Welcome to my blog...
I am Ben Foden, a strategist, DJ, and seeker of all things new. This blog typically has posts about web services, entrepreneurship, and more once a week. I love technology, travel, and living in Silicon Valley. You can read About Me here. (:

Excellent talk given by a man named Dan Buettner about the simple things that, if done consistently, can let you live to be 100+.

Twitter’s short format is really excellent for finding and connecting with great thinkers. I have found these seven individuals to be some of the most fascinating and follow all of them with bated breath.

Without further ado and in no particular order:

1. @sfslim
   Name Aaron Muszalski
   Location San Francisco, CA
   Bio Burning Man builder, VFX artist/educator, polyglamorous social connector, DIY culture evangelist, anarcho-Dada Buddhist biker punk; I eat concepts & make things.




Just an eccentric guy who builds awesome stuff. Every single tweet I have ever read was about something totally new and interesting.




2. @27bslash6
   Name David Thorne
   Location Adelaide
   Web http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
   Bio Amongst my qualities, which include reciting prime numbers backwards from 90956, reading to blind children & training seals, embellishment may be at the top.





Hilariously bitter and sarcastic wit. Really funny guy. Hilariously funny blog at the above url.




3. @fsjblog
   Name Fake Steve
   Location Cupertino, Calif.
   Web http://fakesteve.net
   Bio I run the coolest company in the world. I don’t want to be your friend. Deal with it.





Hilarious and sharp take on tech as if he were Steve Jobs with flair.




4. @rules_unbornson
   Name Walker Lamond
   Web http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/
   Bio Let’s get some things straight before I get old and uncool.





Excellent perspective with a classic but refreshing view on points of life and living.




5. @thomashawk
   Name Thomas Hawk
   Location San Francisco, CA
   Web http://thomashawk.com
   Bio Quiet Observer of Modern Nihilism with Box that Captures Light





Fantastic professional photography and video from the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area.




6. @tariqnasheed
   Name Tariq Nasheed
   Location Los Angeles
   Web http://macklessonsradio.com.





This guy is a so-called “game advisor” or “mack” or whatever you want to call it, but bottom line: he has some real insights about relationships and just dealing with people in general. Follow him and listen to his podcasts to learn more.




7. @shitmydadsays
   Name Justin
   Bio I’m 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says





This guy has the funniest and most charismatic S.O.B. for a father ever. It’s always hilarious.

Who are the fascinating people you follow? I would love to know so don’t hesitate to let me know @benfoden

We are willing to pay a lot more for high thread count sheets because they touch our skin — they are something that is truly close to us on a regular basis.


High thread count cloth appears nicer, feels better, and costs more per square inch than others and your product can too. It’s high level of detail should disappear to the naked eye making it appear cleaner and feel better than lower thread count products.

Let’s compare two services, products, or even entire businesses so you can make a clear thread count comparison. Apple has a higher thread count than Microsoft, thus people are willing to pay a premium for Apple’s products and love them fanatically. Moleskine has a higher thread count than a wide range of competitors, thus people  pay considerably more for the quality of the paper and finish of the notebook and have self-organized a large community around it.

It is no coincidence that these companies also have fantastic histories and excel at telling their story. High thread count is about maintaining a standard of integrity, consistency, and quality above all competitors over time. It comes down to that closeness with the needs and realities of customers, and getting along super smoothly with those pain points.

• In the early years at Apple Steve Jobs encouraged the flying of pirate flags and was the relentless teller of his story of impending industrial and cultural revolution via the personal computer (see the classic 1984 macintosh advertisement). His vision continues to guide the thinking at Apple and continues to imbue their products with a sense of uniquely polished rebelliousness. “I am going to think differently. And it is going to be better.”

• Unlike Apple’s sexy portable computers, the brand Moleskine defines quality paper notebooks. Moleskine consistently touts the exceptional authors and thinkers that used and cherished its notebooks throughout history: “Moleskine® was created as a brand in 1997, bringing back to life the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two century: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin” This story attests to their integrity, their commitment to more quality per square inch than others. Indeed they are the favored notebook of many of today’s great thinkers and the feel of putting pen to that nice paper is unrivaled.

• This level of focus on the quality of the end user translates to devotion and allegiance with the brand. The high thread count products and services these companies sell allows them to command a premium price, and also to command fantastically organic word of mouth marketing by their many evangelists. These evangelists have created an entire range of websites, social networks, and even organize in person meets with strangers on the internet sharing only the love of high thread count. More and more convert to these businesses over their competitors every day and they provide exceptionally high lifetime value.

