The new Innovation Warehouse brand needs to reflect a unique point of view.

Our design research for the Innovation Warehouse is intended to make sure that the final brand designs are sufficiently different from the competitors to be memorable and interesting for the audience. We’ve made our research documents available for download as part of the open-source case study approach that the Innovation Warehouse are taking to the rebranding project.

Competitor Visual Audit

The design team began collecting a visual audit of the main competitors and benchmarks in parallel with the strategic mapping process. Lean branding is all about running multiple racetracks that can reinforce each other.

1. Co-working: Design Research

We discussed the co-working spaces that the Innovation Warehouse team admired and conducted our own research. We then analysed the brand design, website, interior workspaces and interior event spaces of the top co-working spaces in London.

We asked the Innovation Warehouse members where else they had considered joining. Based on this information we looked at:

• TechHub
• Google Campus
• Central Working
• The Hub
• Club Workspace
• The Cube.

You can download the full research report as a pdf: 1 – Design Research on Coworking in London

Co-working: Design research into the look and feel of co-working spaces in London.

We found that the standard of professionalism, consistency and design among London co-working spaces is very high. Each space has a unique feel and a different target market, so the pressure is on for Innovation Warehouse to find its niche.

2. Accelerator: Design Research

The startup accelerator and angel investing marketplace in Europe is rapidly becoming more competitive. The various accelerators are starting to need to differentiate themselves. The LeWeb discussion moderated by Mike Butcher with Ami Shpiro from Innovation Warehouse, Jon Bradford of TechStars and Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp discussed the increasing options for aspirational entrepreneurs. As the accelerator marketplace is maturing, the time has come for the Innovation Warehouse to clearly differentiate itself.

Investment: We conducted a visual audit of the benchmark accelerators and incubators.

Our design analysis found that the average quality of design among accelerators was lower than among co-working spaces. The interior fit-outs of accelerators were less attractive than those of co-working spaces. But the overall standard of graphics and web design was still high and the Innovation Warehouse needs to lift its game. You can download the pdf: 2 – Design Research on London Accelerators.

The next step is to explore possible design themes based on the brand strategy and create mood boards to allow for a discussion about the key things we want to capture in the final brand designs.

The post Innovation Warehouse Chapter 5: Design Research appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

Entrepreneurs now have lots of options for co-working, accelerators and angel investment.

We find that the competitor mapping stage is vital for helping a client realise just how high the standard of competition can be. We use competitor mapping partially as a diagnostic tool and partially as a creative thinking tool.

Competitor Mapping

We use competitor maps to help tease out the brand attributes that can be used to differentiate a client’s brand. I learned this unusual technique from Brian Richards who used it successfully with Icebreaker (and other clients) to help find their most important points of difference.

The trick is to keep remixing the axes of the graph until you find some competitive breathing room. The goal isn’t “up and to the right”, it’s “blue ocean”. The diagrams look like Gartner Quadrants or BCG Matrixes but they’re slightly different because they are about contrasting emotional attributes (from the perspective of your audience). There is no inherently good “up and to the right” on these maps; the key is to look for gaps in the mind-space of your audience.

Here’s how we presented to the competitive positioning process to the Innovation Warehouse management team….

We think the key to positioning the Innovation Warehouse is to separate out the investment programmes from the co-working space and position them honestly in their respective markets. You may not think of some of these players as “competitors” but they are substitute behaviours that an entrepreneur could take instead of engaging with the Innovation Warehouse. Sometimes, your fiercest competitor is having your audience choose to “do nothing”.

Co-working: Positioning the Innovation Warehouse Co-working Space

Let’s look at how the Innovation Warehouse stacks up against the other co-working spaces in London. We applaud your core belief in “being known by our fruit”; celebrating your members, rather than just talking about yourselves. You could do more to celebrate and promote your members; and create a real tribe around the Innovation Warehouse. But the competitor positioning in your marketplace is more subtle…

Innovation Warehouse can differentiate with a focus on hard-working and intelligent entrepreneurs.

1. What motivates the RESIDENT entrepreneurs?

We think there are some really interesting cultural tensions in the entrepreneurship support marketplace in London. The first is the tension between the perceived glamour of entrepreneurial success and the seriously hard work required in real life to succeed in building a technology business.

In London we’re seeing the rise of the cult of the Silicon Valley style startup. This attracts the type of entrepreneur who says:

I didn’t get the banking job I wanted, but I’ve seen the movie The Social Network. So, I’m going to sit in a cafe with my latte and laptop. I can tell my friends that I have a startup. I’ll play foosball, sit on a beanbag, listen to music and have fun.

Startups have become the new rock and roll. On the one hand, we think that is great for society, but the risk is that it’s selling a dream that isn’t real. Personally, we think that it’s great to encourage entrepreneurship and that it can be fun. But the tone of the Innovation Warehouse is more focused on the hard work required to succeed in real life. Up close, running a business is hard work.

There is an opportunity for the Innovation Warehouse to move from promising on its website to be a “Fun, dynamic, creative space” (and then not delivering on that promise).  The brand would have more integrity if it promised explicitly what it actually delivers, which is a “productive environment”.

The Innovation Warehouse breeds pragmatism. There are no business owners here with rose-tinted glasses; they know that there is work to be done in order to build a high-growth business. Everything from your opening hours and quiet spaces; to meeting rooms and flexible membership terms is geared towards a demographic of hard-working entrepreneurs.

2. What are the resident entrepreneurs working on?

There is another point of difference for the Innovation Warehouse: the tension between solving wicked problems and solving simple problems.

Wicked problems include: big data, analytics, commercialising military research, societal problems, deep mathematics or creative use of science and technology. Startups working on these types of wicked problems are valued by their intellectual property.

Simple problems can be just as big (often bigger) businesses but they have a different tone. They salve simple customer pains in simple ways such as games, entertainment, social networking and simple mobile applications. Such startups are often valued by their ability to cause rapid expansion in user numbers.

We see a lot more companies at the Innovation Warehouse working on wicked problems. Your members are going after those big, tough societal problems. This means that they are often very intelligent and thoughtful people.

Accelerator: Positioning the Innovation Warehouse Investment Activities

The investment activities of the Innovation Warehouse are unique and don’t have any direct competitors. But, from the customer’s perspective, there are many substitute behaviours. On the one hand, handing out money should be the easiest thing in the world to brand. But investing in high-growth entrepreneurs (on mutually attractive commercial terms) is a very competitive space.

Innovation Warehouse can differentiate by combining unique capital structures with long-term relationships.

1. How long is the relationship?

Some entrepreneurs want an early investor to make a single transaction investment, while others are looking for a long-term investment relationship with multiple transactions. Most accelerators and angel investors will come along for the ride but few of them build active long-term relationships. One catch-phrase we heard when interviewing the Innovation Warehouse angel network was “The industry norm, a five-minute pitch, is like trying to get married on the first date.”

