Nathan Kontny

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“Is it unrealistic to expect free UI design help?”

She’s wearing the hat, but I’m the one who graduated

RedditorFor8Years asks:

Is it unrealistic to expect free UI design help? I am working solo on my startup and could really use some help in UI. I am a backend developer and have next to no clue regarding color schemes, typography etc. I have no money to spare either as i quit my job to work on my thing. Can i find anyone online who is willing to lend me a hand in UI design for free ? If so, how and where can i find them ?

The short answer: yes, it’s unrealistic to expect free design help. Why would you expect free work from anyone, unless you’re giving away free work too? Of course, maybe you can find someone in a similar spot who’d like to barter. Hackathons are a great place to find people trading services and potentially great business partners.

But the better answer is: Why are you stuck looking for someone at all? Why get yourself in a corner only someone else can get you out of?

“Because I’m a developer not a designer.” Or vice versa. Or “I’m XXX, and I’m not good at YYY.” Right?

In 2013, a young, filthy and malnourished puppy named Kobe was found as a stray. He was clearly uncared for. Also, his ears were “cropped”. Cropping is the practice of cutting a dog’s ears, and is banned across Europe. Though it isn’t largely banned here in the US, a majority of veterinarians find the practice unethical, since it’s difficult to prove cutting a dog’s ears has a positive impact other than cosmetic.

But that’s not the worst part. The folks who found him believe his previous owners had tried cropping Kobe’s ears themselves with kitchen scissors.

Kobe is also a Dogo Argentino mix, a breed of dog falling into the “bully breeds”, or pit-bull looking type dogs. “Bully breeds” are the most euthanized breed of dog. 75% of pit bulls are killed immediately upon being put in city shelters. And Kobe was now on the list to get euthanized.

But here, Kobe’s luck turned.

Lucky Dog Rescue of Chicago found Kobe and fostered him, until the Shedd Aquarium of Chicago stepped in and adopted him. Kobe is the fifth dog the Shedd has rescued, and what’s interesting is that they raised and trained him the “Shedd way”, using many of the same positive reinforcement methods they use to train their dolphins.

Today, you can now see Kobe performing a multitude of tricks with his trainers during the One World dolphin show that is incredibly packed with people. Kobe is a hit 🙂

Apart from the lessons we should take from this story about responsible dog ownership and breeding, I think there’s something else that’s very interesting about Kobe and the Shedd.

I remember getting my first dog, Ewok, at the age of 10. She was a beautiful dog, and very much looked like an ewok from Star Wars. I also remember how much I wanted to teach her all sorts of fancy tricks.

Starting with the basics, I tried to get her to sit, lay down and stay. I’d push her butt down, or tug her legs so she’d end up laying down. I was gentle, but I definitely remember trying to push her body to get her to understand what I was trying to get her to do.

And I failed miserably.

She naturally followed close to my dad on walks and was was a great dog. But she never did learn to follow any commands. My dad even built a dog run for her to keep dog waste out of our yard, and that went completely unused.

When I grew up, my wife and I rescued a Husky/Shepherd mix named Bailey, and I wanted to do a better job than I did with Ewok. So we enrolled Bailey in a puppy obedience class — 2 hours, one day a week, for 8 weeks.

And sure enough she picked up stuff quick: sitting, staying, laying down. Even fist bumps, and bowing. I’ve even gotten her to know the difference between her left and right paws on command. And… we can do a trick where she can do math 🙂 She’s just that good at following my non-verbal commands, people don’t notice how the trick is done.

The class made all the difference.

But here’s the thing. The class wasn’t for her. It was for me.

Ewok’s problem wasn’t that she didn’t pick stuff up as quickly as Bailey. It was because I was clueless on how to train a dog.

Our obedience instructor showed me how powerful positive reinforcement was. I could reward Bailey while she naturally did something and then start attaching commands to those same things. So instead of forcing and failing to get Bailey to do something, she just picked up all sorts of things she did before and now thought worth doing again when I asked her to.

It didn’t take a lifetime of learning to be a Shedd dolphin trainer. All it took was 16 hours of learning a new “vocabulary”.

Granted there are people far greater than me at training animals. People who study this stuff their whole lives. But in just 16 hours I opened up a new world and was able to enrich the experience Bailey and I have together in our family.

People often assume that I have better hearing abilities than “normal” people, but this is not true. What is different is that I’ve been trained to have a vocabulary that many people don’t have. So, for example, where most people would say that a particular loudspeaker sounds “boomy”, I might say that there is a problem with resonance at 78 Hz. We hear the same problem — we just express it differently.

Geoff Martin

Geoff is a Tonemeister, at Bang & Olufsen, the oldest consumer electronics company in the world where they create some of the highest performing audio electronics on the market. Geoff is a master at his craft, but I think he captures perfectly something people miss.

We often look at the people who can accomplish things that we can’t and we just assume they have a talent we’ll never have. They can design things. I can’t. I can’t even draw. They can develop software. I can’t. I have trouble with calculating tips at restaurants. They can build businesses. I can’t. I’ve never even been able to sell the junk in my garage for pennies on Craigslist.

But, what we fail to recognize is how much these folks are accomplishing in that other domain because they simply have a different vocabulary than we have. Sure sometimes that vocabulary might take a decade of medical school to obtain, but others can just take 16 hours. And the impact is palpable in your life.

I was stuck in the same spot as RedditorFor8Years when I was getting done with the Obama campaign in 2012. I was a “software engineer”, and I wanted to build so much, but I didn’t have the money to hire anyone to help out with design. So I decided to see if I could level up my vocabulary.

I started reading books like Bootstrapping Design. Learning a few bits about the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts. Why something can look better by just paying attention to how it’s aligned. Learning how color palettes work. Slightly redesigning other folks homepages to experiment.

With just a slightly better vocabulary and a little bit of practice, I found myself designing things that looked a lot more “professional” than I could ever imagine myself doing.

When Draft was launched, that small upgrade to my vocabulary paid off. I started hearing from people, “Great design!”

When I took over Highrise, I was in a similar spot. I was taking over with very little hand holding. Had to build a team from scratch. I didn’t have any designers I could immediately bring on for help.

But… we were bleeding customers. Folks had gotten the impression Highrise was shutting down. I needed to make improvements to the product pronto and get the news out that the product was vibrant, or we were going to be in an even bigger hole.

I couldn’t just sit here for months vetting designers. But I didn’t have to.

When we made changes to Highrise, I now had a vocabulary to make sure the stuff we were putting out looked great. When we made a change, I didn’t have to just throw my hands up and complain that it didn’t look right. I could express myself that the colors were off, the text wasn’t aligned properly, there wasn’t enough white space between the fields. Just having the right vocabulary now gave me insight into the variables we could tweak.

Of course, I didn’t replace my need to hire skilled designers (and now I’m surrounded by some really talented folks), but when I find myself in a pinch, I don’t just give up.

