You've got to hand it to MS - no one is better at hiding the best, most interesting features when it comes to "wow" for different audiences. I think of Powershell for infinite CLI programability, Homegroup (in Windows 7) for instant sharing, even the simple (but ultra cool) Outlook date converter. They pulled off another one with the release of the Windows Live Sync Beta last week.

I've been a long long time user of Windows Live Sync, back to the early days of Foldershare... I actually paid for it! It's an incredibly useful tool - I sync my browser favorites, my documents and all my photographs to every computer I own, and, presto, I have an instant virtual desktop and backup solution. There have been some annoyances, but I tout it to everyone I can possibly get in front of. You can keep your DropBoxes, Box.net, SugarSyncs, etc - all that matters to me is peer-to-peer from any folder on my machine, and that's what Live Sync gives me for free.

When the new version came out, there had been a lot of belly-aching about reducing online storage, and functionality changes since they merged Mesh and Live/Skydrive and Live Sync, but those users were using Live Sync for the wrong thing. If they wanted storage in the sky, there were a lot of other solutions for it and these changes basically just revealed a fraudulent market  that Live Sync had succeeded in winning. But the real genius of the new Live Sync is that it instantly transforms the same old Windows you've used forever into a machine in the cloud - with nearly all of the benefits thereof.

There have been countless pieces recently about how the cloud will overtake a little/a lot/everything when it comes to startups/games/processing/etc, even in this very space. And it is nearly impossible to overstate how much cloud computing will change the way IT is done for companies large and small. The question is, what happens to the hundreds of millions of machines out there with multi-gigahertz processors and yottabytes of hard drive space when everything is in the cloud? The answer is that they become a cloud too, and this Live Sync is the toe in the water for that.

How's that you say? How can you read all that in from a single little set of features? Well, it's not much, but you can see where things are going. Built into Live Sync are:

1) A device independent storage system (including your phone)
2) A remote desktop/control capability
3) A method for synchronizing not just files but actual application settings
4) A web site to provision and control them all

Add a way to share processing power and you've got a cloud. Sure it's not going to make the top500 (http://www.top500.org/) list, but could it speed transcoding of high quality content to your new device? Sure. Could it provide an instant backup solution? Absolutely. A distributed database for all your friends and relatives contacts, emails and history? You bet. But the coolest ideas are the ones that are so off-the-wall, we haven't even thought of them yet - SETI@Home on steroids.

Make no mistake, there's lots left to do. Beyond the distributing of the processing, there's implementing the user scenarios that make this work. And, there's building an SDK to wire all that goodness up so that devs can build greatness with Visual Basic. You'll see lots more movement here as well - Google will almost definitely make a move here with their toolbar/chrome browser/chrome OS as well. The future is cloudy - and it'll be rolling in to a desktop near you, shortly.

I remember reading a Fast Company article a few years ago that explored software quality assurance activities within NASA.

Quoting:

What's going on here is the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that defines the drive for group perfection -- a drive that is aggressively intolerant of ego-driven hotshots. In the shuttle group's culture, there are no superstar programmers. The whole approach to developing software is intentionally designed not to rely on any particular person.

And the culture is equally intolerant of creativity, the individual coding flourishes and styles that are the signature of the all-night software world. "People ask, doesn't this process stifle creativity? You have to do exactly what the manual says, and you've got someone looking over your shoulder," says Keller. "The answer is, yes, the process does stifle creativity."

It’s a bureaucratic, officious, overwhelmingly boring way to develop software.  But for the task at hand – launching tons of metal and rocket fuel into orbit, with living people aboard (oh, and returning them safely home) – it works.

Startups live in a completely different world – a completely different universe – than these NASA programmers.  Quickness, agility, and passion are paramount.  Tech chops are required, yes, but on any top-ten list of adjectives describing the best startups’ software, “bug free” probably won’t make the list.

Should it?

How concerned should startups be with quality?  It’s a knotty question.  I’ve known startups whose stated intent was to have their users do their QA for them.  They figure that they’ll get multiple chances to convince customers to use their product, bugs be damned.  That’s a risky proposition.  Some customers may be turned off by what they see that they won’t come back.  Joel Spolsky wrote about the “crappy 1.0” phenomenon a few years ago, and it’s worth a re-read.

I can’t deny that most of the pressures facing startups all point in the direction of reduced software quality.  However, I also don’t think it’s a either-or decision.  I’d like to propose that software quality can be viewed as something that can be increased at the same time as increasing speed, agility, feature count, and all these other wonderful things that startups want to achieve, and not only that, but actually CAUSE those things to happen.

So, having said all that as a preamble, what sorts of quality initiatives should you be considering that will help your startup release more high-quality code, quicker and with greater agility?

Get Lots Of Users.  Despite the misgivings I stated above about forcing your users to do QA, the fact is that all bugs are shallow.

Implement Continuous Integration.  Whatever your precise definition of Continuous Integration is – do it.  You’ll find bugs more quickly, have more confidence when pivoting, and deploy with less risk.

Implement Source Control. As I’ve written before, this should be a no-brainer.  But…

Write Unit Tests.  This one is very controversial, especially in the context of the “fast startup” argument.  Some people are firmly convinced that every extra line of unit test code is a line of feature code that is left wanting.  However – I firmly believe that in addition to the traditional benefit of unit tests, which is providing a platform to conduct automated regression tests of your changing codebase, unit tests also increase the quality of your design by requiring developers to think in terms of small, granular, easy-to-change pieces that can be independently verified and, when bolted together, result in some very elegant architectures.  Think of unit testing as “baking in quality from the start.”  The result – faster, more confident pivoting, and zero throwaway garbage.

Simplify.  I wrote about this a couple weeks ago here on Seattle 2.0.  The fact is that complexity, by itself, can cause quality problems.  Complex things break, mostly in unexpected ways. 

Pick Your Experiments Carefully. The Simplicity argument has a close cousin: new things break.  Avoid new, exciting, experimental, unproven tools and technologies if you can get away with a tried-and-true replacement.  Carefully manage your exposure, to allow you to focus your time and concentration on your own product, and not fixing bugs in somebody’s new compiler, version-control system, or AJAX doodad.

Last, but not least:

Hire Good People.  Software development is still a nascent enough engineering discipline that people make an outsized contribution to the success or failure of the product.  Good developers make far fewer mistakes – big and little – than poor developers.  Maybe a couple of orders of magnitude fewer.  That’s huge for startups.  Would you rather be fixing crappy code at 3 AM, or implementing new features that will raise your revenues 10x in the next calendar year?  Your choices for your co-founder, partners, or key technical hires may make the difference.

These are companies providing Marketing to startups (from the Seattle 2.0 Service Providers Directory):

Find other services for your startup or add your business if you provide services to startups.

Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle:

			Recurring
FRI	June 25
SAT	June 26
SUN	June 27
MON	June 28
TUE	June 29	Get Funded!: Winning Strategies for Courting Angel Investors (Seattle)	Seattle Startups Open Coffee (Seattle)
WED	June 30	eKaraoke (Seattle)	Seattle Lean Coffee (Seattle) Eastside Startups Open Coffee (Redmond)
THU	July 1		Hops & Chops Happy Hour (Seattle)
FRI	July 2
SAT	July 3
SUN	July 4
MON	July 5
TUE	July 6
WED	July 7		TechFoam: Eastside Startup Meetup (Bellevue)
THU	July 8	Seattle CrowdPitch (Seattle)

More Startup Events in Seattle...

Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.

My friend Jake is a landscaper. He doesn’t have a Twitter account, he’s never heard of Foursquare, and he’s never considered building a tech startup. I saw him about a month ago, and he was thoroughly depressed. His whole demeanor was one of defeat. He just looked beaten. I was worried, and I asked him what was wrong.

“I’m lonely,” he said. “I feel completely disconnected from the world.”

“What do you do all day?” I asked him.

“I dunno. I go to work, I go to the gym, I play Xbox. That’s about it.”

I gave him a hug and I told him he could always call me if he wanted to hang out. I invited him to parties. I introduced him to some of my friends. Nothing seemed to help much.

I saw him again last week, and, this time, he was walking on clouds. Everything about him was joyful. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. The world was his oyster.

“Ha. You totally met a girl.”

“No!”

“What is it then? What changed?”

He flashed me a sideways grin. “I gave away my Xbox.”

The Addiction

The video games Jake thought he loved had been making him miserable. He’d spent all his free time playing Xbox, chatting on his headset to his fellow players from around the world, but it kept him from interacting with the real world. Over time, he became increasingly isolated by a device that gave him access to people all over the world.

“I didn’t realize how much it was holding me back,” he told me. “I was completely chained to it. It made my world so small.”

Seeing this change in Jake made me think about my relationship with the Internet and with social media. I exist in a self-selected world where my colleagues (fellow entrepreneurs and social media junkies) constantly update their Twitters and Facebooks and check in on Foursquare and flip through RSS readers on their iPhones or iPads whenever there’s a break in conversation – or, realistically, during the conversation.

We have our iPhones on the table at dinner. We say things to each other like “Tell the waitress to come back in a minute, I have to tweet what you just said” or “Hang on, I’m looking for our location on Foursquare. It keeps bringing up the Buckley’s in Queen Anne. Why can’t it find the one in Belltown? Ah, there it is. Now then. What were you saying about being pregnant?” 

Not everyone lives in this world. Among my precious and tiny cadre of non-tech friends, my obsessive relationship with the Internet is perplexing, in turns amusing (“You should really see yourself right now”) and frustrating (“Seriously, can you just put down the iPhone and talk to me?”).

Freedom from the Addiction

There are few times in my life when I am separated from the Internet, and they are often forced upon me. Last summer, I stayed with friends in a one-room cabin in a remote part of Idaho. Cell phones didn’t work and there was no Internet connection in the cabin, built fifty years ago by my friend’s grandfather. I’d been very, very apprehensive about going.

We slept and watched DVDs and took the boat out on the lake and made s’mores over the firepit. I had no access to my 1800 Facebook friends or the 300 people I follow on Twitter or the ex-boyfriends who need to be Internet-stalked every single day lest they change their relationship status in some way that will impact me emotionally (this spans every possible change), or all the publicists and account managers on email who really, really need me to tell them today if we can do that giveaway of their new scented body lotion, or the tech blogs and gossip blogs and politics blogs and polyvore sets I watch religiously.

It was the most connected I’d felt in ages.  

Now for the professional take on all this: Is Internet addition a real thing?

