Games: The Anti-MVP

This was originally posted on 6/6/2013.

My cofounders and I were sitting in the Mission on a sunny morning, eating crepes and talking with a survey and testing guru about testing business assumptions for our new startup.

"I would be hesitant to sink more than a week or two into the idea without data from customers."

My cofounders and I traded sideways glances. The truth was that we had been working on our new startup for 4 months already. We had been play testing our game for more than a month, but  it would be a while before it was ready for a beta launch .

Our meeting left us feeling uncertain, our previous startup had a minimum viable product ready to ship inside a month; why was this taking so long? It didn't hit us until later on when we were speaking with more experienced game devs.

"You have something ready to play in 4 months? That's great."

We had been operating on the assumption that like a B2B startup website, we could throw something down in a week or two, go to customers, test it, and begin iterating. But games defy MVP release schedules. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in 2D Boy's illuminating blog series about developing World of Goo. It's true that they churned out their first version in a week, but their first game tests (which occurred several months into development) were a mess. At CodeCombat we understand that all too well, unfortunately.

Games must be fun. The primary business assumption of any game is "users will like playing it." It's almost guaranteed that users won't be satisfied playing a two week old MVP. In fact, that's sort of the definition of a minimum viable product: it's rough, unpolished, and easy to change. If you're doing it right, the MVP is difficult to take seriously. By contrast, the quality standard for games has been raised so high that it's often not enough to slap something together to gauge user interest.

The takeaway we've learned is that startups with experience building websites need to step back and redefine their MVP expectations when building a game. It takes longer to make something fun rather than just functional, and unfortunately games are defined by the first term, not the second.

Your Child's Name Won't Limit Their Digital Future

What are you planning to name your children? If you answered with any common first and last name combination, your child may be at a digital disadvantage. They will be condemned to a life of appending numeric sequences to their user names, picking off-brand Twitter handles, and choosing unrelated domains for their websites. Their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles will be difficult for new acquaintances to locate, Google results will misrepresent them to future employers, and their children will have an even harder time of it.

At least, that's what I thought several weeks ago.

It's easy to imagine that any given name you choose for a child will be common enough that somebody out there has grabbed the domain, the Twitter handle, the Facebook username, the Gmail address, and countless other digital identifiers. In this paranoid world-view, your child is relegated to being a second class citizen of the net (or whatever it becomes) simply by dint of having a common first/surname combination.

But how large of a problem is it really? To answer the question, I did some research on full name variation and came away surprised.

It is trivial to find popular baby names for a given period of time, but finding the frequency of full names in the US is another matter. The CDC and census bureau both don't have full name information for confidentiality reasons, and the only place I was able to find a list of unique first and last names was from a company doing greyhat Facebook advertising and data mining [1]. Here is their list of the 100 most popular first and last names on Facebook in 2009 [2].

I then ran these names through a bulk domain availability search (where the name "John Smith" turns into "johnsmith.com"). Not a single .com domain is currently unregistered.

Of course, that test doesn't tell me much except that at the very edges of the full name distribution, most of the domains are taken. The bigger question is how long the tail is. If 98% of first name/last name combinations are not contained within the top 100, then your kid will be fine unless you do name them John Smith.

Since I wasn't able to get my hands on a dataset for full names, I decided to approximate the frequency of firstname + lastname duplicates based on individual surname duplicate frequency in the US. Because surnames have fewer letters than first names and surnames combined, there are fewer possible combinations. This means that there should be a lot more duplicate surnames than duplicate first name/surname combinations. So, if it turned out there was a lot of surname repetition, I wouldn't be able to conclude much about how common first name/surname combinations are, I would just know that they are less common than the data I can see. However, if duplicate surnames turn out to be relatively uncommon, I could conclude that first name/surname combinations are more uncommon still, and disprove my suspicion that the uniqueness of my child's name is important to their digital future.

Among surnames, the top 100 most popular constituted 16.4% of the US population, the top 1000 accounted for 38.9%. That means that the majority of surnames lie in the long tail rather than the head of the distribution. We can therefore assume that the distribution of full names is even more skewed towards the long tail since the domain space is substantially larger. This assertion is supported by the Facebook data above.

This Wikipedia graph suggests there were around 350,000,000 users on Facebook in 2009. The total number of names in the top 100 comes to around 592,000, which represents just .1% of users on the site.

The conclusion I have to draw is that unless you name your son John Smith and your daughter Sarah Smith, they will have perfectly viable digital identities available to them when they graduate from college and need to start looking presentable to the rest of the world. So rest easy; I know that I, for one, want to name my first child Ellis. According to White Pages Names, it seems it is suitably obscure, and hey, I notice the domain "ellissaines.com" isn't registered. I think I'll register that ... just in case.

Special thanks goes out to the staff of the Alden Reference Library at Ohio University for helping me obtain this link and other vital statistics I used in this blog post! Specifically Sherri Saines (@bibliosanity), Tim Smith, Kelly Broughton, and Cary Singer.

[1] The company was later banned from scraping Facebook, which is presumably why their data is so old.

Save Time, Cash, and Carbon with Amazon Prime

I have been a heavy user of Amazon prime for years, and it baffles me why anyone shops offline for anything but perishable grocery items. If shopping is something you enjoy as a recreational pastime, you can stop reading now, but for all the rest of us, read on to see why Amazon Prime is not just good for your budget, time, or carbon footprint.

Assumptions

Let's start by making some assumptions. First, I will assume that you earn exactly the national median for a fully employed person in the US: $32,140 which is approximately $15/hour [1].  I assume you spend money like a typical American as well, meaning that you spend approximately $7,423 per year on personal care, misc, alcohol and tobacco, apparel, and entertainment [2]. I assume you have access to a car [3] that gets the national average of 24.1 mpg [4]. Further, I'm going to assume that you are like 90% of Americans and live within 15 minutes of a Wal-Mart [5] which represents an 8 mile distance [6]. I will make the further simplifying assumption that you purchase all your goods at Wal-Mart. You value your free time at $10/hr or a 2/3 of your working wage. Your primary shopping objective is to save money on the goods you want and need.

I will assume that most of your shopping is done for relatively common goods, which is just to say that you are not trying to find a new Tiffany diamond necklace, you're shopping for things like shoe laces, t-shirts, and garbage bags. I will assume you shop about as much as the average American, or .75 hours/day [7], and that a typical shopping trip requires 2.16 hours for a total of approximately 127 shopping trips per year.

The Cost of Offline Shopping

Let's start by calculating the costs associated with your current shopping habits. 127 shopping trips per year means your car is being driven 127 * 8 = 1016 miles per year getting you to and from the store. The IRS mileage rate is $.56/mi [8], which means you are spending $569 in car depreciation every year to shop. Further, at 24.1 mpg, and an expected fuel cost in 2013 of $2.04/gal (so cheap!) [9], you're spending $83 on gas for those trips. The total cost to you in terms of automotive expenses is therefore $652/year.

Then there's the time cost. Shopping takes time away from doing other enjoyable things, like watching movies, taking walks, and eating with friends. In the above assumptions, we put the cost of your time at approximately 2/3 of your working wage, $10/hr, which means that you are paying yourself 274 hours * 10 = $2,740 to go shopping. So far, the total cost of shopping offline is $3,392 per year and that doesn't count any of the unpleasantness of fighting through weekend traffic, having to visit multiple stores (because remember, in this hypothetical example you only ever have to shop at one store), and finding a parking spot at an already overcrowded mall.

The Cost of Shopping on Amazon Prime

Save Time

With Prime, goods are delivered right to your door and the actual finding and purchasing of goods requires significantly less of your time. Consider a simple example to demonstrate the point: it would likely take you less than 15 minutes to find a common item like a serving ladle (not an affiliate link) on Amazon which is less than the one-way time required to get to a store. If you were able to avoid only 25% of your shopping runs over the course of the year, that would be 68.5  hours of your life back. We're talking about a 2.8 day's worth of time you can could spend playing fetch with your dog, socializing with friends, or reading interesting blog posts like this one. That's 8 days of vacation time from work. If you are aggressive about shopping online, you could easily avoid far more than 25% of your shopping trips.

Save Money

Prime costs $79/year (soon to be $99), restricts buyer choice, and recent studies have shown that Amazon can cost as much as 20% more than Wal-Mart [10]. But it's still a money saver. The average American is spending $7,423 on non-grocery non-medical purchases per year (see the CNN money link in the footnotes below). $7,423 * .2 = $1,484, add the $79 subscription fee, and it costs $1,563  more on average to shop on Amazon compared to Wal-Mart. If you shop at Target, Macys, or any other more expensive retailer, the cost savings is likely to be much smaller. Compared to the cost of offline shopping calculated above ($3,392), however, Amazon will save you approximately $1,829 ($3,392 - $1,563) per year in automotive upkeep, gas, and time.

In addition, the estimated 20% premium is an estimate based upon a relatively small sample size for non-Prime customers. So the above estimate is likely understates the actual savings.