In the same sense that it pays to build a personal brand as much as your business’ brand, it is becoming an imperative that you must build your own thread count to be as high as possible.

Do you have high thread count?

I know I’m not where I want to be. Yet.

I absolutely loved this TED Talk that Ken Robinson gave. He is at once a hilarious, inspiring, and insightful speaker. Enjoy!

If you have the goal of building something of your own (and who hasn’t?), then read on.

You had a big idea and have completely fallen in love with it. The initial excitement lasts for awhile, but eventually the day comes when skepticism and doubts creep in. This usually happens for me on a bad day, unproductive day, rainy day, due to someone’s comments, or all of the above.

It is nearly inevitable that your optimism will fade, and in fact it will happen more than once as there seems to be a cycle.



>>Try This:

• Eliminate irrational fears by noticing how short-term they are, i.e. this is a concern today, but is it only for today? Am I still going to be concerned about this tomorrrow?





• Be mindful of the challenges that do persist and address them logically or at least acknowledge that you just don’t know how to solve them yet. It seems like 95% of the negative thoughts about my idea I have one day are quickly replaced by new optimism the next day.





• If you are really down in the dumps, run a classic pro / con comparison and list the things the idea has going for it in Bold.





• When possible, shift your logic from x “CANT, WONT, DOESNT work” to x “needs, requires, necessitates Y” to work.  Use the power of positive rewording to your advantage. (and it does lend a big advantage).
  
  

  The classic example: You are playing basketball and you have a problem shooting too low. You tell yourself “Dont shoot that low! Stop shooting so low! I cant shoot that low! etc..” and before you know it you have shot a complete airball that is a foot short of the hoop.
  
  Try “I will shoot higher. Next time I am going to shoot higher. I can shoot higher, and on and on”

It really will be better tomorrow.

Let me hear your thoughts in the comments.

As you may or may not know, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is on Nov. 9. This historic event was preceded by years of sadness, and in protest many citizens on the western side of the wall painted graffiti. Presumably because they had the time and would not be chased down and questioned by secret police for doing this. To commemorate the anniversary, TwitPaint and DeutschLern Net are holding a “Paint the Berlin Wall Contest.”

>Paint some graffiti on the berlin wall to protest in spirit. on twitter. instantly. Click Here.

Want to see some of the best entries in the contest so far? Check out the best graffiti on the Berlin Wall.

__________________________Deutsch______________________
Wie Sie vielleicht nicht wissen, ist der 20. Jahrestag des Falls der Berliner Mauer am 9. November. Dieses historische Ereignis wurde von der Trauer Jahre voraus, und aus Protest viele Bürgerinnen und Bürger auf beiden Seiten die Wand gemalt Graffiti. Um dies zu feiern, TwitPaint im Besitz einer “Paint Contest der Berliner Mauer.”

Paint einigen Graffiti auf der Berliner Mauer nach Ost Deutschland im Geiste zu protestieren. auf Twitter. sofort. Klicken Sie hier.

Willst du einige der besten Einsendungen des Wettbewerbs finden Sie so weit? Schauen Sie sich die besten Graffiti an der Berliner Mauer.

If you are not immediately in awe of this first photo, click play and I promise you will be very happy with the view =)

The logic is this: If you have not identified a clear existing market (a viable user group for a given product or service) then what are you doing writing code? Rather than sell first develop later, I venture that you should Market First and Build a Product later.

Photo by ChipHunn.

I’d like to reference here two great ideas from Marc Andreesen (via Sean Ellis‘ Post) and Eric Ries (via Venture Hacks‘ Post) that have inspired my take on this concept.

“…what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?“- Marc Andreesen

And in that article Marc goes into detail about why a great market will compensate for a mediocre (or worse) team and product. Here is a dead simple analogy I came up with to illuminate it:

When you are lost and dehydrated in a desert and come across a well filled with murky brown water, will you drink that water to save your life? Yes. Is that Optimal? No.

The key here is to identify market opportunities by finding a pain point– an acute problem or burning need whether through surveys, market research, or your own simple observations. Before you ever develop the code, find a desert and be the well. Then work on purifying the water only once people start to drink it. This is what I mean by marketing (having what people want to begin with) instead of sales ( just getting rid of what you have).

This segues nicely into Eric Ries’ recent interview on Venture Hacks where he talks about building the “Minimum Viable Product” (or minimum new feature of your existing product) and split testing it on a small cohort of users (100 or less will do) and iterating rapidly based on your findings.