Many of the things we need from other people aren’t the product of being blessed with some god-given gift. But something they’ve been trained to do. And those fields have low hanging fruit that would make enormous improvements in our lives with just a little bit of training and 16 hours of free time.

I could really use some help spreading my writing to others. If you liked this piece, you should share it on Twitter: here.

And please check out what we’re now doing at Highrise. It’s a very awesome tool to help manage who you talk to, what was said, and when you need to follow up.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter.

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First principles

In January of 2006, a young comedian with a taste of doing stand-up in college, moved to New York to make it big.

I got $200 and dreams, let’s do this thing.

But following a stretch of barely getting by and sleeping on the subway, he moved back to Chicago by May of the same year. So what happened to him? Did he give up?


Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists and thinkers of our time, was devoted to breaking things down into first principles. He’d strip a problem or idea down to the basics he first could prove to be true before building more on top.

For example, instead of studying theory and papers from other physicists to prepare to take his oral exam for his graduate degree, Richard opened up a blank notebook, titled it “Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About”, and essentially wrote his own physics text book. Over the course of weeks, he built up his knowledge of physics from the very beginning of what he could prove to be true.

During the exam he was asked the color at the top of a rainbow. Instead of using the ROYGBIV acronym most of us learn in grade school, he used the refractive index of water, wavelengths, and physics to calculate the actual colors.

First principles is why I’m so interested in stand-up comedians, who are often solo acts, and survive on their own good ideas and delivery to make people laugh. They don’t have teams or venture capitalists doing things for them. They can’t make excuses that one of their co-founders blew up the business.

Our comedian had a recent interview where he shares several first principles that have helped him on his journey and we can learn a lot from them…

Generic problems

A lot of my standup is argument: Why are we doing this? Why do I have to do this? Why? Simple example: My buzzer rings yesterday. I go downstairs. UPS has a package. And he’s like “What’s the apartment?” “The one you were just ringing”

Peter F. Drucker wrote The Effective Executive in 1966 but much of it still rings true today. How do the best of us seem to get so much done? Well there are several things, like picking battles that matter and working from strengths. But one that stands out — working on generic problems.

Drucker: By far the most common mistake is to treat a generic situation as if it were a series of unique events; that is, to be pragmatic when one lacks the generic understanding and principle.The effective decision-maker, therefore, always assumes initially that the problem is generic. He always assumes that the event that clamors for his attention is in reality a symptom. He looks for the true problem. He is not content with doctoring the symptom alone.

This comedian is great at observing how even a UPS delivery driver presents a generic problem many of us face.

One of the first things I did at Highrise was to stop all the “favors” we were doing. Customers would come in and ask for unique things they needed handled in their account. Things that could only be done by a developer using our backend tools. It took up a ton of time, but even worse, it forced us to focus on symptoms.

When we instead focused on the problems they represented as generic issues many customers were going through, we were able to make big changes that made a lot of people happier. For example, “Company Tags” is a feature we just added because I refused to run a script for just a single account.

Of course it’s a balance. We still find ourselves doing one off favors, and in my opinion still too many. But we get a lot done at Highrise with a very small team, and this is a big reason: when a support case comes in, our first thought isn’t to delight this specific user at this specific moment, but to figure out if what we’re looking at could be generic and what we can do to stop it from happening in the future for more people. It’s hard to pull off, because we might actually disappoint a user at first, but the time we get back can be used to make a much larger impact for our customers.

Ask

On meeting Mitch Hedberg.

I got to do a show with him, actually, in 2005, a few weeks before he passed. He had a couple nights at Zanies in Chicago. I didn’t really have any social grace at that time. I was 22. I just asked him if I could get a guest spot. And he put me and a couple other comics on for five minutes in front of a sold-out crowd.

An opportunity he just had the guts to ask for. No reason Mitch would say yes, but what would hurt to ask?

Over and over again I see opportunities come my way just because I wasn’t afraid to ask. Our first deal at my first startup resulted from a cold email asking if someone would like to chat. I didn’t expect a reply. Instead, it turned into 35k in revenue, which made all the difference for us when we were making nothing.

Even what I’m doing today was because awhile ago I decided to take a shot and email Jason Fried of Basecamp to see if he’d like to chat about product development and share ideas about what I was working on. No reason I expected him to say yes. But he did. Over time that relationship turned into me taking over Highrise.

Didn’t know me from shit. And I killed it.

Sometimes you just take a bunch of shots and see what happens.

Perspective

Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, published an article in 2013 about the “end of history illusion”. They found significant evidence that humans are really bad at predicting our own change. Sure, when we look back a decade we see how much we’ve grown and learned, but when we try to predict how we’ll change over the course of the next decade, most people think they’ll change very little. Our tastes, ideas, hobbies, etc. will just remain the same. Then, give us another decade, and we’ll look back, and again we’ll see how naive we were.

That’s a ripe place to make mistakes. The feeling of not changing makes us resistant to looking for help and new ideas.

We launched a brand new marketing site for Highrise in November of 2014. Of course, I wanted to test the new site to make sure it converted new customers as well or hopefully better than the old site.

And believe me, I know split testing.

I’ve been split testing sites for decades. I know all the tools available. I’ve even written a split testing utility for Ruby.

So as we rolled out the new site, we first tested. And as soon as we saw a statistically significant increase in signups, we deployed the new site to all our traffic. And on we went.

Now, in a new year, we started reviewing how Highrise is doing compared to Highrise of the past, and even more, how does it compare to Basecamp?

This time, to get some help with looking at historical data I reached out to Noah, the data scientist at Basecamp, who sent over a thorough analysis.

Active users — up. Retention of trial customers — up. Yearly retention of users — up.

Awesome. But…

“Nate, the revenue mix is totally off.”

We had increased free signups, but decreased paid signups. The new marketing site has a greater conversion rate but only because we included free signups in our test metric. Overall, we lost a bunch of potential paid customers because of our changes.

Uggh.

The subsequent fix to our marketing site took under 3 hours. Now our plans page looks a lot like the original site again. And it increased our revenue by 63%.

How did I not see this? Hubris. I should have brought in Noah from the get go. I did a poor job of predicting how much I still needed to learn and change in this new role and business.

Our comedian shares in a recent interview with NPR regarding his time sleeping on the subway:

“It was just really goofy on my part,” he admits, in retrospect. “ ’Cause I didn’t have to do that. I could have — one, I could have made up with my sister and apologized for popping in on her place like that. But I was too cocky. And two, I could have just gone back home to Chicago. So it was just goofiness on my part. I don’t glamorize it, like, ‘Oh, I was living on the train for my dream. It wasn’t; I don’t look at it like that at all.”

Now he realizes how easily he could have fixed his situation early in his career. If only he knew then what he knows now. How cocky he was. How easily he could have asked for forgiveness or more help. If only we could predict how little we know 🙂

But maybe just knowing Gilbert’s research is enough. Maybe if we just assume we really never know enough, we’ll make some better decisions.

When I see a comic make headway in the world, like Louis C.K or Mitch Hedberg, they get my attention. Of course because they’re funny. But how do they do it? How do they stay relevant and find new good ideas? How do they market themselves?

Hannibal Buress is a great example. He was that young cocky kid at 23 who moved to New York only to end up sleeping on the subway and moving back home. Today though we can find Hannibal on comedy specials, TV, touring the world, and we can learn a lot from his recent interviews with Scott Raab in Esquire and NPR’s David Greene.

If we understand what’s worked for Hannibal as he struggled to create a life and business in his craft — like looking for generic problems, asking for help, and realizing how little we know — perhaps we can use those as first principles in our own lives, teams and organizations.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see the awesome new stuff we’re doing at Highrise.

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Now that I’ve created something, how do I spread it?


Vaguely remember something about the “discovery of electricity”?

A guy flew a kite in a storm, lightning struck, traveled down the string of the kite to a key…When the key was touched, out came a jolt of electricity giving a non-lethal shock to its famous victim. Who was that famous scientist?

Jacques de Romas.

Wait, that’s not right. Wasn’t it Benjamin Franklin?

Well, not according to more than a few historians. And the Bordeaux Academy and The French Academy credit de Romas for successfully being the first to complete The Kite Experiment.

Even Mythbusters believe they’ve busted Franklin’s claim — the shock from the reported key would have easily killed him.

Still, if you were to believe Franklin performed the experiment, it was meant to prove lightning did indeed behave the same as electricity. (It wasn’t really about the discovery of electricity. People had already discovered that.) And a guy named Thomas-François Dalibard had proven a month prior to Franklin that lightning was electricity through an experiment similar to The Kite Experiment but using a lightning rod.

So why aren’t grade school kids taught about Thomas-François Dalibard’s discovery. Why isn’t de Romas flying the kite in that painting? Why is Franklin so famous for something he probably didn’t even do?

I enjoy helping entrepreneurs figure out how to start and grow businesses. At a recent talk I gave, one question stuck in my mind. The young entrepreneur asked, “Now that I’ve built a product, how do I get it to spread?”

This entrepreneur recognizes that having a good idea and building a great product isn’t enough.

In a paper studying how we can predict success, researchers found that given a market where people are trying to pick things that are of good quality (e.g. movies, music), as soon as you give consumers extra social information (e.g. number of downloads, likes, stars, votes), the success of good products becomes unpredictable.

We can’t predict successful things just based on how good they are. Our social influence over each other messes up our ability to choose.

So how do we get our products to spread if it’s not enough to rely on making something great.

I believe we can find some answers if we explore why Benjamin Franklin is so famous for his mythical kite.

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, and already at 12 years old he was learning how to build an audience.

He became an apprentice to his brother, James, who taught him the printing business. And when Franklin was 15, James founded a newspaper, The New-England Courant. Franklin wanted to write for the newspaper, but James wouldn’t allow it. So the rebellious teenager just wrote under a pseudonym, Mrs. Silence Dogood.

He was hooked. He kept on writing, and working in the printing and newspaper businesses.

Let’s look at this quote from Mythbusters about how The Kite Experiment myth began:

The American legend likely sprang from an article Franklin wrote for the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1752 describing a theoretical kite-lightning experiment.

There’s Franklin writing an article for the Pennsylvania Gazette.

But Franklin wasn’t just an occasional writer there. He owned the Pennsylvania Gazette! And the Pennsylvania Gazette was the most read newspaper of the American colonies.

Franklin knew the power of writing and owning ways to distribute his messages. So he spent significant time writing for newspapers, publishing books, even running a newspaper — in other words, building an audience before he even had much to spread.

So when Franklin was writing about theoretical experiments, it was his name that travelled far and wide because of the audience he had spent years cultivating.

You’ve likely heard of a recent startup called Product Hunt — a popular site listing new product launches. Its founder, Ryan Hoover, is frequently appearing in technology news and popular blogs, and getting some nice TV coverage.

Most people see the “overnight success”. But if you peek just a little bit further back, you’ll see Ryan doing something similar to Benjamin Franklin.

He was writing.

Ryan was a product manager at a company called PlayHaven. And during his time there, he knew he wanted to create a business, he just didn’t know what it would be. But instead of squandering his time dreaming about starting a business, he built an audience.

He put a ton of effort into his blog, Twitter, and getting articles in popular online magazines like PandoDaily and Fast Company, writing about other people’s products and what made them successful.

And his audience grew.

When the time finally came to tell people about a product he built, he didn’t have to go looking for a way to spread it, he already had it.

Look at one of the first articles talking about Product Hunt on Fast Company. Who wrote it? Ryan Hoover. And editors at other magazines were happy to spread Ryan’s news… because he had already been helping them.

Benjamin Franklin also had another genius idea to help spread his work — he created a hub of smart people interested in helping each other out, the Junto.

Look at some of the questions Franklin created to guide a Junto meeting:

  • In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?
  • Hath any body attacked your reputation lately? and what can the Junto do towards securing it?
  • Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?

The Junto was created to help spread the ideas of Franklin and his fellow members.

Before Product Hunt was created, Ryan was creating his own group, Startup Edition. He asked a group of like-minded bloggers, including myself, to blog about the same topic each week. We joined because of our interests, but also because of a slightly selfish reason — the extra value the group brought to each other: shared traffic. If someone like Adii Pienaar wrote a great post, then the rest of us enjoyed benefiting from his blog traffic as he linked back to the group.

And when Ryan had built a product of his own, the folks in Startup Edition were some of the first people to spread the word.

If you’re dreaming about your own business, but reading this while working for someone else, or maybe you’ve already started something, but it’s far from being ready or good, don’t squander this time. Don’t wait. Start writing, teaching, and publishing today. Form groups of like-minded people and friends. So when you do have something of your own to spread, you’ll already have an audience happy to help.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

And Franklin did both.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or check out what my own writing and publishing led to what I’m now doing at Highrise.

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Control Your Type: Google Fonts + Chrome = trouble?

tl;dr: If you let Google Fonts host your type for you, it might look terrible for some users on Chrome, especially Open Sans. Solution is below — you’ll probably need to host it yourself.

It’s not supposed to look like that

A user recently reported having trouble with the typography at Highrise:

This is happening to everyone here at our company. 100+ people here in the building. We took a vote and they had me contact you.

-Alex

Hmm, that can’t be good.

Let me back up…

A couple of months ago we changed the typography of Highrise. It’s part of a much longer and larger project to refresh the entire app. Over months, we went though dozens of different choices. Eventually we landed on Open Sans. Open Sans is a beautiful typeface Google commissioned and open sourced. And for that reason it’s used in a bunch of places not the least of which are many Google sites.

Font Reach shows over 190K sites using it. It’s the #6 most popular font in their catalogue. The biggest sites on the internet are using it: Google, WordPress, Mozilla. Even Chase, the bank, uses it.

And we started using it. People dug it.

https://twitter.com/gregormckelvie/status/665085345613160448

Some it took a moment:

Right away though we had someone complain:

Is there a way to change the font?

