I don’t think I can be more pithy than my headline currently is in summing up a deep philosophical question I’ve struggled with ever since starting Pocket Tales.

Is being logical, logical?

Without hesitation I answer this question “yes” and add that we should always strive to be logical, but that’s the easy part of the question and just the tip of the issue. Let me show you what I mean.

Read this Business Week article from 2001 (read that date again, that’s almost a decade ago): “Sorry Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work?”

Then check out this post about Malcom Gladwell’s “Blink” vs. Michael M. Lewis’ “Moneyball.”

Finally, in “Mad Men” Season 4, Episode 4 the hypothesis of creative advertising genius Don Draper is being challenged by “facts” from a focus group. His response to the focus group is it has “nothing to do with what I do.”

What do all of these have in common? They demonstrate a titanic debate between two sides. One side says we must believe the facts. The other side says the facts as we know them right now don’t lead us to the truth.

In a startup, this is a core issue that will determine how you run your company. Will you only make decisions based on tangible data? How will you know when you have enough data to get an accurate picture? Conversely, will you favor your gut over the facts? How will you know when to trust your gut?

Every entrepreneur strives to be rational. No successful person believes the path to success is acting randomly, but sometimes what we know in our gut contradicts the facts. When we act on our gut, it looks random to others. It looks illogical, even though it’s not. This creates a problem when you have employees, advisors, and investors looking over your shoulder.

Like most things in life, there isn’t one right way. Your gut is as valuable a tool as Google Analytics, but you will second-guess your decisions, and others will second-guess them too. The goal is to know whether you’re following the reason of tangible facts, or the less tangible reason of your gut. This self awareness will help you make decisions more confidently and to sell your decisions to others.

Learn this concept: Network Effect Startup

Short article outlining some insightful success factors for consumer web startups. Also, if you just read the highlighted portions you’ll get a good sense of what this article is about.

Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”

The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”

This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.

First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.

Anyway, some of my big takeaways:

“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”

“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.” 

“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”

“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”

Steve Jobs quoting Picasso’s “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” and saying that Apple has “always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” It’s important to understand that copying is just creating an exact replica, whereas stealing is taking an idea and making it your own.

For obvious reasons (i.e. Pocket Tales is a social reading game) this link is extremely valuable to me.

The biggest choice you’ll make in looking at this list is what gambits not to implement. Focus is key, especially if your application isn’t a game, so decide what behaviors or outcomes are the biggest priority, and design your “game” elements around those.