For those afraid of heights (myself included), the general rule while up high is “don’t look down”. It’s a rather simple concept; if you try to ignore your altitude and avoid the thought of terror associated with the fall from your position, you’ll maintain your composure. Look down, beware the onset of panic.

Through the first 2 months of my foray into recreational cycling, I’ve adapted this mantra with a slight variation: “don’t look up”. For the tough stretches – the steeper hills of central park, the series of climbs in Palisades Park along the Hudson in New Jersey, and through strong winds on the water – I don’t look up. Upon meeting challenging conditions, I gather myself, mentally prepare, and plan far enough ahead to avoid major obstacles. From then on my eyes are on the 5-7ft directly in front of me, using the brim of my helmet as a shield to the view ahead; the hard work that lies before the finish.

The applications go far beyond athletics. Whether it’s a 2 week sprint to push the new iteration of Schoolbinder, or trying to digest a large amount of material for an exam, or pushing through recovery from surgery; the best way I’ve found to get to the finish line successfully is to have a rough idea of the requirements to accomplish what seems like an insurmountable task and don’t look up.

I find it works best for larger chunks of work that can’t seem to be broken down to pieces less than a week or two in length, and with the appropriate amount of preparation. This isn’t to be taken as hard truth, but more as a guide to maintain focus. You can and need to resurface to check your progress and reassess – but keeping head down will avoid the procrastination and doubt that often encroaches when constantly checking progress.

cycling · motivation · Startups

For a full explanation of what The Great Twitter Secret Santa is, and the story behind it, read this post.

A lot of surprising tidbits came out of The Great Twitter Secret Santa project, a number of which I find interesting because I’m fascinated by what can be extracted from a raw set of data.  From the signup trends to the traffic analytics, I learned a great deal about network effects, targeted audiences, and virility of social projects.

Signups

The infographic above (my first ever, so be kind) summarizes our sign-ups and ultimately the matching process.  We had 2,196 people sign up, where sign up is defined as providing an email address and at least starting the Twitter authentication process.  Approximately 645 of all sign ups did not fully finish the sign up process, and thus did not confirm our Terms of Service.  About half of that group did not authenticate with Twitter at all, leaving us with just their email address.

We then identified matches between the 1,550 or so left in our confirmed pool.  A match was defined as a another participant of TGSS that you follow and also follows you.  After determining all possible matches and over 700 did not have matches.  We were a bit disappointed by the large number of people who did not have matches from the onset, but given the nature of relationships on Twitter, it was to be expected.  Prior to this project, I suspected most Twitter users did not connect with the same group of people they would on a network like Facebook, given that it requires both individuals to execute a “linking” action and personalities are more obfuscated with Twitter.  While I can’t say with certainty that this is the case, patterns of matches amongst my group of friends who participated seem to suggest it to be true.

Left with 828 people who had at least one match, we were able to connect 530 individuals with one of their matches.  The remaining pool could not be matched because all of their possible matches were taken by the time the algorithm attempted to choose their secret santa.  I tested several methods for choosing matches, including matching randomly, or with the person with the highest/lowest number of matches, and used the best case scenario, which gave us our final numbers above.

We were hoping to include a higher percentage of those that joined, but a significant portion we had no control over (though we did send multiple reminder emails with match counts) and the remaining unmatched pool was a natural consequence of the selection rules.  As a result, we made the decision to have a “secondary pool”, for which participants were required to opt-in through an email.  The secondary pool ended at 166 people, who we matched according to the number of people they both followed.  It turned out to be a good middle ground to avoid randomness while still allowing a higher number to participate.  Interesting finding related to the secondary pool: far more support messages and deadbeats were observed as compared to the original gift exchange, even though it was roughly a quarter of the size.

Analytics and Coverage

Thanks to the help of a friend, we were the subject of a Mashable article and eventually featured as the headline story of ABCNews.com’s technology section.  As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time on Google Analytics hawking visitor counts and traffic sources for my other sites, I was glued to analytics for hours observing trends and figures.  Below is a screenshot of the traffic numbers we saw over the 10 or so days we ran the project.

