Delusional Notions @justingoeres - Tumblr Blog

Live from #ISUM12: Best Practices for Better UX/UI Design in Mobile & Tablets with Sally Benham @saya4

"Live" notes from Internet Summit 2012 in Raleigh, November 7-8, 2012. See all my notes from Internet Summit 2012 by clicking here. Feel free to use these anywhere, but please credit me if you do.

Saya "Sally" Benham. Creative Director, Design 4UX

Designing for the Mobile Mindset

Differences with Desktop People have an emotional connection to their smartphones that they don't have to their desktops.

More interaction. Orientation sensors, direct touch experience for users, etc.

Sequential aspects to interaction: unlock phone, launch app, login to app account, use app, etc. More modal than the desktop – on the desktop you can choose many different paths to accomplish things.

Gathering Data and Understanding your Audience.

Who is my target market? What's your relationship to the target market as designer? Are you part of it or not?

Personas, user interviews, etc.

Data should help us find the point-of-pain relevant to our App design.

Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile App Design

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a design approach in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience accords a wide range of devices without requiring a separate app. (example: bostonglobe.com)

Benefits: design it once, use it on all devices. No app required, only access from browser:

Drawbacks: Requires clever design and implementation to make it work. If you have limited assets and information, RWD is great. But it typically requires a fast internet connection. Images are scaled by browser, so requires more processing power. Also requires compromises in the design because certain interactions don't map well to the rescaled/reflowed content.

Mobile website design means a website specially designed for access on mobile devices. Involves different design and code than normal websites, but allows use of mobile-optimized images and less processing power.

Benefits: Faster because the code is smaller/less complicated.

Drawbacks: Doesn't typically handle specific tools and processes, especially related to eCommerce.

Mobile App Design.

Benefits: Focus on one task: calendar, to-do list, etc. Can enter and store specific personal information related to the task.

Drawbacks: Must be written specifically for a given device. Users need to actively download and install them to begin using. Cost considerably more to develop than typical mobile web development.

Screen Orientation Considerations

Mobile devices are unique in that they have multiple orientations.

Consider the default orientation. For phones this is portrait, but for Win8 table & Blackberry Playbook it's landscape.

If possible, use a design that is flexible and can adjust to either orientation without losing critical information or features.

Navigation Patterns

Navigation is a critical UX design consideration because it's how we tell users how to go and find information and use it.

In general, put control buttons at the bottom of your app and information at the top.

Several different types of navigation:

Search-based. User signs in or inputs a search term, and then goes to the next screen where results are located.

Listed Item Navigation. Very popular, a list of items that can usually be expanded to show more information in the same page.

Vertical Navigation. Not popular in the mobile platform. Navigation buttons located along the side of the screen rather than at the bottom.

Horizontal or Tab Navigation. 90% of web or mobile sites use this. Fixed permanent navigation bar at bottom and then additional navigation items above as necessary.

Scrolling Horizontal Bar. Like horizontal navigation but you can scroll left and right to uncover more navigations.

Image-based Navigation. Similar to icon-based images, but typically not recommended due to loss of detail in images.

Gesture Design. A new approach to smartphone design. Incorporates non-verbal communication where body actions communicate a particular message: pointing, tapping, pitching sliding are known, but apps & sites are starting to use blowing, shaking, arm movement, etc.

Use of Icons

Icons are a quick & easy way to pass information to the user in a concise & simple way. Carries an emotional, non-verbal message.

Icons are a visual coding system. They represent an idea, experience, object, or action. Receivers view the icon and "decode" it to get the message.

International vs. Conventional. Flame, for instance, means "fire" – it's international. Other things, like "Statue of Liberty" might mean "Freedom" in the US but won't translate to other countries.

UX, Microcopy, and Input Design

Remember the UI is very small.

44-pixel rule (88 pixels on retina display) -- size of a fingertip per Apple's guidelines.

Notifications & Microcopy. Inform users about the content they care about and is important to them at the moment it arrives. Example: traffic jam information before the user gets in his car in the morning.

Don't interrupt users for Sales offers. Respect their quiet time. Don't bother them. Don't spam them. They'll remove your app.

Let users personalize their notifications as much as possible. Example: ESPN lets users pick a sport, team, kind of alerts, etc.

Consider push notifications as part of your brand. You should care about language, design, and content. They're simple but you can be creative.

Be short but valuable. Providing relevant, concise information builds trust with the user.

#isum12 #internet summit

Live from #ISUM12: Integrating Social Into Overall Marketing Plans with Joey Sargent

"Live" notes from Internet Summit 2012 in Raleigh, November 7-8, 2012. See all my notes from Internet Summit 2012 by clicking here. Feel free to use these anywhere, but please credit me if you do.

Advanced Social Media

1. Operational Integration

SM should be a core part of all operations. Marketing shouldn't be the only people aware of or using social. If sales is doing something different, that's bad.

2. Cross functional teams.

Social strategy should be a combination of marketing, sales, product, customer service, PR, even legal.

3. Centers of excellence

If you have a cross functional team and you've decided your'e going to be leaders in how to approach social media, then you can create an ELITE TEAM who can educate/train others in how to do it.

This group can also be in charge of managing agency relations, etc., so you don't have multiple strategies coming from different parts of the business.

Creates policies & procedures for social media. Lots of companies – even big ones – still don't have these. It's not about what you CAN'T do, it's also about what you DO want to do. Ways your people can help you on their personal and/or corporate accounts.

If you don't have something in place, someone WILL do something you didn't want, and you'll have to deal with it.

4. C-suite visibility

If you have someone in the c suite who's a champion for social media, they will help persuade others. Especially in regulated industries, people are scared of SM. You need to find the right touch points in the C-suite to overcome those fears. Build those relationships.

5. Metrics: What to measure

It doesn't matter how many tweets you send, it matters how many people re=share them or how people engage with them.

Engagement

Reach

Conversions

Sentiment

How many people does your activity bring to your trade shows, etc.? How many contacts translate into real sales?

ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS

How to take this approach and actually build it into your social media. How to show people that social media is ONE THING but it's more powerful when layered into other activities.

Social & mobile. Made for each other.

Post-PC era. 46% of US adults already own a smartphone. 119 million tables sold in 2012. 25 billion mobile apps downloaded by 2015.

Content is made for sharing:VideoNewsletter ArticlesBlogsWhite Papers

Reuse/Repurpose/Recycle

People may not want your newsletter, but do read your blog. People might not want your eBook but might sit through a webinar. You can take the same basic content and distribute it 50 different ways.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER: Social media mixed with Traditional marketing

The way we consume media is changing, but we don't spend ALL our time online. We still go shopping, we still see billboards and read magazines.

Tradition marketing isn't going to go away, but it is going to change.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER: Social & email

Email and social are completely intertwined. By adding social media icons to email, some companies see as much as 60% increase in reach.

Other social in email:employee email signatures, promo messages, welcome messages for signup ("Thanks for signing up, also follow us on Twitter!"). It's really simple to go through and check to see if you're giving people the opportunity to share things. Lots of people aren't doing that.

Keywords are important not just for SEO but also for social media. Picking the right hashtags, using the right phrases, etc., is critical for positioning your brand even on social feeds.

#isum12 #Internet Summit

Live from #BOS2012: "The Surprising Truth About Moving Others" with @danpink

"Live" notes from Business of Software 2012 in Boston, October 1-3, 2012. See all my notes from Business of Software 2012 by clicking here. Feel free to use these anywhere, but please credit me if you do.

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, Daniel Pink

Core concept of "Drive." There's a key motivator inside organizations, which we call an "if/then" motivator. If/then rewards (controlling contingent rewards) are effective for simple, repetitive tasks. They're ineffective don't work very well for heuristic, conceptual, creative tasks.

About 3 days after I finished the book, I started getting email from readers saying if this is right, then what about salespeople? Isn't sales built entirely on if/then rewards. And my response to that was, "Uh-oh."

We often hear salespeople are coin-operated.

Email from Neil Davidson (Red Gate & BOS!). Noticed his salespeople were gaming the compensation system no matter how complicated he made it. So Neil eliminated commissions. And it worked. Why? Taking away commissions made everyone more collaborative, and it made customers happier. And I realized I knew nothing about this, so I decided to figure it out and write a book!

So let's talk about what I learned in this two-year investigation of sales.

I discovered a word. It makes developers roll their eyes, but business people like it.

"Disintermediation."

This is what's happening to sales people around the planet. In a world of Amazon where we can do our own research and price-shopping, salespeople are going the way of meter maids and telephone operators.

I beg to differ. In the US, we have 15 million people working in sales. That's more than in manufacturing and WAY more than in state or federal government. In 2000, before the rise of disintermediation (i.e. before the penetration of the internet), 1 in 9 Americans work in sales. Today, same proportion. So the "death of the salesman" meme isn't real.

But that's not the big story. The big story is the other 8 out of 9 people. They're in sales, too. They're in what I call "non-sales selling." They spend their day selling in a broader sense, persuading other people to exchange time and other resources for something.

So I had this sense that even though it doesn't involve money changing hands, these 8 out of 9 people really are in sales. So we did a bunch of survey research on 7000 adult full-time US workers. Tried to get a handle on what people actually do at work. Won't cover the full results, but here's one question:

What percentage of your work involves convincing or persuading people to give up something they value (attention,e fort, money, time, etc. ) for something you can offer?

We asked people to set a slider to answer this question. And here's what we found. Average answer was 41%.

This tells us that like it or not, we're all in sales now. A significant proportion of what we all do involves moving other people somehow. And you know what? We don't like it!

Why?

Another question: When you think of "sales" or "selling" what is the first word that comes to mind?

Took the top 25 adjectives and made a word cloud. And the big words were PUSHY, YUCK, UGH, DIFFICULT, SLIMY, ANNOYING, HARD, SLEAZY, etc. 21 had a negative valence, only 4 were positive.

So if we're all in sales, does that mean we all have to be sleazy and manipulative?

We've lived in a world where there was an information asymmetry between seller and buyer. What are the two words of latin most Americans know? Caveat Emptor.

But that asymmetry is ending at a rate that's pretty mind-boggling.

It's harder to get hoodwinked when I'm buying on equal information terms. Or if I do get hoodwinked, I can tell people. So in this world of information symmetry, the new situation is Caveat Venditor. Seller Beware.

It's not a world that is different in degree; it's different in kind. You can still take the smarmy low road in sales, but you're not going to get very far. It forces people to the high road.

So if this is true, that we're all in sales but sales isn't what it used to be, how do we do it?

We went to the social sciences and we identified 3 key qualities that describe how to be in the new world.

They're the new ABCs:

Attunement: the ability to take another's perspective.

Buoyancy: what do you do before and during an encounter to avoid being emotionally sunk?

Clarity: ability to cut through the muck in complex situations.

Attunement

Is largely about perspective taking, but plays by a peculiar set of laws.

Experiments on perspective taking:

Experiment 1: Two groups of people. In one, researchers induced feelings of power. In the other they induced lack of power. Then they did the "draw an E on your forehead test." High power participants were three times as likely as low power participants to draw a self-oriented E. The higher power they had, the less inclined they were to take the "other" vantage point. Insufficient adjustment to an outside vantage point.

Law 1: Increase your power by reducing it. We have this notion that sales is about dominance, but it turns out it's not.

Experiment 2: Simulation of a tough negotiation. 1/3 were told to imagine what the other side was feeling, 1/3 were told to imagine what the other side was thinking. Last 1/3 was control group. Result: Best group for taking the other's perspective was the "thinking" group!

Law 2: Perspective taking and empathy aren't identical twins, but they're fraternal twins. So you have to use your head as much as your heart.

Humans are natural mimickers. We do it unconsciously. It's an affinity we have as a species. And you can be more effective if you're conscious of it.

Experiment 3: Another simulated negotiation. Groups get regular instructions, or specific instructions to mimic. Negotiators who mimicked their opponents mannerisms were significantly more likely to get a better deal for themselves.

Law 3: Mimic strategically.

It's widely known that extroverts make the best salespeople. Everybody thinks this and there's a tremendous amount of research on it, but it turns out there's no evidence that's actually true! There's no correlation between extroversion and sales performance. It's just folklore.

So does this mean introverts are better at sales? No! It's actually more intriguing than that.

Actual research on real salespeople shows extroverts generate slightly less revenue than extroverts. But "ambiverts" did much better than both. People who show characteristics of both extroverts and introverts.

So this suggests that a capacity for selling is really pretty innate in us, because most of us are ambiverts.

Jeff Bezos exercise: "Pull up a chair." In important meetings at Amazon, Bezos adds an empty chair at the table for The Customer.

You can do this too, for your badass user or whatever. It forces people to get out of their own head.

What to Do. The 3 Abilities needed in the new world.

Pitch: Conveying a point quickly and elegantly

Improvise: What you do when your perfectly clear pitch doesn't work (i.e. all the time).

Serve: Wanting to do something good for the world.

Pitch

The elevator pitch is a little bit "2oth century." Let's talk about a new way.

The Question Pitch. We think of pitches as declarative statements, but research shows that questions can be more powerful.

Reagan: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"

It's much more effective and the science explains why. The listeners have to summon their own answer, even if they don't say it. By making them work just a little harder, they're more likely to come up with reasons for agreeing, and those reasons are their own so they resonate. It's not passive for them.

It's a little bit perilous, especially in weak cases, but in strong pitches try a question pitch.

The Rhyming Pitch.

Example: "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit."

Here's the thing about rhymes. There's a huge body of research that says that when messages rhyme, not only are they more memorable, they're perceived to be MORE TRUE. They enhance people's "processing fluency."

Example: Haribo Candies. Their pitches rhyme in every language they sell in.

The Pixar Pitch.

Every Pixar movie has the same narrative structure, that you can reduce to a paragraph:

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ____. One day ____. Because of that, ____. Because of that, ____. Until finally ____.

I think you can build pitches in this structure, and I think it's easy to do.

Once upon a time, only some people were in sales. On day everything changed. We all ended up in sales. We had to learn new qualities and skills. Until finally, we realized sales is part of who we are and something we can do better by being more human.

#bos2012

Live from #BOS2012: "Understanding Founder's Dilemmas" with Noam Wasserman

Understanding Founder's Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman

Let's start with a happy topic: Failure.

Most companies fail. We wring our hands about it but we can't do anything about it. Let's accept it. However, there are some things we can learn about them that will let us move the needle and change that fact. Things we can think about that are key elements between success and failure.

What goes on in VC firms? How do they evaluate companies, do due diligence, bring founders onboard and join them, etc. What goes into being a successful investor? Research has shown that the key question is "Let's take a look at the VC-funded portfolio companies that no one hears about. The failures. Let's talk about those."

Causes of Failure in VC-Backed Startups

35% of the reasons are product development, functional management, and market problems. The kind of stuff you'd guess would be the sources of failure!

65% of the reasons for failure were something else: People problems. Tensions between cofounders, or between founders and hires. For almost 2/3 of the failures, this people side was the key problem.

So I've devoted my last dozen years of research to understanding these people problems. How can we help startups make better decisions and avoid them?

When you're founding, you don't have a roadmap through these key decisions. The most you can hope for is for someone to wish you good luck :). And without this roadmap there are very natural intuitions you'll be tempted to follow, gut, anecdotes, rules of thumb. And sometimes they'll mislead you.

Favorite Steve Jobs quote: "Follow your heart, but check it with your head." Those intuitions are the Heart element.

The Research

Founder's Dilemma book has 3 dozen case studies. They inform everything. But they're anecdotes. So we complement it with data on 10,000 founders. And we'll see how various decisions led to success or failure of various kinds.

Phases of Core Dilemmas

When to Found

Building the Team

New-Venture Hiring

Beyond the Team

Exit Dilemmas

We're going to take a deep dive into a couple of these today.

Founding Team Dilemmas

You've decided to make the leap. How are you going to go forward and build your venture. What's the first decision? Go solo, or build a team.

In the tech sector, only 16% of foundings are solo. So most people build a team.

Building a team introduces choices. We call these Relationships, Roles, and Rewards.

Relationships:

Hire your friends/family? It's a very common practice. These make up more than 50% of the ventures in the dataset. The book calls this "playing with fire." It can build glorious teams, but it can also blow up. If you decide to found with friends & family, there are things you can do to protect yourself.

Hire prior professional relationships/all-stars? This is the flip side of the friends/family decision.

Roles & Decision making:

Peter Pan lived in Neverland. Some companies do, too. Consensus, voting, "Co-CEOs."

Another model, is the "Zeus" model. Zeus is on top and runs the show, makes the decisions.

As you grow, if you're in Neverland, will you have to transition to being Zeus? Whichever approach you pick, the transition can cause problems when you have to adjust later.

Rewards:

What's the highest-tension part of the founding decision? Equity; splitting the ownership. All sorts of challenges introduced by this decision.

Individual and team tensions are heightened or reduced by specific decisions in each of the three Rs, but they're also interrelated. If you treat all three Rs as totally independent you'll miss these interdependencies and discover the problems too late.

Founders are human. Humans have natural inclinations to things like conflict avoidance. Elephants in the room that we avoid discussing until they start to destroy the relationship(s).

73% of founding teams split the equity at the beginning (within a month of founding). To the extent that you haven't figured out yet how the work will get done, setting it early can be risky. On the other hand, it gets the problem out of the way. The majority of those that split equity at the beginning also set it in stone.

Example: Zipcar. Split equally. Started by two women who met at daycare. Decided to cofound together. One founder (Robin) had heard a horror story from a friend about an equity split gone bad. So Robin was panicked about this and surfaced the equity issue as soon as we could. "We shook and said 50/50, and I thought everything was great." Over the next 18 months Robin became the heart & soul of Zipcar. Her cofounder didn't quit her day job and contributed little. So this created a lot of tension. "It was a stupidest handshake I ever made. Who knew what skillets we would need, what milestones we'd need to hit? That handshake became a major source of tension and a major distraction for me as CEO." So punting on this decision without having a deep dialogue created a lot problems for them.

Example: Ockham Technologies (salesforce software). Group of 3 cofounders who had worked together before. They'd honed the ability to have tough dialogues together, and surfaced early on that they didn't expect everyone to contribute equally – different skill levels, different industry knowledge. So they crafted an unequal split that acknowledged that: 50/30/20. But they also had a deep dialogue early on about their biggest uncertainties, the biggest risks they faced. They honed in on one: Ken (the idea guy) had just become a first-time father. So not knowing his startup life, he also didn't know his family life and a day job he liked. So this team had a deep dialogue about commitment and about who could be on board. They took a series of scenarios into their founding agreement as a list of if/then/else cases. So they captured their key uncertainties and built a dynamic split into the agreement handle them.

There are several key levels of uncertainty in a venture.

Is the strategy stabilized yet?

Is the business model set?

