I will be attending this years CES, which will mark my first time at the event. I’ve read the coverage in the past and fully expect it to be filled with out of touch former big leaguers trying to dazzle the press with products that clearly won’t compete. Yet, I’m not going so I can be a part of that.

Although I’ve wanted to experience the awfulness/excitement first hand for several years, what actually allowed me to justify it this year is the Digital Health Summit, which will be a part of the conference this year. I’m hugely excited and bullish about the space and look forward to meeting with people to talk about the future of the human body as it relates to technology.

I’m not a live blogger, and actually I’m not much of a gadget blogger, so I’ll leave the pros to do what they do best. But what I plan on writing about over the next few days is how my experience goes with CES in general and how my experience goes with the Digital Health Summit. I hope to come away feeling inspired by the big projects that will undoubtedly shape the way we look at and treat our bodies.

What started with a simple, one room hotel in the sketchy part of town, is ending with dear friends, damp eyes, and a road that feels solid enough to walk back to the US on.

I don’t know why, but life never surprises me. When I was younger, I was quite the embellisher. I felt deep inside that my life should have been more than what it was. As I’ve grown older and experienced more, I feel that slowly my life has caught up to my expectations and, if anything, I’m not even telling full stories when people ask, because I doubt they’d believe it anyway. But as my life unfolds and big changes get made, it all ends up feeling like the next natural step. Like it was always and obviously going to happen. And this last big change, leaving Baby.com.br and starting something new and on my own, seems like what was obviously going to happen the whole time.

But life couldn’t be that simple, could it?

It may just be. I have no idea what will come of my next venture. Of my next chapter in San Francisco. I have hope that it will be all I want it to be, and plan to make something along those lines happen. But I’m not alone in feeling that way. I feel I have a rendezvous with destiny, and I must do everything possible to make that appointment.

Here’s to life. Here’s to living it. Here’s to risk and doing what you’ve always dreamed of. Here’s to the high country and riding it. Here’s to destiny.

Although I’m not ready to discuss everything, I do want to say that my new business is very much picking up where I left off at Baby.com.br and is actually inspired by all that I learned while building its expansive audience of over two million moms. Moms are a special group. A noble group. And a pain for them, in my eyes, is worthy cause of my time.

Stay tuned.

There is something completing about a year’s end. Everyone writes something about it, either in the coffers of the mind, the pages of journal, or the walls of a social network. We find ways of resolving things, if at no other time, at the end of the year.

The last year, 2012, was very complete for me. What had barely just begun in 2011, Baby.com.br, entered 2012 with a few employees, big hopes, big promises to big hires and big investors. 2012 was to be defined by what we could do with the expectations we set for the business. But business, I’ve come to learn, is a fickle friend. The friend you think you know and can second guess. The friend you long to be near to and make sacrifices for. The friend that you think you can trust. However, every morning when you meet this friend for coffee they’re different. Their ambitions are smaller, then bigger, then entirely new. Like any loyal companion, you adjust and adapt to the new horizons, but business has an appetite that can never be quenched. An appetite for capital. An appetite for strategy. An appetite for technology. 2012 would be the year I would have my last coffee with this business. The year I would give all I would ever give to Baby.com.br. The team of a couple dozen that greeted 2012, became over 250 that greeted 2013. 2012 would be the year a promising startup would become a very promising medium-sized business. And the year I would let the team I helped grow and the technology I helped shape, continue on their course without my day-to-day guidance.

My last few years have been stacked with really unique, very challenging, and sometimes almost braking experiences. It can be difficult to place them on a scale and say with certainty which ones were easier or harder than the other ones. Almost like choosing a favorite child, I would hate to offend or diminish any one of the moments from the last few years by comparing them to their peers. Each one was met with newness and curiosity, a little bit of fear, and the belief that the human spirit could overcome. Could create. Could build. But this last experience, that began on December 6th, just a few weeks ago, feels unique amongst the unique.

I first started working on startups when I was 18 in 2003 when my brother Kimball and my cousin Davis first wanted to start something on their own. Between selling roses in parking lots and pool tables online, over the next 7 years we would end up working together to see some modest successes, if by no other gauge than by teaching us all what not to do. We created Baby.com.br to be what our previous ideas weren’t, huge. And the last few years have been spent in the pursuit of size and market and success and, in many respects, achieving it.

Flash forward almost 10 years, and for the first time I’m on my own. Leaving Baby.com.br was equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring. Anytime you put your soul into something, it hurts when it ends. And yet, from my co-founders to my friends to the universe itself, I’ve received much strength and optimism in my next project. I feel the time is right to start something new, again. And this time around my brother and my cousin will not be together with me. My trail is my own to blaze. But I couldn’t think of a better way to be brought up. A better course to have taken to prepare myself to strike out and begin walking alone.

2012 was complete for me. Taking a business from its earliest days and passing it off to the most capable team imaginable is very completing. Leaving to start something new, although technically a beginning, it is where I’ve been heading my whole life, and although I have no delusions about how long or hard my road ahead will be, the fact I’ve arrived at the road at all means I’ve completed the most crucial step, the beginning.

One, I’ll feel slightly more bad never using iTunes 11 than I did never using iTunes 10. Two, there will come a time when there will be no one left to review new iTunes releases. All iOS devices now work independent of iTunes and owning music was important to my generation and those before me, but it isn’t important to the rising generation. So a glossier, more visual version of an owned music collection is simply the software version of the best looking CD album holder I’ve ever seen. And just as useful.

It’s late. I got home from work over an hour ago and my wife and I have already eaten dinner. We sit on the conch together, our legs tangled in the middle with a throw, reading books, news, blogs, and chatting about interesting things we find. After sometime, one of us invariably offers to turn something on to watch.

We’re dedicated “cord cutters,” meaning we refuse to pay for cable TV. We have found that through iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, and the occasional Pirate Bay, we have more entertainment, less distraction and less money out each month. However, there are issues, one of which plays out through the words, “What should we watch?” This issue, the wanting to watch something but can’t seem to find something engaging, is an old one, maybe going back to the very roots of humanity itself. Some very smart people are working on this problem, but we all still grapple with it, despite complex algorithms and marketing dollars telling us what we “want” to watch.

I no longer really believe in these methods of recommendation. Maybe I should have given up on them long ago, but it’s only recently that I have had a few experiences that have taught me how random human desires truly are.

Have you ever done a search on Netflix? I’m sure you have. Given how hard it is to find most things through their navigation, it’s typically the fastest way to find anything. Well, the first result within their list is typically the exact movie or show you were looking for, and then beneath that result is a list of 20 other results that share a word with the title you were looking for. Just a word. For example: below you can see the results for my search for “The Rock.” After the excellent movie starring Sean Connery, it suggests Disney’s Camp Rock, a 2001 foreign b movie Rock My World, A Knights Tale, Get Him To The Greek, Madagascar, The Hunger Games, and an old favorite The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

When comparing these fairly random films to their suggestions on my homepage, I actually prefer the random set.

However, after finding and watching Bernie, starring Jack Black, last night I was left almost upset that Bernie, a movie I remember anticipating, had come to Netflix without me knowing. And that’s when I knew something had to change. I have come up with a solution that would solve my problem, and I’m taking to the blogosphere to explain it. I call it My Future List, and this is how it works.

Netflix builds up the largest and definitive collection of movie trailers. I know I love watching them and can spend hours within Apple.com’s movie trailer section. Imagine that exact experience, only on Netflix with a button that read “Add this to my Instant Queue when available.” That’s it. I’m already exposing myself to what I want to watch, and I really only see 1 in maybe 100 films I want to see in the theater. I’m already curating my movie watching desires just by being alive, it seems. All I need now is a way to tell Netflix what I already know I want.

After a trailer is watched, we make an assessment: do I want to watch this or not? If we do we think to ourselves to remember that we want to see it. That’s a great way to never hear about that film again. This type of movie bookmarking for later use is the way I want to use Netflix. I want to find films that excite me and get notified (even a year later like Bernie) when they become available.

Marketing typically is no way to find films. Same with algorithms. My tastes will guide me better than anything, and I don’t even need to develop them. I just need a way to bookmark them.

