Tob.in

It's Just Business

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:08:00 -0500

This week the NY Founder Institute talked about Partners & Suppliers. Skip Hop’s founder Michael Diamant talked about how his company manages his partnerships & suppliers as it relates to manufacturing. Although most of our founding members are creating consumer web applications there’s a lot we can learn about how “traditional businesses” handle distribution from companies like Skip Hop.

Inspired by Venture Hacks, I give you the following video: Somewhere an entrepreneur misunderstands the value of his product in a distribution deal. (NSFW due to language)

Layer Cake: It’s Just Business

The city is my technicolor playground

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:08:43 -0500

The city is my technicolor playground

unhappyhipsters: You can come out when you can properly explain...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:16:11 -0500

unhappyhipsters:

You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation.

(Photo: Craig Cutler; Dwell, February/March 2006)

Quick! What does this chart represent?

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:20:00 -0500

Quick! What does this chart represent?

This is the representation of “interest” for a product before, during, and after a launch at a major technology event.

What about this one?

This is a sign of traction after iterations of testing and validating their solution against the customer’s needs after they’ve optimized for the right market fit.

What is this?

This is a team in the early stages trying to figure out it all out.

An evening with Brad Feld

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:12:00 -0500

Tonight I attended the 20^th Entrepreneur Roundtable, moderated by Murat Aktihanoglu of Centrl.com. The Entrepreneur Roundtable is a pitch event where 5 companies give 5 minutes pitches and receive 5 minutes feedback from the guest speaker. The guest speaker for this evening was the charismatic and renowned Venture Capitalist, Brad Feld.

Brad answered numerous questions about venture capital from the group, but I felt everyone in attendance benefited most from his feedback given to the companies that pitched. Personally, it was refreshing to see a VC with candor and thoughtful criticism. In an industry and community where time is valuable, those that received feedback should be quite thankful. Brad’s mother, Celia, clearly raised him well.

Below are some of the more notable items I took away from Brad’s advice on pitching and meeting with a VC.

One of his first and most repeated themes was keeping the VC excited. Specifically Brad said that your current meeting should leave a VC more excited than the previous meeting you had with them. He even cited this as a way he and his partners at Foundry Group vet potential investments.

When it comes to communication and clarity, make sure your unique selling proposition is easy to understand within the first fifteen seconds of your pitch. As Brad noted, “this is the chocolaty goodness of your company.” Make sure you identify the problem and why your solution stands out above all others. Get to the punch line quick.

However be careful when using analogies and references to competitors. Overdoing it may actually leave the name of your competitor in mind your audience. Mentioning someone more than once could have an adverse effect on your pitch.

When mentioning your revenue model make sure it’s easy to understand. The more complexity there is behind revenue generation, the more likely someone is going to not want to take the time to figure it out. Avoid complex payment dynamics for the customer. If anything the revenue model from the value you are providing should be obvious.

It’s very easy to try and impress someone with numbers, but are the numbers meaningful and relevant to your pitch. If you got 50k unique visits from a Tech Crunch feature can you show that it has a direct impact on your revenue? Numbers should be used to validate a hypothesis.

Make sure you can clearly define your demographic. This helps in getting your audience to understand your marketing.

When talking about milestones and projections, talk in weeks and months. Anything that stretches into years for an early stage startup is bullshit and will most likely change in a few weeks. Like wise you want to leave something on the table to talk about in your follow up meeting. If you mention you are looking to get 10k user sign up in a month, then you have something meaningful to follow up about.

My last note is when you’re pitching ALWAYS have an “ask.” You’re meeting with a VC to raise funds so make sure you put that in your pitch in addition to what the funds are for. Be realistic about how much you are asking for.

Brad gave some great advice and his mother will be receiving an email letting her know how much her son’s advice helps aspiring entrepreneurs.

Enjoy,

Tob.in (:

You say... I say...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:13:44 -0500

Me: alright, I'm heading to the gym. I'll ttyl.
Saadiq: get huge for me
Me: I am getting huge, but in the "I stuff my face every day" sort of way
Saadiq: tomato tomahto
Me: donut doughnut

Oh my… Cookie monster & Google’s auto suggest...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:45:03 -0500

Oh my… Cookie monster & Google’s auto suggest make for some interesting results!

Making an old photo new with Color Mill and Tilt Shift iPhone...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:31:53 -0400

Making an old photo new with Color Mill and Tilt Shift iPhone Apps

Pixel Games

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:56:44 -0400

Andrew Parker posted about a collection of pixelated games. My favorites from the list are Pixel & Small Worlds.

thegongshow:

I really enjoy both the art-style and the simple gameplay of super-pixelated games. Here’s a couple examples that are worth a spin, but, be warned, you’re putting your free time at risk.

Quick List of Big-Pixel Games:

Pixel Grower - Don’t let any pixels drop… watch your character grow fractal-like over time.

Pixel - You’re a pixel that shoots other pixels. That description sounds like EVERY game, which means it’s the opposite of true because the experience is very unique.

Small Worlds - Explore a world.

Squareball - iPhone games. Slide the world to move. Watch a video of gameplay to see if it’s your cup of tea.

I think a big part of my attraction to these games is they don’t try to do too much. The is rarely a narrative or character arc because it’s hard to “identify” with a blob of over-sized pixels. These types of games are often super-concentrated gaming paradigms that most gamers can instantly recognize and quickly get engaged.

Plus, I just really like pixel art.

Know of any other good games in this pixel-style that I should check out?

Happiness is...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:08:20 -0400

buddyblip:

a full access CMJ badge! (:

In other Buddy Blip news, we’ve got some cool stuff in the works. It’s been a VERY productive week, but the changes we’re making are across all sections of the site so we’re making sure it works nice and smooth before we open it up to everyone. It’s pretty exciting though. I certainly can’t wait!

Tobin (:

What? No Updates?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:10:30 -0400

So it’s _almost_ been a week since there have been updates posted on the blog, but it’s not due to lack of progress. It’s more due to the progress is unseen to you. I know there are a lot of usability issues that need to be resolved, but I’ve been plugging away at a simple REST API.

The API is for other developers, but we will be our first customers by using it to create an iPhone Application.

n’joy

Tobin (:

Feedback Overload!

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:46:59 -0400

Feedback is a double edged sword. It’s good in the way that it can validate your ideas, spawn new ones, and in general revitalize your energy in regards to what you are working on. However there are times feedback can catch you and completely overwhelm you.

Last night the NY Lean Startup Meetup Group held a Feedback Round-Robin session where we practiced getting feedback on our respective products. Lee Hoffman of Veritocracy (Veri.com) organized this specific event and provided some great insight on how to conduct use test/feedback sessions. For me I wasn’t so much concerned with the feedback I was getting, but I was more focused on how I was conducting my feedback session and learn how to steer less.

Through the week I had been getting feedback from a bunch of great people and also viewing the results of multiple split tests I had done for various sections of the site. Although I was focusing more on how to conduct a feedback session, the results felt a bit overwhelming.

One moment I was elated with the feeling of validation, but quickly the feeling of suffocation started to settle in about what I envisioned lay ahead of me. All the feedback I received quickly added up to multiple pages of “things to do” where a majority of them were labeled as “URGENT”.

I realized I needed to defuse, so I simply went home and “turned off”. No coding, no blipping, maybe some reading or tweeting, but largely no “productive work”. I did spend some time thinking about the feeling of suffocation and what I could do to change that because my list wasn’t going to go away, but I didn’t do anything about it since I realized I wasn’t in the state of mind to do anything productive.

When I woke up this morning I realized I could look at my “To Do” list as something other then a PM styled task list. I looked at it as small fragments of proposed solutions to problems I am trying to solve. So instead I decided to make a smaller list that identified and grouped the user problem I am trying to solve.

I then ignored the original task list and wrote down next to each problem how I propose to solve that problem. This felt a lot more manageable and helped me align my product vision to the problems I am trying to solve.

Observations of continuous deployments

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:46:39 -0400

Since I set out to develop Buddy Blip I’ve been using continuous deployments to publish code changes for the public facing website. I really like this methodology, but the concept can be quite frightening at first.

