My article, entitled “Content and Communications Companies Dominate WebInno 20“, is now available on Media Bulliseye.
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WebNotes, the web annotation service covered here in November, has launched their invite-only public beta. Since I last covered their closed beta, the service has made several upgrades and feature changes, though most have taken place under the hood:
- UI changes have been made to the highligter functionality
- Security enhancements have been made
- Changes have been made to the underlying technology to make the entire service more stable.
But, chances are you won’t notice any changes to the service because you probably haven’t tried out the beta yet! So, if you want to check out the beta, I have invites. Just leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to send you an invite.
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Tonight is the 20th Web Innovators Group meeting here in the Boston area. The Web Innovators Group:
Is comprised of people engaged in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area. We aim to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction. Our regular meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for everyone in the community to share and exchange ideas
The format of the event is really interesting. First, there are “main dish” presenters which each get 5 minutes or so to tell the 1,000+ people in attendance about their startup. Following the main dishes are “side dish” presenters that get 30 seconds to talk about their offering. The following are tonight’s presenters:
Main Dishes
TripChill– A “mobile travel assistant” that lets you manage your trip itinerary from a mobile device.
LocalMotors- This one is interesting, as the site has a VERY bold claim: “Local Motors is a next generation American car company. It is the first disruptive entrant in the US automotive industry in decades and it is the first of its kind.
Local Motors will design, manufacture, and bring to market innovative, safer, more functional, lightweight, efficient cars through a revolutionary, local assembly and retail experience. These cars will revolutionize not only automobiles, but also the very structure of auto-making, auto-selling, and auto-servicing.”
CrimsonHexagon– A brand monitoring service that seems to be trying to derive meaning and sentiment scores by looking at content across the web. I’m extremely interested in anything trying to discern meaning from text, so I’ll be sure to check these folks out.
Side Dishes
Pixability– Pixibility’s offering is fairly straightforward: They edit your videos for you.
tipjoy- Allowing micropayments for sites. Content owners can add code to their site, allowing visitors to make small payments.
HelpGuest– A marketplace of experts selling advice.
InfoMedMD– A medical symptoms checker that asks users questions and provides personalized healthcare information.
Genotrope– Genotrope matches people to the right company based on their work experience.
Photrade- A site dedicated to managing the ownership of photos.
Tonight’s event starts at 7:00 PM. If you’re going, make sure to stop by and say hi. I’ll be taking notes during the presentation, as I’ll be writing about the presenters for my column in tomorrow’s MediaBullseye.
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After my last post on getting a startup noticed, I started getting emails and comments that were all hinting at one question:
Sure, using these tools might get me some attention or a quick burst of traffic, but how do I make it sustainable?
Well, that’s a great question I pretended to just ask myself.
I think it’s important to take a few steps back from my previous post and look at promotion in context. I’ve always been repeating the same mantra since I started working with startups. I’ve said it so many times that people must be sick of me saying it, but I’ll do it one more time. You need to separate goals, strategies, tools and execution. It’s incredibly easy to jump right in and use every one of the 10 tips from the previous post, but if you haven’t done the groundwork, you won’t have steady, residual traffic.
So, let’s break the startup into phases and look at which promotional methods could work to get you going. These are completely arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head phases, so if I’m missing something, I apologize.
Phase One: The Idea
In this phase, you’re kicking around an idea that could materialize into a startup. You’re rightfully paranoid and don’t really want to give away your idea yet. Your goals:
- Test the viability of your idea
- Find out what others have done to get started
- Find out what competitors are out there and how you can stand out
In this phase, your main strategy is to get out there and do as much research as possible. Google is your friend, but there are plenty of other resources that can help you.
Tools:
1. HackerNews– This is very quickly becoming my favorite site. It’s a social news site focused primarily on tech startups and entrepreneurs. It’s very tech-heavy and most of the contributors are entrepreneurial people with extreme tech saavy. You’ll find many Ask HN posts where would be entrepreneurs ask the community questions about their startups. It’s an indispensable resource for any tech entrepreneur, but DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT abuse it. If you try to use HackerNews to promote something irrelevant, it WILL backfire.
2. SitePoint Forums– Back when I was writing code, I basically learned everything I know about PHP/MySQL from the experts at Sitepoint. Sitepoint has a community of developers, entrepreneurs, etc. and a very active forum with experts willing to assist annoying newbies like I was. Additionally, sitepoint has forums for blogging, content, planning your site, promotion, etc. If you’re looking for advice or feedback, this is a great resource.
3. Mashable, Centernetworks, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, etc.- Go to these sites and search around to see what other startups have launched that are similar to what you want to offer. Keep a list of competitors and search them to find out what they’re up to. This will give you a good starting point to find out who you’ll be competing with.
Phase Two: The Super-Secret Alpha Product
Yep, I’ve skipped quite a bit of time, but let’s now pretend we’ve got something. Code has been written, and the product actually does something. Maybe we’re calling at a POC, maybe an alpha. Either way, something’s working, but it’s not ready for the masses. At this point, your goals are:
- Get people to try it out
- Solicit feedback to find out what works, what doesn’t, and what else is needed
- Start growing an exclusive community of users that care
Right now you want people to use your stuff and let you know what they think about it. You’ve tested it yourself many times, but you’re just too close to the code to be objective. Since you eventually want many people to be your users, you need to let people hammer away at what you have and give you feedback from someone that is new.
Tools:
1. Friends and family– It’s a hell of a lot easier to apologize to your uncle Frank when a feature fails than a complete stranger that feels like they’re wasting their time when there’s a hiccup. I always like to email all of my friends and family and set their expectations, letting them know this is a project I’m working on that isn’t quite ready for the world yet. I tell them there are going to be problems, so please let me know when something isn’t quite right. Your friends and family are much more apt to take the time to beta test what you’re working on, and they’ll tell you when something is busted.
2. Evangelists– It’s not hard to see that I’m a beta addict and that I’ll test out just about anything that is new. I’m a perfect person for this. Look around online and find the people that are blogging about the topic your service/product targets, and ask them if they’d like to try it out. Let them know that it’s in an early stage and that you’re opening up to an exclusive group of alpha testers. It’s a great way to build a small, vocal community of users that feel ownership in what you’re doing. You can’t beat that.
Phase Three: Invite-Only Beta
You’re ready for people to sign up. Congratulations. Nice job. (Again, I’m skipping WAAAAY ahead) You’re not quite ready for the entire world to join, but you’re open for new users. A couple of strategies:
- Offer invites to bloggers– I’m a huge sucker for this over at blogstring. Whenever someone says “I have 50 invites for your readers if you want to post about us”, I almost always jump at the offer.
- Offer exclusives to bloggers– I’m not big on this one, but I see a lot of people doing this. Offering a coverage exclusive to one blogger may be incentive enough to get coverage you might not normally get.
- Offer invites to your alpha users– They’ve brought you this far. Give them invites in case they want their friends to join the fun, and do it in conjunction with an email message thanking them for getting you to this point.
In this phase, your tools are your email list and database of users. This stage is really all about extending the personal relationships you’ve already formed in the prior phases.
Phase Four: Public Beta
Now you’re ready for the big time. But simply adding a join button on your home page isn’t going to bring excited crowds to your door. Now it’s time to go into promo mode. Some strategies:
- Reach out to bloggers– If someone has covered you before, regardless of how big they are, let them know that you’re entering public beta. thank them for what they’ve done for you so far, and let them know any new features you’ve added since the private beta.
- Talk about it– Talk about your service on your blog, on your employees blogs, twitter, etc. Let people know you’re open for business and that you have feedback mechanisms in place to handle what users are saying.
- Let your users know– Let your users know that the service is now open to the world and let them know how much you appreciate what they’ve done for you.
Tools:
1. Your blog– You’ve already been blogging about what you’re doing. Post there about the public beta.
2. Twitter– Let everyone on twitter know that you’ve opened your doors
3. Other bloggers– Reach out to everyone that covers what you do, and let them know about your public launch. Search google blog search and find everyone that has covered you and let them know that you’re about to launch publicly.
4. Analysts- You’ve done research on analysts that cover your industry. Now let them know you’re open for business
5. Events- Go to events like the Web Innovators Group and present your company there. Find events that cater to your crowd and either sponsor or present what you have.
It’s at this phase (and not earlier) that you really want the world to know about you. You’ve ironed out all the kinks (within reason) and you already have a respectable userbase. That part is huge. One of the biggest problems in having any “social” online service is the classic: “I don’t want to join. No one is there.”
Think of any forum you’ve ever visited. Even if the content is good, if there’s a very small user base, odds are you won’t join. It’s the biggest problem in having a community site: You can’t get new users because you don’t have any current users. No one wants to go to an empty restaurant.
It’s because of this that you really want to nurture your early adopters. The activity and content they produce will help you immensely when you’re ready for public beta.
Summary
This article is so basic and overly simplistic that it’s almost embarassing. But hey, it’s a start. There’s no real way to fully cover the entire life cycle of a startup and the associated promotional methods in one blog post. If it were that easy, everyone would have a startup and I’d be out of a job.
But I think it’s important to segment your promotional phases based on where you are right now. Jumping ahead will make people think you’re an amateur. Lagging behind will leave you ready to launch with no users.
I’d love to hear what you think.
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For the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with a super-secret ultra stealth, invite-only beta called sponty. The quick pitch:
Sponty’s mission is to make you and your friends hangoutable.
It’s a Tuesday evening. You want to go to the movies. Of course, you’d rather go to the movies with your friends. You can pick up your phone and start calling friends one after the other; but you don’t know who is out of town, and who has homework to do.
Sponty takes the hassle out of putting together casual social events. It lets you broadcast your hangoutable intentions, so that your friends can see what you’re up to and join you.
Similarly, Sponty shows you if your friends are hanging out so that you may join them.
In short, sponty is all about making yourself “hangoutable”.
The UI is incredibly clean and simple, and the guys behind sponty have been militant in their “do one thing and do it well” philosophy. You can use sponty to tell people about opportunities to get together. That’s what they do, and they keep it incredibly simple.
Despite its simplicity, sponty has some great practical uses:
- Bands could use sponty to let fans know about special events, album releases, concerts, etc.
- Student organizations can use sponty to keep members up to date on meetings
- People new to a city can find new friends and meet new people
Where services like meetup, going, etc. are more event focused, sponty is great for the “social non-planner”. It’s good for the kind of people that have some free time and want to get together with people.
Like I mentioned, the service is still very beta. The guys behind the service are much more interested in growing the service organically, so you’re probably not going to find your friends on the service yet. But I have a handful of invites if you’re interested in checking out sponty. You’ll need a google account (that’s what they’re using for authentication), but if you join via this link, you’ll have a sponty account, and you’ll be able to invite 5 friends.
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So, here’s the situation. I was plowing through emails this morning and had an email from FastPitch Networking. Here’s what it said:
All right. No big deal, right? You get stuff like this all the time, no? But then…….
My phone rings. I answer it.
“Hi this is Bob Poole from FastPitch Networking…..”
Wait, does Bob somehow know that I’m looking at the email at that moment? That was kinda weird.
Rather than Bob actually calling me, it was a prerecorded robocall from FastPitch Networking. The call basically reiterated the same information from the email, then let me know that if I had any questions, I could find the answers on the web site.
I looked back at their site, and noticed that a phone number is required to sign up for the service, but I didn’t see anything in the privacy policy about them calling you (though it didn’t say they wouldn’t either!).
So, I was just wondering:
- Is this a successful strategy? I mean, I understand how effective a phone call to a prospect can be, but is a robocall effective?
- Has anyone else tried this technique?
- How would you feel if a service you use (twitter, facebook, etc) robocalled you to encourage you to check out new features?
I’m not annoyed or mad, nor do I necessarily think this was a bad thing. Instead, it’s just something I’ve never heard of before and I’m curious to see what others have experienced.
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I just read a great article on kottke.org entitled “Does the broken windows theory hold online?” In the post, Jason Kottke examines the theory of broken windows and how it applies to online interactions:
Here’s the 1982 Atlantic article in which the theory was first discussed in a popular forum. (Great article, BTW.)
“At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”
Reading these articles, I wondered: how does the broken windows theory apply to online spaces? Perhaps like so:
Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.
In addition to the presence of malicious users (spammers, etc.), there’s a flipside of the broken windows theory of websites that also comes to mind: the absence of loyal and active users. Think of how many times you’ve been to a forum and had to register to ask a question. If the forum is filled with spam and off-topic posts, how likely is it that you’ll come back? And as a user, what is the chance that you’ll try to outweigh the negative effects of the bad guys?
Since there are so many options available to users, it’s simply easier for a participant to go somewhere else to find what they’re looking for.
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It’s a terrible day here in Boston, and I’ve run out of shows on my DVR. So, I thought I’d actually get back to the keyboard and do something productive. As you probably already know, the mashable Open Web Awards nominees have been named, and voting goes until Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008.
Here are the nominees for the category: Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks
dotblu- I’d never heard of dotblu, and when I checked out the site, it was like being blindfolded and dropped off at a carnival midway. There’s just so much going on everywhere that I have no idea what’s going on. But here’s what the about page says:
dotblu is a community dedicated to friendly competitive online gaming.
Our members compete in a variety of different online games, like prediction questions, quizzes and online flash games. They compete against friends in a fun and friendly atmosphere for BluBucks, our virtual currency, and use their profile to keep up with their friends and show off the wealth of BluBucks they’ve accumulated.
Odds of winning: 37-1
Facebook- Yes, I’ve heard of facebook. It won last year’s Judges Choice award in this category, and I don’t see why it won’t win this year. But the people’s choice last year went to Netlog (a European social network with over 30 million users), so who knows.
Odds of winning: 3-1
Fast Pitch! – Fast Pitch is a little bit like LinkedIn, as the goal of the network is to help professionals enhance their online presence.
Odds of winning: 70-1
FriendFeed – friendfeed isn’t really a social network in my mind. Rather, it’s more of a social aggregator that bridges connections between other social networks.
Odds of winning: 10-1
koornk – koornk is a “personal shouting place” that seems to be exactly like twitter, but in another language.
Odds of winning: 7-1
Multiply – Multiply is a social network for families, with the tagline “Multiply makes it easy to create, share and discuss your blog, photos, and videos with more of the people you know, and fewer of the people you don’t.”
Odds of winning: 13-1
MyHeritage – A family network that combines your family tree with social components. I’d never used MyHeritage before, and I love it. Most genealogy sites make sharing very clumsy and often associate a cost with even basic functionality. Not this one.
Odds of winning: 15-1
MySpace – We all know about myspace, but I think that its popularity is in decline with the mashable-aged audience.
Odds of winning- 8-1
Netlog – This was last year’s People’s Choice winner, and I’m not sure why. So hey, it must be a top contender again this year.
Odds of winning- 2-1
Platinum Lounge Just don’t. Don’t click that link. Don’t go to the Platinum Lounge. Unless this site is a brilliant parody, I’d suggest you just move along.
Odds of winning- 9999-1
ShareNow Another social network focused on sharing photos, videos, etc. They seem to focus more on meeting new friends based on shared interests.
Odds of winning- 5-1
sMeet – A social network where you create an avatar, and communicate with friends in a secondlife-like 3D environment.
Odds of winning- 23-1
Squidoo – Basically a modern-day geocities. You build a page called a “lens”, slap some ads on it, etc.
Odds of winning- 14-1
Twitter – See, this is a weird one. Twitter won the Judges Choice Award for best mobile app last year, and this year it’s up for an award in the mainstream & large scale social network category. And since people that use twitter LOVE twitter, I have a feeling it will win.
Odds of winning- 2-1
So, there we have it. I’m calling this one for twitter. You can vote for your favorite using the widget embedded below:
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I love startups. I write about them. I’ve worked at one, and I’m now helping startups get noticed in a crowded space. As a blogger as well as a guy on the inside, I’ve come to understand how important it can be to get coverage in blogs. In covering startups, I’ve come up with a short list of tips that can make it much easier for bloggers to cover your startup. I’m not much for list-type blog entries (not known for brevity), but here goes.
1. Logos
I cannot stress the importance of having your logo available in an easy-to-embed format. If I’m checking out a startup, I always want to include their logo in the post. If I can simply right click on your logo and paste it into my post as an image reference, I will do it in a heartbeat. And as a startup, isn’t that what you want?
There are three pervasive issues with logos IMHO:
A. Coupled Logos
A coupled logo (in my own definition) is one that does not stand alone. If your logo is part of a 920×300 navigation element at the top of your page, bloggers can’t simply paste an image reference. Though I have no problem firing up Photoshop, cropping the image, uploading it to my server, then linking to it, many bloggers won’t go through the hassle. If it takes more than two steps to add your logo to a post, many people just won’t bother.
B. Flash Logos
I’ll talk about flash more in a bit, but when it comes to making logos accessible, flash is a nightmare. Like the coupled logo problem, if your entire site is in flash, there is no way for a blogger to add your logo to their post. Instead, the blogger has to take a screenshot and crop to get the logo.
C. Unavailable Logos
I learned this one the hard way, and it should have been a no-brainer: keep your logo available. Web sites are evolving creatures. The site you have now might look completely different in a month. But when you change the look and feel of your site, don’t simply delete or overwrite your previous logo files.
Once, when I launched a new web site, I blew away all the old logo files. What happened? All blog posts about the company that referenced the old logo had a broken image. Whoops.
2. Text
Have text available. I know how simple this sounds, but it’s not. There are so many new sites out there that are completely flash-based, and it is impossible to copy and paste text embedded in flash.
I like being able to go to a site’s “About” section and paste that text into a post. I’ll usually write a paragraph about what the startup is trying to do, then will add:
From their site:
This is the text from the site’s about section. When it’s available, I’ll paste it so you can see what the company has written in their own words. And as a company, since you’ve spent the time and energy coming up with copy and positioning, wouldn’t you like people to use this to describe you? Even if they bash you afterwards, you’ve at least got your own copy alongside the review.
But even the most eloquently worded about text is worthless if it’s all in flash. If it can’t be copied, it won’t be pasted.
3. Ajax is great, but…..
I love AJAX. Who doesn’t? But there’s one big drawback: linking. If you use AJAX, that’s fine. But don’t make it impossible for bloggers to link to your pages. For example, it’s easy to link to a company’s “About” section when the URL is http://www.company.com/about. It’s difficult when the About section is: Go to the home page and click on the left hand navigation. A submenu will populate, then click on “About”. The “About” copy will then appear at right, but there’s no URL to get there directly.
4. Blog
Having a blog is huge. It starts an interaction with live people. I’d much rather link to a startup’s blog than just linking to polished marketing text. And since blogs are frequently updated, a link to constantly evolving content is much more valuable to a company than a link to static copy.
5. Contact Info
Make your contact information easy to find. When possible, have contact information for an actual human being. If a blogger has a question, they’re much more likely to contact a person than info@somestartup.com, which may or may not actually go anywhere.
Obviously this is not an exhaustive list, and I’d love to hear any other tips. These are just some of the issues I see frequently when checking out the latest shiny new thing.
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