I still remember my first proper VO2max test. The mask that made you feel like you couldn’t breathe. The prickle of the needle every three minutes, drawing blood for a lactate reading. The poster of Lasse Virén — or maybe it was Martti Vainio — on the wall of the lab at the Paavo Nurmi -keskus, the only thing to look at, and so the only thing to keep my mind off the pain. The clock that refused to move. One of the rewards for figuratively dying on that treadmill, besides my aerobic and anaerobic threshold paces, was a number they called VO2max. Oh, how times have changed.

Because now you don’t have to die on a treadmill for it. You finish an easy run, and before your heart rate has even come down, there it is on your wrist: two digits. 52. Or 54. Or, on a bad day — a hot day, a hilly day, a tired-legs day — 51, and something in your chest sinks a little. The number went down. You went down.

Somewhere between that lab and this wrist, we collectively decided that this number is us. It’s on the club WhatsApp. It’s in the Strava comments. It’s the thing the longevity podcast said would decide when you die. VO2max has become the runner’s credit score — a single figure that supposedly ranks your engine against everyone else’s.

It’s a bad number to worship, though. First, the one your watch shows you is of shaky accuracy. Second, even a perfect, lab-measured VO2max — the kind I once bled for — would be close to useless for deciding what to do at training on Tuesday.

What the number actually is

VO2max is the maximum rate at which your body can take in and use oxygen. Measured properly it means a mask, a treadmill, a ramp test to exhaustion, and a machine sampling your breath — “indirect calorimetry,” the actual gold standard.

Your watch does none of that. It runs a regression model: it watches your heart rate against your pace on a run and guesses what the lab would have said. That’s not a criticism of the maths — it’s just important to be clear that the wrist number is a guess about a ceiling, not a measurement of anything you did.

Why it got so hot

Three engines, none of them about running faster.

Wearables compute it by default and gamify it. Garmin puts a VO2max on essentially every running watch and stacks a whole tower of features on top of it. Polar literally titles its guide “VO2max: The Ultimate Training Blueprint,”¹ calls it “the ‘gold standard’ of cardiorespiratory fitness,” and slots you onto a colour-coded ladder toward “Elite.” Apple Watch shows a “Cardio Fitness” number and will actively notify you that it’s low. When a number appears, unbidden, after every workout, on a hundred million wrists, it becomes important by sheer repetition.

The longevity crowd moralised it. Peter Attia’s line that VO2max is “the single greatest predictor of your lifespan”² turned a training-lab variable into a memento mori. (Cardiologist Eric Topol, it’s worth noting, calls that specific claim false³ — the mortality evidence is largely observational, and a 2025 causal-inference study found that genetically-predicted VO2max is “not causally associated with… longevity.”⁴)

Strava turned it into a scoreboard. As one coaching site puts it, VO2max is now “the ultimate ‘bragging rights’ number… thrown around on club runs and Strava comments like a badge of honour.”⁵ Or, more bluntly, the metric has become the measure of the runner.⁶

Problem one: the watch number is imprecise — and biased exactly where you’re bragging

Independent validation is unflattering. A 2026 study of the Garmin Forerunner 245 (Engel, Masur, Sperlich & Düking, in the European Journal of Applied Physiology)⁷ found an overall mean absolute error around 7–8% — but with a twist that matters. For moderately trained runners it was decent (error ~3–4%). For highly trained runners it was poor: the watch underestimated their VO2max by about 6 ml/kg/min — a 9–10% error, with reliability so low the authors told serious athletes not to trust it.

That pattern shows up everywhere. Wearables tend to underestimate the fit and overestimate the unfit;³ across devices the error runs anywhere from ~5% to ~16%, and it’s sensitive to terrain, heat, hydration, your max-heart-rate setting, and optical-sensor quirks.⁸

Notice what that does to the bragging use-case. The number is least trustworthy for the very people who most want to compare it — trained runners — and it systematically sells them short. Two runners comparing wrist VO2max aren’t comparing engines; they’re comparing two noisy, differently-biased guesses.

To be fair: most of these studies conclude the estimate is fine as a personal trend line — good enough to tell whether your own fitness is drifting up or down over months. That’s the honest ceiling on the number’s accuracy. It is a rough, private trend gauge. It is not a ruler you can hold up next to someone else.

Problem two: even a perfect number isn’t a training input

Here’s the part the hype never mentions. Suppose your watch were exactly right. What would you do with it?

Nothing, really. VO2max describes the size of your aerobic engine. It doesn’t tell you what session to run, what pace to hit, or what to fix. You don’t train differently because the number reads 54 instead of 52. You program running from paces, thresholds, and effort — none of which the VO2max score hands you.

And as a target, it’s a dead end for most of us:

• It plateaus. VO2max rises fast in a beginner (which is exactly why apps love it — it moves quickly and looks like progress), then flattens. After that, performance keeps improving through everything else⁹: threshold, economy, durability. “Your engine may not get much bigger — but you can become dramatically better at using it.”
• It doesn’t separate runners — in either direction. Once people are reasonably fit, VO2max values cluster, and the real gaps open up in lactate threshold (how much of the ceiling you can hold, and for how long) and running economy (how little oxygen it costs you to hold a pace). In a now-classic study of elite 10k runners with near-identical VO2max, VO2max barely correlated with race time (r = −0.12), while running economy explained 65% of it.¹⁰ And it runs the other way too: runners with nearly the same race times can carry very different VO2max values.¹¹ The number won’t pick the winner among similar runners, and it isn’t shared by runners of similar ability. It simply isn’t the thing.
• The fastest version of you can have a lower number. Runners routinely set personal bests while their measured VO2max drifts down, because they got more economical and lifted their threshold. The ceiling fell; the useful space under it grew.

It’s largely a gift anyway — like your max heart rate

Even the ceiling isn’t really yours to take credit for. In the HERITAGE Family Study — 481 people put through the same 20-week programme — the improvement in VO2max was about 47% heritable¹² and clustered in families: gains ran from basically nothing to over a litre a minute, non-responders sitting right next to super-responders. Your baseline number, before you trained at all, is just as strongly inherited. A large slice of your VO2max was handed to you at birth.

Which makes ranking runners by VO2max a bit like ranking them by maximum heart rate. Max HR is a fixed, individual quirk — it drifts down with age, barely moves with training, and, crucially, says nothing about fitness: a max HR of 200 doesn’t make you faster than someone at 180, and nobody sane brags about it. VO2max isn’t quite that useless — unlike max HR it’s genuinely trainable, and it does track fitness across a wide range — but as a number to hold up against another runner it carries the same defect: you’re mostly comparing genetic endowments, not who trained smarter.

And it matters least in the sport everyone’s tracking it in

Running has an unusually large efficiency component — biomechanics, elastic recoil, fibre type — and it varies enormously from one runner to the next. That variance is exactly why VO2max is such a weak divider among runners: it gets swamped by economy. In sports where efficiency sits in a narrower band, aerobic capacity tracks performance more tightly; running is the awkward case. (The raw values happen to be highest in cross-country skiers, then runners, then cyclists — but that’s mostly how much muscle each sport drives at once,¹³ not a league table of who’s fitter.)

And look at who actually wins. Norway currently produces the best distance runners and skiers on earth, and their training is built around lactate, not VO2max: Jakob Ingebrigtsen runs his intervals with a finger-prick lactate meter at trackside, holding a 2–3 mmol/l “double threshold”¹⁴ — chasing a metabolic sweet spot, not an oxygen ceiling. Lactate is itself a surrogate marker, of course — but at least it’s an actionable one: it tells you, right there on the track, to speed up, ease off, or stop. Even at the summit of cross-country skiing, the analysis of Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is that he doesn’t necessarily own the field’s highest VO2max;¹⁵ technique and efficiency carry the rest. The number the influencers push hardest is the one the actual champions bother with least.

The strongest counter-argument (and why it doesn’t rescue the number)

The best case for VO2max is a 2026 Sports Medicine re-analysis of Joyner’s endurance model across 888 people,¹⁶ which found VO2max was the single strongest predictor of lab performance markers — explaining 65–76% of the speed at lactate threshold.

Read the fine print, though. That cohort spans recreational to world-class — and VO2max always wins when you’re allowed to compare a beginner to an Olympian. The authors say plainly that within homogeneous trained groups its discriminative power drops, and that the study shows no causation: nothing in it says raising your VO2max makes you race faster. It supports “VO2max tracks fitness across a huge range.” It does not support “your VO2max is the number to train by.”

What to chase instead

If you want to spend your attention on things that actually change how you train and race, look under the ceiling — some are measurable, some are just qualities you build:

• Threshold pace — roughly the effort you could sustain for about an hour. You don’t have to actually run a punishing hour to find it (and there’s no point if you never race that far): a lab lactate test, a short 20–30-minute time trial, or even just the honest “comfortably hard — can only gasp a word or two” feel all get you close enough. It’s your money metric from 10k to marathon, and it responds to training you can plan.
• Running economy — get more speed per unit of oxygen. Volume, strides, strength, running relaxed.
• Durability — how little you fade in the back third of a long race. Increasingly the thing that separates good from great.
• And, you know, your actual race times. The least gameable metric there is.

None of these fit neatly into a wrist notification, which is precisely why they’re worth more than the one that does.

So keep glancing at the VO2max if you like — as a rough, private line on whether your base is trending the right way over a season. Just stop treating it as a verdict, a ranking, or a plan. It’s an error-prone guess at a ceiling you don’t train by, biased against you the fitter you get. The number was never the point. The running is.

References

Imagine the scenario. Two juniors on the sand. The smaller one serves short into the middle. Both stay back. The opponent picks a corner and lands one in the empty front court. Easy point.

“One of you, up!” I call out after the rally. They glance back at me with blank stares.

Two rallies later, her partner serves. Both back again. This time the opposing reception comes off the arms badly and floats back across the net — nobody is there to attack it, and it drops on our side on the first touch. Another point against us.

I have been telling these two the same thing for four weeks. The cones are out. I have drawn the diagram in the sand. I have given the speech about pressure at the net — first calmly, then with what I’d call professional irritation. It works for two points. Then both back again. Always both back.

For most of those weeks I assumed the problem was in them. They weren’t listening, or they were too cautious, or they hadn’t internalised the tactics yet. I would have told you, if you’d asked, that I was working on it.

Eventually I had to admit something less flattering. They were doing the thing that made sense from where they stood. Both back is the safer choice — maximum reaction time, no decisions to make. And in any given rally, the punishment doesn’t come labeled. The opponent picked a corner. Their reception slipped over and nobody was there for it. The hitter timed it well. Each rally has its own visible reason for the loss, and none of those reasons say you should have been at the net. When both-back works out — the hitter mishits, the opponents lose the rally on their own — that doesn’t tell them anything either. The local picture — this rally, this hitter, this set — keeps telling them staying back was fine.

What the local picture hides is the aggregate. The set that drifts over the net and lands, with nobody up to put it away. The set so tight even a low block would be better than no block. The way the hitter takes their time when they know nothing is up there, picks a corner, takes a free swing. A blocker doesn’t have to make contact to do work — just being there changes the opposing setter’s set, the hitter’s swing, the shape of the rally. None of that gets credited to the blocker in the kid’s local picture. Over a session it adds up and costs them. Within any single rally, it’s invisible.

They had also never felt what was good about being at the net. They’d been told. That’s different.

The issue wasn’t that I needed to tell them better. The issue was that telling — any amount, any tone, any volume — was the wrong tool. So I changed the game instead.

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The session

Below is the session — five steps, one court, about an hour. Same court, same kids, different rules. I said nothing about positioning.

A note before you start: if you haven’t already watched the team default to both-back in match play, run 5–10 minutes of normal 2v2 first, with no constraints and no coaching. You need a baseline — and you need clean data to ask honest questions about it later. Once you’ve coached, you’ve poisoned the well.

1. Net touches pay

Normal 2v2 from serve. One rule: if a net-side player on your team touches the ball before you win the rally — block touch, redirect off the hands, anything legal — the point is worth double. No instruction about who goes forward, no technique input, no diagram. Just: net involvement pays.

