When somebody tells me about a great new product they’re working on, one thing goes through my mind. It’s not how many users do you have or how will it make money. It’s something far more fundamental.

DOES ANYBODY CARE?

Of course, I try to be tactful. What sort of response are you getting? How is it impacting people’s lives? Has anyone told you they can’t live without it? If you hear me ask these questions, you know what I what I’m getting at. Does anybody care?

You see it all the time. A great idea that, in theory, is a genuinely better way of doing things. But guess what? People don’t care. Unless you can really move them, change their lives in some small (or big) way, they’re not going to use it.

The remedy is commonly known as product / market fit. Through continual learning and iteration, you need to build a product that people genuinely care about in a market big enough to build a business around.

As obvious as it sounds, it isn’t easy. Putting your baby in the firing line can be a daunting process. It’s never as ready as you want to be and will always come back with a few bruises. It all too easy to avoid.

But the alternative is worse. You build a product in isolation and hope that it sticks. Odds are that it won’t. Without taking the time to find a match between product and market, you’re wasting your time.

This message is as much to myself as it is anybody else. Get out of the building and make sure people care!

Public vs Private

If you wanted to share a song with someone, would you prefer to make an open recommendation, such as posting on their Facebook Wall, or would you rather send them a private message and discuss it between yourselves? The great thing about public sharing is that other people can chime in and it can often create unexpected music discoveries between friends. But at the same time, there’s something special about sharing music back and forth between two people.

Push vs Pull

Do you prefer to broadcast music discoveries and send tracks to specific people (Push), or would you rather build a music profile that collected everything you liked and let people make discoveries through exploring it (Pull)? You see music being ‘pushed’ everywhere, on Facebook, in Blogs and on various services, but I see any great examples of ‘Pull’. Is this because people don’t want it or no one has nailed it yet?

Dedicated vs Distributed

Do you want a destination that is devoted to music and sharing or would you rather have the tools to share music through the communication channels you already use (Facebook, Twitter, Email)?

Scavenging vs Selection

Are you the sort who scours music blogs and websites in search of new sounds or do you prefer your music served on a platter, for easing picking from a selection that is targeted to your tastes?

There’s plenty more ways to think about it, but these are four areas that I’ve been giving plenty of consideration to.

Have your say!

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are. And don’t feel the need to restrict yourself to these categories either. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted from a music service, make it known! I’m building a browser extension, so all sorts of crazy things are possible. All comments and suggestions will be considered for the app!

So I’m in the process of building a kick-ass music app. You can read about the inspiration here, or follow the progress here, but the point of this post is to announce the release of the first version for beta testing. If you’ve ever wondered what Facebook Music might look like, this is for you. Essentially, I’ve built a Google Chrome extension that injects music playback capability into Facebook as you browse. I’ve gotta admit, it’s pretty cool. It’s far from finished, but I wanted to get it out there and see what people think. Try it out and let me know your thoughts!

Version 0.1 aka “FB Super” (download)

A google chrome extension that adds music playback to Facebook pages

- Instantly start listening to a mix from any band’s FB page
- Listen to a user’s “Liked” bands, direct from their profile
- Queue up multiple bands in a row
- Get a selection of similar artists when viewing a band page
- Plays in the background, so you can browse without interruption
- Popup player for access to playback controls and song queue
- Mini-player inside Facebook for fast access

Known Limitations (with improvements on the way)

- Requires an Rdio account, otherwise you only get samples
- Delay between clicking buttons and playback beginning
- If no tracks are found on Rdio, nothing happens
- Random mix of tracks without any choice
- Ugly grayscale design (be patient!)

Download here: http://swarm.fm/fbsuper.crx

Here’s a quick overview I put together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTmNcxQhYyU

Also, I’ve got a Tumblr going which keeps track of my progress each. Check it out if you want to see how the project is evolving!

For those who don’t know, The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company. They give developers access to a wealth of music information, allowing them to build smarter music applications. Considering that my two passions are music and technology, it’s no surprise that I like them. But they go above and beyond other music tech companies (I’m looking at you, Last.fm) and continue to innovate in ways that make being a music-loving developer truly exciting. In short, they rock.

