We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.
Paul Romer
There’s two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.
Enrico Fermi
Music That Is Interesting
I am a pretty regular poster of music on Strong Opinions. For one thing, it gives me a nice playlist that I can listen to as I have my blog linked up with Ex.fm. More importantly though is that the hunt for music on a daily basis makes me dig around the old music library for something interesting. And if you have been following closely, I generally post what is interesting rather than what I love most.
That might strike you as odd to post music that I did not truly love. It is my blog after all and I do not make any suggestions that I am trying to write a music oriented blog. Therefore there is no one that I am trying to please other than myself. While there could be a social element that could influence my posts, it is pretty clear that I am not attempting to curry favor or approval of anyone else. This blog and every single post is my own love of labor.
What I have found though is the stuff I love is incredibly limiting. If I posted the stuff I loved, you would hear nothing but Alice in Chains, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, with a smattering of Iron Maiden, Anthrax and a few other bands across metal, grunge, and classic rock. That is not necessarily a small amount of material, but it is pretty narrowly focused. That pretty much summed up my music listening habits for a good decade once I stopped playing in bands and buying music.
Over the past few years, I have been making a concerted effort to recover that lost decade. I am also trying to keep current, which is why I keep an open ear and mind to other’s posts, even those whose tastes seem diametrically opposed to my own. It has been a worthwhile exploration and has revived my moribund music collection as well as made me revisit parts of my collection that had been gathering digital dust.
So I will continue to search and listen and discover. It is an inspiration and a rush when I find things that are new and different. So I have given myself challenges by creating theme days like Metal Monday and 80’S Tuesday, participating in the awesome Cover Friday posts, and doing entire theme weeks like Latin Metal Week or Women That Rock.
That is why I prefer to post music that is interesting rather than music I love. The discovery is the game and the song that gives me that little bit of an endorphin rush is the win. Sometimes the rush is from the music itself, sometimes from the memories the music evokes, or simply from the feelings that are drawn out because of the music. I will still post songs I love from artists I admire, but there will always be plenty of random selections and theme weeks and the totally out of left field postings just because I find it pretty interesting.
The Nation of Taste-Makers
Codifying “via” links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem.
Honestly, once again, I think Marco nails it. I, too, am struggling with hat tip, and I’m relieved to find out that I’m on the conscientious side when it comes to via.
The symbols is just plain stupid. I saw them earlier on a different post and had absolutely no idea what they meant.
That said, I disagree with Marco’s assertion that giving attribution to the discoverer is unimportant. Humans need social cues like via and RT to create order from chaos - there are so many bloggers and twitter users, how do we know which to follow? Given attention is a finite resource, which people are most likely to reward me with good content?
Links provide credit to the original source, but we can’t follow every primary source on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo existed in the 90s and Google exploded 5 years later. And frankly, it’s a big reason why Twitter and Tumblr exist today - we need curators as much as we need primary sources. And attribution is the currency that separates curators from mundane readers.
Marco is simply dead wrong. He is stuck in mechanics of linking which is not an easy task to do well, but ignoring where the Internet is heading.
The Internet is simply too big to merely discover something anymore. Google is a hot wet mess of SEO hell. Everyone and their grandmothers have some sort of a blog or website. The amount of information pumped out on a daily basis is more than the sum total of information generation for all mankind’s history up till 2003. Think about that for a second, we are producing more user generated content in a day than exists in one thousand Library of Congresses*.
Dave is absolutely correct here. While folks like Marco may not call themselves “curators”, that is exactly what they are. They define and shape tastes because people like the stuff they create AND find. That is why Pinterest and Tumblr are so huge. What do you think all those reblogs, retweets, and repins are about? It is people giving social credence to your taste.
Taste-makers can now be anyone. This is the online equivalent of fashion magazines, art galleries, interior designers, food critics, and op-ed contributors. The difference is that anyone can now become an expert and the trusted opinion on a given topic. It is the Quora experience, the Yelp Elite reviewer, the Amazon Hall of Fame reviewer. Hell, I am the trusted opinion on all things dumplings because of my tours. Anyone can do some simple research and find great dumpling places, learn about Chinatown, and get educated on Chinese food culture. However, people choose to go on a tour because the alternative is hard and not as much fun.
Curation, taste-making or whatever you wish to call it is simply the democratizing factor of the Internet at work. Instead of getting caught up in curators versus creators is a silly argument because both are critical. Discovery is part and parcel to the creation experience because without taste-makers, most creations simply go ignored.
