Someone in Côte d’Ivoire left me a message via SnapEngage in the early hours of this morning here in California.

“i LIve COTE D’ivoire. How i can do to be help to develop my start up?”

Here’s my reply:

I think you asked how you can get help developing your startup?

1. Make sure you have an idea that can be of value to some other group of people.

2. Share that idea with others, enlist and recruit them. Ask for their help.

3. Do it for the right reason – to make a positive difference in the world. Few people will be interested in helping you make money. Many people will be interested in making the world just a bit better.

Cheers,

Bob

You’re reading How can I get help to develop my startup? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

I was chatting with Alvin of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this morning on my site – he’s a law student thinking about doing a startup. He wanted to know: what’s Silicon Valley is like?

Having lived in the Bay Area and worked in the tech industry 30 years, I’ve got a pretty good sense of that.

The good news re SV is that now it’s digital and online: it’s all available to everyone on the planet. What you need to pick up on if you want to succeed is the habits, mindsets, techniques that work in the Valley and make the Valley work.

Other answer – lots of tech jobs available, great weather, new stuff all the time.

Here’s the habits I mean:

• You try something, it fails, you learn, you try something else.
• You help other people, because in this industry, what goes around, comes around, damn quick.
• Doing beats talking and wondering and trying to work everything out in advance every time.
• Make stuff people want, let them know about it, and the money will follow.

If you live in the Valley – even if you live in Valley online – the above are obvious. You go to other industries, places, mindsets and they above is anything but obvious. Where do you want to be?

(image from the Onion – a great read!)

You’re reading So what’s Silicon Valley like? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

I’m running my brief semi-annual secret MicroConsult sale right now for past clients and their friends and checking in on how past and recent clients are doing. Two bits of feedback that were the kind of results I like to hear:

“Thank you for the help you provided earlier with the 2 MicroConsults.  It helped me get to the point of quitting my full time job and then adding my first employee. ”
- “Tom Esposito, Founder | bridallive.com .

“A year into my start-up venture I booked a microconsult with Bob. Well I should have done that much sooner! His experience with bootstrapped start-ups is invaluable and the fact that he is willing to share that experience for $147 is fantastic. I ran an established desktop software company for 10 years and like to think that I know a little about the business, but running a one-man start-up is a very different exercise.

Bob is a great sparring partner and quickly pointed out some pain points on my web site and helped to set priorities. He really made me take a fresh look at my messaging and positioning.

If you have a start-up, read his books and book a microconsult, you will earn it back. “ 
-  Edwin Siebesma, MeetingKing.com

By the way, Edwin has some advice for other startups: if you’re building a web service, do what it takes to get it into the Google Web Store. Fantastic immediate uptake and great conversion levels to boot!

You’re reading Results I like to hear about… from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

So you want to successfully build your startup and that means building systems that get all sorts of work done. If you’re funded, you can hire someone to define all the task, marketing, support, recruiting, planning, agile project management and operation systems you need. If you’re bootstrapping, you are that person.

In that case, let me recommend a task management system I’ve been using every day, all day long for the past several months. Now before you scream your eyes will melt in your head if you read about one more damn Getting Things Done web/iOS/android/paper system, hold on. This app has some crazy powerful good mojo behind it that redefines the game.

The service is Asana. And here’s 6 reasons you should check it out especially for managing all the work you need to define, track and complete if you want to build a remarkable startup.

Reason one: The right people are using it. Twitter. Foursquare. Uber. LinkedIn. Rdio. Nationbuilder. Airbnb. Twilio. That is a hell of a lot of successful, smart startups – too smart to be messing around with anything that gets in the way. And by the way, Asana founders include one of the Facebook Billionaires and they’ve already raised $10.2 million – deep, deep pockets for “yet another task manager” with an extremely high conversion rate (25% of the people who’ve tried Asana stick it with Asana).

Reason two: Takes the friction out of your startup. Email is not your friend building a startup – it’s the evil Nemesis that slows everything down and drags you under. Not so with Asana, and really not so if you’re more than a one person startup. Every task and project and workspace is owned and can be followed and thereafter commented on by any other member of the team. No more emails about and instead of work: just work that everyone in your startup can track, comment and contribute to at the right level.

Reason three: A single System will rule them all. Count up the number of systems you’ll need in your startup: a beta user feedback system, a lead gen system, a business task system, a help desk system, an agile development system, a marketing system, a content strategy system. Then add a few more: a getting equity funded system, a hiring system, a create raving fans system. Each with their own strengths, weaknesses, learning curves, commands. Too many systems!

Instead, Asana can be a killer overall getting work done system, with projects built and used to suit why these tasks are being done. See it in action: here’s short videos of Asana being used manage projects, track bugs, manage customers, recruit new hires. What you get – a single easy system to learn and use – outweighs for a startup having dedicated/custom/overcomplicated/specialized systems. You are not a big fat company – thinking like one will kill your startup.

Reason four: You can haz freelancers. Or contractors. Or vendors. Or whoever you need to give tasks to and get work back from. Asana makes it easy to create workspaces for your core team and the different people in your startup’s life whom you connect with. Or you can invite outsiders to be part of a specific project. Or members of team can follow specific tasks. Being able to define what needs doing, get feedback from the doer, let others track and comment on the item, project or workspace level squeezes out the need for endless email rounds.

Reason five: Secret Ninja Context Powers. A common failing of task managers (I know, I’ve written several) is there’s a primary implied context shaping what you can do and how you can do it. If it’s by Projects, but you need to look at what’s happening by people, tough. You have multiple projects, but you need to tag and focus by tag – good luck. You want to know what you or your cofounders have to do today across all projects – nope. Asana is structured so you can focus by person, you, project, timeliness, tag or any combination thereof. This makes asking key questions (what do I have to get done this week?, who can do graphics?, what projects have must-do this week tasks?, which projects was Joe working on before he jumped ship? – easy to answer and easy to process into action.)

Reason six: They’re not lists, they’re workflows. You can chose to treat a project as a list of things to get done or as a process tasks move through. For example, you can set up areas in your hiring process project so when an initial lead moves to “setup phone screen”, the person who follows that section automatically sees it and is notified of it. Or let’s say you’re a writer who wants to move work from brainstorm to outline to first draft to polish to place as guest post – you can move tasks from section to section, with the right people, checklist and work plan immediately taking effect. Organizing tasks into workflows where you can optimize each step turns death by task list into a system of improvable processes.

