Doing Words

Everybody can be working while nobody makes money

// November 30th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

Meeting with someone this week who wants to leave their job and build a tech startup, he hit me with this argument: “There are already three other startups doing something similar in Australia, they’re all growing really fast, so there’s clearly money to be made”.

Sorry, but no.

I remember when I was co-founder of a particular startup that was in a very ‘hot’ space — we knew this because there were six other startups in Australia doing something similar, we all appeared to be growing fast, and similar businesses in the US were getting press coverage every week about how quickly they were growing.

Yet none of these startups was making money. In fact, we were all losing money — some more rapidly than others. We were all betting on the market growing, betting that our cost of customer acquisition would come down as we learned more about the best marketing channels and tested different forms of conversion.

Some of us were backed by large corporations, some of us by venture capitalists and some of us by angel investors. You’d see our brands everywhere, in banner ads, newspapers, on the backs of buses and even in television commercials. You read about us in the technology press at least monthly. To the outsider, we all looked like successful businesses.

But we all had one thing in common: we had a certain amount of money and time in which to create a profitable business.

We were test pilots, given a plane loaded with debt and a runway from which to make it fly. We could throw out things and people to make it lighter, we could add more marketing or tech engines to make it accelerate faster, but the weight, speed and runway length were all connected variables. We knew some of our planes wouldn’t get into the air, but it wasn’t going to be us, so we and our competitors kept heading down the runway.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking a hot startup you see mentioned everywhere is evidence of a successful business, or that a crowded space in the tech startup sector is evidence of a successful business model.

Where are they today? The majority of our competitor’s planes crashed or exploded while still on the runway. We sold our passengers and their luggage to a competitor — our ejector seats worked, and we got to keep all our arms and legs and most of the airframe. In the US (which despite all the similarities, is a very different business environment) only one plane really got off the ground. None of the Australian startups in that space survive in their original form. Personally, I don’t regret pressing the ejector button.

I see evidence of similar market conditions today in smartphone app frameworks, social analytics, CMS and especially in daily deals.

It’s very possible to be working and not making any money, so don’t be fooled by a popular startup or business model. It’s not possible to keep making a loss indefinitely, because every runway has an end.

How to write and deliver a startup press release

// October 12th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

reporters notebook by sskennel

I’m so old that I had a whole career in journalism and PR before the visual web even existed. I know, I can hardly believe it myself, but maybe that’s a symptom of early-stage Alzheimer’s. So I’ve written and read a lot of press releases over the years. Press releases are much less important these days, for various reasons, but they can still add some momentum to your startup business. Here’s some tips for the first-time press release writer.

Most first-timers work really hard to make sure they’ve written a good story, but when you’re writing a press release, that’s actually not the goal. A time-poor journalist scans press releases very quickly looking for good news angles, things which, in a couple of keystrokes, can become a headline and first paragraph that will draw the eye of the reader.

A great news angle:

• Is stated simply, without jargon or overly formal language
• Is never more than 15 words
• Makes a surprising assertion
• Leaves a question unanswered

Usually it’s not possible to get that all in a single 15 word sentence. Instead, try to write your news angle as 2-3 (max 4) bullet points.

An example:

• New Aussie online store growing fast, even though it sells only one product
• For young professional men who don’t have time to shop for fashion
• Young, charismatic, founder with a surprising business story

The simplest way to improve your press release is to make the first bullet point your headline and put the second two news angles as bullet points between the headline and body copy.

With good news angles up the top of your press release a journalist may not even read the rest of your press release, just call you for an interview before they really understand what the story is. Or they may run the whole press release as their story.

No numbers

From this day forward until you’re required by ASX/NASDAQ to report the data publicly, never disclose how many customers and how much revenue you’ve had, currently have, or expect to have. Instead, you talk about growth in customers and revenue in terms of “doubled” or “tripled” or “grown by 150% since launch” or whatever. Never disclose a hard number as it can be used against you by competitors, media, analysts, investors and others in future.

Distribution

If you’re a startup and can’t afford a media relations agency to distribute your press release to the media, for heaven’s sake don’t try to research the email addresses of relevant media contacts and send them out yourself — there are more important things you should be doing (MVP, customer discovery, analysis, pivot, you know the drill). Traditional distribution services like AAP MediaNet in Australia will be too expensive so try PRWire, Get2Press, Getthewordout or google “australia press release distribution” — there’s heaps of ‘em. If you have an international story, PRWeb is good. Don’t tweet or Facebook press releases (very poor form) though you may be forgiven for tweeting a link to a blog post based on your press release.

Be prepared

Be prepared to take a phone interview about your business and the product as soon as the press release is out (though don’t be disappointed if you don’t get a single one first time around). It’s important to be well-prepared — practice with a journalist friend if you have one, with a media relations professional if you can afford one, or just a buddy who watches too much TV news and can do a convincing impression of a cantankerous journalist.

Take the interview on your mobile phone — that way if the interview’s not going the right way and you need to stop, recover and think about how to get things back on track, you can hang up on the journalist and call them back, blaming poor network coverage for the drop out.

