July 30
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 30
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: Joseph M. Wallin/Startup Company Law Blog Today (see floor schedule ) the United States Senate will resume consideration of the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 . The bill will exempt... The Name Inspector/The Name Inspector The Name Inspector’s getting local. He’s decided to take a look at all 409 names in Seattle 2.0’s Seattle Startup Index. In his grand vision, this is the... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law If Don Draper's going to make it as a founding CEO, he's going to need help. If they mentor Don effectively, Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling may actually earn... OVP Here is a surefire bet: Gather together a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post up today on Seattle 2.0 : Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some... TechFlash Ever wanted to track down a funny line from a TV show, movie or comedy act? If so, then you'd feel right at home with Entertonement founders David Aronchick... Dave/TeachStreet Imagine 1,500 passionate and influential entrepreneurs and business leaders in Seattle, New York and San Francisco gathered together to strengthen each other... Brent Frei/Smartsheet.com Blog Coupling Smartsheet Simple Sales Pipeline, Customer Support and Marketing Campaign Management into Google’s Email, Calendar and Docs makes for a very... Luke Timmerman/Xconomy Seattle Seattle-based Immune Design has raised $32 million to develop a new generation of vaccines. It’s the second big round for the company, founded in 2008 with... Anil Batra/Web Analysis, Online Advertising and Behavioral Declaring things dead is nothing new. Every day someone declares something dead. For example, in 2007 many people were declaring page views and even web... From Seattle 2.0Sasha Pasulka I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was... David Aronchick Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples: Netflix signed an enormous deal with Relativity Media... Alyssa Royse A guy and a girl walk into a bedroom. The guy looks at the girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.” She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into... Andy Sack The 10 TechStars companies have been selected but not yet announced. We won't announce them until they've been in the program for a couple weeks and have had a chance to improve their first...
July 30
Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle: | | | Recurring | | FRI | July 30 |
| | | SAT | July 31 | | | | SUN | August 1 | | | | MON | August 2 | | | | TUE | August 3 | |
| | WED | August 4 | |
| | THU | August 5 |
|
| | FRI | August 6 | | | | SAT | August 7 | | | | SUN | August 8 | | | | MON | August 9 | | | | TUE | August 10 | | | | WED | August 11 | | | | THU | August 12 | | |
More Startup Events in Seattle... Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.
July 29
 I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was listed as the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “No one even knows what this company does,” I thought to myself, “and it’s already being brilliantly marketed. Who is this woman?”
I discovered that Monica has a near-perfect record in marketing. She was an integral member of the Microsoft Word team that displaced the seemingly impenetrable WordPerfect. She was the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve, the creators of the wildly successful Half-Life. She later spent two years as the Senior Policy Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advising the Gates directly. She left to become Chief Marketing Officer at Picnik, the online photo-editing company acquired by Google in March of this year. In April, Monica joined the Intersect team.
I couldn’t wait to pick her brain, and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty to discuss, so this will be a two-part piece. Today’s segment focuses on the revolutionary marketing approach the Microsoft Word team used to displace WordPerfect during the transition to graphical computing in the late ‘80s. Next week’s will focus on how these marketing strategies can be applied in a startup context.
The Power of a Platform Shift
In 1987, WordPerfect owned the word processing market, and Lotus owned the spreadsheet market. Word had a miniscule market share, but the market was in flux. The days of the text-based editors were ending as graphic interfaces inched onto the scene.
“Any time there’s a platform shift,” Monica tells me, “there’s huge opportunity. And oftentimes the people who are most vulnerable during a platform shift are the entrenched leaders.
“Lotus and WordPerfect thought they owned those markets, so they were complacent. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. They didn’t want to move [from character-based] into graphical. In the DOS-based world, they were the leaders. So why would you want to go through this transformation? They were reluctant. And Microsoft was aggressive.“
Monica found herself uniquely positioned to be part of the team that won this battle for Microsoft and changed personal computing forever.
But let’s start at the beginning.
The Foreign Correspondent
Monica didn’t always intend to be a hotshot thought leader in tech; she grew up in Portland and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, planning to be a foreign correspondent. Her boyfriend was still in school when she graduated – a situation she refers to euphemistically as a “geographic constraint” – so she took a job in Portland as a technical writer at a software company called Timberline.
At Timberline, she worked closely with developers. “They would tell me what they were trying to do,” she says, “and then we’d do a release of the build and I would write about it.”
If she couldn’t figure out how the software worked based on the screens, she worked with the developers to modify the design.
“I was actually a usability specialist – but it wasn’t called that.”
“Oh my God, I Have to Work Here”
She fell in love with tech but realized that product management would be a better fit than technical writing. She set out to interview with tech companies.
“I planned to talk to Microsoft, Lotus and Ashton-Tate,” she says, “because they were all about the same size. I started with Microsoft, and once I went through the interviews, I thought ‘Oh my God, I have to work here.’”
I ask her why.
“There was this hum – an excitement – like everybody felt like they were working on something that was potentially going to change the world. You could pick that up. I hadn’t seen that kind of excitement – excitement tinged with confidence that we could really do it.”
In 1987, she joined the Apps group at Microsoft as a technical editor, with plans to be a product manager. “I assumed that [Microsoft] would recognize that I wanted to be a product manager and just let me do it,” she says, laughing. “But it wasn’t like that.”
Fighting for a Career Transition at Microsoft
She went through the interview process for a PM job, competing against freshly minted MBAs from the top schools in the country.
"We don’t know what to do with you," her interviewers told her. "You did well in the interview, but you don’t have any background or training in this.”
She didn’t get the job they had open, so she took a different approach. She proposed a project to a friend who was a PM – helping Microsoft develop a mutually beneficial relationship with her former employer – and he encouraged her to move forward with it.
“I was a technical editor by day and a product manager by night,” she explains.
After eight months of working on that project, she scored another set of product management interviews, one of which was with Jeff Raikes. “I knew that if Jeff didn’t think I was a fit for marketing at Microsoft, that was the end of my marketing career there.”
Jeff offered her a job as a product manager on the Word team.
Overthrowing the Old Regime
Monica was a perfect fit for the Word team in late ‘80s, because the shift toward graphical meant personal computers could now create broader value for the average person, but only if the usability factor was high – and she’d spent her years at Timberline as a stealth usability specialist. She’d also worked with graphical computing in its very earliest days.
“A lot of people now think that the innovations in graphical computing came out of Apple,” she says, “but they didn’t. They came out of Xerox PARC.”
Monica had worked with the Xerox Star system – the first commercial system ever to incorporate a window-based GUI – at Timberline.
“The things that made Xerox Star so powerful,” she says, “we were going to do on PCs. Apple had done it after Xerox, and Microsoft was going to do it first on OS 2 and then on Windows, and I just so strongly believed in that. It was easy for me to be an evangelist.”
She still speaks of her work at Microsoft using “we” as the pronoun, and she still speaks the word with excitement and compatriotism in her voice, and I picture a line of bonded-by-fire Roman soldiers: They stand shoulder to shoulder, shields up, marching personal computing forward together.
This is not what I hear when current Microsoft employees tell me about their jobs, but you can hear, smell and taste it in the halls of any great Startup Weekend. This is what we’re all hungry for: to be a part of something like those early days at Microsoft; for our voices to carry, twenty years later, still the excitement and creative genius of a team we loved, a team in which each member worked as a natural extension of the others, a team that could do superhuman things, like slay a Goliath.
