Closer To The Ideal

I am looking for an investor who might be interested in seeing the creation of the best site on the web for yoga. The model for what I’m thinking of is iHanuman.

The business model is straightforward: many people fall in love with a particular yoga teacher, and they want a way to follow that teacher, even when separated by time or geography. Often, people will go somewhere far away, to attend a weekend yoga workshop, or perhaps they go to a month long retreat. When they get home, how do they continue to learn what that teacher has to teach? This web site aims to fill that gap.

I was the lead programmer on iHanuman. I learned some important lessons while building that site, and so I think if I had a second chance to build such a site, I could do a much better job.

For instance, there are some technical issues that can be improved. iHanuman was written in PHP, which does not support Unicode – the lack of that support makes it difficult to support text from other languages. iHanuman has had sales in Spain, Sweden, India and other countries. International language support is important. Therefore I propose that the new site be written entirely in Ruby on Rails. Since Rails supports Unicode, foreign language support will be easy.

Another lesson I’ve learned, both from iHanuman and The Second Road, is that finding a good team of writers is crucial. It’s writers that initially pull people to a site, build traffic, and draw the attention of other web sites, who then might link to you. It’s important to hire writers who already have weblogs with established audiences. One thing I’ve learned is that when you hire such writers, and they start writing on your site, they bring their audience with them. Thus, hiring such writers is the quickest way to jump start an audience for your new site. For a site that focuses on yoga, it would be important to hire writers who have already proven their passion for yoga, spirit and health. They’d need to already have reputations for writing well about these topics.

iHanuman cost about $50,000 to build. The new site could be build for somewhat less. I was a major part of the costs of iHanuman but for the new site I’d be willing to work for free, in exchange for equity in the final business. Also, a great deal of money was spent building the video player that is in use on that site, but the same player (or somehting similar) can now be used for free.  [UPDATED: 05-01-08 - I've new information about this. The Flash player I'm thinking of is not free. However, licensing it, or something like it, would only cost a fraction of what it cost to develop it in the first place.]

I think to launch such a site would cost about $25,000. Some of that would go to design work, and some of that would go to hiring good writers, and a small portion of that would have to pay for a staffer who would actually add in the videos to the database.

Three things would have to come together for the new site to be successful:

1.) The right tech team (design/programming)

2.) The initial capital

3.) Someone with deep connections inside the yoga community

I believe I can take care of #1. Over the years I’ve worked with many talented designers and programmers, and I feel confident I could pull together the right team.

The ideal investor would solve both #2 and #3 but such individuals are rare, so I assume that #2 and #3 will be answered by different people. iHanuman was blessed with the dedicated committement of two people who both work as yoga instructors. The new site would need to be pushed forward by someone with a similar kind of energy.

The aim of any new site should be, simply, to be the best yoga site on the web. It should be a site that pulls together the best writers and the best videos. It should be a site that is broad enough to encourage discussion on all related fields: health, mind, body, spirit. The team that built iHanuman doesn’t seem interested in promoting it. The site has been up for 8 months now and nothing has been done with it. It makes a few sales a week, but I believe it has a vast, untapped potential. If you’re interested in seeing the creation of a site that captures the full potential of becoming a yoga mecca online, please contact me:

lkrubner at geocities.com [of course, replace the "at" with "@"]

We are using a new Hewlett Packard machine running Windows Vista. The machine has 3 gigs of RAM – the stuff of science fiction circa 1990. Dual core Athalon processors, 2.6 GHz. The machine is two months old.

I right-click on the Desktop. From the context menu that appears, I choose “New”, then “Folder”. Then I type in the name of the new folder. Then I hit “Enter”.

Explorer becomes unresponsive while it creates the new folder. Counting slowly, I am able to count to 48 before Explorer comes back to life. 48 seconds to create a new folder. On a Mac, circa 1991, using System 7, I recall this same task taking from .5 seconds to maybe 2 seconds when things were bad. On a Unix machine, circa 1980, my guess is that the mkdir command took about .1 seconds to execute.

I am recreating a folder that I just deleted, and perhaps there is some kind of memory of the old folder that is causing problems. Whatever the reason, this is bad programming.

Windows Vista is a unmitigated disaster. No one should buy this product ever. And no company should be legally alowed to sell it.

I used to work at Category4, and yesterday they released a new WordPress theme. Any of you who are big supporters of Barack Obama (as we are) should give it a look.

This looks like a good site. I’ll post a link so I can remember to go back and check it out later.

These are articles that I’ve often spoken of, and often copied the URLs to emails that I’ve sent to others, so I shall record them here, so in the future I shall only need to point people here.

The illusion of agreement:

“We should build a house!”

“Yes! A house!”

But what kind of house do they mean?

The interface as a spec: including stories inline:

Sometimes designing the static states takes more time, and doesn’t quite represent reality, as well as a brief note about how the functionality works. The key is to make this note in context — right next to the interface element its describing. The combination of real visuals and a brief contextual note shrink the chances of misunderstanding to near zero.

Designing an interface: from sketch to screen

The screen mostly followed the sketch, except for the controls in the upper right and the description field. That’s fine, because at step two those details Didn’t Matter. Coding the real thing, I found room for all three of those pieces in the top-right, and that worked better.

Thinking and sketching took me 10 minutes. Creating the real screen and updating the code can take two or three hours. That lopsided pattern, with short make-believe-time on the left and long build-time on the right, is always a good sign that you’re making progress. Ideas and paper are necessary, but they’re destined for the trash bin. So burn through them and focus on the good stuff.

The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites – simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:

 If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.