* This is merely the roughest of estimates so do not take this as an accurate measurement, it is merely to create a sense of scale.
The Rise of the Airbnb of Experiences
One of the hottest trends* in the past few months is the rise of tour guide startups. There have been a flood of entrants vying to be the “Airbnb of Experiences” over the past year, each looking to make their stake disrupting the tour industry. The big brother of this nascent community is Zozi which launched in 2010, then followed in quick succession by Gidsy, Vayable, Sidetour, GuideHop, Blink Collective, MyGuidie, and a boatload of other more locally flavored variations.
I can see the attraction that lures entrepreneurs into the market. The vast majority of tours really suck. What you pay for is usually some cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers service delivered by a disinterested tour company lackey with all the excitement of dried toast. Even if they have the outward appearance of energy and engagement, the tour guide secretly hates you, your questions, and your very tourist sensibilities. As for those really awesome tours, they are either hard to find or very expensive. What you are left with then is the choice of getting gouged by the tour operators, hiring a tout with questionable credentials, or buying a non-personal guidebook and going it alone.
The tour guide market is horribly fractured and broken, so an online destination that surfaces the best in unique and authentic experiences is a great concept. It creates competition in the market, and gives an opportunity for anyone with the gumption and experience to be a tour guide. From what I have seen, the types of experiences being advertised range from city explorations to athletic adventures to outdoors treks to truly unique and intimate experiences with fascinating people. The options that are available to people these days is truly awesome.
I have even had the occasion to use these services for my own nascent food tours. Having been turned onto Gidsy last summer, I decided late last year to use the service for my NYC dumpling crawls. Overall, I have been pleased with the ease of use for organizing and publicizing my tours. While I had contemplated using Eventbrite or Meetup to handle the basics like ticketing and payments, Gidsy was significantly more convenient at managing the core stuff and has does a great job of making the “experiences” standout through thoughtful design.
All that being said however, I question whether these services can scale in the way Airbnb has done. While anyone with a spare room could conceivably become an “hotelier” through Airbnb, not everyone is cut out to be a tour guide. The truth is that most people are simply not that interesting. The best tour experiences come from people that are personally invested in and have a burning passion for the subject at hand. For the economics of this business to work however, these services will require a lot of tour guides doing interesting and high-quality tours on a regular basis. That is easier said than done and as I had personally experienced, high-quality is a tough goal to achieve as a guide.
The other issue is that the market is already feeling crowded. Several of the startups I mentioned have recently secured seed or VC funding. Zozi alone had raised $11M in total and Gidsy collected $1.2M this month. Soon enough, we are going to see experience aggregators, daily deals experiences startups, and niche sites like the Airbnb of Eating Competition Experiences. All this is to say that for all the initial enthusiasm and promise, there is a lot more about the $60 billion tour market and growing a sustainable business than simply allowing anyone to become tour guides. The real vision is about cleaning up that massive, yet unruly market as much as it is about democratizing the market.
I am glad to see these “experiences” startups pop up. As with food startups such as GrubWithUs, the rise of meetups, and dating sites like HowAboutWe, there is a growing thirst for services that help identify novel and unique experiences towards some end. Particularly in large cities when the options are overwhelmingly numerous but equally hard to evaluate, having a service that helps guide folks through a well-maintained directory of curated experiences is becoming more and more important. Simply put, discovery is hard and getting harder over time as the quality of Google searches decreases with top links of questionable value. Instead of discovery based on content farms and SEO gerrymandering, the new era of discovery is both more social and better curated.
*Hot being relative of course, as the real hot market is in novel ways to blatantly copy Pinterest
Author Neil Gaiman on piracy. Most interesting point is towards the end when he recalls asking an audience where they came to find their favorite author. As it turns out, it is not bookstores.
The Internet at its best is the world’s greatest discovery engine. While search still has a long way to go (despite Google and Facebook stepping into dangerous territory with their walled-garden experiments), we are the better for the access to the information and resources available through the Internet. Before the Internet, information was locked away, business models were more regimented, distribution was tightly controlled.
Piracy gets more press than it deserves. There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth by the old guard media elites, who are forever trapped in their own intellectual prison and shackled by complacency. Instead of understanding and innovating, they would rather circle the wagons and break out the big legal and lobbying guns.
