Digging in to the Open Startups List

Open Startups List

I’m super honored and excited to see my business alongside six other incredible startups that have embraced financial transparency, and completely opened up their financial metrics on the Baremetrics Open Startups List. I’ve written before here about why I think financial transparency is a huge asset, particularly when paired with a transparent blog or any kind of business advice. This list of open dashboards, which I’m sure will be growing rapidly soon, is a huge assets for current and aspiring entrepreneurs. It’s a ton of data and I thought it would be fun to dive deep and see what we can learn.

Introduction to the Open Startups

First I’ll do a terrible and cursory introduction to this illustrious list for background.

Buffer is an app for finding shareable content and queuing that content up to be shared across multiple social networks at optimal times. Founded by Joel and Leo in late 2010, Buffer has been a leader in radical transparency, publishing everything from business metrics, salaries to term sheets from their VC fundraising. Their transparency dashboard is a gold mine.

Ghost is a simple blogging platform. Launched as a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 by John O’Nolan. Ghost is an elegant Markdown-based blogging platform that I use for my blog and love. Ghost itself is completely open source software, but they sell Ghost Pro, a hosted and managed version.

Baremetrics is the ringleader behind this whole list and also a provider of one-click financial metrics for Stripe. After building a tool to visualize Stripe data for his own app, founder Josh Pigford, decided the quickest way to demo the app was to make Baremetrics’ (is that the right apostrophe move there?) metrics totally open.

Hubstaff is a time-tracking app for managing remote teams. Founded by Dave and Jared in 2012. it’s a classic “scratch your own itch” story. The founders were trying to manage a remote team of freelancers and decided to build a better tool to do it.

Convertkit is an email marketing app for authors. It was founded by Nathan Barry who is also known for writing ebooks, and then writing an even better ebook about how to write ebooks called Authority. If you’re writing an ebook (like me) you should read Nathan’s book first then use Convertkit to email about it.

Promoter is a super easy way to measure Net Promoter Score in your app and get feedback from your customers. I don’t know much about these guys. Maybe we should change that guys? Say hi sometime 🙂

Storemapper is my app and it is waay less cool than all these other ones. It started as a side project and grew into a proper micro-SaaS business. I blog about it a lot here and am writing an ebook about the process if you’re in to that kind of thing.

Phew! That took forever to write. So with intros out of the way, let’s dig in to the data.

A few quick caveats

I haven’t consulted with any of the startups on this stuff. Just me, a private citizen, digging around in the public dashboards and making some guesses. I am very likely wrong about some stuff. If any of the startups here take issue with my conclusions or want to add clarification please do so.

Also there are a crap load of links in this post. I’d recommend using open in new tab for them all so you don’t get lost.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) and Pricing strategy

Below is the most recent Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for each startup. This figure is available right on the main dashboard for each so I won’t bother linking to it.

ARPU is an interesting metric because it’s not inherently good or bad on it’s own. Raising your prices, or the mix of your pricing options can increase ARPU but you don’t know if it’s a good change on balance until you look at how it affects signup conversions and trials. However SaaS gurus argue that SaaS startups consistently underprice their products and should look to raise ARPU in most instances.

