Pek Pongpaet

One of the coolest things about having a popular site like Pinstagram is the ability to get meaningful data about user behavior. We integrated MixPanel to track every type of user activity including any clicks, and scrolls. Without getting into actual numbers, but rather percentages, we can see some really cool user behavior.

• 43% of all activities are scrolls
• 16% of activities are zooms
• 15% of activities are tab clicks
• 12% of activities are likes
• 1.3% of activities are comments
• 1.7% of activities are searches

Another great data point is that our users average about 10 scrolls each. By scroll I mean, they reached the end of the page, and we present them with another set of photos. That’s equivalent to 10 pages views. I doubt that if instead of an infinite scroll UI, we had next page buttons, that we would have had 10 page views per user. What this means is that the infinite scroll paradigm is really low friction. People don’t mind scrolling down, but pressing buttons is somehow more work.

Likes make up 12% of all activities. But comments make up a measly 1 percent. The ratio makes sense to me since Liking requires a click and requires some effort compared to just scrolling. Commenting requires even more effort and thus is an order of magnitude less than Liking.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There seems to be a very hacker culture here in the Valley that favors the builders and developers and engineers are basically impossible to find. They are put on a pedestal of sorts and rightly so to the extent that they can build things – they can make your idea a reality.

However I would encourage people who have website / app ideas who do not have the ability to program or code not to let that stop them. There’s so much more to having a product or service apart from the ability to code it up.

I’m a designer. Everything starts with the design for me. If I have an idea, I start designing it. I code some – mostly just the front end – the stuff people see. I don’t necessarily have the ability to code it all from end to end. I don’t let that stop me. I’ve launched a ton of sites despite my lack of backend coding skills. How have I done that? Usually I’ve managed to convince people to help me – either by paying them or partnering with them.

Brandon agreed to help me with Pinstagram only AFTER he saw what I had designed and built and that it was good. If all I did was just talk about it, I sincerely doubt he would have taken me seriously and that he would have been so enthusiastic to help. Once he saw that my vision of the product had potential and I had put skin in the game, then he was on board.

In my journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve seen many ideas and businesses take form, and they weren’t necessarily started by tech people who “built” stuff. Groupon started from The Point, but the initial version of Groupon itself was supposedly a WordPress plugin. Dabble was founded by a couple on non-techies and I love it. I love that they started out with just a WordPress site – and the sign up form was a WordPress contact form plugin. By the time I talked to them they were having classes everyday with people paying $20 a class. They had no tech.

I love the folks at DealDecor. They have what can be best described as a Woot/Groupon for furniture. They were moving tons of furniture by the time I talked to them and they still didn’t have a tech team. Amazing!

It can be really depressing to see all these young tech folks from MIT, and Stanford, or exGooglers and exFacebookers come up with an idea, get lots of funding if you are not a tech person and want to pursue the same dream. However I’ve also seen nontechnical people prove the business before they even had tech. I’ve seen business analytists able to raise money from their business plans; I’ve seen writers leverage their internet fame to fund their ideas.

Leverage the skillset you have. If you can code, great – code. If you can design, then design. Use the skills that you have as a starting point, a foundation to what you need to build. Use that to show others the idea has merit and rally people to your cause. If you think you have a good idea, just start doing what you know to make it a reality.

Popularity: 1% [?]

So what do you get when you combine a billion dollar company (Instagram) with a $500 million company (Pinterest)?

I love using Instagram. The problem with Instagram however is their web experience is non-existent. I’ve been frustrated that the only way to consume Instagram is through my iPhone. Lately, Pinterest and Instagram have been getting a lot of press because of Instagram’s 1 billion dollar purchase by Facebook and Pinterest’s hypergrowth.

My cofounder Brandon and I were having a discussion on startup pitches, especially the ones that go “we’re an X for Y” and thought a hilarious VC pitch would be “we’re a Pinterest for Instagram”. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. I liked Instagram, and this was a real need for me. There was nothing like it out there that I would use. So last weekend I decided I would make it a weekend project.

I spent a few hours putting something together using my design and front end skills. I was able to show the popular Instagram feed using their API in a Pinterest-like UI. I showed this to Brandon which quickly convinced him this was a good idea and together we started clobbering together the project. By the end of the weekend we had something that basically worked. You could log in with your Instagram id and view your feeds, your photos, what’s popular and search.

We found that Pinstagram was really useful. I actually consume Instagram a lot more through this. It was an easier experience and I can see a lot more photos faster. Brandon told someone the idea and they wondered why anyone would want to use such a service but as soon as they tried it, they immediately realized that it was very useful.

So without further ado, it is my pleasure to present you:

The site does integrate with Instagram and will require that you have a valid Instagram account.

For those of you interested in how it was made. It’s a very simple Ruby and Sinatra app. It doesn’t even have a database. The front end was built on Twitter Bootstrap. Haters can hate me for not building the html from scratch but I prefer to build my house using off-the-shelf tools instead of having to go and chop wood in the forest. The Pinterest style layout was built using Masonry, a very useful jQuery plugin. All this of course was also made possible using the Instagram API which was very well documented and easy to use.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I recently read Mark Cuban’s book “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It”. It was a short read but full of valuable nuggets of insight on his approach to business. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear that he’s been on the show Shark Tank which I also enjoy.

Here are some great quotes I highlighted from the book:

Lesson #1: Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service.

Always run your business like you are going to be competing with biggest technology companies in your

The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare.

Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles.

Treat your customers like they own you. Because they do.

Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition…

The best salespeople are the ones who put themselves in their customer’s shoes and provide a solution

Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies.

It’s not in the dreaming, it’s in the doing.

Popularity: 4% [?]

There’s a pretty big movement in the tech startup world now around the idea of a lean startup. Terms like customer development, continuous deployment, and mvp (minimum viable product) are thrown around. MVP refers to the most bare bones version of a product you can build and release and still call it a product. The idea is to not spend two years locked in a closet building the “perfect” version of the site, do a massive launch, only to find out nobody wants it and it doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Build the most basic version, put it out there in front of customers and see if the thing has legs and iterate.

I think the MVP is a great idea and eliminates waste. What a lot of people don’t talk about is team makeup. What’s the minimum required amount of people and what roles do you need in order to build a successful web product.

Like everything in life, it depends. There are also a lot of counter examples that I think it’s hard to make a generalized statement. In Apple’s case, the minimum was an engineer and a business guy: Woz and Jobs. I would argue though that the particular business guy also had an eye for product and that’s not something you always see. Which brings me to my point.

More and more, I see the really successful ones require you to have strengths in these 3 roles: technology, design, and sales/marketing. These are in no particular order. Without technology, you can’t make the product work. Without design, it’s not intuitive, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. Without sales or marketing, nobody knows about your product or you can’t get people to buy it. I’m not saying you can make a successful company if you don’t have those 3 components, but it will sure make it a lot easier and increase your odds.

You might say, Larry and Sergei were two engineers and Google isn’t exactly known for design but we’re talking about edge cases here. Not everyone can be like them. A lot of developer types would like to think that they are the MVT. Being able to build the product is just one leg of the successful stool. Sure you can sit on that stool, but it’s wobbly. Design is another leg of the stool and I’m glad to see that nowadays, user experience and design has become a key component in many companies. That’s still only two legs and is not stable. I think the biggest and most crucial piece of the ingredient is sales. Sales is what makes everything run.

Being on the design and tech side, I’ve always thought that if I could just build it, people would use it and somehow it would build on itself. I’ve come to realize that organic viral growth is the exception and not the norm. The antidote is of course great marketing and or sales. I don’t think enough people realize how important sales is in the tech industry. People giving you money to make their problem go away is absolute validation to what you are doing.

And there you have it – the three legs of the stool that is the basis of a successful startup.

Popularity: 3% [?]