Uggh. They don’t like it?

They sent in a screenshot.


Yeah, that doesn’t look right. But then looking at the screenshot deeper:


It looks like their whole system might be pixelated/non-aliased looking. Turns out having “Cleartype” on can make a big difference. So the solution was just to recommend turning on Cleartype. That should improve Highrise as well as their entire system.

Still, I wondered how many people were having this problem. We didn’t hear too much about it, until the above email from Alex that it was affecting 100+ users in their company.

Ok, so let’s tell him to make sure Cleartype is turned on. Hmm, get some push back. It’s just affecting Chrome, not Firefox. Can’t be Cleartype then as that would be a system wide problem.

Looking more for Google Chrome font rendering problems you’ll quickly find: How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues.

Ah, I guess Chrome tries to use some fancy 2D GPU accelerated graphics… But that doesn’t always work on your machine, especially if your video card doesn’t support it. A person in that article: “In my case, “GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D” was enabled in Chrome. I disabled it, pressed the button on the bottom of the page to restart Chrome, and the problem went away.”

But Alex tried disabling this, and it still didn’t work. Besides 100+ people at his company couldn’t possibly have outdated video cards?

So what the hell? Kept looking.

Maybe there’s something specific about Chrome and Open Sans? Bingo.

A bug?!

1. Go to any site that uses Open Sans Normal 400 in Chrome Windows

2. It appears condensed

3. Even on the google font site

uninstalling a local version of the ‘Open Sans Light’ font from my Windows machine fixed the issue.

Dammit.

So Chrome is using the Light/condensed version of the font when it shouldn’t be. When it sees “Open Sans” at weight 400, it picks Open Sans Light locally from your computer. But 400 should just be the “normal” font.

Let’s look at how Google hosts this font using WordPress.com for example.


Which links: //fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,300

Looking at that:

/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Open Sans';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: local('Open Sans'), local('OpenSans'), url(http://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/v13/cJZKeOuBrn4kERxqtaUH3ZBw1xU1rKptJj_0jans920.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2212, U+2215, U+E0FF, U+EFFD, U+F000;
}

And what does src: local() do?

src

URL for the remote font file location, or the name of a font on the user’s computer in the form local(“Font Name”). You can specify a font on the user’s local computer by name using the local() syntax. If that font isn’t found, other sources will be tried until one is found.

Aha, so it’s using the local version of Open Sans first, and somehow Chrome thinks Open Sans Light is the same as Open Sans at 400.

How can we fix this? We can stop using local()…

And host them ourselves. Here’s more detail.

1) First, get the fonts themselves from Google.



How about the “you don’t need to download” bit? 🙂 Don’t believe them.

Get the Zip file.

2) Once you have the fonts in the Zip file, you can use Font Squirrel to convert them to the appropriate web format:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

We used the Basic conversion.

3) Next we chose Amazon’s S3 with Cloudfront in front to host the files ourselves. You’ll need to configure CORS on the S3 bucket.

4) Instead of using the @font-face declarations of Google’s, create your own.

You can take a peek at ours here: https://gist.github.com/n8/64748ac46ee67051dc45

For example:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Highrise Open Sans';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: url("//static.highrisehq.com/web/fonts/opensans-regular.eot?#iefix") format("embedded-opentype"), url("//static.highrisehq.com/web/fonts/opensans-regular.woff2") format("woff2"), url("//static.highrisehq.com/web/fonts/opensans-regular.woff") format("woff"), url("//static.highrisehq.com/web/fonts/opensans-regular.ttf") format("truetype"); }

You’ll notice that there are no more src: local references. We don’t want anymore collisions. So we use the src of the font on our server. Never on the local machine. We’ve also called it “Highrise Open Sans” in order to avoid any more collisions.

5) Now, when we want to use Open Sans in our CSS, we call for “Highrise Open Sans” as our font-family:

input, textarea, select, button, input[type=submit] {
  font-family: "Highrise Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, sans-serif; }

And done!

That looks a lot better.

-Alex

That was a pretty easy change as changes go, and worth it for those folks going through this. I suspect there’s also trouble with other fonts and odd local versions.

One trade-off is that our users will always have to download the font from our servers rather than use their local version. So there’s a performance hit. But since our users are mostly return visitors, they’ll have the font downloaded and cached on subsequent page visits.

Huge thanks to the whole Highrise team for figuring this out, and Grant Blakeman, a designer and developer who has been giving us a ton of help over here, for the solution!

Since Google Fonts, Open Sans, and Chrome are definitely popular, if you’re running into the same problem, hopefully we can save you some pain in getting this fixed!

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see the awesome new stuff we’re doing at Highrise.

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What are you drawing, Lily?


I have more than a few friends who keep talking about the businesses they want to start. But every week there’s a new excuse.

They can’t make up their minds about the best credit card processing company, or the best blogging platform, website CMS, or shopping cart, or the best book that will guide them to success.

Of course, most people invent all these obstacles so they never actually have to start and risk failing. Their ideas can remain flawless dreams.

But others see the Ubers, Dropboxes, and Airbnbs, or whatever else is worth a billion dollars this week, and they think they need to create something as big, and as perfect.

Airbnb has raised $2.39 billion at a valuation of $25.5 billion. That’s an awfully big company to look up to.

But Airbnb was a mess when they started.

Paul Graham told them their idea was crazy.

And he was right. Airbnb’s idea wasn’t just crazy, it wasn’t good — they wanted people to rent out real airbeds, and hosts were required to make breakfast for their guests. After 8 months in business, they were stuck making $200 a week in revenue.

Most of us would have been “smart” enough to give up. But instead they kept on sucking.

At one point they flew to New York with a nice camera to help users update their listings with some high resolution photographs. That helped them book $400 a week in revenue.

Still a laughable amount of money for three guys trying to make a living, but it was enough of a bump to keep them excited.

So they kept on sucking… until they didn’t suck anymore.

Of course, most of us still aren’t going to create something anywhere near as big as Airbnb, but imagine how much we’ll learn if we just start.

The Airbnb guys remind me of a band:

When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight fucking hours with 800 people at a convention center and… then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not fuckin’ good enough.’ Can you imagine?

It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a fucking computer or the internet or The Voice or American Idol.

Dave Grohl, drummer for Nirvana

I was watching my nieces, Madeline and Lily, when Madeline was 3, and Lily was 4. They both sat there eagerly making things. They didn’t have excuses that they didn’t have the right markers or the right paper or the right idea.

I had run out of blank printer paper, so they started making paper airplanes out of magazine inserts. Madeline was thrilled to draw with whatever utensil she could get her hands on. Lily had found a pink ribbon someone had dropped on the street. She picked up the forgotten trash and later turned it into a kite.

Of course, their airplanes didn’t work. I have no idea on earth what Madeline had drawn. And the kite didn’t have a chance of actually flying. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t care. It was a start and you can see them just get better and better at making these things as they practice and practice and practice.

