3 cool things we think you will like

Hey, what are you doing?

I’m being cool, like The Fonz. Eyyyy. If my lovely assistant can just take away my cool.

Why are you being cool?

Because we’re going to show you three cool things, as demonstrated by my cool bubble writing.

Um, before we start, I just wanna say that one of Matt’s jobs is design… Look at this!

It’s cool. D’you know what?-

Even the line spacing here. What’s going on there? And that’s going downhill! Rubbish.

It’s 90s, so these things - what you don’t understand is how cool these things are. I’ll teach you it one day.

Sigh.

So, we like to share some knowledge where we can, and we’ve found some really cool things, that are actually cool, unlike my bubble writing. So the first one is the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. This is one that you brought to us, Chris.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting concept. We’ll put a link to a YouTube video down here, where he explains it better than we ever will. But it’s just how to think about business, and it really is a great tool. So you can either think of yourself as being in a finite game, and you’re looking around you to see what everyone else is doing, and you’re trying to beat your competitors. Or you can be in an infinite game, which is basically you’re just trying to be in business to stay alive and be better than you were yesterday. So thinking about yourself rather than other people. And it’s really helpful.

It really resonated with us, I think, because we were already doing that. We were always trying to improve and make sure that we were better than we were last year, and it’s something that we share with our customers as well, who can often get bogged down looking at their competition, and we try and encourage them to look forward, look ahead, and look at how they can improve and be the best that they can be, without focusing too much on trying to catch up, or get ahead of what their competitors are doing. So it’s a really inspirational thing to watch and get an understanding of how you adopt that sort of mental approach.

Yeah, and I think we’ve grown best when we’ve done that. And like when we first started, we would look at other ‘web designers’ and go, ‘Oh, they’ve got more hits than us,’ or ‘their pages rank better than ours,’ but it’s not really-

Hit counters! Let’s bring back hit counters. This is getting so retro, this particular one.

Animated GIFs.

More bubble writing, that’s what I say.

The second one is MAYA, which stands for Most Acceptable- no. Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Going well.

It is going well. But again, this was something that we could really relate to, so check it out. But the big things we took away from this is how you communicate to your customers, and how you bring them to sort of your way of thinking. So a great example was when we did some logo design work recently, and we got it past every- well, I say we got it past everybody that we sat and explained the journey that we went on to was really behind it, they understood it and everything. But then when it was presented higher up to someone else in the company, they weren’t taken on that same journey, it was just presented to them, out of context, and that was when they kind of went, ‘I don’t really understand this.’ And it’s because you didn’t take them all the way from where they were coming from all the way over to your standpoint. And MAYA explains how you get them into that peak bar part of the bell graph that he talks about.

It’s basically just try not to surprise people with what you do. So if you’re trying to release a new product, don’t come completely out of left field, you need a sort of way, a path to show people that this new thing that you’ve got is gonna be the best way forwards. And there’s a good example about the iPod, and the iPhone. If the iPhone came out just out of nowhere, basically like the Apple Newton, no-one bought it. But once you had an iPod, you could sort of see that, and you’d get an iPod Touch, you could feel that, and then you could just imagine a phone being in the same box so… Yeah, it’s really interesting.

People love new, but people hate new. That’s the basic principle of it. They don’t like what they don’t recognise. And it’s really good when you look at your product design, look at your communication, that you bear MAYA in mind. Great thing to look at.

And the third one is Blinkist, which is a website we’ll put a link to down there, and it’s a great thing where - I’ve read quite a few business books and self-help books and any non-fiction book, but most of them have one or two main points that they’re trying to get across, but they’re trying to fill out an entire book’s worth, and it’s not really worth reading. But Blinkist takes a full book and squishes it down into something that you can read or listen to in about 15 minutes.

Yeah, and I just listen to them instead of listening to the news nowadays on the way to work because it’s just less depressing and makes me happier. So definitely worth looking at. Some really good knowledge held in these Blinkist little short versions of the longer story. So we hope that was useful to you. It was definitely cool, right?

Mm, kinda.

Yeah, well you work that out for yourselves. Bring back bubble writing. And The Fonz.

Eyyy.

Eyyy.