Life: Turning It Up to Eleven

Monday, January 23, 2012 | Entrepreneurship, TribeHR | Leave a comment

When working on a startup, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day details and lose track of the things that are most important in life. Late in 2011 I had the opportunity to realize this – one could say that life completely blind-sided me and forced me to stop and smell the roses.

At the beginning of September we’d had our first official board meeting for TribeHR, and flush with positive energy and excitement, I had a schedule jam-packed with recruiting and business development meetings. Mid September I left for a trip to San Francisco to pursue a number of conversations and my wife, Xiaopu, took the opportunity to cash in a bit of vacation from work and join me. The blind-siding I mentioned earlier happened on Sep 22 when our water broke early and we were rushed to hospital. On Sep 26, at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, our son Evan was born.

Working at a SaaS startup, I’ve conditioned myself to measure our stats rigorously. And Evan’s stats kept staring me in the face:

  • 26 weeks 2 days.
  • 1 lbs 8 oz.
  • 3536 km (2197 miles) from home.

Holy crap San Jose is far from Waterloo

It abruptly felt like our world had been completely changed. Was Evan going to be ok? What are the long-term implications? How are we going to manage a surprise 3-month stay in California? How will we cover the medical expenses?

It’s been four months since the initial scare, and although there have been moments of crisis and elation along the way, things are going well. Evan is home and doing extremely well and during this journey I’ve learned a lot. All platitudes and obvious lessons aside – here are a few things that stood out from this experience.

The Best Teams Improve Around Adversity

I’m involved in a number of volunteer and business organizations, and something that stood out from all my other experiences, was how well the TribeHR team pulled together. I can’t imagine the uncertainty I must have caused with my short email to them explaining “… an emergency has altered my plans and I’m going to be down here for a longer period of time,” but their ability to device processes and patterns around my absence was incredible. While I was spending most of my time in San Jose, they managed to help us win accolade after accolade after accolade after accolade. Any lesser team would have been hobbled, but these guys managed not only to lead critical events and hiring activities in my absence, but they managed to do it at an award-winning level.

Personal Touches Go Far

Conversations with potential investors and partners is part of my role – it was expected that I’d use some of my time in the Bay Area to connect with new partners and to follow up with investors. One person in particular, however, that stood out from the rest was Karan Mehandru of Trinity Ventures (@kmehandru) – not only did he make it clear that I could lean on him if my wife and I needed any help, but when he realized that we’d be stuck in San Jose for a prolonged period, he went so far as to invite us to his place for a BBQ and for Thanksgiving so that we’d feel more comfortable. That kind of consideration made a world of difference and is one of the major reasons that Karan is at the top of my list of valley VC’s that I’d want to work with.

Rewards Optimization Doesn’t Equal Customer Loyalty

Just before this incident occurred, I signed up for two customer loyalty programs to try and consolidate the travel expenses I was incurring: Hilton Honors and Enterprise Plus. When I realized that we were going to be stuck in San Jose for approx. 90 days, I thought to contact both rewards programs to see what options there were for more cost-effective options. My experiences couldn’t have been more different. Enterprise not only offered me the special rate for the local hospital, but also offered a free upgrade at a further discounted rate, and helped with scheduling our pick-ups and drop-offs. The care they showed had us rent a car from them for the duration of our stay.

Hilton Honors, on the other hand, couldn’t help me directly – their number is just a call center. Instead they suggested I contact the sales managers at two local Hilton properties. Of the two sales managers, neither returned my call, and the one that I did manage to reach was unsympathetic and kept telling me to go to their website as that’s where I could find their best rates. Over all, it was an experience that pushed me away and we spent our time at a different property.

Comparing the two, I realized that although both started with loyalty programs, they ended differently. I am loyal to Enterprise – I rent from them almost exclusively now. I am gaming Hilton – I stay there only when it’s convenient to take advantage of points optimizations – as soon as I encounter a different brand that has a better points program I’ll likely end up shifting.  The point I’ve taken away from this is that a loyalty or rewards program is still only as effective as the attitude of front-line staff.