Finally, did I mention Asana is blindingly fast, super elegant, has web, mobile and iOS interfaces and is free forever for up to 30 people in one organization? Or the good newborn API, inbound integration with email, outbound integration with your calendar, repeating/reoccurring tasks, file attachment, and plenty of keyboard shortcuts?

Bottom line, you need to be smart about how you create and improve the workflows that will define your startup and corral, oversee and process a huge number of tasks that need to live both on your todo list and on the task radar of others. Asana is being used by several high profile startups to do just that, and scales down to improving the productivity of a single startup founder and is fast, fast and free for under 30 people. Highly recommended.

You’re reading 6 reasons to use Asana to build your startup. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

By Dan Gravell, Founder, elsten software

Content marketing is a cheap way to attract visitors to your site, but how can you achieve a long tail content marketing strategy as a single founder? As a single founder of Micro-ISV, I wanted to develop a scalable way to attract both visitors and inbound links. I came up with a way of combining Wikipedia, the software I sell and oDesk to generate hundreds of pages of useful content that has seen an increase in visitors to my website.

You see a lot of discussion about content marketing nowadays. Content marketing is an approach to marketing where you drive interest in your product or service via the provision of information to prospects. This information could be anything: simple Web pages, promotional videos, or the now ubiquitous ‘infographic’. The great news for solo founders and small companies is that the Web’s democratisation of information publication has meant it is now easy and cheap to publish such content.

That doesn’t mean any old startup can fling up some Web pages about “credit cards” or “insurance” and expect the world to beat a path to their door. The same old economics of competition persist: entrenched competitors with enormous marketing budgets will beat you in marketing content about highly competitive, high worth products and services. Instead, you should be targeting less competitive, ‘long tail’ content that people still search for.

The nature of capturing long tail interest is that you aim to cover many different bases and expect to only receive a small amount of attention for each. Covering many different bases means creating lots of content. So here’s the paradox: how can a solo founder or startup hope to create the content needed for a long tail content marketing strategy? The answer? Outsourcing and automation!

If Patrick McKenzie hasn’t written the book on “ scalable content generation“, he’s certainly written a number of useful blog posts on the subject. Patrick applied scalable content generation to his product, Bingo Card Creator by generating bingo cards for different themes, for example Mother’s Day bingo cards, Classical composer bingo cards and so on. He automated the generation of bingo cards by hiring freelancers to write simple word lists of intended entries in a bingo card and then generating the printable bingo card, uploading it to the Web for others to find.

The results? In Patrick’s own words:

This really works. Some of the activities, like Summer bingo cards or Baby Shower Bingo cards, have resulted in thousands of dollars in sales in the last year. $3.50 in investment, thousands in returns.

Aside from the positives of more website traffic and (hopefully) more sales, you’ve also the chance to make the Internet a better place. People type the most obscure or detailed questions into Google. By combining data in different and innovate ways and paying for freelancers to produce fresh, new content, you’re more likely to be answering those questions. The more people with more questions answered, the happier those people are.

So I decided to start my own scalable content generation project.

bliss-ful content generation

My company, elsten software, writes software called bliss for organising large music collections. Now, that concept is fairly vague and hard-to-sell, so initially I focused on auto populating album artwork in large music collections. That’s much more specific, talks to a pain point, and as it happens was moderately successful (enough to quit my day job after a year-or-so).

The reason I chose to concentrate on album artwork first of all is because quite a few people search Google for terms like [cover art finder] and [album art downloader]. They are specifically searching for tools that will find, download and install album art, so I thought it rude not to deliver a software solution to them. Then, I noticed people are also searching for album artwork for specific albums or for album artwork for specific artists. For example, [AC/DC album covers]. This seemed a promising first target for my content generation project.

My plan developed fairly quickly: use bliss to find artwork for a set of albums, generating a page for each artist with album and artwork. There were a number of reasons I aimed for a page per artist rather than a page per album:

• I predicted ["artist name" album covers] queries would be less competitive
• I would be able to generate larger pages with more content, pleasing Google
• Some people would genuinely want to see a list of “Bo Diddley album covers” so I had made the Web a better place

What were my goals from the project? Twofold: first, to gather a little extra interest in my product, and maybe convert some visitors to downloaders; second, to encourage visitors (maybe fans of the artists depicted) to link to my pages, to further improve the number of inbound links to my domain and therefore improve my search engine rankings.

How I scaled my content generation

If you’re a developer-by-training like me and you run a software company, any old excuse to adopt a technical solution to a marketing problem is to be greeted enthusiastically. And so I came up with my approach to scalable content generation.

First, I needed a way of generating the artist and album names. As I’ve already established, the aim is to generate a lot of content, so this means lots of artists and lots of albums. One option is to go to Wikipedia and copy a list of artists and perform some grep-tastic string mangling, but what about all the albums for those artists to ensure each artist page is long enough? That would mean clicking through each artist, mangling their discography… the thought of all that clicking was not attractive.

bliss finds artwork from a number of sources, and one of these is Wikipedia. The way it does this is to use DBpedia, a structured version of the Wikipedia corpus. DBpedia builds its database by reading Wikipedia articles and using structured elements of those articles (e.g. particularly ‘Infoboxes’ – those boxes of information you often see at the top right of Wikipedia articles, example). The way you query DBpedia to retrieve the data you want is via a language called SPARQL. Using SPARQL you can connect and query multiple different items in the DBpedia dataset, for instance from Thriller you can look up Michael Jackson, and from there his birth town, and then its population… you get the picture.

So, to generate my artist and album list, I wrote a SPARQL query to retrieve all artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and from there each of those artists’ albums.

PREFIX rdf:  PREFIX dbpedia2:  PREFIX owl:
SELECT DISTINCT str(?name), (sql:SAMPLE(?artistNames) AS ?ArtistName) WHERE { ?subject dbpedia2:name ?name . ?subject rdf:type owl:MusicalWork . ?subject  ?artist . ?artist  ?artistNames . ?artist   . }
ORDER BY ?ArtistName

This query takes each ‘MusicalWork’ (album, single etc) in the Wikipedia dataset, links its associated artist (this is like a SQL join) and only includes results where the artist is an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I won’t bother with a tutorial for SPARQL, mainly because I would be incapable of providing one (SPARQL gurus will no doubt recognise inefficiencies in the above; I very much learned-what-I-had-to for this project).

I won’t hot-link to the results to avoid excessive strain on DBpedia’s servers, but if you want to try the query out, copy and paste it into the DBpedia query interface. Suffice to say you’ll get a list of album and artist names.

