Got Feedback?

In the latest stealth startup that I’m helping out with, we went through all the usual steps: Strategy sessions, market research, demographic studies, competitive analysis. We pitched the idea to the people we trust and respect, and worked their feedback into our product development. From there, we could have hunkered down into development mode, coming up for air only during alpha or beta tests. However, we would have been wrong.

We held a small focus group earlier this week, and got feedback from our target demographic. You see, we’ve built a great team, but we’re all 40-year-old males living in Calgary. We wanted to hear what young people had to say about our product. Our plan was hold a focus group every week, giving us constant feedback during our development process. Call it arrogance, but I would have never thought that focus groups would have made a big difference. In fact, the feedback we’re getting could be the difference between success and failure of the company.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Separate the coders from the product designers. We wanted to iterate on at least three different product concepts with subtle, but important variations on our core concept. So, while the development continues to work on the core code library without interruption, our product design team is working on product mockups and presentations for the focus group sessions.
• Build feedback into your development cycle. When feedback becomes part of your company’s DNA, everyone will understand that your goal is to build features that customers want, not the features that employees want.
• Show a real product (or something that looks real). If you have real product, show it. If you don’t, create high-fidelity mock-ups. People will have a hard time commenting on your product if all you do is pitch a product concept.
• Don’t change your company strategy overnight. Chances are, you’ll get feedback might completely contradict your company’s reason for existence. Sleep on it, analyze, and get more feedback before you do anything drastic. In other words, treat focus groups as one of the many data points you’ll use in your strategic toolbox.

If you’ve already build feedback loops into your company’s development cycle, I’d love to hear your opinions. If you haven’t – get going!

Are You Using 1999 Analytics Talk?

A large majority of people are talking about page views and uniques these days, but every so often, I still hear someone talk about hits. I’ll have to admit though, that even the experts don’t necessarily agree on terminology. Which is why a new document defining 26 new web analytics definitions from theWeb Analytics Association is so important.

In it, the WAA standards committee list some Building Block Terms, such as page views and unique visitors; Visit Characterizations such as click-throughs; Content Characterizations such as page exit ratios, and Conversion Metrics such as events.

The document is a great start, and would be even better if there was some “color commentary” – for example, sample statistics and industry standard ratios. For now, we’ll just have to rely on good old fashioned research to find those numbers.

No Mulligans on YouTube.

Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen South Carolina, struggled to answer a question during the Miss Teen USA competition – and of course, it gets posted to YouTube almost immediately. It’s hard to tell how many times the video has been seen because the same clip gets posted so many times, but one clip is nearing 6,000,000. The clip above, which simply added sub-titles, is nearing 1,000,000 views.

You’ve got to feel for the poor girl – everybody has a brain fart every so often. She went on the Today Show for a follow-up interview, and was very well-spoken. However, very few people are interested in looking at this clip – only 14,000 views so far.

Innovation At The Speed of China.

Popular Science is out with an article this month chronicling the maturation of China’s counterfeiting industry. Years ago, China started out with simple brand counterfeiting in the fashion arena. Now, it manufactures everything from cars to cell phones at significantly lower pricing. Here is what happened to LG’s “Chocolate” phone in China in 2005:

LG’s phone began to sell out as soon as it was released, but it took four months for the Korean electronics giant to release a version for China. By then, it was too late: A doppelgänger Chocolate had hit the market first, and had become the preferred choice for Chinese shoppers. Quality wasn’t an issue. The fake phone was “exactly like the real one in design,” a company spokesperson told Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s largest daily newspaper. “Chinese people think it’s LG electronics that manufactures the fakes.”

Today, iPhone clones are showing up on the market with improvements such as removable batteries and access to multiple mobile carriers. The Chinese are certainly benefiting from the R&D efforts of first world nations, but this isn’t their end game. They will almost certainly invest in R&D in efforts to build better, originally-designed products.

They also have their problems too – cheap Chinese knock-offs may have a host of problems – from lack of occupancy crash safety in cars to toys containing lead paint. However, even the world’s best manufacturers have found that the only effective way to combat knock-offs is to release new products in China with delay.

So, how can companies like Apple combat the clones? Here are a few suggestions:

• Iterate faster. Nobody expects a perfect v1 – but don’t make consumers wait long for the next version.
• Build loyalty. Allow customers who stood in line to buy v1 phones an easy upgrade path.
• Learn from the clones. Removable batteries and access to both GSM and CDMA networks are just a few of the features that the clones have built. Apple needs to incorporate these features into their next release, even if it means swallowing some of their pride.
• Innovate faster. There’s no time to complain about the competition. Get back in the R&D lab and create more of what made you great in the first place.

Come to think of it – these might be good rules for any company!

The “Twitter Test” of Branding

When creating the brand for your next venture, consider applying the “twitter test”. That is, what are you going to print on your t-shirts, and will it be cool? You might have the coolest logo in the world, but a standard logo t-shirt is just plain boring – and I’ve got a garbage bag full of them to prove it.

Twitter, for those of you who don’t know, is a SMS & web community based on the question, What are you doing? Since SMS has a built-in limit of 160 characters, it’s become an amazing, short attention span-type tool that has been used for everything from live-blogging events to letting your network of friends and family know where you’re at. Some are sending upwards of 20+ twitters a day!

Twitter has a simple logo, but brilliant branding. “wearing my twitter shirt” strikes immediate resonance with twitter fans, and evokes questions for those who aren’t familiar with it. Their business cards have “handing out business card” on the back of them. It’s clever, witty, and something that people will buy, wear, use, and talk about.

If your brand works nicely on a t-shirt, chances are that it will integrate smoothly into your advertising also. Using your brand as a verb, you can work it into a variety of headlines – for instance, consider Yahoo!’s latest branding headlines “Do you Yahoo?”. Now imagine what twitter could do if it ever needed to go to print advertising one day!

IMCDb: Internet Movie Cars Database

If this isn’t definitive proof that there’s an Internet venture covering almost any idea there ever was, I don’t know what is. We were having a discussion last night about the good old days, and I recalled the car I used to drive in high school. It was a 1979 Chevy Caprice Wagon, otherwise known as a Chevrolet Impala with fancier badging. Monstrously huge by today’s standards, it was plastered with fake Mactac woodgrain paneling and had a beautiful sky blue interior.

Anyways, a search for 1979 Chevrolet Impala Wagon in Google yielded IMCDb.org as the number one result. And there it was, the woody wagon. Makes you wonder why Toyota has taken over as the world’s #1 car manufacturer, doesn’t it?

Settling Down With a Co-Founder

I’m starting to sound like a grandmother to all the “single” entrepreneurs I meet. They may not be single in their personal lives, but they are the one and only founder of their companies. Here’s why finding a co-founder is important:

1. Because “1” is a lonely number. People are social. You find friends and partners in all other aspects of your life, so why is building a business any different? Think about it – most people find soul mates to share their life experiences; friends to share social experiences; schoolmates to share the homework load. So, if only to share the pain and joy of creating an entrepreneurial venture, entrepreneurs need to find a co-founder.
2. Entrepreneurship is about finding customers, partners, advisors, employees, and sometimes, investors. Your co-founder should be your first big believer. Align interests – entrepreneurs should not use hard earned investment capital to hire executives. A guy getting paid six figures doesn’t have the same interests as you if you’re taking a minimal entrepreneur’s salary.
3. You can’t do it all. Entrepreneurs need to understand what they are good at, and what they are not good at (Think hard about this one, because “I’m too much of a perfectionist” is a BS answer). Find somebody with a complementary skill set – think Hewlett and Packard, Page and Brin, Jobs and Wozniak, Gates and Ballmer, Dell and Rollins (ok, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea).
4. Learning to share. It’s tough for most entrepreneurs to share their company’s vision with others. The fear is that people will change that vision. They have to get over this – people must internalize and personalize a company’s vision to get passionate about it. One of the reasons why Google has such passionate employees is because Larry & Sergei have shared their vision with their employees, and have allowed employees to add to that vision. Allowing a co-founder to share in, and add to an entrepreneur’s original vision is a great first step in creating a scalable enterprise.

So, for all the single founders out there: Whatsa matta with you? – when are you going to get a nice co-founder and settle down?

Special thanks to Austin Hill for reminding me how important this issue is.

We’re the Facebook of (insert your industry here).

I can’t recall the number of pitches I’ve seen lately where entrepreneurs have told me that they plan to become the “Facebook” of their industry. Sure, you can create a social network for just about any niche nowadays (check out Dogster, for instance), but be sure to do your homework before you stake your claim. Here’s how:

1. Read the Facebook Blogs: FaceReviews, Inside Facebook & AllFacebook.
2. Do some research: The success of all social networking sites is a study of analytics, statistics and human social interaction (hey, that BA I got years ago is finally relevant – kind of). So, dig deep and understand some of this stuff. Here’s a start: HP has some great papers here. One of theirpapers studies 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook! Also, check outthe Pew Internet & American Life Project, where in the Online Activities & Pursuits section, they have studies on social networking, Wikipedia, and online video usage.
3. Do some more research. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who is developing or has developed a Facebook App these days. So, ask around and get as much first-hand information as possible.
4. Do some number crunching. We’re less than three months into the release of the Facebook Apps platform, and as of today, there are 3,131 apps available. The #1 application, Top Friends, has over 12,000,000 users. The last place app – well, it’s hard to find. Click here to see the 1,350th app, then try and get to the 1,351st app. Let me know how that goes!

I’m doing this research to help the companies I’m advising become more successful in launching Facebook-like businesses, or applications within Facebook. If you have come across any other interesting sources, please share!

Calgary DemoCamp 3: Thursday, August 30th, 2007.

It’s been a fantastic summer, as indicated by my utter lack of attention to this blog. But it hasn’t been all fun and games – I’ve been busy working with all the companies I advise, and connecting with a long list of new ventures also. If you’re on that list and I’ve responded yet (I’m not intentionally ignoring you!) let’s try to connect at DemoCamp3.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, BarCamps & DemoCamps are open, community-organized events that are focused on technology. Think open source for conferences, because it’s free, and depends heavily on the contribution of the community. BarCamps are full-day events, while DemoCamps contain 4 presentations in less than 1 hour, followed by a meetup at the local watering hole.

The Calgary BarCamp/DemoCamp organizing team met a few weeks ago, and we had a great discussion on how to gather up a group of entrepreneurs, aspiring and otherwise. We talked about the ethos of BarCamp – an open, learning environment where PowerPoint is shunned, and diving deep on topics and issues such as technology, DRM, and intellectual property rights is alright. We’re more interested in hearing passionate discussions regarding great products and services than we are in hearing about exit strategies.

We’re also organizing a BarCamp for later this year, and working the back channels to bring in some special guests for our inaugural event – more news to come as this develops.

For now, I invite you to sign up for the upcoming DemoCamp, either as a presenter or attendee. Also, join the Facebook Group, and chances are, you’ll find someone that you want to meet or connect with at the event.