Preselling Your Startup

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It was late at night on top of the Topricana Hotel in Las Vegas.  The drinks were flowing.  The conversation was electric.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a pole dancer or a roulette wheel that was creating the excitement.  It was #microconf.  100+ pretty geeky guys (almost exclusively guys) where enjoying the dessert air, pumped up after spending the day swapping tips on building an online business.

“Dude, I’m going to help you with your product”, Stephen said to me.

“Fantastic, will you be my first paying customer”, said I.

“Ehhhhh”, said Stephen.

Aw well.  I guess I’ll have to keep looking for a better validation of LInktart, a tool we use internally to track who is doing the best job social media marketing for us.  Its the latest in a long list of projects on my hardrive.

Little did he know, Stephen did me a favour.  When it comes down to it.  you can talk until the cows come home, but the only real test of your product is whether someone is willing to hand over a credit card number.

Period.

Does that mean that ‘customer development’ interviews are useless?  Well.  Maybe.  After all, it takes no more than a day or two to knock up a sales page for almost any product.  Slap a credit card field at the bottom, and you are 90% ready to validate your market for real.

So why don’t we do it more?

Well, there are some human factors.

  • People will say ‘no’ more often, and we don’t like rejection.
  • Its easier to ask people what they would pay for (again, avoid having them say no)
  • It takes longer with more interviews to find someone who will say yes (aka: laziness).
  • We’re afraid of getting stuck in some local maxima, just missing out on a pot of gold in some slightly adjacent opportunity.

So why shouldn’t every customer development interview end with …

As a way of saying thanks for your time, would you like to pre-order a license?  I’ll take you card number but won’t charge you until the product is launched.

 

 

My Favorite Google Analytics Report

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A few months ago, Phil Boyle pointed out a report that has been sitting in my GA account for years, but I’ve never noticed.

51842ce8e4b0484a551f378e

 

It hides under Traffic Sources -> All Traffic.  On that page, select ‘Goal Set 1′.  You have to have your goals set up in order to have this available.

So why do I like it so much?

Because it tells me two things;

  1. What I should be doing more of
  2. What I should be doing less of

I do this by looking at the sources, and for those sources which are driving most conversions with the highest conversion rate, I can decide to spend more time building up traffic from that source.  This might mean spending more advertising on that source, commenting more on it or asking the owner for more links.

 

Product Launch: bestexplainers.com

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The Best Explainer Videos on the web - BestExplainers.com 2013-03-14 16-26-13

 

For the last couple of months, Priscilla has been working her tail off building up piehole.tv.  Before Christmas I started to look at ways of building up a sales pipeline for her.  I did a mix of things including an Mixergy interview and overall things have been going well.  We have been tracking the HTTP referrer of new leads so we can hook up our best lead sources with customers.  By far one of the best sources of traffic for us have been directories of explainer video producers like us.  I suppose that makes sense.  People do their shopping somewhere else and by the time they arrive at us, they are ready to buy.

One concern has been that this traffic source might dry up if for example, those directories decide to go into the video production business for themselves and kick us off their sites.

So, I decided to build our own directory of video content.  Building on what we learnt when building Piehole.co.uk, the site allows you to browse and shortlist video producers, and even message them once you are ready to buy.   I tried my best to stick witha  vanilla development stack to keep development time down.  It was built using …

  • Rails
  • Heroku
  • Bootstrap
  • The Dresssed Rails Theme
  • Vimeo for video hosting
  • WebSolr

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Hacking Launch

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I have been a fan of the This Week In Startups show for a couple of years now.  The guests are great, but more importantly for me, it has been a way for me to eavesdrop on the progress of its founder, Jason Calacanis.  It is somehow comforting to see that even someone as anointed as Jason has had his share of setbacks along the way.  I have watched sales teams, producers and even co-hosts move on while Jason kept plugging away.

It was nice therefore to be there to witness some of the success.

I hadn’t been to Launch before, and I was blown away by the scale of the event.  A reported 5,800 people looked about right to me.  I spent three days solidly in the demo pit talking to startups and I didn’t even get around to everyone.  It was motivating as well as profitable as I was pitching Kickass Startup Videos for PIehole.tv.

