Doing Words

Joining Pollenizer Ventures: Australia’s newest tech seed fund

// December 18th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Funding, Industry, My work, Startup

Mick Liubinskas at Pollenizer is “Mr Focus” — much of the value he brings to clients is his ability to create and maintain laser-like focus; on the problem a startup needs to solve, on finding customers, on raising capital, on recruiting the right team.

Me? I’m more “Mr Shutterspeed”, “Mr Aperture”… basically, anything but “Mr Focus”. I wield my firehose-like lack-of-focus on many projects, many products, many problems and many ideas. Not all of them at once, either, it’s more of a wild spray across from the first to the last and back again.  Sometimes this frustrates me, I know it can frustrate Mick when we work on something together. But it’s who I’ve always been and I’m making progress, really I am.

But enough about me, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing lately…

Earlier this year I snuck in as one of the mentor/investors participating in the early-stage tech startup seed fund Startmate.com.au but, since I’m Mr Shutterspeed, how could I possibly stop at just one early-stage tech startup seed fund? So now I’m delighted to say I’m also a mentor/investor in Pollenizer’s new Pollenizer Ventures fund (no separate website for it but here’s Pollenizer’s announcement).

The $500k seed fund is made up of some of Australia’s most experienced technology veterans including:

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian
Matt Macfarlane
Stuart Richardson, Adventure Capital
Adrian Vanzyl, Adventure Capital
Matt Dickinson, Growth Angel
David Cooper, Deloitte
Mark Greig via Elevation Capital
Adam Broadway
Rob Antulov & Nick Gonios via 3eep Ventures
Chris Hitchen, Getprice.com.au
Domenic Carosa, Dominet Digital
Phaedon Stough, Mitchell Lake
Tony Faure

…and yours truly, Mr Shutterspeed.

Whereas Startmate is a seed fund for technical founders looking for business advice, Pollenizer Ventures is a seed fund for business founders looking for technical advice, so the two ventures are quite different and compliment each other nicely. After all, how else could Mr Focus also be involved in both funds?

Social media for TEDxSydney

// December 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Issues, My work, TEDxSydney

TEDxSydney 2010 was Sydney’s first direct experience of TED, the innovation festival phenomenon. Now TEDxSydney is back for its second year, scheduled for May 28, 2011 at Redern’s Carriageworks complex.

TED’s reputation has grown partly thanks to an open and engaging approach to sharing ideas with the internet community. TEDx is an endeavour designed to spread TED even further and give people not just the chance to attend a mini-TED event, but to plan and host their own TED-like conference, reflecting the spirit and purpose of TED while addressing their own local cultural values and issues.

I was fortunate enough to attend TEDxSydney 2010, and it blew my socks off — the calibre and the scale of the event went far beyond my expectations, encompassing science, politics, gender and sexuality, design, art, music, indigenous culture and more. Although auditorium space was limited, TEDxSydney included a second stage outside the auditorium with live crosses, vox pops and post-presentation interviews with speakers, as well as an active Twitter stream. For a first effort from the organisers it was hugely impressive. You can still watch the presentations, available on YouTube.

Now I’m utterly stoked to post that I’ll be a member of TEDxSydney 2011′s all-volunteer organising committee, helping as Social Media Director.

I’ll be working on helping people who can’t attend TEDxSydney get the most out of the live and archived content we’ll be publishing, helping people interact with each other and the speakers, and using social media to learn about what people like/don’t like about TEDxSydney 2011.

If you’ve got thoughts about that, please let me know, follow @TEDxSydney on Twitter and join the Facebook Page.

Here’s one of my favourite sessions from last year, featuring Michael Kirby on the separation of Church and State.

From Zurb: Lessons from marketing Verify

// December 8th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Conversion, Marketing

I got to know Dmitry Dragilev, the frenetically productive marketing guy at Zurb after giving the company some feedback about an early version of their conversion testing tool for online marketers, Verify.

Dmitry’s gone to extraordinarily lengths to detail every lesson learned from setting up to launch, launch and post-launch marketing activity in this very detailed post: Lessons from marketing Verify. If you’re a startup marketer and you have 30mins at lunch today to read it, this is well worth your time.

Missed Groupon deal could be Google’s Stalingrad

// December 6th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, Startup, strategy

The news today is that Google’s attempt to acquire GroupOn for a massive US$6B has failed. Ten years ago, I was working for an industry-dominating technology giant when a similar thing happened to us: we tried to buy our way into a smokin’ hot new web startup category way too late, only to be roughed-up and shown the door by a team of young punks a couple of years out of college. Why did this deal fail, and what could it mean for Google? It could mean the beginning of the decline.

All the tell-tale signs are there: Google, whose next-biggest acquisition was for online advertising powerhouse DoubleClick for a mere US$3.1B back in 2007, has US$33.4B in cash and securities with which to rule the world, and yet was prepared to throw a reported US$6B at the deal. That’s 18% of Google’s money pile. For a startup only three years old which earned an estimated US$350M in the past year. A 12x valuation. Why? (more…)

How do startups avoid running out of money?

// December 2nd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Planning, Startup

How much money did your business earn last week? How much did it spend? What’s your bank balance? How long can you go on with that pattern of earning and spending? Critical questions for any business, particularly so when you’re a small startup with $25,000 and a lot to get done in a short time. But when you’re all busy coding or designing or cutting deals, who’s got time to track every dollar?

