Why This Is The Most Important Blog Post You'll Ever Read

The general trend of internet reporting goes something like this:

Here's Something You Think Is Good And Why It's Really Bad

And then the content of the piece is, "I am one individual who has a specific viewpoint about a situation informed by a personal experience that may or may not be representative of a broader problem. I will cherry pick certain statistics that directionally support my thesis. And then I will write in a matter that is ever so slightly (or not so slightly) condescending and patronizing so that the reader is convinced that what he or she thought was right is actually wrong."

The eZine Slate is a great example of a site with talented journalists that has migrated to the Buzzfeed style of content generation and promotion. I have been reading Slate for 6 or 7 years, and while I understand its evolution to "clickbait" articles (drives clicks, eyeballs and revenue), I find it disappointing. It seems like their writers stare straight ahead and pick something they see and then write an authoritative article: "Stacking Binders On A Shelf: You're Doing It Wrong And Why The Way You're Stacking Them Is Killing Your Kids And Will Lead You To A Nervous Breakdown."

Aaron Sorkin has a great quote: "While everyone deserves a voice, not everyone deserves a microphone." Twitter and Tumbler and Blogger give everyone a microphone. So talented journalists and websites have to follow suit and create content as quickly as possible and package it as sexily as possible to draw readers. Fine. It's up to the reader to choose not to read, which is particularly difficult when the headline screams "Why This Is The Most Important Blog Post You'll Ever Read".

Update - Some Examples:

Why I Stopped Writing Recommendation Letters For Teach For America - And Why My Colleagues Should Do The Same

If You Send Your Kid To Private School, You Are A Bad Person

We Post Nothing About Our Children Online

Is The NFL's Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign Better For Women, or Just Football?

A Whole Generation Is Missing Out On Great TV Because Of Netflix

Will Your Great Idea Work?

If you’re thinking about introducing a new product or service into the world, it’s helpful to have a solid framework to structure your approach. The model I’m proposing is born out of a synthesis of the many wonderful resources I’ve read along with my own first-hand experiences as both an entrepreneur and start-up adviser. It is designed to force you to focus on truly understanding the problem before you spend your valuable time and resources designing a solution or developing a broader business case. At another time and in another space I will expand on why following these steps are so important, and how they will help you make better use of the many great resources available.

One other note: while this model is relevant to any entrepreneur, it is particularly directed at the person(s) who has been hit with a spark of genius and has the guts to put that into action. Often, you are so enamored with the solution that has serendipitously appeared, as if in a vision, that you take the problem for granted. This can have dire consequences, no matter how “lean” and “agile” you are willing to be. Contrary to how “conventional wisdom” seems to be moving nowadays, pre-planning, research and analysis can help mitigate future design flaws, as long as it’s done correctly and you’re asking the right questions. On to the model.

