A Promise
2AM in a pub, doing things that don’t scale and how to make conversation
Sat in a pub at 2Am on a monday, we were donning our Penney’s Christmas jumpers on our torso’s and, with a pint in our hands, we were discussing what all drunk men discuss: the universe and everything. We swerved from politics to religion and then U-turned back to emigration and hit technology just before the traffic lights. It was a glorious little slice of conversation nestled away in the corner of a tiny pub.
Traditional Irish music was the soundtrack for the night; it’s melodies striking us from our wooden pews and reminding us of Ireland and then about the world beyond it.
It was just Mervyn, Colm and myself that night. We’d been to The Electric’s Tech/Startup Xmas Party in their bar earlier and had been about to leave when we were persuaded to stay due to a round of drinks from Kieran Daly. In the end, it was a good night, we met some nice people and we enjoyed ourselves but everything wrapped up around 11 and so here we found ourselves: three pints into our “just one more before bed” plan in the Abbey Tavern, talking passionately about life and meaning.
Our conversation drifted to ourselves and our own passions. It was a beautiful experience to see the people I spend most of my time with slip into some type of euphoria as they spoke enthusiastically about what they knew and what they wanted. I was utterly entranced by my companions and, for a while, my own voice and my own visions. There was an optimism that you can only experience amongst friends.
I felt I had to take some kind of snapshot of this point in time — of this memory. I couldn’t just let it escape like all the others and hope that it was resilient enough for my brain to remember it down the road. From one of the goody bags from the party, I produced and cracked a Christmas Cracker, unfolding one half of its cardboard shell. On it, I wrote:
“We all vow to create something that goes beyond ourselves, that changes the world.”
and then I signed it, afterwards turning it towards Mervyn and then handing it to Colm. We all signed it. In our drunken stupor we’d all given our word that we would change something about the world we live in and I firmly believe, with all my heart, that those two men who shared my company also share my dream.
The Problem
During our drunken ramblings, we did actually end up talking shop for a while as well. It’s weird how a lack of inhibitions and a misplaced sense of invulnerability can lead to a lot of concrete ideas and decisions.
We talked a lot at length about what we wanted NativeNote.com to do and to be and where we saw things going, etc. etc. It was all things we’d said before; reassuring ourselves about the decision we’d made. What really made the discussion though was when we started just talking about our problems.
The main problems we have with notes right now are sharing and finding notes. Often people in our class’ facebook group create really detailed notes as we go on throughout the year but when it comes to exam season, these notes seem to have fallen into the endless abyss that is the facebook group system. Not to mention that although these notes are detailed about their topics, they look absolutely horrendous. Coming mainly as .txt files, these kinds of files would look infinitely better if they could just be parsed through a markdown syntax — a lot of the files have the correct syntax already anyway!
Doing things that don’t scale
Our product has a large focus around a community aspect and it’s incredibly hard to create and encourage a community. I mean, how do you reward people for interacting and how do you encourage people to participate and share? It’s probably not something that’s going to come easily for us.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been watching a lot of YCombinator’s “Starting A Startup” series on Youtube and one that stands out is Lecture 8 on Things That Don’t Scale. One of the ideas that I had was to ask our top 50 or 100 users, that were contributing a lot of good material to the site, what their address was and then send them sweets based on how much they’d contributed that month. A lot of physical product companies like OverclockersUK and Qwertee bundle Haribo with their products during shipping, why couldn’t we do something similar while shipping a software product?
I had Bobby cost this and we figured out we could do a lot of this for just €60 and that was if we even gave users the choice of gluten-free, lactose-intolerant or vegetarian-friendly sweets too! Obviously, though, this isn’t something we could scale past our early user base. Even if we kept it to just 50 users, the manpower required to either monitor people to pick those 50 or to write a system that could determine what was good and what was bad content and then rank users based on that just isn’t scalable.
Regardless of its longevity, I feel like this idea gives users a physical reward for sharing their notes with us and contributing positively to the community as well as also incentivising them to create a larger volume of notes as they’d receive more sweets that way. It’s something small but it would really reward people for efforts that may not have otherwise tangible rewards.
Talking To People
A lot of what I’ve been trying to learn during December is how to talk to people and encourage conversation. This has been a big hurdle for me as I have a very introverted personality as well as a lot of self-doubt when it comes to new people. Although I’m still finding it hard to approach new people, I have found a couple things helpful for small talk and continuing conversations.
The ARE Method
Communications expert Dr. Carol Fleming offers a three-part process to kick off a conversation: Anchor, Reveal, Encourage (ARE). It’s a really simple process you can keep in the back of your head as you start a conversation. The best way I’ve found to start a conversation has definitely been “Hey, how’s it going?” but after that, the Anchor part of the process becomes important.
Anchoring is an observation of you and your partners mutual shared reality. It’s essentially a comment on something you’re both seeing or experiencing; just something small about something currently happening or is contextually appropriate such as “the band tonight is really awesome” or “the weather is perfect today”. These may seem unimportant but nothing in this instance is too superficial as these are just “Friendly Noises” and you both know these aren’t meaningful — they’re just stepping stones to real, more meaningful conversation.
The Reveal aspect is a chance for you to reveal something about yourself that is related to the anchor you just mentioned. For example: after mentioning the band, you could say something “there’s a much bigger crowd here than there was at their show last year.” By opening up to the other person, we’re showing a bit more trust and establishing a connection with them while also giving them some content to respond to.
The last step — Encourage — is there for you to hand the conversation back over them with a related question; “Were you there at their gig last year?”. This is, hopefully, the beginning of a bit of back and forth as both of ye ease into the conversation a little more and let things develop naturally with more open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions often start with some of the following:
- Tell me about…
- What was the best part of…
- How do you feel about…
- What surprised you most about…
Open-ended questions are great for encouraging more conversation because, as the name suggests, they leave the ending open for the other person to do with as they wish. The best thing to do from this point on is to alternate between making comments and asking questions so you don’t end up interrogating the other person like it’s a job interview.
If you get stuck…
There’s always the big four you can talk about: Family, Occupation, Recreation (hobbies, etc.) and Motivation (“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”). Just pick one and ask a question about it. It’s not meant to be the next topic but just something to lead you into the next phase in the conversation.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime
Well, that’s a lot of what I’ve learnt from and experienced this month. That drunken night in The Abbey Tavern still rings clear in my head. We tackled so many of the complex questions about starting a business — the emotional ones — that our mutual understanding and combined vision for the future is an incredibly inspiring feeling for me. The next year of my life’s going to be hectic and insane. And, I’m looking forward to it.
