Insurance and “protection” is the world’s largest fear mongering industry.  People like my mother who incessantly worry over everything are willing to get ripped off in order to buy a peace of mind.  When a tall black man from Allstate goes on TV, cites some statistic about how 8100 sons a year die from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome and asks if you are in good hands, my mom immediately starts fearing for the future and buys life insurance for a perfectly healthy son.

Call my cynical, but every time I’m told to give my time or money for some hypothetical better future or to prevent some hypothetical future disaster, my BS-meter goes off immediately.

The two most effective ways to get people to willingly part with their time or money is to prey on their hopes or fears.

There are examples of hope mongering everywhere, but the most applicable to the tech/design industry is the omnipresent spec work guy and stock option/equity guy.  The spec work guy is the one that’s always saying, “Hey do this gig for me for free or cheap and I’ll hook you up with twenty HUGE BUDGET projects in the future, double your client roster, and even get you a meeting with Steve Jobs himself.”  The stock option/equity guy is the one that’s habitually looking for a “partner” to “execute” his “genius” idea that will compete in a $16.2bil market.  Stock option/equity guy is basically offering you the opportunity to be graced with his amazing idea and in return for doing all his work for free you’ll get 8% of all future potential profits.

No self respecting professional should be dragged into either of these schemes.  Your portfolio of successful work is an indication of what you are capable of, you don’t need to do any spec work to prove yourself.  The amount of equity you own in a partnership should be based on the percentage of work you do.  “Amazing” ideas are a dime a dozen and are actually worthless if implemented horribly, so I would actually weigh execution and implementation heavier than coming up with the idea.  You can always just take an established idea (like web e-mail) and come up with a better version (like GMail), effectively bypassing stock option/equity guy.

Other examples of hope or fear mongering:

• Bernie Madoff - Everyone involved knew that consistent 15% returns are impossible, but they all hoped that the dream would never end.
• The Lottery - The classic example of buying hope.  For only $1, you can dream of a life full of material goods.
• The News - There are two kinds of news stories: ones that makes you feel all happy on the inside and ones that make you fearful of criminals, police, a neighborhood, human nature, or mother nature.
• Obama - ’nuff said.  He is literally Mr. Hope.
• George W. Bush - Instilled fear into the public by saying, “We must do everything possible to prevent another attack on American soil.”  Only one in many “giving up your freedoms in return for protection” fear tactic moments in history.
• Now that I think about it ALL Politics are based on hope or fear.  Hope for a brighter future if you vote for Candidate A and fear for increased crime, crushing taxes, deteriorating schools, and a terrorist attack if you vote for Candidate B.

Ultimately the easiest situation where you can evaluate if a transaction is fair is when you pay for something now and get something now.  All in the present tense.  You are not buying something in the future or protection from something in the future.  Figuring out how much something is worth in the future is pretty hard.  Unless you own a DeLorean and have access to 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.

I think a company’s office says a lot about their priorities.  A layout where the executives have private offices along the exterior, sucking up all of the natural sunlight, while the interior is for the peons in depressing cubicles filled with horrible artificial lighting would indicate to me a very closed and bureaucratic workplace where the rank and file employees are treated as second class citizens.  A wide open layout with desks crammed end-to-end, where every employee is given 3 feet of space would be horrible for any task that requires concentrating because you can hear every conversation in the room.

Anyway, Simande’s International Headquarters features the world’s best computers, a spectacular view of the NYC skyline, and a Dunny toy collection.  I don’t know why I’m boasting here because companies’ usually brag about their *amazing* workplace as a recruiting tactic.  I should be documenting our humble beginnings so a few years down the road I can either look back and laugh at how meager these accommodations were or look back and laugh at how great these accommodations were now that I’m programming VBScript in a cubicle for a project manager that neither understands the Internet nor speaks the English language very well.