Winning Over the Influentials
Monica saw that the overall PR effort for Word required her team to change the way the market influentials evaluated products. Reviewers at the time valued products for the length of their feature list, but, if personal computing hoped to be truly revolutionary, the focus needed to be on usability. The average person needed to be able to use personal computing tools to do his or her job better, and this person would not need to use the bells-and-whistles features that a handful of professionals might find marginally useful.
But the spreadsheet and word processing reviewers at publications like PC Magazine and PC Computing still needed to be sold on this paradigm shift.
“You can’t overestimate how influential these people were, “ says Monica. “They determined what could even be considered as an application for corporate America.”
The team focused PR efforts on these people.
“We brought reviewers in over a two-year process and had them observe the usability work that was going on at Microsoft. It was changing the mindset. These products were going to be adopted throughout organizations, and ease of use was going to be important.”
I only need to glance at the name of the software I’m using to write this article to know how this particular war ended.
As I converse with Monica about the teams that created enormous successes for Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I’m surprised by how many of the names that come up are female. Ruthann Lorentzen. Leslie Koch. Marianne Allison. Mary Dieli. And Melinda French -- who would, in 1994, change her name to Melinda Gates, but to whom Monica still refers by her maiden name.
During a time when women were still something of a curiosity in the tech world, Microsoft was anything but an Old Boys Club. Bill Gates and his team were hiring brilliant women and putting them in leadership roles, and it was working.
Next week: Monica Harrington brings her marketing prowess to the startup world.
Editor's note: Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and branding at StartupDay. Register early for priority advisory slots!
July 28
A guy and a girl walk into a bedroom. The guy looks at the
girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.”
She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into their time together
and next thing you know, she has a baby. Turns out, they got carried away, and
she got screwed.
A guy and a girl walk into a boardroom. The guy looks at the
girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.”
She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into their project
together and next thing you know, he has a company. Turns out, they got carried
away, and she got screwed.
I’m never sure whether trust plays too great or too small a
role in our business relationships. That’s likely because it means different
things to different people, which is part of the problem. But, at the end of
the day, having unprotected business isn’t a whole lot smarter than having
unprotected sex. I won’t have sex without condoms, and I won’t do business
without contracts.
What is the role of trust in our business relationships? For
me, trust isn’t just one monolithic thing that applies equally to all aspects
of a business venture. I assume that if two (or more) people are to the point
of discussing contracts about a business venture, there are already several
layers of trust.
-
They all trust the idea enough that they want to pursue it.
They have some degree of shared vision and energy that has brought them to this
moment, and they “believe” in it, whether they call it trust or not. By this
point, the venture itself is it’s own emotional entity, worthy of it’s own
trust and value and concern separate from the players and other personal
relationships.
-
They all trust each other’s skills and dedication enough
that they want to help grow the venture together. They think they can do it.
That trust is implicit in the momentum that got them this far.
-
They all believe – as all entrepreneurs do – that this is
going to work, and that everyone is going to be as committed as they are to the
venture, and to their own happiness. And this is where things start to fall
apart.
Unless you are doing business with Mother Theresa, then whoever you are
doing business with is likely more concerned with their own happiness than with
yours. It’s human nature, and there is nothing wrong with that. This is the
moment at which you must be responsible for saying, “this is so exciting, do
you have a condom?”
I have literally had someone look at me and say, “I wont’ do
business with someone who doesn’t trust me. Why do you NEED a contract?” I find that question both stupid and insulting, but
I’ll answer it, and see what we can learn. - I would not do business with someone who was afraid to
have their good intentions codified. To me, that means they are already trying
to wiggle out of the “deal.” (I would not have sex with someone who wasn’t
prepared to be responsible for his actions.)
- I would not do business with someone who was unwilling to
honor my own need and right to feel safe and protected. (I would not have sex
with someone who didn’t mind risking my life or my future for his
gratification.)
- I think that the process of codifying a business
relationship is very useful. It helps everyone involved clarify their intent,
expectations, process and starts the business off on a foundation of mutual
understanding. (I would not have sex with someone with whom I didn’t feel
comfortable saying, “you need to wrap that rascal because this is only about
sex, I have no intention of dying for you or raising your progeny.”)
- I believe that sometimes the best-laid plans go wildly
awry, and a contract can provide a baseline for rectifying the situation in a
less emotional manner. (Condoms break, at least you know I wasn’t trying to get
pregnant.)
When is the right time to whip out a contract? We’re all
different on this one, I tend to wait until the last minute. I’m a big fan of
emotional and intellectual foreplay, in all arenas. But I start discussing
intent fairly early. - When you first start discussing an idea, just run free
with it. Brainstorm, have meetings over and over again, email ideas, see what
happens. This is the fun and flirty stage, during which you find out if you’re
compatible in any real way. Ideas, even good ones, are a dime a dozen, play with them freely.
- Once you realize that you actually want to do this
together, say so. Even these conversations can go on for a protracted period of
time, and that’s okay. There’s rarely any reason to rush headlong into this
union. Discuss it and be clear about your intentions and desires. “I think we
should be co-founders of this, and after we reach X milestone, we’ll hire Y
people and…..” Do you need a contract at this point? I don’t, but other people
may be different. (I do, however, like a nice long email thread in which these things are discussed in writing.)
- Once you get to the point that assets of any sort are
changing hands and working towards the fruition of the union, then I’d get
contracts in line. Be damned good and clear about what your intentions are, and
get it written down. And just because the other party doesn’t want to, doesn’t
mean that you shouldn’t be proactive and protect yourself. If you are handing
over assets of any sort – whether it’s money, IP, work product – you need to
know that you are putting them into a union in which your interests are
protected.
To me, that is the ultimate form of trust. It means that you
trust the idea, trust the chemistry, trust the people, and trust that the
future is going to be what you make it. You trust it all enough that you want
to be totally prepared to do it as best you can. You even trust the people
enough that you aren’t worried about the could-be-scary process of negotiating.
That’s a lot of trust. But it would be stupid not to have contracts to protect your
interests, no matter how you feel about the people or the product. It would be
just as stupid to have unprotected sex with someone just because you were
afraid they’d think less of you if you told them that you were smart enough to
protect yourself and still get what you want. Trust is great, but it’s not worth getting screwed for. ________ Alyssa Royse promises that her next blog post will have
nothing to do with sex, love, dating or romance. She trusts her team and her project, and respects them all enough to want them to be safe and happy. And those aren’t mints in the Hello Kitty tin.
