Tag Archives: time capsule

I have a new project!!!

Hello world!

I am excited to announce that I’ve figured out a thing that I would like to create! My last real project was the now-defunct time-capsule app that I launched in 2016, Sealed Messenger, and that was a lot of fun and also a failure. To be fair, just about every other time capsule app so far has also failed to gain much traction, which means that there may not be a market there or at least not as an independent service. The best feedback I ever got about Sealed was, ‘seems like a feature, not a product’.

Since then, I have been working in large enterprise UX/UI design consulting and having a great time traversing healthcare, finance, higher education, utilities, and manufacturing, designing connected dashboards, chatbots, task management systems, and other automated solutions — but these are projects that I don’t choose, that enable other people’s visions and create impact according to stakeholder groups and corporate strategies far external to my own desires.

It has been rewarding to be focused on craft – the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’ or ‘why’ – but I have truly missed having a project all of my own! I did some freelance work alongside my design job over the last few years, but I have reduced that as I have felt increasingly that I didn’t want to work on just anything. To start working on something new, I had to create space for that thing to grow into.

Towards the beginning of Covid I joined an author’s group led by Smiley which was a lot of fun, and the resources, good vibes, and accountability that came with that were an excellent jolt to the system. The writing buddy I got paired with has been the best part of the experience – it has been refreshing to make a new friend during the pandemic and I still look forward to our weekly check-in’s.

So I am excited to announce that I am writing a book which will be called 101 Ways to Use a Hanky. The rest of the working title is, “a practical, historical, and personal guide to get you hooked on using hankies“. I am imagining it to be sort of a family friendly coffee table / bathroom book that you could flip through and learn something fun, put it down, pick it up, and maybe be inspired to try something new.

Basically, I have allergies. I sneeze a lot. Most people who know me will attest. And I have a grandfather, who I call Pop, who always carried handkerchiefs. My dad was more of a bandana guy, but I did see him carry that hundreds of times as well.

After blowing through a prodigious amount of paper tissues, I decided to order a pack of hankies from amazon.

And they were great for blowing my nose and allergy maintenance.

But I also noticed that I started using them in other odd ways, like as a napkin during dinner, or as a cover for my hand to touch something dirty, or to get better grip, to provide some protection for a delicate object, dry things, collect crumbly items, and, well, almost a hundred other things!

Yes, I believe a hanky could be used for hundreds and maybe thousands of different, distinct use cases. And yes, I do define what constitutes a ‘use’: if people actually do it and there’s some distinct value to the method, it’s a use case. I get more technical than that – that’s the simplified definition.

And part of my punchline is — just like carrying a hammer makes everything look like a nail, carrying a hanky starts to shift how you see the world, and you can discover ways to save effort, be physically safer, and more effectively manipulate your surroundings to find easier paths through moments in your life.

Not to mention all of the money you will save from buying less paper products and the environmentally friendly nature of reusing a piece of fabric.

So that’s that! I’m taking the slow but steady approach. I have drafted over 100 uses for hankies and organized them into eight or nine categories or ‘chapters’, but there is still a lot of refinement left to be done. I’m currently working on learning how to illustrate the elusive, ghostlike shape that is a white square piece of cloth, and I’m setting some rough sights on getting a draft done in a year, and then probably another year to see it into print, or whatever its final form takes.

If you have some fun ideas for how to use hankies, please share them with me! I am especially looking to hear about anyone’s experience as a hanky user themselves and what your most common use cases are, as simple or extravagant as they may be. All perspectives are welcome! If you have an experience or idea to share, or if you would like to stay in the loop about this project, please feel free to fill out this form and / or contact me directly via email, Facebook messenger, or here in the comments!

Keep calm and hanky on! 😛

How to Sell Sealed

There are many ways to spin a product. Facebook could have been sold to baby boomers who wanted to reconnect with long lost college classmates. Twitter could have been spun as a way for activists to amplify their message. Snapchat could have been marketed as a tool for business professionals to communicate instantaneously across departments or between cities.

But Facebook started with college@students.edu, creating that initial scarcity that made it desirable. Twitter managed to combine microblogging-as-self-expression with tweeting-as-public-broadcasting, and Snapchat flamed its way through every high school in the nation as a way to thwart their parents.

How did these companies know to target the users that they did? Did they do extensive market research and customer validation? Did they run focus groups and a/b test taglines and color schemes? Was the process wholly scientific or was it human intuition that led to these decisions? Of course the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but what does that mean for Sealed?

Sending a time capsule message is a very abstract concept, and as such, there are a number of different use cases that could be compelling to different users.

The Relationship-Driven User

Use Sealed to give your friends or family something to look forward to. Send your significant other a message in the morning that will unlock when they get out of work at 5pm.

The Pragmatist

Send birthday and holiday messages and gifts ahead of time. Never miss a birthday again.

The Sentimentalist

“Someday this moment will mean something.” These users are haunted by the passage of time and our ever-pending mortality, leaving themselves a trail of breadcrumbs for then they are old and “remembering the days when…”

The Joker

Send a friend a message for 25 years from now. Why? Because you can. Better yet, send a picture of nothing. Imagine the let-down…

– – –

Each of these approaches will appeal to a different user. How do I know which of these users will be the most engaged and likely to become an active evangelist? How can I decide on how to sell Sealed?

The following are potential strategies for customer validation.

  • Short ~$50 campaigns of Facebook / Google ads, A/B testing.
    Pros: nearly immediate results in hard data. Cons: expensive and hard to avoid bias in the testing process. Validately and Optimizely do this. This guy did it with $30.
  • Create an online survey.
    Pros: will receive subjective feedback in real sentences from real people, which could result in insights. Cons: survey design is tricky, hard to avoid bias. Hard to get large number of responses, and most people responding will know me personally, contributing another layer of bias.
  • Go out into the world and ask.
    Pros: real-time feedback from town centers, shopping malls, etc, could lead to enlightening conversations. In person I can make note of the subtler aspects of people’s reactions and probe deeper into unexpected results. Cons: very easy to ask ‘leading’ questions. Responses in person are likely to be self-censored to some extent in order to “be nice” / protect my ego.

What this all boils down to is a conundrum. I am currently trying to design a product for a user that I have not truly identified yet. My unscientific intuition-led gut-guess is first Sam and Sammy, 24-year-old lovebirds who value displaying thoughtfulness towards each other, and second, Mommy Jane with baby Jaye as she revels in those precious moments with her young child. People in relationships and young mothers are my top two guesses, but I could be completely wrong. Without a data-backed validation process, it’s impossible for me to know for sure whether I’m building a product that anyone wants, and that’s the number one rule of entrepreneurship… build something that at least SOME people really, really want.

Even with an extensive ad campaign and conclusive data, I’m still not sure I would accept validation or refutation without users having tested the actual app, because I think the experience of having an inbox full o’ surprises from your closest friends and family will be more tantalizing than a pre-product ad campaign or questionnaire can reveal. But I could simply be in love with my own idea and blind to its faults…

What do you think about how I am thinking about this? Do you have recommendations or ideas for most productive next steps? I plan to troll around the Natick Mall this coming week with some flyers and a sign-up form, maybe that will give me something to work with.

“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
—Steven Pressfield