It feels good to be excited about blogging again. Here are some of my favorite things from this past week.

Good Reads

• Overnight Success: It Takes Years
• The 90-9-1 Principle
• Patience and Hard Work

Favorite Meta Post

• Switching from Client Services to Product Startup

I’m a big fan of hacking my mind to try to take emotion out of my decision-making. Here’s one ghetto-looking chart I’ve used a lot in the past year to help decide what direction to go with my career.

Every job you do has an inverse relationship between money and education earned. The line indicates an approximate average. If you’re on the line, you’re “OK”. If you’re above and to the right, you’re probably really happy with your life and growing as a person and growing as a target for financial advisors . If you’re below and to the left, it’s probably a good idea to change what you’re doing. Maybe learn some new skills, meet some new people, move to a place where more opportunities are available.

This chart is really convincing for the people thinking of quitting their job to do a startup. Do that, and you’ll probably be on the far right of the line. Think of it as a DIY MBA. If you’re holding down your finance job, you’re on the far left of the line. That’s cool for some people.

I was fortunate enough to not have to travel this Thanksgiving.  I love going to visit family and friends on the west coast, but as I approach 30, I’m starting to dread the experiences at JFK, especially during the late fall and winter. Today will be celebrated with good NYC friends at WeWork Labs and my friends that have moved east from Chapman.

If you’re looking for some nice inspiration on your day of rest, take a look at Des Traynor’s list of his favorite posts. Des is one smart guy, especially on the topics of user experience and product development. I find his posts highly informative and empowering.

My favorites of his are:

• Patience and Hard Work
• Your Web App Has Launched – Now What?
• You’re Just Getting Started

I hope you enjoy his work as much as your second slice of pumpkin pie!

PS. I’m going to be working hard over the holiday weekend to clean up the mess this blog has become. It makes my mind hurt to think of how I hacked together this site with my bad WordPress and CSS skills from a few years ago. Look at the source at your own peril!

As a film student, I spent most of my weekends working on friends’ film sets. As you can imagine, we talked about a lot of ridiculousness and we often wondered about how our parents’ hard-earned money could have been better spent. Film school was actually very useful (teamwork, leadership, defending/critiquing artistic work, etc), but we couldn’t help but think the $100k+ tuition could be better used on actually making real feature-length films. It turns out many great filmmakers agree. When you do something for real and have your skin in the game, learning happens quickly and sticks with you. No exercise or lecture could ever replace the lessons I learned when I finally graduated and was working in Hollywood.

The same logic applies to business school. Looking back on the past four months of effort put into Onepager, we have learned a ridiculous amount of on-the-job training. From business law, to investing, to marketing, to PR. We’ve had to become proficient in a course catalog worth of subjects. Our awareness and internalized skills with these subjects could never be learned in the safety of a classroom.

If you really want to learn how to do something, start doing it right now. There are too many resources available for passionate people to waste time and valuable experiences in a classroom. I don’t want to suggest that school isn’t a very valuable endeavor, but if you know what you want to do and school isn’t mandatory for you to accomplish it, then why not start learning the most valuable lessons right now?

My friend Mark Birch posted yesterday on the transition from a service-based design/development shop to working on your own product. He’s got some great points, but I wanted to add a few more as my team did this five months ago and I’ve been thinking about this topic ever since.

There is no “Sign Off”

Client projects typically have an end that is well defined. Usually that’s when the project launches or the agreed upon deliverables are handed off. For our team, and me especially, it was hard to get past that hump of launching the initial release of our product and getting into the really important work of listening to customers and iterating rapidly. The vast majority of the work of a product company comes post-launch, which is generally the exact opposite from client services. If we had been doing our product for a client, we’d be taking our final payment to bank soon after we launched and moving onto the next gig. The habit of “where’s the next project” was ingrained in us and we had to get over that as quickly as possible.

You better love what you’re doing with your product

One of the nice benefits of doing client services is that there is always another project to look forward to. That helps you get through the hard times with particularly annoying projects or clients because you’re always a short amount of time from starting fresh. This doesn’t really happen when doing your own startup. Once you start and fully dedicate to your product, you’ll be spending a lot of intimate time with it, analyzing its flaws, talking about it, thinking of what directions you could go, and generally consuming yourself with it during all waking hours. Handing the keys off to the client doesn’t happen and accountability is all on your shoulders.

You are now the service provider and the client

True, you may have customers using your product, but the decisions about what you do and what you don’t do lie with you and your team. Have problems making decisions? Have trouble with your team being undivided on certain issues? Any other team and decision making problems that might arise that could be detrimental to your product? Those issues are amplified when you and your team are staring at each other, needing to come up with a solution.