July 27
Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples:
However, in the rush to disrupt the existing models, people are forgetting the lesson learned in the music industry; aggregation of content provides the best experience for users and the biggest profit opportunity for the owners. Simply said: aggregation wins. One of the biggest problems with professionally produced video today is that it reveals too starkly the seams between the different organizations involved. Viewers do not care one iota about the subtleties involved in what, when, where, and how a movie is released, they just want to watch content on their schedule on their device of choice. And, worse than that, they certainly do not want to wander the Web, searching site after site with completely different user experiences, billing models, and content catalogs to find what they’re looking for. Anything superfluous that gets between the users and the content makes it that much more likely that they will abandon looking altogether. There is a strong parallel to the music industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the industry struggled to make the transition to digital distribution, each label tried a model that fit their artists, but left everyone else out in the cold. Then, in 2003, the iTunes store rescued everyone. With a single product launch, users now had one place to go, behind a single user interface, and a single billing method, and all was right with the world. But the real genius here was because the catalog was nearly complete (despite hold outs like the Beatles & AC/DC), it simplified things enormously. If the big four labels had each launched their own iTunes, it would have been a disaster. By providing a single place to find, listen, and buy nearly ANY content, Apple increased the size of the pie for everyone. This powerful form of aggregation extends to other media types as well. When someone wants user generated content, they do not have to think for a nanosecond before they type in Youtube. Ditto for Flickr and pictures. Or Scribd and documents. Or Wikipedia for knowledge. Users adopt aggregators very quickly when they understand that it simplifies their lives – if users say “when I want X, I go to Y” then it makes everyone’s lives easier. We’ve seen this aggregation strategy work in our favor at Entertonement. By providing an extremely simple way to upload, find, and share all the content on the site, users quickly understood that if they wanted audio, they knew where to go. Even better, we’ve been lucky enough to work with partners who got it too. There are huge libraries of phenomenal content out there and the owners have read all the success stories of those who embrace this model, rather than avoid it. As they brought their hundreds of thousands of hours of sounds into our platform, we’ve seen everyone’s experience get better and better. So, who is going to win for professionally produced video content streaming? The winner will be the company that is able to bridge all the gaps for the users and make available the broadest possible catalog. My bet is on Netflix. They have a profitable business model that does not require being supported (or beholden to) the content creators. They’re aggressive enough to go around anyone necessary to get at the real value–the content–and can write huge checks to make it happen. And, finally, every additional customer who streams a piece of content from them is a huge cost savings, which makes it extremely motivating to move every single customer online. Combined with the fact that, unlike Hulu, they don’t ever have to worry about the ups and downs of the advertising market, Netflix has the inside track to victory.
July 23
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: 
| Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMORRILL)
wefollow.com/DanielleMORRILL
entrepreneur, Twilio.com employee #1, blogger, marketer, college dropout, Objectivist, and happy
| 
| Michele Mehl (@michelemehl)
www.buzzbuilders.net
PR for biz and consumer tech startups. Current/previous clients: Cheezburger, Zulily, WhitePages, Wetpaint, Adapx, Twango, Napera, & Socrata. Wife and mom.
| 
| Peter Boctor (@boctor)
theappvine.com
iPhone, Rails & Twitter developer
|
Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 23
The 10 TechStars companies have been selected but not yet announced. We won't announce them until they've been in the program for a couple weeks and have had a chance to improve their first impressions. In other words, we want to give the companies a chance to work on their pitch and to work on their web sites before making lots of noise about them.
Next week, we have the first mentor only dinner and we move into our new offices in South Lake Union. I hate moving and I especially hate moving offices. But in a weird way, I'm really excited about this move. The new office is super sweet and has a speakeasy in the basement -- no kidding -- it was the syncher on the negotiations.
The TechStars program officially starts Aug 16! Not far off. I write another update in August.
July 23
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: Joseph Sunga's Thoughts Today will be my 2 year anniversary at TeachStreet . I don’t really pay attention to these milestones, but a couple of my friends reminded me. I have to... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post on Seattle 2.0 today: Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day... TechFlash Dave Milesi has worked in biotech and banking. But now he's giving online real estate a try, operating the five-month-old startup Comient.com. The Seattle... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law FourSquare's recent Series B Preferred Stock financing was famously competitive. FourSquare had negotiating leverage most startups and emerging companies... noreply@blogger.com (DaveSchappell)/Dave Schappell (TeachStreet) Last week, Fred Wilson had a guest post from Andy Swan entitled "Who are we plowing for today?". It summarizes why I love to encourage new... nic/eVenues Blog Recent surveys show many of today's workers plan to launch a business soon. But many of them won't be "opening" businesses in the traditional... Brian Goffman/Optify Lead Generation Blog Real Time Marketing Software Provides 4X Boost to Sales Pipeline and Prioritizes Prospects SEATTLE – July 21, 2010 — Optify , a leading provider of... Thea Chard/Xconomy Seattle Last week the Northwest Energy Angels—a group of over 45 private investors who have banded together to invest exclusively in cleantech and energy companies... Glenn Kelman/Redfin Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin... Charles Seybold/LiquidPlanner Project management is currently undergoing its own Cambrian era, the geological period some 500 million years ago in which an epic explosion in diversity and... From Seattle 2.0Andy Sack Entrepreneurs are often looking for money to grow their businesses and frequently looking for alternatives to venture capital. Well, that's why I started both Founder's Co-op . Lately, people... Anthony Stevens Quality is a funny characteristic. It requires constant attention to maintain it. Even then, there’s no guarantee that some unknown, systemic problem might crop up just when you least expect it... David Aronchick Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day and night recruiting them. Yet, all but a few entrepreneurs fail miserably... Gerry Langeler Here is a surefire bet: Gather together a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue of control. Here's the common refrain... Jennifer Cabala We all know them, the attorney, marketer, accountant, consultant, web hosting service or other person that helped make your startup the best it could be and saved you plenty of headaches along the...
July 23
Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle: | | | Recurring | | FRI | July 23 | | | | SAT | July 24 | | | | SUN | July 25 | | | | MON | July 26 | | | | TUE | July 27 | |
| | WED | July 28 |
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| | THU | July 29 | |
| | FRI | July 30 |
| | | SAT | July 31 | | | | SUN | August 1 | | | | MON | August 2 | | | | TUE | August 3 | | | | WED | August 4 | |
| | THU | August 5 |
| |
More Startup Events in Seattle... Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.
July 22
Here is a surefire bet: Gather together a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue of control. Here's the common refrain: "If we take VC money, the next thing you know, they'll be in control, and we'll be out on our ear."
Now, try the reverse. Gather a bunch of VCs, and before long you'll hear something like this: "If we invest in them and we don't have the ability to take control, these young hotshots may run right over the edge of the cliff and take all our money with them."
The problem, of course, stems from the following: Entrepreneurs often have mixed goals in starting a business. They want to deliver on a product vision, want to grow a major enterprise and make money, and also want to be the boss. Venture capitalists have only one goal: To make money for their investors and themselves. Sometimes, if the company gets off track and management doesn't seem able to fix it quickly, VCs want to bring in people who they believe can.
So, if you are the entrepreneur/CEO, how do you avoid this potential conflict point? First and foremost -- perform. The last think a VC wants to do is change senior management. It is messy and risky and often leads to a washout of the previous round of investment. And no VC in their right mind wants to take the reins themselves. We know how hard you work!
In that spirit, here is a checklist I've found useful over the years in serving as a board member in a number of firms, both public and private. It doesn't cover every situation and covers some that tend to appear only as companies get beyond the start-up stage, but you may still find it useful. If you as the CEO can put this list up on your bathroom mirror and every morning tell yourself you aren't running afoul of any of its tenets, then you have a long, successful career ahead of you!
With all due respect to Stephen Covey, here are:
The Seven Reasons to Remove a CEO.
