Brian M. Erickson

My second day in Spain, Karl and I headed up to Granada for the day to check out the famous La Alhambra and the city nightlife. La Alhambra is a Moorish castle that sits above the city and contains some very impressive architecture and artistry.

One of the more interesting statues I saw while walking around Granada was this one of Christopher Columbus receiving funding for his explorations from Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

We also visited some of the local establishments, it helped to have Karl there as a guide so we could find some of the true local flavor.

All in all I enjoyed Granada quite a bit and only wished we had more time to see the sights!

So I am finally at a point in my trip where I can write a bit about my trip so far and I thought why not just start at the beginning.

On Sunday June 15th, I started my trip with a flight from Denver to Frankfurt and then on to Marbella, Spain. The flight(s) and bus ride were rather uneventful and I finally arrived at my destination around 4pm local time on the 16th. My long time friend from college was there to greet me and we set off to see a bit of the area.

Our first stop was Mijas,  a small mountain town just above Malaga. We sampled some of the local beer and I snapped a few photos:

After Mijas we swung down to Marbella and Puerto Banús, had some Tapas and saw the impressive yachts, shops and vehicles.

Afterward we headed back and I finally got some sleep and adjusted to the time change.

This weekend I took a couple of trips to Elk Meadow Park up in Evergreen. Saturday I took Juno to the nice dog park there and then on a short hike with Michelle and Aiden. Sunday I went back and did my first trail run of the season; a five mile run around the red loop in the map below:

It was a really nice (and strenuous) run, not all that long but I’m still getting back into the swing of things after a fairly long hiatus from running. The trail system is well maintained and has a wide variety of terrain, including lots of tree cover. I first did this trail during a 10k race hosted by the Denver Trail Runners a couple of years ago (it was actually one of my better 10k times at 54mins despite the massive hill climb towards the end). I’m planning to come back again and hopefully tackle the blue loop (about ten miles) up to the top of Bergen Peak by the end of the summer.

So last fall I spent a couple of weeks getting myself into the Getting Things Done system. Read the book, bought a filing cabinet, labeler, etc and got down to business. Everything went well, I got myself organized and set up a system to track the infamous ‘next actions’. I was attempting to use Remember the Milk to track my tasks along with a small notebook for storing tasks while I was mobile. This worked for a little while, especially for schoolwork but fell short for non-school related tasks as I didn’t have the list on me except when I was online. I even got an iPod Touch so that I could access the list while I was mobile (and within reach of a hotspot). Suffice it to say the system fell into disuse, although I still have the filing cabinet and all my files organized.

This weekend I decided to give it another go with a different task tracking system, made famous in the ‘Hacking a GTD Moleskine‘ blog post by Eston Bond. I picked up a Moleskine notebook and ‘hacked’ it in a similar fasion described in the blog post. I spent the morning going through my overflowing inbox and processing everything and feel pretty good about this system. Of course the true test will come with time but I like having something tangible and not depending on a device to keep track of my next actions.

I’ll make another post in a month or so with how its working out.

I just finished reading ‘Crossing the Chasm‘ by Geoffrey A. Moore. It is one of those books that you hear a lot about in the high-tech industry and especially in MBA programs (well mine anyway). One of my co-workers even mentioned that it was ‘required’ reading for everyone at one of his former companies. While I wouldn’t call this a ‘must read’ for anyone in the high-tech industry, I did get a lot of take aways related to product management, marketing and general product strategy that I felt like sharing.

The general concept of the book revolves around bringing high-tech products to the market. His observation is that most products will have a fair amount of success initially with early adopters but consistently struggle making the leap across the ‘chasm’ to be accepted by the mainstream consumer. Even though the book was written in 1991 (updated in 1999) it still holds very true today; so many products especially in the more recent ‘Web 2.0′ boom never make it over the chasm and become adopted by the mainstream. I would even argue that recentl successful offerings such as Twitter and Facebook have still not truly crossed the chasm in terms of becoming accepted and used by the mainstream Internet ‘consumer’.

What I really liked about the book was his strategy for actually creating and delivering a product that can cross the chasm; by choosing a ‘beachhead’ target market and aggressively positioning your product to attack that market. It really got me interested since I have been more and more interested in Product Management as a career path. I can think of so many products that I’ve been involved with which are great technical ideas but struggle to really address the needs of any specific target user. This book give some great concrete examples of how to find your ‘beachhead’ market and then go after it with a ‘whole product’ solution.

Another aspect of the book which I liked was his skepticism of quantitative market data for unknown and new markets. The example he uses: “It will be a billion dollar market in 1995. If we only get 5 percent of the market …” struck me because I’ve seen others using that same logic and been tempted to use it myself in analyzing markets and industry for business plans. He gives some good examples of how to use market data (and lack of it) to make a ‘high risk low data decision’ as to what market is best to attack.

