Oink is an app released by Kevin Rose’s new lab company, Milk, which lets users rate everything in the world around them. Stamped is an iPhone app which allows users to put their stamp of approval on things in the world. Both apps are very similar but take different approaches. Oink lets you rate things with a thumbs up, a thumbs down, or as so-so (they call it “ho-hum”). Stamped, however, is all or nothing: you either give something you like a stamp or don’t rate it at all.
There are a lot of reasons why I like Stamped so much more than I like Oink, but I am going to focus on one key area: each app’s ability to be useful and actually solve a real problem (versus just creating more noise and being another useless social network.)
When you open Oink, you see a stream of things that your friends have rated, usually featuring a picture of the item very prominantly. Naturally, when browsing through this feed, I feel like I am looking through Instagram (only the pictures aren’t nearly as good). The fact that this is a feed of items that my friends have recently rated means nothing to me. Sure, it can be fun to look through pictures of items that your friends have reviewed to see what they think of the item. But when it comes down to actually wanting a recomendation (getting real-world utility out of the app), all these random ratings are just fluff and make the app useless to me.
Stamped, on the other hand, does exactly what I think an app of this nature should do. When browsing through the stream of recently stamped items by my friends, I know that everything I am seeing in the stream is something that my friend actually suggests that I should try (and would probably like). This is how real-world social interactions work. When you watch a movie you absolutely love, or eat the most delicious chocolate cake you have ever had, you will want to tell your friends. Stamped offers a platform to make this easy. Whenever something in the world gets your stamp of approval, you open the app and let your friends know. It’s that easy. When I am looking for a great place to eat, I don’t have to sift through noise, I can simple open Stamped and see a list of places that my friends approve of.
Most importantly, Stamped actually has a place in my life. While Oink may be a cool novelty, I can’t see myself using it on a daily basis. Whenever I experience something new that I absolutely love, I will remember to use Stamped to give that thing my stamp of approval. With Oink, however, the app seems to expect users to use the app regularly to rate all sorts of things — both good and bad. This means I am exepected to somehow make Oink one of the apps I use on a daily basis.
Both apps have potential and I look forward to seeing them itterate. However, for now, I give my stamp of approval to Stamped. I am ho-hum about Oink.
This is my response to a question asked in MLGen, a private group for young technology entrepreneurs.
Would you rather launch a product that is 60% complete, or hold on and launch with a better product that is 90% complete? — Shahed Khan
People often answer this conundrum by saying “you only have one chance at a first impression.” While I agree with this statement, I interpret it differently than most people do.
Instead of ensuring a good first impression by not shipping until your product is perfect, ship features as fast as possible, but stay honest with your users the whole time. Make them trust your product from the very begining. If they trust you, they will be willing to come back to see new features. And they will be rooting for you even if you make small mistakes and your features aren’t all perfect.
So I would rephrase and say “you only have one chance to gain a users TRUST.” So if you value design, make that evident from the begining. Don’t ship ugly stuff! But that doesn’t mean you can’t ship incomplete products. Let your products evolve. The users whose trust you have gained will help along the way.
It was four o’clock on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. I had just walked home from school and was already immersed in what I love—writing code, crafting pixels, and obsessing over my latest project’s emergent user experience. I was in the final stages of a web application project that I was working on with a friend I’d met online. Twitter was open in the background on my computer, which in retrospect, was probably not the best idea given how susceptible I am to distraction. “Steve Jobs is dead,” proclaimed a tweet as it scrolled past my screen. “Rumor, please be a rumor,” I thought in panic. The thousands of tweets that followed confirmed the truth. It was October 5th, 2011, Steve Jobs was dead, and I was crying like a baby.
Steve had been sick for a while, and intellectually I knew his death was around the corner. I expected to be sad when he died, but I didn’t anticipate how emotional it would be for me. The world lost a cultural icon, a great business leader, and a man who delivered a string of “insanely great” products. I lost something more. I lost my hero—a lifelong mentor I had met in passing but didn’t know. He inspired me to embrace being different, to do what I love, and to never give up on my dreams.
As I laid roses at the makeshift memorial on the sidewalk in front of the Jobs’s house that evening, something he said hit me: “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” His words gave me peace. He died much too young, but he died with faith in the next generation. He was passing the baton to a new batch of “crazy ones” like me who think different and want to change the world. It was a clear call-to-action, and one that I embraced personally.
Steve’s incredible success and public recognition, despite his character flaws and public failures, proved that being different was more than just okay, it was admirable. He demonstrated the value of a unique point of view, taking a stand, and demanding perfection. I am grateful that he taught the world to value individuality as it paves the way for me to be me.