  1. Promotor $97 This is really interesting to me. Promoter is by far the most aggressive on pricing with plans ranging from $49 – $499/mo. The only feature that changes by plan is you go from a limit of 500 surveys/month to 30,000/month. Businesses must really find the NPS data valuable. If I had built this product I definitely would have made the mistake of pricing it much lower than this. Lesson learned for SaaS startups to always check: http://shouldichargemore.com/
  2. Baremetrics $80 This one I completely get. Baremetrics gives you a ton of stuff right away that’s directly related to your bottom line and probably makes you more money. You’re probably paying an accountant or someone to do this crap already. On top of that it would be a huge pain in the ass to build it yourself. Prices range from $29 – $249/mo primarily scaling with the number of paying customers you have; no free option; requires credit card upfront.
  3. Convertkit $54 is also priced fairly aggressively. Particularly when customers might be switching from a free Mailchimp account. $54 is just a hair above their lowest tier at $49/mo. I would imagine that writing Authority generates a lot of first-time ebook authors, like me, who sign up for the lower tier, like me. As the app matures, one would expect a lot of their customers to progress up the plans which scale with the number of subscribers up to $359/mo @ 45,000 subscribers.
  4. Hubstaff $29 is still a B2B product like the previous three but is priced noticeably lower with a free option for 1 person and the highest tier at $99/mo (though it does go up further for very large teams). The ARPU is just a bit higher than the $25/mo plan for 5 person teams. The bulk of their revenue comes from plans for teams of 5-15 (more on contribution by plans later). I wonder if they might take a cue from the other startups here and consider raising prices at those plan levels.
  5. Storemapper $16 as I’ve chronicled on my blog, Storemapper was very much underpriced and raising ARPU has been a big priority for me. When it launched I only charged $5/mo. Over time I increased that price several times, then added Premium plans at a much higher price point and focused heavily on upgrades. For a B2B product we’re still very much on the low end. For example: We have 60% more customers than Baremetrics but on 1/3 the revenue 🙁 I think it represents a big opportunity for Storemapper though but something we’re not doing well yet.
  6. Buffer $13 Buffer and Ghost are the only two B2C startups here so it makes sense that their ARPU would be lower. The $13 number surprised me since I know Buffer’s 1-person paid plan is $10/mo and you would expect other plans to be less than that per person. Here you can see the challenge of one-click metrics. It turns out Buffer does have group plans that range from $50-250/mo for 25-150 users. But because it’s only one charged account the ARPU figure is skewed high.
  7. Ghost $9 It’s interesting that’s Ghost’s current ARPU is $9, lower than their current lowest paid plan of $10/mo. They currently list plans ranging from $10-250/month allowing you to have more pageviews (Ghost’s product is a hosted instance of its open source platform) and more blogs. It’s pretty clear that the bulk up Ghost’s current paying customers (including me) are solo bloggers on the lowest tier. This makes sense as the platform is still very minimalist. As it matures it will likely appeal more to teams, companies and agencies who will opt for the higher plans. The Ghost team wrote recently about the realization that they initially weren’t charging enough and the decision to raise prices.

MRR contribution by plans, Number of plans and price discrimination

One of my favorite features on Baremetrics is the fact that for most metrics you can segment by plan to get a sense of how each plan is contributing to your key metrics. This can help you change pricing, add or retire plans that just aren’t pulling their weight.

Here are some interesting nuggets from looking into that feature. Btw, I’m not trying to pick on any of these businesses, just showing what valuable things you can learn from transparent metrics.

Almost all Buffer’s business customers are on their lowest Small Business plan of $50/mo for 5 team members. Though they have $100 and $250/mo options for bigger teams, the $50 plan (and it’s annual billing equivalent) dwarf the other two in contribution to monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Check out the table at the bottom of this page. This tells them maybe they could do a better job appealing to larger companies, or maybe that they should just increase their focus on the Awesome Plan (the 1-person $10/mo plan) and Small Business and leave the agencies to others.

Hubstaff’s sweet spot is 5 – 15 person teams. As I mentioned earlier it’s clear that the plans for teams of 5-15 people make up the lion’s share of MRR: Table at bottom. They are clearly doing well with this audience and maybe that’s a good segment to focus on increasing ARPU if they think that’s a good idea.

Promoter.io could improve the value proposition of their annual plans. Even though they offer prepaid annual pricing for all their monthly options, annual/yearly plans contribute almost nothing to their MRR: Same table. Prepaid annual plans are extremely valuable to SaaS businesses. Even though they actually decrease revenue from a customer, they massively improve cashflow which you can re-invest in the business. Prepaid annual plans have been hugely helpful for my business (and even helped me pay the rent in a pinch one time). Maybe customers are hesitant to commit to a full year, thinking they only want to test NPS intermittently. Maybe a deeper discount for annual is in order. Or maybe they just need to deploy this amazing end of year pitch email from Patrick McKenzie.. Or maybe things are just the way they like them and I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Storemapper has done way too many attempts at price segmentation. I spent a bunch of time setting up with elaborate way to A/B test prices, cookie’ing users to a plan cohort, attempting to track lifecycle differences in churn and so on. We have three plans each with monthly or annual payment options so just running one A/B test requires setting up 12 different plans in Stripe. The reality is we just didn’t have enough traffic for a test to really be conclusive. Lo and behold, the vast bulk of our revenue comes from the two plans my gut told me would work $19 and $39/mo: table. This is definitely a lesson in premature optimization. Related: I love David Kadavy on why you should run an A/A test.