2. Front space is expensive

Keep 2v2. Add a rule on top of the first: if the receiving team wins a rally with the ball landing in the front third, two points. Both staying back becomes actively expensive — the front court is open and the opponents can see it. The serving team has to solve that problem itself.

3. Pressure zone

Mark a zone roughly 2–2.5m from the net. Bonus on the rally if, by the moment the opponent’s setter touches the ball, one of you is in that zone, and the team either wins or forces an easy ball. “Pressure success” isn’t only blocks — it’s a hitter forced into a roll shot or a pokey instead of a clean swing, a high easy ball back, a defender digging because the front player changed the angle.

4. Triple ball, with a one-touch rule

By the time the first three constraints have done their work, the kids are functional in serve-receive — non-server up, server defending. But junior rallies usually end at the serve — service error or ace. The ones that survive the serve usually end at the first attack. Either way, the transition problem — both players have moved during the rally, the rule no longer tells anyone who’s up — never surfaces, because the rally never gets there.

Triple ball is the standard fix for that. After the served rally ends, the coach feeds extra balls into play to keep practice going past the natural junior endpoint. By itself, it just produces more reps.

To make those extra reps surface the transition problem specifically, layer a rule on top: when the coach throws the free ball to one side, that side gets one touch only. They have to send it back over, not set up a proper attack. The other side, having received a clean ball, sets up and attacks back. The one-touch side now has to defend that attack — the same front-court / back-court work they’ve been learning in serve-receive, except neither player was pre-positioned for it.

What surfaces in the second-ball play is the transition problem: both players moved during the one-touch return, neither is pre-positioned for what comes back. The convention that worked at serve-receive (non-server up) doesn’t tell them who blocks this attack. They have to find another way.

The “another way” depends on how the team blocks. With a designated blocker, it’s trivial — the blocker blocks. With split blocking, a common convention is that whoever just attacked stays forward and blocks the counter; they’re already moving toward the net. Which rule the team picks matters less than that they pick one — and that both players know it before the rally starts. The constraint surfaces the question; the convention is the team’s answer.

5. Fade the rules

Remove the bonuses. Play normal 2v2 — no commentary, no corrections, no scoring tweaks. Watch whether someone goes to the net without being told. The silence is part of the test: any coaching now puts the question back in the verbal channel the whole session was built to escape.

That’s the session. The numbers and bonus sizes are mine — adapt them to the level you’re working with.

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Within a few rallies of the first constraint, the smaller one started drifting toward the net when her partner served — when she was the non-server, the one whose job it is to be up. Not committed. Looking back at her partner, looking at me to see if I was going to say something. I wasn’t.

A few rallies later she was at the net when the opponent attacked. She got a hand on it. Her partner dug what came off. They won. Double.

By the third or fourth time we ran the serve-receive sequence, both of them were going up after their teammate’s serve without thinking about it. Server back, non-server up — the convention they’d been told a hundred times, now happening because the game rewarded it.

How I talked during the session

I said little during play — the constraints did most of the work. What I did say was questions, mostly between games rather than inside them.

Instead of you’re standing too far back: where did the ball want to go — could you have reached it from there?

Instead of watch the hitter’s shoulder: what was she showing you before she hit?

Instead of good block!: what did you see that told you to commit?

Instead of one of you, up! — nothing. The scoring asked the question for me.

The questions take longer than commands. They don’t fix the rally we just played. They are a worse tool for winning the next point. They are the only tool I know for the rally a month from now, when I’m not standing there.

What this doesn’t do

Some kids don’t go forward in session one. Or three. The pattern has variance.

Sometimes both staying back IS the right answer — weak attack, scramble, somebody is gassed. The goal isn’t a rule, it’s a read.

This doesn’t teach blocking technique — hand shape, jump timing, reading the setter’s hand. Separate problem, separate session. What the constraint games teach is the wanting to be there. Everything else assumes the wanting is free, and it isn’t.

