the goose

Ana appears to be directly connected to the intwebs, and particularly Twitter these days.  She is pumping out an unholy  amount of links and tid-bits.  This one I really liked.

I’ve also started listening to Dan Benjamin’s Pipeline podcast which features interviews with tech entrepreneurs.  Neil Patel of KissMetrics and CrazyEgg was chatting to Dan about how he had no problem blogging about his failures as much as his successes.  What a good idea.  So here we go, lets bring these two beautiful concepts together and run down my bias mistakes.

Representativeness Bias: I used to try and avoid putting people in boxes.  It is not PC, but I do it anyway.  Most notably, a now good friend of mine, was introduced to me as a cleaner from Romania.  I watched a little condescendingly as she presented at a local business networking group.  No need to go to college for that!  It turns out of course that she actually had a engineering degree and had built the cleaning business to a stage where it supported a property portfolio in Dublin (which she exited before the crash) and Bucharest.  All as a single mother to 2 kids.  Inspiring lady.

Having said that, I have learned to lean on my instincts a lot more than I used to.  My old man meets thousands of people each year in his job, and he reckons he can suss someone out with a minute of them sitting down in his office.  Looking back, I can see how in the past, I’ve had a worrying feeling about a strategy of person which came to fruition.  Maybe this bias is here to protect me a little.

Anchoring Bias:  By and large, I’m not a detail person, but sometimes I let small details distract me from the bigger picture.  With an engineering background, this most often manifests itself in wanting to tinker with a website / product rather than step back and look at the cashflow as a whole.  For years, I developed countless features into SmartNote.ie in the hope that the killer feature would solve my lack of sales.  When I say years – I mean YEARS of my life were spent in a dungeon basement in Baldoyle coding away.  It ate my way through my savings and eventually the money that was supposed to go to the tax man because I was focused on the wrong thing, unable to step back and see the bigger picture.

Availability Bias:  Working with Priscilla on Piehole, you really get to appreciate the creative mind.  She is the creative force behind everything we do and I’ve come to learn that key to this talent is the ability to step past the first best thing that comes to mind.  If we need to promote a specific feature of the site, Priscilla can come up with 10 different concepts and counting.

Thinking more generally, I find myself unduly influenced by the poster boys of the web-scene.  The same tired examples of successful businesses (basecamp, Microsoft, Google) pop into my mind when I’m trying to consider what model or tactic we can attempt next.  I guess I should dig a little deeper and try to educate myself about the other successes out there.  Mixergy.com is a fanstastic resource for this.

Confirmation Bias:  Because I’m reading blogs and listening to tech startup podcasts, I’m re-enforcing a pretty narrow view of the world.  In reality, making money online is bloody hard and not the most sensible way to try and achieve financial freedom.  For all their faults, the property investments I’ve made still make far easier money for me that the night and day effort that goes into building subscriptions.  I tend not to listen to that voice in my head however.  I seek out information that confirms my own world view.  I get bored reading books on savings and mutual funds and all that malarky.

Worse still, I find myself slightly belligerent to anyone who seems to affront my strategy.  Public servants aren’t high on my list of people to be admired.  I guess this is mainly because their safe, secure and sensible position is an implicit criticism of my insecure, month to month, country to country existence.  I think I need to make more friends in the public service.  I hear they can be nice.  The self-help books tell you to avoid them like the plague (not civil servants, just people who aren’t on the same track you are in general).

Hmm.  Maybe I should keep this bias burning for while.

Self Serving Bias:  This one most often pops up if I have some custom development work to do for someone.  There is an implicit contention between my desire to bill as many hours as the best rate possible, with my clients desire to get it done for as little as possible.  Preparing a quotation sometimes feels like playing a hand of poker.  For fixed price work, someone is going to ‘win’ either them or me.  I even find it influencing my thinking when proposing improvements to projects.  ”Yes, you should consider upgrading the hardware for x, y and z reasons” – meanwhile I know it’ll mean I have to write less efficient code and I can spend less time on those projects for the same money.

Offering advice to budding voiceovers also puts us in an awkward position.  We try to guard against giving biased advice, but at the end of the day, it is hard not to let an upcoming rent payment influence whether or not you’d recommend a product or not.  A common problem in sales.

Ideally I’d like to decouple the value I deliver from the price I charge completely.  This means delivering value that isn’t attached to the number of hours I spend.  If I could charge €1, knowing they would make €10, I’d be a happy camper.

Expectancy Bias:  These ones are easy.  I expected a torrent of sales when

• I spent thousands on adwords listing
• Was a guest on RTE’s ‘the business’
• Appeared on national TV receiving offers from the Dragons
• I set up business networking groups around Dublin

Of course, some of them do generate sales.  My problem is, that none of them generate that much.  I’m always keen to find a silver bullet when an hail of arrows seems to be required.

Self-consistency Bias:  This is hard.  I’d like to think I’ve always had a master plan to move abroad, live the good life and deliver value to hundreds of customers paying tens of euro.  Of course, I never used to even consider leaving Ireland.  I thought I had to network harder, meet more people, spend more time behind the desk.  The networking didn’t really seem to get me anywhere.  Sitting behind a desk certainly didn’t.

Now that I think of it.  Maybe some of my biases do me a favour from time to time.  I guess its worth bearing them in mind though.