When an investor puts their own money into a startup in return for a stake in the company it’s know as angel funding. It’s the lowest level of formal funding there is, excluding bank loans and borrowed family and friends money.

Why not go lower?

Leprechaun funding is giving an entrepreneur enough money to get a single, simple application built and launched. It is finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, as opposed to discovering a savior from the heavens. A pot of gold is good, but it doesn’t go as far as a savior.

Why leprechaun funding?

The cost of starting a business continues to fall. It’s at the point that a viable business can be built around making small applications. Leprechaun funding would allow entrepreneurs access to a small pool of cash to build and launch small applications, primarily for the iPhone and Android, but it could be any small application.

The investor gives the entrepreneur anywhere from one hundred to five thousand dollars. The point is to give just enough money to launch a single application that can then start generating revenue.  It’s not enough money for the entrepreneur to live off of, but it isn’t meant to be.  It is meant to give the entrepreneur money to cover development costs to get an application launched. The entrepreneur handles the creation, running, and other costs of the business on their own.

What does the entrepreneur give up? A portion of any revenue generated from the application up to, but no more than, 50%. Leprechaun funding doesn’t suck the entrepreneur dry or wrestle control away from them, but allows them to be creative and try out new ideas.

Any leprechaun contract would also include a buyout clause. At any point, the entrepreneur can buyout the investor and stop splitting revenue. The buyout level would be from one to two times the initial investment. The investor doesn’t lose their money if the entrepreneur wants out and the entrepreneur isn’t bankrupted getting out. The main risk to the investor is that the application fails to generate any revenue, leaving the investor at a loss.

No ownership of the startup is ever given to the investor. For funding this small, that’s a price too high to ask. Leprechaun funding should encourage innovation and risk taking while not drowning the entrepreneur with overbearing terms, but still being worthwhile for the investor. This isn’t a game of home runs, but a game of singles.

Leprechaun funding won’t generate returns like those sought by angel investors and venture capitalists. However, it could provide a decent stream of returns to an investor patient enough to give it a try. The returns aren’t as large, but neither are the risks as great.

Is this an idea worth experimenting on, or would someone be better off just sticking with mutual funds?

The web is full of designers: visual designers, graphic designers, interaction designers, muppet designers.  I threw in muppet designers to see if you’re paying attention.

Designers on the web are experiencing a bit of a revolution that is summed up in a few words: measure everything.  Led by the likes of Google, every click, every eyeball movement is tracked to see what the user does next, all in an attempt to answer the question: what works best?

Design no longer is the purview of instinct and feeling; it has become more analytical.  My characterization here is crude and not wholly correct.  There are shades of gray, as instinct has its place and measurement can’t tell us everything.  Since I am not a designer, I’m not enmeshed in the design world and can’t speak to everything that happens.  I only follow along from the outside as a curious and interested spectator.

I don’t think most designers would argue that design has become more and more about measurements, conversions, and click through rates.  And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

However, all this focus has fallen in the visual design and user interaction arena.  One place that still gets neglected is that of copy design.  For those of you not aware, copy is the term used to refer to the written part of a website or a magazine, as opposed to the images and layout.

The web is more words than images, although Flickr and YouTube are doing their best to change that.  Day in and day out, you get around the web by reading.  It stands to reason that what the web says is as important as to how it looks.

Typography gets a lot of attention and for good reason, as fonts matter.  A font can catch your eye or set the mood.  Often fonts are compared using the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.  This is great for evaluating the font, but if a font isn’t used to say anything, what use is a font?

Shouldn’t copy – what a website says – be given as much attention as how it looks?  Changing copy can quickly fix problems that otherwise would be difficult to deal with, as Joshua Porter shows.  Copy can affect conversion rates.  Dustin Curtis tweaked the words that pointed to his Twitter account and saw a measurable difference in click though rate: a 173% difference.

The design world already knows the work of Edward Tufte.  It should also know the work of his wife mother, Virginia Tufte. She wrote the book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.  It’s a book that does nothing except examine sentences.  The fact that this can be done speaks to the richness of language and suggests that we all should pay more attention to it.

So I ask: where are the copy designers?  I expect that over the next few years we’ll see them appear.  If they don’t appear explicitly, current designers will add copy design to their repertoire.

Words matter just as much as looks.  How much opportunity is your site passing over just because your copy lacks power or style?

