On Thursday, Reuters reported that San Francisco-based Lyft is close to hiring an IPO advisory firm as a first concrete step toward becoming publicly listed.
Lyft would establish a public valuation for ride services startups that has been elusive. Lyft was valued at $7.5 billion in its latest fundraising, while larger rival Uber is valued at $68 billion. Some question whether that is fair, given the range of scandals at Uber this year. In August, Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi set a new tentative timeline for Uber’s IPO of between 18 and 36 months.
Interesting news. It appears that Lyft is attempting to get to the IPO stage before Uber. I’m curious what Wall Street will do when they file. I’m rooting for Lyft, and personally rooting for Logan Green — the CEO. Green is smart, methodical and runs a tight ship. The LA Times has a great write-up about him and the future of Lyft, here.
Uber is hemorrhaging cash in R&D, has continuous workplace problems, and isn’t even profitable. Ride-sharing (and hailing) is a difficult game, but both Lyft and Uber seem to be investing in AI which is a wise choice. It’s good to see Lyft is courting investors this early on in autonomous ride tech, and has even struck deals with Ford and GM. Uber is notably not into collaborations or any deals for that matter.
Green knows what he’s doing. Nothing creative happens in a vacuum. I’m thinking Lyft is a buy. Uber is definitely in the hard pass column.
It’s the year 2000 and The Dot-com Bubble has just arrived. I was 11 years old at the time. I don’t remember it. What I do remember is playing Chess on Yahoo! Games or chatting with friends on AIM. Those were the good ol days.
However, researching The Dot-com Bubble has been eye-opening. Two major factors catalyzed the conflagration of sell-offs, bankruptcy and failure of so many e-companies (as they were called then). Those startups (as we call them now), were plagued with:
The stock market crash that followed the 9/11 attacks.
9/11 was unavoidable for those businesses. But overspending, or burning cash was a very serious problem then — and remains a serious problem now. Snapchat lost almost half a billion dollars in 2016. Uber spent $2.6 billion in 2016 alone. Apple, the prodigal son spent $10 billion on R&D in 2016. The tide is pulling back for some of these VC-backed companies, and there may be a tsunami looming around the corner.
Enter, the holding company.
Holding companies reduce the risk for owners. If a financial hardship comes for one of the holdings, it’s unlikely the business will disappear as the corporate group as a whole owns a stake. This is a healthy relationship, and strengthens the bonds between business and consumers.
Recently I came across Tiny. Tiny invests in internet startups, but it also buys businesses into their holdings. If you’re a bootstrapped company, struggling to grow under your own weight, or can scale to level that your VC’s want — Tiny will make you an offer (within 7 days no less).
Their portfolio is very impressive.
Dribbble, Crew, Designer News, Need/Want, and Buffer are just a few of their holdings. Tiny won’t flip the business, and they won’t come in and micro-manage team culture. These internet businesses are thriving — each one isn’t an Uber-sized goliath, but they come together in harmony. Each one working as hard as the next, producing a quality cluster of nodes for the web. Each one producing jobs, solving problems and existing through lean years and fat years. Even The Walt Disney Company has an immense amount of holdings and assets, which to say the least… is smart.
If another (VC catalyzed) bubble is coming, and it most certainly will… I believe most of the businesses (if not all) within Tiny will survive. As overspending becomes more and more entrenched, it’s going to get rough out there. Minimizing the next bubble fallout means taking action.
Holding companies can make the web a healthier place. Less link rot. Less bullshitery like what happened to Vine. No more dead projects like FFFFOUND, RIP.
Maybe I’m paranoid, buy if you’re not standing underneath the umbrella of a holding company, I’d be worried about survival.
TaskRabbit is one of the best-known startups in the so-called “gig” economy that links freelance workers with jobs, from handymen to movers to assistants. It has about 60 employees, but over 60,000 independent workers use its platform.
The total price of the sale is unknown, but previously Ikea’s acquisitions ranged from $20 million to $50 million.
The total number of Taskers as of 2015, was just over 15,000. [1] That’s some interesting growth over over the course of 3 years. Nothing wild. But an interesting move by Ikea nonetheless.
It looks like Ikea is doing two things here. First, they’re signaling to the market that they’re still here and making moves. Notably, moves into the tech space. I mean they recently were one of the first companies to bring AR into their app. Secondly, they’re building a moat around their business model. If a size-able chunk of users go to TaskRabbit for assembly, why not own a piece of the pie?
I for-see a bright future with Ikea as the IOT continues to encroach into our lives.
I mean as hilarious as these hot-takes are, just how serious is Apple taking this heat? Well, in their documentation they have clearly defined safe-areas to lock-in content in our familiar-yet-safe rectangle we're fond of.
A safe-area example and Auto Layout grid columns.
I think designers are going to have to get creative to deal with this. Thankfully app designers can look to web design for inspiration. Lots of wonderful solutions are just waiting to be discovered.
