuming that things will get better with time. In some cases, they will, but in a majority of cases, they won’t. What this means, for example, is that you shouldn’t assume that your inexplicably small share of the business will magically grow to 50% later on. This is even less likely to happen if the business is working well (if the business isn’t working out, chances are it doesn’t matter anyway).

Sample questions

This article wouldn’t be complete without a list of questions that you might go through and discuss with your cofounder. Use them as a guideline or as a checklist, as you please.

What do we both mean by “the business is successful”?
What do we both mean by “the business is not successful”?
What happens if one of us needs to voluntarily pull out, for any reason?
What happens if one of us cannot work on the business anymore, for involuntary reasons?
What are the conditions under which we’d call the business a failure and pull the plug?
What is plan B for each of us if we do pull the plug? Are we both prepared for that plan B?
What do we expect of each other, both in terms of responsibilities and in terms of attitude and effort?
What is and is not an expense? What is the maximum amount someone can spend on an expense without checking with the other? (from Sebastian Marshall)
When and how will profits be distributed? How much will be reinvested? What will the reserves be? (from Sebastian Marshall)
What happens if one partner needs cash and the other wants to reinvest it into growth/expansion? (from Sebastian Marshall)
How will you handle it when (not if) the hours each partner is working are unbalanced? (from Sebastian Marshall)

This is not a final list by any means, but it should at least provide some starting points to make the implicit explicit. If you have other suggestions, please do add them in the comments below.

Conclusion

I don’t regret starting that business with my friend, but I do regret not clarifying those kinds of questions upfront. It would have saved me a lot of worry. If your business is struggling, you don’t need the additional pain of seeing your friendship unraveling under the stress of accumulated misunderstandings.

So, do yourself a favour, and set out to:

Make your agreements explicit so that you don’t break implicit promises
Detail your agreements so that your promises are clear
Don’t be afraid of discussing negative scenarios, so that you don’t add the stress of misunderstanding to already bad situations
Write things down so you’ll remember
Don’t make things work at all costs, so that you don’t spend the next years living with a deal that’s not acceptable to you
Don’t assume things will get better with time, so you’re not surprised when they don’t

I hope this helps others. Your comments below are much welcome.

¹ It’s worth adding that this advice can be useful for any kind of adventure, not just business. However, given the propensity of businesses to crank up the pressure to diamond-producing levels, and what can often be at stake, it’s particularly important in this context.

² Although this sounds like a barely mitigated disaster, I must add that, on the whole, the business was a success (it made money, I learned a lot from it both about myself and about start-ups, and it provided a jumping board from which to start my next business). It wasn’t as much of a success as it might have been, and there were some times when it looked like it might turn into a small disaster, but on the whole it turned out reasonably well.

How to nap

2010-03-23T23:00:00+00:00

I am the kind of person who takes 30 minutes to an hour to fall asleep, most nights. Falling asleep is an ordeal for me (unless I’m completely exhausted). Don’t get me wrong – it’s not an unpleasant ordeal… there are worse things in life than lying in bed. But I truly envy those people who can just put their head on a pillow and drift off within moments. Oh, such bliss… not for me. I will lie in bed, awake, forever thinking and rethinking whatever happens to be on my mind at the time.

Because of this, I always thought that power napping was not for me. After all, power naps are supposed to last about 20 minutes, and you don’t need to be a maths genius to realise that if it takes you at least half an hour to fall asleep, 20 minutes won’t be enough. So, therefore, I thought, since I can’t fall asleep quickly, I can’t nap.

Fortunately for me, I was completely wrong about this.

Napping isn’t sleeping

The reason I was wrong is, napping is not sleeping. To get the benefit of a refreshing power nap, you don’t need to fall asleep. It’s enough to relax yourself and let your thoughts drift off, even while remaining mostly awake. If you can do this properly (it does take some practice), you can power nap even if you find it impossible to fall asleep quickly.