Step two was to use those album/artist names to look up the artwork using bliss. This bit was easy; I wrote bliss and have access to its source, and the API for finding cover art is fairly mature. I hacked up a bit of Scala (my current scripting language of choice and easily interoperable with my existing code) to find the artwork for each album. These results were then stored as JSON in a results file. In all there were around 2500 separate queries made.

The final piece of work was to generate the Web pages for my results. The blisshq.com website (for that was the destination for this content) is actually a set of static HTML files, hosted on Amazon S3, but generated by Jekyll. The advantages of this are: cheaper hosting and less server software to go wrong (and I guess there are some security advantages too). I wrote a Jekyll plugin to generate the pages by parsing the JSON file and then writing the results by looking up a Liquid template. This template defined a <title> and <h1> tag for “[artist name] album covers” and contained the layout for the art on each page. I also added buttons for Twitter and Facebook to encourage sharing of the content and generate some more inbound links.

Finally, this work was complete! The pages took just a few seconds to generate, were uploaded to blisshq.com and were now live.

Advice from the master

Emboldened by a promise on Patrick McKenzie’s website I shot him an email with a link to the newly generated pages. Patrick replied a couple of days later with some practical on-page SEO advice. The main piece of advice was to add more textual content; around 300 words about the artist on each page.

I experimented by setting up an oDesk job to write content for ten artists (I just randomly picked the first ten artists in the list). I quickly found a contractor who wrote the content and I incorporated this into the page generation. Here’s Frank Zappa’s album covers sans description, and here’s Alice Cooper’s artwork with a bio. I’m moderately pleased with the content; although it is a little clumsy it was reasonably cheap; $3 per article. Anyone wanting to write further bios can get in touch with me; I’ll credit you on the site.

The results

The pages were only picked up by Google on the 11th March, but traffic has been building since then. The current average is around seventy visits per day landing on one of these generated pages.

In terms of my goals, the first was to draw more visitors to the website, convert them to downloaders of my product and (hopefully eventually) customers. So far, conversion rates (visit to download) have been disappointing. Currently only around 1.1% of visitors landing on these pages download the product, whereas the site-wide average is around 25%. That said, I’ve made no real attempt to optimise this yet. There are no calls-to-action and few obvious links to guide the visitor to other parts of the site.

Patrick’s advice of adding extra artist biographies appears to be helpful; of the top twenty pages by visits 30% of the pages have this extra textual content despite only making up 6% of of all the pages. By tracking the number of visits I receive in Google Analytics and tracking these pages’ search rankings I can build a list of new pages to add biographies too and get the best return on investment.

There have been no inbound links posted to the content yet, nor social media shares, but with an increasing number of visitors I am hopeful.

It appears that, as ever, generating the content is the first step of this content marketing strategy: next will be promotion and optimisation!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticpuppy/

Dan Gravell is the founder of elsten software, a London based company which aims to make your large music collection manageable. bliss is an MP3 organizer whose aim is to audit the consistency, completeness and correctness of your computer music library.

You’re reading Scalable content generation using DBpedia (and a hint of oDesk) from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

The cold zombie hand of those who want to save you from the evils of the Internets are back: CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) will keep you safe from evil cyberterrorists, pornographers and copyright infringers. Just close your eyes, shut up, do as we say and go shopping.

Or not.

Spencer Belkofer of Lumin Consulting is ringing the alarm bells with this great infographic:

You’re reading They’re back! from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Matt Williams (an “avid” reader of this blog) emailed me this morning. Who’s Matt Williams? a) He’s the guy who added a little style to Google Docs – specifically this nice OS X-like Linen Background script and, b) He’s the guy who got a post about a) in TechCrunch about his “make it pretty” effort in under 10 minutes after posting.

“I have always been passionate about useful and well designed tech. When i designed the Google Docs iOS Linen Background, i honestly just wanted to share it with others who would appreciate it. I told my friend to install the pluggin and he sneakily sent it in to techcrunch and within 10 minutes a post had been written about it.”, Matt replied.

Matt runs No Yelling Driving School in Australia (Brisbane and Perth) when he’s not making the interwebs just a smidgen easier on the eyes or getting ready to expand his business to Sydney. Seems he has a few new Facebook friends now: 1,090 to be exact.

Maybe if your startup is looking for a few new friends and a ton of legit linkbacks you should take a page (linen of course) out of Matt’s playbook.

You’re reading Google Docs – get a little style! from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

The hardest part of building a startup isn’t coding, marketing, building the web site, finding your market, defining your product, raising seed money, raising equity money, getting press attention, building a Twitter or Facebook or Google+ following, finding a URL, setting up a VPS, getting approved by Apple, finding a co-founder, making a YouTube video, writing marketing copy, building a blog, deploying to your server, scaling your servers, managing your cashflow, doing your business taxes, or getting Robert Scoble to notice you.

It’s dealing with the doubts, fears, objections echoing around in your own head, dragging you down. Alone.

Mastermind Groups is an idea that’s been kicking around for 85+ years. Find a number of like-minded people trying to succeed, provide each other with feedback, constructive criticism, different points of view, resources, accountability. Meet on a regular basis, what happens in the group stays in the group, mutual respect and support are the rule.

A quick google makes it clear more than a few people have tried to make money one way or another out of Mastermind Groups. Chris Pirillo, whom I respect, started “Gnomies” a couple of months ago and I wish him well. But that is not kind of Mastermind Group I want to build or join.

What I want to do is find up to 1o technical founders closing in on launching a new startup willing to meet once a week via Skype or probably Google+ Hangouts to brainstorm ideas, get and give feedback, and support each other. Lifehack.org did a good writeup on what Mastermind group is really about – I intend to follow it.

Who’s in? Email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com.

You’re reading I’m starting a Mastermind Group – who’s up for it? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

If you’ve founded a startup, or are thinking of founding a startup, your API to OPM (Other People’s Money) just got earthshakingly easier to use.

Sitting in President Obama’s inbox this afternoon is HR 3606 – the JOBS act – ready for his signature, SEC rulemaking, and going into production. Three startup constituencies are going to get some good stuff from Washington:

• Angels and Angel Groups will be able to do much more business, easier, and actually solicit business much more directly and publicly,
• The onramp for taking successful startups public just got much easier to navigate, meaning it won’t take a Facebook-sized business to make this an attractive way of raising capital again,
• People like you and I (not “accredited investors”) will be able to buy stock through crowdsourced sites (called “funding portals”) in startups who with relatively little effort will be able to list with these portals. How much stock? Up to 10% of our annual incomes or $10K whichever is less. As for startups, those who go through portals, can crowdsource up to $2 million a year.