Churn, the SaaS entrepreneur’s worst enemy

Next let’s look at user churn. Even with the Baremetrics data right in front of you it can still be tricky to figure out how to define and chart churn.

Below are each startup ranked by an approximate range of monthly user churn over the last 12 months.

  1. Storemapper 1 – 1.5% this is the category where we’re totally kicking butt. Storemapper has very low churn. The main reason is because users more or less put our app on autopilot once they set it up and get their store locator looking right whereas all these others guys are active apps that you use as part of your workflow regularly and therefore might look into alternatives more often. Chart link
  2. Buffer 3 – 4.5% Buffer is the most mature app by far with 10x the users/revenue of anybody else on the list. This is a great example of a target churn for a fairly mature SaaS app done well. Chart
  3. Hubstaff 4 – 8% had really nice 3-4% churn for a while there a year ago but it’s been on the rise. I don’t use the app directly so haven’t been following it close enough but I wonder if they raised prices around then end of 2014. So frequently in SaaS raising prices increases churn but is still a huge net win, with the remaining customers more than making up for departures. Chart
  4. Promoter 5.5 – 8.7% most months they are in the 5-6% range, which is great for a young SaaS business, with some occasional big spikes. The user base is comparatively quite small (104 customers) so those spikes might not mean much. Keeping churn as low as they have is all the more impressive as they are really aggressive on pricing with the highest ARPU of all the startups on the list. Chart
  5. Baremetrics 5.5 – 10.0% certainly has the most erratic churn rate with as low as 3% and as high as 10%. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that it’s a pretty low commitment to actually sign up. You put in your credit card, connect your Stripe account and boom you see your metrics. Folks who are just window-shopping might still want to give this a shot even if they aren’t truly a good fit. I suspect churn smoothes out if you exclude people who cancel within the first month. Chart
  6. Convertkit 15 – 20% has a much higher churn rate than the others. This is probably due to how crowded the email marketing space is. It’s also evidence of still being a bit pre-product-market-fit (that’s weird to type). Nathan wrote recently about how initially the product was targeting too broad an audience. After refocusing the product exclusively on authors I suspect churn will fall rapidly as it has for the last six months. Chart
  7. Ghost (not enough data)

Lifetime Value: the holy grail of SaaS

Customer lifetime value is the holy grail of SaaS. The reason SaaS is such a great business model is that new customers continue paying and over time generate a big predictable stream of cashflows. It’s the reason VC-backed SaaS startups can lose money for years while growing and still be worth billions.

If each new customer was forced to keep paying forever, well SaaS would be like printing money, but customer’s leave at some point. On the churn pages, Baremetrics gives you a handy “time to churn” figure which is the length of time the average new customer is expected to stick around before canceling — based on your monthly churn rate. Combining the average amount of money you expect from each new customer and the length of time you expect them to stick around gives you your lifetime value (LTV).

Now when you say, “This is my business’s lifetime value,” you need to add like 27 footnotes to that statement. Lifetime value is a tricky to calculate and assumption-riddled figure. However at least with the Open Startups List we do have LTV per customer calculated the exact same way for 7 different businesses. Fascinating.

So what do we find?

  1. Baremetrics $2,661 What?! They rigged the game for sure. 🙂
  2. Promoter $1,391 Makes sense. Aggressive high pricing while keeping churn low makes for a nice solid LTV.
  3. Storemapper $1,279 What, how’d we get up here? This just shows how important churn is in the end. Even though we don’t extract a lot of cash from each user, they just never leave, with a time to churn of nearly 7 years! Hence we get to hang out up here with people actually good at startups, unlike me.
  4. Hubstaff $388 Both Hubstaff and Convertkit have a pretty similar LTV. What’s interesting about that is they are both going after pretty established B2B markets: time-tracking and email marketing. It may be that this is good expectation if you’re going to build an app that fits many different use cases. The upside is their target market is probably much larger including smaller businesses, individual freelancers and a wider array of target customer types.
  5. Convertkit $359 see above
  6. Buffer $278 Hahaha, sucks for Buffer all the way down here. Oh wait, they’re doing $5.75 million per year in revenue. Classic difference between B2B and B2B/B2C apps. Lower LTV but a massively bigger potential market. Now that I think about it, this actually seems very high and their churn rate quite low for a product where most of their customers are individuals rather than businesses. *slow clap*
  7. Ghost $117 Again this makes total sense. Ghost is going after the totally massive blogging market. Nearly all their customers are currently on the lowest tier plan, but the product and company are also quite young. Despite that, they are totally crushing it with a $420k annual run rate. Hopefully so many people will read this blog post I’ll be forced to upgrade and nudge this number up.