I learned how to nap when I was starting my first start-up, while still working full time at Accenture. It was a pretty hard time for me, and I was constantly tired. Learning to nap allowed me to keep performing in both my job (during the daytime) and my start-up (in the morning and evening), despite my chronic lack of sleep. It’s great to be able to magically transition from a state of mind-numbing exhaustion into a fresh, wakeful mind, in just 20 minutes.

Pzizz

The way I learned to nap was with a tool called Pzizz. What Pzizz does is to generate soundtracks for your nap. They use a fancy thing called a binaural beat, combined with a hypnotherapy track, to help pull you into the depth of a good nap. When I tried Pzizz, I discovered, to my surprise, that I could listen to it for 15, 20 minutes, while sitting on a bench (or hiding in the toilet at work), and when it was over, I felt completely refreshed, ready to face several more hours of work.

All I needed was to have one of those tracks on my iPod, and bingo – I could gain the benefit of naps even though, as I knew, it was impossible for me to nap.

Pzizz without the Pzizz

Fast forward a couple of years. I don’t use Pzizz anymore, but I now nap up to three, four times a day, whenever I feel a wave of drowsiness overpowering me.

After quitting my Accenture job, I went through a phase where I tried to nap without Pzizz. At first, what I found is that most of my naps were refreshing, but not as refreshing as if I’d used Pzizz. But the important difference from before I’d tried Pzizz was that I knew what I was aiming for. With practice, I eventually got my Pzizz-less naps to be just as effective as they’d been with Pzizz – better, even, since now I don’t need to wear headphones or listen to a distracting voice while napping.

Now, I can nap in almost any position where I can relax (lying across two chairs mostly works, though I still much prefer a couch or a bed). I can even nap in a relatively noisy environment (so long as the noise isn’t someone speaking). Within 20 minutes, I will drift off to a zone where I don’t feel like I’m asleep, but my brain is actually pretty much in the REM zone (it feels like dreaming awake). After those 20 minutes, my alarm clock will wake me up, feeling refreshed, and that feeling lasts for up to several hours.

As a final step, I’m now practicing napping without an alarm clock. It’s going well so far.

So, what should you do to learn to nap?¹

I think most people should be able to get from “completely unable to nap” to “can nap in most circumstances” within a few months. It took me about 6 months to get it consistently right without any hypnotic tracks, earplugs, or other aides.

The hardest hurdle to get across is, I believe, just realising that napping isn’t sleeping, and that you can learn to nap even if it takes you ages to fall asleep. Hopefully this article got that point across.

Next, you need to learn what to aim for. Until you’ve had a successful nap-like experience, it’s pretty hard to practice it. The way I learned that was with Pzizz. You may find different, perhaps better ways to learn that (please do share them in the comments). Some ideas include meditation classes and hypnotherapy recordings. There are also a number of binaural beat applications on the iPhone, including some free ones, but I haven’t yet found one that worked to my satisfaction (that said, I haven’t looked that hard).

The best way I can describe the feeling of napping is that you lie down or sit somewhere, and first focus on relaxing. Relax your muscle groups one by one, from your neck all the way down to your toes. Take a good minute or two to do this properly. Then finally you relax your thoughts. Let them drift off. It’s important to gently nudge those thoughts towards more relaxing topics – you won’t nap very well if you’re rehearsing a conversation with the boss – but at the same time, they need to largely drift on their own. Keep your eyes closed, your body relaxed, and let your thoughts meander from subject to subject without much order.

Once you’ve learned what to aim for, it’s just a matter of practicing it. It takes time (you can only nap a few times each day!), but it’s very rewarding.

Some final thoughts on napping

First of all, don’t go over your 20 minute target. You may find that your target window is slightly shorter or slightly longer, but whatever you do don’t over-sleep. This is a good article on the subject. When your alarm clock rings, get up, even if you feel drowsy for the first few moments. If you stay down, you risk going from the REM sleep mode into slow-wave sleep, which would require you to stay in bed for 90-120 minutes before your sleep cycle is complete. If you get up, the drowsiness will vanish in a minute or two.

So, paradoxically, napping longer makes you drowsy, not rested.