Mashable

The Mashable article was our first major piece of coverage, coming about a week after we originally launched the site. While I hadn’t gave it a thought earlier, Mashable is just about the perfect major blog to drive signups; their demographic is comprised of social media directors, general digital enthusiasts, as well as entrepreneurs.  Their Twitter account has over 2.1 million followers – a monumental reach (and on the social network that we needed!).

As you can see above, we converted an astounding 52% of visits from Mashable (those that clicked through the article), as compared to 16% from Twitter and 14% from Facebook.  Having read countless case studies on conversion rates and observing the rates in my own projects, I was shocked at the Mashable numbers, and even fairly surprised at the overall conversion rate of about 20% for the site.

ABC News

The other fairly surprising bit from our traffic numbers came from our coverage on ABCNews.com.  Perhaps we overhyped the ABCNews spot amongst ourselves because it involved video content and ABCNews is such a major household name as we expected rather large numbers on par with Mashable traffic.  Overall, we saw 106 referrals from ABCNews.com to both the Great Twitter Secret Santa and The Great Secret Santa (Facebook version, for charity).  We converted 16%, about on pace with other referring sites, but the overall traffic from the coverage paled in comparison.  I attribute this completely to demographics – the readership of ABCNews technology is a much different crowd than the technology enthusiasts reading Mashable and our traffic logs confirm this.

Other Fun Bits

A little gem we realized about halfway through: in some ways we conducted a social media experiment on a set of people who spend a great deal of time trying to spread their ideas or products through social media.  As someone who has isn’t the biggest fan of the underlying motives behind social media and advertising, it was both interesting and mildly humorous to reverse roles and observe their behavior.  Granted, this is a bit of an assumption based off of a bit of random sampling of the people tweeting about the project, as well as the network of people connected to both Regan and Theo.  But it’s a hunch that has a small amount of backing.

The match determination process examined the followers and those following for each participant and compared those two sets with the participant pool.  A great majority of our signups were from people who had a higher number of followers than the number of people they followed – signaling a strength of presence on Twitter (even after removing outliers like Mashable and other major outlets).  As shown in the infographic at the top of this post, the average participant had 649 followers and only followed 461 (again, Mashable removed from this calculation).  These numbers are somewhat expected as this experiment favored people with strong networks on Twitter, otherwise they wouldn’t be matched given the selection process.

If you made it this far – congratulations on being as big of a data nerd as me – and I hope you found these findings/numbers interesting.  As I said in the last post, this project far exceeded my expectations and I’m really proud of what we were able to throw together.

If there’s anything else you’re curious about regarding the project, drop me a line.  And if you didn’t get matched, had a grinch, or something went wrong, we’ve learned a lot this year and hope to improve by leaps and bounds for next holiday season – so stay tuned!

No tags

Now that The Great Twitter Secret Santa has settled down a bit, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the roller coaster ride that became the month of December.  It far exceeded expectations and we gained a couple interesting insights in the process.  We experienced (read: scratched the surface) some of the emotional drain I tend to romanticize about startup life, from the initial excitement of the first working prototype to the frustration of a pesky bug that can’t be squashed to the adrenaline rush of watching your work spread across the web.

The Great Twitter Secret Santa was an idea brought to me by Theo and Regan to take the basic concept of a secret santa gift exchange and twist it a bit to incorporate people from all over the world through social networking.  Their intention was to pair mutual followers together to exchange gifts – all the while observing some of the cool interactions between those who may only know each other digitally through Twitter.

As a developer and rather vocal critic of Twitter I met the project with skepticism, but the workaholic in me generally doesn’t have the word “no” in its vocabulary.  I decided to take on the project assuming it to be a few extra hours to build something that may reach a small group of people

I threw together an initial design and prototype in about a day and a half – then had a two week sprint to launch the startup I work for and we almost decided to scrap the Great Twitter Secret Santa.  Running on fumes over the weekend, I managed to work out some of the kinks and we made the app live on December 2nd.  The first draft was rough, barely tested, and generally rushed.  I was okay with it – if it did well, then I could shore it up.