You should join us!

Hopefully by now you’re convinced what an invaluable asset Open Startups can be for the business world. It’s a little scary, yes, but it’s also really fun. At first you going to be so scared that everybody out there is going to steal your idea or crush by knowing a little bit about your business. But after you do it you’re going to realize that world is totally not that zero-sum and that being helpful to other businesses and entrepreneurs pays itself back hugely.

If you’re already a Baremetrics customer, join us, Rip off that kimono!

If you’re not using Baremetrics… Wait you’re not? How do you know anything about your business? I can’t even.

The Best Networking is Not Networking

My first job was at a research consultancy. I was learning and writing about the booming wind energy industry. A big part of my job, and that of and many of my colleagues, was to attend an ever increasing number of industry conferences. The goal was to be part salesperson, convincing potential customers that the analysts at our firm were smart people with interesting things to say, and to play journalist, getting nuggets of data and an informal consensus on topics for which we lacked data. The fact that I reverse-engineered the financial model for a complicated financing structure1 almost entirely from buying beers for CFOs at conferences was probably the only reason anyone in the industry thought I had anything valuable to say, for the first few years at least.

These conferences were like any other — people milling around in uncomfortable suits at random convention centers, and sometimes fancy resorts. The startup I worked for was still young so my business card carried little cachet, that meant I would have to do some networking… ugh.

I’m a slim 5’6” so nearly everybody, already packed into tight circles, was physically either taller or wider than me. Wind energy was already an old energy industry so nearly everybody was two decades or more my senior. The battlefield was intimidating to say the least.

As a natural introvert I hate this stuff. I don’t mind talking to people, but walking into a crowded room and trying to spark up conversations with strangers. Makes my palms sweat as much as anybody else. Except for extroverts who actually like that stuff, those people are lunatics.

At first I was very analytical about figuring out how to network in the least painful way possible. I observed my colleagues who were good at it, read Dale Carnegie books and that awful Never Eat Alone book, read some blogs and experimented continuously. I learned some stuff that does in fact work.

I learned if you are young you need to dress very sharply to be taken seriously. If you manage a billion dollar private equity fund, everybody takes you seriously even if you’re in an oversized mustard yellow three-piece suit, a bolo tie and cowboy hat with an eagle feather in it. If you’re in your early twenties with nothing to trade but your wit and charm, you need a dark well-tailored suit, pocket square, some strikingly neon dress socks in polished kicks.

I learned about a “whatzit” or a conversation piece. Sometimes the tiniest ice-breaker can kick off a great conversation so it’s good to dangle something, anything really, that someone can make an off-hand comment about to break the silence. In my case it was a metal and tortoise-shell business card holder that I deftly whipped out to distribute cards while everybody fumbled in their wallets for crinkled pieces of paper. “Oh nice card holder,” they’d say. I’d respond, “Thanks, what are you investing in these days?” I’m aware of the American Pyscho business card analog here but you gotta admit, Bateman was a smooth operator.

I learned to get to the conference really early because everybody is off their guard and bleary-eyed at the coffee line. I learned later to spend hours before the conference emailing attendees because hard to reach people were 10x more likely to agree to a 15 minute side meeting at a conference than a 30 minute phone call on their normal calendar.

These are just a few snippets, there’s mountains of advice out there on how to network better. And a lot of this stuff does technically work, it will improve what you get out of a networking event and it totally worked in some ways for me.

But then I discovered a networking tactic that worked 100x better. All the other marginal improvements I’d made were worthless by comparison.

The secret to power networking is: Make something awesome and tell people about it.