“(paraphrasing)…We added a VIP Area banner to IMVU and although very few people clicked on it, we found that the sample group on average spent noticeably more money elsewhere on the site.”-Eric Ries

Note that they did not actually build a VIP Area… they simply built a banner which said it exists and displayed it to one hundred users in their beta. When a few of those people clicked they simply received a message that said “Hey there! We’re having technical difficulties…” and then were sent an apology letter. If IMVU did this with a different idea and saw that seventy-five, fifty, or even thirty-three users out of the hundred clicked it, then the apology letter would also include “we will let you know when this is fixed.” And then they rapidly begin the very healthy evolutionary process of iterating on direct need and demand– it admittedly helps if you are agile and with a low turnaround time, but the point still stands.

This is just one example of an existing service testing a single new feature, but it could just as easily be done for an entirely new product or service simply by setting up a landing page which contains a description, mock-up, or prototype and sending a few dollars worth of AdWords clicks to it to determine viability. This test is the part where it is important to take your rough code and turn it into a rough product whether you are making a simple test or full-blown prototype! And this is what I am great at– all those bits and pieces that make code into a product.

So, in conclusion – test until you find a new desert, or test to see if  there are hidden deserts in parts of your product and start building wells to bring up that muddy water fast! It all boils down to achieving Product / Market Fit — the first step of any successful startup.

Again, thanks go out to Eric and Marc as well as Venture Hacks and Sean Ellis for the inspiration.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Want to identify new or existing deserts, and fit your product to new user needs succinctly and intelligently? Hit up my about page for contact info so we can talk about how I can help your business.

As someone who continues to have ideas and is interested in making them a reality, I am extremely curious to know the different ways that this can be accomplished. After having done some research on my own I have come up with three real options…

1. Pay a Programmer / Developer to Build a Solution






2. Find a Technical Co-Founder






3. Learn to Do it Yourself

Each one of these paths has its own merits and downfalls, so lets examine them a little bit further.

1. Pay a Programmer / Developer to Build a Solution

This is a great option if you have the cash, but if you are like me and just graduated from college it is not that easy. Of course any Mr. Moneybags can buy the appropriately skilled engineers and have their idea built into a working prototype but that is not a good use of time or money.

Ultimately, two thirds of all software development costs are maintenance, and software development is also never done (until proven unprofitable or in the non-profit sector, useless.) If you have a solution built to your needs and handed off, 99% of the time you will have to pay much more money to have them come and provide periodic updates and additions that are really devalued if they don’t have a personal stake in the product. So in reality, that only leaves us with two choices:

2. Find a Technical Co-Founder

This is by far the best choice, although arguably the most difficult. There is a great post that is several years old in the Y-Combinator Hacker News that talks about this, but it links to a dead blog post. The resolution I have come to is that there are a few key things to look out for, but essentially networking and personal connections are the best way to go about it. You can not post a job listing for a co-founder, it will not work.

You can however, get out to the various networking events in the Bay Area and other Tech Hubs and talk to like-minded people. My finding is that the people at these events have similar goals to you if not the same, and can likely recommend someone or at least point you in the right direction. I may or may not be in the middle of doing this right now for my own idea.

3. Learn to Do it Yourself

As Paul Graham, god of start-up wisdom has said: “…if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.” I think this is certainly true. As daunting of a challenge as it may seem, the proliferation of the internet and its very nature of allowing you to teach yourself have made this much easier than in any other technical industry. You can use the internet to teach you how to make new stuff for the internet — I love this concept. No more chicken in the egg.

Tools like Web2Py can really speed this along for people with a little bit of a technical understanding. If you are really a beginner then it would probably make sense to visit the section of your local bookstore that contains programming books and begin from the very basics with some light CSS and XHTML, then step it up. I have a firm grasp of CSS and XHTML but am a total beginner with python.
At this point, it is a split for me between options 2 and 3. I believe the best course would be to find a technical co-founder through networking and simultaneously learn what it would take to do it myself.

Update: I am learning to program myself. Period. Thanks again to Paul Graham and his great article on what makes a Great Hacker. He points out that in order to have good taste, you have to understand what it is you are tasting. How are you going to know how to find a good programmer, if you don’t know what it takes to be one?

If you are in the Silicon Valley area and you are interested in software development or web services in general, join me and my dad (aint that great?) at the Silicon Valley Code Camp on October 3rd and 4th at Foothill College.

It’s gonna be a great event, I’ll be mingling and mixing it up with everyone so come on over and hear my dad’s talk about taking your Code to Complete Product and Brand.