(really) entrepreneureal

As much as I often get to help clients determine the best Web 2.0 strategy for their needs, my experience with promoting VotetheQuote.com just goes to show that what goes in one ear really does come out the other…

The scoop:

VotetheQuote.com is a side project of mine that I started with my room mate, Etan (who you can find here).   We initially wanted something that was easy to produce and would be easy to disseminate – a web-based voting platform seemed liked the perfect idea, especially given the proximity of the presidential elections.

As it turns out, Etan and I work pretty well together, and the research, design and prototyping phases went by smoothly.  We had a brief moment of panic when I discovered Google Lab’s InQuotes project, but since we have what we believe to be an inherently more engaging product, the worry subsided quickly.

However, we started running into problems when it came time to promote the finished product (or beta version, anyway), and were faced with some important questions: What’s the best way to get it out there? How much lead time do we need?  What is the best strategy for minimum input (from us) and maximum output (ie: users and media coverage)?  We ended up mixing the old with the new: a traditional email campaign to friends with a request to send the link onward, as well as some strategic comment-placing on political and news blogs, and some minor activity on some popular social networks.

Initial response got us excited – just over 120 unique I.P. hits in one day! It was as if we were on the path to becoming the next Facebook (forgetting that Fb has over 20 billion hits a month), and life seemed good.  To supplement our outreach over the next few days, I created a Facebook Cause and created entries on Digg and StumbleUpon.  On paper, at least, it seemed as if we were golden.

On paper.

It seems that I (and I say “I” because Etan can weigh in on this himself!) forgot the fundamental rule of networking and spreading ideas on the social web: finding and using the right tools is less than 10% of the battle – the rest is getting other people to use them (or, indeed, choosing tools that people already use).  So while the ingredients for a rocking viral idea were there – a Facebook cause, bookmarking articles, blog comments and articles, even a good search rating on Google – and the chefs were ready (me and Etan)… the restaurant, as it were, remained empty.

Here we are, 2 weeks in (with one week to go), and we’ve barely crested 500 unique hits.  500.  From an exciting growth curve to flatline in precisely 3 days.  And what did we learn?

1. If using the social web to spread an idea (even if it’s a good one), give yourself enough lead time.

Aiming for hundreds of thousands of hits (which are the figures we dreamed of, albeit foolishly) with barely three weeks time to build traffic isn’t just overambitious – it’s ludicrous.  Save a Black Swan, there’s no way that the web moves that quickly, even in this day and age of the billion page view month.

2. Don’t forget that your friends are friends – not your personal marketing reps.

It’s OK to send an email to your friends, asking them to check out a site.  It’s even OK to hit up these same friends with a request to join a Facebook cause/group, or visit a MySpace page.  What’s not OK is using these friends like a marketing rubber band – keep coming back too often and they will break, which is bad for everyone.  People have other things to do beyond forwarding your emails, and trust me, they don’t care about your Google Analytics stats. Period.

3. Be persistent.

It’s easy to think that with a social web success story appearing every day, you’ll hit the jackpot and win it big.  Take a site like TriplePundit.com, which went from 0 to 150,000 readers a month in under a year.  It’s convenient to forget that one of the core team at TriplePundit, Nick Aster, was also the co-founder of Treehugger.com (now owned by the Discovery Channel) and is currently media architect at MotherJones – Nick couldn’t have had enough eyeballs on him if he tried, and it’s no accident that quite a few of them followed him over to TP.  Nick put in the time at Treehugger to build up a loyal following, and there’s no reason to think that you don’t have to do the same.

And finally:

4. Be positive.

Not every social web project is meant to be.  Maybe it was bad timing, maybe it was simply a bad idea – in any case, it’s a necessary step toward learning what works, what doesn’t, and how to use the web to affect change in the world.

Rock on.

*Case in point about how ideas germinate (“Ideal Ideation”) and develop: the to-and-fro, both on- and off-line with Etan over at eL has got me thinking big time about Guerrilla Design and design process more generally.  So Hear Hear! to a great conversation!!*

Etan previously mentioned how ideal R&D includes customers in the design and development process.  Too often products and services are created in a boardroom somewhere, or with minimal end-user input, and then companies are surprised when returns, market share, or general feedback are less than stellar.

While incorporating user-input into the R&D process is certainly a step in the right direction, I think it points out something glaringly obvious:

“The R&D process as we know it, even including user input, is broken.”

Let me explain.

The typical design process “supply chain” of a given product or process looks like this:

This is fine if A. products are scarce, and B. customers aren’t accustomed to providing feedback.  However, in the age of “is that it?” (thanks Seth), products fight for shelf space and eyeballs while customers have the luxury of being able to jump from product to product and brand to brand, because an unresponsive brand is a dead brand – and easily replaceable.   How, then, should the R&D design process be reconfigured to take into account this state of affairs?  Well, it should probably look like this:

This is important for a number of reasons:

1. It takes R&D out from the back warehouse/lab bench/silo and puts it front and center.  A department whose responsibilities cover the ENTIRE value supply chain can hardly play second fiddle, can it?

2. This represents a clear shift in how a company interacts with its customer.  Sure, user research up front is useful (and necessary), but part of attracting and keeping customers is making them feel like they are all part of a special focus group.  In that sense, then, every customer feels part of the “tribe“.

