The Equity Kicker

A quick way into Steve Blank’s Customer Developement methodology

nic — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:21:56 +0000

A couple of months back I wrote a ~~post~~ explaining how Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany is a great manual for startups. Since I wrote that post a number of the entrepreneurs who I respect have told me how much the book has helped them. If you are an entrepreneur you should go read it. For me it is as simple as that.

The book does have one major drawback though, it is a tough read – both on account of its length and the style of prose.

For that reason Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits have written a short book titled The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development which introduces Blank’s core customer development concept and how to guides in a more accessible format. The idea, bluntly, is that more people will read it this way – either entrepreneurs who don’t like to read business books, or employees at startups whose founders are practising customer development and want a quick way to bone up on the philosophy underpinning the way their company is managed.

Patrick sent me a copy of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development after I wrote the post above, and I’m posting these thoughts as a review. If after reading this post this you like the sound of it, you can get the PDF here or the paperback at Amazon.

For sure a more accessible way into Blank’s ideas is welcome. I’ve sent or recommended the book to a few CEOs and some of them have failed to really get into it precisely because it is a tough read.

And Cooper and Vlaskovits do a good job – the book is much shorter (you could read it end to end in an hour or so) and the prose is much livelier. They have also done a good job of bringing in the work of complementary thinkers like Eric Ries and Dave McClure and extending the thinking beyond software to internet companies.

The first third gets some important concepts across, but is possibly a little theory heavy (reflecting Blank’s heritage), and then the final two thirds, which you get to after 20-30mins, is full of powerful how-to guides. E.g. how to tease out the assumptions your company idea rests upon, how to talk to get out of the building to validate with real market participants, how to change your ideas if the assumptions turn out to be false, how to figure out the minimum launch requirements for your product, and how to keep iterating.

The power of the customer development philosophy is that it forces rigour into your thinking and keeps you honest with yourself and my final comment is that one of the nice things about this book is that it addresses the emotional side of staying disciplined.

I found reading the Four Steps very useful at the time, and coming back to the concepts again via Cooper and Vlaskovits’ book helped to re-enforce the ideas, as do blog posts on these topics from some of the other authors above. As I said at the beginning, if you are an entrepreneur I recommend you get some exposure to this thinking.

Touchscreen web apps

nic — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:40:18 +0000

Last week I wrote about the beauty of the touchscreen interfaces on some native iPad apps and then in a post about HTML5 briefly explored the notion that web standards will need to evolve if web apps are going to keep pace with the user experience available in native apps on touch screen devices.

Evidently the folks at Yahoo! have been having the same thoughts.

There is a piece on Techcrunch today detailing Yahoo’s release of the latest version of their open source User Interface Library, YUI which will make support for touch events like flicking, sliding and I hope pinch to zoom, “a whole lot less of a chore to build”.

The post also has a good description of the basic challenges of turning traditional browser into a touch browser, and it is a whole lot more complicated than assuming a mouse click and a touch are the same thing.

I also like Techcrunch’s description of the problem that touch screens are bringing to web designers:

Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they’ll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren’t going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go.

Smart phones as sensor platforms for health tracking

nic — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:26:04 +0000

Earlier in the year I wrote a couple of posts about the future of healthcare from a consumer products perspective. One of my points was that data gathered from smart phones and specialist wireless health devices will enable a new generation of products, and I named a couple that I have been using. I’m writing today about some new developments in this sphere.

Nike just released a new iPhone app which takes run tracking to a new level. It uses the GPS sensor and accelerometer to track pace, distance, and calories burned and visually maps the run routes on Google Maps – see the picture insert. Full review on VentureBeat.

I have been using Runkeeper, which does many of the same things, but with a less intuitive interface. In particular Runkeeper makes it difficult to see exactly where on my run I go slowly and where I go at a better pace. I’ve installed the Nike app and will try it out tomorrow.

Nike have slapped a £1.19 charge on the app though which I think is a strange decision. Their reason for releasing the app must be brand promotion, and, given that any revenues Nike might earn from app sales will be negligible in the context of their apparel business, I would have thought their best strategy would be to get the maximum number of installs by making the app free.

This Nike app, and also Runkeeper, Gymfu and the others that I use make use of the sensors within the iPhone (accelerometer, GPS). I’m also fascinated by the idea of third party sensors that connect to the iPhone to display data and sync with web apps. The Withings scale I have at home works in this way and my next ask is for a heart rate monitor that works in the same way.