In 2007, the American Psychological Association chose not to recommend that video game addiction be added to the edition of the DSM to be released in 2012, citing a lack of research for evidence to conclude that video game addiction was a disorder.

In that same year, the American Medical Association declined to recommend to the APA that they include Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as a formal diagnosis in DSM-V, citing a lack of research and unclear definitions of the associated terms.

Yet, professionals in the field continue to insist that Internet addictions (and not just porn!) are real disorders that leave lives in disarray, and they’re pushing to get IAD listed in future editions of DSM.

How to Recover

Since some of us have trouble conceiving of a life without Internet access, here are some concrete suggestions for breaking the cycle:

The Family Vacay

Plan a phone-free weekend vacation for your family or with your friends. At the start of the trip, phones should be collected, stored somewhere safe, and be turned off throughout the trip. Take a road trip – check out Leavenworth or Vancouver or the Olympic Peninsula. Go hiking or camping. See a concert at the Gorge. Try new restaurants. Go back to your hotel and play board games. Pour a glass of scotch and challenge your brother-in-law to a game of chess, while your sister and your wife are sprawled out across the living room reading books. (The real kind, made of paper.) Talk to them without distractions. Focus on being 100% present for them. Reconnect with the things that make you human.

The Retreat

If you think you can do it, just turn your damn phone off for the weekend. Don’t check email. Don’t check Twitter. Don’t turn on your computer, not even to jot something down on your calendar or to check what’s going on at TechCrunch. If you manage to do this successfully, please volunteer to coach others in your methodology.

If you read my posts frequently (and pay attention instead of snoozing), or if you were at the Seattle 2.0 Awards this year and heard me speak, you know I’m not a big fan of “me-too” products or businesses. I’m also not a big fan of “me-too-but” products. The two primary reasons I don’t like those have nothing to do with pride. I don’t like them because there is just too many unexplored opportunities out there, so why put yourself into a harder competition? However, most importantly of all, I don’t like them because it’s too damn hard to get mind-share from investors, partners, and, above all, customers.

But let’s assume you are set on your ways to do a better mousetrap. You ignored my advice. You looked at a fast growing startup, raking a ton of attention and revenue, and you are sure as hell you could do a lot better than that. Can you predict how this plot turns out? Most of the time, it does pretty badly.

You Don’t Know Their Business

[Parenthesis: I was giving a hard time by Dave Schappell last week because I critique startup or ideas without giving names, but that’s fine by me. I think if I give names I might break the trust people put on me and they might not tell me their ideas or products because they might be afraid I’ll write negative things about it and it might affect their fund-raising, partnerships or hiring efforts]

Just last week I was talking with a young entrepreneur, working with a few other folks and he told me they were going to build a product to help people do X. As I always do (and everyone does it as well), we try to fit this into the context of other things we know. Clearly that idea was exactly like startup “S” (“S”  stands for Successful) and I asked if it was just like “S”. The entrepreneur said, yes, it is, “but it’s better because on S you can’t do Y, Z or W”.

Turns out I know a heck of a lot about startup “S”, not only because of personal friendship with the founders, but also because I followed a lot of their moves and twists. Immediatelly it became clear the entrepreneur had no clue what “S” really did. They explored the UI and User Experience, but had no idea about all the business development, partnerships, monetizations, strategy shifts, core technology, marketing and other elements behind “S”.

Which circles back to the title of this post. You can’t copy what you don’t see. You need to have inside information to do that, and, unless you worked at the competitor, you don’t know all the moving pieces. The interface is just the tip of the iceberg.

But what about Posterous, Tumblr, Wordpress, Android, . . .

Yeah, bringing up success stories of what might look like “me-too” is not going to make you successful. A lot of successful startup stories seems to be “me-too-but” startups, but they are not. They understood that, and they clearly carved out a piece of the market where they felt they could make strides, and they did.

My personal story…

Just to illustrate this story with a real close-to-home example, the success of Diaspora raising $200,000+ through donations to build a “Facebook competitor” made me wonder if we could do something similar with the Seattle 2.0 website. We have this vision for a more useful, engaging and information rich website that would cost a lot more money than we can afford now. The logic goes like this… Diaspora raised a ton of money…  Lots of Seattle entrepreneurs, investors and service providers love Seattle 2.0… Ben Huh once told me we should start collecting taxes from Startups because the good we do for the community… We should raise money through a donation system!

If I was just slightly more naïve I would have done that, and I’m pretty sure it would have flopped. Why? Because there is a lot more behind Diaspora story than I know. There were forces working on its favor that either we don’t have it, or we can’t replicate. There were angles that made the press and bloggers love it, which we don’t have (“young college students”, “challenging The Man (Facebook)”, “who wouldn’t want to be a very early support of Facebook?”, etc.). There were some big name supporters who were very vocal. They executed the marketing of the campaing (voluntarily or not) very well.

My final advice is for you who is doing a better-mousetrap play, to really understand a lot more than just the surface elements of a business. Who are their investors? Who are their partners? Who are the people who made the connections? What are the business processes? Who joined or left the company? What pivots they did over the years and why? Oh, just forget it, go do something else. 

When I was pregnant, I faced what seemed like the hardest decision I ever had to make – what to name our child. We had a very simple set of rules that we used to eliminate potential names immediately: The name cannot rhyme with a body part, body function or sex act, nor can it be shortened to rhyme with a body part, body function or sex act. As such, Dick, Art and Puck were all out of the question. Turned out she was a girl, and we named her Celia, after my grandmother. It was a golden name. Until our stockbroker said, “hey Celia, can I feel ya?”

Naming a new company isn’t much easier. In fact, it can seem a lot harder. Not only does it have to be a name you like, but you need to be able to get the matching URL, it can’t sound like the competition, you want it to reflect your values and your product, be memorable and spellable and….. You can have the best intentions, brightest minds, follow all the current naming rules, and still get a name that someone thinks sounds like a sex act. It is not possible to get the perfect name. And it may not matter.

My soon-to-come-out-of-the-closet-new-project had a naming meeting the other night. It involved 6 women (our target market) and the intrepid geek-genius-guy brave enough to be part of this company. (We love him.) When the evening was done we had consumed 6 bottles of wine, pounds of artisan cheese, two baguettes and an absurd amount of chocolate. We also had the perfect name. We spent 4 hours and no money. Based on that, let me share with you some ideas on how to name your new startup.

Brooks Talley, geeky demigod who is worshiped by his three female (business) partners, sent out the ground rules for our naming session in an email that was funny and perfect – and totally X rated, so if you’re easily offended, step away from the screen now. His rules will work for you too.

In our case, we realized that we may want to serve men someday too. Good thing we didn’t do the happyvagina.com thing.

Now that you’ve done all that, it’s time for the most important rule of all. Relax. You will not get the perfect name. There are lots of ways to get someone to walk through your door, and once they do, it is your product and service that will keep the happy customers coming. And once they do, your brand will be sticky, people will hear about it, and what you named it simply won’t matter.

These are companies providing IT Services to startups (from the Seattle 2.0 Service Providers Directory):

Find other services for your startup or add your business if you provide services to startups.

This is not meant to be comprehensive. But it's a good start. I wish I had known this stuff before and published it 3 months ago....but I needed to go through the process myself.  

Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle:

			Recurring
FRI	June 18
SAT	June 19
SUN	June 20
MON	June 21
TUE	June 22		Seattle Startups Open Coffee (Seattle)
WED	June 23	Valuation eIQ (Seattle)	Seattle Lean Coffee (Seattle) Eastside Startups Open Coffee (Redmond)
THU	June 24	Mobile Advertising: What's in it for YOU? (Bellevue)	Hops & Chops Happy Hour (Seattle)
FRI	June 25
SAT	June 26
SUN	June 27
MON	June 28
TUE	June 29
WED	June 30
THU	July 1

More Startup Events in Seattle...

Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.

This is such a common mistake, and it’s one I made over and over and over again before I had a light bulb moment. I pored over my Google Analytics data and assumed that the keywords that were popping up in my search engine referral log were the only keywords for which my sites were ranking, or at least the majority of the keywords for which they were ranking.

This was not at all the case. These were the keywords that produced the search engine results that people clicked on.

I finally sat down and compared what Google Webmaster tools listed as my search queries to what Google Analytics listed as my referral keywords. There were some major discrepancies.

For instance, a category page on my celebrity gossip blog was ranking well for “Katy Perry,” but the title and description it was displaying was about Katy’s long-ago fling, Benji Madden. As a result, the click-through rate was below 10%. Similarly, a page on my women’s issues site was ranking well for “Bristol Palin,” but the title and description were about abstinence. When I tweaked them so they focused on Bristol’s television campaigns and print ads for abstinence, the click-through rate shot up. People wanted to see and hear Bristol talk about her pet causes – they didn’t actually want to read about abstinence.

I had to think about how my page titles were phrased, what my meta descriptions said, and, most importantly, what searchers wanted when they typed in those keywords.  If I was providing the information they wanted, but I wasn’t making that clear in the title and the description, some tweaks were in order.

This leads me to my second point.

2.   Use organic search terms to segment your market.

Your website doesn’t have to serve only one market. This is true if you’re an ad-supported website (like the ones I run) or if you run a website with the goal of driving a purchase. An analysis of the search terms for which you rank – and for which your competitors rank – can help you further segment the market and determine where you fit in.

Let’s say you run a website that sells widgets. You assumed your target market would be women ages 30-45 searching to buy widgets for themselves, but when you analyze your organic search terms, you realize that you’re ranking for “anniversary gift” and “best widget for my girlfriend.” Then you analyze your main competition and realize that they’ve targeted their SEO for “graduation gift” and “widget for college student.” They also seem to be targeting “fubars,” a potential substitute for the widget.

(You can often get a sense of your competition’s SEO targets just by scanning the tags on their page source, but if you want a more detailed analysis, you can invest in a professional SEO tool.)

By looking at organic search data, you’ve just uncovered three new active markets without investing very much time or money in market research.

Now, not only can you tweak your SEO for these markets, but you can change the experience the user has on your site based on the search term they’ve come from, regardless of the page they land on.

We spend a lot of time optimizing the navigation of websites (“For Grads”, “Anniversaries”, and “Just Like a Fubar!“), assuming searchers will land where we expect they’ll land. This is a very, very useful practice, and most definitely something you should be doing. But if your site gets a lot of traffic from search, it makes sense to take it a step further and actually use the search term to determine what content the site displays.

For instance, if a user comes in to your home page using a search term containing the word “girlfriend” or “wife,” you might want to make sure you display a picture of a woman gratefully kissing her male companion, widget in hand. If a user comes in using a search term containing the words “college” or “graduation,” perhaps a college kid high-fiving his awesome widget-bearing dad would be more appropriate. If your user comes in on any variation of “fubar,” consider using a portion of the site to do a simple and favorable comparison of fubars to widgets.

3. Always Be Testing

I stole this from REI’s Jonathon Coleman, who gave a fantastic presentation on organic search at the Online Marketing Summit earlier in the week. (You can check out the slides here.)

It’s a good mantra: Our SEO failures and successes should be quantifiable. It helps to have more specific goals than “I want to sell more product” or “I want more traffic.” A clearer goal would be “Over the next nine months, I want to triple the number of widgets I sell to the anniversary-gift market as a result of search traffic.”

Now that you have a clear goal, you can start making actionable, testable decisions. We like to overlook the “actionable” and “testable” parts and just make decisions. I know I do. I make a lot of decisions. I make them quickly and I make them all the time, and, as a result, they are not always good decisions. More tellingly, though, I usually don’t have any idea if they were good decisions or not, because I’ve set up no clear path for action and test.

For the goal above, I could break it into two portions:

a)    I want to double the amount of search traffic I get for anniversary-related searches

b)   I want to improve conversion rates from anniversary-related search by 20%.

Okay, cool. Those are actionable goals that you can test against. Now, take a break from being proud of yourself for creating actionable goals that you can test against, and actually set up the tests. (This is another part where I have trouble.)

You can use Google Analytics and multivariate testing to test against both of these goals, or, if you want to get fancier, try a professional SEO solution like SEOMoz or Optify or any other one of the eight billion SEO analysis companies that multiply in Seattle every time it rains. Know your baseline and track your actions against changes to your baseline. If you want to show off, make a bunch of changes over a span of time and run a regression on the data. (Seriously, though, don’t do that.)

We all know how to do this kind of data analysis – everyone here took a lot of math in school – but I’m always surprised at how few entrepreneurs do. We like to be making decisions and doing things and changing the whole world asap, not measuring boring results. But there are so many ways to quantify search-marketing decisions, to see what works and what doesn’t. There’s just no excuse not to do so when you consider the relative payoff.

Now, will somebody please volunteer to call me every morning and remind me to do all the things I just told you to do? 

Easy: bill at $125 an hour, and work 2000 hours a year.

What's that you say? You don't work on an hourly rate? Wrong. You absolutely work on an hourly rate, and if you don't treat your job that way, it's a recipe an inefficient work day. But I only make $(insert some smaller number than 125 here) an hour! Wrong. That's what your paycheck says, but your opportunity cost is much higher than what you take home. Whether it's doing something else at your current job, working at a high paying new job, or spending time with your family, or basking in the sun, you need to treat every second you're at work as a little distilled piece of gold. And every second that goes by, you're spending that gold on something - whether you like it or not.

A very close friend of mine is head of product at a software firm. They had their origins in consulting, but now do mostly software as a service and only run the consulting arm on the side. When they first started, the company was all about billable hours and so it was critical to track every second of work that occured on a contract. Now, the company makes much of its money off an on going service revenue stream, so lots of the consulting infrastructure isn't really necessary any more. Yet they continue to measure everyone in the company by the hours they work, and the projects they worked on. With every opportunity to throw out the old ways, they still keep the tools and reports around. Why? Pure productivity.

There are lots of tools out there that help you focus and look forward towards a goal - but nothing more helpful in getting there than simply looking at what you accomplish every day. In a blog post about Fogbugz, Joel Spolsky talked about the concept of evidence based scheduling , a methodology I am a huge fan of. The quick summary is that you can tell more about how long something is going to take, compared to your estimation, by looking at how close your estimations were in the past and using that margin of error moving forward. The key insight here is that the amount you were off from estimation to realization is most often caused by the dull hum of usually constant interruptions that plague us all every day. By including these constant irritations as part of the calculation looking forward, you'll be more accurate in your prediction. Even better, by recognizing that tasks are consistently off your estimation because of some recurring distraction, you have the opportuinity to address the distraction systemically and be a more efficient team.

You can use a tool like Fogbugz to accomplish understanding how much real time tasks are taking, and I am a big fan of using it for exactly that. But for non-milestone related tracking, I think my friend's company has hit the nail on the head.  Instead of looking at filling out time cards and tracking developer checkins against work items as being a drain on time and energy, it's viewed as a way to move the team forward together, with a unified look at what's important and what needs help. If Jim is working on pitching a partner, and puts down that he's been working on it for 31 hours this week, that's something everyone can see and evaluate. Either this is viewed as a) appropriate, b) inappropriate and help Jim be more efficient or c) inappropriate and get something out of Jim's way. Sales, marketing, business development, software engineering, system administration - the technique works across all disciplines because it does one thing extremely well: it provides transparency.

What about for yourself? The dollar figures I used earlier provide a fantastic touchstone for what's valuable and what's not. Did you just spend a half hour arguing with a vendor over coffee delivery? You just cost yourself $67.50. Forty-five minutes figuring out Outlook? $93.75. You can go through your whole day like this - and be hard core. Abstracting your tasks away from the vague notions of efficiency and 'getting stuff done', and bring it back to cash to help you realize exactly how important every second is. And you'll find the more work items you track in this way, the more careful you'll be about where you spend your time.

