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The Desperation Economy

So many of the project requests I get these days are things I just simply don’t have the heart to take on. I think I’m partly broke because I can’t bear to take money from people who are plopping their entire life savings on doomed startup web projects.

I’ve been there and I’ve seen what happens a dozen times, so many hopes and dreams and fortunes lost in this silly gold rush to nowhere. Its a “desperation economy”, desperate unemployed folks who lost their livelihoods and still have enough cash & dreams to start something but aren’t really qualified to make it work right.

They come to me with a “small budget but we’ll be able to pay you more when it works out”. And then they tell me their plans, usually to build a specialized social network for xyz in some field they have no experience in, with way too little money and ass-backwards ideas on product development or marketing. They’re doomed to failure from day 1 and they want to pay me to seal their fate.

I just can’t do it anymore, what I would give to get a project request email from an established biotech company or a pharmaceutical, someone I have no investment in assumed guilt for failure. I want this recession-fueled desperation startup economy to end. Its depressing.

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everydayjonhill:

The Business Casual - My latest invention. The Business Casual is the perfect elegant hoodie for all occasions. Shirt and tie required? Check. Impromptu jogging? Check. What more do you need?

Click here to buy one for the holiday season. Guaranteed to get you laid.*

*Not a guarantee

This is by my buddy Jon Hill. Its genius. If you’re not following Jon Hill already on Tumblr, you should. The video was shot in the WheresCool HQ, at the desk to my left.

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Venezuelans Tweet in Traffic in BlackBerry Revolution

I was quoted by Bloomberg News about Commuter Feed in relation to Twitter traffic reporting in Venezuela.

Apparently I’m an expert on traffic in venezuela now, who knew? I wonder what other random topics I could be quoted on…

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Yes! The new Little Dragon album is finally up on Lala. I thought it was supposed to come out like 3 mos ago they’ve been playing it on KCRW since August

Machine Dreams - Little Dragon

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USS New York

OK, I was reading this article about the USS New York, a new battleship made with recycled steel from the World Trade Center. One thing stuck out - the ship cost $1.2 BILLION dollars to build.

$1.2 BILLION. According to the CIA World Fact Book the purchase price for that battleship was greater than the GDP of 35 different countries.

Why do we NEED a $1.2 billion ship exactly? Honestly, I’m just curious. Terrorists make bombs out of nail polish remover apparently. Afghanistan has no coastline. Who is this intended to fight? I don’t get it.

(Coincidentally this is also the same purchase price Amazon just paid for Zappos. So with $1.2 billion you could buy a warship or a huge online retailer.)

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Am I the only person who watches the Mighty Boosh? Not one person on Halloween knew who Johnny Two Hats was. I think they just thought my costume was “douche”

Am I the only person who watches the Mighty Boosh? Not one person on Halloween knew who Johnny Two Hats was. I think they just thought my costume was “douche”

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The Giant Robot group show at the Japanese American Museum last week was pretty bad ass, as evidenced by this photo.

The Giant Robot group show at the Japanese American Museum last week was pretty bad ass, as evidenced by this photo.

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“Invading Iraq”. This is another post about web development clients. The other day I proposed a new piece of web developer jargon - “cutting your dick off”. Here’s another one. Web developers take note. “Invading Iraq” is what I call a huge-ass project that was fucked from Day 1. It’s usually when a client with way too much money takes on an ambitious project with a dumb idea justified on hasty assumptions based on significantly miscalculated projections. Many Fortune 50 clients have Iraq projects they don’t like to talk about and almost 90% of the VC funded startup clients I’ve had fall into this category. Typically its a matter of some execs with a ridiculous vision to capitalize on a market opportunity having way too much leverage to acquire money and resources but completely lack any grounding on reality in terms of what the people want or how to build it, all while being too pigheaded to deviate from the plan when things go wrong. Kind of like being a spoiled president with an opportunity to invade a country without repercussions, a budget surplus, some loose intelligence about WMDs, and a ridiculous plan to quickly invade, be greeted as liberators and open up a new trade partner. All the while never thinking through the costly consequences of NOT being greeted warmly and being too pigheaded to change course - which results in continually dumping resources and lives into a plan that was f’d from the start. From a project management perspective Iraq was a giant project that was fucked from Day 1. And thats why a huge-ass fucked project is called “invading Iraq”.

“Invading Iraq”. This is another post about web development clients.

The other day I proposed a new piece of web developer jargon - “cutting your dick off”. Here’s another one. Web developers take note.

“Invading Iraq” is what I call a huge-ass project that was fucked from Day 1.

It’s usually when a client with way too much money takes on an ambitious project with a dumb idea justified on hasty assumptions based on significantly miscalculated projections. Many Fortune 50 clients have Iraq projects they don’t like to talk about and almost 90% of the VC funded startup clients I’ve had fall into this category.

Typically its a matter of some execs with a ridiculous vision to capitalize on a market opportunity having way too much leverage to acquire money and resources but completely lack any grounding on reality in terms of what the people want or how to build it, all while being too pigheaded to deviate from the plan when things go wrong.

Kind of like being a spoiled president with an opportunity to invade a country without repercussions, a budget surplus, some loose intelligence about WMDs, and a ridiculous plan to quickly invade, be greeted as liberators and open up a new trade partner. All the while never thinking through the costly consequences of NOT being greeted warmly and being too pigheaded to change course - which results in continually dumping resources and lives into a plan that was f’d from the start.

From a project management perspective Iraq was a giant project that was fucked from Day 1. And thats why a huge-ass fucked project is called “invading Iraq”.

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A new dawn is coming. I need to amass an army of mobile developers

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“Cutting your dick off.” This is a post about web development clients.

Every so often in my career a client will come to me with a ludicrious request for something that they believe will bring them either extra revenue or web traffic or exposure that I know will completely ruin their business or site.

Now, out of ethics I usually try my hardest to dissuade the client even if I know that the work to do said task and deal with repercussions of said task will bring me plenty of extra $$$ for a long time.

But every so often you get a stubborn client who insists on this really ridiculous plan and you can only just sit back and do it, take the $$ and know that you warned them.

Anyhow something like this happened to me today and I thought of this clip. From now on I’m calling this behavior “cutting your dick off” (for a massive dick-cutting fuckup I call it “invading Iraq”). AKA hastily cutting off your dick to get YouTube hits even though you could’ve just made some funny faces.

I hope that some day this can be entered into permanent web developer jargon. If you are a programmer, please help make this happen.