We all know that 2016 was a dumpster fire. I don’t need to rehash this. But for me, personally, 2016 was one of the biggest struggles of my life.

After two failed entrepreneurship ventures in 2014 and 2015, I started 2016 freelancing, underbidding for projects just so I can get an advance payment to make sure my rent was paid. That meant I was working on 3 to 4 projects at a time, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and making somewhat the equivalent of minimum wage. …

Let me get this out of the way. I’m 35 years old. This puts meat the tail end of being a millennial (technically) but honestly I identify way more with Generation X than anything. Personally, I think Snapchat’s insistence on Selfies and Hipster-influenced culture is annoying. Kids don’t go to events for the experience anymore — they just go to prove to their friends that they were there. I’ll never understand that. If I had a lawn, I would tell these kids to get off it.

However, as someone who bills himself as a digital strategist, I have been diving deeper into the platform and I’m warming to it. Snapchat is the best social media network in 2016. With it’s context-aware filters and facial recognition technology, it has completely changed the way we interact in 2016. …

A few months ago, a startup client asked me a very pertinent question:

“Should we shift our development from apps to bots?”

The team started looking at engagement in their private Slack channels and they started to actively debate pivoting their business model to focus on distributing their app via slash commands, slack bots, and SMS-based assistants.

Since that conversation, more and more people have been approaching me about bots, and thanks to Facebook’s aggressive push into the space during their F8 conference, Bot-Mania is poised to emerge from a coder hobby to a mainstream phenomenon.

But before you get caught up in the hype, you and your team should ask some fundamental questions about bots, and determine if it would be a perfect fit in your product roadmap. …

Let’s face it. Freelancing can suck sometimes.

There are no rules for this life. No order. Every day you are tasked with making lemons out of lemonade. But as Drake and Future would say…. “what a time to be alive.” Whether you’re working for yourself or you’re building a team, there is no time like the present to build a sustainable, productive office. These 5 apps have helped me streamline my operations and work, and allowed me to make some damn good lemonade in the process.

Calm
https://www.calm.com
Desktop, iOS, and Android — Free (additional content $9.99/month)

I’m going to say this again and again: Every entrepreneur must meditate. In as little as 5 minutes a day you are given the opporunity to clear your mind and rest your headspace. However, most people have no idea how to get started. Enter Calm, the picturesque app that not only has several amazing guided meditations but also provides a 7-day tutorials for beginners. The monthly buy-in is a bit pricey, but the peace of mind that it has given me over the past year has been worth it. …

Tidal made news last week, and not in the best way.

First we learned of the departure of Tidal CEO Andy Chen, and the layoffs of 25 additional employees. Then, a number of news outlets noted that not only did Tidal not make the cut of the top 700 apps on the app store, but it may have increased awareness of its streaming music competitors, mainly its chief rival Spotify. Add to that the usually quiet Jay-Z’s Twitter rants, and you have the makings of a possible disaster.

So things are not good for Tidal. But instead of piling on the misery, I would rather talk about how the brand can win. …

So first off, let me say that I want Jay-Z to win. I want him to shake up the music streaming marketplace in a way that no other company has done before. I want the bonafide hustler to hustle the industry, and I want musicians to be seated at the table with Silicon Valley in the streaming landscape.

I wanted Tidal to shake up the world. Unfortunately, the first iteration of the product falls far beyond that lofty promise.

The User Experience Issue

As someone who has developed and deployed software before, I won’t focus on the bugs. This happens for every launch day, for every product. I would rather focus on the user experience, the pièce de résistance that grabs enables the user to shout “take my money.” …

Music sales are at an all time low. The US music industry sold half as many units in 2014 as it did in the year prior. It took until October for the country to see its first platinum album release of 2014. And although streaming music revenues are rising, disputes over payouts to artists put the medium on shaky ground.

Faced with declining sales and decreasing profits, the music industry, just like film and Television, is relying heavily on “tentpole releases,” heavily marketing sounds that data has confirmed are surefire hits. It begins by flooding the marketplace with more music by a smaller subset of artists — according to The Atlantic, Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” was played on the radio 70 percent more than any pop song ten years prior—and continues by ensuring that popular music fits an accessible mold. …

Last week our team boarded a plane to Dublin to attend Web Summit. The European conference has emerged from a gathering of around 400 or so in 2010, to over 20,000 attendees in 2014. That meteoric rise is putting a conference once known as an also-ran on the scale and size of South By Southwest.

Ironically, I seeked out Web Summit because I was tiring of SXSW. As an attendee of almost 7 years, I now somewhat loathe my trip to Austin. The scene has become devoid of true inspiration. But is a trip to Dublin any better? …