Here are four ways of hacking the conference to help get the most out of them.  Two I observed others do, while two I used myself.

  1. Everyone needs to crap sometime.  dmcclure Which presents a brilliant if obvious space to marketing your brand to at least 85% of the audience.  Funnily enough, only one startup took advantage of this, placing a single sticker above the urinal at the main toilets.  I should have done that too.
  2. Simple flyers left on the main networking and lunch tables presented another space to get you message across.  SAP left Frisbees there while FounderSuit just left a slip of paper on each table.
  3. If there was a criticism to be laid at the feet of the conference, it would be there were too many companies to cover.  Launch’s clever app took the standard conference app experience to another level, allowing attendees to mock invest in their favorite pitches on the main stage.  It made it much easier to see which companies were gaining the most interest.
  4. The Launch App wasn’t the only piece of tech which you can use to get the most out of the conference.  TouchPulse is a service which allows you to track social activity based on location and time.  I had it set up to monitor the conference, giving me a good idea of the most influential people at the event, and those I should consider trying to build a relationship with next time around.  You see a report on each day’s activity at …

I hear #launch2014 is going to be twice as big.  I’ll be first in line to buy my ticket.

 

 

A different kind of Startup Meetup

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I was lucky enough to get invited to an edition of Techpreneurs, a meetup of tech entrepreneurs last month Dublin.  Run by the successful tech startupper, Sean Blanchfield, and spnosored by Lemans Solicitors, the event wasn’t your standard awkward meetup.

It was a different type of awkward meetup, but in a much more productive way.

There were some refreshments provided in the upstairs of a Dublin city centre pub (how Irish) followed by everyone getting broken up into groups of 6 to 10 people.  Each attendee was vetted to a certain extent and it meant that everyone there had at least some startup experience.  A discussion topic was provided, in this case “how to pick a startup founder”.  A very good topic indeed.

At first it was a bit weird.  We went around the table in typical startup geek fashion explaining a bit about ourselves a la any good Anon meetup.  We then got to the heart of the matter and started to talk about what it is we thought made a good partner.

Before long the contrivance was forgotten, and I started hear some vary interesting stories from my group.  Some where brand new “out of the box” tech guys, with ideas, passion but not a lot of experience . Some were older hands with tales of excess and bust from the first dot com bubble.  Everyone had something interesting to say.

So why did I like it?  Well, in a typical startup meetup, the social norms prohibit getting to deep and meaningful too soon.  This format swept that away and gave us license to start swapping tales and advice.

Overall, it was the most useful startup meetup I’d been to in hears.  Bravo Sean.

Reverse Engineering Entrepreneurial Success

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Every engineering student has heard about reverse engineering.  I first heard about it when AMD produced a microprocessor that copied the results outputted by INTEL chips, allowing the to be compatible with MS windows. God help us.

So how can I become compatible with unbridled entrepreneurial success?

At the end of the day, successful entrepreneurs have two arms, two legs and breath the same air you and I do.

Why is it then that some are more successful than others?  It must come down to how they allocate their time.  They have the same number of hours in the day that you and I have.  They must just be spending them differently.

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Startups: Divided we fall

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Over the past four months, travelling between Latin America, South Africa and Europe, I have noticed a common trend.

Smart, energised folk, tech folk in particular, are working on too many bad ideas. With the easy availability of early stage funding in place like Chile and Ireland, there are too many single founder or unbalanced teams spreading their effort over too many projects.

In the more glamorous startup cities (I won’t mention them yet again), collaboration is the name of the game. People are generous with their ideas and see how successful teams win, but hardly ever single geniuses

So why not encourage more collaboration?

I for one am scared of being alone. My business partner and now wife is doing great. We’ve decided that living and working together isn’t the way forward. That means I need to find a team to join.

Here is the rub.

Everyone wants their own fiefdom. As a bit of a geek, I’ve looked to entrepreneurship as my way
of not having my work day organises by bug ID. I’ve got lots of ideas. No doubt you would think they stink. Just like I would think yours do.

So how do we get good guys and gals to drop their stinky ideas and build an extraordinary life for themselves?

I’m not sure, but this is what I’m doing in 2013

  • Working at a cowork or office with smart people around
  • Finding new clients to do stuff for
  • Doing more speaking at small conferences