With 3-4 power naps through the day, I’ve found that I could, on occasion, drastically reduce my need for sleep. I’ve done it for a week or two at a time, basically sleeping only about 2-4 hours a night, without any apparent ill-effects during the day. I’m still undecided as to whether that’s something that I can or want to pursue as a longer term lifestyle change. Polyphasic sleep has its benefits and its drawbacks.

Another point worth highlighting is that napping is not just a cure for drowsiness. It’s also simply a way to make yourself more alert. And, importantly, it works, and feels, far better than any caffeinated drink. If you have a choice between drinking a strong coffee or having a 20 minute nap, always take the nap – you’ll feel more alert and smarter after the nap, and its after-effects will last longer.

Finally, the Wakemate guys inform me that it is also possible to do a 90-120 minute nap, which goes through a full sleep cycle. The difficulty there is to get the wake-up time right. Apparently their product should be able to help with that. We’ll see (I’m signed up to get a unit when they ship!)…

In summary

TL;DR? Here’s the Cliff notes:

You don’t have to actually fall asleep to nap – it’s enough to drift off to a half-sleep state
Even if it normally takes you 30+ minutes to fall asleep, you can benefit from 20 minute power naps
First, learn what you’re aiming for, for example by using something like pzizz
Then, practice reproducing that feeling – plan for a few months before you get good at it
Don’t over-sleep when power-napping, it will only make you feel groggy

Good luck with your napping! I would love to hear your comments below, especially if you have more tips for people who are trying to learn to nap.

¹ Please note that the approach I present here is what worked for me. I’m sure there are as many different approaches to learning to nap as there are people in the world. This is not meant to be a scientific guide to napping, merely an inspirational description of one approach that worked.

Thanks to Scott Wheeler, Yousef Syed, Greg Nemeth and Mike Gunderloy for reviewing a draft of this article, and particular thanks for Colin Curtin for needling me into finally publishing it!

No best practices

2010-03-13T12:00:00+00:00

I worked in Accenture for 4 years. For almost 2 of those years, my role was to be the QPI lead on my project. That stands for “Quality Process Improvement” lead. No, I’m not kidding you.

In that role, I was essentially meant to take the “best practices” from the Accenture methodology and ensure the project followed them. Yet even a relatively rigid company like Accenture understood that not all “best practices” applied to every project. Project managers were not told to take everything from the book and apply it to their projects. Instead, the very purpose of the QPI lead was to work with the project manager to figure out which of the Accenture methods were suited to the project at hand.

Circumstances vary, and with the circumstances, the “best practices” change. A competent project manager must be able to pick and choose the techniques that work best for his team, his project, his objectives, his budget, etc.

Even Accenture, with all its big-corporation mentality, had this figured out. And yet when I look at the world of start-ups and agile projects, I see a much more religious fervour. People seem to believe that the only way to apply an agile methodology properly is to apply the whole of it, without exception. When someone picks out the bits that might work for a specific project but doesn’t succeed, the blame that they receive is “you didn’t follow the whole methodology”.

The truth is, the methodology is rarely to blame for a failed project. Ultimately, blame rests with the people: the project manager, the product lead, the developers, and so on. Blaming anything else (from “the requirements gathering” to “the methodology” or “the programming language”) is just pointless blame-shifting. If your project failed, it’s most likely because of you failed to adapt to your project’s circumstances, rather than because you didn’t follow your methodology to the letter.

As a start-up project manager (and every start-up founder is a project manager, whether they know it or not) your job is to pick out the best practices for your start-up, apply those to help the project, and terminate, adapt or replace them when they’re no longer the best practices for your start-up’s stage.

Every start-up is different, and calls for a unique mix of techniques. Blind obedience just doesn’t cut it.

iPad: an Apple for Mom

2010-01-28T12:00:00+00:00

To much of the geek-sphere, the iPad is somewhat of a disappointment. It’s underwhelming – there’s nothing all that surprising in there, no “oh, and one more thing” to throw some real techno-magick spices into the pot. We saw it coming from a hundred miles away, so now that it’s finally here, there isn’t much surprise left.