- Poor Leadership
- Lacks the confidence of key personnel
- Hires/retains weak people in key positions or fails to fill key roles in a timely way
- Fails to grow/retain successor(s) and/or create management depth
- Poor Vision
- Lacks clear understanding of where business is going
- Lacks focus on organization and priorities or tries to keep too many balls in the air
- Is unable to strike key industry strategic partnership relationships
- Poor Results
- Has major and sustained poor financial performance or missed targets
- Shows major loss of competitive position or market share
- Is unable to forecast timing/nature of recovery events or of revenue achievement
- Poor Understanding of Business
- Misses key industry trends and changes
- Lacks understanding of fundamental profitability factors
- Cannot crisply define what it takes to win
- Poor Work Habits
- Does not put heart and soul into business
- Sets bad example/role model for others
- Is not viewed in industry as a key player
- Poor Management Style
- Allows top management infighting, not working as a team
- Demonstrates unpredictable decision processes or will not make tough decisions
- Starves key programs but spares sacred cows
- Poor Board Candor/Communication
- Controls flow of information/agenda, preventing focus on or sufficient time for critical issues
- Does not allow ready access to VPs and other key individuals
- Keeps favorite nonstrategic programs or perquisites out of board review and approval process
Significant evidence across any one of these categories should be enough to awaken a board to the potential for trouble. Two or more should cause a responsible board to act.
Venture capital boards are like normal boards, only more so! They have little time to spend developing management in the face of fierce competition and dynamically moving markets. They are much more ready to fix something that is broken or keep a rocket ship from coming off the rails.
So--avoid The Seven Deadly Sins for CEOs.
You'll find your venture capitalists supporting you every step of the way!
July 21
We all know them, the attorney, marketer, accountant, consultant, web hosting service or other person that helped make your startup the best it could be and saved you plenty of headaches along the way.
Show them some love and recommend they get involved in sponsoring StartupDay by this Friday so they can get the best deal. There will be hundreds of first time and early stage entrepreneurs at StartupDay who need just as much help as you needed when you kicked your fledgling startup out of the nest.
At StartupDay your favorite service provider can meet, advise and get their name out there to new startups. You'll be helping the Seattle startup scene expand, you'll share your great person with new entrepreneurs who need them, and you'll help your favorite person help grow their business too! Let them know today, we offer 20% off rates if they commit by Friday!
July 20
Fanatic
users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful
entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day and night
recruiting them. Yet, all but a few entrepreneurs fail miserably when
it comes to finding, talking with, and winning these incredibly
valuable partners. How do you avoid this all too common
mistake? This past weekend, I listened to a great conversation with the author
of A Full Cup, a biography about Sir Thomas Lipton.
For those who do not know, Sir Lipton was a business man in the mid
to late nineteenth century who completely reinvented the tea industry
and brought it to America. Before tea, he had become an extremely
successful shop owner by using sales techniques new to 1870s
commerce. These techniques included things like: displaying his goods
with flare; investing in interior and exterior lights; and ensuring
quality goods, or making it obvious when they're day old products.
Lipton’s innovation assured his customers they were getting
what they paid for, and that honesty translated into a commercial
relationship they wanted to be a part of. When your business is
repeat customers, nothing could be more critical!
However, the
most important thing Lipton did when it came to selling was simply
being extremely passionate about his store. Whenever you come upon a business where the owner’s soul
shows through to the customer, the customer never fails to return the
love tenfold. In Lipton's case, this meant having fun with the
process: putting convex and
concave mirrors at the entrance to create a fun atmosphere; hiring
fat men and skinny men to walk the streets near his store with signs
saying "Coming from Lipton's" (fat) and "Going to
Lipton's" (skinny); and arranging for a parade of pigs to lead
customers right to his front door.
Bizarre? Sure. But it's got
character, which is something that people yearn for no matter what
the time period. It gives people a chance to commit to something,
rather than just interacting with a faceless entity.
Recently,
the founders of Trada
left stealth mode, and one of the co-founders had a nice blog post
about why they decided to stay silent for as long as they did. One of
the most salient points I took away from it was the following
quote:
Commit to the public conversation when you can actually
commit to it.
Sir Lipton understood this advice, Woot
understands this and any company that wants to have passionate
customers needs to understand this. You will not get committed users
until you are committed. Your users will never have more
passion for your products than you do, and until your commitment to
whatever you hold dear oozes from every pore, you'll have a bunch of
half-hearted users who will be more than willing to jump on the new
new thing.
The best way to think about your business is to
think about every activity, product, and transaction as a
conversation with your customers and users. It's not enough just to
open your mouth and spew words. You've got to believe in what you
say, or no one will listen. And you can't just keep talking, you've
also got to pause and listen to what your customers are saying. It
may feel unnatural or unprofessional at times to be so exposed, but if
you are truly genuine in the way you interact, your dividends will be
enormous.
July 19
Quality is a funny characteristic. It requires constant attention to maintain it. Even then, there’s no guarantee that some unknown, systemic problem might crop up just when you least expect it.
Toyota’s braking problems are a case in point. For years, Toyota has been known as one of the highest-quality auto makers, rated highly by all the independent reviewers like J.D. Power, and coming up near the top in customer satisfaction surveys as well. And yet, one (admittedly complex) brake-software problem has put a stain on the brand that will take years to recover from.
Apple’s recent antenna glitch with the iPhone 4 is another example. Apple has prided itself on innovation and elegance, not necessarily quality, but its recent products have all been widely heralded for having high quality as well. Until now. Like Toyota, the initial reaction was poor – denial, deflection, minimization – and that response has hurt the company’s brand, and put a dent in customer’s perception of how important quality is to the company.
There are some aspects to your products or services that are fairly stable. Feature sets, for example, change monthly or yearly. Performance (under the same load) tends to be very consistent. Inputs – 3rd party products, tools, website hosts, domain registrars – all remain stable as well. But quality has a short half-life. Once quality starts to decline, its orbit can decay precipitously fast, until you’re facing a recall or a horde of dissatisfied customers.
There are exceptions. Twitter is one. But Twitter doesn’t charge for its service. If it did, the Fail Whale might have gone down in history as one of the best quality-control case studies in the Internet Era.
How do you keep quality high? There is a whole sub-genre of business literature dealing with this topic. From Six Sigma to Self-Organizing Teams, from Peer Review to Pair Programming, our industry has plenty of strategies to choose from. But I think it starts and ends with an attitude: Quality is non-negotiable. You will not cut corners on quality. You will not do the expedient thing that might introduce quality problems.
This is slightly radical, especially among go-go internet startups, for whom revenue and (god forbid) profit are the immediate goals; but as I’ve written before, I believe you can have both quality AND profit, and that in fact, a focus on the one helps achieve the other. It’s more about your attitude than any sort of formal process, and yes, breaking the rules is acceptable if you know WHY you’re breaking the rules and WHAT you’ll do to recover from any short-term deflections in your quality program.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you achieve quality in your business?
July 18
These are companies providing Marketing to startups (from the Seattle 2.0 Service Providers Directory): Duo PRDuo PR is a full-service consumer PR agency. Working with clients big and small, our team is adept at creating smart, impactful PR campaigns with budgets of all sizes. We’re responsive, creative and passionate about what we do. More information... Heinz Marketing LLC
Sales and marketing strategies that deliver results - more customers, higher revenue, lower costs. Demand generation, sales pipeline & CRM, retention marketing and more. More information...
