Information Agriculture

Users are the bread and butter of any type of social network. They are a network's component pieces: its publishers, owners, critics, advocates, and consumers. And every one of them is a real person with distinct needs, interests, and habits. For a network to be useful, it must cater to the needs of an incredibly diverse community and provide value for a host of different user types.

For the information addicted web-worker, Pinyadda's value is almost immediately apparent. It takes the work out of using your RSS reader. Anyone who uses an RSS reader regularly can understand that. But the RSS reader remains a tool of the few, and not the many. So how do we provide value to the other 90% of potential users?

The answer is simple: we provide access to relevant content they were previously ignorant of. We like to think of the Web as an egalitarian paradise where any piece of information is available to any user, but the reality is that getting more than cursory value from the Web requires a skill set and technological understanding that represents a pretty high barrier to entry. Most users visit search engines to find information, email to communicate with friends and colleagues, and social networks to establish connections with others. But beyond these relatively simple uses, the value of the web is lost on the average user. Massive amounts of data that could help users make sense of the world around them exists, but it's diffuse; scattered across thousands of websites and blogs, buried in directories and hierarchies and archives.

If you know exactly the type of information you're looking for, search works great. If I want to find the address of a business, the name of public figure, or a bus schedule, you can't beat static web search. But if I want to use the web as a news portal to find out what's happening the world around me, search is complete failure. It's a static resource in a dynamic world.

We can do better. There is a way to break down the walls of knowledge and training that keep most users from getting the most out of the web, and we're building it. While Pinyadda's appeal to the uber-user is important to us, it's the ability to harvest data on the web and deliver it to the average user that will make Pinyadda both successful and profitable.

Think of it like information agriculture. We're your new farmers.

Walking the (Bottom) Line

Yesterday's Alpha release coincides with a big week of business for us when we return from Saturday's festivities, and it got me thinking about the need to balance the internal and external aspects of our company. One of the hardest things we have to do as a small team is find the right balance between product and production, by which I mean spending the right amount of time on product design and development and the right amount on networking, marketing, positioning, and pitching. It's a tough line to walk but one that I think we're doing pretty well with.

As a team, we're in agreement that we should spend as much of our time and energy developing the best product we can. Without that focus, we're nothing more than words on a page. But the need to raise capital isn't going away, and as a group we understand the importance of keeping our eyes wide open when it comes to the market opportunity and the way we position our business. Yes, we think Pinyadda is the coolest thing in the world, but it's first and foremost a business venture that demands our constant scrutiny and focus.

The great thing about our team is that everyone clearly understands both sides of this equation. Each product innovation represents a new business opportunity, which in turn leads to more product improvements. When done right, the interaction between business strategy and product strategy creates a positive feedback loop that drives both innovation and ROI.

As much as preparing for meetings with investors may seem like a chore to some entrepreneurs, it's an amazingly useful exercise. Considering an outside perspective is crucial to avoiding the groupthink trap, and formulating our value proposition forces us to constantly evaluate our long-term vision and make sure our short-term actions are directly related to achieving those goals.

As entrepreneurs who are absurdly obsessed with our idea, our initial urge is to think of raising capital as a necessary evil that will allow us to get back to work on the product. But in reality raising capital is great a way to always be asking ourselves the question "is this idea worth the work we're putting into it?" As long as the answer remains a resounding yes, it's more likely that both users and investors will find value in our product. If not, it's a sign we're doing something wrong and need to re-evaluate the direction we're heading in.

At XSITE last week, Tilman Genross, the CEO of Adimab, kept hammering away at an idea that I think is often overlooked by startups. The first thing to do, he said, is to figure out exactly what the problem is, and then ask yourself if there is real value in finding the solution. The short answer is always "of course, why else would I be working on this?" But being honest with yourself and regularly holding your own feet to the fire is enormously important.

We happen to think that the disjointed and scattered nature of the huge amount of content on the internet is a real problem, and we see enormous value in creating a system for people to get that content in a manner that is relevant and entertaining. And we hope we can pass that value along to our users.

Alpha Rising

After months of product development and testing, our Alpha is being loaded to the live site right now, and it's really exciting. We've come a long way from that first spark of imagination, and we still have a long way to go. But it's the little pieces of gratification along the way that make the startup ride worth taking. And today is one of those days.