Workstation #1
Apple Mac Pro 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core
NEC 30″ LCD3090WQXi
Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Speakers
Grado SR 80 Headphones
Humanscale Liberty Chair

Close-up of Workstation #1
Linksys WRT54G w/ open-source Hyperwrt + Thibor firmware
iSight camera (now an antique!)
Field Notes “I’m not writing it down to remember later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

Workstation #2
24″ iMac 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 20″ Dell Monitor

I try to keep only the most used and relevant books in the office instead of a giant stack of ancient trees.  Plus, who reads books anymore anyway?  My most used book right now - The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.

I love our glass whiteboard from Ikea.  The messages were left after the 2008-2009 New Years party.

Everything ended up being too monochromatic and cold.  I tried to add some color with the light blue background, but it ended up just not working.  Also, the navigation was way too small so for the next revision I did the opposite and made GIANT navigation.

I thought this was a decent beginning, but I had no idea how to add more color and “life” to the design and I was having trouble laying out the content inside the shell.  Luckily, it was around this time that our current designer came along and expressed interest in our little start up.  Having been formally trained at Pratt and previously worked at Grey and Starwood, I was immediately excited when he wanted to join.  Here’s a pictorial journey through the evolution of Simande’s site design (click the thumbnails for a full-sized image):

The two designs above were the first round drafts.  Initially, we wanted to go with the white version because of its cleaner “spacious” feel, so here were some additional revisions:

As it turns out, our designer felt that we were going down the wrong path and liked the darker background version better because it had a more “elegant” and “boutique” feel.

At this stage we were pretty happy with the overall look and feel of the site design, but we felt there was too much “stuff.”  We wanted to stay true to our principles and keep things SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE, which meant displaying just one portfolio piece and making it large and iconic, and reducing all that extra text into more concise blurbs.  We made the controversial decision of removing “Home” from the navigation bar.  The debate was that the less navigation items, the cleaner the look and its easier to find where to navigate to.  However, less savvy Internet users may not know that clicking a site’s logo should take you back to the home page.  In the end, we decided that we didn’t need to be so explicit and there weren’t enough pages on the site that navigating back a couple times with your browser was a big deal if you didn’t know to click the logo.

Average - 10%
Current U.S. Unemployment Rate - 7.2%
While it definitely sucks to get fired, theoretically companies should be firing 10% of its worst performing employees.  Now how hard could it possibly be to make sure you aren’t in the bottom 10th percentile?  Realistically though, good people will end up getting fired because of corporate politics or the inability for management to discern crappy employees from good ones, but if you are able to accurately determine that you are better than 50% of your co-workers you should feel confident in not getting fired.  Plus how many times have you gotten pissed off that there are tons of people around you doing absolutely nothing and getting paid the same amount of money?  Hopefully this recession thing causes your company to “trim the useless fat” without cutting into any of the bone.

Anyway, this is an extremely unpopular and insensitive point of view because some of the people who are horrible at their job have three kids and an aging grandmother to support.  However these “doom and gloom” reports should be giving you a reality check to make sure:

1. You are keeping your skill set up to date.
2. You can accurately determine your performance in relation to your co-workers.
3. You know how to properly suck up to the right people.

In the end, the most employable people are the ones who are confident in their abilities, stay out of the bottom 50%, and are able to find a job if something unexpected should happen regardless of “market conditions.”

1. Gradients everywhere.
2. A light colored glowing background that radiates outward from the main site, reminding you of angelic hymns.
3. Sign up box in the upper right corner to give you email to Barack, making you feel part of his community.
4. Buttons with that shiny iPhone look - an arch through the middle of the button with a lighter shade on top and a darker shade on the bottom.
5. A giant panel that rotates through 3 or 4 main headline (each with its own giant image).

(clockwise from upper left: whitehouse.gov, change.gov, usaservice.org, barackobama.com - click thumbnail to see what the site looks like on a 1024×768 resolution monitor)

For comparison sake, lets look at some other governmental websites.  Here we have the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell and the minority leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner.