Are future skill requirements known?

Are future roles set?

Is each founder 100% committed throughout?

Are there personal uncertainties for anyone?

If you don't have all of these answered, research shows a dynamic split reduces tension and increases the chance of keeping a great team.

Capital Requirements.

Two major ways to do it: Bootstrapping and Funding. Each leads to a bunch of ripple decisions.

Source of funding. Smart money vs. dumb money. Do you want money from people who have been there before, and who will try to steer your business even if you don't like it, or do you want "dumb" money from people who don't understand your business and will stay out of your way.

The Board. Controls decisions like who is going to be CEO, etc. Big decisions. The choice you make about capital has huge implications for how these decisions at the top of the firm happen.

Example: Wily Technology. Lew Cirne built a 50-person company and was able to raise 2 rounds from top VC firms. Revenues up, losses down. Lew's reward: Fired. Had a pretty typical technical founder path, worked at Apple & Hummingbird. Was given 6 months to resign by one of the investors. First reaction was bafflement. Jack Dorsey (Twitter) described being fired as CEO as "Being punched in the stomach." But as time evolved, Lew got over the shock. Negotiated to have veto power over his successor. 6 month search for a replacement becomes nine, then 12 months. After 13 months, they find a successor. Then the successor has final demands: way more compensation than Lew, and wants Lew to resign as chairman. Lew took the deal and Wily took an exit a couple years later.

Looking at the data on this, the rate of CEO succession increases after things we generally see as big wins:

After product development is completed.

After raising a new round of financing

etc.

What we're really celebrating at those events is actually the chance our founder/CEO will be replaced.

"If the company tanks, I'm gone. If it's a big hit, I'm also gone."

The Rich vs. King fork in the road. To become king by having more control over a small player, or become rich by having less control over a big player.

So these decisions lead to cumulative effects on the founder's control over the company, and they have long-term effects that aren't obvious at first.

What is motivating me to go and do this? Would I be more excited to give up control and be richer for it, or would I rue the decisions to give up control and rather celebrate being king of what I've built?

#bos2012

Live from #BOS2012: "Building a World-class Culture in Three Easy Steps" with Mikey Trafton

Building a World-class Culture in Three Easy Steps, Mikey Trafton

About Mikey: Not a book author, not a tweeter. Just an entrepreneur on my third company. We sell software and consulting to BFCs (Big Freakin' Companies). We're basically a services company.

I'm a bootstrapper. No external funding. Goal is to become profitable and cash flow positive ASAP. I swear a lot. If you have delicate ears, apologies in advance :).

Culture.

Most companies have a split personality. Sometimes when you deal with them they're nice; other times they're jerks. This is a reflection of a weak culture, and a company who's essentially hiring random people.

Great Culture = Great Place to Work. It's only a great place to work, though, for people who FIT with the culture. For everybody who doesn't fit, it probably sucks. A good culture attracts people who are a culture fit and repels people who are not.

With a great culture, you'll attract better employees, they'll stay with you longer, they'll stick with you through hard times, and they're cheaper.

If you don't design your culture, your employees will do it for you. And they suck at it. It's your company, you get to have the culture you want.

Culture Trumps Money.

1. Decide what you care about.

2. Hire people who care about those things.

3. Pay attention to those things.

Decide What You Care About

In your business, this is the one time you get to act like a king. When it comes to customers, etc., you have to win people over and make nice, but when it comes to culture, you're the decision maker.

Think about the place you want to work. But also think about what's the kind of place the people I want to work with want to work.

Core Values. It's a cheesy 80s management consulting term, but it's still important and has a lot of impact. Think about what your strengths are, what people/customers admire in you. But think about what you admire in other people – what makes them so special. Those are "aspirational" core values.

Values of Bluefish:

Client Focus.

Teamwork. An elite team, not a team of elites.

Accountability.

Excellence.

Communication.

4 of these are my strengths, but Accountability is NOT. Putting that in the core values, however, drives Bluefish to fill in holes and backfill where Mikey is weak.

Make it real. Make the values concrete and tangible. What would your culture be if it were true that the only thing that could get someone fired from your company is if they violated the culture?

E.g. You are a culture fit if...

…you do more for others than you do for yourself.

…you love your job and are really good at it.

…people like having you around.

…you're not scared of a little hard work.

Hire People Who Care About The Same Things As You

Generic interview questions:

Describe the culture at your last job.

What do you expect from other team members?

What behaviors are you unwilling to tolerate?

What does [core value] mean to you?

Weed out questions. People are really good at "interviewing" so you need to offer some "land mines" that identify cultural non-fits. Doesn't mean the candidate is bad, just means they don't fit and should work somewhere where they do fit.

Pay Attention to the Things You Care About

You've decided what you want and you've hired for it. Now you need to make sure you and the team delivers on what you want.

You will get from people the behaviors you tolerate.

Ringing the "good news" bell:

When we close a deal.

When we deploy for a customer.

When someone accepts a job offer.

So Does This Stuff Work?

Running an experiment this year to see how much success is dependent on Mikey vs. the culture itself. So I fired myself. I don't work at Bluefish anymore and turned the company over to the employees. I still own it and I get checks :), but the team is in control. Without me, but with the awesome culture, the team has doubled revenue and profits are up 500%. So that's nice!

#bos2012

Live from #BOS2012: "Coding is the Easy Part!" with Peldi

Coding is the Easy Part, Peldi, Founder, Balsamiq

Who's Peldi? Used to be a programmer bee at Adobe, decided in 2007 to move back to Italy and start his own thing. "Micro-ISV" was the big thing back then – let's make a small software product & company to feed himself and the family. Since then, Balsamiq has grown to about $6m in revenue of which $3m is profits!

Peldi's Law of Learning. Learning is a roller coaster ride. For brief moments you think "Wow! I'm smart and can share my knowledge!" but then you immediately realize you're not really that smart.

Epiphanies encountered during the growth of Balsamiq.

Vision. At first you think all you need is a genius idea. "I have this idea but I can't tell you because it's so valuable." It's common knowledge, though, that the idea isn't worth much by itself – you're probably not the only one with your idea. You need a product. So you build a product, and you think THAT'S all you need.

But it's not. You need marketing because if nobody knows or cares, nobody buys it. Lean startup/customer development is a big thing and it's good, because customer development is just as important as the vision.

So you do those three things right, and now you have customers. Now you're doing support. All. The. Time. So support is actually just as important, too. So you hire people to help with that.

And now you're a company. This new thing you have to deal with that requires your attention. And it's just as important as the other pieces because it's fragile.

Then with all those things, it's really STILL not a defensible competitive advantage. You need an ecosystem of partners, vendors, community who root for you to be successful. A company with a strong ecosystem is harder to beat than one that doesn't.

These 6 things are all EQUALLY important. That was the biggest epiphany of all in building Balsamiq. There are books and books about many of them, and today we're going to talk about Ecosystem and Company.

ECOSYSTEM

You start with the Founders, but when you get employees it adds a layer of complexity. Then you've also got the lawyers, accountants, payroll, etc. These are important roles – they protect you from yourself. You have to think of these people as extensions of the team. Add to that contractors, vendors, partners, channels, and competitors. Competitors are an extension of your company in the sense that they influence some of how you behave and no matter what you do they're going to be there.

Externally to your company, you've got your website, your CMS, your blog(s), forums, UGC, teaching resources, etc. It's all the "same website" but it's on like 7 different servers/platforms. On top of that, you add Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn group(s), Google+ (if we're being generous :) ), other blogs/guest posts, evangelists, and if you're lucky you have a cottage industry of people who extend your tools with plugins or extensions or the like. Finally, then you have your New Friends who you meet at places like Business of Software!

So you have to embrace all of this ecosystem. If you don't, the whole thing basically doesn't work. All the interconnected relationships are just as important as the product development and marketing and support.

"Surround yourself with excellence." Make yourself the dumbest person in the room. Get the best lawyers, accountants, vendors you can. And play nice with them. They'll play nice with you.

COMPANY

Growth needs gardening. If you want to grow organically, revenue/employees/PR/quality all need to grow together. (See Joel Spolsky's article "Four Pillars of Organic Growth" from 2008).

Company Values. Pick your battles, and deliver. For Balsamiq these are Usability and Customer Service.

Company Policies follow from the values. These are documents on the Balsamiq wiki that describe how they do their work. Goal is to have as few as humanly possible. It's easy to ADD policies, but HARD to take them away. Be careful what you add. Like 37signals says, don't scar on the first cut.

Policies are never frozen. They will never be final. If they're frozen, you're frozen and you're dead.

Always explain the WHY of the policies. Explain (concisely) the reasoning behind them.

Then, why leave them on the wiki? Why not put them on your blog? Ask your community what they think of them.

Main goal of the policies is to keep everyone on the same page. Policies aren't for the sake of having a law, they're for the sake of helping everyone understand why things are the way they are. They're also very useful for new employees: "Read the whole wiki, you start tomorrow."

Example Guidelines at Balsamiq...

Pace > Deadlines. We're all mature. If you give a person their dream job and ask them to go fast on their own, they'll do that. Everybody can go in 3rd or 4th gear, but not 5th or you burn out.

Vacations. TAKE SOME. We can't afford to have you burn out.

Salary. Heavily inspired by Daniel Pink. Remove the money form the conversation. We pay our employees better than the same job in the same geographical location, so they don't worry about money. Worry about the work.

