Get the most out of your weaknesses

A lot of blogs will tell you as an entrepreneur: Focus on your strengths! Delegate! Empower your team to make decisions!!!

That’s great, but HOW? 

Are you really as good at things as you think you are? To find out, list what you think your strengths are. Then list what you LIKE doing. Is it the same? And so that you don’t get away with making things up, go back and think about things that have gone really well. And ask your friends, coworkers, and employees. Don’t be shy, it’s worth it.

Now, what DON’T you like doing?  Are you great at talking but terrible at paperwork? Expert at Excel but useless at writing? Keep track of those also. At this point most articles would tell you to find other people who can make up for your weaknesses. Or maybe to change your business/business model so that you don’t have too spend too much time on them.

But that’s not where this is going. Instead, I propose another step: think about the ways that you’ve dealt with your weaknesses before, and find new ways to use those skills. Chances are high that you are creative and resourceful. Chances are also high that for each weakness, there is a hidden strength underneath it. 

One study that backs this up is the research that says that many entrepreneurs are dyslexic. Richard Branson is a great example- struggling with school, he decided to become an entrepreneur instead. Also, entrepreneurs are more verbal, and are comfortable making fast decisions with limited information. In fact, being dyslexic is probably an *advantage*.

So think about ways to capitalize on your weaknesses. And of course, find people and processes that can balance your skill set.

 

 

3 Big Brand Social Media Wins, and 1 very big FAIL

Brands are finally growing up.  In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed some fantastic applications of social media for brands to reach out to their customers.

Coke

For the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, Coke installed vending machines at a train station in Belgium. If they pressed a button at the machine asking if they wanted free Skyfall tickets, they were  given 70 seconds to get to a vending machine in a different part of the station. If they made it in time, they were given the tickets. There’s just one catch: the whole station was secretly an obstacle course, with seeming strangers actually in place to distract, confuse, or trip up the participant. As he or she raced to the machine, a chorus of fake passengers hummed the 007 theme song. 1 by 1, people got to be James Bond for a few minutes. Truly an awesome video. 10m views so far.

 

BodyForm (feminine care brand)

Just when you thought your Facebook status was safe…..  A guy posted a tongue-in-cheek takedown of BodyForm feminine product commercials, saying that they totally misrepresent a woman’s ‘time of the month’ as something fun, active, and carefree. Many Likes later, he gets a personal video message on YouTube  from none other than the CEO of BodyForm herself. In a very funny parody, she apologizes for misleading him and opens his eyes to the truth. The fact that the CEO herself was willing to send up the company in such a cheerful and relaxed manner gets them many, many points and 3.5m views. Social media win!

 

Just Falafel (UAE-based falafel chain). This is my favorite social-media-Middle Eastern-food-chain in the UAE (sorry Wild Peeta!). What’s great? Their topical, fresh, funny, and wonderfully simple picture campaign playing on the the theme ‘Just’. From Gagnam Style to Felix Baumgartner (of Red Bull Stratos) to new delivery services, the play on the word ‘Just’ connects the brand to the campaign. 715k Facebook Likes.

 

FAIL: Victoria Secret Pink Brand/ PinkLovesConsent by FORCE

It’s not every day that a major brand gets caught in a no-win situation. A feminist group in the US named FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture decided to shift the messaging and marketing of the brand to speak out against violence against women. So they produced a campaign that mimicked the Victoria Secret Pink campaign, replacing the previous slogans with new anti-violence ones.  They produced new photos featuring realistic women, and produced Tumblr and Twitter campaigns that launched in time with the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. Victoria’s Secret moved quickly to take down the campaign, but there had already been many likes, fans, and retweets of people commending Victoria’s Secret for supporting a pro-woman cause. Oh dear. Now that Victoria Secret has come after the feminists, fans who loved the campaign are disappointed. This is a social media fail. Let’s see whether VS is able to harness the enthusiasm for the pro-woman stance in the parody.

 

Increasingly, brands are realizing that social media is just that: social. It’s a way for brands to interact with their customers, and a way for customers (or activists!) to interact with them.

 

Steve Blank VC meeting flowchart: @slide

Steve Blank VC meeting flowchart: @slideshare @sgblank . For any followers of Blank/Dorf you can predict how it ends http://ow.ly/exvvL

Not just about good looks- what other critical design elements will make you successful

In the talk ’10 Golden Principles for Designing a Web Application’, celebrity VC Fred Wilson discusses, well, you can guess. Point by point, Wilson describes how everything critical needs to be built in. Marketing? Build it in to the product. Playfulness? Build it in. Customization? Ditto. If you want your product to ‘go viral’, that’s a design, not marketing feature. Wilson encourages designers to create their products to be shared, customized, and loved.

Later that day, a friend asked me about entrepreneurs that I see and work with, asking ‘do you get the idea that sometimes people develop products without a revenue model?’

Gosh, yes.

So it bears thinking that there are 4 elements that can be built into design from day 1 :

• Zero-cost marketing:  a decade ago new marketing terms appeared like ‘guerilla marketing’ and ‘viral marketing’, and ‘stunt marketing’. It seemed too good to be true for million-dollar-marketers: we just spend NOTHING and customers flock to our products anyway?? Genius! But in reality, it takes a tremendous amount of work to make this happen. How will your product leap out of the tablet/phone/laptop and into the hearts and minds of target users? Design this into your product. All of your ‘earned media’ like free writeups in the newspaper are great but you can design that from the start by thinking about what journalists get excited by.
• Virality:  Everyone wants to ‘go viral’. But how do you do it? Are you so funny that your friends forward your emails to each other? Do they constantly ‘share’ your photos on FB with their friends? Do they trade stories about you at dinner parties when you’re not there? ALL THE TIME? So then what makes you think that strangers will want to share your your business and do your work by signing up their friends? Virality is not something that happens later, it’s something that happens in the design of the product and ad itself. It’s a very powerful, yet very difficult thing to do.
• The revenue model: Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, Facebook, Twitter: all started as platforms that didn’t generate revenue from day 1. However, all are good examples of dominant platforms that became #1 in their space, and therefore were creating their markets. Designing a good revenue model is more an art than a science, but as a rule of thumb design a revenue model that links value you create to what your customers value.
• Retention and stickiness: What about your site/product/service will keep customers using and coming back for more? Planning to send an email newsletter is not really enough to engage customers. The product itself must have the ‘hooks’ to make customers come back again and again.

Wowza! Marketing

 

 

 

It’s not every day that I see a marketing initiative that makes me jump out of my chair to get a closer look, then I immediately start blogging about it. But that’s what happened when I saw the new product packaging for Swiss watchmaker Festina’s new model.

It’s a watch. In a bag of water. That’s it. Clever, ingenious, a headache for the packaging design guys and a nightmare for the logistics guys, but the kind of thing that gets customers stopping in their tracks (and bloggers running for their laptops). Let me explain exactly WHY this is one of the best marketing ideas I’ve seen.

It integrates ‘Marketing’ and ‘Design’ – Seth Godin’s classic marketing book Purple Cow argues that the new wave of marketing will simply be remarkable products. He predicts the future will no longer be a great marketing campaign developed as an afterthought to a product launch, but rather an integrated marketing-design approach that creates remarkable products that don’t need brilliant campaigns to sell. In this case, a packaging design feature is marketing a product feature, and in the process

It highlights a key product feature – what fundamentally works about this approach is that it’s not a gimmick for gimmick’s sake. The ‘gimmick’ actually shows off a key feature of the watch- 100% waterproof-ness. Customers wonder exactly *how* waterproof a watch is, and there are different definitions like water-resistant, waterproof, etc. The bag of water answers that question definitively, in a fun and engaging way.

It grabs your attention, and stands out – now, Festina ‘owns’ the watch-in-a-waterbag concept. If anyone else does it, it won’t be nearly as powerful, and won’t get them nearly as much attention. No other competitor can match it. And as much of a headache as it might be for shelf-stockers, the unusual size and shape forces them to put it front and center, on display.

It screams ‘pick me up’ – what I’m sure every customer does is pick the pouch up and immediately play with it. How could you not? Even if you’re not in the market for a watch. Even if you came to buy a competitor. The package begs engagement, asking to be picked up, touched, examined. And of course, once you’re holding it you see the other design features.

While few products can market themselves in such an extreme way, it’s worth thinking about how you make your marketing claims credible, real, and (literally!) tangible.

Give ’em what they want: scaling by customer’s need

 

There are lots of ways to scale, which I’ll explain in a series of blog posts.

Scaling by need- when your customers buy from you, what else are they buying? Answer this question by identifying what else that customers are paying for, or where else they are going. Don’t feel constrained by the barriers of sector, because you can always partner to deliver.

A great example of this was in K-mart, an American retail store. College kids in the United States are busy buying things for their dorm rooms, walking the same aisles to buy bedding, toiletries, and desk items. This innovative company gatherd it all in one place, and sold it for a low price. The kit contains sheets, a blanket, towels, a lamp,  a white board, and even a picture frame. And it’s sold within a collapseable laundry bag. And for a low price. And it matches. The whole thing probably saves its young customers 2 horus in shopping time and over $200 buying everything separately.

Great expansion idea, because it solves a real need: first-time customers getting set up. And in the long-term, brand loyalty can be built by consistently understanding their pain points (making long-term houseware decisions for the first time on a low budget) and solving them.

In your startup, look at ways to leverage customer needs that you can also address. In many cases, if you can solve many problems at once, customers will pay more, you will be more sticky, and you can increasingly target lifecycle stages with new products.

Web portals like Yahoo! and Excite did this in the late 90’s by gathering everything that people wanted from the internet into one place- sports, weather, stock value, news, and email.  These still exist, but increasingly new products require users to go to an additional site to get everything they want.

Scaling by need requires you to know your customers very well- what they want, where they are frustrated, what they do, what they pay for, who else they interact with and what they don’t like about those interactions.

The Good Mentee: how to help me help you

The blogosphere is packed solid with advice on how to find, keep, and compensate mentors and advisors. But what about being a mentee? What makes a mentor WANT to take you on? What do we mentors look for in a mentee?

• Do your research – Let me know you know who I am, that your problems would be improved with my input, that you’re not just accosting anyone with a gray hair or a year of experience.
• Reach out – Get in touch with me on a regular basis, to update me on your progress, ask for feedback, or invite me to events.
• Let me know you’re listening – You don’t have to agree with everything I say, but let me know you’ve thought about it and have an intelligent response. It let’s me know you are receptive, and that it’s worth it for me to give feedback.
• Remind me – I get busy. All mentors do. If you don’t hear from me, come back again. We want to know it was important to follow up on.
• Feed back to me – Let me know how my suggestion or introduction turned out. There have been times that I learned of partnerships or sponsorships that resulted from introductions I made from reading a newsletter. Let me know in a personalised note if I’ve helped you.

And most importantly:

• Progress – The biggest reason we mentor is that we want to see you do well. As the prominent VC Dave McClure recently said:

… and so here I am in the arena… fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my own…

Onward!

The bizarre media hack home run

I saw the weirdest thing on television recently. Sports broadcasting rules forbid showing game highlights on other networks before the game has finished being broadcast. A channel in Washington, DC had predicted that the baseball game would be over before the newscast, and they’d be able to show highlights. But they were wrong. So instead, what did they do? With about 2 jerseys and caps, they decide to REENACT the game highlights in the office. Interns and aides lobbed balls over their working colleagues, swung bats (badly), and bolted (jogged) down corridors, as ambitious cameramen struggled to make it look realistic and exciting, and editors pieced a narrative from the madness.  I couldn’t look away, but I also didn’t have a clue what was going on. 

But in the media business, distracting is better than boring, so in this case they won. I admired the courage of the channel to break the rules in order to get the job done. It was messy, but as a viewer, I *noticed*. It let me know that no matter what the rules, they were going to get me the news story. It was a great broadcasting rules hack.

‘Oops! I did it again!’ Make your customers buy within seconds

Take the pain away, take the pain away, and all the riches will be yours…. OK, so it’s not a song, but it should be a mantra. The theme of this blogpost?

People will pay big money for convenience.

Are you building an ecommerce site? Are you selling ANYTHING? Then you need to design how you will remove the little obstacles to your customers taking out their wallets. Make it as easy as possible. This includes:

• Tell them what you’re offering. It sounds obvious, but a number of sites forget this one. Don’t assume that your customer is aware of your product, has years of industry expertise, and lots of information on product choices. Make it obvious what you’re selling and why they need it. Tell them up front.
• Take away the pain. I can’t stress this enough. Especially if your business relies on solving a problem. Survey people in your target demographic about what the problems are. Ask them why they haven’t purchased from competitors. Ask them why they haven’t found a solution. Find out what the pain points are and take them away. You want the customers to literally breathe a sigh of relief when they get to your site, saying ‘finally!’ Imagine that your user is a 3-year old (with a credit card), and design it for them.
• Keep it simple, silly. Don’t complicate the page with too many options, pictures, menus. In fact, remove choices. Make a ‘quick buy’ option for those who don’t want to sort through features and option. Bundle different highly -popular features together. Give  enticing, appealing names to the bundles.
• Assume your customer is 3 years old. Pretend they can barely read, have a limited attention span, and are easily distracted. How are you going to get their business quickly before they lose interest? For one, make the Buy button big, noticeable, and just begging to be clicked on.
• Make the payment process seamless. If you trust and can use CashU, PayPal or a similar easy payment function, do it. Amazon’s launch of their 1-click payment function made them famous and gave them the fastest checkout in the industry. This led to much higher conversion rates and impulse purchases.

You want customers to be thinking ‘buy! buy! buy!’ from the moment they come to your site. Remove the obstacles to making this happen, and you’ll see better conversion rates and satisfied customers.

Micro-efficency: when the little stuff counts

What’s hot right now? Lean Startup, efficiency, operations, kanban squares, blah blah blah. This is great, but it’s a serious, full-scale approach. A lot of early stage companies can benefit from making a few tiny changes to how something is done. And yes, I will tell you how. But first, an example:

When you fly into New York City’s JFK airport, the only way to the city via public transport is the Airtrain, a shuttle train that connects the airport to the closest train stations. The Airtrain costs a nice, even $5. Instead of paying when you get on, you pay when you exit, using a public transport card. There are a row of machines that will sell you the cards, the small snack stand sells the cards, and  then there are agents who stand in front of the exit gates with wads of cash, selling cards from their pockets. As a result, there’s almost never a queue of people waiting to get out. Like the Airtrain, a simple efficiency change can make a big difference. To start:

Reexamine the process Don’t take for granted established processes for doing things, and don’t be afraid to change it if it makes it easier. Airtrain put the machines at the exit, instead of the entrance, and this reduced confusion about the different trains that left from the airport. Another example is from a time I once posted a submission online that asked for a title, summary, and detailed description, in that order. I later flagged to the site that by reversing it – detailed description, then summary, then title- it’s more efficient for the user because they are reducing the same text, not expanding. If similar information is being asked of the customer, look at ways to request it that are efficient.

Focus on the bottleneck What’s the longest part of the process, and is there a simple hack that can fix it? In the Airtrain example, requiring thousands of international tourists to interact with transport card machines would cause a major backup, as well as a broken experience. Putting (multilingual!) agents armed with cards and cash allows people to ask questions and buy cards quickly and efficiently. To do this hack, a dispatching agent monitored the cash and cards each agent was given, and logged it into the system that the standard machines used.

Bundle processes that can be done together  What are steps that would benefit from being done at the same time, or via the same process? At Airtrain, agents spoke multiple languages, were able to assist travelers using the dispensing machines, were equipped to handle routine questions, and could also sell transport cards directly. When there was a lull in one process they could switch attention to another. And being on foot they could approach travelers who looked particularly lost. This ensured that whatever needed doing received attention. In your product, are there steps that can be bundled?