Three other parameters worth mentioning. While a startup could do all the legal stuff that needs to be done and sell stock direct, it’s going to be a lot easier, and a lot more credible, to go through a portal who can do all that for a hundred, a thousand, 10 thousand startups. And for all the non-tech would-be startup founders, no, you can’t use this kind of stock to pay for your Facebook clone – you can’t own crowdsourced stock in a company you work for. And speaking of those new funding portals, how much will they be making? Dunno. Stay tuned as the SEC makes the rules. At least they will be startups, insofar by at least one informed reading of the bill, existing stock brokers cannot become crowdsource brokers.

New Rules, new Game.

So how is this all going to play out after Obama signs the bill and the SEC spends six months writing out the nitty-gritty there will be devils in these details rules?

First off, go get on Motaavi’s mailing list, like now. There’s a great story by PandoDaily writer Erin Griffith about how Motaavi’s co-founder Melanie Plageman pulled a Ms. Smith Goes To Washington, buttonholing staffers, started building a database of startup by congressional district,  and learning how the DC game is played. Upshot? Great networking, and already Motaavi is gearing up to start posting startup profiles. There will be of course other players – SecondMarket, KickStarter, Gate Technologies have been mentioned – but Melanie now knows the right people, is tied into the DC tech caucus, and has a power suit to wear while walking the walk .

Second off, you need to get serious about a) what the hell your startup is going to do to be successful and b) just exactly why you want Other People’s Money. The single biggest hurdle to launching a startup is that it’s a killer to launch a company and hold down a day job. Crowdsourcing your big leap forward makes sense, and the 20 self-funded startups out there for every traditionally funded startup will be getting into the game. And that means it’s time to get read and adopt  both Steve Blank’s brand new Startup Owner’s Manual and Ash Maurya’s Running Lean, 2nd edition. Both these guys are channeling Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas that gives founders a way of figuring out how their startups succeed and investors a much better way of comparing startups to startups that b.s. business plans.

Re what you plan to do with the money you crowdsource, that’s definitely an app I’d like to see – and you will too unless you delight in using crappy old Excel accounting templates divorced from startup reality. Keep in mind those funding portals have an ongoing responsibility under the JOBS act to report to their investors where the money invested goes.

Third off, expect to see the rise of a brand new kind of Angel/VC. When the likes of you and I go buy $300 of NextBigStartup through a funding portal, we (or at least I!) will be doing it in the hopes of making some money, money we get when that startup gets bought and the new owners buy out the crowdsourced owners, or the company goes public, or when an “accredited investor” makes us a good offer. We won’t be able to sell our stock for a year (see Sec. 4A(e)(2) of the HR3606 if you’re interested). But if a Ron Conway, Brad Feld or Dave McClure want to take buy that $300 of stock for say $900, I for one won’t say no.

So what happens when non-rich people can buy startup stock instead of lotto tickets, successful startups can go IPO-Big, Angels can do real audition calls for startups not American Idol-like competitions and a whole lot more would be startup founders can get that critical first couple of million dollars? Stay tuned – but that damn Internet has gone and done it again – disrupted how things used to be.

You’re reading JOBS bill passes – New era for startup funding starts now. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

By Marc Strong,
Founder, Wienot Films

The world is drowning in information–at least I know I am! In 2011, we created an estimated 1.8 zettabytes of data. What’s a zettabyte anyway!? Mashable says 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes is enough information to fill 57 billion 32 GB iPads. If that number’s still too abstract, you could build a mountain 25-times higher than Mt. Fuji with all those iPads! Needless to say, it’s easy for the average consumer to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available today. Email overload alone is enough for most people to consider suicide! Okay, maybe suicide is too extreme. Perhaps some kind of Chinese water torture would better fit the bill. Imagine that slow and steady drip right between the eyes on your forehead. A bit like your email perhaps…unrelenting! Why do we have such short attention spans these days? Maybe it has something to do with the overabundance of information.

When thinking about whether you need a video to explain your startup, I think a wise question to ask yourself is whether your product or service is contributing to people’s feeling of information overload. Is your offering so easy to understand that an average reader could figure it out in the first 10-20 seconds on your site? Most people–your mom excluded–don’t want to take much time to figure it out. How much reading and digging is required to understand how your product or service works? If they can’t figure it out quickly and easily, you need to find a better way to explain it.

A concise, well-produced video can be a fun and soothing antidote to this information overload problem, while simultaneously increasing your conversion rate. Here’s why. First, with limited time to share your message, video requires you to figure out exactly what you want to say and prioritize only those things that really matter. What would you say you do if you only had 30 seconds to explain your business? I love this quote by Mark Twain, “If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter.” Video, with its finite length, forces you to write that shorter letter.

Second, clarity of the written word is exposed when made audible. If you think you’ve written something that’s crystal clear, ask your spouse or good friend to read it to you out loud. Watch them read it and you’ll know right away whether it’s as clear as you thought. If they’re stumbling or pausing, or making strange faces, those are good indicators you need to refine things. The process of producing a video similarly helps illuminate the clarity–or muddiness–of your message.

Third, video is able to leverage the power of sight. I’ve heard various claims about the portion of our brain that’s devoted to vision, from 50-75 percent. I don’t know the true figure, but I think it’s obvious that we understand things better when we see them. A good video will use compelling visuals to support that clear message you worked so hard to develop.

As you focus on the most important things, use language that is clear, and add visuals that support your point, your message will grow in power. Add in elements of story and your message will be like Popeye after he eats his spinach. For whatever reason, we humans are wired to intuitively understand and remember stories. Add all these element together and a quality explanatory video can act like a breath of fresh air in an environment polluted with too much information.

THE COST

Explanatory video producers I’ve come across–and I’ve looked at a lot of them–charge anywhere from $2k to upwards of $30k for a video, depending on the project’s length and complexity. Most seem to charge somewhere between $5k and $15k for an average video. If that’s within your budget, you’re good to go.

One note on picking a video producer. I’d highly suggest you look for one who is not only a talented animator, but more importantly is a gifted storyteller. Common Craft, arguably the father of explanatory videos, may not make the most technically sophisticated videos from an animation standpoint, but the clarity of their explanations are among the best in the business, which is why they’re in high demand (their Dropbox video is below). If you want a video that’s going to stick, remember the adage that content is king. Just like in Hollywood, visual effects can be great, but they should support your story if you want them to have a lasting impact on your viewers.