Later I heard of a conversation Lily had with her mom that sums up how little these kids care of what others might deem as “perfection”, and how much they just care about putting their best something — anything — they’ve created into the world.

Lily’s mom: Lily, what are you drawing?

Lily: I don’t know, Mom. I haven’t drawn it yet.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see what all my own sucking eventually led to with what I’m now doing at Highrise.

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Highrise 2015 — Getting Stuff Done

At the end of 2014, Highrise was spun-off from Basecamp so it could get some well deserved love, and boy did we give it some love last year.

I don’t how you guys accomplished so much. I really don’t. –dhh

One of the ways we’ve been able to accomplish a lot with such a small team (5 full-time, 1 part time) is by implementing a train schedule:

On day one, I established a train schedule — we’d make major announcements on a regular basis. If something isn’t ready, it misses the train. But an announcement is going out; something better be on it.

Another thing we try to make sure to do is to celebrate our successes. And the amount of improvement we’ve brought to Highrise over the last year is very much worthy of celebration. Here are just a few of our favorite things from 2015.

Top 3 we’re most proud of

These three level up the power you have in Highrise. We kept hearing from customers how important it was to make sure contacts were followed up with if they wrote in, how often people had to export contacts and spend more money to send emails from another tool, and that Deals could be so much more useful if they just had a bit more flexibility. Our solutions were Good Morning, Broadcast, and Deal custom fields.

Good Morning — your group inbox // 19-Oct


Broadcast — bulk email // 1-Dec


Deal custom fields // 16-Dec


But we’ve talked with so many customers and have heard many more important needs and insights. From those chats, we realized customers have too many steps getting data in and out of Highrise, so we’ve been nibbling away at them, making things more automatic and native to the tool itself. We’ve added things like the ability to connect directly to your Gmail account, and auto-forward all your mail from Gmail right into Highrise.

We also wanted to really extend our support for email. So we added the ability to help you collaborate and share important emails you find yourself sending over and over with:

And we rounded it all out with features you’d expect in a full class email client like:

We found we were often getting the same questions over and over, so we started making changes to the Highrise Help site, but found we really needed a complete redo. We released the new help site in July.

And once we did, we saw an immediate decrease in the number of tickets coming in. We love talking to our customers, but it’s even better when we can remove the step of having to reach out to us :).

Speaking of tickets, the number one thing that caused the most tickets is imports. There are so many ways an import can go wrong when trying to get data from one system into another. So we also completely redid how Imports work in Highrise. The biggest change was simply avoiding frustration with better indicators when we find something wrong.

And the number one feature request was an iOS app. We delivered a 5 star app early in 2015:


I have been using Highrise for many years and this new app is just the thing I’ve been waiting for!

Really, the above is just a few things we’ve done. We polished, tweaked, and improved so much more based on all the great feedback we’ve been getting. You can see the full (and much longer!) list on our blog.

And 2016 is going to see more of the same. Improvements to all the things we’ve already added, but we hear everyone loud and clear on what they need. Better reporting, an Android app, more powerful filters and custom fields. It’s all coming. 🙂

And if you haven’t checked Highrise out in awhile (or ever) now may be a good time! We’re just getting started.

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Why are some people so much luckier than others?

James Scott Bumgarner, more famous as James Garner, film and TV star, passed away recently at the age of 86. Many people shared how great a guy he was and stories about his life.

A few things caught my attention. Not the least of which was how lucky he seemed. How does a guy without any acting experience and who hates talking in front of people land a well connected Hollywood agent to jumpstart his career? Luck?

In 1935, Hollywood created their talent scout system. Just like athletic scouts, folks would monitor Broadway plays and radio for talent. But occasionally they’d “discover” someone in public who didn’t have any acting experience — they just looked like a movie star.

Lana Turner, one of the most glamorous and popular female stars of Hollywood during the 40s and 50s (pictured here at the right with James at the 1966 Academy Awards), is a great example.


She was 16, ditching a high-school typing class and drinking a Coke at a soda shop in Hollywood, when someone spotted how attractive she was. He recommended her to his Hollywood agent friend and soon she was in a movie. Gorgeous girl — right place at the right time — lucky.

James had a right place at the right time story, too.

Before acting, James Garner had dozens of different jobs. He’d work them a few months, save money, quit, coast for awhile, and then find the next thing.

At 17, one of James’ jobs was pumping gas at a Shell station in Hollywood. That’s where James met Paul Gregory who worked at the drugstore across the street manning the soda fountain.

But Paul Gregory had a dream of being a Hollywood agent and talked about representing James.

James after all was good looking — enough people told him so. But James had no intention of being an actor. He just laughed it off.

Years later, James was coming back from a tour of duty in the Korean War and he spotted Paul’s name in Newsweek. Paul was now a stage producer with three big hits.

And about a year after that, while visiting LA and driving back from a failed attempt at getting a job drilling oil wells in Saudi Arabia, James spotted a sign: “Paul Gregory and Associates”. He wasn’t planning on stopping, but all of a sudden he noticed a parking space open up in front of the office.

James parked the car, went inside to visit his old friend, and Paul immediately decided to become James’ agent, send him to acting school, and help get him a job. The rest is a brilliant career in television and film.

It reads like another guy-gets-lucky-in-Hollywood story. But is it?

Luck
 success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions

Richard Wiseman was a professional magician before he became a famous psychologist. Given his interest in magic, he has a healthy dose of scepticism for things like superstitions and good luck charms. So Wiseman has spent a good deal of his career studying luck.

In one experiment, Wiseman asked people to self identify themselves as lucky or unlucky. Then he gave his test subjects a newspaper. “Count the number of photographs inside”, he told them.

There were 43 photographs.

On average, the unlucky people took 2 minutes to count them all. The lucky people? Seconds.

The lucky people noticed the giant message that took up half the second page of the newspaper. It said, “Stop counting — There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

The unlucky people missed it. They also missed the equally giant message half way through the newspaper, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.”

The “lucky” people weren’t lucky. They were just more observant.

And James was observant.

James fought in the Korean War and had more than a few close calls with death. James explains in his autobiography, The Garner Files, an event that could have turned out disastrous:

Like our South Korean allies, the Chinese and North Korean troops lived on a diet of fish heads, rice, and garlic. One night while on guard on the line, I caught a faint whiff of it coming from the direction of the enemy positions. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew there was someone out there and they were coming closer. Once I sniffed them I could hear them, too. It turned out to be a patrol heading straight for our position. They were just the other side of a rise when I passed the word down the line. We were ready for them and stopped them in their tracks.

His observation of enemy troops nearby likely saved a bunch of his fellow soldiers lives including his own. But it wasn’t James being lucky. It was James being observant.

Wiseman notes from his research that unlucky people also identify themselves as being tense and anxious, so he performed another experiment to confirm how anxiety affects people.

He had one group of people watch a moving dot on a computer monitor while other large dots flashed on the screen. They noticed the large dots. He did the experiment with a second group of people, but this time he offered a financial reward to make them more anxious. This group missed a third of the large dots that appeared.

Anxiety focuses us, but it also becomes an obstacle to observing opportunities in our lives.

One thing you notice from people talking about James’ life is how relaxed the guy was.

Appreciating the relaxed genius of the late James Garner.

Hitfix

RIP James Garner. One of my favourite cool actors. Always looked so relaxed on screen. A proper film star.

Russell Kane (@RussellKane)

James had a reason to be relaxed.

He and his brothers grew up in a home of mental, physical and sexual abuse. His father would force the kids to sing, and if they didn’t he’d whip them. His stepmother raped his teenage brother and beat the boys constantly.

If that wasn’t terrible enough, James grew up during The Depression in Oklahoma, meaning he, his family, friends and neighbors battled things like the Dust Bowl.

You want to put pressure on somebody, live through the Depression. In Oklahoma. In the dust. After that, studio executives don’t bother you at all.

James didn’t worry about much because nothing could be as bad as the life he had already lived.

Wiseman also found lucky people go out of their way to try new things and meet new people.

Remember all those jobs James had?

And James knew everyone: crew, cast, people in the towns he’d film in. Gretchen Corbet, one of the co-stars in James’ series, The Rockford Files, remembers, “Everybody loved him — but he took care of not only the actors and me but the whole crew. He knew everybody’s name, he knew everybody’s kids’ names.”

This wasn’t just after he was famous. He was doing it constantly.

I used to go around with the three of them — [Henry] Fonda, [Johnny] Hodiak, and [Lloyd] Nolan — as a sort of bodyguard-gofer-mascot.

At the table reading on the first day of rehearsals, Lloyd never had to look at his script. Everybody else was reading their lines, but Lloyd was letter-perfect…Fonda was amazed, because Queeg was a difficult part. “How the hell did you do that?” he wanted to know. “I hired Bumgarner,” Lloyd told him. So Fonda asked me if I would cue him, too, and I gladly agreed.

James considered himself an introvert. But that didn’t mean he didn’t take every chance to befriend someone else. He was happy to clean movie stars’ dressing rooms, or help them remember lines, just to get closer to new people.

One last point from Wiseman’s research — lucky people think the things that happen to them are lucky, even if they’re the same things that happen to the unlucky people.

In another experiment, Wiseman asked his lucky and unlucky test subjects how they would describe a hypothetical situation where the subject was in a bank, and a bank robber comes in firing his gun, shooting the subject in the arm. Unlucky people lamented about their terrible luck at being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lucky people were thankful — the situation could have gone so much worse. One of Wisemen’s lucky subjects noted, “It’s lucky because you could have been shot in the head.”

Again, given James upbringing, you get the sense that he too felt like anything after that traumatic childhood was just a blessing.

In a story James has about having to share a motel room with two other guys:

There were only two beds so I slept on the floor. The two Marines stayed up all night moaning about how unhappy they were — it was their first Christmas away from home and we were all just teenagers — but I was quiet on the subject. They were depressed and homesick, but there I was, lying on the floor, happy as can be.

It’s easy to look at successful people and chalk up their achievements to good luck. And sure enough, some people really do just win the lottery, or get born so beautiful that someone notices them on the street and puts them in a movie.

But if you go back through James’ story:

Paul Gregory was just one of many, many friends James kept making. He noticed his friend’s name in Newsweek, that sign in Hollywood, that parking space that opened up not because he’s lucky, but because he’s so keenly observant. And of course he’s observant; he’s one of the most relaxed people you could have met. He’s just happy to have gotten through that horrific childhood.

Is James Garner luckier than you or me? Maybe. But that’s because James Garner created his own luck.

When I started acting, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was just stumbling around, hoping to get lucky.

P.S. You should follow me on YouTube: youtube.com/nathankontny where I share more about how we run our business, do product design, market ourselves, and just get through life. And if you need a zero-learning-curve system to track leads and manage follow-ups, try Highrise.


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“How do I get out of my writing rut?”

Weird truck

Often I get asked a variation of:

I’ve been writing for a couple years, but I have no more inspiration, and little readership. How do you write? Where do you get inspiration? How do you get out of the rut and get people to start reading?

We all get this way. But here’s a few things that have helped me keep pushing through that, and eventually ended up with some stuff that’s done well on places like my blog Ninjas and Robots, or Signal v. Noise, and have even found their way into The Huffington Post and Fast Company.

1) Create a schedule, and go with what you got.

Years ago I felt I was doing a somewhat decent job writing, but I just wasn’t getting any traction. Dustin Curtis had just launched a new blogging platform called Svbtle that was getting a lot of attention and was only publishing authors he had invited. I didn’t have an invite. But I knew his attention could rub off on me. So I took a shot, emailed him and showed him some samples of my work.

As I hit send, I felt very pessimistic about my chances. The other folks writing on Svbtle were much better and had better followings than me.

No way I’m getting an invite.

I got an invite.

Huh, I should stop assuming things won’t work.

But writing on his blog network came with a caveat, publish one thing a week. I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t, but I assumed he’d kick me out, and I really didn’t want that. I needed this opportunity. So I kept publishing once a week. If I was up against the end of the week and hadn’t had inspiration, I would just find something to even take a picture of. Like that truck I saw as I walked down the street.

Or I saw an interesting article in Esquire about Bill Murray. Again, under the gun to get something published that week, I wrote up a few sentences on why I thought it was interesting.

Not my most brilliant post — turns out to be one of my most trafficked posts.

Don’t worry so much about meeting the schedule with the same quality and quantity. Running up against your schedule deadline, find a picture of something interesting and write a hundred words about why it’s interesting. That’s it. Write a yelp review even. Get some personality in that review and put it on your blog. Just do something, anything, to keep the momentum going. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself.

The momentum will actually push something through that your weird brain pessimistically thought was terrible and turns out awesome. As journalists like to say, “Go with what you got.”

2) Stop writing the same thing.

If you write about yourself, start writing about other people. Or vice versa. I personally like to share a lot of anecdotes about my life, but I find I get into a rut. I don’t want to talk about me all the time. Especially if I’m going through some really tough struggles. But there are so many interesting people to write about. Here’s: a great example on my blog. I took myself completely out of it. Just wrote about someone in the news (James Garner) who had recently passed away and how cool his life was. A lot easier to write about him, when I feel stuck writing about myself.

3) Take a class!

I don’t know why we as writers stop taking classes. They are great places to learn new things and get yourself on a schedule. There’s probably a ton of places to find a fun writing class. I took one at Gotham.

It was in that class actually that I wrote that article above about James Garner that went gangbusters. It was another thing pushing me to write something different. If you’re stuck on your blog, I’m sure a homework assignment can shake some new stuff loose.

4) Bands don’t keep playing the same song in the same place. Write somewhere else.

Find a new place to share your stuff. Stop the blog for a bit. Get your stuff in a magazine, the Huffington Post, wherever. Go pitch some editors for some guest posts and articles.

5) Bands also don’t keep playing completely original songs at each venue either.

