Minimum Viable Personality

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality.html

by robert-boehnke • 15 years ago

322 51 15 years ago

paulkoer2• 15 years ago

Was this meant to be funny or demonstrate a lot of personality? (as in: you will endure all this rough English because the message is so important). I am probably not getting the humor but I found it an obnoxious read. All this to tell you "Don't be boring - do something different"? I could imagine a much better article on that topic.

morsch3• 15 years ago

On the plus side, it has a cute drawing of a dog!

mberning• 15 years ago

I rather enjoyed the chicken with the mushroom cloud on the horizon.

brlewis3• 15 years ago

If you read a "much better" article on that topic, you might forget who the author is. You won't forget the giant robot dinosaur.

Roboprog3• 15 years ago

I am reminded of "Thag the Caveman" asking for help on network printing or some such thing, or perhaps of the "Hulk Feminist" tweeter. Sometimes, bad form is a form. Lighten up?

I guess the point is to be memorable to at least a small group of people, rather than correct and bland and forgotten by all.

code_duck• 15 years ago

I'm reminded of http://twitter.com/#!/devops_borat - minus the extraneous words.

dhimes3• 15 years ago

One thing this blog post highlights strongly, albeit accidentally, is that if you are going to have a personality it is important to have the right personality for your market. Having the wrong personality can set you back in ways ranging from not being taken seriously- and therefore having a greater hill to climb, to being offensive- and therefore being locked out of your market/audience.

This blog post reads closer to something that I expect to see on a joke or casual chat forum than something I expect to see on a VC's blog.

Having said that, I also think the message is spot-on. In particular, I thought the advice under "How not be boring" was clear, simple, and compelling.

brlewis3• 15 years ago

I think you're right that the wrong personality can set you back, but disagree that this post is an illustration of it.

Another of Fred's posts a few days also had spot-on advice relevant to the HN community. It never made it to the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3025690

This one being so much more successful illustrates one of three things: (1) the personality helped or (2) people think the content in this post is more interesting than that one was or (3) pg fixed the problem that makes it harder for items to reach the front page if they're submitted too early in the morning Pacific time.

jethroalias97• 15 years ago

Personality will make more people love you, but will also make more people hate you. However, both drive page views and attention.

dholowiski3• 15 years ago

I think you missed the point. The "product" (the rough english) was terrible, but it had personality, it was enjoyable despite the rough english.

morsch3• 15 years ago

Is it really enjoyable? You are begging the question. Things or people may have a distinct personality, but I don't enjoy bad personalities, even if I remember them.

AndrewGCook• 15 years ago

It's supposed to be an online version of Grimlock from Transformers. He's part of a clan or robots that all talk in third person and have broken English.

That being said, I thought it was a thoughtful read with good points, and absolutely hilarious. I've spread it to 5 of my start-up friends who would get the Transformers reference already.

People love personality in products, like the MailChimp helping you along when creating your email newsletter, or w00ts hilarious product descriptions. Wufoo even does this by having a t-rex be the log in button and a title tag that says "RARRR!"

Apparently people really enjoy T-Rex's

darasen• 15 years ago

Try reading it like it is a caveman speaking.

hnal943• 15 years ago

NOT CAVEMAN. GIANT ROBOT DINOSAUR.

paulitex• 15 years ago

A demonstration of course: http://minimumviablepants.com/post/10813109434

petercooper• 15 years ago

Seth Godin's new book, We Are All Weird, perhaps?

keithpeter• 15 years ago

Yup, I found the mock primitive a bit grating. However, I liked the chicken drawing enough that I'm going to print it and put it next to the computer.

sneak• 15 years ago

I think Spolsky does this best, even though I can't quite pin down how.

His company doesn't have a trendy name, he doesn't really have a gimmick (other than being a clear and prolific and useful writer, which is not a gimmick), but he's reasonably celebrated.

In the context of this "don't just be useful, have personality" idea, what's his personality? It must exist, because the following that he's built points to it, but I can't identify it directly, sort of like a marketer who you've heard great things about but don't know where. (Obligatory xkcd comic link to be posted by someone else.)

Note: I'm not saying he has no personality, just that I can't point out what makes it come to the forefront, because it's subtle. I love the guy, but don't know why I love his site so much more than, say, jwz's. Maybe it's the implied profitability of his software business, versus the "I sell beer because I hate computers" message?

Roboprog3• 15 years ago

"I like developers, and letting PHBs put devs in a dungeon is bad"? More to it, but that seems to be a recurring theme in Joel's writing.

He makes things that explicitly help developers, whether its a bug tracking system, or a Q&A board for devs. In one column he says that a small software company or startup manager's job is to provide the illusion that developing software is all there is to do (all that matters).

izak30• 15 years ago

Joel is funny. not comically funny, but enjoyably funny, such that you can almost always get through a post or interview or whatever without feeling labored.

Joel always brings in metaphors or stories from worlds outside development (only sometimes funny). Many stories still go back to the Army, or his first job at the bread factory, but the recurring stories make you feel like you know him, you know his past, his experience at Microsoft. You know his whole personality through his vast writing, and it's all masked in "clear and prolific and useful" writing.

You feel like he's an expert, because you didn't notice that he's always injecting personality, where, an example from AVC's comments is Mailchimp, who makes their entire brand about a single chimp.

It will be hard for Fog Creek to keep their brand after Joel leaves, but it won't be hard for Mailchimp

Benjo• 15 years ago

Yes, Joel is very funny, but not in an overbearing, obvious way.

In an old essay on software specs [1] he states: one of the easiest ways to be funny is to be specific when it's not called for

I've noticed that he does this a lot. All the time. Sometimes too much, like in hginit.com, which I did not find that amusing. But most of the time he is spot on.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000033.html

nhangen2• 15 years ago

I love Fred, and I love his blog, but I couldn't make it through that post.

fredwilson• 15 years ago

the fake grimlock is an acquired taste. but once you grok him, you can't believe how good he is

nhangen2• 15 years ago

I knew it had to be good to be given a guest post slot, but I just couldn't understand the purpose of the format. Now that I know what a grimlock is, the writing style makes perfect sense.

ehsanu1• 15 years ago

Just as an alternative point of view, I thought it was quite clear and concise, and made its point strongly. More so than a typical long-prose essay may have done.

It would probably be more readable with the ALL CAPS, but then it would lose its humor.

harrisreynolds• 15 years ago

This is basic "How People Think" 101. People like HOT, INTERESTING, SEXY. People also like FUNNY! Which is why this article was BRILLIANT.

martinkallstrom• 15 years ago

This was the most helpful article I found on HN this week. Not joking either, I'm mucking about with product design for which this was spot on. And it was performed (I find no better word) with personality.

dholowiski3• 15 years ago

I agree, probably the best thing this month. I've printed it out and hung it on my wall.

capdiz• 15 years ago

I liked "EVERYONE CARE AND TALK ABOUT PRODUCT YOU WIN". Kind of reminds me of when ma kid brother had literally droped out of school and we as a family seemed to care and talk about him now he just graduated from Uni. He won and we won.

Monkeyget• 15 years ago

This reminds me of this TED talk : http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...

Sell by saying who you are, not what you do.

rajpaul• 15 years ago

"webcopy that sells" speaks about a lot of this, and other ideas on how to communicate to users.

http://www.amazon.com/Web-Copy-That-Sells-Revolutionary/dp/0...

woot.com is a great example of how to sell through persionality, and not by being a sales person, which doesn't seem to work as well on the net.

ghc• 15 years ago

I cannot begin to express how much this made me think. In preparation for my own launch coming up, I'm looking at it and wondering why I've spent so much time of Minimum Viable Product when the personality just won't cut it. The guys at Hipmunk posted something to this affect a while ago, but it didn't have the weight of this.

But how does one launch a product with a personality? As a developer, not a designer, I'm at a loss...

Vandy_Travis• 15 years ago

I think it has to develop. You can't slap it on like it's a feature, because authenticity is one of the most important components of personality/voice.

I basically try to avoid squashing the personality. Just by not thinking like a PHB, or a corporate manager, I seem to avoid being bland. And I try to have fun as I'm developing something.

Also, its better to be personal than impersonal (contrary to what I was taught about writing essays).

kn0thing• 15 years ago

Was it something I wrote, I presume? I'd love to know what and how to improve it. I'm working on an e-book about Making Something People Love based on a class I've been teaching that hits a lot of what was in this post.

jasonshen• 15 years ago

Hey there - just posted an article about how you can add personality to your product. Hope you find it useful! http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/how-to-give-your-product-perso...

ajaycancherla• 15 years ago

Totally love this article! Your company and your product have to BE ABOUT SOMETHING!!! Why should people care about you as opposed to the hundred of apps that launch everyday? You have to represent an idea. You have to represent possibilities.

rheide• 15 years ago

I read the whole thing in the Hulk's voice.

mcantor• 15 years ago

For me it was (somewhat inexplicably) the voice of Morbo, the prodigiously-foreheaded newscaster alien from Futurama.

mannicken• 15 years ago

People like a degree of anthropomorphism in, well, anything. But when designing things with personality, keep in mind that there's, what I call, a valley of creepiness which happens when you add too much realism. E.g. it's probably okay to have a coffee-machine that kind of looks like an animal, but it's not okay to have that coffee-machine defecate perfectly realistic pieces of shit on your carpet.

Universal Principles of Design calls it the uncanny valley: http://books.google.com/books?id=zXAx9_Y8GiEC&lpg=PA243&...

NY_Entrepreneur• 15 years ago

How does this apply to Google search, Yahoo, Facebook, Dell, Asus, Intel, StackOverflow, Hacker News, Google News, YouTube, Kingston Memoriy, Seagate, Cisco, Verizon Superpages, C|Net, Twitter, FourSquare?

gavanwoolery• 15 years ago

I like the occasional "common sense" article as much as the next guy, but this was a little bit too obvious, vague, and uninformative. Make a product that is interesting that has meaning and people like. Wow, really? Wait, I've got a better strategy, that is even more straight to the point: Make money, get rich.

Making something that people care about is a goal, not a strategy.

bgrissom• 15 years ago

Rework.

Minimum Viable Personality

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