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Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s upcoming move back to LA, an update on Appignite, avoiding depression while not running a $1B company, the new Pluggio UI and why some existing customers don’t like it, Company 52’s new focus, Jason’s thoughts on Steve Job’s biography, the new interview format, how Jason bought some Facebook shares, Mesh01’s upcoming design competition for a “luck surface area” t-shirt, the aborted SpaceX launch, why Steve Blank thinks the age of Silicon Valley is over, when a blow to the head creates a sudden genius, the Reproducibility Project, the genetic basis for why Jason talks so much and the progress being made on AnyFu.
Justin, I’m just 43 minutes into the podcast, but I couldn’t help myself:
If the new Pluggio UI is the same layout and functionality, just different colors and lines, you should skin your app! Don’t run two versions, have one version with an ability to choose skins: old, new, and with time add more skins (say, Bloomberg terminal-inspired).
And until you roll out skinning, let the guys who hate the new skin use the old version side by side, as you said it’s right now.
Cheers.
Just started the ep, and the kids sound a little husky 😉
Good podcast guys. Thanks.
Jason, sounds like you’re hitting some real tough choices. The problem and advantage with Appignite is that there are so many really cool things that sound like they could come out of it. The original idea of a drag & drop app builder. A web framework where prototypes are built with drag & drop. Web based filemakerpro. All awesome big ideas. I was always very interested to hear about it.
The thing is they’re all hard things that’ll take a lot of time and have a pretty big risk of being even harder and taking even more time. They’re also all things with a pretty high chance of failure. This is a holy grail type problem you set out to solve, really. Programming without programming.
What kind of a hit will Anyfu take if you put 100 hours into Appignite?
@nethy – The time I put into Appignite is limited to 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM, Mon – Fri, which I reserve for working with Guyon. For that reason, doing or not doing Appignite really doesn’t impact AnyFu one way or the other, at least while we’re in the development stage.
As I mentioned on the show, Guyon and I have decided to put another month of work into Appignite to try to get it to a stable version that we can at least use for our own purposes. If at that point we feel like we have something that we can monetize, then we might try to take it to the next level.
About the Steve Jobs book criticism, you may want to listen to this Hypercritical Podcast which has the potential to make it like it a lot less in retrospective.
Good show.
@Armando Sosa – Thanks, I’ll check it out.
On a tangent the Steve Jobs biography, I was watching the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I said to my wife “I wish they made more of these techie drama movies!”.
For getting stuff done, do you guys know of Tim Conley over at Foolish Adventure? He’s got a podcast, and in the last one [1] they talk about following transformational goals. The argument goes, as I’ve understood it, is to do stuff that will make a difference (the Big Stuff). If you’ve a long list of minor things to do (like getting around to updating the color of your footer, just for a simple example), then you should really consider again whether it will get you any closer to your goals (like 50% more customers by the end of this year, or whatever). Sometimes it will, but often it will not.
[1]: http://foolishadventure.com/audio/are-you-setting-transformational-goals-fa099/
P.S. It’s nice not have have to grapple with the Disqus-type form for posting a comment – thanks for keeping it simple.
I strongly recommend this podcast discussion of the Steve Jobs bio, both shows:
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/43
I think it will shed some light on the negative reaction of a lot of people to the bio.
Essentially, we don’t know what Steve Jobs did every day, and we still don’t. The only person granted unlimited access to Steve Jobs didn’t know enough to ask good questions and followup.
I partially agree with Axure, I would let the user choose the skin on their control panel.
I think the reason why people live with changes has to do with free environments where you have no choice since you are not paying for the service (Facebook/Twitter/Google+) but once some one is making an investment I would assume they want to have some input if the changes will be major. I don’t know if that ever came up during discovery but I am glad that you are able to let the user use the old version if they decide to do so.
On a similar note, take Facebook for example, even tho they could make any change they want, they still roll out the changes to beta users before making it to the general public.
Keep up the good work.
Justin, just wanted to say that I like the new pluggio very much!
I meant to post this earlier but I got distracted.
I agree with Jason’s work satisfaction triangle; money, fun, learning. In my view – the money vertex can also mean potential money so it doesn’t need to be happening right now so in this sense, I’ve got all three 😀
@Guyon , yeah, actually doing the fun stuff can lead to great dedication and that results in mastery of some field, which translates to value.
Jason, I’m sure you’ve had a hundred suggestions of what to do with AppIgnite and the idea to open source it as a framework does sound like it would finish the core and provide a tool that’s useful to you and hopefully others.
However, it seems to miss the part that was really cool about AppIgnite: that you could create webapps even if you couldn’t program. There are lots of frameworks out there for developers, adding a new one with more code-generation is good but seems like an iterative improvement. Allowing non-programmers to create apps, even in a limited form, would be much more of a step change.
What about viewing AppIgnite as a prototyping tool for non-developers? The aim wouldn’t be to create completed apps but to build an example of functionality and actually be able to try it out, without having to get a coder on board. Once the user played around with a basic app and tweaked it a bit they could pass the generated code to a programmer to add more advanced features and style. This kind of prototyping seems to be very complementary to wireframes, etc for design.
I’m sure there are niches where AppIgnite could fit without needing to deal with every edge case found in advanced webapps. For example, my wife recently set up an online survey using Google Forms and was amazed at how easily she could set up something she wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, it didn’t do everything she wanted but it was quick and easily good enough for the job.
Started listening to the new show while I had some driving to do and hear you guys mention the listener numbers and wanted to provide a visualization of just how many people that is.
So 1500 people *looks* like this:
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4099/4947293363_b234502435_o.jpg
Every week, that many people are going into a virtual lecture hall, sitting down and listening to what Justin and Jason have to say about the world… I think that is pretty awesome.
Also really appreciate you two touching some sensitive topics like where your passions lay, are you wasting time with X or Y and so on; we all deal with doubts and it is nice to hear it talked about honestly and not with the spin necessary to mask real feelings.
On a closing note, one of the most popular series of shows Andrew Turner ever did was his “failure” series; if you guys could line up 5 or so speakers (even people you’ve spoken to before… that actually might be better since you already have a rep with them and new people to the show likely don’t want to open by talking about their failures) and so some interview shows about failure… I think you’d blow the doors off of it.
I’d love the shows to be tandem interview… I know some folks gives Jason a hard time for over-talking Justin, but I can’t help but think if that is the squeeky wheel syndrome… I love the dynamic between you two and in a content-rich episode about failure I’d hate to loose either of you. I want to hear you both laughing… it makes me laugh while I’m jogging/driving/sitting/etc.
Anyway, my 2 cents.
@Armando Sosa & Jon – I just finished listening to the two Hypercritical episodes where Siracusa critiques the Steve Job’s bio and while I think he’s probably right about most of it, I still found the book to be a good read and I’d still recommend it.
But as evidenced by the name of the show, Siracusa is an extremely prickly individual, so it’s not surprising that he would find fault with the book and be able to make some strong points in support of his dislike. I just wouldn’t let that put you off unless you share his fine-grained sensibility and also happen to be a Steve Jobs / Apple expert.
That said I very much enjoyed listening to the shows and have subscribed to the podcast, so thanks guys for bringing it to my attention. 😉