Tanooki Talks - Tanooki Labs

Tanooki Founder's Story - Hadley

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 17:25:26 GMT

Founder's Story - ReferIn

Yosh Miller calls himself an accidental founder. But as the founder of the financial services app Hadley he's beyond passionate about helping to democratize saving for the future. Yosh also has some extremely helpful advice for first time founders who are looking to do good with their startups.

You can find the best 529 plan for you at https://www.gohadley.com or download Hadley on iOS and Android.

You can find Yosh on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoshmiller/ and Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/heyyoshmiller/ .

Founder's Story - ReferIn

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 19:59:05 GMT

Founder's Story - ReferIn

Joel Rodriguez is a repeat founder that had been creating tools for people since his days at Duke University. Joel's newest product is a SaaS platform designed to help sales leaders to generate more pipeline, specifically around referrals. Joel talks with us about being a solo founder and the super powers that brings with it as well as how to grow your product with your users input.

Find ReferIn at https://www.referin.com

Find Joel at https://www.instagram.com/joeljrod

Tanooki Founder's Story - Target 100

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 14:47:02 GMT

Founder's Story - Target100

Today we're speaking with celebrity weight loss specialist, author and founder of Target100 Liz Josefsberg. Liz has built a truly market changing health and wellness platform with the Target100 app and we were so excited to speak with her about the journey from executive at Weight Watchers to bestselling author and finally startup founder.

Read the Tanooki Case Study here .

Find out more about Target100 at https://target100.net/ where you can sign up for a free trial and see how personalized wellness works.

Listen Up: The Tanooki Talks Podcast is Now Live!

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:13:31 GMT

One of the best parts of working at Tanooki is the different experiences we get from partnering with our incredible clients. We continue to learn new things every week and thought: “Why keep those learnings to ourselves?”

Enter: Tanooki Talks .

Every other week Tanooki co-founders Eric and Dave discuss the world of technology with me as well as some of the amazing entrepreneurs we’ve had the pleasure to know and work with over the past 10 years.

Recent topics have included, “Will AI Take My Job?”, “Lessons from our side-hustles…”, and “What is RAG?”. In a future episode, we’ll be starting a new series talking about how entrepreneurs come to the beginning of their tech product journey by diving deep into one of our own products, Tanooki OS, the agency operating system.

So join us every other Friday, you can listen and subscribe on the Podcast app of your choice simply by clicking this link . And we hope you do!

Binx: An AI Experiment in increasing human creativity

eric@tanookilabs.com (Eric Skiff) — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 18:34:21 GMT

TL;DR - Binx is an experimental AI chatbot that helps you break through your writer's block and write more.
Join the discord to try it out!

The past year has been an incredible explosion in generative AI. We’ve got Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-e creating incredible works of art with genuine sparks of creativity. We have ChatGPT and open source large language models answering our questions, writing poems, and generating reams of new content daily.

Amidst this frenzy of AI generated art (and the natural questions it brings about originality and what it means to truly be creative) we wanted to explore using AI not to supplant human creativity, but to help us be more creative ourselves.

Personally, I love writing near-future sci-fi short stories. I love exploring what the world might be like as technology leaps forward and seeing what that elicits from my characters, but I often find myself getting stuck in the middle of my writing. I move on to new ideas, and writing the connective tissue between my intro and my ending is hard. I wanted an accountability buddy, a coach that gives me new ideas, and a cheerleader that’s eager to read my pages and give me encouragement and feedback. I tried using ChatGPT in that way, but it’s really focused on responding to what you’ve said last. It never independently thinks about you or your work, and its session-based nature means that once I leave the window, the conversation is over.

I imagined having a writing partner that texted me daily to ask for new pages, or to share an interesting thought they had, or to share advice they found about writing.

Binx is the embodiment of that idea. It’s an experimental AI which combines traditional chatbot flows with a generative AI that truly thinks about your writing and how to develop your writing habit. It’s also got an “idea engine” which wakes up on whatever cadence you set to share it’s latest thought with you, tailored to the work you’ve told it you want to do and your writing so far.

In the few weeks I’ve been working with Binx, I’ve found it remarkable at teasing out new ideas, getting me to write, and generally getting me excited about what I’m working on again. One day recently, Binx randomly “thought” about a bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman about taking two interesting ideas and “colliding” them to make a more interesting whole. Instead of parroting that quote directly, it thought about the story I’m currently writing, and how I might add an additional quirk to my main character and how that would complicate his journey and make it more interesting and relatable.

When it works, it’s remarkable.

As of today, we’re opening Binx to some free alpha testers to get a sense of what works for other people, and what else we can add. We’re not sure if this is a business, but for us it’s an important avenue to explore as we consider how AI will become part of our lives. Where can we use AI for good to help us be better, or more creative, or happier people.

S o far Binx has modes for working on larger pieces of writing or coaching you through daily journaling, blogging, fiction writing prompts and nonfiction/free-writing slice of life prompts.

I ’m excited to see other people start to use Binx to work through their resistance and start writing more. If you’d like to try it out, you can join the Discord here , and then DM Binx - that’ll kick off your onboarding then the AI will take it from there.

Join the WriteWithBinx discord to get started

When (and when not) to use that shiny new technology

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:18:34 GMT

The Tanooki Talks Podcast, Ep. 4

On our last episode, we hinted at how long we've been doing this and Eric Dave, I've gone back, done the math. We've got about, you know, 65 to 70 years, depending on how you want to count it between the three of us in the space. So in that time, we have come across a whole lot of pitfalls. We've stumbled into them ourselves.

We've watched others tumble into them and you know, we've identified these things that people should pay attention to and you know, it's how we go about helping our founders as they're building out their products by, you know, showing and sharing all of the things that we've come across in the combined many, many years of working in tech.

So one of those that comes across a lot is what we've all kind of. Defaulted to calling the shiny tools problem, Eric, you want to give us a little definition of what the shiny tools problem is? Sure. And I think it's, it's a reflection of our mantra, which is, you know, from a tech perspective, when we're building the pieces that are fundamental to a product, to a piece of technology, we tend to be a bit boring.

And we do that on purpose. We want to use tools that are tried and true, that have stood the test of time, that are going to be things that people know in three years. And if you choose the latest technology and, you know, backend code or new framework for your JavaScript, It is entirely possible that that will fall out of favor in a few years, and no one will really know it and be able to work on it from there, and also that you'll end up with a number of different technologies in your stack without a real cohesion between them.

So we sort of dubbed this shiny tools pattern as a way for us to identify when something was being used just because it was fun or interesting or exciting and not necessarily the best choice for the product or company.

And, you know, maybe the place where the rubber meets the road around that a little bit, just in terms of even of what you're saying, Eric, and like choosing a platform development platform that will fall out of favor in some period of time, which means it's harder to hire for, which means more expensive to hire for, right?

And then also, you know, beyond that, even like, Becomes more expensive to maintain if like the, like, for example, we love rails because the community is so dynamic and strong and long term has such longevity, but I mean, I don't know, I'm trying to think of other like frameworks, but if that doesn't exist, that that actually costs the company that built on that platform more because you get some of that shared value from from the community of these things.

Right?

And I wonder, as we think about things like, you know, languages, when we think about things like platforms that we're building on and with, you know, a lot of these tend to be, if not developed explicitly for particular solutions, they kind of adapt over time for solutions. And you don't want to go, you know, mixing and matching between programming languages and, and, and the end result product that you're looking to build.

Right. I also think it's a question of premature optimization, right? At what point. Are you going for absolute blazing speed and performance, and are you doing that at the expense of the experience of the end user, your developer ergonomics, and the cost to the company up front? And as a completely absurd example, you're never going to write a website.

In assembly language, you might unroll a few loops of a HTTP server in that you might write a movie decoder in that, but those are the very tiny places where that level of, you know, bytecode optimization is going to make sense writing your website in an extremely performant language. Can take you 10 times as long as doing it in something like a framework like Ruby on Rails, where you have an expressive language, you have a existing framework with lots of community that's been contributing to it for over a decade.

That's not to say that's the one and only language, right? There's plenty of other ways that you can build a website, and today you can write in Node, you can write in Python. And any of those are going to have that same level of sort of right fit between the ease of developing in it. Shipping features that matter to your users and also being performant enough until you get to massive Facebook skill.

And then you can figure out how to deal with those problems. And you know, Facebook's famously on PHP and they figured out how to hack around that, you know, in quotes. So this also brings to mind, you know, we talk about the shiny tool and we talked a little bit last time about these kind of hype cycle products and tools.

And we hinted, you know, a little bit at like blockchain development in the previous episode. What, what, you know, what do we think about those things? Right. Where they may be a good fit, but maybe not. Well, I guess you know, one way to think about it is, you know, they're, they're, they're, I mean, we talk about these in terms of hype cycles sometimes.

So. The ones you mentioned there, Dan, that I think are currently pretty obvious. So AI is one of those today. Crypto was last season's or one of last season's, I suppose. At one point, mobile was that like just being on a mobile device. I mean, at one point, Web 2. 0 was right sharing you know, social things and people contributing back.

So and you know, another one funny one that comes to mind that's in a minor way is probably like the called the tinder swipable interface. Right? So to me, this is like almost the quintessential shiny tool, because at one point there, you know, there were how many startups existed that were we do recipes.

But with a swipe interface or how many, you know, how many of, you know, apps that you used, like, ended up with something that was like kind of harder to use because they just tried to use something that was like, you know, you, people were exploring the, the, the UX space around it. And, you know, maybe it's a good marketing tool to some extent.

Maybe someone on their team wanted to use that methodology because it was, would look good on their resume and they could talk about it later, but some reason or another, like. Things hit this hype cycle and people feel almost compelled for all kinds of reasons to include them in their product. And, you know, I mean, in many cases that that might be the game changer, that is the right move.

You know, a lot of times maybe it's not, and the real. Way to figure that out is just think about how, you know, like what's the real value that adding a swipe interface, you know, jokingly, but like, or having a mobile app instead of a website or incorporating the blockchain instead of just a database that has some, you know, transparency involved, right.

And, and thinking about how that relates to really the value that you're providing to people. And fundamentally that's where we come from, right. We're thinking about. Value to the end user empathy for the end user above all and if we can get there that we can understand what tools we need to build that rather than coming from the tool first, right?

If I'm and I'm guilty of this in my real life, right? I will buy myself a fancy mechanical keyboard to write my novel. No, I should just write my novel, right? The keyboard has nothing to do with it. It's not going to make me write it. We can be guilty of the same things with software, right? Working with tools that seem fun and exciting is one way to feel like you're continuing to grow and learn on the job, but it does really take the understanding of why, why are we building this in?

And I think as much as Dave and I were both extremely interested in the technology behind cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. We were also resistant to building it in for clients unless it really. Was essential and the only way to solve that problem. And for so many of the folks that we work with, a database with a central server made much more sense for their customers, for them as a company.

And that was ultimately our recommendation. So is there any kind of, you know, if I'm coming from this as a founder. How do I tell, especially if I'm a non technical founder, how do I tell hype from help? How, how do I examine this? So I think there's two axes that we want to measure this on. One is, you know, how much will this help my customers and how much will this help my team?

And you need to answer that question now. And in a year and in three years, and if you can do that, if you can talk to your lead engineer and they're saying, Hey, I really want to use go for this part of our service. If you can say how will that help our customers and they can say the system is going to be able to deliver 300 requests for every one that we can do right now, but also it takes about 25 seconds and we're going to get that down to 2 seconds for this one thing where we're going to use this, you're hearing some of the things that are really great.

This person is suggesting the technology because it's going to make a big difference for the company and for the customer. And they're also limiting the scope. They're not saying we're going to rewrite everything because I heard that Amazon said you have to deliver a page in under 250 milliseconds or your customer goes away.

Right? That's a factoid you can spew that's about e commerce in particular. That's not true for the whole world, right? Faster isn't always necessary for every single webpage ever. Most things are good enough. You don't need blazing speed. So listening for, are they talking about the end user? Are they figuring out how this helps them?

And then how will this help our company? Is this something we can hire for? Are there other humans who know how to do this? But you, are there people who will still remember this technology in three years? Does it have a growing community and will it be incredibly expensive to hire for this? And this can cut both ways, you know, four square used Scala.

They were one of the largest shops to do so. That meant that they were selecting for people who were willing to learn that sort of esoteric flavor of Java. It was a interesting litmus test because it helped them hire some of the best engineers, but it also certainly made it a smaller pool for them to pick from.

That is really, yeah. It's interesting to think about that, the future scalability of hiring as kind of a an impact point on this, what do we think about using some of these tools perhaps in not necessarily in private, but internally, right. Using them as testing grounds. If people are, you know, if you're looking to hire and want to, you know, you always want to hire people that.

Want to continue to learn that's, you know, a core tenant of who we hire. That's just a core tenant of, you know, what a good hire is. What do we think about using that building internal tools, using some of these shiny tools, perhaps. Well, the example Eric used was an interesting one, right? Where it was the, this kind of esoteric programming language is actually like drew a bunch of smart people who wanted to work on, on it and learn, learn in that way.

So, so I mean, there's certainly a call, like a marketing component maybe from that you know, I think it's, it's also interesting if you look at people's. And there's some folks that, you know, I mean, it's, I mean, funny, like working where we work, like we've probably touched each one of these things in some way.

And, and just kind of seeing how have, you know, what were the roles that people had in the past and. Were they were they working on you know, more often these kind of like trendy sorts of things or, or, or how did they have like more direct business experience around, around things, like, were they bouncing around?

Jobs in, in a way that like, you know, like, well, you know, the, the set of people who now work at an AI company that previously worked at a crypto company that shortly before that were at outta something else. You know, like, like you know, it's, I mean, not saying it's good or bad, but it's kind, it's, it's certainly shaped someone's perspective on these things.

And it's, it's probably worth. You know, considering in that way, but in terms of, you know, like, and so that might draw more people like, like that, you know, whereas something a little bit more, I don't call it conservative, you know, you might, you might end up that might end up being a different sort of talent pool that you end up drawing towards you also think that.

You don't have to poison the well of your main product in order to get to play with these technologies. You know, we built our own crypto powered press release system in order to experiment with the technology to see if that made sense. There was a thesis there that would have been interesting.

Multiple parties want to participate and publish, anyone can listen, and there could be a currency. Right. It makes sense on paper. Let's try it. Let's learn from it so that when our client comes and says, Hey, we want to do this, we can say, you know, you can, but here's some of the pitfalls. And here's what we learned when we played with it.

Absolutely. With AI right now, we're building internal tools so that we know exactly what to do and not to do when putting together knowledge plus tooling to equal a product. There's going to be. Things that you can't possibly bring to a final product experience without experimenting, but we're not going to change everything and say, we are an AI company that does all AI development.

We're going to get good at it and focus at it for clients who need it and for products where it doesn't make sense. We're not going to mention it. So I wasn't going to directly address the 900 pound gorilla in the room, but Eric called it out. So is AI one of these shiny tools is the LLM is the modeling like all of this?

Are we living through another cycle with another shiny tool?

I mean, it's it's certainly a tool. Yeah, it seems it's trying at the shiny and shiny. So yeah, I guess that that probably fits. You know, and and so I think all the same logic applies, right? So as we've been. Like Eric, Eric said, the experimenting with these tools, you know, we, we did that in the crypto space and with our co pilot project, we've got, you know, our Tanuki co pilot kind of PM tool to some extent is where we're applying that as well which we've talked about, I guess, a couple of times on here.

But you know, I think that the way that the. It's, these are so much fun. It's a place that you want to spend a lot of time. And I think one of the things that we have found interesting is balancing the, how do you, how much time do you spend exploring and those things? And we're like, how do you efficiently, like, I mean, what we end up doing a lot of times is when we have some free developer time on from our full time team, we'll focus kind of folks in that area with a direct plan with a goal in mind to really try to, you know, like, what are we trying to learn about this thing and.

