Intro
Is your product a racey kitty?
Just as the name suggests, a racey kitty is a cat with an unusual pattern of stripes on its back or sides. It’s also sometimes called a “pink cat” because it seems to be pinker than most other cats.
The post-war Japanese designer Akio Toyama created more than 200 racey kitties and produced them in bright colours that would make them stand out from the crowd. His design for the racing kitties has become something of a legend around the world, used as inspiration for everything from decorative buttons to iPhone cases.
A self-taught artist, Toyama was born in Kyoto and lived there until he was 21. He then went abroad to study art, but returned to Japan when WWII broke out and joined the army. He worked as an artist specializing in camouflage before designing his original racing cat designs in 1942.
The post-war Japanese designer Akio Toyama created more than 200 racey kitties and produced them in bright colours that would make them stand out from the crowd. His design for the racing kitties has become something of a legend around the world, used as inspiration for everything from decorative buttons to iPhone cases.
A self-taught artist, Toyama was born in Kyoto and lived there until he was 21. He then went abroad to study art, but returned to Japan when WWII broke out and joined the army. He worked as an artist specializing in camouflage before designing his original racing cat designs in 1942
Crafty Kitty
In the music industry, you are either a star or you’re boring. And if you’re not a star, you don’t get to perform.
I guess that’s an unintentional irony, but there’s no denying that it is true of software companies too. You either have your own ideas and/or products to market or you don’t. It doesn’t matter how good your product is — unless there are real users who actually want it — it just won’t help to build a business out of it.
But if we can capture some of the magic of the music industry and apply it to software, we may be able to achieve something like a symbiotic relationship with our customers: we give them something they need and they give us something they want in return.
The most famous example I can come up with is AirBnB . They have built their brand around providing a platform for people to rent their spare rooms for short-term stays (when people need somewhere to stay during travel or when other people are away). When I first saw them in action (a few years ago), I was impressed by the simplicity of their service but less than impressed by their “product-market fit” because all those rooms seemed awfully empty compared to the hundreds and thousands of apartments they had on offer. But over time I came around: they did indeed have a product that worked, but it was also obvious that many others were offering almost identical products (AirBnB was just one among dozens). And ultimately with enough advertising, word-of-mouth marketing and referral programs (which is how most people discover AirBnB) they built a strong brand loyal client base.
We need our own version of this story — be it as simple or as elaborate as we desire — but at the end of the day we will always need many things that our customers already provide for us (which may not be as clearly defined on paper), so instead of “nice try guys! We tried so hard! Now do it yourself! By xyz! Just like us!”, perhaps instead we could say: “Doing great things for _______ for _____ years now… blah blah blah blah blah blah blah… So here we are again… back again… now do good stuff again!!! Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah … oh yeah… this time it pays off
Kitty race
It’s been a few years since I first posted this to our blog, but I just realized that it is an actual thing. When I was a kid, my dad would have me draw racey kitties for him when I had time on weekends. And then, after school, he would try to make mincemeat of me with his racing cars. So it was in the back of my mind that we needed to find a way to do something similar for cats.
The idea clicked when my daughter asked me why you couldn’t draw racey kitties for her:
“Why can’t you draw racey kitties?”
“How would you like it? That’s how we do it.”
Then:
“Ohhh! Why don’t you color them in?”
And then:
“You color them in on the computer?”
So we did! Here’s the result: http://i.imgur.com/7OuFkks.png There’s also an issue with colors at work here too. This would look better if there were less white space and more contrast between colors (but it’s not too bad; I’m guessing most people will be fine with it). Anyway, here’s what she drew (note that one of the kitties is black). If you want one like this, send us an email and let us know!
Crafty Kitty race
Racey kitties are a lovely example of the way that people use cats to express emotion. It’s a nice one-off, but it also has a pernicious habit of getting stuck in your head as something that we should all do. So, let’s try to get rid of that from our vocabulary:
All new companies need to be racey kitty free. Not for any moral reason; just because the word is so ubiquitous. It’s like the very word ‘sexiness’: it gets stuck in a lot of people’s heads and it can lead to odd habits when you change it back.
If you have ever been thinking about changing your company name, remember to think about it from an emotional standpoint. When we change our company name, we usually do so for technical reasons (e.g., because Google has started to like our name). But this happens more often than you might think:
• When you change your company name, you should really think about how you want the world to see who you are and what you stand for …
• When you change your company name, consider whether or not that will help educate your target audience on who you are …
When we decided on our new company by using a cat emoji as part of our company logo, I was not sure how successful that would be. The first week after launch I received many messages from fellow developers who were jealous that I had chosen such an adorable icon for my product — which was in fact mostly about me and other people feeling human emotions through their kitty friends! And because I have been fairly vocal about both my own personal needs and those of other developers in my life (which is why I tend to relate better with developers than non-developers), several users posted comments on Twitter saying they liked the way I represented myself by using dogs as my avatar. Even though it may not be relevant at all now, I did feel slightly better about myself after choosing this icon for my product — and hope that others would feel similarly too!
Conclusion
If you are building a product that is most likely to succeed — as opposed to one which will fail, which is the case with most new startups — you need to have a great team. You don’t need the best engineers or the best consultants or top-notch lawyers (though they can certainly help).
The opposite is true: the best designers and marketers may not necessarily be the ones who make your product better (though they certainly can). If you are lucky enough to have great designers, marketing professionals and developers, then you would do well to delegate as much of your work as possible. Ideally, these people should be helping you create something which solves an immediate problem for someone.
Sometimes it works out that an engineer wants to design something entirely different from what you want (or vice versa) and it makes sense for them to work on a different product than yours. But sometimes it doesn’t. And in this case, there is no way for two products built by two separate teams working directly on each other’s products could both benefit from increased user engagement; it would just be wrong in principle.
The same goes for designers: they can’t help with everything in every project (though they can certainly help out with some projects). Sometimes they take up too much time and energy, but if not done right, all too often their work just ends up being wasted effort that serves no purpose other than flushing out ideas and adding color to a whiteboard.
So — unless there is a very good reason why one kind of work should be done by one kind of person while another kind of work should be done by another kind of person, generally speaking we should delegate people who do what we need them to do. Even when we believe our product will succeed because we know exactly how good it will turn out; our team members know far more about how exactly this works than we do ourselves so it makes sense for us to delegate that work as well.