• What is the user pain? This is still the right place to start. Always start with the problem, but spend some time here and be sure it’s a real problem. And do a little research
• What studies/research papers/articles/3rd party analyses exist that identify this specific pain and, perhaps, provide statistics, causes or recommended solutions?
• What comes up when you Google various search terms related to the problem/pain? Are there existing solutions? Interesting blog posts? Experts? Take notes – they may be worth contacting down the line
• Try stating this pain as an assumption or hypothesis and then come up with reasons that would falsify this hypothesis. Keep these mind as you develop your prototype.
• What is the cause of the pain? A very common mistake is to jump from the problem to the solution. “Shopping for groceries is a real pain, so I’ll build a website so that people can shop online.” This solution only makes sense if the cause of the pain is that people don’t like leaving their houses to shop for groceries, or that they cannot get a diverse selection. Understanding the true cause will inform your solution. And, as with the pain, make sure to differentiate whether your stated cause is itself a hypothesis or a fact. Hypotheses need to be validated while facts can be taken as given.
• To better understand cause, map out the current customer process. No detail is too small – who do they interact with? How do they interact? Phone, email, fax, text? What time of day? Are they with anyone?...you get the point
• Identify where along the spectrum are the greatest sources of pain and why. Quantify in terms of a measure of cost (time, money). Prioritize those pain points from greatest to least (ie 80% of pain is caused by 20% of the steps). You may be proposing a solution that is only marginally impactful and, thus, less likely to be adopted
• What is the cost of the pain? Cost is a key driver of adoption. People can understand tangible cost – in terms of time of dollars – and then properly assess whether they are willing to pay for a solution. If you can’t identify a true cost (other than “it’s annoying”) then you should think long and hard about developing your solution. And pointing to the success of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are not good enough answers.
• Try to quantify all costs in time or dollars and establish a baseline (ie an efficient process would result in $X and Y hrs to the customer, while the current process adds Z% of overage)
• Are costs recurring or one-time? Ie does the customer incur this inconvenience once and then forget about it or does it occur over and over?
• What are the direct (I pay) and indirect (someone else pays or it costs me in non-apparent ways) costs? Show me the money Lebowski
• What types of users have this pain? Now it’s time to go from general (social media users) to specific (photographers who regularly upload 2+GB of high-res photographs to various social media profiles for commercial purposes). This is especially hard since we’re often conditioned to think in terms of demographics (women ages 25-34 who shop online). The proper way to think about this aspect is to link the cause to the person. Even if it’s hard to target this person at first, that’s ok. Find enough of him or her and you’ll be able to generalize demographic trends that will inform your customer acquisition strategy. But the important thing is to ensure that these people are the FIRST people you’re speaking with when designing your product. They should get it at the outset – if they don’t, it’s unlikely the faceless masses will.
• Create a more detailed view of each constituency. This connects to step 2 in understanding the cause of the pain. Here you understand how your users live their lives. Try to create a few relevant personas
• What are the key drivers that would push someone to need help (think about it as trying to properly order cause and effect)?
• The goal would be to say, if you have the following 5 or 10 attributes you are likely to be in my target group
• Don’t confuse resulting attributes with predictive attributes (Eg assuming that women are your likely target. A woman is the target of a bra manufacturer because their product is specific to women. They may or may not be the target of an e-commerce site just because research, and my grandfather, suggests that they like to shop.)
• Build your solution and your business case – Now you’re ready for Steve Blank’s customer discovery, Eric Ries’ MVP and iteration and all the great minds of the interweb who can guide you on the VC pitch deck

You may often hear that the most successful entrepreneurs just start building. They aren’t seized by analysis paralysis. But I bet if you dig deeper you’ll find that they are able to do so because they are solving problems that they are already innately familiar with. I’ve always said that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a billionaire because he built Facebook. It’s because if Facebook fell flat, he would have built 20 more consumer product companies before graduating from Harvard and one of them would have hit. He didn’t need to research his consumers and Google alternative solutions. This type of development was in his blood because he built solutions for problems that he inherently understood. If you are one of the intrepid people who wants to follow your gut into unknown territory, you better do your best to create an accurate map.

So Will I Be Right?

As a quick follow-up to my recent post about Mailbox, Dropbox just announced that they acquired Mailbox in order to take advantage of their much-buzzed about email app. I can say that I was right: Mailbox went the Sparrow route (and quickly). Teaming with Dropbox - and gaining access to their 100 million users - is wonderful news for the team. Now it remains to be seen whether they can create a sticky, differentiated email client. And whether Gmail plays nice in the sandbox with one of its top Google drive competitors by ensuring smooth syncing for the folks who adopt the Mailbox client over their native (and rapidly improving) Gmail app. And whether more than a statistically insignificant percentage of email users (because 1.5mm out of 3.5bn worldwide accounts is still pretty small) will care enough to adopt the app with gusto.

Why Mailbox Won't Win

Mailbox has gotten quite a lot of press recently in advance of the release of their new iOS app, which promises to reduce email clutter and bring users to the ever elusive inbox zero. There's no doubt that Orchestra, the design team behind Mailbox, are brilliant app developers, having received accolades from their everyone-connected to-do list. But the question is - Will Mailbox Win? Or, from a business/longevity standpoint, will mailbox become a viable replacement email client for your mobile device?

Mailbox's most brilliant flourish has not been their design or technology - it's been their reservation system. By showing users exactly where they stand in line, as well as the number of people who are standing behind them, they have created a sense of anticipation around the app's release: "Dude, look at me, I'm number 1,750 and there are 22,000 people behind me! You better get in line before it gets too long." The important thing to note, though, is that the length of the line does not mean that the product itself is world beating - just that there's enough curiosity around what the product is to induce people to line up.

