What better way to find real estate than to look next to your favorite bars, cafes, and restaurants?
Heck, I’d pay foursquare to see those ads for the month or two I was looking for an apartment!
( I know it’s in French, but here’s the “tip” on foursquare for an apartment)
These are the places I spend my time, and these are the places I need to access my apps
Example 1: Evernote
They’ve got a web app, an iphone app, a blackberry app, a bookmarklet to clip content from the browser (firefox & safari), and desktop apps for mac and windows. They are covered from almost every angle, and for those moments in between I can still send in notes via email.
Example 2: Posterous
For Posterous, publishing directly from their web app was almost an after thought. They know its a lot to ask to require someone to come to your site just to create content, so their main focus is e-mail. E-mail is a shortcut to accessibility, and saves them the time and effort of creating apps for different platforms (even though they have a great iphone app for posting pics)
I can create posts from Gmail, or from my mobile phone, and then I have the option to send these posts to any of the services that you see in the list here on the right. You can set it up to auto post for to every service in your list, or you can choose on the fly by indicating the destination in the email address you use ” flickr+twitter+vimeo@xxxx.posterous.com” or “posterous+flickr@xxxx.posterous.com”.
Not only is Posterous accessible from almost anywhere, but it actually increase your reach by tying into all these extra services.
Example 3: Remember The Milk
RTM ( Remember the Milk) is a todo or task application, and what makes it so great is that I have access from anywhere. Not only can I view my todos from their iphone app, mobile web app, web app, and even a few 3rd party desktop apps, but I can also add tasks via email.
No matter where I go, I know I can quickly jott (yes, they integrate with jott too, so you can create tasks via voicemail) down reminders to do things, or look at my list of todos, which is what makes RTM so sticky. If i needed to jot something down, and i wasn’t able to get access to the app, that would be the first step in making me into a non-user.
So how are you making your apps accessible from everywhere? Is this tough to do with a small team because of the resources required to build for so many platforms?
]]>First off, buzz is a great idea, and I can already tell it’s going to get massive traction just because of it’s location. Gmail may be the only thing I use significantly more than Facebook, so anything you insert into Gmail is going to get some eyeballs.
It’s biggest advantage is also my biggest frustration. Besides being a distraction to my already growing inbox problem, it also presents a clash of my public and private worlds. Up until now gmail has remained a private safe haven. Conversations with any new acquainances take place on Twitter and Facebook, but only progress to gmail once they’ve reached a certain threshold ( yes getting someone email on Facebook or Twitter before moving to gmail can be a barrier). Point being, buzz blows my private gmail world wide open.
The default settings for buzz are SUPER public, and the options for private sharing are confusing at best:
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Even if I did want to make a post private, how would I choose who to share it with? Why isn’t it an option to share with just the people you follow? Am I really going to put in the work of going through my gmail contacts to break them up into subgroups based on location, interests, or each person is a work friend, highschool friend, etc? I’ve been down that road before on Facebook and it’s a mess.
To make matters worse, I can’t seem to separate buzz from my public google profile and I can’t seem to turn the profile off either. In the end, I would have preferred a buzz that operates much more like the old Facebook, just for the people I accepted as friends. Then they could have given me the option to go public with certain material, a la Twitter.
So who do these 3 stack up? Facebook, buzz, and Twitter?
Facebook is clearly in the lead. As I recently overheard someone say; “Facebook is the new cell phone, you can’t have a social life without it”. Facebook has a strangle hold on users, and they are not leaving for any other services anytime soon… Except buzz.
By catching users at the one place they go before Facebook, Google has a chance to siphon off a bunch of activity, and become an equally critical platform. The uphill battle both of these services face is whether or not people will trade their privacy to help bring in ad revnues. Will the new public default scare away more people than they could have gained by keeping the warm and fuzzy “friends only” settings of the early facebook days?
Twitter chose to “go public” from day one, so they don’t face these privacy issues, but I don’t think anyone can make the case that twitter carries the same value to individual users, or is growing nearly as fast.
Will public win or will people find some other refuge to have their social chats in a more private setting?
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The problem is time. We don’t have enough of it, and eventually we get sick of all the low quality crap. You can conginue to run the rat race, or we can start making the effort to take more than a few minutes to enjoy all the slow content out there.
So who else cares about slow content? Marcos Arment , creator of Instapaper, made a stand when he launched his simple reading tool encouraging people to spend more time consuming long form high quality conent. Check out what he says in the Instapaper FAQ:
What does Instapaper do?
Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.
We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.
Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.
Why?
From a personal perspective, I appreciate great writing, but I’ve become frustrated with the quick-consumption nature of many devoted blog readers. Authors are encouraged to cater to drive-by visitors hurrying through their feed readers by producing lightweight content for quick skimming.