Triple ball is moving more slowly than the serve-receive constraints did. The non-server up rule that resolved the easier case doesn’t tell them what to do once the rally has extended past first attack, and the constraints that DO work in that second-ball world are still taking sessions to figure out. The alternative — telling them what to do mid-rally — won’t survive any better than telling them what to do at the start did.

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The constraints were not the hard part. Being quiet long enough for them to work was.

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Further reading

What you just read has a name in the literature — the constraints-led approach, commonly abbreviated CLA, and one strand of the broader nonlinear pedagogy. The body of the post never needed to say so; you don’t need the term to run the session. But if you want to read your way in, the practitioners below are the doors I’d walk through first.

Practitioner-friendly starting points:

• Rob Gray runs The Perception & Action Podcast and has built the single best entry point on the web for coaches who want to read about skill acquisition and the constraints-led approach. His CLA Resources page is the place to start. His book How We Learn to Move turns the same material into a coach’s manual; there’s a useful review on Coaching Volleyball that explains who it’s for.

• Mark Lebedew writes At Home on the Court, the most CLA-aware volleyball coaching blog I know of. A representative piece: “Coach’s Rules or Game Rules?”

• John Kessel has been writing the “Stop Teaching” series for USA Volleyball for over a decade — same sensibility as everything above, from a practitioner who pushes against drill-based instruction and toward game-based learning. The provocative titles are deliberate; each piece challenges a specific conventional coaching habit. A few entry points:

  • Stop Teaching Technique
  • Stop Teaching Passing!
  • Stop Teaching Setting
  • Stop Teaching Running

If you want to go deeper into the source material:

• Renshaw, Davids, Newcombe & Roberts (2019) — The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design (Routledge) — the practical book on applying CLA in real coaching contexts.
• Karl Newell (1986) — Constraints on the Development of Coordination — the original chapter that laid out the task / environment / individual taxonomy. Foundational. Dense; read after a practitioner intro.
• Gabriele Wulf (2013) — Attentional Focus and Motor Learning: A Review of 15 Years — meta-review of external-focus research. Why “deliver the ball to the antenna” works better than “raise your elbows.”

Your freedom to carry a gun messes with my freedom to walk around without fear.

Your freedom to “stand your ground” with force is at odds with my freedom to run anywhere in the woods freely.

Your freedom to refuse to pay taxes diminishes my freedom to fall ill without the fear of it bankrupting me.

There are many kinds of freedoms. Yours might not be the only ones or the right ones even though you’re inclined to think so. Neither do mine.

Last fall – on the brink of transferring to the masters series in sports – I started a new triathlon project. I’ve been looking for something new for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to take it into action. I’ve also always loved triathlon. I’m a bit of a generalist in everything and always looking for variety¹ in everything I do.

The big problem in triathlon for me was that I was (and to an extent still am) a terrible swimmer. Sure, I can get by but if I tried to swim a longer distance, I quickly went out of breath, which is disturbing for someone with presumably great oxygen intake. I assume that’s very common for quite a few tri-newbs, so I also wanted to document the process as it goes.

Writing a sport project blog is what everyone seems to be doing right now, so I wanted to do it with a twist. I have no illusions that very many people are actually interested in me or how I’m doing. Thus I’m always trying to write articles with the audience in mind: people who have a background in endurance sports but have not done (or have recently started) triathlon.

For now I’m doing it in Finnish. But who knows, if the interest is there, I might start translating the articles in English as well. So, if the language isn’t an issue, come on over.

Dear specialty coffee roaster,

Let me start by saying that I love you, each and every one of you. I love what you’re doing and respect the work you’re doing to bring better coffee to us all and fight the apathy of people sinking in them chain-oil-like substance just to get a fix of caffeine.

That said, it’s time for some tough love. Tough in the sense that I’m going to be quite outspoken and love in the sense that it’s all for the common good of you and me. So here we go.

Here’s the problem with your coffee: It’s sold stale. Why? Because you set the expiry date to something ridiculous like 3 months or (gasp!) a year. And retailers will sell it until that date and not order fresh coffee until they nearly run out of the previous batch. They will do this because it’s more economical for them and it’s not their coffee that’s sold and their reputation that’s on the line. Thus, your coffee is sold stale. And you don’t want that.

