Introducing 321 Catapult

We are motivated primarily by the great deal of evidence illustrating that students can make great leaps in their understanding of their creative and leadership abilities through one-on-one attention from skilled tutors and entrepreneurs working in support of classroom instructors. 321 Catapult is dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Beginning in January 2009, we provide drop-in tutoring, field trips, and in-schools tutoring, help for English language learners, and assistance with student publications. All of our free programs seek to strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice.

The Origin of 321 Catapult

321 Catapult is inspired by a tutoring center founded by Bay Area writer Dave Eggers that is run by a small regular staff along with hundreds of volunteers and professionals. The center offers adult writing workshops, scholarships, drop-in tutoring for students, and in-classroom visits, among other educational activities. The above programs are all free, and are funded by various efforts, including adult seminars run in the evenings, where panels of established writers discuss topics such as writing and publishing a novel, or creating your own magazine. Other fundraising efforts include sponsored mustache-growing contests, an annual comedy night.

The Pirate Store

The tutoring center founded by Eggers runs San Francisco’s “only independent pirate supply store.” Located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, the store is the front entrance of the tutoring center and has the look and feel of an authentic pirate shop. The store sells pirate clothing, eye patches, compasses, spyglasses, pirate dice, skull flags, and secret treasures. It features handmade signs, scattered around the store, offering tongue-in-cheek wisdom, such as “Uses for Lard” (#5: “Lard Fights”) and “Guidelines for New Shipmates” (#4: “No forgetting to swab”).

Project Based Learning

The tutoring programs at the San Francisco tutoring center almost always end with a finished product, such as a newspaper, a book, or a film. This teaching model, known as project-based learning, encourages students to collaborate and to make creative decisions, and gives them ownership over the learning process. Working toward a goal, the students are inspired to revise until their work is perfect. They leave with new skills and a newfound passion for writing. And then they come back. Maybe they’ll make a movie, or polish a college-application essay. We offer all of the above services for free serving families who could not otherwise afford the level of instruction their children receive.

The Net Effect

The tutoring center founded by Dave Eggers is the sole inspiration for 321 Catapult. Founded by Anthony Deloso in early 2008, 321 Catapult was envisioned after Deloso flew from Raleigh, North Carolina to San Francisco, California and experienced the pirate store and the tutoring center first hand. Deloso met with Eggers in the downtown tutoring center and they discussed how Deloso could build something similar, but with resources devoted to entrepreneurship in tandem with writing.
Eggers supported the idea and 321 Catapult was born.

Dave Eggers’ TED Talk

Here are a couple simple rules that will help you leave your audience wanting more.

Rule One: You First. Slideshow Last. 

Many speakers seem to think they can prepare a memorable talk by creating some slides. Never start with the slides. Start with nothing but yourself. Leave the slides for last. The slides in your presentation are about visual story-telling that complements your presence and speaking. If you can’t speak, you’ll be standing next to slides that dwarf you and the message you are trying to deliver. People are more easily engaged by looking into the eyes and hearing the measured voice of another human being, not by reading a couple bullet points on a slide.

Not a gifted speaker? Don’t worry. Practice your stories before you deliver them in front of an audience. Use a camera. Use a mirror. Use the eyes of another person… when you see a glimmer you know you’re getting through. Tell your story to your friends and family. Afterwards, ask them what they thought. Let your audience tell you where your storytelling is lacking. Then ask your audience how you might improve. Most people will jump at the chance to critique your speaking skills. Try it.

Rule Two: It’s Not A Script.

The majority of the presentations that I have witnessed have been half-hearted narrations of the contents of each slide. As soon as I realize that the human being in front of me is just reading the text on the screen, I begin to read ahead and tune them out. Most people will begin to read faster than the presenter can speak. The result is that the speaker has marginalized their own presence. They have become an annoyance, an echo of the audience’s thoughts. Don’t read from the slides. Instead, tell a story and let the slides complement your words.

Rule Three: Tell A Story

For rule three I’ll refer to the an article written by master storyteller and marketer, Seth Godin.

Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.

A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.

Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety or a shortcut. The promise needs to be bold and audacious. It’s either exceptional or it’s not worth listening to.

Great stories are trusted. Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left. No one trusts anyone. People don’t trust the beautiful women ordering vodka at the corner bar (they’re getting paid by the liquor company). People don’t trust the spokespeople on commercials (who exactly is Rula Lenska?). And they certainly don’t trust the companies that make pharmaceuticals (Vioxx, apparently, can kill you). As a result, no marketer succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.

Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.

Great stories happen fast. First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for.
Most of all, great stories agree with our world view. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

Rule Four: Start in the Midst of Uncertainty

Start in the middle of the action. Grab your audience’s attention. Then confuse them and hint at an explaination. In television, the TV show Lost begins with several characters crash-landing on an island. Over the course of several seasons of the show, we learn about the characters through both flashbacks and flashforwards.

