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Why Neighborgoods Matters

The topic of having too much stuff isn’t new around these parts, and in fact I talk about it a lot. It’s a constant struggle for me as most of my life I’ve been a hyper collector of “things” and over the past few years I’ve been moving more and more in the direction of getting rid of it all. I’ll never really get rid of it all of course, but I desperately want to get it down to a bare minimum.

For me, this started a few years ago when some friends and I started sketching up the idea of Multibasing, specifically this part about hardware. The Multibasing think tank, as it were, was talking about what items we’d need to replicate in each of the locations. What are those things that everyone has but has little use for, that we’d be better off with just one that we all had access to. Do 6 people who are somewhat sharing a living space all need to own the same book? Like most of the Multibasing plans this never ended up happening, but it led to a lot of very thought provoking discussions among our group and bits and pieces of the overall idea have been realized in different ways.

One of the people who helped me shape those ideas was Micki Krimmel. She had the idea that it was pointless for her to go buy something when her friends had that same thing sitting unused at their house. Take a ladder for example – In most cases 99% of it’s life will be spent sitting in a closet or garage waiting for someone to use it. I actually owned a ladder when I lived in Gainesville, I bought it because I needed to get something out of a tree. I used it once, then moved it around for 3 years from apartment to apartment but never used it again, finally I gave it away. During that time I know many friends who had a need for a ladder and went and bought their own, only for it to suffer the same fate. Micki noted that if we’d all known who had a ladder and who needed one, we probably have just borrowed it instead of each person buying a new one.

This is a genius idea because of it’s simplicity, OF COURSE borrowing is better. It saves money, which can then be spent on things that are actually needed. It reduces the demand for an item, which means fewer of them will be sitting around unused at peoples houses, which means fewer of them will eventually get thrown out and end up in landfills. It makes things more useful, which means things that are designed to serve a purpose actually get used for that purpose. It reduces excess, there simply doesn’t need to be 10 copies of an item when one single item can be shared by 10 people just as effectively.

The problem is organizing who already has what, and what is available to be loaned out. Last year Micki launched Neighborgoods.net to deal with that problem specifically. It’s a quick and easy tool to list what you have that you are willing to share with your friends, and see what your friends have that you can use. Have a power drill sitting in your closet unused? List it on Neighborgoods and next week your friend might borrow it from you rather than buying their own, which would just end up unused in their own closet. Need a backpack for a trip? Check Neighborgoods and see if any of your friends have an extra one you can borrow rather than going out and buying one you only have a short need for. Because in most cases if you are going to borrow something from a friend, they probably need to live near you, the launch of this service was limited to Southern California. We were the lucky ones.

Since then she and the Neighborgoods team have been constantly tweaking, fixing, and upgrading the site. Talking to the users and finding out what works and what doesn’t and making it easier to use and offering better options. Want to share something only with a small subset of your connections? No problem. Want to make a group for new parents to pass around baby stuff that gets outgrown while it still has plenty of use left? Done. Have something you aren’t using, and probably won’t use that you just want to give away or maybe even sell? Got that covered too. Of course you could do all of these things before in various different ways, but they were all time consuming and daunting Do you really want to call 25 friends to see who has an umbrella you can borrow for your weekend trip to Portland? It’s easier just to go to the store and buy one for yourself. But Neighborgoods makes it easier to borrow instead.

Neighborgoods has been refined and perfected over the last year, and now it’s available nationwide.

I’m not just being exaggeratory here, I firmly believe that Neighborgoods will change the world. This is a world changing service. The best products/services/ideas are the ones that make your life easier – they shave you time, they save you money, they save you hassle. Neighborgoods does those all of those things while at the same time reducing the amount of waste we will generate that will end up in landfills. It saves you from buying things you don’t need, and lets the things you already have be put to better use.

But it also allows us to be social within our neighborhoods again. There was a time when people actually walked next door to borrow a cup of sugar from their neighbors. Nowadays most people don’t even know what their neighbors names are. Neighborgoods allows you to share your stuff with only your friends, and/or also with people who live near you. Our society is increasingly told not to talk to strangers -but everyone is a stranger until you have a reason to meet them. Neighborgoods makes it OK to be friends with the people who live near you again. It’s not just good for your wallet, for your storage problems, for the environment, it’s actually good for society as a whole. I whole heartedly believe this, and I’m so excited for and proud of what they are doing and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. People launch sites and products every day, but few of them have the ability to impact your life for the better as much as Neighborgoods does. If you live in SoCal you probably already know this. If you live somewhere else in the US, this just changed your life and you don’t even know it yet – go sign up now.

(or watch this video, then sign up)

Watch This Intro Video! from sparky rose on Vimeo.

It actually makes a tangible difference in the overall health of our communities.

Audience vs Monetization, which comes first?

This topic has come up a several different times in many different circles over the last few weeks so I thought I’d make a post about it just to sort of document some of my thoughts on it. I’ve been talking to companies and groups about their situations and trying to help them isolate their current problem or bottle neck. Often times people know something isn’t working right, but aren’t sure exactly what the problem is and an outside perspective can sometimes help make things more clear and that is where I come in. It’s been a little surprising to me how frequently the problem has boiled down into one of two things:

1. They have an audience but don’t know how to monetize it.
(aka traffic but no business plan)

or

2. They have a good business plan but no audience or idea how to attract one

Which of these problems people have often comes from their approach – are they trying to make something cool or are they trying to make a business. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those approaches, and in fact both should be on your mind, but one without the other will lead to one of the above problems, and one of those problems is definitely better to have than the other. People often confuse this with the “build it and they will come” idea which isn’t really reliable because some people think “it” can be anything, but really “it” needs to be something awesome for that to work. Most people aren’t awesome product factories so there are other aspects that need to be considered.

“Would I want to use thing?” is a fantastic question to ask yourself. I asked an entrepreneur that the other day about the product they were pitching me on and it stopped him cold, he thought about it, and then told me he wasn’t really the person he was building it for and it would be much more helpful to a different kind of person. I don’t need to tell you anything else about that other than that and you should know it’s likely going to fail because the guy isn’t invested in his own product. He’s not trying to solve a problem he is having, he’s trying to solve a problem he thinks someone else is having. Really it’s a solution without a problem. And while it might have positive numbers in all the right places in the business plan, if no one ever uses it.. ? Well, you get the idea.

I think in a lot of situations people have this idea of getting everything perfect before they launch so drilled into their heads that they lose sight of the original idea. At some point they thought of this product and thought it might be fun or useful or cool for people, or might make their own lives easier and decided to get it built. But along the way they got more focused on the finances and exactly how much they will make from each user and by the end what they’ve built isn’t fun or useful or cool and doesn’t make anyones life easier. It doesn’t matter if you will make $100 from every user every month if only 1 out of ever 10,000 people to your site signs up, and you only get 10 people to your site a day. See the problem?

Conversely if you make something cool, something that people find useful and that makes their lives easier, they will use it and they will tell their friends to use it. Having thousands upon thousands of people going to your site or using your product is great even if you don’t know how to capitalize from that, because that allows you room to figure it out. Doing tests on an existing audience is easy, not so much the other way around.

It’s because of this I’ve been telling people to stop worrying about perfection, get their produce out there and see if people find it useful, if they don’t, what changes can be made to make it useful? Tweak, tweak, tweak until it makes sense to the users – then figure out where the cash is. If it doesn’t make sense to the users, well, time for a new idea.

Where is “home”?

The idea of “home” is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. As a kid home was where I slept and spent most of my time when not at school, but because my family moved around a lot I didn’t have any real emotional connection to it. As an adult I often tell people that it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I actually felt like I was home. I’ve talked to a lot of friends about this over the years and I get the feeling for a lot of people the idea of home is much more romanticized than anything they’ve ever actually experienced. What with “home is where the heart is” and other such slogans beaten into our heads. But even that doesn’t point so much to a place as a feeling, right? If you can feel like you are home when you are around certain people just as much as when you are in certain places then maybe home itself needs to be better defined before you can try and figure out where it is.

According to Dictionary.com, home is:

“any place of residence or refuge”

Wikipedia adds to that saying:

“It is usually a place in which an individual or a family can rest and be able to store personal property.”