I haven’t been able to find one yet, but the device from ithelete in the pictures below points the way. It connects with a heart rate monitor and runs analytics on the heart rhythm which guide how hard you should train on any given day. That is a little sophisticated for my training requirements, but will bring information formerly only available to professionals to serious amateurs.

3D TV and vendor push

nic — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:38:00 +0000

It is common in the tech industry for a new technology to be hyped up by industry insiders who hope it will transform their business. The mobile industry’s attempt to push “WAP” to the mainstream back in 2000 is perhaps the example that stands out most clearly in my mind, and I think the TV industry is now doing it with 3D TV.

I saw a demo of Sky’s 3D TV at the Rewind Music Festival earlier this summer and at the time I tweeted “Just seen 3 min demo of Sky 3D. My view – it’s quite cool, but not enough to go prime time” – and today Henry McCracken has a post up saying much the same thing. He is at the IFA tech show in Berlin, which is apparently all about 3D, and according in Henry’s words:

All the 3D at the show had one thing in common: It’s lousy.

I’m not saying it’s all equally lousy: Some of it (especially at Panasonic’s booth) was at least somewhat better than I expected. Much of it was unusually blurry–some of the sets that required glasses looked only slightly better than Fraunhofer’s no-specs technology demo. None of it rose to the level of being good, and I came away thinking that the level of hoopla was bizarre given the lackluster products being hyped.

You might wonder why it is that the TV industry is putting so much effort behind this new technology when the product isn’t great – and the answer is, of course, money, or rather the hope of money. Hardware companies hope that 3D will drive a massive wave of television replacement, and content companies hope they will be able to add an extra line or two to our cable/satellite TV bills in the way they have done for HD.

I’m writing about this because it creates a dangerous environment for startups. Judging market timing is key to being a successful entrepreneur and it is important to make a judgement call on whether vendor led technology pushes are going to be successful. A lot of startups (and VCs, including yours truly) bet on WAP back in 1999/2000 and most of those bets went bad because the underlying technology wasn’t good enough for the mainstream. 3D could go the same way.

Making these judgement calls correctly can be tough, particularly for startups focused on enterprise customers. Back in the days of WAP there was no shortage of people who really believed, and considerable amounts of money were available from network operators and other businesses to launch services. Unsurprisingly lots of entrepreneurs went chasing those dollars. However, when he services they created failed to get traction projects got canned and pipelines dried up, leaving many startups in a difficult place.

Many of those industry insiders believed in WAP because of its potential to transform their business, as the wired internet had done for many other companies over the previous five years. Their excitement stopped them from thinking rationally about all aspects of the technology and consumer experience – something which happens surprisingly often. Industries that are in desperate need of a story (arguably like the content industry today) are particularly prone to going down this path, and sometimes large numbers of companies club together to create an echo chamber which leads quickly to collective myopia – as happened with WAP and maybe happening with 3D TV now.

Successful startups (and their investors) need to have the presence of mind and self confidence not to get caught up in all the hoopla.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-05

nic — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-29 http://goo.gl/fb/0xaYS #
Some emails are more equal than others http://goo.gl/fb/xCM6a #
NewTeeVee Review – Flash on Android 'shockingly bad' – this is bad news for the Android community http://bit.ly/cCBbIG #
Movie and TV streaming services – Amazon and Apple gearing up to take the market http://goo.gl/fb/dHPfT #
Touch screen UIs to kill the browser? http://goo.gl/fb/dJRHD #
The power and limitations of HTML5 http://goo.gl/fb/uQyRE #
New kitten in our house today. Kids are thrilled. Eira (6) said "this is the best day of my life". #

The power and limitations of HTML5

nic — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:33:49 +0000

Back in July I wrote about Google’s HTML5 initiatives on mobile – including their YouTube HTML5 mobile site and their Google Maps HTML5 mobile site. This week they have been showing off what HTML5 can do on the desk top – at least when running in Chrome. Check out this custom interactive video for the song “We used to wait” from Arcade Fire – I’m a sucker for music with a bit of a dance beat which may have influenced my opinion, but I loved it.

As a starter the video is pretty cool, but beyond that the customisation and dynamic rendering is awesome. You begin by typing in the address where you grew up and then, after a lengthy pause while the video is generated, the action kicks in. They integrated with Google street view to have me zooming up and down the street where I used to live in time to the music (nice to see my mum’s car is still there…) and dynamically grew trees in a line down the middle of the road. There are also a bunch of other nice effects including the ability to type directly onto the webpage in a generative typeface. If you are into this stuff you should check it out.

On a similar note check out Scribd’s HTML5 demo. It showcases rendering complex images and text directly in HTML and using browser functions like search and select text to directly manipulate documents. That’s much better than using Flash, PDFs and other plugins which take time to load, can crash the browser, and make documents difficult to manipulate.