I think part of the reason for this is, as usual, that the first round of people interpreting the meaning and purpose of the iPad are all geeks – developers, designers, and assorted Macheads who already own one or two macs at least, and an iphone. I believe the collective “Meh” is absolutely right from this crowd. Yes, the iPad is a nice-to-have, yes, I’ll probably be getting one, but it’s not really all that revolutionary. It doesn’t do anything that we can’t already do with our iPhones and Macs, after all.

But geeks and assorted Macheads constitute a relatively small percentage of the computer-using people around the world. The vast majority of the world is still using Windows PCs. And for them, an iPad may be exactly what they’ve been waiting for. Let me elaborate on this…

Most people don’t need a computer

Most people have a computer at home. For some (like my mom), it’s an ancient Dell laptop they bought years ago. Others have bought into the netbook trend and invested a small amount of money into a machine that, for most people, can only be irritating to use (slow, small, ugly, and burns your lap – not a recipe for success). A few have actually paid good money for what was supposed to be a modern machine, and actually turned out to be yet another annoying slow, painful-to-use, Windows-based machine infested with trial software, spyware, and sometimes viruses.

In today’s (western) world, not having any computer at home makes life difficult. My mom needs some way to check airline ticket prices, to find out the weather, to go on Facebook, to buy movie tickets, to check her email, to call me on Skype, and a thousand other little uses that aren’t very taxing or challenging for either her or whatever device she’s using.

She doesn’t really need a computer in the same sense that I do, though. As a programmer, I need a machine that is powerful, that I can mess with under the hood, that I can do everything with. My mom needs a reasonably priced machine that Simply Works and does all those simple things that she wants to do when she’s at home.

In short, most people don’t really need a proper computer at all.

And they mostly don’t want one. Many people spend all day working in front of a computer, and they simply don’t like the idea of coming home to yet another computer that looks just like the one they use at work.

iPad: the uncomputer for the masses

Apple has grandiosely claimed that the iPad is creating an entirely new product category, and I think they’re right.

Many people are comparing the iPad launch to the iPhone or the iPod – dismissed by tech critics, who were ultimately proven wrong by mass adoption of the devices. There is something to this comparison, but it’s not quite fair. Both the iPod and the iPhone attacked existing product categories and made them so much better that they wiped the floor with their competition. The iPad is attempting to create a new market. A great many of the people who bought an iPod had other MP3 players beforehand. I’d wager most of the people who end up buying an iPad have never owned a dedicated tablet computer, and never considered that it would be worth owning one.

A better comparison is with the Nintendo Wii. While Sony and Microsoft competed in the cut-throat market of consoles for gamers, the Wii also created a new product category: consoles for everyone else. It worked pretty well for them – it turns out that there’s a lot more non-gamers than gamers, and making a device that appeals to 95% of the population sells better than making one that appeals to only 5%.

And that’s exactly what Apple is doing: making a slick “uncomputer” that’s tailored to those people who don’t actually need a computer. Many gamers ended up buying Wiis too, and I’m sure many geeks will buy iPads, but the real money-maker will be those who don’t even have a Mac, and probably won’t ever have one because it’s too expensive and they don’t need it.

The price point is also just right for this market – $499 is around the range of a cheap laptop or an expensive netbook. The applications balance is right – focus on email and web, with a good helping of medias, games and various practical apps. The gorgeous look is of course going to appeal to everyone. Once it has a video camera (inevitable for the next iteration), it will do everything that normal people do with their laptops at home today.

The only question, in my my mind, is, what will these people do when their cheap old Dell finally clonks out? Right now, to use an iPad and iPhone effectively, it seems you still need some kind of base station. So when the old Dell gives up the ghost, will people buy another one? Pony up for an expensive Mac? Or simply decide that the iPad is good enough and they don’t want another laptop?

