projects

Which expensive events permanently go digital?

August 21, 2020 by rememberlenny

One of the more interesting conversations I had recently was with a b2b sales director, who could clearly articulate the before and after changes from Covid. In short, companies account non-trivial budgets to send reps to in-person events, trade shows, and conferences, knowing there are unattributable affects for these costs. The side channel interactions between conference talks or the face time with in-person attendees is crucial for most sales pipelines.

Using a framework that I was introduced to by Daniel, from Pioneer, these events and their impact could fall into a two axis map of attributable results and costs. This means, there are results that are not attributable to a cause or are attributable. And similarly there are actions that are costly to take or not costly. Between these two axis’ you can have sales channels that are expensive and attributable, expensive and not-attributable, not expensive and attributable, and not expensive and not-attributable.

GPT-3 Make me a stratechery styled chart for attributable results and cost

As noted from the sales side, most efforts to generate leads are not attributable to specific actions, and costly. In other words, sending a sales rep to speak at a conference or signing up for a booth at a trade show are both costly, dont generate leads or sales at a normal cost per acquisition. The intangible benefits, such as exposure and branding are the justified reasons for spending money.

Outside of the individual sales rep perspective, a company’s yearly multimillion dollar event may be held at a huge cost and have relatively little attributable sales impact. While an event can give a slight sales bump, when compared to no event at all, it in no way justifies the huge cost for organizing the event. Think Saleforce’s Dreamforce or Google’s SPAN.

A few other examples of expensive not-attributable actions could be in the recruiting space. Engineering teams may sponsor large events or send employees to attend conferences for recruiting purposes, but don’t actually return with concrete recruiting leads. Again, there are often more benefits that are intangible, such as employee satisfaction, but the point is clear.

Due to the major shift from Covid of in-person events going digital, companies are paying closer attention to costs and attributable results. The digital event equivalents with attributable outcomes will be harder to justify with large costs in the future. If a $4 million event gave a 30% sales boost, but a $300,000 digital event can create a 20% equivalent boost, then the outstanding costs for the in-person event wont be returning immediately. Is the remaining 10% worth $3,700,000? No.

As many more events are moving online, a far greater number of previously in-person events will likely stay online. Considering the ratio of online event invites to registrations and actual attendees are continuing to shrink, the need refine the surface area of online events is becoming more important. A similar email invite and zoom link isn’t sufficient. The event speakers, email reminders, in-event promotion, post-event follow up, and summary resources are more important than ever.

One great write up Ross shared with me was on the webinar industry trends and the reception of the “Cambrian explosion” of digital events. (I had to do it)

You can find that here: https://www.trustradius.com/vendor-blog/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-digital-events

Hmm…which one should I attend?

Companies holding online events are now competing with the newest HBO hit-series release, but have much less to offer. Considering the competition, tools that help companies do promote, run and engage audiences for online events better are more important than ever. As we saw over the last few years that companies went from refined writing techniques over clearly defined visual brand guidelines. Now that well laid out photos and visual styles are not enough, companies are hiring in-house video producers to manage livestreams, tutorial content, and editing recorded events.

Video tools used to be generic timeline editors, like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, but the consumer tools such as TikTok and livestream tools for the likes of Twitch are revealing the potential for improvement. How many webinars are using OBS to engage their audiences? As new demands are set for quality video content, the tooling will continue to evolve and become more niche.

As the events that were previously in-person move online, I expect a lot more companies to appear in this space.

Thoughts on side projects

December 18, 2019 by rememberlenny

I recently visited my best friend from college.

We were both city boys who caused trouble as teenagers, and connected over our free spirited willingness for fun. Since our friendship began 10 years ago, he has taken up farming and lives in Oregon on a nine acre plot with crops, animals and a seasonal business. I ended up in New York city, married, and working at a tech company as a programmer. Both of us studied philosophy and literature, both of our lives took unexpected directions, and I think that we both ended up exactly where we want to be. At least for the time being.

I wouldn’t necessarily call the farming a side project, but I also don’t think my friend will be a farmer for his entire life. He spends his days and nights farming, but his dreams are around writing and his real income comes from highly successful real estate deals. If all of his time goes toward one thing, and all of his money comes from another, then which is the side project and which is the job?

Similarly, my income comes from a consulting contract, but the majority of my time isn’t spent at work. In one sense, this is because I found a great company to work with, but in another it is because I prioritized finding a source of income that allowed me to spend a lot of my time on side projects. In my own defense (not that I need one), my time spent on projects makes me much more impactful in the other areas that I end up working in. But I don’t consider them work.

Given the two cases where a side project ends up becoming the main allocation of time, I conclude that a “side” project doesn’t necessitate a minor allocation of time.

For the past seven years, every winter, I have taken on a side project.

In 2013, I traveled around the US and built an artistically laid out website that described an educational pedagogy. In 2014, I went to India and learned enough Objective-C to make an iOS app. In 2015, I made a hotline for people to share their breakup stories. In 2016, I built a ruby API and bot that traded stocks (very poorly). In 2017, I built a deep learning machine and trained some amateur image recognition models. (Surprisingly I never used this to mine crypto.) In 2018, I indexed millions of street art images and built a web application to explore them online. All the while in between, I was playing around with unfamiliar tech and building out personal projects for fun.

This winter, I haven’t “built” anything, but I have been thinking a bit more deeply about what the output of all my side projects have been. I have a nagging feeling that while each project was unique and fulfilling in its own right, I don’t have any concrete products to point to. Once the project becomes too expensive (or no longer interesting) to maintain, I often let domains expire or spin down servers.

My usual process is this: The output of the side projects is a website, possibly with a registered domain, and some efforts to gather attention. This results in a boost of page views/downloads while the promotion efforts happen (ie. Reddit/hacker news posts), but then eventually drops to a crawl. The remaining traffic normally comes from search, and otherwise never surges again. At the point that the traffic doesn’t feel worth the small but real cost, I start sunsetting the project.

This brings me to the question of why I do side projects, and also what more I think could come out of the projects.

While reading a great book about note-taking (How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens), I was intrigued by the idea that all notes should be taken with a purpose in mind. In the book, Ahrens states that notes should be taken with the mindset of needing to write about the material being read. In the same way, maybe defining clearer purposes for side project, could ease my feeling that more could have come out of old projects.

(I preface this thinking with an important point: Doing a side project for the sake of doing it alone is absolutely a good enough reason. I think if every side project must have a predetermined purpose or end goal, you will end up a person with boring side projects. And you would likely become a boring person. For example, if you feel all side projects need to result in becoming a business or passive source of income, then the pursuit itself will result in a series of unoriginal projects that are hard to maintain over time. Personally, doing projects out of sheer interest and a desire to learn or experiment has been the greatest force for sustaining my excitement and investing my time into producing something new.)

Now, let’s assume there is some definition of a side project. It’s a pursuit of some idea, which, in my case often revolves around technology, and results in a product (ie. an app, hardware), a community, or a collection of knowledge (ie. research, blog post, dataset, academic article).

That being said, the yearning sense of looking back at projects and not having some clear value to point to s concerning to me. With some projects requiring well over 100 hours, and in some cases hundreds of hours of time, I do wish I could point to something concrete that crystalized my effort.

Value I have derived from side projects:

I can honestly say that the projects I decided to work on made me more interesting and have something worth talking about.
If I was just doing “work”, I would feel dull.
In the process of learning something new for a project, I regularly made new friends to expand my knowledge and perspective on a problem.
Along the same lines of being “interesting”, by making something new, I felt I established some authority as a developer or product maker.
I established more confidence in my ability to contribute to other people’s projects.
When in work atmospheres that were less than exciting, side projects gave me something to be motivated about when work was not.

Moving forward, concrete things that I’d like to do

First, I need a lessons learned blog post and some kind of summary of the project. I don’t know if this is a series of gifs and screenshots, or some kind of gallery that can be previewed. Or at least a document or single place of reference that explains the project would be great.

Second, if data or an untapped area of interest is involved (ie. my street art project), I strongly feel publishing in an academic journal article would be possible. I don’t know what the process is like to submit to an academic journal if you aren’t affiliated with an academic institution or research entity (except I sometimes treat my projects as research entity), so understanding that early and then pursuing the project accordingly could be interesting.

Third, wouldn’t it be nice if all side projects resulted in some $$$? It’s not possible and shouldn’t be the goal in most cases, but in some cases the project could be wrapped up as a deliverable to someone who wants to buy it. When doing explorative projects, there are certain decisions I have made that I didn’t consider too seriously. If I had considered a sale of the overall codebase/community as an original goal, I imagine I would make different decisions along the way.

Anyway, I’m sure I will come up with something to work on this winter. If this year’s project doesn’t survive a year from now, and doesn’t become an academic study, and no one buys it, I think it’s still okay. I’ll still be happy working on something.

I returned my Google Glass after 30 days

January 6, 2014 by rememberlenny

I returned Google Glass

At the end of November, I was one of the thousands of people who receive the next round of invitations for Google Glass. After the v2 explorer edition was announced, I responded to an email from the Google Developers Group meetup in New York City. The email offered a Google Glass invitation code to anyone interested in acquiring the device.

Initially, I was completely sure I would want the device. I immediately responded to the email and excitedly told my roommate. Based on the timing of the invitation code request, I had to wait over the Thanksgiving holiday period before hearing a reply. During the time, I went home and spent an extended period researching the Google Glass status.

Many of the blogs online weren’t very diverse in opinion. There were the two camps of: “Its not where it could be, but I love the potential” and “This thing is way too expensive for what it can do”. Through reading state of Google Glass, I found that the battery life was poor, there was no integration with iOS (since December, this changed), the app eco-system was not extensive, and you couldn’t use it with perscription glasses. While I ocilated on my perspective toward buying Glass, I decided to go ahead with it.

Upon receiving confirmation of an invitation code, I setup my pick up date. Suprisingly, after I told my roommate, he applied for a Glass invite and was able to get a pair. After seeing his pair, I was reinvigorated to experiement with the new technology. In fact, because he had a pair, I started to imagine a number of possibilities involving multiple Glass users.

Wearing Glass

Wearing Glass in New York isnt too obscure. My roommate says it make you a “C class celebrity”. People look at you in the subway. Glass becomes a easy point to start a conversation. I even feel like you get special treatment at resturants. Regardless, it also becomes an impediment for feeling comfortable around people. Its an expensive piece of technology that draws attention.

I found that initially I was very interested in the different applications offered on Glass. The most interesting application is called Field Trips. Field Trips uses your current location to feed you relevant information about places around you. For example, Field Trips pulls in historic information about the landmarks around you. When you pass the area, you get a “card” that tells you the areas significance. There was a building in my community that I really admired, but never knew its historic significance. After walking by the building while wearing Glass, I got a “card” about the building. This blew my mind.

In most of December, Glass didnt have an iOS app. As a result, there was very limited functionality. There were no maps, very little SMS integration, and quickly drained phone battery. Even with these limitations, wearing Glass was awesome.

In mid-December, Glass updated itself overnight and introduced new features. This was impressive. The coolest was a “Wink” recognition feature that was not previously accessible. This feature allowed you to take pictures by winking with your right eye. Although the wink detection would occasionally lose calibration, the feature was very impressive.

Around the same time, the iOS application was released. This gave the Glass the ability to integrate with the iPhone. With the iOS app, Glass users could get directions without an Android device. This was very useful, but still not as impressive as I hoped. Even in the cold December weather, I found it easier to pull out my iPhone and look on Google Maps. When I needed to go to obscure addresses, it became impossible to “speak” the appropriate address.

My biggest struggle was the limited user interface on the Glass. While the device itself is best fit for voice activation, you can also use a number of gestures. I found the current interface too one-dimensional. When trying to set a Timer or procede through a list of application options, finding and selecting the prefered choice was difficult. Im sure this will be improved and no longer be an issue in the future.

Personal impressions

The reason Im returning Glass is less to do with the technology and more to do with the social implications. I had some great use cases, such as ease of recording personal interviews, as well as some bad acusations from stragners. Overall, the response from people was more positive than anything. People wanted to know about the “cool looking glasses”. Most lay people don’t follow tech news, so they have no idea what the Glass is. I found that there was a higher population of young men who responded to Glass positively. Oppositely, I found the largest group of negative responses to come from middle-aged woman.

My biggest issue with Glass was the disruptive quality when looking at or talking with people. Glass doesn’t disrupt your field of view, but it does feel like a barrier when interacting with other people. Once talking to someone, the Glass can be easily ignored, but I always felt a sense of discomfort.

My greatest joy with Glass was letting other people wear it. I found that younger people were very adept and using the voice activated commands. Oppositely, people in the twentys would wear the Glass and passively wait for something to happen. Adults who I had wear the Glass were often impressed by the device, but not as interested in trying it on.

After the honeymoon phase, I found myself using the Glass as a glorified watch. It because very easy to look at the time. I can imagine that great applications would be able to provide very valuable snippets of information with ease. For the time being, the information that is being served is not personally convincing for the need to have Glass. For the time being, even the best Glass apps are accessible via mobile devices. The moment Glass will shine is when apps are exclusively avaliable for Glass.

Reason for returning

I am returning Glass because I feel guilty about how much it costs. Buying the Glass was not a financial burden. As a software developer, I can justify expensive technology purchases because if they benefit my quality of life. Even if I dont use the device frequently, I would justify the value if it was useful when needed. I found this to be the case with buying a nice moniter for use at home and a high quality light laptop.

Still, the notion that I paid $1500 for the Glass felt obscure. Between the number of people who work low-paying hourly jobs, my mother included, I felt it was ridiculous to have such an expensive luxury item. The Glass would require more than a months worth of paychecks for most people to buy. Knowing that I was wearing the thing around without having much utilitive value kept reminding me how I was wasting the financial capital invested into the piece of technology.

If the device was a third of the cost, I could begin to justify the cost. For the time being, I am embarrased to be paying two months rent to feel apart of an exclusive group. While I think its amazing, I dont feel comfortable participating.

Overall thoughts

Considering my grievances about the user experience, I know these will be worked out. I have no question that the team working on Glass (officially and unofficially) are building amazing software. The potential for having a freely accessible camera and screen is brilliant. I can imagine security guards with Glass networks. Having a network of other “eyes” that you could access at the command of a voice seems useful in a number of professional use cases. I can see great social implications where people can see digital geo-fence activated messages based on their social networks. The Glass-like technologies have only jsut begun. I will be waiting with excitement to see the continued maturation of the Glass platform and users.