They repeat their hits or their latest album. They might improvise and riff on old songs, but they reuse a lot. That’s beauty of #4’s advice about finding new outlets to write — you can recycle some of the ideas you are most proud of. James Altucher is great at this. It’s like the guy is a writer Everywhere. And you see some of the same stories. But that’s fine. Very few people are like me and reading his stuff on all these different places. He’s out there making new audience members constantly from these new channels.

6) Practice your idea muscle.

It’s been super interesting hanging out with Jason Fried these days since I took over Highrise. The guy always has an idea for something. A new book, a new blog post, a new product. Only executes on a tiny fraction of those things he thinks are worth it, but man does he have a wealth of things to pick from.

Need a little push to do the exercise? Come up with lists. Everyday, push yourself to come up with lists of things to write about. Most will suck. But don’t let your brain atrophy. Keep coming up with stuff.

7) Get out and do some new things.

Go to a new museum, or weird place. Pick up a new or strange hobby for a bit. Go buy some strange magazines you’d never ever buy. Learn what other people are reading and caring about. Lots of interesting things to draw from those experiences.

8) Copy someone else’s template.

I’ve literally taken writing I’ve liked and dumped it into my writing software and just written on top of it, working to match the flow and structure, deleting their stuff as I go.

Go find a writer that you like, and write something using their piece as a template. Maybe you try and copy their tone. Or structure. How they use analogies, or anecdotes. Or even copy the argument. Try to make their same argument with a different analogy or method. It can be freeing to use the constraint of someone else’s writing.

9) Stop writing. Talk.

Pretend you’re giving a talk instead. Or some kind of presentation. Get out of the chair and walk around with your phone recording your voice. Moving and talking have a way of loosening up whatever it is.

10) Put together chocolate and peanut butter.

Take two unrelated things, stories, or people and show everyone what makes them so interesting together. Why was writing Frankenstein like stealing cars? What does Elon Musk have in common with a boy who wants a pet moose?

Take things that people haven’t put together before and put them together to show what an interesting combination they make. Fries and milkshakes? Yes, try that.

11) Buy books like they’re free.

When you’re broke, like I’ve been many many times, you need to find some creative ways to get by and you get to complain all you want about the prices of books (Like wtf college? Why do you keep releasing new versions of the same text book when all that changes is mostly page numbers and not the physics of the universe. There goes another $80 down the drain for the “new edition”).

But I don’t get most other people’s hangup with how much books cost. If you aren’t living paycheck to paycheck, and buying a $20 book isn’t going to change the food you buy your family, give yourself a huge budget to buy books.

If there’s something I’m really interested in, I’ve turned off the nag in my head, “oh man, this should be 15% less. I’ll wait.” Or “I’ll wait for the library”. I need more ideas, quicker; instead of waiting for the rare library visit.

The other weird thing people feel about books is that they’ve “invested in it”. This leads them to feel, when they realize they hate the book they “invested in”, they can put it down for fear they’ll waste their investment. But they never finish the terrible book. So they rarely get to another.

Throw more books away. It’s a sunk cost. Forget about the past “investment”. Move on to something interesting.

I buy books like they are free. I saw a physics textbook that looked interesting. Maybe there’s something in there to help me think about problem solving. Oh it’s $99. I don’t care. I didn’t even finish it. I got something interesting out of it after a couple chapters, might make its way into an article, and the book is there if I want to learn more physics.

Again, if you live on a tight budget, you have to be a lot more careful. But if you want to introduce yourself to new thinking and options as a writer, and your budget has money for clothes, drinking, eating out, vacations, cable, televisions, etc., I’d rethink the lack of allocation you have to books, magazines, and anything that can potentially get new ideas across your brain faster.

12) Stop hitting the delete key.

I want to create something out of nothing but nothing isn’t a great place to draw from. -Mitch Hedberg

Just write. Free write. Take your writing software or notebook and just go nuts. DO NOT DELETE or edit yourself. You need a body of thoughts before you can edit. You need that place to draw from.

Don’t underestimate paper either. It’s a great place to just flow. Typing can be too slow to get all the thoughts out there.

I hope that’s helped some. If there’s something else on your mind and you feel like you could use some more help, please don’t hesitate to ask. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see where all this writing stuff led to what I’m now doing with Highrise.

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How can I find someone to help me?

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

I’ve been running businesses for over 10 years. I helped start Inkling at the end of 2005 with Y Combinator.

One of my biggest frustrations was simply how little the company spread through blogs and news sites. I echoed the wants of every other entrepreneur. How can I get more press? How can I meet more bloggers who want to write about us? Do I need to hire a PR person?

We had a blips of press when we first started. But for 9 years it was in business (was acquired last year), it’s a minuscule list.

Inkling had been able to stand despite the difficulty spreading the word the way I wanted, but I hated that feeling of being beholden to other people to spread what I was working on.

As I found myself dreaming of what I’d work on next, I was haunted with the struggle of finding people to spread my work.

In the late 1980s there was a teenage actor who was doing well finding movie roles. But as quick as his career started, it stuttered.

So he fell back to Plan B, and went to college. But he couldn’t let the acting bug go away. He kept looking for and landing parts. Then in his final year of college, he landed the best role of his life — a starring role in a movie filled with A-list actors and a great director. This was an Oscar-worthy movie.

So he quit school and moved to LA to pursue a professional acting career full-time.

Except, the movie bombed.

Critically, it did well. But it was a box office dud. And his hope that this was his stepping stone to stardom was squashed.

He was back to being a largely unknown actor, sleeping on friends floors in LA, with endless competition. He’d get an occasional minor role, but was making less than when he was a teenager.

He needed a breakout role. But no one was giving it to him.

So, he decided to do it himself.

He dusted off a script he had started in college, and with a friend put serious time into turning the half-written document into an actual screenplay. When they thought they finally had something, they started shopping it around. And, it wasn’t half bad. They got some interest from a big name studio, and made a deal.

Just one problem. The studio decided they didn’t want either of these guys to act in it. They wanted A-list celebs to star in the movie.

The whole point of writing the screenplay was to give them big parts to help launch their careers, and now the plan was falling apart.

But another friend of theirs with some clout at a movie studio, was able to step in and find a new buyer for the script. The new buyer green-lit the movie, and put the friends back in charge. They gave themselves the parts they wanted, and the rest of the story is very well known.

In 1997, on Christmas day, the movie premiered. It made over $225 million in theaters, was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two of those awards, Best Supporting Actor, and most importantly…

The script Matt Damon had started while attending Harvard became Good Will Hunting and won Best Original Screenplay for Matt and his good friend, Ben Affleck.

Matt and Ben’s careers soared, catapulted by the success of that movie and their roles in it. All because they worked hard to become what it is they tried so hard to find — someone to put them in starring roles in a great movie.

Become that which you seek

Everyday I bump into someone struggling to find someone else to help them with their project or career. They are business people looking for technical co-founders or people like me at Inkling looking for someone else to write about me.

