Wandering Wandering Star

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

He knew why he wanted to kiss her. Because she was beautiful. And before that, because she was kind. And before that, because she was smart and funny. Because she was exactly the right kind of smart and funny. Because he could imagine taking a long trip with her without ever getting bored. Because whenever he saw something new and interesting, or new and ridiculous, he always wondered what she’d have to say about it—how many stars she’d give it and why.

Three key principles of designing home-run products

1. Provide a novel form of self expression

People love to express themselves. This is why we buy the clothes we like, enjoy customizing our World of Warcraft characters, decorate our apartments, change our profile and cover photos, put bumper stickers on our cars, among many other things. Every decision you make is a form of self expression. Even if you are buying a pair of $5 throwaway glasses for Coachella, you’re exercising your taste whether you’re doing it consciously or not.

If you can provide a fun new way for people to exercise their taste and creativity to express themselves, people will try it. People love trying new things and being the first to spread news to their friends about the new thing, which is always great for a new product.

For examples of novel forms of self expression, you can look at recent products like Instagram, SnapGuide, Diptic, or Cinemagram which all allow you to create things that you weren’t easily able to do before. You can also look at more historic products, like MySpace, where an exploit-turned-feature allowed users to thoroughly customize their profiles and how that led to its mass adoption.

2. Make it stupidly simple

The task of expressing yourself needs to be dead simple. Think Instagram vs. Photoshop. There’s an enormous gap between the time it takes you to achieve the same effect in each. Instagram makes it so easy for you to exercise this novel form of self expression and produce immediate results that it’s even enjoyable to complete the task.

SnapGuide took the process of creating a how-to and made it extremely easy. While creating how-tos is not necessarily novel, it was previously not accessible to most people. SnapGuide made this form of self expression available to the masses, effectively providing a novel form of self expression.

3. Make it rewarding

This is the glue between it all. Once someone has expressed themselves, if they feel rewarded, you’ll have them for life. There are two important forms of reward I want to highlight: satisfaction and validation.

As with any laborious work, your work is not finished until you are satisfied. Satisfaction is the guiding feeling that drives creation and directs creativity. A painter doesn’t release his painting until he is satisfied with his work. Steve Jobs didn’t release the new iPhone until he was vehemently satisfied with the product. A designer is not satisfied until his design reaches perfection. Work that is released before satisfaction is reached generally results in a sub-par product.

Think about this: When you create a novel form of self expression and you’ve made it extremely easy to do, you’ve provided people with a shortcut to feeling satisfaction. You optimize and reduce time-to-satisfaction – this is extremely powerful.

Instagram has reduced the time to satisfaction like a boss. Take a photo, and start skimming filters with ease until you find the one that satisfies you. Diptic takes all of the work out of creating photo collages for you, so when you select a few photos, they do all the hard work and sweep you into a feeling of satisfaction with the collage they generate for you.

This feeling of satisfaction is usually followed by a desire to share and receive praise or approval from others. This leads us to the second and equally important part of reward that closes the loop: validation.

Every successful social product has some form of validation. Facebook has likes and comments. Twitter has retweets and followers. Instagram has likes, followers, and popular. Tumblr has notes, likes, and reblogs. The list goes on. If you launch a social product without any of these feedback mechanisms, you’re doing something wrong.

Humans have a deep-seated psychological need to feel like they belong or that people appreciate them. You might say “Not me!”, but deep inside you’ll hope that someone says “Me neither” and agrees with you. That is because you too crave validation.

If you can master this loop in your product, you’re well on your way to making something people want.

Create → Satisfy → Share → Validate

The problem with non-addictive tools — particularly when they’re free — is that they’re bad for business, especially when that business is advertising.

On the Web, where people have learned not to value things directly, the most common business model is to make a product, give it away for free, attain tremendous scale, and then, once you have a lot of users, to turn those users into the product by selling their attention to advertisers and their personal information to marketing departments.

This is a dangerous deal — not necessarily in economic terms, but in human terms — because, once the user has become the product, the user is no longer treated as an individual but as a commodity, and not even a precious commodity, but as one insignificant data point among many — a rounding error — meaningful only in aggregate.

Thinking of humans this way produces sociopathic behavior: rational in economic terms but very bad in human terms.

Yet many companies operate under this premise.

Businesses — initially invented as a means of solving social problems (my village needs bread and I can bake it, my neighbor needs a roof and I can build it, etc.) — have become disconnected vehicles that exist primarily to profit, often with little regard for what people actually need, what social problems the companies purport to be solving, or for what kind of outcomes their products and actions are likely to have in the world.

Advertising — initially invented as an accelerant to make existing business models flourish more deeply — has become the business model itself, turning whole companies into marketing departments, products into attention hooks, and people into products.

When advertising is the business model, companies cannot afford to create non-addictive technologies, because their businesses rely so heavily on page views and clicks. These companies cannot optimize for meaning and beauty (like healers), but have to optimize for addiction and volume (like dealers).

“What are those people with no superpowers doing on the team?”

I’m like, “Rocking my fucking world is what they’re doing.”

They’re awesome. I mean from the very start, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes — including Ant-Man. Really? Really? Like it just it makes no sense. That was basically what I wrote the introduction to The Ultimates, that was the premise I built it on. It makes no sense, and Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch made an argument for why we need them anyway.

They don’t belong together. They all belong alone. The more they’re alone, the less useful they are. And there are a lot of elements of that that got thrown out at script stage, in editing stage. A lot of slightly darker things.

But the one thing that did stay in there was the assertion that there are people who can’t be controlled, and we need as a human race to deal with it. We need something to stand up for us. We either need to fight them or we need to make them fight for us. And it doesn’t matter if they’re just kind of skillful or they’re the fricking Hulk. What matters is they’re all people, and they’re all dysfunctional on some level no matter how cool they are. And the dysfunction comes from their inability to work in a group.