But, you say, every coffee in the supermarket is sold with an expiry date of up to a year in the future. So what? You’re not in the specialty coffee business to be just like everyone else. First of all, their coffee is probably stale in any case since it’s sold pre-ground, which makes it go bad in a matter of days. And secondly, their coffee is of so bad quality in the first place that who the fuck cares whether it’s stale or not when used?

Your coffee can be the most awesome single-origin bean in the history of micro-roasting, but when it’s used four months after roasting, it will be stale. And it will be sold until the very last day, because it’s a niche product with fairly low turnover.

Maybe your argument is that most buyers will never notice. That gets us to the heart of the problem. You will want them to notice. You want them to become coffee conoisseurs if they aren’t already. Because if they don’t notice the difference, they shouldn’t be your target market in the first place.

Here’s a little Marketing 101 to you: you want to target a niche. In your case, the niche should probably be the people who really care about the taste and quality of their coffee. Like said above, most people will probably not notice the difference between your Kiawamururu AA and the generic supermarket blend destroyed with robusta. Their taste buds are long since burned. And of those who can taste the difference, most just don’t care enough to justify the significant price difference and inconvenience of sourcing and self-grinding specialty coffee. Trying to convert them is a one-way street of frustration ending up in a bankruptcy.

You are, by definition, a small fish. Trying to target everyone is as good as targeting no one. It will cost you a fortune and be much less effective in actually finding your ideal customers. And this is just from the marketing standpoint. An even more important point to make here is that by making it not only possible but very likely to make your coffee available as stale, you are alienating the very core of the niche market you should be aiming at – the people who not only buy your expensive coffee, but the ones who talk, nay, rave, about it; the ones who serve it to their friends and perhaps convert them as well into your customers and evangelists.

Here’s the thing that I’m quite sure you know: good, fresh coffee is freshware, sold to a small subset of coffee drinkers. Don’t pretend it’s something else. Don’t be like the one-person consultancies talking in enterprise-y terms and about “we” instead of “I”, destroying their personality in the process. Milk producers don’t set the expiry dates of their produce to several months in the future just to get retailers to sell every one of the cartons because (regulations aside) they don’t want their milk to be sold sour. You don’t want your coffee to be sold stale, either. So do something about it. There is no reason in the world for not to do the same as Square Mile:

Brew within one month of roasting.

Could you please do the same? For me, and in the end, for you.

XOXO,

//jarkko

If you missed it, I just wrote a long write-up of my Monitorama.EU talk in the Bear Metal blog. If you’re working on big data, design, or visualizations, you probably want to read it.

The common perception is that sales and marketing is mostly about telling how good you or your product are. That it’s all about me, me, me. Us, us, us. I tend to disagree. People don’t really care about you, they care about themselves. And while that sounds selfish, it really isn’t, it’s just a natural fact of life. Why should they really care about you?

So to be successful both in creating products and services and marketing them you have to step in your customers’ shoes. How can make them kick ass? That’s the driving force behind Bear Metal, so I kicked off the company blog with an article that isn’t the traditional “who we are” post but a dive into the philosophy mentioned above.

Read the full story at The Den.

A few months ago, several friends announced taking a few steps back from their hectic work life, taking perhaps on some freelance clients but mostly enjoying life, family, getting into shape, or whatever they felt they had been neglecting in their busy lives as software professionals and entrepreneurs. The term they often used for this was funemployment.

June 30th was my last day doing full-time contracting for Wildfire. I joined the company back in 2008 when the company was basically the co-founders, Victoria and Alain, and a couple of remote contractors. During the past five years I was fortunate enough to see a bootstrapped startup grow to a juggernaut of hundreds of employees and eventually a lucrative acquisition target.

In many ways I always experienced Wildfire as my own product even though that technically never was the case. There’s just something in midwifing a product, seeing its first paying customers, then the first thousand (including several Fortune 50 companies), and so on. That’s a lesson money just cannot buy.

The folks at Wildfire were always awesome to us contractors. We were allowed to work pretty much how much we wanted, wherever we wanted. That might have been just as well from the fells of Lapland as from a B&B somewhere in New Zealand’s South Island. That trust and philosophy also let and motivated us to deliver.

There are some things I missed during the past few years, however. Being wholly subsumed by Wildfire meant that I all but gave up writing and making serious contributions to open source projects. That’s something I want to change.

Say hello to Bear Metal

Working with Erkki, Tarmo, and Lourens for several years built a special bond between us. A 100 % trust in everyone pulling their weight is surprisingly quite a luxury these days. Thus, while our work on Wildfire will soon be done, our work together will not. We’re not burned out enough to look for funemployment. We love what we do. However, one thing we love the most is doing it wherever we want to be, be it hitting the XC tracks of Äkäslompolo, wakeparks (with the bidirectional cable) of Bangkok or trail-marathoning across islands mid-Atlantic. I’d like to call that runemployment.

That’s something we’re not willing to give up. Because of that shared passion and mutual trust we decided to set up a shop of our own, by the four us. We’re called Bear Metal and we’re open for business beginning next fall. We’re a cross-functional team ready to build web businesses from scratch and also provide training and consulting services about building and running large-scale Ruby apps; deploying them with Chef; and ZeroMQ.

Come join us in our run into the future.

Bootstrapping Resources

In the Scottish Ruby Conference, Tekin Suleiman gave a great talk about his experiences in bootstrapping a web app. At the end of the talk there was a question about further resources into the subject. I’ve been into this thing for years now (both in the form of building Wildfire, dribbling with personal projects, and now with Bear Metal), so here’s my take on the subject.

First things first: Tekin mentioned Amy Hoy’s 30x500 class and that has been my philosophical home in the field as well. I was fortunate enough to join the class early on, but even after several price hikes it’s worth many times its cost if you’re committed to bootstrapping. But you really, really need to be committed. If not (yet), you should still read her blog Unicornfree from top to bottom to gain lots of insight into all things bootstrapping.

Another commonly mentioned resource is the Lean Startup book by Eric Ries and the lean startup community sparked by it. My issue with the book for a bootstrapper is that in the end of the day, its ideology is still your normal startup mentality, only executed in a more nimble manner. That said, it might be worthwhile to read the book, if only to know what people are talking about when they mention the MVP or validated learning.

If you’re doing anything related to web, Patrick McKenzie’s blog Kalzumeus and the related podcast is an indispensable resource. Another one is Brennan Dunn’s blog and mailing list. Nathan Barry has also written a lot of good stuff on the topic recently.

If you’re a conference kind of person, there are a few that hit the soft spot quite nicely. Hoy organizes one called BaconBizConf in late May. Microconf (unfortunately this year’s conf already was in April) is another one that has received a lot of praise. LessConf was great as well from what I’ve heard but I believe the past one was the last one there was.

Random resource pointers aside, I’ll next delve into some (as random) details and lessons I’ve learned about bootstrapping.

Perils of starting with an idea

An old adage says that ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything. However, most people will only hang on to the latter part of the saying, not taking the first part literally. In her class, Hoy takes this one step further, explaining why starting by looking for an idea to build is actually harmful for you. The reasons for this are manifold.

First of all, it is not very likely that you have a unique, great idea that is also sellable. It is much more likely that someone already had the same idea, tested it, and found out it did not work. Second, thinking that the starting point of a company is an idea found in a flash of deitic brilliance is a very nice path to despair. This effect Hoy calls the idea quicksand. In it you think you find a great idea, sit on it, let it subsume you, and finally give up. It victimizes and paralyzes you.

Lastly, starting a company with an idea is very likely to cause your thinking to suffer from serious confirmation bias. You harvest information that supports your idea and dismerit or ignore cues that would tell you your idea is in reality a stinking, unsellable pile of yak poo. We all are affected by it and it’s really, really hard to avoid it. So do yourself a favor and don’t start bootstrapping with a ready-baked idea.

So what should I start with, then?

To sell anything, you need a market. You need an audience. An audience is a mostly homogenous group of people. Ruby developers. Web designers. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. You don’t necessarily have to be a part of the audience yourself, although that does help you both in finding the pains and later when you’re actually building your product because of your domain knowledge.

Once you have picked an audience, you can start finding out what really bugs that audience. Lurk in their forums, and spy on them for insight. What itches do they have, from which colossal pains do they suffer? This will form the basis for the business you’ll build.

Don’t directly ask whether they’d need this and that. Actually search for patterns and keywords in how they describe issues they’re having. This is what Hoy calls a Sales Safari.

Content marketing

One topic that pops up in almost every discussion about marketing effectively on the web is content marketing. What it basically means is that by providing valuable content to your audience you teach them and simultaneously build trust in yourself. This appoints you as an authority in the field.

An important thing to note is that you do not have to be a super expert in the field in question, just a notch above the knowledge level of your audience. This means you’re actually more likely to remember the pain and issues you encountered when you were in the same situation. For a seasoned expert this might be years in the past and thus something only vaguely in their minds. Thus it is easy for them to take many of the issues as given.

What you do have to be good at, though, is writing. If you have a big budget you can hire people to do it, but for a bootstrapped company at least one of the insiders needs to be a wordsmith. Sorry to break the bad news but there just isn’t a way around it. As said many times over, if you can’t write clearly, you can’t think clearly.

By writing skills I don’t mean writing grammatically perfect English (or whatever language you use to reach your audience). Grammar is important for sure, but much more important is communicating your ideas effectively. The most important thing to learn the ropes here is practice, but here are some resources you might want to have a look at for getting better at writing.

• On Writing Well is a great general guide on writing effective prose.
• Writing for Story by the two-time Pulitzer prize winner Jon Franklin is a succinct introduction to writing gripping narrative in non-fiction. Storytelling is one of the most powerful techniques we have to grip our audience and get our ideas through.
• Breakthrough Advertising is a bible for writing effective ad copy. While you might never become a copywriter, your goals are very much the same. Unfortunately the book is out of print and very hard to get your hands on. You might (I’ve been told) find the full text from the net, though, using your favorite search engine.
• Copyblogger (subscribe to their RSS feed or mailing list) is a blog about pretty much all of the above. The amount of new content there is a bit on the high side but the quality makes up for that.

Once you got the basics covered, you’re ready to get into the nitty-gritty details of teaching your audience. Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics just recently published a free minibook called the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing. Aforementioned Copyblogger also has a series of articles about content marketing. One thing that invariably exists in these primers is building a warm email mailing list.

The Power of Email

As a geek it might be easy to dismiss email as a communication method as old-fashioned and something people mostly ignore. I mean, everyone prefers to get their daily RSS fix or (nowadays) read about your stuff on Twitter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Growing a list of email newsletter subscribers is by far the most effective method of reaching your audience. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it is way more personal. Most email list software lets you personalize your emails (so do collect at least the first name of your audience members, if only as an optional field), and if you write them in a conversational tone, the reader will react to them in a completely different manner than to a more generic form such as a blog post.

Secondly, in the spirit of permission marketing, everyone subscribed to your list has already given you permission to penetrate their email inbox. This is A Good Thing^TM. You’re given a lot of trust. Just remember not to fail that trust. Always think how what you’ll write will benefit and teach the readers. If your newsletter is literally a collection of news about you, you, you, your readership will disappear faster than you can say MailChimp.

So, here were some random pointers for getting started with bootstrapping. Obviously, it’s a life-long path so taking up everything at once is pretty much a doomed undertaking (I’ve been taking Amy’s course at least three times already). So give yourself time, but get started now. And ferchrissake, don’t try to sell anything to consumers. Why? That’s a topic for another post.

Did I miss something? Anything else you’d like to read about bootstrapping? Drop me a note.

Here’s my deck from the Tampere Web Dev meetup on the 10th of November, 2012.

Thanks to Thomas Fuchs for retinafy.me and Thijs van der Vossen.

If you enjoyed the talk, you might consider signing up for my up-and-coming eBook, Forgotten SVG.