Apple apparently has some yet-to-be-released Safari documentation about how to handle full-width designs as their Apple TV 4K seems to take advantage of this. Check it out:
Apparently there is a way to set the background color, e.g. the Apple TV 4K page does it. pic.twitter.com/Am3xn6wjRp
I have a feeling that it's just the background-color of the document body, but we'll find out sooner than later. I think this is a real challenge, but in the beginning it's going to be a bit rough out there. I'm going to do a deep-dive into the Human Interface Guidelines and documentation next.
The 4-year old Gif Search Engine has 200m daily active users who watch over 4 million hours of GIFs every day. To put that in perspective, Snapchat has 173 million daily active users. [Giphy] has raised $150 million and is valued at $600 million but it is not yet profitable although they are trying to change that by rolling out sponsored GIFs. Giphy seems to be doing a lot right — not just creating a huge repository of content, but also executing an effective search strategy, forging impressive partnerships and engaging a massive network of users.
The ecosystem that Sketch has built around it is impressive. If you put Sketch together with Craft, InVision and Zeplin, the package suddenly becomes very competitive and attractive. You can go from designing, prototyping, to testing and shipping the ideas. And if on top of that you add simultaneous collaboration, a better shared revision history and a browser app allowing Windows users to play with Sketch, you are still ahead of Adobe.
Currently there are 3 tools facing each other to win the love of designers: Sketch, Adobe XD & Figma.
There is not enough space for 3 big players. Only 2 at the end will remain to hold most of the market share (e.g. Windows/Mac, Android/iOS, Uber/Lyft). Other smaller competitors will share what is left behind.
For sure XD will be one of the two.
If Sketch wants to remain one of the biggest player, it has to buy Figma.
He’s completely in the right. There’s just simply too many players on the field. If Figma and Sketch knows what’s good for them, this sale will happen sooner rather than later.
Wouldn’t it be neat to embed your Unsplash photography on your WordPress site? Unfortunately, there’s no WordPress plugin available. If you’re not familiar, Unsplash is a huge library of photographs for commercial and noncommercial purposes. It’s an awesome resource for designers, prototypers, and developers alike.
So yeah, I figured it would be cool to add a showcase of my Unsplash photos on my website. Upon closer inspection of the Composer wrapper, it looked like it was overkill for my use. But if you’re gonna make a WordPress plugin using Unsplash, you’ll want to use it.
So I began here — first I made a quick blueprint on how I wanted this to go down:
Just a simple page, and a two column grid layout of my photos.
Seems easy yeah? Next, I went to check out what kind of HTTP Response I get from the API with hurl.it and everything is looking hunky-dory so far.
So at this point I realized a few things:
I need to make a simple HTTP request
Decode the JSON
Loop through the array and echo the goodies
I decided on making a simple snippet below:
If you leave line 19 uncommented, you can see the full array and figure out what you want to use from the HTTP request. You can copy/paste that snippet in any template or PHP file and it should work. NOTE: make sure to replace my username and swap YOUR_APPLICATION_ID for your actual App ID from Unsplash.
After a few layers of paint my Photography page now looks like this:
It’s quick and dirty, but at least I won’t have to upload my Unsplash photos to my website manually anymore. It’s all programmatic baby! I’m really happy how this turned out. I tried to make this as simple as possible and under 15 lines of code I think this rocks. But I hope someone else finds this useful!
Let me know how if you have any feedback, improvement or philosophy on this implementation in the comments below. 🙂
E-mail is making a come-back apparently. Inside, claims that their e-mail newsletter network is growing at a break-neck rate. With open-rates just above 40%, and click-through-rates at 10% — it's something to ponder.
I believe newsletter networks will see huge growth in the coming years. It's going to be the next big thing. This is potential huge signal for other companies to bootstrap together a newsletter product.
We've already seen companies trying to get some skin in the news aggregation game. Two notable players are Twitter and Google. They already have your e-mail. They know what you read. Why not deliver a curated newsletter of news/moments you may have missed?
Thought Experiment #1:
If I'm a non-Twitter user and visit Twitter Moments….
Instead of convincing me to be a user here, offer a newsletter to follow Moments
Show me news I may have missed
E-mail is forward-able, and thus shareable
Try to convert me into a Twitter user later
Thought Experiment #2:
If I'm a Yahoo! e-mail user, and visit Google News…
Instead of convincing me to be a user here, offer a newsletter to follow Google News headlines
Show me news I may have missed
E-mail is forward-able, and thus shareable
Try to convince me into a Google user later
Thought Experiment #3:
If I'm already a user at *Twitter or Google*…
Send me newsletters to catch news I may have missed today
Periodically send me posts from users I follow
Recommend me to engage on a story my followers engaged with
Remind me to check in on Moments or Google News as breaking news comes in
Newsletters are very powerful tools plainly because they're a direct line between me and a service I chose to join. I wish Twitter would take advantage of e-mail more. It's highly underutilized, and it's one strategy Twitter has never taken. If they ever did, it could grow their user base and could be very rewarding long-term with user-growth.
The state of Web Design continues to evolve every single day. It has always been in a constant state of flux — pretty much since the iPhone was released in 2007. The iPhone was a doozy, because it forced developers and designers to find workarounds with Flash. Steve and Apple were not intent on bringing flash to mobile users. However, the web really became an exciting place when Google Chrome overtook Internet Explorer sometime in between 2011-2012. It signaled a shift in usage, technology and design thinking — and that just about brings us to now.
