Jonathan Kim

Living Lean

I got some sage advice from Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz of Wistia fame: live lean. The pair lived in a 10-person house spending $600/mo on rent combined and an average of $15/wk on food each. When “eating in” means staying in business one more day, every dollar really does count. The duo said that living lean is easy once you’re in the habit of it. “Start now,” they said.

The benefit? Endurance.

Chris and Brendan attribute their ability to endure the long and rocky ride of entrepreneurship to their ability to live and operate on very little. So that’s what I’m gonna do. Starting in June, I’m living lean(-er), cutting every spending category (except rent, since I’m stuck with a lease) in half, and continually reducing it each following month.

I’d love to hear suggestions on how to make this even more successful.

Super Powers

There are some people who I’ve met in my life who are damn good, who have given me the impression that I will probably never meet someone as good at X or Y as they are. And it’s because he or she has a super power—something that puts him or her head and shoulders above the rest. It’s led me to believe that super powers are soft skills that simply manifest themselves through tangible results.

Some people with really cool super powers:

Christopher O’Donnell: Focus

Even with a hundred great opportunities open to him, Christopher always finds a way to narrow in on the one that’s most important.

Elias Torres: Energy

If you’ve ever met him, the first thing you’ll realize is that he is absolutely tireless. He has more spunk and pep at 30-something than most people do at 15-years-old.

Ariel Diaz: Winning

According to his co-founder, Aaron, whether he has tried something before or not, Ariel always finds a way to come out on top.

So what’s my super power?

I’ve been seeking advice on super powers for a while now, and I’ve come up with a few guidelines to help me find my super power. While claiming that “winning is my super power” would sound cool, the benefit of having one is being able to harness it at will. I came up with 3 gut checks:

Have I already been doing it in some other form?
Does harnessing that power make me happier?
Am I actually good at it?

I’ve (tentatively) discovered that my super power is growth. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with this concept called kaizen: continual improvement. I may not be great at something right away, but I always get better, often significantly better, the next time around. It probably means I will never become an over-night success, and guys like Ariel will beat me quite often.

But given time, I too will win. And I will continue to win.

Should I Build My App with Meteor?

Meteor is trying to give the world a whole new way of doing development. If you haven’t had much experience with it, here are the highlights:

Everything is Javascript. Gripe all you want about the choice of language, nearly any programmer would prefer the option to go soup-to-nuts in the language they know best. This also means you can share code among the entire stack.
Super tight coupling between browser and database. You can literally write CRUD operations in the browser console if you want.
Shipping code automatically refreshes all clients. No need to dance your machines behind a load balancer or wait for caches to expire.

The above are things that I and my frontend dev comrades would love to have. That said, I still think Meteor is not ready.

I got the chance to chat with some of the engineers at a meetup recently, and they agree. Meteor has not yet reached v1, and there are still several issues they need to work out (scaling, packages, etc). Even then, the main thing stunting Meteor’s maturity is the lack of serious uses for it. While latency compensation and the DDP protocol are sexy, there is currently little reason to use Meteor over a stabler system unless you’re building something that needs realtime updates. Because of that, almost every app in the Made With Meteor list is some flavor of a chat client or leader board.

The day I consider it ‘ready’ is the day I can charge money for a Meteor-backed app. Despite that, I still highly recommend you check it out. The best screencast they have up is the one introducing user authentication.

Listening for a Hungry Stomach

The term, “hungry,” is something I picked up from David. It describes someone who has an insatiable passion, and it’s a characteristic that has been really valuable in my life.

It’s also a quality that I’ve tried to look for in others, but so far, it’s been difficult to pinpoint in conversation alone. Here are a few techniques I’ve tried (with mixed success). If you’re reading this, I’d love your help with this list, which I’m calling “The Hungry Stomach List.”

1. Looks for Tangents

The premise is that a passionate person is going to be familiar with topics that are tangential to the thing she’s interested in. So if a person says she’s interested in “icon design,” does she know about dribbble? Has a favorite icon library? Designed any icons herself?

2. Desires to Learn

A desire to learn is a great passion to have. A person who loves learning should have a history of not just being in good learning environments but also of seeking them out. Did he frequently take on a significant amount of responsibility? Does he do things outside of school/work to advance his education?

3. Desires to Improve

Some people love knowledge. But hungry people don’t just horde facts, they use them to inform and improve. A person who desires to improve is aware of, if not humbled by, what they don’t know. They don’t necessarily need to be the best, but they must want to be better on every subsequent attempt.

