The Blog of Matt Gornick

When to say no

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:14:42 -0800

When does Oral-B determine that their $1 toothbrush is not enough, not MVP, not meeting customer demands? When does a toothbrush need to have an LCD screen and cost $130? When do they say no?

When does Apple say that MP3 players suck and what exists isn't enough? When do they say no to disk drives, CD drives, and 'Intel Inside' stickers?

It is easy to say yes to those who are vocal about what they want. Even if it is what you believe, it is hard to say no.

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Experiments with local outsourcing and saving 6 hours of my life

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:17:00 -0800

"The sole purpose of money is to not do things you don't want to do" - overheard at ORD Camp 2012

In January, I started an experiment aimed at giving me more time to work on my startup as well as increase my happiness. I started with locally outsourcing two tasks that could be done asynchronously without me around and would make my life easier. I weighed the following tasks between how much I wanted them completed and how much time/energy it would cost me to do them. This made it easy to settle on an acceptable price to have the work done.

1. Apartment Cleaning - Having a dirty apartment reduces my productivity and puts me into a bad mood; however, spending 3-4 hours cleaning is hard to justify when I could be using that time to focus on my startup.

2. Hanging Shelves - I've had a series of shelves that are time consuming to hang and thus remained in boxes since I moved in to my apartment in September. After 5 months of not having these shelves hung, it was time to have them setup, but spending an afternoon hanging them and making them look right was always at the bottom of my list.

As luck would have it, a great Chicago cleaning lady advertised in my apartment and had a very competitive rate to clean my apartment. I called that night had scheduled her for the very next day.

The stats on 'Apartment Cleaning':

Total time spent organizing the task: 10 minutes

Monetary cost: $50

Time saved: 3-4 hours

That same night, I was recommended to TaskRabbit, which is a web board for posting tasks and chores then people will come to your apartment, complete the task, and the payment would happen through the website. I had a referral code so I saved some money off my first task and spent around 15 minutes typing the post for someone to hang my shelves. Within 10 minutes, someone responded with a great price and then came 2 days later to hang all those shelves, perfectly aligned and level.

The stats on 'Hanging Shelves':

Total time spent organizing the task: 15 minutes

Monetary cost: $36

Time saved: 3 hours

I'll be continuing these experiments to see where I can optimize my time. Post in the comments if you have any other tasks or work that you outsource to someone or a virtual assistant.

Notes:

In my post, I used a referral link above for TaskRabbit where you'll get $10 toward your first task and I'll also get a $10 credit. If you don't want the $10 or to give me $10, you can signup through a non-referral link: http://www.taskrabbit.com

If you live in Chicago and are looking for someone to clean your apartment, I can email you the contact info of the lady I used. She did an great job for a very good price.

Tools and services that I'll be experimenting with:

http://taskrabbit.com/PAL/194750

http://www.fancyhands.com/

http://www.sanebox.com

https://www.odesk.com/

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Quantified Self at ORD Camp

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:27:00 -0800

I gave a talk at ORD Camp 2012 on 'Quantified Self and How to hack your body'. The group was amazing and we captured a great list of tools and tips for tracking and improving oneself.

Below is a list of tools, gadgets, and services that we use:

Sleep:

SleepBot - http://www.appbrain.com/app/sleep-bot-tracker-log/com.lslk.sleepbot - mobile application to track sleep cycles
Jawbone UP - http://jawbone.com/up - bracelet that tracks sleep cycles and wakes you up based upon your sleep cycle
FitBit - http://www.fitbit.com/ - small clip that tracks sleep, food, and fitness
Wakemate - http://wakemate.com/ - band and mobile app accessory that wakes you up at the best time in your sleep cycle
Lark - http://www.lark.com/ - tracks sleep and wakes you up at the best time
Zeo - http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/ - sleep tracker

Food:

EatDifferent - http://www.everyday.io/ - take photos and track your food based upon goals
The Eatery - https://eatery.massivehealth.com/ - take photos of your food and have others rate the healthiness

Exercise/Body:

FitBit - http://www.fitbit.com/ - small clip that tracks sleep, food, and fitness
Nike+ - http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/ - run tracker that syncs with your mobile phone
Withings - http://www.withings.com/ - digital wifi scale that tracks your weight, fat mass, lean mass, and your BMI. Also has online dashboard.
Polar Heart Monitor - http://www.polar.fi/en - measures heart rate throughout the day

Productivity:

RescueTime - https://www.rescuetime.com/ - tracks application usage and productivity of your computer usage
OneThing - http://oneth1ng.net/ - post your one thing to get done today. Additional app that will remind you randomly throughout the day to work on your one thing to get done ( https://github.com/mgornick/onething-terminal )
Pomodoro - http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/ - break tasks into small 25 minute chunks with a short break in between.