So now, four months later, when the stats are looking much better (43 weeks, 6 lbs 11 oz, 0km from home, and we’ve learned excruciating lessons (like the value of travel insurance), I’m looking forward to joining the ranks of startup fathers that juggle their ventures with their families.

Wish me luck.

12 Rules for Using AngelList Like a Boss

Thursday, September 29, 2011 | Entrepreneurship, TribeHR | 5 Comments

A recent Huffington Post article on AngelList reminded me I need to finish this post – my apologies to those that expected me to post it months ago.

Leading a Workshop Like a Boss

There are some fantastic posts about how to get started on AngelList (one of my favourites is Brendan Baker‘s post How to Hustle with AngelList), but I haven’t seen as many written by entrepreneurs that have successfully used AngelList to raise money. Although I’m no expert on the fundraising process, I can say that we successfully used AngelList’s introductions to raise our round.

Here are the rules we set for ourselves as we went through the process.

Disclaimer: be sure to take these with a grain of salt – they worked for us, but might not work for everyone. Best of luck!

1. Before Posting – Find a lead investor

This is the first rule we decided on. It’s also the first rule that was shared with us by someone else. Over lunch this past March, Dan Martell shared this rule with me, and I’m giving it my +1. We didn’t want to post our profile until we could say that someone else thought we were a good investment. When we did post our profile, there was no money in hand yet, but we had verbal commitment from a local investor for $50k of the $500k we were trying to raise. It was meant to get us started, and it did. It made a big difference to our profile as it demonstrated that we had already been pitching and it became a conversation piece with several angels. For a few that reached out, the name and background of this investor were part of the opening conversations – I truly believe that they wouldn’t have reached out if we hadn’t been able to say we already had money committed.

2. Before Posting - Build a great website

This may sound like a flippant comment, but it was actually a critical component of our product and pitch.  A great product is a given, but some startups I’ve been around forget their public-facing content. We got our site to the point where we were receiving regular compliments before we posted our startup to AngelList, and it came in handy. When you put your profile up, the team that runs AngelList may send your profile out to investors that are a good fit – this was what happened for us. One of the recipients of the email blast saw the short email summary, visited our website, then gave us a call. This is important: they were persuaded to contact us based on a single paragraph in an email and the quality of our website. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have an awesome website.

3. Before Posting - Complete a great pitch deck

The pitchdeck is important, not just because it provides investors with a description of your company, but also because it forces you to condense your business into a few slides. We went through a pitch coaching process with the Venture Services Program at Communitech. Although it was difficult and painful at times, it helped us figure out how to talk about our business in very succinct terms, and it gave us the chance to practice talking in terms that investors would care about. If you’re having trouble pulling your pitch deck together, feel free to drop me a line and I’d be happy to share ours with you as an example.

4. Before Posting - Collect your social proof

The value of social proof is described elsewhere, so I’ll skip trying to convince you. I am, however, offering the suggestion that documenting  your social proof  before you post to AngelList will help. . Yes, you’ll need to post your social proof to your AngelList profile, but you may also want to dole it out in chunks (see point 9 below), or share specific links with investors while you’re talking to them. Having your list prepared ahead of time will make that process easier, and it will help you keep it top of mind, which will elevate your confidence (not to mention providing anecdotes for your conversations with potential investors).

5. Before Posting - Acquire paying customers

I realize this is easier said than done, but if you have paying customers before you go raising money, it not only puts you in a much better position when it comes to discussing valuations, but it also piques investor interest and helps you calculate the myriad of statistics and numbers that you’ll need to share with potential investors. If you’re building an SaaS company, I suggest reading David Skok’s original blog post on SaaS metrics. Reading this post will help you understand how to prepare your numbers, which will also give you some thoughts on how to acquire the right type of customers. Also, if you time your customer acquisition right, you’ll be able to share numbers as part of your AngelList profile. Updating those numbers regularly also helps (again, see point 9).