OTHER OPTIONS

If you’re like most startups, funds might be tight. If that describes you, I’ve come up with a few solutions to help bridge the gap until you’re able to hire a pro.

1. Simplify your product or service. If your product is too complicated, the first question I’d ask is whether there’s a way to simplify it. Remember, simplification is a process of stripping away everything that’s not essential. It’s difficult and takes time, but is worth the effort if you’re serious about success. Isaac Newton wisely said, “[M]ore is in vain, when less will serve.” The advice my wife loves to give me is apt too: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

2. Use visual aids to explain your product or service. Sometimes simple images can help communicate the purpose or effect of using your product or service better than any words can. Look for ways to explain your product visually. Even hand-drawn images using stick figures and a sharpie can often do the trick.

3. Tell your story with a text-only animated video. I’m sure many of you have seen text animated videos (searching “kinetic text” will give you plenty of examples). Some of them are very complex. Others, less so. They’re typically easier and quicker to produce than fully animated explanatory videos, making them a cheaper option. If you go this route, make sure to still develop a concise message that tells a compelling story.

For a great example of a powerful text animated video that combines story with music, watch “The Girl Effect” below.

4. Show your product with a demo video. If you’re offering some sort of software or web service, a demo video combining screen capture and simple narration can at least help your potential customers understand how your product works and see it in action. If money were no option, I’d create an explanatory video giving the bigger picture of why your product matters and how it works and then create separate tutorials or demo videos showing some of the ins and outs of using it. There are all sorts of inexpensive screencasting programs that can help.

5. Make a personal “talking head” video. If you’re at least somewhat photogenic (if your mom thinks you’re lovable, you probably pass the test!), a simple video of you in front of your webcam, or other higher quality camera, explaining why you created your service and why it’s amazing is sometimes enough to do the trick. If you make your own, make sure you get enough light in the video so your viewers can see you properly (search “three-point lighting” for a few tips on lighting). Also, make sure there isn’t background noise competing with what you’re saying. Don’t underestimate the importance of clear audio.

6. Make your own video. If you have some time, try making your own video. You could do any one of the options I mentioned above. If you have a Mac, I’d suggest iMovie. It’s super easy to learn. I’m sure Window’s Movie Maker would also do the trick. Maybe your video won’t look as good as you had hoped, but perhaps you’ll surprise yourself! Find some people to give you honest feedback after you make it. Take their comments to heart. Even world-famous directors get feedback from test audiences before they release their films. Whatever you come up with, remember to focus on the important things, be clear and concise, and try to tell a story. Last but not least, don’t forget to have fun!

If all of the above felt like a lot to take in, perhaps this simple summary will help:

And lest I post everyone else’s videos and none of my own, as entrepreneurs who I suspect give your fair share of presentations, some of you might appreciate this fun video I made last year. It includes some useful tips for giving great (PowerPoint) presentations. Enjoy!

===

Marc Strong is the founder of Wienot Films, an Austin-based company that specializes in making fun explanatory videos that turn complex ideas into clear, concise stories. When not making videos, you can find him riding his bike or hanging out with his wife and kids. Contact him on Twitter @wienotfilms or via email at marc@wienotfilms.com.

You’re reading Do you really need an explanatory video for your startup? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Hi Bob,

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say thanks for helping me escape the morass I was in last summer, trying to get my project off the ground. I am going to launch in the beginning of April (retailintel.com). The marketing site still sucks, but word-of-mouth is spreading fast and I will launch with about 30 stores on board as customers.

I’m using WP Engine for the marketing site (thanks for that), Rackspace Cloud for my hosting (thanks for that), Stripe for credit card payments, Twitter Bootstrap for my application’s UI, and Grails for my application stack.

Once I launch and have a marketing site that is not embarrassing, I’d like to schedule a session with you to review it. Thanks again, love the podcast.

Best,

Mike

–

Mike Sickler

You’re reading Emails I like to get… from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Pat and I interviewed Professor Steve Blank, one of the key thinkers behind the whole Lean Startup movement, and that interview is up today!

If you’ve wondered what Customer Discovery really is, if it’s more than a Silicon Valley buzzword, this interview will give you the facts from the man who created it. And if you are wondering what’s in Prof. Blanks brand-new, eagerly-awaited book, The Startup Owners Manual, we have the details before anyone else.

Seriously, this is one of our best interviews and a must-listen if you want your startup to succeed.

So who would you like us to interview next? And what should we ask them?

You’re reading An awesome interview with Prof. Steve Blank from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Here’s a quick rundown on three jawdropping online productivity tools I heard about and installed in the past hour:

• Buffer just added updating LinkedIn, giving you much better control over what you add to your LinkedIn Profile. In fact, just by this one change, LinkedIn at least for me goes from the so what to the it’s useful column.
• CloudMagic – Adds a floating search box to gmail and twitter that as you type returns results in one freaking second. Twitter goes from a fleeting stream of noise to instant database of anything I’m interested in. And Gmail? I can find anything, anything at all in a single second.
• Smartr – Instant social context to anyone who emails you or you email, plus who you know in common, plus all of your related email.

You’re reading 3 Tools to up your Productivity Game from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

(Got a startup question? Ask it at AskBob and I’ll take a stab at it. And if it’s a question that other startup founders are asking, look for it as a post here.)

Andrew of CliqFlip asks:

We’re about to release and we are starting to build ‘hype’ around our product. We are using all the social media sites: http://www.Twitter.com/cliqflip http://www.youtube.com/cliqflip http://www.facebook.com/cliqflip , etc. How do we grow our user base and our following ? How do we make people intrigued?

Hey Andrew,

Looking over your pre-launch page, your YouTube video, your Twitter feed and Facebook page, in a some of ways you’re doing the right thing to gain attention and ultimately users for CliqFlip, but there’s a key, critical element missing.

Show me the Value: Go Fast and Go Long

It used to be that just by creating an app or service, you were breaking new ground and would at least get a quick look-see by people. That was so last decade. This decade, everyone’s attention funnels are overflowing with teasers and offers each and every day. The bar has been raised. Your “15 minutes of fame” is now about 15 seconds. That means you’ve got to go fast and go long when it comes to getting people’s attention.