There's a danger that cannot be ignored here - this culture MUST be imbued from the top down, and the bottom up. There's a cost in tracking (10 minutes every 2 hours is $50), and, of course, and any friction at all will be met with the harshest resistance. The second anything starts to appear to get in the way of getting things done, people are going to try to throw it out (at best) or just ignore it (at worst). But there is no doubt, by measuring everyone's work with a public ruler, you'll create a team that not only works efficiently, but works together in a completely new way. When people realize time is money, they treat every second with the importance it deserves.

We'd like to thank our sponsors who support the Seattle 2.0 and, like us, are passionate about tech startups and want to make Seattle an even better place for them.

TechStars Seattle

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. We run a three month long program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), and Seattle (WA) once each year. We’re very selective – hundreds of companies apply and we only take about ten companies per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, three months of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

SharedBusinessSpace

SharedBusinessSpace.com is an online listing directory that focuses solely on listing shared spaces for lease that are affordable to startup businesses, small business owners and entrepreneurs. SharedBusinessSpace.com serves as a matchmaker by helping businesses that have extra office space find a sub-tenant to rent it, while at the same time helping small businesses who need the space to find it.

Fenwick West LLP

Emerging technology companies partner with Fenwick & West for a broad range of services, through all stages of growth. We represent venture-backed private companies from formation and initial funding through IPOs and mergers. Through 30 years of partnering with leading technology start-up companies, we have obtained a deep understanding of how companies are formed, financed, grown and taken public or merged and earned the role of key trusted advisor. Fenwick is ranked by Dow Jones as the fourth most active U.S. law firm in helping IT clients raise venture capital and by MergerMarket and as one of the top five technology M&A practices in the U.S.

Freelock Computing

Freelock Computing believes changes are the status quo. Nothing stays the same for very long. Every day your site sits on a development server is another day it's not bringing in new business. Our motto: Launch early, change frequently. If you're looking for a long-term development partner for your web porject we can help.

Want to become a sponsor of Seattle 2.0? Learn more

A concept has been bouncing around in the back of my head for a couple weeks now that I’d like to explore with you.  The hypothesis is this: that one of the most fruitful things you can do as you’re building your tech startup is to take steps to aggressively simplify things on a regular basis.

What form does this "Active Simplification" take?  Let’s look at some examples:

Code: Remove old, unused lines of code.  Eliminate complicated edge case handling.  Use fewer languages.  

Infrastructure: Pare down the number and variety of software and hardware vendors.  Standardize on one or a few platforms.

APIs and Formats: Work with vendors/partners/end users to standardize on fewer formats.  Actively refactor and simplify your APIs on an ongoing basis.

Customers: Cut loose the most complicated and needy customers. Reduce and consolidate the categories of customers you target.

Pricing: Simplify and consolidate your pricing schemes.

Product Development: Eliminate all but the top three most-requested features from your backlog.  Reduce the number of SKUs or custom configurations.

Operations: Constantly reassess, and eliminate where possible, the implementation of custom tools that support operational functions, such as payroll, accounting, or legal.  Use templates and industry-standard tools where possible.

You get the idea.  This is a holistic strategy that can be applied to any aspect of your business, and it doesn’t apply only to tech startups, either.  The notion of “Active Simplification” came to me after spending some time reading systems theory, a field in which many writers argue that large systems are inherently dysfunctional.  Following the string backward, one could make the argument that for any two systems that meet the same need, the simpler one is better.

This makes sense.  The more complex your system/business/codebase/customer list, the more effort it takes to learn, maintain, and grow.  The fewer exceptions you have to address, the faster you can move forward.  The less overall volume of “stuff” you have to worry about, the lower your costs.

I’m not convinced, not thoroughly anyway, but it is interesting to work through the practical ramifications of this theory.

First of all, you have to put complexity on the table as an equal partner with other things you care about, like customers, features, or profit.  How can you possibly do this?  You have to buy into the notion that simplicity is a primary driver of business success, that all sorts of good things will accrue to you when you no longer have all these complex systems to deal with. 

Second of all, you have to make hard decisions.  One of your software developers wants to use custom tools?  Hm.  Maybe not.  One of your customers wants some complicated, custom code written in to support their business?  Maybe not.  Your new bookkeeper wants to use their own preferred accounting package, when you’ve spent the last year in QuickBooks?  Maybe not.  All sorts of tough decisions, made tougher by the fact that the answer to the question “Well, why not?” has never had a very good tangible answer.  To answer “We’re actively trying to manage complexity” seems shallow, abstract, and too theoretical by half.  And perhaps it is. 

I would close by suggesting that this is not a black-and-white, either-or decision: simplicity vs. complexity.  It’s a VERY long spectrum, with many, many shades of gray. But maybe thinking through the advantages that simplicity may bring to your business can be a useful exercise.

These are companies providing Consulting to startups (from the Seattle 2.0 Service Providers Directory):

Find other services for your startup or add your business if you provide services to startups.

Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle:

			Recurring
FRI	June 11	Breakfast Buzz: Social Media (Bellevue)
SAT	June 12
SUN	June 13
MON	June 14
TUE	June 15	First Look Forum Applications Open (NWEN)	Seattle Startups Open Coffee (Seattle)
WED	June 16	Essentials of VC Financing (Seattle)	Seattle Lean Coffee (Seattle) Eastside Startups Open Coffee (Redmond) TechFoam: Eastside Startup Meetup (Bellevue)
THU	June 17		Hops & Chops Happy Hour (Seattle)
FRI	June 18
SAT	June 19
SUN	June 20
MON	June 21
TUE	June 22
WED	June 23
THU	June 24

More Startup Events in Seattle...

Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.

Let’s face it: Most of us don’t like Microsoft. A lot of us have worked (too hard and thanklessly) for Microsoft, or been laid off by Microsoft, or been passed over for a job by Microsoft, or had a Microsoft product crash on us just as we were trying to save some really important data, or just flat-out blame Microsoft for the fact that the 520 is a parking lot after 3pm.

Since the first of the year, the celebrity gossip website I run has seen an average of 2.62 page views per visit.

60.75% of the visits this year so far came from search. Users coming in from search engines averaged 2.74 page views per visit – this is about 4% above the site average.

If you pull the search engine data apart, some interesting trends emerge:

Google represents 41.67% of the site’s traffic --  69% of search engine traffic -- averaging 2.81 pages per visit.

Yahoo represents 0.45% of the site’s traffic --  less than 1% of search traffic -- averaging 2.48 pages per visit.

Bing represents 0.85% of the site’s traffic – 1.4% of search traffic -- but users coming in from Bing average 3.37 pages per visit. That’s nearly a 30% improvement on the site’s average, and a 20% improvement over Google. When you’re running a website that doesn’t sell a product – a website whose revenue is dependent on advertising sales – page views per visit is your conversion. A 20% bump matters. (Ask.com, although it sends a tiny amount of traffic, comes the closest to Bing's page view benchmark, at 2.95 pages/visit.)

The top ten search terms across the search engines are comparable, but most of my search traffic comes in from a giant range of long-tail terms.

On Wednesday, I attended Bing’s session at SMX Advanced called “Bing Webmaster Tools at a Glance” (mostly because it was free). I figure that Bing is, to some extent, unconquered territory. The average webmaster may have stumbled his way through creating and submitting a sitemap to Google at some point in the past ten years, but how many of us have even logged into Bing’s webmaster tools? This is a space where some serious ass can still be kicked by those who take the time to figure it out.

Plus, recent figures indicate that Bing represents 9.43% of U.S. search traffic at this point – why does it account for only 1.4% of my search traffic? Clearly there’s room for improvement here.  (Perhaps one source of the discrepancy: Google has 77,660 images from my website indexed; Bing has 80.)

The speaker at the SMX session was Eric Gilmore, the Group Product Manager for Bing. He’s a Microsoft vet, but only recently moved into search. “SEO 101 is still really, really hard,” he said. “It’s hard for the big players, let alone the little guys.” He says the search industry is “ripe for innovation,” and that Bing’s goal is to demystify the process of SEO to create user value.

"It's a cluster @#$%!"  How's that for a direct quote (modified for family viewing) from a recent due diligence call I made?  And yes, when the words hit my ears I broke out laughing so loudly that Linda in the next office stuck her head in my door to see what had happened.

This is one of the joys of doing due diligence on a new deal.  It's very much in the Forest Gump "box of chocolates" model - you never know what you're going to get.  But sometimes, just sometimes, you get far more than you expect in just a few words.  In this case, I was probing around with an executive on our Technology Advisory Group who was getting his first exposure to the company in question.  It turns out his firm had created an in-house tool to handle some of the functionality the startup was offering.  And while they were getting by with their proprietary solution, his shall we say "candid" assessment of how he felt about the internal program (that his team had to create, support, and enhance) told me all I needed to know about whether this was indeed a pain point - and a major account opportunity for the startup, whether we invested or not.

 

Granted, he and I knew each other before the call, so his propensity for direct talk was higher than it might be with a stranger.  But that's why we keep a broad stable of very connected, very savvy industry professionals on that Advisory Group.  That direct talk has both saved and made us millions over the years.

 

 

 

I believe there is no other time in the history of human kind information has spread as fast as it does now. Every time there is a new trend, the “innovators” are on top of it on day 1 and the early-adopters join the party shortly after. Particularly innovation on the intersection of technology and business, also known as startup-land, the speed in which information spreads is causing these waves of ideas that move really fast. That means today we might not have services of products of type X, and in 6 months we’ll have 20 or 30 startups battling for that market. Think Augmented Reality, Location-Based Services, Social Recommendation, etc.

In my view, if your startup is riding the crest of any of these waves, you are doomed, because these waves are trailing indicators of success. In other words, the companies that will be better positioned to be the winners will be slightly ahead of the wave and everyone else will follow. A simple example is Foursquare, which launched by the middle of last year. But if you think about it, the Foursquare founders were working on this idea many months before. In all likelihood they are doing this for 18 months and thinking about the space for 24 months.

The location “check-in” game is pretty much over. Foursquare has the hearts and minds of the people. It will take time for Gowalla, Facebook, Yelp and others to accept that. And big companies (Facebook & Yelp) can continue to add to their service to make it more interesting, but any other startup that tries to play the “check-in” game will likely fail.

I’m not ignoring the fast follower pattern. It used to work really well when the pace of innovation was measured in years. But now it’s much harder, because by the time you launch your better/bigger/nicer product, the leader is already launching v.2 or v.3 and has the mind-share of partners, media and consumers. Of course, if they are not good they will stumble and that’s your opportunity, but you are also likely competing with 20 other companies who consider themselves fast and innovative.

