The best comedians are often not that funny. The reason you see Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari perform hilarious routines with audiences laughing for an hour or more is because that routine is practiced and polished. You never see the duds.

Friends of mine are big fans of Aziz and they’ve seen him perform a handful of times. Once, they caught him in a really small club where he was testing jokes from his cell phone. He was on stage, literally reading jokes from his phone that he had typed out earlier.

Chris Rock does this too.

In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between forty and fifty appearances at a small comedy club, called Stress Factory, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. In front of audiences of, say, fifty people, he will show up unannounced, carrying a yellow legal note pad with ideas scribbled on it.

…he will talk with the audience in an...

I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.

Mitch Hedberg

This post is inspired by Startup Edition, in response to the question, “How do you discover what people really want?”

“Why am I talking so fast?” I thought as I sat across the table from Martin, an owner of a restaurant in my neighborhood. I cold emailed the guy to get a meeting to chat about his business. I was hoping I’d discover a problem I could create a new product around.

If you’ve read any of the dozens of books about running a Lean Startup (I’ve read them all), you’d probably call this “getting out of the building”.

I got my nerves to calm down, and I sat with Martin for quite awhile listening to how he runs his business. I asked all the advised questions, “If...

I did a three part interview with ProgrammableWeb. We talked about writing, being an underdog in a fight against Google and Microsoft, innovation, and what’s maybe next for Draft.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

There’s this cafe near my home. An Argo Tea. My wife and I go by it frequently at night walking our dog, Bailey. Even at 10:30PM, there’s always at least a couple people typing away at documents. Peering in the window, you see the glow of Word or Google Docs.

I tell my wife that it’s a goal of mine to walk by the Argo Tea window one day and see a complete stranger using Draft to type that document. It would be so neat to spot someone I don’t know, obviously working on something important to them to be in this cafe at night, using something I made only feet away from where they’re sitting.

I’m a big Tim Ferriss fan since randomly coming across 4-Hour Workweek in a Borders Bookstore many years ago. And now I give his books away as presents to my friends. I’m a frequent visitor to his blog and yesterday I was checking out his most recent post. I spotted this in the comments.

I...

“What price do we charge?” That question brings up endless debate. If you have a business partner, you probably argue about it. I know we did at Inkling.

This is an answer to: How did you choose your pricing model?

There’s a lot of great advice. Things like using split testing to experiment with different prices. Or an interesting psychological principle called anchoring that can occur when you have multiple price points. But here are a few thoughts on pricing that have been helpful to me.

1. Pay for your own product.

This is the most important. It’s simply to take dogfooding to the next level. Dogfooding is the act of using your own product. So I don’t just use the product I create. I also take out my credit card and pay for it like everyone else.

You might think that’s a trivial detail. It might even seem silly, since I have to pay credit card processing fees just to charge...

It’s hard for me to eat right. To find the time to workout. To keep up on literature. To get all the features done for Draft.

When I was young, my parents remodeled the downstairs of our house. My sister and I got this awesome new homework area and our own desks. But I remember being a brat when my father said it was ready for us. My desk didn’t have a desk pad calendar:

Which I wanted for a soft writing surface.

A naive, impatient kid. But what’s interesting is how this childlike attitude manifests itself in adults in a much more destructive way.

We hate things that aren’t finished.

Like the times we go out for dinner and lament we ate too much. We regret finishing the entire plate of food. Now we feel terrible and don’t want to see the movie we were planning afterwards.

Or we can’t find the time to workout. We’ve tried DVDs at home, like the popular P90X, but the...

I’ve been in my share of trouble.

I was 18, and one day these Mucky Mucks - as my father likes to say :) - were touring the Chicago Park District courses where I worked. They started at one, played a round of golf, then moved onto the next. Their last round was at the course I worked at: Robert A. Black.

Well as the group got ready for their last round, a guy came into the pro-shop and told my boss that he screwed up. He left his car at the first course, and hoped someone could pick it up and drive it to him. Here were the keys to his BMW.

My boss was busy hosting these VIP’s, so he smiled and handed me the keys. He trusted me. He also knew I would love driving this car.

I was driving a 15-year-old Oldsmobile Toronado, a Flying Bull. It had no horn. No air conditioning. No speedometer. Which is really fun on lonely highways when cop cars pull alongside. The real interesting bit was...

I’m insanely excited and honored to be writing a column at Fast Company Labs. It will be a narration of things I’m learning while building Draft.

Two years ago I crashed and burned at Y Combinator’s Demo Day. When I realized what I had done wrong, I endeavored to build Draft, a new way to improve people’s writing, without repeating my mistakes–and I think it’s working. Here’s what I did differently.

I introduce Draft and a process I’m using to try and build something innovative to help people write better, while avoiding more technology for technology’s sake. Also, how I met Ashton Kutcher :)

Here’s the article.

A few Draft updates today:

• Markdown Todos
• WebHooks
• REST API
• Over 75,000 documents

Markdown Todos

There are so many software tools for task/todo lists. But it’s funny how unportable those todos are from system to system.

I really like what Github did.

They created a style of text (Markdown) that can be easily understood as a task/todo list in plaintext, while remaining easily parsed by software. I want this to spread. So Draft now supports Github-style Markdown todos.

Create a todo list like this:

- [ ] Write the documentation
- [ ] Get tickets

And when you’re viewing a document it will look like this:

If you check one of those boxes or labels:

your document’s text will automatically be updated with an ‘x’.

- [x] Write the documentation
- [ ] Get tickets

I keep multiple Draft tabs open now, with one of them being a Draft todo list.

There’s also a...

Just released an API and WebHooks for Draft. TechCrunch covered it and some other publishing features I’ve released recently.

The one-man team of Nathan Kontny has just introduced a new REST API that’ll let any news outfit or other publishing organization connect Draft to the other software it uses. If you’re Buzzfeed or The Huffington Post* or another media company with a big mix of full and part-time writers, you could use the API to let writers and editors work through versions together in Draft then publish straight to your custom content management system.

Eric Eldon, TechCrunch