One of the highlights of the inaugural Seattle 2.0 Awards was Glenn Kelman opening speech. He was very good and inspiring. To many entrepreneurs, investors and startupers, this was exactly what they need on tough times like this.
First of all, MG Siegler has joined TechCrunch a few weeks ago and he’s by far the best writer TC has ever had. He actually brought back my interest on reading TC after so many bad writers were ruin it (more on that on a future blog post). But MG has a piece on how startups must keep their product simple that I disagree on many levels.
I don’t disagree that simple is good, as long as it gets the job done. And this whole talk about KISS is much easier said than done.
When MG Siegler mentions Twitter, Atebits, Instapaper and others he’s talking about single purpose services. Same thing as Flickr, YouTube or Google search. Multi-purpose products like Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Windows, etc., are much, much harder to keep it simple.
The “KISS” meme keeps coming back every 6 months or so because some blogger somewhere was presented with a new startup product that should have been simpler, but it’s not. Or he (or she) try to do something on a service they use and can’t figure out how. Then they pile on with examples of successful services that kept it simple (I’m surprised he didn’t mentioned 37Signals on his post).
Then, I come and talk about single-purpose (easy to make it simple) and multi-purpose (hard to make it simple) and I top it all off with a list of products that are not easy to use, not simple, yet they are huge winners, which includes: Windows, Office, MacOS, Linux, Ruby, C#, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Photoshop, Typepad, etc.
Dear Facebook, I don't mind so much the new redesign (I actually like it), but I'd like you to collapse all the updates from individuals into some kind of thread. The problem is that 2-3 of my 'friends' make 15 updates at a time and the ruin the experience for me because they are so much 'on my face'. I don't want to 'hide' them, since I do want to know what's going on on their lives, but I need a dial to slow it down. You can do it two ways: Only display 1 update per person (the latest) and have a "more from this person", or make each person a thread and list all the updates below him/her. The first updated being expanded and all consecutive updates collapsed.
Dear GMail, stop saving empty drafts. If there is no one on the TO/CC line, no subject line and no content on the body, feel free to discard that message automatically. For the record, spaces (whitespace) is the same as no content. You guys are smart. You can do that.
This commercial about a person trying to buy a laptop for less than $1,000 and going for an HP w/ Windows instead of Mac just show how technology companies (big and small alike) don’t get it: it’s not the technology.
Pretty much all technology companies are founded and ran by technologists and we (yes, I’m a technologist as well) tend to think different. We like numbers. We like to compare things. We like to evaluate options and come up with a formula which once we input the data will give us the definitive answer: Will you buy or rent a house? Will you lease or buy a car? Should you run your own server or use a cloud solution? Should you hire 4 developers in the US or 7 in Asia? That’s how engineers and most business people think.
Turns out that’s not how customers make purchase decisions. Your customers don’t care if your product has 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code. They don’t care if your software has 2MB or 7MB to download. They don’t care about Windows vs. Linux on the server. They simply don’t care.
Customers care primarily about their usage of the product. Is it something enjoyable? Do they need it? Do they want it? What color is it? What colors can they chose from? Will I look good in front of my friends if I tell them I’ve been using this product?
Yes, I’m a wounded technologists by the marketing battles I fought and lost. It’s like I brought a bullet-proof vest, but they came with the torch-throwers. Then I’ve brought the fire-extinguisher and they built a moat, and I build a bridge and they weren’t there.
Marketing is a battle that most technologists are not prepared to fight. They don’t even know what they don’t know. Most startups are going to suffer (and fail) because of their lack of understanding on how to do marketing. And no matter how much I talk about this, pretty much all entrepreneurs will say they understand the importance of marketing or understand marketing itself.
Microsoft trying to make the Mac vs. PC fight to be about price is just to show how clueless their marketing department is about what customers are looking for.
After TechFlash broke the news of entrepreneur-turned-VC Rob Monster closing his venture capital “branch” to focus on his startups, there was a flurry of ill-informed or just plain nasty comments on the blog post. That triggered this question on my head: Can successful entrepreneurs become successful VCs? That question got a bit more steam after I thought all the criticism Ignition Partners has received due to their “lack of entrepreneurial experience” over the last couple of years (maybe more).
Let me ask you a question: Can a great doctor become a great teacher? Or, can a great teacher become a great engineer? Or, can a great actor become a great singer?
There is no question on my mind that great entrepreneurs can become great venture capitalists and vice-versa, but that doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed path to success. The skill set to be a great entrepreneur is different than the skill set to be a great venture capitalist. We all like to point success stories of people that are good at both, but I find that correlation irrelevant. I much rather prefer to get funding from a VC that has a track record of investing on successful companies, than from a successful entrepreneur-turned-VC that has yet to prove he has the “eye”. At the same token, I prefer a serial successful entrepreneur investing on my company than a wealthy doctor that has no clue about startups.
I think VCs need a good eye at spotting a good deal, not a good knowledge on how to bring a product to market. VCs won’t be running the business for you, so if they know how to setup payroll, or how to prepare a balance sheet, or how to manage a 25-person startup is irrelevant. They won’t be doing that. At best, they will help with strategic thoughts and introductions, besides funding, of course. I’ll even say that a VC who has too much “hands on” experience might be the opposite of you need as an entrepreneur.
And just to finalize I feel really bad Rob Monster couldn’t make his model work at this time because he tried something every innovative in startup investing. And I also feel strange that every time anyone blogs or comments on Ignition they are quick to point out Entellium and other Ignition failures, but they never mentioned their successes. Ignition has absolutely a brand issue in town, but for the smart people you have to know the “news” is what people want to read, not necessarily the reality.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation and never done business with Rob Monster or Ignition.
I have many addictions, including a very common kind of addiction amongst entrepreneurs: data-analyctites.
We do a lot of AB Tests at Sampa and last Friday we just wrapped up test number 902 and are ready to start 903 (903 stands for March 2009, not nine-hundred tests). 902 was about when to show our customer about premium packages: Before they sign up, just after they sign up, or when they hit a limit on their plan. We also did it with another dimension, one showing one upgrade option, the other showing two upgrades options.
But this post is about a common mistake I saw at MSN when we released new versions of the product. As soon as we released a new version that had a dramatic different design from the previous version, a big change would happen on the data points we collected, sometimes up, sometimes down.
The problem with that was the fact that too much had changed at once. So, a new version that would cause a 7% gain in the number of page views was highly celebrated. But there was 12 changes that happen at once. Couldn't some of the changes have brought a 15% gain while others took away 8%? We'll never know because they were done all at once.
You might say a gain is a gain and that's a good thing. I agree. It's only a bad thing when people try to justify the 7% gain in one of the 12 changes and use that argument to push more changes forward. Well, if you changed so much on your homepage how do you know which changes are really responsible for a gain in PV, UU, conversion, upgrades, etc?
By far, the most common mistake I see people making is to change their product and launch a new homepage all on the same day. If you do that you really won't know how much your user experience has impacted your business or how much your new branding has affected conversion and expectations.
You should not consider the individual pieces of your product without considering the whole, but you can't justify gain/loss based on one of many features if you did it all at once.
One thing that I really like about this time of the year is the number of events for startups and entrepreneus. There are events all year around, but the Spring and Fall events are usually better than the Summer and Winter ones.
The week after I'll be going to the nPost Networking on March 31st.
In April I'll be a judge at the UW Business Plan Competition and on May we'll have the Seattle 2.0 Awards (which I'm hosting) on May 7 and the WTIA Fast Pitch Forum (ex-Investment Forum) on May 27.
One thing that I really like about this time of the year is the number of events for startups and entrepreneus. There are events all year around, but the Spring and Fall events are usually better than the Summer and Winter ones.
The week after I'll be going to the nPost Networking on March 31st.
In April I'll be a judge at the UW Business Plan Competition and on May we'll have the Seattle 2.0 Awards (which I'm hosting) on May 7 and the WTIA Fast Pitch Forum (ex-Investment Forum) on May 27.
There is a wide range of social network connections policies at an individual level. This is, how I consider who I invite and who I accept on social networks might be different from what you. But most people that I know use two different standards: One for Facebook and one for LinkedIn.
Facebook has the widest range of "personal policies". I know people that will accept any Friend invite, no matter if they even heard about that person before. I also know a person who is using Facebook as an exclusive "family network". Seriously.
On LinkedIn I see mostly two standards: 1) Those that accept/invite anyone they've done business with, or would like to do business with, and 2) Those that are only people they've met in real world.
My social network policies are these:
On Facebook I'll invite or connect with anyone that I know (physically or virtually) and that I know he or she knows about me.
On LinkedIn I only invite/accept people I have met on real life.
On Twitter I'll follow mostly people that I've met, know personally and find their tweets (mostly) relevant to me.
The sucky part is that I have not found a way to get my LinkedIn connections into FB, or FB into LinkedIn, or to find out about my existing FB/LinkedIn friends that just joined Twitter. I'm sure there is 100 early-adopter tools out there, but I'll wait for the "de facto" to rise to the top.
I'm the Founder & CTO of Sampa (site builder/blogging service). I was born in Brazil, where I graduated in Computer Science. Moved to the US in 1998 to work for Microsoft and there I worked for 7 years (Exchange and MSN Search). In 2004 I decided to do my own thing and left to start Sampa. Besides my new company, I keep myself busy with my new son which takes most of my non-working time. Once I have a few minutes to spare I read, cook, do video editing, take pictures and hang out with friends.
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