Of course, companies will need to figure out the best ways to re-engage and interact with customers on an ongoing basis, which will certainly require some creative thinking.  We need to move toward on-the-spot barcode scanner by mobile phone (for product information and reviews) rather than buried 1-800 number, and then I know we’ll be on the right track.

Thanks to Etan over at eL for talking a bit more about Guerrilla Design.  As a concept it is by no means ours at all, especially since Jay Levinson started messing around with guerrilla marketing way back when.  Interestingly, both guerrilla marketing and guerrilla design are intended to better sell something – a product, a service, a person; the only difference is that one is initiated on behalf of the seller (marketing), while the other is a consumer-initiated effort (design).

I definitely don’t see GD as a negative reaction on the part of consumers, but more of a positive reaction to a negative/flawed interaction.  Sad as it is, if I feel the path of least resistance (and let’s be honest, most fun) to giving feedback to a seller is by subversively re-engineering their intended interaction, then something is definitely broken.

It’s funny how the whole idea of customer/user/consumer feedback is still totally divorced from the average day-to-day interactions of our lives.

We are fully expected to go through our daily lives, living and experiencing unfulfilling and flawed interactions with people, products and services, all without being given an avenue to provide feedback.  Sure, some interactions offer an olive branch – a suggestion box, a 1-800 number, a feedback email buried in the fine print – but most do not, and even then one feels like it’s an afterthought, that companies don’t actually want your input.

Most of the time, however, I don’t feel jipped because a company is trying to pull the wool over my eyes.  I don’t think that the average grocery store goes into business thinking “Thank god we can’t actually get feedback from our shoppers on a regular basis! Let’s bury a suggestion box back near the ice…”, or that a public transit company doesn’t give travelers the chance to let them know that their carpet is dull and dirty, or that the damn beeping noises for every station are too loud; much like Seth Godin says companies should ask our permission for every interaction, companies also need to give themselves permission – make it okay to solicit feedback from us, the customers.

Honestly, if there was some system or service where I could scan my phone or some other device during an interaction – everything from grasping a door handle to buying a coffee – and immediately rate my user experience based on some scale, I think the world would be a much better place.  Even better, imagine a service where users take photos of interactions, and they are uploaded to a Flickr-type system, where users could then describe, rate and provide additional feedback on the interaction; image-identification software would help tag the content, and companies could then seek out user feedback.  Customers get their say, companies get to improve their offering – everybody wins.

But even then, uploading to a service is one too many steps of permission required – what does the future of on-the-spot, specific service agnostic user experience rating look like?

I’m currently involved with building a hybrid venture fund incubator, and it’s turning out to be fascinating.  Last week, I helped a core design team “tell the story” of the incubator – a high level overview of the incubator’s beginnings, the need it will fill, how it will do it, etc.  While relatively vague, the story is meant to boil the concept down to its essence: without the fundamentals of the incubator in place (which to me mean the culture, approach, design methodology, etc.), there’s no point delving into too much detail.

I jump on today’s planning call, with the founder of the organization we’re working with to build the incubator (who was intentionally left out of previous design calls), and the whole thing is turned on its head.  WHAM.  The language isn’t right, the ideas aren’t exactly what the founder wanted, there isn’t enough detail… The fundamental disconnect between the original design team’s story and the founder’s reaction (and vision) couldn’t have been starker.

So what to learn from all this?  For one thing, collaboratively designing a concept that is, by definition, collaborative, isn’t necessarily going to work.  “Collaboration” certainly means something different to everyone, and for some it’s a little one-sided.  So take note, and make expectations clear up front.

Similarly, defining the audience is absolutely necessary.  While the design team had in mind a more general, uninitiated reader, the founder obviously had a more serious, investor type in mind.

And finally, make space for brainstorming.  Going through a document pulled together by a team is not a brainstorm.  Comments or ideas that cannot be explained in under 15 seconds, or require rewriting of large portions should be put into a brainstorm “parking lot” and dealt with later.  There is a time and place for everything, and not confusing things is crucial.

Word.

I’ve recently been reading a lot on tech startups – the successful ones, anyway.  Books like Founders at Work, coverage from magazines such as Inc and FastCompany, and loads of stuff from the web.  If I took all of these anecdotes to heart I certainly couldn’t be faulted for assuming that startups have an amazing growth trajectory that looks something like this:

This is what happens when A. literature focuses only on success cases and B. the cases are the likes of Google, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc, etc.  The picture is definitely skewed, and I feel the pain of budding entrepreneurs the world over who feel they have to have such meteoric growth or risk being judged a failure.  Whatever happened to doing things for curiosity’s sake?  Since when did an IPO or exit strategy become the holy grail of entrepreneurship and startups?

How can we make the space for people to have fun?

I struggle with similar pressure every day.  I spend countless hours daydreaming about the millions of ideas that I want to try out, but have to fight the urge to figure out a business model, or include the words “Series A” in my thought process.

Which is precisely why the idea I’m currently pursuing has absolutely no financial purpose whatsoever; no pot at the end of the rainbow, just a (hopefully) fascinating experience.

Oh, and this is more likely what a true startup trajectory resembles: