wayneyeager

I would use the spare time (10 hours a week you said) to develop a prototype of your application. MVP, etc. Keep your job, and start out small with your side project.

Work on it until someone will pay you to use it. Over time, improve it, get others to pay, etc. Repeat until you can you reasonably devote yourself to it full-time.

If your app/idea/situation doesn't lend itself to that sort of organic growth, then you've no choice but to roll the dice and go big, or stay where you are. But since rolling the dice sounds unlikely, I'd contort myself and my idea as much as possible to fit into the grow-slowly-as-a-side-project paradigm.

[Source: my experience. This is what I did to launch my first biz. Grew slowly. Company got acquired.]

This reinforces Reid Hoffman's maxim that if you're not embarrassed when you launch version 1, you spent too much time on it.

I suspect there are some whopping economies of scale to be had here, though. This was a one-off and prototypes do tend to be expensive.

BTW, I'll bet 2/3 the cost was that military-grade omnidirectional treadmill. Mass-produce that and you're back into the realm of possibility.

Indeed. Gerber went even further and says that it may be counterproductive to own a business that matches your technical expertise. That's because of the temptation to jump in and do the technical work... instead of focusing on the strategic aspects of owning the biz.

And, apparently, videography.

It casts a shadow too :)

My attempt at Dueling Banjos: http://goo.gl/doodle/gsW2

The icon for point #9 is particularly clever.

Can you imagine how cool that would've been if it had contained actual information?!

Although presumably the idea is not to fail.

I don't think the premise is bad, but we're pretty good about separating REAL consequences from contrived ones.

Example:

Several years ago, I put a $100 bill in five different envelopes (w/ no return address)... all addressed to a guy I really, really dislike. I gave the envelopes to my housekeeper and told her that every week, we'd measure my weight and compare it to the previous week. If I didn't lose weight during the week, she was to mail one of those envelopes. It worked for 2 weeks, but then I gained 1/2 lb during the 3rd week and I pleaded until she handed over my envelopes.

I think there might be a workable hack here, but it takes courage to make the consequences real and irrevocable.

I was surprised that Buffett's lukewarm statement warranted such a headline, but reading some of the interviewers questions, my "agendar" went off:

Q. Do you see things differently today... the shortcomings of capitalism? Q. What do we need to do to improve the system and its shortcomings? Q. You are still very optimistic about America. How do you reconcile this? Q. Does Wall Street bear a resemblance to the robber-baron era 100 years ago? Q. Jeffrey Sachs from Harvard [says] US is turning into a plutocracy. And this is a feeling you get throughout the world... Do you feel that way?

I'm wondering if merely displaying a number is really "social proof" in the Cialdinian sense.

Possibly at one time, but now I think the "proof" part of social proof must be demonstrably not BS for it to work. In the same way that testimonials by "J.S., Ohio" have no real meaning anymore, but "Jared Sanderson, CEO of Whatever.com" would probably be taken seriously.

An interesting experiment would be to get permission from some of your better-known users to say something like "Join Bill Gates, Dalai Lama, and 14,152 others...". Possibly even better to use little avatars or pics of a bunch of people, ala Facebook Like or the old BlogLog widget. Who knows? I feel like that'd be a better thumbs up/down on social proof than just the number.

If you've missed these, here are a few on Netflix Streaming that I really enjoyed: Restrepo, Brother's Keeper, all the "Up" (7 Up, 35 Up, etc.) documentaries, Harlan County USA.

What a small world. My wife was project manager on this keyboard at IBM/Lexmark in Lexington, Ky.

I just showed her the article and she said she must have thrown away over 100 prototypes!

Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but I wonder if 66 is an adequate sample size when respondants are self-selected (as opposed to random).

(66 respondants can be deduced by finding the highest common denominator in all the response percentages. In this case the HCD is 1.51515. So 100/1.51515 = 66.)