Learning from Wakemate

2010-01-23T12:00:00+00:00

A few hours ago, Wakemate made an announcement that the shipping for their product would be delayed (it was supposed to be shipping by the end of January 2010). To sweeten the bad news, they thought it wise to add that people who had pre-ordered the product would get some free access to previously unannounced premium features.

This seems reasonable, by the book – announce bad news, soften them with good news. “Yeah, we screwed up our deadlines, but we’re working hard and we’ll give you something for free to make up for it!”

Perhaps surprisingly for the Wakemate team, the reaction to this has been very negative, at least on Hacker News, with people suggesting that they want a refund on their $5 preorder. I think it’s fair to call this announcement a screw-up. I’m sure the Wakemate team will recover from it (in fact, it probably won’t make too much difference to their bottom line in the end), but there’s a few lessons to be learned from this.

First, why was this apparently innocuous announcement received so badly?

Sweet, sour and very sour

I don’t think it has anything to do with the delay in shipping the product. Nobody’s going to be happy about shipping delays, but people wouldn’t care that much about a mere delay — especially people who work in the software industry, where delays are the norm. A simple “We’re going to be late” announcement wouldn’t have incurred such negative responses.

The problem wasn’t anything to do with the apparent sweetener, either — getting free stuff is always nice. However, no one knew that Wakemate was intending to introduce premium features, and this was where the problem arose.

The second part of that problem was that Wakemate specifically said “We will be giving everyone who pre-ordered one month of Premium Analytics Features free for each month their delivery is delayed.” Oh dear. So the delay could be months? They didn’t mention months of delay in the first part of the announcement.

Those are the two points which ended up angering people. And they’re both in what was supposed to be the sweetener, the part that’s supposed to make us feel better about the delays.

We’re going to charge you more

It’s obvious why people would get upset at the later announcement of “months” of delay. The first part of the announcement doesn’t make it sound like they’re that late on their schedule.

What’s less obvious is why people are getting so worked up about the mention of premium features, even after Wakemate has added that all the previously announced features will remain free, i.e. the premium features are completely new features. So really, no one has been misled, since they’re not being charged for things they thought would be free.

But that’s not how people perceive a new product pricing announcement, which is what this is, really. Before the announcement of premium features, everyone thought they were getting the whole lot for $50. That seems like a really good price – we get a neat technological gadget and access to an awesome analytics website, all for a $50 one-time fee. After the announcement, however, the situation feels different. We’re still paying $50, but we’re only getting the “free” part of the website, not everything. There’ll be some important features (and they have to be important or no one will pay a monthly fee for them) that won’t be accessible unless we pay a monthly fee, which hasn’t been announced yet.

To top it off, it’s not clear which features will be free and which will be paying. It’s very nice that the Wakemate team is saying “all the features which were previously announced will still be free”, but that’s not a very clear commitment. Everyone knows software evolves as it is developed, so presumably even the free features will be different from what was initially announced. So there’s a big dollop of uncertainty thrown in here too.

That’s why people are getting pissed off. Their expectation was “I get everything for $50”, and it’s been replaced by “I get something (I’m not sure exactly what) for $50 and have to pay more for the rest, whatever that is.”.

Some better approaches

So what should the Wakemate team have done instead?

Well, first of all, they shouldn’t have tried to soften the bad news. “We’re going to have a few months of shipping delays” might be a bitter pill, but it’s not so bitter as to piss people off. I believe they should simply have made that announcement, clearly, without any fuss. No one would have been particularly surprised or offended.

The second important lesson is that any announcement to do with charging people more money needs to be handled very carefully. Consumers are very sensitive about costs, and they particularly dislike monthly recurring costs, but really any announcement of an increase in cost (even if it’s optional) should be treated as a major, delicate announcement. Rather than being mentioned casually in passing, this probably would have warranted several communications, progressively introducing the idea.

In addition, pricing increase announcements should be wrapped in good news, not bad news. We want to make people feel good about our product, so that they want to pay for it. A good example would be: “We’re happy to say that more than half of our 10’000 users have written in to say that Wakemate has really helped improve their sleep patterns. To ensure that we can continue to make Wakemate even better, we’ve been working on some additional, premium features that some of you may wish to pay for. Here they are: X, Y, Z.”

