"Keep your eye on the donut more so than the hole...People eat at a particular restaurant 'cause it tastes good never mind the ingredients"

-My dad

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The following is last nights dialogue during Betsy's visit to Cali

See the full gallery on Posterous

Brett=over energized startup fella

Bets=master uguay community builder 

Brett: "Bets, we're about to re-launch...how do I market the product to lots of people?"

Bets: "Hm, I think you have it flipped" 

Brett: "Flipped?" 

Bets: "Well, I think you should just focus on the Mavens. Spend your time finding the 20 or so people who "get it" and figure out how you can help them and make their lives easier"

Brett: "That makes sense" 

I wanted to share this dialogue because my brain has strayed a bit, too much marketing talk. Back to community building and problem solving!

*This isn't verbatim

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Cool. Amy's stuff

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Two weeks ago I made a claim I couldnt deliver on to a user and was wrong. I believe in transparency and doing the right thing, here's what I wrote...still waiting to hear back:

Some good news and some bad news. I know this isn't exactly what we planned so it's a good thing you guy's aren't starting school for a few months. 

After talking to many high school teachers, we realized that the old remind101 wasn't really providing direct value to the teachers. We've made the decision to overhaul the old remind101 to enhance it's functionality to cater to teachers.

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Since moving to Palo Alto we've learned a lot (obviously you can see that based on my previous two posts). 

So much so, that we think it's necessary to revamp the entire web application, both from a UX perspective and technical standpoint. We've been prepping the last few weeks to make the transition and we should go live again in late July. We're planning on using Launchrock to spread the word while we're closed...I did my best to design the landing page, needless to say I'm working on it. Any good designers that want to lend a few tips I'm all ears! 

Read about it here if you'd like

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See the full gallery on Posterous

I was scrolling through the press we've received for remind101 and came across the first piece of media that picked up on us from the State News. I was on a 2 week camping trip with Jon & Glenn, about to go on the most ridiculous Mountain Biking excursion in Moab Utah I've ever done (16 Miles, Kona full suspension...a thing of beauty). 

My eyes widened as I read the article...holy cow, is this real? #cool. 

As I sit here a year later and reminisce about what we've went through with remind101 I realized 3 very simple things that my lack of experience and quite honestly, pride stopped me from doing.

1.     Make your product simple

2.     Talk to users 

3.     Solve a problem 

From the look on our  home page design, you'd think it was simple. However, when you got in the system users were often confused. This is an easy fix if I would have talked to users.  But we didn’t. I didn't take enough time to actually sit down and watch users go through the site. I wrote about my first lessons in California last week on how I've been doing user testing. It's not rocket science and I've read all the blogs that say how to do it, but I didn’t. Of course the most important lessons is to solve a problem. We've really had to buckle down and ask ourselves who's problem are we really solving. Turns out, we were making MORE work that solving a problem and providing value to our users. 

The good news is, I learned and we're fixing the issues. We've done a hefty amount of user testing and are honing in on the real problem we're solving. If you are about to start a company, don't make the same mistake I did and follow 123! 

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I read a lot of blogs about UI, usability testing & talking to customers. I admit that we haven't been good at it, but in the last two days we've learned a ton. Here's how we set it up:

1. Have users share their screen via Skype
2. They have 2 objectives: signup & add a course
3. There's no right or wrong answer
4. As you fill in the fields and navigate through the site, talk out loud (i.e, "I'm typing my name in, now I'm going to search for a course")

Things I thought were easy and intuitive actually make no sense. What's more interesting is that each user had similiar problems on certain pages. 

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I just wrote a post on remind101's blog about a pilot we ran with a local high school. The pilot was by no means perfect. In the post, there are real screen shot's of user feedback. Some good. Some bad. Some great. You may ask, why would you actually tell the public of your imperfections, are you crazy? Well, I have a very strong belief in being honest & transparent. We know remind101 isn't perfect and we're constantly working to make it better.

I'd much rather admit our imperfections and talk about what we are doing/have done to enhance the system. I think this builds trust with users & customers. It allows for more flexibility when there is a bug or the system doesn't work correctly. My hope, is that they know I'm here to answer any questions and help fix the problem. 

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This post is a draft from mid Februray 

Sometimes life doesn't explain why things happen. This morning was pretty frustrating. We just fixed a bug and I thought everything was going just dandy. Then, I got a email from a user asking why their text message looks so odd. Ding ding ding!  

I had a nice lunch to talk biz with a fellower MSUer and startup fanatic John. Then, I went to Starbucks to grab coffee and try to do some work. My usual 3 seats were taken, I almost left. But the seat by the door was open so I figured, what the hell. I sat down and started working on an email. Then, a women walked in, and politely asked if she could share the outlet I was using. Of course, I said. 

Theres some people that, when you meet them you just click. You vibe really well. I don't know why, but I could tell there was something really cool about this women. So we started chatting about this & that, the local restaurant down the street, her sons schooling experieince, what I'm doing with remind101 etc...etc... 

One thing led to another and we started talking about her life experiences. She had just finished her final round of chemo from breast cancer. The funny thing is, she had so much exciting, warm energy you would have never guessed it. After some conversation (I felt like we've been friends for years at this point btw) I asked her if she was scared. "No, not so much actually" What scares me is that I have a 12 year old and the Dr.s say I have 3-5 years to live. So, they aren't joking when they say "live every moment like it's your last". 

At this point she started tearing up a bit and it was tough for me not to as well. See, it's easy to watch the movies, see the videos and hear stories and I cant even say it was someone I'm close to cause we just met 30 min ago! 

And to think I was frustrated with a bug fix earlier in the day. 

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Excellent Slideshare Presentation via @judyb

A few important slides:

• Slide 6- incredible mobile stats 
• Slide 13- learning outcomes 
• Slide 34- Text4baby  
• Slide 36- research findings 

Thanks to @sidneyeve for sharing

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I never wrote a blog post talking about what I learned at SXSW. No no no, I don't mean specific tactics like what time to tweet, product iteration, how to raise money etc... If you want to hear that, see this or this.  I'm talking about intangible learning. The type of learning that gives you perspective, clarity and focus. That's what I got out of SXSW. 

Allow me to explain. SXSW is overwhelming. Internet stars unite to learn and build.  In their presense, half way through the experieince I started to get a little down on myself. I was surrounded by such great success. I felt inclined to step back and say, "man what have we really accomplished?" My life's work (thus far) is remind101. We've done fine, but by no means have we seen the type of success I want yet (but we will!) (: 

That resignation setting in while surrounded by such amazing people gave me a lot of perspective on what's REALLY important. Not the blogs about raising money, or if Chrome will beat out Mozilla. What's important is focusing on making our users happy. What's important is implementing a viable business model that makes money so we can grow. What's important is staying true to our values and saving students from missing assignments. I don't think I ever lost sight of these things, but that doesn't mean SXSW wasn't a nice wake up call.

The experience gave me a great deal of focus and clarity. A few days after, our business model hit me like a brick. We are executing it as we speak. I wrote this post because I'm a strong believer in sharing mistakes and lessons learned. What's the lesson in this? Focus on what's really important, rather than comparing yourselves to others. Especially when they are totally unrelated. 

Thanks to @CAgarland for checking this

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Friends, writers & volunteers. This is cool. I voted. (Best part is, you don't have to signup! Just vote!)

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Watch Bryce & myself experience sxsw for the first time. Big shout to MSUAA for sponsoring us to go! I can't beleive they caught me trying to crip walk. Sheild your eyes! 

If you want to see all the blog posts go here. Like the video? Well two very talented MSU students filmed it. They caught 18 hours of footage! If you are looking for video work let me know and I'll introduce you. Even though they spelled my name wrong (ehem) (; 

People in the video:

• http://photogram.me founders @bobarmour & @brianhand (Chicago startupers) 
• bradpopiolek is the one who I met and well worth it!
• Jay Adelson is the fella who stares at the camera while Bryce is speaking
• @msuaajohn interviewing towards the end
• @timbograkos interviewing Gary Hoover (read his bio)
• Sam Rosen I'm speaking to him towards the end

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For a soon to be 24 year old fella with tons of energy & ADD you can imagine anticipation to the biggest startup conference in the country is a bit overwheleming. 100,000+ people: developers, marketers, investors... Over the past month I've been trying to figure out how to prepare and make the absolute best of the expereince. 

How it'll start

It all starts tomorrow at 5:45am. Myself & Bryce (a fellow educational startup founder) will hop on the bus with 25 U of M Business School MBA's and drive 24 hours straight to SXSW in Austin Texas.  They were kind enough to let a few MSU student join them. They are actually having a "Startup Weekend" on the bus which will be pitched to investors & sucessful entrepreneurs on Sunday. Sign up here if you are going. Some pretty cool people judging: 

• Jay Adelson—CEO, SimpleGeo, Inc (and Founder and Chairman, Revision3 Corp., Former CEO,Digg, Inc., Founder, Equinix, Inc.)
• Kevin Koym—Co-Founder and CEO, Tech Ranch Austin
• Marc Weisser—Founder Managing Director, RPM Ventures
• Chris Shonk—Managing Director,  Liahona Ventures
• Jason Bornhorst—VP of Product, Mobiata
• Blair Garrou—Managing Director, DFJ Mercury

Why am I going you ask?  

Well, last year I watched Twitter & the news from a distance and it seemed incredible! I promised myself I'd find a way to get there this year. Thankfully, the Michigan State Alumni Association invited me to head down to SXSW with them. I never actually new what goes on there, so I suggested bringing a few film students down and filming our experieince, then sharing it with MSU students and the rest of the world. This, is exactly what they decided to do!

Who is going from MSU?

• Megan Gebhart - Michigan State senior, founded MSUcatalyst & the popular 52cups blog
• John Hill - Linkedin guru & MSU's MSUAA career services guy. Probably the most well connected person on the planet too
• Leigh Graves Wolf - (pronounced LEE) - Director & instructor at MSU's Ed Tech program & Edupunker
• Paul Jaques - MSU's go to internship guy. He'll be working on developing relationships with all the rockin startups 
• Tim Bograkos- MSU's Young alumni coordinator and former Spartan bball player. Good friend too!
• Bryce Colquitt - Student & founder of education gaming startup Jolly Digital 

You can follow the Twitter hashtag #msusxsw and to participate with everything we are doing check out our blog alumni.msu.edu/sxsw. We're actually partnered with Techsmith! Ever use Snagit or Camtasia? Great products. You very well may see a lot of Betsy Weber on our video's. She's Techsmith's Cheif Evangelist. 

Who I hope to meet? 

I'm going in with a pretty open mind, but anyone that that has something to do with education. Startups, existing companies & innovators alike. I think the main reason I'm so excited, is because all year long I read about, tweet about or communicate with cool startup people around the country. Now, I finally have a chance to meet them in person! Who? Justin Miller (co-founder of Notehall), and a very helpful biz mentor. Charles Hudson who has helped advise us informally for months now, the Collaborize team (who I met on Twitter last week!) the Twilio & Sendgrid teams...the list goes on. 

The point of this blog post was to unload all the things I've been thinking about and intend to do at SXSW, sorry if it was a bit long. Of course if you have any questions, ideas or are at SXSW and want to meet let me know! You can follow my schedule on Plancast, Tweet me, see remind101's Twitter account (big announcement in T- 24 hours, stay tuned here) and of course don't forget to keep track of all the MSUsxsw 

-Brett

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Every day I make a lot of decisions. Some big. Some small. I found the best method to figure this stuff out is this funnel. Please note, it's what works for me, maybe it won't for you. Everyone has unique styles. 

The lack of quality design below was proudly brought to you by, me! (:

I know it seems pretty simple, but you have major life or business decisions to make, I've found it really clears everything up. And if not? You bring in a trusted advisor to give the non-biased "I'm looking down from 30,000 feet and here is what I'm seeing" viewpoint. 

I'm curious to see what other people are doing?

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I had this jacket for a few years. It was ripped up and not very warm anymore. So, I thought I'd see if Northface would honor their lifetime warranty. Well, they did. So why am I blogging about it? 

Thanks for honoring your warranty Northface, you have a happy customer here! 

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I found this burried in my phone and realized there was some good content here. Duh, its Seth! (No, unfortunetaly we arent on a first name basis). A few months back I saw him in person when he visited Chicago and felt these were the biggest marketing lessons:

• 37signals: wrote a computer language and gave it away for free. Hence, rails. That gave the 37signals folks legitamcy.
• Not how do I get people to fan us but ask what they want from us?
• Revolutions change things. We are living in a revolution but we are talking about stuff like Twitters re-design...(stupid!)
•  What's next? Not just 3-6 days or months. But what about 2 years from now...how many of the plans we are making are two years and not just short term. Don't only do short terms stuff!
• If it's easy, it's scarce and people are not going to talk about it because it's not remarkable. 
• Willingness to have people laugh at you and take risks, that's hard!
• People that are building things that matter, are ignoring the gatekeeper. They're just doing it.
• Ideas that spread, win. And how will we make it easy to spread? Don't yell, but make something worth talking about!

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Over the past year my brother David and I have experienced incredible highs (building the application or hearing we saved students from missing exams) and incredible lows (our text messaging won't work for a major carrier, the application crashed mid-day, we didn't get into to that incubator, again).

Inevitably, there will be more ups & more downs. I was interested in seeing if there was a trend, so I could learn to "stabilize" the roller-coaster ride a bit and stay focused. I've been using a really cool web application to monitor my mood called Mercuryapp. It allows you to track decisions & feelings. In my case, I was interested in my overall mood. It pings me 3 times/day and asks me how I'm feeling on a 1-5 scale. Since December 17th, my mood has been relatively stable (which is totally hypercritical to the "ups and downs" of this post). I may actually be getting better at managing my mood!

@CAgarland was kind enough to edit this post, and mentioned I need to elaborate on why I decided to do this. It's easy to get laser focused on your product & miss the big picture. I, for one am a candidate of this. All I think about is remind101, but there are other important things in life like healthy eating, friends, the gym, reading etc... I was finding that it was difficult to figure out how to balance all these things. I speculate that most 23 year olds have a full time job that starts around 8ish & ends at 5. This provides structure. For me, I have to define my own structure. Up at 7(ish) work, eat, workout etc...I'm still trying to get into a good routine but after a year it's starting to come together. So, Mercuryapp was a great tool to to track and benchmark the way I was feeling. Now, I can track what I did on the "good" days and figure out how to minimize the "bad" days. (It also let's you comment each day so if there is a specific event that occurs you can take note of it). 

Lessons learned on how to minimize the bad

• If you get denied, use it as fuel!
• Build a supportive community who believes in you & your company
• Focus on the good 
• Recognize what went wrong & learn from it
• Accept that you may very well fail 10 times before succeeding once.  

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