Genetics/Body:

23andMe - https://www.23andme.com/ - genetic testing company that provides heath, disease, and other wellness information based upon your DNA.

Home:

Nest Thermostat - http://www.nest.com/ - tracks your habits and learns what temperature to maintain in your home.

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You are a brand

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:58:39 -0700

"If you were a brand, what would your tagline be?" via @abinoda

Guess what folks? You are a brand. Every person you meet, every card you hand out, every tweet you post...

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Remote Work

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:50:37 -0700

"[In the future] Men will no longer commute, they will communicate" - Arthur C. Clarke

Several months ago, I though the concept of remote working was rather absurd and wouldn't work for most teams. Ideas that would normally be shared in the same room on a whiteboard would be poorly communicated in emails, Skype calls, and Basecamp projects.

Despite this, I can say that I've been won over some efficiencies of remote working. This wasn't a choice per se as some of my colleagues were in Chile, St. Martin, Maine, Tokyo, St. Louis, and an arboretum near Chicago when we needed to get work done. Each time, we adapted, grew, and got things done.

Some tasks may be more difficult if you're not in the same room. How do you brainstorm together? or feel the "excitement" (read: hustle) in a startup? I would follow Pareto's principle in saying that 80% of the work doesn't require everyone to be in the same room and 20% of the work might be helpful to be in the same room. Much like developers get into the zone while doing a pomodoro or timeboxing work, you know that the 20% of time you spend together needs to count.

Working within these constraints has helped me focus on the most important things first.

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Working at a startup (and notes from WashU talk)

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:58:22 -0800

This week I had the opportunity to speak with some great students at Washington University in St. Louis. As apart of "Alternative Career Week", they brought in Aaron Papermaster (Moxie) and I to talk about starting your own company while in college and working for a startup once you graduate.

I've noticed that I keep referencing the same books, videos, and people so I decided to make a page to have all of this information in one place.

This information can be found at:

http://blog.mattgornick.com/pages/starting-up

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Customers hate surprises

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:41:38 -0800

Law 1: Tell your customer what you're going to tell them.

Law 2: Tell them.

Law 3: Then tell them what you told them.

Today I went to the barbershop for a quick trim for the holidays. My hair wasn't long, but just needed to get cleaned up. I told the barber to take just a touch off the length and trim me up. He smiled, agreed, spun me around (away from the mirror), and proceeded to cut my hair in complete silence... not a word. 20 minutes later, he spun me back around and I promptly figured out that this wasn't want I asked for. He tried his best to correct the butchery of a haircut, but as the ancient proverb goes "measure twice, cut once". There was nothing he could do to fix the haircut.

This is an important lesson because it is a perfect example of what businesses do and try to meet customer demands and expectations. All too often, you are on the phone with a supplier/vendor/sales person and they can barely contain their excitement to get going, install software, and sell you hardware without truly understanding your needs. There is a disconnect between what they want to sell and what I want because they aren't communicating with me.

Going back to my haircut, the barber should be constantly communicating with its customers. "Trim here, hows that length? Did you see the game last night?" Without communication, even a seasoned expert can deliver something completely unexpected and unwanted to the client. Obviously, unexpected and unwanted results are the last thing a paying customer has in mind.

Even Apple Computer who is known for secrecy, telling the customer what they need, and surprising everyone also plays by these laws although a bit differently. First, they do an insane amount of research (read: listening) to determine what people's problems are with technology. People are "communicating to" Apple and Apple is doing a great job at listening. Before a product launch, there will be banners, rumors, faux product pictures, etc. but these are likely setting up the expectation of what they Apple will tell us (Law 1). The anticipation leading up to the launch brings us to Law 2, where Steve actually tells us they are releasing an iPhone/iPad/etc. Law 3 is the rest of his talk where he basically makes everyone on earth want to purchase this new gadget. Law 3 is subsequently reinforced by other people (media, friends, etc) telling you what Steve already told you (e.g. "you need to by an iPhone because it is the greatest achievement bestowed upon mankind").

That being said, we need to either be more strategic (like Apple) or more active when communication and listening to customers and their needs. Communicate early and often.

Happy Holidays!

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Recommendation engines are pretty smart

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 07:34:00 -0800

Yesterday, I decided to buy a book on Amazon I have always wanted to read. Amazon kept recommending other books and topics that "I might like"... and oddly enough they were right! Amazon recommended several books that I've heard and wanted to read, but had since forgotten about. Needless to say, I walked away with a slightly larger bill than expected.

I've been using Amazon and Pandora for a while now and they both seem to know what products I want to buy, books I want to read, and music I want to listen to. I think there is something to be said for these engines and that they might very well be the norm in the future.

I don't know the all inner workings of these technologies and collaborative filtering, but I interested in learning more about them. Time to reread the old lecture notes from CS410 at UIUC.

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Why don't US students take a gap year?

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:33:36 -0800

I have heard some of my friends doing a "Gap Year" where they take a year between college and the work force to travel the world, volunteer abroad, or study topics that are interesting to them but didn't get time to focus on in school. A few years ago, I would never have thought of a gap year, but after talking with some friends I'm starting to think it is a great opportunity for our generation. It is natural to follow the paths of others, but seemingly difficult to try something different.

Here are some of my ideas of a good gap year that I think would be a huge learning experience:
1. Work on or create a startup company
2. Spend 8 months in Italy learning the language and cuisine
3. Live the life of a rock climber and travel through the cliffs in North and South America and learning the culture and dedication of the sport along the way

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Why companies engage customers (via Twitter)

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 09:53:20 -0800

I recently wrote an article about getting Schwab and Mint.com to work so you can keep track of your budgets online. The next day I got a tweet from the Schwab Twitter account (@SchwabService) with a short "thank you". I feel like more companies should do this and reach out to their customers. Most communication is one way from customers to companies. It is refreshing for it to go in reverse.

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Finally getting Charles Schwab and Mint to work

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:34:00 -0800

After months of trying to get my Charles Schwab Investor Checking and Mint.com to work, I've finally been able to get my data imported. As an extra layer of security, I use the Schwab Token (available here) which generates a unique 6 digit code that you use each time to login. This makes it impossible for Mint.com to continuously update your account which is aggravating, but a small price to pay for the sense of security. At the same time, it would be nice to still have the data available in Mint.com if you use Schwab's Bill Pay and want to keep track of your finances. Here are the steps to get it working (finally):

1. Login to Mint.com
2. Add a new Account - Search then add "Charles Schwab - Banking"
3. Type in your Username
4. Type in your password, press the button on your secure token to get the 6-digit code (e.g. 123456), then type in that 6-digit code immediately after your password. Example: your password field would have "secret123456"
5. Hit Save and wait for Mint.com to pull in the data.

For your safety the tokens from Schwab expire pretty quick (maybe ~1 minutes). If you wait too long during step 4 or between step 4 and 5 then your token will expire and Mint.com won't be able to login, so you have to be fast.

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Simple ideas can be profitable

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 13:49:00 -0700

I love receiving (and giving) feedback on startup ideas, pitches, and product demos. It allows people to look for ways to improve their product as well as see their startup from objective eyes. I think the biggest deterrent to creative feedback comes from people that discount ideas simply because ... they appear to be simple.

I love this quote from Paul Graham's Essay "How to Start a Startup" (http://paulgraham.com/start.html):

"In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better."

In my experience, some people like to think that all the easy problems have already been solved and thus you should only look at solving the huge and complex problems. Unbeknown to most, there are tons of horrible (any annoying) solutions for rather simple problems. Additionally, these companies might have completely solved the problem wrong to begin with and it is just up to you to create a simple and elegant solution.

Here are some great examples:

Groupon (http://www.groupon.com/) - People have been able to get coupons before, but never before has a website made it so easy and enjoyable to look at deals and new venues in your city. The solution is amazingly simple so much so that thousands of Groupon clones are starting to take over internet. Great idea, simple solution, $1+ billion company.
37signals (http://37signals.com/) - For those using MS Project, you know the pain and angst that is involved with doing the most simple task. 37signals didn't set out to destroy MS Project, but rather just focus on the customers that just wanted to manage a small team or project. The overhead and headaches of MS Project allowed 37signals to solve the problem the correct way.
Inventables (http://www.inventables.com/) - For years, people scoured big material books, bids, and online to find things like 'squishy magnets' or 'water proof coatings' when building new products such as cars, running shoes, airplanes, etc. Inventables is changing the way people find these unique materials buy offering a digital marketplace for buyers and sellers to interact and discover new materials. Buying materials isn't anything new, but enabling people to easily find and buy them is.
Snuggie (www.getsnuggie.com/) - As most people on this earth already know, the Snuggie is amazingly well-known and is an incredibly simple idea (essentially a backwards robe or a blanket with sleeves). Not only was this idea easy to create, manufacture, steal, and reproduce (if someone was so inclined), but it was a wild success and has generated millions of sales.

In a quote from Twitter user heathwblack, "Sometimes the best inventions don't reinvent the wheel, they just make it roll better."

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Tips for Traveling Overseas

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:35:00 -0700

There was a blog post recently on How To Travel more Intelligently (http://stu.mp/2010/10/howto-travel-more-intelligently.html), so it inspired me to jot down some of the tricks I employed on my travels. I recently traveled to Italy and spent an amazing 10 days sight seeing, soaking up culture and history, and meeting some of my relatives who lived in Asiago, Italy.

I put together some quick tips I used to save myself some headaches in overseas travel.

1. US Dollar -> Euro: While in the US it is easy to rack up fees at your local bank to get US Dollars converted into the currency of your traveling country. To give yourself a break, Charles Schwab has an Investor Checking Account with all of the ATM fees waved. A small tip that I found out was that they also don't charge currency conversion so you can go to an ATM in Italy and get out Euros at the US/Euro exchange rate without any fees.

2. Money Belt - Everyone I talked to mentioned the pickpockets in Rome and around Termini Station. To mitigate the risk getting items stolen, I picked up a money belt on Amazon. This one worked really well for my trip, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00007FCI1/ref=oss_product.

3. Small Combination Locks - I locked my backpack while I was walking around the cities to once again mitigate the risk of someone digging through my backpack and stealing my stuff.

4. Rick Steve's Podcasts + Tips - http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/packlight.htm I downloaded all of the podcasts for the cities we were staying in so I had some background into the history, culture, and sightseeing locations. It was amazing to walk into the Uffizi Gallery and have some background knowledge of all of the works of art.

5. Tim Ferris Tips: My sister and I made it through 10 days on only 1 piece of carry on luggage that we shared. Try to pack as light as physically possible and only bring the absolute essentials. You'd be surprised how little you can survive on while traveling. Also every city has a Walgreens-like location, so you can buy anything that you forget or is above 3oz. Check out Tim Ferris's blog for packing light. http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/07/11/how-to-travel-the-world-with-10-pounds-or-less-plus-how-to-negotiate-convertibles-and-luxury-treehouses/

5. Skype - International calling is quite expensive. I believe Italy to the US was somewhere around $1.50 per minute for my iPhone on AT&T. To save money and still stay in touch with my family and friends back home, I have the Skype Unlimited plan which I paid around $30/year to call any US number without any extra charges. I connected my iPhone to a hotel available wi-fi network and was able to call the US without any additional charges. One phone call makes up the cost of the Skype Unlimited plan.

6. Travel Agent - Some people like to be more spontaneous and travel without any sort of plans in mind. Because we wanted to visit 4 cities (Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan) in 10 days as well as visit our relatives, we had to plan more diligently. A travel agent was a massive help and allowed us the luxury of having train tickets organized and purchased in advance as well as detailed notes about all the locations. Our travel agent, Nancy, also organized the hotels we were staying at so that they were centrally located to all the sites that we wanted to see.

Good luck on your future travels.

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The love or the money: Measuring Job Happiness

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:28:07 -0700

I watched a really good TED talk on the "Happy Planet Index" (posted by my friend Sam Johnson http://asamjohnson.posterous.com/are-we-happy) and it got me thinking about how we as a society rate ourselves. Especially right out of college, most people care about 1 number and that is their yearly salary. It might be time to rethink that notion and think about what we actually love to do. There is a great list of successful people that do their job because they love it rather than love the money (e.g. Steve Jobs and his $1/year salary). It seems that while living in one of the richest and most privileged nations in the world with the infrastructure to reasonably employ any skilled worker, we should be able to enjoy our work.

Are you working at your job because of the love or the money?

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Using PDFKit on Heroku

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 08:55:00 -0700

Recently, I've been working on a small project that crawls the web to gather information about trademarks (e.g. number of Google results, placement of sponsored links, etc.). In the requirements, we needed to have PDF versions of the webpages that were crawled, so I found this to be a great opportunity to try PDFKit and try hosting the project on Heroku. Initially I got everything working locally, but once I tried running the app on Heroku it didn't have access to the wkhtmltopdf library. I've outlined my steps to get the PDFKit gem working on Heroku.

1. Setup PDFKit to work locally (gem install pdfkit, added the config.gem lines to your environment.rb or if you're on Rails 3 use the Gemfile)

2. Make sure Heroku installs the PDFKit gem to your slug by either creating a .gems file (Gem Manifest) then have a line inside that file that says pdfkit or if you've setup Bundler on the Heroku Bamboo stack (Heroku Bundler) than just have pdfkit in your Gemfile

3. Download the wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9 Linux Static Binary (amd64) executable (via Google Code), unarchive it, and then place it inside the bin folder of your Rails project.