I’m at a loss of what questions to ask in this situation.

Solicitations?

I’m sure there are other key characteristics of a hungry person, but I haven’t found any good ways to flush them out in conversation. The best way to find out if someone is hungry is to spend a lot of time with them, but we don’t always have that luxury.

The Power of Objectives

The topics in this post are things I learned at an Intelligently class. I recommend checking out their list of classes.

I got the chance to hear Dave Balter speak about OGSM, an organizational framework made popular by Proctor & Gamble. Much of it was stuff right out of an introductory business course. “Set a big vision” and “have clear objectives” are obvious ones, but Balter positioned those lessons in a few ways that hit home for me. I thought I’d share a couple.

We Have a Goal, But What Does it Look Like?

Every blog on entrepreneurship says that startups should set a transformative vision. Everything has to “change the face” of something, which is fine. But how do those startups know when they’ve achieved that?

At HubSpot, our goal is to transform marketing, but what does that look like? One measurement we have is to “make marketers (and their materials) loved by their audiences.” But even that isn’t very easy to quantify. Balter recommends setting goals that are quantifiable and time-sensitive. E.g. HubSpot could set a goal of collecting 100 million organic leads for our customers by 2015.

By setting clear top-level goals, benchmark goals are easier to define and can be qualitative, as long as they work toward fulfilling the big goal.

How Do Our Daily Activities Fulfill the Company’s Vision?

So yes, goals are great and you should use them everywhere! A department can set a goal that helps fulfill the company’s main goal. An employee should set a goal that works toward her department’s goal.

An unfocused team can produce wasted effort. We see this when smart, well-intentioned people start initiatives to fix things that aren’t broken or win battles the company won’t benefit from. Cascading goals focus each unit in an organization. True clarity means that every employee, at any time, should be able to ask herself, “Is what I’m doing going to help us reach 100 million organic leads by 2015?” and get a clear answer.

So is OGSM the Best Thing Ever?

Meh. OGSM is a top-down approach to setting goals, which seems to be great for aligning many people under a single, vague mission. That might not work well for companies that want to set their goals from the bottom-up, aka from employees at the front lines who interact with customers every day. Executives at companies that dictate priorities need to be very careful that those goals are aligned with the market’s expectation.

When it comes to goal setting, a balanced approach is probably a terrible idea. Instead, a cyclical approach to goals might work best, whether it’s top-down or bottom-up. Regardless definitely have a goal.

If you want to learn more about OGSM, check out this blog post.

Unsizzle: A Simple Selector Builder

A while ago, I started toying around with a Chrome extension that would let me save a set of DOM actions and play them back. I did a bit of digging and found that there were already a few implementations out there, like Selector Gadget and whatever Optimizely is using.

Selector Gadget was last updated in 2009 and built for much older browsers. Optimizely’s code seemed decent, but it was dependent on jQuery. That’s not terrible, but it seemed unnecessary and lazy. So I embarked on writing my own.

With this very tiny library, I set out to do three things:

1. Accurately find the right node, every time.

2. Expose an API that was simple, memorable and flexible.

3. Create no dependencies.

As a side note, I’ve recently added a fourth mandate of making this library testable via Grunt.

With that in mind, I release to the world, unsizzle. The core API is as simple as can be. Simply give unsizzle an Event or Node object, and it’ll return a selector. E.g.

unsizzle(document.getElementByTagName('div'))
// Returns something like "#some-parent > .some-class > ul > li:eq(3) > div"

There are certainly optimizations to be made, but I’m hoping the wider community finds this little library useful. It’s great for browser plugins, bookmarklets and any situation in which you’d like to record a DOM action for later evaluation. Enjoy!

You’re Shipping It Wrong!

There seems to be no confusion around the action of “shipping.” Shipping is pushing something out the door; shipping is getting a product in front of customers. However, it’s easy to forget the reason for shipping: to get quality feedback, early and often.

The key word there is quality. When a person ships shit, the feedback he gets is that his product is shit. His more vocal, loyal customers will give him detailed analyses of which specific parts are shit, in addition to some feedback about how he can make his shit into prettier shit.

Helpful, right? Wrong.

Feedback on a shitty product often fails to answer the core question: is this useful? When a person ships shit, she doesn’t get to fully test the product she set out to make. Instead, her customers judge her execution of an orange when, “It’s really a work-in-progress apple.” In the end, she’s left with a lot of feedback on how to make the perfect orange, and no insights about better apples. In fact, she’s no closer to knowing whether customers even want apples.

