I’m super excited to be part of the crew (along with Bootup Entrepreneurial Society) bringing the Startup Lessons Learned conference to town via simulcast this Friday April 23rd. For those of you who don’t know, the Lean Startup movement (a derivative of lean manufacturing) was kicked off by Eric Ries, formerly of Imvu. It has blossomed in a very short time into a global movement of entrepreneurs interested in how to build fast-cycle, highly iterative startups that learn fast and minimize wasted effort.

More information on the event is below.

• REGISTRATION: http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• PRICE: $25 (regular on-site SF price = $695USD so that’s a 96.5% discount not counting the savings in travel costs.)
• SIMULCAST LOCATION: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, 3rd floor, 163 W. Hastings St., Suite 200.

Startup Lessons Learned, San Francisco (via simulcast to Vancouver)

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Confirmed Speakers and Participating Mentors:

• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)
• Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute (@kentbeck)
• Steve Blank (@sgblank)
• Randy Komisar, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play (@andrew_chen)
• David Weekly, PB Works (@dweekly)
• Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics (@hnshah)
• Cindy Alvarez, KISSmetrics (@cindyalvarez)
• Ethan Bloch, Flowtown (@ebloch)
• Timothy Fitz, IMVU (@TimohtyFitz)
• Drew Houston, Dropbox (@drewhouston)
• Ash Maurya, WiredReach (@ashmaurya)
• Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
• Sean Ellis (@seanellis)
• Laura Klein (@lauraklein)
• Damon Horowitz, Aardvark / Google (@iamnottweeting)
• Max Ventilla, Aardvark / Google (@ventilla)
• Brant Cooper (@brantcooper)
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs (@clarashih)
• Manuel Rosso (@manuelrosso)
• Rashmi Sinha (@rashmi)
• Dan Martell, Flowtown (@danmartell)
• Brett Durrett, IMVU
• James Birchler, IMVU
• Andres Glusman, Meetup (@glusman)

Agenda

• 8 AM – 9:00 Registration
• 9:00 – 9:30 AM Welcome
  *Eric Ries, Host, Startup Lessons Learned
• 9:30 AM – 10:20 AM Build Keynote: “To Agility, and Beyond”
  * Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute
• 10:20 AM – 10:40 AM Continuous Deployment Case Study: WiredReach
  *Ash Maurya, WiredReach
• 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM Agile Development Case Study: Grockit
  *Farb Nivi, Grockit
• 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM Case Study: “But Does it Scale?”
  * Tim Fitz, James Birchler, and Brett Durrett, IMVU
• 11:30 PM – 12:15 PM But What about Design? Minimum Desirable Product
  *Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Laura Klein, Dave McClure, Rashmi Sinha
• 12:15 AM – 1:15 PM Lunch
• 1:15 – 2:00 PM Conversation: Getting to Plan B
  * Randy Komisar, KPCB
• 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM Minimum Viable Product Case Study: Aardvark
  *Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, Google (Aardvark)
• 2:20 PM – 2:40 PM Pivot Case Study: Flowtown
  *Dan Martell and Ethan Bloch, Flowtown
• 2:40 PM – 3:00 PM Pivot Case Study: KISSmetrics
  *Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics
• 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM Afternoon Break
• 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM Customer Development 2.0
  *Steve Blank
• 4:15 PM – 4:35 PM Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study
  *Manuel Rosso, Food on the Table
• 4:35 PM – 4:55 PM Customer Development Case Study: Dropbox
  *Drew Houston, Dropbox
• 4:55 PM – 5:15 PM Customer Development Case Study: PB Works
  *David Weekly, PBworks
• 5:15 PM – 6:00 PM Customer Development Panel
  *Cindy Alvarez, Brant Cooper, Sean Ellis, Matt Johnson

This event is intended for people on the front line of delivering products. If you are a start-up founder, an employee engaged in customer or product development role at a company of any stage, or someone at a large company looking to bring the lean startup methodology to your company, we encourage you to attend the event.

Local Simulcasts

For those outside of the Bay Area, we will be offering simulcasts of the event. Official simulcast hosts can be found below – make sure to sign up using one of the links below:

Africa

• Cape Town, South Africa http://sllconf-capetown.eventbrite.com

Asia

• Tokyo, Japan http://startuplessonslearnedtokyosimulcast.eventbrite.com

Europe

• Barcelona, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/638921030
• Birmingham, UK http://sll-birmingham-uk.eventbrite.com/
• Bucharest, Romania http://sllconf-bucharest.eventbrite.com/
• Budapest, Hungary http://sllbudapest.eventbrite.com
• Cambridge, UK http://startuplessonslearnedcam.eventbrite.com/
• Copenhagen, Denmark http://sllconf2010copenhagen.eventbrite.com/
• Delft, Netherlands http://sllconf-delft.eventbrite.com/
• Edinburgh, Scotland http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=652392323
• Gothenburg, Sweden http://gotsllconf.eventbrite.com/
• London, UK http://www.meetup.com/agile-entrepreneurship/calendar/12944310/
• Madrid, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/640820712
• Munich, Germany http://www.eventbrite.com/event/650629049
• Timisoara, Romania http://www.meetup.com/The-Timisoara-Agile-Software-Meetup-Group/
• Vienna, Austria http://at.amiando.com/sllconfstream.html

North America

• Atlanta, GA http://atlantasll.eventbrite.com/
• Austin, TX http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13090413/
• Boise, Idaho http://sllconf-boise.eventbrite.com/
• Boston, MA http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle-Boston/calendar/13093640/
• Boston/Cambridge, MA http://dplc-lessons.eventbrite.com
• Boulder, CO http://sllconf-boulder.eventbrite.com/
• Chicago, IL http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13056515/
• Cleveland, OH http://startuplessonslearneduniversitycircle.eventbrite.com/
• Cleveland, OH http://sllsimulcastcleveland.eventbrite.com
• Grand Rapids, MI http://startupgr.eventbrite.com
• Los Angeles, CA http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13082783/
• Monterrey, NL México http://www.eventbrite.com/event/654293008
• Montreal, QC Canada Chttp://leanstartupmontreal.eventbrite.com
• New York, NY http://dplny-lessons.eventbrite.com/
• New York, NY http://www.meetup.com/lean-startup/calendar/13102326/
• New York, NY http://sllnyc.eventbrite.com
• Omaha, NE http://sllconf-omaha.eventbrite.com/
• Providence, RI http://sllconfprovidence.eventbrite.com
• Provo, UT http://wsg-lsc.eventbrite.com/
• Raleigh, NC http://www.meetup.com/lsc-rtp/calendar/13161035/
• Redmond, WA http://www.eventbrite.com/event/648075411
• San Juan, Puerto Rico http://startups.eventbrite.com/
• Toronto, CA http://startuplessons-toronto.eventbrite.com
• Twin Cities, MN http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/12849312/
• Vancouver, BC Canada http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• Washington DC http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13068744/