Rule Five: Your Photos Bring Your Story to Life

A good speaker never directly looks at the screen while his visuals flash behind him. He holds a remote in his hand and carefully advances the slides as the storyline moves forward. Hold eye contact with your audience. Use your words (and your carefully practiced remote usage).

Quick notes on choosing photographs:

Use photos that convey meaning.
Use photos that connect with your audience on an emotional level.
Use photos that take up the whole screen and immerse your audience in a new world.

Rule Six: Explain Something Unexpected

From a word-of-mouth perspective, it’s virtually impossible to discuss an idea that is 5% better than the norm. People talk about the exceptions, the unexpected, the highlights. Give your audience something to talk about. Give your audience something they will never forget.

Rule Seven: Respect Your Audience’s Attention

Adult learners can keep tuned in to a lecture for no more than 15 to 20 minutes at a time, and this at the beginning of the class. In 1976, A. H. Johnstone and F. Percival observed students in over 90 lectures, with twelve different lecturers, recording breaks in student attention. They identified a general pattern: After three to five minutes of “settling down” at the start of class, one study found that “the next lapse of attention usually occurred some 10 to 18 minutes later, and as the lecture proceeded the attention span became shorter and often fell to three or four minutes towards the end of a standard lecture. A study done at Indiana University in 1996 confirmed that students’ attention spans are about 15-20 minutes maximum during teaching lectures.

You can prolong attention spans by periodically giving your audience a rest. This can be done by telling a story, giving a demo, or doing something else that gives the brain a break. An analogy to what you are doing is running hard for a few minutes, taking a break, then running hard again. However, just as you will typically not be able to run for as long after the break you cannot expect the renewed attention span to last as long after the “break”. In fact, count on having only a couple of minutes.

Rule Eight: Stand Still, Use Your Words Carefully, and Wield Silence Like Darkness.

When you move around, you distract the audience from your message. The audience concerns themselves with your movement and is always wondering where you are going or why you are moving. Only move to emphasize a point or focus the audience’s attention on you instead of the message or slides.

Talk in at a steady measured pace. Don’t talk too fast, it gets exhausting for the audience to keep up. Only speak quickly for emphasis or to make asides.

Silence is your cliffhanger ending. It leaves your audience waiting for the conclusion and sharpens their attention. A carefully placed pause is the most powerful weapon in your speaking arsenal. Use it to tease your audience, to make them want to scream, “Tell me already!”

Rule Nine: In the End… Create Action.

Your presentation has a point… right? You’re hoping to inspire some sort of action or reaction from the audience. Is there something that your audience can do to follow up on the message you’ve conveyed to them? If so, make a big deal of it at the end of your presentation. Make your audience want to jump out of their seat and get started as soon as they can. Spend a lot of time crafting a memorable and actionable ending. If nothing else, display your contact information so that your audience can follow up if they are compelled to do so.

Rule Ten: Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. Read more on Guy’s blog.

Rule Eleven: Emulate Good Speakers, Then Derive Your Own Style

In this presentation Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Getting Social: Salento Flickr Meeting in Lecce, Italy

More Bang For Your Buck

According to the Forrester Research Report, word of mouth strategies such as blogging and social networking will withstand the estimated 3.9 cut in advertising spending in 2009.

In the previous economic downturn Internet advertising was looked on as foolish. In the 2001 recession, US advertising dropped 9% and Internet advertising plummeted 27%, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Marketers turned to tried-and-true media in droves. Why will marketers turn to social media now?

“Last time around, there was a lot of mindless investment in online,” said Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. “People were dong it because their competition was doing it or because it looked cool. Those are good reasons to stop doing it when money tight.”

Now, many companies are dicovering that social media applications can be useful and cost effective marketing tools. For example, Forrester found that Procter & Gamble’s BeingGirl.com, an online community for adolescent girls, is four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media.

Soaring Growth

A study conducted by Netpop Research found that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have been growing at an average of 93 percent annualy since 2006. Facebook alone has soared in popularity, growing by 500 percent between 2006 and 2008.

“Social media will play the same role in this recession that movies played in the Depression,” said Cate Riegner, Vice President of Research at Netpop Research, “The growth of social networking is still accelerating and the bonds consumers are developing with friends and groups of like-minded people are just beginning to shape behaviors.”

Facebook to Face

SMM is a solid marketing strategy, but make sure not to stop short of the real world. In a recession communities will turn inward, travel shorter distances, and look to their neighbors, family, and friends to share in their bad times and — if you’re marketing team is lucky (and smart) — convey the virtues of your product or service.

“In a down market, people want to socialize. Sites like Meetup.com are going to boom during this recession.”, writes Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, in an email to startup companies and venture capitalists.

Engage your local community. Throw events. Make people happy. They will talk.

Put Crayons in Their Hands

OK. Maybe not crayons, but give your market a way to decompress, a method of acting out, or a creative endeavor that may distract them from the hard times.

In the same email referenced above Calacanis continues on to say, “In a down market, people with free time get creative. The blogging boom was not born out of a technological innovation–far from it. In fact, blogging-style software existed for almost 10 years before the boom. Blogging broke out because so many folks were laid off–and pissed off–that they took the time to write down their thoughts.”

