Paul GrahamYou can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
Mining insanity
In 2008, I hacked together a little experiment called I Feel London, enabling people to share places they like to visit based on mood. It was, as you can see, very crappy, clunkily utilising Google’s (now retired) My Maps to get around my inability to code. Bizarrely, thousands of people got involved and I found myself manually inviting them all to each *individual* mood map in a frenzy that lasted an entire weekend. And they loved it, even though it was terrible. The whole episode was, by all accounts, insane.
So Paul Graham’s recent essay, Do Things That Don’t Scale resonated with me, even if my experiment didn’t result in a successful business:
Paul was riffing off Steve Job’s famous phrase, ‘insanely great’ and suggesting we take the term a bit more seriously:
Paul GrahamSteve wasn't just using ‘insanely’ as a synonym for ‘very.’ He meant it more literally—that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
As tempting as it is to think about scalability from day one, *nothing* can replace the fanatical attentiveness and pro-activism of enthused founders, willing to sacrifice sleep and ignore social boundaries to kickstart interest - and love - for their product. This ‘insanity’ is gold dust, so the question is: how do you maximise it?
This got me thinking about different kinds of insanity. And where you can and can’t find it.
Made by Many has plenty of insanity. As a company, we’re fanatical about industry-changing innovation and obsessive about making sure things actually succeed. We have pathological designers who aren’t happy until the experience is perfect and fervent engineers demanding efficiency and clean code. All this madness is for hire - its the intangible value that can be felt but not entered into a spreadsheet.
But what about the insanity we ’re less well placed to provide?
‘Founder insanity’ is hard for a company like us to replicate. Sure we care a hell of a lot about success, but if we were truly insane we could quickly over-service our way to bankruptcy, marching around the world trying to on-board users one-by-one. Let’s be honest, that’s not going to work. That’s the kind of insanity that needs to come from the organisation itself, whose business - and pride - hinges on the success of the product. As much as we support this behaviour, it’s just not where our greatest value lies. But we can help to mine it.
This is another reason Made by Many’s new offering, to help ‘design ventures, not just products’ makes sense. An offering with which we are...
Tim Malbon...recruiting, training and incubating a team around a product we’re making – with a view to implanting the whole venture back into the mother-org when it’s capable of supporting the product
Because it’s not just ‘teams’ we’re incubating with clients. We’re helping to find people that can truly own and obsess over the things that we can’t, ongoing. We’re incubating insanity. And that’s something we *can* obsess over.
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Update: It’s been pointed out to me that this post could be perceived as mocking mental illness. I hope no one thinks that’s the case. Apologies if anyone took it the wrong way.
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