The Innovation Warehouse has access to a range of intelligent angels who pride themselves on taking the time to evaluate business propositions that might confuse other investors (either because of the underlying science or because of the capital structure required). To make these types of investment, the Innovation Warehouse has a whole range of incubator, accelerator and seed-investing activities (that gradually build a relationship over time). The entrepreneur feels that they are being invested in by someone who really knows them.

2. How unique is the capital structure?

Most startup accelerators only offer standard equity investment with standard terms. The range of valuations and percentages may be negotiable, but the fundamental investment relationship is standardised. This is fine for most general cases. But any startup with more specific growth needs might require a unique capital structure.

Innovation Warehouse provides an entirely bespoke accelerator process. Entrepreneurs can start at any time and the capital structure can change over the course of the relationship.

There are nuances in a long-term investment relationship such as dilutable vs. non-dilutable stock, preferred or common stock, voting rights, stock options, convertible notes and mezzanine debt structures that a normal startup accelerator can’t account for.

The competitor maps build on the early brand audit and brand strategy stages. They are some of the most important inputs for the next strategy, messaging and design phases. You can follow the journey on the Innovation Warehouse blog, Klaus Bravenboer‘s blog and on Twitter at @IWLondon.

The post Innovation Warehouse Chapter 4: Competitive Positioning appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

Patrick Vlaskovits was in London for a few hours so he dropped by the Innovation Warehouse.

Patrick has reverse engineered what causes rapid growth in some disruptive products but not others. He’s pulled together thinking from advertising, marketing, lean and even black-hat affiliate marketing. The key (to Patrick) is that the Medium is the Message (a quote from Marshall McLuhan). Disruptive ideas need disruptive marketing channels. To get an innovative idea to spread quickly, it needs an innovative communications medium.

Disruptive ideas need disruptive marketing

Patrick uses Clayton Christensen’s Sustaining Innovation versus Disruptive Innovation classification to separate out which types of companies need to consider growth hacking as a strategy. If you are going to grow fast, you need to do something different. If you are going to do something disruptive, you need to communicate it in a disruptive way.

For many successfully disruptive ideas, the novelty of the medium itself does the job of marketing the product. Having virality, referrals or economies of scale built into the product can make the audience grow faster than through normal advertising or marketing.

When to start growth hacking

Patrick said that hiring a growth hacker before you have a product ready to sell might be unnecessary. I popped up my hand and we had a good debate about whether marketing is added to a product or engineered in from the start.

His examples of innovative communications mediums that made a difference to the (also innovative) products included: Picasso (new models of art dealer trading), Tupperware (home parties) and Tesla Motors (dealerships inside malls). The key seems to be to find a communications channel so new that it is essentially uncontested.

Growth Hacker vs Growth Hacking

We also debated whether growth hacking is a function or a person. While many startups are hiring for a “growth hacker”, in practice the art of “growth hacking” is a responsibly that is often best shared across the team.

Patrick had great examples of innovative products that succeeded because of an innovative communications medium.

There are certain skills that a real growth hacker has acquired which make them almost impossible to hire into a startup. Basically, if you can make thousands of dollars selling weight-loss ebooks, then you’re not sitting around in Shoreditch waiting to work for the latest startup for free.

How to hire a growth hacker

Product focused startup founders secretly think of themselves as artists and above marketing or sales. It seems demeaning to many CEOs to have to justify or persuade the marketplace. I often meet founders from engineering backgrounds who say things like “The product should speak for itself.”

By contrast, a shameless affiliate marketer is a true mercenary; they’ll sell any product if it makes money. This tension makes hiring highly skilled growth hackers an uneasy alliance for most engineers. Dark arts growth hackers are skilled in SEO, PPC, direct mail, affiliate marketing and behavioural engineering. If you want to compete in a new market, they are a necessary evil.

Growth Hacking and Lean Branding

We’ve been experimenting with using lean thinking in our rebranding work. Growth hacking is related to lean thinking but it’s more focused on practical implementation, demand generation and behavioural engineering. Growth hacking is lean branding applied in real life.

Sofia and the Lean Startup London crew networking after Patrick’s presentation.

The talk was organised by Kumaran Veluppillai and the Lean Startup London Meetup group. Klaus and I had just been to the Digital Shoreditch open house at MakeShift that morning with Courtney Boyd Myers, Jon Gold, Nick and Stef. Sofia Zab from Founder Centric was visiting Makeshift and also joined us at the Innovation Warehouse for Patrick’s presentation. Things are heating up at the Innovation Warehouse and we’ll be blogging more about the rebranding process and how we can hack the growth model for a coworking space.

The post Growth Hacking with Patrick Vlaskovits appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

Using the initials and full name together is unnecessary duplication.

If you introduce yourself with a diminutive, the name that people use day to day will never revert back to your full name and eventually you’ll be known by your diminutive only. I tell clients not to lead with their initials unless they are willing to eventually abandon their full name. Few people remember what BP, IBM or CNN stand for. Furthermore, for a startup, the initials won’t be meaningful to your audience so you lose the benefit of your chosen name. Even BP and IBM started out using their full names and only evolved to using their initials after market awareness was established.

From The IW to Innovation Warehouse

We’ve been sharing the adventure of rebranding the Innovation Warehouse as a transparent story to let other startups learn from the experience. The other chapters are here as a live Branding Case Study. It should also be a useful case study for branding professionals as we’re sharing the experience from the strategist’s perspective, the designer’s perspective and the client’s perspective.

The Innovation Warehouse has been using both the initials and the full name since its launch. For the existing strategy, the term “The IW” was woven into the market positioning. For the existing messaging, “The IW” was used in online copywriting. For the existing design system, the initials “IW” are prominent in the logo.

We haven’t used “IW” or “The IW” in the rebranding. We think of “Innovation Warehouse” as the official brand name.

Removing the initials from the strategy

We’ve recommended putting “Innovation Warehouse” at the top of the brand hierarchy. Any new locations or product offers will be part of the overall umbrella brand. The goal is to reduce “namingitis”, which is the tendency of some companies to try and invent unnecessary proprietary names for every product. This is often confusing for consumers.

We have already shifted the URL from www.theiw.org to the full www.innovationwarehouse.org. Google has been notified using the Google Webmaster tools so there should be very little SEO loss. We’ll also be asking the main inbound link pages (co-working directories) to update their links to the new URL. The decision to change the URL was driven by wanting to make it easier (for someone new to the brand) to understand and remember.

The overall strategy of the project is to move from organisation-centred thinking to user-centred thinking. This goes beyond marketing and visual design and is really a shift in mindset towards having empathy for our customers (especially for new customers).

The brand strategy for Innovation Warehouse is all about attracting intelligent and hardworking entrepreneurs. To gain mindshare with this audience we need to be consistent and professional. Using the full name means that we are repeating a consistent message in every medium.

Removing the initials from the messaging

The copywriting and messaging for Innovation Warehouse is all about encouraging positive word of mouth. We think that the viewpoint of the organisation has gradually become too internally focused (because the member community has grown so successfully and is taking more and more time).

Apparently, some of the team enjoy the mystery of saying “I work at the IW” and then having to explain it. That works fine with the “first degree” of communication. But doesn’t work for word of mouth. When the initials get to the second or third degree of word of mouth, they lose their meaning. People who have never been to Innovation Warehouse are talking to other people who have also never been here, and they’re being confused by the initials.

The members currently talk about “The IW” to each other because we encourage it. Instead, we want to encourage the members (as brand ambassadors) to talk about the “Innovation Warehouse”.

The new brand needs to encourage members to talk about the Innovation Warehouse with their friends in a way that is memorable and persuasive.

Imagine an entrepreneur who has just been to an event at the Innovation Warehouse. When she goes home to her family and talks about it, she is not going to say “I’ve been to the IW…”. Instead, she is going to say “I’ve been to the Innovation Warehouse…” The brand should be engineered to survive word of mouth. The best way to achieve this is through consistency, repetition and clarity.

The messaging for the Innovation Warehouse is all about participating in the wider technology and entrepreneurship community. Entrepreneurs in this environment have so many options that being memorable is the key to word of mouth referrals. In turn, consistent language is the key to being memorable. Nobody knows what “The IW” means unless they have already been exposed to the Innovation Warehouse.

Removing the initials from the design

As discussed in the brand audit, the existing logo includes both the initials and the word mark. At first, the Innovation Warehouse team asked us to include options for an initials mark in our new brand designs. But we found that (even with the best of intentions) the initials kept creating less-than-perfect design results. This week, we had a landmark meeting with the senior management team, to agree whether the initials needed to be part of the brand design.

This is how the meeting went…

Klaus and I updated the CEO and management team on progress with the design work and shared the difficulties we were having incorporating the initials into our design concepts.

An example of the initials and the full name used together.

The CEO, Ami, leaned back in his chair thoughtfully and looked at the pull-up banner out in the co-working space (which has both the giant lozenge and the word mark). Then he leaned forward, looked us straight in the eyes and said:

I’m not sure that any visitor, when they look at that banner, even notices that it says “IW”. I think that they just see the “Innovation Warehouse” and a squiggly thing next to it. If you want to drop off the initials from the designs, go ahead.

As Ami settled back into his chair, Klaus and I looked at each other and thought, “Hold on, that was too easy.” Ami had instantly understood why we recommended killing off the IW. We’d been advocating for some time to think from the audience’s perspective so it was like a breath of fresh air to hear the CEO really take our advice on board.

There was a moment afterwards when Ami said, “Are you guys saying you want to kill off the IW entirely?” Klaus (in the way that only Klaus can), let the question hang in the air for a couple of seconds before saying:

Yes, we are killing off the IW. That is what we recommend.

We all sat silently for a couple of seconds in the boardroom and let it sink in. Then we strode out of the room, called the design team and let them drop the graphic elements that referred to the letters “IW”. The team breathed a sigh of relief and pressed on to the next round of design concepts.

Follow the rebranding process on the Innovation Warehouse’s team blog, Klaus Bravenboer‘s blog and on this site. You can add your input into the branding process by tweeting @IWLondon.

The post Innovation Warehouse Chapter 3: Initials vs. Full Name appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

We have to be totally honest with a visual audit so that it’s a platform to build on.

The full brand audit (warts and all) is included below with permission from the Innovation Warehouse to help make the branding process more open (and to allow other startups to learn from the process). Some of it is complimentary, some critical and some harsh. But it’s all in the interest of building a solid platform for the new brand. This article is a summary of the management team meeting where we presented the findings of the brand audit. We had identified the key priorities during the briefing in Stage One.

In a full brand audit we don’t just look at the surface of a brand, we go deep and look at the underlying organisation of the business, the product architecture, culture and behaviours. We get deep down into the attributes, values and essence of a brand. Then we look at how that essence is expressed through design. The Innovation Warehouse brand is communicated through copyrighting, logo, colour palette, design, social media and other channels.

This is how we presented the findings to the Innovation Warehouse team…

Strategy Audit

We started the audit with customer interviews. We spoke to resident start-ups and graduates. We interviewed staff members to understand what their daily processes are that bring the Innovation Warehouse brand to life. We have also done a couple of targeted workshops to agree the brand attributes and values and essence internally.

Then we have our own insights. We have the luxury of being able to come here with the beginner’s mind (the eyes of a first-time customer). Some of this is because it really is our first time, and some of it is because it’s the job of a brand strategist to constantly think from the perspective of your audience. Our main day-to-day tool is empathy. We can look around and see all those little things that people who have been here a while have occluded and don’t notice any more. Whether it’s a broken light fixture or rocky chairs; all that type of stuff; all the little pieces which form the overall impression of the Innovation Warehouse.

Our assessment of the Innovation Warehouse’s strategy is that we needs to clarify the vision, market positioning, brand hierarchy and brand architecture. These are common issues but they’re often the root cause of issues that show up on the surface.

Design Audit

The Innovation Warehouse has become a victim of the ‘ship without a rudder’ problem. Innovation Warehouse has ended up with visual chaos and the ethos of the business isn’t coming through. The things that the Innovation Warehouse cares about most just aren’t being communicated to the audience.

Innovation Warehouse was given (possibly through no fault of it’s own) a logo instead of a system. Either you weren’t given a system, or you were, and you didn’t use it. This is common with inexperienced or cheap graphic designers or clients who stop the branding process too early. They get a logo, but not a system to implement it.

Using an Initials Mark and a Word Mark together is redundant and confusing.

The Innovation Warehouse has an Initials Mark, a Word Mark and a Lockup of the two together. When these marks were created there should have been a set of rules about how they are to be used together, applied to different pieces of collateral, and implemented in practice. There should have been an entire system to support the logo. If anything, the system is more important than the logo itself.

Now let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor to the Innovation Warehouse…

Customer Experience Audit

The first issue is that we can’t find the front doorway. The Innovation Warehouse is down a dark alleyway and the door is hidden because the columns create an optical illusion. Would-be visitors have told us that it’s spectacularly hard to find the Innovation Warehouse. At one point, the official Google Maps location marker was on the wrong street entirely.

There have been heard jokes from the management team such as “It’s like a speakeasy or an intelligence test.” And “If you aren’t smart enough to find us then you aren’t smart enough to join.” This is all in good humour but it hints at an institutional lack of empathy.

The user journey for a first-time visitor is confusing and unwelcoming.

Once we actually find the door, we’re confronted by a confusing intercom system. The label for North Star Law is right next to the button, whereas the Innovation Warehouse label is far away from the button.

I have watched visitors stand outside, afraid to buzz the North Star Law staff because they couldn’t find the button for the Innovation Warehouse. Others tried in vain to press the label itself. The label for the Innovation Warehouse is hard to read because the lozenge shaped Initials Mark is larger than the words. I observed one visitor pull out their reading glasses and peer awkwardly at the whole mess.

The Innovation Warehouse is getting the simple things wrong: user-centred design, clean colour palettes and legible typography. None of these issues are expensive or difficult to get right. It begins with empathy for your customers.

Once we’re through the door, we don’t quite know where to go next. The most eye-catching thing we see in the entrance way is the bright yellow plastic sign shouting “Caution, Wet Floor!” The next largest piece of signage is a giant “IW”. These initials don’t mean anything to us because we have no prior association with them. We are struggling to make out the words Innovation Warehouse, because they are overpowered by this huge and meaningless IW.

Up the stairs, we find a jumble of inconsistent arrows, typography and graphic devices that have been created using PowerPoint, MS Word and even by hand.

The large Initials Device overpowers the Word Mark. There is also a random mix of fonts.

On entering the reception area we find a mix of collateral…

The postcard flyer is quite smart and professional looking. The logo has been reversed out and used as a background. It looks as though it was professionally designed by the person who created the logo. This type of discovery is what I call a “ghost of the design system that could have been”. I think that whoever created this postcard was probably thinking along the lines of a design system, but they never got as far as creating enough templates to ensure consistent implementation of the rest of the system.

The business card has yet another graphic style, which isn’t consistent with any of the rest of what is going on.

The final insult to greet us is that the brightest thing we see is a notice that says “Read Me!” but is, in fact, only relevant to existing members. This is a sign of just how insular the Innovation Warehouse’s outlook has become. This notice has eight different fonts squished onto a single piece of A4 paper. It’s visual anarchy.

After all of that, we are finally handed a visitor’s name card which is printed on pink paper with a weird, blue font from the movie “Tron”. Half of the name cards are coffee stained, torn or battered. Finally, we are welcomed into the co-working space for our meeting…

The audit stopped there, but the customer experience inside the co-working space isn’t much better.

Find out how the Innovation Warehouse team responded to the audit in the next post. Read the other chapters in the Innovation Warehouse Rebranding Live Case Study and follow the story on the Innovation Warehouse’s own blog as well.

You can also give us feedback and input by commenting on the blog posts or tweeting @IWlondon.

The post Innovation Warehouse Chapter 2: The Audit appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

The Innovation Warehouse is on the top floor above the Smithfield Market in Farringdon.

The Innovation Warehouse is a shared co-working space in London. The space is an old Council office above the Smithfield Markets. It has been converted into open-plan shared-offices with free wifi and lots of meetings rooms.Recently, the market for co-working in London has become increasingly competitive. Exciting new spaces, accelerators and incubators are opening up almost weekly. The Innovation Warehouse has outgrown the logo that was created for the launch and the brand needs to mature to stay competitive.

The old logo of the Innovation Warehouse has served well. But it might be time to reconsider it.

More urgently, the Innovation Warehouse has a new startup accelerator and angel investing network that has been in stealth mode and will soon be ready to be launched publicly.

The brief

The original brief was only to create a new logo for IW Grow (the working title of the angel network). The crew had a couple of events coming up and needed business cards. They had already knocked up a temporary name, website and logo.

We could already tell that the temporary branding wasn’t going to work. But are there deeper issues?

From working on a few subsidiary brands before, we knew that the master brand hierarchy needs to be robust for a sub-brand to fit properly into it. The current Innovation Warehouse master brand wasn’t up to the task. So we asked permission to re-look at the entire thing.

After some prodding, we started to uncover that the real business goal was to increase enquiries for new coworking memberships and to increase the volume of quality deal-flow for the investment activities. It turns out that the financial imperative is to fill the space with a vibrant community (who pay a membership fee for being in the coworking space) and a steady stream of fast-growth businesses looking to raise investment funds (of the type that the Innovation Warehouse angel network can profitably invest in).

Our process

Lean Branding happens on three parallel tracks; Strategy, Messaging and Design. To deliver the brand strategy for the Innovation Warehouse we will run management interviews, workshops, ‘out of the building’ customer discovery sessions and lots of team creative sessions. We need to consider the business model, competitive positioning, customer journey, key messages and potentially, a whole new brand.

Lean Branding operates on three parallel race tracks.

We’ve run a number of branding projects like this in the past but we’ll be trying out some new techniques from Lean Branding, Design Thinking and Behavioural Design. For the Innovation Warehouse we’ll bring together new processes, teams and ways of working to experiment and learn. The overall stages will include:

Brand Strategy

1. Business Model
2. Competitive Positioning
3. Brand Umbrellas
4. Brand Architecture (Attributes, Essence, Values)

Brand Messaging

1. Communications Framework (Key Messages, Stories, Tagline)
2. Customer Personas (including Customer Journey)
3. Product Architecture
4. Tone of Voice

Brand Design

1. Design Genres
2. Design Concepts
3. Design System
4. Brand Guidelines (Logo, secondary devices, etc)
5. Brand Implementation

Because we’ll be using a lean approach, we’re open to being called on to help out with the existing website, tactical marketing, interim brand implementation and any other issues that arise while we’re working on the project. This is a departure from how most normal re-branding projects are delivered (using a waterfall approach) with one final deliverable and no iterative improvements.

The team

The team will be based at the Innovation Warehouse for the duration of the project to get a real-world feel for what it’s like to be a member. We’ll be working closely with the Innovation Warehouse management team. This type of on-site consulting will be a new adventure for us.

We are going to be based inside the Innovation Warehouse during the project.

It’s going to be an interesting experiment to see what it’s like to do a re-brand from inside the business; instead of arriving periodically to do a presentation. Instead, we’ll be living and breathing the brand. The project team includes:

• Peter Thomson
• Klaus Bravenboer
• Sichi Pollard
• Ross MacKay

The Innovation Warehouse team we’ll be working with includes the senior management, investment, marketing and PR teams including:

• Ami Shpiro
• Tony Fish
• Luisa Morales
• Arjun Sathe
• Anca Toma
• Ward Lennarts

And a host of other characters (such as community members, investors and corporate partners) that we’ll meet along the way. The Innovation Warehouse has had some wonderful people contribute to the community over the years and we want to make the brand more personal with real life stories.

The journey

We’ll be live blogging the journey and sharing the lessons that we learn along the way. Our aim with capturing the journey is to provide the opportunity for input from the Innovation Warehouse members and wider London tech community. It should also provide a real life resource for any other businesses looking to re-position themselves in their market place. I’ll be recording the journey on this blog, Klaus Bravenboer will share some key insights on his blog and the Innovation Warehouse team will also be blogging about their experiences of the project.

The next step is a thorough brand audit and a series of strategic conversations to get to the heart of what the Innovation Warehouse team cares about and what their goals are. Read the other chapters in the Innovation Warehouse Rebranding Live Case Study and follow along with the Innovation Warehouse’s own blog as well.

The post Innovation Warehouse Chapter 1: The Brief appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

The Thought Leaders that have inspired me have all had blogs and put their writing out there for people to see.

A blog allows you to share your thinking and the lessons you’ve learned. Being a “thought leader” isn’t something that you can just put on a social media strategy and will magically happen. You need to do the hard work of thinking and then putting that thinking into words that others can benefit from. Over the years, I’ve been inspired by several writers that I admire and I’ve tried to learn from how they write.

I’ve been complimented a couple of times on the writing in this blog, but I’ve always felt uncomfortable about these compliments because I just write what I’m thinking. There is no really deliberate style to it. I write to help myself (and my clients) codify the things that we’ve learned along the way about branding, design and innovation.

It’s a bit weird that I’m always telling my clients to adopt a deliberate brand “tone of voice”, but in my own writing I tend to just let it all flow onto the page. I think what’s happened is that I’ve evolved a tone of voice through sheer milage. The best way to improve your writing is to write. I’ve modelled writers that I admire such as Tim Ferriss, Mitch Joel, Seth Godin, Tom Peters and Tim Brown. Joel from Buffer (a social media tool we use with our clients) has a great post on Lifehacker about his five realisations that helped him write more regularly.

An offline blog editor means you can focus on one thing at a time.

I also get asked how I keep up with creating content for Peter J Thomson (my business blog), Coffee Hunter (about independent coffee around the world) and London Street Photo (about urban anthropology, street photography and camera gear). Part of the story is that I only aim to post once a month (on average and often even less than that). The other is to make the writing process itself as easy as possible.

Blog writing tricks

I have a few small tricks that helped me make it easier to keep writing. I’ve tried to schedule time to write but it always felt too forced. So instead, I’ve learned to create an environment that’s generally conductive to blog writing. You’ve got to get in the mood to write.

1. Write to a friend

When I write my early draft blog posts I put a salutation to a friend, colleague or client. I then imagine that I’m simply writing a personal letter to them with some casual advice. This particular blog post started out as a blank page with the words “Dear Mark…” at the top.

2. Write offline

I get the most writing done when I have the least connection to the internet. Trains, planes and small cafes all have poor connectivity. Ideal for writing without distractions. If you can’t find a nice cafe down an alleyway, at the least try turning off your email notifications for an hour.

A good offline text editor can help. My friend David Clare likes IA Writer and I’ve long been a fan of the powerful simplicity of TextWrangler. Recently, I’ve fallen in love with the offline editing features of MarsEdit. You need to tweak the formatting menu and keyboard shortcuts in MarsEdit. But the easy synchronisation with WordPress is pretty awesome.

3. A background low hum

Another great feature of trains, planes and cafes is that they have a low, quiet, background hum of activity. Recent studies have found that gentle background noise can make you more productive (for creative tasks). (Thanks to my friend JP Morgan Jr. for this tip.) My own theory, is that you’re writing for people so it’s nice to have people around.

4. Mellow tunes

I like to listen to dub and mellow electronic music while I write. My favourites are Bonobo (thanks to Ward Lennarts for the recommendation), Ian Pooley (thanks to Jonathan Gunson) and the Hotel Coste compilations. Music is useful during the middle “slog” part of fleshing out a post and the final editing stage but I find music distracting during the early ideation phase. Sometimes I just sit with my headphones on but the music off.

5. Have posts at multiple stages of development

Writing isn’t a single task. You need to have the initial idea, form the idea into key points, write the outline, flesh the post out, edit the copy and finally add headings, images and taxonomy information. Each stage requires a slightly different mood and setting. My trick is to have several blog posts at each stage at all times so that I can always be pushing the ball forwards no matter which type of activity you feel like. My writing stages include:

a) I keep keep a running journal of any blog worthy insight that pops up while doing client work. Insights are often born from unrelated concepts that get mashed together to create something new during a high-energy conversation. I’d love to use Evernote to capture insights but it’s too slow to load so, often my blog starting-point insights are just scribbles in a Moleskine or a sentence the default Notes app.

b) When I’m in the mood to reflect on my progress, I can draw down from the bank of real-world insights to create ideas for blog posts. I often start by clustering the insights around a theme so that the become a coherent idea for a post. By this time, I’ll be collecting the ideas together as bullet points inside WordPress, Text Wrangler or Evernote.

c) Actually forming an idea (set of insights) into a single post is a matter of fleshing out the bullet points into paragraphs with anecdotes and examples. One way to keep a coherent thread is to keep thinking about how to impart knowledge that is relevant and actionable. No matter what mood you’re in, always write for your audience.

Don’t write a blog

One of my best kept secrets is that I don’t actually write most of my blog posts. I dictate them. Writing isn’t actually the most important part of blogging, it’s thinking. You can get a wonderful, easy tone of voice by using dictation or transcription to go directly from thinking to words. If you’re dictating then you can go straight from insight to finished post in one step.

Brian Richards was early to the party with voice recognition software and taught me a lot about the importance of verbalising your thoughts clearly. But there is no software substitute for a professional typist who has some free reign to professionally edit your work as it’s typed.

I tried outsourcing my dictation to China (using eLance) but in the end I found a UK based transcriptionist who sends my work back better than when I sent it to her. For almost to the same price as Chinese outsourcing, I get a clean, well edited, paragraphed and nicely laid-out blog post in an almost ready-to-publish state.

Why do I keep blogging?

But is it even worth having a blog in this age of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter? I’ve found that a blog is still the most powerful way of building a professional reputation. If writing still isn’t your thing, then you can still have a blog but make the content anchored off video, images or drawings. You can even use podcast recordings to feed your blog.

Having a blog forces you to clarify and articulate your thinking. Also, Google loves the written word, so blogs rank well and get good traffic. And a blog is entirely under your control so it’s a true online expression of your vision.

The world isn’t at a shortage of boring articles from entrepreneurs, investors or consultants. But the world is always ready for someone who cares about what they are doing and has a unique take on their industry. You might not build a massive audience, but you’ll learn fast and the challenge of getting your thoughts out there will make you stronger.

The post Five ways to get in the mood to write appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

Alley NYC brings together hackers, hustlers and designers.

In Silicon Valley there is a saying that the perfect combination of skills for a start-up is a hacker, a hustler and a designer. The hustler is responsible for ensuring that the business has a steady and increasing cashflow. The role of the hustler could be taken by someone with training in marketing, sales, finance and/or accounting. Hustle is just a combination of clear communication and hard work.

Learning to hustle, New York style

During our recent UK startup trip to New York we met lots of startups with a uniquely New York combination of skills. It seems that in NYC the perfect skills combination for a startup is simply a developer and a designer, because in New York everyone hustles.

The art of the hustle has nothing to do with misleading people like hustling a pool table by being deceptive about your skill level. Instead, the modern art of the hustle is all about sales, business development and a bias for action.

In New York you can’t survive (no matter what your industry) unless you can deliver a short and effective pitch for yourself and your product. New York is so competitive in every field that the ability to communicate and persuade is actually part of every discipline. Gary Vaynerchuk was the first to introduce me to just how important energy, enthusiasm and sheer hard work is to entrepreneurship. He’s a true New Yorker.

I have never met so many developers who were so confident in explaining their product, their go to market strategy and their business model. Nor have I ever met as many designers who were so confident explaining the value of design, the importance that their work held within their company and their role in championing the cause of the user.

Jake Dunlap from Skaled taught us about how sales and Business Development are different for startups.

While in New York we met Jake Dunlap from Skaled who consults with startups on building a sales function. He’s a consummate hustler, always delivering value to people he meets, so they want more. He taught us a little bit about the different roles that a good sales team can play across the business.

@peterjthomson New Yorker hustle is all about being on your game, and making sure that it is fresh, unique, and replicable so you scale big!

— Skaled (@Skaledcom) April 24, 2013

What does a hustler do in a startup?

In London the role of the hustler is to “go get that money” so no one else needs to worry about it (which in practice means that they need to be responsible for marketing and capital raising). In New York, everyone gets involved in hustling and the art of the hustle is used in more diverse areas. Any time that you need to persuade another person to do something, then it’s time to hustle.

Strategy hustle

The strategic role of hustling is to interview customers, understand the marketplace and to engineer behaviour. The hustler isn’t afraid to get out of the building and go talk to potential users of the product. The key strategic function of a hustler is to be able to listen. Understanding a customer’s pain is the most important input into a good startup strategy.

Marketing hustle

The marketing benefit of hustling works across sales, business development, marketing, branding, advertising and public relations. The key part of this is business development because the hustler is responsible for results. They see branding as a way of supporting sales results. A good hustler is surprisingly metrics focussed and they are often very interested in conversion rates, website traffic and margins.

Finance hustle

The finance role of the hustling is to drive capital raising through venture capital, angel investing and seed capital investment. The hustler takes on the job of relationship building with venture capital investors. Investors are often more interested in the team and their relationships than in the product.

In many ways, the art of sales to customers and the art of raising capital from investors are simply about relationships, communication and persuasion. Therefore the hustler is important to both.

Learning to hustle along with your day job

If you are not based in New York then you can still learn the art of the hustle. In the case of developers, it is simply a matter of learning to communicate the value of good development processes and technology. Likewise, for designers, the art of the hustle is about articulating the value of design. Both groups can afford to learn more about how to “always be closing” (ABC) when it comes to social and semi-professional interactions where you can be conveying the value of the business.

When a developer goes to software engineering events, being able to hustle would mean being able to explain why the company is a good place to work and therefore attract other developers. For a designer going to design events, the art of the hustle would mean explaining what new and interesting things the company was doing so that they could attract new design talent.

Culture of hustle

I am very conscious of the need to hustle because I come from New Zealand. In New Zealand we are very apologetic, polite and reluctant to hustle. In fact, it is widely frowned upon in New Zealand business culture. Persuasion, communication and relationship building are all considered low quality and low paid activities that are often delegated to sales support roles.

New Zealand companies often struggle when they go to America to raise investment. New Zealand start-ups are often creative, technical and interesting businesses. But they struggle to raise capital because they are too apologetic and polite about their aspirations. The American investor wants to hear a good story, well told, quickly.

Only a determined hustler is able to persuade, communicate and build relationships quickly and effectively. In large law firms and professional service firms there is a long-standing idea of becoming a rain-maker. The rain-maker takes on the art of the hustle, but also maintains their core deliverable within the business; for example, continues to be a lawyer or accountant.

Hustling the network

At a networking event, hustling does not mean being the annoying salesperson who thrusts their business card into your hand and runs off. Instead, a true hustler will research and identify who their high priority targets are for the evening. They will then find those people and spend quality time building real rapport. If you find yourself in a conversation with a real hustler you will notice that they are 100% concentrating on the conversation with you. If you notice your conversation partner looking over your shoulder, it means that they are not a real hustler.

Klaus Bravenboer from FuelStory (also part of the Converge Collective) was on the trip to New York and found that follow up is the most important part of hustling in New York. If you meet someone in New York then you need to follow up within 24 hours to keep the contact alive. Klaus also noticed that you need to get other people’s business cards so that you can take responsibility for follow up, rather than handing out your card and leaving it to chance,

Brian Frumberg has bought together a diverse network to support VenutreOutNY.

In New York we were hosted by a true hustler. Brian Frumberg is the founder of VentureOutNY and an entrepreneur at large with DFJ Gotham. He has built real relationships throughout the New York startup community by making mutually valuable introductions and genuinely caring about people. Brian is a good networker but his main point of difference is that he works really, really hard.

Another participant on the tour was Ian Randolph from Prepict who is a New Yorker by heart. His conclusion from our tour was that no matter what your job description, everyone has to be a hustler. In the startup environment, there is no way to avoid the importance of relationships, communication and getting things done.

Learning to hustle

Anyone can learn the art of the hustle. My first recommendation would be to spend time in New York, the quality of communication and persuasion in New York is extremely high. Simply log on to meetup.com and go to networking events in your industry. If you can’t travel to New York then you can still go to more networking events, use these to practice describing your business and your role within it. You can also read “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk and the old classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.

The best way I have found to get better at hustling is to get out and do it more. Agree to go on sales visits with your sales team and try and arrange speaking engagements that force you to distil and communicate the essence of what you do. For me, the key to being a great hustler is to be open, honest, clear and direct.

The post How to hustle like a New Yorker appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

The trade group was part funded by UKTI and VentureOutNY hosted the programme.

Recently I’ve been in New York checking out the startup scene with VentureOut New York and UKTI. Keith Moses from UKTI and Brian Frumberg from VentureOutNY were our hosts. It was a great trip with an exciting group of startups. We had a full programme of events, meetings and visits. We kept a frenzied pace and I learnt a lot about the startup culture in New York.

Tour: New York Startup Events

British Invasion Pitch Night

The week kicked off with the VentureOutNY British Invasion Pitch Night. There was a mix of headlining five minute pitches and a round of rapid-fire one minute pitches. The panel of angel investors gave feedback on the five minute pitches. A recurring question from the investors was “What are you going to use the money for?” New York investors are (rightly) interested in what you can achieve with their money.

Josh Mora presenting at the British Invasion Pitch Night.

The Innovation Warehouse was well represented with several startups presenting to the group. The presentations were condensed to fit into the short time frame but everyone managed to talk through their product, market size, team and their company’s aspirations.

New York Tech Meetup

The New York Tech Meetup is the largest meetup group in the world and the event usually sells out within two minutes of tickets becoming available. The focus is on technology and they ban the question “What’s the business model?“. The technology focus allows the presenters to relax and enjoy sharing great hacks, demos and product ideas. On the night we attended, a group of high school students demoed a wrist-band using a circuit board to help blind people find food on their plates, a hacker showed us a code library that simplifies coding for Arduino Boards, Grand St showed their curated technology retail site, and Swiss Miss shared her minimalist to do list Teux Deux.

New York Tech Meetup is the largest meetup in the world.

The standard of pitching was very high and the demos were all live demos so it was fun to see the companies really step up. We also saw a demo of the Power Clip which allows you to charge a cellphone from a car battery in an emergency situation and Sunrise which is a better mobile calendar application.

Klaus Bravenboer, Paz Saavedra and Peter Thomson at the New York Tech Meetup

The event is unashamedly technology focussed but we met some great designers, product managers and UX people. Lots of the attendees were new in New York so we had lots to talk about.

LeanUX New York Conference and New York Tech Drinkup

Chris from AppLaunch invited us to the New York TechDrinkup which was also the official party for the New York Lean UX Conference. It was great to hear about the buzz from the conference. Lean Startup and Agile are beginning to be more and more important to modern user interface and user experience (UX) design. The topic of how to apply branding to startups seems to be coming up more and more, so the idea of Lean Branding is starting to take off. Using Lean Thinking in the startup world are very important to me and I’m excited to see this taking off in New York.

Geeks and Designers

New York is like London in that there are amazing events going on every night. Geeks and Designers was at General Assembly and we managed to get last minute tickets. This event was dear to our heart because we believe so strongy in bringing together people from design and technology (and business). Geeks and Designers hosts events in San Franciso, New York and Los Angeles. The team from Grand St gave a great talk about the convergence between fashion and technology. Watch out for technology companies acting more and more like fashion companies.

Tour : New York Startup Visits

The Ladders

The Ladders is a success story from the New York startup scene. The CEO, Alexandre Douzet gave us some great insights into doing business across New York and London. He talked about his experience with expanding The Ladders into the UK market and the ways that The Ladders has expanded their offering over the years. The team are obsessive about metrics and have dashboards on screens throughout the office.

The Ladders uses digital Kanban boards, live tracking and digital whiteboards.

We had rapid fire sessions with the team leaders from marketing, product management, development and even the culture team. The discussion on how Agile and Lean fit together was particularly interesting. The team talked about how they prioritise and measure their development resources. The most important point was to: “Separate problem statements from solutions and to leave the solutions to the people closest to the problem.” This means that management sets the overall direction but the design and development teams drive and iterate the user experience.

We learnt about lean and agile development at The Ladders.

One of the big challenges for a successful startup in New York is to attract developers. One of the engineering leads told us that “There is no recession in developers.” We learnt about the importance of the office kitchen to the company. Klaus Bravenboer observed that “You can learn a lot about the culture of a business from their kitchen.” The kitchen and general office perks seemed to be a real selling point for attracting software development talent.

Skaled

Skaled helps startups with business development and the team had some great advice for us about how to build a sales team in the USA. Skaled works with startups and technology businesses. Jake Dunlap believes that “Startups don’t need consultants as much as they need real help to actually get things done.” He often finds that startups aren’t disciplined enough about building a sales system to support the sales process.

Jake Dunlap taught us about business development.

Jake taught us about how to separate customer needs analysis from selling and how to build “talk tracks” which are sales messages with more flexibility and questioning built in. In New York the customers you are selling to are so overwhelmed with sales messages that you really need to sell in a better way. He recommends selling using thought leadership by being aware of industry trends and being more of an advisor to your prospects rather than just a salesperson. Today’s New York based buyer wants eduction, leadership and advice about the general category.

Janine Just

Janine Just specialises in public relations for startups based in New York so she had lots of great advice for the group. She mentioned Help A Reporter Out as a DIY way of doing some early PR and getting to know the USA technology media. She also mentioned PR tools that are useful in the USA like Vocus and Cision. It seems that in the USA the PR industry is more driven by press releases than the UK, where personal “sell-in” of a story through media relations dominates. Janine had some good tips on how to make your own startup story part of a larger industry trend such as New York Vs. Silicon Valley.

Janine talked to us about how to get publicity in New York.

Janine talked about how to get featured in technology blogs and which events to attend in New York to get to know the scene. Jeanine shared a secret that for a first expansion into the USA, a Business Development person was probably more important first step than PR. The fact is that you need to have someone on the ground to convert the traffic into sales.

Tour: New York Co-working, Incubators and Accelerators

Alley NYC

Alley NYC is a fantastic co-working space in New York. Alley NYC are very community focussed. Their community values include “No Assholes” and “Be Awesome”.

Alley NYC is a very friendly co-working space.

WeWork

WeWork is a network of co-working spaces in New York. The TriBeca venue has a mix of offices and open space and the Soho WeWork location makes a mean flat white. WeWork have a very professional space and the member companies seem very focussed on fast growth.

General Assembly

We visited General Assembly for the Designers + Geeks event. General Assembly has an interesting mix of co-working, dedicated offices and runs great events and training.

General Assembly has an open feel and the co-working spaces are friendly.

ERA Accelerator

Entrepenuers Roundtable Accelerator (also known as ERA, ER Accelerator and/or eSpace) is an accelerator with co-working space for the members. [ERA, if you're reading this, please call me for some advice on consistently naming your brand so that you don't confuse people.] They told us that “We are only successful when the member companies are successful.”

Ian Randalph presenting at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.

ERA is a fund built on a number of core principles. They don’t like group mentoring, instead preferring a more personal one-on-one approach. They believe in simplicity so they do their accelerator deals using common stock, no board positions and a half-page term sheet. ERA accepts founders from around the world and several of the UK tour group were very interested in applying to the programme.

Tour: New York Startup Support Eco System

NYEDC Mayor’s Office

We met with the New York Economic Development Corporation team who are part of the Mayor’s Office.

The New York EDC is actively promoting New York as a location for technology startups.

They are super passionate about promoting New York as a centre of entrepenuership and showed us some of the initiatives and programmes happening in New York to support new technology businesses. They are big fans of the Made in NY initiative.

DFJ Gotham

DFJ Gotham are an angel investment and venture capital firm. They met privately with each of the startups to give them advice on capital raising in the USA. They are one of the lead sponsors of VentureOutNY and Brian is their entrepreneur in residence.

Startup support services

We also visited some other great companies based in New York such as USA Corporate and Stephen Bradford Recruitment. There is a lot of support and services available for companies expanding into the USA.

Overall, the tour was a great success and we learnt a lot about the startup scene in New York. Several of the companies are thinking of expanding into the USA and New York now seems like a natural first base. Mimi Liu and John Aiello were also great hosts. VentureOutNY is running events to host startups from other countries that are interested in expanding into the USA. I was amazed at how much you can fit into a week if you plan well in advance and go as a group. I was also impressed at how easy it is to make new friends and new connections in New York. It’s a surprisingly welcoming place to do business.

The post UK startup tour of New York appeared first on Peter J Thomson.

London and New York both have unique startup cultures.

VentureOutNY is run by Brian Frumberg (and team) to promote New York as a first port of call for overseas startups expanding into the USA and raising capital from American investors. Over the course of the year, they have had events welcoming startups from all over the world and they have dedicated events coming up for startups from Brazil and Portugal.

London Tech Startups visiting New York

The London based startups that we are travelling with will be pitching to a panel of New York investors including Thatcher Bell, John Frankel, Kathleen Utecht and Angela Lee. The flagship event of the week will be a Dragon’s Den style angel investing pitch event on Monday night.

Brian Frumberg and Danny Lopez will introduce the startups to a panel of four high profile New York investors.

The startups pitching include Love Home Swap, Platter, Footfall123, Blottr, Storygami, HipSnip, Sanona and Blooie. We’re also travelling with some other exciting startups including Prepict, Incredibli, What Users Do, Makerble, Juice.me and DeadSocial.

Startup culture in New York, London and Silicon Valley

Planning the trip has made me reflect on why I moved to London and why I chose to live in Clerkenwell (close to Shoreditch). London is an amazing centre of finance, fashion, design and creativity. All things that it shares with New York. I lived in San Francisco for a few years when I was younger, studied at Berkeley and spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley hanging around to absorb the atmosphere. So I’ve got just enough knowledge of each city’s startup scene to be interested in how they are different.

New York as a first base for expanding your startup into America

I’m interested in the differences between the tech scenes in New York and Silicon Valley. On our trip, I’ll be exploring whether New York is a better first stop for expansion into the USA than San Francisco. So far the advice I’ve received on New York is that it has:

- Less of a technology bias in the investor community.
- Easier access to customers.
- Easier ways to expand your community and network outside the tech industry.

There are lots of other factors, and I’m particularly interested in access to talent, other expats, startup support, co-working spaces and good coffee. To me, each of these play a key role in creating the right environment for a new business to flourish.

1. War for talent

The perfect union for a startup is a hacker, a hustler and a designer. New York is a great place to find two of these three groups (hustlers and designers). So developers will find the co-founder pickings better in New York. The same balance is also true in London where good developers are the scarce resource.

The perfect union for a startup, the hacker, hustler and designer.

Silicon Valley has more developers but they are also in high demand so it’s not an easy place to hire engineering talent. The hackers also set the tone of the community so it can be less of a great place for business people and designers who want to be the key founder. The Stanford MBA is excellent but the wow factor at Silicon Valley cocktail parties is a Stanford Masters in Computer Science.

2. Expat community

In London I’ve made lots of great local contacts but the best have been other expats. The bond formed by being strangers in a big city is a great way to get to know people quickly.

New York is filled with immigrants from around the world and you’ll quickly make friends. My peers who have lived in New York have all met more new people in their time there than in any other city in the world. It’s a hive of activity and connections.

Silicon Valley is very connected once you’re in. But getting in takes time. One night at Silicon Drinkabout (a London Technology Meetup) or NYTechMeetups and you’re instantly connected.

3. Accelerators, incubators and co-working

In New Zealand, I worked with the Icehouse Business Accelerator during its formative years. The incubator got started well with partnerships with BCG, HP, Microsoft and BNZ bank. Andrew Hamilton has been a strong leader for the group and the activities of the Icehouse have expanded over the years to include angel investing networks, education programmes and new models for collaboration. New Zealand has a small technology startup community so everyone knows everyone. Incubators and accelerators create buzz, momentum and a centre of gravity (even for companies that aren’t actually members).

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are world famous for startup support, incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces. But in practice you need to fight hard to get into the good ones and the ecosystem isn’t as easily accessible to new immigrants as programmes in other cities.

Silicon Alley in New York is like Silicon Roundabout in London, a bit spread out but still an active cluster.

New York has some great co-working spaces and I’m looking forward to visiting General Assembly, WeWork and New Work City. The incubators and accelerators in New York are also taking off with a vibrant angel investing scene.

In London, I really enjoyed working from the Central Working Cafe at Google Campus when we were first getting started. Google Campus was a bit too noisy to get real productive work done but it’s a fun place to hang out and meet other entrepreneurs. The Innovation Warehouse has a totally different vibe and is a much more productive space.  I’ve visited and/or worked from Wayra (sponsored by Telefonica), Mozilla, TechHub and the other Central Working locations. They are all very different from each other. The diversity of startup support and co-working spaces in London is a real accelerant of company growth.

4. Coffee

If you’re not ready for a co-working space or business incubator then the default venue for a startup these days is a coffee shop. Starbucks used to fill this role in San Francisco, New York and London. But the big chain coffee stores have become too impersonal and too full of hustle, bustle and tourists to be productive spaces (not to mention the quality of the coffee). These days, a trace indicator of a city’s startup friendliness will be the presence of small, cool, independent and high quality coffee shops.

The Shoreditch cafes in London provide a hotbed of entrepreneurial energy.

London has embraced the Flat White culture from New Zealand (and Australia) with open arms over the last three to five years. There are dozens of small, local cafes that attract entrepreneurs, business meetings and evening meetups and encourage serendipitous encounters.

San Francisco has always had a good cafe scene but the average quality of the coffee isn’t as good as you’d expect and the cafes are spread all over the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. The closest I came to a cafe at the epicentre of Silicon Valley was the Borders Bookstore Cafe (not exactly a free-spirited bastion of dissent). I know this isn’t fair to the other cafes in the area, but Silicon Valley simply doesn’t have the same heart and buzz as London’s Shoreditch.

New York has a fast growing cafe scene and I’ve heard good things about the new coffee roasters that are moving into the city. I’ll have to wait until after the visit to comment on whether the cafes are acting as meeting points for entrepreneurs and innovators. But I’m looking forwards to visiting Grey Dog and Cafe Grumpy.

The best place to do a startup

The best place to start your business is the one that you’re in right now. It took me a couple of years to settle into London; moving to a new city can be pretty disruptive. I found that London was a great place to win clients and find co-founders but having an established network would have made things easier and faster.

You should also consider the ease of banking, internet connection, company formation and trademark protection. New Zealand, USA and UK all rank highly on the Ease of Doing Business rankings from the World Bank. But if you are mobile, London, New York and San Francisco are all amazing cities.

I’m still not quite sure which is a better first base in the USA, Silicon Valley or New York but I’m  determined to find out. You can weigh in on the issue on Quora.

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