Amazon released the Fire Phone in 2014. It was a flop.
It cost Amazon more than $100 million dollars, but Jeff Bezos was fine with it.
“You can’t, for one minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone. Promise me you won’t lose a minute of sleep,” Bezos told Ian Freed, a key leader in the Fire Phone’s development, according to The New Yorker.
This reaction is one of two parts of Bezos’ ethos:
“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle,” Bezos wrote in his 2018 annual letter to shareholders.
It’s worth taking risks, because if you do, one blockbuster success can outweigh multiple losses.
Bezos’ second secret to success is that you have to be willing to take time to float, be curious and experiment, according to CNBC.
“Wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random,” Bezos says in his letter to stockholders.
“It’s guided — by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there.”
Amazon took a big risk with the Fire Phone and it didn’t payoff. But work on the Fire Phone included work on voice recognition technology, which eventually formed the heart of Alexa — an enormous winner for Amazon.
The time spent on the failed phone helped propel the Alexa’s success.
“While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa,” Bezos wrote in the shareholder letter.
In other words, those who wander are not lost. You never know where your journey will lead if you remain open to opportunity.
Time for my boot heels to be…well, you know
I had been doing some wandering of my own in Fall of 2012. Once again, my site had reached a plateau. New teacher registrations were steady, but they were offset by attrition amongst teachers. In the teaching profession, 50% of teachers leave every five years, so churn is a fact of life.
I had done my fare share of innovating, including:
A photo of the day, with a novel way of engaging kids — they were required to submit a suggested caption before the could see the actual caption
Lesson plans, tailored to the content and interactive nature of my site
An essay contest with $10,000 in cash prizes. Students were challenged to answer this question in 100 words or less: “How does technology make the world a better place?” We received 16,000 entries — more than twice the number of entries received by a contest that Microsoft sponsored at the same time.
Apps for iOS and Android.
Sister sites for students in elementary school, high school and a version in Spanish
Even with four sites, I could not get the growth I sought. In the Fall of 2012, I didn’t know what else to do. So I did the obvious. I asked the customer.
Ask the customer
When all else fails, ask the customer. This may be the most valuable advice I can impart.
So, I contacted my 100 most-active teachers and asked them what I could do to increase their participation in my sites. Thirteen teachers responded. Of those 13 responses, several said they loved the sites just as they were but they were too busy with “Common Core.”
I thought to myself, “What the hell is Common Core?”
Common Core State Standards
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a set of educational goals that were adopted by (rather than imposed upon) the states as a result of a federal initiative called “No Child Left Behind.” Most states adopted the same standards, but some states went their own way to meet the de facto federal requirement. For instance, Texas adopted STAAR and Virginia adopted SOLs. Yes, Virginia, in Virginia they actually call them SOLs. What were they thinking?
I know that’s a lot of alphabet soup, but I put it all in here to make a point. Prior to launching my site, I had 30+ years in newspapers and zero experience in education. But to compete in the education space, I had to come up to speed on the issues facing education and teachers, notably Common Core.
The same will be true for you. If you are not already an expert on the stakes and stakeholders of the enterprise you are pursuing, you need to become one. But not to worry.
Tim Ferriss explains it all in “The 4-Hour Work Week.”
If you aren’t an expert, don’t sweat it. First “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about a the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best — just better than a small target number of your prospective clients.
On page 170 of ‘The 4-hour Work Week” check out Tim’s “Expert Builder” How to Become a Top Expert in 4 Weeks.”
I took Tim’s advice and quickly became an expert on Common Core. I particularly focused on CCSS requirements for “non-fiction reading” which were at much higher levels than current curricula. In other words, the non-fiction content of my sites could help teachers meet Common Core standards, rather than be a distraction.
So I began a program to align my site’s content and the user experience to Common Core. I had just introduced new Common Core-aligned lesson plans which were integrated into each teacher’s dashboard for distribution to students when they logged in. Little did I realize that the much-despised Common Core requirements would ultimately lead to the acquisition of my site 18 months later. The results of Common Core would be measured by testing conducted by Smarter Balanced and PARCC. And both of them required Lexile-leveled reading material.
What the hell is Lexile?
Lexile is an automated system for determining the reading level of books — typically for grades 1–12. Lexile is quite opaque about how their system works, but basically they use an algorithm that employs an exception dictionary and calculates characters-per-words and words-per-sentence as a proxy for reading level.