Neither of those really sound like anything too special to me. I can rest on a park bench, is that home? I can take refuge in a coffee shop, is that home? I can store personal property in a rented out storage space, is that home? You see where I’m going with this, there must be a better of not just what home is, but what we want home to be. Let’s take this one step further – with the exception of about one suitcase worth of clothing and a backpack with some assorted electronics, I just put everything I own into storage. We also gave up the lease on our apartment in Venice and plan to spent the rest of the year bouncing around the world staying with friends and at guest apartments. Does this make me homeless?

I think at one point when people were born and died in the same building home was much easier to define, but now, especially for a certain group heavily traveled people, home isn’t one place, it’s many places. By the end of the year I expect to have a few basic necessities like a change of clothes and some toothpaste stashed in a few major cities around the world. Not because I’m paranoid and trying to have a plan B, C and D in place (though I kind of will thanks to this) but rather because I travel to them on a regular basis and it’s pointless for me to always take the same things there and back in my luggage. (If money was no issue I’d duplicate a few other things like bikes and electronics but for now I’m sticking with clothes) While I’ll have a home somewhere in Los Angeles, I’ll also be “at home” in many other places.

I see this as a natural progression of things, and think more and more people will be doing something similar, or some parts of it anyway. This is the core of what I’ve been calling “Multibasing” for years, that is having multiple bases, but it’s something that would make sense to a much larger group of people I know who are always on the go, but often in one of a handful of places. Well, I guess they would never be at two of a handful of places, but you know what I’m getting at. People tell me they can’t keep track of all the places I go, but honestly I go to a few of the same places over and over again. If I’m not in Los Angeles and you had to just guess where I was, picking Singapore, Tokyo or New York wouldn’t be a bad choice. And with any luck I’ll make that list longer as time goes on.

There is a whole group of people, Global Nomads, Technomads and Permanent Travelers who don’t live anywhere, but at the same time live everywhere. In the same way that people are drawn to the idea of “home,” I think that the ability to call the whole world home is just as romantic, and equally if not more attractive.

So if you travel all the time and have many places you call home, then which one do you decide is the most important and where you should keep all your stuff? Maybe the real question is why do you think you need all that stuff? But that’s a topic for another post.

That thing with Metblogs

Whoah, it’s crazy how much can change in 48 hours.

In the grand scheme of weeks, this one has been closer to the difficult side. It’s been extremely bad, and at the same time humbling and inspiring. In case you missed the news, on Friday we announced that after six and a half years, we would be shutting down Metblogs at the end of this month. It’s abrupt and unexpected even for us. Jason DeFillippo, my friend and business partner throughout all of this, wrote a personal and touching post about how it all started, and posted some closing stats to wrap it all up with a bow. In that time the network has had over a thousand writers, created more than 100,000 posts, and generated nearly 320,000 comments. Even I was impressed by that.

I wanted to write something about it myself. I wanted to explain how I felt and how hard of a decision that was to make but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Every time I started writing I’d just get a page full of emo crap that wasn’t much more than me wallowing and feeling bad about myself. I couldn’t help it. I was heartbroken. I never in all this time thought there would ever be a situation when we were forced to turn off the lights and walk away, but there we were standing in the middle of it. To think of everything that had gone into this, and to think of it just disappearing was crushing. I stopped trying to write and just let whatever was going to happen happen.

I said this was a surprising thing for us and I meant that. For it’s entire existence Metblogs has pretty much taken care of itself. It’s never been the biggest thing in the world but it wasn’t losing money and we felt that the social impacts and benefits it had were certainly worth that alone. We were also lucky to know a few people who supported what we were doing and chipped in some cash to help make it better. Michael Baffico, Larry Busacca, Michael Goff, Jody Mulkey and Sean Suhl believed in us enough early on to help us out with some of the bigger growth costs and we will forever be in their debt. And as Jason mentioned having Joi Ito and Xeni Jardin as our consiliari of sorts has been invaluable.

In 2009 the ad market took a serious nosedive industry wide (I’ve written about that here) but luckily we had some reserves to get us through the rough patches. And even in the darkest hour we never considered shutting things down. At worst it was more like “crap, ok we’ll let our phones get turned off for the month or something” and things would bounce back. But 2009 was exceptionally rough and we didn’t bounce back as quickly as we needed it to.