The world however is not waiting for this slumbering beast. We are evolving into a remix and sharing culture. The artists and creators that understand this shift will succeed in the end, because they leverage power of discovery that is only available via the Internet. This is exactly what Neil himself comes to understand, as has Louis CK, Radiohead, and many other artists who used the Internet to get discovered, become viral, and unleash hordes of new fans.
Best of the Week on Strong Opinions
Back to your regularly scheduled serving of wit, sarcasm and insight here on the Strong Opinions. Check out stories on the fixing the post office, sexy tech founders, music discovery, inane startup analogies, awesome ultrabooks, and the difference between gambling and investing.
As a BONUS, there is also another NYC Chinese Dumpling tour this Monday, so if you cannot attend, come back next week to here the results.
- Reinventing the USPS
- Check Out These 30 Hot, Sexy, and Young Startup Founders in NYC
- Music Discovery Continued
- Startups Are Like Unicorn Rainbow Pixie Dust and Other Inane Analogies
- Why My Ultrabook PC Is Okay
- Gambling, Investing and Startups
Enjoy and happy reading!
Music Discovery Continued
A couple of weeks ago, I heaped praise upon Ex.fm and Tumblr. They have been a revelation in helping me to discover music and feeling plugged into what is relevant and interesting. Without them, I would probably still be listening to the same Pearl Jam and Metallica records I bought over fifteen years ago.
There are a few other excellent services that have been instrumental with expanding my musical horizons. When I purchased a new car last year, I decided to try out the pre-installed SiriusXM radio feature. I have to admit a huge amount of skepticism at first as CD’s and radio had been perfectly fine for years. Let’s face it though, NYC radio is horrifically bad and lugging CD’s is a pain. As my “smartphone” refused to communicate with my car’s sound system (thanks Motorola for your stupid boot loader software), I was left with Sirius XM.
It turns out that Sirius XM was better that I expected. There were enough channels to flip through, and several worth storing in memory. My fear was that the playlists would grow stale, and though that does happen on occasion, the choices have been solid on the whole. Unlike with cable where you can have hundreds of channels with literally nothing on, if my regular stations are not doing it, I have several sports stations, a few public radio options, two classical channels, a solid jazz channel, and a channel dedicated to redneck humor.
One problem though with listening to music in the car, I would forget the artist and song titles of the music I liked. This is where SoundHound came to the rescue. While I hesitate to muck with the mobile while driving, SoundHound is pretty easy to use and very quick in capturing songs. I open the app, click on the massive “Listen” button, wait a few seconds, and the song is captured and logged. At the end of an hour long drive, I can usually build up a list of a few new and notable songs to download later. SoundHound also keeps a record of all the searches, so I have a pretty good log stored up of all the songs I have snagged.
One site that I had only used sparingly until recently is Soundcloud. I had started noticing the number of Soundcloud shares increasing in recent months though, so I decided to poke around more. I am glad I did, because it is treasure trove of great independent artists loading up their music there. Recently, I was searching for bluegrass music, and found a ton of classic as well as recent recordings. The week before, I was checking out Sub Pop Records uploads for some of their artists. Great tunes and easy to find and share.
The last great find in the music discovery area has been Noisetrade. In full disclosure, Brandon McAllister is a friend of mine from WeWorkLabs, but the site would still be awesome with the association. It works in a similar fashion to Bandcamp, but you can download for music from independent artists for free, and if you like the music, you can donate any amount back to the artist. I think this is a brilliant model that helps artists to build up a following and get paid for their work. On the flip side, for music fans, there is no barrier of having to pay upfront and music aficionados can refresh their music libraries with great, new music from up-and-coming artists. With a update to the website several months back, Noisetrade is much easier to sample different artists and peruse various music genres.
With these additional options, plus Tumblr and Ex.fm, I have doubled a music collection in just one year that took twenty years to build. I still have my old favorites like those crusty Pearl Jam and Metallica albums, but I am really enjoying expanding my tastes. There are plenty of other apps however for music discovery however, so I would love to hear what you are using!
Music Discovery
Over the last decade, my musical tastes atrophied. I was not in a band or playing gigs anymore. I stopped buying music. I did not attend a single concert. I was essentially stuck in the 90’s music wise as a whole decade of music passed me by. My music collection stopped at the Foo Fighters.
When I started my blog on Tumblr, it was simply to get something up quick without much hassle. As I started reading other Tumblr’s though, most of the people I followed were also sharing music. Some of it, like the stuff Bijan posts, is not my taste, but plenty of other folks, like WhitneyMCN and Jenrobison, have inspired me with the music they post. The point is whether I like the song or not, I still follow all these people and get exposed to music that otherwise would never cross my way. This was when I got back into music again.
Discovery is a tricky thing. The music we listen to is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to, which is generally the mainstream media and our friends. When we are introduced to music that goes outside of the bounds we are used to, the natural reaction is to dismiss or mock it. Most of the kids I hung out with in school listened to Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, not Joy Division, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. We mocked one kid relentlessly for a year because we found out he was an Amy Grant fan. We were not into discovery, we were into what we knew and what Kerrang, Hit Parader and Circus told us we should like.
Social networks have entirely shifted the game of discovery. Now we can collect and stream and share music all across various destinations. We are awash in awesome online music apps like Spotify, Turntable and others. My problem is that these apps are not really solving the discovery problem. My problem was that I wanted to expand my musical boundaries without being deluged with options while getting the balance right between playing it too safe and being way too out there.
Tumblr therefore was my default music discovery service. While I enjoyed checking out tunes in my Tumblr dashboard however, it was a pain to find music, especially music I liked and wanted to play again or share with others. Then I found Ex.fm, the most brilliant music discovery service ever. It is now my regular everyday playlist,. New music is getting fed into it every day from the people I follow on Tumblr, but the explore features help me break out once in a while to find new music and artists. My only complaint is that there is as yet no Android mobile version (only iOS), but I am sure they will fix this problem soon.
If your music has been getting stale, I recommend trying out Ex.fm, hooking it up to Tumblr, following some folks, and open up your mind. Good listening!
Confusion between Vision and the Journey
An exchange on Twitter between Dan Martell and Keith Rabois caught my attention several days ago.
It reflected many of my misgivings regarding the Lean Startup movement. I very much believe in having a strong vision and fighting through doubt and apathy to create success. On the other hand, I have seen firsthand how Lean Startup has revolutionized the trajectories of early start-ups and guided them through a systematic approach towards a successful and thriving business.
While the debate was interesting, I believe the underlying premise that big vision is incompatible with Lean Startup is false. There has been much noise around the polemic of the big, innovative idea versus the iterative, customer driven approach. The customer driven community views the big vision community as haphazard and dangerous; they might hit a home run one in a blue moon, but their batting average is hovering only slightly north of .000. On the other hand, the vision folks view the lean startup folks as small-minded and unimaginative; they might get on base by hitting singles, but they are not scoring runs. It is the “ask them what they want” versus “tell then what they need” argument.
However, vision and lean startup are not mutually exclusive and contrary paths. Quite the contrary, the best entrepreneurs incorporate lean techniques but are driven by the big vision. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry Page/Sergey Brin and all other successful entrepreneurs had a clear vision in mind, and that is the story we all know well. What we did not see was the journey and the many steps (and missteps) that they took along the way in reaching that vision. There were pivots and dives and tucks and all sorts of contortions to get where they sit today. In this way, Dan was correct in pointing out the discovery aspect, but not in the way he may have intended. The vision was there from the beginning, but the process of the journey refined and clarified the “how” of turning the vision into reality.
Keith was correct in saying that many great tech entrepreneurs had that vision and willed it into being. There are just as many entrepreneurs that discovered some key insight along the way that enabled them to bend reality to fit their vision as Dan alluded to. For Dan, the tool of choice just happens to be Lean Startup, and I believe that as a process of quickly discovering and validating a market, it is an invaluable tool that removes some uncertainty and risk from a venture. It is a stepping stone towards reaching the bigger vision.
The giants of the tech industry had a really big and somewhat audacious vision to change the way people behave or the way industries operate or the way our world works. Not every idea will be so big or even need to be so big. Rather than getting caught up in whether your idea is “big enough”, it is better to think about the type of problem you are solving. Are you tackling a broad and incredibly complex problem where there is no precedent or are you tackling a specific problem that has some proof points and validation of a recognizable problem? Once you know the type of problem you are tackling, then you can better assess your journey and the tools to use in guiding your way whether it is Lean Startup or some other approach. Just make sure you have a vision before you set off on the journey otherwise you may not end up anywhere other than in a circle, otherwise known as Pivotville.