The way to crush a conference is to give a compelling, data-rich, slightly funny and slightly controversial talk. It’s as simple as that.

I learned this when the CEO of our company was supposed to give a presentation at a reasonably important conference and couldn’t make it at the last second. So my boss thought, “Tyler’s been working for us for like six months now, why not have him do it instead?” (Yea, everybody there was awesome like that).

So I worked my ass off, put together a really interesting deck, nervously told a joke or two and pulled it off. I made something and told people about it. And then an amazing thing happened, everybody wanted to network with me! My talk was on the second day, so people who had actively ignored me the first day were now introducing themselves, or sending their lackeys to arrange a meeting. I got invited to the cool nerdy after parties where everyone gets too drunk and tells you all the juicy data.

This isn’t even an 80/20 effort. Just giving a 15 minute presentation yielded 99% of the value of the conference with 1% of the effort. Unless you have a deathly fear of public speaking, sitting on stage and saying “look at this cool thing I have” is a lot less scary than walking up to a stranger and saying “Hi I’m Tyler.” At least to me.

After that my conference trips were both more effective and much more pleasant. I focused almost all my efforts on getting a good speaking slot and giving a kick ass talk and mostly didn’t worry about the rest.

The general pattern holds well too. Since I put my suits in storage and quit my conference jockey gig, I’ve spent the last four years making stuff and blogging about it. Blog posts have been by far the best source of any kind of networking for me.

Inbound requests from folks who want to partner or help with my businesses all come from blog posts. Interesting people who just want to have a chat, come from blog posts. Fellow entrepreneurs who want to swap stories, find me through my blog posts. The blog-first startup is getting a lot of traction as a business tactic because it allows you to cheaply make something useful and show it to people before you ever pitch an investor. If done well, investors read what you’re putting out there and reach out to you!

I’m sure I’ll think of other good distribution methods for the make and tell people about it but for now it’s all about the blog game for me. Or rather the full pattern is: make something awesome, blog about it and then Buffer it, and then later repost it to Medium.

People always think the end-game to actually get value out of your blog is to monetize it with ads or something. But I think the biggest benefit by far is it allows you to do “pull networking.” You write down “these are the things I’m thinking about and like talking about” and others can read them and reach out to you if they like thinking and talking about those things too. That is infinitely more valuable than the $0.00005 per page view for one weird trick ads in your sidebar.

Making things, by the way, is also the only way to network upwards. What do I mean by that? Well let’s say you want to meet someone you look up to and admire: a writer, film star or entrepreneur. If you deploy all the traditional networking tactics incredibly well, they might be impressed and maybe you would get to meet them and gram a selfie with them. But let’s say you actually want to become friends, confidants and colleagues with these people. No amount of cold-calling, leveraging alumni networks or stunts can get you there. But write a best-selling novel, Kickstart a film in Sundance, or build a fast-growing startup and now you get invited over for drinks and conversation. The only way to build a real relationship with someone who has hugely asymmetric demands on their time is to make something they admire.

Sadly there’s no one weird trick here. The making of awesome things is massively harder than becoming a LinkedIn Group power-user, but it’s massively more rewarding too.

  1. “tax equity” for the energy geeks ↩

Technical skills for non-technical people in tech

Technical Skills

Tech is one of the few growing bright spots in the job market and understandably a lot of folks want to figure out how to get a job at tech startups.

When I quit my job and started getting into tech/software/startup things I was “not technical” — meaning specifically that I didn’t know how to write software. I’ve had lot of conversations with people trying to break into the market who are also not technical, didn’t grow up hacking, didn’t get a computer science degree and can’t write a line of code. I taught myself to code so a lot of the conversations start there: “Should I learn to code?” While I was technically non-technical in startup parlance, I am in fact a pretty technical person and spent a good part of my pre-startup career mastering nerdy things like Excel Macros so it made sense that I would eventually learn to write my own software. But for many people I’ve talked to, I don’t think learning to code, to the point where they would actually be able to get a job as a software engineer is a good idea.

So how do you get into tech if you’ve decided that you don’t want to write code.

Many people respond by really emphasizing things they believe to be the antithesis of technical skills: salesmanship, networking, being a people person. Maybe it was once the case that all software engineers were antisocial nerds incapable of expressing themselves in public who were dependent on non-technical people to get things done, but that is not at all the case now. Startups increasingly brag about their focus entirely on products, their salesforce of zero, their T-shaped team fully capable of writing and speaking convincingly among everything else.

It’s true, if you are good at sales you will always be able to get a job, but if you are young, or without a ton of relevant experience, and trying to get into tech, there are just too many applicants claiming to be able run through walls and sell snow to eskimos.

Learning to write server code and deploy apps is not a good fit for everyone at a startup, but there are quite a few non-coding but still a bit technical skills that I would highly recommend acquiring. Every startup will value this skill set and in many cases developer/designer colleagues will love you for having them.

So this is my proposed list of technical things non-technical people who want to get into tech should learn.

Know how to use a task managers correctly

Create some test projects and learn how to use Asana, Trello or Basecamp or all three. Learn all the features. Read the companies blog posts and tutorials. Because they are so product and engineer heavy, tech startups tend to live and die by their task/project management apps. Nothing is more annoying than adding someone to the team who keeps adding tasks as subtasks, not tagging correctly, forgetting to add due dates and so on.

Onboarding someone who seamlessly jumps into the project, and even starts cleaning up the task manager and making others lives easier is a dream come true for startups trying to grow the team rapidly.

Email marketing and marketing automation

For all the times journalists have proclaimed the death of email to be nigh, sending email is still an essential activity for all startups. Despite evidence that building an email list and talking to it regularly is very profitable activity, most startups actually don’t send enough email to their customers and prospects.

This is mainly because email marketing systems are still not that easy to use. Brilliant copy can get completely mangled by a poorly edited email template. Forget to check a certain box and your email is completely unreadable on mobile devices. Did you insert the FNAME variable correctly or did you send 12,000 emails addressed to “Dear insert name,”

Make a newsletter of your family and friends and practice sending emails, playing with templates, add call to action buttons and learn how the analytics dashboard works, how to track opens, read and click throughs.

Learn some basic email marketing automation such as how to build a welcome/onboarding course the sends new users an email each day after they sign up.

Mailchimp, Aweber, Drip are a few good options to try out.

Become a form wizard wizard

Forms are still the most underestimated web tool and with form wizards like Wufoo, Google Forms and Typeforms, they can be deployed in powerful ways without any coding at all.

It’s amazing how powerful a good form linked up to email marketing can be. Learn all the different field options. What other apps can be integrated. Should you build a Google Form and output the data directly into a Google Spreadsheet, or a Wufoo form that automatically enrolls signups in an email course on Mailchimp?

Do you really need an engineer to deploy a payment processing system when you can accept payments directly in Typeform without writing a line of code?

CSS tweaks

CSS is not coding and basic CSS is very very easy. It’s just a matter of learning a simple, declarative vocabulary. There are no complex functions, no math, and basically no variables. You can want to turn the text on your embedded form the same dark gray as your company’s landing page text you just need to learn how to say that in CSS:

#my-form label {color: #333}

Take a Codeacademy course and watch a bunch of videos on CSS Tricks.

Learn the most common Content Management Systems

Every startup has landing pages and almost every startup has a blog. Most of these are run on WordPress or Squarespace. Learn how to add and edit a simple page in each of these, learn the default options and how to add your forms and email signups widgets to each of them.

Being the idea person is one thing, but being the person who can create ideas, put them on a landing page and A/B test pricing options is a 10x more valuable.

A little knowledge of forms, email automation, CSS, and how to create a page in a CMS and you can execute that without writing a line of code.

Internet superpowers: Zapier and IFTTT

Here’s where you can out-tech the tech people on your team. When faced with basically any problem: Coders gonna code. This frequently leads to unnecessary custom-built solutions for fairly simple automation.

Two services: Zapier and IFTTT let you automate interaction between hundreds of apps and services without writing a line of code. Do you really need a fancy dashboard to run a cohort analysis of you email signups or can you just have Zapier export every signup into a spreadsheet and run a few Excel functions on it? Taking that off your engineering team’s plate so they can focus on the core product is a huge win.

Learn how to automatically create a support ticket for everybody that tweets at your company, send your inbound leads directly to your task manager so they all get assigned properly and followed up with quickly.