Mixtur InteractiveFull service marketing agency supporting technology companies and start-ups with branding, messaging, go-to-market planning, demand generation, copywriting, collateral, graphic/web design. More information... Find other services for your startup or add your business if you provide services to startups.
July 16
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 16
Entrepreneurs are often looking for money to grow their businesses and frequently looking for alternatives to venture capital. Well, that's why I started both Founder's Co-op. Lately, people have been asking me what is RevenueLoan it for....thus, I decided to write this post.
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Find a lead investor and we may want to follow
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July 16
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: TechFlash Seattle Internet entrepreneur Tony Wright seemed awfully excited when he joined Feedjit last month, writing in a blog post that the fast-growing company had... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law Is it nature, or nurture, that makes one founder a serial entrepreneur, and another the long-term leader of a great tech company with a long run? The Name Inspector/The Name Inspector The Name Inspector is planning a big post about Seattle startup names (and will of course refer to Seattle 2.0’s Seattle Startup Index). So he can add a... nic/eVenues Blog by Michael J. Shapiro of MCMag.com Photograph: Apple INC May 1, 2010 document.writeln(AAMB006);On Jan. 27, Apple CEO... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post up on Seattle 2.0 today: "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned." – various attribution... Gregory T. Huang/Xconomy Seattle With all the talk about “gamification” of the Web—adding video game mechanics to websites to boost customer engagement, loyalty, and spending—it’s time we... Scott/TeachStreet Most startups have been there – you have a simple site, and you want to have users upload photos of themselves or something else to share. We were there as... Cristin Carey, Customer Care Manager/Avvo Blog Peer endorsements are one way to show you are connected in the legal community and can add some points to your Avvo Rating. This video will walk those of you... asack/Andy Sack (Founder's Co-Op) One of the most powerful forces in business. It's important to one's career. And it's really important to a startup's success. The important thing for a... Robert Pease/Gist - know more about who you know This is a guest post from Concur EVP Elena Donio, who is responsible for the creation of Concur Breeze, an online expense reporting solution for small... From Seattle 2.0Sasha Pasulka It has been a crazy thirty days. I suppose that’s nothing to complain about – as entrepreneurs, we love to be busy, to be juggling lots of different projects, relationships and ideas. We... David Aronchick "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned." – various attribution, most commonly to Bruce Ediger While there is some debate (especially among new mothers!) how... Alyssa Royse Back in the old days, when the World Wide Web was more like the Wild Wild West, the porn industry was the great innovator. It was porn that showed us how to use the Web to attract and retain... Marcelo Calbucci Last week Sasha Pasulka wrote about adding an email newsletter to her blog and how she was surprised at how many users were signing up to receive it. I’m a big believer on email, and the same way... Andy Sack I had dinner with an old friend, George, and his 15 year old daughter, Halle, yesterday. It was really fun. We ate at the Woodmark Hotel and it was beautiful. Dinnertime conversation consisted of... Jennifer Cabala It's not easy to find entrepreneurs before they start their first business and make service provider decisions, until now. StartupDay 2010 is the only conference of it's kind, targeting future... Marcelo Calbucci Almost two years ago I created an account on Shelfari (a Seattle-based startup acquired by Amazon) for us to list interesting books for entrepreneurs. It took me two years to add a page to our...
July 16
Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle: | | | Recurring | | FRI | July 16 | | | | SAT | July 17 | | | | SUN | July 18 | | | | MON | July 19 | | | | TUE | July 20 |
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| | WED | July 21 |
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| | THU | July 22 |
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| | FRI | July 23 | | | | SAT | July 24 | | | | SUN | July 25 | | | | MON | July 26 | | | | TUE | July 27 | | | | WED | July 28 |
| | | THU | July 29 | | |
More Startup Events in Seattle... Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.
July 15
Almost two years ago I created an account on Shelfari (a Seattle-based startup acquired by Amazon) for us to list interesting books for entrepreneurs. It took me two years to add a page to our website with 3 lines of HTML. Yeah, we are that fast.
Anyway, we just created a permanent residence for our shelf of Great Books for Entrepreneurs and Startups. It has just about 20 books, but those are 20 very good books that you should read. You might ask why a book about productivity (Getting Things Done) has to do with startups? Well, if you ask that you are not an entrepreneur yet. We are not trying to list every book under the Sun, and our books have a bias towards software, web and mobile tech startups (hence the books about user experience).
If you have a suggestion, we love to hear from you. Here is what I think is missing from this bookshelf… Books about: - Marketing products and services
- Branding
- Sales and Business Development
- Product Planning/Management
Any suggestions?
July 15
It has been a crazy
thirty days. I suppose that’s nothing to complain about – as entrepreneurs, we
love to be busy, to be juggling lots of different projects, relationships and
ideas. We thrive on that sort of thing. But it’s always good to have tools to
lend a hand, and it’s even better when those tools are available for free.
Thanks to great advice from the Twitter and startup communities, I’ve come
across a handful of free web tools that I’ve found invaluable recently, and I
figured I’d pay it forward. Here ya go:
AppAnnie
It’s no secret that Apple’s developer tools for tracking
earnings, sales and rankings of iPhone and iPad apps are not exactly, um, user friendly. Over the past couple months,
I’ve come to the conclusion that Apple genuinely does not want you to be able
to do any sort of quantitative analysis on the performance of your application.
Juxtaposed with the effort they put into the UX of their consumer products,
it’s baffling. The Internet’s built a trillion hacked-together solutions for
Apple’s shortcomings here, but none I’ve found is anywhere near as elegant as
AppAnnie.
Currently in open beta, this free tool easily allows you to
track and analyze revenue, unit sales, rankings by country, and reviews. It
builds graphs and marks them with relevant events, like price changes. It also
tracks the top apps in the store by country, category, price and grossing. The
UX is intuitive and easy on the eyes. It’s a must-have for anyone developing an
iPhone/iPad app.
Skitch
I don’t remember how I lived without Skitch. Also still in
beta, this simple tool allows you to take precise screen captures, mark them
up, and save them as jpegs. It’s an easy way to communicate design needs to remote
developers without a Skype screen-sharing session or a tedious encounter with
Photoshop (which is the antithesis of free). It’s also a quick way to measure
pixel dimensions of web real estate, or to draw Hitler mustaches and undersized
reproductive organs on photos of your ex so you can post them to your Facebook
wall.
Get Satisfaction
If you’ve ever seen a static “Feedback” badge clinging to
the side of a website, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction. The company
provides a user-friendly, in-site interface for your customers to provide
feedback on your product and to interact with each other and company employees.
Customers can “like” one another’s ideas, so it’s easy to see which feature
requests or complaints have the most support behind them.
While they do offer integration with Facebook, I prefer to
keep the customer support segment of my company separate from their Facebook
interactions, and Get Satisfaction achieves this perfectly. I launched redesigns of two websites
last week, and this tool was enormously helpful in keeping customer complaints
and feedback from cluttering the comments sections of the websites (“AMY
WINEHOUSE LOOKS UGGLY HERE BUT NOT AS UGGLY AS THE NEW SIDEBAR!!!!!!1 fixxxxx
it”) and the Facebook pages.
A quick glance at their website makes it look like you have
to pay for the service, but if you peck around a bit you’ll see you can create
a community with basic functionality for free. I also found their customer
support to be friendly and flexible when I needed assistance.
Color Scheme Designer
Seattle is chock-full of brilliant designers. Unfortunately,
many of them have already been snatched up. And, let’s face it, a lot of us who
are really good with ideas and code are maybe not so hot with design. (I, for
one, believe I have a learning disability when it comes to design.)
Startups don’t always have the cash to bring on the design
help they need.
My amazing cousin, who did all the design work for my new
websites and who I am totally going to use this opportunity to plug (check out
her portfolio here and then hire her), introduced me to Color Scheme Designer,
a free and easy application that takes the hex code for the main color you want
to use for your design and then produces a set of colors for mono, complement,
triad and analogic color schemes. Never again do you have to make your
company’s website black, gray and white because all the other color
combinations you try look like a five-year-old ate a box of crayons and then
vomited on the screen.
Cross Browser Testing
You know and I know: The only thing worse than the way your
website looks in IE 8 is the way it looks in IE 6. This tool takes screen shots
of the way your site renders in different versions of Firefox, IE, Opera,
Safari and Netscape (Netscape?)
across various Mac, Windows and Ubuntu OSes. You can scan them all quickly and
on one page to see where problems are showing up. It’s a tad bit slow but it’s useful
for catching these issues before the users do. I wish they would also test
sites across mobile platforms, and hopefully that’s coming in future releases.
Fair warning: This tool isn’t really free. But a lot of you will find you can get most of what
you need out of the free demo period and then cancel, or, if you find value in
it, choose to pay using their SaaS pricing model.
So those are my suggestions for the month. Which free web
tools have saved your life this month?
July 15
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.  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.  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.  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.  Garvey Schubert Barer represents emerging companies at every stage of development and across industry sectors, including software, hardware and peripherals, computer gaming, medical devices and clean technology. Our emerging company clients find that Garvey Schubert Barer differentiates itself from larger competitors by providing a steadfast, accountable and experienced corporate counsel to serve as a single point of contact for virtually all their legal needs. We offer a unique value proposition while maintaining a full-service platform which provides access to lawyers practicing in specialized legal areas such as labor and employment, executive compensation, real estate, intellectual property, technology licensing, and tax.  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. Want to become a sponsor of Seattle 2.0? Learn more
July 14
It's not easy to find entrepreneurs before they start their first business and make service provider decisions, until now. StartupDay 2010 is the only conference of it's kind, targeting future entrepreneurs in tech. Most attendees have told us that they have yet to make a decision on hiring the important service providers for their new business, whether that is an attorney, accountant, consultant, or technology service like hosting. And a large number of StartupDay attendees will make that decision soon. Becoming a StartupDay sponsor means you'll have your companies name front and center in front of 400-500 future technology entrepreneurs. Last year's sponsors told us that StartupDay proved to be a critical source for generating leads and brand awareness, because of the audience and because we also have several ways of interacting with attendees whether it's at vendor tables, in one-on-one targeted meetings in the advisory room, or networking.
Sponsors will also have their name associated with a well-respected conference. 98.6 percent of last years attendees told us that they would recommend the StartupDay to a co-worker or friend. Our speakers are also well respected, founding incredible companies like LinkedIn, Twilio, Posterous, Blue Nile, Survey Analytics and more.
Your company will be showcased in all materials going to StartupDay attendees including the "Seattle Startup Guide", which includes a service provider directory. Our packages also include opportunities to reach more current and future entrepreneurs outside of attendees including through sponsor blog posts on Seattle 2.0, Facebook postings, tweets and in our online service provider directory. We have a number of price points so even startups targeting startups can find something in their budget. If you commit to become a sponsor by July 23rd, you'll get an additional discount.
You can find learn more about sponsoring StartupDay on our sponsor page including a short 5 minute video about opportunities. What are you waiting for? Contact us today and be part of this amazing event!
July 14
Back in the old days, when the World Wide Web was more like
the Wild Wild West, the porn industry was the great innovator. It was porn that
showed us how to use the Web to attract and retain customers, convert voyeurs
to members, market related products and content, develop affiliate
relationships, and even modify offerings based on customer behavior. It was
during those times that I sat in conference rooms with Fortune 500 clients and
tried to explain to them how they could use the Web to do all those things. It
was hard to explain, so we literally sat with them and surfed porn sites to
show them what we were talking about.
Take a minute and picture that. Yes, it was fun.
I just spent a great 5 days in San Francisco at the Cybernet
conference. This is an “adult industry” conference focused on harnessing existing and
emerging technology to promote porn. Needless to say, I was breathless to see
where the Pied Pipers of Porn were going to lead us all next. (And check out my
schwag bag.)
The keynote address by Steve Lightspeed was something of a wake-up call – much
needed for people who had partied too much and didn’t necessarily want to wake
up. Steve is something of a God in the industry, and he came to it naturally
from his love of computers and love of porn. And that’s a good place to start
this cautionary tale.
Do What You Love, Love What You Do
When it all started, people who were making porn were doing
it because they loved it. They cared about their product and their industry,
times were good. When the Internet came along, they were able to do what they
loved and monetize the hell out of it. Eventually, it became the money that
they loved, and the product became little more than a way to get the money. The
product suffered. More and more people were making a race for the money and the
market was drowned in crap.
Now, it’s a mess, people are losing money and there is way
more crap than non-crap.
But who’s making money still? The people who are doing what
they love. Sites like kink.com (which is absolutely not for the faint at heart,
so I’m not putting in a link) are thriving because they are serving a unique
quality product by and for people who truly love it. They play in niche markets
(what “legit business” calls verticals) and have never lost site of their
customer or their product, and the love they share. (How successful? The bought
The Armory Building in San Fran. Can you buy a city block of a major American
city?)
The lesson? Do you know and love your product? Do you use
it? If so, don’t lose site of it and be sure that you always support your
product and your customer. Love, even in porn and business is the key to
longevity. Are you just in it to make money? Then you’re in the crapshoot. It
may work, it may not. Either way, it probably won’t last.
Clean Out The Crap
You, your company and your product are all part of a larger
market. You need your market to be healthy or you will be out of business.
Porn, more than just about any other industry, has fallen victim to their own
insane growth. They are (and there’s no pun-free way to say it) full of more
predators, shady characters and viruses than any other online segment. And it’s
their own fault. They got obsessed with size and volume, pulled out every trick
in the book to get more, and they’re getting screwed.
Lightspeed suggested it was up to the industry to clean up
the industry. And he’s right. As much as you love your product, you have to
love your market even more. If there are people giving your market a bad name,
engaging in practices that make customers weary of even the good guys, then
it’s up to you to join with the other good guys and clean house. Be part of the positive change, and you
will be part of the future.
Know What’s Coming
An enormous amount of time was spent discussing emerging
technology like digital fingerprinting and new mobile devices. These are the
things that will shape the future, and you need to be able to adapt to them.
Use it or lose it, as the saying goes. Truth is, unless you are a strictly
original content play, technology may develop that can do what you do, faster
and cheaper. (Porn translation, unless you can so something that no one else is
willing to do, it’s just as easy to get my needs met with any old…. )
If you are going to build a lasting relationship with your
customer, you need to know what tools they will be using in 5 years, and how
your product will work with them. Get to know the leaders of all the industries
that will shape your future. Work with them, help them, share with them.
