You’re Not Ev Williams, Yet
As we sip our tea to read another warm and fuzzy perspective from Ev Williams, it’s important to step back and realize that his perspective, for all intents and purposes, isn’t incredibly helpful to an invalidated entrepreneur. How he now works, builds and markets his products isn’t practical or reasonable for most. He states it himself at the end of the article.
If you’re an entrepreneur (or public company employee), don’t get caught up in this. Numbers are important. Number of users is important. So are lots of other things.
If you’re wondering if you fall under the category of invalidated, I’ll define it as follows:
If you tweet a prediction and the press doesn’t immediately pick it up and write a story about it, then you’re not there, yet.
Ev’s recent experience is too different than what most entrepreneurs face. When you decide on a product idea, it’s not likely that you’ll have the ability to hire and fire the best talent in Silicon Valley to build you a beautiful product. You may not have a team, and, if you do, you won’t be able to allow them to spend weeks improving the underline. Competing on design is incredibly expensive when you’re building a web-first app so you won’t be able to self-fund, have a competitive office space and competitive cash compensation from day zero. Most people won’t take the time or energy to respond to your requests, nevertheless, support you loudly across the internet.
If you need content, you won’t be able to pay professional contributors based on the performance of their posts to bootstrap content and promote your brand. You won’t be able to garner press and analysis by simply stating an intention from your iPhone. When you say something that’s different than the status quo, you will not be hailed as a disruptor. Your thoughts will likely just sit unread on your blog or liked by your mom on a social network.
Deeper metrics should guide a product internally, but when you’re building something new, you’ll need to sell it to people who are comparing it to other products. That is, unless you’re Ev Williams and people will try something because you tweeted it. You’ll need to sell it to advertisers if that’s who will be paying your bills. You’re required to use comparable metrics. Those include active daily, active monthly, monthly unique visitors, and views. Engagement metrics are great too if they’re huge; but, otherwise, they mean diddly squat in the context of your piddling active user numbers.
Metrics power a “business model.” Most companies need to make money or at least have a reasonable idea how they’ll get there. The reason for “vanity” metrics like unique visitors and active users is they are tied to well-understood revenue models. If Ev wants to use ‘TTR’ — great! Tell us how you’ll monetize it and keep the experience as clean as it is, we’ll plug in the numbers and we’ll figure out what this product is worth. Otherwise, if you’re going to monetize based on impressions, visitors, follows, or reads, it’s simple to understand how much the product can earn.
Happiness is awesome. So are monarch butterflies, the smell of flowers, and dancing in the rain. I’d love to live in a world where we measure our product’s impact on world happiness or number of childrens’ minds opened, but I live in a world of science – not unicorns. Ev’s comes to us with “wishful thinking” rather then providing a framework for how the world can move forward. That’s not leadership or bold. It also wasn’t in 2006 when he claimed incorrectly that page views would be obsolete then continued to lead Twitter to track and sell impressions for the Twitter Ad products.
The “vanity” metrics that Ev trivializes do matter. They matter to the almighty advertisers who care about reach. The fact is, Medium can live in a reality where it’s not profitable and burns enough cash to heat Siberia, but most can’t. Medium will be able to get advertisers to take a risk on the platform with native ads that no other ‘new’ platform can or will. Medium can guarantee distribution through existing known channels like Twitter where they have millions followers and can easily garner additional ‘earned media’ coverage for their early advertisers. Let’s be honest, many advertisers would pay for Ev to just tweet their brand.
Metrics will change but we require new ad formats or revenue models which can be proven to perform. I’m not interested in hearing about what metrics Ev wants the world to use unless he can tell me how he plans on monetizing it and what tests he’s done to prove that leads to more purchases, conversions, or leads.
You’re welcome to live in a pipe-dream where you have the reputation to tell the tech press, “we don’t focus on active users” when they ask you during a conversation. Nevertheless, you’ll find that they don’t tout you as a “creative genius.” They’ll simply state: “The company would not disclose how many active users they have.”
Jeff Atwood chimed in with his perspective on Ev’s piece on Twitter.
Although I do slight Ev’s puff piece, my hope isn’t to slight Ev’s success. He worked his tail off to build his reputation. He toiled through hell and high water to keep Blogger afloat, for the most part, through his own perseverance and stubbornness. My point is, he’s at a different level. He has different resources and different problems. I’m not claiming he has it easy, as new ventures never are simple. Just very, very, (did I say very?) different.
Medium can spend their time focusing most of their energy on the product within a vacuum while most actually don’t have that luxury. His focus on his idea of perfection is the opposite of what most early founders need to be focused on. It’s important to note that this Jobsian perfectionism didn’t make Williams successful. If you used Blogger or Twitter in the early days, you realized they were both falling on their face constantly.
More generally, as an entrepreneurial community, we need to look to people who are “at our level” for feedback, guidance and perspective. There’s a separate problem of knowing where we stand, but, suffice to say, it’s easy to know when you’re not Ev, Marissa, Zuck, Elon, Gates or Steve — yet.
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
Feel free discuss this with me @CyrusRadfar or if you’re in the Kapuno Communities alpha here.