Steve had a vision for the world that outlived him. He emphasized the importance of design, he was intuitive, he knew what consumers wanted, and he understood that simplicity is key. He saw a world where technology was human and would improve life instead of distracting from it. As someone who has shared this philosophy before I knew it was his philosophy, I feel a sense of responsibility to keep his vision alive. I had always hoped that, one day, Steve would be able to look at what I have created and be proud of me. Unfortunately, that day will never come, but I will always remember that, when he died, I was in the middle of doing what I loved.
In the end, I realized that his life had already affected me deeply. Although his death was sad, no one can take the lessons he taught away from me. It is now my turn to go off into the world, to live my own life and to set my own path—not to emulate Steve Jobs’s life, but instead to try to give the world as much as Steve did, so that when I die, I can leave knowing that the world is a better place.
Just over six weeks ago, I officially resigned from Teens in Tech, the company I joined over two years ago after being hired by Daniel Brusilovsky as a marketing manager. Over those two short years, I rose in the company’s ranks, serving as COO, then CEO, then CTO. I had a great run, spent a ton of time with people I care about, and learned a lot. I’m a bit sad to put the Teens in Tech chapter behind me, although I must.
As I reflect back, none of the job titles mean anything to me anymore. To be honest, they all really just blur together as no job title ever accurately described my role and what I provided the company. In my eyes, I was most importantly Daniel’s business partner the entire time (regardless of my rotating job title). Beyond writing code, I tried to keep the company on track and help Teens in Tech achieve its full potential. Even today, I attempt to maintain an advisory role, if in no other way than as Daniel’s friend.
Why no blog post has been written or announcement made about my leaving the company is a complicated issue, and quite honestly, not particularly interesting. What I can say, speaking only for myself, is that I have been intending to write a blog post about my departure for several weeks. I initially had so much on my mind (including high school final exams) and had no idea what to focus on or where to start. With the start of summer, I finally decided that it was time to post.
The following are my opinions and thoughts about Teens in Tech and why I left. They are relatively unfiltered and reflect my thinking process. I could have spent more time editing my thoughts and making them clearer, but I felt that might detract from the authenticity of the post.
Any company built on the premise of serving the needs of, advocating for, and bringing together huge numbers of enthusiastic teenagers with an interest in startups, entrepreneurship and technology has a ton of potential. The company’s mission is a good one as entrepreneurial young people need what Teens in Tech is trying to do. The company has done many things right over the years, most notably conferences, which for me have often been the highlights of my year. At the same time, expansion beyond conferences has been a bit hit or miss. Moving forward there’s a real opportunity to focus on the mission and achieve even more greatness.
Okay, Teens in Tech has a great mission and a bunch of unrealized potential. So why leave?
I am passionate about helping entrepreneurial teens. In fact, I’d love to lead an organization like Teens in Tech. My time as CEO, while short, allowed me to make a big impact on the company by deconstructing what Teens in Tech used to be, taking things back to the basics, and reminding everyone that Teens in Tech needs to be honest with who they are…and aren’t. But the simple reality is that Daniel was the founder of Teens in Tech and, as a matter of principle, he is and will continue to be the company’s leader.
When Daniel made me CEO and took the role of Chairman of the Board, we struggled to make it work. A company can only really have one leader, one visionary, one person to guide the company in the direction it should go. This is especially true in our case since our respective leadership styles and visions for the company were so different.
I needed to go so that Daniel could re-establish himself as the one clear leader of the organization. He can set the direction, make decisions, build the team. I’m happy to have left Teens in Tech on good terms—Daniel and I are still great friends, I still communicate to the board from time to time, and I even retained my stock in the company, which, regardless of whether it ever ends up having monetary value, is a meaningful symbolic gesture.
Now that I’m on the outside, I’d like to give Daniel and Teens in Tech three pieces of advice. Feel free to take it or leave it.
1) Daniel – perfect your skills, accept your weaknesses, and build a great team that complements your own talents.
Being a leader does not mean you possess the sum total of all the skills in the company with the added bonus of being in charge. If a leader was someone who could do everything by himself, he would not need to have any employees and would not have anyone to lead. Scaling would be rough, but you could probably find some kids willing to do what you tell them to do…at least for a while.
The truth is that you don’t have to know everything to be a good leader. In fact, you should probably assume you know nothing (at least nothing for certain). Look to your employees as your mentors, let them inspire you as you decide what the company should do and how to do it. Your job as leader is to keep everyone else on task. If you do this right, you will naturally come of as if you are a strong, determined, skilled leader that people trust and want to follow.
