I’m on a panel at SXSW

By colin | Published:

Due to a last minute change, I’ll be taking Brandon’s spot on the panel Why Challenge Prizes are the future of Innovation. If you’re at SXSW, come and check it out. Everyone on the panel is fantastic:

51810_thumb Billy Bicket
NetSquared/Techsoup.org

Billy Bicket is the Director of NetSquared, a social-technology initiative of TechSoup Global. Billy spends his days working to develop and convene networks of people working at the intersection of technology and social change. In the community, Billy leads a cadre of +60 Community Organizers focused on convening +30,000 entrepreneurial developers, designers, researchers and business people working on developing practical solutions to some of our most pressing social issues. NetSquared powers face-to-face events happening in 18 countires and 63 cities around the world. On the resource side of the equation, Billy works with government agencies, academia, technology companies and philanthropists to develop innovative programs that help partners meet research, development and philanthropic goals. Under Billy’s leadership over the last 4 years, NetSquared’s community-driven approach to innovation has distributed +$300k in cash awards to social innovation projects, and has provided support to +700 projects. He has been instrumental in developing partnerships with luminary organizations such as the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, USAID, Vodafone, Microsoft and Yahoo!. Learn more about Billy here www.linkedin.com/in/billybicket.
51811_thumb Chris Volinsky
AT&T Research

Chris Volinsky is Executive Director of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, N.J. Chris got his PhD from the University of Washington in 1997 studying Bayesian Model Averaging. He joined AT&T in 1997 and became Director of the Statistics Research Department in 2004. His research at AT&T focuses on large scale data mining: recommendation systems, social networks, statistical computation, and anomaly detection. In 2009, Chris was a member of the 7-person, 4-country team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos that won the $1M Netflix Prize, an open competition for improving Netflix’ online recommendation system.
51812_thumb Brandon Kessler
ChallengePost

Brandon Kessler is the founder and CEO of ChallengePost, a New York City-based start-up that serves as a marketplace for challenges. Prior to that, Kessler founded independent record label Messenger Records which was repeatedly singled out for its early embrace of the internet, and its creative use of grassroots promotions. Before Messenger Records and while in college, he founded a college radio promotion company and a street marketing promotion company. Kessler holds undergraduate and MBA degrees from Columbia University.
51813_thumb Kim-Mai Cutler
VentureBeat
Missing_thumb Tiffany Montague
Google

Responsible for the $30 Million Googles Lunar X-Prize
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Links should always be blue and underlined

By colin | Published:

So you thought it would be clever to make your links pretty? Don’t do it! If you’re short on time, follow these simple rules:

  • Unvisited links should be blue and underlined
  • Visited links should be purple and underlined
  • Active links should be red and underlined

Searching for “links should be blue” turns up enough reading for an afternoon. This is a topic that has been discussed to death, but still isn’t widely understood.

How to break the rules.

Breaking the blue link rule without understanding it makes usability a disaster.

There are a few good places to break the rule though. Navigation, Buttons, Blog Item Headers, or if you’re a design and user experience badass. You need to be sure to communicate the right information to your users. A good place to start understanding links is Smashing Magazine’s “The Definitive Guide to Styling Web Links”

Rules are meant to be broken, but do it in a way that makes you look 1337 – not like a n00b

Posted in Design, Usability | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A response to “Why don’t startups hire MBAs?”

By colin | Published:

Why don’t startups hire MBAs?

A friend posted the following text on Facebook and I decided it warranted a response below.

The problem with startups is that they think that just because you’ve never been involved in one, you would be incapable of adding value. This especially true if you have “MBA” painted on your back. “Not only is what they teach you in the classroom useless, but you will ask for too much money!”

Does this sound familiar? Maybe they didn’t speak those words out loud, but I bet if you’ve ever talked to someone at a startup, you could almost hear those thoughts bouncing around in their heads.

The problem with startups is not that they think this way, its that the image of an MBA has been cast that allows them to think this way. I’ve met few MBAs interested in startups whose primary concern is how much they get paid or how much equity stake they will be offered. Those things may be important, but if that was all that they were driven by, they probably wouldn’t be asking about YOUR startup! An MBA looking for a position in a startup already knows that you are cash-strapped and that they’ll need to hit the ground running. If they weren’t prepared for that situation, they wouldn’t be applying to a startup! I think we call this Self Selection Marketing. But apparently self-selection isn’t enough to overcome the stigma of having an MBA.

Maybe its that we use the term MBA too much; we refer to ourselves as MBAs as if we are a world apart from the rest. If this blog post reflected the way I spoke, you would think that this is absolutely true! But again, I know few MBAs who refer to themselves as “MBAs.” I’m only doing it here for illustrative purposes. No one I know goes around saying, “Hi, I’m an MBA,” or any version of that. If anything, we are usually pretty modest and would rather not say that unless explicitly asked. So it’s not that…. what could we be doing that make startups think we are all useless?

I think the problem has to do with expectation: startups expect that MBAs will bring with them rigid frameworks that don’t fit their business; MBA’s expect that startups will fail without their business acumen. Neither is true yet each false expectation reinforces opinions that MBAs are poor fit for a startup culture. Maybe once we are all able to shed these false expectations startups will realize that MBAs have a lot to offer, and MBAs will realize that they have a lot to learn. I think we call this a Win-Win situation!

When I started working for startups, I had no education – i.e. only a B.S., but I have been doing internet things since I was a kid. My time was cheap and my expenses low. So, I decided to get an education. I learned a little bit of everything: development, design, marketing, project management.

When that company ran out of money, I went to the next guy and said “Hey, I already know how to do all of these things and Im learning more every day. I’d like to get paid a little more than the last guy paid me”, and I got paid more. I did that again when I moved to NY, and learned how to manage a larger team, and be responsible for a product. I learned a/b testing, landing page design, and the basics of user experience and information architecture. In a larger team, I ended up getting too specialized, and wanted to take a step back so I found a new role.

It was no easy task to make the case to Brandon to hire me at ChallengePost. But I sold him on the fact that now, I can do or learn really quickly everything a startup of fewer than 10 people needs to do in product design, business, marketing. If I wasn’t working here, I’d probably be working for another startup, and I’d definitely be creating content and participating in internet culture.

So, enough about me and back to the original question: “Why don’t startups hire MBAs?”. It comes down to this: Most MBAs by and large haven’t done anything in the eyes of a startup. So if you want to get an MBA and join a startup – you need to get two educations. A startup doesn’t want to help pay for either.

Posted in Startup Teams | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The tools I like: Basecamp

By colin | Published:

I spent about a week evaluating a range of tools for creating great products on the web. The harder I looked for the perfect tool, the more frustrated I became. However, I did realize one thing:

The more a tool does, the more frustrating it is to use.

My experience for the past 1.5 years has been with Atlassian tools: Jira for project management, Confluence (wiki) for product planning. Atlassian’s tools have too many features. Some of the features are great, some of them just get in the way.

Today I’m starting at ChallengePost. In preparation I’ve been using many different tools to see what feels natural and what is likely to scale as the team grows. My goal is to implement a process that avoids the friction bad tools and processes create as teams get larger.

I’m going to spend this week talking about the tools and processes I plan to propose we use at ChallengePost when we build software.

So, what’s first? We need a place to capture ideas and nurture them. We need a place to organize everything that happens before code gets written.

Basecamp

Basecamp impressed me by it’s lack of features. It is the 80 / 20 rule applied to software: 80 percent of the customers only need 20 percent of product features. So, they built a product for that customer and successfully avoid complexity in the software. This makes it a joy to use and collaborate with.

Basecamp is designed with consulting in mind. It’s easy to set up a project and add your customer while restricting them to only that project. Since customers see what you see, everyone is better able to communicate and collaborate. I’m looking forward to seeing how external parties like communicating with us in Basecamp.

