FourthSegment Blog: Social Media is exploding, and it's only going to get hotter
A few weeks ago, Boston Innovation released an infographic called Social Media is NOT as Popular as You Think. The point of the article is to remind people not to get lost in the bubble of thinking everyone in the country is a Facebook & Twitter expert. This is very true. If you’re a technical…
The ‘Cache-Control’ header is your friend on Heroku
FourthSegment has a bunch of static pages that were loading too slowly. We hadn’t really put much thought into caching, so I thought I’d spend an hour speeding things up. Here’s what I came up with.
I added this method to ApplicationController to be used as a before_filter:
This tells Heroku’s Varnish layer to cache the content. The ab results testing out the homepage speak for themselves.
Before:
After:
#winning.
Low barriers to entry are awesome
I attended Gluecon last week. It was awesome. I had a phenomenal time talking to some really smart people. While I was talking to someone at one of the demo booths about FourthSegment, one of my all-time favorite lines came up: “Yeah but it sounds like there’s a low barrier to entry there.”
I smiled. ”Hell yeah there is.”
“But what if someone copies your idea?” said my new buddy.
“Then that means I’m on to something” I replied with a huge smile on my face.
Let me very clear: I love low barriers to entry.
At it’s core, the idea for FourthSegment is a straightforward idea. You can go to our homepage, see what we’re doing, and if you’re really good you can probably code up a tech demo in a few days. If you’re average, you can probably do it in 2 weeks.
But if you think for one second that FourthSegment is just a website - that you can just go copy our functionality and make money - then you’re not getting it.
FourthSegment, like all ideas with apparent ‘low barriers to entry’ came out of the collective intelligence of a couple founders who were searching for an idea for years, scores of meetings with hundreds of people, and some really difficult realizations along the way.
Every single inclusion and omission in what is about to be the first version of FourthSegment is the result of these discussions.
- Why do we only let people share on Twitter and Facebook and not over email? You would have had to have listened in on a 2 hour conversation Jonathan and I had at 2am a few weeks back.
- Why are we going to be charging right out of the gate? That’s something I’ve thought about for years. Another 100 hours of conversations, reading, and thinking over past several years, combined with the mistakes I made at MessageSling.
- Why aren’t we providing any kind of dashboard to visitors? That something that could actually be pretty valuable. There are times where I’ve wanted it for myself. The decision to ditch that came from some experiences that Jonathan and I had while working on our last idea.
And a 80 other things.
The bottom line is that a low barrier to entry means that the product is streamlined — optimized. Copying functionality might get some dollars in your pocket, but they’ll never make you a market leader.
So if you think there’s a low barrier to entry when it comes to any product, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and try to compete. It’s never as easy as you think.
New world meets old world
My buddy Brian asking about my 1st startup with a tool from my current one. Hilarious.
Seeing the country for the forests
“…we were struggling to make sense of the bubble and its aftermath, what it meant for technology and what it meant for venture capital.”
-Fred Wilson
This quote from a recent Fred Wilson blog post reminded me of something I’ve been going through lately.
I’m out in the world. I have a “neat idea.” I talk to a lot of people about it. I get lots of wide eyes and “whoas” and great feedback. After months of searching for a great idea, it’s easy for Jonathan and I to rest on our laurels and think “well that was hard, but we worked hard and talked to a lot of people and did a lot of research and we finally got it.”
Not so fast.
Now that we have a product, Jonathan and I have to figure out what it really means in the grander context. Where does it go? What is the future of the product and the brand? These are questions similar to what Fred was talking about in his blog post: what do we go from here?
When I first saw Square, I thought to myself: “Thank you, Jack!” But I also thought to myself “hrm that’s nice… buuut is that it?” I wondered what would be next for them. What’s next for them is Card Case, and while the fantastic design of Card Case is a shining example of seeing the forest for the trees, the evolution of the Square payment platform from ‘just’ Square to Square + Card Case is a level higher: it’s seeing the country for the forests.
Square is not just building a product. They’re building a company with a greater hunger and vision. That’s something I am looking forward to doing with FourthSegment. I’m looking forward to reminding myself constantly to never stop thinking about the bigger picture; to never stop seeing the country for the forests.
Now hopefully this blog post will do its job and help me remember that ;)
FourthSegment Blog: Welcome to the FourthSegment Blog
Check out what I’m working on next:
Hi,
I’m Ryan Angilly, and I, along with my business partner Jonathan Woodard, want to welcome you to the blog for our new company, FourthSegment.
Back in November, Jonathan and I started to ask ourselves: What’s the next big thing? What’s coming down the pipe that is going to…
