The Mouse & The Elephant

In 1995 I remember seeing a documentary where they interviewed Bill Gates. He was asked if he was fearing competition from other big software companies. His answer was that he didn’t fear any of the big companies around. He said that the threat to a big company is not in the other big companies, but in the smaller companies slowly undermining the foundations of the business that his big company was built upon. He pointed out the window at the lawn down below and said something like

“Up from here it is hard to see the really small companies down there who are slowly becoming a threat to us below our radar. Until it is too late”

It made a huge impression on me because I was planning on starting a small company myself and having Bill Gates telling me that I was a potential threat to him made me feel powerful.

I thought about this because Tessa started her own company last week: The Next Speaker

She manages and represents speakers and motivators and hires them to companies who need to be inspired or have an event where they want a knowledgeable person to talk about new media, new technology or innovation. She launched her company on Friday and got a lot of attention from blogs over the weekend. Then, yesterday, she found out that the biggest speaker bureau in the Netherlands contacted a large part of her speakers to ask them if they weren’t interested in joining them.

I thought it is a great compliment if the bigger company feels that your company poses a threat to them enough to do something silly like this.

So, congratulations Tessa!

UPDATE: while you are here, please vote for Tessa at Challenger50.nl:

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Famous Failures

OpenIdea: TwitterCounter.com

During the Kings of Code event two weeks ago I was talking about Twitter with someone. He mentioned how many followers he had and I mentioned my number of followers. He was impressed with my number of followers and I felt a moment of pride. Then I suggested that this number might become significant one day as it says as much about someone as pageviews or RSS feeds. If I come to a blog and see they have 10.000 rss feed subscribers I take their opinion more serious than if they have 10 feed subscribers.

The same works for Twitter. When I see people on Twitter with more followers than I have than I’m interested to find out why. What do they tweet and who are they? During that same conversation I said that it probably wouldn’t be long before a Feedburner for Twitter would arise that would start tracking the follower count for people.

Right after that conversation I opened my laptop and started checking out names for this project. Twitterburner.com was gone and FeedTwitter.com didn’t make sense so I came it with TwitterCounter.com. The domain was available and I registered it that same day.

Then I got distracted with other stuff until early last week. The subject came up at the office and I asked around who would have time to develop the idea. Everybody is pretty busy and we decided it wasn’t a high priority project and we would postpone it until later.

The next day however the idea was still buzzing in my head and I decided to do some sketches in PHP to see how difficult it would be to built it. Within a few hours I had a basic site and some scripts that sort of worked. I worked until 2am in the morning on Tuesday and then the whole day on Wednesday. On Tuesday I arrived at the office and asked Sander and Arjen to help me with a few details. Sander fixed my database (MySQL) and Arjen spent some time fixing a few algorithms.

during lunch that day Ernst-Jan asked me if I would be ready to launch TwitterCounter.com on Monday. I smiled and said ‘Why not just launch now’. So we did.

This is what the site currently says:

TwitterCounter: How popular are you? (open beta)
TwitterCounter is a service for Bloggers, Social networkers and other well connected individuals to communicate and track the number of followers they have on Twitter. Add the TwitterCounter to your blog or profile to attract more followers. Also check out our top 100 and add your own name too!

After we launched Ernst-Jan published a short review on The Next Web Blog and I twittered it. That was enough to start an avalanche of blogposts, tweets and traffic to TwitterCounter.com. The service has been reviewed on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and made it to the front page of Del.icio.us where it stayed for hours.

The most exciting thing though has been the huge adoption of the TwitterCounter at hundreds of blogs all over the world. Here are some randomscreenshots (+ links) to a few blogs displaying the TwitterCounter:

Kill your darlings…

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on March 16, 2006. I’m posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks.

This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn’t finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a (code)writers block but after 3 days I still didn’t feel like finishing my work.

I couldn’t even explain why I didn’t finish the design, after all, I had 90% of the screens finished and we only needed a few more pages. So yesterday Patrick and I were in the car and suddenly I blurted out ‘The design isn’t good enough. I want to start over’. Patrick looked shocked and confused and I explained to him that we were making things to complicated for users in the current design and we needed to go back to the basics of the service.

We went back to the office and decided to spend a few hours just trying to look at the whole thing with a fresh look. After 2 hours we were sweating, high on caffeine and extremely excited because of what we sketched on our whiteboard. We decided to throw away my 2 weeks work and implement a much simpler design. It reminded me of this great story which I’m going to ask you to read now:

From Folkore.org: MacPaint was good at drawing text, allowing the user to specify characters at any position, with any font, size or style. But once the text was instantiated, it just became pixels like everything else; you couldn’t go back and edit it as text. In June 1983, Bill thought he could do something about that.

Bill decided to try to turn pixels back into characters when you selected them with the text tool. He wrote a lot of elaborate code, probably as much as for any other MacPaint feature. First, he wrote assembly language routines to isolate the bounding box of each character in the selected range. Then he computed a checksum of the pixels within each bounding box, and compared them to a pre-computed table that was made for each known font, only having to perform the full, detailed comparison if the checksum matched.

Bill got his character recognition routines working well, and it seemed like magic, if you were used to the earlier MacPaint, to be able to recover and edit previously placed text. It wasn’t perfect, because it would fail to recognize a character if a single dot was out of place, but it was still very useful. Everyone loved the feature, and congratulated Bill for pulling off another miracle.

I was surprised a few days later when Bill told me that he decided to remove the character recognition feature from MacPaint. He was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program. It was probably the right decision, although I didn’t think so at the time. I was amazed that he was able to detach himself from all the effort that he put into creating the discarded feature; I know that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the same.

So why is this story so important to me? Because it shows a lot of courage to throw away your work when you realize that the final product will be better without it. And I was lucky that it was MY work that I thought we should throw away and not someone else’s. How would I have felt If I would have been happy with my work and Patrick would have suggested we throw MY work away? I would have resented the suggestion and been offended. Which I shouldn’t be. I should welcome the suggestion. That is why I think every developer should read the story about Bill Atkinson and MacWrite. Every day you should ask yourself
‘am I doing the right thing? Should I start over? Is this feature really cool or do I just like it because I CAN build it?’ and if the answer is no, you should be able to detach yourself from your work and throw it out of the window.

Like a rabbit chewing off its leg to get out of a trap…

How do you paint a white rabbit?

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on April 16, 2006. I’m posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks.

On Sunday I was visiting my parents house to celebrate Easter Day. As we drove there we noticed a perfect white rabbit sitting by the side of the road. I stopped to show it to our children and told them it must have been the Easter bunny. My parents hid painted real eggs and chocolate ones in the garden, which the kids had to find, and then had lunch. After lunch I took a nap in my sisters room. As I woke up I looked around the room and noticed a drawing of a white rabbit. I stared at it for a while and noticed that that painting was actually a very good metaphor to starting a company.

When you start a company you have to know the answer to the question:

‘How do you paint a white rabbit’

In art academy (which I attended) you are taught to think different and one way to practice that is to think in negative shapes. You can paint a white rabbit, or an invisible form, or a bright light by outlining the outside of the form you wish to make visible. In the case of the white rabbit painting in my sisters room there is a background and a shadow which make the white rabbits stand out from the paper. In art academy they call that ‘inversion’ or ‘a negative’.

In Flecks case the white rabbit is our product. As you start to establish the company you build the background. We started with a patent, a blog and logo, then a website and a little funding. Then we hired developers and worked up a demo. You could say that we started working on all the stuff around the actual product and the more stuff you but in the background the clearer the white rabbit/our vision becomes.

This is a scary procedure. All the time you are building around, talking about and building upon something that simply isn’t there yet. You are constantly thinking “this is all background stuff, I want to see the actual product!’. But to get there you have to go through all that other stuff first.

It is strange to talk with investors about your dreams and vision. What you are actually trying to do is show them the white rabbit. The more stuff you show (Excel sheets, patents, demos and plans) the more clearer the white rabbit becomes.

Then one day, you wake up, and are suddenly staring at a very real and white rabbit and everybody can see it…

Shower Interview

I did an interview for a Dutch student association while taking a shower. Yeah, that is not a typo. Check out the result (Interview in Dutch, sorry) here:

This frame shows Tessa leading the interviewer to our bathroom…