Profit Sharing. The formula is interesting. 10% of profits from previous quarter, split among employees. 25% of that is equally divided. The other 75% is based on seniority so new employees get something and the whole thing levels out after about 5 years. It's not based on job titles or skills, because we think everyone contributes equally to the company. We don't have equity or shares because I haven't figured out how to do that right. If the company does well, the company does well. For some employees the profit sharing is nearly equal to their base salary.

Donations. Employees are given money earmarked for donation, that they can contribute anywhere they want.

Other Guildelines.

Sales support bible.

Setting up a new dev machine. PLEASE tell me you have this :).

How we do dev & QA (branching, TDD, etc…)

How we communicate. Hipchat, Skype, Google Hangout.

How we do support. It's better to let a question sit while you find a perfect answer than it is to answer immediately only to say, "Hold on while I look this up."

Website Style Guide.

How we use Twitter.

Sponsorship Guidelines.

How we let people go.

Time Saving Tips.

Awards. One day someone is going to "give you an award." They're meaningless and they want you to pay them anyway.

PCI Compliance. PCI compliance charts are intended to terrify you. They have documents just to help you navigate other documents. There are people whose entire job is to "assist" you with this, in exchange for your money – it's like the mafia. The only valuable thing about it is we got a "compliance policy" document template.

Dealing with VCs. Just because we sell stuff on the internet and we're programmers, we're supposed to be in the same league as Facebook. VCs and the press are confused about this. All the calls are the same. They happen a couple times a week. We have a standard template reply to make them go away, but be nice to them. People gave them a lot of money that they need to invest, and they're not used to being told to get lost. Ask Peldi if you want his template :).

When to Hire. A couple years ago, I said "Wait until you think you're going to die." Now I feel differently. Start earlier so you have more time. Give yourself a chance to find the best person. If you have a good cash flow, start looking so you can take 3 months or whatever to get someone.

The Pledge

I, <your name>, hereby solemnly swear, that I will never, ever, ever, rush a hiring decision.

Do not underestimate the importance and difficulty of growing a company the right way. It's harder than coding, because it has to do with people and nobody prepares you for this at all. But everybody has to go through this. If you have competitors, they're going through it too.

Our Current Challenges

Peldi is the bottleneck. I'm the CEO and my job is to ask people what they need. And I love that. But if I have a one hour meeting with each employee every day, that's a full time job. So now I probably need managers, but I don't want them!

So we have Valve Envy. They have this beautiful employee handbook and they make us jealous. So I made a wiki page about "Balsamiq 3.0" with links to companies we want to be like, Valve included.

Recurring themes in flat organizations: self-organizing teams. Internal recruiting. People are encouraged to make few commitments, because they'll tend to overcommit if not reminded. Not job titles. Etc.

Clearly we're in over our heads, as usual. Is it worth it? But I think about the 6 epiphanies. If every wedge if that pie is just as important, why not give it all you've got in each one?

#bos2012

Live from BOS2012: "Founding Principles vs. Scaling Principles" with Peter Bauer

Founding Principles vs. Scaling Principles, Peter Bauer, CEO, Mimecast

4 Principles that have supported the founding & growth of MimeCast:

Building something with Friends

Deal constructively with my fears about success

Never allow an investor that would change the chemistry

Clear intent & logistics

Mimecast, founded in 2003 to look at business information management and email. Story of MimeCast is more a story of Endurance than of Brilliance.

Just closed a new round of $62m funding. Will allow to grow from ~350 people to double that number, and up to 5+ million customers as well as from $70m to hundreds of millions revenue.

It will also test us like we've never been tested before, and will draw fearsome competition to the space. Despite the investment, it leaves the management team to be in control of our own destiny and gives us the opportunity to compete together at the next level. We all love the opportunity to wake up in the morning and know we're working on our own terms and following our own passions.

That's the first principle: Build something together with friends.

Before starting Mimecast, New Year's 2001. Thinking about the next phase of life, and a remarkable idea occurred. So I said, "Hey guys, why don't we all start a business together, and work together as friends!" Everyone said, "Hooray!" and went on drinking.

But I woke up the next morning and the idea stuck with me, and it seemed a good idea to do just that. So over a year later, Mimecast was born. Most of the friends that were there when the idea was discovered now work for the company. And many more friends now work for the company, and have brought their friends along as well.

We pass this spirit along to our customers and our partners.

It's not a picnic, though. We're deadly serious about success and making each other successful.

The end result is a culture of friendship, and remains that way today.

The key question for recruiting is "Can this person act and work with us like a friend?"

Building this kind of business requires confidence, and fear undermines that. That brings us to the next principle: Deal constructively with my fears about the implications of success.

From the time we started Mimecast, the fear of not succeeding was always present. Startups are fragile things. But the far more restrictive thing was a fear of success. I can remember my wife asking me what would happen if Mimecast got big, what would happen to the family? This, and the fear of the consequences of prioritizing business tasks over family, were ever present.

This is common: great success is easy to fear. But the reality is success brings many options. The eventual outcome was that success allowed me to move to the US with my family.

Another component of fear of success is that success changes the nature of the business, and the nature of the founder's role. "Am I a real CEO?" is the question that creeps in. At the time Mimecast was founded, there was a strong sentiment that founder's can't scale. Conventional wisdom was that investors wanted to install "proper" executive teams in their companies. This was borne out in some of the term sheets we rejected. But our prime desire was to maintain our own control over the direction of the business.

This even goes beyond the founders as you grow. The whole leadership team needs to understand and not fear success.

The third principle: Never allow an investor to change the chemistry or assert their agenda above that of the company.

Shareholder interests must come a distant second to the interests of the company. Company interests include the company, employees, customers, families, etc. This makes many investors very uncomfortable. But writing the check doesn't make them right.

Angel investors provided a better way. We built a network of a few dozen angel investors around the UK. They provided a form of patronage for us. It wasn't for everyone, but we raised over $10m in small increments this way. Each of these angels is now substantially in profit for having supported us while we found our path in an intuitive and responsible way.

The biggest advantage this method of funding gave us was that when we finally brought in bigger VCs, we'd proven we knew how to build a business. We were able to credibly assert the interests of the company above investor interests.

Fourth principle: Clear intent and logistics.

Just participating is not intent.

Real intent creates a power multiplier. You can see this in many sports. It's surprising how many teams and companies operate without proper intent. Exhibiting potential but really doing very little with it.

So participating isn't intent, but you do need to participate. The key is to have a purpose. It may take time to formulate an intent, but you need to find it if you can.

For us, sales targets became the language of intent. It gave the sales teams a power multiplier in our business. Sales was working for "their number" and this allowed others to invest energy in helping them achieve that number. Sales was proactive, and the rest of the business became reactive to those goals.

We got to a point a few years ago where the non-revenue-generating functions were actually apologetic to sales for anything they did that took away from resources for sales. It started to reduce our ability to change as we grew, even though it looked successful.

Systematically, we started to talk to the non-sales groups about their sovereign goals and we put marketing & systems goals higher on the agenda. We put strategic programs on the list and discussed the significant impact these could have in the long term.

Then we defined "AIM Factors" (Actionable Intent Matrix) which forced groups to define their intent in a concrete way. That gave our teams an intent-driven focus that could counterbalance against the goals of the sales team.

The AIM Factors defined the "supply chain of success."

#bos2012

Live from BOS2012: "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange" with Joel Spolsky

The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange, Joel Spolsky, CEO, StackExchange

StackExchange is roughly the size of Texas on the Internet.

Building a site with 25 million users is an exercise in cultural anthropology.

Back in the olden days, it was enough to get any answer out of a computer, but as connection speeds increased (from 300 baud to 9600 baud :) ) people got the idea to send messages to each other through the mainframe. So email and Usenet were born.

Usenet culture was born out of thousands of tiny decisions made in the Usenet software, some by choice and some because there was not other choice. Usenet was in the 80s, there wasn't really client/server yet, so every node had an entire copy of everything and used store & forward to sync. This meant you could never be sure if everyone in the discussion had read what you had read. This is where quoting of messages came in handy.

Then we moved to the whole generation of online discussion forums & software. phpBB, etc. It's still threaded, with topic groups, etc. The behavior of users in that scope is still similar to what evolved/emerged in Usenet, even though those behaviors were sort of accidental.

We don't need to do that anymore. We know we're going to build a culture, so let's think of every single aspect of that and design for it. That's StackExchange.

We designed StackExchange for the cultural anthropology we wanted from the users.

Major Principles of StackExchange

StackExchange is one of the few sites that's designed to drive away the wrong kinds of users rather than attracting everyone.

Voting. Provides peer review.

Reputation. Provides recognition. When you first join the site, you get 1 reputation point. Over time you accumulate reputation and features. Bronze/silver/gold/platinum; at 10k reputation you get a little drop shadow on your avatar and the ability to customize bits of it.

Badges. Users can acquire badges by providing certain services or tasks. You'd think nobody would strive for badges, but an interesting part of cultural anthropology is that as soon as people think someone is noticing what they do, they work on it. If users think someone else cares about the badges, it turns out they work on them. We use this to encourage users to do certain things by providing badges that recognize those behaviors (e.g. answering your own question).

Government. Every culture has government. We try to put as many of the policing/governing responsibilities on the users as possible. As you earn reputation, you gain capabilities related to governing tasks.

meta.stackoverflow.com. Special communities for talking about the communities.

Closing questions. The most popular pages on StackExchange, it turns, out, are not actually useful to people. StackExchange is also not an open discussion/chat forum about anything.

Q&A

Q: If you have a question that gets marked as closed/inappropriate/not a question, what makes people will actually read the reason?