In January of 2010 we made a post asking for help – we wanted the sites to stay online and to grow and knew that what we were doing wasn’t cutting it anymore and there had to be someone or someone’s out there who could take the steps we couldn’t. We spent the next few months talking to many people and finally settling on a deal that we thought would be perfect. And it was. Until it wasn’t. Which was the beginning of last week. We were suddenly faced with the cold hard reality that putting all of our eggs in one basket was a very, very bad idea. We spent 24 hour or so running around our respective rooms in a panic before realizing we didn’t really have any other options. And that’s when we notified people that this was likely the end.

I want to say that sitting alone in your own house watching something you’ve spent the better part of the last decade crumble in front of you is no fun. It’s pretty easy to think you are the only one who cares about it, and that if it all went away tomorrow no one would
notice. Or if they did they’d just feel let down. It’s pretty defeating honestly. And I know that is exactly the whiney emo crap I was trying to avoid, but that’s pretty much the headspace we were in towards the end of last week. So we accepted our fate, and made our post. Clicking ‘publish’ was the lowest I’d been in years. And I didn’t even have the guts to do it, I made Jason do it.

And that is when the unexpected happened. People started popping up like goddamn ninjas out of nowhere to tell us how important they thought Metblogs was and how they couldn’t let it die. Several people offered their own cash to help keep things alive. Several groups stepped forward and offered to take some of the weight off our shoulders to help keep things alive. We honestly never expected that to happen, and we’re blown away by the kind things people had to say about it. We’ve spent the weekend talking to people, running numbers and getting hopeful. On Friday everything seemed dark and impossible, today everything looks like it will work out.

Our number one goal in all of this is to allow the sites to live on, and ensure the efforts of the last six and a half years don’t disappear. After what has happened this weekend I think we can safely say that that won’t be a problem. While things are moving super quickly, they aren’t moving quickly enough that I can say anything specific but I’m really excited about the prospects. Because these prospects require cash, and because people keep offering it, we’ve set up this pledgie to make it easier to donate. I want to take a moment and thank everyone from the very bottom of my heart for all the kind words of support and stories about how much Metblogs has meant to them. It’s been flattering and humbling to have been even the smallest part of something that people feel has had such an impact on their lives, but all credit, all of it, should be going to the authors on the sites. While Jason and I had a small part in getting this train in motion, it’s the authors that are at it’s core and are it’s lifesblood. I can’t stress how grateful I am to each and every person who ever contributed to any of the sites.

With that I’m going to end this post, and hope to have another with even better news in the very near future. Thanks again everyone.

Long Term Travel, minimalism’s best friend

There is nothing like packing for a trip to make you stop and think about what you really need. If you are new to it or not that good at it you’ll likely end up with way too many bags, which are filled with way too much stuff, and are a total pain in the ass to travel with. You’ll also likely return with things you dragged with you on your trip that you never once ended up touching. Traditional wisdom tells us it’s better to be prepared, to have things you might need just in case. That’s the worst kind of thinking for travel. If you are good at travel packing the things you bring will likely be multi-use, light weight, compact, and will all be used regularly.

For most of my trips I try to fit everything in one single carry on as well. Sometimes I break that into a carry on that will fit in an overhead bin and one that will fit under the seat in front of me just so I don’t have to access the overhead bin mid flight, but ideally that smaller bag should fit into the larger one when I get off the plane. It’s said that packing for a 2 week trip is easier than packing for a 3 day trip and I’ve found that to be very true. Over a week or more I find myself using the same things over and over again, where as for a single day or two I’m not sure what I might need that particular day. It’s because of this that I actually end up with more luggage on shorter trips.

Everything I took to Japan, summer 2009 - I brought too much stuff.

I never thought much about the difference between a short trip, a long trip, and more extended long term travel until I read Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (which I highly recommend) but that helped change my view of travel quite a bit. I’ve always thought of being home as the base, and travel bouncing out and back from that. Now I don’t feel so rooted and look at traveling more as the default, and stopping over at whatever I’m calling home at that point more like an intermission. I’ve been drawn to travel and the ‘open road’ as it were since the first time I spent a month in a van on tour with a band back in college, and since then have taken any opportunity to travel that has presented itself.

