Telling your story – episode 1

February 4, 2009 at 10:59 pm | Posted in cloud computing, Software as a Service, Sofware Startup | 2 Comments
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Over the past few months I have been watching new technologies come to life  in the silicon forest of Portland.  Although I see some great new solutions that actually have a fighting chance, it has become clear to me that messaging is something that eludes even the smartest of the entrepreneurs.  It seems to me that there is almost a void when it comes to the concept of marketing with the small teams.  The focus remains on the technology for the duration of the project and only at the very end of the cycle the team spends a morning at a coffee shop trying to figure out how to market what they have built.   In a three part series of posts beginning with this one, I plan to  offer a bit of my assistance to help the young company come to grips with the fact that marketing must be part of the bigger process.  Marketing must be something you think of when you start your project, as your build your project and even past the day you launch the project.  Marketing isn’t just using twitter to tell your peeps about your cool application, it’s a process that takes some thought and process.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Marketing isn’t always about yelling “Sunday Sunday Sunday, big monster trucks in the mud.”  Marketing is as subtle as a simple story that explains what you are doing.  Unfortunately many think that marketing is rather simple and doesn’t really require much thought.  This would be yet another one of those mistakes that the entrepreneur can make.  Creating your story takes a little patience on your part and an understanding of what your target market wants to hear.  Creating the story is more than telling the world why you build something or what it actually does.  Telling the story is explaining why the software will help the user in terms that the USER understands.

Let me offer a scenario to make my point.  You are at a cocktail party and you are mingling around the group.  As you make your way across the room you are approached by the slick salesman wearing his pimped out suit and shiny shoes.  He introduces himself and starts to tell you all the great things about his condo project.  The earth quake proof building and how it took a design team 5 years to architect it.  He talks about the two story glass pool.  He talks about the great access to public transportation and the soundproof walls and the high speed elevators.  He goes on and on about the condo project.  You sip your drink and smile politely waiting for the opportunity to escape.  After he divulges all these great amenities he asks you if you would like to stop by to see the project.  You politely decline, telling him you like your home and aren’t in the market for a new one.    Finally you walk away and think to yourself, wow that’s 5 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Let’s make the correlation to what I see with software companies.  Many of the companies are just like this sales guy.  They start to spew out feature after feature hoping that something in there will gain interest by someone (I think we call this throwing s*&t against the wall to see what sticks).  They think to themselves “If I show all the features or how many whiz bang buttons I have, the audience will see for themselves that our solution is vastly superior and they will use it instead of the competitor.”   DING DING DING….wake up! This won’t happen.  Success isn’t a magical event.  It’s a planned strategy that takes time, hard work and great timing.

To create your story, the first step is to define your audience.   I won’t harp too much on target market, but if you have read my previous posts you are starting to see a pattern.  Once you know who you are speaking to, you will have the insight to speak to them in the terms that they will understand.  Your story should use words that make sense to the audience. If you are speaking to small business owners, drop the techno-jargon.  If you are speaking to doctors, talk about patients, medical records and insurance forms.    Do a little research about your target markets and find out how they refer to the issues or challenges that you solve.  Create a list of these keywords to use later in the process just like you would create simple functions to use later in your code.

As an example, if your application manages documents then get more specific based upon your audience.  In the case of MioWorks.com, we help to manage documents between companies and their customers across six verticals. But instead of just saying documents we look deeper at our target markets and find out the types of documents they use on a day to day basis.  This allows us to talk to our customers in terms that they will associate with and easily draw conclusions between our software and their business.

Now that you know how to “talk the talk” it’s time to take a walk through your own solution.  Put on your customer hat and view your application as if you were a customer.  Think about a day in the life of that person.  Think about how they would actually use your software.  One ritual I always perform with my applications is to physically set up an instance as each customer type.  I then try to mimic their use of the solution.  I also try to find a few people I know to help me simulate the role of the customer.   Afterward we have a chat about what we thought were the most compelling reasons for using the software.  At the end of this session you should have the foundation to your messaging and this is what we need to move onto the next step of creating your story.

Stay tuned for episode 2.

Completing the elusive first version of a web application

January 29, 2009 at 10:13 pm | Posted in Software as a Service, Sofware Startup | 1 Comment
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It’s just a bunch of web pages, right?  Why do developers struggle with getting these pages completed?  Why do the the developers go back and do rewrite after rewrite?  Why has the team missed three deadlines and are telling us it’s another six weeks?   

Do any of these questions sound familiar? 

Well, don’t feel bad.  In all my years in the software industry I can confirm that this syndrome hits every company from the smallest to the largest and every generation.  It started with mainframe applications for 3270s, then continued to plague developers in the client server era and now continues with web applications.   The struggle to deliver a product on schedule  seems to be the monster lurking behind every side project, start-up and well funded corporate effort.  But don’t despair, there is a way out of this seemingly endless maze. 

Much of the problem lies within the definition of “done”.  Developers want the product “done” before they release it to the world.  They don’t want to be judged on a design, a work flow or a business process that they aren’t 1,000 percent satisfied with. Product managers want the product “done” according to the precise specification they wrote.  Sales teams want the product “done” to satisfy that one customer who is on the cusp of a sale.   And executives and founders want the product “done” to meet their investor expectations.  Unfortunately if you line up the trajectory of each of these stake holders, more often than not you will not find point in time where they all converge.   This mismatch of expectations and understandings  result in missed schedules, arguments between teams, dis-satisfied customers and even worse, a company in chaos.  

