We see the world in terms of stories, we love them, so much that we make a living telling them. We help creative people (that's you) tell better stories using the web.
We think good ideas want to be online, and we help them get there. We create holistic strategies that combine design and development with marketing and monetization.
When you leave us, we want you to go with your own story to tell and a platform to tell it well.
steve@crossinggaps.com
quang@crossinggaps.com
nate@crossinggaps.com
Light Reading
Be willing to fail - Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference
There are a few prerequisites to inventing…. You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can’t do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation…. You typically don’t get misunderstood for sustaining innovation.
- Jeff Bezos (via tedr)
This point is relevant not only for marketers but for product designers of all stripes. You have to be epic, you have to do the “hard thing,” that someone else can’t or won’t do.
Your products are predictable. Your insights are recycled. You don’t bring surprise with you when you enter a room.
That’s why people are ignoring you.
Which used to be fine, because you could just buy attention for your brand or your company or your sales efforts. But that half-price sale on attention is now over.
This is one of the things I love about entrepreneurship. You’re encountering new challenges, and you have to learn at a very fast rate.
You can only work for the people that you like
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.
- Milton Glaser: Ten Things I Have Learned
As entrepreneurs our job is to strive towards solving Hard and Very Hard problems, while constantly making our way through trivial ones.
Very Hard is the extreme of hard problems. You’ll often see both words capitalised for emphasis, even in the middle of a sentence. Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
Finished the “Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success” by Penelope Trunk. I’ve been a long-time fan of her blog, and I have to say the book was a great read.
Leverage your core competencies by off-loading jargon.
I am utterly convinced that success as an entrepreneur, a designer, a “creator” is simply a matter of surviving long enough to collect the opportunities you need in order to succeed.
If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don’t! If you want to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost a cinch you won’t. If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost; For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow’s will; It’s all in the state of the mind. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger and faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can.
– Walter D. Wintle
Almost at the end of this building hump.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
- Gilda Radner
“Businesses will live or die on original content…Get down to the essence of what your product solves and write good stories about that and publish them online.” - The New Rules of Marketing & PR (Book)
“People who feel good about themselves produce good results.” - The One Minute Manager (Book)