Great post on the Creative Process by Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studio:

I’ve spent a lot of time vacilating between “No one else will like this” and “It’s awesome!” He goes on to say the following:

However, in being surrounded with only positive comments from others, it can lead us to feel like everyone else is succeeding all the time, while we struggle away wondering why it’s not as easy for us.

The reality is that it isn’t easy for anyone.

Gartner reported today that there will likely be 46 billion app downloads, 89% of which are free (via TechCrunch). The trends are clear, and I don’t think there is any turning back.

David Barnard, founder of AppCubby software development house, is seeing the same thing: “The future of sustainable app development is to give away as much value as possible and empower those who receive more value to pay more for it.” It is an excellent article and well worth a read. He even includes an interesting graph that I haven’t seen before. The chart, inspired by Evernote, was created by the founder of Pocket:

In short, if you create more value over time for your customers then you can charge money over time for that created value. Things that decrease in value over time, like food (left), should have a one-time cost.  Items that maintain value over time (center) or increase value over time (right) have the potential of being repeat revenue opportunities for the company creating them. In the second, content must be changing. In the third, content must be growing or value must be improving. David Barnard and Pocket CEO Nate Weiner see a freemium only future.

Freemium — the combination of a free product with paid premium features — is a term invented by Fred Wilson in 2006 but the concept has been around a long time. The term ‘freemium’ is also a problem.

Why a problem? Because it is misinterpreted. There is more than one way to implement a freemium model. One way — the way most technologists think of freemium these days — is to release a totally free app, one that functions free forever, and then sell premium features on top of it. This is exactly what Evernote, DropBox and a few other companies do successfully. It is, however, a very hard road to be successful with and there are very few large successes. Another possibility is to offer a free product with time-limited use. Many web services, like 37signals, have now switched to time-limited models. Of course this model has been around forever in software. We used to call them trials. A third model is to give away functionally limited products and charge for more features. Infinity Softworks has always done function-limited free products, whether that free product was available in an App Store or bundled with a device. Again, this model has been around since the dawn of software. We used to call them Lite versions.

I don’t think I’d advise a company to develop a paid app today. Instead, I’d focus them on finding a freemium model (or another model altogether) that works. The key is remembering that there is more than one way to implement a freemium model, and any of these might work better than any others.

The problem with working on something new, that is big, and evolves over time is that the inventors are watching the sausage get made.

Most projects evolve over time. I go out and show the ideas off to someone, a great designer lends a hand and influences the direction, a book makes me think twice about an idea, or a new product shows a better way to do something. This is all normal. So are the rat holes I wander down for a week or two, the misdirections, and the questioning. Always the questioning.

The biggest problem is that every person who sees the new idea has a mental picture of that idea at a certain time in space. The next time that person gets an update, he inevitably carries the previous mental picture with him, and his feedback and impressions are partly built off that. But it isn’t just outsiders who do this. As the inventor, I do too. It is hard to evolve the story when I know the history and carry all the baggage, when I’ve watched the sausage get made. I, too, still present the product the way it was discussed two months ago, not what it has evolved into.

I have to be constantly vigilant, fighting my intuition to study the history, and instead focus on the product in front of me. Because what we have today is so much more interesting than what we had even two weeks ago.

Fred Wilson had an interesting post about a month ago on the atomic unit of a product or service:

This isn’t exactly about a feature. Features are the verbs of a web/mobile product. Objects are the nouns. And one thing I always like to think about is what is the most fundamental object of all in your service. I like to call this the “atomic unit.”

He goes onto list a number of examples from the Union Square Ventures portfolio and then reveals the punchline:

When you think about an MVP, it’s really important to identify the atomic unit and make sure you focus the product crisply and cleanly on that object. If you think you have three or four atomic units, you are going to end up with a clunky and bloated experience and that is what you want to avoid at all costs with your MVP (particularly if you are mobile first).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea over the last month. It is imperative to be focused very specifically, not just at launch but throughout the life of the company. I believe very strongly in the theory that customers hire a product to do something for them. By being very clear about the atomic unit of the product/service, it also should clarify to customers how this product fits into their lives.

Brad Feld, describing his first interactions with two guys in the incubator TechStars as an example of passion in a start-up founder:

At that moment, Sphero was born. And I knew that if Adam and Ian could make any progress over the next 10 weeks creating a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone, I wanted to invest in these two amazing guys. Their passion and obsession around the idea of a robotic ball you control with a smartphone was awesome.

For one, it is articles like this that give me a lift when I am feeling down.  Second, it is articles like this that, if I was raising a round of funding, keeps Brad Feld at the top of my list (along with Fred Wilson). It feels like the start-up world is too cynical, most of the time. We are working on some unknown future and yet, when looking at the still-forming business, all we analyze is the guessed-at numbers and market opportunities.

I’ve spent my entire career so far trying to change the way we work with numbers. After all, our world is very different today — with always connected computers in our pockets — than how it was in 1979. And let’s face it, there have been far more tough days then good ones in the past 15 years. Sometimes it feels like all I have is passion.