Layouts
When designing a layout, it’s important to keep an objective in mind. For example, Stripe is a product for developers and web-stores so their main objective is to completely wow developers from all walks of life (Stripe.com has some insanely cool cutting edge Front-end CSS). Another example is Lyft, whose primary goal is to convert visitors into users. What it really comes down to, what is this layout supposed to do for us and for visitors?
First, we figure out an objective: e.g. convert visitors into customers, signup users for a newsletter, or maybe there is no objective at all. Second, we need to figure out a design strategy. This is where the Z-Layout comes in.
Z-Layout Design Variations
Let’s take a look at some classic examples. If you are the head of product for an app, or wish to drive visitors to a specific page elsewhere on the website — chances are you want to go with a Z-Layout optimized to move customers around. Let’s look at some variations on this theme.
Slack – The E-mail replacement app has a lighthearted design, and aims to convert visitors into users.
Lyft – No paragraphs of copy, just high contrast, a simple form to become a driver and that’s it. If half of your visitors just want to become a driver, or a customer — make it easy for them.
Asana – Project management can be a hard sell, but communicating a simple product can be more effective than talking about bells-and-whistles.
Southwest – This airline gets an honorable mention. It’s not very sexy, and booking a flight itself is not fun here. But it is important to note that a vast majority of visitors here probably go straight to the booking form — so at the risk of being annoying to repeat users, it seems Southwest values their reward program over actual ticket sales. In fairness, this Hero area above the form likely changes all the time for various promotions and deals.
Coinbase, Caviar, Medium and Blue Bottle Coffee – more examples of Z-Layouts (yeah yeah some are stretching it) that promote engagement (e.g. interacting with a form or scrolling down). A single input on the form is key here. If there’s more than one, such as First Name and Last Name… forget about it. Medium is the exception because the product is reading. If you’re not into scrolling and reading, you’re probably not an ideal user for the platform.
Various – Above are some examples of heroes that are designed to convert visitors into customers. Key takeaways here on these, high contrast, elements along a “Z” path for eyeball scanning, and a button. The button is very important to driving engagement. It is 100x easier to just click a button than fill out a form.
Conclusion
Before I get destroyed in the comments, a layout is not a blueprint. If you’re a product designer looking to spice up your homepage or wish to drive customers to a sale happening at your webstore — look to the examples above for inspiration. The basic rule of this layout is this: simply align elements along a Z-shaped path above-the-fold. The secondary objective is: keep it simple. The less copy, the better. High contrast helps a lot. Make sure to check your colors for accessibility’s sake. And lastly, add your objective last along the Z-path (e.g. a button, form, or link). I hope this helps anyone in need of inspiration or direction!
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If you have any questions, feedback or comments drop me a line below 🙂
There’s been an article floating around the web lately, maybe you’ve seen it. It’s time to talk about MVPs.
WP Engine dissects a lot of the problems with MVPs. I have to agree overall, too often do you see entrepreneurs rushing their products only to fail disastrously. However, MVPs don’t suck. Entrepreneurs are just becoming more and more reckless. I have a problem with creating a new-hip pneumatic called “SLC.” It isn’t going to rally everyone to arms about how to deliver a badass product.
In the article they claim:
MVPs are great for startups and product teams because they maximize validated learning about customers as quickly as possible. But it’s a selfish act.
Well… learning about your users is not selfish. In fact, it’s the very opposite of selfish. It’s a huge reason why the Dot Com Bubble happened in the first place. Too many companies were cannibalizing each other’s features without considering the consequences of users. To make matters worst, VC’s and investors were moving too much money into bad ideas without sound research.
In the old days, startups had little to lose with money moving that fast. Just build it, gather feedback, iterate and repeat.
But things have changed haven’t they? MVPs are a symptom of a new problem post Dot Com Bust — user expectations have inflated.
Products have become increasingly complex. Solving problems becomes more and more difficult and that tends to follow a quadratic curve. Naturally, competition does too. That should go without saying.
Since users grow along that curve too, customers will have loftier and loftier expectations. You’ve’re up against the likes of Google and Apple. It ain’t easy being a startup.
Users have grown drunk with their expectations, and while that sounds bad, it’s not. MVPs are the hair of the dog.
It forces us to focus on delivering complete products out of the box. It forces engineers to deliver, designers can ideate further, sales teams can unify under one message and users can more efficiently share products via word of mouth.
Everyone wins.
There’s no reason to think that MVPs suck. Customers just want a complete experience. No one wants to go to a carnival with no rides.
Stick to your wits and make a damn fine product. Focus on what you want. Focus on what users want. Make it fast, make it complete. Table your conquer the world ideas for later and simplify your product design before launch.
While I have a lot of problems with WP Engine’s take on things in the valley, I do agree that delivering a complete product from the beginning should be your highest priority.
But there’s no reason to create a new pneumonic device for product development. Just maintain focus and never lose sight of satisfying the experience of the users.
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