Getting clients is easier than passing them off to someone else

No matter what we do, we still receive requests from past clients to do work for them. We also have a few projects that still linger, uncompleted, which are hugely distracting. I’m not sure what the right approach is on handling past clients, but it’s important to be aware that just because you stop accepting new work, it doesn’t mean your existing clients will instantly find someone else to provide your service. This gets especially tricky when an “easy” project comes by and you’re on month two of eating ramen.

There of course are lots of other things to consider, but those seem to be the most noteworthy as I’ve just gone through the whole transition.

This week I’ve been experimenting with my email consumption.

Email does three troubling things to me:

1. It’s highly disruptive to my overall productivity
2. It contributes to a high level of nervousness because I feel I need to respond to people immediately
3. It brings me less joy in my work and I believe it keeps me from doing my best at my work

So my new experiment is simple: I now read through my inbox only 5 times a day. Once when I wake up, when I first get to the office, at lunchtime, right before leaving the office, and before going to bed. Every time I open my email, I go to inbox zero either by deleting the garbage or responding to the important ones.

At first, this was hard to do. I suddenly had tons of gaps in my day, which were the moments I’d typically glance at my inbox. Now I’m slowly starting to fill those gaps in with focusing more on my work. This has meant that I can do something I’ve been struggling with for a long time: completing my daily to-do list. All week I’ve been absolutely killing my list of things I need to do and it feels amazing. The combination of feeling I’ve had a productive day and the lack of the feeling of email nervousness is powerful.

If someone has a high priority thing they need my attention for, they can call me, IM me, text me, Kik me, or walk in and talk to me. I didn’t think that would work too well, but it’s been going great so far.

Hack Your Mind
Think about how you do things, why you do them that way, and how that impacts your work and life. Maybe it’s time for a change and by doing a little hack like this, you can make a big impact.

I would love to not be writing this post. As a designer of web sites and web applications, and as one that’s lived through the last ten years and seen no change, I guess it’s my duty. Art schools are failing everyone.

Before I jump down this cliff, it’s important to note that I didn’t go to art school. I didn’t study typography, or advertising, or printing processes. Instead, I went to film school, which shielded me from becoming enamored with doing print design. My college career was spent building sites for various departments in the university. I do wish I left school with some of the knowledge art school gives, but instead I picked things up as needed while working.

Why you gotta hate art schools?

I don’t despise art schools. I just think they are teaching graphic designers an incomplete set of skills for the century we are currently living in. I thought this when I took a couple of art school classes, I thought this when I saw my newly minted art school graduate friends struggling to get work, and I think that now after having an art school intern this past summer.

I’m constantly shocked with how many designers I meet that have gone to all the respected art schools, but their web courses consisted of a semester of Flash timeline animation. Ugh. No wonder they don’t care to go further into interactive design. Why aren’t schools teaching designers the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, much like they teach them about silkscreening and the variety of other printing processes? For both print and web, knowing how the thing you’ve designed gets put onto its medium is key. Learning Flash is like learning how dot matrix printers work. It’s cool, if you like history, but pretty useless for whenever you get out of school.

Further, why do so many print designers have a phobia of working on the web? Every time I’ve drilled down to the core of their fear, it’s always boiled down to not wanting to learn to code.

What’s the solution?

If I was a new art school student, I’d focus on fundamental skills like typography, color theory,  and illustration. Those skills are key regardless of if you wind up being a print or interactive designer. But please, please, please, do these two things:

1. Ingore any professors you may have that never designed for the internet and have some bias against it. As you go on in life, you’ll realize a lot of your professors and teachers were wrong about a whole variety of things.
2. Take a course in HTML/CSS/JS or just read a book. Build a bunch of sites and learn the constraints of building something on the internet. You could even totally hate it! All you need to know is how to do it and you can let other people do the coding in the future. But without that knowledge, you’ll frustrate yourself and the people you work with in the future.

If you do ignore the haters and learn some coding basics, you’ll bring all those other great skills you learned at art school to the world and you’ll also be vastly more employable.

Steve Jobs did numerous, magnificent things in his time as CEO at Apple. I try to not be a blind fanboy, but it’s easy to appreciate all of his gifts and the company he created. One of his accomplishments stands out above the rest for me and I believe our society in general: Steve Jobs created our modern design culture, which is one of America’s strongest fields right now.

I read a significant amount of books on design and frequently attend presentations on the same subject. It’s gotten to the point that I almost cringe whenever Apple is referenced in these writings and talks because they are in every freaking one! They have been the darling of the design community not just because they produce great products, but because they are the most obvious example that great design equals business success.

Over the past decade, companies have awoken to the fact that design, and specifically user experience, is a differentiator that leads to increased profits. This realization has driven the growth of our field and continued to push us further and further from creating life-like visuals for interfaces, to building the skill of interaction design, to diving into psychology to compel user actions.

Without Apple releasing new, game changing products every few months that challenged the boundaries of what had been done before, this design culture we live in would have been a lot different. No one out there has done anything comparable to Steve Jobs for the design world. He showed us the power of simplicity and creating with a purpose. For that, I’ll miss him most.

I’m reading Stephen P. Anderson’s Seductive Interaction Design and one thing he talks about is spontaneous gifting for users. The thought is that giving a user an unexpected gift will surprise them, make your product more memorable, and push them towards becoming an evangelist.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about in the past few years and it’s nice to have it be put together into a little package I can refer back to in the future. Here are a few examples:

The Dopplr Annual Report

Stephen’s example was the annual report from Dopplr, the trip tracking app. At the end of the year, they send every user a PDF that summarizes their travels into a big infographic. It looks great and can be printed and hung on your wall if that’s what you’re into. The key here is that it’s unexpected and unannounced. The user is truly surprised when this arrives in their inbox. It’s the very definition of a great gift (appreciated, unexpected, and no concept of paying them back). Stephen mentions how he resisted switching to TripIt for years, even though all of his peers were, largely because of this gift.

MailChimp

We’ve been using MailChimp for our email marketing at Onepager, which we just launched, so we needed to set up a new account. I had previously used Campaign Monitor, which I really liked and would recommend to anyone, but everyone else said we needed to use MailChimp. Whatever, I try to avoid conflict, so I signed us up. After I entered my payment information and the paid signup was complete, I received two emails. The first was a confirmation of the new account, which was full of very grateful language. The second email was unexpected and very memorable. It turns out that as a ‘thanks’ for signing up, I was being given a free MailChimp t-shirt! All I had to do was tell them my size and where to mail it to. Very cool!

Think about if they had told me about the t-shirt I’d be getting before I given them my payment information. It would have felt like they were trying to bait me to upgrade to the paid account. I would have thought a small degree of negativity towards them. Instead, this gift surprised me and I’m pumped to get my new shirt and to keep on using MailChimp because they seem like a great company to do business with.

Anderson’s Restaurant

I used to spend a fair amount of time in Santa Barbara, Calif. during college and distinctly remember two restaurants. One is a Moroccan restaurant that was my first exposure to the seductive art of belly dancing. The second is a great breakfast place called Anderson’s. Using the word “great” here might be misleading because while their food is certainly good, I can’t really remember any of the particular dishes I ordered. What I do remember is their unexpected gift they would bring to us.

After you ordered your food and the drinks were brought, they would bring you a plate with small pastries from their bakery. This wasn’t announced and was particularly effective as a gift because it’s something you’d never buy for yourself. Who would order a big breakfast and a plate of pastries as an appetizer? Of course, I always wound up eating everything, but the real thing this gift did was make Anderson’s stick in my brain. Every time I go back to Santa Barbara, I go to Anderson’s. Every person I speak to who is traveling to Santa Barbara, I tell them to go to Anderson’s. I write about Anderson’s in this blog. I LOVE that place, simply because they brought me a plate with a few slices of pastries. I’d say their ROI on that dough, butter, and sugar works out for them in the end because I know I’m one of many that feel this way.

We’re definitely working on thinking up some nice gifts for Onepager subscribers because it is a good way to connect with your customer, and it will be a lot of fun. It’s just a small way to go the extra mile and show your customer that you love them.

The chicken and egg problem is common for a user generated content driven startup. If there is no content on the site to engage the user, then it’s difficult to get them to sign up and start participating. There are getting to be many novel ways to solve this issue, from private betas with invite codes, to signing up with a service to reserve your user name (I fall for that often since my name is so damn common).

I’ve recently been using Skillshare, which is a site where people can attend classes taught by others in their community and also teach their own courses. I’ve always stuck to looking at classes in NYC, but I was wondering how they do various things on their site, so I clicked through to see another city and this is what I saw:

There are several things here that are important:

1. The lock very strongly indicates that you aren’t going any further, which makes you wonder why.
2. The picture builds up some community pride, assuming you’re from that city or recognize the skyline.
3. The countdown shows you exactly how many more votes are needed and makes you wonder if your action really will lower that number by one.
4. The instructions give you another reason to give them your email by promising updates and an invite to a launch party (!)
5. The title, which was the last thing my eye noticed, reaffirms that my actions can unlock this city and I’ll even earn a special title because of it.

I don’t think Ron Popeil himself could make you more motivated to give up your email address and generate some pent-up anticipation for the full experience. Further down the page, they tell you 500 people are needed to “tip” your city as well as 50 pilot classes. They really want to make sure that there is an audience of students and teachers before flipping the switch.

Think about what would have happened had I come to this page and seen 1 or 2 classes with hardly any students. I would have left and forgotten about Skillshare. With their solution, I’m actually excited to be supporting the cause and am looking forward to a future with Skillshare in San Diego. When that happens, there will be plenty of content for me and the others to choose from.

Great job Skillshare!