Taking a bite out of Craigslist
“You know for me, there’s nothing better than sharing the music I love with people who want to hear it. I don’t look at it as work—I look at it as a fun time. I don’t charge for DJing, I charge for flying to get there now. The traveling is the aspect I charge for; the DJing is free.”
John Digweed
Source magneticmag.com
I’m embarrassed. By now, you’ve probably read the Forbes article which chastises the University of Florida (my alma mater) for cutting their Computer Science department.
“Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely? ”
I agree one hundred percent. Major fail Gator Nation. But there’s a major opportunity for the likes of Skillshare, Code Academy, amongst others to bring the learning revolution down to Gainesville.
“Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.”
Paul Graham, on Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Collaboration, ftw!
“Have an idea for a startup? Don’t launch a company, launch an experiment.” - @vacanti
Vin, from Yipit, wrote a great post suggesting entrepreneurs launch an experiment to prove their assumptions, before spending the cash and time building a product, a la the lean startup movement.
He had an idea, spent one day coding it (instead of six months), to realize consumers maybe weren’t so interested in that idea, so he could move on to the next. Eventually, his Yipit experiment tested well, and the rest is history.
At Phoundit, we have a similar mentality. It’s tricky to redesign lost & found.
Experiment - fail or validate - build. That’s the cycle. We’re always experimenting. Most importantly— we’re always moving. Because that’s the only way to solve big problems, after all.
So we were curious,
Are finders really keepers?
We dropped 100 stamped envelopes across New York City, with my name and address - at coffee shops, bars, street corners, all over the place! All a finder had to do was drop the found envelope in the closest mailbox. Nothing more, nothing less.
I was pleasantly surprised when 57 of them were returned to me. While this wasn’t the most scientific of experiments, I learned:
If made easy and actionable, quite a few people return what they find.
So that was an interesting insight. It was time run another social experiment. Like I said, we’re always experimenting - we’re just that curious.
Vin makes a great point - starting a company is scary. But when it’s an experiment, what do you have to lose?
*Thanks to my boy Alex Green for his help on this project
Source phoundit.com
Sometimes, you just have to pay attention.
Chris Dixon wrote an interesting blog post, regarding products build from improvised user behavior. We highly recommend you read it for yourself, but to summarize, some of today’s most popular technology startups were born from current behavior already present in niche culture. A good example mentioned by Chris:
“For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who shared photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared them using other apps. Then came Instagram, which combined lo-fi filters and easy sharing. Instagram has been downloaded 15M times and has apparently crossed over to mainstream users.”
Other product ideas like Twitter and foursquare were also born from similar insights grounded in user behavior.
Phoundit fits this mold as well. People are human and lose things all the time. They post flyers on lamp posts. Post ads on Craigslist. And even a few post pictures of what they lose Twitter. Hmm, that’s interesting. So it got us thinking,
“What if we could centralize this behavior with actionable steps to mobilize the community to help us find what’s missing?”
A little food for thought as we enter the new year. We can’t wait to show what’s in store. Request an invite here. Stay tuned :).
Source phoundit