If you don’t know the answer, if you can’t remember the industry statistic, if you can’t remember the caller’s name: be honest and admit it. Offer to call, text or email back with the missing info and make sure you do it before you take another journalist’s call, or really, do anything else at all. A frustrated journalist with only 90% of the story will be tempted to make up the missing 10% or punish you by writing a negative piece.

Good luck!

My new Northern Beaches co-working location

// August 8th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Me, My life, My work, Other news

Luck makes itself sometimes, don’t you think? I’d just moved up to Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with my wife and son, looking for the sea-change lifestyle and figuring we’d work out career and work once we’d made the move. Then luck made itself, and I met Simon and Karen from NewportNet.

First, the background: as a mentor and investor in tech startups, there’s only so much time I need to spend face-to-face with people, and since clients are as likely to be in Lausanne, New York or San Jose as Sydney, I don’t really need to maintain a city office, or spend more than a day a week in the city if I plan ahead.

But working from home has drawbacks for such a distractable guy. My productivity plunges if I get distracted by hanging out the washing and finishing the newspaper, and I miss the chance to bounce off other creative, entrepreneurial people.

This is how I'm often distracted: by kayaking

I was keen to try and solve these two problems, and was investigating establishing my own co-working space in the neighbourhood if need be.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space…

The day after we moved house, I was at ZUBI Bar, one of the best locations in Newport, an extremely funky and fun coffee shop on the main strip. Big, charismatic South African Steve and his team of loud, cheerful, playful baristas and waitpeople are happy to share their Wi-Fi connection if you order a meal.

I told Steve about how I was considering starting a co-working space. Steve knew somebody I had to talk to: “Simon Bond, a guy up the street who’s got a space with really fast internet access and a few spare desks”. Sounded intriguing!

Got Simon’s contact details? No, but Steve thought the owner of the local Apple reseller, Mac&Me could help, so I went looking for Margot. She  had Simon’s number because she was also setting up a training room and Apple service centre in Simon’s space.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space, NewportNet.com.au from Simon and his wife, Karen. I’d gone from worrying about finding someplace to work to finding the perfect workplace in an afternoon.

ZUBI Bar, like the best of Surry Hills transported to the Northern Beaches

Thanks to St George Bank opening a branch downstairs, this brand-new building has high capacity optical fibre all the way from Newport back down to Sydney. When stockbroker Simon was looking for office space to relocate his busy broking business, he happened across the developer at [address] and discovered that much of this optical fibre cabling was sitting un-utilised.

Simon’s connections run far and wide, including senior management at Internode, the Adelaide-based internet service provider. Simon knew just the people to help him put in the hardware required to utilise all that unused high-speed bandwidth.

Simon needed some high-speed, reliable internet access for his broking firm: if Internode could install and configure the necessary internet plumbing, could he build the Northern Beaches’ first high-speed internet access point for small creative entrepeneurs? Would Simon Hackett of Internode back that idea with some technical people and hardware? The answer was a resounding yes.

He’s a bit of a visionary, is our Simon, and he and his wife Karen have an admirable vision for the Newport business community: “build it and they will come”. That is, create a bright, open, collaborative business environment for the creative entrepreneurs of the Northern Beaches, give them access to the services they needed, make it affordable and too good to refuse, and they will come.

That certainly appears to be the case so far at NewportNet, with video production company Stem Media and Mac training and retail business Mac&Me joining me as anchor tenants in the new space.

The entry to NewportNet

As well as high-speed internet access (currently 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down, with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet available throughout) the premises includes elevator access, secure car park, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom and several lockable offices about 4m x 4m. All the desks are IKEA and the chairs are Herman Miller.

One of the offices

Downstairs you’re a block or two from banks, chemist, post office, supermarket, organic produce market, several great restaurants and cafes, and the wonderful ZUBI Bar.

A typical desk (in this case, mine)

Space in NewportNet is available by the desk or by the office, by the day, week, month or longer commitment.

Meeting room

If you’re on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and you’d like to share a workspace with other professionals in a casual and collaborative environment, get more details at NewportNet.com.au  au, follow us on Twitter as @NewportNetAU or drop in at Office 1, 341 Barrenjoey Rd, Newport Beach 2106 (Google Map)

By the way, if you’re lower down the Northern Beaches, I’d recommend you check out Co-Worka in Dee Why.

The team from Mac&Me in their training space

Social media pro tips from TEDxSydney 2011

// May 27th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

Third, longest and most useful of a series of three posts from my social media team guidelines, written in my role as Social Media Director for TEDxSydney. You might find them helpful in planning your organisation’s social media policies and procedures. Here’s the first and second posts.

Twitter versus Facebook: news versus current affairs

At TEDxSydney we have a presence on Twitter and a presence on Facebook and the two presences lend themselves to related but different applications.

Material we post to Twitter usually has a shorter ‘shelf life’ — it is more likely to run off the news stream page sooner, and Twitter material is more likely to be forwarded on than Facebook material, so it lends itself to newsy items, controversial or sensational items.

Facebook has a more generous character limit, which allows for longer updates, so if our Twitter page is “the news”, Facebook is “current affairs”.

As time gets short and TEDxSydney approaches, the temptation will be to favour Twitter over Facebook but we should try not to neglect our Facebook community. (Note: we have a YouTube presence too but conversations there tend to be less synchronous, we have more time to consider and respond, and most comments don’t require response.)

Start conversations by asking questions

Too many brands make their social media feed a constant stream of announcements — special offers, new features, seasonal sales, press releases.

Good social media is a conversation and, as any good conversationalist will tell you, often the best way to start a conversation is to ask someone a question about themselves.

“What do you find interested you most in this morning’s talks?” “Do you agree with this statement from this speaker?” “Who have you most enjoyed meeting here today?” — all great questions to get conversations started.

Follow the people who tweet about us

Following someone on Twitter is a tiny compliment. Anybody who tweets about TEDxSydney deserves to be followed. Although they’ve tweeted about TEDxSydney they may not yet follow us, and they may do so if we follow them first — building our community and our marketing reach — to them, and their followers.

We don’t have to respond

Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away by all the positive feedback we’re getting from Twitter and Facebook, and respond with gratitude by thanking everyone who tweets something nice. Now, imagine reading a Twitter stream that’s entirely full of those thanks — boring as batshit; and we don’t ever want to be boring as batshit.

Of course they like us; we’re good. So reserve the thanks for the innovative, creative, stand-out mentions we get in social media. Personal blog post authors should be thanked, news editors and journalists shouldn’t (just doing their job and we make them uncomfortable when we thank them).

It’s also easy to over-react to criticism. It’s one thing for one person to tell a friend they think TEDxSydney sucks; it’s another thing entirely for them to do so in front of everybody on Twitter. The temptation is to react to every negative tweet or Facebook comment. Don’t.

Some people are negative on Twitter to attract the attention of others, and nothing is more likely to get them more attention than luring us into a discussion, that becomes a disagreement, that dissolves into a slanging match, only to burst into a flame war.

Please correct the incorrect, and defend the brand: these are the only two reasons to respond to negative material in social media. People are entitled to their opinions and we are unlikely to ever change those opinions in the course of one discussion in a social media platform.

If it’s absolutely necessary to take on a negative person on social media, try enlisting our most significant advantage: our large, loyal and communicative online community. Don’t say:

@example it’s a bit unfair to judge the TEDxSydney line-up before you’ve even seen these people speak.

Instead, try:

“What about it, TEDxSydney community? Is @example right when he says our speaker line-up is boring?

We don’t have to respond in this medium

Just because someone raises a problem, error or criticism on Twitter or Facebook, we shouldn’t necessarily respond in the same medium.

If the problem raised affects the whole event (e.g. “sound not working at back of auditorium”) then use Twitter to respond so everyone gets to hear we’re working on a fix.

If the problem is personal (e.g. “I’m going to ask for my money back, this food is shit” then either direct-message the person or respond via email or even mobile, if available. The best way:

1. Tweet them to direct-message you their email address or mobile number;
2. Follow-up by email or phone.

The one-to-one nature of email or phone makes the complainant feel like you’re going out of your way to address their problem. The less-than-instant nature of these mediums reduces the expecation that we’ll respond immediately. And taking the issue out of social media helps keep the issue from attracting further attention and blowing up into a larger incident.

If it gives you pause… pause.

If you’re not sure whether to send your tweet or Facebook message, don’t. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and even if you delete it, someone can still find it if they want to badly enough. If you’re not sure, save it in a draft state, review it with someone else, or just give it a little time, come back later and see if it still makes sense to send it.

…and that’s our plan. It really swings into effect in 1 day, 8 hours and 31 minutes from now. But as they say, “no plan survives contact with the enemy/customer/marketplace/audience!” Wish us luck!

Social media guidelines: procedures

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

Post 2 in a series about my work as social media director for TEDxSydney.com, this one about how to do the actual work. Hope it helps you craft your own social media procedures.

Has someone already tweeted this?

We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.

Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account

It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:

@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)

Use your initials on Twitter

It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.

However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.

Use an URL shortener with tracking

Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.

Social media guidelines: overview from TEDxSydney

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.

TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.

Why are we using social media?

• Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
• Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
• Feedback channel, customer satisfaction barometer;
• News and information distribution; and
• Brand reinforcement

When representing our organisation online, be:

• Informative
• Engaging
• Exciting
• Courteous
• Witty
• Humble
• Accurate
• Timely

Remember

• We have our brand (and those of our partners, sponsors, customers and suppliers) to protect
• Nothing is ever truly deleted from the web

YAAARGH! Warriordash.com

// February 12th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

Well, other than Gelo dislocating his shoulder, #warriordash was the BEST!

// February 12th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

Anybody want to buy a family kayak?

// February 11th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news

Two great items for wallet fetishists (and who isn’t?)

// February 8th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Other news