Oceania

• Syndey, Australia https://s.eventarc.com/event/view/597/entry/startup-lessons-learned-simulcast-conference
• Wellington, New Zealand http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Wellington/calendar/12624714/

South America

• Belo Horizonte, Brazil http://sllconf-bhz.eventbrite.com/
• Buenos Aires, Argentina http://buenosairessll.eventbrite.com/
• Florianópolis, SC, Brazil http://www.meetup.com/Floripa-Startups/calendar/13090194/
• Santiago, Chile http://sllsantiago.eventbrite.com

Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS metrics team, Randy Komisar (VC/angel with Kleiner Perkins and author of my favourite book on venture capital – The Monk and the Riddle), Steve Blank (who recently wrote a fantastic blog post called “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers” and many others. This is a top-tier collection of speakers.

This is going to be a kick-in-the-ass day that is going to make any startup entrepreneur rethink their entire business approach.So if you’re sick of limping along building your business 10 users at a time or “working to get the app just right before we launch”, get yourself and your team down to this event.

Sign up HERE. This event is $700USD in person. We’re providing the simulcast here for $50 FREE. Do it. You won’t regret it. And you’ll get to hang out and meet a bunch of other startup entrepreneurs who are all building their ventures. Great place to connect with like-minded folks.

I haven’t outsourced my inbox yet like Tim Ferriss has. I still do it myself. So every time I hit Inbox Zero, I thank my friend Alex Samuel from Social Signal for her tweeting about her own inbox zero success. I used to have 3000+ emails in my inbox and another 20,000 somewhere in the archive. I finally found a way to clear it. It requires Gmail, a to-do list of some kind and Gmail’s awesome keyboard shortcuts, and some Apple keyboard shortcuts.

Ensure you already have a good to-do list manager of some kind, that you can use to sort and prioritize tasks. I use a basic google sheet in a dedicated Site-specific browser too called Fluid (so it looks like a desktop app and it has an icon in my dock), but you can use anything. The keys to success are in these principles:

• Email is not a to-do list. Period. Get tasks out of there.
• Archiving = peace of mind. I never really understood the value of archiving until I realized that it is a way to file…without the psychological overhead of filing. It is a way of saying “get this out of my inbox and put it away in case I need it again.)
• The important thing is to either archive, action/archive, or put on list/archive everything.
• Eliminate (in this case archive) everything you don’t need to action as fast as you can
• Delegate (with short emails) nything you can as fast and succinctly as possible)
• Put tasks into the task list, then come back and keep sifting.

So once you have your crazy full inbox and your to-do list:

1. Go to the oldest email in your inbox and open it.
2. Scan the contents and using standard GTD thinking, do one of the following:
   1. Task?
      1. Command-Tab to your task list
      2. add the task as an ABC or to-delegate item
      3. Command-tab back
      4. hit the magic “]” key.  (<- This archives the message and takes you to the next most current email.)
   2. <2 minute action?
      1. Command-tab to app to take action. If you need to send an email and don’t want to lose your spot in the email inbox in Gmail, hold SHIFT and then hit COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. It will pop open a window on top. When you’re done and have sent it, the window will close, leaving you right where you were before.
      2. Take action. If that means writing an email, do it in five sentences or less.
      3. Command-Tab back to Gmail if necessary.
      4. Hit the magic “]” key to archive the message.
   3. Archivable? No action required?
      1. Archive and next with “]” key.
3. Repeat as fast as possible until Inbox Zero.
4. Celebrate.

The beauty of the ] key and the command-tab and the shift-compose is that with a few keystrokes, you can can clear hundreds or even thousands of messages in a few hours. My first pass? I cleared 3000 messages in a few hours. It can be done. And when I was done, I had a complete list of all of my tasks again. I wasn’t living with some tasks in email and others in a to-do list which is always a recipe for lack of prioritization anyway.

Have you hit inbox zero? How do you handle it? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear it.

Its authors Lincoln Murphy and Justin Pirie do a great job of articulating the high level difficulty of building a Saas play and explain it in simple terms. Great 100,000 foot view.

It really is THIS hard.

Holy cow, did I ever call this one right back in March of this year. Scary right. Apple has reinvented the mobile industry…again.

Apple’s new iPad is a radical game-changer, a disruptive competitor to Amazon, a disruptor to the software business and a great leap forward in terms of user interface. It’s freaking awesome. This will be Steve Jobs’ legacy:

• Apple update:
  • they just had their larget quarter ever
  • their gross margins are up over 40% while the rest of the industry is collapsing while fighting it out in the netbook category
  • They have over 140,000 apps in the app store that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.
  • They’re now a > 50B company.
  • Apple is the world’s largest mobile product company: bigger than Nokia, Samsung, or Sony. Holy crap.
  • 125M credit cards that have downloaded over 12 Billion products.

• The iPad
  • “netbooks suck at everything”
  • we decided to create a tablet
  • 9.7″ diagonal
  • custom processor
  • <1/2″ thick; less than 1.5 pounds;
  • auto-rotation, GPS, compass, 3G, WIFI
  • all new iTunes
  • all new iPhoto
  • all new calendar
  • all new address book
  • It’s a full on replacement for the old “day-timer”
  • multi-touch everywhere
  • 10 hours of work time and a month of standby time
  • insanely fast graphics
  • run all 140,000 existing iPhone apps at regular 1x size or at 2x full-size;
  • new apps can be built to run at full screen
  • soft keyboard is almost the same size as a real keyboard
  • plugs into a projector and a portable keyboard and has its own cover

• iBooks
  • 5 major publishers on board, more coming
  • beautiful display
  • iTunes like bookstore built in
  • Editorial notes from me:
    • as a user of the Kindle DX, I can’t wait for this. I hate the low speed and crappy hardware of the DX but love having my books with me eveerywhere I go.
    • They have only said “we have 5 major publishers on board” but haven’t said anything about how many titles they have. Amazon has 400,000 and counting and content is king.
    • I would also be happy to use the “Kindle for iPhone” application from Amazon if they release one. I can see having my e-books split across the two libraries which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world.

• iWork – all new iPad apps for $9.99 each (WHOA).
  • brand new apps
  • multi-touch
  • incredible app for a portable device
  • Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations.
  • [I'm floored by this $9.99 pricing. They've just disrupted the entire personal productivity software pricing model.]

• Accessories:
  • we have built a dock so you can plug in and type and recharge
  • we have a great case built for it

• Pricing:
  • DATA PLAN
    • USA:
      • $14.99 = 250MB/mo (good for most people) with no contract; cancel anytime you want [this is great because so many people were so pissed off at AT&T)
      • $29.99 unlimited
      • Both include free use of AT&T wifi hotspots
      • Cancel anytime is a great feature
    • Rest of world:
      • July 2010 pricing coming soon
      • but you can use a micro SIM to run it on your own local carrier with our permission before July
  • IPAD (wifi only pricing / wifi + 3G) [kind of like the iPod Touch / iPhone]
    • 16GB: $499/$629
    • 32GB: $599/729
    • 64GB: $699/829

SUMMARY thoughts:

As usual, Apple has knocked it out of the park. They have built on their successes that came before: iPhone, app store, iPhone economy, app store, iTunes, and now iPad. This is the beginning of the next arc for Apple and will add another $50B/yr to their revenue. You can see their follow-on areas to add: video camera for skype/camming.

The price models illustrate the best pricing strategy I have seen. They chose the price to go to market with $499 and also had margin requirements (knowing Steve and team from a distance) and as evidenced by their increased margins from this last quarterly earnings call. They then engineered it to be producible at that margin and at that market price. It’s staggering.

This will cause yet another Cambrian explosion in application development and a (temporary?) bump in the publishing realm as all of the struggling newspapers move their content onto this platform.

Fan-boy glow aside, this is a technology and business game changer across mobile, netbooks, and laptops and will fundamentally restructure things AGAIN like the iPhone did.

I”m shocked at how well Apple has consistently executed on their business from the Macbooks to the iPhone/iPod Touches, the App Store, the iTunes store, and now the iPad. This is the beginning of something huge for Apple.

Nice work Steve and team!

Sign me up!

For more information see:

• iPad Main Page
• Features
• Design
• Gallery

I laughed when I read this because it’s so true. I haven’t heard anybody say “DAMN IT, I can’t send email because my inbox is full!!!” since working at a prior company where we used Exchange where 5000 people exclaimed that almost daily. What a colossal waste of their time. Only about 1/10 of 1% of them knew how to set up auto-archiving so it was a huge drain on the organization’s resources.

Good on ya Google. Nice simple ad, straight to the point.

Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google Apps, but there are several larger issues that need to be addressed before there is any kind of mass adoption.

Letting users use what they want to use (Outlook) while being able to use a back-end from Google that allows 25GB per user (and not the fantastically annoying 100 MEGA bytes offered up by most in-house Exchange admins because they want to make their lives easier and their users lives hellish) is absolutely brilliant. This is about lowering barriers to adoption and user behaviour change barriers are a big deal.

With this move, IT owners now get to provide better uptime (Gmail’s effective 99.9% uptime is frankly higher than many corporate email systems or at least close to par), more storage (250x more on average),  a much more functional web interface than Outlook Web Access, and native Blackberry push email all while saving 66% of their operational costs. I believe that enterprise adoption of Gmail will begin to increase rapidly.

I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with:

Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to rival HTTP since before it was called that (or, about 3 years).

I have some ideas about the identity piece, and I actually think (yes, crazy, I know) that SXIP was partially headed in the right direction.

Troy is totally spot on about data flows, although it is logins (i.e identity + permissions) plus data flows that is important. “In the future”, one might imagine a composer like Yahoo Pipes where you can “pipe” data workflows between different apps. An email is an email is an email, whether in the billing system, the PM system, or the support system.

None of these are islands, they’re already leaking into each other. We just (for now) have this terrible tool of “synch” rather than connected flows.

First let me say that Boris has always been my  bellwether of what’s coming up next. He taught me about Drupal about 2 years before anybody else cared.  And he has done this repeatedly so I trust him when he says that real-time communication and XMPP based systems are coming.

In thinking about his comment above, I realized that I needed to start a meme in the Saas world:

Integration, Integration, Integration. It’s about the Integration. (Crikey, I sound like Ballmer.)

As a business, you DO want to move to the web, but in order to actually get more benefit than just the supposed (and sometimes difficult to realize) benefits of Saas vs. on premise, it’s important to minimize the number of platforms that you adopt because every extra platform you bring on gives you more identity headache and worse, more data flow headache so your ability to have your people use those systems and flow that data around in a meaningful business process are blocked.

You want MORE Saas on FEWER platforms where everything is PRE-INTEGRATED so you can have single-sign-on and flow the data in a simple way. Salesforce + Google Apps + Echosign = bliss. Google Sites + Dropbox? Nope. Can’t do it. They don’t connect. So to achieve what I wanted the other day, namely finding a simple cloud based file server that integrates with Salesforce and Google Apps in a clean way from an identity and data availability perspective – that sounds like a business opportunity for somebody because it’s not there (or I haven’t found it yet.)

KEEP IT INTEGRATED STUPID (KIIS) – pass on the meme.

And by the way, yes, I’m aware of the Cast Iron’s of the world who help companies with these issues but defaults are important. Something like 99.999999% use the defaults (yes, I made that number up) and so if it’s not built in, then it won’t get used by the broader market.

So what do you do if you’re a business running on Google Apps who wants to have internal distribution lists? Well, you could bolt something on. Or you can use Google Groups. But if you use Google groups and your people are already using Google personal for their non-work life, things can get pretty crazy.

First, we have to make sure that you’re clear on the basics:

• Google’s personal apps and Google’s business apps are not the same, so Gmail or Google Apps Gmail are different applications with different log ins.
• Google Groups does not exist in the Business apps, it is personal.
• Businesses need to have discussion groups.
• The work around is to have your people create a NEW, PERSONAL account using their WORK email address. (Yes, brain hurting).
• So they’ll have to have THREE accounts (2 personal and 1 corporate):
  • username@work.com (which you give them from the Google Apps admin control panel);
  • username@work.com (a PERSONAL Google account that they have to set up separately on their own!) What they’ll need to do is log out of everything and sign back in as a new personal Gmail user using their corporate email address (username@work.com)
  • username@gmail.com (their original personal account that they set up on their own).
• Why is this an issue? You can have tabs open in Firefox or Internet Explorer for both the Google personal apps as well as for the Google business apps. So your people can have their personal and their work data open in front of them at the same time. But if they try to have their personal, their work, AND the groups data (which is also personal), things break.
• Here are the answers:
  • Option 1: only ever log into work or personal or groups by itself (not very productive);
  • Option 2: 2 browser approach
    • Run the personal and work applications in multiple tabs in browser #1 (or a site specific browser)
    • Run the Groups application with the new userid ID in browser #2 (or a dedicated site specific browser)
  • Option 3: 3 Site specific browsers
    • Create a site specific browser for each of these and keep them completely siloed:
      • Personal Google apps
      • Personal/Corporate Groups
      • Corporate Apps only

Will any of this ever be resolved and will Groups ever be a full Google Apps for Business application? I don’t know. But until that time comes, this will let you and your company be productive. Enjoy!

I wanted something that was cross-platform, super simple to use, inexpensive to use long-term for a 5 person team, and ideally that would give direct drive mapping to the desktop of a Mac or a PC so you could simply connect to it like a file-server, and I also wanted something that could scale up to a decent size (most file servers have a 500GB drive on them now at the very least).

I decided to check out Egnyte, Box.net, and GetDropBox.com and here are the results:

Are there others?

Stay away from JungleDisk. Their site is awful and they make you register with Amazon Payment service in order to use them and the user experience is just a total nightmare. Then for billing issues, you have to visit both sites. They really needed to integrate the payment system better.

Nomadesk is a new entrant in the field but they’re PC only so I never looked at them but they are going to reach out to me once they get their Mac stuff in place.

My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great ideas have you found to tame the chaos?

Current view:

And here’s the resulting Venn diagram of how my stuff just DOESN’T stay connected in one large meaningful (and simple) way.

Will somebody fix this please? It’s only going to get worse. I’d happily pay somebody a monthly fee to manage all of this, keep it clean and de-duped, analyze my email to capture email and phone number changes, and let me never think about this ever ever again.

And Skype team: WTF are you doing way out there in space?

Before Plaxo Pulse

Once I got through the slightly hard to use website to actually pay Plaxo for a premium account (there is a 15 day trial offer BTW), I managed to get Premium services turned on. The process to get there was not pretty and looked like this:

• try to find Plaxo pulse on Plaxo site  – if I didn’t already know about it, I never would have looked;
• find their “premium service” link buried in a page
• sign up for premium service
• connect blog
• connect Twitter
• connect Facebook (this took 5 tries ande vetnaully I gave up and tried it in Safari instead of Firefox and it finally worked.)
• download and run sync tool for Mac OS X – it works;
• de-dupe contacts – also seemed to work;
• connect personal Gmail account – FAIL 3x
• export all Gmail contacts into vCard format and import into Address Book
• sync up to Plaxo
• de-dupe again
• try to resync to Google now; it now works since there are no Google contacts…but the sync is one way so nothing goes up to Google. Argh.
• Download and use A to G to export Address Book enties into a file that Google can parse;
• Re-run de-dupe. It works.
• Contact syncing to personal Gmail is also syncing
• Just for the heck of it, attach old unused MSN account. It too syncs up.
• Add in work client A’s Google Contacts (again, one-way sync only.)
• turned off the broken Apple Address Book sync connection to Google contacts

Now I have this:

After Plaxo Pulse

Things I’ve noticed:

• Plaxo doesn’t know what it is as a company;
• They have some amazing technology. If they had a focused team leading it, I think they could stop being so confused about their identity and just be the one player in the system that keeps all this crap conneted properly. But it doesn’t seem like it’s in their DNA.
• Their de-duper tool looks way better than the Address Book built-in version.
• They have a really cool thingy that appears in Mail.app that tells you when somebody is not in your Address Book. Apple should have added this about 10 years ago. Thank you Plaxo.
• Skype is still an island but I barely use it these days as I mostly live in Facebook and Google chat.

Overall, not the world’s worst process, not the best – probably a 5 on the scale of ugly things you really want to avoid. But it probably went faster because I have done about 1000 contact and calendar import and exports for other systems ver the years so I get the process and understand sync chains well.

But so far it doesn’t seem to have caused a new singularity or black hole to come into being. Good first step. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: June 2, 2009

• Plaxo Pulse’s sync is only one way from Google contacts into Address Book and that’s useless so I’ve added Spanning Sync back into the mix.
• Also Plaxo had (but then abandoned) LinkedIn sync – a feature I had originally wanted  but now it’s dead and gone.
• So with Spanning Sync managing my Address Book <–> Google Contacts and hopefully not borking them too much (I had problems with Spanning syn in the past), Plaxo is now relegated to just keeping my Facebook contacts and status updates in sync and doing more powerful de-duping than Mac’s Address Book.

It now looks like this, (adding in calendars and IM networks):

It remains to be seen whether Plaxo is worthwhile. I’m fine with losing access to my old MSN account and if at the end of the day it’s just a $65/year de-duper, I’ll pass.

Thanks Brendon for making me look at Spanning Sync again. I had left it when Apple and Google built their sync tool…which then stopped working. Hopefully SS will do the trick.

This seems like an awful lot of complexity. I may just turn off all of my networks and become Amish.

Update: September 8, 2009: Goodbye Plaxo

I finally killed Plaxo today. I had duped my mac into another machine and booted it and Plaxo went all nuts trying to sync, then resync all of the contacts and it was just annoying enough that I uninstalled it on the cloned machine, questioned the entire value of Plaxo, and uninstalled it on my primary computer and then deleted my account. Goodbye Plaxo. I wish I had gotten more value out of that $65USD. That was a hard lesson.

They asked me for my reasons for leaving. I only had a minute so I jotted down as many as I could:
- it adds no value
- most of my friends are not in it
- I don’t need or want another social network aggregator;
- Comcast should not have bought you
- your product management team doesn’t know what the hell you’re building
- your annual licensing model is stupid (it should be monthly)
- your development stalled out a LONG time ago
- your de-duper isn’t really that much better than just doing it in Address Book after all.

Good bye Plaxo.

In the relatively short era of online storage, there has been no shortage of sturm und drang . As with all nascent markets, venture capital flooded in, funding many look-a-like companies with little differentiation and many have struggled to truly understand their customer’s needs and differentiate their offerings to sustain themselves over time. The result has been entertaining to say the least. It has been a ghoulish tale of ghosts, zombies, rumors, theft, deceit, and opportunity.

Back in 2007, you had Google’s GDrive still being rumoured but also being 18 months late , feisty startup Mozy winning a large scale contract from GE , ElephantDrive launched and Box.net partnered with Zoho. Fabrik raised another $24.9M, Microsoft released Windows Live SkyDrive and presenter Egnyte was telling the world that they were KM2.0 providers (remember KM 2.0?), and TechCrunch started to wonder where GDrive was (for the first but not the last time.) Nirvanix also made some waves as they released their beta , Iron Mountain – one of the largest document repository companies weighed into the market with a hybrid offering and the Wall Street Journal again warned us of the imminent arrival of GDrive. But it was not to be.

2008 had enough drama for a Michael Lewis novel. Omnidrive staggered around the edge of the deadpool like a zombie with his head still attached by a strand, and then failed again . Five months later, the CEO was still proclaiming “We’re not dead yet.” It was like the scene from Monty Python of the body collectors (see 1:02 to hear Omnidrive’s CEO say: “I think I’ll go for a walk.”)

Troubles also plagued DivShare which flew close to the deadpool before landing on the auction block back in 2007, then managed to have a security breach where user data was divulged from a “malicious user” attack (why on earth was that data available to a malicious user??), but which would go on to quietly acquire “over a million registered users” and become profitable before selling to a new set of owners over at 3Sixty in early ’09.

Still back in 2008, The big guys jumped into the fray with EMC picking up the 1990s darling Iomega (remember the 128MB iomega zip disks?) for $213M,  and Symantec buying SwapDrive for $123M, while AOL was busy shuttering a number of services including their XDrive . There were some incredible successes as well with Carbonite’s CEO taunting the market gods by bragging about their “26 consecutive months of double digit month-over-month revenue growth” and Box.net winning the online storage vendor slot for Dell’s netbook strategy.

With the economic storm in full swing and the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States past, the comedic relief ensued. The now annual rumors of GDrive’s “very near release” made the rounds for the fourth year in a row although few people are falling for that old saw anymore. Yahoo tripped, fell, and lost its Briefcase on the way to work. And perhaps as a statement on the industry’s silliness as a whole, even Dilbert jumped into the market with Dilbertfiles.com. I mean, you almost couldn’t even write that if you tried.

In the births and deaths section of the news this year, Backblaze launched what seems to be the world’s simplest backup service while HP’s Upline went offline for good, going out in a blaze of glory by refunding its users all payments that had been made to the short-lived service. In the wedding announcements, Lacie merged with Caleido AG , creators of Wuala’s online storage system.

I need a simple but powerful online file-server for a small workgroup. I have tested out JungleDisk and found it infuriatingly awful and can’t recommend it at all (to the point that I refuse to link to them). Next up are Dropbox, Egnyte, Box.net and Mozy Pro. I’ll let you know what I find. Or if you have experience with any of them, drop me a note at troy at troyangrignon dot com or leave a comment here.

There was an even more important piece of news buried in the story though. As the old journalists used to say, “Don’t bury the lead!” Google finally adapted and released a critical piece of technology from their acquisition of Positin that allows corporations to use their existing Active Directory systems (their lists of users and groups and permissions) for Google Apps. Before this Google Apps Directory Sync tool was released, the adoption barrier was so huge that there was no real way for a company to adopt Google Apps. The downstream permissioning nightmares that come with having Google Apps disconnected from your Directory Service are horrendous.

The long and short of this is that with that AD Sync tool now in place, Google has removed one more MAJOR barrier to adoption to large enterprises. Nice work Google Enterprise & Postini Team!

This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media customers who are buying cloud services to let you see for yourself what the cloud REALLY MEANS…

What is Cloud Computing?

We have a very simple but broad definition of cloud computing:

Applications, services, platforms, or infrastructure that are highly abstracted or virtualized, web service enabled, able to be automatically provisioned, and generally charged on a pay-as-you-go model.

As the market evolves, we predict that there will be a number of clouds from a variety of vendors with a range of performance characteristics. They will vary by location, security, pricing models, supported “stacks”, degree of regulatory compliance, location, service level agreements, and many other dimensions.

Benefits of cloud computing

The key benefits of cloud computing are that it allows organizations to:

• shift up-front capital expenditures to ongoing operational costs which can allow businesses to provision more quickly or scale faster than if they had to deploy capital;
• provision infrastructure more quickly than by their traditional infrastructure purchasing and provisioning model;
• dynamically match computing capacity to demand more accurately, which means less wasted resources in low-traffic times, and less downtime during high-traffic times;
• test ideas with a lower threshold by deploying test environments in the cloud and then shutting them down when not in use;
• scale up to computing capacities that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way cost-effectively;
• decrease the time-to-value of new IT projects because of the faster provisioning and lower costs.

In short, it allows organizations to do more, faster, with less resources. In some cases, it allows organizations to do things they could never have dreamed of doing before. 

Current Issues with Cloud Computing

It is still early days for this next generation of computing. There are many issues to work through including: security; performance; vendor lock-in; cloud interoperability;  stack selectivity (only certain clouds will support certain technology stacks); cross-cloud portability, administration, and management; regulatory compliance (current clouds do not comply with many regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, data protection regulation or others), and even common metering and billing models.

We believe that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify and fill those gaps by picking components of the stack and bringing them forward into this new era and we’re hand-picking the best ones to tell their story on April 24!

Early Bird Tickets are going fast. Register to be the first to meet and do deals with these innovators.

Does anybody still doubt that internet video is here to stay? I don’t.

I’m at Startonomics today, put on by Dealmaker Media. I’ll be posting updates to this over the course of the day.

Live stream is here:

My notes and editorial comments are in [square brackets.]

These are DRAFT NOTES. Better versions coming after the conference, complete with images.

MORNING SESSION:

Dave McClure, 500 hats

Image via CrunchBase

• Metrics
  • ultimately, lead through to sale conversion and total return are the keys.
    • Many people pay attention to uniques at the top of the funnel and $ at the bottom. That’ s okay, but look at the conversion steps INSIDE there.
• Be a pirate who says “AARRR” – Acquisition, Activation, Referral, Retention, Revenue
• Typical failures:
  • business plans are bullshit
  • revenue projections are hockety stick delusions
  • features don’t matter; usability and MEASURED conversion matters
  • Offline PR, “Big-bang launches” are stupid and expensive. In general, offline to online conversion is 100:1 or greater (i.e. it’s very weak.)
  • Investors don’t know your business any Better than you do. Their opinions are interesting but don’t change your plan because they have an opinion.
• Be Bold. Be Humble.
  • 20% inspiration; 80% perspiration
  • Be audacious but also creative
  • Be humble and be analytically rigorous
• What matters?
  • passion for problem
  • hypothesis of cutosmre lifecycle
  • 1 page business model (proiritized list of users and conversion)
  • critical, few actionalble metrics and a dashboard of MEASURED user behaviour
  • 1 page marketing plan (channels & campaigns * (volume, cost, conv%)
  • voleocity of (product execution + cycle time of Testing) * Iteration rate
    • Speed is the advantage, not IP defense
• What’s my business model?
  • how you get users
  • how you drive usage
  • How you make money profitably short and long term
• which metrics?
  • few metrics and you can use them to make decisions
  • hypothesize customer lifecycle
• 1 page business model:
  • what TYPES of people use your tool?
    • visitor?
    • contributor?
    • distributor?
  • what ACTIONS could they take to help YOU or THEM?
  • Look at the TeachStreet dashboard that shows where they are strong and where they are weak (see slide)
• What features and why? When are you done? When do you remove them?
  • use conversion to guide
  • (use evidence-based decision-making, not “I like…” or “he likes…” or “I think…”)
  • easy to find, fun, useful, unique features THAT INCREASE CONVERSION are the only things that should go in.
  • spend 80% of your time on HYPOTHESIS CORRECTION, not on feature development.
  • [This was the key take-away for me. I see most teams focusing on arguing about features, not arguing about their hypothesis and then testing it against market feedback.]
  • Most companies are doing 80% feature development with no A/B testing and feedback loop
  • The ONLY pupose is to move users from lower to higher value states.
  • Features are ways to make that value leap happen faster. That’s it.
• Check out KissMetrics for product planning metrics tools
• Marketing and sales
  • move your marketing from vague to highly rigoroous
  • you want to increase volume, decrease cost, and increase conversion rates. That’s it
  • design & test multiple marketing channels  campaigns
  • focus on best peformaing channels and tehme s
  • optimize for conversion  to target CTAs
  • (Look for SLIDE: Example Marketing channels)
• One step at a time:
  • Make a good product: activation & retention
  • Market the product: Acquisition & Referral
    • market once you get your product to an 8/10
  • Make Money: Revenue & Profitability
  • [I think it's interesting that he's still using Build...then market...then sell, and not  the sell first, build second model which is safer, following the Dell Model or the Cisco Sale model.]

Dan Olsen, CEO & founder, YourVersion – Designing the DNA of a Killer App

• I led product for Intuit and for Friendster
• Dan helped Friendster drive massive traffic gains that they were never able to recover fro
• How to integrate metrics & optimization into your process
  • Plan
    • business objectives
    • product objectives
    • prioritized features list (we use a one page google sheet)
    • requirements for the feature
    • scope of the feature that feeds back to the prioritized features list
    • code
    • test
    • launch
    • track metrics and user feedback to then loop back into biz objectives, product objectives, and product requirements
  • Design
  • Develop
  • Optimize
    • measure metric
    • analyze the metric
    • identify top opportunnities to improve
    • design and develop the enhncement
    • launch the enhancement
    • measure the mtric (repeat
    • The value is in the learning of market, customer, domain, usability
    • The faster you iterate this cycle, the faster you learn
• Using metrics to optimize value creation
  • for you
    • “given current reality, how do we optimize the busines results subject to our resource constraints?”
    • (grab his slides – missed all of this.)
    • Take-aways:
      • you want to track things over time DAILY
      • you want to track them visually
      • create ratios from primary metrics so that you’re not fooled by volume changes. It also allows you to compare to other sites.
      • (inserrt his slide of sign up page metrics)
    • “using metrics to optimize the equiation of your business”
      • sniper shot – least effort for maximal gain/result
      • [YES!!}
    • optiming metrics for viral loop:
      • active users
      • invite
      • prospective users click
      • registration
      • succeed
      • Lop again
      • (grab this slide)
    • grab the maximum upside potentio of a metric slide. it is KEY here.
      • see third metric (there is no upper boundary of 100% (because it's how many invitations can they send?)
      • see the "doubling number of invitations sent" slide)
  • for your custsomers
    • customer value =
      • satisfies customer needs (It is NOT ABOUT FEATURES)
      • is easy to use
      • has a good price
      • is better than alternatives
    • cust value = customer stisfaction
    • not fuzzy:
      • # of users
      • frequency of use
      • At a bare minimum, track those.
    • understanding user needs and satisfaction:
      • quantitative: site analytics, usage metrics, surveys
      • Qualitative: support emailos, usability sessions (best)
    • Value Proposition:
      • Which benefits are most imporant?
      • How well does it deliver?
      • (grab this slide/table)
    • Analyzing product ideas ROI
      • see related slide/graph
      • this is based on your prioritiezed feature list
    • UI Design iceberg
      • [HA! I have been using this model all along and didn't realize that asomebody had this awesome graphic.]
      • www.jjg.net – Elements of user experience chart from Jesse James Garrett
    • Put Key conversation actions above the fold.
      • Grab chart from clicktale.com
      • Most people are running at 768 pixels
      • The chrome steals 170 pixels off the top
      • leaving you 600 pixels.
    • Case study: Intuit account signup process redesign
      • we had to ask lots of questions for legal reasons
      • we tracked new and existing signins.
      • we got a 37% improvement in conversion rates
  • SUMMARY
    • define success for your customer and your business
  • Other resources:
    • slideshare product requirements doc from web 2.0 exp
  • CONTACT:
    • dan@yourversion.com
  • QUESTIONS
    • long MRD and PRD docs are over;
    • go with light weight wiki docs

Startup Scalability Strategies, Frank Mashraqi

• Frank is the expert outside of MySQL;
• spending too much is wrong
• not worrying aobut iss is also wrongwhat to measure?
• nobody knows what cloud computing is; it’s very fuzzy
• Agenda
  • what to focus on?
    • distribution of data: how is it distributed?
      • how many servers?
      • what percent of data per server?
      • how many connections per shared/ partition?
      • divde the data up into multile databases or shareds
      • MOST People don’t have a clue how to distribute data. They know that they HAVE to do it, they just don’t know how.
        • a client that seaparated data by username first letter found that 15% of usres start userenames with M. So that was a bad distribution strategy
    • utilization
      • how well are your resrouces being utilitzed:
        • IO wait
        • threads
        • CPU
        • queries
        • disk utilization
        • cache utilization
        • disk saturation
        • memory
        • cache hit
        • cache prunes
        • thread thrashing
        • connections per shared
        • swap utilliztion
        • threads running
        • exceeding high or low water marks
        • growth rate
        • connections usage
      • performance:
        • constant access time is the issue
        • if you focus on performance, you may only buy yourself a bit of time, but then growth hits and you hit the same issues and now it’s HARDER to maintain performance.
      • what’s the difference?
        • performance is not high availability which  is not scalability
        • scalability is the easiest thing to implement.
        • performance = ability to proces s or execute a task comapred to time and resources used
        • HA = ability to ensure certain degree of operational continuity – expensive!
        • scalability: ability to handle growing amounts of traffic in a graceful manner or ability to be easily enlarged
      • Pick any two of these – not all three.
        • consistency:
          • choose this if you don’t care about 24×7 or accomodating high traffic
          • forget about HA and scalability
        • availability: if you need it up 24×7
        • Partition tolerance: great for high-traffic scalable websites;
      • Vertical or Horizontal
        • Vertical: scaling up
        • add resources to a node (more ram or faster processor
        • can be more than the price of the gain (double fast server might cost more than 2x)
      • Horizontal (scaling out)
        • adding more nodes
        • cost efficient
        • increased mgmt complexity
        • more complex prlgramming model
        • throughput and latency between nodes.
        • good for linear scalability
        • considered more complex and harder to do so many people aboid it.
        • This is no longer really true and there are ways to do this from day one.
        • [One of my clients, WorkHabit,  is helping their customers do this from DAY ONE - avoiding the vertical model entirely.]
  • which way to go?
    • vertical or horizontal
  • how to partitiion?
    • make sure that your aplication does not care about partitioning;
    • abstract / isolate that from the application
    • (grab the slide here)
  • how to balance?
    • not that difficult if you start with the right foundation
    • use agile methodologies
    • technical debt is expensive (technicla debt is stuff you put off to do “later”)
    • technical mortage is a killer
    • once you have a good foundation layer, you can build on it.
    • there are frameworks for Jave for example like HiveDB that you can build on.
    • Hire the right people who know those frameworks so that you can build correctly from the sstart
  • before and after
    • what dto do early
      • lay the right foundation
      • set up the ability shard/partition
      • decouple components
      • effectivevely cache
      • have a plan in place
    • what can wait until after things start to grow?
      • now focus on micro optimization
      • acaquiring and upgrading hardware
      • performance  optimization s and OS tuning
      • (get bullet 5)
      • (get bullet 6)
  • who to hire?
    • Get the best architect you can find who can help you build the correct foundation
    • find the libraries you can scale on
    • Developing with Hibernate for example, you can move it to Hibernate Charge and then make it scalable very quickly and easily.
    • But if your people don’t know this, then they’ll hurt you.
    • You need people who know how to build for scale from the beginning with the correct frameworks.
  • Best practices
    • go asyncronous
    • Synchronous processes KILL scalability – they requrie you to scale VERY expensively
    • go stateless
    • The Best IO is NO IO – serve from memory, not disk
    • decouple as much as possible
    • build using APIs; easy to scale development that way
  • how to kill your project
    • focusing too much on performance up front
    • instead, ensure that you are hiring the right people, building the right foundation, the right partitiioning scheme
  • can I offload scalability?
    • most clouds are proprietary, that’s not the answer and often you still end up having to do all the hard work of laying the correct foundation anyway.
    • Be cautious with this approach.
  • SUMMARY:
    • go horizontal
    • go asycnhronous
    • architect once up front
    • choose two of consistency, availability, and
  • RESOURCES
    • http://mashraqi.com/2008/09/startonomics-startup-scalability.html
    • http://mashraqui.com
    • http://twitter.com/mashraqi
    • fmashraqi@yahoo.com
  • QUESTIONS:
    • CDN? Play the top vendors – you can get them down 40% off list
    • Generally loook for what suits your budget; Use them for sure to offload content;

Amy Jo Kim, Putting the Fun into Functional

• Gaming knowledge can be leveraged in your social media sites;
• You want to go after primal response patterns. The most important type of validation is variable reinforcement – i.e. reinforcement that varies by size and duration. Reward people (or rats or other animals) and they will be more addicted.
• To drive addiction, apply the following five gaming mechanics (or some of them.)
  • COLLECT: Let people “collect stuff” [reminds me of George Carlin's "stuff and shit" talk]
  • POINTS: (many different ways to accrue points and see leaderboards.
    • System Points: assigned by the software
    • Social points: given by other players to each other; eBay’s reputation system fits into this category.
  • FEEDBACK: Bejewelled gives you great feedback on how the game is going;
  • EXCHANGES: a transaction. This is like the giving of gifts in Facebook. It has a back and forth flow.If you can add an exchange between the person and the software or the person and another person.
    • Explicit: both people are involved in the transaction. I want to be your friend. They have to accept the invitation.
    • Implicit are where there is an opening for others to engage but they don’t have to. Comments and wallposts are great examples of this. Other users don’t have to respond to the comment.
  • CUSTOMIZATION: Let people create custom everything; UI; feeeds; blocks of content.
• We just built a new game that we’re releasing soon:
  • people can upload their photos and create games from them.
  • we built awards that people can collect;
  • you can achieve points from creating good games, from playing a lot of games, any other dimensions.
  • There are muliple ways to achieve leaderboard status.
  • [Makes me wonder about Crossfit. We use a leaderboard and even though I'm in good shape, I'm almost never on that damned board! Would I "feel better" if I was hitting a different board? I know that when I used to adventure race, my teams would often win the "team spirit awards'" but not the "top 3 finisher award. And we felt awesome about that because we were recognized for somethihng that was a different dimension of importance. When I was on the administration side of those races, I really enjoyed handing out those awards.]
  • The gaming site built in strong communication with the player;
  • We let people customize their world…but not entirely. We insert other people into their friend list for  example so that they can see things serendipitously.
• CONTACT:
  • amyjokim@gmail.com
  • Amyjokim (Twitter)
  • Shufflebrain (Facebook game);www.shufflebrain.com
• QUESTION:
  • Q: How do you handle different types of audience? Game players vs. non-game players.
  • A: Give them the option of opting out of the gaming system.

Introduction: from Dave McClure:

• the two biggest lacking areas in Web 2.0 are marketing and design; The limiting factor is NOT engineering ability.
• [Yes...totally agree.]

Understanding Designers; Erika Hall, Mule Design; Jeffrey Veen, Small Batch, Inc.

• They’re not separate; they’re integrated
  • [this is like Rocketbuilder's Integrated Marketing & Sales program that suggests that those are unified disciplines that are fully integrated. Very interesting corollary.]
• Design is not something you “sprinkle on”
  • it isn’t fairy dust
  • “jazzing up your site” is useeless;
• Start with goals, timeframes, and constraints;
  • goal: business goal drives design goal
• Roles/Hats:
  • there are really a bunch of different roles:
  • roles include:
    • Design strategist
    • visual designer <– this is the person who most people think of as “the designer”
    • information architect
    • Interaction designer
      • A failure in interaction design can not be covered over by visual design.
      • Bad ID =
      • You can’t save that with colour and type
    • Sometimes people batch those up into one thing (ID/IA)
    • Writer
  • Frameworks are so powerful now, you can design/build/review LIVE;
  • documentation is a function of team size and separation;
  • If they wrok side by side, they they can iterate quickly
  • go for the lightest weight documentation you can afford given your team size and separation;
  • Remember that language is part of your design!
    • [I have seen great cases of this where sites changed words from "post to blog" to "ask a question" or from "forum" to "discussion group"
• Case study: Measure Map
  • [I really liked the visual interface that Jeff discussed.]
• Design flaws
  • No goals
  • subjective (non-qualified users) using “gut feelings”
• SUMMARY
  • Design is making and documenting decisions about the experience of your audience.
  • It required knowledge, skills, and thoughtful feedback.
  • It works when you are clear on our expectations, priorities, and goals.

Ted Rheingold, Dogster:

• We’re at 3M in revenue this year;
• First things first:
  • Do people use yoru product right from the beginning?
  • Are happy customer creating new happy customers?
  • [i.e. don't waste time on metrics when your overall volume is irrelevant!]
• Objectives and Key Results:
  • OKRs must be deetermined in advance
  • OKR’s will show transfrmative growth (revenue, users, partners, etc.)
  • “The CEO often dreams something up and then sets the team to work on something but there are no organizational goals attached.”
• Get clear on your Key performance indicators:
  • define the metrics that define and measure progress toward organizational goals (OKRs)
  • KPIs are often ratios
  • KPIs can and will change over time, do conscientiously
  • Everything else i sinfo-porn
  • “don’t get sucked into the time vortex of looking at all of thiss information.”
• “So what?” / Actionability
  • Put EVERYTHING through the So What test?
  • Don’t do anything rfor 25% gain. Shoot for 10% minimum gains.
  • Keep putting effort only towards things that have real results.
  • If you have an idea that you can’t
  • Focus on REAL results.
  • I spent  months doubling adsense revenue (from $1500 to $3000) with a 100K burn rate. WHO CARES?
  • Stop working on the low-value stuff. Go for 10x gains, not 10% gains.
  • [I love this. It follows the Pena model. Go for quantum leaps, not incremental arithmetic growth]
• Testing
  • It’s like sex education – everybody says they’ll do it. Nobody actually does it.
  • Test, test, test
  • A/B – test
  • YOu don’t understand your customers and they don’t either and can’t tell you.
  • try crazy testing methodologies (multivariate testing, click-desnsity, user experience)
  • Watch people using your product. It is the only place where you can collect data from people using your site.
    • iIt’s very expensive and complicated and $25K sticker shock.
    • You can do it on the cheap though.
    • Do not test your mother or friends
    • Pay people $50; present them a script; have them look at your site and tell you what they’re thinking.
  • [Jay Abraham is a huge fan of testing for absolutely everything that a business does in all dimensions. So does Tim Ferriss.}
• SUMMARY
  • Be disciplined
  • Have a clear line of sight
  • Minimize stats review
  • Fight info-porn!
  • Do not dilute responsibility among too many stakeholders
  • test that your data is sound.
• Case study: DOGSTER used SEM/campaigns
  • We ran a campaign and used the wrong metrics
  • Wrote it on a blog entry at startonomics here
  • Marketing initiative: Feb 2007
  • We went on a massive customer acquisition binge (hooray - we have all these new customers!)
  • ...and then realized that holy crap, we increased the # of customers but didn't realize that we drove down the value per customer from $4 to $0.10. We
  • [Jay Abraham uses a great model: NumOfCust * ValuePerTransaction * NumberOfAvgTransactionsTotal
  • We found out two things:
    • advertisers only care about uniques
    • people just want infomation, not to set up dog page so we moved to a more heavy information centric site;
      • [I like this because it follows the pattern of expanding your TAM (total addressable market) by broadening the possible number of users;]
• Favourite resoources
  • Web Analytics – Avinash Kaushik
  • Advanced Web Metrics – Brian Clifton
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Trends
  • Adwords Keyword tool
  • google website optimizer (A/B multivariate)
  • AWStats (fee serever side webstats)
  • CrazyEgg (click tracking heat maps)
  • Kissmetrics (social space analytics
  • silverback (experience testing)
• Question: what about partnerships?
  • Answer: be cautious with partnerships. They can suck a lot of time out of your business.
  • Weigh their requests carefully againsta all other investments on the same ROI basis as we discussed above.

Notes from Dave:

• For building MINT, we did a lot of landing page and A/B testing before we did product dvelopment.
• [This fits well with the Tim Ferriss model of advertise first to test the buy rates, and then build only the products that get radical uptake.]

LUNCH