6. Before Posting - Be helpful and connected

The last thing I set for myself was to make sure that when people looked us up (the founders in particular) that they would find rich social profiles on networks that offered opportunities to share expertise or thoughts. I don’t know if our investors made it as far as checking us out. I’m including it as a rule because we went through the effort. The networks I’d consider “knowledge-based” social networks include LinkedIn Answers, OnStartups Answers, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Quora, etc. I’d been using OnStartups for a while, so that was the profile I put energy into. Leading up to posting to AngelList, and even after I’d posted, I tried to be a frequent visitor and a helpful one on the site. Like I said, I’m not sure how effective this was (I’ll have to ask our investors on this) but my objective was to demonstrate that we have a capable team that actively learns and is happy to share lessons learned.

7. Before Posting – Build an investor profile/persona

There are many different types of investors on AngelList – it will save you a lot of time and stress if you can figure out the characteristics of the investor you’re looking for. For us, here is a summary of what we wanted:

Single high-tech startup in the HR space is seeking investors that want to build a big company rather than a quick-flip. The ideal partner has way more B2B SaaS marketing expertise than we do,a ridiculously successful track record of good investments/companies, and entrepreneurial experience. Bonus marks for investment experience in our industry and/or networks that could bring in key strategic partnerships. Personality-wise, we are looking for people we feel comfortable with – people we’d want to have a beer with and with whom we can chat about any problems that come up, be they business or personal.

Our profile won’t be a perfect fit for everyone, but by building it up-front, we were able to better qualify investors and be prepared to answer the inevitable question about what we were looking for.

8. After Posting – Aim for < 5 minute follow-ups

This one was the most challenging, although maybe the most impactful, of our self-imposed rules. Follow-up is exceptionally important, but it’s not a binary thing. A great follow-up to an inquiry will not only answer the person’s questions, but is also personalized and timely. When we thought about out target investors, we realized many of them might see a $20k angel investment as a small investment, thus might make impulsive decisions. To capitalize on that behaviour, we gave ourselves the goal of following up within 5 minutes of an inquiry – the idea being that if they are on our profile submitting an expression of interest, then they are thinking about us right now and may be more receptive. We also figured that if an investor was interested in our business model, they might also be looking at other startups with a similar profile, and we didn’t want to be the last one to follow up if they were submitting multiple contact forms.

9. After Posting - Show growth and progress

One of the neat things about AngelList is that it notifies people about the startups they follow whenever there is a change. We actually modified our product release schedule, as well as expected blog/media coverage, to ensure that we’d be able to show an ongoing pattern of buzz, activity, and customer growth throughout the entire time our profile was available. Then, every couple of days, I’d post the new content/change/coverage to our profile as a comment or update. There were several situations where I’d have a second call with an investor a week or two after our initial email exchange and have to clarify that our numbers or progress had been updated and he/she might need to update their records. The risk to this was that some people might be annoyed with information that felt out-of-date, but the upside was that it helped bring attention to the speed of change we were trying to maintain.

10. After Posting - Assume nothing’s been read

This was a surprise to us, and we had to shift our conversation pattern very quickly when we realized that a significant portion (memory tells me about 3/4) of the people that contacted us hadn’t looked at our deck or our documentation – they contacted us based on a cursory look into the AngelList profile, perhaps our website, and maybe our LinkedIn profiles. Once I changed my conversations to always start off with an introduction (letting them know they could tell me to skip over stuff) it greatly improved the quality of our chats. The phrase I used was:

If you’d like, I can kick things off with an overview. I know there may be overlap with what you’ve already read, but we’ve found that with things changing so quickly, it often helps when I run through the basics, incorporating recent changes, then let you tell me where you’d like us to spend more time. Would that work for you?

Only once during our fundraising did I have someone balk at the invitation, and that’s because he had just finished reading everything 5 minutes before, and had some very specific questions. For most others, it was a great way for them to catch up if they hadn’t spent the time to read our slide deck.

If you’re anything like me, it may feel a little insulting the first couple times an investor reaches out without first taking the time to read your material – I know I felt that way. However, once we started taking it as a compliment, things improved. We told ourselves “our pitch looked so hot that they had to contact us before finishing” and things became a heck of a lot easier :)

11. After Posting - Be awesome and be committed

Another way of saying this is “Promise High and Over Deliver” – we were looking for investors who would commit time and energy to us, so we needed to do the same. When investors asked us for specific information that we didn’t have, we committed to turning answers around quickly and with all possible bells and whistles. There were times when we had to change the product just to get the information the potential investors wanted – for example, we started making changes to our funnel to better record states and we changed our billing systems to gain better insights into our customers. Similarly, we’d go the extra mile whenever possible for conversations – we had calls before 6am ET to field calls from European contacts and calls at 10pm to field west-coast inquiries. We made custom power point decks to highlight key insights, we delivered numerous online demos and we travelled to other cities to meet in person to get to know various investors. These meetings were particularly important. According to one of the AngelList investors we spoke to, “Your AngelList profile sparked my curiosity but meeting you is what got me really interested in your vision.”

All these things placed a ridiculous toll on our schedules, sleep patterns and families, but they gave evidence to our commitment and dedication not just to the company, but also to finding the right investors.

12. After Posting - Be picky, respectful, and honest

I left this point to last, as it was a point that drove all the others. Going into this process we had clear investor profiles in mind (*cough* point 7 *cough*). It was a lot easier to manage our calls when we were honest with investors. We had several conversations with people that were clearly brilliant people, but didn’t quite fit our target profile – rather than being vague on our description, we were honest with them about what we were looking for, and offered to keep them in the loop. This saved us (and them) time. Similarly, once we had a couple of investors closing in on a commitment, we were open with everyone else to make sure we avoided a competitive bidding scenario. This avoided any conflicts, but also freed up our time to really work with the investors that we were primarily engaged with. At the end of the day, we really wanted investors we could trust, who respected us and were honest with us – we tried to set the stage by offering the same.

So there – 12 rules that we followed that helped us eventually close a $1M round from Matrix Partners. If these rules help you out – please let me know! If you find anything missing (or have something to add), please let me know in a comment, and if they fit, I’ll add them to the post.

If you’d like to read more about raising money on AngelList, here some useful  posts I’ve referenced in the past:

Your Funnel is a Finite State Machine

Friday, September 23, 2011 | Entrepreneurship, TribeHR | 1 Comment

I’m of the opinion that the startup journey is really just the process of repeated work between “a-ha” moments of key insights. The faster we get to new insights, the better we are at ongoing improvement. I’m writing this post to describe an a-ha moment that happened early on (although earlier would have been better) in the lifecycle of TribeHR.

Exciting! An Arbitrary State Machine

To other engineers turned entrepreneurs: your customer acquisition funnel is a finite state machine.

This statement implies three specific premises:

  • your funnel can and should be modeled as a Finite State Machine (FSM)
  • your funnel FSM should map to explicit in-app states
  • investors care about the funnel state as much as (if not more) than anything else in your app

Your Funnel Should be Modeled

This point is best described in terms of my experiences with TribeHR:

When designing features within TribeHR, it was intuitive to think about our software in terms of moving objects through a series of states: a review was “in-progress”, “completed”, then “filed”; a vacation request was “pending review”, then “approved” or “rejected”. Similarly, the users of the system would also be moved through states – “employee”, “manager” or “admin” for example. When I thought about the marketing process, however, I treated “sales and marketing” as the entry point into the state machine – I saw it as the entry arrow rather than a separate series of states.

Because we didn’t start by planning our marketing and sales states, it was easy to rely on 3rd party services for our definitions. Unfortunately, implementing multiple services led to confusion. Some customers subscribed using PayPal, others paid through our payment gateway, and others found us via third-party app stores – each system had a different way of defining the state of a customer, so simple numbers like “how many customers are active” was a difficult thing to determine. This was compounded by our shift from a freemium model to a free-trial model earlier this year.

If we had clearly defined and tracked our states from the start (which we have since done) it would have been easier to map third-party terminology to our own, making analyses and improvements much easier. You can see the results of subsequent mapping in the diagram below:

Our Funnel as a Finite State Machine

As you can see, our entry state is “trialing”, thus the primary objective of our website is to convert visitors and leads into trialing users (our lead nurturing program is a state-machine still being designed). Once someone is trialling, they have two potential transitions: they can become either a paid “active” customer or an “abandoned” trial. Once someone becomes an active customer (and ideally remain one for a long time) they will exit the state only as a “cancelled” or “suspended” account. By clearly defining our states in the above format, we are now much better equipped to modify our messaging and features to optimize the experience. Before identifying the above state machine, we wasted a lot of time manually analyzing and identifying states, often on a case-by-case basis.

The “should” part of my assertion follows from my conversations with investors and advisors. I’d frequently be asked for information such as our conversion rate from trials to paid customers or our re-activation rate of suspended accounts – without a clear FSM, we’d have some accounts that occupied more than one state, which made answering these questions impossible. By defining our funnel/FSM we were then able to answer such questions with ease, which made a world of difference to our working relationship with investors and advisors.

If you haven’t defined your Funnel/FSM yet – do so. If you’re early-on in your startups, ot might not be perfect, but it will save you significant stress, time, and effort as you continue to work with mentors and investors. If it helps, put the model up on the wall at your office – it’ll keep it top of mind with your team.

Mapping to Explicit In-App States

Once you finalize your model, it’s critically important that you then track these states explicitly within you app. For example, if you offer a 15-day trial, during which users have to cancel or continue, it might be tempting to calculate “trialing” customers as those who are subscribed and whose date subscribed value is within the last 15 days. While this calculation might yield a correct result, formulating queries becomes significantly more complex when you can’t simply evaluate whether a field “state” is set to “trialing”.

These queries are important because as your company and customer base grow, you’ll need to generate reports and dashboards that highlight this information in near real-time. You’ll need to answer questions like what percentage of users that sign up for a trial convert to a paid customer, and how is it changing over time? As soon as you can answer that, you’ll then be asked to segment by lead source, user characteristic, or time window. For example how does that conversion rate over time vary according to lead source or engagement level?

To put it into an example, below are two examples of queries that would generate a summary of states of a single cohort from January 2011, assuming a 15-day trialing period. The first uses explicitly defined states, and the second assumes you calculate a real-time trial period, and simply delete records when they terminate their account.

Explicitly defined:

SELECT COUNT(state) AS total_users, state
  FROM users
    WHERE date_registered >= "2011-01-01" AND date_registered < "2011-02-01"
  GROUP BY state;

Calculated on the fly:

SELECT SELECT COUNT(state) AS total_users, IF(date_registered >
    DATE_SUB("2011-02-01" , INTERVAL 15 DAY); "TRIAL"; "ACTIVE") AS state
  FROM users
    WHERE date_registered >= "2011-01-01" AND date_registered < "2011-02-01"
  GROUP BY state;

As you can see, the query in the first is much easier to use and read, and it includes all states, whereas the second is challenging to use (even more challenging to modify if you have more states) and doesn’t track cancelled accounts.

By structuring your database such that the state is explicitly identifiable, you’ll be able to generate queries much more readily, which will then let you automate standard reports (like conversion and churn rates) for dash boarding, and will allow you to more easily connect business intelligence tools to your database. The ultimate goal is to let your business-oriented team members manipulate the data as readily as you can.

An added benefit of explicit states is that they act as assertions. Although it’s possible to determine that a customer is active by checking the date of their last successful payment, it’s much better to have an explicit “active” state as you can then run automated tests to verify that your assertions are true. Having a recurring task that iterates through your customer base to confirm that accounts with a most recent payment made within the last month are correctly identified as “active”, is a good way to follow monitoring-driven-development approaches. Any assertion errors can help identify critical flaws in your system.