A: Closed questions aren't indexed by search engines, and they don't hang around on the site very long, but they're displayed on the homepage for a while.

Q: If you were going to take the lessons you learned from StackExchange could you boil them down to one Rule For Startups?

A: No :), other than to say that cultural implications matter a lot. You may think that "login"/"signup" terms or where the page scrolls to when you reply are technical decisions, but everything you do is creating a culture.

Q: At one point you productized StackExchange so people could start their own sites, then you took it away. Are you considering productizing it again?

A: We learned a whole bunch of lessons by doing that. First there was StackOverflow, then ServerFault and SuperUser. That was "the trilogy." In trying to figure out how to get more sites, we decided to license the software. It turned out there were not a lot of people who had the ability to create sustainable communities (~200 active users). Another thing we realized was the value of a community is in the community, not in the software that powers it. We realized the software was not a sustainable competitive advantage – anybody can code another StackOverflow. The community population, though, is a HUGE and non-disruptable value. Nobody can create another StackOverflow community.

#bos2012

Live from BOS2012: "Building a Minimum Badass User" with Kathy Sierra

Building a Minimum Badass User, Kathy Sierra

So many economies: the attention economy, the female economy, the Facebook economy, even the MySpace economy. (pinterest, etc., too) It's impossible to "compete on all these." How did we get in this mess?

We want our products to be desirable, but we NEED them to be SUSTAINABLY DESIRABLE.

What's happened in the last few years is the emergence of "desirability engines" and the like. It's based on the idea that people like to "engage with brands." But we don't have an ENGAGEMENT problem. More engagement isn't the answer. In fact trying to get people more engaged with the brand actually harms the brand in most cases.

Gamification is based on operant conditioning. It's literally the same thing as the rat in the Skinner Box. It's the same thing responsible for slot machines and cocaine. It's not loyalty, it's bribery.

We need to be sustainable desirable WITHOUT having to bribe, incentivize, coerce customers.

So what does it mean to make something sustainably desirable? What are the key attributes?

GP;DS "Great Product. Didn't Sell." History is littered with great products that didn't sell.

So if it's not quality that drives desirability, what does?

People trust reviews from family and friends. Also online recommendations. It's word of mouth.

So what drives WOM? What makes people say "This brand/product/service is awesome?"

The user's goal is to BE AWESOME. Companies frequently want to be PERCEIVED AS AWESOME. These are two very different things, and there's a very small overlap between them.

Compete on User Awesome, not App Awesome. Being viewed as awesome is a natural side-effect of making your customers awesome.

The key attributes of a successful app live in the User, not in the App.

So desirability is about User Results.

The bar for App Awesome is really high,and it's noisy and bloody underneath it. The bar for User Awesome is amazingly low.

Making User Awesome is NOT LUCK. And it's not quality or marketing. It's a focus on making the User Awesome.

It's not about making crappy software, of course. It's about focusing your resources differently – on User Awesome.

And by "awesome" we mean "badass." Because the word "awesome" is too easy to apply back to the company again. There's actually science around the concept of "badass."

So really, the fundamental way to think about this is User Badass. They're using your app not because they like you, but because they like themselves. And they're telling their friends about you not because they like you but because they like their friends.

Your product is just a tool.

What does the user DO with or BECAUSE of you? What bigger things do you enable? Nobody's goal is to be "badass at your tool."

Be aware of how you treat customers before and after they give you money.

It's dangerous to replace glitzy "you'll be awesome" marketing literature with dry and bland manuals, etc. The problem isn't that they're bland specifically, but that they don't address how to make the user awesome – they focus on the product.

The only thing that matters at the end of the day is what happens when the clicking's done. Don't design for your users, design for your user's users. How can you make your users more interesting at work, or more interesting at a dinner party?

Making your user badass has the side effect of sustained word of mouth.

The Science of Expertise

"Given a representative task, experts perform in a superior way, more reliably, than experienced non-experts."

badass = reliably superior performance

Don't confused badass with "jackass" – one single act of extreme brilliance (or extreme risk) does not make expertise.

Myths of expertise

Expertise comes from more knowledge.

Expertise comes from more experience

Expertise comes from natural talent.

After 18-24 months, years of experience is a poor predictor of future performance.

The 10,000 hour rule isn't about 10,000 hours. It's about 10,000 hours of doing a very specific type of thing.

Becoming badass takes THREE things:

Models

Edge Practice

Forward Flow

See K. Anders Ericsson and Edward Deci. Also "Drive" by Daniel Pink. It's the best summary of self-determination theory. Also watch his TED talk. Also "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle.

Step Zero: Define badass for your thing.

Given <representative task> an expert would <perform better in some way>.

Now that you know WHAT badass/experts do, you just how to know HOW they do it. Easy, right? :)

This is the curse of badass. Experts frequently don't know how they do it. "I just know…." or they think it's somehow obvious. It comes from deep intuition, which is hard to describe. Our brains do things above our security clearance.

If you could do one thing to make your users more badass, provide them with repeated exposure to the performance, process, and results of badass users. (models)

Most people could learn better by literally staring at experts and the result of expert work. The more experience you have with mediocre examples, the more likely it is for those examples to become burned in.

Brains can acquire deep perceptual knowledge and skills more effectively we we STFU. See "doing with symbols" by Alan Kay.

If you could do two things to make your users more badass, add a progressive series of exercises, each designed to build a fine-grained skill within 1 to 3 sessions. (edge practice)

Edge / deliberate practice is NOT the same as tutorials. High-quality, low-latency feedback. Example: play this short musical passage with no mistakes, at this speed in this key.

If you could do three things, add a clear, believable map that shows the growth of skill toward expertise. See the degrees of martial arts mastery for a good example of this.

Provide a "motivational GPS" to keep them moving forward, especially when it gets tough.

There's one thread that drives all this. It's the most crucial design point of view.

Cognitive resources are scarce, limited, and easily depleted. We should be managed cognitive leaks wherever we can. This is also why we get end-capped at the supermarket at the END of our shopping trip, not at the beginning.

This tells us we should to "cognitive-resource-driven design," which is a hard thing to say, but it means things like, "Being overwhelmed by choices is a huge leak."

The best mentor says, "I know what the books say, but forget that… here's what REALLY matters…" There's something where you're an expert, and you KNOW everyone else looks in the wrong place. The more your product can point people to what really matters, the better you serve them.

How to be instantly badass. Stand like a superhero. We know this experimentally – posing like a superhero increases testosterone and reduces cortisol.

#bos2012

Live from ISUM11: Fireside Chat with Noah Everett / TwitPic

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Notes from Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-16.

An Interactive Fireside Chat with Noah Everett, Founder, Twitpic

Q: Let's talk about TwitPic. How did it start, where did you go?

Noah Everett: It was 2008. It seemed like a good shortcut to share pictures, I stayed late at work with some Red Bull and wrote it over a weekend, and launched it. Then it got picked up by blogs and media, and went from there.

Q: When did you realize it could be a business?

NE: In 2009, one of our users took a picture of the plane in the Hudson and TwitPic'd it and it exploded. We had one server at the time, and it melted. I realized then that TwitPic wasn't just a photo-sharing tool, it was for breaking news, etc. We've been running ads since 2008 and run at about a 70% profit margin, which has allowed us to not take any funding. We have 7 employees counting me and Mom & Dad.

Q: Where do you see the micro-blogging space going? What are some uses for microblogging that people maybe haven't heard of?

NE: I separate it into Facebook (private) vs. Twitter (public). Twitter is just a great way to share openly what you're doing without having to log into Facebook and have that network.

UNICED uses TwitPic a lot because they've found that their tweets get a lot more exposure if they include pictures of people they're helping.

Q: How have you been impacted by Twitter's own photosharing app?

NE: Twitter's a great company. We were blindsided by it and we wish they'd communicated better with their outside developers there. But we haven't really noticed a loss of traffic or growth, so we're happy.

Q: Tell us about Heello.

NE: We really rushed to get it out. It's very much a Twitter clone right now, but next year you'll see it really change. We're working to make it more location-based, so you're seeing information based on your area.

Q: Any advice on how to get a new app noticed, other than waiting for another Hudson plane crash?

NE: First and foremost, build an app that solves an issue for people. For getting exposure, make sure your app can share to Twitter & Facebook, and let your users promote your app. Make the barrier to entry as low as possible for your user.

Q: You get some interesting pics through TwitPic. Any interesting ones?

NE: Ashton tweeted Demi's Moore's butt. The funniest are celebrity ones. We're running a thing for Movember now.

Q: What's your advice to other startups re: taking VC funding versus growing organically?

NE: You'll get approached by VCs as soon as your app gets started. My rule is "If you don't need it, don't take it." We've talked to a lot of them, but we can't figure out what we'd use their money for, so we turn them down. That means we still control the direction of the company.

Q: Give us a sense of the metrics that pass through your servers.

NE: We process about 1 billion requests a day. We try to be really smart and lean with our servers - we have about 50 of them. Amazon S3 is our primary data storage. Somebody from Amazon told us we were accounting for 1% of all Amazon S3 data storage last year.

Q: 5 years from now, where do you think Twitter, Facebook, etc. will be?

NE: The biggest challenge now is curating the data you want to see. Making it more integrated into our daily lives so we can get past the "following too many people" problem.

Q: What problems or successes have you had with Amazon?

NE: There are cheaper solutions out there now, but overall their service is the best and we're happy with them. That said, we built our system to failover in the case of downtime, but that's kind of not a problem anymore.

Q: Are you looking to recreate the old Twitter Developer Love with Helo

NE: Definitely. We're trying to be upfront about where we're going. Our API is live but we haven't launched it yet. Hopefully we've been clear about what areas we're going into so our developers don't get blindsided.

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Venture Capital Startup Roundtable

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Venture Capital Startup Roundtable, Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-16.

Sean Marsh, Co-founder & General Partner, Point Judith Capital David Heaney, Sr. Associate, TomorrowVentures Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures Jason Caplain (moderator), General Partner & Co-founder, Southern Capital Ventures

Q: What do you look for in a new prospect that approaches you?

Sean Marsh: We invest early, so we often invest in something like 2 people and an idea. It's about passionate, energetic, visionary people going after a big market. The first product you go after a big market with is probably not the product you'll eventually succeed with, and we know that. We back a lot of people who are first-time entrepreneurs, first-time founders, who figure out how to surround themselves with impressive people.

David Heaney: TomorrowVentures is pretty similar, we look for similar things. On the idea side we're looking for something that's different and unique. We see lots of ideas that are kind of the same. We're looking for someone who's finding a new market or bringing new technology to an existing market. We're looking for a team with leadership, persistence, perseverence, or do they have technical or domain expertise that will help them on the execution side.

Don Rainer: I react to the first meeting with a prospect. The CEO has 3 aims: win, make a ton of money, or change the world. The Change the World people are where we make our money. If they're trying to "win" the tendency is to narrow down the game. Making money is usually about taking shortcuts. Changing the world involves no narrowing and no shortcuts. So what's a Big Idea? A big idea is frequently where you're in the meeting and you think, "This is an interesting concept and I'm not sure which industry it would have the biggest impact in." It's a crisis of opportunity.

Q: Let's talk about your last investment. The timing, and the reaons you invested.

DR: I just invested in Gramercy 1 (?) - it's OpenTable for everything but restaurants. I like it because it's broadly applicable, but also because they have traction. They already have 2500 spas using their product.

DH: Our most recent is Prism Skylabs in the Bay Area. They're connecting the online & offline worlds through security cameras. They have a way to bring most of those "offline" security cameras online. It has a lot of value for both consumers and companies -- for instance you could go to Yelp and see live video from the restaurant to see if it's busy. From the merchant side, you could use the feed to run analytics on traffic, etc. Bringing that data into the cloud has a ton of value in different industries. So we liked the product but the team is also great.

SM: The most recent for me is a company in NY called Igniter. It's an Indian group and social dating site. Where India is right now on the Internet is about where the US was in 1997-98. Rate of growth of penetration in India is huge. So we've backed these 3 guys. They launched this group-dating thing in the US and it flopped, but hundreds of thousands of people in India started registering for it. So to their credit, they said, "OK, we have to go there," instead of trying to force it in the US. The world is definitely flat and it's easy to move a product like that around the world.

Q: Raising VC is hard and it's not right for every company. What strategies have you seen for entrepreneurs that don't involve raising capital?

SM: I'd say in a lot of cases if you want to build something big, at some point you'll want outside capital to grow faster. You can build it without capital but it will be slower.

DR: We live in an interesting time, where you can start a business with very little capital. There are people who are doing hundreds of startups. That's prompting a ton of small companies with solo guys with no money. That can be a limited value prop for the entrepreneur because it's harder to do it yourself. If you're going to do it without outside money, you probably need 2-4 founders instead of one. And ideally you need to go into a cash business so you have cashflow.

DH: Picking a business model carefully, like an online-only model that's low cost, plus an immediate cash flow, is important. Other value VCs provide, though, is to surround you with talent that complements your talent. If you're strong technically, you need cofounders with other skills. Or build a network of mentors. That's so critical in the first 6-12 months.

Q: The costs of building a company have sharply declined in the last 10 years. Are you able to put in less money and finance less over that time? How as your approach changed?

DR: I don't think the physics have changed. When we go to a startup pitch festival, I feel like I should be making a sandwich -- I could put 4 or 5 pitches together and make a company that I'd put $1M into. We're still always backing companies that need a million dollars or something. There are incubators everywhere handing out $50k/100k etc., but we still deal with the bigger things.

SM: What I've found in these companies that take smaller money to figure things out, is that a lot of times our first 6 months with them is a push and pull with them where they've got the money but they don't want to go. You have to work through that gear-shirt with them. That's a dynamic I've seen. Frugality at the cost of equity value creation.

DH:To get the really big ideas still takes large amounts of money. With the smaller amounts of money you can get further in understanding the market and tweaking the product before committing a larger amount of money to juice big growth.

Q: What are some good online resources for entrepreneurs? Where do you send people?

SM: Fred Wilson's blog is really good, especially if it's truly your first time around.

DR: There are always segment-specific newsletters. I'm a fan of those, they're high-impact.

DH: Some venture funds have newsletters and online resources that describe the types of things they're looking for. Also, go to big universities (MIT, Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, etc.) websites. They have sections devoted to who you can talk to in the community and what's available for new or early-stage companies.

Q: What's your favorite company you're NOT an investor in?

DH: J. Hilburn from Dallas, TX. They've done a great job talking to their customers and then customizing their business model. They provide high-quality custom-tailored clothes for men. By using ecommerce and shortening the supply chain they could make things cheap, but they found that guys hate measuring themselves for clothes. So they created an on-the-ground sales force to h

DR: Pinterest. It's a virtual pinboard(?)

SM: I have two. Gilt, a high-end fashion goods club/sales site. Also, Rent the Runway, a site for renting very high-end dressed & accesories for women.

Audience Q: I struggle with the question of competition - answering the question of "am I a feature or a product?" How do I get past that block?

SM: When you start your company you need a focus, but think about how building the business creates barriers to entry for others - how it builds walls that give you a competitive edge.

DH: Another thing is looking at competitors in adjacent spaces -- they haven't already done it for some reason. Think about why not. Maybe it's actually not high on their priority list.

Audience Q: Should I negotiate around a term sheet or should I just take what's offered? Do you guys negotiate around, say, Series B terms or keep the same terms as Series A?

SM: It's all over the map. Broadly speaking we try to make our Seed and A-round terms as simple as possible to avoid complicating things later.

DR: If you're dealing with somebody who's trying to make money on the terms, you're dealing with a knucklehead! If they're trying to make something overly complex, just go to the next person. The truth is at A-stage things are going to work out or not, and it's not because of the terms. The question is what's a fair value that in the fullness of time we all feel good about?

Audience Q: What role do you play once financing is complete? How active are you in the company?

SM: We sit on the board, we try to be as valuable to the entrepreneur as possible. We try to do everything we can to make the entrepreneur better. That usually means helping to build the team.

DR: A lot of what we do is "what can go wrong next," etc. I've been around startups for 30 years and I've got a lot of perspective I can share privately with the CEO about what's going well, what's not. Initially they don't take as much of that advice in the first 6 months as they start to later :).

DH: We vary widely on how involved we are and the types of help we give. If we're not the lead investor, we put ourselves out there as ready to help but we're less proactive. If we're taking board seats, we're trying to be as helpful and possible but without dictating actions. Our role is to help actively when asked.

Audience Q: You mentioned having 2-4 founders to help spread the work. What advice do you have for EXISTING companies who have hit a growth roadblock and are spread too thin?

DR: All these businesses grow through plateaus. Adding the talent you need requires figuring out what skills you're missing. You have to do your own inventory of what elements you could add to the mix that will change things. Most small businesses are small for a reason - frequently it's due to problems with customer acquisition. If you could acquire more customers, you could grow. You can't succeed at customer acquisition and stay small.

Audience Q: When multiple VCs invest together, what are typical challenges they and the prospect company face? (too many cooks in the kitchen)

SM: At the end of the day, if you've got an investor and a new investor coming in, if they can't quickly agree on things at the beginning, if there's not rapid agreement on things you're probably going to have more problems going forward. Syndicates can be really powerful and successful but can also be really distracting. Have these guys done deals together before then that's good. If not, be careful?

Audience Q: What's the right time to bring in a VC, from the standpoint of sales and revenue of my company? Are you looking for a certain level of success?

DH: It varies a lot depending on what kind of VCs you want to talk to. Some really early-stage investors don't need to see anything. It's a question of approaching the right firms at the right time rather than any general guideline.

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Effective Strategies for Successful Webinars

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Notes from the Online Video track of Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-15.

Jamie Beck, Service Marketing Manager, Cisco

"The Do's and Don'ts of Webinars"

Why Webinars?

HUGE cost savings over live presentation/training/meetings

Ability to scale from an individual or small group to many

Leverage regional or global talent without travel

Allow participants to attend form their location or even from home

What are the risks?

Attendees may be multitasking / not paying attention

There are lots of bad ones; people are jaded about them :(

Easy to set up; equally easy to screw up.

"Free to Me" can equal high registration but low to no attendance.

Getting People to your Webinar - Invitations

DO - Have a clear title and message

DO - Offer some kind of incentive; think of drawing, free Starbucks card, book, something.

DO - Keep it (the invitation) short and sweet

DO - Use social media to supplement the email

DON'T - Just send a text email with a URL

DON'T - Make your target audience jump through hoops to register. Make registration simple, don't collect a ton of data. They'll give up.

Running Your Webinar

DO - Engage your audience

DON'T - Have 84 slides for 30 minute webinar. Don't fall victim to "this isn't important I'll skip it"

DON'T - Start late. And test your equipment 30 minutes early. Don't ever test it on your attendees.

DON'T EVER - Leave entry/exit notification turned on for a webinar. This is not a conference call.

DON'T - Read your slides word-for-word. Use good presentation skills.

Best Practices

Offer an incentive - a $20-50 drawing is a small price to pay, and it increases attendance. If your company makes products, give one away.

Use Video - People want to see your face!

ALWAYS share your material afterwards

ALWAYS leave time for Q&A

ENGAGE! Polls & multiple choice questions keep the audience active.

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Sean Kimball on Live Streaming Video

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Notes from the Online Video track of Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-15.

Sam Kimball, Executive VP, Advertising & Brand Sales, Livestream

"Live Streaming Video"

5 Key Value Propositions to live video.

1. Live is a "lean in" experience. People are paying attention. 2. Natural for social integration 3. Provides real-time feedback & sharing for publishers. 4. People watch longer (9-12 minutes per video, per viewer) 5. Brand messaging stands out - higher CTRs.

How is live video done on the web?

Need a web destination & platform for broadcasting live.

Social integration (Facebook + Livestream, for instance)

Currently: Millions of channels, billions of minutes of video livestreamed monthly.

Live video is the democratization of broadcasting. Anyone can broadcast with a camera, computer, and internet connection.

Users access live video from anywhere, any device, many different bit rates.

Live video fits in any vertical that lends itself to a live event.

Top verticals: Entertainment 15.3% Gaming 13.8% Music 12.5% News & Politics 9.0% Business & Finance, Spirituality, Sports, all about 5% each.

Leveraging Live: Custom Campaigns

A "holistic approach" to a live-streamed event.

(1) Video Production (2) Web Development / Social App i-Frame Creation (3) Promotion Driving Viewership << often neglected!

Getting people to watch is not an "if you build it they will come" proposition!

Promotional Playbook:

RSVP emails/reminders

Social Nets - live-streaming platform partner, participants & performers in the stream. Ask them to help; it's in their interest!

Pre-Roll ads

Banner / RSVP ad unit

In-banner video of the livestream itself while the event is going on (see GE Eco-Imagination live-streaming campaign Spring 2011)

New Perspectives - new definition of a "livestream"; not a promotion for Livestream per se - this is just what viewers are saying they want no matter the platform.

new.livestream.com

(1) Expanding the LIVE moment beyond the live broadcast, adding a timeline of posts: * Text * Photos * Images * Clips Relevant multimedia in the runup to the event

(2) MORE social integration, adding: * Sharing * Commentary * Re-posting

(3) Adding ability to follow channels & groups of channels via personalized Livestream home page, push notifications, etc.

(4) DVR functionality during live broadcasts - let people rewind the live event if they show up late.

(5) Adaptive multi-bit rate, up to 720i HD & Akamai HD Net (automatic adjustment up and down for device and connection speed)

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Strategies for Engaging Your Audience with Online Video

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Notes from the Online Video track of Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, 2011-11-15.

Donna DeMarco, Co-Founder, Vice President, Viddler Inc. @fiddlinlady

"Strategies for Engaging Your Audience with Online Video"

Video Interactions: various ways of engaging viewers of video content

Call to Action Find out more / Email Me / Follow Me / Contact Me << put links right in the video

Invite Conversations

Contests Invite users to upload their own videos related to your products

Customized Training & Support Video tutorials and walkthroughs for particularly relevant tasks

Monetization

Ads have come to videos :-/.

Traditional ad revenue is coming to video, but we've also learned it's OK to charge for content. If it's an easy process, people will pay.

Online ad spending on video is increasing (as % of total online ad spend)

In-Video Ads:

Ad Networks

Need 100,000 minimum views per month before you can make money on CPM.

Your Sponsors

Real-life newspapers are moving sponsor ad content form the printed paper into their video channels. Moving their traditional ads into the digital age.

Selling Your Content

Selling Your Expertise

swingstargolf - Film your own swing from multiple angles, upload it to their site, and receive back a custom private analysis of your swing.

Measure Your Success

You can't control what you can't see.

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Opening Keynote Panel / The Future of Digital Media & Marketing

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Live notes from Internet Summit in Raleigh, 2011-11-15. Justin's notes from the opening keynote panel, discussing "The Future of Digital Media & Marketing"

Rogelio (Ro) Choy, COO, Formspring David Payne, Chief Digital Officer, Gannett Maria Pergolino, Sr. Director of Marketing, Marketo David Perry, Business Development Executive, Software & Services, Google

Kurt Merriweather (moderator), Director, Digital Media Business Development and Strategy, Discovery Communications

The biggest challenge marketers face today is getting attention in the sea of laptops, mobile devices, etc.

Q: What are the most disruptive trends we're seeing today?

Ro Choy (RC): Harnessing and controlling viral marketing

David Payne (DPa): There's a huge amount of fragmentation in the way people consume content.

Maria Pergolino (MP): Seeing how TV and content consumption is changing (tweeting while watching TV instead of watching commercials), culture of meetings has changed (people look things up on the spot rather than coming to meetings prepared, etc). Marketers need to take a new mult-channel approach to reach people -- this didn't happen a few years ago.

David Perry (DPe): From Google's perspective, one of the most disruptive things is Mobile. Mobile is changing the way people interact with brands and information faster than anything else ever has. Forces marketers and businesses in general to come up with new ways to engage audiences. As much as 70% of brands stlil don't have a mobile-ready website.

Q: As you look at the landscape, who do you think the winners are going to be in terms of monetization? Is it the platform providers like Google, is it the content providers like Gannett? Who?

MP: Early adopters often have an advantage in monetization. E.g. people who first got started advertising on Facebook had it a lot cheaper than now. So the landscape, especially for B2B, will evolve and change.

DPa: Ultimately the people who are going to monetize the best are the ones who can drive sales the most. Who's going to win is going to come back to who can provide the range of services to convert clicks to sales.

RC: The people who are producing the best content will do it on any platform. That content is what will drive money.

DPe: It's not clear who's going to "win" the platform war, but it's definitely clear that content providers are critical providers of value.

Q: So what about Facebook, Amazon, etc.? They've got a huge repository of consumer data. Talk about the role of this data in the process finding and acquiring customers.

DPe: Every action a customer or potential customer takes leaves some kind of trail or marker. The challenge is to put that trail to use in figuring out how to reach the customer. Start by defining the goal of the interaction and work backward through the customers' observed behaviors to understand how to reach them.

MP: Also, it's important to think of the customer's perspective specifically rather than just saying, "What are all the places we can throw content just to see what happens?" You have to start at the customer's perspective and bring them along for the ride.

DPa: You have to be cognizant of where the data comes from. First-party opt-in data, for instance, is really good. Third-party, inferential, or indirect tracking data is both a little suspect and kind of creepy.

RC: The genius of Facebook is all the things people share on it. Everything you share online is being aggregated and collated through advertisers and developers and so on. It's an enormous amount of data. Purchase rate on this kind of data has been shown to be as much as 4x higher because you can align your product/messaging exactly to the interests/needs of the customers.

DPa: Where people are expressing an interest in a particular product obviously that works. Where marketers get into trouble is when they're making decisions and targets based on inferred data.

Q: Let's talk about social media in general for B2B versus B2C. Is it "better" in the B2C context over B2B?

DPe: Social media is something B2B companies like IBM are obviously taking seriously. It works well especially for support services, and is great way to turn detractors into fans.

MP: Social media is a really important channel for B2B. Lots of companies in lots of industries stuggle to figure it out because you can't just do what Pepsi does and measure yourself against Pepsi, but customers are out there discussing you or looking for you, so you can definitely reach them.

DPa: We use social media as a marketing funnel but also as a content source; we use it as a promotor and a marketer and a news gatherer.

MP: Some B2B companies are more conservative in their use of social media, but it goes with the industry. If I buy the wrong CRM system for my company, for instance, I could lose my job. That's not like if I decide to watch the wrong TV show. This is where recommendations from social networks like LinkedIn become critical in B2B.

Q: Talk about the role of content in marketing itself and which parties should be creating content.

DPa: This is a sticky wicket. Part of the reason why companies want to align themselves with us is because we have credibility and they put trust in us. This comes from the traditions of the "old guard" media. But that said, what's really interesting is that advertising will evolve in an important way. The tablet shows us a completely different type of experience -- it shows us why interactive television failed. The tablet, by putting touch into the equation, lets you deliver all kinds of different content and advertising in the environment of the user. You're not limited to banner ads or commercials. Advertising starts to look more like content because it is more like content. So this new form factor allows much more varied and interactive forms of this advertising.

RC: You're seeing a lot more social interaction at the content level. You're reading what your friends read, or seeing what your friends bought. What do my friends think of this restaurant? What car do my friends think I should buy? etc. Even though the content creators can't control the discussion anymore because it's friends talking among friends, the engagement with your content is even more personal because of it.

DPe: Everyone in this room can be a content creator in just minutes on YouTube or whatever. So we're seeing this great explosion of content. How do we make this discoverable? How do we cut through the clutter? That's a challenge.

DPa: The discovery is moving to Social. People upload a video and post it on Facebook, then it appears in people's feeds, etc. So the discovery is happening in those feeds.

MP: Being a good content creator is not enough. Building up a network to share the content and move it around for you. Content may be king, but not if there's no one in your Court to see it.

Q: Who do you think is navigating the sea of change well right now?

DPe: Obviously Amazon is doing it well with the Kindle Fire, and they have support for small, medium, and large businesses.

DPa: Apple with their focus on their ecosystem is doing really well. Driving their technology platforms and marketing with simplicity is something we can all learn from.

RC: I find myself consuming a lot of content about TV shows, etc., I watch, on my iPhone. HBO, PBS, etc. are all doing this well. The mobile and tablet experience are going to subsume the web experience very soon.

Q: Let's open it up to the floor for quesitons.

Q: The emphasis has been on 200-300 people in terms of size. What about the 1-10 person shops. What can they do?

DPe: Small businesses can take advantage of the fact that people who use mobile tend to be locally focused.

MP: You have to have a plan and goals for what you need, no matter your size. Where I see businesses going wrong is in trying to do everything. You need to choose a few channels and be deliberate in those channels. Before thinking social media, think about referrals in the real world -- social media is like that. Too many channels with little content in each shows poorly for the brand.

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Relevant and Useful Mobile Apps

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Quick and dirty live notes from "Making Mobile Apps that Stick" Dana Kirchman, SVP, Head of Client Operations, Lumi Mobile, at Internet Summit in Raleigh, 2011-11-15.

@LumiMobile, @danakirchman

Mobile apps are doing to the web what cable did to television

Timeline: 2007 iTunes App Store 2008-2009 Android 2010 iPad 2011 Subscription distribution, Kindle, HTML5 2012 and beyond: Content, Ads, B2B

iTunes is like a boutique - it's heavily curated.

Android is like going to the mall - tons of selection.

HTML5 is anything goes.

Paying for Content: Who Wins?

Typical customer has 50-60 apps on their device.

58% of them are free apps (acquisition/marketing play)

23% are paid apps (publishing play)

Rest are default or preinstalled apps

Your mobile app needs to offer more than the web. Needs to be interactive and personal.

Four areas to differentiate: * Entertainment: Angry Birds, Pandora, Xtra Factor * Teach Content: Tiger Woods Swing Teacher, How to Cook Everything, "Fractions" apps * Manage Life: Airlines, Banks, Dropbox * ...all with less clutter than the web.

Apps vs Web Experience

Almost no advertising in apps (for now :( )

Fewer pop-ups

Less multitasking / fewer divided screens

Less shoulder pain and squinting: "lean back" vs. "hunch forward"

Top Apps by Time Spent: Apps

Entertainment: 29%

Games: 25%

Social Networking: 13%

Top Apps by Time Spent: Web

Life Management (bill paying, etc.): 34%

Search: 25%

Social Networking: 17%

App usage is a much more leisure-oriented activity than web usage

Interactive Apps: TV's New BFF

60% of viewers use mobile phones while watching TV

Only 33% of viewers have their laptop open.

iPad owners spend more time watching TV with their iPad open than any other activity.

>80% of TV app users say they had more fun watching while using the app than just watching broadcasting alone.

Cautionary Tales: Can an app experience dilute your brand?

Cloud Sync: iCookbook. Recent version screwed up the sync and got flooded with negative reviews.

Overpromising: Grey's Anatomy app didn't keep up with new content related to the show.

Number of users: magazine apps

Unfun: kids' apps. If you waste people's money they're hard to get back.

Customer Acquisition

Using a brand's points of contact.

Not just app stores/markets.

Is the goal acquisition of the app, or is it acquisition of the product?

Consumer Style, B2B Scale

Consumer apps are the tip of the iceberg, and B2B success comes from consumer connection

Field tools: Doctors, Sales, Political.

Lots and lots of doctors' offices are still on paper!

Employee engagement. Data collection tool for HR departments, rate company presentations, activites, etc.

Health Care: Mobile is being regulated because the app is considered a medical device.

Retail: Location-based activities

B2B Apps: Market Research

Surveys are completed dramatically more often on mobile devices than on desktops

Health Communication

Toumaz: sense vital signs through smart band-aids

Communicate vitals wirelessly to diagnostic devices

Retail GPS Patterns

App captures footprints in mall.

To get people to give up their data (i.e. their footprints) the app needs to wrap itself in B2C benefits (e.g. a shopping magazine)

#internet summit #isum11

Live from ISUM11: Making The Tools Work for You - Video, Widgets, Wikis, Podcasts

Note: See all my notes from Internet Summit 2011 by clicking here.

Live notes from Chris Condayan, Manager of Public Education at the American Society of Microbiology (AMS) and MicrobeWorld.org on "Making The Tools Work for You - Video, Widgets, Wikis, Podcasts" at Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh on 2011-11-15.

AMS is largest single life science membership in the world. More than 38k members. More than 26 disciplines of microbiology, with a special arm for education.

ASM has launched nine different podcast programs.

Common Widgets * Video/Audio Players * Weather * News/Blog Feeds * Twitter/Facebook/Flickr Updates * Slideshare embedded slideshows * Audience/User Polls (e.g. SurveyMonkey)

Why Use Widgets?

They help keep people on your site.

They're an easy way to point people to relevant/related content on or off your site (i.e. cross-linking)

Why Create Widgets for Other Sites?

They make it easy for other people to supplement their content with your stuff. Raises awareness of what you're doing and helps SEO.

Low development costs; it's easy to make widgets using various free online tools.

Wikis (e.g. wikipedia)

Editable websites that allow end users to create and collaborate on content.

Use Cases:

* Document Collaboration * Knowledge Base * Project Management * Intranet * Conference Planning/Networking * Neighborhood/Community Site * Fan sites

ASM Communication Department uses a wiki.

Internally: collaborative platform for documents, policies, procedures

Externally: allows others to see what's going on and contribute/comment

Podcasting

Chris's specialty!

What is Podcasting?

Audio/Video on demand. Portable and convenient, take it with you on any device.

Content "as it is published." As soon as production is done, it goes out to all distribution channels.

Syndicated programming, episodic content.

Podcasting Statistics

You don't really hear about podcasting anymore, but 45% of all Americans are aware of what a podcast is (up from 22% in 2006)

1 in 4 Americans have listened to a podcast.

An estimated 31 million Americans listened to a podcast in the last month!

Compare: Only 8% of Americans used Twitter.

Breaks down evenly by gender.

Video

71% of the US Internet audience uses online video-sharing sites.

What are people watching online?

(1) Comedy & humor (2) News (3) Educational videos << great opportunity for ASM

How long does it take to make a podcast?

A simple chat show with no editing? As little as an hour.

Slide 15-minute edited podcast with interviews/news reporsts? 6 hours to record and edit

3-5 minute video? 1-40+ hours depending on production values

Don't forget writing & research time too!

Is there money in Podcasting and Online Video?

Creators are experimenting with: * Sponsorships * Grants * Advertising * Listener Donations

AVOID PODFADING / burnout

Most people don't make it to their 7th episode.

Consider a flexible production schedule. Give yourself leeway.

Consider a limited run.

Schedule vacations from production schedules (and tell your audience so they're in the loop!)

Have an exit plan.

Choose the Right Content

#1 Message: Be Authentic.

Listeners are more interested in authenticity than production value.

New Scientist podcast used a professional American DJ. Everybody hated it, so they pulled the plug and did it in-house with just a couple people. Eliminated the fancy audio work and effects and had much better reception.

Podcasts can complement existing content...

* Raise interest in your company/mission * Deliver same content you use elsewhere, but in audio version * Deliver supplementary/bonus content on top of your normal content.

Pros and Cons or Repurposed Content

Pros: You already have it "Cool factor" of being a podcaster without lots of work -- if podcasting is still cool :) Can go places you never expected -- other media platforms/networks may discover and licensing your stuff

Cons: Your stuff (lectures, conferences, etc.) might be boring Uses bandwidth ($$$) You can't control what happens to it. People will take it and do what they want. You may not get proper credit.

Lessons Learned: CONTENT

Finding the right music is important. Best choice is mid-range "production" music: firstcom, soundsdogs, digital juice

Don't try to imitate NPR, PBS, or other major media. They've been doing this longer than you and they've got way better equipment. You won't sound as good and your audience probably doesn't want a clone of them anyway. Be true to yourself.

Tools: Audio Editing Software

Audacity, free on all platforms

GarageBand, free on Macs

Tools: Microphones

Blue Snowball ($100, USB)

MXL ($100-300, USB)

R0DE ($200-300, USB)

Sony ECM-MS907 ($80 field mic)

Microphones are highly variable and personal. A $300 mic might beat a $1000+ plus mic for you.

Tools: Advanced Gear

For podcasts with more than one person, you probably want a mixer with pre-amp, Firewire card to record individual channels, more mics, etc.

Podcasting Via Skype

Best quality is Skype-to-Skype, not cell or landlines.

Recording Skype: * AudioHijackPro (Mac) * Pamela (PC) * Use a mixer with another computer.

Video Podcasts

MicrobeWorld Video Podcast started 2007

No host, just clips & soundbites from researchers and piece them together.

1 podcast feed, upload to 12 video sharing sites.

Deliver content in multiple file formats -- some people or institutions lock down their software so can only view certain types.

55 episodes to date

Video Equipment

Digital Camera, tripod/rails, mics & software as for audio, lights, lots of tapes & hard drives.

Learning Curve

Takes 6-12 months (up to a lifetime!) to learn to record & edit video

Editing takes 20-50 hours per project, ~45 to compress/render per file format. Online distribution/marketing takes ~8 hours.

Hosting Options

Can store podcasts on own servers, but can be expensive

Or use a traditional hosting service -- can be risky if they're not tooled up for your bandwidth

Or use a podcast/CDN specific to media hosting. Less control, but they're inexpensive and low-risk.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Delusional Notions