But this blog post is not about Location-Based services. I want to talk about Social Graph integration with your product.

Chirp (the Twitter developer conference) and F8 (Facebook’s dev conference) generated an explosion of ideas of integrating social graph into your application. This is nothing new per se. I’ve known people using the social graph to do shopping recommendation for 4+ years and Netflix has been using it to do movies recommendations for a decade or more. Yet, over the last month or so, I’ve been flooded with ideas of using Facebook or Twitter social graph to do recommendation/review of everything on this planet. Just to name a few: restaurants, hotels, schools, senior homes, doctors, destinations, lawyers, plumbers, food, music, and on and on.

Problem 1: Critical mass on your network

First of all, in some of these categories, the critical mass of recommendation simply doesn’t exist. Let’s just pick a random category like Plumbers. And do some basic pipeline math:

• You have 500 friends on Facebook
• 50% of your friends are local
• 10% of your local friends have used a plumber on the past 3 years
• 2% of your local friends who used a plumber on the last 3 years will take the time to rate or write feedback about that experience.

That will translate into 0.5 reviews every three years.

But Marcelo, you might say, you are being stupid because we can do better than that if we do friends-of-friends as well and that would multiple the whole thing by 30, so instead of .5 reviews on average on your direct friends, you have 15 reviews. Isn’t that awesome?

That’s top-down math but let’s assume it’s correct. Remember it would take 3 years for you to get to those numbers and even when you get to those numbers, how many Plumbers there are? Will you get enough critical mass on a per-Plumber basis? Pick a place like Seattle. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine there are 1,000 plumbers on the metro area. The 15 reviews on your network, what does it mean?

One of the reasons Craigslist, eBay and other mass-market websites did well is because they could create enough critical mass in any vertical or location. Your startup that reviews [WHATEVER] won’t get critical mass using this strategy. It doesn’t matter you have 10,000 Plumber reviews. If they are not concentrated in a specific city, it won’t help you.

Problem 2: The Dilution of Social Networks

The older social network gets, the more connections (“friendships”) are being made. Take someone like Jolie O’Dell who has 2,600 connections on Facebook. Using those 2,600 “friends” and the 70,000+ “friends of friends” will help her how? Actually, I wonder what my 65 year-old boss at my old job could have in common with me so that I’d like my recommendations to be based on his views.

There is a pervasive belief right now in the technology world the social graph is a great way to help people find music, hotels, restaurants, Pilate’s classes, cars, houses and what not. I’d be extremely cautious about what you are doing to integrate the social graph into your work. A “blind” integration might not create the desired effect and you’ll be left with a me-too product no one uses.

Social Graph is one of the many variables in any kind of recommendation engine. It possibly is an important and ignored variable by most companies to date, but it’s not the only variable.

 

Let’s face it: Most of us don’t like Microsoft. A lot of us have worked (too hard and thanklessly) for Microsoft, or been laid off by Microsoft, or been passed over for a job by Microsoft, or had a Microsoft product crash on us just as we were trying to save some really important data, or just flat-out blame Microsoft for the fact that the 520 is a parking lot after 3pm.

Since the first of the year, the celebrity gossip website I run has seen an average of 2.62 page views per visit.

60.75% of the visits this year so far came from search. Users coming in from search engines averaged 2.74 page views per visit – this is about 4% above the site average.

If you pull the search engine data apart, some interesting trends emerge:

Google represents 41.67% of the site’s traffic --  69% of search engine traffic -- averaging 2.81 pages per visit.

Yahoo represents 0.45% of the site’s traffic --  less than 1% of search traffic -- averaging 2.48 pages per visit.

Bing represents 0.85% of the site’s traffic – 1.4% of search traffic -- but users coming in from Bing average 3.37 pages per visit. That’s nearly a 30% improvement on the site’s average, and a 20% improvement over Google. When you’re running a website that doesn’t sell a product – a website whose revenue is dependent on advertising sales – page views per visit matters. (Ask.com, although it sends a tiny amount of traffic, comes the closest to Bing's page view benchmark, at 2.95 pages/visit.)

The top ten search terms across the search engines are comparable, but most of my search traffic comes in from a giant range of long-tail terms.

On Wednesday, I attended Bing’s session at SMX Advanced called “Bing Webmaster Tools at a Glance” (mostly because it was free). I figure that Bing is, to some extent, unconquered territory. The average webmaster may have stumbled his way through creating and submitting a sitemap to Google at some point in the past ten years, but how many of us have even logged into Bing’s webmaster tools? This is a space where some serious ass can still be kicked by those who take the time to figure it out.

Plus, recent figures indicate that Bing represents 9.43% of U.S. search traffic at this point – why does it account for only 1.4% of my search traffic? Clearly there’s room for improvement here.  (Perhaps one source of the discrepancy: Google has 77,660 images from my website indexed; Bing has 80.)

The speaker at the SMX session was Eric Gilmore, the Group Product Manager for Bing. He’s a Microsoft vet, but only recently moved into search. “SEO 101 is still really, really hard,” he said. “It’s hard for the big players, let alone the little guys.” He says the search industry is “ripe for innovation,” and that Bing’s goal is to demystify the process of SEO to create user value.