Shrink Your Carbon Footprint

Finally, shopping online is better for the planet because it significantly reduces the energy cost of shipping goods to consumers [11]. The most efficient way to deliver goods to end users is on big trucks, planes, and delivery vehicles like that UPS truck with all the Amazon packages in it. True, such trucks get poor mileage per gallon, but they deliver hundreds of packages per run, and unlike your personal vehicle, UPS and other shippers are spending big money on reducing their fleet mpg [12].

Conclusion

Amazon Prime saves time, money, and helps me be a reduce my carbon footprint. The $79 might sound like a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the improvements in quality of life. And if you are like me and dislike shopping in the first place, all of these calculations are meaningless. I would actually be willing to pay more to avoid the mall, but Prime has conveniently given me a better option. You can check it out here (non-affiliate link): http://www.amazon.com/gp/prime

 

[1] Personal income in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

[2] This comes from the CNN money breakdown of American expenses: http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/us-spending/

[3] For every car in the US, there is 1.3 people, so this seems pretty reasonable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle

[4] Presumably if it is newer, you'd be more likely to get good gas mileage, but I'm working with averages here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency

[5] It's actually pretty shocking that we all live so close to Wal-Marts, http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/

[6] This is an extrapolation from the statistic about living 15 minutes from a Wal-Mart. I do not have a statistical source to back up the conversion from 15 minutes to 8 miles, I'm just guessing you can't go 60 mph on the way to the average Wal-Mart from the average home.

[7] Yes, that means that the average American spends 274.13 hours shopping every year: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

[8] 2014 IRS mileage compensation rate: http://www.irs.gov/2014-Standard-Mileage-Rates-for-Business,-Medical-and-Moving-Announced

[9] Expected cost of gasoline: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/business/energy-environment/after-steadily-falling-price-for-gas-notches-an-increase.html

[10] The study was conducted by Kantar Retail. Their sample size is pitifully small (36 goods) and doesn't take into account the fact that Amazon doesn't cover all goods with Prime shipping: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-22/wal-mart-beats-amazon-prices-including-glee-dvd-set.html

[11] The study is actually focused on Buy.com, which presumably has a less efficient distribution network than Amazon: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/03/16/shopping-online-more-energy-efficient-say-carnegie-mellon-researchers.aspx

[12] http://compass.ups.com/ups-lightens-up-with-fuel-efficient-plastic-trucks/

Why You Shouldn't Follow Your Dreams

Back when I was in 9th grade, I purchased my first desktop computer. I did extra chores, mowed lawns, and shoveled snow to afford my dream machine. It came tricked out with a 900Mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird CPU, 128MB of RAM, a GeForce 2 GPU, and a Plexdor CD burner. Housed in a bleak grey metal box, it was my pride and joy. Countless hours of Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, and Starcraft were played on that computer.

Despite my fond memories of that first computer, it was never the perfect performance machine. I had made many compromises to meet my meager budget, and the hardware was out of date less than 60 days after it arrived. So around that time, I vowed that someday I would buy myself the most ridiculous performance-intensive machine that could be had.

A while back I realized all of a sudden that I had more than enough cash to buy that no-holds-barred gaming machine. But desktop computers are no longer terribly practical. And I don't play Counter Strike in the evenings anymore. And my middling laptop runs the Adobe Creative Suite just fine. In fact, I spend most of my time in front of productivity and office applications at work, and in the evenings, I try to spend time away from the computer for the sake of variety. I have the cash, but I longer want that beast computer, and it's sad. When I explained my disappointment to a friend over lunch, he shrugged and said, "of course you wanted that computer, but dreams expire."

He was right. Since making my vow to buy an uber gaming machine, the dream had lost meaning for me, and like a mesofact, I had not updated my list of dreams.

This caused me to not only go through that list, but to re-evaluate how I pursue and value dreams. I have kept a bucket list for several years, but I here propose a short list of reasons why you shouldn't have one. Maybe you shouldn't even follow your dreams.

Destinations are boring.

As a society, we praise big dreams and tell kids to aspire to be astronauts. But as a society, we focus our dreams on destinations, not on the journeys that make them meaningful. I fell prey to this exact problem when we were founding my first startup. I wanted to build a successful startup. For three years, we worked hard, we got some lucky breaks, and these days Skritter is pretty darn successful. I have become an astronaut. And you know what? It's an empty victory, because as it turns out, what I really want is not to have a successful startup. What I want is to work hard on difficult problems with people I like. Notice the difference there: the first dream is a state, "success," the second dream is a process "work hard."

