Making the World Suck Less… with Software!

Not Quite Live from Business of Software 2011 – Alexis Ohanian (@kn0thing) challenges us to make the world suck less… with software and in general!  Awesome notes by Justin Goeres (@justingoeres) from JKI…

You should start every talk with a cute animal photo because it wins the audience over.

Something I’ve been thinking about forever, and it’s only kind of snowballed into something much better.

We’re all trying to improve the world somehow.

Been holding a lot of guilt over Pierre Francois in 2009. Didn’t realize the lightning talks were a competition and I did this satirical sort of thing.

If you can come up, by the end of the day, a way to make the world suck less with #bos2011 #suckless, tweet it and if Mark picks you we’ll send you a MacBook.

reddit, chipmunk, breadpig. I love making things people love.

No one has done this better than Steve Jobs. This makes traditional business people uncomfortable.

What does it say about the state of business when CEOs act like “treating your customers well” is some kind of new thing?  All of this success is a testament to how sad things are.

It needs to trickle down to everything you do.

The fact that we can see people’s breakfast on Twitter means we need to be able to see what the companies we touch do, too.

Poverty Porn. Sally Struthers guilts you into giving away money. This will never work again and I’m happy about it.

Donorschoose.org. Started by a public schoolteacher in the Bronx. Needed supplies for his class. Put up a request for a project and people can donate as little as $1 to help you. Students get stuff, donors get thank-yous.

breadpig creates geeky products and donates all the profits to organizations and individuals making the world suck less. You can take a simple story, like the first $35k from xkcd’s book went to build a school.

This is the kind of stuff that just happens online, because we want to do good things.  When people love what you’re working on, they’ll find ways to help you.

It speaks to this new thing in this geek community. You’re drinking the milkshake of the old guard.

What makes this new generation special is they make a $10 donation feel like a $10,000 donation.

Kiva: 630,000 lenders. $249M loaned.

Lending teams. Atheists vs. Christians :). They battle every day to out-good one another.

We’re making connections with other people behind soulless machines!

Even if you’re on the sexiest newest mac or iPhone, you’re still behind a device. But you’re all HUMAN.

I hate it when we lionize philanthropic heroes like Bono. He’ll raise millions for some gigantic cause that probably won’t get solved because it’s so huge, but more importantly you probably won’t admit failure even happened. With large amounts of money, failure is not an option. Smaller amounts of money are closer to Silicon Valley — fail fast, fail easy.

Surprise & Delight. Wants everyone to get to this point where they tattoo your product on your body.

reddit: 28,000,000 visitors a day. $400 in advertising to date.

Community with a CAPITAL C.

Your greatest threat is the Back button.

The internet is the flattest playing field we’ve got.

You have to surprise & delight people or they’ll click the Back button and that sucks.

So many opportunities to build things that don’t scale.

WuFoo: form building software. Most boring software imaginable. Not social, not photosharing, etc. You do it by yourself. BUT they’ve one a phenomenal job of connecting with people. Every employee sits down and writes handwritten letters to their customers. Reminds people you give a damn.

Remember how low the bar has been set: “Wow, they actually gave a damn.”

Everything I needed to know about startups I learned from webcomic artist.

When we launched hipmunk we had people who were willing to give us a try, so we sent them care packages.

We liked google doodles. So I  started doing reddit alien doodles every day for like a month. It was cathartic and fun.

Even if people didn’t want reddit’s content, they came for the alien.

SeatGeek: if you’ve every had to buy 3rd-party tickets for an event, it sucks. Let’s aggregate all this data and put it together and make it easier.

hipmunk sells planes & hotels by referral fees, other sites sell by ads. UX is disincentivized because they make more money the more search pages you see.

The world is not, in fact, flat.  The WWW, though, is.

There will be more “builders” on the Forbes billionaires list this century than last.

Find a way to spread the awareness to programmers, at really great technical schools, to START BUILDING STUFF. You don’t have to take that consulting job — you can start something. You are in extremely high demand.

The Bill Gates model: focusing on getting stupid rich, THEN worrying about how to make the world better.

But almost nobody gets stupid rich. If everyone focuses on that then ALMOST EVERYONE FAILS. These are wasted minds.

Make your dent.