First of all, I was amazed at how fast some people responded.  It felt like they just sat around all day refreshing Craigslist and sending their sucky form letter to every new post immediately.  My advice would be to throw out all the replies you get within the first 20 minutes because they’re too busy spamming people to be working on their craft.  I did the due diligence of going through every email and clicking each portfolio link.  If there was no link I just trashed it immediately, because who wants to hire a web designer without a website?  Out of the 153 replies I received, there were only 3 that I would consider using (that’s a 1.96% signal-to-noise ratio).  They each charged between $1500-$2500 for a logo design that includes a couple of concepts (3-5) and then 3 rounds of revisions based on one of those concepts.  By that time, I was so frustrated by the amount of horrible design work out there that I decided to try my hand at it.  The hilarious results will be in the next part of the series.

• Make a post on craigslist asking if anyone would like to exchange links or would like a guest writer for their blog.
• Find someone who blogs about similar topics as you, but is not too famous.  Add a link to their site on yours and then click it.  You’ve now added yourself to their list of referring sites and if they’re anything like the rest of us self-obsessive bloggers, they’re addicted to their Google Analytics and you will peak their interest as to how someone found their site from yours.
• Write a short, complimentary description of a blog that interests or inspires you for whatever reason.  Send off an email or comment to the owner of that blog with a link to your post.
• Find a Christmas or Chanukah present you don’t want or random trinket around the house and offer it as a gift to the top commenter.
• Do an short email “interview” with someone in your industry.

We wanted to get business cards printed as quickly as possible because Matt has a lot of in-person political and business contacts, but we didn’t want to go with the standard run-of-the mill business card.  Usually they’re chock full too much information in unreadable tiny print, so we stripped off all non-essential info to try to make it look as clean as possible.

1. No title? We are a small tiny business where everyone does six different jobs at once.  Titles can be used to impress clients and make you seem bigger than you are, but what’s the point?  They’ll find out anyway.  Use the fact that you don’t have a title as a segue (not segway) into bringing up the advantages of working with a small company.
2. No address? A business card is supposed to be a reminder of a conversation and a way to contact you or refer you to someone.  I have as much New Jersey pride/self-loathing as the next benny, but we’re an online company and most people don’t care where you’re located anyway unless its a “hey we live in the same neighborhood lets buddy up and do some tequilla shots” kinda thing in which case it would have been brought up in the conversation.  If needed, our mailing address is available on our website for reference, in case you really wanted to mail us a dead tree copy of a contract or a Hiro Nakamura bobble head doll.
3. No fax number? Please.  Is this 1999?  If you really wanted to fax us something, just email or call and we’ll set up one of those fax-to-email services.
4. No website? The website is the domain of the email address.  If you can’t figure that out, you’re probably going to be entering “simande” into your browser’s search bar to get to us anyway.
5. One letter email address? Take advantage of the perks you get as a small company where you can.  Nobody likes to type in long excruciatingly long email or website addresses.  We took it another step and made it that much easier for you to contact us.

Just as an added touch, we used the back of the cards to print a black and white version of our logo.

Lessons learned:

1. Get as few cards as possible, you’ll definitely encounter situations where giving out your card is necessary, but for an online company these sitautions are few and far between.
2. The joined thin font + thick font look doesn’t work as well with small font and strong kerning.

Regardless of which model you choose for selling software, I think the most important thing is to make it as easy as possible for a potential customer to get your software up and running.  If its a web app, that means no lengthy sign up process (one click trial would be best), if its a desktop app, that means as few dependencies on external software as possible (e.g. .NET Framework version 3.5, Java Virtual Machine versuion 6 update 11, DirectX 11).

• Archive all the emails in my inbox and automatically label all unanswered emails that are more than 7 days old as “this is how much of a delinquent procrastinator i am (4 messages).”
• Sign off of Gmail once a day in an effort to increase productivity and reduce chat/email time.