(Resisting the urge to make an intellectual orgy comment here.)
Know the laws that govern your industry and use them to your
advantage. Don’t do business with bad people. Always take the high road. And
wear condoms, every time. (He didn’t say that, but it’s a good reminder and a
good metaphor.)
Porn was the first industry to exploit the power of the
World Wide Web. They may have been the worst to pollute it with crap. And now
they are trying to have an internal industry revolution to behave in a way that
will keep it all clean, healthy and profitable. We have followed them every
step of the way. If this is where they’re going, we need to follow them there
too.
_____________
Alyssa Royse is working on something big. She will be
attending a lot more conferences if they’re all this fun – but needs to wait
until she gets back some of the innocence she left at the kink.com party. (Stop laughing.) You can read
lots of other thoughts on her personal blog, which will also tell you how to
reach her if you want her to help you with your writing, marketing, or bad-pun
needs.
July 13
"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned." – various attribution, most commonly to Bruce Ediger
While there is some debate (especially among new mothers!) how intuitive the nipple is, the nipple is the perfect product. It fits exactly to spec, even without user testing and with a variable user group. It's extremely portable and instantly available in a wide variety of environments (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). It's (mostly) instant on, and (mostly) intuitive, and works without even thinking, when one or both users are half asleep. But best of all, it was designed with a singular purpose for a very select audience segment, and, for that segment and that audience, it is a wholly complete solution.
Product designers have a horrible tendency to creep scope. When they come upon a problem (my pancakes burn on one side and a raw on the other) which cannot be filled with the stuff people have (should I hold the pan upside down? should I grab the pancake with my hand?), and build a very useful tool which is pretty good at solving said issue (a spatula). Unfortunately, rather than stopping there, they proceed to add a whole bunch more features (slots, ultra sharp edge, clock radio) until it barely solves what for what it was initially designed, and most definitely does nothing else well. If they had just stopped after their first pass, and moved on, every one would have been so much happier - and their pancakes would never have been so well flipped.
What's the solution to this? Allow me to build on the post of my Seattle 2.0 colleague last week, " You Are Not Your Target Market (Even Though You Used to Be)". The most important thing in designing products is focus focus focus. New features are fine, new audience segments are not. The more focused your solution, the more successful you will be. Let me give you some examples:
- The G.E. Volusion E8 Ultrasound Scanner - If you've never had an ultrasound, you've missed a truly amazing display. In complete darkness, Ultrasound technicians are able to move a wand with one hand and make detail measurements with the other, zooming in and out, recording locations and spotting for landmarks. It's not just that they are well-trained, it's that the designers of the machine knew exactly what challenges the users would be facing. You can't require key combinations, for example, because you have one hand holding the wand covered in goo. How, then, can they make the most of the five fingers their users have left? Trust me - they do.
- Avid Media Composer - Within twenty years, Avid moved an entire industry to a new technique, and became the ONLY solution for the space. Avid Media Composer is the reason why. In complete darkness, a master editor can fly through any length of video, faster and more accurately than you can imagine. The keystrokes and techniques are not obvious, but when you watch someone trained, the machine is like an extension of their arm.
- Oxo Measuring Cup - Ok, I've written about this before. However, it's worth bringing up again: this measuring cup indicates such creative and such a perfect solution, the designers should be nominated for the Nobel equivalent of product design. A chef no longer has to bend over to look at how much stuff is in the cup - you can see from the top. My God is this brilliant. The designers must have been looking at themselves trying to figure out why someone else didn't come up with this in the past 100 years, and not even realizing it's because it required a genius to think of something this simple.
I note, with some dismay, that it was basically impossible to come up with a candidate for this list that was software or Web software only (Avid is obviously software, but it really only shines when you pair it with the hardware workstation). It's not that software and Web sites don't make good UI and UX examples, it's just they are so broad, and do so many things, that it's very challenging to view them through the lense of a single user group. And, therein lies the failure of software development when it comes to developing the perfect product.
Because hardware is much more rigid (pardon the pun) in how much you can develop, it forces lots of decisions up front. How big is your device going to be? How many people can use it at once? How much are the raw materials going to cost (and thereby set your margins)? Software, on the other hand, is way too flexible - you can justifiably say that there are products that are designed to address a market of three billion people. But by doing so, you no longer have a perfect product - since three billion people cannot possibly have even remotely similar needs, you are guaranteed to have a whole bunch of unhappy users. They'll use your product, but they won't love it.
This may not be the worst thing in the world - I'd be happy to have the Google search business, for example. But you're not Google today, or tomorrow - and you won't be Google, likely ever. If you start out gunning for three billion, you're just going to generate unhappy users who are so-so on your product and who will leave you in a nanosecond for the new new thing. If you want to succeed, don't build Google - build the perfect product for a VERY specific market. Only when you satisfy them have you earned the right to build any bigger.
July 12
Last week Sasha Pasulka wrote about adding an email newsletter to her blog and how she was surprised at how many users were signing up to receive it. I’m a big believer on email, and the same way I believe every company should have a blog, I think every company should have an email newsletter. If I remember correctly, the first time I met Sasha face-to-face about a month ago, I told her she should have an email newsletter or her website. :)
Our instincts say we’ll be annoying the heck out of users if we send them an e-newsletter. But who are you to say what users want? The point is that no everyone consumes information the same way. I’m surprised to learn that people still use dozens of bookmarks to remind them to visit sites every day to check for new blog posts. Haven’t they heard about RSS? Well, apparently it didn’t work for them, so they prefer the manually visit the sites. Email is the same thing. It works for some people. Actually, it works for a lot of people.
Email newsletter, if done right, can be a powerful tool to keep people even more engaged with your content or product. There are many things that can be done to maximize the number of readers and minimize the number of upset users (by the way, you’ll have some pissed off users no matter what you do, so relax).
Here are my incomplete tips (and hopefully more startups will chip in on the comments):
Tip #1: Do It Regularly
If you are going to have an e-newsletter, manual or automated, make sure it’s following a regular schedule. Daily, weekly, bi-monthly or monthly are my preferences and it will depend on what kind of content you are including on the newsletter. If it’s about news topics or a blog-in-email, do it daily or weekly. If it’s about tips, new features, coming events, etc., do it weekly or monthly. But don’t skip. If you go too long without reaching your users (which happens quite often on startups that are too busy to remember they had to send a newsletter), your users will forget about you and might think it’s a spam.
True story, on my previous startup we used to send a newsletter every month. There were less than 0.1% of users who unsubscribed after every newsletter sent. Then we went 2 or 3 months without sending a newsletter and we finally sent one. You’d expect 0.1-0.3% of unsubscribe rate, but it was more like 1-1.5%.
Tip #2: Subject Line
By far, the most important text on your entire email is the subject line. Yeah, you know that already, but I just want to re-enforce it. It doesn’t matter how good the body of your newsletter is if people don’t click on the email to open it. Here are three different styles: a) “Zillow June Newsletter”, b) “Zillow: Lowest Interest Rates in 30 years”, c) “Your house price just dropped 0.5% in June”. Get it? Option (a) is completely impersonal and most likely to not be opened. Option (b) is better, because the subject is unique for that month. Option (c) is the best of them all because it’s relevant to you. Be obsessed with the subject line. A/B test the heck out of it.
