Scan.me is great use case for focusing on the right customer, not just the right product.
AND that the product doesn’t *have to* be complicated or new to be wanted.
It just has to be easier to use, and packaged up better then the alternative.
Category: Learning
Deciding on a new feature: An Insta-Test-market. (AKA: Ghetto Testing)
I love making a decisions tree as efficnet as possible, especial around discussion that steer the business or the product within a business. Or in another words, I HATE “tough decisions.”
Here is another addition to the decision tree to make life easier, it is called “Ghetto Testing” and coined by the founder of Zenga.
How do you figure out if you should go with a feature with minmal disruption to the company or its engineers, and how can you invest in it with the highest posible certainty of success? Ghetto Testing a feature. The concept is there are a wide range of data points you can aquire to guage interest on an idea before the idea is fleshed out. At the “Ghetto” stage, it sint so much a test of the product value or feature set itself, as much of a servey to see if the concept will get clicks or interest by the public. It’s basically an adhoc test market. If you think people will love feature x for instance, create a google adword promoting the vapor-ware concept and run it for 5,10,30 mins. The resulting page of the ad could technically go to a 404 page, and although that would be a horrible experience it still wouldbe a valid ghetto test.
From there you can invest incrementally into how deep of a gauge you want to testing of the idea i.e. a pretty landing page with feature highlights, a download, or a purchase wall.
http://grattisfaction.com/2010/01/how-zynga-does-customer-development-minimum-viable-product/
Pictures that are literally worth over a million words
Check out this cool little tool: Google N-Grams
It shows a graphical representation of the frequency words used in books over a rangeof years. It is based on on all the books google has scanned into their database to date.
This TED talk is what turned me on to the project.
The project, the tool and the lecture are all quite entertaining.
Here are some graphs I created playing with the tool. Graphic data, especially that which is based on sentiment represented by our societies authors, gives us amazing clues into how perception and reality intersect.
My greatest life lessons from Computer Science
I really appreciate my education in Computer Science. The most valuable mental shift I gained was the understanding that there are no “hard problems.” To recognize that even extremely difficult problems were easily solved once you were able to deconstruct them into smaller more simple ones. Problem-solving is about figuring out how to simplify, dismantle, and rebuild toward solutions. Simplifying is all about getting good and asking the right questions.
For instance, playing the guitar is hard, playing chords with rhythm is easier, playing chords is even easier, playing a note is more easy – and so on and so forth.
Just breakdown what you want to accomplish and get great at each little piece of it. Then, get great at putting each individual piece together and your problem isn’t all that bad.
Twitter, Facebook, and Blogging – oh my!
Here is a simple breakdown of some popular communication-based internet technologies, in plain English. Hopefully, it will help give readers a better understanding of the basic abilities, purposes, and differences these tools provide.
For each technology, I attached an “In Plain English” video to help explain the usage of the technology. In Plain English became popular in 2008 for their extremely basic no frills explanation of – things. So click on the link for each technology to get a quick breakdown.
Blogs:
Facebook and social networking
twitter.com
Sean Shadmand 