An Innovative Instagram Use Case

Tags:apps, innovation, instagram, Mobile, photography, Social Networking, startups.

I’m late to the Instagram party (I define late as discovering my first name has already been claimed as a username; if you’re curious I’m grabbed Tylda instead) and I’m hooked. Its simplicity makes discovering images a joy and its community is overwhelmingly positive, lacking the anonymous trolls that usually plague public comment threads.

And, while photos can be posted to multiple other social networks, those connections are not visible to other users, putting the focus squarely on photography. On Instagram, who you are is defined only by how you see the world, a refreshing departure from most social networks profiles.

Most people share photos and interact with others through comments and likes. One user, @assingm3nt, innovatively built a community around his account, posting topics for photo contests to his followers and highlighting the most interesting submissions with a followup photo:

Instagram might not have predicted this use case. That’s one of the fun surprises about building something: You never know how users will interact with your product. If you listen, you can find inspiration to improve, or just enjoy the innovation.

What Does Journalism Have to Do With Startups?

Tags:journalism, skills, startups, writing.

I’m asked this question often and was reminded of it while reading Mark Copeman‘s post on lessons learned during the first 100+ days of his startup, one of which was:

Every task seems to be writing oriented – writing the app, writing the site, writing the alert emails the system will send, writing the welcome emails, writing the landing pages, describing the app, blogging about it, emailing contacts about it – the list is endless.

Aside from writing, storytelling, research, organization, clarity and interviewing/reaching out to people who know more than you are also invaluable skills. What else would you add to the list?

Photo by dbdbrobot

Harry Potter and the Deathly Startups

I finally saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows and was nicely surprised by how close to the book it was, in comparison to previous films.

Harry, of course, experiences a number of close calls, but what struck me was how he escaped them. Despite  his best efforts, he couldn’t survive on his own but someone from his network always happened to turn up in time to help him.

There are parallels in running a startup. Most founders are unique and possess strong skillsets and tools to launch an idea into a company, but no founder can make it entirely alone. We all need some saving sometimes.

Should Startups Mimic Nature?

Tags:Biomimicry, ITP, nature, NYU, startups.

I’m taking a course titled Designing Living Systems at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program this semester. The course has little to do with journalism and startups, which is great because I believe stretching the mind in new directions can help propel it to find solutions in familiar fields. Sometimes it’s best to step away from your field of expertise for inspiration within your own field.

One of the suggested readings is a book titled Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus, which explores ideas and technologies that echo nature as a way to create more useful and sustainable products.

Benyus offers some observations about nature in the first chapter, and I can’t help but wonder whether some of these are good considerations startups as well:

• Nature runs on sunlight
• Nature uses only the energy it needs
• Nature fits form to function
• Nature recycles everything
• Nature rewards cooperation
• Nature banks on diversity
• Nature demands local expertise
• Nature curbs excesses from within
• Nature taps the power of limits

Perhaps nature can inspire business ideas as well. This is one the ideas I’ll be contemplating throughout the semester.

Illustration Flickr’d via Peter Durand.

Learning From Founders Who Failed

Tags:event, Founders @ Fail, lessons learned, meetup, startups.

Tonight I attended the Founders @ FAIL meetup, whose purpose is to celebrate and learn from failure by telling stories of startups that had a lot going for them but didn’t manage to make it.

It’s a good idea, since failure can be a better teacher than success. College multi-player web game GoCrossCampus founders Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer walked us through their experience from building a product to raising several rounds of funding, to making hasty decisions for the wrong reasons until the money ran dry. I won’t recap the entire talk, but I will share a few tidbits that stood out:

• Five co-founders was too many and resulted in blander choices. “You can’t make decisions that appease everyone in the room.”
• Every founders’ meeting felt like a board meeting. “People say you should go into a board meeting knowing what you want to accomplish and leave it with approval.”
• GoCrossCampus built the product to maximize the number of players, not revenue. The company was forced to pivot mid-way when investors wanted more growth of the latter.
• The team spent their seed round on paying an outsourced development shop. More development was needed as the site grew, and subsequent rounds were soaked up by outsourced development costs as well.
• The company’s product development became focused on pleasing investors to score another funding round. Brad and Matthew advised having a four to six month “runway” of a road map before raising money at any given time. They said at the time, they had a negative-two month runway for GoCrossCampus and became dependent on raising more money once every four months or so.

Their story was interesting, but beyond the points above, a lot of their lessons learned centered around the challenges of targeting a college market. They learned a lot, especially since, as students themselves, they were surrounded by their user base, and it was doubtlessly helpful to anyone working on a product targeting their the same demographic. For someone contemplating a different age group, however, it was a little too zoomed in.

It’s difficult to give general advice based on a specific experience. Subjectivity is inevitable and every case is unique, but it’s a skill to pull wisdom from a distinctive experience that can be applied to unrelated examples.

On the flip side, it’s also a skill to hear specialized advice and apply it to something more general. I don’t claim to have mastered this art, but one piece of advice on marketing to college students caught my ear:

“The more you can empower college leaders, the more effective your marketing will be. Give someone a way to look good.”

Good food for thought in any kind of marketing.