So far so cool, and other HTML5 features including drag and drop, offline storage and geolocation will massively increase the power of browser apps.

Turning to the limitations – Techcrunch has a piece up today which highlights the immaturity of HTML5 standards. The cool stuff in the Arcade Fire video doesn’t work in Firefox or IE, both of which consider themselves to be HTML compliant, and in fact was written for Chrome. That is a really big deal, there is limited value in having cool features available if you have to code differently for each browser to get them to work.

Continuing my thought from yesterday – I’m also starting to think that to compete effectively with native apps the HTML5 standards will need to take advantage of the richness of touch screen interfaces – side swipes, two fingers down and other gestures should be incorporated into web page navigation.

Done right the web and the browser should be a more efficient way of delivering many if not most services – both desktop and mobile – but if the infrastructure and underlying standards aren’t good enough native apps will be more appealing to developers – which will slow the pace of innovation. The standards issues Techcrunch wrote about today are concerning from this perspective.

Touch screen UIs to kill the browser?

nic — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:44:53 +0000

I got up this morning to find the world going crazy about the new Twitter iPad application – see this glowing Engadget review and the Techcrunch titled Twitter Just Killed Something Else: Their Own Website – the title gives a hint of where I’m going with this post. (Apologies for the fact this link is to the shortened post on TC – the full one seems to be currently unavailable).

So I installed the Twitter iPad app on the iPad I have in my kitchen at home, and – I loved it too. I won’t go into the features here (check out the Engadget review for that), but I will say that I got lost clicking around my timeline, user profiles and the tweet history of individuals in a way I haven’t done for a while. Put simply, the Twitter iPad app is a much more engaging way to use the Twitter service than any other interface I’ve seen.

I feel the same way about Flipboard for looking at my Facebook. Again I get lost browsing Facebook through Flipboard in a way I never do when I’m on the site itself. In fact, post Flipboard the site feels a bit dull.

Finally – I love reading Techcrunch and The Guardian via the Pulse app. It would be nice to have more flexibility to include the feeds I want, but it is a great experience for those two sites.

It is still early days for the iPad, and UI innovations are coming thick and fast – the Twitter app only just came out and Flipboard is only a month or two old – and already for media consumption the experience is getting way ahead of the browser. Apple and Steve Jobs have copped some flak for describing the iPad as revolutionary, but I’m starting to think they might be right.

Regular readers will know that I’m no Apple fanboy, and I don’t think that it is the iPad in and of itself that is making the difference. Rather I think it is richness and variety of touch screen navigation and the speed of the iPad apps that makes the experience so good – both features that can be replicated on other devices – e.g. these new Archos tablets. That said, the iPad is a beautiful and brilliant machine and Apple is clearly way out in front here.

What I’m wondering is whether consuming content on touch screen tablets is going to become such a better experience to consuming it on desktop or laptop computers that it will start to change the way offices are set up. As I said, we have an iPad in our kitchen at home, but I don’t have one in the office (yet) which is where I do the majority of catching up with blogs.

I’m also wondering if there might be a much better way read emails. One of the nice things about the iPad Twitter app is that it makes it easy to read the content behind links and navigate back and forth to the original Tweet and your timeline. By contrast Outlook forces me to open a browser and change application to look at a link (or any attachment for that matter).

If I’m even half right with the ideas in either of these last two paragraphs then revolution isn’t too strong a term for the changes the iPad is bringing.

Movie and TV streaming services – Amazon and Apple gearing up to take the market

nic — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:22:57 +0000

Last week I asked whether the TV and movie industry is ahead of the music industry in the race to build profitable streaming services. Today there is more news that suggests it is:

Bloomberg reports that Apple is Said to plan Netflix service on new TV product – that would be a c$10 per month subscription product. Others are predicting the worlds favourite consumer electronics company will offer 99 cent rentals of TV shows.
Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is working on a movie and TV subscription service to run over the internet

It looks like the American consumer will soon have access to a plethora of legal movie and TV services via their broadband provider. As I discussed with Alan Patrick in the comments to my previous post on this subject that will allow them to pay for the content they want and drop the subscription to the bloated cable TV bundle with tonnes of channels they never watch. There are clear analogies here with the declining popularity of music albums, many of which are bloated with second rate ‘album tracks’.

Some emails are more equal than others

nic — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:16:38 +0000

You might have seen the news today that Google launched a priority email feature within Gmail. I am still using Microsoft Exchange for the vast bulk of my emails so I haven’t been able to experience the power of Google’s offering myself, but Jason Kincaid on Techcrunch thinks ‘it’s fantastic’.