I take a shuttle to work. It comes to the front of my apartment building every morning at 7:35. So, every morning I call for the elevator at 7:25, and usually arrive at a bench where I sit and wait for the shuttle at around 7:30. Again, every morning. 

There is a young English guy, Stephan who reports for Bloomberg, that always gets to the bench before I do. I quite enjoy his company, and look forward to seeing and chatting with him everyday.

Then this morning happened. I walked out of my building to cross the street and wait on the bench, only no Stephan. I didn’t expect it, but my whole world unraveled quite quickly. Was there no shuttle today? Did it come early? Did they change the schedule, which they occasionally do? Is my phone’s time wrong? Is it a holiday?

My mind raced through a million different reasons why I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll spare you the suspense and tell you that I’m actually writing this post while on the shuttle. It came just as it does every morning at 7:35, the only difference was this time I didn’t have social proof.

After so many mornings, as soon as my fellow commuter was gone, I suddenly started questioning myself. This same phenomenon happens all day with the tools we use online. If we feel like we’re the only one there, then we will not trust that it’s somewhere we want to be. If the new visitor hasn’t been there before, they’ll question it. If they have been there before, just like me sitting on the bench wondering why the shuttle wasn’t coming, they will find ways to doubt it. 

What every product needs is a Stephan. A familiar, cheerful face that reminds them that they have come to the right place at the right time. Social proof for online tools, be they on your smartphone or the web or even in the enterprise, often need a lot of testing and creativity, but I’ll offer some rough ideas here in this post. 

Everyone Is Doing It

Yes, that infamous peer pressure line from junior high is back. Peer pressure is really what “grown ups” call social proof for bad things, but if companies can scale peer pressure for their products, they’ll win. That’s all social proof really is. 

We humans love things that we think everyone is doing. We like to fit in. Think Germany in 1938. Think teen smoking. Think Instagram. Be creative on spreading the word, but using the press to discuss really vague usage stats is a common place to start. People love reading things like “millions have already tried.” Never mind the fact that that means almost nothing, it’s a way of saying “there’s a party here, and you’re late.” People need to know that they are in danger of being left out of something everyone is using, and the media is square one. 

Another place to offer this “everyone is doing it” mentality, is through showing potential users that cool people are already deeply involved. You’ve seen this before a million times. Celebrity endorsements, sexy hipster YouTube/Vimeo videos of people from Banana Republic catalogs. This shows that everyone is doing it: people you know or can relate to solving their problems.

I’ve been seeing more and more “Tweet to download” white papers and digital assets. The concept is that if you tweet about something through a little interface they have available, they’ll give you something “for free.” This was a clever development to me, and emphasizes the “everyone is doing it” philosophy, both for those tweeting out the link, and those reading the tweets.

Works Both Ways: Negative Social Proof

One of the most powerful sentences offering social proof I ever read is the following: be the first of your friends to Like this. You’ve read that before. You’ve probably read it today. It is the sentence following most Facebook Like buttons when no one you know has Liked something. It’s a failure. I don’t know why Facebook has it as an option and I don’t know why companies choose to display it. 

It is saying to every would be customer or user “there is no party here”. It’s the opposite of “everyone is doing it”. It is saying “we’re the one who eats his lunch alone and has B.O.” One of the best ways to offer social proof FOR your product is simply by removing social proof AGAINST your product, and a great place to start is by removing all “be the first of your friends” lines from your tool. If your product is young in age or social experience, simply display a raw Like-count for now. Only companies with wide distribution and adoption should be tapping in to the names of friends next to the button.

If you’re in commerce, show some products with low quantities or even out of stock. Not so much it displays a problem, but enough so that people get the idea that so many people are buying that you can’t keep everything in stock.  It isn’t showing people buying things, but it implies it. It is removing negative social proof.

There are a million ways of adding a Stephan to products, many of them will need to be unique to each individual tool, but they are crucial for initial and longterm loyalty. If Stephan isn’t there, they’ll doubt the whole thing even if they’ve been taking the shuttle every morning forever.