There is something about being out in the world that frees you from the constraints of possessing stuff. I’ve written before about how the things you own end up owning you and how we’d all be happier if we stopped buying crap so I won’t spend too much time on that here but thinking about some up coming travel has me chewing on a lot of this. With the exception of 2 or 3 months I spent in europe a few years back, the majority of my trips have been a week or two out somewhere and then back. Right now Tara and I are polishing off plans for a much more extended trip that doesn’t yet have a clearly defined end point.

Over the next year we have the opportunity to live (thanks to business or friends) for a month or so at a time in Singapore, Vienna and Paris. We’re also lucky enough to have professions that don’t tie us to any specific location for any set hours (I say lucky but that is really by design as well) and so long as we have an internet connection and don’t mind being awake weird hours all is well. So naturally we’re jumping at the chance. Of course our schedules aren’t free enough that we can just lump those next to each other, and at least I already have some other places I need to be at set times of the year so assuming some bouncing back and forth, the next 6 or 8 months might look something like this:

I say *might* because you know how things go, plans change and things get rearranged. There are also some other spots I’ve been meaning to go that might get added to the mix, but regardless, there’s a lot of travel on deck for the rest of 2010. Which means there’s some serious packing that needs to go on.

First of all there is the our place in LA. If we are going to be out of town for several months on end, there’s no reason to keep paying rent there. That means packing stuff into boxes, sticking it in storage and effectively making ourselves homeless. Yeah that is a big one to swallow but you’ll get past that (we did). But the more interesting thing to think about is what to take. A few things to consider that make this more interesting: The places we’re going have different climates, given the length of the trip seasons will change and warm weather will become cold in some places. One solution to that is to pack different things for different locations and mail ahead, but that’s getting outside of my point. I’m talking about minimalism and travel so lets stick with that.

Looking at a house full of stuff, it’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking about how much you need to bring. But the truth is packing for a month isn’t much different than packing for 2 weeks. And packing for 3 months isn’t that much different either. In any case, falling into the “I need this, I don’t need this, I need this” trap can be deadly. Instead start basic. What categories of things will I need, and what categories of things won’t I need. This is easily done by thinking about both what I’d be unhappy without, and what I don’t want to drag around with me. A few categories of things I need to be happy on a daily basis: My computer, location specific clothing (warm for cold, cool for warm), a bike, coffee supplies, camera stuff, and that’s about it. What don’t I need that takes up a lot of room at my house? Books. Artwork. Home entertainment system. Toys. That says a lot actually.

It’s an interesting mental experiment to take – what do you actually need on a daily basis to be happy? I surround myself with aesthetics and visual stimuli that inspires me, but the stuff on my walls today is the same thing that was there yesterday. When traveling the world around me becomes my decoration and it’s constantly changing and much more vivid.

How this will play out remains to be seen and there are a lot of factors to consider (not the least of which is that Ripley, who is almost 2 months old, will be joining us). On the pure packing standpoint I expect to have to bring more with me than usual, but I’m committed to that not making things more difficult. I try to avoid checked luggage which is easy for one person, not so easy for three. Instead of my one small piece of luggage I’ll likely use a larger stand up Zero Halliburton case that I have and try to put most things into that. I’ll document some of these decisions as I go, but I’m already forcing myself to think about serious downsizing to allow for this to work smoothly. We’ll see…

Sissy Bounce, a taste of the real underground

Last week my old friend Scott Beibin IM’d me asking my thoughts on Sissy Bounce. My reply was pretty immediate:

“What the hell is Sissy Bounce?”

After he got over the shock of realizing he knew about something before I did he went on to tell me one of the most interesting stories about an actual underground music scene. I say actual because I’ve known Scott for close to 20 years since we met through the early 90’s hardcore and straight edge scenes across the US. We both booked bands, ran labels, and generally tried to foster the scene. At that point underground meant something. It was actual sub-mainstream. Today it’s largely a marketing term and the notion of having to hunt to dig up information about a band or a style of music is completely gone. Information that used to require hours of driving and good words put in by the right people to get ahold of can now be googled in seconds. That’s not good or bad, it just is. So when Scott started telling me about a completely unknown sub-fork of the already crazily obscure New Orleans Bounce scene I dropped everything I was doing and started hitting him up for info.

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