Ade in Business

I launched a new blog called Pseudocoded. It’s something to express a more silly, creative side.

The idea came to me last week and I decided to just run with it. I’ll keep writing here as well, but I thought the content would be too divergent to mix it with regular posts here.

Enjoy.

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header('Location: http://www.pseudocoded.com');

I ran across a really interesting article at strategy+business by way of Businesspundit. The article’s premise is that there weren’t enough failures during the dot com crash:

The 50 percent failure rate of the dot-com era still seems high, until we put it into perspective. Compare the dot-coms to other business realms: From 1996 to 1998, for example, the survival rate for independent restaurants open for three years ran 39 percent.

…the low failure rate indicates that too few entrepreneurs were funded and too few new ventures launched. Had twice as many been launched, the short-term failure rate for individual businesses might have been higher, but a larger number of successful business models would probably have emerged, and these would have led to more enduring businesses in the long run.

It was really easy for all of us to scoff at the dot com companies that crashed, dismissing them as being doomed from the start. And I have to admit, even now I regularly find myself shaking my head at some of the new startups I see profiled on sites like Techcrunch, and wonder if we’re on the verge of seeing history repeat itself.

But what if that’s just part of the circle of life in the business world, and we’re not really trying out enough “stupid” ideas? If the article is right, the mathematics suggest that web entrepreneurs as a whole should risk trying out even more ridiculous ideas, saturating the market in order to figure out the best business models.

When you think about it, how much more stupid is it to start a new Flickr or YouTube competitor today as it is to open a new coffee shop, casual Italian restaurant, or ice cream stand?

If the statistics are right, it suggests that either the market for web-based businesses is under-saturated or the failure rate is just lower than brick-and-mortar companies. Either way, that’s good news for would-be web entrepreneurs.

(By the way, if you’re on the fence about whether or not it’s the right time to move forward with your business idea, make sure to read Paul Graham’s excellent essay on why to not not start a startup.)

I’m happy to announce that August Trometer is joining Recursive Function as a web developer. He’ll be spending most of his time working with me on software development. He hasn’t been here more than 20 hours yet and he’s already knee-deep in PHP code.

August was most recently working on his own creating cool Mac desktop applications for FoggyNoggin Software. He also built and maintained DotMac.info, a news and community site for everything .Mac related. Prior to work at FoggyNoggin, August co-created the popular application iPodderX, the first podcasting application with a graphical user interface. He comes with extensive expertise developing web applications with PHP and MySQL, and has some mad Photoshop skillz to boot.

Please drop August a note to welcome him. If you stop by the office, you might even convince him to let you take a sneak peek at a developer release of Leopard.

And yes, he’s got an Aeron too.

A few days ago a friend of mine posted his thoughts about 37signals and Basecamp, their flagship product. He mentions that users he’d signed up on his Basecamp account didn’t end up using it, and speculates that it’s because the application isn’t user-friendly. As evident from the comments, a number of other readers share the same frustration with Basecamp. A few people also chime in to voice dissatisfaction with other 37signals products.

For those of you that don’t know, 37signals is one of the darlings of the Web 2.0 world. They’ve built a suite of successful web applications, have a large number of readers on their blog, and published a popular book on how to create great web applications. To suggest that their products aren’t well designed and user-friendly is outright blasphemy in a lot of circles.

As I was thinking about Doug’s post, I came across an interesting article in the Washington Post by way of the Freakonomics blog. The Post ran an experiment where they took Joshua Bell, an expert violinist, to a Washington D.C. subway stop and had him play beautiful pieces on his $3.5 million violin.

I hate to spoil the ending, but Bell played for about an hour and went largely unnoticed. He collected a mere $32.17 for his time, even though he can sometimes earn $1,000 per minute for his work.

I would like to think that I’d walk by Bell in the subway and be struck by his talent and the beauty of the music. But in reality I’d probably rush by, annoyed that some guy was allowed to play that loudly in public. And with all honesty, even if the venue had been more appropriate and Bell had my complete attention, I probably wouldn’t sense that I was in the presence of a master. But if I knew who he was beforehand I would probably feel overwhelmed with appreciation.

Here is the key question posed by the Post article:

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

We ask this kind of question about classical music and abstract art, but why don’t we ask it about technology more often?

It’s hard to say that Basecamp isn’t user-friendly when everyone points to 37signals as the experts on creating user-friendly web applications. It’s hard to say that the iPod is mediocre if everyone feels like it was an object of perfection handed down to Steve Jobs from above. It’s hard to say that Google Search returns irrelevant search results when everyone calls the engine the greatest tool of the web age.

The Post asked Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, what he thought would happen in the Bell experiment. He was pessimistic, but his estimate still far exceeded the actual results. I think those of us that subscribe to dozens of “what’s new in technology” blogs and digest the content every day are in a lot of ways like Slatkin. We live and breath technology, so that puts us closer to Arrington, Godin, Graham, Kawasaki, Scoble and Spolsky than the 1,000s of people walking through the subway.

It seems right to say that Basecamp is awesome. But if nobody on your team wants to use it that doesn’t compute. Are they ignorant, or are they just seeing it sans hype?

Would Basecamp pass the subway test? How about the many products featured on Engadget and Techcrunch every day?

I’m finally in some new office space, located just south of Castleton mall here in Indianapolis.

I’ve been working on this for the last couple months and it feels so good to finally get settled in. I’ll write more about the process later, but for now you’ll have to settle for pictures:

My desk, in desperate need of some cable management.

An empty desk, awaiting a new owner and some art on the wall.

This is where the interns get to sit.

It’s always time for coffee.

A beautiful view of the parking lot a nature preserve.

Come visit, or just send gifts:

6525 East 82nd Street
Suite 215
Indianapolis, IN 46250
(317) 842-2863