Got it?
It sounds more complicated than it is. Think of it this way: bigger words and longer sentences are harder to read. Ergo, if a book has relatively more big words and long sentences — think Faulkner — it’s harder to read than Dr. Seuss who used mostly short, one-syllable words.
So why did I care about this arcana that should only be the province of librarians and reading specialists? Lexile was required and I had to provide it.
But there was a hitch. Lexile wasn’t perfect. Far from it.
Dr. Seuss isn’t the only author who employed short words and short sentences. So did Hemingway. So did J.D. Salinger, whose “Catcher in the Rye” clocks in with a Lexile level of “4th grade” along with a prostitute on page 2.
Lexile doesn’t measure the appropriateness of content. Instead it merely measures length of words and sentences.
As an outsider to the educational ecosystem, I couldn’t believe teachers and standards-setters had bought into this sham. Furthermore, I believed I could reverse-engineer Lexile’s algorithm, and add a sophisticated exception dictionary that could help sniff out content that was inappropriate for younger readers.
And that’s what I did. Well, me and Sudeep.
In the summer of 2013, Sudeep Goyal of Ebizon Digital was visiting me in Virginia from his home in India. We were working shoulder-to-shoulder on some previously agreed-to enhancements to my site. But in the middle of this work I asked Sudeep about Lexile.
Could he create an algorithm that reported reading difficultly based on word length and sentence length, and also included an exception dictionary that I would compile?
And…if he could do that, could he also use Lexile’s free online tool for capturing Lexile levels of works shorter than 1,000 words?
And…if he could do that could he also display the results side-by-side in real time from both Lexile and my version of a text leveler?
“Yes,” he said. Sudeep is a man of few words.
A week later, ReadRank was born — that’s what I called the online tool that generated two reading level results simultaneously in real time.
Some people thought I was off my rocker to pursue ReadRank. “What’s the point?” they said. “Lexile is the accepted standard.”
But ultimately, I believe I was vindicated.
In 2019, the The Washington Post published “What’s wrong with assigning books — and kids — reading levels.”
The Post published a long list of famous adult-themed titles that earned Lexile levels for 3rd- and 4th graders, as well as young children’s books that earned Lexile levels for 12th grade.
According to the Post, “We find these exceptions — as exemplified by these titles — to be insurmountable. They demonstrate the fundamental flaw in reducing books to algorithms and creating reading levels based on them.”
But that story ran in 2019. Back in the summer of 2013, I wanted to promote ReadRank, my newly minted innovation. So I joined SIIA — an organization that promotes the creation of software, information, or other publishing for specialized industries, such as education. A one-month membership earned me the right to submit a press release via organization’s monthly newsletter. It also landed my email address on a list used by other members.
A couple months later, I received an email newsletter from Chris Curran at Educational Growth Associates (now Tyton Partners). They are investment bankers who connect buyers and sellers of software and products, primarily in the education sector. They were also connected with SIIA.
Are you following all these breadcrumbs?
I emailed Chris and asked him whether he’d be interested in my sites. He said yes.
A few weeks later, he set up meetings for me with two prospective buyers. Four months later, my sites were acquired — and I paid cash for a sailboat 🙂
To recap
The Bush Administration’s introduction of No Child Left Behind led to Common Core, which led to Smarter Balanced and PARCC standards to achieve Common Core’s goals, which required Lexile, which led to my development of ReadRank, which I chose to promote via a membership with SIIA, which put me on their mailing list, which Chris Curren used to promote his business, Education Growth Advisors, to whom I reached out upon receiving his newsletter via email. And then Chris facilitated the acquisition of my site.
What a long, strange trip it’s been, right?
It’s not enough to merely practice “Continuous Improvement” on your existing enterprise. You must never stop innovating and adding to your offering. In Fall of 2012, I was on the verge of turning a profit and teacher registrations, while not growing, were sufficient to offset churn. I could have rested on my laurels, but instead I pursued an entirely new offering, ReadRank, without a guarantee that it would enhance my sites.
But without ReadRank, and the path it put me on, my sites would not have been acquired.
So keep walking, my friend.
You can reach Alan at [email protected] (that’s “.co” not “.com’)