Recently, they pushed a number of updates that elevated my feelings towards them from deep respect to outright infatuation. I’ll run through them quickly:

1) Artist Extraction

In a nutshell, this feature allows you to find Artist Names within a large body of text. It may not sound particularly fascinating, but it makes scanning the web for musical information MUCH easier. In fact, this is a feature that I desperately needed about a year ago. I posted a (poorly worded) plea to Last.fm, but it fell on deaf ears. Thankfully, The Echo Nest have come to the rescue. I’ve long moved on and abandoned the project, but for me, this is an example of how these guys just ‘get it’.

2) Rosetta Stone

Another noble initiative that The Echo Nest is leading is the Rosetta Stone project. This provides a way to work seemlessly across multiple services and APIs. Every service uses its own ID system, but The Echo Nest is building a translation engine that allows them to speak to each other. So, for example, I could take a band’s Facebook ID and convert into a 7Digital ID in order to request songs for download, without doing any messy text-based matching. So far they support MusicBrainz, 7Digital, Facebook and Rdio which creates some interesting potential for music applications that work across these platforms.

3) EchoPrint

They also released a service called EchoPrint, which lets developers ‘fingerprint’ audio samples and work out which song is currently playing. It’s complex technology, the same that powers applications like Shazam or Soundhound, yet The Echo Nest have open-sourced the whole thing, giving indie developers a chance to build exciting new applications. It’s a move that goes straight to the heart of The Echo Nest. They build amazing technology and invite developers to lead the innovation. It’s part of a broader embrace of API platforms, which is great for developers and great for consumers.

The Competition

Now that the gushing is out of the way, it’s time to get into the actual reason for writing this post. When The Echo Nest first announced these new features about a month ago, my mind naturally went into overdrive with potential applications. I managed to control these urges and put the ideas away in a special area of the brain known as ‘save for Music Hack Day’. But they wouldn’t sit still. And today I found myself getting impatient and starting to wonder when the next Music Hack Day acutally was. Sadly, nothing was planned, but I stumbled upon something just as good: The Echo Nest are offering $10k and some sexy swag for the best music app using their APIs.

Now, between working for a startup and entertaining various side projects, a competition like this is the last thing I need, but it’s just too good to resist. I feel like destiny is calling for me to build a kick-ass music app. And so I will. I’m publishing this post in the hope that it holds me to account and I actually make this happen. I also wanted to capture the moment. The beginning of the journey.

For historical reference, I plan to turn the web into one big music portal, with cameos from Rdio, Google Chrome and Facebook. Aiming small, of course. Here goes!

Following on from How to Select Your Angels, Orrick were back with another great startup panel, held on June 21st. This time, the topic of discussion was How to Choose the Right Incubator for Your Startup, featuring:

• Jonathan Abrams, Entrepreneur, Founders Den
• Dave McClure, Founding Partner, 500 Startups
• Adeo Ressi, Founding Member, TheFunded.com and the Founder Institute
• Kindra Tatarsky, VP Silicon Valley, Astia
• Cameron Teitelman, Founder & Senior Managing Director of StartX

It was a diverse mix of panelists, with plenty of variation in how they run their organisations. In fact, the only thing they agreed on was that there’s no such thing as a ‘standard’ incubator or accelerator. Even commonly compared programs, like YC and 500 Startups, have significant differences in what they offer. Others, like the Founder Institute are even further differentiated in the services they provide. So when you’re looking for a program to help your startup, be sure to do your research, and pick the one that best fits your needs.

Here’s a rough overview of some the ways in which they differ:

• Office Space
• Investment
• Entry Fees
• Equity Pool (all participating companies share a piece of their company)
• Shared Services (Legal, Accounting, Design, etc)
• Company vs Entrepreneur Focus
• Entry via Application vs Referral
• Stage: Early vs Traction
• Niche (Stanford, Women, Consumer, etc)
• Official Mentor Matching
• Event Participation

The main common element between all the featured programs was an element of community. You are typically expected to give something back in exchange for the advice and support you receive. But even this varies in the way it is administered. They also agreed that team / entrepreneur is far more important than the idea, so keep in mind that you need to pitch yourself, not just your vision.