Bring your own army of outsourcers

Your startup’s lead designer is spending the afternoon redesigning the app onboarding process but you really need someone to remove the whitespace from a few logos so you can get a press release out the door. Interrupting their flow for such a little task is a huge drain, instead you should get very very good at using oDesk, Elance and Fiverr to outsource little jobs like that. You can often find freelancers to do things for incredibly low cost (e.g. $5) such that even if you were paying for it yourself it would still be worth it. But there is some overhead of time that you have spend familiarizing yourself with the process, learning how to select candidates and learning the hiring/managing workflow for each one.

Start spending some time and little money now developing that skill. The best part is you can save those freelancers in your account to call on later, an incredibly useful resource for you and your company.

Conclusion

Even if you had literally no other valuable skills, proficiency in all of these categories would be enough to get a job at a tech startup. You’d probably have to call yourself a growth-hacker or technical-marketer but you would definitely be valuable to almost any startup.

The last question is how to express this skillset to potential employers. The answer is LINKS. You must send links to THINGS. Startups do not care where you went to school, what your GPA was, who wrote you letters of reference. They care about what you made. So build a personal website, hire a freelancer to spruce it up, manage that freelancer in Basecamp, write about the process of hiring and managing that freelancer. Start a newsletter for a cause you care about, build a cool form for it on their site and learn from the analytics. Write a case study about that and put it on your site. Then send links to all of those things somewhere very early on in your job application.

Good luck.

How travel can help you live forever

When you go off to college, everyone your parents’ age reminds you to cherish the time there, take advantage of every opportunity because it’s going to be the best time of your life and then after that life blows by. This terrified me. It still does. The risk that at some point time will start speeding up and then suddenly, without realizing, I’ll be old, with my best days behind me.

I’ve thought about this a lot, why does it happen and how could I stop it. Most of the people telling me this at the time were baby boomers. Most of them had started a career shortly after college. Then they worked the same job, in the same city, more or less for the next 30 years. This must be what caused the acceleration. Without unique new experiences, daily life becomes one long run-on sentence. My theory is that having new experiences out of your comfort zone, a complete change in your day to day, adds punctuation to existence and creates structure in the passage of time. Those changes add a rhythm and a topography to our memory that when we reflect, appear longer, more meaningful and fulfilling than a smooth progression of nearly identical days.

So I found this post, from the always excellent Brain Pickings, fascinating. The piece is mostly a review of a book called Time Warped, that focuses on our perception of time. The book describes the “reminiscence bump” which explains why most people perceive that time passed comparatively more slowly when they were young. When we have unique and new experiences we remember those experiences more vividly and perceive time in higher fidelity. A similar effect is called the Holiday Paradox.

But one of the most enchanting instances of time-warping is what Hammond calls the Holiday Paradox — “the contradictory feeling that a good holiday whizzes by, yet feels long when you look back.”

This seems like a pretty plausible explanation. New, unique, and novel experiences make us perceive the passage of time more slowly. When we’re young and first venture into the world we have a lot of these. The same effect happens on vacations abroad.

Like the “reminiscence bump,” the Holiday Paradox has to do with the quality and concentration of new experiences, especially in contrast to familiar daily routines. During ordinary life, time appears to pass at a normal pace, and we use markers like the start of the workday, weekends, and bedtime to assess the rhythm of things. But once we go on vacation, the stimulation of new sights, sounds, and experiences injects a disproportionate amount of novelty that causes these two types of time to misalign. The result is a warped perception of time.”

How do we use this?

This seems like a credible explanation for two ways that time appears to slow down and why it can speed up as we age. It also seems to give us a lever with which to slow down our own experience of the speed of time passing.

Like most humans, I am pretty terrified by my mortality. But there is a soothing image of an old man who has lived a ridiculously full life. He’s done so much in life that he finally gains a level of contentment with his own mortality and looks forward to the rest. Basically this awesome turtle:

Take a few minutes and watch one of the best movie scenes ever.

There is a popular critique of the quest for immortality. That it seems good in theory, but eventually we would tire of the daily struggles of life.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe living forever wouldn’t be that great. But striving to live a very long time, to the point where you actually feel like you’ve had enough time on Earth seems like a worthy goal.

