Month: September 2007

I usually get ideas in the shower, but this one hit me while taking a crap. And for a reason. I thought, “My crap is so different every time. Once its dark and hard, other times it’s brownish yellow almost fluffy etc…” Then simply because we consider this crappy shit to be nasty, we are afraid to talk about it, discuss it, and analyze it. But if we take the initiative to only think about something that has been guarded by a barrier so insignificant as bad smell, we will probably discover many new, interesting, and useful facts.

I want to mention one more thing before I share my idea. I read an article on Twitter, which is simply a little widget that has your status such as, “I am eating” or “I just came back from X’s party where I met great people”. It basically is quite useless, except for one side, unsuspected effect – you get to develop a sixth sense of what other people are currently doing. You are bombarded with useless information of your friends and people you subscribe to, but they add up and after a while, you subconsciously begin to accumulate this data and make sense of it, so basically if your friend mentioned at some point that they had a bad week, you probably won’t bother them to help you with math homework (all that subconsciously). This feeling of what is going on emerges.

Now back to the shit.? If you start to record and track your dumpings you will probably start noticing some trends that we have been quite unknown till that moment. If you start tracking other things also such as what you eat, how much you exercise etc, you might be able to reach conclusions that it’s actually the peppers in your mom’s soup, not the tomatoes that give you stomach ache. Or maybe that if you run more than 2 miles at a time, your shit gets quite Y which according to the studies means that your body is craving for vitamin/mineral Z. So I wish there was a way of doing this tracking without getting my hands dirty.

On the other side, there is probably tons of other information streams that can be adopted to discover brand new theories much more significant than your mom’s pepper-tomato cooking.

Accepting any ideas for such streams…

Marc Andreessen wrote a very good article that introduces a new point of view as to what is the most important factor for successful startups. He says its good market. I won’t explain why. Just go and check out his arguments. I think they are very logical and seem right.

On the other side I am reading a book named “Stumbling on happiness” by Daniel Gilbert and there is one specific topic I want to bring to your attention. He basically says that humans almost never realize what they missed when trying to imagine something. In other words, our brains can’t deal very well with lack of information. The following experiment was done:sets of trigrams (three letter words such as SDF DFU DKI OET) are given to people and at each set, one of them is pointed and said to be special for a reason. As results show, it takes roughly 34 sets of 4 trigrams before people realize the simple rule that governs which one will be special (such as a rule that the special trigram is always the one that contains T). However, when this experiment is done the same way but the rule of the special trigram is a MISSING T, no one ever manages to figure it out, no matter how many sets are presented. Fascinating. “Pigeons have no trouble figuring out that the presence of a light signals an opportunity for eating, but they cannot learn the same thing about the absence of light” says Daniel.

So then what is the connection between the two? I think there are two markets: the ones we can spot due to knowledge, experience, and studies, and the ones that we can’t. Because those invisible opportunities exist, there is plenty of potential for everybody. “And how exactly am I supposed to see what I can’t see?” Easy. Just do things. Plenty of the most famous startups did not imagine their future like it is now. They just did it. Neither Flickr, nor Paypal, nor plenty of others started with the idea they became famous for. But by just starting, they had the chance to see those new clues for new markets that were otherwise invisible.