I have always been impressed by the fact MIT gives away some of their course materials.
Today I stumbled upon an article that lists 8 free courses for entrepreneurs that you can find on the MIT website.
Thank you MIT, thank you College Mogul.
Now it is a matter of finding the time and the discipline to study them: one more item in my Quandrant II todo list.
Add comment August 31st, 2009
Earlier during the year, I read a book called “Four hour work week” from Tim Ferriss where I first learned about the concept of personal virtual assistant.
Some people make a living out of being virtual assistants and helping busy people with their everyday tasks (such as organizing a meeting, doing some online research, calling someone, etc…)
Depending on the skill set and the country of origin, the cost of hiring a virtual assistant can be as low as 5 US$ an hour.
I regularly reviewed my tasks to see whether I should hire a VA, but unfortunately very few tasks were delegatable to a virtual assistant. First of all, many of my time-consuming tasks need to be in french and the virtual assistants market is almost inexistent in french (or not at 5$ / hour).
I am an extremely busy person. It has been almost a year now I am that busy. So busy that for the first time in my life I don’t do sports on a regular basis and I see fat on my belly (for the ectomorph I am, this is a shocker), and I have to turn down social invitations I am craving to go to.
Paradoxically, time is what I cherish most. And the reason why I am so busy is because I want to earn more time on the long term.
Because I got burnt out by my self-inflicted busy-ness, because I realized my time was the primary bottleneck of my productivity, I started looking for alternatives.
Recently, a new company generated some buzz online, TimeSvr. They offer a three day free trial, and then for 70 US$ a month, you can submit an unlimited number of tasks that would take under 15 minutes to a pool of virtual assistants.
I registered for the free trial to see whether a virtual assistant could be useful and whether I should hire a dedicated virtual assistant.
The first day, I sent 15 tasks I wanted them to do, from internet research, to answering questions about them.
I found that it is hard to find things an other person you don’t know could do. I started asking to do some research on internet. “Please find me where I can buy barefoot shoes in Australia” “Please find me alternative products to the mobile printer PoGo” etc…
Unfortunately, the results I was getting from the virtual assistants weren’t very accurate. And usually, they were returning me the first result of a google search.
I think the 15 minutes limit is too constraining. If a task can be done under 15 minutes, it is faster for me to do it myself (I will be assured of the accuracy) rather than taking the time to describe it correctly and taking the time to review it, without being assured to get the results I wanted.
For example, for the task “Please find me three shops where I can buy barefoot shoes in Australia (online or not)”, I got back three links from the US.
I stopped the trial after the three days.
Although I heard about Amazon Mechanical Turk only a few weeks ago, it has been around for several years already. Requesters submit tasks publicly, workers do them and get paid if the requester approves the task.
What is remarkable with mturk is that it has an API that allows developers to submit tasks programmatically. FeedbackArmy takes advantage of the API to provide cheap usability testing.
The second remarkable thing about mturk is that workers are willing to do things for almost nothing (could be 0.01 cents to leave a comment on a blog). There are three categories of workers: those who work for money (not enough for a living but enough to pay books or gifts), those who work for fun (some tasks can be entertaining), those who work out of boredom.
I decided to submit a first task. In short it was “Help me find a asp.net developer” for 10$. Although some workers are currently working on it, I haven’t received any results yet.
Because somehow I see a huge potential behind mturk, I decided to learn more about the turkers (workers). This is why I decided to create a community for Turkers to allow them to connect with each other and to share any tips or experience they want to share: Social Turker
Usually, the hardest part of building up a community is the beginning.
When the forum is empty, why would someone join your community? I answered this question with a second task for Turkers: “Please join Social Turker and write something relevant in the forum” for 0.01 cents. Because this social network has been created for them, I feel no guilt for paying someone 0.01 cents to do something. And, if they don’t want to do it, they won’t do it.
After a few days, 23 people have joined. This is not bad, this is not great either (I was expecting 700 people in the first week, a bit ambitious). I can see in the mturk stats that a lot of the workers have a look at the task and return it. I am not sure what “returning a task” means yet. I will probably create the same task with a higher pay-out to see if I get a better conversion rate.
Then, came a second crisis. After having spent my whole (sunny)weekend working, I couldn’t managed to do the progress I wanted. I felt very frustrated. This is when I decided to hire someone fulltime. I decided to convert my savings into time for me by hiring someone to help me develop my ideas.
I posted several ads in various websites and I am amazed at how many answers I get. I got more than a hundred answers of developers willing to work with me. More than half of them are actually companies specialized in outsourced development. I am thrilled to have to filter these offers, it means I have a higher probability to get a good quality developer (actually, I am searching for two). I have sent to some candidates a mini project to do to see the quality of their code, I am waiting for their answers. The great thing about using these websites is that you can read the feedbacks left by previous customers. Anything under 90% of positive feedback is not acceptable for my criteria.
Hopefully this week I will find my first two employees.
I will keep searching for a virtual assistant whose mother tongue is french (because most of my users are french at the moment) and I will start looking for someone who can improve the marketing strategy used to promote my facebook applications. I contacted the University of Sydney to see whether some students in Marketing would like to experiment with a userbase of over a million users.
12 comments May 3rd, 2009
As a French living in Australia, I have two social networks speaking two languages, french and english. I always wondered whether I should write my online content in english or in french.
Although until now it made sense to keep my mother tongue because I was using my blogs as a way to keep connected with my family and my friends back in France, today I feel I should broaden my audience and try to share more than just personal information. Facebook has replaced blogs when it comes to sharing glimpses of life. Now I want to have an online presence.
This is a new double challenge for me.