This problem could be avoided by shipping in smaller batches. If the goal is to make an apple, ship just the meat/flesh. If people respond well to that, see how they like it with skin/stems/bigger/smaller/etc. Ship when the feedback is likely to answer an important question (and you should have important questions all the time).

Above all, when it comes time to ship, “cut out features, never cut out quality.” - David Cancel

Giving a product to customers is easy, but choosing what to give them is hard (and it should be). The feedback cycle is important, don’t waste it!

Huge thanks to David Cancel and Zack Bloom for the lessons and inspiration for this post.

Finding a Big Idea

Lately, I’ve been squarely focused on learning what makes a business truly great. The most insightful piece of information I’ve gotten so far was from Laura Lederman, a self-described Salesforce groupie. She said that great businesses target budding markets with little or no competition, then work to expand it with the expectation that market growth is a five-year process.

Great advice, but it also implies something else: that your idea/company should alleviate a broad pain that will be more widely felt the future. Basically, great companies predict markets by looking around at what others are doing right now.

I whipped up a quick diagram of how I envision this market timing working.

Assuming everyone is able to penetrate the market (e.g. build, market and sell) at the same rate, a company would get more value by predicting the market a few years before it exploded. The later a company latched on to this phenomenon, the less there’d be to reap from the market. Predicting too early is also equally deadly, since you’ll be running a business that has no customers.

My favorite examples of good market prediction are products like AWS, AppEngine and Heroku. Their platform as a service business model was so successful because they saw a growing industry of SaaS applications that would require technical infrastructure. They took all of the generic tasks and boiled them down to clicking a few buttons.

In the past, many of the ideas I’ve had solved my or someone else’s immediate problem. Now, the challenge is to find an idea that fixes the future. Should be easy.

Why There’s No Such Thing as an Aspiring Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs are doers—they go out and make things happen. They hack and hustle on their way to the top, and they’re driven by an insatiable, innate passion.

Entrepreneurs are not day-dreamers. They are not someone’s understudy. They are not in a dressed rehearsal. Rather, they’re live, on stage, and they’re playing “for keeps” with their time and money (or worse, someone else’s money).

I’m ashamed to say that for years now, I’ve called myself an “aspiring entrepreneur.” All along, I’ve ignored the most common advice of founders who I admire: that you learn most of it through experience. In that way, entrepreneurship is boolean: you’re either doing it or you’re not.

Many people have written about the many paths to becoming an entrepreneur. Some people don’t undertake it until they’re much older; some do it without any experience. Regardless of how long a person waits, the formula is the same: passion + action = entrepreneur.

I’m not an entrepreneur—I haven’t found my irrevocable cause, and I haven’t acted on it—but I’m no longer going to waste energy explaining how I “aspire” to be one. I’m a doer who wants to improve the world, but until I start doing that, I’m just a guy learning from someone else’s gamble.

</rant>

Timmy will make you feel better.

The Walking Meeting

I met a guy a few months ago who first introduced me to this idea. I can’t remember his name, but this idea stuck with me as one worth trying out.

He talked about an experiment he had been trying out called “walking meetings.” Whenever someone wanted to schedule a meeting with him, he told them he’d be happy to meet with them, as long as it was a walking meeting. He’d meet that person somewhere in the office, then they’d embark on a pre-selected route that took roughly the amount of time that the meeting was scheduled for.

It’s a funny way to do business, but it has two very compelling advantages:

1. Added stimulation

Instead of sitting in a small, stuffy room thinking about how you’ve spent the whole day sitting down, you’re outside benefiting from all the extra stimulus and fresh perspective of an ever-changing environment. It’s invigorating.

2. Meetings never run over

This is my favorite reason. When you’re in the office, there’s little pressure for a meeting to not run longer than intended. Everyone is comfortably seated and usually OK running 10-15 minutes late because what you’re talking about is always oh-so-important.

No longer! Now, you’re walking a predetermined course for a predetermined amount of time, and you and your guest both know it. Even better, the landmarks of your walk serve as mental cue cards, telling you roughly how many more minutes you have before the trip ends. “Oh, was that the Starbucks? I’d better wrap things up.”

It’s not a great fit for every kind of meeting, especially meetings that require visuals. But if you ever find yourself scheduled for a “quick overview” or “short catch-up” meeting, consider making it a walking meeting.

If you find success or failure with it, I’d love to hear about it.

Work at HubSpot and want to try this? Here’s a nice 30-minute route that takes you past Kendall Square, Voltage Café and the Charles River (1.4mi, approx. 28min).

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