Doing Words

Don’t sweat the small stuff, but make damn sure you remember it

// December 14th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Communication, Startup

Clients sometimes mutter “he’s crazy…” behind my back, because I’m forever taking photographs and short videos; of conversations, people coding, diagrams we’ve sketched on whiteboards, and anything else that will stay still for long enough.

Why crazy? I understand that sometimes those messy, chaotic moments in startup life seem like the very things you want to forget. You’re on a mission to change the world and I’m taking photos of a three person all-hands meeting? What’s that about?

This is what it’s about: with a few years of hindsight as perspective, some of these will be the moments you miss the most and the things you’d give anything to recapture.

My job title at Doing Words is “Chief Hindsight Officer” for two reasons. I’m not just working with you because I bring the perspective of many startup experiences of my own, I’m also busy capturing as much as possible from your startup’s early history because some of it will be important to you one day.

You won’t know until you look back on it whether the person you’re meeting for a coffee will become the most important hire you ever made. You don’t know if whether that lunch appointment will result in your biggest-ever distribution deal or your biggest-ever waste of time. Perhaps that diagram we just threw up on your whiteboard is a heap of delusional crap, but maybe it includes a significant insight that will one day power not just your business but a whole ecosystem of businesses.

Crazy talk, sure, but not that unusual. And because I’ve missed enough of these pivotal moments of my own, I’m determined to capture yours if I can.

I can’t be there every day, even if you can afford me, so I’ll try to help you understand why it’s important to capture the little moments along the way, and I’ll try to tutor you to remember to capture them yourself when I’m not around.

When you boil it down to a few simple rules, it’s really not that hard. They are:

• If an external meeting isn’t subject to an NDA that specifically forbids it, try to take a photo.
• If an internal meeting isn’t disciplinary, try to take a photo and a video.
• If it goes on a whiteboard, take a photo of it with something like JotNot so the words will be legible.
• If you aren’t capturing your company processes and business rules in something like a Wiki, start immediately. If you already are, make it a key goal in someone’s metrics to keep it maintained, authoritative and consistent. Trusting it to ‘everyone’ is guaranteed to leave you with a tangled tagliatelli that makes no sense to anyone in a few years’ time.

Of course, there are some startup milestones that nobody needs a prompt to remember: the first time someone invests in your idea, the first time you go cashflow positive, and sometime between the two, the first time you have a paying customer. But there are ways and then there are ways to celebrate these more obvious milestones, and if you don’t make the time to celebrate them properly, then you are selling yourself and your team short.

One very inspiring example of remembering the first customer is this wonderful letter from makedo founder Paul Justin, which accompanied a beautifully packaged recycled cardboard bucket of the company’s creative play craft materials. Yes, Paul goes long on the big picture in his letter, but as his first customer and one of his product’s biggest fans, I want him over-the-top on this, because I’m pretty darned close to the top on it myself.

The text of his letter reads:

Dear First Ever Customer,

This is quite the moment. By receiving this package you have made reality of what was merely an idea one year ago.

Behold Makedo.

You are the first beat of the heart, the first breath of air.

I invite you to get involved and become a spirited presence in the life of makedo.
There is so much potential for what is possible, so many conversations to be had, so many ideas to be thought, and of course things to be created and shared.

We have created makedo.com.au as a place for you to think large, share your voice, express your ideas and inspire the world with your making.

Be part of the journey. Makedo was made for you.

Smiles,
Paul Justin
Inventor and founder of makedo.

Wow! Now that is a startup company that stops to remember the little-stuff-that-could-be-big. Can you tell how exciting it is to be a Makedo customer? Can you imagine how exciting it will be to be a Makedo employee or a Makedo investor? I encourage you to do the same. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but make damn sure you remember it.

I don’t want more iPhone apps, I want better iPhone apps

// November 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // software, strategy

Fred Wilson writes in The Power of Instant Approval that Apple is risking its lead in the smartphone app market by forcing app developers to wait on approval from Apple before publishing their apps on iTunes Store. It’s a growing industry concern — does Apple risk being overtaken by competitors? I think Apple understands the consumer relationship better than any competitor in the smartphone market and that’s why in this case, the cathedral can win over the bazaar.

The greater risk is that the industry may turn away from Apple if groupthink decides that Apple’s strategy is flawed. We’ve seen it before.

Could Google's Android Market really overtake Apple's iTunes Store?

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Let your users show you the money

// October 22nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // platform, Products, Startup, strategy

To paraphrase William Gibson, “The street always finds its own uses for things.” If you’re starting an online marketplace, or a social messaging platform, or an online community, one of the big challenges is to stay in touch with your users, to learn more about how they use your platform.

Why? Often ‘the street’ (your customers) will use your platform for surprising purposes. Likely, purposes you didn’t have in mind. Should you ignore their preference and try to force customers to bend to your will, or bend to theirsand try to find a commercially successful model for what they’re doing? (more…)

My Charity Water: case study in homepage conversion

// October 21st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Startup

My frequent readers (hi Mum!) will know I’m a sucker for charitable causes. In particular, I love Oxfam Trailwalker, MSF, Kiva, Pathways Foundation, MS Australia, and JDRF, However, the charity sector as a whole is not a great source of online marketing inspiration. If you need to find examples of poor online marketing, there are many great examples among charities (and SEO optimisation experts, ironically.)

An exception — and also a great case study in visitor-to-customer conversion — is Mycharitywater.org. Mum, by the time you read this, Mycharitywater will have moved on from their milestone of reaching USD$500,000, which translates into 100 water development projects in poor communities in the third world. There are many reasons for this success, but you only need to examine the design of Mycharitywater’s homepage to understand: these are people who understand how to convert online visitors to customers.

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Six tips for making a better demo video for your startup

// October 17th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Communication, Presentation, Startup

There comes a stage in any new web startup when the founders complain, “It’s so hard explaining all this on the homepage in words and pictures! Wouldn’t it be easier and better if we just showed it to them in a video?”

Well, no. Compare Hollywood box-office takings and the top 100 videos on YouTube and it illustrates how anyone can get a large audience, but it takes talent, experience and some budget to make something that puts money in the bank. Your startup’s demo video doesn’t need to make money directly, but it needs to convert visitors to customers, and those customers need to make you money.

In the course of my work I see a lot of demo videos, so many in fact, that I don’t watch most of them, because so many are so very, very bad. I could compile a short piece of my own, a “Top Five Worst Demo Videos” (let me know if that sounds like fun.) Clearly anybody can capture video from a computer screen and talk about it, but it takes some planning and some experience to create a great demo video.

Whether it cost you 30 minutes of your time or $2,000 to outsource it to video freelancer, it’s wasted money, wasted time and a waste of a conversion opportunity if your demo video isn’t watched. More importantly, it doesn’t convert visitors to customers.

Here’s a great demo video, produced for Dropbox.

After the click, my guide to what makes the difference between a good and a bad demo video.

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In product strategy, faith is a handicap

// October 16th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Startup, strategy

(This story originally ran on the Pollenizer blog and is re-published here because it’s on my mind right now and it still has legs… the story, not my mind.)

You remember the future we were promised, right? It had flying cars, robotic housemaids, one-piece shiny suits and meals in convenient pill form. We don’t live in that future because the people planning utopia fell in love with their own beliefs about what consumers wanted. They missed the gross and subtle cues that consumers use to indicate that this is not something they want, need or are prepared to pay for. It’s important to learn how to read those cues or your own startup vision may turn out to be as popular as nuclear flying car.

But first, let’s look back on the brighter, shinier future we were promised. As an impressionable adult I look back on when I was an impressionable boy and remember how deeply I had bought-in to that utopian future. At the age of 12 I had decided I’d be working as a journalist in a bustling colony on the Moon by the age of 30, flying to work, my only wardrobe choices the silver one-piece or the bronze one-piece, working late each night on a dinner pill. I’m a geek and I bought it wholesale. This was the future I wanted. Turns out, I was in the minority!

What happened to our bright utopian future? Real consumer behaviour happened. Society did not and does not really want a utopian future. Consider this: each of those emblemic utopian products kinda/sorta exists today:

Flying car: the Terrafugia Transition is more of a driveable airplane than a flyable car but it’s roadworthy, and once it has approval from the authorities you can drive it to an airport and fly it to another airport. The future we were promised included nuclear fusion-powered saucers, so where did the utopian product manager go wrong? He Underestimating the bureaucracy of the FAA, sure, but really the big mistake was an unfounded optimism that if consumer demand was high enough, the nascent nuclear industry would be able to solve the safety and disposal problems of nuclear energy. Turns out, no amount of commute time saved is enough to offset the fear of contaminating your neighbourhood with radioactive waste for the next half a million years. Almost always emotions (fear) beat logic (we’ll solve this) in the consumer mind.

Meals in pill form: turns out in reality meals are more easily delivered in powder form, and you can even get something better than a meal, if what you want to do is lose weight. Turns out the powdered meal replacement marketplace is quite a bit bigger than the market for flying cars but it’s not something most people choose to do. What went wrong? If asked, “Would you like to be able to save time by consuming a meal in pill form?” most consumers will say yes: sometimes they would like that. But the unasked question is, “how often?” and our utopian product manager either didn’t ask that or didn’t want to hear the answer.

Shiny one-piece suits: you only have to go to a fashion show, a car race, or buy one online to debunk the idea that these are somehow more practical and comfortable than jeans and a tee. Our utopian product manager was on happy drugs for this one.

Robot housemaid: the robot housemaid could be easily the most mainstream utopian product that exists today, yet consumers just won’t go for it. The iRobot company of Massacheusetts makes a whole range of the things. I pitch the joys of Roomba ownership to almost every visitor to our house — I’m famous for it — and I’m not too shabby at the art of the pitch. Anybody who doesn’t believe me need only check Amazon – this is a product that gets a 5 star review from nearly half the people who’ve bought one. So why have I been unable to convert even one single person yet?

Two simple reasons: almost everybody who cares about a clean floor already has a vacuum cleaner; and without exception they actually prefer to clean their floor themselves to make sure the job is done to their own high standard. They don’t want to be freed of the burden of cleaning the floor. They might tell a utopian product manager that they would love to be able to trust the cleaning to a robot, but you know what? They never will. Their housekeeping ability is closely associated with their self-esteem. You would have to pay them to allow a robot to do it, and even then they would stand there and watch it work, waiting for it to fail. That’s not increasing quality of life, it’s increasing anxiety. The only product people are prepared to buy that increases their anxiety is tobacco, apparently.

Even good startup founders make bad decisions

As startup founders designing online services, what can we learn from the mistakes of the utopian product manager? It is this: the very faith that makes you a good startup founder makes you a lousy judge of what consumers truly want to buy from you.

To even get a break as a startup founder you need an idea; more than idea, you need a dream, preferrably an unshakeable one. You need to evangelise not just consumers but sceptical investors, employees, industry and media. You can walk in with a meter-high stack of convincing-looking qualitative and quantitative research meant to back you up, but at best that’ll help with the post-purchase rationalisation. People will get on-board because they believe you, and they will believe you only if you have faith. And faith does not require facts. In fact, the more you have faith, the less you need facts and the more likely you are to select the facts that reinforce your faith.

The successful startup founders I know often have the uncanny ability to go to bat — and hit a home run — for ideas they don’t have much faith in. It’s a psychological makeup that is useful in sales roles; perhaps that’s why I know many successful startup founders from a sales background. Faith can really get in the way of building products consumers want. Not having faith in your product and your strategy requires you to apply reason, it allows you to subject a business to the strictest scrutiny, to make 110% sure that consumers aren’t just being polite to the nice young man who asked them if they’d be interested in buying a nuclear-powered flying car.

If you have faith, perhaps you have the wrong product, or you are the wrong person for the job. Get yourself a CEO (stay on as founder) an equal partner or an advisory board who don’t need faith and then pay close attention to what they’re telling you about what the market is saying.

Sadly for those of us who’d still love to be flying our robot housemaids, if you don’t have faith but everybody believes you anyway, you’re well on your way to success.

(That’s a depressing note to end on, so here’s a very funny skit about flying cars and what you should — or shouldn’t — be prepared to do to get one.)

Is burnout just around the corner? (wait, just lemme reply to this email)

// October 2nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Startup, Work

Derek Featherstone in Box Of Chocolates has a great post today on the very modern disease of working crazy hours. He says in part,

I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.

And later,

Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.

Great post, and I agree. Why is it happening? I think there’s three reasons: technology, knowledge work and wealth.

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How to choose a startup brand name

// October 1st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Branding, Marketing, Startup

One of the many things that can bog down or trip up your startup team is deciding on a name for your company and your product. Without the right process you can bat ideas back and forth for weeks without making any progress at all. Through hard-won experience I’ve learned a few rules, and found some useful tools, that can help save you time and help you avoid many of the common problems.

How important is a brand name?

First, let’s recognise that a great brand name doesn’t make a great product. Neither does a bad brand name condemn a company to failure. Can you think of a successful business with a crappy brand name? Let me see… Google, Wal-Mart, GE, Ford — if we were sitting around a coffee table with $5,000 and an idea, none of these would be in a top 5.

Fortune's list of biggest companies is a list of blah brand names... With the possible exception of Total (I can see some appeal there for the megalomaniac demographic).

It’s possible to build a strong brand by building a strong company around it. Brands can also be strengthened, tweaked, broadened or focused over time — you don’t have to get it completely right the first time. But it helps. (more…)

Master “W Fu” — the secret art of media relations

// May 28th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Startup

photo credit: laverrue

Despite my baby-face, I’m so old that I had a career as a journalist and PR consultant before my interweb production career. While I no longer have to practice media relations every day, most startup founders find they have to wear many hats, and one of those may be the natty trilby hat of media relations. (more…)

On the importance of owning your web platform

// December 9th, 2008 // 0 Comments // platform, Startup, strategy

For web businesses, web platforms are not like phone connections and photocopy paper, they are tightly woven into the fabric of every aspect of your company

But first, big props to Balsamiq, the mockup tool I used to do the image above. It costs $79, comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, or you can use it from within Confluence, JIRA and XWiki wikis if you use one of those to manage your product process. It’s the best quick mockup tool I’ve ever used – quicker even than pencil and paper, and after about a month of use, it’s an essential part of my paper prototyping and developer briefing toolkit. Product people: if you have a customer or business process owner who’s always bugging you, give them this to use and tell them if they can sketch it, you’ll build it. It’s so easy to use even the dumbest marketing manager can figure it out. It’ll teach them more about web development than a week of workshops and you can get some real work done in the meantime. More about Balsamiq later.

If you’re starting a trucking company, you need at least one guy who knows about trucks. If you’re going to franchise a network of muffin bakeries, better get yourself someone who can make great muffins. Have a guess what kind of skills you need to have before you decide to open a scuba school… give yourself a gold star.

Late last week I met with a potential client (yay, I love potential clients, sometimes even more than actual clients.) The potential client shall remain nameless to protect their identity.

We met. They stepped me through an impressive and well thought-out introduction to the business, all the way through a detailed business plan, laboriously detailed spreadsheets listing costs to be incurred in the first three years, introduced the entire executive team and… uh oh…

…there was no Chief Technology Officer on the executive team. There was no budget line for recruiting a top-line team of web developers, product manager, interaction designer and customer service manager. They were planning to outsource the whole lot.

Common mistake, but critical mistake nonetheless.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: if you are a web business, you need to own your own web platform. You need to have the people responsible for the web platform represented at director level in your company, aligned with your business goals and sufficiently motivated to bring onboard a web platform team of the highest calibre.

If you’re starting a trucking company, you need at least one person who knows about trucks. If you’re going to franchise a network of muffin bakeries, better get yourself someone who can make great muffins. Have a guess what kind of skills you need to have before you decide to open a scuba school… give yourself a gold star.

In other words, web businesses are usually not businesses-that-happen-to-have-websites. When you outsource a web platform you not only incur additional cost and add to your relationship-management burden, you miss out on all the intellectual property of actually running the business.

For instance, if you discover a better way of helping customers choose and add something to a shopping cart, you can act on that learning lesson more quickly if you own the team that implements it, and crucially you keep the IP on not just the business process but the platform code used to build it, which lets you get better and faster at making other improvements in the future.

If you’re a web business, how well your web platform works defines the success or failure of almost every metric of your business: converting consumers to customers, average revenue per customer, customer churn, competitive moves, and most crucially of all, time-to-iterate. Name a big, successful web business that is still on an outsourced platform.

It’s OK to be the founding team and not have a senior technology guru there with you from day one, just as it’s OK to not have your CFO or even your CEO hired yet. But recognise that you will need that person, and you will need that person to hire a team, and that team, while it may use off the shelf and SAAS and hosted components to build your web platform, will ultimately deliver something unique that your competitors can never hope to imitate; something your suitors will pay an arm and a leg to get to… the experience that comes from building and  operating a successful web platform.