Squared Eye Notebook

It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how to dyou pursuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to costumers – not once or twice but three or four times with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.

The Pitchman by Malcom Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw

I was reading last night about a simple disruptive innovation in the cooking world that made hundreds of millions of dollars. The Veg-O-Matic. Reading that, I was thinking of another product that did virtually the same selling, the same pitching, an elegant form of an infomercial for a fruit company.

I’ve been working toward getting this for a good while, so I chose the idea, the right artist, and let go of control. This is one thing I wasn’t going to design.

The result is awesome, and its just the beginning. Filling in will happen in December. Next arm begins next spring. How about pics of your work below?

Buckle down. Knuckle up! Getting back on schedule.

Okay, no more joking around. I’m nearly six months into working on a product and its time to tighten the belt. Why? Because I’ve become fat. Somewhere in the transition from service to product design I forgot all the best things I learned about efficiency and productivity. I went off track because working on a new product is fast paced crazy town and my normal process was out the window.

Thankfully Jamin Jantz (our Project Manager) and the leads on our Product Team have been working on refining our process, and its inspired me to think about my daily personal process again. So here goes. This is what I’m going to try:

Personal Daily Process

The day before Every good day starts with knowing what I need to do the day before. We’ve started trying out Flow App from the folks at Meta Lab for our product design team, and it will help me know what I need to accomplish for the current day and the day ahead.

Old Man Schedule With a 10 week old baby and posting to Tumblr at 3am after a bottle feeding, the OMS is right out, but don’t worry, it’ll be back soon, and a few times a week I manage to be up at 6am and off to the gym to start the day.

8:30am start with a plan I will come into the office and make my double coffee on our super fancy CoWork espresso machine, and promptly sit down and work for one hour on an interface or any other product design task that requires productivity. NO Email. NO Twitter. NO RSS. NO design surfing.

9:30am cut off the head of the dragon You have to answer email sometime, and there may be important things you need to check on from the day before or night before if you work at Zaarly. Email is endless though, and so I’ll only do this for 30 minutes.

10:00am Mandatory fraternization with the natives Tweet, micro blog, chat, say bad words, watch Charlie the Unicorn again, and get a drink of water. Oh, and get my butt outside for a quick walk.

10:00 - 12:00am Pomodoro style spurts of productive digital work and Creative Direction. The great thing about working on the East Coast when so much of your team is in San Fransisco on the West Coast is that you have over three hours till they start asking for your attention.

12:00pm Take a real break I don’t love lunch like I love other meals, but I’m realizing again that I need to take a real lunch. Maybe I need to just go have a real sit down and a lunch coversation in our CoWork Greenville kitchen?

CoWork Kitchen

1:00pm - 5:00pm Creative Direct, Meetings, and Work I’m not going to be able to schedule my whole day. I know that now, but I might be able to schedule a portion of it, and then make the latter half of the day a reasonably scheduled stock of work. I need to set an email timer for 2 times for 30 minutes during this period. Anymore is insane it will eat me alive. I get 150+ emails a day, and that doesn’t count the type site email newsletters!

9:30pm Nighty Night I will keep going to bed at a reasonable hour or none of this will work. Also, I promise not to blog about any of this kind of thing at 3:00am anymore, I should have just gone to bed after Lucy drank her bottle, but I had too many ideas on the brain.

With that. Goodnight!

Greenville Grok

Update: Republishing this, because Tumblr somehow un-indexed it.

Every year I travel to listen to people speak about topics I’m interested in. Most are confident experts in the field. My positive experiences range from relatively educational to life changing. I remember the first time I heard Lawrence Lessig speak about Creative Commons. My mind went nuts. It was burping out ideas like I’d just poured a 2 liter of Dr. Pepper through a hole in my head. It wasn’t just Lessig though, it was the discussion afterward on the car ride home. I couldn’t sleep that night and I loved it.

The conference experience can be a worth every penny, but before you sign the next check over to one of the big-boy conferences, ask yourself if its worth the dollar.

Real and perceived costs and returns

I attended SXSW in 2009 and 2010. Each year I spent an average of $1800 for travel, room, board, and ticket. I missed a good week of billable work. That’s conservatively 25 hours at ($125/hr - my rate at the time). That’s a total of just under $5000. Five Thousand Dollars. Ouch. That number should put a few things in perspective.

The value of those two years at SXSW is hard to quantify though. Without a doubt it has led to more work, and being a speaker adds ballast to the Squared Eye brand. I get exposure to the ideas and practices of other great speakers and thinkers. Not to mention many of my closest friendships in our little web industry started at SXSW.

From Zero to Grok in 60 days.

If going to conferences all year seems fiscally daunting, and if one of the best parts of the conference experience is the discussion between conference sessions then why not work to make that happen at home? That’s the question that sparked what we now call Zero Days. A monthly measure to break away from the norm of work and make use of the collective mind of CoWork Greenville. We wanted to create community and grow the camaraderie of our small collective of businesses and freelancers. My expectations for what a small group of talented and idea-hungry people could do went through the roof.

The next experiment was to see if you could sustain these kind of focused sessions over a few days. I knocked the idea around with Mr. Cameron Koczon, a co-founder of Brooklyn Beta, and in mid-March, the week after SXSW 2011, I launched Greenviile Grok. Yes, I know, Grok is a strange name. It’s perfect though, rooted in sci-fi, Grok basically describes a kind of deep mind-sharing. Besides a great mind-meld I set out to share Greenville’s best BBQ, beer, and backyard fun with what ended up being about 25 people.

Dispersed between three days of meals, downtime, and other breaks were 10/20s, the highlight of the Grok weekend. Born out of our Zero Days these are ten or twenty minute sessions when someone presents an idea, a new app, a business challenge, a question, a technique, or anything else that’s likely to hold the attention of 25 people for a handful of minutes.

In order of occurrence not awesomeness

Though many more than just these folks shared, talked, drank, ate and played with our Grok herd, the list below details the topics that were covered in the three 10/20s.

Matthew Smith - Sharing wireframes of the Name Brain App
Cameron Koczon - Discussing The Old Man Schedule
Yaron Schoen - How many projects should I take at a time?
Kevin Smith - How do you schedule personal/side projects?
Bermon Painter - Jack of all Trades, Master of Many (Generalist vs Specialist)
Jamin Jantz - Project management Questions (How do you do it?)
Jeremy Nigh - How to make the best of the “design by committee” process.
Kevin Smith - Wren App preview (OSX Twitter App)
Cameron Koczon - Orbital Content or What the hell is orbital content? Yaron Schoen - Is there any money in content on the web?
Chandler Van De Water - Side projects: How do I get crap done?
Kevin Smith - How to structure business partnerships (ex: a developer & designer want to make an app)
Adam Clark - Doing freelance work vs. growing a business.
Matthew Smith - Rethinking Craigslist
Jamin Jantz - Personalizing Project Management (Not one tool to rule them all)
Joshua Blankenship - How do you articulate design thinking to clients when it’s largely instinctual to you?
Bermon Painter - Building Teams - A perfect storm
Joshua Blankenship - I’ve got 10–15 hours/week for freelance + a demanding 9–5. How can I be professional at it?
Yaron Schoen - Help me think how to make Tweetment (design your tweets) work quicker.

A few nuggets we gathered along the way

Track Time. Keep the 10/20s time accurate. Its best to let the downtimes before and after these focused sessions handle any overflow on discussion. Keep people hungry for more.

Write it down. Next time we Grok we’re handing out notepads rather than tshirts. Just getting some cat scratch down so that you can remember your ideas for later is good. Using your phone or computer might be distracting to you and others.

Make room to chill. The time between the 10/20s was not only effective for hashing out the ideas and questions that the 10/20s raised, it was also great for laughing it up, and getting silly over a few pints.

Go get it done. If all this ideation and talking goes nowhere and does nothing, we should all go home. Its important to sift through the cruft and find the three take-aways from something like this and go and make them happen.

Grok is not a conference killer, but its a serious alternative or a way to augment your conference attendance in a year. Grok is not a focused teaching time, there is great value in learning from industry leaders in a conference setting, and Grok isn’t well suited for that.

Grok is not for networking. You may meet new people and that may have the fruit of building some kind of false “network” for you, but we all came to Grok because we are truly hungry for new ideas, answers to old questions, and ways we can throw out the status quo or refine old standards.

Grok is not for large groups or an elite few. We had roughly 25 people attend and we might have been able to add a few more, but beyond that it would have lost its edge. We would have also lost out if we had focused on industry elites. We had a great mix of people from all kinds of backgrounds and skill sets, both in and peripheral to the web industry and I think it made all the difference.

Curate your crowd. As I picked the group that came to Grok I had a distinct desire to find people who were eager to think critically and ask hard questions. Their level of experience was less important to me than their energy for change and growth.

Don’t create something that’s more work than it’s worth. I set out to make Grok easily manageable and require next to no extra work on my part. The main way to do this was by getting people to attend who have some level of self motivation. I’m not interested in dragging anyone along.

Your turn now

Keep going to those great conferences. Keep doing incredible work. Read your ass off. But somewhere in between all that, take the time to do something like this. Do your own thing. I hope my little treatise here will give you some ideas along the road. In general I find that high quality and high gravity beer moves the whole thing along nicely.