Now, from all these years in business, I realize that Matt Damon had it right. Instead of looking for some executive producer to give him a starring role, he was just going to become the executive producer.

If you’re a “business guy” stuck because he can’t find a technical co-founder: go become the technical co-founder. Go to some classes, conferences, meetups. Read and use the same blogs and forums. Do what you think a technical co-founder would do. You’ll be surprised that the action of trying to accomplish this actually puts you in the company of a great deal of people who would make… really great technical co-founders.

You know who Matt Damon met on the set of his movie? Steven Spielberg. Who then cast him for a role in Saving Private Ryan.

I was so sick of no one writing about me and the companies I work on, I decided I needed to become that writer. I put in years of practice and patience of publishing blog post after blog post and having three people read them (my wife, my mom and me). But, eventually, my blogging gained some traction and followers.

One of those followers turned out to be Chris Dannen, a senior editor at Fast Company, who asked me to write for them. About what? About me. And now, that’s turned into invites to write about my projects for other magazines and newspapers.

I had spent all this time looking for someone else to write about me. But, when I spent that time instead becoming the writer, better opportunities presented themselves.

Of course, this took a while. Everything worth it does.

But a funny thing happens when you do the work to become the thing you seek so much from others. You find it.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see where this has all led to what I’m now doing with Highrise.

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Discouraged — I’m not any good

Uranium hexafluoride — I used to make this stuff

I’m currently trying to teach myself coding and feeling a bit discouraged at the moment. Trying to hear of other’s success stories to see if it’s worth it to see it through to the end. (zeexik asks on Reddit)

Who hasn’t felt like this about something? We’re out of school, but there’s things we want to still learn to get where we want to go. But it’s daunting. We get discouraged.

17 years ago I spent my summer in Paducah, KY. It was friggin hot. It was even worse because on a lot of days I was wearing an acid proof suit — those things are made of an unbreathable plastic something that doesn’t react with acid; see Breaking Bad and why you don’t use acid in your bathtub 🙂

Why was I in this suit? Because I was doing experiments at a uranium processing plant where we used a lot of hydrofluoric acid. If that sounds dangerous, it was. We’d have to carry gas masks around all day; go through radiation detectors; some guy had recently burned a hole through his shoulder from some tiny, accidental leak somewhere.

It was my first real gig doing chemical engineering, and I hated it. I mean, aspects of using my education were incredibly enlightening, but I didn’t want to work in plants like this after college.

Fortunately for me that summer, I broke my ankle.

They wouldn’t let me in the plant anymore for fear my cast would get contaminated with uranium. You know, typical summer intern problems. 🙂

It was fortunate because they stuffed me in a trailer outside the plant where I couldn’t get into too much trouble. And the only thing I could then do all day was use a computer. They’d give me Excel spreadsheets and ask if I could help them with some macros to speed up their calculations. It opened my eyes to what I really wanted to be doing.

I loved that work. Programming macros turned into me creating visual basic UI’s to make all these things that made the lives better of people around me at that plant. The feedback was instantaneous. Unlike the experiments I was doing that were dealing with all these messy chemical and physical problems people still couldn’t understand from decades of academic research, the computer obeyed my will, and allowed me to make so many people happy when it made their lives easier. I was hooked. I just dove in. Found everything I could about programming. Started making websites.

But then college was almost over, and I was still a chemical engineer, and instead, I wanted a job programming computers. So I took the closest thing I could get near the software business which was as a consultant for Accenture. And that sucked.

I was stuck gathering requirements all day. Typing up meeting notes. I didn’t have the skills for them to let me do any software engineering tasks. So I just kept at it. I’d bug all the engineers around me on what they were doing and learning. I’d go home and make more software. More websites. Try more things. Eventually I bugged enough people at work about the stuff I was making, they saw I had a hunger and new set of skills and they started letting me do some tasks on the side. I still had my requirements gathering and grunt work to do, but I’d stay after work for hours programming things for them, and learning some new reporting tools they had that they didn’t have time to learn yet, which included the ability to program UI’s to pull up the reports.

Eventually, I moved on from that role and they started putting me in software engineering roles. I still wasn’t any good. But I just sponged all the knowledge I could from the senior people around me. I did my work off hours too to see if I could make it better than they expected of me.

Eventually, I moved on from that company and was a pretty damn good engineer finally, and got a job at a software company.

Eventually, I moved on from that job and started creating my own software companies. First Inkling, where I was the CTO, then I was an engineer for the Obama campaign, then I made Draft (http://draftin.com) and then all of this led to Jason Fried and Basecamp picking me to take Highrise (http://highrisehq.com) and turn it into a separate company where I still get to write software every day.

So heck yeah, I’ve taught myself software development and make money at this. It wasn’t fast. It took at least a year of really hard work on the side to get people to give me some tasks that were programming related at work. And years after that before I’d say I was any good.

But it’s like anything. It takes practice. We suck at so much stuff when we start out.

I have a 19 month old daughter. She’s awful at everything.

Right? 🙂 Crashes into walls. Falls down constantly. Can’t figure this out or that. But we know she’s going to be awesome at this stuff she struggles with today. Look at how far she’s already come! It’s ridiculous how much she learns and learns and learns. And that doesn’t have to stop.

Don’t pick up software development if you’re just doing it for a paycheck or what you think the paycheck is going to be in the future. Pick it up because you like figuring out things like that. And I guarantee you, with enough practice and work, you’ll get better. And then better. And then better after that.

And as for the coding schools, I haven’t done any myself, but sometimes those are the best ways to learn for some folks. Some people get by with a book and a keyboard. Some really need the mentors and fellow students around them to bounce things off of. I would definitely experiment and check them out. I know people who’ve taken those courses and gone on to make their own things or gotten really great jobs. Claire Lew is a great example. She took a course at Starter League, and now Basecamp put her in charge of Know Your Company. That’s not everyone’s story of course. But let me share one more anecdote:

An acting teacher told his class of total beginners (which included me): “New York and LA are inundated with actors. It’s tough to make a career there. But… you can absolutely achieve it in Chicago. You won’t get everything you want all the time, but if you do the work you can get enough acting jobs, including commercials or industrial films, to make the money work. If you want to have a career as an actor, it’s yours.”

He absolutely believed that it wasn’t about what we looked like or innate talent we had at acting. If we wanted a career in acting, we just had to do the work.

And as I started watching the people around me succeed at acting, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were making a living at it. It wasn’t A-list Hollywood stuff all the time. Sometimes it was appearing in training videos about workplace sexual harassment, or chemical safety, or whatever. But those paid the bills so they could get up on stage every weekend to perform a play for a hundred people. The people with the rigid goal of Hollywood now or nothing? Those folks were bitter and gave up.

If you want a career in software, it’s yours. There is nothing stopping you from learning this. Just put in the work to learn it like anything else. It might take a bunch of only fair jobs before you’re good enough, but take what you can get and learn.

P.S. It would be awesome to meet you on Twitter, or see where this has all led to what I’m now doing with Highrise.