Investors Care About the Funnel State

Although this may seem obvious, it still needs stating. The platitude what get’s measured gets done has a corollary – what we care about gets measured. Technical founders often measure and know details like server load, traffic metrics, lines of code and number of commits or push requests. Because we innately care about those tasks, we tend to measure and follow them. What can’t be over-emphasized is how much investors, advisors and partners will care about your funnel states. Below is a representative subset of the metrics we’ve been asked to report at our board meetings – you’ll notice that none of them are related to in-app usage or infrastructure performance:

  • Total # Of Customers (overall and by customer segments)
  • Visitor-to-Trial Conversion Rate (overall, and by lead source)
  • Trials-to-Active Conversion Rate (overall, and by lead source and by segment)
  • Churn Rate (overall and by lead source)
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (overall and by lead source)
  • Average Revenue per User (overall and by lead source)
  • Life Time Value (overall and by lead source)

Most of these numbers depend on measuring our customers’ states as well as various additional segments. Because our segments will vary frequently as we experiment and optimize with marketing campaigns, if we don’t have explicit (and easily determined) states, rapid iterations on our reporting become exceptionally difficult.

Investors and advisors will assume that you have infrastructure running smoothly – you don’t need to hammer home evidence of it, so skip on reporting the infrastructure stats I mentioned earlier. For them to provide valuable advice, however, they need to be able to understand and trust the business metrics I listed. If you can speak as confidently about your Funnel/FSM as you do your application, and if you can deliver transparency into the funnel by automating reports and dashboards, you’ll build your investors confidence and trust in you as an entrepreneur.

Bonus Reasons

As a bonus, here are a few cool things you can then do once you have this funnel modelled and embedded within your software:

  1. More easily build dashboards with tools like Geckoboard
  2. Delegate data-mining and analysis to non-technical staff, by tacking on BI tools like Qlickview
  3. Automate segmentation and lists for automated email campaigns and lead nurturing using Mailchimp, Performable, and others
  4. Simplify cohort analyses by customer segment

If you have a state machine for your funnel or customer base, especially if it deviates significantly from mine above, please share it in a comment or an email to me. It would be interesting to see what approaches others are taking.

The Best Time to be Running a Tech Company

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 | Entrepreneurship, Waterloo Region | Leave a comment

If you haven’t seen Ali Asaria‘s video on CBC yet, it’s worth watching. You can watch it here, but the best segment from it happens at 3:42 when Ali says:

“There’s no better time to be running a tech company & there’s no better place to be running it than from Waterloo”

I couldn’t agree more.

First, to set the stage, it’s great to be running a tech company anywhere – the number of tools that can be rapidly deployed to help get you off the ground is astounding, and there is investment money available for teams that can execute well. On the tool front,  in many ways it feels like you assemble a startup these days, rather the building one – tools like Google Apps, Mailchimp, Basecamp, Freshbooks, CloudBees and others make it supremely easy to build your company.  Note: I’ve included a great infographic on tools you might want to use at the bottom of this post. On the investment front, tools like AngelList and others make it easier to connect with potential investors, regardless of geography.

So with that out of the way, why Waterloo Region?

Core Network

The support network available here is second to none. The Communitech Venture Services Program is world-class (from the perspective of someone that’s been able to experience the quality of the mentorship first-hand) and other near-by programs, like those offered at MaRS (who just announced they’re expanding), are great institutional ways to help companies grow. These are complemented by a core network of individuals that are just as willing to help. The folks locally pulling together things like StartupCamp, DemoCamp, Founder Drinks and other similar events have helped any number of would-be entrepreneurs connect with people that have done it before. Our region is replete with experienced entrepreneurs that are willing to help. If you’re embarking on a new project, having a core network of people and organizations that are interested in helping you succeed is crucial, and our region is fortunate to have such a robust network.

Investment Money

Although there is a lot of truth behind the sentiment that there isn’t a lot of VC money available in Canada at the moment, what’s also similarly evident, is that more and more VC firms and Angel Investors from the US are looking north of the border for their investments. More specifically – they’re also looking at Waterloo Region. Investments into companies like Kik and TribeHR (full disclosure: I’m co-founder & CEO at TribeHR, and am unabashedly biased towards the company) and growth of offices like Google’s Kitchener Office are evidence of the decisions that are driving the buzz. Like Ali mentioned in his CBC interview – people are talking. People know that Waterloo is where things are happening, and that buzz is following real money coming into the area. In addition to outside money coming in, we have an increasingly active Angel Investment community – individual investors and organized groups (such as GTAN) are making it easier for startups that have early traction to speed things up.