The following afternoon Regan shared it with his network on Twitter; and for about 2 hours the three of us were glued to HootSuite, watching word spread, signups grow, and people get genuinely excited about the idea. In reality, the few hundreds tweets that spread that Thursday afternoon barely caused a ripple – but it’s invigorating and incredibly motivating as a developer to observe even a small amount of buzz about something you’ve built.

It was at around 500 people that I realized I should probably solidify the code a bit.  I finally optimized (marginally), ran a few sanity checks, and discovered a rather obscure mistake I had made that caused a few miffed signups.  It was seemingly random, couldn’t be replicated locally or on the live site, and I just about wrote it off.  Then I get a tweet from someone at Mashable inquiring about the site. Oh shit.

Two Issues.  First, the “seemingly random” bug that occurs for 1-2% of visitors will be a nightmare from the traffic Mashable will send our way.  Second, we’re running the site on a server with 256mb of memory through Rackspace cloud hosting.  We won’t last more than 5 minutes with a setup like this.  Panic sets in.  I try to compose myself, pull down the code from Mercurial and start digging.  Through purely dumb luck, I pinpoint the issue while setting up the development environment and managed to patch it.  Bug fixed.

That leaves the hardware issue.  I hop on the Rackspace administration panel, fire up a live support chat, and in 10 minutes (and virtually zero downtime!) I have the most powerful machine Rackspace can provide for $1 an hour.  (Aside: I use Rackspace for 3 separate projets and I can’t praise them enough for the incredible service and support they provide).  Both problems solved 30 minutes before the article hits Mashable.  Crisis averted.

Throughout the next week and a half we accumulated signups in spurts, our browsers constantly refreshing, tracking the “santa” counter and continuing to be surprised at the growth.  We had some fun with the TG_SecretSanta account and kept the conversation going as much as we could.

The site wound down leading up to our cut off date of December 12^th, leaving me to deliver the matches on the 13^th.  I tweaked the site to close the signups automatically at 3pm (after all, I had other holiday festivities to attend to) and spent most of the 13th determining matches through a series of trial and error approaches to arrive at the most possible matches.

Night transitioned to early morning, and with the help of Regan and Theo the matches were mailed (thanks Mailchimp!), those who weren’t matched were notified, and we established a secondary pool for those who couldn’t be matched.  I’ll save the actual results and numbers breakdown for another post).

In short, a fun little idea that almost never saw the light of day put us in front of the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people in our target demographic (Mashable), and became the headline story for the technology section of ABCNews.com.  It made December a little more exciting, brought a few people together to exchange gifts, reallocated some wealth to a few charities, and taught us a few things.

The most interesting points throughout the whole ordeal, at least as a developer and someone working at a startup, were the concepts and mantras continually talked about being reinforced and validated.  A few of the biggest ones are below:

1. JFDI (think Nike’s slogan).  Sleep when you’re dead; work on as much as you can.  The time you spend deciding whether to pursue a small idea would be much better spent building a proof of concept.  Let your idea prove (or disprove) itself – and you may even find something much more viable beneath the surface of your original plan.  I’m a big proponent of throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.
2. Build the minimum and reinforce as you go.  Had I spent the time to optimize and get everything perfect on the first go-round, we probably would have never launched the app.  Build what’s necessary and let your users tell you what’s not quite working.
3. If possible, work with great people who share the passion and vision that you have and you’ll navigate any issues with ease.  Frustrations occur and issues happen, but trusting the intentions of your partners and having honest conversations mitigates the potholes that pop up in any project.  I can’t thank Theo and Regan enough for the awesome job they did to help support the development side while still keeping the wheels greased on Twitter.

For the data/number nerds, I’ll be following up with the breakdown of how we fared.  By no means did we have earth shattering sign up numbers, but we noticed some cool trends with those that did sign up and the matching proved quite interesting as well.

All in all, it was a few weeks of hard work and excitement in exchange for a little less sleep than normal.  And it’s another reason why it’ll be even harder for me to say no to the next project that comes my way.

Side projects · Social Media · The Great Twitter Secret Santa

Have you ever used The Point? Heard of it? Neither did any of the 850 audience members at the New York Tech Meetup on June 8th.

