I’d be very happy to get feedback on this new service idea: Your Change Manifesto – about a free online service for facilitating creating consensual change in companies, teams, enterprises.

A webcast where I present the idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL6IM1yV41o&hd=1

These ideas are inspired by Seth Godin’s writings.

Feedback can be posted on this Facebook page, discussed on Hacker News, by sending an e-mail to info@licorize.com or a tweet to @ppolsinelli.

1. Courage to try new ideas.

2. Capacity to ship.

So in 2010 we started failing: released the first product, failed, released the second one, failed, released the third one… not a failure. We actually released four new products in a year. Without the previous failures and lessons learned, it would have been impossible to release the successful one.

Most people and companies I know are well below failure. Wake up!

This post has been written under the influence of high doses of Seth Godin’s Tribes. Go get it.

Also by having here the embed you won’t be annoyed by SlideShare’s advertising…

“If I come out with this product, some all powerful software house will steal my idea in no time.” Anyone familiar with Seth Godin’s set of ideas concerning shipping, will recognize here a pattern – a typical expression of your “lizard brain” that makes it impossible to ship. What your “lizard brain” gets wrong is that ideas by themselves, without execution are worth little or nothing: read this Coding Horror article Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas:

How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much:

Also the linked article is quite interesting:

Conceptual modeling software (like Prezi or Balsamiq Mockups) is appreciated because on release there is the need for such tool, in a vague, undefined form, and this need is modeled correctly by the application released; the creators gave a great execution to the pending need. The need got articulated in a coherent story, which the application implemented. And this way you may also get some interest from the press.

This fear is justified?

But I would like to point out also that some fears about your idea being stolen are actually justified. If your idea is based on some anthropological insight, relative to the moment, the needs, a certain kind of user, it may occur to many. I have experienced this in that last few months.

Licorize development started in June 2010, and a public alpha was out in July . I then found (pointed out by some Licorize users) that in August 18, 2010 this post came out:

This is actually a good description of what we had done – but this post was not copied from what we had done: simply the need was around. Several people tweeted about Licorize since its release saying “this is exactly what I was going to build”, and even more “this fits exactly the need I had”. A couple wrote me “I was just going to build something like it, but you did it before”. The idea of Licorize came to me because Delicious was not answering a need for my marketing activity, and made searches online, found nothing was – and then I thought: I can’t be the only one with this need now, given how much of our working life is exploring web sites. But I was also aware that we had some advanced and ready web technology to apply, and a lot of experience in work management.

So if you have some anthropological insight that fits a new need of many – you may not be the only one who has it.

The cure

For justified, unjustified fears – there is only one remedy: shipping. Because it is really hard to copy from anyone that is determined in executing and shipping.

Licorize was developed in only two months and a half, by two people full time and six others half time (I’m not counting the conception period). I’m not trying to fool you and myself in saying that that is all it took, of course in it we’ve put years of previous study in design, development and marketing (see this interesting discussion on the real costs of applications:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-an-iphone-application). Still, from when we decided to ship to shipping it it did take only two months and a half.

Shipping is a rich concept: focusing on shipping means discarding every day many, many unnecessarily complex technical and communication solutions, finding smarter, simpler ways to do things – without betraying the original idea.

For example Licorize first video was done in two days. It is not great, but it tells enough, and it is not simply a webcast: it is designed, built, animated. And video usually take a long, long time to be put together. But keeping in mind the ship it idea, with my colleague Pino (who is a talented designer but also a perfectionist…) we managed to do it really quick.

So… ship.

I’m no Sims player, actually, not a great computer game player at all, but I found a tweet that made me curious about this game, because it seemed similar to a game I’ve been thinking of for quite a while. Was deeply skeptical of what I was seeing on the first screen, started playing anyway.

After midnight I was still playing – had to make a gigantic psychological effort to stop the game and get to bed – I had just got a larger office for my team… .

Game Dev Story is a game that has been around for quite a while in Japan, and has recently been released for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad (get it here ).
It’s a sims game in a game developers environment.

I’m not a sims player, but I’m a fan of Douglas Coupland’s JPod book . And while playing I was simply in the middle of that story (this has been noted also here). This is what the book is about:

And about the same can be said about this game.

This game has several features that make it a good candidate for a failure in the Apple gaming world: we iPad owners are used to slick, beautifully design games, with cool soundtracks and refined user interactions. Game Dev Story fails on all these features. But the ratings and reviews are all positive… how is this possible?

Why it is so addictive?

First of all this is no Farmville: it is addictive for a set of users that are somehow familiar with the workings of a software house. But is in no small set of humans. And for these users, it is addictive and rewarding entirely because of the storytelling: you are playing the main character and decision maker of a story that keeps rolling effortlessly. The game designers did a great work in making you feel that the story you are living is original, not making it too easy but actually quite easy, and most importantly having ways to make the story proceed on new scenarios without you feeling it artificial. This is the main positive feature, to which they added many nicely detailed developer/designer behavioral models that are fun, for example:

- modeling of developers behavior: burst of productivity, introducing bugs

- informal working environment: no fixed working hours (but not so for the secretary and boss)

- silly manager’s decisions, like “swapping chairs”, feeding developers with stimulants

- evolution of the office space towards luxury

- relationship with the press

- the critical role of reviews

- training of developers

- cultivating fans of your software house

- financially crazy proposals from the developers, that may lead to more bugs in the software

And so on.

The fact that the graphic design and environment is so poor is not necessarily a problem: that characters are just outlined is actually a strength – it lets users create their own image of the workers. It is something with which anybody with writing experience is familiar.

This game is a perfect example showing game developers and software creators in general the critical role that storytelling can play in the success of a product.

As noted by this reviewer (in very different terms), the creators rely so much  on storytelling that the game suffers from lack of what in game design is called balance (see here for an excellent explanation of balance). Anyway the game is great play for many hours.

Damn it, still six hours to go before home and getting back to “Solaris Software” management in Game Dev Story…

References

All the references from this post are in this Licorize booklet:
http://licorize.com/users/ppolsinelli/gameDevStory

Matteo Bicocchi’s (“pupunzi”) mappping of neeeds of site improvements to Patapage:

9 ways to improve your site but you don’t know how to

My mapping of different work management needs with Teamwork:

Stories of work management

Your software is what people’s usage makes of it.

Here I give some quick impressions and links.

The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.

Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.

Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.

Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”

http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona

because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!

Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his  kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:

“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”

His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”

Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”

Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.

Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.

He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.

My talk: “Una home page memorabile” –  actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:

Part 1: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/

Thanks to all – see you there next year.

http://devineu.eu

This is a site where European startups can learn from other startups and innovating software houses. Read the mission here:

http://devineu.eu/mission.page

You can even interview yourself here. We used also Patapage for the site development.

P.S. Among the gadgets, there is the Seth Godin – inspired “Tame your lizard brain” app:

http://devineu.eu/lb.jsp

These are among the books  that have most influenced us:

Some of the beloved / informative or both are not currently in Open Lab, because some of us is reading one or is hiding it at home, among which:

Our software house is not formally a startup, though product development has changed so much in the last 12 months that we are proceeding as a startup. There are many nice books from the past in our libraries, whose content is always valid.

-

Also a section for the IT guys:

And there is more: