“There are a few drivers for the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, and here’s a summary of the top ones:
- Customers respond to novelty, which inevitably fades
- First-to-market never lasts
- More scale means less qualified customers”
My favorite parts:
Don’t take too much advice:
But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”
“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.
Being comfortable as a non-engineer:
Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.
“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said.
The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:
Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”
In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.
Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.
“Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:”
A few that jumped out at me:
3. You must go through the motions of being creative…The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking.
12. Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional, logical, analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they exclude all information that is not related to the problem.
“Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The build up to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses.”
A fantastic post by my friend Avand Amiri from Sqoot, an API for daily deals
“How to Measure the Metrics that Determine Real Progress” By Trevor Owens on Oct 3, 2011