A few weeks ago a new segment was introduced entitled “What Happened to that Fail” at the NYTM. Basically, a presenter gives a short talk on their failed venture demoed previously on the NYTM stage. The inaugural subject was Andrew Mason, founder of “The Point”, a site created to harness the power of groups to get things done that normally can’t be accomplished alone. Like most entrepreneurs who cross the stage at the NYTM, Andrew presented the Point back in 2007 with high hopes of its potential to change the world and dramatically increase the power of people working towards a common cause.

After realizing that the site was just too unfocused and failing to gain traction, the team at the Point took a step back and attempted to leverage the technology they created to develop something a bit different and ideally, profitable. They took a small portion of the Point – group buying – brainstormed different ways to make it successful. I think we all realized where this was going – that small subsection of the Point became one of the fastest growing companies in business right now: Groupon.

The site went from idea to conception in about a month, beginning as a small blog called “Get Your Groupon”. “Get Your Groupon” used a small flash widget originally developed for The Point, featuring a daily deal only unlocked when a certain number of people committed to the deal. The site exploded as has been well publicized; in its 20 months of life, it’s spread to 18 countries, 150 cities, and sells 50,000 groupons a day. They’re currently amassing subscribers at the tune of 1 million people per month.

The best part of the entire interview:

Scott:

What is the “Hallmark after school special” take home message?

Andrew:

Shit that you read all the time. The biggest mistake we made with the point was being completely encumbered by this vision of what I wanted it to be and taking 10 months to build the product, all the while making assumptions on what people want that we then spent the next 10 months backtracking on instead of focusing on the one piece of the product that people actually liked. You’re way too dumb to figure out if your idea is good. It’s up to the masses. So build that very small thing and get it out there and keep on trying different things and eventually you’ll get it right.

If it hasn’t been driven home enough, failure can often provide the types of lessons that lead to future success. The Point swallowed their failure, abandoning their original goal of changing the world through the power of groups and honed in on a small segment of their original idea. They revolutionized deal discovery and amassed a $1.85 billion valuation, all by making things simpler and focusing on what people actually wanted.

Here’s the full clip. [Funny aside - this was directly after Meetup founder Scott Heiferman smashed an iPad with a sledgehammer]

Failure · Groupon · New York Tech Meetup · Startups

One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read is Western Attitude Towards Death, a rather short piece by Philippe Aries that documents the transitioning view towards death during the rise of western culture.  Death is a topic I’ve always found intriguing, as it’s the biggest uncertain certainty of life.  Every living organism will die at some point, and it’s safe to say that we’ll never be certain of what lies after until we encounter it.  Regardless of this rather indisputable fact, the attitudes and treatment of death has evolved greatly over the last several millennia.  What’s equally fascinating in addition to the uncertainty of death itself is the influences on society that alter the way it looks at death.  In almost all cases, direct ties to large periods of economics transition coincided with great changes in society’s attitude towards death.

Aries outlines the attitude and mentality towards death from the middle ages to the modern view on mortality, highlighting several of the key turning points during the time period in question.  His book takes the form of four essays, beginning with “Tamed Death” – a period of solemn acceptance of a necessary threshold – to the modern take he calls “Forbidden Death” – the widespread view that the effects of death should be minimized as much as possible.

Perhaps the most striking correlation between the treatment of death and economic transformation crops up when comparing the nature of western society to its view of mortality.  A plausible relationship exists between the level of commercialization (and subsequently, individualism) and the view towards the deceased.  During the Roman civilization, the level of commercial activity and trade between different providences was astoundingly high as compared to the years that followed its demise.  Aries does not comment much on the attitudes toward death during this particular time period, but explains the nature of burial grounds for the dead.  Historians have discovered that Romans engaged in the practice of marking graves with the names of the deceased, a measure carried out to maintain the identity of the dead.  This practice all but disappeared following the collapse of the Roman civilization, corresponding with a complete collapse of continental trade in Europe from the chaotic country sides.  Quality of life decreased dramatically, most of the population lived in fear, and the level of individualism became virtually zero as religion grew to be the central theme of the average person.

After several centuries, numerous innovations in technology and very gradual commercialization influencing even slower urbanization became a catalyst for the return of the importance of the individual.  At the same time, religious themes began to transform to a stronger approach, an attempt to maintain devout faith to the Church  as the fear of God diminished in society.  Aries describes a radical shift in thought concerning the time of death.  Before the 12^th and 13^th centuries, death was considered a long, expectant sleep, awaiting the Second Coming.  Upon the Second Coming of Christ, those who were devout to the Church would awaken in a “heavenly Jerusalem” while those who were not followers were never to wake again, damned to non-existence.  Just before and throughout the 13^th century, the idea of the “expectant sleep” transitioned to a judgment upon death, with an analysis of a “good/bad deed balance sheet” that dictated the faith of the deceased.  This development coincided with the shift of Jesus as a “feminine” and loving figure to a vengeful and judging force that occurred in the 14^th century with St. Augustine.  It’s more than conceivable that the thematic shift in religion was a response to quell the growing commercialized and individualistic culture that the Church opposed vehemently.

The Protestant Reformation would further alter the view on religion and consequently the attitudes of Europeans toward death.  Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, supported the rise of commercial activity, citing a deep religious connection between man and his work.  To succeed in an occupation was to succeed in God’s calling, providing motivation for commercialization and a direct connection between individuals and God.  Aries discusses the revitalization of marked and named graves, a return to the Roman practice of maintaining the identity and legacy of the deceased.  Again, this resurgence coincides with the rise of the individual in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.  Furthermore, since that time period, it can be argued that modernized countries have become more and more individualistic, and at the same time the attitudes toward death have continued to center around minimizing the loss of the deceased and extending the length of the human life.   While it is difficult to say with certainty that these movements are directly related to each other, mere coincidence is not sufficient in explaining the cyclical nature of both of these trends and their consequential nature.

In addition to the relation of the movements supporting individualism and the attitudes toward mortality, growing secularism can be attributed to transformations in how death was viewed.  As I mentioned before, the Middle Ages consisted of a chaotic state with a low quality of life, directly influencing the faith of those who lived during the period.  No scientific evidence attempted to explain the world around them, which left the explanations up to religion.  Additionally, their lives were spent in fear and suffering, providing a motivation for faith, as life was a means of suffering on the way to a glorious afterlife for eternity in paradise.  As commercialization gradually improved the per capita income for Europeans, individualism overtook the power of the Church and with the help of Catholic corruption led to the Protestant Reformation.  The reformation began a trend away from religion as the sole purpose for life, and eventually faith waned as time passed influencing an evolution in the feelings toward fatality.  During the Middle Ages until around the 16^th century, the deceased were buried in dirt near Churches to signify their devotion to God.  Charnel houses became the final resting place for many people, as the idea of individual tombs did not arise until much later.  The idea of a complete body was not an issue at this time period, as the deceased merely wanted their bones to be near those of the saints; whether their body was left intact structurally was of no concern.

However, as death took on a romanticized role in a secularized state contrary to its previous function in society, individual coffins served as permanent and marked “housing” for the deceased, meant to maintain their identity and allow visitation by survivors of the dead.  The decline in religion coupled with the rise in per capita income would have further implications.  With better nutrition, life expectancy increased to the point where depression ridden leisure classes developed in westernized societies.  While this occurred much later, it is a consequence of the growing conflict between the individual and death (both of one’s self and others close to them) from the “lack of fulfillment” set out during adolescence.  This development is a possible economic effect of Industrialization, as many individuals no longer provide the means of production for the output they produce.  This disconnect is one explanation for the romantic transformation of death during the 18^th century, as it provided a further sense of meaning in some ways.

Ever since I’ve taken courses on economic history, coupled with the books I’ve read on behavioral economics, I’ve been enthralled with this type of analysis.  The economic influences are obvious but few tend to look at the causal, long term effects of economic change on the intellectual nature and behavior of society.  If you found this essay interesting, I highly recommend reading Aries book cover to cover.  Not only is it interesting, it’s almost therapeutic.

Death · Economics · Life