You will seem a lot more genuine of a leader if you accept your weaknesses and compensate for them by choosing employees whose strengths are your weaknesses, instead of assuming your weaknesses don’t exist and trying to do something you don’t know how to do. Asking for help and admittedly not knowing how to do something is one of the wisest things a teenager, like us, could do. If you try too hard to be an adult, you will be a fraud. If you accept your youth and ask for help, you will be unique in that you are young and will be wise for your age.
2) Focus, focus, focus!
This one applies to the whole company. It is so important to focus on defining a unifying vision that guides everything the company does. Everything you contemplate doing should be bumped up against the vision. Everything you do at the company is about making sure that every product, every idea, and every endeavor that the company takes on fits snugly into the vision as if it were a puzzle. Someone should be able to look at Teens in Tech as a whole and know what Teens in Tech stands for, not just what the incubator is or what the conference is or what the blog is, but how it all fits together to help accomplish the organizations vision.
3) Commit to a brand image and an internal culture to match.
If everything you do reinforces the whole, you’ll be able to build an image that is easy for customers and partners to understand. Someone will be able to look at your company and instantly know how you can help them.
As for the culture, it is important that all Teens in Tech employees know how to act, how they will be treated, and what they can expect. This way, employees can feel the most comfortable and will, in turn, be the most valuable to the company.
Perhaps, even more important, a culture needs to be defined for the customer’s sake. Zappos and Amazon are great examples of this. They really care about their customers, provide great support, and are generally friendly and supportive. Teens in Tech could really benefit from defining a culture that is welcoming of all teen entrepreneurs, teen bloggers, and teens interested in technology in general.
Your target market is immense–teens worldwide–just be careful not to turn any of them off. As you know, word spreads quickly.
The world of teen entrepreneurship is interesting. In our everyday lives, we stand out among our classmates and peers. Most of us probably live at least two entirely separate lives. We have our normal, “offline” friends, but then we live in an entirely different world online. Online, we’re all connected to each other in some way or another. When one of us starts a project, we’ll usually draft some of our entrepreneur friends to work on the projects with us. This is a great way for us to get to know each other better and have the opportunity to work with friends. A great group of smart friends is one of the most valuable resources you can have when starting a project or company, especially as a teen. All of this is great, but I think it has gone a bit too far.
As a teen entrepreneur, it’s really hard to say no to all the opportunities we come across in life. In our minds, saying no means giving up on yet another possibility to become the next Facebook, Google, or Apple. We seem to have this idea that we need to do as many things as possible to increase our likelihood of succeeding. Teens are creative and filled with great ideas. Many teens, like me, come up with new ideas on a daily basis.
When I first got started a few years ago, I would do something, learn from it, and then move on. I would do this over and over. And in the beginning, this was a good thing. In order to learn quickly, I needed to experiment with lots of different things and I didn’t care about making something that would last. This worked great for learning, but once I actually wanted to start a project and turn it into something incredible, I needed to learn how to focus and make tradeoffs.
I have so many opportunities to work with friends on their projects and it would be so easy to say yes. I used to think it was cool to have as many projects on my resumé as possible. But recently, I’ve realized that I was wrong. It’s better to do a few projects really well than to be involved with everything but do nothing really well. Additionally, when I would start my own projects, I would have a lot of enthusiasm at first but then I would be tempted to move onto new ideas that I considered better.
Moving forward, I’m only going to work on one or two projects at a time and try hard to stay focused. Other teens should do the same!
I think teens should stop hiring their friends for jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. I can’t count the number of times that teens create a group of their close friends and then make up jobs for them to do. This is a horrible idea! Especially because most of these teens already have projects that they are working on themselves. This is exactly where the problem of teens having too many projects begins. Having friends to talk to and share ideas with is great, but you don’t have to be working on the same projects to do so. In fact, I think it’s better when your both doing your own thing. In my experience, when you have to many people working on a project, you get way too distracted in dealing the “business” stuff and have very little time left to actually get work done.
I think teens should each choose one project to focus most of their attention on and do it well. If there is something that their friend legitimately needs their help on, than they can do a few more projects. But, for the most part, focusing on one thing at a time is a lesson that every teen entrepreneur needs to learn. Some of us have learned this already, and others will soon realize it.
What I’d like to see more of in the teen entrepreneurship community is advisors. There are so many of us with fantastic ideas. While we shouldn’t be working on too many projects, being an advisor to a friends company is a great opportunity to share knowledge and experience with each other. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see more teens helping each other out and less unnecessary job titles and random projects that distract us from our overall goal—success (and happiness).
Do you agree?
It’s hard to realize how isolated your life can be, how different you are than the rest of the world, until you experience what it’s like to live on the other side. It’s nearly impossible to deny that I live, breathe and experience cutting edge technology in my every days life.
Sure. We all know it. The Silicon Valley, the place I call home, is an incredibly atypical community. It’s the home to some of the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. It’s not surprising that people’s lives in this area are vastly different than those of people in the rest of the world.
After spending 12 days away from technology while at Hidden Villa summer camp I have discovered just how fun it can be to live without relying so much on technology in my daily life. There is a whole world out there, waiting to be explored. There are thousands and thousands of species of trees and plants and animals that don’t use an ounce of electricity. There are even people out there that don’t own a computer and their lives seem to be going great.
Inside the bubble, life is so predictable. So boring. So ordinary. So planned. So stressful. I feel pressured to tweet about what I’m doing at all times. I feel obligated to stay up to date and read TechCrunch, Mashable, Engadget, VentureBeat, AllThingsD, The Apple Blog, 9 to 5 Mac… (the list goes on and on.) I feel like my friendships are defined by Facebook. I feel like knowledge of startups and new gadgets equates to importance in life. I feel pressured to always buy the newest things when they come out. I sometimes mistake the internet for the universe and I can’t possibly imagine life without access to the internet.
I have internet wherever I go. I am never disconnected. If I ever have something that I feel like sharing, then, by all means, I can and will share it at that instant. I have internet at my house of course. But, I also have internet on my phone. And I have a 3G connection on my laptop. When I’m connected, I feel like I am inside of a bubble. No matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, everything and everyone that I care about is at my fingertips. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting at home at my desk or out and about doing my thing. If something happens, I am notified immediately. When Michael Jackson died, I was out at lunch but I knew immediately because I had my iPhone with me. When Billy Mays died, I was in the Grand Cayman on vacation. When Facebook bought FriendFeed I was waiting for my lunch.
When I get up in the morning I go on the internet and read TechCrunch, update my Twitter status and go on Facebook. Whereas, in much of the world, people spend their mornings milking a cow or enjoying breakfast with their family. During school, I continue to update Twitter often discussing what I felt about a test or sharing random thoughts that popped into my head during class. I then will text my friends to find them and meet for lunch. At lunch, I usually scan TechCrunch, go on Facebook and read people tweets.
I feel like I have been living a life that is defined by connectivity. I get the feeling that there is nothing to do when Comcast goes down or AT&T fails once again. I feel like I have to be connected at all times or else…
It’s hard to imagine what life would be like without the kind of constant connections I rely on today. While I most definitely can’t fathom what it would be like to live in an era before the internet, I can’t even picture what it would be like to not have access to your email whenever you need it. For me, knowing stuff makes me tick. I am the kind of person who would say something like “have you heard of Brizzly” and have no one answer me with a yes.
When I was getting ready for camp, I was thinking about how hard it would probably be for me to survive without an internet connection. At first, I couldn’t believe what I had gotten myself into. But then, I realized that I had to make it through the twelve days, it’s not like I was going to literally die because I couldn’t read TechCrunch or update Twitter. So with that attitude I went to camp where I did things like make french fries from potatoes which we picked and I even walked a goat through the woods. All of this without an internet connect.
It turned out okay. Actually, it tuned out amazing. I couldn’t believe that I had done it. I am now back at home where I have the internet once again. But now, I don’t find the internet as amazing as I did before. When I first got home I went strait to my room and grabbed my laptop. I thought there would be so much for me to do. After all, 12 days without internet means a whole lot of Facebook notifications and TechCrunch articles to catchup on. Sure, I was right. A lot had built up while I was gone but I just didn’t care. What I really wanted to do was go outside and have fun in the real world.
Now, when I find myself glued to my computer reading each and every TechCrunch article, I think about how fun it would be to be taking a goat for a walk. I now know just how fun the world that mother nature has created for us can be. The world is filled with billions of people who are living their every day lives just like those 12 days I spent at camp. Billions of people who don’t give a $#!+ that Facebook bought FriendFeed.
So, perhaps the best way to live is in the middle. Technology is something that I am passionate about. There is no use ditching it. I just don’t need to be so addicted. So, next time I see the Fail Whale or AT&T goes down, I don’t have to feel like the world is coming to an end. Maybe it’s just a sign.
As Dr. Carl Sagan once said…
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.