A few ideas for using Basecamp

  • Capture important dates for deliverables publicly as Milestones
  • Upload designs and wireframes to get feedback from stakeholders
  • Use a product like ProofHQ to add comments right onto PDFs
  • Use todo lists to make sure you do everything you need to for a presentation

Alternatives

  • Bantam Live – Essentially a combination of Highrise and Basecamp. Targeted towards business development with a short sales cycle. I liked what I saw, but it didn’t seem to support the helpful access control for integrating your customers into projects
  • A Wiki – Wikis don’t effectively facilitate brainstorming and communication. What they are good for is capturing things that are concrete – like specifications and facts.
  • Google Wave – Should be great for real time collaboration, but waves are a little bit unstructured. And, there is no way to let people know you changed something.
  • Others ??? – I’m sure there are more and I’d love to hear them from you.

Now that Basecamp is in place, there’s a great place to collect all of the “stuff” you have for a feature or project. Stay tuned for tomorrow when I talk about Paper Wireframes.

Posted in Product Management | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Building things from scratch creates a better user experience

By colin | Published:

When I started building Mimi and Hy‘s web store for my friend Allison, I wanted to prove to her that Shopify was better than her existing solution, so I took the standard and free Vogue theme and customized it with her colors and logo.

This was a great way to get a store up and running very quickly and prove my case. But even before starting, I knew trying to take someone else’s work and molding and shaping it into Allison’s vision for her site would be difficult. In fact, it would probably take longer to understand the way the designers of Vogue were thinking than it would to start from scratch.

If I start from scratch, I’m only dealing with the limitations of my abilities with HTML, Liquid (the templating language shopify uses), CSS and design.

I’ve learned from through trying to customize wordpress, drupal, joomla, mediawiki, vbulletin, and numerous other pieces of software that if you don’t really understand what each line of code is doing, you can’t make the software do what you want and then end result is a hodgepodge of cobbled together code.

There are a few wonderful projects that abstract complicated software and make it easier to build it from (almost) scratch. One of these is Thematic, the theme framework that powers this site. Over time, I’ll be changing it to look right for me, but right now it’s functional. I’m trying to make a similar theme framework for Shopify called Blankify. This should help bridge the gap between people starting from scratch and those trying to work backwards from someone elses beautiful mess.

Once I’m done with Blankify, I’ll be using it to make Mimi and Hy’s new theme and combine their shopify store and their main site, removing a point of confusion for users and providing their customers a better experience. That’s what building from scratch lets you do.

Posted in Design, Online Stores | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Google Adwords is not the best use of your advertising budget

By colin | Published:

In my first post, I mentioned I was helping a friend set up an online store. Well, she doesn’t mind if I blog about our progress. Right now the store is at mimiandhy.myshopify.com, but we’ll be replacing her current site at mimiandhy.com soon

We set up Google Adwords to drive traffic to the store with our first focus on a designer perfume brand. Her margins were enough on the product so that we could spend some advertising dollars and provide a discount to customers. As long as we made a few sales, we’d be net positive.

What we found was surprising. As we expected, customers liked the offer and were buying the product. It’s not a huge volume of searches on google, and the product is priced at around $145. There have been about 6 sales in the 3 weeks of Ads. Not a huge amount of volume, but enough to test a theory. However, Google was taking a big chunk of the potential profit that was on the table. We ended up paying google around $30 per conversion.

I’m hypothesizing that in the long run when the store contains more products and is receiving organic traffic, overall costs will go down since people may have shopping carts with more than one item. And, as long as we’re net positive on every adwords sale, why not run the ads? These costs are cutting it close though!

What can we do about it?

Paying google $30 for a customer does nothing for customer loyalty. But, providing that discount to existing customers does.

Why not run a customer appreciation campaign that gives existing customers a good discount? They’ll probably tell their friends and family members and instead of converting faceless googlers, you’re reconverting existing customers and deepening their engagement. I recently saw the quote below in a presentation by Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

Whenever I receive a nice discount from a store I’ve shopped at, that makes me feel pretty good, right?

We’ll be experimenting with twitter marketing and email marketing to try to have a deeper engagement with customers (and thus more online sales). I’d like to try to translate the wonderful way Allison interacts with customers in the store into an online experience. If any readers have other experiments we should run, let me know in the comments.

Posted in Email Marketing, Google Adwords, Online Stores, twitter | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Track links in email and social media using google analytics

By colin | Published:

Most web businesses send two types of email: Auto-responses and Marketing Messages. Most marketing messages are sent using sophisticated email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. That’s the smart thing to do.

But what about those messages automatically sent by your site. Emails like:

  • Thanks for signing up
  • Here’s your password reset code
  • Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while
  • We’ve deleted your account

… and everything in between.

What’s different about these messages is they are one off messages, specific to a user and generally triggered by a user action. So, using a mass email tool doesn’t make sense.

But, if you send it from your server, you lose visibility into user behavior. Luckily, if you’re using google analytics (and why aren’t you? It’s free), we can use some clever magic to understand how many clicks that email is getting.

Let’s take a look at what happens to your analytics normally when someone clicks a link in an email?

Well, if it’s webmail, google analytics will log the referring URL – so you’ll be able to see a bunch of email applications as inbound traffic into your site.

Interesting, but not very useful. If it’s coming from an email client like Outlook or Apple’s Mail.app, google analytics thinks it’s a direct hit, i.e. the person typed in the full address into their browser.

So, how can we make this more useful? Luckily it’s easy. For each URL you have in an email, append some magic, and google will track which links people are clicking on.

You can use a tool like this destination URL builder, but I prefer to build the links by hand.

Here’s what a link I would create looks like:

http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/?utm_source=newsletter20100118&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch

So, you can see it’s a link to this website, Iamnotaprogrammer.com, but what are those other things appended to the end of the URL? They’re specific tags that google has created. They allow you to define how you want to bucket certain types of people based on where they saw your link.

Let’s dissect the rest of the example.

  • utm_source – Since this is from a “newsletter” I theoretically sent today, let’s use that as the source
  • utm_medium - “email” – that’s pretty straightforward
  • utm_campaign - This mailing is part of my push to get traffic on my blog, so I’m going to call it “launch“.

So now, when I paste this link into my emails that I’m sending, regardless of what email client people have, they will always be in the Newsletter / Email / Launch bucket.

You don’t need to do any configuration in google analytics to make this work – it just does. You should start to see the Source and Medium combination show up in “traffic sources” in analytics as:Newsletter / Email within a few hours of someone clicking.

Have fun with this, and keep in mind that this works for twitter, facebook and anything else you want to set up customized links for too.

Update:

I eat my own dogfood. Here are the links I set up for this article in google analytics.

Related Links

Posted in Email Marketing, Google Analytics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hello World! (and why I’m starting this blog)

By colin | Published:

Two weekends ago, I helped a friend in Los Angeles set up a profitable online store in a day and a half.

She has a wonderful brick and mortar boutique and had paid a consultant to create an online store with the branding of her brick and mortar. She was disappointed with the sales results. Since I work on the web, I took a look.

What I found was bad:

Visual design was inconsistent with the brand (colors were off, the logo was pixellated and distorted)

User experience of the site was cluttered and confusing – search was in the right margin, there was no clear action on the homepage. Catalog pages were a little better.

Pages were poorly optimized for web crawlers

Order processing was insecure and highly susceptible to fraud. Credit card info was captured with SSL, but then run manually in store.

So, I pitched to her that we run an experiment. I suggested that if she was willing to spend up to $100 we could figure out if we could set up a better online store that makes her money.

We worked together and set up the store on shopify, I customized a template for her, and uploaded one product line for our experiment. We added a discount code for 10% off. We set up google payments, and google adwords to drive traffic. What I wanted to test is whether or not we could sell these products without removing all of her margin.

And we did make money! It took about a day and a half of work to find that out.

We’re now running a second experiment to see if we can add another profitable product line complete with google ads. Over time, we should be able to reduce the ad spend when google indexes the products and online customers become more familiar with the brand.

This experience is the impetus for the blog. It led me to realize that most people out there don’t really know how to put the pieces together to make a project successful or even which pieces to use. This allows subpar consultants to make a living providing bad service to people who know less than them.

In this blog, Im going to talk about the pieces:
Analytics, Adwords, A/B Testing, Site design, User Experience, etc…

and how to put them together:
Product strategy, Marketing

You too can use the internet for fun and profit! I can help. But, take my advice with a grain of salt – I am not a programmer :) .

Posted in Online Stores | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments