
Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage - sinak
http://sivers.org/hi
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brianwillis
This is fantastic advice. Being small can be an asset, yet it's often treated
as a liability. Sure, there are some things your company can't do because you
don't have as much cash in the bank as Google, but there are some things your
company _can_ do that Google can't compete with because it's too big.

~~~
chii
The size is neither an asset nor a liability - its just an attribute.

However size can determine whether you can do certain things. Unfortunately,
small size prevents you from making profit from economy of scale, and so you
must somehow differentiate with other attributes (such as personalized
services).

But i think the market has spoken - large size business is more valuable and
thus make more profit than a small sized business.

~~~
smokeyj
Googling "what percent of economy is small business" yields

[http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/businessfinance/a/sbatopten.ht...](http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/businessfinance/a/sbatopten.htm)

~~~
EGreg
10\. Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.

9\. Small businesses create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross
domestic product (GDP).

From this it follows that "not-so-small businesses" create the other 50% of
nonfarm private GDP, despite being only 0.03% of employers right? So what is
the conclusion exactly?

~~~
xmodem
The conclusion is simple - economies of scale for larger businesses are
incredibly powerful.

~~~
EGreg
To me it says that small businesses are the long tail, but large businesses
are also interesting and valuable in their own right. Both are going to be
around, and a "healthy" distribution is probably good for us.

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_lex
I completely agree. When you're a small startup, few things are in your favor.
It's worth every minute to pour over creating a great experience, even if it's
done by hand.

@MassageJoy (<http://www.massagejoyspa.com>), we're currently going through
Pinterest and the wider web, and pulling things together to create thoughtful
Care Packages for our clients.

Is it hella expensive? Yes. But that doesn't matter. The basic point is to
make sure the experience that we deliver is unmatched. And we're either going
to do that or die trying.

~~~
verbalist
Are you a sexual service? Maybe you should consider posting on backpage..
"Book Online in Secs" sounds like "Book Online in Sex"...

~~~
_lex
We are NOT a sexual service - I'm not sure if you were joking, but I'm
honestly offended. At the same time, if you were being serious, I'm happy that
you asked instead of making an assumption.

One more time: We ONLY do professional massage therapy.

~~~
xal
I think he is being genuine but a bit brash. The advice is sound and I second
it.

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wiseleo
When people ask me "So what technology are you using for transcription and
sound editing?" I answer "Humans. The end product is to be used for marketing.
Computer technology is not good enough today. That is also why my price per
transaction is so high".

Them: "But that will not scale, your costs will be too high!" Me: "I really
want that problem. I also want to have the problem of having to pay too much
in taxes"

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scott_meade
Love how the acronym for human intervention is "Hi".

~~~
sivers
:-) Thanks for catching that.

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edanm
Very good article (as always from Derek). I'd just like to point out something
he didn't mention in the article: Derek was coming at this mostly from a "User
Experience" angle. But there's a very clear business angle to this as well.

While most startups gloss over this fact, programming time costs money. Sure,
if it's you doing the programming you're not actually paying yourself money,
but that's a fiction - you're costing yourself a ton of money on opportunity
costs.

So when you're trying to make a decision on whether to automate or not, you
should also take into consideration how much money it costs to automate,
versus how much it costs to program. A good programmer costs thousands of
dollars a month, so spending a month building an automated billing system (for
example) _isn't a good business decisions_ if the alternative is paying
someone $100 a month for going over 30 customers and manually doing the
billing.

Not to mention the fact that a month spent building things that can be cheaply
automate is a month farther from getting market validation for your product.

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khitchdee
NYTimes article on a similar theme:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/technology/computer-
algori...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/technology/computer-algorithms-
rely-increasingly-on-human-helpers.html?partner=yahoofinance&_r=0)

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AndrewKemendo
I think this is good advice but I have to nitpick one thing: as a former music
director for a popular indie rock station, I have to disagree that listening
to new music all day is "The coolest full-time job in the world."

Joking aside, we adhere to his/pg's do more work principle almost to a fault.
I constantly try to make it such that my customers have to do as little as
possible to get our products to work for them and so far that has proven
valuable.

~~~
derefr
This sounded less like the traditional editor's job of "wading through the
slush pile", and more like "clustering great albums against other great albums
from a pre-screened pool." Must be nice ;)

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gavinh
His advice really is 'good user experience is good; bad user experience is
bad.' Human intervention is not essential to good user experience in most of
his examples; he compares the human versions to poor implementations of
automation. A form with some validation and normalization is probably a better
user experience than having a human review the fields.

~~~
derefr
I wouldn't say that was his advice at all. I read it as being something more
like "there isn't always a (known, or sensible-ROI to research) way to make an
automated user experience anywhere near as good as what you get by just having
a human do it."

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espinchi
Great advice. And quite a cool story!

It's interesting to note that Derek mentions about doing this (sort-of) front-
line work yourself, but then outsource it when it grows so much that it would
take too much of your time that you put on your core activities. Some
entrepreneurs stay in the first phase or move from it to automation too
quickly.

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swang
It's interesting reading this story, if I were in the author's place, I would
have felt embarrassed to admit this point. Like our company isn't technically
adept enough to implement a recommender.

~~~
benmanns
Technically adept or not, his human-based recommender was so good that the CEO
and VP of a 'hugely funded' online music company were willing to fly all the
way from SV to NYC to hear about it.

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stephengillie
Is it too pessimistic to expect not to scale? How well has Apple's App Store
reviews scaled? Aren't Apple still using humans to test apps before letting
them on their market?

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ablus
Any tips on how to hire/contract a team with some reputable local manager from
China/India/a third world country to do this at reasonable prices, while
staying physically in the U.S. or Europe?

Because obviously this is not feasible at the uncompetitive wage levels +
confiscatory taxation in the "first" world.

~~~
hyung
This is what I do. Please feel free to contact me (details in my profile).

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mynameishere
Isn't that how Yahoo worked in the early days? They had humans categorize web
sites? Well, the only way to make that scale massively is exactly what amazon
(mentioned in the article) currently does...have human reviewers work (but for
free.) Google essentially did the same thing with pagerank.