For all the glib discussion of life being a journey, not a destination, we overlook that fact when forming our deepest and most personal goals. Maybe you want to be a famous rapper, a skydiving instructor, or a polyglot. All of these are noble ambitions, but thinking about those dreams in terms of continuing actions rather than destinations makes them more meaningful. You don't want to be a rapper, you want to spend most of your time rapping in a studio. You don't want to be a skydiving instructor, you want to teach newbies how to enjoy their first jump. You don't want to be a polyglot, you want to spend time learning the nuances of dozens of languages.

Destinations are boring, and dreams that rely on them are hollow.

The exotic is kinda meh.

You know what sounds cool? Getting out of a Cleveland winter and working from Costa Rica for 2 months. The problem is that if you value a degree of consistency, recurring familial interaction, predictable diets, stable electricity and internet, reliable transportation, and a hundred other factors you probably take for granted, then it's actually not that cool. That was the story of my 2 months in Costa Rica.

Yet despite the disconnect, whenever I tell people about going to Costa Rica, most people said "I wish I could do that."

Daily life constrains choice sets to the degree that most people can't up and move to Costa Rica for 2 months. And for most people, that's a good thing. Dreams often take the form of overcoming the inertial forces that keep us grounded to the status quo. But it is precisely these forces that often make us happy. Many dreams are predicated on circumstances that by their very nature would make us unhappy.

Dreams made in a vacuum are meaningless.

I drive an extremely economical car and I've always dreamed of having a performance sports car. Recently I got the chance to test drive some exceptionally cool sports cars, and coming back to my little Suzuki Aerio was a relief. Why, you might ask, would I prefer my 1600cc putsy hatchback to a Mercedes Benz E55? I won't go into details, but in forming my dream about owning a sports car, I ignored all of my previous preferences. A Porsche looked cool, but in my daily life I prefer gas economy, reliability, and low insurance bills.

Dreamers are encouraged to think big, and that often implies "outside of our experience." This gets back to something Paul Graham suggests about finding what you love to do: if you aren't tinkering with computers in your free time, do you really want to be a programmer? If you didn't sacrifice to buy a sports car when you were 17, are you really invested in performance automobiles?

We often classify our unqualified aspirations as "dreams" and then foolishly work towards them. Daily experience is often a far better judge of what you will enjoy than a groundless idea of you got from society.

Summary

All of this might lead you to conclude that I think dreams are meaningless, but that's not the case. I think dreams are extremely important, but they often grossly misrepresent what people actually want from their life experience. I am still struggling to find a good way to pursue my own aspirations and would be interested to hear if anyone else has had luck better forming and achieving meaningful dreams.

Magic Tricks

Back in my junior year of college, I switched my major from Cinema Studies to Economics. I was sitting in the office of my favorite professor and adviser, a man who had his Economics degree from Harvard. I was asking about post-graduate options.

"I was thinking about maybe getting an MBA one day. Do Oberlin graduates stand a chance of getting into the Harvard MBA program?"

My adviser smiled in a good-humored way. "Honestly George, I don't know how anyone gets into the Harvard MBA program. I think you have to be magic to pull it off."

When I heard those words, my heart sank, but I took the advice to heart. Seven years and two startups later, I still vividly remember that conversation because it crystallized my understanding of how to pull off a seemingly impossible accomplishment: it's a magic trick.

Getting into the Harvard MBA program might embody a magic trick for most people, but magic tricks encompass anything that appears to be impossible on the surface. Retiring at the age of 30, traveling full time while working remotely, being a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company, or knowing people of repute. All of these accomplishments work to confound explanation and increase the perceived importance of the speaker. After all, only 1 in a million spend our evenings rubbing shoulders with A-list celebrities and our days on the cover of a business magazine. It's unique, it's interesting, and it defies simple explanation.

But it's a mistake to write off such accomplishments as impossible. It's an even bigger mistake to write them off as unimportant or shallow.

I've learned the hard way that when you are an entrepreneur, it is extremely important to quickly impress people you meet. When all you have is a one-month-old company and a smile, people write you off unless you can quickly portray success. Maybe you didn't go to Harvard or MIT, but the more magic tricks you have under your belt, the more investors, customers, and peers will assume you can accomplish your next audacious goal. This is the first step in actually living your life like you want.

Which bring me to choosing magic tricks. I've used common examples above, but your achievements will be most impressive if they are your own. Maybe you want to start a nonprofit mentoring program and positively impact 1,000,000 kids. Maybe you want to make the next greatest search engine. Maybe you want to replace Netflix and bring the world a decent selection of on-demand movies. You need to define what you want to achieve, and then do it. The coolest thing about magic tricks is that they are cumulative: the more you've already done, the more people will believe you can accomplish the next one.

After all, if you've already started the first commercial space program or played basketball with president Obama, or even been accepted to YCombinator on stage, then you can probably do whatever you want.