This is a feature I would love to have in my email client, and I hope that it comes to Outlook soon, maybe via a plugin. I have to process a couple of hundred emails per day (excluding spam) and whilst most days I’m successful in getting to Inbox zero every week there is a day or two when I fail in that ambition. When that happens I spend increasing amounts of time searching through my Inbox for important mails – which is a real drag, particularly given that the reason I haven’t got to Inbox zero is that I’m going through a busy patch. So a priority email feature in Outlook would really help me.

The thing that interests me more about this development is the way it will change email usage. If our email clients start telling us that certain emails are important, and therefore others are not, then we are going to spend less time reading the unimportant ones. For many ‘Inbox zero’ will become ‘Inbox zero for the important emails and check the others once per week’. Then ‘check the rest once per week’ will become ‘once per month’, then ‘once every three months’ and so on. Ask yourself when you last checked your spam folder.

Some people have already declared ‘email bankruptcy’ and given up on getting back to everyone who has emailed them. As we all get more and more email more it is inevitable that more and more people will take this step. Google Priority Mail will accelerate that trend.

People already treat their Facebook and Twitter feeds like this, so it is a small step to get happy with emails flowing through our systems without getting seen.

I don’t think this is a bad development. I buy into the ‘river of news’ concept first explained to me by Stowe Boyd. The ‘river of news’ idea is that in the age of information overflow we can’t hope to stay on top of everything that happens but we shouldn’t worry about that, because if something is important multiple sources will bring it to our attention. Therefore, if it is important we will see it at some point, so long as we keep a reasonably close eye on our news and message feeds.

As an example – I try to keep an eye on Techcrunch and Techmeme and catch most deals when they are announced via those websites. If I miss something there, I often learn about it via email from a friend or someone related to the deal. If I don’t hear about it via email, sooner or later someone will tell me face to face, or I will read an article about something else which mentions it. I can’t think of an occasion recently when a deal of even minor importance has happened and I haven’t heard about it somewhere within a day or two.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post I am still using Exchange. In fact our whole partnership is using Exchange and it wouldn’t be straightforward for me to switch to Gmail if I want to, and much as this might not be the fashionable thing to say, I’m not sure I want to switch. I have a Gmail account I use for some personal mail, and in my experience, for the volumes of emails I read and write Outlook is still quicker – I have also read blog posts from Fred Wilson and others complaining about slow response times from Gmail.

I take a lot of care to keep my laptop running fast, including regular rebuilds of the entire machine, and I do that because performance is incredibly important to me. I do lot of stuff (mostly blogs, web apps and email) and it drives me nuts when my machine and/or services run slowly, because it means I don’t get through my work. Worse still, poor response times can sap my motivation to get stuck into tasks like clearing email backlog.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-29

nic — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22 http://goo.gl/fb/RPy6W #
The counter arguments to Kurzweil’s Singularity thesis http://goo.gl/fb/sBM03 #
@TGerigkPartners I have a shallow knowledge of each of these areas, but interested to know more. sources would be great. tks in reply to TGerigkPartners #
London's bike lanes are now so congested I find myself moving back onto the roads #
Bad news maybe coming for Intel – Facebook rumoured to using ARM instead of X86 in their new datacentre http://bit.ly/90QKx2 #
Interesting piece on how carriers and handset manufacturers are using Android to re-assert control over the value chain http://bit.ly/dBXIHF #
Musings on app stores, portals and search http://goo.gl/fb/6uDBF #
Good post on AVC/@fredwilson about sales commission plans – keep 'm simple, you get what you pay for, set once per year http://bit.ly/bISGBp #
Profitable streaming services – will movies get there before music? http://goo.gl/fb/Ut0lE #
Good TC piece on Apple’s Flawed TV strategy garden still walled and not enough cloud http://tinyurl.com/37rforv (via @pulsepad) #
On yje iPad is an awesome UI for Facebook. I spend much more time on it than I should. #
That should say Flipboard on the iPad is a great UI for Facebook ….. Dammed predictive typing thingy #
Google’s acquisitions – a European take http://goo.gl/fb/CfAag #
Establishing authority on the web http://goo.gl/fb/9ijeO #
@AndrewBellay 'a wise man learns from the mistakes of others'…. in reply to AndrewBellay #

The Equity Kicker

A quick way into Steve Blank’s Customer Developement methodology

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Touchscreen web apps

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The power and limitations of HTML5

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Some emails are more equal than others

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