The good news is that the solution to this problem isn’t new.  As a matter of fact it is well understood and has been tested over time.  The only problem is that as entrepreneurs we think that we can shortcut reality and just get the job done.  Well, let me warn you.  If you take this approach to your first version you will be very unhappy when you realize you are in the wheel of chaos missing deadline after deadline. 

History has told us that a good plan gets a good result.  Software development is no different, regardless of the medium.  After many lessons learned, I always guide my teams with a high level plan before we get started.  We answer four basic questions before we ever talk about a single feature or cool technology.  These questions include: 

  1. Who is our target market? And this isn’t just a label – it is the actual companies we want to sell to.  Names, locations, characteristics. 
  2. Why would these companies have an interest in this solution? – Get real here.  Don’t fantasize, explain it and see if you believe it yourself.
  3. What is the compelling reason they will use your solution? – Get away from your computer and go ask some people even if its only a dozen or two  This input  will give you insight into what the customer thinks and if there is something to your ideas. 
  4. What must the solution do for the target market to win their hearts?  Continue discussions with a few select prospects and see what really gets them excited.  Find out the “must have” elements to make them happy.  I will tell you now that customers need less features than you think they do.  Find out what drives them and what makes them excited about your idea. 

If you notice, I have not talked about writing one line of code, creating a single wire frame or thinking about color schemes.  The success or failure of the delivery of the first version lies squarely on the answers to the four questions posed above. 

For our application, the MioWorks.com team sat around a virtual conference table and talked about the type of customer we thought was being ignored by the Software as a Service marketplace.  That was pretty easy to define.  But we still had nothing more than a label that defined 100 million companies.  Not very targeted.  We then generalized the types of problems that were the most compelling to solve for this marketplace.  We then took it a step further and performed an analysis of dozens of verticals.  Finally we had our set of six vertical markets in a well defined geographic region that we thought would benefit the most from our idea.  

Once we had the answers to our question we were able to start to bring the idea to life.  We wrote a document that described the problems faced by the target market and what could be done to solve those problems.  Then we shared that document with all of our team members and consultants.  This set the foundation for all decisions to come.  At the end of the planning exercise we knew exactly what we should build to provide the biggest benefit for our target market.  

From the business definition we then began sketching our wireframes on paper and bringing together all of our ideas.  As new ideas came to light that were not directly aligned to our plan, we tabled them for a later time.  In our project management system we created an area called the “Idea Bin” that everyone could contribute to.  This allowed us to keep track of the great innovations that we can implement after the first version is completed.  As progress continued, we applied strong discipline to focus on our solution according to the plan we set out with.  I think that this is where many companies falter.  They have a “better” idea along the way and want to make wholesale changes to the application and the schedule.   

As our development continued and we broke through each of our milestones, we were challenged with potential schedule breakers. But this is where our plan and our answers saved us.  Every time we ran into a roadblock we took a step back.  We didn’t try to force a solution or try to build a bridge to cross a stream once.  We re-evaluated the software requirement and then looked at how it impacted the overall plan.   In many cases we were just trying to be way to slick for our own good.  We realized at times that using a piece of open source technology here or a library there would solve the problem and let us continue down the path to completion.   As problems arose we talked about them as a team.  We looked at options and the impact of each option.  We then made the best decision that would allow us to keep momentum and still satisfy the needs of the prospective customer.  

The process we follow with the MioWorks.com application may not work for everyone, but the guidelines behind the process will.  No matter what you are building, start with knowing who is going to buy it and why they will buy it.  Once you have that golden nugget of information, you can direct your team and make decisions much easier and get just a little more sleep!

Put your money where your mouth is…

December 31, 2008 at 2:43 am | Posted in Sofware Startup | Leave a comment
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I have been involved with Startup companies most of my adult career.  My role started out as a sales engineer where I performed demonstrations and answered questions for Wall Street companies.  I then moved into Product Management and brought to life several products for Axent Technologies including Enterprise Access Control for Windows 95 as well as for Windows NT.  My trek around the county then landed me as a technical marketing evangelist for Pandesic eBusiness and then onto my first role as a Product Marketing Manager with Vignette Corporation where I focused on portals.  A brief stint at a few more companies and then I found myself gracing the halls of Symantec getting my lessons from the big boys.  After nearly four years of abuse in the corporate arena I returned to start up land and took the helm of a VC funded start up called Morph Labs.   After an exciting year and a strange turn of events in the economy we launched our products, established our marketing presence, made a lot of noise against Google and then I quietly slipped away as I transitioned the company back to the founding VC.

So now it is my time.  My time to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to building a startup.  To this end I have now embarked upon a journey to create a company.  Funded on a shoestring and progressing only through the appetite of my friends for success.   I am now in my second month of this venture.  At this stage we are pushing for an introduction release in about a month.  Yes that’s right.  We plan to bring to market a web based application by February that is focused on changing the way that small business connects to their customers and leverages the internet to get things done.   Follow along as I write about our successes and our roadblocks.  I’ll try to detail what it takes to build your own startup not only from a skills perspective but also from a passion and committment standpoint.  I know that this will be an interesting ride and I would like to welcome you aboard!

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