Embrace Google Maps/Transit

Google transit gives point-to-point directions using public transportation for over 400 cities.  The service especially shines on a mobile device.  Google maps on my iPhone was an indispensable part of navigating the city, helping me figure out exactly where and when to catch the buses.  I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t know their iPhone (and Android and some Blackberry phones) can do point-to-point train/subway/bus directions while incorporating the schedules too!

Get a Bike

Public transportation is great, but renting/borrowing a bike is a must.  Yes, it takes cajones to hop on and conquer the streets of a foreign city, but biking is without a doubt the best way to learn a new city.  You’ll cover much more ground than walking and avoid the headache of parking a car or waiting for public transportation.  Basically, you’ll get more done with your limited time.  And since bikes have zero variable cost, they strongly encourage exploration.  So go get lost on a bike! (but bring along your phone with Google Maps of course)

Connect with the Local Community

A few days before embarking, I asked the Austin Yelp community for suggestions of places to see and things to do.  “NYC Eliter Comin’ to Austin” garnered over 70 super helpful tips like: “6:30pm tuesday is the start of hippy hour at the continental club with the lovely miss toni price.”  Several of Austin’s fantastic Yelp members even sent me personal notes welcoming to the city.  If you weren’t already aware, I’m a big fan of Yelp and find it far and away the best source of hyperlocal information.

See the Heart of a Neighborhood

So you’ve picked a neighborhood to explore.  Great, but where exactly should you start?  Use Yelp to figure out the main commercial streets in a neighborhood!  From the homepage just click ‘search’ (leave the search box blank).  Then filter the list by “Most Reviewed” and maneuver the interactive map around your destination neighborhood.  Red pins will help call out the main streets!  Around the UT Austin campus, Guadalupe Street stood out as the clear winner (see picture on left).  This feature also works really well from Yelp’s fantastic iPhone app.

Find Must-See Popular Hotspots

Again, click ‘search’ on Yelp.com and leave the search box blank.  Setup the filters to sort by “Most Reviewed.”  This will show all Yelp listings in that city ranked by popularity.  For Austin, that includes Home Slice, Uchi, Guero’s, Polvo’s, and the flagship Whole Foods Market store.  In NYC, this list features Shake Shack, Magnolia Bakery, Ippudo, Pommes Frites, Katz’s Delicatessen, Grimaldi’s, Lombardi’s, and the Chicken & Rice Halal Cart at 53rd/6th.  You could certainly do worse as a tourist…

Find Weird Local Stuff

Most people know Yelp for its restaurant and bar listings.  But their ‘Local Flavor’ category has some seriously cool stuff.  Austin’s Local Flavor included the Cathedral of Junk, a massive three story structure created from decades of junk.  And my insider knowledge of the Bats Under the Congress Avenue Bridge seriously impressed the locals.  In San Francisco, this category led me to the Clarion Alley Murals and also the Seward Street Slides which turned out to be tremendously fun.

Bookmark Now, Retrieve Later

Bookmark places on Yelp.com that look interesting (you’ll need a yelp.com account to do so).  Then, from the Yelp iPhone App you can view those bookmarks on the go.  Best of all, the app shows your bookmarks ranked by proximity to your current location!  This is phenomenally helpful.

Log your Trip and Get Local Recommendations

I checked in on Foursquare at every place I went, despite having no Austin friends using the service.  Why?  Because afterwards I can view a minute by minute log of my trip on the history section of the Foursquare website! Equally cool, foursquare provided me great local recommendations.  Checking in at a random grocery prompted “Go to Green Mesquite and eat BBQ with friends!”  The tip was left by fellow NYC Foursquare user and friend Lee Semel and Green Mesquite was right down the block.  His trip to Austin occurred eight months prior but the virtual breadcrumbs remained!

