Stop Pushing me Around

I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity as of late. How do I get the most out of my days? How do I make every minute well-spent? How do I accomplish what I set out to do in the beginning of the day.

I was having coffee in NYC with Ryan Holiday and this particular subject came up. He told me about how he gets a tremendous amount of work done on planes. He never opt-ins to buying wifi, because that’s just a distraction.

It then occurred to me what the enemy of productivity is. The enemy is push. Push notifications in all it’s forms, SMS, twitter mentions, path updates, emails and it goes on and on and on.

We’ve been trained that it’s okay to be interrupted by these notifications. We are supposed to have our fingers on these digital triggers or else we are deemed rude or douchey. And hey, most of us are cool with it because it only takes a few seconds to respond.

These notifications although disguised as harmless little things ruins the key to getting good work done. The key is flow. To be most effective and efficient, you need to be distraction-free and focus on that task at-hand. Interruptions get you out of the zone. 

The solution is simple. Don’t let push notifications push you around. Block off your day into slots for doing different tasks. 1 hour to give feedback on your friend’s project, 1 hour to code that feature, 1 hour to spend quality time with your mom etc… Then schedule some time in to answer your notifications in bulk. 30 minutes in the beginning, middle and end of day for email, social media responses can occur all at the end of the day etc… Whatever works for you.

One caveat, this requires a ton of obedience. It’s so easy to just mess up and go check Twitter or Facebook. But remember  if you stick with this, it will deeply improve the quality of your business and personal life. With less time wasted, better work done and more time to spend with friends and family, you’ll be happy you’ve given up getting pushed around.

What are some ways that you combat the push? Do you use any tools? I’ve heard good things about AwayFind. 

5 Life Hacks That Will Make You More Successful

I’m an anomaly  By the age of 24, I’ve had the opportunity to brush shoulders with billionaires, impact millions of people via the internet and build fortune 500 internet strategies. Plus, I did it all from Montreal, Canada, with no Harvard degree (frankly, no degree, I’m a comp sci dropout) and with no capital. It’s thanks to these life hacks like these that have help these opportunities present itself. Below I’ve shared a few:

1. Be memorable with people you want to know better. A few months ago, I saw Daniel Eckler’s investor presentation on TechCrunch. I knew I wanted to invest. But he was getting bombarded by the Dave McClure’s of the world, and it was a tough deal to get into. So when I heard that he was flying into Montreal for 2 days, I asked him if I could pick him up from the airport to save him some bucks. At first, he thought it was kinda stalker-ish, but hey, I had 23k followers on twitter so how crazy could I be. I picked him up and then showed him around Montreal. He’ll never forget me. 

2. Do 3 things a day. The night before you go to sleep, write down the 3 major things you want to get accomplished the next day. The next day, you will wake up with focus and make sure you accomplish those things the next day. 

3. Don’t check email in the morning. If you were anything like me, you wake up and the first thing you’d do would be grab your phone and check your email. Forget email. Remember, you have 3 major things to do. The world will wait for you. Early AM is the best for tackling key problems.

4. Bring smart people together. When my friends at Dwolla were eager for some marketing ideas, I brought together a conference call of some of the smartest internet minds on the planet. The call included stars like Andy Ellwood (Gowalla sold to Facebook), Dario Meli (Hootsuite/Invoke and now Quietly), Rory Olson (4 exits, 2 IPOs) and viral marketing genius & growth hacker extraordinaire, Andrew Sider (now at Bunch).

5. Take life notes. Document what your key learnings and key insights. You’ll forget about the journey and the process if you don’t and it will help you when you make key decisions. Guys like Shane Mac have written books like Stop With the BS in 24 hours based on life notes. 

What are some of your favorite life hacks?  Comment below.

For more life hacks, follow me on twitter.

How to hit critical mass with your startup

In real estate, location is king. Location, location, location, right? The equivalent on the internet is distribution. distribution, distribution. Distribution means taking a feature of your product and integrating it on a partner’s website or app. 

If you build it, they won’t come.

A lot of entrepreneurs have the mentality, that if you build a great product, in a big ass market, it will automatically achieve critical mass. Wrong. The UI/UX could be killer and it can have all the right viral hooks in it, but without major strategic alliances or key distribution partners, the time to hitting that critical mass is tremendously longer.

Distribution is one of the unspoken keys to consumer web startup success. It’s largely based on social capital. Make a target list of your ideal potential partners and make it a goal to friend the key people there.

That means, you need to be regularly flying out to hang out with these people. Not just for formal meetings and conferences, but to develop deep friendships over drinks and real experiences. Be genuine with them and connect with them on a deep level. Don’t sell them on your startup the first time you meet them. People do deals with people they feel comfortable with and it’s unlikely you’ll do a deal after a cold call and a first meeting.

How you do it. 

Your startup is the best in the world at one thing. This is your core value proposition. For example, for Path it’s private sharing. For Foursquare, it’s location discovery. 

Over time, your target partners will learn what exactly your raison d’etre is. After all, you should be oozing your authentic passion for the problem your are solving. Once you’ve built the trust, position your startup as a value add for your target partners. Every startup wants to create as much value for it’s user base as possible. Sell them on the fact that an integration would add value for its user base, so it’s a no brainer because it makes their startup more valuable (and after all, we are all just trying to create as much value in the shortest amount of time).  

Recap

Step 1: Make a list of target partners

Step 2: Shmooze your way into this circle

Step 3: Prove value add for their userbases

Step 4: #win 

Pick a Big Ass Market

You are starting a company. You have this ‘great’ idea for an app or something. You’ve read The Lean Startup. You know exactly what to do. You are going to launch an MVP, iterate and going to raise millions of dollars. Your face is going to be on TechCrunch. It’s so clear and the crowd goes wild?

Wait. How big really is your target market? Even if you do achieve product/market fit, is this really a venture-scalable business?  Is your company merely a feature or a company trying to own a big market?

Below are some examples of big markets.

PayPal, market: payments

Instagram, market:  mobile photos

Foursquare, market: mobile location 

Spotify, market: music

Boxee, market: TV

Kohort, market: groups

Facebook, market: social!!!

Picking a big-ass market ensures you have the potential to pivot your product significantly because you have room to do so. It helps give you the confidence that you can one day pay back your investors. It allows you to gain significant market share once  you create a product/market fit (assuming a viral loop is built-into the product).  Most importantly, it takes just as much work to create a small business than a big-ass one. 

So don’t forget, find a big ass market.

So You Want to Change the World Through Tech? Go to Silicon Valley.

Attention Non-Silicon Valley Residents,

            Is your dream to change the world through technology? I know it’s mine, but I’m going through an internal crisis. Because I can’t live in my city (Montreal, Canada) if I want to follow my dreams.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Montreal. The quality of life is unmatched.  My friends and family are here and I recognize the importance of that. I also strongly believe that the city can produce companies with exits in the 1-50MM range. But, people who believe they can come up with the next Facebook in a city like this must realize the huge disadvantageous forces at play.

 I’m not talking about 1-50MM exits; I’m talking about changing the world. To change the world through technology means creating a startup that seriously disrupts huge markets. For example, Paypal (payments), eBay (commerce), Facebook (social), Zynga (gaming) and Google (information) have all achieved this.

My thesis is that these world-changing companies are ripe only in first tier cities (NYC, London, Hong Kong…), and the ripest in Silicon Valley. It is substantially (100-1000x) harder to successfully create a startup that changes the world in other cities. It is naïve to think otherwise.

There are three main reasons:

1)   The high level of social capital concentrated in these areas. I.e: if you have a Facebook gaming startup, perhaps you have a connection at Zynga headquarters in San Francisco that can give you some pointers that makes the difference between success and failure.

2)   The abundance of capital and access to sufficient follow-on financing to really scale the business. In places like Montreal, there is no VC firm that can scale a company the size of  Twitter, for example.

3)   The sheer experience of entrepreneurs and employees .  I.e: in Silicon Valley, there are bigger failures and bigger successes, and employees have the opportunity to learn from the experience of this elite set of entrepreneurs. In cities like Montreal, the amount of 100MM exits are a small fraction of what they are in the Valley. The management of those companies have a tremendous amount of knowledge that they can convey to other tech entrepreneurs. With less big exits and successes, less knowledge is conveyed, the talent is less knowledgeable and thus the ecosystem is less competitive.

 A startup is like a plant. The environment in which a plant is in is like the city where the startup is located. Sure, a plant can grow with just sun and water, but with the perfect combination of water, sun and even vitamins, the plant has a much better chance of reaching record growth heights than an environment with not the right mix of variables.

I wanted to write this post, because I believe there are many entrepreneurs and future-entrepreneurs, who have the intellectual capacity and entrepreneurial vision to be the ones to shape the new world, but they are stuck in environments which inhibit them.

We must come to terms with the reality of the situation and the continued significance of geography in terms as it’s significant factor in seeing success.

What are your thoughts?

 

The Rise of the Anti-Social Network

 

Last week, Google offered to buy Path, a private mobile social network for 100 million plus a 25 million dollar earnout over four years. Path, an “anti-social network”, rejected it. This signified the beginning of the rise of the anti-social network.

Definition anti-social network: A social network that allows a limited amount of people to communicate and connect, with a user-experience created that is focused on creating a environment that is respectful to privacy.

Anti-social networks like Path would have not succeeded a few years ago. It has to do with the maturation of social media and the associated societal effects of the widespread mainstream consumption of social products.

Let’s talk about how we got here.

We are all addicted to social media. 2005-2010 really marked the golden age of social. Web startups tried to socialize everything from music (Rdio) to videos (YouTube) to business listings (Yelp). This converged with the rise of smartphones and made social media accessible everywhere, anywhere and of course, freely. The iPhone App Store allowed for the socialization of mobile with companies like Foursquare and Gowalla popularizing social check-ins.

Social media succeeded because it spoke to an inherent human need, the need to connect with one-another and to communicate. Along with that, social products had little-to-no user-acquisition costs because they were inherently viral in nature. This allowed many entrepreneurs to create social products at a low cost. This was very different than the 1990s when web companies needed to raised money through IPOs largely to acquire users.

Another inherent human need however, is the need to remain private. People don’t want to share everything. Consumers have already begun to realize how much they are losing when they are sharing (reputations, jobs…). “Anti-social networks” act as solutions for these consumers as they allow them to share, but with a certain degree of privacy.

The large social media players will not be able to be a social network and an anti social network at the same time. For example, although Facebook has added a layer of privacy features, they are largely hidden and the focus remains to create the product as social as possible. After all, their mission statement is “to make the world a more open and connected place”.

This leaves a void, an opportunity for startups like Path and Diaspora to own the anti-social network space. A plethora of interesting anti-social networks will succeed over the next few years. Welcome to the rise of the Anti-Social Network era.