Go Fast – Tell – or better show – people exactly what makes your app different, exciting, useful in the first few seconds they hear about it. That’s something that’s missing right now from all of your Internet surfaces. That value is “buried” a whole 32 seconds into your video: “Improve your network by building deeper, better connections.” Now that is something that got my attention! Is it “fair” that few people – especially in your target market – will give you 32 seconds to get to the point? Nope. But it is what it is. That statement needs to be headlined on your landing page, be your Twitter and Facebook profiles. Up front and center.

Go Long – You need to start building a relationship with me your future customer by creating content of value to me long before you can make a sale. That’s how mainstream commercials work – they hammer on you for years, decades, before you are actually ready to buy. But you don’t need to interrupt customers 10,000 times. In our Internet-centric world (and I say our because it’s clear that whatever CliqFlip is, it’s for people who live on the Net), Content Marketing (creating relationships with future customers by blogging and curating great information) is the way to go.

Take a good, hard look at one of the best Content Marketing practitioners out there: KISSMetrics. Again and again and again and even again they come up with content that is useful, interesting, remarkable, shareable and tweetable as far as their customers-to-be are concerned. They’ve pre-made the sale as far as I’m – and a lot of other potential customers – are concerned.

Your challenge, even while you are building CliqFlip, is to start getting great content out there that helps your customers before they become your customers. If you are building an app, start showing people your expertise, understanding, insights into the problem domain that the people you want as customers are concerned with.

It’s easier today to get the attention of literally millions of people all over the world. But keeping that attention for longer than a second means you’ve got to start delivering specific relevant value to them that second – and follow it up by giving them value before, during and after your actual product launches.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Bob

You’re reading AskBob: How do we grow our user base and following? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

So what’s the “secret sauce” of Balsamiq Mockups? That’s what I set out to find out in Balsamiq Interviews (available today, free download) – a set of 9 interviews of cheerfully rabid Balsamiq fans.

The secret is this: Balsamiq affords a new kind of communication and interaction for UX experts, designers, developers, project managers, startup founders and money guys. All of these people wrestle every workday to express the rightness of intangible ideas. How do you explain to another human being what something that doesn’t exist “should” look like? How do you move from your mind’s eye to their eyes an already intangible intangible?

You do it with pictures, after finding a way to get your inner art critic to shut the hell up and get out of the way. No one is going to mistake a mockup done in Balsamiq as anything but a mockup – a reasonably good way communicating how the elements of a web page, web app or something else entirely should come together. It’s good enough to get across how “this thing” is going to work, without erecting barriers to involvement, collaboration and participation. No art degrees needed. And it’s fast.

That Balsamiq secret sauce has given this very diverse group of people a very real competitive advantage. They can communicate faster, across distances and barriers. Whether it’s the British VC who deals with literally thousands of startups and arms them with Balsamiq so they can get a handle on their ideas (James King), or uberdesigner Ryan Carson planning out his next big thing (Treehouse) or a careful practitioner of the UX arts over delivering to wow-ed clients (Theresa Neil), there is something going on here. Why not get in on the action?

Balsamiq Interviews was great fun to create, thanks Peldi for the opportunity!

Grab your copy of Balsamiq Interviews!

You’re reading Book #6: Balsamiq Interviews is out! from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

(Phil Simon is a four-time author, speaker, and technology and management expert. I met Phil for the first time when Pat and I recorded Show #104: Phil Simon and the New Small on the Startup Success Podcast. Phil is way smart, insightful and knows how to tell a great story! Recommended Reading!)

Book excerpt from The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business
By Phil Simon. Published by Motion Publishing.

INTRODUCTION: THE GANG OF FOUR

There are many smart people out there—and few are smarter than Eric Schmidt.

Even before joining Google as chairman in August 2001, Schmidt was long regarded as one of the most respected, knowledgeable, and prescient technology minds on the planet. Among his many accolades, in 2007 PC World named him the most important person on the web—along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.1 Today, there are few more astute observers in the field. When he talks, people listen.

Schmidt was talking on May 31, 2011. He had the floor at the D9 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. In broad terms, he discussed today’s rapidly moving, tech-heavy economic climate.

Beyond generalities, though, Schmidt remarked that a small cadre of companies was growing at unprecedented rates, reaching scales that could only be described as extraordinary. Moreover, this growth had “not been possible before.” 2 Schmidt named four companies that stood apart from the crowd: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. He collectively referred to these companies as the Gang of Four.

Today the Gang of Four is light years ahead of its peers. And this lead is not just in one vital area, such as technology. In incredibly short periods of time, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have done truly amazing things. They have built valuable brands, released popular products and services, cultivated widespread followings, and generated enormous shareholder value and profits. They have quickly risen to prominence, in the process becoming the envy of thousands of organizations. They have been able to innovate and launch products, services, and even entire lines of business at unprecedented rates. As we’ll see in this book, the source of these companies’ competitive advantages stems from many things, including profound customer insights enabled by troves of data, immensely valuable partnerships, highly adaptive cultures, and the intelligent use of technology.

BIG COMPANY SYNDROME

Historically, as large companies have grown to such dizzying heights, they have begun to show signs of fissure and eventual decline. Examples abound. IBM struggled mightily in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To be fair, it was able to successfully redefine itself as a service-oriented company, a turnaround that has been nothing short of astounding. Kodak was woefully unprepared for the rise of digital cameras and printing. More recently, many iconic organizations have lost their leads, sometimes in just a few years. Microsoft comes to mind and is discussed at length in Chapter 9 of this book.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the symptoms or diagnose the disease. After some degree of success, large organizations begin to tread water. Over the course of, say, five years, they start to exhibit the signs of stereotypical risk-averse, monolithic organizations. Again, this is well-trodden ground. Many books have been written about how size tends to encumber organizations, along with attendant bureaucracy and other baggage. Call it big company syndrome.

The Gang of Four, however, appears to be largely symptom-free.

Each company continues to hire thousands of new employees, enter new and often challenging markets, forge new partnerships, and launch entirely new lines of business. These companies are doing much more than avoiding the traditional perils of growth, nor are they simply maintaining previous levels of performance. They are somehow increasing their organizational pace of innovation.

DISCLAIMER

I have no axe to grind with Microsoft, IBM, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, and other technology companies that have recently fallen from grace. On the contrary, I admire each company’s accomplishments and innovations. As we will see in Chapter 1, we would not be where we are today if Microsoft had not pushed for common computing standards, Yahoo! had not broken new ground with portals, AOL had not taken dial-up to the masses, and MySpace had not introduced the idea of a social network to millions. In many important ways, these companies paved the way for the Gang of Four.

