Let a thousand flowers bloom

One of the big advantages of working at an agency for several years was that I’d come into contact with many people from many different industries. And by being commissioned to “build a website” for each one of them, I’d gone through the process of tying to understand hundreds of different businesses and business models. To do a good job on a website you have to really get to grips with what the client is all about, and often the process would turn into a kind of “patient and doctor” couch consultation.

I learnt a lot. Mainly about how different companies worked and how I might want to do things differently.

But what I wanted to learn next was how to go about building something where the intellectual property of the business was retained, and where a small group of smart people could make a scalable, sustainable, profitable business using the new technologies that were coming out.

I dipped my toe in the water and focussed on one idea. I’d recently become a father for the first time, and I thought “Mumsnet is very popular but where’s the equivalent Dadsnet?” After some research it was clear that there really wasn’t a good dad-centric online service around parenting available anywhere. So I set about building it. I surrounded myself with involved dads, gained some funding for a prototype and set about learning Rails as quickly as I could, whilst building the thing that would fill the gap.

It was to be called Odadeo - a social network for involved dads. It was beautiful, it was usable, I thought it was great. When it came to launching it, I thought it was a dead cert for an internet success story. But there were a bunch of problems that I’d not spotted until it was too late.

Yes, I’d surrounded myself with the “involved dad” set, who wanted a social network just like Mumsnet, but better, and for dads, but the trouble was that most dads aren’t “involved dads”, they’re just normal dads. And it turns out that “normal dads” probably want a shop, and maybe a forum. Not a fancy-pants social network about sharing the joys of parenthood. And I’d pinned my hopes on the latter by taking far too long to get out of beta, and I’d spent all of my time building instead of talking to my potential users.

It died. I think that allowing it to die was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made - I could have fought on, as I had done with 3form for years and years, but because of the finite funding I’d received that was that - I had to stop. I’d build the wrong thing.

I licked my wounds for a little while, but then I came to a realisation. The problem with this project was not that it was poorly executed - I’d done an excellent job on what I thought was the right thing. It was that I’d not validated early on what the right thing to build was.

And then I heard a quote - “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”. So said Linus Paul, and it’s something that I took to heart.

With the agency experience behind me, I’d become used to being able to come up with ideas very quickly for pitches. Through my rapid “learn Rails and build a startup” experience I’d gone from being an “ideas guy” to an “execute the idea guy”, so what would happen the next time I had a good idea?

My strategy was simple: “Let a thousand flowers bloom”.

Rather than focus on a single idea, like Odadeo, I would collaborate with people with some other domain knowledge, and rapidly build small web apps to demonstrate the idea. By throwing my net wide I hoped that I would be able to find a number of opportunities that I could work on. Each of which could potentially be a valuable business, or could be something interesting on the internet.

I started playing, and one of the first people I collaborated with was Andrew Dubber (now Professor of Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University), and we spent many an afternoon in our local coffee shop coming up with ideas for things we could make on the web. But interestingly, and very differently to many coffee shop conversations that may have occurred in the past, in the coffee shop we would make those things. I’d be there with Rails, building the bare bones, and Dubber would be helping talk through what needed to happen from a user’s point of view. It was a revelation - rapidly making things for fun was a good way of getting protoypes made. And people seemed to react positively to the idea that we’d hack something together quickly and then put it out immediately online.

One of our “hacks” (I’m not sure I was calling them hacks yet) was Twadio - a “silent radio station”. We were trying to make a comment about the insane nature of trying to licence songs for airplay, when we came upon the idea of a silent radio, where we’d just tweet song names, and then actual songs would play in the heads of the “listeners”. It was funny, it was very low cost (a handful of hours to build) and we got the app out over coffee as I recall.

By being quick, and using Rails to optimise for productivity (I’ve since learnt more about this, but at this point this held true) we were able to put out tiny first versions of these ideas and see what people thought.

Over the coming months I extended this idea quite wide, and tried to get a variet of things off the ground by prototyping them in public and having open conversations with interesting people. ⇠

Get back to the craft

Hack it in a day ⇢

Introduction

Stop feeding the beast

Get back to the craft

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Hack it in a day

Kill your darlings

Just do one thing

Go wide, go narrow, go wide again

Get good at getting fast

Not that kind of hack

Hack, play, learn

Explora labora torium

Think before you hack

And then what?

The hack is the message

How to decide what to make

Fail in parallel

Hack It Forward

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