Tip #3: What if they read just the first paragraph
A typical problem with too many people writing email (or creating e-newsletter content) is they wait until the end to deliver the punch line and tell you to click on a link to buy something, or to respond to a survey. Look, if I like your product. If I’m willing to receive emails from you. If I already clicked on the email to open it and read it, why do you need to make me go through 4 paragraphs of text before you tell me exactly what you want? Just tell it on the first paragraph and justify it later. This is very different from writing a paper for school. You just want to skip the chit-chat and get to the action item, which brings me to the next point...
Tip #4: Tell them what to do
Have a purpose! I mean, your email newsletter should have a purpose. Maybe the goal is to get people to visit the website every week. Maybe it’s for them to update their profile. Maybe you want them to answer a survey. Don’t start a newsletter if you don’t know the purpose. And once you know the purpose, don’t be subtle about it. Be direct. Don’t be passive-aggressive (“we love when you rate products on our website because…”), and just say what you want them to do (“Rate the Canon 5D!”). Most readers will ignore what you ask them to do no matter what, but the goal is not be popular, but to get the highest result from your newsletter strategy.
Tip #5: Make it personal
The best e-newsletter is the one that’s crafted just for me. Maybe there is a bit of editorial to announce something, but the core value is directly to my use of the service. Case in point: the LinkedIn Network Updates newsletter. It shows stuff that I’m interested in, instead of being a general newsletter. Most businesses can do that – and should – at a minimum provide some data points or some other useful information about the customer usage of the service. A bad execution of personalization, in my opinion, is Expedia notification of your planned trip. It just repeats everything you knew already and slaps a bunch of generic information on it. So much so, that it’s near useless.
Tip #6: Who’s it coming from?
Besides the Subject Line, the only other data point people have to decide if they will open the email or not is the “From”. Be very obsessed about what name will appear there. “No Reply” is obviously a very bad choice. So is “Administrator”, “Account Manager”, “Marketing Team”… you get it. In certain cases I like to use my name, with or without the company name, as in “Marcelo Calbucci (Seattle 2.0)”. At my previous startup, the emails would come from your website. In other words, if you created a website called “Matt’s Adventures”, the emails would come from “Matt’s Adventures”. That’s very personal.
Tip #7: Read the Email
Did you prepare your newsletter and it’s ready to send? Now, wait 24 hours and then go back and read it again, but this time you have to impersonate the receiving person. Answer these questions: Do I know the sender? Would I open an email with this subject line? What would my impression be if I stop reading the email on the first paragraph? What do I want to do after I read the email? Click on a link, forward it to someone, save it for later or just click ‘Delete’? Correct your newsletter for those. You can do that even if it’s an automated LinkedIn-like email.
Tip #8: Test it!
Did you ever receive an email referring to an attachment that never came? Did you ever send an email from the wrong email address, using your personal email account instead of the business one? Did you ever send an email, but the link was for the wrong URL? Or you receive an email and the image didn’t render properly? Well, test the heck out of your email. You can use a service like Litmus to make sure it will render properly on popular email services and clients, however, don’t overdo it. You can spend the rest of your life making sure it’s correct on all browsers, clients and services and never get there. Good enough is actually great here.
Tip #9: Unsubscribe Link
No matter what you do, or how much value you add, some people will not want to receive your email. Just make it easy for them to unsubscribe it. Losing 0.3% of subscribers on each monthly newsletter is not going to kill you. More likely, you’ll lose a lot less than that and hopefully you are adding people to your email list who are genuinely interested, but don’t make them go through many hoops to unsubscribe.
Beyond these content and style tips, there are complex technical issues sending mass-email newsletter. You should consider using one of the many services out there, including WhatCounts, but if you are more on the techie side you can check a blog post I wrote 3 years ago titled 13 tips for your email not end up on the junk folder.
What other ideas and tips do you have for an effective email integration with your website?
July 9
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 9
I had dinner with an old friend, George, and his 15 year old daughter, Halle, yesterday. It was really fun. We ate at the Woodmark Hotel and it was beautiful. Dinnertime conversation consisted of catching up and talking about high school, father-daughter trips, and business. She ended up making some obvious observations and questions. I thought I'd share some of the things she said because while they were in part nieve, they were also really smart. It got me thinking about the value of nievete (as opposed to experience).
July 9
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law Chris Dixon quietly did something remarkable on his blog yesterday. He revealed the dilution taken by the founders in the VC financing of his prior startup... jheitzeb/Currently Obsessed I often bump into entrepreneurs while they’re in the midst of fundraising. I usually ask “why are you raising money?” and what I often hear is, “because we... TechFlash Vivek Bhaskaran's journey to the Seattle tech community has been a long one, from high school in India to an engineering college in Russia to Brigham Young... Joseph M. Wallin/Corporate Finance Law Blog By Amy Hwang, Monica Gianni, Pamela M. Charles, and Seth D. Levy 07.06.10 The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (the “Act”), enacted... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post up on Seattle20.com today: Agility, in the world of software, is the focus on iterating quickly on customer demands, releasing regularly, and... Joseph M. Wallin/Startup Company Law Blog If you are interested in knowing what Congress is up to with respect to allowing states to require out-of-state internet retailers to collect and remit sales... Wade Roush/Xconomy Seattle by Gregory Huang If Xconomy had an official interstate highway, it would be I-90. The longest highway in the whole interstate system, it stretches 3,099 miles from Logan... Spencer Rascoff/Zillow Heads up agents, brokers, home shoppers, home sellers and builders — we have exciting news to share with you. Today, Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow announced... Brent Frei/Smartsheet.com Blog “An App Suite in a Sheet” – possibly the most concise description of Smartsheet we’ve seen yet. The folks at The Launchpad have written a tight synopsis of... Conversation Marketing On the everything-is-marketing theme, I bring you my own adventure, still ongoing. Lesson: When things go wrong for your customers, sympathize, help out... From Seattle 2.0Sasha Pasulka My celebrity gossip website has a mailing list now. Not, like, a Google Group sort of thing; rather, an actual mailing list where people go to a page and enter their email address for the express... Gerry Langeler We've seen all sorts of presentations from startups over the years. But none as succinct, yet as effective as one we saw a few days ago. The Seattle company in question is one that... David Aronchick The true lean business demands nothing less than absolute agility . Anything less and you'll be doomed for failure. Agility, in the world of software, is the focus on iterating quickly on... Jennifer Cabala I'm excited to show off our new design. Marcelo and I had talked about making changes for awhile because our content and our needs had outgrown the previous design. Marcelo put in some serious... Andy Sack Having just returned on Monday from a great weekend in Las Vegas with a group of other entrepreneurs from Seattle, I found myself thinking about poker. Poker is everywhere. There's Poker 2.0, the... Anthony Stevens Mention the words “project management” to most entrepreneurial types and an involuntary shudder runs up and down their spines. Project management, as it has typically been practiced, implied lots... Jennifer Cabala I’m excited to announce StartupDay 2010, the conference for pre-entrepreneurs. Last year’s conference was a tremendous success with an off-the-charts satisfaction rate. 98.6% of attendees said...
July 9
Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle: | | | Recurring | | FRI | July 9 |
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July 8
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