A couple small notes on how the web helps us “bring our hearts to work”.
Hearts, Hidden | San Francisco | 2007
Hearts, emerging:
- Jason Kottke, Your company? There’s an app for that.:
The internet is still the ultimate “there’s an app for that” engine; it duplicated some of the capabilities of and drew attention away from so many products and services that these businesses offered. Some of these companies are dying — slowly or otherwise — while others were able to adapt and adopt quickly enough to survive and even thrive.
This is why, when people ask what industry I work in, I can find no other answer than “web”.
- Robin Sloan, Know thy market, commenting on markets such as the Internet, the Kindle and the App Store:
For the past few years I’ve been trying to think this way about projects, professional and personal: I need to know how big the market is, and I need to know what success looks like. Now, this doesn’t mean the former has to be huge and the latter has to be blows-the-doors-off; in fact, the opposite usually sets a better stage for satisfaction. Small, well-understood audience; limited, well-defined success scenario. The Powell Doctrine of projects.
My comment:
The brilliant part is that the form and underlying economics of the web makes it an easier, cheaper and better way to reach one’s “addressable market” (i.e. anyone that should or would be interested in what one is creating) than any other form of communication.
It’s incredibly powerful and meaningful to re-frame our goals from “appealing to many” to “being loved by a few”, and it’s even more liberating to think that the economics of the Internet make it possible to succeed with that re-framed mindset.
- An example of how that works: Diana Kimball, Kickstarter, and Imminence:
Kickstarter forces promotion, planning, and urgency to the beginning, right when affirmation is most precious. By creating a public contract, Kickstarter takes the vanity out of self-publishing. It’s not you publishing it, not really; it’s all the people who trusted in your work enough to bet on its success.
“The money” Robin confided, “is nothing, compared to just knowing.”
Why is “knowing” important? Why is connecting with fans and consumers “awesome”? Because “knowing” that our work is valuable, wanted, even needed, is a key component to bringing our hearts to our work.
