The DigMyData Blog

I used to love ideas. I could daydream with the best of them (and on occasion still do). But the act of taking DigMyData (originally BigBrassBand) from idea to concept to beta to early product and eventually to a mature product and company has shown me that ideas are a minuscule part of launching and running a business. Effort, patience, and determination are what pulls it all together (wish I had much more of all three of those).

Hugo Lindgren, the editor of the NY Times Magazine, writes:

Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up. Magazines give me a healthy, satisfying amount of creative license, as well as a very defined responsibility. Journalism keeps my imagination from flying off into the ether. At the core of everything is reporting, a real event. And editing allows me to collaborate with people whose talents make up for my weaknesses, especially writers who don’t seize up at the sight of a blinking cursor.

Mr. Lindgren goes on to describe how John Lasseter of Pixar creates movies:

 Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Ideas are wonderful – but they are only the beginning. Go be wrong! (and then do it right)

In the 1989 film “Back to the Future II”, Doc McBrown takes Marty McFly to the distant future – October 21, 2015 – to help prevent Marty’s children from ending up in jail. Marty sees a holographic sports report of the Cubs beating Miami for the World Series.

Note that when the film was released in 1989, there was no MLB team in Miami. While the writers were not attempting to forecast the future of professional baseball, they knew that  Miami was one of the only major cities in the U.S. without a baseball team. Sure enough, the Marlin’s expansion came to Miami just 2 years after the movie was released. Cubs fans: keep hope! Despite your abysmal 2012 finish, your 104  year drought (the longest in U.S. major sport history) will come to an end in 3 years. Maybe. Probably not.

The truth is, all data in life is in the rear-view mirror. To look into the future, we rely on our understanding of the past. But what if our magic-8 ball is pointing us in the wrong direction?

For example, from Nate Silver’s new book The Signal and the Noise:

Since World War I, no Democrat had won the White House without carrying West Virginia—until, in 2008, Obama won big nationally without coming close in coal country.

From the same article:

“In 2008, Silver’s general election forecast, while perfectly sound, was only a marginal improvement on crudely averaging a bunch of opinion polls. Where he really stood out was in the Clinton-Obama primaries where the unprecedented contours of the race were ruining pollsters’ models. Silver was able to see that in this case, state-level demographic information about race, age structure, and educational attainment could drastically improve forecasts. Putting it together took math, but this was fundamentally a substantive conjecture—and a good one—about the underlying structure of American politics.”

To put it into our own math: Data + deep understanding of the context = accurate forecasting.  DigMyData’s forecasting model is more than taking last year’s numbers and adding 20%.

DigMyData’s will give you the numbers; add your context and make great decisions.

When Balsamiq founder (and DigMyData advisor) Peldi Guilizonni was approached by Bob Walsh to publish a series of interviews with Mockup users, he was a little hesitant:

“We really appreciate it when other people say nice things about the tool we so lovingly build, but we’re naturally shy about doing so ourselves.

Being humble and genuine are values that are at the core of our company since the beginning, so I was afraid that publishing a set of interviews would come across as too “marketing-y”, too pushy.”

Luckily for all of us, Peldi instead decided to view it as a learning opportunity, both for the customers and for his company to understand the user experience.

DigMyData’s own Mark Smith and Adam Wride are one of the nine featured interviews in the free ebook: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2012/02/15/ebook/