Aviv delves into some strategy and inside thinking behind Think Brilliant. Check out the full interview over at IdeaMensch.com.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them, everyone’s heard them. Some people even build huge businesses on nothing more than grand ideas. There’s a fundamental problem with this mentality. Ideas are not what you need. Comparatively, some may even call them meaningless.

“I just had an idea for a t-shirt” – “I just thought of an amazing iPhone app” – “I think I’ve invented the next big (fill in the blank).” A common misconception among entrepreneurs is that a singular idea can be a catalyst to success. This is not true. In reality, ideas are nothing more than specifically defined concepts that allow individuals (and teams) to showcase their talents, execution, and brainpower.

Every “new” idea is a derivative of something before it. These days, nothing can be purely invented, à la the lightbulb. Take the iPhone as an example, with its awww-inducing, mind bending technology. While absolutely stunning, it’s merely an intelligent implementation of previously existing technologies. What the iPhone did (as a true catalyst to success), was give Steve Jobs, Apple, and the immense brainpower behind the company a global stage. They placed themselves prime in the spotlight, ready to show-off their precision perfect execution and world-class talent. It wasn’t so much the idea of the iPhone, more so that they knew how to back it up. Apple knew it could execute the development and engineering, market the product, bring it to the public and generate demand. The idea of the device is secondary to the knowledge and experience that they have (more on this later).

Far too many people spend hours upon hours dreaming up that next “big idea.” But that’s the wrong mentality. Ideas aren’t the bread and butter behind innovative services, popular software and great companies. Actual bare bones development, time spent on the product, and months and years of hard work are what can be attributed to a company’s success. Would you rather play the lottery every day with the hopes of hitting the jackpot? Or would you rather make a calculated and well-researched investment? If you chose the lottery, then it’s time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.

The notion that this magical, all-encompassing idea will come along and make you rich is a complete farce. You have a much better chance at being “successful” (however you define success) – if you have good foresight, and focus on what’s important.

Going back to the iPhone, would Steve Jobs and Apple have pursued revolutionizing the mobile industry if they felt they couldn’t deliver the actual product? Not a chance. It’s a phone. They tried to launch a phone with Motorola in 2005, it sucked. The idea of a revolutionary mobile phone is completely secondary to actually delivering the goods.

Rather than trying to invent a “make it big” idea, having good instincts, foresight and putting together a team that can execute has much greater value. If you spend time putting together a group of people than can actually deliver the goods, an idea becomes nothing more than a showcase for your talents. With the ability to execute, ideas become distilled down to their essence. This makes way for knowledge and communication.

The industry needs a wake-up call, and a majority of entrepreneurs need to shift their focus. I’d much rather see world-class teams developing products they believe in, as apposed to the generic Venture Capitalist funded rapid startups that only make noise.

A team with knowledge and experience will see an idea as a means to showcase what they’ve learned throughout the years. A good team will take each project or product as a culminating adventure. Whether it be discovering new user experiences, writing faster queries, managing larger infrastructures or perfecting communication flows, every component plays an integral role into the next.

Stop trying to invent the next Google… Focus on what’s really important and the natural paths will emerge.

We’ve added some great new RSS feeds. Subscribe Away!

Here are some links and feed examples to get you started
• All SP Exclusives: http://www.soulpancake.com/post/rss
Subscribe to all SP Exclusive posts written by our team.

• Entire Question Collective: http://www.soulpancake.com/question/rss
Subscribe to all Questions submitted by SP members.

• Individual Question (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/question/rss/25026
Subscribe to the ongoing discussion of a single question submission. To subscribe to an individual question, simply click the blue RSS icon in the rop right corner of that page.

• Individual SP Exclusive (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/post/rss/710
Subscribe to the ongoing discussion of an individual SP Exclusive. To subscribe to an individual SP Exclusive, simply click the blue RSS icon in the rop right corner of that page.

• Individual Member’s Activity (NEW): http://www.soulpancake.com/people/Aviv/rss
Subscribe to an individual SP member’s activity. To subscribe to an individual member’s activity, simply click the activity feed link in the sidebar of their profile.

Of note, if you’re using Google Chrome, there’s no RSS feed reader support quite yet. They’ve outlined their plans for feeds here.

We previously explained how our own Mike Mitchell lit a fire under the internet’s ass with this Conan O’Brien piece. Not only has this piece paved the way for a movement behind one of late night television’s biggest stars, it has catapulted Mike into the spotlight and shined a light on his artwork.

