Rocking The Mic Right
I gave a presentation at Tokyo2point0 yesterday - a casual gathering of Tokyo’s web entrepreneurs, technologists and business people. My presentation was titled “How To Prototype, Implement and Market a Simple Web Application” - which was a fair amount to get through in my 30 minute slot, but I managed to cram some fundamentals in.
The presentation was half technical and half philosophical (how effing pretentious) and in it I was using Open Source Food as an example of a simple web app, and talked about my philosophy and approach when building and marketing such applications.
The crowd was a good mix of corporate and startup types. I think my presentation was quite successful, managing to elicit a few laughs here and there (I tried to inject a bit of humour into my presentation. You know, to make up for the lack of content) and I got my message across; which was basically “minimal planning, know the fundamentals, use these tools, build it, and here’s how to let your app market itself”.
A couple of quotes paraphrased from my notes:
We live in an age now where there is so much transparency and the barriers to entry and exit are so low for any given web service that the important metric is no longer how many users we can attract to a website. If you want sheer numbers, you can pay a bunch of guys in Bangalore $10 an hour to hammer your links into a bunch of social networking sites - you’ll see a spike in traffic that will likely settle right back down again. No, the important metric is how many *quality* users we can attract, how likely they are going to be engaged in the site, become an active user and / or make some kind of transaction.
Cooking is actually a really good metaphor for building a simple web application. With cooking, you can have all your ingredients laid out in front of you and you can somewhat guess the flavour of the final dish, based on the ratios of ingredients you intend to put in. However, you will absolutely not know the true taste of the dish until you have cooked it and put some of it in your mouth. In the same way, with a simple web app - an interactive entity with multiple variables - you simply will not know how the app “feels” to interact with until you have built yourself a working version. Building is the new planning. You are in a much better position to decide what the app needs to make it whole *after* you have implemented core functionality and can actually play around with and “taste” the application, rather than trying to decide everything at once during the planning and conceptualising stage.
If anyone is interested in seeing the slideshow I used, I’ve put it up on slideshare and embedded it below:
However, these are more visual than informative - I tend to let my voice make my points, rather than my slides.
I had a great time at the event and will definitely be back to watch, and most likely present again perhaps early next year if they’ll have me. I met a bunch of interesting people including the trend scout from CScout who made the infamous Japanese wave pool video, and also the director of kakaku, which was personally quite awesome as I have masses of respect for what they are doing - in terms of the big Japanese internet companies, kakaku has by far the highest standard of usability and interface design in my opinion, and it’s great to see someone in the Japan industry acting as a role model for the rest.