The obvious strategy for living forever is to look at life extension.

But Time Warped seems to give us an interesting theory that all time is not created equal. The two weeks on vacation might feel 5x or 10x longer than the other weeks of the year. So let’s make this very numerical for a minute. Living life on a typical 9-to-5 schedule with 2 weeks vacation per year you have 50 weeks of normal time passing. Rour 2 weeks vacation (assuming you actually do something interesting with them) feel more like 20 weeks of normalized memory time. So in a typical year, you have about 70 units of time. What happens if you then take a sabbatical and take 12 weeks off to travel. Now you have 40 normal weeks and 120 vacation weeks. That year is now 160 units of time and will feel more than twice as long as a normal year. Let’s go crazy and say you spend fully 50 weeks of the year traveling and creating unique experiences. That year of 502 weeks might feel seven times longer than a normal year.

Living a life so punctuated with new experiences that it feels like ten lifetimes is not exactly living forever, but 10x life extension is basically forever when compared to what you can achieve with healthy and longevity-based strategies. There are a lot of good critiques of incessant travel, but it does seem like it’s always the incredibly well-traveled old people that feel content with their interesting lives and most like that awesome turtle. Maybe there’s a secret there.

Terrifying Freedom

It can be comforting to have something keeping you down.

A shitty boss or a dead end job, the Gub’ment or the Man. Patriarchy or racism. All of these things conspire to block you from being happy, successful and fulfilled. And that’s comforting for a lot of people because it gives you something to blame. Something to rail against and to grumble about on the commute home each day.

I’m pretty sure my best thinking is behind me. I did it all during my four years of high school debate team. But during that time the one idea that we studied that continues to fascinate me the most is threat construction. Threat construction is a fairly formalized sociological and psychological tendency for us to construct external threats. Psychologically this manifests in our desire to constantly create a bogeyman that’s the root cause of the problems in our life. The effect becomes even more powerful when groups of people circle the wagons and rally together to blame some “other” for their misfortunes. People are constantly creating, or at least vastly exaggerating, external threats.

And we really enjoy this. Coworkers love to kibitz about the bosses. Crazy uncles love to prognosticate on the impending threat of sharia law. I do it too. When my startup was failing I used to love to bitch about the stupid VCs who wouldn’t invest in us. Once you start thinking about threat construction, you see it everywhere, including in your own thinking all the time. We are constantly manufacturing and exaggerating layers upon layers of external threats.

Because the alternative can be terrifying.

When you start to really examine these threats or forces one by one and deconstruct them, what you probably find is that 99% of what’s keeping you down is made up of two things. The first thing is the shear randomness of the universe. You’re not cursed, you don’t have consistently bad luck, it’s just that the universe, the distribution of positive events, gene allocation are all profoundly random. Nothing is conspiring against you there and they only thing you can do is act like a professional poker player. You make good bets with your time, energy, decisions and resources and you let the chips fall. The second thing is You. And that’s the terrifying part. It’s comforting to think that you’re doing all you can and some force, human or otherwise is just blocking your path. But we when you really examine those thoughts it turns out that you have the ultimate control over the vast majority of those things.

Those layers of external threats and forces act as comfort blanket, shielding us from the ultimate responsibility for our own lives. My Dad used to always have a saying about his martial arts teacher who would say that “if someone punches you, it’s your fault for not getting out of the way.” It sounds a bit crazy at first glance, but it’s pretty liberating. It’s a way of thinking that you have the capacity to affect every part of your life and nothing is really out of your control to influence or improve.

Now I’m not saying that shitty bosses or government intrusion or sexism or racism are not real things. I’m not saying they’re made up. Some threats are made up, but some of them are very real. But I do think that in most cases they simply tilt the already uncertain and difficult terrain of life further against you. The lion’s share of the blame for the status of your life is probably still on you.

Complaining to your friend about something that’s keeping you from your dreams gives you a short, quick hit of good chemicals in your brain. Deeply examine the issue and you realize that 1) ultimately the onus is on you to act and 2) acting probably involves taking some risk, and the randomness of the universe ensures you don’t know it the risk will pay off. That does not give you a spurt of good chemicals, but something more akin to a punch in the gut.

But it’s the truth. We all have a terrifying freedom.