The I’m with CoCo movement is much more than a 24 hour internet sweep. It’s been well over 48 hours at this point and the buzz is still going strong. The facebook page has around 150,000 visitors, and since we opened up the I’m with CoCo store, it has been tracking lots of orders. The shop is selling 18×24″ prints of the piece, as well as t-shirts like the one shown below. $1 from each item sold goes to PlantingPeace.org.

One of the obvious downsides to such instant visibility are the inevitable copycats that spring up. Sometimes they’ll just be personal bloggers who ripoff your articles or images, don’t link back to you, and call it a day. But other times it’s downright horrible companies like BustedTees.com who completely ripoff an idea, sell it for profit, and hide behind legal shills (corporate bank accounts) to play it safe.

As well as tracking at the places we listed here, the movement has been gaining momentum all over the internet hitting nearly every major publication and even landing Mike 3 radio interviews.

• TMZ
• Geekweek
• PopEater
• Mashable
• CNBC
• People
• New York Times x3
• The Village Voice
• Fox News
• Entertainment Weekly
• Laughing Squid
• The Huffington Post
• Radio Interview

You should follow Sir Mitchell on twitter here. You never know when he’ll drop the next internet sensation.

A classic example of having a good pulse on the internet, applying talents and nailing an instant classic. Sir Mike of Mitchell goes viral with a beautifully done Conan O’Brien piece.

Mike has always been able to sit down and crank out a jaw-dropping piece of artwork. This latest sensation is no exception. No hype, no bullshit… He just drew it and dropped it on the internet. And boy did the internet respond.

The piece is currently tracking at the following places:

Digg Popular: http://digg.com/television/I_m_With_Coco_4
Digg Popular: http://digg.com/television/I_m_with_Coco_poster
Reddit Popular: http://www.reddit.com/comments/aotsa/show_your_support_im_with_coco/

The piece has even gained national exposure around major media outlets such as The New York Times and The Consumerist.

“Support for Mr. O’Brien seemed to spread virally, through gestures like the reblogging of this image by the artist Mike Mitchell. The image shows Mr. Conan standing triumphantly, orange hair aglow, with the caption “I’m with CoCo,” one of Mr. O’Brien’s nicknames,” Brain Stetler writes for The New York Times.

and The Consumerist adds,

“Our inbox has spoken: due to popular reader demand, it’s time to harness the power of the EECB, the executive email carpet bomb, for its most important mission ever: saving the Conan O’ Brien show.”

Rounding it out, Rainn tweeted about the piece earlier in the day, and the SoulPancake feed has been buzzing for over 10 hours. This has turned into hard conversions for the site. You should follow Sir Mitchell on twitter here. You never know when he’ll drop the next internet sensation.

“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.” –Terry Tempest Williams

Our Community

Since launching SoulPancake in April 2009, our team has learned quite a lot. Alongside all of the natural growing pains a startup faces, we’ve dealt with tremendous growth, and a tightly hindering and rigid infrastructure. Along the way we’ve continuously done our very best to meet our community’s needs and foster a safe environment for our members. We think things have been going pretty well, but not as good as we’d like them to. Over the last few months we’ve been tirelessly working behind the scenes to change that. We are investing in the core of our community and our technology, and properly lining ourselves up for the future. After months of development, we are proud to unveil a brand new, and much improved SoulPancake.com. There are a lot of new and exciting areas to cover, and we couldn’t be happier to finally unveil the fruits of our labor.

We’ve overhauled our design and layout, added exciting new features and critical enhancements, re-rewritten our entire apps platform and restructured our core infrastructure. Everything has been upgraded, refined, and in some cases completely rewritten from the ground up. In other words, SoulPancake is officially ready for prime-time. If you’re already a member, login and take a look around, if you’re new to SoulPancake, joining takes about 12 seconds. Here are some of the core additions that we’re thrilled to finally unveil.

Following/Friending

We have adopted the model of initial peer to peer following. This model works because it allows every member of SoulPancake to carve out and reserve an individual slice of the site. With this model, our community and wealth of knowledge grows, yet leaving our individual experiences natural and unhindered by the masses.

With our community, the interaction doesn’t stop at single-sided following. When you start following someone, your streams are updated with their activity from around SP, but when two people follow each other, a wealth of new possibilities open up around the relationship.

Groups

Organizing your friends into groups allows you to easily share and facilitate natural communication through your content. Say for example ten of your friends share your passion for Tomatoes. With SP Groups, you can organize these friends into a group called Tomatoes, and next time you contribute something about tomatoes, easily share it with that group.

Fundamentally, groups initiate the process of organizing people you find interesting around SP. We felt it as important to role out people organization with Groups, as we did the model of friending and following. Instead of doing friending first, and Groups later on, we’ve released the functionality at the same time. This way, our community can deeply organize itself and provide a great base from which to discover new people in the near future. This is just the beginning of Groups… We’ve got big plans here.

Real-Time Streams

Because of our focused infrastructure efforts, we’re able to deliver real-time streams to the community. This means that data and information exchanges between members involve nearly zero lag time between occurrences. When someone you follow does something, your stream will be updated nearly instantly. Alongside the value this adds to our community, the ability to filter your streams and distill the experience down as far as you want, sheds a whole new light on the content that our community creates. As relationships grow and content matures, so will the conversation and interaction around it. We’re particularly excited about our new real-time discussion engine. Get involved in some discussions and take it for a spin.

Question Collective

The SoulPancake Question Collective is an amazing place to discover new submissions and get involved in some great discussions. We’re rolling out some wonderful enhancements and upgrades to the entire process. First and foremost, you can now edit your questions for up to thirty minutes after they have been submitted. You can attach Vimeo and YouTube videos, upload images from your computer (or simply enter an image’s URL), geotag your location, and input some source links.

We’ve also made it incredibly easy to share individual submissions with two-your friends inside the SP community. Additionally, we’ve now made attachments completely optional with each question. You can now simply ask the community a question (no image or attachments needed), and keep your followers intrigued and entertained with less requirements.

Community Notifications

You’ll notice a revamped Settings area for SoulPancake. Alongside your account information and privacy settings, you’ll now find some very handy Community Notifications. These are email notifications that you can easily set and personalize to keep you up to date with everything that happens around the community.

We truly hope you enjoy the new SoulPancake.com. We built it for you.

[Baby Pancakes from Flickr]

Mailchimp makes sending emails fun. Whether you’re sending 10 or 100,000 emails, the service is powerful, fun and easy to use. Our friends over there recently sent us this awesome box of Goodies! A pile of stickers and a plethora of shirts.

Thanx guys! We’ll keep sending those emails.

SoulPancake is number four in WIRED’s “What’s WIRED This Month” playlist in the January 2010 issue. Rainn graces the mag with a little shot of his near perfect Michelangelo-esque physique, and we get a nice blurb as well! It’s on page 48 in the magazine.

The internet page-fold. A term from the newspaper industry that describes the first page of an issue. In recent years, it’s been used to describe the visible area of a user’s computer screen before needing to scroll down the page (aka the top half of a website). And it’s a complete myth.

I firmly believe that this entire ‘above-the-fold’ concept is a huge myth. The entire idea is something being held onto due to preconceived notions, with absolutely no data backing any of it up.

In our research, over 98% of internet users instinctively scroll down the page. It’s the second inherent behavior and point of interaction besides actually viewing the page. Nearly every mouse on the market has immense scrolling features, and in some places companies are innovating on specifically how to increase scrolling and touch-enabled gestures. The idea that people don’t scroll is absolutely ludicrous.

“Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.”

“The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content.”- Milissa Tarquini

The top half of a website, so commonly referred to during ‘page-fold’ myth discussions

Image Credit

As with most of the research done to back this up, it’s been proven that having content poke or peek up above the “fold” is most successful, entirely due to enticing the user to scroll and discover more content. The one use case that increases interaction and content discovery, is actually based around one of the most natural motions of interacting online. What a surprise. People actually scroll.

There’s a lot of wonderful articles specifically pertaining to debunking the internet page-fold. These are real-world use case scenarios backed by research, usage results and actual data.
Click the search bar below to see some of them.

After a few weeks of hard work, we have successfully upgraded our printing methods. All of our Because Steve Says So shirts are now screen-printed completely by hand (one by one) locally here in Portland, Oregon.

A good screen printer who’s capable of printing organically by hand is hard to find. Like with most trades, as everything moves into the digital realm, it’s becoming harder and harder to keep business. When we decided to switch over to hand printed screens, it only took one run of shirts to see the incredible difference.

All of the shirts currently shipping are screen printed by hand, and being sold for the same price. Check them out now! Shipping is fast, and affordable.