Thanks guys. I wonder how many people look at stuff mainly for conversation reasons, as mburst was saying. Like, would you rather have stuff recommended based on popularity so you know what to talk about with people, or based on personalization tailored specifically to you?
Whoever wrote this is brilliant. I'm very excited to see what these guys are doing. Skim.me looks like a complete game changer. Totally amazing. This is probably the most excited I've been for a startup launch, ever.
I look at a lot of sites throughout the day, and waste a lot of time checking them more often than I need to, typing in urls, navigating to content, scrolling past ads, and even just trying to remember what sites I want to look at.
With skim.me, I could just go to one spot each morning and evening, and scroll through everything I was going to look at that day in 15 just minutes, so I can save time and focus on other stuff for the rest of the day. It would change my life. I can't wait.
And I am definitely not saying because I'm on the skim.me team or anything like that. Nope. No affiliation whatsoever. I definitely don't know Clinton or Neil or go to school with them or co-found skim.me and work out of Varick St with these awesome guys every day.
The entire purpose of a startup is to redesign some aspect of the user's life. A startup takes some experience in the world that has low usability, and makes that aspect of your life more usable. Having a founder with a design background, meaning someone who actually understands usability and how to simplify experiences CAN fix your broken business, assuming that the purpose of your business is to simplify some experience and make it more usable, which is what pretty much all businesses are. Additionally, the UI is not "just pixels" any more than a song is just "a C and a D chord" or a table is "just wood". The interface is the means through which the user problem is solved. From the user's perspective, the interface is the app -- the entirety of the app -- nothing other than the interface exists. And the user's perspective is the only one that matters.
Now, does this mean you can have a founding team without a developer? No, of course not. You need a technical founder. You should have a designer, a developer, and a hustler/biz person, but those don't need to be three separate people; one person can embody several of those qualities.
This is not a new idea, it's why almost nobody took Democracy seriously before the U.S. I like Jefferson's answer to this problem:
"if we think [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." --Thomas Jefferson
Democracy is really the only reason that we have universal education in the first place. If the elite are forced to allow the people to make decisions, then they're going to make sure the people are educated enough not to do anything too dumb.