There’s no time to sit and read anything when you’re going through 500 feed items while responding to email, chatting, and watching bad YouTube videos….
This is a great tool in fighting the addiction of multiple tasking and RSS feeds full of posts. Find a few well written articles, click the “read later button” and then set aside some time later in the day just to focus on reading.
Another big player in this apace is the kindle ( which actually plays quite well with instapaper). As I’ve said in the past, the kindle OS really was designed to replace the book. It’s too slow to do much else, making it the device of choice for the slow content consumers. Whether you’re reading a novel or articles you’ve carefully currated via instapaper, the kindle is a refuge from all the distractions.
On the production side we’re also seeing some tools to help slow things down (not that I need tools to write blog posts any slower). Rather than encouraging content farms through hyper speed publishing, writing apps like Focused and WriteRoom strip away everything but the text and encourage publishers to focus more on what they’re writing.
Since leaving San Francisco for Paris, I’ve been enjoying the break from the center of the web world, and I’ve been slowing down my content consumption. Before I used to just blindly read feed upon feed of news trying to keep up, now I’m spending more time on the good stuff. Anyone else?
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Kindle
These two devices are not competitive. The Kindle is simply new book format, one that drastically shrinks the physical size of the book and makes it much easier to buy. These are great features, but the kindle is too slow with its monochromatic screen to make it a good email, photo browsing or RSS reading device.
In a previous post, “Kindle: reshaping the computer industry” , I wrote about how much I liked the form factor, and despite the Kindle not delivering on all the potential (email, blogging, commenting, rss), I could see this mid size range become its own device category. In the end, the Kindle offers a decent niche devices for book lovers AND it makes a great case for the tablet form factor or ipad.
iPhone / Ipod touch
Next, let’s talk about the iPad’s little brother, the iPhone/iPod touch. After two previous attempts to use the phone, and a full switch two months ago (I’m in Paris, where I’ve got the choice of 4 carriers), I still don’t like the device as a phone.
I you break the functionality breaks down into two parts
1) the phone (calling, sms, email)
2) the reader (everything on the ipod touch).
The reader experience is the real game changer. On the phone side of things, the experience is still clumsy compared to my blackberry. The reader on the other hand, is a joy to use, and I use it so much I never have any juice left for phone calls. Even with just wifi access, I’m hooked on the apps. I read rss feeds with mobile rss , surf the web with safari, catch up with friends on Facebook, and read the NYTimes, Le Monde, etc. The only thing I could ask for, is a bigger screen….. which yet again points to the ipad.
Netbooks
Last, let’s look at the booming netbook category. Is anyone really happy with their netbook? Everyone ran out to buy one of these tiny devices with visions of no strings attached web surfing, emailing, writing, etc …. But what they got was compromise. The keyboards turn out to be tiny, the processors underpowered even for basic use, and at arms length the 9-10inch screen seems much smaller than you thought. It’s almost as if you would be better off holding it in your hands, like a book or like an….
Yes, ipad. Not only do all 3 of these devices make the case for the ipad, but they also make the case that it doesn’t really need any fancy extra features to succeed. What good is multitasking if its slow? Or flash if it crashes? The ipad just needs to deliver on a good screen, iPhone / iPod touch like ease of use, and reasonable battery life. Everything else, from the enhanced processor, to the ipad specific apps , and the 3g connectivity are just the icing on the cake.
( Ok, they should just throw in a camera to get everyone to shut up about it )
]]>Its a bit cheesy, but after a little reflection, I had a lot of questions. Do these attributes apply to early stage companies? Why do startups think sales is a four letter word? Why isn’t revenue required to have a “company”? Otherwise isn’t it just a hobby? Would startups even want to read this article because its copywrited 2006 (which is old new for them)?
To help bridge the gap, here’s an analysis of how each of the attributes from Sherry’s list maps out to the early stage startup world:
1) Achievement Drive
This may mean something in big business talk, but to us this means EXECUTION OBSESSED.
Sales people are fast talking fast acting deal closing machines. They’re going to be more aggressive than your average startup hire, and they’ll be just as goal focused as your google analytics addicted user conversion team. Like everyone else in the startup space, don’t be afraid to let sales people learn on the job, because they should be more than comfortable jumping into a new industry head first!
You need to be careful not to hire the time share selling Gordon Gecko that would sell his own mother to protect your startup’s culture, but this extra “edge” is what you need to close big deals for big $.
2) Empathy
A big part of the web2.0 / social media trend is about making companies more personal. Think Whole Foods having a facebook page. Sales people working for a startup need to reflect that as well.
They need to know what problems their products solve, and how they can help their customers. The cold hard sell does not work anymore because most people can sniff it out, and becaues they expect more from companies these days.
Empathize too much, and you won’t close the deal. You’ll spend all your time worrying about the features that have yet to be built, and not enough time closing what you currently have.
3) Self Confidence
90% of all startups fail… so yes, sales people at startups have to be EVEN more comfortable with failure. Their obsession with execution and strong belief or faith tha the startup is game changing (we’ll touch on faith in a future post) has to keep them going in the worst of times.
After 100 phone calls, 20 touches/contacts, and 20 rejects, a good sales person will pick up the phone and close a deal on the 21 st call. A great sales person will close a deal on the 21st call AND give you a full analysis based on what they learned during the 20 calls in which they made contact.
With so much to say on the subject, and so little time, I’m going to break this up into several posts…
]]>To solve the first Social Graph problem, solutions like Facebook connect popped up. Many services let you log in via gmail or twitter to import your address books. You could register for a new service, or just log in using facebook connect, and within a few minutes you could have a your whole social graph, or at least enough to get started, connected to you. Enter Social Graph Problem 2.0:
Not only do I want to take my social graph with me, but now I want to break it down and carry that meta data with me.
Facebook, in 2006, launched a “news feed” feature dumping all your friends actions into a long stream and immediately overwhelming users across the platform. The natural reaction (besides futile protesting) was to group friends into little subgroups, to break the data down into more consumable chunks. This way Facebook could serve as a feed reader from your friends from “college”, “work”, or even “highschool” through their “Friends Lists” feature.
Now, I’ve got 600 + friends, its going to be a huge pain to do this manually. And worse, what if I want my friends categorized like this on other services? 
Is facebook going to let me take these lists (categories, subgroups, etc) to another service? Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and most recently Twitter have all added the ability to create lists, while services such 37 Signal’s Highrise CRM sofware have powerful tagging features to categorize your contacts. Things get even more confusing when you bring in new services like, Friendfeed, Threadsy and Gist, where you can group your friends and they communications across all your services (twitter, facebook, etc)
In summary, we’re pushing the envelope of data portability, and I think its exposing a bigger problem. These are my friends. These are my contacts in life, and to stay in touch with them I need a better way to organize them. These categories and lists are rapidly going to become important across all the services you use, and right now they’re stuck in one place.
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1) The product looks damn good
First and foremost, the product looked damn good for only four months of work. Within a few seconds of looking at it, even from the back of the room, you could tell what it did. Compare that to all the “realtime web” applications that just had long cluttered pages of “lifestreaming” data, this one really stands out.
2) The pitch was smooth, slow, and confident
Aaron’s spoke about his company and the space they’re in with AUTHORITY. Not something you see from the first timers. He spoke slowly, and described the product in simple terms everyone could understand, while keeping them entertained with an exciting demo (and some crass jokes).
More importantly he didn’t cram in 2000 details about the features, and he got straight to the important issues that the judges wanted to discuss
3) They’re taking a huge risk, and thats what startups are about
There was no sneaking around the licensing issue. Its the 1000lb gorilla in the room. Everyone knows it, and everyone wants to see them suceed.
4) Like I just said, EVERYONE wants this to happen
Who hasn’t said to themselves “oh shit, what movie was that,” in a conversation with their friends. Its something that everyone from my grandma to girlfriend or sister (people that don’t fall into the uber nerd category) can understand.
Here are a few steps to help out:
1) Keep it short
The startup world is booming and with so many companies out there its really hard to get anyones attention. Investors, possible partners, and acquirers are looking at new ideas all day long, so they need to know what you do in 30 seconds or less.
Angelsoft has this nailed down with their “one line pitch”. Lead with a very short, comprehensive explanation of what your company does and why its different.
2) Make it visible
Once you have this perfect one line pitch, put it out there so everyone can see it. On your website, make it stand out. Get marketing, sales, and product all using the same vocabulary, so you’re customers see one consistent message.
At your booth in the DemoPit make it visible so someone can see what you do before coming in for a more detailed discussion. Investors and other interested parties don’t want to waste their time or yours, so help them find you. This last part is KEY! A half dozen investors mentioned how difficult it was to approach companies without knowing what they did. Make it easy for them to find you, and you’ll have a lot more highly relevant conversations.
3) Keep it simple
Use words that your customers, or your mom can understand. Here’s a great example from Get Satisfaction, a community based customer support site, where they ask their customers how they would describe the service to their mom.
Leave out the buzz words and stick to common sense descriptions that a wide audience can understand
4) Know what your cutomers are hearing, not just what you’re saying
This is the all so important feedback loop. Even once you get your message nailed down, you may not be spreading the right message. Theres a big difference between what you think you’re saying, and what the customers are hearing.
The example by Get Satisfaction above is one way to get feedback on how your customers see your product. My buddy Dan Martell , suggested that investors just ask their users what 3 words come to mind when they think of XXX company.
You need to be describing your company using the same words that they would use, and you know you have a problem if they describe something completely different than what you built.