For a typical deployment the team would set up a timeline/milestone to get bug fixes and new features deployed to live. This is a nice practice as it allows you to smoke test significant changes, however one thing I’ve noticed is that a portion of your team has now “forked” off to handle the deployment and they are no longer working on features. Depending on the scope size of the milestone, a good portion of time would be taken up by one or more people to prepare and execute the deployment. I’ve seen cases where this is limited to 30 minutes of work for 2-3 people, but I’ve also seen that this take an entire dev team a full day to synchronize code to a release branch (and tag) and deploy it.

When using continuous deployments for deploying web applications the process typically takes 5-10 minutes for a single developer. For me the process is checking in my code to the trunk, making a branch from the latest release, merging my changes to the branch, tagging the branch as a release and then deploying the code to live.

I still like to maintain the “trunk” as a progressive development version so I set up a branch and only merge in the changes I want to deploy to live. This is so I can maintain and back up versions of code that aren’t ready for live yet. For significant development changes that would take multiple weeks I will typically branch off of the trunk, but for small features that only need a few days of work and testing I will continue to work off the trunk.

In all I like the continuous deployments, however I’m curious to see how well the methodology holds up as the team grows and scope increases. However I feel if the scope increases then I’m no longer practicing Customer Development/Lean Startup methodologies.

My observed benefits of Continuous Deployments

Morale is increased due to momentum of getting things done
Quicker route to testing new ideas with real users
Focus on obtainable feature sets and things that matter

How would you spend $20K - Revisited

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:11:23 -0400

buddyblip:

“If you had $20k to use towards your own technology business/startup, how would you manage it and spend it?” – That was a question I asked other nextNY members in May of 2008. At the time I had created a small fund for myself to allow me to bootstrap my startup and I wanted to find out from my peers about what they would do.

Some had humorous responses such as a huge launch party or aeron chairs, but what I really wanted to know was what should I put my money towards to most benefit my chances at success. Some of the more serious answers included development of prototypes, customer & market research, and marketing.

Looking back I feel my questions was a bit naïve. However over a year later I have a much clearer thought on what I’d do with that money. I’d spend as little as possible. Specifically I’d minimize my costs to find the cheapest way to validate my product idea.

I would start spending the money only when I feel I have a product that I feel confident would garner interest from my customers. Once I knew more about my product, customers, and distribution channels I am certain I would be confident in where spending would be effectively applied (be it development, marketing, research, distribution, etc).

The most meaningful advice I've heard given to an entrepreneur...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:46:00 -0400

This past week I put together the Feedback Forum where we discussed Klickable.TV with Roger Wu. First, what is the Feedback Forum?

The Feedback Forum is a monthly gathering of NYC entrepreneurs and technology-based startups or businesses in the NY metro area.

Each month we focus on a specific company and discuss critical operational challenges in an open environment that creates a learning opportunity which can benefit the broader NYC entrepreneur community.

There was a great discussion all around but there was one comment that was made that stuck out in my mind the most. David Rostan of SocialYell.com gave a really solid piece of advice in regards who to talk to or try to talk to when finding champions for your product in an organization.

Find the people that want to see you succeed.

To me that means find those who if you succeed, they succeed as well. So if you’re challenging an existing thought find the person who will benefit the most by adopting your solution.

October 3rd, 2009 Buddy Blip Update - We got images! (:

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:56:58 -0400

buddyblip:

While on my flight from ATL to California I was able to do a bunch of coding. The biggest thing I did was allow users to post images to comment streams and private conversations. It mostly started with my friend Kenji posting a link about getting some Korean food in NYC’s K-Town. I thought it’d be cool to show what I’m expecting!

Take a look:

Yum! (=

Okay, aside from that I spent time working on some API REST services and administration tools.

n’joy!

Tobin (:

October 1, 2009 Buddy Blip Update & Thoughts on Usability

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:47:51 -0400

For the past two weeks I’ve been collecting data through casual user tests, A/B testing, Feedback Army, and general analytics. The most significant thing I realized from the feedback is that I’m not doing much communicating on the site. I’m not explaining to the user how I envision they use Buddy Blip. I’m only telling them what it can do and leaving them to figure out how on their own.

I came to the realization that I’ve been focusing on usable features instead of communicative features. Communicative features are functionality that helps the user understand what a product does by communication and functioning at the same time. This goes above just a simple blurb that tells what the user should do. A communicative feature should also assist the user in performing an action on your site while guiding them how to do it. A perfect example of this is Tumblr.com.