Keep the Community Involved

Each night I updated the Yelp Forum with my accomplishments.  I also laid out my plan for the following day.  This united the Yelp community around my adventures and was really fun.  “You’re doing more things than most Austinites do in a year” wrote one Yelper. Seeing my plans even spurred Riki M., a former Brooklynite herself, to join me at the Cathedral of Junk.  The kindness of a tight-knit online community like Yelp is amazing.  Riki brought with her the Austin essentials: beer and bug spray.  And our mini picnic was fantastic — albeit buggy.

More Tips?

Since my trip, I’ve discovered plancast, which may prove very useful.  Readers: are there other tech tools I should be taking advantage of? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

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• Golden Skyscrapers and Minimal Viable Products

Apple’s app store taught me that living in New York City is expensive.  How expensive? $1.25 an hour.

Consider that the rent for my (rather modest) Brooklyn apartment is roughly $900 a month including utilities.  There are roughly 30 days in each month, so $900 / 30 days means I’m paying $30 a day and $30 spread across 24 hours in each day means I pay $1.25 an hour.  Ouch.  Suddenly $2.25 per subway ride doesn’t seem all that bad…

Most people I tell about Exit Strategy NYC ask “How much did it sell?”  They phrase the question in past tense.  This is fine for fad-like novelty apps.  But for utility apps like Exit Strategy NYC the question is best phrased in the present tense: “How much does your app sell?” (Marco Arment refers to these types as two different app stores).  Selling apps in the app store is an on-going business.

Apple’s app store has changed the way I look at the world. iPhone app sales figures are available each morning for the prior day.  As a result, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking app sales first thing each day.  But more importantly, I now view the world around me differently: it’s all about rates.

In the manufacturing world, the question is whether a product can be sold at a price and volume high enough to cover production costs.  But many businesses sell products which are almost pure profit.  I’m not just talking about software or service businesses.  Consider your local coffee shop, bar, or video rental shop.  The items they sell are almost entirely profit.  In these cases, the more useful question to ask is can they sell *fast enough*?

The phrase ‘Burn Rate’ is typically applied to pre-revenue startups calculating how long the business can survive (ie their ‘runway’).  But the concept is applicable to all businesses and individuals: Is money coming in faster than it’s draining?  Simply put, is the bathtub filling? Or draining? (the photo is a metaphor by the way…not a picture of my $1.25/hour apartment)

Is that cool new coffee shop in your neighborhood going to succeed?  Consider all the costs as rates.  If their rent is approximately $3000 a month, that’s $100/day.  If they have two full time employees, tack on another $100/day for each.  The owner should make at least $100/day to make the business worth running. So that’s an on-going cost of $400/day.

If the main product being sold is a $2 cup of tea, unless 200 people pass through the doors each day, don’t count on that business staying around too long.

Let’s break that down further.  If the shop is open 10 hours each day, that’s 20 customers an hour.  Or one purchase every three minutes. They better start upselling those croissants real fast..

There are a number of businesses in my neighborhood (specifically places on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill) that I’m afraid won’t exist much longer.  Consider the perpetually empty video store.  If rentals are $4 and it’s a one man business, he’s going to have to cover $200/day to stay afloat assuming he’s willing to work 7 days/week.  Is he doing 50 video rentals a day? It certainly doesn’t look like it.

Businesses aren’t the only thing that should be analyzed this way.  Break anything down into a micro-rate and it really makes you think about ‘value’. I pay roughly $90/month for my AT&T iPhone service, which comes to $3 a day.  Do I get more than $3 of value and enjoyment out of my iPhone each day?  Absolutely. Similarly, my gym costs about $75 each month.  Does considering my gym subscription as a $2.50 daily expense motivate me to get my money’s worth (almost) every day?  Absolutely.

[Continue to part 2]

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!

Originally, I installed this plugin to help me learn more about SEO (search engine optimization).  But it’s been useful in a way I wouldn’t have predicted: knowing the number of inbound links helps me quickly make decisions based on popularity.  It helps separate the signal from the noise.
Let’s say you need an online bookkeeping solution.  You ask friends for a recommendation but get none.  So you google “online bookkeeping solution”.  The results are overwhelming and confusing.  You poke around a bit more and stumble on a Techcrunch article that mentions a bunch: Outright.com, Xero.com, Saasu.com, Lessaccounting.com, Fastdue.com.  How do you decide between them?

You’re a busy person. You don’t want to spend the entire day researching and reading reviews.  You need to pick one quickly and get on your way!  You visit each site and keep an eye on the SEO toolbar which instantly shows you the inbound links for each of the sites:

Outright.com: 2,000 inbound links
Xero.com: 11,000
Saasu.com: 2,000
Lessaccounting.com: 2,000
Fastdue.com: 284

You quickly identify that Xero.com has the most inbound links.  It’s probably the most popular because it’s the best product (this point is discussed in more detail later).  Maybe you do a quick twitter search to double check that people are in fact saying good things about the site.  Everything looks fine.   You sign up.  Decision = done.

Inbound link information is also extremely helpful for figuring out roughly how different competitors size up against each other.  Camelbak versus Nalgene? 31k links versus 6k.   Turbotax vs TaxAct?  340k vs 8k.  Google.com vs Live.com vs Ask.com?  515M vs 66M vs 9M.  Trying to figure out if anyone else has heard of some (seemingly obscure) website/startup that a friend has told you to check out?  Drop.io perhaps?  110k inbound links — “whoaaa, well ok then, I guess drop.io is worth taking a look…”

On a similar note, this information can help you avoid scams and phishing attempts.  If for some godforsaken reason you should land on http://www.ie-internet-explorer.com/landing/ie/ie-internet-explorer-browser.php or http://msie.com, the toolbar shows that these sites both have a total of THREE inbound links.  Obviously, if they were legitimate sites owned by Microsoft they would have a few more links — so you should probably stay away from them.

Quickly assessing the legitimacy of a site is especially important if you arrive via an advertisement.  Anyone can throw up a seemingly legitimate looking website and buy search/banner ads to drive traffic there.  But getting a few thousand links?  That’s a much harder task.

Having information about inbound links at my fingertips help me separate the wheat from the chaff and figure out what’s worthy of my attention and my time and perhaps my credit card number.  It’s basically a lifehack.

Using Popularity to Judge Quality
The decision making process I described above uses popularity as a proxy for measuring quality.  In most cases, popularity is a suitable enough measure for quality, especially when a decision needs to made quickly.  After all, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” This method of decision making does however discourages you from trying anything other than the market leader.  What if second place truly does “try harder” in an Avis sort of way?  What if this method causes you to miss some awesome new website or company that hasn’t received a lot of attention and inbound links yet?

Another issue is that this method reinforces a lock-in situation where the rich get richer.  But Google itself is guilty of this too: the results of the search engine page are largely dependent on inbound links.  More people find the sites with more inbound links.  And then they link to these same sites which leads to a self-reinforcing situation where only the top ranking pages get found — a phenomenon which has been labeled Googlearchy.  (also see the original academic paper that invented that concept/name [pdf])

The truth is that popularity is always used as a filter.  People watch the NYTimes Best-Seller list like a hawk to figure out what to read.  The iPhone Top 25 App list is the key to getting your app noticed — and downloaded.  And popularity is frequently a selling point: automobile companies brag about their “bestselling” models.  Why?  Somehow it’s comforting to know that you’re not alone in your decision to purchase this particular car.  Millions of other people have done it.  They can’t all be morons, right? right?

(P.S.  This is where the sociologists come in.  If you’re interested in this topic — popularity as a decision-making tool — read some of the research of Duncan Watts, a former sociology professor of mine at Columbia.  He has one particularly interesting experiment where researchers tweak how ‘popular’ different songs are in an fake online music store and test the relationship between preceived quality and stated popularity.  Full research paper is here: Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market [pdf])

Possibly Related Posts:

• Young Entrepreneurs and B2B Startups: Doomed to Fail?
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