I only highlight the missteps of these organizations to underscore one of the key points in this book: Platforms—even great ones—do not guarantee long-term success. In other words, the platform is no silver bullet, and we can learn a great deal from the declines of these companies—and their platforms.

What’s more, I have great admiration for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—and the leaders behind them. However, I do not mean to imply that the Gang of Four can do no wrong. In Part II of this book, I catalog some fairly large tactical and strategic blunders made by these companies. Throughout the book, I have endeavored to strike a balance between the good and the bad.

Let me be clear: Microsoft, Yahoo!, and their struggling counter-parts are not bad or incompetent organizations. Nor are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google above reproach. They are not run by inherently better or smarter people. But the fact remains: Each member of the Gang of Four has done an excellent job of building and managing its platform. And this is the main reason that each has enjoyed so much success over the last five years.

Bezos, Zuckerberg, and company have learned a great deal from tech pioneers like Bill Gates and Jerry Yang. But now the pendulum has swung the other way. Current management at many organizations—including Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other besieged companies—would do well to study the success of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Hence the need for this book.

GET BIG FAST

“At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.”
—          Marshall McLuhan

In general, the Gang of Four is doing what top management gurus have been espousing for years. Specifically, they are embracing intelligent risk. They aren’t afraid of failure, experimentation, and change. Innovation depends on this type of mentality. At least in part, each company has moved away from its original and core business model—often multiple times. They are sprouting in different and unexpected directions: horizontally, vertically, and evendiagonally. They have entered new markets, and in some cases, created markets where none had previously existed.

That’s one explanation. But it’s actually not the underlying reason for the massive and sustained success of these companies. Rather, they are winning because they are following an entirely new blueprint and business model. They have spent a great deal of time and money building extremely powerful and valuable ecosystems, partnerships, and communities. This new model hinges on powerful ecosystems that, in turn, fuel astounding levels of innovation, profits, and growth.

In the understated words of Eric Schmidt at the D9 Conference mentioned earlier, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google “are exploiting platform strategies really well.” 3
Without question, the Gang of Four has built the world’s most valuable and powerful business platforms. In so doing, these companies have done nothing short of redefining business. Collectively, they have introduced the platform as the most important business model of the 21st century. And they have spawned a litany of imitators. Thousands of companies are:

• Building their own platforms
• Creating valuable planks that complement existing platforms
• Modifying their business models to incorporate platforms
• Becoming platform partners

Welcome to the Age of the Platform.

FORESIGHT IN AN ERA OF CONSTANT MOTION

It isn’t easy to conceive of, build, and continuously adapt a platform. If it were, then everyone would be doing it. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google would be commonplace, not exceptional.
Expenses aside for a moment, creating a robust platform does not just hinge on consistently developing great products or services. Rather, it requires a completely different mind-set. It must be at the core of a company’s business model. Companies must not only exist, but they must thrive in a state of constant motion. They must embrace dynamic stability (discussed in Chapter 7).  They need to constantly reevaluate and redefine basic precepts such as:

• What they currently do
• How they do it
• What they could do
• How they could do it
• With whom they do it
• How each piece interacts with other parts of its eco-system and the world at large

As Part II of this book will show, building such a platform requires many things. There is no five-step program or quick how-to guide. At the top of the list are amazing foresight, organizational agility, and the courage to let third parties participate in a business frequently, and in some very unconventional and collaborative ways. Insular companies are unlikely to build a great platform.

BOOK BACK STORY

As 2011 progressed, I began to feel a compelling need to write a book about the platform as an important and new business model. As I will explain shortly, I have learned from personal experience that building a platform is not only beneficial, but also imperative for many companies’ survival. I look at myself as a case in point: In a relatively short period of time, I redefined my business and launched completely new products and services. How did I do this? In short, I built my own platform.

By way of background, from 2002 until 2008 with a few brief exceptions, my entire livelihood was tied to one fairly specific type of work: enterprise resource planning (ERP) consulting.
Even that type of relatively provincial work involves a wide variety of people and technical skills. Let’s just say, however, that more than 99 percent of all companies never considered engaging me. And probably 99.99 percent did not need me at any given time.

Despite this significant limitation, by 2008 I had started to come into my own. That year, I knocked the ball out of the park, making more money than at any other point in my life (nearly $250,000). I had concurrently balanced several difficult projects and had taken just one week off. For me, 2008 was the very definition of the “feast” year about which independent consultants like me dreamed—as in feast or famine. By any measure, I should have been ecstatic.

Yet, at least professionally, I was quite concerned. At the time, I was 36 years old. As I gave my accountant my third-quarter financial statements to prepare my taxes, I told myself: I had better enjoy this while it lasts, because it just couldn’t get any better. I couldn’t raise my rates forever and there were only so many hours in a year. Plus, rarely does an independent consultant like me move seamlessly from one project to another for an entire year as I just did. Downtime was a given in any economy, and ours was getting worse.

I knew that I needed to diversify and establish myself in different lines of business—or face dire consequences. But somehow that didn’t seem sufficient. I strongly suspected that I would have to refine my entire business model—and maybe even blow it up. In the long-term, this shift was necessary, but there was a short-term problem: No one cared. The world at large was not terribly interested in my decision to enter new lines of business—nor were many of my clients for that matter.

If I was going to be successful in diversifying and mitigating my own risk, I would have to build my own platform.

SIMON 2.0

Fast forward to mid-2011. As I send my same accountant my quarterly financial reports, “Simon, Inc.” barely resembles the company of less than three years ago. That same type of consulting that generated more than $200,000 in revenue for me in 2008 is now barely a line item on my P&L statement. I had completely transformed my business. In part by accident and in part by design, over the next three years I launched entirely new lines of business. I earned money via services such as website design, writing, book coaching, marketing, and other areas for which I had no formal training. I made money from book royalties and mobile app sales. I also started a publishing company and a public speaking practice. In large part, I would have not been able to pay my bills and continue working for myself if I had not built an effective platform.

As we’ll see later in the book, platforms are not elixirs. You still have to do the work. In my case, I had to develop a new brand and offer services that people would want—and pay for.

For three reasons, I’m glad that I started diversifying and building my platform when I did. First, I was beginning to tire of working on the same types of highly contentious projects.

Second, I wanted to tackle new challenges and continue my own professional development. Third and most important, my shift turned out to be an economic imperative. In hindsight, my timing could not have been better. By early 2009, ERP consulting had slowed to a trickle, and many of my colleagues had either lost their jobs or could not find work. Although I have yet to replicate the financial success of 2008 (and may never do so), my platform-based business model is much more sound and resilient to risk. I start each year with a fair amount of base income from my writing and speaking clients. What’s more, book sales generate passive income for me. Unlike years past, I no longer start at zero every January. As my platform continues to evolve in new and unexpected ways, it generates new income and opportunities for me.

WHY THESE FOUR COMPANIES?

As mentioned previously, I have been self-employed for most of the last 10 years. I am also a student of both technology and business—perhaps sponge is a better word. I am constantly absorbing information from myriad sources about technology and business trends, events, and issues. Like any solopreneur, I have my ups and downs.

If I have a bad quarter—or three, as I did in 2009—I wonder what I would do if I had to close my own little shop and work for a large company. And assuming it was my choice, where would I like to work? It would have to be a company that was:

• Doing extremely interesting and innovative things, especially with respect to emerging technologies.
• Adapting extremely well and quickly to change.
• Routinely introducing compelling new offerings.
• Working with partners in very exciting ways.

Which ones fit the bill? Which large companies are doing the most exciting things?

To me—and I don’t think I’m alone here—the answer is clear: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. I certainly didn’t need Eric Schmidt to tell me as much. These four companies occupy elite status because of the popularity, reach, and power of their platforms.

I knew that their extensive and successful use of platforms war-ranted a book. Against that backdrop, I started writing The Age of the Platform in April 2011.

In this book, I certainly don’t contend that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the only companies that understand the notion and importance of platforms—or at least make that claim.

(Chapter 10 provides examples of lesser-known platforms, and Chapter 11 covers powerful emerging platforms.) I focus on the Gang of Four in this book because their platforms are so popular and robust. What’s more, these four can teach businesses of all types and sizes many valuable lessons. To my knowledge, no existing book has looked at each of these dynamic organizations through the lens of the platform.

Very large companies such as Google and small companies like mine have embraced platforms—and seen amazing results. As a business model, the platform is size- and industry-agnostic.
I make no secret of my admiration for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—and the leaders behind these amazing companies.

Yet, I have another reason for profiling them. Millions of people and small businesses concurrently do business with the Gang of Four in a wide variety of capacities. That is, we have symbiotic relationships with them. For instance, we earn money from Amazon as affiliates and then buy books on the site. We sell games and productivity apps on Apple’s AppStore and then spend money on an iPad or a MacBook Pro.

WHY BUY THIS BOOK?
This book is first and foremost about the platform as a business model. It explains how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have built dynamic and powerful ecosystems. Next, it lessons for creating and expanding your own platforms—and utilizing existing ones. Finally, it looks at the candidates for the next great platforms.

You might be asking yourself:

• Just what is a platform, anyway?
• Why are planks so important to platforms?
• Why does my law firm or accounting practice or widget factory need a platform?
• What can my business and I possibly learn from the platforms of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google?
• How is my small business remotely similar to these companies?

These are all fair questions. After all, relatively few businesses can spend billions or even millions of dollars on acquisitions—and afford to be wrong. Only a fraction of all companies have this type of liquidity and size. In fact, fewer than 1,000 American companies employ more than 10,000 people, according to the 2008 U.S. Census.4 In all likelihood, your business cannot be compared to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

But let me draw a few analogies here. One should not embark on a career in acting with the expectation of becoming the next Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, or Meryl Streep. Foolish is the guitarist who starts a band with the hope of selling more records than the Beatles. The upstart novelist who expects to be the next John Grisham or Stephen King had better not quit her day job. Ditto the teenager who picks up a tennis racket with dreams of being Roger Federer incarnate. The odds that any of these things will happen are beyond remote.

We can still learn a great deal from these extremely talented and successful people. Iconic actors, artists, musicians, writers, and athletes have achieved their levels of prominence because they are doing so many things right. Luck and innate ability can only explain so much. I can’t hit a forehand like Roger Federer, but I certainly can learn a few things by watching him on the court.
The same principle applies to the business world. It may not be realistic to compare your company to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, but you can still learn a great deal from them and their platforms. And your business can benefit from these lessons.

In a nutshell, these are the goals of this book.
Aside from examining the platforms of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, this book profiles a number of smaller companies that have built impressive platforms.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

The Age of the Platform is organized into four parts. Part I provides the framework and background for the remainder of the book. It takes a look at the technological, societal, and economic trends and developments that have led to the emergence of the modern-day platform. A number of key trends and events have allowed Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to build powerful platforms. Before examining each company and its platform, we need to consider the context in which it is operating.

Part II looks at today’s great platforms and the companies behind them. We’ll see how external parties such as customers, users, developers, partners, and vendors extend platforms’ reach. The focus is on the Gang of Four. Besides providing brief histories of these organizations, Part II examines how they have created such transformative platforms—and why they are generating such incredible results. It shows that, by building powerful platforms, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have become admired and valuable companies. Part II explores how these companies benefit immensely from their platforms— and of equal importance, allow their partners to benefit as well. Moreover, companies don’t build powerful platforms by doing only one thing—even if they do that thing really well.

Part III takes a step back. It synthesizes the lessons of the previous four chapters. It looks at the components, characteristics, benefits, and perils of the platforms. Part III concludes by providing lessons for building your own platforms.

Part IV looks at the powerful platforms of the future, provides a brief synopsis of the book, and boldly offers a few predictions.

WHAT WILL I LEARN BY READING THIS BOOK?

That is probably the burning question in your mind right now. You will gain a profound understanding of the importance of the platform. You’ll learn how the Gang of Four—and other companies—is utilizing these ecosystems in all sorts of innovative ways.

“Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.”
— Archimedes
Granted, this knowledge alone will not enable your company to usurp Google in search. Although your company might sell more stuff on Amazon’s platform, it will not sell more stuff than Amazon.
Neither scenario is realistic, and I am not a fan of business books that make grandiose promises such as these. But this much I vow: After reading this book, you will know why platforms matter today more than ever. And you’ll understand the importance of how platforms are changing business in many profound ways.

Let’s go!

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Phil Simon is the author of four management books. His fourth, The Age of the Platform, is his most ambitious yet. A recognized technology expert, he consults companies on how to optimize their use of technology. His contributions have been featured on NBC, CNBC, Huffington Post, The Globe and Mail, Fast Company, the American Express Open Forum, ComputerWorld, Technorati, ZDNet, abcnews.com, forbes.com, The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, and many other sites.

You’re reading The Age of the Platform from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.