This update includes a whole host of stuff that is just plain cool. All the functionalities of our core product are here, along with a bunch bug fixes and UI updates that make using Pinyadda a truly enjoyable experience. The difference between this version and our prototype seems infinite, and the product is really starting to come into its own.

A new, way more intuitive Build page, better Pintax navigation, and host of back-end improvements are all up and in working order, and we're pumped. When we look at the big picture these seem like small changes, but when we put on our user hats and try it out we realize that these improvements make a big difference. It's an encouraging and exciting milestone, and as we start to refine the product, the tech, and the business model, the amount new opportunities and ideas seems to be multiplying almost daily.

With all this comes an ever-expanding to-do list which has required us to begin developing and implement some key workflows and processes that are already helping us to stay better organized and be more productive with our time. Scheduling our time better, setting and achieving measurable small goals, and using collaboration technologies have been a key focus over the last several weeks as we begin to think about growth phase. While we're still really small and everyone is definitely wearing multiple hats, we're very aware that streamlining our processes and workflows and documenting our systems will be a key component of how fast we can ramp things up and how much we can squeeze from each dollar of investment. Two of our key organizational philosophies are agility and resourcefulness, and making sure that we can get new people up to speed quickly and adapt to changing conditions are tasks that affect every aspect of the business.

As we ramp up this summer we're making it a point to share our experiences on this blog, and we're always interested in hearing what you have to say. Post a comment, drop us a note, tweet us, whatever. We're also going to schedule a couple of external work sessions where anyone can drop by and shoot the breeze about tech, Boston, Pinyadda, or pretty much anything else. We'll post those times and locations up here and tweet them as well. Hopefully we'll get to meet a bunch of new folks who are down with what we're doing and love the internet in the same freakish way we do.

Today's a great day for Pinyadda and for us, but we're already logging bugs, testing features, and thinking about ways to make it better. With every milestone reached comes a new starting point and a new opportunity for improvement, and we can't wait to get moving on the next round of stuff as we head toward Beta. It's part insanity, part geekiness, and whole lot of obsession with our product and our vision.

A Better Way to Get Your Information

Good news - by the end of the week/early next week we hope to have Pinyadda up and running for a select few people to check out.  For those of you who don't eat, sleep and breathe all things Pinyadda, let me give you a quick update on what it is we're doing here...

A while back, Kevin and I (along with our pal Greg Rogan, now of Expat Teaching Recruitment, a kick-ass recruitment agency focusing on the placement of qualified teachers and trainers with top international companies) were transitioning from our last startup, CampusWord, when we began speaking about the potential for a smarter, more efficient way to find and consume the information we want and need everyday.  As we discussed the possibilities for our relatively vague "smart system" (enter our other partner Greg Gomer), we came up with a few ideas of what this system should be able to do:

Search for information for us even if we're not looking. 

As Google announced earlier in the year, they have identified over a trillion unique URLs online and the number is climbing quickly.  With so much valuable information available, we could sit around searching all day and still not find every piece of content or information out there that would be valuable to us... so we need a system to do it for us.

Deliver information without having to be asked.

Brad Feld, Co-founder and Managing Director of the Foundry Group, explained this best in a recent blog post, "In 20 years, I expect we will snicker at the idea of having to go search for information...typing the same stuff into little boxes over and over again."  Basically, no one can possibly know what to search for all the time and we believe that to receive information, a user shouldn't have to continually ask the system for it... it should just be there for us whenever we want.

Understands the unique nature of every person's information needs and adapts as these needs change over time.

Why should you and I see the same search results when we enter the same keyword phrase? Why should any two people see the same results ever? Why should you even see the same search results today for the same term you searched yesterday?  You shouldn't! Because after all, information is absolutely unique and infinitely dynamic.  Think about it... absolutely unique - meaning no person "computes" any piece of information exactly the same as another person.  Infinitely dynamic - meaning at no point in time will your information needs be exactly the same as they were a moment ago (or at any other time for that matter), nor will you "compute" a piece of information exactly the same as you did at another time, nor will your information needs be exactly the same at any time... follow my drift?  In brief, the system needs to know each unique individual user and grow with them.

I think I have gone deep enough for our first blog post here.  Our team will continue to describe different parts of our vision for Pinyadda here and we look forward to receiving your feedback!  Till next time...