4. Create an initializer, so in production Heroku will use this to generate the PDF's. I put this inside of config/initializers/pdfkit.rb

# config/initializers/pdfkit.rb PDFKit.configure do |config| config.wkhtmltopdf = Rails.root.join('bin', 'wkhtmltopdf-amd64').to_s if Rails.env.production? end

5. Commit all your changes and add the new files via: git add .

Push your app to Heroku. PDFKit should work just fine!

Some additional tricks from the comments that might be helpful in your app:

If your Heroku app hangs when trying to load images when generating your PDF, check out Julian's post on how to fix this.

If you'd like to send custom PDF files back to the user (e.g. from HTML stored in your database or a file within your app). This method is much cleaner than rendering the pdf as a file to the /tmp folder, then using send_file.

# Could be one of your controller actions def show html = "

Hello world

"


     pdfkit_instance = PDFKit.new(html)


     send_data(pdfkit_instance.to_pdf)


end

If you would like to email the PDF instead, Andrew Gertig had a great recommendation of using the render_to_string() to take the rendered show page and send it as a PDF.

# /controllers/posts_controller.rb def mail_post @post = Post.find(params[:id]) email = render_to_string(:action => 'show', :layout => false) email = PDFKit.new(email) email.stylesheets << "#{Rails.root}/public/stylesheets/emailpdf.css" email = email.to_pdf CustomMailer.email_a_pdf(@post, email).deliver redirect_to :action => 'index' end

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Going to Italy for a week this summer. Anyone have any tips?

Sun, 09 May 2010 18:27:37 -0700

I'm planning on going to Italy this summer (sometime after June 6 and before Aug. 1). I want to go for about 7-10 nights and of course see as much as I can in that time. I want to set a tentative budget for $1500 (is this realistic?).

Does anyone have any tips/websites on:

1. Cheap airfare or cheap dates to travel

2. Top things to see. I'm trying to go to Rome, Florence, Venice, and maybe Milan.

3. Recommend staying in Rome for all 7 nights or switch between hotels and stay in a few different cities for the 7 nights

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Public Speaking

Fri, 07 May 2010 17:17:00 -0700

2012:

ORD Camp 2012: Quantified Self and How to hack your body

2011:

Washington University: Entrepreneurship

2010:

Building Businesses at Passionate Pursuits (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) http://prezi.com/wgyvl1acdwnq/

Rework College at Illini Entrepreneurship Network (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) http://prezi.com/awr5_k5rf1rn/

An Entrepreneur's Point of View at Pecha Kucha (Urbana-Champaign)

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Dispelling the Myth of the All Nighter

Thu, 06 May 2010 08:47:16 -0700

It is that time again! The time when college students all over sacrifice sleep for studying. The most likely offender is the 'all nighter' where students stay up for 24-48 hours prior to a final exam, research paper, or final project to squeeze in any last bit of information.

"[Researchers] found that people who drive after being awake for 17 to 19 hours performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent" (via CNN.com - Sleep deprivation as bad as alcohol impairment, study suggests). DHH at 37signals wrote in "Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor" to "... get more sleep. Stop bragging about how little you got. Make your peak mental capacity accessible."

Personally, lack of sleep causes me to perform at subpar, lack creativity, and create mediocre work. Most of the time, the all nighter is just a seemingly okay solution to a much bigger problem of time management. I've found that simply organizing my 168 hours in a week better, you can mitigate the risks of having to pull an all nighter.

If you're working on a startup, studying for school, or working a 9-to-5 please take some time to get some sleep. Everyone benefits from you putting out the best work that you can.

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Two types of meetings

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:01:42 -0700

There are two types of meeting. Those that move your product, idea, or mission forward and those that are a waste of time.

Luckily, I was in the former today.

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Great talk today from Kevin Wolz on 'Saving the World'

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:35:51 -0700

This afternoon Kevin Wolz of iFoundry gave a great talk on 'Saving the World: My Philosophy, My Story, and My Summer.' Kevin did a great job of bridging the gap between engineering and nature and how he is trying to unite his two passions.

His presentation was a real eye opener with 'the average food travels 1500 miles to get to your plate!' as well as the small food garden he built in his dorm room to grow food for the summer. Definitely impressive stuff.

Learn more about his quest for a better and more sustainable food ecosystem at his blog: http://kwolz.wordpress.com/

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