Proximity to Universities

Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m not the biggest fan of how my University education made it difficult to pursue my entrepreneurial adventures, but in the intervening years things have changed significantly. On-campus programs like Velocity are helping students exercise their entrepreneurial muscles earlier than ever before, and I’m seeing more and more students take advantage of the opportunities afforded by networks I mentioned above. Go to StartupCamp or DemoCamp or attend a featured speaker or presentation put on by Communitech, and there is always a strong undergraduate representation. The opportunity for startups to bring on students in full time or part time roles is often over-looked: with one of the top engineering schools and one of the top business schools, we have our pick of the brightest and most entrepreneurial students in the country. I don’t mean to imply that they are less expensive to hire, rather I mean that they are often more open to experimenting and adapting to changing conditions, and with a 4-month co-op cycle, startups can iterate on projects and models more quickly than others. This is a strong strategic advantage that is often overlooked.

So yes, when I look around, this is definitely the best place and time to be running a tech company.

 

As I mentioned above – here is a great inforgraphic, courtesy of the folks at BestVendor, on which tools other startups are using.

Tool Search – Content Sharing / Collaboration

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 | CIGI, Web | 8 Comments

I’m looking for a tool – and I’m hoping that the magic of the interweb can help me find something. I’m working with a development team in Africa on a project for CIGI and we’re looking around for a new way to share content between the development teams. Here are some of the characteristics we’re looking for:

Social:  We’ve experimented with using Twitter (and similar tools) as a way to share links that we come across of, and although that works for our team in Canada, it hasn’t proven to be particularly useful for our African counterparts. We’re not online at the same time, and the internet connectivity issues there make Twitter clients painful for them. Also, linking to the content is a frustrating experience because of those same connectivity issues. We did, however, find a lot of value in the personal nature of the shared links – it was clear who it was from, and it could be easily directed at someone specifically.

Reader: The interface of a reader is a great interface, and both our teams currently use Google Reader, but we found that for the African team, it was less effective. Because of the internet connection issues, they are hesitant to open many articles at a time, so the speed of reading and linking it greatly hampered. The ability to follow a user has been nice, but non-optimal.

Off Line: I’ve been using InstaPaper for off-line reading, and find the interface particularly applicable to the internet connection issues. We’re going to give the social tools in Instapaper a try, but I’m not sure if it will be perfect (the need to mark for later reading, then to “like” it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be perfectly smooth)

Anyone have any suggestions for other tools that include a similar set of social offline blog reading?

How Chevy Won SXSWi

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 | Web | 3 Comments

I just came back from SXSWi, and the best way to describe it was mardi-gras for geeks. Although I had a blast and managed to fill my days with sessions, speakers, and productive meetings, what was most striking was the torrent of marketing activity going on. Yes, there were dozens of mobile place-based and group messaging apps launching (all of them seemed to be following the same strategy of having cute girls in branded tank-tops handing out post cards), and yes the big brands came out to play (e.g. Samsung, Pepsi, Microsoft, etc), however the clear winner in my mind was Chevrolet.

Using a big wide, generalizing brush, I’m going out on a limb that the goals of sponsorsing SXSW would be:

  • Connect your brand with the concepts of hip, savvy, technical, relevant, forward-thinking, etc
  • Get young, connected, social-media minded people to talk about your brand
  • Have people with disposable cash try your product, to intice them to buy

I’m sure there are other goals, but let’s start there, as I’d like to share how General Motors kicked ass on these fronts.

General Motors isn’t a brand that I’d normally associate with any of those adjectives above (connected, hip, etc) but the showed some keen insight in their execution at SXSW.

Vector 1: Get People To Try Your Product

Just outside the conference centre, GM had a “Drive a Chevy” setup, where you could exchange contact & demographic information for the right to drive any of the Chevy Cruze, Volt, Camaro, or Corvette. After filling out the forms, I was whisked off to the Volt line where I had all of 30 seconds to wait before getting into a vehicle. This car has one hell of a first impression - the interior is gorgeous, and as we drove off, I realized it had surprisingly good acceleration. From there I had the chance to shift over and give the new Camaro convertible a drive, and was similarly impressed. Finally, I capped the afternoon off by taking a new Corvette Convertible for a spin around Austin. All together, it was an incredible way for them to introduce their cars to me, and to really show of their new design approaches. All three vehicles were fantastic to drive, and now none of them would feel out-of-place in my garage ;)

Vector 2: Get People to Learn About & Talk About Your Product

Chevy offered a “Catch-a-Chevy” program where they had 30 Chevy Cruze’s driving people around town – essentially running a free cab service. The drivers new their cars, and didn’t hesitate to talk about the festival and the brand. This was reinforced by telling people about it through twitter and heavily broadcasting the #ChevySXSW hashtag. It worked incredibly well – people were lined up waiting for a drive, and it did a great job of teaching people about the the Cruze. Beyond that, people were telling their friends and other attendees about the free drives and about the test drives. Their placement (just outside the front doors) was excellent, and their use of social media reinforced the buzz.

Vector 3: Show Off Something Different & New

Cars, even electric cars, aren’t *that* new – what was pretty different, however, was the 360 Photo Boom with the Chevy Sonic. By placing about 30 digital SLRs on a circular boom, they could snap a pic of you from multiple angles. They then animated it much like was done in The Matrix. It was new, different, and shareable. Here’s mine.

Vector 4: Ease a Pain

They had a kick-ass charging lounge (all of the attendees were busy draining the batteries of their cell phones and laptops), and with the Catch a Chevy program, were resolving taxi dilemmas. Need I say more?

Put these efforts all together, and I found myself leaving SXSW with a much more positive impression of GM’s future, their design sense, their products, and their relevance to me. Before SXSW I don’t think I could have identified a manufacturer that “got it” when I thought of technology, social media, and experiential marketing.

Now, however, if someone asked me to pick one, I’d be pointing at Chevy. That’s why I think Chevy won SXSW.

Wry Twist – China Monetary Policies vs. Maintenance Work

Thursday, December 23, 2010 | CIGI | Leave a comment

In a wry twist of fate, we have a small maintenance project at work that’s been impacted by an international economic governance situation. At CIGI (The Centre for International Governance Innovation) we recently installed a TV Studio for doing live media hits. As part of the setup, we’re installing an upgrade to our security system. Although our security company is a local provider, the upgrade has been delayed by over a month due to a part that’s on back order – a part that isn’t available here or anywhere else in Canada. Read More »

The Sound of Raging Designers

Monday, November 22, 2010 | Design, Web | Leave a comment

I just finished reading Peter Merholz’s rant against Ad Agencies on the Adaptive Path blog (Peter is AP’s President) and it’s as filled with rage and vitriol as any good rant should be. What’s most engaging, however, is the flood of replies and comments that were trigged by the post – many of them from other AP employees. If you are interested in the debate of User Experience Designers vs. Advertizing Agencies then I urge you to read the original post, the comments, and the many cross-linked posts in the comments. If you have only a passing interest, then the following summary is for you. Read More »

CIRA Registry Change

Thursday, September 2, 2010 | Web | Leave a comment

I just received an email from OpenSRS that makes me, as a .CA domain name holder, very happy. On October 12, CIRA will be flipping the switch on their new registry platform which will replace their current system (an old, difficult-to-use, and frustrating system) with something much more in keeping with registry standards out there. Here are some highlights of the changes: Read More »

Peer Learning Experiment

Friday, August 27, 2010 | Waterloo Region | 2 Comments

I had a great conversation with a friend yesterday, where we talked about how important it is to be always learning new things, and about how important it is to be always sharing the knowledge that you have. Our conversation meandered to Japanese history, to math to ideas about changing the way our education system works. Although we may not have solved any of life’s great mysteries, we did come up with the idea for an experiment: a peer learning group. Read More »

JosephFung
web tech entrepreneur
waterloo region enthusiast
ninja in-training