What I love about gifyo.com

I’ve recently been playing around with Rohan on a relatively new site called Gifyo. It’s such a simple idea it has the ‘why didn’t I think of that’ written all over it.

What it does: Gifyo is a social service that allows you to create animated gifs directly from your webcam. Simply capture, create, and share.

It’s like 3 seconds of filming, that makes an ‘Old School’ style gif. Which has a certain quaintness to it. It’s also very cool because it is so quick to do, and it makes people think about what might entertain other users. Just go to their home page and you can see how quickly this web service has caught on. Some other simple yet smart things it has done is create a live feed where every post gets a turn on the home page feed. Sure, this can only last while it is niche enough to feature everyone… but it sure is a good way of spreading the service – everyone loves a little bit of microfame.

We started a little #officedancing meme just for fun.

So for startup entrepreneurs it provides a couple of really cool lessons.

1. Sometimes really small, in fact tiny ideas are the ones that catch on.
2. People want to get attention, more than give it.
3. Retro technology is big. It is fun and creates a sense of simplicity & nostalgia which is very human.
4. If you love something, others might too. Don’t waste time thinking about it, build it and find out.

I can’t wait to hear my readers next fun, small and retro idea they have launched.

Everything to everyone

We live in a wordy world. It seems there’s a new acronym, piece of business jargon, or self defining adjective emerging every minute of the day. It’s easy to get caught up in the language, the jargon and forget what business and startups are all about:

Building stuff. Buying something for $1 and selling it for $2. Having a laugh along the way.

Keep it simple. Don’t try and be everything to everyone.

With all this in mind I’ll hand over to George Carlin – and yes, this video is worth every second of the 3.56 minutes it takes to watch.

Unexpectedly Awesome – BBC

Sometimes it’s worth being even just a little bit awesome. We don’t need to change the world, maybe just having a little bit of public fun is enough. The usually conservative BBC did that for me today when I realised the following: The BBC video player has a volume which goes to 11.

It’s what I call unexpectedly awesome. I was delighted. So much that I’ve linked here to little video of Warren Buffett being interviewed. Upon which you can learn something and also pump the volume up to 11.

Startups – do something a little bit awesome.

Decision intertia

I was having an interesting discussion with a colleague Cris Pearson (founder of Skitch & Comic Life) about pricing models on the web – as soon I’ll be changing the rentoid model.

I asked his some advice and his response was so simple it is till ringing in my ears.He said;

The more choices you give consumers, the less likely they are to do any anything.

He then went on to say ‘choose a price’ not multiple options, to avoid decision inertia. The question for startups is – what complexity barriers have we created which stop our people from buying from us?