What might be useful for us, right? So there's kind of this balance that we consider there. And then, you know, it's always a struggle of, well, who has time and how can we do that in an efficient way? And I think that balance is actually kind of valuable because we spent too much time. I think we'd go down rabbit holes that would really help us a lot.

But by using this as like a capacity filler, to some extent it keeps people like excited to have like something new that comes up and then also you know, just kind of keeps us on our toes and gives us some space to like, think about it without having to rush to, you know, okay, what's the next feature we have to work on?

Because we have, you know, we have a full time person who's, you know, literally burning resources every day. They're not working on this, right? So from my perspective, I completely agree. We're in the, yes, this is the shiny tool. Everyone wants to build it in. And not every product needs a chat bot. But to me, I think there's a big difference between crypto and this.

Crypto was a tool which has a lot of Possibility, but not a huge amount of direct applicability to most people's lives into most products or companies, at least not today, the jump from, Hey, I can make a distributed ledger to, I'm going to build it into something is fairly technical and difficult for a long game playoff that won't work until there's mass adoption of everyone having a crypto wallet, whereas AI is almost completely inverse.

Integrating is incredibly easy. Developers will sit down, take 2 3 days and say, okay, now this reads in information from here, takes the user's input and we get an answer. Isn't that neat? Now what do we want to use it for? So I think there's going to be a much faster experimentation cycle. And I also think there's a lot more applicability.

You know, McKinsey just announced today that they're using an LLM powered by their own corpus of documents for each client to have an internal. Product whisperer that can give advice, help right and have that deep knowledge across the organization. And there's an org that has massive retained knowledge across years and regimes at other organizations perfectly positioned to sort of reuse that knowledge.

Great use of AI. Is it the shiny tool of 2023? Will we all look back and remember, Hey, that was the moment when everyone did that? I believe that's true, but I also think it will be. More set in the tone of that's when this all started and it's easy to forget, right? GPT 3 is just this year, right? It's not like this has been around for a long time and the huge leap that we have from, you know, we could kind of generate an image and maybe some text last year to it's available for everyone, cheap and easy to build in.

We're still just at the beginning.

Dave, I think that you had mentioned in the kind of list of shiny tools earlier on the, you know, web 2. 0 was a shiny tool at some point. I think that really ties into what Eric's talking here about AI and that it was when things began as opposed to just being a shiny tool, right? This is, you know, a shift in how something is used.

It's sort of like getting a Tool added to the toolbox rather than just being like, Oh, now all I have is hammers. I'm just going to hammer everything.

Yeah, I think I, I hope, I hope that's true. And I hope we maybe learn lessons from, from how that kind of has played out in some sense. Right. I think there's a lot of you know, good things that came from the web 2. And, you know, some challenges as well. And I mean, this is probably an even bigger.

Has an even wider range of of pros and cons. So you know, that that's maybe 11 way to look at it. But, you know, if you look at it from a you know, a financial perspective, like Facebook is how big of a company now? You know, and like that so what's the, I mean, I'm sure like this is the classic VC thing.

Right. But it's like, okay, well, what's the Facebook of this you know, this thing. Right. That, that'll be an interesting yeah. And is that, is that open AI? Maybe but what seems to be interesting with those is like what Google was like, I don't like the 12th search engine or something. It wasn't like the first.

And so, you know, I, I've heard a bunch of takes I've liked on this where it's like, not like Apple does it this way. It's like, not necessarily the first mover who always wins. It's, it's kind of like the third or fourth person who's kind of seen how it's done and was able to come in in a different way, like, like knowing what, like, was hard to learn.

So. That's, that's one thing I'm kind of interested in seeing is like, what kind of, you know, what's the next couple waves of these things, right? Because it's clearly not going to end tomorrow.

I do want to bring it back to some core technology to rather than just thinking about AI and product, you know, what about the tools that you're building with? We were resistant to JavaScript frameworks for a very long time for the same reason, right? If we have to go back to some old code and it's using Angular 1.

3, you know, that was absolutely seen as the best front end framework for quite a while. And now, touching a code base that has it is like finding the crusty old person who remembers exactly how it was done and hasn't already moved on in their career. So, We eventually started experimenting with React. We tried it in a couple internal products, and then tried it as a component in certain places for applications where it worked.

And now, I would say, it's in most of our applications, and in certain applications it's the predominant way we're doing the front end. That's been a gradual change. And it's also been informed by the fact that React Native is so good and has been so good for so long. Developing mobile applications, so some of this is just about taking your time and waiting to see, you know, has this technology has this bad burned in a little bit and then riding along with the community absorbing all that knowledge rather than being on the absolute leading front edge.

If you're building a company that. Doesn't need to be at the forefront of tech. It just needs to deliver its service. Well, being on the bleeding edge of tech is probably the wrong decision. Not always, and you can consider pros and cons, but certainly for the fundamental tools you're building with, you want to use something that's been around rather than what's new and exciting.

Yeah. Where are you adding innovation? Is it in the, you know, your, your internal development stuff or is it like what you're building for your customers? So yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. And that reflects, you know, very squarely with how we approach engagements, right? The innovation is in. The founder's history with the product, with the service they're providing, it's their insights, technology, technology, and we can manipulate that to serve a whole bunch of needs, whether that's using something that's new or something that has burned in a little bit, I think that's a good way to look at this is.

Look at the mix, find the thing that is right for the solution you're trying to provide for your users and always keep them in mind. Eric, you spoke earlier about, you know, we're empathetic for the user. And I think that that's, you know. Occasionally a rare thing and a good thing to kind of keep in mind as a founder is coming across new tools, whether that is blockchain or LLMs or whatever is around the corner and there's the other thing, right?

There's always something around the corner. And I think using that as a frame, especially for non technical founders, it gives you a chance to ask the people who are building your tech in a non threatening way, right? You're not challenging them on what they're building. You're saying, how does it, how does this add value for end user?

How does it add value for the company? Gives them a chance to reflect and go, well, maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't, and they can defend it and you can listen to that. With an ear towards is that true or is that what they would like to build it in and why what are those reasons because maybe those reasons matter to maybe they've got three people who are really great at developing that and as a team, they're going to blaze forward fast.

Great. That can be a good answer, but you should understand that that's your answer and that it might come with other costs.

Great. Well, I think that kind of wraps it on shiny tools. I think it's super helpful, a wonderful way to look at framing this kind of pitfall that we've seen a lot of people come across and really, you know, giving some guidance on how to frame how to think as you move forward in developing your product.

And you know, making sure, like we said, always keep the user and their experience in the forefront of your mind. And you'll always come out ahead by doing that.

The Business Cyrano, or How entrepreneurs can leverage AI create a better experience for their users.

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 16:30:00 GMT

Today on the podcast we're going to look closer at the idea of the Business Cyrano that Eric brought up last episode and talk a bit more about how entrepreneurs can integrate AI into their product to create a better experience for their users.

Will AI Take My Job?

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 16:11:36 GMT

The Tanooki Talks Podcast, Ep. 2

What is RAG and how will it make my AI projects better?

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 16:07:53 GMT

Episode 1 of the Tanooki Talks Podcast

Business Cyrano: AI isn’t coming for your jobs

eric@tanookilabs.com (Eric Skiff) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:48:23 GMT

But it is coming to whisper in the ear of your workers.

In the classic story of Cyrano de Bergerac, a brilliant man whispers in the ear of a young, inexperienced suitor to help him succeed in romance. The tragic twist of the story is the woman falls in love with Cyrano’s words but Cyrano himself believes she could never love him if she saw his face.

Today, with AI exploding into every product and every experience, there’s a similar backlash. Consumers don’t want to feel like they’ve been foisted off on some AI. We’ve all dealt with years of fighting through robotic phone-trees before we’re finally allowed to talk to a real person. We want to feel listened to and cared for, and we want to talk with someone who’s got a depth of knowledge and tools to help, whether it’s for sales, support or something else.

How can we combine the best of both worlds, providing real human connection where it’s needed, but backing up the humans on the front lines with all of the knowledge and experience that’s currently locked up in documentation, support articles, and in the minds of senior people in our organizations?

Enter the concept of a “Business Cyrano,” an AI which can sit alongside workers and provide them with key insights, propose solutions and compose chat and emails, and connect the dots between what’s being asked for and how to best serve the customer.

Contrary to what you might expect, these chatbots don’t need expensive and complicated fine-tuning on all of your documents. In fact, attempting to re-train a large language model on a relatively small amount of information doesn’t usually work very well, either over-fitting for the new data and losing general intelligence, or failing to incorporate the learnings from the information you’ve provided, and defaulting to it’s own knowledge (or worse, making things up)

So, how do we create an AI which both has the knowledge we want it to incorporate without retraining? Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, which is a fancy way of saying “look up relevant information and then insert it into the prompt before responding to the user”

The reason this works well is that we’re able to combine two recent innovations with ChatGPT style language generation. The first innovation is the emergence of cheap and powerful vector databases, which store not just words, but their meaning in the context of the words around them. Vector databases are excellent at finding documents with similar meaning, so we can insert highly relevant information into the prompt. The second innovation is the expansion of the context window in Large Language Models (LLMs). Previously, prompts were limited to 2048 tokens (around 1500 words), which was not large enough to insert a meaningful amount of documents to base their response off of. As of a few weeks ago, even the cheapest model of ChatGPT now supports 16k tokens, and open source models have recently grown to support 4k, 8k and 16k tokens as well. That means we can insert a lot of relevant information into a prompt, and then instruct the bot to respond only using the documents we have provided it with.

Armed with this simple approach, we can begin to see how “Business Cyrano” bots can be assembled for almost any role. Customer support is obvious, but what about middle managers? Let’s say a manager has an employee who’s underperforming and showing signs of burnout. Imagine a bot which has a small knowledge base of essays on how to handle employee issues in a empathetic and supportive way, some examples of similar issues and how they were handled, and the official playbook on how to address performance problems. The manager could ask the bot for help, explain the situation, and even paste in recent emails, and receive advice and an example response they could send, with links to more resources. The response is far more tailored than simply going to ChatGPT, and allows you to shape the advice your employees are getting to ensure that they’re managing in a way that’s consistent with your culture and values.

These bots can also combine integrations with your internal systems, custom rules, and private communication with employees. Imagine a “Shift Manager” bot, which assists a manager with staffing and shift juggling. When an employee texts in with a need to change shifts, you could set a combination of typical responses and custom rules, and have the bot attempt to reach out to other employees who have indicated that they want extra hours to see if they’ll take the shift, and then finally respond back to the original employee with an update. Along the way, you can give the actual shift manager the chance to interrupt the flow and respond at any point, so some parts are on autopilot (the monotonous task of reaching out out to find coverage and responding to changes) while still allowing them to take action as needed. The bot could even suggest a response for difficult situations where there’s no coverage.

Researchers, academics, sales, tradespeople… Nearly every profession could benefit from having sage advice and reminders of the correct procedures at the right moment. While AI is unlikely to replace all these roles any time soon, it’s already capable of assisting us. There is a quiet race underway to provide that level of assistance across industries and roles. Finding where you can deploy your own Business Cyrano to whisper in the ear of your team may be a key advantage, or you may find yourself competing against teams using them without knowing it.New Paragraph

Real Talk: Marketing Shouldn't Be That Complicated

aubrey@aubvious.com (Aubrey Sabala) — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 13:15:18 GMT

This is the second in a series of articles where we’re sharing our thoughts on the industry, some tips and tricks, and advice that has helped us (and hopefully will help you, too!). Today, we're talking to Marketing & Operations expert, Aubrey Sabala, who has spent 20+ working with companies including Google, Meta, AOL, and Dentsu and now runs Aubvious , a marketing consultancy. Here is her advice for startups and companies of all sizes.

Growth-hacking. Ambush Marketing. Call it what you will, but any of these buzzword-friendly strategies are NOT the best way to market your startup. Instead, focusing on the basics and building a sustainable - yet malleable - Marketing strategy will help you grow and maintain that growth.

I don’t recommend this to be contrary; instead, it’s because I’ve seen too many smart founders chase the next big Marketing approach, only to realize that one of their key foundational elements was missing, be it brand, voice, or even a testing methodology. And after 20+ years of marketing companies and products both big and small, I’ve found the following tenets to be true.

Think like a scientist. This is my strongest piece of advice, and not just because my left-brain genetics training makes any other way foreign to me. In fact, Marketing is often just a real-world science experiment. Isolate a variable (so you know what is causing the outcome). Test & learn (so you don’t continue to make the same mistakes). And above all, ensure that you’re able to track and measure all channels so you’re seeing causation, not just correlation.

Marketing doesn’t exist in a silo. It can’t succeed unless your Marketer(s) are in lock-step with your Product and Operations team; employ a cross-functional Slack channel and include your Marketers in daily standups, even from the onset. This allows them to understand the full nature of the product and potentially influence features that can inherently further Marketing efforts.

Hire wisely. Every company is different, but I always recommend that founders budget for a seasoned Marketer who can help define the blueprint for their Marketing plan. Whether you hire an Agency, a Fractional CMO, or bring a trained Marketer in-house, you need someone at the helm who has walked this path before and can help you avoid any pitfalls; you’re paying for them to help you avoid the mistakes they’ve already seen or even made in the past. More often than not, a combination of a seasoned Marketer - even if it’s only a couple of hours a week - plus a less-tenured but eager-to-learn junior employee creates a powerful team.

Flaunt your strengths. What problem are you solving? If you don’t have a clear and realistic answer to that, stop any and all Marketing efforts and ensure that your product is filling a need in the industry, AND that you are able to clearly articulate what that is. How are you helping people (save time / save money / eliminate frustration)?

Talk to people like people. And while we’re at it, let’s try and leave the jargon behind. I want to quickly know what the product does and why it would help me. Use real words, and ones that people understand. As Ted Lasso wisely said recently (no spoilers): KISSP. Keep It Simple, Smarty Pants.

Spend money sparingly. Act like your Marketing budget is your personal bank account, and that you’re a finicky auditor. You can always spend money on ads, but you may not always have to. Creativity + testing new ideas can often be more effective than costly CPC ads.

Operations are just as important. Let software like Monday.com, ClickUp, or Asana help you plan and track your progress, and keep things moving forward. I rely on Monday to help me balance the multiple priorities from my clients (and also my life; I’ve automated Parent of the Week reminders as the Class Mom!), as well as serve as a repository for documents, allow streamlined approval, and show results, right within the same system.

Don’t over-architect the solution . I’m not contradicting myself, I promise! But be realistic about what you actually need in terms of software or tools to help you succeed. Depending on your company’s size and maturity, Hubspot might be a solid CRM / Marketing Automation tool, but you could also accomplish much of the same with a strong project plan, an Excel spreadsheet, and your email account.

Don’t be daunted; a lot of this advice is common sense, and give yourself permission to fail. Many times. I used to give my Marketing team a “Failure of the Quarter” award, since I wanted to encourage people to come up with big, crazy ideas, and allow them to fail stupendously. (It also came with a bottle of champers.). After all, Marketing is just a fancy term for sharing something that you think is cool & helpful. And regardess of the strategy, focusing on THAT as a core tenet will prevent you from wanting (or needing!) to hack or ambush anything or anyone.

Required Reading for Founders

eric@tanookilabs.com (Eric Skiff) — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:24:37 GMT

This is the first in a series of articles where we’re sharing our thoughts on the industry, tips and tricks, and some advice that has helped us throughout our 10+ years. Up first, we’re talking to our Co-Founder, Eric Skiff, and asked him:

What is the best piece of advice you can give a first-time founder?

READ .

Get a kindle or an Audible account and use your commutes, chore time, etc to start focusing on this. You’re going to need to be an expert in product, marketing, running a business, managing your people, fundraising, your industry, and how companies like yours have worked in other industries… just to name a few. Start reading or listening to books today.

When we were initially building Tanooki, my Co-Founder Dave started showing up one day with all of these great ideas, and I realized he was reading books related to our business and totally leveling up. I committed to doing the same, and since then we’ve read hundreds of books. It’s amazing how applicable learnings from one area can be to other problems you face, and I’ve NEVER regretted reading a book, even when I heartily disagree with it. Either way, I’ve learned, and I know that we now run a better company and have become better leaders because of it.

If you need somewhere to start, here’s my shortlist for anyone building a tech product and running a company:

Never Split the Difference
Way mo r e than a negotiation book, this will change how you relate to the people in your life, and use your empathy to hear what they really want…not always what they’re asking for.

Building A Story Brand

We all have to sell: ourselves, our products, our companies. This book is a master-class in understanding what your customer needs, crafting your message to make them the hero of the story, and positioning your product as the crucial tool they need to succeed.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Before you can sell, you need to find people to sell to! This book walks through a process for trying experiments, looking for your niche, and then laser-focusing your marketing spend to fill your funnel.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
A totally different book with a similar name. Traction by Gino Wickman is about building the operating system for your business, setting the strategy, and using a quarterly meeting rhythm. Also known as “EOS” of the Enterprise Operating System, this has been amazing for aligning everyone on the goals and working in the same direction.

Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

What makes your business attractive to potential acquirers? Learn how to build those metrics and get your business hitting them in a way that you could step away. Once you do, you might find you’re having a lot more fun running your business and no longer want to sell!

The E-Myth Revisited

A classic for a reason! This book is especially helpful for anyone starting a small business, but I’ve found it applies to early startups as well. You need documentation, routine, and repeatability or you can never scale past the hand-to-hand stage.

Competing Against Luck

Unlock real innovation by understanding the job that customers are hiring your product to do, and what the real competitors are that they might choose (including using nothing at all).

The Great Game of Business, Expanded and Updated: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company and its more engaging sequel, A Stake in the Outcome

These books absolutely changed the way we’ve run our company and any company we’ll start after this. They pioneered open book management and profit sharing, and if you’re giving anyone equity, I highly recommend reading these books to understand how to align that equity with shared goals.

We’d love to hear from YOU - what’s on your “required reading” list?

Farewell, Forming & Storming. There's a Better Way to Build.

dave@tanookilabs.com (Dave Renz) — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:38:19 GMT

So often these days, we hear both Founders and VCs insist that the only way to grow (or get or receive funding) is to hire a robust internal team of top talent, boasting credentials from big Tech companies. While we agree that putting the right people in place is crucial, we approach it differently, and have seen success again and again from this model. We advocate for kickstarting your progress by first hiring an agency, then proactively hire full-time employees as you build. Here’s why it works.

Provides Structure & Stability

Hiring a top developer into a nascent organizational structure and non-existent code-base, without process or managerial support, sets everyone up for failure. What is the deploy process? What flavor of Agile methodology should you use? What project management tools do you use? What development platform do you choose? These are just a few of the countless, important decisions that could be made incorrectly the first time. But quality Agencies like Tanooki have already crossed this path and will help you avoid wasting time & money on wrong initial choices. By letting an Agency build out the structure & put the product development processes in place, a company can then bring in strong developers and give them a head start on being productive.

Provides Top Talent Efficiency

Agencies can get a bad rap for being costly, but the math doesn’t support it. Founders should think about the value created given the resources invested. You’re getting a team of tenured, top-of-their-game specialists who are dedicated to the project at hand, at whatever percentage of allocation makes sense. You likely don’t need 100% of a seasoned Marketer from the onset, though you should have someone thinking about your go-to-market strategy as you continue to build. Especially for startups, it makes more sense to invest in fractional top talent - and an Agency model provides security in both business processes and allocation - than paying an inflated salary and significant equity for a mid-tier professional that will likely have to learn a lot on the job.

Allows for Smart Succession

As your product takes shape and you continue to build, NOW is the time to start thinking about strategic hires. And let your Agency help you source. After all, they were pivotal in the initial product development process and will know what type of employee would best serve your team. They will also help to ramp up those employees in a functional product development cycle. And as the Agency’s purview shifts from primary build responsibility to an augmentation of your now-growing team, you can pull them back in when needed (to accelerate a new feature or backfill any organizational holes) and do so at an efficient cost.

It goes without saying that the Agency’s capabilities are a critical element. But, if you find the right blend of an Agency you can trust that has experience working with companies like yours, we believe you can expect more reliable outcomes in terms of quality and on-time delivery. We’ve proven this model for over ten years, and have countless success stories that have allowed us to work with companies multiple times over many years. And in an ever-competitive marketplace, we’d argue that thoughtful growth and scaling is what founders and VCs should be looking for in their investments.

Tanooki Take: Which Website Builder is Best For You?

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:49:12 GMT

At Tanooki Labs, in addition to building some outstanding products for web and mobile devices, we also help entrepreneurs design and build the marketing websites for their products. After all, even if you build the most amazing product in the world, people can’t use it if they don’t know that it exists. And since these marketing websites are intended to be updated frequently by the entrepreneurs, we often use a website builder instead of hard coding the marketing site. This allows founders more flexibility to quickly iterate on messaging, imagery, and other marketing touchpoints.

Because of this, we’ve become experts on the strengths and weaknesses of the various website builders that exist. Since we often get asked this question, we thought we’d share some of our favorites. We’ve used most of these at some point over the last 5 years, and our new website (yup, this one!) is built using Duda. Let’s dive in.

VEV

VEV, a relative newcomer in the space, is a great platform with the best overall page scaling to date, which is important because it adapts the website to the desired screen resolution. VEV offers a wide range of components with the ability to fully customization of everything. The animation panel is ideal for adding scroll and page transitions to really bring your projects to life. From staging to production, VEV is very intuitive and comprehensible for the average user.

Siter

One of the latest builders we’ve looked into is Siter.io. This platform offers some nice building tools with a very clean and minimal interface. The multiple page width controls allow you to scale your content accordingly and optimize view widths as desired. Siter.io offers many widgets or components out of the gate, making it a quick solution for content building.

The only drawback is the flexibility within each component, especially in comparison to the other builders we’ve reviewed.

Readymag

Our Creative Director’s personal favorite is Readymag. This platform offers complete creative freedom at an affordable price. The scaling options allow for fewer breakpoints (meaning you don’t necessarily need to design all page sizes), which allows for quicker turnaround on projects. The overall updates of the platform throughout the years have included upgrades like Inspector Mode, which locks page elements allowing content writers to update copy without breaking layouts. Readymag also features Adaptive vs. Responsive Scaling, meaning you can design a completely separate mobile layout if desired.

Squarespace

If you’ve ever listened to a podcast then you’re probably already heard of Squarespace. The overall interface for Squarespace is very intuitive with extensive focus on user experience. From customer service, custom and pre-designed templates, along with seamless e-commerce integrations, the Squarespace ecosystem brings a lot to the table. This is a powerful tool that continues to get better every year. Squarespace is definitely more of a template-based site builder though, so while you can start from a blank page, the learning curve is steep and you lose the advantage of constant updates in security and features from the Squarespace team. Our Head of design, Dan Scholz, has multiple Squarespace sites for personal projects.

Duda

Our current favorite, Duda, is what we chose to power the new TanookiLabs.com. The platform is robust, allows designers to easily create individual templates and components, and provides excellent image scaling and animations. Duda also allows our design team to lock sections of the site’s design to allow entrepreneurs and other founders to manage copy and image selection. This is something that most other website builders struggle with, but is key for the marketing sites for our products. This, on top of its customizable scaling, CMS simplicity, and overall user friendliness, is why we often build our sites with Duda.

The table b elow gives a snapshot of our Pro/Con list, but we’d also love to hear what you think. Drop us a line and let us know your experience with these tools, or if you have other platforms that you love using!

How CitiBike Can Help Us Understand The Potential of DAOs

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 18:51:14 GMT

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are a hot topic in the world of blockchain. They claim to be more efficient, transparent, and fair than traditional organizations, but they can be confusing and few people outside of the blockchain space understand their potential.

CitiBike , a bicycle-sharing service in New York City, provides an interesting lens through which to understand how DAOs can work.

Big Brother vs. Little Brother

We've all dealt with systems where a few bad actors ruin it for everyone, and we're left saying "This is why we can't have nice things." For decades, cities have tried to launch municipal bike systems, and they have generally ended in failure, with people stealing bikes, treating them poorly, or tossing them into the river.

So why did CitiBike work when previous bike share programs have failed? Instead of relying on Big Brother-style surveillance and punitive police action to crack down on the bad actors, each CitiBike has its own little system of surveillance and consequences built in. Let’s call this “Little Brother” instead, where punitive action is inherent within the design.

If someone doesn’t behave according to the rules of the system, they get fined. That can range anywhere from a few bucks for keeping a bike too long up to $1250 or more for not returning a bike. The system of bikes and docks provides the rules of the game as well as the enforcement, and CitiBike (and its sister programs in other cities) have been an incredible success.

DAOs provide much the same structure: they provide the rules of the game as well as direct financial risks and rewards. They can also remove the overhead that many centralized organizations need to spend to maintain their systems, and in some cases remove the "profit leak" of owners or shareholders attempting to maximize profit-taking from a system. These closed-circuit systems DAOs can return all of their own profit to the members.

Incentivizing behavior in DAOs

The simplest incentives in DAOs are monetary, and easily computed. In Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps, this usually manifests ininterest rates for borrowing or lending liquidity.

However, it’s possible to incentivize users to perform nearly any task using a DAO, providing you can design rules which cause them to act in the desired way.

To encourage real-world actions, the DAO must provide a reward for that action, a way to submit proof of the action, and a mechanism for verifying the action.

In the example of CitiBike, a bike redistribution worker could be given a task: ride a certain bike from Dock A to Dock B. The system can monitor when the bike leaves Dock A and send the reward to their wallet when it arrives at Dock B.

What about a system where it’s harder to prove the action happened, without a centralized system to query? This could involve various levels of workers to provide this verification. Imagine a DAO-powered security service, where workers walk the rounds at a work site. In that case, the security worker could submit time-stamped photos of critical locations at the security site, which are sent to a verification queue. Verification workers can then use a dApp - a decentralized app - to verify that the task was completed and that the pictures are valid. To ensure that verification workers are honest, the task can be sent to 3 or more verifiers, and then reward them if they agree with the consensus, and penalize them for disagreeing with the consensus.

This can even bridge up to executive functions, with salaries being paid to people who are voted into a position, and members of the DAO are able to vote on their continued tenure, salary, and bonuses based on their performance.

Where we go from here

Ultimately, there’s limitless potential for what we can build with DAOs. Daniel Suarez’s Daemon series of books, which predate DAOs by a few years, explore this concept taken to a societal extreme.

When building these systems, we need to ensure that workers incentivized by the DAO are treated fairly, and that we’re not creating dystopian traps which devalue labor. We need to build systems which distribute the wealth they create in fair ways to all participants. We also need to expect bad actors to attempt to use the rules of the system for monetary gain, and should plan accordingly, stress testing our ideas and thinking about how they could be abused.

Despite their complexity, there is incredible potential for DAOs to create positive change by building distributed systems that provide services while acting in a way that benefits the communities they serve.

Tanooki Take: Is Web3 Right For Your Business?

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 21:02:16 GMT

At the recent Elevate Conference, I spoke on a panel discussing how businesses can use the Metaverse and Web3 to build community. As Tanooki’s co-founder, I get this question a lot, so I thought it would be worth sharing some of the points I made during the panel more broadly.

While there’s a lot of buzz about NFTs and the Metaverse, the reality is that it doesn’t work for all businesses, and won’t likely for a while. This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that this technology is and will continue to be transformative; quite the opposite! We’re already seeing so many technological advancements due to the blockchain, and a high-fidelity digital layer on the world (i.e., the Metaverse) supports this. Though this is seen as the “shiny new tech” that people are scrambling to monetize, the reality is that setting up shop in the Metaverse probably isn’t the best idea, at least not for everyone. Here’s why.

Businesses commonly operate on a model where they deliver value to their customers for revenue and (hopefully) profit. So, before deciding to enter a new space like the Metaverse, I recommend first taking a step back and asking some fundamental questions:

What are my business goals?
Who are my customers today, and who would I like to become a customer in the future?
What services do I offer today, and what are the opportunities to improve them?
What other services do I want to offer?

Knowing that budgets are limited, looking at what strategies and channels can provide a positive ROI is a determining factor for how to allocate your budget. So, as it relates to moving into Web3, businesses should figure out how the properties of the Metaverse or blockchain will get them closer to their goals.

If a business determines that building or operating in this space could improve marketing and/or incur a lower cost of customer acquisition (thus generating more revenue), here are a few tips on how to learn more about Web3:

Dedicate time to deeply understand these technologies and what they enable.
Find communities similar to the ones you serve today in the metaverse, Reddit, or on Discord, and participate there
Follow smart people in the space like Kevin Rose and Gary Vaynerchuk
Look for off-the-shelf ways to accomplish your goals, like Colony for DAOs or NFTify for NFT marketplaces
Start small when you do decide you want to introduce a Metaverse angle to your business

If you decide that focusing on Web3 is a next step for your business, reach out. We’d love to help.

Watch Dave’s full panel here !

Light Up the Night: DIY Halloween Idea

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 18:01:40 GMT

The creator vibe runs deep here at Tanooki.

So even when we’re not working on client projects, we’re often tooling away on something fun. I recently attended an event benefiting Unite to Light, an incredible organization that creates low-cost, solar-powered batteries for people in developing countries and disaster responses. The theme was “Interactive Art”, which inspired me to showcase my own crafty side. Adding some flair to this Black tie event was my DIY Blinking Top Hat!

With Halloween right around the corner, we thought we’d share how to make this fun bit o’ flair.

First, you’ll need a hat. This traditional black felt top hat was my “canvas”.
Now it’s time to jazz it up. I used this flexible LED “screen” , which you can customize with your own message. Simply secure it to the hat with black Gorilla Tape .
To ensure it stayed charged throughout the event, I added this portable charger to the inside of the hat and secured it with tape (so I could recharge the battery for future wear) after drilling a hole to allow the cord to run through.

Voila! The event was lit, and I made sure I helped light up the night myself while supporting this great organization .

Should you build a web or mobile app?

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 14:26:29 GMT

As the head of Business Development for Tanooki Labs, I speak to hundreds of startup founders every year about the products they’re looking to build or expand. One of the most common dilemmas faced, particularly by first-time non-technical founders, is whether to build their product as an app or for the web. First-time founders in particular are drawn (or generally coerced) to first building an app, as they believe that an app is still seen as a “real startup”, whereas building for the web isn’t. Some investors often share this view, and we’ve found that agencies will want the excitement (and often higher project fees) of building a native app.

At Tanooki, we pride ourselves by functioning a little differently from other agencies. We’re allergic to spending too much of your money and to us, the answer to the “app or web” question is almost always: “It depends”. Let’s dive in.

When to build an app
Let’s face it: building an app still feels like you’re part of a ‘real startup’. And there’s something inherently intimate about being on the user’s phone that’s intoxicating for many startups (not to mention the promise of all that data that can be used or sold to help support the app). But, despite the appeal, the data tells a different story. Most apps don’t get installed in great numbers, and even when they do, they struggle to retain users. Even in a category like digital banking where you’d imagine people are more likely to stick with an app, the retention rate after 24 hours is 30%, and that drops to ~10% at day 30 . This is because every app needs to have a return value (i.e., a reason for the user to return); otherwise, it will be at best abandoned and at worst deleted. Let’s not forget that the average user has roughly 40-80 apps installed, but only uses ~10 of them.

Given the high bar for installing an app on your device, here are some reasons that you should look to an app-first model:

If your product gets its value from data that’s easier to get from a phone (e.g., geo-location). Saturday - an app that promotes spontaneous gatherings with nearby friends - is a great example of this. Generating a map of your contacts' locations and creating spur-of-the-moment meet-ups could of course be captured on the web, but it’s much easier to do so on the phone. Another great example is the pool testing app from HTH Pools Test to Swim which relies on your device’s camera to scan a testing strip to provide water treatment recommendations.

If your product requires or leans heavily on time-sensitive engagement, then the phone is almost always a better option. An excellent example is a product that prompts users to input data in a timely manner, such as Target 100 . Making sure that you have a means to update food intake and/or exercise is key to the product.

If your product is designed to allow users to engage with it offline. Products whose users can engage even when offline, such as The Information , will benefit greatly from having a place on the phone.

When a web app or website fits the bill
The other angle is to focus on a web-first approach. As founders are working through product development, they should think about their ideal user and how they’re going to engage with the product and build and design around that user.

Here are a few situations when a web app has some distinct advantages:

It’s better for data-intensive business products. It’s not that a product like Quadrant Wealth’s wealth management platform couldn’t work on a mobile device (in fact, we’ve worked to ensure that it is mobile-friendly), but just like Excel spreadsheets aren’t ideal to use on your phone, you also probably wouldn’t want to work with a mobile-first financial services reporting tool.

Superior cross-device compatibility. While we love React Native (and use it to build robust apps for both iOS and Android), when it comes to offering true full-featured cross-device compatibility, nothing beats the mobile web.

No app store reviews! Something that most startups don’t give enough attention to is that when it comes to apps there’s always another layer of approvals to get through: the app store itself. In general, these approvals can be a good thing, and they do help to keep app stores from releasing malicious apps. However, there are plenty of horror stories about app store rejections for apps that really have no reason to be rejected . There’s also the fact that reviews can come on almost any update of the app, which can hamstring a startup that’s trying to react quickly to market demand. It’s hard to ship an update that your users are looking for if the app store rejects the build.

Of course, there are pluses and minuses for both developing apps and focusing on the web. And any truly successful venture is at some point likely to have both up and running, adding a whole other layer of complexity to the mix. This is why, as your partners, we’re here to help you figure out what’s best for you, your startup, and your budget.

Startup-Centric Branding

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 14:10:21 GMT

Build first, design once you have traction. Back in the golden days of Web 2.0 - you know, a decade ago! - design was often an afterthought when building startups. Product was king, and if you found time to be novel in your design, you were lauded for going the extra mile and didn’t think about branding until you had both traction and funding. News products boasted sans serif fonts for their wordmark, and social media sites competed for a unique shade of blue. UX & UI received slightly more focus, but suffice it to say that ensuring your product had memorable branding wasn’t often listed high on the priorities roadmap. It was an “if we have time” or “when we need it” decision.

I started my career in digital branding, but my agency never got to work in the startup space, as there just wasn’t any demand. It wasn’t necessarily their fault; startups were gaining traction WITHOUT having to prioritize this aspect of their product/site because in many verticals they were the only player in their particular space.. Further, building and developing a full brand platform/brand book was (and still is) expensive. Think high five/low six figures at a minimum!

How things have changed…thankfully. Let’s look at just one industry: Fintech. In the Americas alone, fintech startups have basically doubled in the last four years ; that number has tripled in EMEA. No longer can you just exist by creating a product; your product needs to be compelling to use AND your brand needs to be memorable, especially if you’re launching in an established space. People have begun to expect elegant design, intuitive UI, and a product that is just easier to use than the competitors. But that’s not the whole picture.

At Tanooki, we’ve solved the product portion of the design problem with our Sprint Zero process. For those founders who are starting from just an idea or are looking to create a memorable brand, we also partner to provide startup-centric branding via a Brand Sprint. Over the course of 2-3 weeks (as opposed to 2-3 months at larger agencies), the Tanooki design team can get to the heart of your brand and determine a basic set of assets including a logo, typography, and positioning statement in the form of a brand manifesto. That’s it. No six-month engagement, no 5-figure price tag.

There’s another added benefit of going through a Tanooki Brand Sprint: if you’re also thinking through product design, our Sprint Zero moves even faster than usual because we already know what your brand looks like and its personality. And just like the Sprint Zero, a Brand Sprint’s deliverables can go with you if you decide to build your product yourself. Of course, we’d rather you build with us. :)

Betaworks Render Recap: Tools for Thinking

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 19:44:09 GMT

Betaworks, a venture fund, incubator, and accelerator based in NYC, is often known for its events and co-working space. While COVID slowed down their ability to host regular in-person events, they’ve now relaunched Render, a mini-conference that focuses on a hot startup trend. We recently attended their most recent Render event, entitled “Tools for Thinking”, and came away with much to think about ourselves.

The talks and panels focused on sharing technologies and products that help capture, organize, internalize, collaborate on, and analyze information to improve human thinking. Not just solely defining these tools or detailing how they apply to various products and projects, the conversation also included the historical and possible future impacts of this technology. Here’s what we learned.

There’s a positive feedback loop on the very existence of these tools. To think (pun intended): by creating opportunities to improve our own thinking, we can then create even better tools that increase personal and civilizational efficiency. This isn’t anything new; in fact, mnemonic devices, mind-mapping strategies, and even dictionaries are simple “tools for thinking” that have improved our writing and cognitive output for centuries. But now, with improved technology such as graph databases, natural language processing, and machine learning, we’re evolving and quickly accelerating how we organize information, which in turn alters and enhances how we think.

Here are a few examples that we think are interesting:

The Brain is a robust mind mapping and note-taking tool. During the talk, one of the MCs demoed his 25 years of history by live annotating his own presentation.
Noosphere is an open-source protocol for thought which enables users to “own” the thoughts they publish via the protocol. Those thoughts can also be accessed and built upon by a future ecosystem of applications.

We should also consider how recent AI advances like GPT-3 for NLP and Dall-e for image generation impact the workflow of writers, developers, and designers. For example, Github’s Copilot uses GPT-3 to help developers accelerate their speed of writing code. This advancement doesn’t come without caution; in fact, speakers were sure to warn builders that AI should not be the product, but instead, that incredible opportunities exist to incorporate AI into tools for thought.

Beyond technological innovations, business model innovations also enable some tools over others. For example, it’s now easier to fund and grow tools like Notion - which in turn helps fund and grow businesses - due to the maturation of Enterprise SaaS models. Others, such as Readwise - a cross-platform, highlighting tool that improves reading comprehension by automating spaced repetition - are potentially best to bootstrap because they may not fit the venture capital model.

As AI, user interfaces, and business models continue to evolve, so will our tools for thinking. Our hope is that these tools will serve the intended purpose of actually making us smarter, more creative, and more efficient, rather than allowing us to lazily lean on technology to generate banal outputs, devoid of the spark that only humans can provide.

For more photos and hot takes, check out Dave’s Instagram Highlights from the event .

UX Best Practices for Web3 - Transaction States

dscholz@tanookilabs.com (Dan Scholz) — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 15:39:11 GMT

Web3. NFTs. The Metaverse. Whatever you would like to call them, the future is here. At Tanooki, we support the advancements these new technologies bring as adoption rises. However with new tech comes new responsibilities, especially in design. Let's dive in.

First, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a true ‘sea change’, as designing for Web3 leverages many user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) best practices that were honed by Web2 over the last couple of decades. However, the blockchain adds new elements, user interactions, and data concerns that designers must consider. Here’s why.

In Web2 applications, most interactions involve making calls to a centralized backend that almost instantly executes some server code to retrieve and/or update data in a database. People are used to this near-instantaneous response, so anything taking longer than a second to respond is considered a bad user experience.

Alternatively, this response time is much slower in Web3, because in Web3 transactions are sent to either execute code and/or update data on the blockchain. And depending upon the blockchain’s characteristics, network activity, a transaction’s complexity, and other factors, it could take minutes, hours, or days to complete a transaction. So to combat any anticipated user impatience, as this feels very different from what people have learned to expect, it’s important for a designer to consider the response time variability to create a great user experience.

This was front of mind for the Tanooki team when we worked with Dapper labs to create the marketplace reference application, KittyItems . We understood the need to show the latest UI / UX and development best practices for building on the Flow blockchain as part of our remit, and we made sure to think in terms of the potential quantity of pending transactions and transaction completion time. This allowed us to optimize the users’ experience by setting expectations and keeping them informed.

Visual Cues = Better UX

One way to ensure people understand any necessary waiting times in Web3 apps is to provide visual cues within the design. Depending upon the complexity and number of transactions, this can range from utilizing time-tested elements like a spinning wheel to indicate that there is action on the back-end, to a customized progress bar. Here are a few different ways that we’ve approached this:

A SINGLE FAST TRANSACTION

The most basic user flow for any decentralized app (often referred to as ‘dapp’) experience is when a user initiates a single transaction and waits for the transaction to complete before leaving the page. This is a realistic user experience depending upon the value of the transaction and how long it takes to complete.

Most Flow transactions execute very quickly, so we can expect users to only have to wait a few seconds for an important transaction to finish and the UI to update in response. Since the response time is similar to interacting with a centralized service, we can use a traditional spinner to indicate that the request will complete soon. However, another benefit of working with Flow is that the Flow Client Library (FCL) allows our front-end code to easily monitor the status of a transaction utilizing Flow’s events.

In the case of KittyItems, this applies when minting, purchasing or selling an NFT and we chose to show the status of transactions, especially since this is a reference app intended to teach developers about Flow’s capabilities. But in a real marketplace with non-technical users, the project team might give a friendlier name to these statuses or use them to update a progress bar.

ONE OR MORE SLOW TRANSACTIONS

Of course, complex transactions can take additional time to complete, even on blockchains as fast as Flow. There are also use cases where users might fire off multiple transactions within a short amount of time. In circumstances like these, we can expect a user to continue navigating around the site while one or more transactions are pending. Ideally, users also get notified when these pending transactions complete.

To enable this experience, we leveraged a notifications status element that appears when transactions are pending and allows the user to slide a “drawer” from the right to view the recent transactions.

Using this ‘card-like’ approach has a number of UX benefits, including:

Encourages the user to continue engaging with the product
Indicates whether any or all of the transactions completed
Only takes up a small amount of screen real estate
Informs the user of the status of specific recent transactions
Allows the user to get more detail about any transaction by clicking through to Flowscan , the Flow block explorer

…and more. It also works well on mobile devices, further expanding the UX benefits.

As Web3 continues to expand and dapps become more proliferated, we expect to see additional design innovations that put the user’s experience front and center.

A Week At #nftnyc: The Tanooki Take

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 14:00:00 GMT

Though we wouldn’t be able to recap the entire week of projects, events and talks, here’s what caught our eye:

The multichain future

While Ethereum has been many dApp builders' go-to blockchain, most seem to acknowledge that a lot of the NFT activity will take place on layer 2 blockchains or alternative layer 1’s. Ethereum-based layer 2 blockchains like Immutable X or Polygon are becoming more popular because they inherit the security of Ethereum while providing performance characteristics and other attributes important to NFT projects, like faster throughput and lower fees.

We also heard a lot of talk about developing on Flow , an alternative layer 1 (i.e,. it’s not Ethereum) that hosts some of the most successful NFT projects, because it enables best-in-class user experiences that developers can create on today’s blockchains. (Psst…you can learn a bit more about our work on Flow here .)

PFPs & DAOs

If the official conference events were largely sponsored by the blockchains, the must-attend, nighttime events were hosted by DAOs and PFP projects. The Bored Ape Yacht Clu b threw Ape Fest, a week-long music festival in Manhattan with top-tier talent each night. Moonbirds took over Webster Hall for their own event, including a concert featuring Tame Impala. (And outside of these, you can bet there were many off the grid events supported by these groups.) For most of these PFPs & DAOs, the members ascribe to shared goals and values, and collaborate to use pooled resources to create value for their community and the world. They also include groups devoted to NFT collecting, like Proof or Flamingo . Or, Links DAO , a group that raised $10M in their initial sale to buy an actual golf course.

Ticketing as Fan Club 3.0

Decentralization of Media?

People in film, music, streaming, animation, and other media outlets are all exploring where NFTs and the blockchain will intersect with their industries. While this comes inherent with its own list of potential pitfalls (including the always tricky IP issues), already there are decentralized movie studios where fans and users dictate everything from who gets cast on the movie to the details of the script. Other concepts being explored reward the audience for engaging with the content, e.g. “watch to earn” programs. Of course, some are also getting in on the “traditional” collectibles game, like this Dr. Seuss project .

NFTs are a ball (literally!)

Sports are still a big use case and there are a number of NBA TopShots-esque collectibles projects launching soon. With a creatively different take on tying the physical world to digital collectibles, the Australian Open launched the AO Artball project , which divides the tennis court into 6,776 squares and assigns each one an NFT. People can purchase the NFTs that represent specific areas of the court and see the history of it (like the number of times a ball hits it, etc.)

What was quieter than expected

It might have been the circles we were at during the conference, but for a large-scale NFT event, we were surprised by the lack of creators and artists that we ran into. (And we’re not the only one who had this take!) Sure, there were NFT gallery showings and the NFT awards, but fewer people seemed most excited about NFT collecting than the utility itself of NFTs.

While the conference may be behind us, the world of blockchains, DAOs, PFPs, NFTs, and acronyms that haven’t even yet been envisioned, is ahead of us, and here at Tanooki, we’re excited to continue to develop and build in this new world.

Tanooki & Web3: Partnering with Dapper Labs

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 14:55:00 GMT

It’s not every day that an application or project changes the course of an industry forever, but that’s exactly what happened with Dapper Labs ’ wildly successful Web3 game, CryptoKitties . The response was so strong that it slowed down the Ethereum blockchain, and Dapper Labs quickly realized that there was an opportunity to build a better blockchain. So they did.

Welcome to Flow , a fast, decentralized, and developer friendly blockchain that quickly became the go-to platform for brands to launch their own NFT projects. While established organizations like the NBA were already building award-winning applications like NBA TopShot , Dapper (and its accompanying development tools) wanted to democratize development on Flow to enable any team to build their own NFT projects. And to make it even MORE developer-friendly, they leveraged our expertise designing and building in Web2 and Web3 to create some key components of the Flow developer ecosystem.

Here’s what we did:

Development Wallet Redesign: Being developers ourselves, we know the importance of good developer tools. So we pounced on the chance to redesign the Flow Developer Wallet . The result was simple yet robust enough for developers to use to debug their code.
Testnet Faucet: When you launch a new blockchain app, it’s important to ensure you’ve tested it in the most realistic way possible. So we again collaborated with Dapper to create the easiest to use testnet faucet for any blockchain.
KittyItems Development: To make it easier for developers to learn to build NFTs using Flow, we created a reference application. We led the Dapper Labs team through our Sprint Zero process to design a world-class marketplace experience that leveraged Flow’s latest innovations. Then, our developers collaborated with Dapper’s expert blockchain developers to implement and deploy the project to the Flow testnet.

The results speak for themselves…but we want to share them, too:

KittyItems is now the de facto reference for all new Flow developers.
All Flow developers rely on the Development Wallet to enable an efficient workflow.
Project teams use the Testnet faucet to experiment, learn about and build on Flow.

You can read more about our full collaboration here .

We’re excited to continue to work with the Dapper Labs team, so stay tuned for even more updates coming soon!

Three Tips for Managing Remote Teams

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:27:00 GMT

Let’s be honest, most of us are bad at managing. We often think walking around the office, chatting with employees and generally asking when projects will be completed are what constitutes management. We’re Michael Scott, stumbling into actually getting things done by happening to occasionally be in the right place at the right time.

This may have worked when your team was at the office and your presence could be counted on to keep things running smoothly. But now that team is scattered and you don’t have the same ability to wander and catch problems while they’re happening what do you do? How to you make sure your team keeps running smoothly when everyone is remote? How do you make sure everyone stays productive? Just how do you manage remotely?

Focus on results.

If anything good comes from this rapid shift to remote work it will be this one change. The American workforce in general has always been focused on putting in the hours, often going so far to eat at their desks, or even skip lunch all together ( see Business Insider for some some seriously bad American work habits ). That’s what makes this the first and most challenging thing for managers to change.

As managers we need to stop thinking about how long people are working. It doesn’t matter any more (and quite honestly it never did). It’s counterproductive to the process of getting things done, you’re just noticing it now that your team is remote. Stretching out a task to take longer than it needs to doesn’t help anyone. The employee is bored and not engaged; and you’re frustrated because things are taking too long to get done. Instead focus on the results you want to see, not the time that’s being put in.

Know what productive means. Then make sure it’s communicated.

Productivity is different for every team inside of an organization. For a web developer, being productive may mean pushing two new features a week. For a sales team it may mean reaching out to three prospects a day with a relevant touchpoint. For a marketing group it may mean testing your landing page copy every four days.

As a manager it’s your job to set the definition of productive for your team and to make sure it’s been effectively communicated.

Over-Communication is the new normal.

In the pre-remote work days you could casually walk by your team to check in. This helped not only to make sure things were moving forward, but it also gave an opportunity for them to let you know if they were having any problems with getting their work, done, or if they felt overwhelmed with a project, or a coworker, or life in general.

This touchpoint may be gone now, but thankfully it’s easily replaced.

Part of our process at Tanooki Labs is our daily standup meetings. Kept to 15–20 minutes these meetings are a key part of the new reality of over-communication. Check-ins with your team should be daily with everyone giving a quick status update. Check-ins with individuals ideally happen daily as well, but at the most should fall on an every-other-day schedule. This is the perfect time to communicate goals, timelines and feedback (both good and bad). It’s also a great time to just catch up and enjoy some one on one time with someone you’re not related to.

Just because you can’t walk around the office anymore doesn’t mean you can’t stumble into being a good manager.

These three tips will only work if you do one additional thing, trust your team. Remote work is hard on teams at first. Individuals will have their attention pulled in a hundred different directions (pets need to be walked, kids need help with classwork, a pipe burst upstairs, etc) and they’re going to feel like they need to make a choice between work and home, which adds nothing but stress. But by effectively defining and communicating goals, shifting to an emphasis on getting things done (and not sitting at a desk 9 - 5), and allowing ample opportunity for communication, you can remove that stress. But only if you trust your team to get it done.

So, you’re remote now!

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 19:00:00 GMT

Maybe it’s because of the Coronavirus, or maybe your office is just finally coming around to the fact that people are more engaged, more productive and (of most importance to your boss) more profitable. ( https://www.gallup.com/workplace/283985/working-remotely-effective-gallup-research-says-yes.aspx )

It’s also better for the planet ( https://www.greenchildmagazine.com/environmental-benefits-of-remote-work/ ) and helps companies recruit the best talent for a given job, regardless of where that talent is located ( https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2019 ). So while it may have taken a pandemic for your company to finally make the shift, there are a bunch of us who think that this shift may become permanent.

Tanooki Labs is a remote-first company and not to toot our own horn too loudly, we’re pretty damn good at it. We have an office and at any given time you’ll find a various mix of partners, design and the product mangers there, more often than not you’ll look in on one of the conference rooms and see a Google Meet or Zoom meeting happening with Tanookis from across the country. Given that so many people may be working remotely for the first time we thought we’d share some of our favorite tips and tricks on how to get stuff done remotely without losing your mind.

Find a place to work. Not your bed.

It’s tempting to work from your bed or couch when you’re working from home. I mean c’mon it’s the couch! So much more comfortable than the kitchen table or in your office! But trust us, you won’t be at the top of your game if you’re falling asleep at your computer. Warm computer on your lap + comfy bed or couch is a recipe for nap time.

And set it up like your office, not your dorm room.

If you wouldn’t have wrappers strewn about or a pupper (or kitteh) at your feet in the office, don’t do it at home. If you would, well then you do you.

One for the Managers - Focus on production, not hours.

The temptation as a manager to think that because people are at home they’re going to do laundry, take a nap, binge on Love is Blind. And honestly, you can’t control that. But what you can control is productivity. Set reasonable expectations about how much is supposed to be getting done and make sure it’s communicated to the team.

Keep in touch.

We live in Slack and Hangouts, both in the office and remotely. While having a company-wide public chat is super helpful, Noelle’s point about talking live is an important one. And turn on the video. Having a few face-to-face conversations with co-workers can completely remote the solitary feeling that can come from being heads-down at home.

We also have a bunch of fun company wide challenges to keep people engaged with their co-workers like the Tanooki Arcade Challenge.

For managers this is extremely important, because it’s how you communicate your expectations for productivity with your team. Consider starting each day with a 10 - 15 touch base with your direct reports and the other managers. Think of it as water cooler time.

And, of course it leads perfectly into…

Put on some clothes. And no, sweats don’t count. ��‍��‍��

Let work be a different mindset from relaxing and you’ll be more productive. And being productive is the name of the game.

Get some exercise. Any exercise. ��‍♀️��‍♂️

Working from home can cause you to get sucked down a rabbit hole like nothing else in this life. You can start a project, and because there’s nobody there to walk by your desk with a question (or even just walk by your desk) you look up to find that 5 hours have passed and as we all know sitting is bad, like really bad. ( https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/expert-answers/sitting/faq-20058005 )

This advice isn’t meant to replace your office remote-work policy (and if you don’t have one managers, now’s the time to clarify one). Rather it’s here (and we’re here) to help you to make the switch to remote work as easy as possible.

One last bit of crucial advice though - and this one is for managers and employees.

Give it time.

Working remotely is likely new to you, and it’s going to be a transition. So I’d highly recommend that both managers and employees treat it as if everyone is a new hire. Managers - give them the leniency that you would someone who’s just getting their feet under them in a new office. And employees - take the time to figure out the routine and patterns that work for you. Getting into a productive cadence is what’s important and that always takes time.

want to chat about how to optimize your remote work?

Not technical? Not a problem.

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 16:44:00 GMT

This month we’re featuring a guest post from one of our Founders and Tanooki PM Noelle Francois.

My name is Noelle and I’m the co-founder and Executive Director of Heat Seek , a hardware/software startup that builds web-connected temperature sensors to help tenants prove when they’re not receiving adequate heat in their apartments in the wintertime. I took a fairly non-traditional route to become a startup founder, and prior to starting Heat Seek, I had no experience with tech entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and social impact are hot topics, so how does one break in if you’re not technical? Where should you start?The following is advice I’d give to other non-technical folks looking to break into tech entrepreneurship.

Identify your problem

First, aim to solve a problem you know intimately. A problem you’ve experienced yourself, and one that you feel passionate about solving. You have a unique perspective on this problem, and are likely a domain expert on this subject and problem.I lived for two years in a freezing row house with windows from the 1920s that we struggled to keep at a livable temperature, no matter how high we turned up the heat. I became an expert in space heaters and electric blankets, and the experience has stayed with me almost a decade later.If you find yourself wondering, “How has no one has solved this yet?” you are on the right track.

Surround yourself with subject matter experts

It’s unlikely that you are the only one who has ever thought about or worked on this problem. You may have a unique approach, but you’ll benefit immensely from understanding what others have tried before. Learn from their mistakes.Understanding what others have already tried is the only way to really know that your solution is contributing something new and unique. You’re not here to reinvent the wheel. You want to build something that only someone with your particular blend of skills, knowledge, and perspective can dream up.You might also be thinking, “I need a technology focused solution to my problem, and I don’t know the first thing about coding/hardware!”Don’t worry. On to my next point…

Partner Up

Find a partner who can make up for your lack of tech experience. They should be someone you trust. Your partner might be a CTO, or it might be a tech agency like Tanooki Labs . At Heat Seek , we’ve had both.What works for your company will depend on the maturity level of your company. A Google search for “Do I need a CTO?” may lead you to think you absolutely HAVE TO get a CTO, but I advocate for partnering with a tech agency for the following reasons:Crowdsourced product thinking — instead of one brain, you’ll work with a whole team of folks invested in building the best tech possibleStartup guidance — agencies that have been around for a while have seen all kinds of startups, and can help you avoid mistakes they’ve seen founders make in the pastStability — while someone from the agency team might come or go, you’ll always have someone on call who knows your product and can jump in in a pinch

Test early and often

You’ve got a team. You’ve got a problem to solve and a hypothesis about how to do it. Now it’s time to see where the rubber meets the road. Validating your solution early and often is critical to success.Your unique perspective allows you to bring creative new ideas to the table. But you aren’t just building this solution for yourself. Get out there and test it with real people in the community you care about.Testing doesn’t have to be expensive. A nonfunctional (not-coded) prototype someone can click through is often more than enough to demonstrate the value of your solution. Ask tough questions and try and understand as much as you can about whether people will want to use your tool. Once you have something built, go out and watch real people use it. Conduct interviews. Talk to folks! It’s time intensive but absolutely invaluable.

Final Thoughts

I’ve learned more on my journey with Heat Seek than I can possibly share here. No doubt there is an enormous amount of time, effort, and learning that will go into your new venture, too.I hope you can see from my example that you don’t have to have a degree in computer science or an MBA to be an entrepreneur.The people who live and breathe the problems in their communities are often the best people to solve those problems.What are you waiting for?

Find out more about HeatSeek at https://heatseek.org/ .
Find out more about Tanooki Labs at https://www.tanookilabs.com/ .

What do you want to build?

Building Community, Remotely

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:46:00 GMT

900 Broadway, Suite 404 in New York City. That’s where the Tanooki Labs office is. We have conference rooms, a kitchen, the usual stuff. Our extraordinary PM team is here, as well as our talented Creative Director and the full Management team. But for the most part our team is distributed across the rest of North America. That cultural fluency and ability to grok a feature is key to making great products. Hiring from different locations also helps make our products robust by ensuring that not every viewpoint is from NYC. But team members in remote locations means that we have to focus on building community since we can’t rely on proximity to take care of it.

Slack

Slack is more than just how we communicate with our clients, Slack is how we communicate with each other. Sure there’s tons of email, and we’re no strangers to Google Meet, but nothing can replace Slack for managing to keep projects flowing and connecting our team.

In addition to the regular Slack channels for projects, we have a few internal facing channels for all Tanookis to chat in. For us that’s #Social and #Tanooki-Team and the key for us has been that once you’re a Tanooki you’re always a Tanooki. #Social and #Tanooki-Team is full of all of the talented folks we’ve had the pleasure to have on our team in the past seven years. Whether you’re currently working on a project with us, or you were a contractor 5 years ago, you’re welcome there.

Games

Tanooki Labs was named after the best power-up in the best version of the best video game on the best console (Tanooki suit, Super Mario Bros. 3, SNES, NES — change our minds) so retro gaming runs deep with our team. Our office has a custom arcade cabinet built by our own co-founder Eric Skiff . Every month Tanooki hosts a competition for all Tanooki team members to win the coveted Golden Tanooki, built by Director of Biz Dev, Dan Scholz . It’s a bit of silly fun and a trip down memory lane for most of us, and most days you’ll find some kind of chat either in the office or in Slack about the game of the month.

Tanooki Tech Talks

Every other month all Tanookis, both past and present, are invited to join in for the Tanooki Tech Talks. We’ll discuss some of the challenges we’ve encountered in recent builds and the often creative ways we managed to resolve them as well as the newest tools and best practices on everything from machine learning to database management.

We close things out with the always popular “what are you hacking on?” segment.

These touch points are the foundation of how we keep our on-site and remote staff close, and how we can bring our entrepreneurs the best talent for their projects, regardless of where they live.

How Startups can Survive an Economic Downturn

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 19:23:00 GMT

The world will not stop spinning when the next recession strikes. Startups will continue to be founded and they will continue to grow. Many VC’s raise their funds with a 5 - 10 year time horizon, so by the time we realize we’re in a recession there will still be a lot of capital to be allocated. Not to mention, consumers and businesses will not instantly stop paying for products and services they need. Some of the biggest names in tech today (Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Square, etc) were all started during the last recession.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the calculus behind investment decisions, consumer/business spending behavior, and labor’s motivations don’t change during an economic downturn. For startups to thrive during and after a recession, they will need to adapt strategies and operations across their businesses to accommodate for the realities of the bear market.

While it’s impossible to know exactly what the impacts of a recession would be, we can take a look at the important components of a startup’s organization, products, and strategies and begin to think about what changes could bolster a company during a slow down.

Organization and Business Planning Strategies

Product Development Planning Strategies

According to a Fortune Magazine from last year, two-thirds of business economists expect a recession to hit the United States by the end of 2020 . By taking steps now to fortify your startup you can help ensure that your business will continue long past that next economic downturn.

Cheap is Never Cheap

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 18:30:00 GMT

Or, why cheap tech generally comes back to bite you.

I’m not here to discount bargain hunters. Sometimes you can get a good deal on something. I’m a car guy, so keeping an eye out for inexpensive parts is part of my DNA. But the one lesson I’ve learned over ten years of hunting for parts is that there’s a huge difference between discount and cheap. Discounts happen when supply is greater than demand. On the other hand, a cheap part is built cheaply, which means I’m going to face one of two realities:

Usually both of these realities will come true, and in the end I’ll have paid twice as much as I would have in both time and money than if I’d just bought the properly factory part in the first place.

This is exactly the same story with software development. If something is cheap, the chances are it’s not going to work perfectly, and when you’re starting your business there’s no room for “works less than perfectly”.

One of the most common stories I hear from entrepreneurs is that they found a development shop (usually in Eastern Europe or India) with an hourly rate of $25 — $40 an hour. That’s well below our hourly developer rate and at $25 an hour the entrepreneur really has no reason not to at least try it, right? The worst that can happen is that the result is an application that either works or looks a little less than perfect, right?

But exactly like the cheap part, that’s never the worst possibility. If it was then maybe a little extra time and a little extra money could fix things.

Unfortunately, the reason I’m hearing these stories is because that’s far from right and often entrepreneurs are left holding the bag with a product that is not only unfinished, but is unfinishable in its current state. Whether that’s due to problems in code hygiene, or incomplete workflows is beside the point. They’ve often spent the majority of their budget (sometimes more than their budget and almost always more than we would have estimated) and are behind on their timeline as well.

Getting things back on track is difficult, but doable. In fact “founder PTSD” is something that we specialize in at Tanooki.

Using a modified version of our Sprint Zero program we can get into development quickly, whether that means cleaning up existing code, or starting from the ground up again. Our process provides complete transparency for our entrepreneurs and for those who were left holding the bag from “cheap” developers we make sure there’s no ambiguity in any of the decisions.

While this has helped to salvage many a product, it’s a shame that the project needed salvaging in the first place. Even though a professional development team may seem expensive by the hour, over the life of your business it will be much, much better than cheap.

What do you want to build?

The Tanooki Pledge

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 14:00:00 GMT

If you’re one of our entrepreneurs you will know the Tanooki Pledge pretty well by now. After all it’s on every proposal and SOW that you’ve signed off on. But it’s a core part of our beliefs at Tanooki, and something we’re both proud of and take seriously. No project starts without the Pledge getting signed by both the entrepreneur we’re partnering with an a Tanooki Partner.

The Tanooki Pledge

At Tanooki Labs we think of our engagements as partnerships and we always approach our partnerships with a radical level of transparency. You can expect to put in a minimum of 8 - 10 hours per week on the product between meetings, ticket review/accept/reject and general product thinking. Because this is a partnership and we know that the success of the product relies heavily on mutual trust, we make some significant promises.

Things We Promise to Do

Things You Promise to Do

In our experience, when these promises are kept, projects have a much higher likelihood of being delivered on time and on budget. We pledge to keep these promises to the best of our ability during the course of this project and our partnership together.

We take our partnerships seriously and there’s no better representation of that in my mind than the Tanooki Pledge.

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 3)

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 16:00:00 GMT

PlaceCoin imagines a near-future where augmented reality glasses are commonplace, and miraculously aren’t controlled by a single big tech company

Instead our glasses show us information, art, and history placed there by other users, who earn points and even money for placing great content that gets upvoted, and explores what that world might look like, good and bad.

This story is continued from PlaceCoin - Part Two

We were going to lose.

“Sam...”

“I know.” she said, still frantically working the controls in front of her, snapping up as many of the gaps as she could. Then she was out of Coin too.

Suddenly, Washington’s statue turned red on the map again.

“What?!” I heard her shriek next to me, and I saw it too. 4096 PLC. Someone had just dropped a quarter of a million cash on that spot, the most expensive buy I’d ever seen, even in Times Square. We snapped up the gaps around it, but it was futile. They quickly started to flip red again.

“We’re going to need help.” I heard myself say, and I started to pull up a terminal window.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, our plan has to change. We’ve have to go public now. Put the install up, show people what we’re trying to do, and what these trolls are trying to pull.”

Sam made one more big purchase, locking up the intersection at 16th and Broadway, and that was it. She was out of options unless she sold everything she’d worked on before. She hesitated.

“Do it.”

I keyed in a few triggers and started the deployment. Within a few minutes, each of the root nodes of the Coin we held was populated. As the transactions propagated, we could see the experience go live in the virtual world around us. I pulled off my VR headset, looking at the real-world Sam standing in my small apartment arms outstretched, watching the world inside the glasses.

“Sam” I said. “Let’s go see it live. Even if It’s just for a minute.”

She pulled off her VR headset, the impression of the light-blocking foam leaving a red mark around her cheeks. She nodded, we grabbed our gear, and started across town.

“I forgot that it was daytime!” I said, blinking at the early afternoon sun as we walked down 14th st. We’d been working in VR on the nighttime set, and it was jarring to return to a real world so different than the one we'd just inhabited. I'd remarked many times as we built Sam's installation - our installation now, I guess - on how much of the city was the same. So many of the buildings survived the ages, and even when they didn’t, their footprints endured and the invisible lines of real estate acted like force fields as new buildings grew in their place, taller and brighter.

We walked in silence until we came to the park.

People were pouring out of their offices and looking out their windows. I hadn’t realized what a stir this would create. We were standing amid the crowd now, and turned on our glasses.

We’d just unveiled the largest PlaceCoin installation in the world, and it was slowly crumbling in front of our eyes, and in front of the eyes of all the New Yorkers who were coming out to see. We could hear people ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the details, looking at the ways we’d changed the facades of the stores and the different shapes of the skyline around the park.

Sam looked up at me and smiled, and we heard the crowd gasp, sounding like a cross between a 4th of July fireworks audience and an angry mob. We looked in their direction, and the big banner hanging above the north end of Union Square to announce the electric lighting ceremony disappeared piece by piece as the patchwork of Places underneath it were bought out from under us. In their place, the worst of the internet emerged. A disgusting pastiche of memes, swastikas, dickbutts, and worse spewed forth from the dark corners of the internet. This was a huge, coordinated attack by well funded trolls, bots, and hate mongers, and people were getting pissed.

“Sam. We’ve gotta use this. We need help, and these people are pissed off that someone’s destroying what we just built before they even get to see it. You need to get a message out.”

She thought for a moment. I assumed she was worried about exposing herself to the internet masses - she already got enough hate mail just for having Girl in her name - then she just nodded.

“I’ll film” I said, nodding back at her as she climbed up onto a concrete block at the corner of the park. In my glasses, I could see the install behind her, partially damaged, and continuing to blink out of existence as we watched.

“Okay. Here goes” she said, and I pointed at her silently, to indicate that I was now streaming live through my glasses. “Hello internet. My name is Sam, but you probably know me as HistoryGirl. I’m standing in the middle of what was supposed to be the biggest and most ambitious AR installation in the history of PlaceCoin. I’ve spent the last year quietly gathering up the Places between Union Square and Madison Square Park to create a historical reenactment of the first run of electric lighting in New York, from the year 1880. Every corner, every storefront, every building has been restored to period in the experience, and as many of you guessed, I’ve been working with Will White to integrate my historical reenactment experience into his experience which digs deeper into the science and math of early electrical systems in partnership with the Museum of Math.”

“We’ve worked hard to bring this to life so everyone with a pair of AR glasses can explore the city as it was almost 150 years ago. But now, something has gone wrong. An army of trolls is buying up all of our places to ruin the installation and we’ve spent every Coin we have trying to fight them off. We’re broke and they just keep coming. Someone behind them has deep pockets.”

“So we’re calling on all of you. We need your help. PlaceCoin exists so that we can share free and open information integrated with the world around us. Information not controlled by Apple, Google, or Snap, but created by the people, for the people.”

“Every day detractors and pundits claim that PlaceCoin shouldn’t be part of the default experience on glasses. That the PlaceCoin community can’t be trusted to govern the information around us. We’ve proven them wrong before, and it’s time to do it again. Help us stand up to trolls and hate groups. Help us create something ambitious, beautiful, and amazing for everyone to share. We’re here in Union Square, live right now, fighting for what we’ve built. I hope you’ll join us, even if it’s just tonight before it’s all destroyed.”

Behind me, I heard a yell, and I startled, shaking the camera view along with my vision. I turned quickly, and saw that while she spoke, Samantha had gathered a crowd 100 people. They shouted in unison, and I smiled in amazement at the sound and suddenness of it.

I gestured to stop the video and looked back at Sam, and she was smiling too. Win or lose, we were going to fight for this.

I heard a chime in my earpiece, and saw the notification at the top right of my vision. I’d just been given control of a root node. Just a small one along the periphery, but someone had staked it with their own Coin and then given me control.

I looked over at Sam, and recognized the same thousand-yard stare. She was reading notifications as well, and they kept streaming in. The community was fighting back.

I climbed up on top of the concrete traffic-control block that Sam had perched on, and took my place next to her, as we’d been for the last few weeks. We set up a control center of screens in a half-circle around us and made them public so anyone could see them, trailing the latest transactions and showing the map of control as well as a heat-map of latest activity. We made community-controlled Places on the map Blue-Green, a mix of our two colors, and the map was starting to change back.

The battle raged into the evening. From the recesses of the internet, the trolls had decided to make this stand, and they were getting the attention and publicity they craved. But they were also losing.

While Sam and I worked, back to back, to purchase what we could and install the experience on nodes which had been bequeathed to us. Upvotes on the installs we had were pouring in, giving us more Coin to work with, as we worked, the crowd settled in as a type of encampment around us. Placers came in all different shapes and sizes, and we were surrounded by young and old, people in business suits and kids coming out of school. A few people had even dressed in old-timey costume or steampunk regalia, looking much like the NPCs that now wandered the streets among us as long as the install was up.

By dusk, it was clear. The tide had turned, and we were going to win. The crowd, both here and online, was downvoting the invaders en-masse, and that cost them real Coin and shrunk their places.

Sam and I pooled our own Coin into a consortium account along with everything we’d made in upvotes that day, and opened the account for contributions. By dusk, we knew the simulated sun towers would come on, brilliantly lighting the installation, and the NPC mayor would begin the lighting ceremony. We timed it perfectly, and at exactly that moment we repurchased the statue of Washington at the south end of the park.

I heard the cheer erupt from two blocks away and work it’s way north, and turned to Sam. We’d done it. Even at the edges of the install, the little incursions of red on the map were being stamped out by the community, and in the battle, the prices had been run up so high that it was unlikely that anyone would be able to afford to give us any trouble for a long time to come. In the meantime, the kerfuffle had gotten Sam a live spot on Cheddar from the front of the FlatIron (which now found itself surrounded by our installation), and the Curbed article had front-paged on Reddit and every other internet news source by dusk. Half a dozen Placer live streams were covering the event both in person and from VR, and the internet’s eyes were on us.

Sam turned towards me and I couldn’t think off anything less-cheesy to say than “we did it” so I just smiled at her.

Disembodied, I heard the crowd cheer, and at some point, I must’ve stumbled off the traffic block with her, because the next thing I knew we were walking hand-in-hand up Broadway among the crowd, looking up at the lights, and marveling at the stars behind them.

“Sam, this is....” I trailed off.

"You can say it."

“This is... magnificent."

"I know."

"You're going to make a *lot* of money.”

"I've already made a lot of money. What I want now is a lot of upvotes, and a lot of Coin. What I've got planned next is even bigger."

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 2)

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 17:50:00 GMT

PlaceCoin imagines a near-future where augmented reality glasses are commonplace, and miraculously aren’t controlled by a single big tech company

This story is continued from PlaceCoin - Part One …

“So can I ask you a question?” I said. I was high up above Broadway in front of the facade of a building in the VR facsimile of our install restoring the gargoyle based on a photo I’d found. It wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was at least period.

“Sure” she said from the street below, where she was working on an NPC’s costume. Her voice was incongruent with her position, sounding like she was right beside me because, of course, she was actually standing in my apartment no more than 3 feet from me.

“How in the world did you pull off Hamilton vs Hamilton?”

I heard her laugh, and take a deep breath. Over the past weeks she’d gotten the hint that I knew her work, but I’d kept any general fanboy fervor hidden, not wanting to be “that guy”. But it had been weeks and I had to know.

“So you’ve seen it?”

“Yeah - I mean, I’m a musical theater nerd and a Placer, so it was basically inevitable. But that’s a huge install, and I’ve run the numbers. It was way more Coin than you should have been able to afford.”

She smiled. “Yes… Yes it was.”

“So how’d you do it?”

“Well, I got lucky I guess. I was a huge fan of Hamilton when it was big a few years back… what was that, 9 years ago? Anyway, I’d visited Hamilton’s grave down at Trinity Church and his house uptown with my dad when I was a kid - I was totally obsessed - and once I started to get some Coin together, I wanted to do something amazing there. On a lark I sent a note to Lin Manuel. He wrote me back that day.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Turns out he’s a huge nerd. He bought up a bunch of PlaceCoin in the ICO, and was just kind of sitting on it.” Sam said.

“Wow. Who knew he’d be into PlaceCoin - I figured you did a partnership with him and some investors or something, but I didn’t think he’d have any clue what it was.”

“It took us forever to put together the install and Lin kept asking all these technical questions. I think he’s working on an AR musical now that you can perform anywhere you can stake enough territory to make a stage. The actors and NPCs interact with the sets, backdrops and even some effects.”

“Cool.” I could picture it. “Like Shakespeare in the park, but anywhere.”

“Exactly - we were also talking about a doing a version of Hamilton where NPCs act out everything except the role you want to play, so you can pretend to be right in the heart of the action. But we were having trouble getting the choreography to work without real set pieces and other human actors, so we shelved it. That’s when I started on this.”

“Oh man, that sounds amazing. And hilarious. Could you imagine walking up into a field without your glasses on, and guy is just dancing around and belting out showtunes? I mean it would be...”

“Will.” Sam interrupted. “Will!”

I aimed my controller at the street next to her and closed my eyes as I jumped, pointing my cursor at her feet and instantly appearing next to her. There were perks to working on the virtual version of the installation in VR, if you could get over the potential nausea.

“Look at this” she said, stretching her hands apart in front of her and placing a terminal in front of us in mid-air.

I watched as the screen enlarged until I could read what she was bringing up, and even then I had trouble making sense of it. She had the blockchain ledger for PlaceCoin up tailing recent transactions. Normally that would be nearly impossible to follow in real time, but I could see she had it filtered to a one meter radius around our installation. And it was still going by impossibly fast.

“What the...?” I said, watching the purchases happen in flurries.

“We’re under attack” she said, watching as someone, or more likely lots of someone’s, bought every possible gap, edge, and weak-spot in our massive land grab. Sam had bots fighting back, buying the spots back up as quick as she could, but she was going broke quickly trying to fight them off.

“Oh shit.” I said, watching as the onslaught continued. I could see where this was going. Her install was going to be ruined, covered in some stupid pharma ads. Or worse. Someone had decided that they wanted in on her publicity stunt and was trying to horn in. “Alright. I’m in. What radius are you buying?”

“I’ve got a polygon covering 1 meter back from the facade of every storefront from Union Square up Broadway to Madison Square.”

“Okay,” I said, drawing the same slanted rectangle on a map along broadway on a virtual terminal I’d brought up in front of my own avatar. I set up purchase rules, max bid per spot, and a filter so I wouldn’t bet against Sam’s account ID as quick as my fingers could type. But I could see we were already losing the battle as I glanced at the ownership graph. I had my spots in blue, Sam’s in green, and anyone else in red, and the red was seeping in like a virus.

There would be a limit to what we could do together and I looked at my account balance for a second. If we lost this, we’d hold a patchwork of worthless Places along the middle of Broadway, with no coherent story, and upvotes would be few and far between. No upvotes meant no return on the Coin we’d invested. We’d both be right back at the beginning of our careers, with a handful of Coin if we were lucky and no momentum. I looked at Sam and hit buy before I had too long think about what I was doing.

“Whoa” Sam said, as the map hovering between us flooded blue momentarily. “Jesus, Will, that’s all your Coin! You don’t have to do that.”

“We’ve worked too hard on this, I’m not letting them ruin it. Besides, they haven’t seen anything yet. That’s just what I’ve got liquid. Let’s see how deep their pockets really are.”

I triggered some sales on choice spots I’d been squatting on in touristy areas. I’d developed a knack for putting helpful info right where people needed it and the return on the Coin had been good, they were lucrative spots.. A few sales later, and I was back in the black. My bots surged again, and chased out another wave of red sneaking in around the corners.

Each back-and-forth in the war was shrinking the radius of the multitude of Places we held and the map was looking more and more fractured, but the doubling of costs on the bigger plots seemed to have priced out the invading swarm after a few trades. We held most of Madison Square and focused the fight on Union Square now.

“They keep outbidding me on Washington’s Statue. I can’t afford it without taking down something major - I’m going to have to shut down Hamilton down to keep this up” she said.

Losing Hamilton would be a blow, as it was her main driver of upvotes and working capital, not to mention it and was a huge tourist attraction now. The community would be furious if it blipped out of existence and became a Starbucks ad.

“Okay, I can still take it” I said, selling off a few more tracts of land I’d speculated on north of Westchester, hoping that self-driving cars would extend suburban sprawl more than they had so far. I had a more immediate need for the Coin now.

I winced as I manually keyed the okay to take Washington’s statue, and started to sweat as I did the math in a command prompt I pulled up. 2048 PLC. At today’s exchange rate, that would be 512 ETH, or about a $128,000 dollars. I knew my total holdings were a bit shy of a million, and I couldn’t make much more liquid without losing everything and reneging on a bunch of contracts I had with groups like MoMath to keep installs up for them.

My little hero move wasn’t going work, and I could feel my heart sinking.

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 1)

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 14:15:00 GMT

PlaceCoin imagines a near-future where augmented reality glasses are commonplace, and miraculously aren’t controlled by a single big tech company

—

"Hey!"

I heard the voice distantly at first, not really paying attention as I focused on my work. By the third time, I realized the yelling was directed at me.

"Hey! Is that you?" She hollered again, pointing up at the sky above the street between us, crossing the street towards me.

I swiped the air in front of me and the space between us was suddenly clear as day, the giant 3D sculpture I’d been working on removed from sight. My glasses no longer showing the massive Augmented Reality installation I'd been working on, I was suddenly able to see the person jogging towards me.

Feeling strangely exposed I glanced down 26th St and then past her into the park. From what I could see she was alone, which was a good thing. I usually worked in private, but I was putting up my newest installation today, and I wanted to get the placement on the building just right which can be tricky to do remote. Truth be told, I also liked to see my finished pieces come together, spreading out on top of the world in AR, but hidden from view in the real world. They'd be invisible to the naked eye, but I paid top price for my Places so I could control the root node. That way my installation would be part of the default experience for anyone wearing AR glasses, which these days was basically anyone under 30, and a lot of other folks besides.

The Museum of Math had gotten some grant money to create AR attractions outside their space - and they were offering me a sweet chunk of PlaceCoin to make them a custom interactive piece. As an added bonus, my work was generally fun and kid friendly, and was all but guaranteed to get solid upvotes and earn a nice return on the Coin of my own that I’d had to lay down to secure the MoMath spot (grants will only get you so far).

Back in the real world I was standing on the corner of 26th and Broadway as a woman walked straight at me. She clearly wanted to chat.

“Is that you?” she asked again, gesturing at the space above the front of MoMath.

“Yeah, that’s me. I’m doing an ‘artist in residence’ stint with MoMath.” I could see she was unimpressed. “William,” I said, extending my hand.

“I know who you are” she shot back as she turned to look up at my digital sculpture once more. “This!? This Fibonacci kiddie bullshit? This is why you stomped on my Spot?”

“Whoa, hey!” I said, starting to feel a bit defensive. Apparently she’d had the previous claim to this Spot, and I’d ousted her when I put up my installation. “MoMath sponsored my work here, and it’s their building”

“Bullshit. They may own the physical building - and they rent, by the way - but they don’t have any claim on the AR Place around it, and you know it.”

I did know it. Among Placers - those of us who spent an inordinate amount of time making our mark on the virtual world - there were clear lines drawn around this. History outlived ownership. Truth would outlast lies. Useful information would trump advertising and spam almost every time. It was built into the rules of the game, but it was also the code we lived by. It was what we fought for. MoMath might not have had property rights over this Place, but that didn’t stop them from being able to make a claim like everyone else.

“Okay. Okay, yes. But it’s not like I’m hanging a giant Starbucks sign here. This is an extension of the museum. It’s educational art. I don’t get what your problem is.”

“The problem, William” she spat, “Is that this is the third time in the past month you’ve stomped on one of my spots, and I’m running out of Coin. You’re running up the rent on my installations!”

Shit.

"Holy shit. You're HistoryGirl?"

Silence.

"Oh man, no way! I didn't know you had an installation in Madison Square Park!"

"I don't. Not yet at least." She said. "I'm doing an immersive on electric light from Union square up to here, it's where they did the first run of sun lamps back in 1880. But I have to buy up my spots in stealth and then put up my installations all at once, otherwise griefers get into pissy little bidding wars with me. Like you are right now."

"I'm not... " I started, but she cut me off quickly.

"It doesn’t matter if you’re not doing it on purpose, you're still messing up this whole install. I've got every Coin I have invested in this. It's going to be huge, and you're the only one with enough Coin to screw me up. So here you show up, right on the spot where I need to be, putting this modern pseudo-educational monstrosity up, and I'm not having it. I need you off my Place. Now."

"I, I..." I stammered. I wanted to be mad, I really did. She had no more claim than I did, and if I wanted to I could easily outbid her for this spot. I had plenty of Coin myself and the Museum might be able to cough up more if they had to. Besides, I only needed a small footprint and she had almost a mile to cover between here and Union Square. It was insane that she could even hold that much territory against the ad buyers, signage, and trolls.

But I could imagine what she was planning. New York's first electric corridor, magically reverted to the way it was in 1880. Old New York, replete with HistoryGirl’s usual cast of AR reenactors, playing out on a constant loop. Her work was amazing and you could live in it for hours. This sounded epic. And lucrative. Something that audacious would be a major event and would probably earn a huge return. It would probably even cause a tourism pop for the area. This could be good for both of us.

"Look, you wanna grab a coffee?" I asked.

"You’re buying".

We stood in line quietly until we finally ordered our coffees.

"Okay so listen" I said, broaching the topic at hand. "You and I both like to own the root node, right?"

"Right. Installations don't go viral unless you can take over the default experience for all users. Most people don't even know how to filter their glasses by subtag."

"It's the same for me. If I don't get my art in people's faces, it just sits there, and I need to make a return on each install to have enough Coin to do the next. Look, I'm happy to host you in a subtag..."

"That's not going to cut it. I need the root node to finish the experience."

"And I've already spent the museum's commission, so I can't really just hand it over." I said. "What if we collaborated?"

"How do you mean?"

"What if my install was an extension of yours. Something like a 'POWER of Math' exhibit, where the museum teaches people the math and science behind the first electric lights."

"Oh.." she said, mulling it over. "That could actually be kinda cool. What about your sculpture?"

"Well, what were you going to put in that Place?"

"Well in 1880 that location had sun towers. It was arc lighting - just these infinite bolts of lightning held suspended between two electrodes that burned up slowly. They were so bright they hurt people's eyes, and you had to wear sunglasses to look straight at them. The biggest one in the row is supposed to be right at the north edge of the park."

"OK, so what if we put up the sun tower, but as you get closer to the tower, these ghostlike equations for electric conversion and transfer drift from it towards the museum. And the front of the museum could be reconstructed to a period look.."

"Do you think the museum would go for it?"

"They'd be idiots not to. You're putting up the biggest install in the history of PlaceCoin, and they get to be the gift shop at the end of the ride. I bet they'd redo the whole museum for the event. Half of the exhibits are going to be my mini indoor installs anyway."

"OK, that would be cool."

"Really?"

"I mean, I wanted to include more historical info and science in my install, but I didn't want to break the reenactment experience, so it was just going to be exploratory. This bridges the gap, and let's people experience the scene and then dig into the why and how. It's perfect actually."

"Okay then!" I said, "it's a deal!”

“By the way - what’s your real name? ” I asked, realizing I still only knew her as the internet Placer celebrity History Girl.

“Samantha, but everyone calls me Sam.”

---

Sam and I spent the next 3 weeks working together. We spent almost every night and weekend building out models, programming the experience, and then testing it. Most of the time we were running in simulator mode, our glasses blocking out the interior of her small apartment or mine, wherever we’d chosen to work that night. We’d place our art against virtual versions of the buildings and locations we were dressing up with digital installations. We spent a number of nights testing the code by taking picnics in the middle of the experience, sitting in the middle of a strangely empty Broadway circa 1880, awash in the over-bright light of the sun lamps.

Sam had given me write access to the Places she’d claimed all along Broadway with her massive stash of Coin, and when I finished the sun tower-meets-math-museum piece and a few new mini installations for inside the museum, I’d started helping out with her build. She’d been working on this for nearly a year, and was a truly massive undertaking. Every storefront was dressed up, and the tops of buildings were lopped off to their original height with a relatively starry sky behind. New York with stars as a backdrop was really something to behold.

The glasses superimposed us on the scene, so we could work and talk together inside it to get things just right.

We weren’t talking about it publicly, but rumors were starting to swirl. Between Sam’s land-grab and my big buy at the top of the park, we were holding a lot of square footage without doing much with it, and the PlaceWatcher blog was starting to run with the story. HistoryGirl’s installations were big news and once people traced out the blockchain for the Coin sitting on those spaces and the blogs surmised that we were collaborating, the buzz started to grow. It was fun seeing the theories about what we might be working on emerge, but they had no idea what was coming.

Unfortunately, neither did we.

This story is continued in PlaceCoin - Part two …

Founders: Lessons Learned From Hundreds of Startup Launches

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 17:17:00 GMT

You are launching a product and have a million things to do. First you try to do it all yourself and you soon figure out what you don’t know and don’t do well. Next you start hiring but it takes time to build a team. And then you consider bringing in outside advisors but wonder how to get effective help. Knowing how and when to choose among the three ways startups grow will accelerate your company’s path to product/market fit.

The panel was moderated by Andrew Sispoidis, an early stage investor and repeat founder who has sold 3 companies, raised more than $250 million in capital, and returned over $1.4 billion in value. The panelists have helped hundreds of ventures launch and accelerate. We will then have ample time for questions, group discussion, and then networking.

Panelists :

Andrew Sispoidis (moderator) – Managing Partner, Kynismos , an investment and advisory group focused on select technology companies from early stage to lower middle market.

David Renz – Co-founder, Tanooki Labs , a product and development agency in NYC combines CTO-level technical and product strategy with excellent technical and design execution to become a trusted partner for entrepreneurs.

Harlan Milkove – Managing Partner, Foundational , a fundraising strategy firm that expedites the pursuit of early-stage venture capital. Its framework-driven approach proactively aligns startups with the expectations of their prospective investors to eliminate the months of consensus building that leads to the prolonged fundraising cycles.

Erik Fabian – Founder, Upright Brand , a brand marketing consultancy, that helps entrepreneurs stand above the hustle in an age of off-the-shelf ventures. Erik formerly built the brand teams at Moleskine America and Greenhouse Software. He has been called a “brand therapist” for his work helping organizations develop their strategy, story, and plan.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning, A Very Good Place to Start

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 16:00:00 GMT

The Tanooki Sprint Zero or, Why We Start with Product and Design

Tanooki Labs was founded in 2013 with a mission to be the most trusted development shop in NYC. A little over 6 years into our journey and we’re well on our way. With over 65 products under our collective belts, (not to mention all of our various passion projects) we’ve gotten things to a point where going from Idea to Product is a familiar journey. Over the years we’ve defined an approach to getting our entrepreneurs to MVP or V1 that now starts, more often than not, at the Tanooki Sprint Zero.

Sorry, Sprint What Now?

Like every good development shop that follows an (in our case non-dogmatic) agile process, we measure things in Sprints. But before a line of code is written, in fact even before the first user story is written and ticket placed in Pivotal Tracker, there’s the most important part of the process — The Sprint Zero.

Part of what makes Tanooki Labs unique is that we focus on a stage of product development rather than a specific industry vertical. For our developers and PMs that means there’s always a ton to learn. One project may be about organizing residential real estate listings, the next may be a new take on a learning management system and the next could be a social platform for live music lovers. But that diversity of product means that we rely on our entrepreneurs to bring a wealth of sector expertise to the table. Sprint Zero is how we meld the entrepreneur’s sector expertise with our product expertise.

Through a series of in-depth product meetings we help entrepreneurs come to a shared understanding of what their product is, how a user moves throughout it and (most importantly) what it looks like. This follows a modified version of our process with a Product meeting followed by a Demo/Feedback meeting. These meetings happen twice a week for anywhere from 3–5 weeks with the Tanooki Design and Product teams.

At the end of Sprint Zero we all gather around a Prototype of the product (generally produced in InVision or Sketch) that the entrepreneur team can click through and experience their vision.

And I Do This Why?

Most entrepreneurs use the Sprint Zero for one of two purposes — market validation or fundraising. Those who are committed to the prospect of fully bootstrapping their startup tend to look for market validation following a Sprint Zero exercise. This can involve surveys to prove out features with potential customers, product testing with in-person demos, and gather contact information with a lead-generation focused marketing site.

Entrepreneurs focusing on fundraising have successfully coupled the Sprint Zero Prototype with their fundraising deck and use of funds document (one of our very detailed estimates) to raise the funds required to build and market their product.

And Then What?

One of the additional benefits of the Sprint Zero process is that the following product is better positioned for development. Many of the product decisions that would otherwise get discovered in the course of development have been made already. Designs are not finalized, but they’re easily at 90% complete and in almost all cases enough of the underlying design decisions have been made so that development can make highly educated assumptions about how a feature should look and behave.

All of this means that development runs more efficiently, products get done quicker, and there’s generally less change in scope from the product estimate and the final MVP/V1. And that means our entrepreneurs are set up to succeed with their products.

Combating the Relentless Optimism of Technologists

Thu, 23 May 2019 18:59:00 GMT

How the optimistic nature of the early internet opened the door for weak product design and how to fix it.

The internet is a weird place. And its founders were weird people. Technologists who saw a place where open communications would lead to the best of the best ideas bubbling up and leading humanity to a new panacea. This feeling is most famously summed up in John Perry Barlow’s “ A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace ”.

I don’t want to get into how bogged down this statement is with privilege (Barlow wrote this in Davos, Switzerland in 1996 ), but I do want to focus on the optimism that it expresses. The optimism that the Internet would be a place for one and all to gather and speak and move the human race forward.

I’m from that seemingly rarified slice of the generational pie, born in 1980, at the end of the Gen-Xers and just before the Millenials. Behind Barlow and before the YouTubers.

Pollsters and marketers have never really cared about our opinion (and believe me I know — I used to work for one ) but I think the “Oregon Trail Generation” and our elder Gen-X brothers, sisters and cousins are doing a pretty decent job of managing those few things we now have some modicum of control over. There’s a good reason for that — we’re the generation that saw the transfer of information and communication from offline to online. We remember a world pre-cell phone where you had to carry a quarter for emergencies or had to be able to pull off the “make a collect call and then in the space the telecom gave you to say your name instead say “I’mdonewithpracticeandreadytogetpickedup” trick.

I remember starting to download a picture, heading into the kitchen, making a sandwich and coming back to a still downloading jpeg. But even then we realized that this Internet thing was going to be huge. We thought it was going to be the best thing in the world for people. The ability to communicate and share ideas across the globe in real time was going to make the world a better place by spreading the best of those ideas and squashing the crazy. Exposing conspiracies and hate to the light would disinfect.

We really should have seen it coming.

Optimistic, I know.

Since then entire new industries have been born by the Internet, and almost every legacy industry has been disrupted by it. And we have seen the world shaped by the ability to communicate across borders with speed and openness we only dreamed about. But the light didn’t disinfect. In some cases the open communications that the Internet provided allowed fringe conspiracy and hate groups to find one another allowing their thoughts of “I must be the only one…” to turn into “We are legion!” As we, the technologists who created the websites and applications that allowed this to happen are at least partly to blame. Because of our optimism.

Our optimism and general belief in the goodness of mankind allowed us to build products without thinking through how they could be weaponized. How they could be turned against us and used to sow the seeds of hate and fear.Facebook is a wonderful example of this. A global communications platform to bring the entire world together for conversation and the sharing of ideas. I honestly believe that this is the intent behind Facebook. What the platform failed to do is predict that the network effect applies to those seeking to spread fear and hate and that the Facebook platform would provide the perfect mix of anonymity and familiarity to stoke those fears. Because the founders, engineers and other employees truly only saw the positive implications and didn’t take an adversarial view it’s been possible for various bad actors to turn Facebook into a weapon.

Thankfully, there’s a solution to this problem, and it’s one that we can all undertake. When creating a new product or platform we should take the time to think about how the decisions being made in the planning of the product can be used for good, and for ill. Think about the best, and the worst case scenarios for the usage of your product. We as humans generally don’t like to think of the things that we make as being used in a way counter to our desire, but the fact of the matter is that it may be. So think about it. Plan for it. And that way you just may avoid it.

The Slog

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 15:57:00 GMT

It’s always there, waiting around the corner, yet it always seems to take you by surprise.

If you’ve sat down with me, Eric Skiff , or Dave Renz to talk about building your software product, chances are we talked to you about the slog. If you’ve ever been a founder, chances are you know the slog, even if you don’t know it by that name. But for those of you who are thinking about your first startup, it’s important to know about the slog so you can identify it when it comes and not let it crush your spirit, or your startup.

What is The Slog?

The slog, in the broadest terms, is that period during the creation of your startup that just really sucks for everyone involved. The product isn’t fully launched and every tester and investor you’ve shown has ideas about what should be added, tweaked or removed. And to make things even better, it’s the time when you’re probably either low or out of funds so whoever you have doing your development (either internal or external) has left you holding the bag until the coffers are refilled.

In truth, the regular trajectory of startup development is pretty straightforward and not unlike any other early business. There’s a direct correlation between budget, production level and overall happiness. As long as there’s money to pay for development, marketing, etc… people are happy and things truck along.

But then there’s the time where budget runs thin. When you as the founder need to go out and sell your vision to someone who will buy it. That someone can be investors or users, but there comes a time in every startup where what you’re selling needs to be bought by someone. This is the slog.

At Tanooki Labs we pride ourselves on helping entrepreneurs identify and manage the slog in a way that makes it significantly more manageable. By clearly communicating that production is nearing the slog and then holding on and helping you make those small but vital course corrections during this period of uncertainty we can make the process much less painful.

We treat all of our entrepreneurs like partners, not clients. As such we’re ready to hang on with you through the slog and get you to your next milestone. That milestone may be the next level of engagement, users, or a fundraising round. We do that because we know if we can get you there, there’s going to be more work for everyone.

Now that you know what’s coming you can plan for it both mentally and financially. Hopefully it won’t catch you by surprise and cause you any undue stress at what will most likely be an already stressful point in your early startup career. Because knowing is half the battle.

Ain’t Nuthin’ but a Trust Thing

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 17:07:00 GMT

A framework for every relationship you’ve ever had.

That’s right.

I’m going to outline a framework contained in every relationship you’ve ever had. And I hope the shock of how obvious it is knocks you out of your chair.

What is this framework?

Trust.

But more specifically, trust which is earned by managing expectations and follow-through.

(I’ll give you a sec to recover.)

Trust is mandatory in any successful relationship. That sounds so obvious doesn’t it! But it’s a point worth making that trust in a relationship should be reciprocal to really be called trust. In product development, when a PM isn’t trusted chaos is almost ALWAYS close behind.

As a management tool, this framework is so obvious, yet often under-looked.

When new PM’s are looking to get into the industry they often have one of two worries. “Will I be technical enough?”, or “I don’t know anything about [insert topic here].”

I’ve found the answers to those questions don’t matter. If you are able to build trust that’s at least half the job. You can always fill a technical deficit and learn about the product’s vertical.

Trust is key, but it’s not the only part of the framework. Managing Expectations and Follow-Through are the concepts and actions that create Trust.

Let’s take a closer look at the system, by use of this fancy model:

(Managed Expectations + Follow Through) = Trust

What does it mean?

1. Tell people what you are going to do. (Or get them to tell you what they want)

2. Then do it. Repeat.

I’ve created an example we can reference as I discuss the parts:

Client: Can you send me a report about the project every week?
PM (to client): Sure!
PM (to self): oh geez, where can i get the numbers from? When does the week start/end? Will this give the client more transparency than we want since I know where the budget is at right now? How should I format the email? Who needs to be on the email?

See? Simple!

Let’s break each part down further…

1. Managing Expectations

This is a critical concept, and one that is often missed for any number of reasons. Fear, impostor syndrome, and lack of agency are often at the bottom of why someone won’t say what they will do.

It’s not only the Junior PM who might feel this way! Talking to people and influencing their reality is HARD. The unknown is SCARY.

The core of it is this:

If you don’t manage expectations, you’re at the mercy of the unknown. You can counter this by managing. Your job is to evoke a confrontation which leads to clarity and resolution.

I know, that’s scary. But it’s a mistake to think expectations are better left alone.

2. Follow Through

Let’s say you managed the expectations! Good for you! Halfway there!

Now you have to do the work you set up when you managed the expectations.

As I showed in the example above, saying ‘SURE’ is the easy part. Getting all the questions answered to deliver on the task, in this case a weekly report isn’t that easy. Lots to do. It’s your job to do it, or communicate why you can’t.

3. Trust

You said SURE, created the report, then delivered it. Nice.

So, do you have trust now? Hard to say, but it’s without a doubt the first step in the process. You validated that you can do what you say you will. Which is great.

Now do it again.

And again.

That’s it, right?

Funny thing about trust is you can’t see it, or know it’s there. But you will know when it is NOT there.

Gaining trust is like losing weight. It takes lots of effort to build trust, same as losing the weight. While one doughnut or missed task won’t throw the whole game, it’s a slippery slope.

Telling someone you’ll do something then consistently missing the follow up erodes trust, and quick.

Conclusion

Again, these concepts aren’t new to the PM role. They aren’t new to how you treat your friends or family. Hopefully you have people who trust you, and you trust.

You can have the same relationships in your business life, just stick to the framework.

Erik Carlson

Lessons from an ICO

Thu, 24 May 2018 16:16:00 GMT

Despite the fact that they’ve been around in one form or another since 2014, ICOs are still the new kids on the block. As the new kids there is still a lot of uncertainty about what, exactly, an ICO is. Is an ICO a security? Is it a utility? Is it both? Neither? Because of this uncertainty we’re all still figuring out the safest and most secure way to run an ICO. In 2018 we are starting to see regulations come down from the SEC and because of that crossing t’s and dotting i’s has never been more important.

With SEC intervention in the ICO market practically guaranteed to increase throughout 2018 (I mean the SEC went and built a fake ICO to warn investors ) it’s more important than ever to go into the process of hosting your private and public sales with a trusted partner who has gone through the process before and has the battle scars to prove it.

At Tanooki Labs, while we’ve been working on our own projects leveraging the advantages of the Ethereum blockchain, we’ve also been helping some of our clients in preparing and running their own ICOs. One of our last projects was a two month blitz to create the infrastructure necessary to support a $19M public sale with complete SEC-compliance. Needless to say we learned a lot. So we thought it would be helpful to the community to break it down into notes for PMs, Devs and CTO/Business Owners and let those who lived the ICO give their tips. First up, advice from our lead developer on the project, Ryan Boland .

For this project we leveraged ICOBox for its book building capabilities and Cynopsis for automating the KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and checks against other blacklists. We also utilized InvestReady to ensure that people in the US purchasing large amounts of tokens were accredited investors.

So, what did we learn?

Some general thoughts:

Security and Stability

Overall, running an ICO isn’t terribly complicated from a development standpoint. The applications are not extremely complicated, but the security, performance, and third party integrations can make things take longer than originally expected. As usual, always budget extra time!

Thanks to Eric Skiff and Travis Pew .

Blockchain’s Sriracha Moment

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 15:34:00 GMT

Sriracha is an unlikely king among condiments . Introduced in 1980 it wasn’t until its popularity took off in the early 2010’s that everyone from famous chefs to your Uncle Pete was adding sriracha to damn near everything. Dishes ranging from award winning hot wings to, I kid you not, Ice Cream have received the sriracha treatment. But sriracha doesn’t really go with everything, regardless of what your hopefully well-meaning Uncle says. Making new sriracha-based recipes should take a bit of thought and a practiced hand. Kinda like blockchain.

That’s right, blockchain is having its sriracha moment.

After years of just being there, the blockchain concept and development has exploded. In the past few months we’ve seen major players in the existing financial system decry the utility of crypto currencies (see JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s statements ).We’ve seen companies get a short term boost out of adding a thin veneer of blockchain to their company or product (my favorite is Long Island Iced Tea changing it’s name to Long Blockchain Corp because there isn’t even technology involved). All of this undermines the true utility of blockchain. Which is why the technology at the heart of the innovation is so much more important and amazing than the first real proof of concept application.

So What’s the Big Deal?

We’ve all seemingly forgotten that for technological tools to truly survive they need to prove themselves through utility.

From the development of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago to the connection of the world’s information via a world wide web, the test for which advances will stand the test of time is and always has been the utility of the advancement. Utility made the knife. Utility made the bicycle. So when we’re looking at new technologies such as blockchain we should view it, as best we can, through the prism of utility.

While there are enormous implications for both society and individuals for the development of a scarcity based technological solution for a world currency, the utility of the blockchain is based more in the authenticity of the data held within it than any single expression of that authenticity. Imagine being able to know that in this world of manipulated media it was possible to know that a specific photograph was the source for all of its derivative works and was untouched from its creation? Imagine being able to greatly eliminate insurance fraud through a system of smart contracts ? Imagine being able to verify your identity without having to provide a government-issued piece of ID? All possible through blockchain technology.

For a generation societies around the world has been asking for transparency. Transparency in government. Transparency in business. Transparency in day to day actions. The thinking goes that in darkness lies deceit, and with transparency will come better decisions. Blockchain technology introduces transparency in a new and radical way to markets that have always been murky. This should excite both businesses and consumers. Because there is the ability to practice the utility of the technology there.

As a technology blockchain is really just getting started. There are many places to build your company in this brave new world, both at the platform level and at the application level. At Tanooki Labs we focus on building distributed applications (ÐApps) utilizing blockchain technology, from consultation and feasibility studies to full application development we’re ready to help you build your next product.

If you’re just starting on the road to building utilizing blockchain, we’re happy to sit down and talk through your concept for how to build or improve your product using blockchain technology. We’ll examine the strategy and concept and then run a feasibility study to prove your core thesis.

If your blockchain idea has been validated but you’ve decided that you’re not prepared to bootstrap development, detailing the architecture around your ĐApp is an invaluable next step.

Of course we can also help with full development if you’re ready to build your product using blockchain.

Just remember to keep it useful.

We All Need Data Literacy

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 16:11:00 GMT

We don’t usually see data, we see its interpretation. It’s on us to train our brains to look for and examine the data and remove underlying assumptions.

When I was in college, I was genuinely surprised at the number of my fellow students who struggled with basic media literacy. Professors would repeatedly remind students to look at primary and secondary sources and not just turn to AltaVista (or my personal favorite MetaFilter, yes I’m that old) for primary sources. My how times have changed.

In 2006 social media sites like MySpace and the then new Facebook were about interacting with people online and were largely innocuous platforms, and not focused on sharing news. The rampant distribution of news sources via Facebook and Twitter in the past 3 years has exacerbated the need for robust media literacy training. Unfortunately, we as a population are failing miserably at even basic media literacy. Users distribute material on social media without examining it’s origin and then upvoting/liking that media without even reading the article . Some “publications” are obfuscating their bias through clever branding. And this is true on both the Left and the Right here in the US. For every Media Research Center on the Right there’s a Huffington Post on the Left, each proclaiming their truth through data. A large part of what’s propping up the distribution of these dubious sources is the manipulation of that data, because data shows the authors intent. The multiplier on this problem is that likes and upvotes on articles can be bought , thus increasing the relative impact of the shared new item.

In our society we take solace in fiction of the objectivity and truth of data. Throughout our lives we constantly hear the old maxim, “numbers don’t lie.” When you think about it, we rely on data for nearly everything in our lives. From requesting a raise at work to which TV set you’re buy every argument is made stronger through data. If you can prove sales increased 15% under one of your plans then you deserve that extra 6% damnit! The TV with the highest refresh rate and PPI will win the shootout. The car with the most horsepower will win the hearts and minds. You will be lured into believing the veracity of a claim if there’s an accompanying chart . Because charts mean data! And data is king! All hail Lord Data!

Seriously, Scott Adams said it best:

The problem here is something that our current state of mind and reliance on visual media won’t let us believe, but I’m going to say the thing that others won’t. Data, at its core, is meaningless. Data requires analysis to gain meaning. Much like algorithms reflect the bias of the humans who develop them, data analysis reflects the bias of the data scientist. The same data set can be used to prove both sides of a given coin by omission or careful storytelling. Anyone who has had to make a presentation based on Google Analytics, MixPanel or any other web/app analytics program knows the power of selecting the data to present. As Jennifer L. Aaker explains in Persuasion and The Power of Story :

Effective communicators use data to reinforce a story and is no lack of resources to help marketers tell their story through data. And of course it’s always possible to tell a story from a single datapoint.

From 2014–2016 I was the head of digital marketing at YouGov, a market research / polling company. There I learned the true power of data as well as what I would consider the moral way to analyze data and the stories around it. Being surrounded by pollsters, data scientists and other masters of enormous data set analysis taught me a skill that I thought I had, but had sorely oversimplified — data literacy. My time at YouGov was spent with analysts who taught me the virtue of looking at data and extracting a story as opposed to than cherry picking data to support my story.

We’re moving towards a future of data. Thanks to developments in materials engineering I can go to Amazon.com and buy a 4TB hard drive for less than $100. My first computer (a hand-me-down IBM 286 XT from my parent’s office) had a whopping 10MB and we all thought that was more drive space than we’d ever need. That’s a 400,000x increase in just 30 years or so.

Data will be used to help form our opinions and it’s already being used to sway public opinion. As we move towards the future it’s important that we all learn a little bit of data science. Learn how to locate the raw data that’s being presented to you and become critical of the underlying assumptions. Learn how to create a good survey/poll so that you can readily identify the bad ones. Harvard University has a really wonderful one-sheet for their Program on Survey Research that everyone should read.

The unintentional result of the 2016 US Presidential election is that more people than ever see the need for strong media and data literacy. But the influx of data and the need for data literacy doesn’t have the same kind of lead time. Get out there and become a truly informed consumer of news and data.

Tanooki Talks - Tanooki Labs

Tanooki Founder's Story - Hadley

Founder's Story - ReferIn

Founder's Story - ReferIn

Founder's Story - ReferIn

Tanooki Founder's Story - Target 100

Founder's Story - Target100

Listen Up: The Tanooki Talks Podcast is Now Live!

Binx: An AI Experiment in increasing human creativity

TL;DR - Binx is an experimental AI chatbot that helps you break through your writer's block and write more. Join the discord to try it out!

Join the WriteWithBinx discord to get started

When (and when not) to use that shiny new technology

The Tanooki Talks Podcast, Ep. 4

The Business Cyrano, or How entrepreneurs can leverage AI create a better experience for their users.

Will AI Take My Job?

The Tanooki Talks Podcast, Ep. 2

What is RAG and how will it make my AI projects better?

Episode 1 of the Tanooki Talks Podcast

Business Cyrano: AI isn’t coming for your jobs

But it is coming to whisper in the ear of your workers.

Real Talk: Marketing Shouldn't Be That Complicated

Required Reading for Founders

Farewell, Forming & Storming. There's a Better Way to Build.

Tanooki Take: Which Website Builder is Best For You?

How CitiBike Can Help Us Understand The Potential of DAOs

Big Brother vs. Little Brother

Incentivizing behavior in DAOs

Where we go from here

Tanooki Take: Is Web3 Right For Your Business?

Light Up the Night: DIY Halloween Idea

Should you build a web or mobile app?

Startup-Centric Branding

Betaworks Render Recap: Tools for Thinking

UX Best Practices for Web3 - Transaction States

Visual Cues = Better UX

A SINGLE FAST TRANSACTION

ONE OR MORE SLOW TRANSACTIONS

A Week At #nftnyc: The Tanooki Take

Tanooki & Web3: Partnering with Dapper Labs

Three Tips for Managing Remote Teams

Focus on results.

Know what productive means. Then make sure it’s communicated.

Over-Communication is the new normal.

So, you’re remote now!

Find a place to work. Not your bed.

And set it up like your office, not your dorm room.

One for the Managers - Focus on production, not hours.

Keep in touch.

Put on some clothes. And no, sweats don’t count. ��‍����‍��

Get some exercise. Any exercise. ��‍♀️��‍♂️

Give it time.

Not technical? Not a problem.

Identify your problem

Surround yourself with subject matter experts

Partner Up

Test early and often

Final Thoughts

Building Community, Remotely

Slack

Games

Tanooki Tech Talks

How Startups can Survive an Economic Downturn

Cheap is Never Cheap

Or, why cheap tech generally comes back to bite you.

The Tanooki Pledge

The Tanooki Pledge

Things We Promise to Do

Things You Promise to Do

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 3)

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 2)

PlaceCoin, a Narrative (Part 1)

Founders: Lessons Learned From Hundreds of Startup Launches

Let's Start at the Very Beginning, A Very Good Place to Start

The Tanooki Sprint Zero or, Why We Start with Product and Design

Sorry, Sprint What Now?

And I Do This Why?

And Then What?

Combating the Relentless Optimism of Technologists

How the optimistic nature of the early internet opened the door for weak product design and how to fix it.

The Slog

TL;DR - Binx is an experimental AI chatbot that helps you break through your writer's block and write more.
Join the discord to try it out!

Put on some clothes. And no, sweats don’t count. ��‍��‍��