What entrepreneurship means to me… thus far

Getting Techcrunched. Seeing your iPhone app featured. Wearing hoodies to business meetings with people that cant wait to write you a cheque for $1MM. Waking up whenever you want. Being your own boss. Scaling to 1 million users. Scaling to 10 million users. In a week.

Those are just a handful of the romantic misconceptions associated with entrepreneurship. The reality is much less sexy, yet so much more rewarding than that.

Building a business from nothing can be painfully hard. It can be a very lonely endeavor. It is usually exhausting. It can rob you of work/life balance if you’re not careful. It can make you wonder if it’s all worth it.

But despite all of those things, I don’t think I could do anything else. I honestly could not see myself ever being a cog in someone else’s machine again.

To me, It’s worth it every time I hear our team laugh and celebrate together, all being strangers to one another just a couple of months previous. It’s worth it when I see something much bigger than myself emerge out of nothing but a vision to change a small part of the world just a little bit.

It’s so worth it every time I hear how our product helped a customer enjoy their day a little more, maybe even putting a smile on their face.

But what really inspires me is the rare and beautiful experience to go up against overwhelming odds, and constantly be winning little battles each and every day regardless of the outcome.

How I discover new music, then play the hell out of it

I have a pretty good music system now. A while back I discovered Last.fm and immediately fell in love with its discovery engine.

How it works

Type in an artist or song that you like, and Last.fm will play songs that the community at large has deemed similar. It does this by tags. You’re encouraged to tag songs with genres and similar artists. And it works remarkably well.

I discover new music that I think is awesome almost every day. And every once in a while I find a song that makes me stop in my tracks, listen intently and just get immersed in it.

But, then I usually want to listen to more of the artist that made the song that just got me all excited. Unfortunately, Last.fm is not the place to do that.

You see, Last.fm licenses its music similar to a how a radio station would (at least it’s how I understand it) and so you cannot listen to any specific song you want on demand (only a short preview), because that would be more similar to buying a CD or purchasing a song from iTunes.

They are essentially creating a radio station on demand for you, based on your search criteria (song, artist or genre).

So… that’s kind of a bummer. Downloading MP3’s is tedius. And expensive. More often than not I get bored of a song/artist after I obsess over their tracks for a few weeks to a month or two.

Enter Rdio.

What is Rdio

Oddly enough, Rdio is less like a radio station than Last.fm is. Rdio can be compared to Spotify. But Rdio works in Canada while Spotify doesn’t. And from what I have seen, I like Rdio better.

How it works: Find music you like and listen to it. That’s it. They have a pretty huge catalog of albums for you to listen to all you want. You can even sync songs to your iPhone or iPad, so you can listen to them later while offline.

Rdio does have a sort of recommendation engine built in as well, but for me it doesn’t work nearly as well as Last.fm in terms of usability and the tracks it selects.

Price

Last.fm is $3/month and Rdio is $10/month for unlimited web and mobile streaming + sync (listen offline). For me, $13/month for the ability to discover new music and listen to almost anything I want, when I want is well worth it.

Little rant

These are the types of services that consumers want. I find it incredibly pathetic that record labels would rather keep trying to sell their plastic and lobbying to pass legislation to stifle innovation, than just change their model and offer something that consumers want and would willingly pay for.

Empathetic Design

I come across people making assumptions and decisions every day that are based solely on their personal perspective.

In the design and interactive industry, this is a major problem.

Some people are really good at designing things for themselves, or people of a similar perspective. This is great, if you make up the major and only audience for whom you are designing for.

When I say design, I mean anything that someone else interacts with: website copy, API, UI, information architecture, etc.

It’s an easy mistake to make. We naturally want to create things that resonate with ourselves. It’s enjoyable and self gratifying. But, it’s very easy to forget who you are audience is composed of; what their preferences, limitations, skills and perceptions are.

It’s also very easy to justify your decisions by making a sweeping assumption that you are part of the audience, or that if you have a preference, certainly the rest of the world must!

Following trends

Some like to design everything with a specific style. This is not very affective, and hardly good “design” even if it looks good aesthetically.

Do you really need to give a retro-worn look to that website you did for your trucking company client, because that’s your style?

Should you create a minimalistic design for a children’s daycare service, because it resonates with you personally?

Talent

A skilled and talented designer is versatile. They can empathize with their target audience and understand what makes sense for them. They deploy the aesthetic and functionality design that resonates with their audience, and not necessarily them on a personal level.

I believe naturally talented designers have the ability to go outside of themselves, and empathize with their audience. Walk in their audiences shoes. And if they deploy methods and tools like proper research, personas and scenario testing they can create things that are a joy to use and look at, for their intended audience.