I LOVE Tumblr.

The first time you create an account and log in to Tumblr, you are presented with an introduction to how to use their service. These aren’t just splash screens though. They guide you to creating a post and customizing your Tumblr account while collecting data. After three steps you’re all set and already experienced on how to use Tumblr.

Here are a few examples from Tumblr:

Tumblr instructs users how to customize their account

Now they show you how to find cool people

These are great practices and have prompted me to spend the past week building a similar set of functionality. This past week I’ve been focusing on creating a system that allows me to create communicative features on the site. If you want to take a look at how it works, just sign up for an account! Don’t worry, if you already have an account it will still guide you through the process.

Noticeable updates:

Fixed image upload bug that “lost” user images after uploading
Added “welcome” guide to help users get started
Added an announcement system to the dashboard that allows me to send updates to users when they log in.

More to come soon.

n’joy!

Tobin (:

Photo

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:58:07 -0400

Regarding Search Engine Marketing (SEM) on $5/Day

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:52:57 -0400

buddyblip:

The other day I was discussing the thought of SEM on $5/day with a few peers. The general consensus was that $5/day is not really effective for generating leads on Google Ad Words, but after giving it some thought I was able to turn around the notion that the “SEM on $5/day” was outdated.

If you’re building a customer product/service that’s re-segmenting an existing market then chances are high that you are going to be running into a lot of competition. You will often see valuable keywords for your ads with high Cost Per Click (CPC) bids. When trying out Ad Words for Cupid’s Lab, I was seeing CPC bids starting at $5-$6 for keywords associated to dating. In other cases there were keywords that were a bit less costly, however they were still $1 CPC. You’re not going to get very far on $5/day. Or are you?

If your intention is to scale and bring in as many customers through the door, then $5/day is not going to work for you. However, if you’re starting out and you really have no idea how users are going to react to your product then you should spend no more then $5/day. If you are the latter, then you really aren’t in a position to scale in the first place. So fight the temptation of increasing your ad spend to introduce more people to your product.

Do you know what the current conversion rate for your product is? How many visitors do you have to your service before they become customers? Do you have a solid number or do you have an assumed number? Assuming that 1% will automatically convert is not realistic unless you actually see 1% convert and understand why.

If you don’t know these numbers, then you the $5/day allowance is where you should start. This allows you to begin the validation process of your assumptions by collecting qualitative data. From there you’ll be testing two things.

First you’ll be collecting valuable metrics about what users are responding to through your ads and whether or not you are targeting the proper keywords. You’re going to spend a lot of time refining and increasing your Click Through Rate. Don’t worry about the # of impressions your ads get, focus on the percentage of users that actually show interest in what you are selling by clicking your ad. Your actionable data should be which ads and keywords yield the best click through rate.

Next you should be prepared to collect actionable data from the users that click your ads because the sale does not end there. If you have a multi page flow for the user to follow, you need to determine the abandonment rate and why the user is dropping off through split testing your pages.

When it comes to this sort of testing you do not need significant data to find emergent behavior. Having 100 visitors test your assumptions most likely will yield the same results as if you had 1000 vistors. This where SEM $5/day works well, it helps you collect qualitative data without breaking the bank.

Once you have a clear understanding of how your customers are behaving you can begin to increase your ad spend and see if your assumptions are scalable. Until then, stick with the $5/day until you can validate and tweak your conversion rate.

September 27th, 2009 Update

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:24:47 -0400

buddyblip:

The day job has been keeping me a bit busy, but I was able to manage to squeeze in some BuddyBlip.com time.

Here are some of the noticeable updates:

New Temporary “Logo” & Header

New landing page

Task notification system on the dashboard

Other things I’ve done is modified the server side caching on uploaded images. I’m dynamically processing the images based on how they are used. There was a small bug where the resulting image was not being cached properly

Another change was the use of Google Web Optimizer for doing A/B Tests on the landing page. I don’t think either of the landing pages are going to yield any significant conversions, but this is largely a test in exploring the process of collecting actionable data.

I have some cool things in the works for this week in regards to how Buddy Blip is used. I can’t wait to share them.

Tobin (: