Don’t Sell the Problem – Sell the Solution

April 9, 2013 Leave a comment

One of the most important stages in the process of building a product is choosing your marketing strategy – including your target and goals (especially if you are on the marketing team).

Frankly, when you’re a marketer (or least not a developer), the initial product development period gives you time to think, plan, and act towards your marketing strategy and decide how to approach bloggers, customers, users, etc.

Your marketing strategy should involve many aspects such as social media, public relations, and SEO, in order to broaden your reach as much as possible. To keep it simple, Kissmetrics covered these points in an amazing guide called “The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing”

Getting to know and choose your market (the first point in Kissmetric’s guide) is not only about defining demographics and market size, but about the message you are going to deliver to each one of these potential users.The first thing to understand is that you are not selling your users the problem, you are selling the solution.

We want to help people who have a problem sharing content

Earlier this month, we released the private beta of our new product, Swayy, a tool that brings you content to share with your community. As founders of a startup, we worked hard keep our social media accounts active on a daily basis. This in large part involved finding engaging content for our followers to consume, and thus grow our community and position us as thought-leaders in the industry. That was OUR PROBLEM. No one had to explain me why I should be active on my social media outlets, what my goals should be, how time-consuming it is, and how painful they are to maintain. When you are familiar with the problem, you understand the solution.

Once we had our first version of Swayy ready for beta testing, we decided to devote the first few weeks to pitching it only to close acquaintances and asking them to test it in order to get early feedback.

The feedback was divided into two clear groups:

• Those who had the same marketing problem as I did focused on the quality of the content and the necessary components of the system.

• Those who don’t understand the point of sharing mostly gave feedback on the UI (which should not be discounted).

I instinctually had the urge to explain to the second group why they should share, why it’s important to be active on social media, and why they should want to grow their community. After enlightening them, how could they not fall for Swayy?

You can’t convince people to solve a problem they don’t have

The defining moment in our marketing efforts was when we realized that we cannot sell the problem itself. We’re not here to explain the importance of social media for you and your startup, we’re not here to explain what sharing can do for you. We aren’t the messengers of blogging, content marketing, and content sharing. We’re here to solve a problem for the people who already know they have it.

Filter feedback from “fake” users and ignore their metrics

Having more users onboard is a good thing, but it’s a bad thing when it negatively affects your usage percentages. The users that didn’t understand the point of Swayy or social media marketing were not counted as signed up users, and their activity on Swayy was ignored. These “fake” users are great for getting feedback on UI, UX, the onboarding process, and so on. Their feedback is important, and we made a point of never ignoring it.

How we approach user growth at Swayy

At this moment, several weeks into our private beta, we’ve better learned more about who our users (or potential users) are and are not. We also learned which channels to use for finding potential users, and which should be avoided.

The most important lesson we learned since launching the beta is to not waste time explaining why Swayy will help one solve a problem someone might experience in the future. We’re here to solve an existing problem for those who know they have it.

I would love to hear about how you find your potential users, and the ways you reach out to them. Leave comments or be in touch on Twitter

If you are interested in using Swayy, leave your email at www.swayy.co to join our growing private beta.

Cheers.

Photo Credit gem66

Why You Should Learn To Code Even As a Non-Technical Founder

January 14, 2013 Comments: 5

Being in a technical environment my entire professional life, I came across programming several times:

First, as a System Engineer I came familiar with basic scripts programming, and DB structures. Later on, during my engineering studies, I learned some basic C and Java programming.
I never became an expert or developed the desire to be a programmer, but by knowing the basics of programming and how systems are built, I understood how it helps one become a better startup founder.

Got my hands dirty

I was always capable of having decent coding conversations, so when we needed an extra hand in the development of SUMMER, it was clear to me I could step up to help with the client-side programming.

I took the minimum time necessary, and expanded my “knowledge” with HTML, CSS and Javascript. My contribution to the product was negligible, but I became more familiar with the product, got myself involved in techie conversations, and ended up with a different point of view in regards to my marketing role.

I fell in love with this status. When I was asked to program for my studies final project using any programming language I wished – I took the opportunity to learn Python (our server-side language), and wrote an entire program based on it.

As I expanded my knowledge of programming, I began to better understand the bigger picture.

Get explanations from the programmers

I’m no longer involved in a programming role, but I’m still doing my best to know about the inner workings of our products. I initiate frequent discussions with my technical co-founders, I want to know the flow of our system, what it takes from us to do certain things, why some take longer than others, and so on.

Understanding the background of your system, and how beneficial it can be for you is a huge advantage for several reasons:

1. Know How Stuff Works

The basic and most common advantage when you know how your system works, is actually absorbing the daily routine of startup life. Additions and improvements to your product might be something you talk or think about frequently.

Encounters with bugs, unclear scenarios, and other weird cases happen all the time. Knowing the cause of these issues, and understanding the situation is important as a founder of the company, rather than waiting helplessly for the problem to be fixed.

2. Pitching & Meetings

Startup founders often find themselves in situations where they need to talk about the startup and the product. When in a marketing role, you can find yourself with people wanting to know more than the general explanation of the product. Some people will be interested in the technology behind it, learn about future capabilities, technical advantages, and so on.
Having the answers to these inquiries can improve a meeting or a discussion, and prevent questions from awkwardly hanging in the air.

Picture yourself speaking with potential collaborators, interested bloggers, or a journalist wanting to cover your work – having the right answers allows you tell a better story, and even can be a time-saver for both parties.

3. Product Support

In an early-stage startup, all of the founders handle customer support. If you are the person behind the social accounts, you are the first stop in the support process. Knowing the answers to technical questions from customers saves their time, your time, and the precious time of your fellow programmers. With my understanding of the product, I am able to easily answer questions regarding low-level bugs and user feature requests, leaving the development team out of the communication.

Trust me, you and your teammates will greatly appreciate streamlining of this process.

I would love to hear if any of you non-techies had the chance to learn to code, and how it affected you in your startup.

Picture credit: Hans Braxmeier

How to Manage your Time Better as a Startup Founder

December 31, 2012 Comments: 6

A lot has been written and said about Lean Startup, Minimum Viable Product , and Bootstrapping your idea to a product quickly and efficiently.

The techniques are known and well described and the unending amount of tools that help you to achieve it are also common knowledge by now.

But getting to know how to do it, doesn’t mean you can set your mind to accept it.
So HOW do you get yourself to become that person? How can you adapt to lean thinking?

Seinfeld Moment: When Karmer told Jerry he’s gonna make his Rickshaws in NYC idea happen, he explained how he’ll do it quick, efficient, and with a minimum cost:

“We’ll start out with one, and then when it catches on, we’re gonna have a whole fleet!”

I used to be

Before starting my first venture, I used to work in a Telecom company for around 5 years.
This is a completely different type of work, with different working methods – Selling Cycle is long, we got to make sure everything is perfect, and things may take some time. In many cases a very long time.

So when I started my first venture it was obvious to me I knew the right methods, Quality Assurance was a top priority, and everything should be well polished.

Worst part? my partner was working in the same company as me. We were both screwed.

needless to say this first venture failed, but during that time of failure, I came across the principles of being Lean.

Getting to know those principles, on the other hand, doesn’t make implementation easier.

How to make that mental switch

Diving in my second venture, SUMMER, left me no other option but to decide (quickly) what’s important and what to focus on.
When you don’t understand what’s important, you spend all your time on every single part of the product, and on every single and useless feature that comes to mind.
It took me one failure to learn NO ONE cares about most of what you’ve done, and to get my mind not to care either. To be more conservative – I’ll care when I’ll need to.

So I came up with a Pareto concept for my Time usage:

Spend 80% of your time for 20% of your product elements

Picking out the features under the 80% percent in the graph is great for you to be agile, smart, and efficient.

Decide your 20%

Recently, me and my partners were thinking about some cool stuff we wanted to create, and we didn’t want to waste our time on anything. Every one of us has his Pareto in his area.
During the weeknd, mighty Rambo Oz built the Social Bar so we could test our assumptions on some part of our bigger idea. We knew exactly what’s important, and what we should spend our time on.

Many people already explained and shared their case studies on how to do everything right.
I would like to focus only on how to choose what to work on, and how to spend your time.

1. 100% of the visitors that will get to your landing page will see, well… your landing page.
Your Goal – get as many of those visitors as possible to understand your message.

2. considering how good you did on this first part, some portion of your visitors would like to go on with you. Your Goal – Keep your sign in process quick, easy and clear as possible.

3. Those new users you just owned now want to use your product, or actually try out this one thing you promised them, and caught their eyes. How many of those will start using your product immediately?

4. The rest of your product – Leave it for when it becomes necessary.

5. My Tip – Even with the slimmest product you build, let the users leave a feedback – they will from the get-go, and you’ll get a lot from it.

72 Hours of hard but precise work, led us to #1 on Hacker News with our “Show HN” post of Social Bar, getting thousands of visitors, and hundreds of sign ups almost immediately.

That can only be done with the right time usage, and knowing which elements to focus on.

How do you split your time when building a MVP?

Photo Credit: mararie on Flickr

If You Have Competitors, Go On With Your Idea

December 9, 2012 Comments: 2

So you did it, you had the big A-ha! moment. You encountered a problem and come up with the solution; an idea that you find really helpful or needed in so many ways.

It might have arisen from a personal need, or be a new use or twist on something that already exists. It could be anything.

The funny part about ideas is they take a second to come up with

After this one-second spark of brain lightening, comes the interesting part. Who is already an innovator in this field, who is trying to solve the same problem, and how they are doing it?

It’s a hard search to start – you don’t actually want to see others doing the exact same thing, and even worse – succeeding.

While building and improving upon SUMMER and other previous projects, I used competitive analysis as a metric to assess where the business stood. The process of understanding where my business was relative to other taught me the value of competition.

Someone is already working on your idea

The important kick-off point is the fact that even if no such thing exists already, someone else is working on it right now. And it’s probably several people.

Whether it’s the exact same idea or something similar, the point is that people around the world are using their existing technologies to implement solutions, or inventing new products to solve the very same problem as you.

What if there are no competitors?

You should stop and think why there is no one else doing it.
If no one is experiencing the problem you are trying to solve – can you think of keywords people will google to hit your landing page?

There is a chance someone tried this already and failed? Try and find out why.
Is it because there was no demand for the product? Or perhaps the problem was implementation.

Reasons for failure can be a bad marketing approach, and often times it can be that the solution was simply born ahead of its time.

In any case, by doing this research, you will find out whether to go for your idea or not, and more importantly – how.

Why you should WANT someone else to work on the same idea

The equation is simple:

Someone working on your idea = They share the same problem = You have a market

Of those who are having a problem, only a small portion will do something to solve it, and the ratio stays the same the larger the problem is. From the other side, the more people you have as competitors – the bigger your market will be.

Get yourself an edge (learn from your competitors)

Competition is good for your idea – it challenges you to the next phase of development – beat them.

In addition to finding out why your rivals might have failed, try and see what they are missing.

Funds

Research the competitor’s Cruchbase and AngelList profiles, find out if they received funding, when they got funded, and who are their advisors.

Business Model

Check out the features they offer and how much they cost. Figure out which feature is the most expensive one and why.

Engagement

Peek at their Facebook and Twitter accounts – see if they’re active enough, and how many people are engaged with the company.

So the next time you’re glowing with a new idea – pray for some competitors and then get to know them well. Your idea will become much better, faster than you can imagine.

photo credit 50mm on Flickr

How a Broadway Show Made Me Meditate

December 2, 2012 1 Comment

Around 10 years ago, a friend of mine convinced me to join him on a meditation retreat. While I appreciated the beauty of silence, I found that five minutes was more than enough.

That was my last attempt at finding pure quiet. In the 10 years since then, technology added heavily to my list of distractions, and I realized how rare it is to do nothing. Think: Could you make it two hours without watching TV, emailing, texting, Facebooking, sleeping, or eating?

Catch a Broadway Show

During my last visit to New York, my girlfriend wanted to see a Broadway show. Of course I said yes, although this was not a matter of my enjoyment. Not only does theater not interest me in the slightest, I have bad vision.

After waiting for hours in a discount line we ended up with seats in the very last row. Ten minutes in, I gave up trying to enjoy the show and surrendered to my waste of time and money; I couldn’t see, I didn’t know what was going on, and most importantly, I didn’t really care.

Meditation Time

Here is the biggest problem with being bored in a Broadway show: It’s forbidden to do EVERYTHING.

I couldn’t open my phone, I couldn’t talk, it wasn’t comfortable (or appropriate) to nap, and of course leaving is out of the question. Afterall, I did pay $80.

That’s how I found myself meditating on Broadway.

For the entire three hours I completely tuned out the show and focused on sorting out the noise in my mind. I thought about the product I was developing and the setbacks it was facing. I thought about why some ideas worked but their duplicates did not. I replayed the last company meeting in my head and looked for points that I could improve upon. I saw it all.

Three hours of pure thinking without distraction – on some level it felt divine.

Bravo!

The show finished and I was the first up to give the actors a standing ovation (I’m sure they deserved it) – it had indeed been a significant life experience.

When I returned home, I began searching for that ultimate focus in my everyday life.
I tried taking longer showers, but longer than 15 minutes just felt excessive. I tried listening to music, but my phone kept distracting me. I even tried laying in bed with the lights off, but (to no surprise) I kept falling asleep.

There’s only one way for me to find that pure silence – find a show with seats in the back, pay too much money, and catch a Broadway play. It may seem a bit extravagant, but that overpriced meditation session was invaluable. I walked away feeling balanced, with renewed energy and a clear mind. When you get away from everything for a few hours, all you have to focus on is yourself and your thoughts.

Tips for meditating on Broadway:

During the show, sit up straight, or you might fall asleep and lose valuable thinking time. Intermission is a great time to retain your sanity/check your phone.

photo credit @robyoung

How to Set Up a Company Blog

September 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Following the launch of [Summer], my co-founders and I sat down to discuss our company blog – a place where we could post release notes, stories, tips, information about exciting startups, and anything else we would want to say to our amazing supporters.

Then we faced fundamental questions about setting up the blog – where and how we should do it?

Although I have basic knowledge of web development (as a Marketing guy), I felt that I wasn’t equipped enough to decide the best way to set up the blog. So I had to bug Oz, one of our engineers, to help me with it.

I also asked him to summarize the needed steps, so that all of you out there which are like me, could do it next time easily, and consider everything before you set one of your own:

The Requirements

Customization – We wanted the blog to have the same look and feel as our website (and I expect you do too), which means the HTML and CSS need to be customized accordingly.
Domain – One key issue was to have the blog on our own DNS, blog.getsummer.com.
WYSIWYG (What you See Is What You Get) – In many cases (such as our own), the non-techies from the team might need to be the ones maintaining the blog and posts, so editing needed to be easy.

The Alternatives

WordPress.com – Theming at WordPress.com is hard, and regretfully not available in the free package.
Hosted WordPress – Again, theming is hard, and getting it hosted seems like a big headache.
Django Blog Engine – Since we are mostly a Django Shop, we considered using some of its existing engines, such as http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ but it turned to take too much work. Mezzanine can however be a great alternative if you want to control every little detail, and don’t mind getting your hands dirty.
Blogger – A valid option, however, Oz wasn’t pleased with the confusing template language (and we thought it best to avoid upsetting the engineer…).
Tumblr – Tumblr templating with HTML / CSS turned out be incredibly easy despite it being only one file to edit (which usually means it will be harder to maintain). Thanks to the simplicity of the Tumblr templating language, maintenance is actually quite simple. Tumblr also has an attractive admin interface that allows you to edit the template, setup Analytics, add a commenting system, and a custom domain. Although Tumblr’s WYSIWYG editor is probably not the best out there, it’s still good enough for our needs.

As you might have guessed, Tumblr won, and we started to implement the requirements (mentioned above).

Now, this is the important part (so pay attention and take notes!)

Start off with the default theme since it’s pretty straight forward and easy to extend.
If you are familiar with Mustache\Handlebars.js\Jinja2\Django templates it’s kinda similar, but without any real programmable logic. http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_themes is a great resource.
Use {block:PermalinkPage}…{/block:PermalinkPage}where you want things that only appear on a post and not in the main feed.
Add a few classes in the CSS to add predefined styles that you might want to incorporate into posts.
Since the Tumblr editor doesn’t let you do much in the way of coloring or altering text, nor will it let you use thestyle=”..” attribute in your HTML – we use the class=”…” attribute and add these classes to the theme itself as a workaround.
Analytics! – As a figures freak, I recommend never forgetting to track the visits to your blog.
Simply add an Analtyics tracking code to the blog HTML (I recommend using a UA which is different from your website UA).
DNS – Tumblr makes this pretty easy. Using your DNS provider’s admin interface, create a CNAME record calledblog.yourcompany.com and point it at domains.tumblr.com. Then, under Tumblr’s admin dashboard, check “Use a custom domain name” and enter “blog.yourcompany.com”. It will usually take around an hour for the DNS changes to propagate, so be patient.

If you find that you have the same blogging needs as we do, I recommend choosing Tumblr. It was surprisingly easy, and we are pleased with the results.

Visit our blog at blog.getsummer.com to see how it turned out – and as always, we welcome your feedback.

Tell us what you take into consideration while setting up your company blog, and how you chose the right platform for your needs.

Twizdom: How to Use Twitter for Daily Learning

September 4, 2012 Leave a comment

Everyday, over 500 million users are on Twitter to connect with others, find out what’s trending, stalk their favorite celebs and air their dirty laundry… you know, the usual.

Up until recently, my daily Twitter routine consisted of just that, until I discovered Two Spanish Tweets. Go figure, now there is a Twitter feed that teaches you Spanish!

After being inspired by my recent trip to Central and South America, I decided that I really wanted to learn Spanish. Upon discovering this feed, I realized that learning another language could be quick, easy, accessible and kinda trendy.

Everyone has things they would like to learn. Here are a few more Twitter feeds to turn your daily social media routine into a learning experience.

Spanish

Along with Two Spanish Tweets, there are two other accounts that are great for learning new words, sentences, and grammar tips (I recommend using all three).

@tweetsinspanish

@spanishlanguage

@hola_lessons

Music

There are several websites for discovering new music, but rather than sift through articles about up and coming artists, I can find and listen to them them easily through quick links from NPR and The Line of Best Fit.

@bestfitmusic

@nprmusic

Math

I’ll admit this is an eccentricity of mine, and probably not for everyone. I see math as an endless journey, and there is always more to know. This PhD in mathematics shares some interesting and (mostly) understandable wisdom.

@mathematicsprof

History

For adding a bit of flavor to your day, History Facts will inform you of interesting events that happened on the same date in previous years.

@History_Facts

Random Facts

Not only is howstuffworks.com one of my favorite websites, but it’s one of the most fun Twitter accounts, with topics ranging anywhere from dance science to shark attacks.

@HowStuffWorks

Bonus! Amazing Soccer Stats

This is famous among soccer lovers (myself included), but on the off chance that you haven’t yet heard of it, it would be criminal not to share. Opta Sports gives incredible soccer facts, many of them are updated in real-time, making it the perfect feed to have handy as you watch a match.
@OptaJoe

By following these feeds, I’ve enriched not only my Twitter experience, but my general understanding of the world around me.

What are your thoughts? How have you benefitted from ‘twizdom’?
Let me know on @liordegani, Founder of SUMMER

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