The other day over lunch at Shapeways we were discussing how important it is to just do something. When faced with a problem doing anything is always better than doing nothing. This got me thinking about habits and how we create them. 

A lot of times when you’re trying to solve a problem it requires persistent action. The problem of not being in good shape could be resolved by exercise. But you just can’t exercise one day and stop. You have to do this continuously. It has to become a habit.

The same goes for when your product. Your application, service, or any other product needs to become a habit. 

Sunrise.im is a calendar digest service. Everyday I’m emailed at 6AM a digest of what I have scheduled. I’ve never liked maintaining a calendar but I have to admit it’s helpful. Before I started using Sunrise.im I used my calendar sparingly. When I started using Sunrise.im I started receiving on most days empty digests. But it wasn’t accurate. The emptiness of the email made me want to control it. How dare this calendar tell me I’m not doing anything today! Within a few days the digest I received represented my day accurately. I had created the habit of adding events to my calendar.

Sunrise.im was successful for many reasons but the one I want to focus on is how Sunrise.im managed to become a habit. By Sunrise.im being sent to me every day in the morning it was looped in to an already existing habit of mine. From there the product itself changed my behavior. But it’s important to note that Sunrise.im used my existing habits to create and reinforce new ones.

Timehop has also done this in a similar fashion. A daily was sent to me and now that the app is available I check it on a daily basis not because of the push notifications but because it’s already a habit. 

The next time you build something you want people to use ask yourself what habits do I want to create and how will I reinforce them?

If yore building anything right now I’d love for you to share what you’re building and what habits you’re trying to create in the comments below. 

Rather consistently I read that one of the startup’s main priorities is to make smart hires. To ensure that that the open positions are filled with people who are a culture and skill fit. Yet most startup’s websites don’t seem to agree. They’re designed with unordered HTML lists, a color theme, and state the responsibilities of positions. But they do very little to convey anything about the most important thing about the startup itself, the team.

Your Team & Jobs page is your startup’s most important product. It’s how a startup’s culture, vision, and environment is communicated to potential hires. It’s the most important “sale” a startup can make when acquiring talent. When your startup is up against other employers such as Apple, Twitter, Facebook, it’s important to have a great first impression. 

Kickstarter and Square have upgraded their jobs and team pages recently. 

Kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/team

Kickstarter’s team page features a horizontally scrolling video of the entire team. It doesn’t just show you who works at Kickstarter but it also gives you a sense of their personality. If you idle the page you’ll notice the team interacting with each other. A brief description sits below this video listing all the team members. From this page you understand that ‘team’ culture at Kickstarter is a top priority. 

Square https://squareup.com/careers

The Square career page is divided into 3 main function of Square: Creative, Engineering, and Business. Each function has a video of an employee telling the Square story and each page is highly targeted at the specific function. Visit the engineering page and you feel like a developer built the page. It’s simple, and puts technology in the forefront. When you the creative function you immediately get excited. Schematics, blueprints, web apps, oh an iOS app and they all need to be built - by you.

Taking a look at the Square office photos they don’t just showcase the office building, they show the culture. Above you see a high bar with stools and monitors displaying statistics. The high bar represents a value in collaborative work, the statistic monitors how Square measures goals and their effectiveness. 

How does your team and jobs page measure up? Share it in the comments! 

It’s Sunday morning. You just finished brunch and stroll past an Apple store. You stop in for a quick look. After all you’re in the market for a new mobile. 

You enter and immediately see rows and rows of people using a MacBook, an iPhone, and an iPad. There’s the adorable family playing a game on the iPad, a group of teens updating their Facebook status on a MacBook, and a hipster scrolling through the iPhone’s playlist. They are all part of the Apple lifestyle, and after seeing them you want in also. After  hovering a few moments over some of the product displays and watching others use them you leave thinking an iPhone is for you. 

You head to your favorite nearby cafe for an iced coffee. While standing in line you notice the person in front of you is texting on an iPhone 4. It’s screen is cracked. They’re having a hard time reading the text because of the cracks. Their fingers aren’t seamlessly tapping the screen. This isn’t the Apple lifestyle you observed at the Apple store. Sure they might have been careless with their iPhone, but this could happen to you! 

Apple’s strengths in marketing is in their products and users. A cracked iPhone screen damages the strategy. If there’s one thing the iPhone 5 needs to do it’s never to fail the promise of the Apple lifestyle.