Two sentences highlighted by Viginia Tufte in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style:

I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me – that I might easily have failed before I began.
- V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions, 195

The desire to move on, to metamorphose – or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary – was given to me as life’s inevitable and rightful condition.  To keep becoming, always to stay involved in transition.  It was all she and my father had ever known.
- Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, 4

Thanks goes to Jason Rudolph for the conversation that sparked this post.

Last night, as is no surprise to regular readers of this blog, I gave the presentation at the Raleigh.rb meetup.

My presentation was titled Self Marketing: An Adventure in Jazz

I thought it went well: the crowd was receptive, especially given it was a non-technical talk for a technical audience.  Never sure how people will react to that.

Matthew Bass has updated the Raleigh.rb page with the slides from the talk in PDF format and under the Podcast section of the page you can find audio.  Below I’ve embedded the slides from Slideshare, as well as a link to the slides as a PDF and included a link to the audio file.  It should be easy enough for you to follow along at home if you so desire.

Slides As PDF

Audio

The presentation also featured a playlist of various jazz songs.  With almost every slide I played about thirty seconds of a song.  Thanks goes to Matthew Bass for capturing a screenshot of the playlist:

After the talk there was plenty discussion and I solicited opinions of the talk.  Talks are rarely perfect, but sometimes it is difficult to get people to offer criticism.  After some questioning, I received several critiques I’ve very glad to have received.

Ways my talk could have been improved:

• Smoother music transitions
• Include specific examples of good self marketing
• Don’t play music and attempt to talk over it

All of these are very valid points that I, as the presenter, wouldn’t have noticed.  Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback, as it will help me make the talk stronger in the future.

Please look over the slides and take a listen to the audio and let me know what you think.  While I realize it won’t be the same as watching the talk live, the change in format means you might find something I can improve that got overlooked while the talk was given live.

Also, if you have any examples of great self marketing (from individuals or small companies) let me know in the comments: your examples might make it into a future version of the talk.

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk – I appreciated you being there and hope you learned something from it.

I want to remind you that I’m giving the Raleigh.rb September presentation tomorrow.

Full details:

7:00 pm

September 15th

Red Hat Headquarters, Centennial Campus, NC State

Parking and Event are Free; Parking can be found in the Red Hat parking deck

I’m speaking on the non-technical topic of self marketing.

My talk is called: Self Marketing, An Adventure in Jazz.

You’ll have to attend if you want to find out what Jazz has to do with Self Marketing.

Further information:

Raleigh.rb Meetup Page

My previous preview post

I hope to see you there!

In what now seems like an eternity ago, I saw Nathan Huening of Sprocket House give a talk at Refresh The Triangle back in July on Edward Tufte.  Nathan’s talk was his attempt to highlight Tufte’s main points about design.

Looking back, I don’t remember all the points Nathan highlighted, however, at the time the ones that most struck me I wrote down in my moleskine.

One of the points was that of the smallest effective difference.  This is where elements are separated by the smallest distinction possible, so that they are distinct and easy to follow, but so that the eye isn’t overwhelmed by the divider.  An example of this would be having a thin gray line dividing boxes, as opposed to a thick black bar.  This principle stuck out to me because I realized it often shows up in calendar grids.  Google calendar uses this to great effect.  Each block is marked with a thin blue line in Google calendar.  This also has the side effect of maximizing space.

The other principle that struck me from Nathan’s talk is that content influences design.  Nathan used an example from his own design company to showcase this.  He talked about how as they designed the website for Peace College the Alumnae Affairs department at Peace College the homepage design was designed last and was influenced by the content of the second level pages.  How could they have known what needed to be highlighted on the homepage without knowing the content of the other pages?  The hierarchy of the second level pages also influenced how the layout and navigation of the homepage was to work.

Once it is shown to you, realizing that content influences design seems obvious, yet as most of us go through our lives we continually ignore this fact, leading to suboptimal designs.  What tends to be designed is one size fits all, and while there is a place for systems like that, more often than not they lead to inefficiencies.

The ignorance of content influencing design even shows up in programing.  All to often, we programmers build the scaffolding of our programs first and then later insert the all important content, squishing it into the scaffolding we’ve built.  This leads to logic that is warped to account for the scaffolding, instead of the scaffolding changing to accommodate the logic.

DSLs (domain specific languages) are one way that content influences design in programming.  The content becomes the design of the language.  While it’s still possible to have a badly designed DSL, a DSL is closer to the content than a generic language will be and this should lead to greater efficiencies in design.

Nathan’s points were well taken.  While I’d heard of Tufte, not being a designer myself I’ve never taken the time to read his works.  I’ll need to rectify that, as it’s clear that principles that apply in the design world also have applicability to the world of programming.