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.

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!

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

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!

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.

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

Posted via email from Trailwalker Tips Still time to Donate now!

The Air Mail design is made from almost-indestructible Tyvek paper, the same stuff they make courier bags from. Very light and flat, they expand to hold a lot of stuff, though the smooth interior means you have to be a little careful opening your wallet or a card may slide out. There’s a range of cool designs featuring all kinds of real-world and abstract art over at mightywallets.com. You can see that I’ve written my address on the front with a Sharpie to personalize it (and if I lose it, maybe someone will mail it back to me?)

Both vendors ship internationally.

This year I’ve decided to put in an extra effort on my personal physical challenges.

In 2010 I competed in a 50km trail relay walk called WildEndurance, the 18km Kayak4Kids kayak race, the 90km Sydney To Gong Ride and my personal favourite, the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney.

This year I’m going to add the 90km overnight Hawkesbury Classic kayak race!

Those paying attention will notice these events all have more than long distances in common – they are also charity fundraising events, where competitors are expected to raise a minimum fund-raising amount to qualify to compete. Last year in addition to the minimum charitable contribution I raised about $8,000 for these charities, thanks to the support of many friends, family members, colleagues and social media friends.

This year I’ve decided to take a break from raising more than the minimum amount, and I’m going to donate the minimum amount myself instead of asking others.

Why? Charitable fund-raising disguised as endurance competitions are clever marketing ploys, but they’re psychological marketing strategy too, exploiting common weaknesses in the male psyche as effectively as the sugar-laden energy bar manufacturer telling you their product is healthy and good for you. It works on two levels.

See, human males have evolved to be risk-takers. I can only assume that in cave man days it was the males of the tribal group who did most of the hunting, risked their lives driving off predators, and of course, competed with each other for dominance and access to breeding age females.

From an early age, young boys start taking physical risks, from climbing to the top of their first flight of stairs to swinging off a rope or throwing themselves off the roof of the carport hoping they’ll fly. Risk-taking is a big element in determining what a man thinks of himself and what other men think of them. As they age, the surges of testosterone moderate and the demands of relationships, families and careers tend to moderate the risk-taking urge, but it still lurks within, seeking expression.

In their fourties, men are commonly stricken with mid-life crises. With the ego and emotional maturity of a young man stuck in the suddenly aging body of a middle-aged man, we rebel against this sudden awareness of our own mortality. We take off with a younger woman or buy a convertible, make a surprise career move, take up electric guitar, start playing soccer or, in extreme cases, all of the above. It’s all risk-taking.

It’s this same instinctive rebellion against ageing that I think is the reason most of us have many friends, mostly male, competing in an endurance event with a charitable fundraising compenent. The typical endurance event speaks directly to the risk-taking centre of our brain; it says, “here’s a chance to pit yourself against nature, to prove you can still climb that mountain, conquer the wilderness, succeed at something that looks impossible”.

The fundraising element gives us a higher cause to hide behind, a reason other than fear of aging to take the time needed to train and compete, to spend the money needed for equipment, meals and transport. It’s handy justification for the wife, kids and workmates who’ll be seeing less of us during training.

Problem is, for many of us, endurance events are addictive. The endorphin high is as addictive as any drug and much more socially acceptable. We like how we can run up a flight of stairs without losing our breath, how we can eat what we like and still lose that little pot-belly the odd gym session could never quite shift.

But get addicted to endurance events and there’s a hidden toll – if you’re a friend of mine, last year I would have asked you for a charity donation at least four times. One time is fine, four times maybe, but if I do five events this year are you happy to support me with a cash donation nine times in a two year period? If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t be, and I say that as one of your closest friends!

If it was really all about the charitable cause rather than the masculine cause, maybe, but not while at least a part of it is sustaining my endorphin addiction. So this year I’ll take the year off. I’ll pay my own endorphin tax. You’re welcome to donate if you wish (I’ll post the links here) but you won’t hear me asking. If you do, please do it for the sake of the charity, not for me.

Posted via email from Trailwalker Tips Still time to Donate now!

Coming soon to a zombie-ridden suburb near you!

Nevertheless, due to the needs of my clients I’ve enmaddened my skillz in SurveyMonkey, the tool of choice for startup online marketers (because you can design small, basic research surveys free). I’ve just upgraded from SurveyMonkey’s PRO subscription to their GOLD plan. I’m now allowed to build surveys including “unlimited questions and responses”! (Hah! Everybody knows the number of respondents is inversely proportional to the number of questions in the survey).

It also comes with:

• Custom Survey Design, URLs & Redirects Upon Survey Completion
• SPSS export
• A/B Testing
• Question & Answer Piping
• Text Analysis

…and more!

It’s going to cost me a fair chunk of change to be a gold subscriber and there’s nothing stopping me running multiple research projects for multiple clients, so if you’ve ever yearned for more than an eight question survey or longed for some piping (when the survey recalls your answer to a previous question and includes it in a subsequent question) let me know.

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.

Here’s a simple, clever solution I saw on a train station billboard this morning. It invites you to take a photo of the billboard and bring it into the store to get a discount off the sale.

You’re speaking to the target market (geeks) who are likely to have a cameraphone but not over-complicating things by requiring them to get a data connection and upload it to a competition mini-site.

You may even be able to get some location data by getting store staff to match photos against a book of photos you’ve prepared earlier.

It rewards the target consumer by making them feel smart enough to be able to do this without alienating them by making the offer too hard to redeem.

Like it.

Location:Whatmore St,Waverton,Australia

How to clear up the formatting? Cut or copy the text into (and then back out of) another text app that doesn’t support rich text. Apple thoughtfully ships just such an app with every iPad: the Notes app.

Cut or copy your sentences from Mail into notes, then copy and paste it back into the email, and SHAZAM! No more pesky text formatting.

But wait, you ask, how do you add formatting to text in a Mail email? Again the answer lies in copying and pasting, but this time you’ll need an app that supports rich text and let’s you mess with it.

Apple doesn’t include anything that’ll do this for free, but if you’ve already bought the Pages app from iWork for iPad, that’ll work nicely. I wasn’t able to find any other iPad apps for document editing that included rich text formatting, but let me know if you know of one.

(I made this image using the SketchMe iPad app, which makes images look hand-drawn in pencil or crayon. I started with a screen dump of the Notes app on my iPad. Like the iPhone, you can take a screen dump on your iPad by pressing the Home and Power buttons simultaneously. Your screen dump will be saved to your Saved Photos album in Photos. Note that screen dumps taken while in landscape mode will be sideways and will need to be rotated).

Don't ask customers for their opinion without paying attention to their answers.

It’s a great idea to show consumers considering your brand what other consumers think about it. But it’s really important to listen closely and pay attention to that stream and participate in the discussion.

This angry and ignored Malvern Star customer hasn’t just been ignored in store and on the phone, he’s also being ignored when he takes his complaint to the brand’s website.

This page could look so much better with a conciliatory comment from Malvern Star customer service, with an offer to resolve the problem on the phone or via email. It might even become a net positive result for the brand if handled well.

“I think most consumers use a search engine the same way they brush their teeth — with 90% of their attention on something else, with impatience, boredom and frustration with the whole category of search. They begin with unreasonable expectations about the quality of the result and with minimal patience for any request to contribute to the input.

As search product designers we find it very hard to really live inside that mindset since our work requires that we have 90% of our attention on the product we’re designing. It’s really a kind of method acting to get inside the head of a search user.”

That’s me, talking to Kat Mackintosh in a two-part interview on Nestoria’s company blog. Read on for more bold assertions about how personalisation, recommendation and geolocation might change the world. Again.