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Have Fun and A Community Will Follow

by Jorge Escobar on October 29, 2009

When you are trying to create a community around your brand (personal or corporate) there is an important consideration that you need to have in mind.

And that is your “fun factor”.

I’m not sure if it is something we are programmed to detect (like those tales of pheromones and the cavemen and stuff) but I think people like to hang around happy individuals or fun brands.

If you are writing content, uninspired or because you’re doing a chore, or meeting numbers, or increasing followers, people will smell your fakeness from a mile.

There’s a brilliant campaign sponsored by Volkswagen called the “Fun Theory“:

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

One of my favorite videos is about a train station in Odenplan, Stockholm that decided to try a novel approach to make people use the stairs instead of the escalator, by turning it into a piano.

At the end of their experiment 66% more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator. It was more fun and without knowing it and they where also doing good for themselves.

What ever you’re doing that has to do with communities, do it because you really want to. Be the “fun piano” and people will choose you instead of the mechanical alternative.

Photo by W2 a-w-f-i-l

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Building Startups Following the Bruce Lee Philosophy

October 14, 2009
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I’ve been watching (little by little, as I’ve been very busy) a great documentary I DVR’d about Bruce Lee’s influence on other artists and in Western culture in general and I’ve found out that Lee was actually very much into philosophy.

In one of his few televised interviews (see video below) he mesmerizes us with this thought:

Be formless… shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend…

I immediately thought how this could be applied to any entrepreneur thinking of building a new startup and how this is the best approach you could have. At the start (and hopefully throughout) you need to be a flexible enterprise with the ability to morph to your customer’s needs.

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Check the Expiration Date on Your Favorite Startup

September 22, 2009
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Rob Diana has a provocative post today titled “What Do We Expect From A Startup Exit?” where he puts forward the thought that users should not expect startups to become multibillion corporations, but that exits are something that should be part of their lifecycle.

In effect, users should adopt products like they buy milk: checking their expiration date.

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Feeling Secure with the Latest WordPress Version? Think Again (and 7 Tips to Secure it)

September 21, 2009
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Late on Friday, I read a post from Allen Stern in FriendFeed saying that his blog, CenterNetworks had been, once again, injected with spam links. Allen runs his blog on the latest Wordpress installation, 2.8.4, which we all figured was really secure.

I had upgraded barely a week ago, so I instantly checked my blog and lo and behold, I had been hacked as well.

There is something inherently wrong with Wordpress’ code if it’s this easy to hack it, even with the tightest security measures, which in my case, include the top 5 of the 7 items listed below. I felt completely let down by Wordpress and for a moment thought that it’s time for me to move on to something else for my blog.

I’m giving Wordpress a last chance, and have enforced the following security measures to see how it goes, and I highly recommend you enable these as well if you are running Wordpress.

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Estimating Time to Launch a Startup Using The 1,000 Hour Rule

September 16, 2009
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There is this moment in all things creative where you stop and say “What am I doing?”. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a novel, painting on canvas or coding a website (and some would say starting a relationship).

You start with a fiery passion, the eureka moment where everything looks illuminated, and your legs tremble just thinking that someone else could be doing what you’ve imagined.

You start getting things done, revel at the first sparks of creativity you see unfold before your eyes. You immediately have the urge to share this excitement with your closest friends and family. You work on it some more, and finally release it to more users, only to find that they don’t understand or get your creation.

What’s next? More work.

The business thinker Malcolm Gladwell has reported that to become a real expert at something, you need to practice it for at least 10,000 hours. That’s eight hours a day for almost three and a half years.

I was thinking about this rule and how it kind of makes sense (even though some critics question Gladwell’s rules) and how it could be applicable for a startup.

I’ve been involved in many startups during my career, both personal and work projects, and going back on the times it took to get stuff from concept to release versions, I can safely state the following rule:

To get any startup project in a launch-ready state, it must have been developed for at least 1,000 hours

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If You’re a FriendFeed Addict, You Must Use Feedly

July 6, 2009
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Just when I thought I was closer to giving up on Firefox, a new application, in the form of a plugin, has become a major addiction for me (and a saviour for the spiraling browser). I’m talking, of course, about Feedly.

Feedly was brought to my attention (as many other applications have) by the omnipresent Robert Scoble. He posted on FriendFeed:

I love http://www.feedly.com — it is how I read my Google Reader feeds now. Requires Firefox, but if you have it very nice headline display

I thought, Firefox plugin? No thanks. But something about the UI bit my curiosity and I decided to install it.

The truth is, it’s much more than an RSS reader. It’s an extension to FriendFeed, to a point where I’m wondering why FriendFeed hasn’t purchased them yet.

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My Blog is One Year Old. Here’s How I Did it

July 2, 2009
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Here I am. Twelve months and 60 posts later. I managed to do it.

This is not the first time I start a blog. I did when the blog term was coined and then a second time when I thought I had to say.

Third time is the charm, they say.

There are many times when bloggers will think about quitting their blogs because it makes no sense to continue writing for 40 people, or because they’re making pennies or less per month.

This post will tell you why I haven’t quit and what worked this time.

I will also share some data about the blog’s progress in traffic and revenues.

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Apple Has To (and Will) Have a Netbook

May 8, 2009
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On my Christmas vacation I carried a new friend with me that everyone was nuts about. What was it? What’s the brand? How much did it cost?

I had just bought a brand new MSI Wind on Amazon.com for a little less than $400 bucks.

Eight months later I can tell you that this machine has increased my work output by at least 10x. I carry it everywhere, I’m now writing a novel, two blogs and coding my next app while riding on the subway, I take it to the conference room and show power point presentations under my co-worker’s jealous glances, I surf the web while watching TV and my wife almost doesn’t mind it. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for a long time for something like this, and so were thousands of people.

The only thing, of course, is that it’s not an Apple — and I’m an Apple fan. I have an iPhone, an iMac and an iBook, and would have loved this next purchase to be an iTablet.

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As Citi Field Opens, Memories are Demolished

March 12, 2009
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I had mixed feelings of sadness and disgust as I drove by the last remaining piece of the Mets Shea Stadium.

Somehow I see what’s wrong with our economy in this image. In the name of development and progression, we are just replacing stadiums, financing the new ones with taxpayer’s money.

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Twitter’s Value Goes Down as More People Use It

February 20, 2009
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This might be something that @ev or @jack aren’t expecting. But I think it could potentially transform what users get out of Twitter, and ultimately, the future of Twitter itself.

And in some ways it might be exactly the opposite of what happens with other web businesses.

I’m starting to think that as more people use Twitter, the less valuable it becomes.

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