Finally, people dislike uncertainty. When you announce new pricing, you should be as clear as possible about it. Otherwise, people will often assume the worst. So if you’re going to charge people, tell them exactly what they’ll be paying for (and what will remain free). Don’t be vague!

I think the best thing would have been for Wakemate to wait until a month or two after the release of their product before even beginning to talk about premium features. Then, find some good news to wrap it in, and make an announcement that you’re going to release these new, awesome, specific features, that people can choose to pay for.

That being said, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I don’t think this will be a critical blow for Wakemate. But we can all learn a few lessons from it.

In short

Here’s a summary:

Treat pricing announcements seriously – any announcement about pricing is always sensitive
Be clear and precise in pricing announcements – otherwise people assume the worst
Wrap pricing announcements in good news – make sure people are in a positive frame of mind by the time they get to the pricing part

If you have any further tips about pricing announcements, please mention them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

Note: I preorded Wakemate a day before the announcement.

Counting hours doesn't make sense

2009-02-25T17:00:00+00:00

There’s recently been some interesting discussion on the internet about “How many hours” people are putting in each day, inspired by a Slashdot poll.

This can be a sensitive topic. After all, everyone wants to do a good job, and the number of physical hours that you spend “working” is considered an objective measure of that. In some cases, that measure is considered positive (Fire people who are not workaholics, claimed Jason Calacanis before he changed his mind and toned it down to “people who don’t love their work”) or negative (Fire the workaholics, responded the ever controversial 37-signals blog).

When working in a self-employed, services job (e.g. freelancing), the idea that hours matter is deeply ingrained, because hours are the measurable thing that we charge for (even though what the client really cares about is getting the job done). In regular jobs", hours are also important, because they are the basis of the long-term contract between employer and employee (“Your working hours are from 9am to 6pm on weekdays, excluding public holidays”), and they are the first mechanism an employer will use to make sure you’re working hard enough.

This is all very interesting from the point of view of a technology start-up ¹, because when you run your own start-up, and you have no one to impress with your long working hours, you end up realising that hours are immaterial. What matters is the quality of what you do, not how or when or for how long you do it. And that quality is not correlated with how long you are sitting down and focusing on your immediate “work tasks”.

When we measure results instead of hours, something interesting happens: the distinction between work and not-work blurs away and vanishes, for two reasons. First, clever ideas can make a huge difference to results, and ideas occur anywhere, at any time. In fact, they’re least likely to occur while sitting at a desk working. Secondly, it soon becomes obvious that our actual output of things done is correlated far more to how we feel on the day than to how many hours we spend “working”. The real measure of work is not hours – it’s energy.

We all have a certain amount of energy each day, that can fluctuate depending the day, on our general level of fitness, nutrition, health, state of mind, etc. Some activities (such as going to the gym) increase our daily pool of energy. Others (such as staying up all night or getting drunk every evening) decrease our daily pool of energy.

Asking the wrong question can have very detrimental effects. It forces our mind to focus on the wrong approach. I don’t get more done by sitting in front of my computer looking at work for an extra hour. I get far more done by investing time to exercise regularly so that I feel energetic.

So the useful question is not “how many hours do you work?” but “how much energy do you put into your work?” Other useful questions that come with it are:

How much of your daily energy do you spend increasing your total energy? Do you feel you spend enough? Do you feel you spend it on the right things?
How much of your daily energy do you waste each day? How do you define waste? Is all that waste really unproductive or does it have some beneficial side-effects? Are those side-effects sufficient to justify spending that energy?
Do you spend energy on things which actively hurt you?
Has your daily energy increased or decreased in the last 6 months? year? 5 years?

Any of these questions is more worthwhile than “How many hours do you work each day?”

¹ This varies depending on the kind of business you run. If your business is to produce birthday cards, chances are there’s a direct relationship between your hours and your success. The relationship breaks down for start-ups where the output is largely intellectual and leveraged (like a web-based application).