Yes. You’re going to have to get creative to help your potential consumers get creative. (or hire us to do it for you)

What You Should Take Away

• Not only is social media here to stay, it is booming.
• Procter & Gamble’s BeingGirl.com is four times effective as a similarly priced traditional marketing strategy.
• Engage your local community (online and offline)
• Help people decompress by giving them a creative endeavor to embark upon.

Great Coders Hire Great Coders

Only good coders can identify fellow star geeks. In his essay The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups Paul Graham spells it out: “So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer? I don’t think there’s an answer. I was about to say you’d have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can’t recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?”

Less is More

A team of two or three great coders who enjoy building software and focus on the end result can build pretty much any system. The team of 20 so-so engineers will not get far. The mythical man-month book debunked the notion of scaling by adding more coders to any project. The truth is that most successful software today is built by just a handful of good engineers. Less is more applies equally to code and the number of people working on it.

FizzBuzz

The developer who writes http://imranontech.com/ created a simple test to help screen out applicants that may be misrepresenting their ability to program. Imran writes:

After a fair bit of trial and error I’ve discovered that people who struggle to code don’t just struggle on big problems, or even smallish problems (i.e. write a implementation of a linked list). They struggle with tiny problems.
So I set out to develop questions that can identify this kind of developer and came up with a class of questions I call “FizzBuzz Questions” named after a game children often play (or are made to play) in schools in the UK. An example of a Fizz-Buzz question is the following:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

FizzBuzz Performed

Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%.

Joel Sposky writes:

…when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you’re hiring the top 0.5%?

“Maybe.”

No. You’re not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn’t hire.

They go look for another job.

That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he’s the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they’re getting the top 0.5% when they’re actually getting the top 99.9801%.

Takeaway Points

• Great coders hire great coders
• Good coders hire worse coders
• Screen all applicants with simple questions first (so that you don’t waste your own time)
• You’re not hiring the top 1%
• Don’t hire a 20 person team
• Take the time to hire a small, but talented, team.

A Paralyzed Target Market

As Psychologist Barry Schwartz notes in his book The Paradox of Choice, many developed nations have become societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before. His argument is that infinite choice is paralyzing and exhausting to the human psyche.

In a market of abundance consumers have a wide array of choices in each purchasing decision. A consumer will make a purchase when one or both of the following conditions are present:

1. A customer is comfortable choosing your offering after reaching their threshold of product research.
2. The perceived pain of using your product or service outweighs their current increase in discomfort sustained without your product.

We’ll get back to these two conditions in a moment.

Create A Customer Profile

Assembling a customer profile will allow you to assign characteristics to a concrete mental visualization of your average target customer. A customer profile is an analysis undertaken to gain insight into a given customer base. It seeks to understand the key factors that determine who is and, conversely, who is not a potential purchaser of a your product or service.

There are four widely accepted ways of dividing your market into market segments (with the aim of creating a customer profile):

1. Demographic Profiles - Potential customers are identified by criteria such as age, race, religion, gender, income level, family size, occupation, education level and marital status. Choose those characteristics of your demographic target market that relates to the interest, need and ability of the customer to purchase your product or service.
2. Behavioristic Profiles - Information is gathered about what was purchased, how much was spent, when was the last purchase, etc.
3. Pyschographic Profiles - Profiles on your market’s lifestyle, their attitudes, their beliefs, their family stage, market trends, status seeking, etc.
4. Geographic - Where do your customers live, work, or play?

The Most Important Consideration: Who Does Your Customer Aspire to Be?

After you’ve assembled market segmentation research your next goal is to create a profile of your target customer. Give your target customer a name, a place of birth, a hairstyle - the more detailed your target profile is the better off you will be. The most effective target profiles can be assembled by citing characteristics of well known characters in movies or television shows. At this point you’ve exhausted all of your creative abilities on determining the characteristics of your target customer. Take ten more minutes to write a single paragraph describing a typical day in your target customer’s life.

Most books, blog posts, and business school professors will STOP at this point, leading you to believe that your advertising now just needs to be created in such a way that it addresses your target customer. At Beacon & Milestone we are firm believers that most purchasing decisions within societies of abundance are dependent on the goals and aspirations of your target market, NOT the characteristics of your target market. Was all of that work for nothing? No.

Wear Their Shoes

This next exercise will allow you to nurture a successful marketing strategy that your potential customers will pine after. You’ve created your target customer and a description of their typical day. Now we’ll create a profile of your target customers aspirations. Who do your target customers idolize? Who do they want to be? What would their ideal picture of their life include? Answer these questions in a few short paragraphs.

Putting Theory in Action

Combining the knowledge created in the exercises above will give you a substantial competitive edge. Remember a customer will make a purchase if one or both of these conditions are present:

1. A customer is comfortable choosing your offering after reaching their threshold of product research.
2. The perceived pain of using your product or service outweighs their current increase in discomfort sustained without your product.

Align your target customer’s comfort with their aspirations and you will have a decent chance of making sales.

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