Something to remember us by

This fine specimen of a caveman is named Grok. He’s a reminder that you don’t have to be a genius to get into this stuff. You just have to be hungry for great ideas and pizza.

When’s the next Grok you ask? Well that’s a hot little question. We’re asking ourselves that same question now, but I’d be surprised if we’ll be able to wait a whole year till the next one. There is a rumor that we may throw the next one in Brooklyn somewhere near The Beer Table, but I can’t confirm that.

Don’t go to Brooklyn Beta

There’s really no reason for you or anyone else to read about any recap of Brooklyn Beta. You should live it in the form of your own time with other designers, creative developers, and critical thinking human beings. I’m actually writing this in hopes that you won’t attend Brooklyn Beta next year, that instead, you’ll realize that you and your web neighbor have everything you need to breathe life into any event, your own event. I’m not kidding.

Here’s what I’m bringing back from my Brooklyn web neighbors

Some Questions:

How is Zaarly serving women? Women make up a huge population of web and technology users, and yet the people making most of the products out there are teams of men. The issue of an egalitarian web workforce aside, men like myself can at least contemplate how we can better serve this portion of the population. I began wondering how women will use Zaarly in a year, 3 years, 5 years, and how I can steer it to be a safe, wonderful, profitable, time saving experience for them.
What are people hiring Zaarly to solve for them? This is a core product question. One that every product team should be asking. The answer you have now may not actually be what the answer your users have. Finding market fit and where people are the most eager to hire your product to be of great value to them is crucial. It’s the big question for us at Zaarly right now. It’s a joy to seek the answer in design, building, shipping, and testing.
**How can you create a holistic, design centered team?* How can Zaarly curate hires, making sure that every hire is a creative hire, a designer at heart. We need to be asking of our hires what they feel about craftsmanship, what they feel and believe about art. In a manner we simply need to find out if they have good taste. This applies to admin, designers, developers, operations folk, and marketers. We all must be humans serving humans or we’ll lose.
What kind of person (buyer) would use Zaarly the most? Who is the quintessential user of Zaarly that would pull more people into using it by asking for things regularly. Who in my household spends the most money on normal stuff? My Wife. Food for thought.
What is the single unifying feature or character quality of the people at Brooklyn Beta? Why are we all here? What draws people to a conference like this opposed to SXSW? Some are likely here to be around the cool kids, but hopefully they soon found out that everyone here is cool, and no one here is cool. We’re all fumbling like mad toward the future of this digital enterprise. I think there’s a common hunger to see something great, something big, something hopeful, and wonderful come out of all the work we’re doing. Everyone here is dreaming about something.

Talks I want to give:

Designing to change the economy. My dream for Zaarly in the hands of the underdogs all over the world.
Treating your service design like product design. How designing using the parent/child relationship can change your perspective on what you’re handing over to clients, giving them better service, and making you more money.
Don’t just vote, design, build, ship, and make money. If you care about your citizenship at all, your loudest voice is probably not what you do at the ballot box, its what you produce with your hands and give to the economy.

Stuff I am going to do:

Start a movement of designers/developers inspiring high-schoolers and young people to get involved in design and development. Creative thinking and dreaming of making things that change the world. /cc @DanielMall, @jbrewer, @jenseninman, @duointeractive, @danrubin
Help build a CoWork campus in Greenville, and share the vision of CoWorking through helping other CoWork’s start up nationwide using our brand and guidance. This is how we win.

Stuff I’m thinking about: 

How many people are designers? How many people on Dribbble might be better classified as web stylists? Decorators? Could more people be taught to design? To think in design is to organize, create, and solve, and only use pixels when necessary.
The economy is not tanking. The economy is shifting, its growing sideways. Like a skateboarding on a half-pipe you have to learn to lean into the movement or you will fall off. Startups, the web industry, we’re leaning. It’s natural for us to lean. The old agencies, most of them, walk dogs, they don’t know how to skate and they’re not willing to learn.

Stuff to read:

Bird by Bird.

Wouldn’t it be cool if:

You could use your Credit Card number or phone number to easily accept money?
You could vote “No” to the whole voting system to show that you disagree with everything happening at this moment in American history?

People

Everyone I met and spoke with impressed me. I loved hearing from people who you’d never know by name on Twitter and yet amazing ideas, great ambition, and real talent.
The most unimpressive person I saw at the conference was also one of the most “well known”. No need for names, but I was struck by how this person’s negativity was shockingly abrasive compared to everyone else’s positive stride at the conference.
Your own neighbors may be the smartest people you know. Seek them out, and have real, good, conversations — preferably over beer.