Many great startup ideas fail because they ‘run out of runway’ — they find out too late that they’re nearly out of cash, and there just isn’t enough time to raise some more money. Even larger startups with more money can crash at the end of the runway, if the CEO isn’t getting the truth from the person managing the finances, because that person is trying to hide the bad news in the hope things might improve.

Here’s a great, quick solution that’ll keep CEOs and startup co-founders directly in-touch with exactly where you are on the ‘runway’ — how many days you have left on your current earning/spending rates. It’s InDinero.com. (more…)

How do you do a great product video?

// November 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Communication, Conversion, Social Media, Video

Lately, all my roads seem to lead not to Rome but to video; online streaming video, for education, business, advertising and starting-up web startups. The Universe is trying to tell me something. I’m spending a lot of time considering what makes a great product video — the sort of video that launches a new product on the homepage of a web business.

Such videos are hard to get right: they need to rapidly attract and hold your attention like a television commercial but that conflicts with their need to be informative, to address features as well as benefits. They need to give you a sense for the structure of the story they tell from the beginning, so you can decide whether you’ll watch the whole thing, without being so structured that the story navigation interrupts the story telling.

(more…)

How do ideas spread via social media?

// October 28th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Social Media

Seth Godin lists 20 reasons why people might want to spread your message. very few of them involve anything that traditional advertising offers its audience:

See Seth’s 20 other reasons why ideas spread here.

Top 100 most influential Australian political voices on Twitter

// October 19th, 2010 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Communication, Me, Social Media

Yesterday, Australian blogging consultant Alister Cameron published a list of the “Top 100 Most Influential Australians Talking Politics On Twitter“. Actually, it was two lists: one of people who’d been calculated to be influential during the recent Australian Federal elections (using the Twitter hashtag #ausvotes at the end of their tweets) and another of the most influential people taking part in the weekly Twitter audience for the ABC TV show, QandA (using the hashtag #qanda).

I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate

The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).

The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.

More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.

Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.

For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.

Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours

Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.

But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.

In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.

Startmate seeks startups: apply now!

// October 16th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, Me, My work, Startup

Are you a technically-focused startup founder looking for a little funding and a lot of advice to help you get to that crucial point of a Minimum Viable Product and then on to an introduction to investors in Australia and Silicon Valley? Startmate.com.au wants you (or someone just like you).

Startmate is a new early-stage startup seed fund initiated by Niki Scevak. I’m an investor and mentor in the program, and there’s many more impressive names than mine on the roster.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Applications are open now and interest has been very strong so far, so please do your best work and give us all you’ve got.

Drop me a tweet if you have any questions. They better be good ones…

Turn a small step into no step at all

// October 15th, 2010 // 0 Comments // strategy

The superbright and always working Dave Cheong and I were talking about converting visitors to customers and he asked me if I thought Traindom needed some help with its homepage copywriting. Well, yes, I think “your information marketing business” is about as obtuse and unemotional as copy can get. With the exception of the headline, the rest of the homepage is cluttered with product features and details instead of engaging you with benefits — examples of how the product can change your work/life.

Still, my gut says the biggest problem is not homepage conversion rates but actual use of the product. I bet they find too few new signups get all the way to creating and marketing something they’ve made using Traindom. In fact, I think I could build a bigger business teaching people *how* to make this kind of material and inspiring them with examples they can cut up and use as templates.

Here’s what I mean:

Another friend, Yorke Hinds, started Bed And Breakfast Institute, selling an online course for people who’ve always wanted to own/operate a bed-and-breakfast. He’s smart: he could try and build a web platform to help people operate their B&B, but because there’s so many steps of investing commitment and time in those sorts of decisions, a tiny percentage of the people who dream about doing a B&B ever actually start one.

The principle is: avoid business models that depend on convincing people to take a big step. Until they take that big step you’re either waiting to bill them, or you’ve billed them for something they haven’t used and so won’t pay for when their free trial expires in 30 days.

Even if you’re taking that big step down a few notches by giving them a web platform, it’s still a big step and you can spend a lot of time waiting for them. If you can build a platform that lowers the height of stairs, then apply those skills to lowering the height of a low stair, so that you’re taking it away altogether. Then there’s no barrier, no hurdle, no reason not to, no reason to wait until you’ve thought about it some more, and every reason to come back and back again.

'Steps' by Jan Tik

Yorke’s online education course addresses a small step: it helps people decide whether they really want to start a B&B by teaching them about what it’s really like. It’s marketed as a course that will teach you the insider secrets of the most successful operators in the B&B industry but that’s the justification the customer needs to sign up. The benefit he’s offering his customers is to help them make a big decision, so he’s not waiting for them to make that big decision before he’s able to sell them something. He’s grinding down that small step so it’s level with the ground, so you don’t even pause before you decide to buy.

If you want no barriers to conversion, start with a smaller barrier.

These days, web platform design and development is so cheap and fast to do, there’s  not much downside if a startup idea doesn’t get traction. And we know it’s possible to test many startup ideas without doing much coding at all. It’s worth building an MVP and seeing what testers think of it. But test a MVP as soon as you can so you can test whether you’re trying to shave a few centimetres off the top of a huge step, or whether you’re levelling a step only a few centimetres high.