Currently:
Product Manager at Shapeways
Studio Director at Toy Studio
The Trunk Club - by Trevor Gilbert of Pando Daily
Having met some of the Trunk Club people for myself at Tech Cocktail in Chicago I can say that this is truly what they encourage. Now imagine if Trunk Club had a lot more foot traffic and an already established household brand as many department stores. Rather than going through the chore of purchasing new clothes you were to go through the experience of never having to worry about it ever again. And, for that matter if you ever wanted to change some things up or needed to talk to someone you could just drop by your local store to talk to your assistant.
Trunk Club is exactly what every high-end department store needs. A subscription personal shopper service. Visiting the department store becomes more of a service experience, something special that when you do visit it is out of desire and because you are worth it. With Nordstrom’s acquisition of Haute Look I can only imagine that Trunk Club is already in someone’s sights.
The Curation-Over-Creation Trend That Fueled Pinterest’s Rapid Growth - Dave Copeland
I love Pinterest and the ‘curation movement’ on the web, but I’m cautious of making everyone feel as if they were a thought leader. Once we believe we are thought leaders what is there left to fantasize about? Why not just stay at home and curate a Pinterest board rather than work on a new idea. A bit drastic of a thought but I can’t help but think it.
The fundraising record on Kickstarter could very well be broken within 65 hours. The Elevation Dock is only a couple tens of thousands dollars away from breaking the $970,000 record set by LunaTik (interestingly enough also an Apple product project). Now, a few short hours after reading a post on how the funding record might be broken this month on Kickstarter a new project emerges - Double Fine Adventure.
In a few short hours this project from the prestigious video-game studio Double Fine has received up to $50,000 in funding. I believe that Double Fine Adventure could be a contender for the fastest backed project in the history of Kickstarter. With every page refresh the funding counter increases by $1,000-$2,000 dollars. Double Fine Adventure might even have the potential to break the Kickstarter funding record within the same month!
Tim Schaefer - founder of Double Fine - speaks in his Kickstarter video of how Double Fine doesn’t have to pitch to publishers for funding. They can pitch straight to their audience. Casey Hopkins of Portland, Oregon rather than taking out a loan from a bank or taking on funding pitched his product to millions of strangers and received backing to make his idea into a reality.
Kickstarter is our own self made future.
In one year Fab pivots their business and succeeds. This timeline is a great showcase of how they made it happen and their story along the way. It’s visual, it’s highly contextualized, and it has some damn good numbers in it.
Over a year ago I tried using Evernote. Everyone who spoke of it said it was a great service and that I should give it a shot. I was rather impressed with it’s ability to OCR my writing from a whiteboard and that was enough to keep me interested. The problem though was that I didn’t know how to use it so my sporadic Evernote use quickly turned into no use at all.
At the time I wasn’t really sure what I would use Evernote for. At first I thought I would use it exclusively for capturing whiteboard brainstorming sessions and I did. But when my whiteboard use dwindled so did my Evernote use. I remember trying to use it for project note taking but at the time, I did most of that on the studio’s wiki, project management software, or via e-mail. All three of those services provided me with rather substantial means of tracking and tagging my notes well enough so that I didn’t need to do much more.
Now, a year later I see the real power of Evernote. It’s not just meant for work, and it’s not just meant for play. It’s meant for my life. A collective digital scrapbook that I can scour at a moment’s notice. Whether it’s a recipe or an interesting game mechanic, my Evernote will give it a home and keep it safe until I need it. I didn’t quite understand that before my need for a service of that nature became so strong.
Almost over a year ago, a feature of a web service I use daily went unnoticed, lists for Twitter. When this feature was first introduced I asked myself, “Why would I want to make a list of people I follow? What would that list even be?” I couldn’t answer that question. Today I follow over 1,000 people on Twitter and lists make complete sense to me. Much like Evernote it wasn’t until I had a problem that Twitter lists showed it’s real value. I was having a hard time keeping up with people’s tweets whom I wanted to read on a daily basis. They were often hidden amongst several hundreds of other tweets and visiting their individual profile was time consuming. So I started a list of people whom I’d like to read every day on Twitter. The list works great and it really helps me keep up to date with those users.
So what does Evernote and Twitter lists have in common? They weren’t put in context to me when I was first introduced to them. I didn’t understand how either Evernote or Twitter lists would be effective yet yet now that they are effective, I can’t stop using them. Building a great service or a new feature is only half the battle the other half is presenting it in a way which will resonate with the target audience. Twitter could have created empty lists for me that could have been slightly suggestive as to the type of users I would add to that list. Entrepreneur, gamers, techies, any of those would have been great context for what lists are meant to do. Evernote similarly could have made suggestions as to how I should use their notebooks, and add media so it all makes sense and the value became apparent. In the end, it’s not just what you build but how you present it.
