4 factors for webpreneurs – Guest Post
1. Technology is easy – getting customers to pay you is outrageously difficult.
When was the last time you heard about a web startup failing because the product didn’t work? Almost never. With the greatest respect to all the hackers and engineers out there coding away, making a product do what you want is simply a function of time. Spend enough development time on it, and you can write code to do almost anything you want. Getting a customer to pay you some money for that feature you just added? That’s an entirely different proposition. The vast majority of web startups fail because they don’t find enough customers, at the right price and in enough time before they run out of cash. If we spend as much time on marketing your startup as you do on writing and shipping your code, and we just might beat the odds.
2. Customers can always choose to do nothing
When pitching a prospect we are generally trying to convince them to do one of two things:
(i) Leave a competitor and join you
(ii) Stop doing nothing about their pain problem and join you
Who knew that getting them to leave a competitor was often easier than getting them to stop doing nothing? At least if they are using a competitor they recognise that they have a problem that needs solving! The truth is, many prospects are indecisive, stagnant, glacial, apathetic, unwilling, and unmotivated. Demonstrating your product and then asking for the sale is just as likely to be met with a yawn and a scratch of the arse as it is with a chequebook. If you understand how difficult the process is, then there is a good chance you will approach it with the right amount of preparation and effort.
3. Financial models are fantasy
Their is one good reason to construct a financial model prior to having any real customer data. Do it to prove to yourself that the fundamentals of your model will produce a profitable business over time. Think of it as a sanity check. Once you are happy that the model works in theory, throw the spreadsheet away. Never look at it again, and for christ sake don’t go out and try and raise investment funds off the back of it (guilty as charged!). Just launch your product and get as much real live data as you can. Months later you can giggle about how wrong your projections were, but at least you won’t be making life altering decisions based on nonsense.
4. There is no replacement for quality user testing
User testing pays for itself many times over. This doesn’t mean getting your mates over to play with your creation in return for a 6 pack. It means getting real life customers/strangers to use your product while you watch. True story. Our startup is an online event registration solution that allows customers to sell tickets and accept registrations for any sized event. Three months after launch, we sat and watched via web cam while a Canadian tester spent 15 MINUTES just trying to create an account. In one of our releases, we had cannily decided not to display a “register button” to anyone using Internet Explorer. No-one using this browser could get in and use our product, and it had been that way for over a week. He eventually managed to get in, but man was he pissed!
What else do you wish you had known before you did your own web startup?
Post by Scott Handsaker founder of Eventarc
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An advertising lullaby
Some more brilliance from George Carlin. For marketers and entrepreneurs alike it’s a great reminder of the value of language and how that can be used to create a benefit perception in peoples minds. Although, I’d recommend the picture we create is one of authenticity. Enjoy!
Simultaneous radness
So how do we leverage a human revolution from a commercial perspective? It’s a big question. And even though the web has gone a long way in deconstructing power bases, business and human evolution are still inextricably linked. So I thought I’d post a few things that matter in a digital world so all players (people and commerce) can create value for each other simultaneously.
Rules of engagement
- Authenticity pays. Be real, don’t pretend to be something, or someone your not. Brand respect comes from understanding the rules and respecting the on line world as the real world and vice versa.
- Speak with a human voice. We don’t listen to Corpi-speak. We listen to voices from people. We ten must personify our brands.
- Engage the crowd. They own our brands. You want proof. When they stop feeding our brand (buying) it dies. We must pay the respect the real brand owners deserve. It’s always been this way, but we didn’t know…. because we couldn’t hear their voices. Now they they have a voice, we must act on it. We have to let our people hijack our brands. User Generated Content and Crowd Sourcing is where it’s at.
- Compound effort. Benefits take longer to garner in the new world. It’s not like the old days of a large media campaign with instant results. We are moving from a low human capital, high financial capital environ, to a large human capital, low financial capital world.
- Learn on the job – it can’t be strategized. It’s too unorganized and changeable… the web is humanity in digital form. Then they only way to play is to embrace the chaos and be part of the conversation. It can’t be justified to a board room, but the companies and brands who choose not to play will be wondering what happened a few short years from now.
Most of all, have fun doing it.
What’s your media philosophy?
It’s easy to believe that owned and earned media (aka social media) is superior to the older paid media. We’ve been trained over the past 15 years of the GUI web to think this way. Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows my thoughts on traditional media, in that it is dying, or at the very least changing.
So what is the right media? The media that achieves the objective, within the budget constraints, and lastly fits the risk profile of the media investor.
Sure, it may be cheaper to vlog, blog and tweet ourselves to functional levels of brand awareness – especially in startup land. But it may be a smarter option to invest 1 million dollars advertising on TV if it results in 3 million dollars in revenue. I say this because I think entrepreneurs are being blinded by the zero cost nature of digital media. What we are better off embracing is an objective driven, performance based approach. This is especially true now that the lines between old and new media are blurring.
The best advice I can give is this: ‘don’t discriminate’ – don’t even think of digital as a channel. Instead think of making connections with audiences. Sometimes this may involve traditional media, sometimes exclusively digital, and sometimes only one or the other. Instead, think in terms of ‘Human Movement’. That is, what they do, where they are and how the communicate with them. Essentially we need to integrate our thinking into how ‘they’ (the people we want to have a conversation with) move. The important caveat is that we need need to be nimble enough to develop an understanding of new media channels as they emerge.
Youtube rewind 2010
I promise this will be the last year in review video I post. But I do think it is relevant to all entrepreneurs and marketers to be across what people are watching. The one caveat that I’d place on anything which makes a hit list or a top ‘anything’ list for that matter is this:
When anything reaches a certain level of critical mass, the fact that it made it onto the agenda drives a large part of the subsequent popularity.
In the case of Youtube, the videos that make it to the most popular for the day, often make it to the weekly list… and so on. We end up watching, because people are watching. Not because it is actually worth watching. A few excellent pieces make it anyway – like the Old Spice commercial. You can check out the Youtube top 10 for 2010 here: http://www.youtube.com/rewind And the summary video is below. Enjoy.
Year in review – Google Style
It’s interesting how technology changes the way we interact. In fact, the way we do a year in review is also changing as Google show here with their Zeitgeist 2010 video. I’m sure there is something in this for everyone, not just retrospectively, but the type of stuff that will matter in our business prospectively.
The end of the Wild Wild West? (www)
You can probably remember back to a time when websites were tagged on advertising or with addresses in their full glory
http://www.xyz.com
It then became www.xyz.com followed closely by xyz.com In the early phase of the web had to direct people to our sites overtly in our communications. We had to spell out exactly where to go. This evolved further to the phrase ‘Google us’ which is the modern version of ‘Find us in the yellow pages’. And the most recent iteration we are seeing is the Social Network, aka Facebook becoming the directory of choice. Many brand advertisements are now are using Facebook as their sign off:
facebook.com/brandxyz
More recently ‘there’s an App for that’ and the success of the itunes / app store platform is doing the same thing in smart phones and mobile devices.
Is this start of the the end of the open web, the Wild Wild West (www)?
Are we moving back to controlled media channels where we have to play in other organisations spaces?
Is this what we really wanted? Or is it just the natural evolution when there is just too much information available? It feels a little like we’ve let other people take control to remove the clutter in our life. We’ve stopped leading and started following. It makes me wonder if there is a limit to the number of information channels we can follow. If Dunbar’s number tells us how many meaningful relationships we can have, is their a media channel equivalent? It feels like there should be. It scares me to think controlled media is making a very big comeback – sure we generate the content, but we don’t own the forums. I just hope this latest iteration of the web is temporal and it doesn’t stifle the great period of innovation we are currently experiencing. The thing all entrepreneurs need to remember is that the the barriers to any digital innovation have never been lower, and no business is all powerful.
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