My only real gripe with the book is that the examples are getting rather dated so its tough to even recall who those companies are (most have gone under or been acquired) at this point without looking them up. Also I’m not sure the chapter on sales and distribution channels is really applicable today particularly for Internet based products.

All in all I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to anyone starting a business or developing strategy for new products. This will definitely be one that I keep on my shelf to read again throughout my career.

So I remember doing one of these as a kid for school and thought it’d be a good thing to do before my brief respite from classes is over in two months.

1. Post Guides to GuideSpot
   We released GuideSpot.com in the beginning of this year but I have yet to really get into actually using it by creating some guides. Feels like when you are constantly fixing bugs and adding features sometimes you can get disconnected from how the site actually gets used. I want to re-visit my ‘Guide to Denver Brews’ and add a guide about the process of building my arcade cabinet.
2. Blog Once a Week
   The all too common ‘I got too busy to post’ definitely applies here. Since I have some time off I want to post a bit about some of the things I’ve learned in classes over the past months and projects I’ve been working on.
3. Read at Least Two Books
   I have ‘Crossing the Chasm’ about a third of the way read so I want to finish that. Also want to finish ‘Good to Great’ and ‘The Omnivores Dilemma’ before I head back to classes.
4. Re-write my Resume
   My resume hasn’t been overhauled since I was leaving my first job over three years ago. I want to get it a bit less technical and more product focused so when I get closer to graduation I have something ready.
5. Continue Taking Photos
   I got a new Nikon D40 camera a few weeks ago and have taken some interesting (to me) photos with it so far but want to keep getting out and experimenting with it. Hopefully that will give me some good experience before I head out to Denmark for my study abroad program in June. I’m tacking going camping at least twice on to this one and hopefully hiking as well.
6. Run Three Times a Week
   I’ve gotten started with this already but I want to continue running so I can shed some of the pounds I’ve gained doing work and school non-stop for the past year and a half.

Well thats about it, hopefully this post will be a good place to revisit my goals and see if I can meet them all while I’m out of classes.

So classes ended last night; our group did a presentation on a new product concept for my company Local Matters. It went really well, even got a few good ideas for the product from my classmates and professor. However, I think we could have done a bit better in two areas:

• Market Size - We had some rough numbers of number of movers but didn’t go into how many Realtors were out there. We also didn’t project how much of the market we hoped to capture in order for the product to be viable.
• Financials - I think having a break even point and also some idea of how that equates to market capture rates would be good. Also some specific monitization numbers as far as what we would expect to charge realtors, how much ad revenue we could expect for each product in the customers hands.

I might try and work on these items a bit more as I have time. Almost seems like one could take this idea and spin it off into a company!

So I was reading Marc Andreessen’s blog today and noticed a post that his company, Ning was hiring. I thought I’d poke my head in and see what they had going on and ran across a position for Product Manager; a career change I’ve been investigating since I started my MBA program. What astounded me was the line at the bottom of the posting:

Qualifications

• Passionate about creating great software that people use
• Experience developing and launching new online services
• Intuitive sense for feature design: ability to think through every aspect of the experience and make good decisions
• General understanding of web technologies (e.g. AJAX, CSS, Flash, Streaming Media), how they’re implemented/served, and how they fit together
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Entrepreneurial spirit and pace. Thrive in a dynamic, fast-moving environment
• BA/BS degree. Please no MBAs.

I’m not sure what to make of that comment. Can anyone shed some light on why a company would so plainly reject people with an MBA? I suppose it is Silicon Valley; applying rational logic rarely seems to work in that dimension.

Well its official. I’ve been sucked into the Facebook vortex. My company, Local Matters just finished and released our first Facebook application, called ‘Go Where?‘. The app was developed by myself and a few others (including Jay over at Bar Diver) at Local Matters. The idea was conceived by our Marketing director, one of the founders of The Onion. Go Where? essentially revolves around sending people to places from fictional spots like ‘An Elderly Singles Cruise’ to actual addresses that are shown as maps on your friend’s profile.

It should be interesting to see where this goes; we’ve put a lot of effort into it and I think its a great looking and functional application. Keep an eye out for future updates, its exciting to be involved in the Facebook revolution!

Mashable has an article up about the app and our CEO Perry Evans has some things to say about it in his blog.

There have also been a couple of Facebook articles out today; one in Business Week on the creators of ‘Sticky Notes’, Tech Stars graduates J-Squared Media. O’Reilly also released a report about the ‘long-tail marketplace’ that is the Facebook application sphere.