First, writing in english is harder than writing in french. My personnality doesn’t come across as easily. And even after three years in Australia, I am pretty sure I still make grammatical mistakes. Unfortunately I am not aware of them so I can’t correct myself unless is kind enough to correct me.
Second, I need to learn to share. I am not the kind of person that naturally shares whatever goes through his mind on a website. I still struggle understanding why Twitter is such a success.
My problem is not that I have nothing to share, I simply don’t have the habit to click “Share” on whatever article I find interesting or the habit to leave a comment when I could add some value in a discussion.
But I know my online presence can and will help creating new opportunities for me and my future businesses.
So here I am english speaking readers, I hope you will find some value in my writings!
Add comment May 3rd, 2009
Mon ami François m’a conseillé de lire le livre “the dice man” de George Cockcroft. C’est l’histoire d’une personne qui déprime et s’ennuie dans sa vie, et qui après une soirée avec ses amis, trouve un dé. Alors pour donner un peu de piment à sa fin de soirée, il décide de laisser au dé le choix de sa prochaine action. Si le dé fait entre 2 et 6 il va se coucher, mais s’il fait 1, il ira sonner à la porte de la voisine et la violer. Il tombe sur 1, bien entendu.
La suite du livre explique comment il laisse sa vie gouverner par le dé et comment il retrouve le plaisir de vivre dans l’excitation et la “folie”.
Bien sûr, je ne suis pas en train de te dire d’aller voir tes voisins sur un 1, mais je propose ici une méthode pour réapprendre à sortir de la monotonie de tous les jours.
J’ai moi-même utilisé le dé à plusieurs reprises et me suis retrouvé dans des situations très “rafraichissantes” et j’ai constaté des effets positifs sur ma façon de penser. En fait, ce qui fait la force de l’homme-dé, ce n’est pas que sa vie se base sur le hasard, mais qu’il soit forcé à trouver des alternatives à une situation spécifique car le dé a 6 faces, jusqu’à 6 choix à définir pour le prochain lancé.
Par exemple, tu es dans une file d’attente, tu pourrais te dire : de 1 à 3 tu continues à attendre sagement, 4 tu engages la conversation avec ton voisin, 5 tu sors de la file et vas ailleurs, 6 tu hurles sans donner de raison.
La philosophie de l’homme-dé permet de se reconnecter avec soi-même et ses envies et à diminuer l’étreinte des règles sociales. Penser en termes de face de dé change beaucoup le processus de pensée. Au lieu de s’arrêter sur la première action qui vient naturellement à l’esprit, on est encouragé à être créatif et à chercher d’autres idées qui sortent de notre ordinaire.
Je t’invite maintenant à essayer par toi-même.
1. Prends un dé. Si tu n’as pas de dé, prends un livre (tu t’arrêteras sur une page au hasard, et le dernier chiffre du numéro de la page de droite sera le résultat de ton lancé de dé à 10 faces).
2. Maintenant imagine trois options possibles pour ce que tu vas faire après avoir fini de lire cet article (et laisser un commentaire :)) : une action facile, une action différente de ce que tu as l’habitude de faire, et une action complètement folle.
3. Lance le dé et laisse le décider pour toi ta prochaine action
De 1 à 3 : fais l’action facile
De 4 à 5 : fais l’action différente
Sur un 6 : fais l’action complètement folle :)
Que penses-tu du concept de l’homme-dé ? Si tu as lu le livre, comment l’as-tu trouvé ? Personnellement, je ne suis pas allé jusqu’à la fin car je l’ai trouvé un peu répétitif, mais le concept qu’il introduit vaut le détour.
1 comment April 14th, 2009
Dans un récent voyage en France, mon ami Benjamin m’a fait part de son expérimentation en cours, Happy Log. En quelques mots, Happy Log propose une mesure du bonheur basée sur l’auto-évaluation des individus sur Twitter. En se forçant à se demander régulièrement “Que suis-je réellement en train de ressentir ?” (à la place du classique “Que suis-je en train de faire ?”), Happy Log aide à prendre conscience de son état émotionnel. Si le sujet vous intéresse, je t’encourage à lire l’article entier sur le site de Benjamin.
Je participe moi-même à l’expérimentation, et tu peux suivre mes états d’âme sur la zone droite de mon blog.
Happy Log se rapproche beaucoup d’un concept que j’avais imaginé pendant mes années étudiantes: les cogitoramas. Le nom vient du composé de cogito (pensée) et orama (voir). Il s’agit d’une dizaine de mots-clé qui représentent les choses qui ont l’attention d’une personne. Un peu comme une page d’une journal intime, mais simplifié à l’essentiel.
L’usage des cogitoramas a plusieurs avantages:
Quelques années plus tard, j’ai développé un outil web pour pouvoir analyser visuellement mes cogitoramas. Plus un tag était utilisé, plus il était écrit en gros, les tags plutôt négatifs étaient en rouge, les tags positifs en vert. Il y avait même un score global du cogitorama qui représentait mon niveau de bonheur à cet instant (similaire au concept de Happy Log). Voici à quoi un cogitorama ressemble :
Ouvre un notepad, ou prends une feuille de papier, écris en 10 à 15 mots ce qui te vient à l’esprit : les gens à qui tu penses en ce moment, les choses agréables de cette semaine, les choses moins agréables, et même les pensées qui paraissent aléatoires. Essaie de faire cela chaque jour pendant une semaine, je suis convaincu que tu seras étonné par ce que tu découvriras.
Voici le mien pour aujourd’hui :
steve-pavlina benjamin plage facebook blog manque-d-exercice graisse stress camping eduardo
Que penses-tu des cogitoramas ? Laisse-moi un message, cela m’encourage à continuer à écrire :)
3 comments April 10th, 2009