Email is an emotional tool for all of us because everyone has it and we use it all day, every day for our most important correspondences. Unlike social networks, which are self-contained universes of non-essential comments and pictures, email is a communication ecosystem that acts as the conduit for, and repository of, crucial messages in a variety of forms. Its flexibility as a medium - long form, short form, social, professional, pictures, documents, calendar, tasks, data storage, confirmations, deals - means that it is difficult to simply replace it because it gets a bit gummed up. As I've said in another post, that's like saying, "Man I really hate traffic, so let's rip up the interstate system and rebuild it with something more efficient." So back to Mailbox.

What problem is Mailbox solving, specifically? Well, they're saying that because we get so many emails, it's hard to manage that flow of information. Rather than dealing with the email in that moment (by replying, archiving, deleting or foldering), we need to remove it from our list and deal with it later. So the crux of the argument is, if you receive an onslaught of messages, a meaningful percentage of which you want to deal with later, you should use Mailbox PROVIDED that you don't use any tools included in your existing client to preform the same functionality. I'll concede that, especially with mobile clients, the work around for managing email this way is less than efficient. You'd probably have to create a "LATER" tag and then archive the message to create a similar process. But it wouldn't be as functional (different reminder times, etc.)

But the question is not what you get, but what you LOSE. Your mobile and (especially) desktop clients are designed to let you do all kinds of things, so Mailbox has to match that functionality and precision and then provide its value-added functionality on top of it. It also has to ensure that it syncs perfectly with the underlying server so that it delivers all of your messages properly. Since Gmail spoiled us 8 years ago with virtually unlimited storage, that's an awful lot of work to expect from a company with no revenue model who's competing against the incumbent clients Apple ($137bn cash on balance sheet) and Google ($48bn cash on balance sheet).

My prediction is that, of the 1.5mm people who stood in line, a very small percentage of them will abandon their existing client in favor of Mailbox. A smaller percentage will tell their friends - ie the Viral loop will dwindle to zero instead of growing exponentially - and Mailbox will find itself in the hairy predicament of not knowing just who it is targeting with this product. Perhaps with a big chunk of funding, they could be Xobni-esque and acquire more users and root around for a business model, but the likelier outcome - if they don't pull a fluent.io and "move on to different things" - is that they will pull a Sparrow and get acquired for their talent as designers and developers. And the beast of consumer email marches on...

How I took an old Yahoo Junk Account and turned it into a nice, clean, useful Gmail Account

This is a post for the anal-person in all us. As most people know, I have lived in the email world for the past year and a half as the co-founder of PhilterIt. Our entire premise is that email is better organized and managed into visual icons. To that effect, our first product was a brand new email client - a visual interface to delight the masses (here’s AOL’s exact copy). Anyhoo, in order to test our new email client, I kept an old Yahoo junk email account. This is the account that many millions of Americans keep - the address that you use to leave your footprint all over the internet without letting retailers find you at home, ie Gmail.

When we moved away from the stand-alone client to our new Chrome extension, I decided it was time to put our own product to the test and abandon the old, crusty Yahoo account once and for all. (On a side note, I’m pretty much drunk on the Google kool-aid, a point which I will post about later). With the help of email unsubscribe service Unroll.me, I turned this also-ran steaming pile of email into a useful repository of my most important brand messages. Here’s how you can do it:

Step 1: After setting up a new Gmail account, use the Gear dropdown in the top right hand corner to access the settings. From here,  select Accounts and Import and follow the prompts on the fourth line: Check mail from other accounts (using POP3). This allows you to auto-import all of your messages from your old account. It’s like a vacuum - it just sucks ‘em all out and into Gmail. (Note - set it and forget it for a day or so, in order for Gmail to get all of the messages and fully sync).

Step 2: Sync your account to Unroll.me and quickly unsubscribe from all of the many brands that have assaulted your inbox with offers you just don’t care about or need. This contains the influx, but what about the seven thousand legacy unread messages?

Step 3: Install the PhilterIt sidebar to Gmail (you must be using Chrome). PhilterIt will automatically detect and label all of your brands (Note: as above, set it and forget it for a few hours while PhilterIt reaches back and tags all the old emails in your inbox).

Step 4. Now here’s where you have to have some patience and throw on an old favorite movie in the background, while you’re on your couch on a cold, rainy Sunday. One day we'll get this automated, but for now, use PhilterIt’s instant search to pull up each of your icons. I just started by typing “A”, working through those and then moving on to “B”. It’s not fun, but it’s a one shot deal and, once you’re done, you’re done! As my dad used to say, “In the time, you’re complaining to me you could have already been finished by now!”

Step 5. Use Google’s native features to select all of your emails at once. It’s amazing how quickly your unread counter will decrease. You can even search within an icon if you only want to delete “Amazon deals” but want to keep confirmations and receipts. Either delete, archive, or mark emails as read. The goal is for the counter to be down to zero when you’re done.

Step 6. Use PhilterIt’s dropdown to select your personal messages and see what’s been buried in there. I found an old email exchange between my now-deceased grandfather, my brother and my sister. It was a real treat.

Step 7. Finally, use our one-click skip the inbox feature to set up a sidebar that matters. Pick the “junk brands” you care about: Amazon, American Express, LinkedIn, Groupon, and then ensure that only emails to those brands go to the icon, where you can check them periodically.

Step 8. Now that all of your messages have been either deleted or marked read, make the inbox work for you. Using Google’s “Unread First” view, you will now have new or unread emails displayed on to. Check periodically and unsubscribe from the new junk. And add new icons as emails come along (eg newsletters) that you'll want to read on your own time and in batches.

Just writing this down leaves me with a sense of peace. An inbox that was clogged to the gills for 10 years with 3,500+ unread messages, now has one unread message in the inbox…and that’s it! My personal, primary Gmail account remains personal and high priority, and this new account captures receipts, tracking information, flight information and other non-urgent email. Google - you win again.

How To Write and Deliver The Perfect Wedding Speech

I have been fortunate enough to be asked to speak at a number of weddings. This is an honor I don’t take lightly. Having also sat through quite a few cringe-worthy speeches from my fellow speakers, I feel compelled to share my tips for how to write and deliver the perfect wedding speech. Before starting, keep in mind why you are doing this: to provide an indelible memory for the bride, groom and their guests on the night before/during what will hopefully be the greatest night of their lives. You’re not doing this to be funny or entertaining for the sake of being funny or entertaining. The mark of a great speech is not that they remember you, but that they remember your words, specifically, the stories, jokes and sentiments about the bride and the groom.

Structuring the Speech

My tried and true method is the 2 (or 3) - 1 - 1 format. This means 2 or 3 paragraphs about the person whose side you’re standing on (in my case, it’s the groom), 1 paragraph about the bride, and then 1 paragraph about the two of them together. You begin by telling stories about the person whom you know best - this allows you to get off to a strong start with your best material and set the tone for the speech. The next part - that paragraph about the other person - is key. It demonstrates your willingness to welcome them into your life by focusing thought and attention on them independent of their spouse. It signals, “Jenny, Tom is my best friend, and but you’re special enough to me that I can speak about you as an individual rather than simply as an extension of Tom.” The final paragraph is designed to wrap up with the two of them as a couple. Remember, this night is about them, not him or her. It’s not Tom as an individual that we’re here to celebrate, but Tom and Jenny as a couple.

Joke, Vignette, Sentiment

Now, within the 2 - 1 - 1 format, you still need to share the right sentiments. How do you do it without coming across as mean, inappropriate, boring or overly sentimental? You combine them into each paragraph by opening with a joke/one-liner, then telling a supporting story, and ending with a warm sentiment that takes the sting off of your joke and keeps the tone positive and loving. Here’s an example:

David’s always been a terrible liar - let’s just say that if you ever plan on robbing a bank, he’s not the guy you want corroborating your alibi. In high school, we decided it was time to get shredded, so we found some shady muscle pills from GNC, which were pretty much a combination of caffeine and four about-to-be-banned substances, and decided to start a regimen. He said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t tell my mom. She’ll freak out.” Later that night, after our first workout, he gives me a call and says, “It’s over, my mom knows!” I said, “How did that happen? I haven’t said a word.” He said, “Well, I got home, she asked me how my day was and I cracked and told her everything. I couldn’t take the pressure!” Needless to say, Maria, you will have no problem with him sneaking around on you. But you can also rest assured that when David talks about how much he loves you and how much you mean to him, there is no doubting that either.

The jokes and stories should be benign enough that Grandma won’t be offended but descriptive enough so that the audience nods their heads and says, “Yes - that’s David!” If it’s too much of an inside joke, it will be lost on everyone.

Delivering The Speech

There are plenty of posts on public speaking, so I won’t recount them. But there are a few wedding-specific things to keep in mind:

• Don’t introduce yourself or spend time talking about how you know the bride/groom. This sounds counter-intuitive because everyone does it. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter who you are or how you know them. You’re obviously special (and credible) enough that they asked you to stand and speak. Most people there probably already know you. And the content of your speech will probably fill in the gaps (oh - they must’ve gone to college together). But, again, this is about the bride and groom, not about you.
• On that note, leave yourself out of it. This is not a reflection on your personal relationship with the bride/groom. It is an opportunity to speak about them - their quirks, great qualities and love for one another. Of course, “I” will come up in the course of the story, but stay away from using the bride or the groom as a foil to talk about all the things that have gone on in your life.
• If you screw up, forget your lines, or skip a paragraph, just pause - don’t acknowledge it. The audience has no idea what you intended to say. They only know what you’re saying. Likely, they are still processing what you’ve said in the past and won’t be paying attention. Just press forward.
• Finally, consider your audience and make it unique. If you are at a wedding where half the audience is Indian or Russian or Argentinian, add a quote in their language (properly vetted). Otherwise, they will tune out. While it’s not about the audience, it’s certainly helpful to have them engaged, laughing, and on your side.

In the end, just keep in mind the big point: it’s about the two of them, together, building a life with one another. Reflect on the stories that made them who they are and brought them together, leave out the parts that are best saved for the bachelor/bachelorette party (like substance abuse, stories about their exes, or how much they hate their soon-to-be in-laws), and remember to stay positive. And to that, I raise my glass and say “Best of luck on your next speech. May you leave the bride beaming, the groom grinning and the audience asking for more!”

Portion Sizes

My many friends who are doctors have long told me, “There are two things that are definitively and conclusively bad for you: smoking and obesity.” But unlike smoking, which is a fairly straightforward proposition (don’t smoke or be around smoke), tackling obesity is far more complicated, as an excellent special report in The Economist points out. In general, I agree with economists that the best way to encourage a decrease in consumption is through an increase in pricing; however, it’s hard to decide which calorie and form of calorie can be efficiently taxed to make a positive impact on obesity rates. Therefore, I support a piecemeal approach where, rather than tackle “the calorie” as an aggregate unit, we target sub-categories of calories. Specifically, I support the restriction of portion sizes for beverages that exceed a certain caloric threshold.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a lot of flack for restricting portion sizes for soft drinks in New York City. Many complained of paternalism or the nanny state, and saw it as an unnecessary incursion into personal liberties, as well as imposing onerous execution costs on store owners. I tend to be wary of reactive government intervention that seeks to score political points at the expense of effective action; but, as with the ban on smoking that changed social norms around smoking (contrast the atmosphere of Mad Men with how you might react today when you see a colleague sneak off for a  smoke), I believe this is a good step towards nudging consumers in the right direction for calorie management and consumption.

What solidified my support of Bloomberg’s plan was an unintentional experiment I ran on myself. I have been trying to drink more water - 8 8oz cups a day. I’m lucky enough to have a great water dispenser at my office. But I found I repeatedly missed that mark, drinking, at most, 4-5 cups a day. Then, I started bringing a 32oz Nalgene to work. I filled it once in the morning, once after lunch and voila - I have no problem drinking 8-10 cups a day. That simple. Nothing changed - my daily routine, my diet, my exercise - except for the size of the vessel I was drinking out of. While this is n=1, it’s indicative of human behavior - we eat (or drink) what we’re given. In the aggregate, it’s unlikely for every consumer who is forced to switch from 32oz of beverage to 12oz of beverage to replace those oz by purchasing a second or third beverage.

The impact of reducing your intake of sugary beverages is huge. Imagine if 20oz sodas were unavailable, and you had to make do with 12oz cans. Further assume that you drink two 20oz sodas a day. Saving 16oz of soda a day translate into 186 fewer calories per day. That’s one pound every 2.5 weeks or 20 pounds in a year! Even if you decide to add a third beverage to compensate, you still save 4oz of soda per day or 5 pounds per year. And, unlike the difficultly of effectively  substituting fruit for cheese or fish for beef, or an English muffin for a bagel, consumers are unlikely to face a trade-off with soda (or juice). It’s simply drink more or drink less, largely driven by how much is in front of you at any given time.

So kudos to Mayor Bloomberg and, as with the ban on smoking that eventually became de rigueur around the country, I hope that other cities and towns take note. A journey of a thousand steps just might begin with a smaller cup.