Here’s a look at what each had to say about their own program (some commandeered the mic more than others, so the level of detail varies).

Founders Den (Jonathan Abrams)

• Neither an incubator or accelerator
• Coworking space
• Getting In
  • Referral only
  • Genuine referrals, so don’t bug the members!
• Criteria
  • No discrimination on demographics
  • Avoid assholes
  • It’s about the community
  • Referrals is a big filter
  • Look at human factors rather than success likelihood
  • Good person good network
  • Serious about their idea and want to step up
  • Or experienced entrepreneur who wants to experiment
  • Expectation that a lot is going to happen in the 6 month lease

500 Startups (Dave McClure)

• Getting In
  • Don’t bumrush me
  • Don’t email me
  • Referrals through existing members and advisors
• Space + Funding
  • Found that members were more helpful to each other than the mentors / investors were
• Shared design and usability focus
• ‘Still figuring it out’
• Goals
  • Give enough money to explore
  • More funding for scale if it’s validated
  • Aiming for 50 percent to raise $250k
  • Focus on helping people to get to next level of funding
• Criteria
  • Don’t look like Dave (as a failed entrepreneur)
  • Evidence of product success and unbiased customer usage
  • Product may shift, but clear customer focus
  • Ideally clear revenue model
  • Rare to fund people out of college
  • 5 to 10 years of experience in industry
  • Invest in unusual entrepreneurs
  • No prejudice

Founder Institute (Adeo Ressi)

• Aiming to master the science of success
• Getting In
  • Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?
  • What are you passionate about?
  • Send you a test
  • Very scientific
  • Don’t even need an idea yet
• Older candidates fare better due to experience
• Perfect candidate
  • 31 – 34
  • Either gender
  • Frustrated by a burning idea
  • Not sure of next step
  • Need structure and guidance
  • Have vocational skills and achieved professional success in the past
  • Openness within reason
  • Fluid intelligence
  • Moderate level of agreeableness
• No shared services, but enable them to get what they need
• Very structured
• Help from founder mentors
• Work closely to build the business in small teams

Astia (Kindra Tatarsky)

• Accelerator not incubator
• Focused on woman but not exclusive
• Need at least one woman in the executive team
• Looking for people that appreciate the relationships and give back

StartX (Cameron Teitelman)

• Getting In
  • Need someone from Stanford
  • Avoid the ‘new douchebags of silicon valley’
  • Passionate dedicated and true entrepreneur
• Support
  • Just give you enough to live
  • Learn the hard way
• Customized to each
  • Help fill the gaps in founder knowledge
  • Real time info at the point they need it
• Ideal Candidate
  • Extremely focused
  • Know what they want and how
  • Must be open to feedback
  • Be able to recruit a team and draw people towards you
  • Ability to execute themselves

Finally, here are some general notes from the discussion:

• There’s no standard ‘incubator’ or ‘accelerator’
• No two are the same
• Anyone who thinks it’s about investment or space doesn’t get it
• Mixed feelings on shared services
• Accounting and legal commoditized
• Many are happy to let members work out of co-working spaces rather than compete and set up their own
• Investment is typically at a low valuation so be aware
• Success Measures
  • Able to raise further investment (Dave, not Adeo)
  • Exits (All)
  • Build large companies (All)
• Many provide opportunities to connect rather than funding
• Adeo thinks only Idealab has succeeded so far
• Others feel Y-Combinator has proven themselves
  • Big company exits
  • Smaller exits and people are going back which is proof that it creates value in their mind
• Some are focused on founders others on the company
• Every entrepreneur is able to get investment
  • It’s a process
  • Not necessarily easy but you can do it
  • Need to incorporate feedback you get along the way
• Lots of experimentation is happening with funding and services, which is a good thing
  • Not in competition with investors, but rather with business schools
• Want people where success is aligned with adding back to community
• Finding a good mentor is as hard as finding a good company
• The incubators do a good job of filtering mentors
• All about chemistry
• Find and identify mentors beforehand
• Have to be passionate and willing to pivot
• Reasons for failure
  • Fear of failure and self sabotage when they get close to succeeding
  • Over engineering and not listening to customer feedback
  • Build something people want!
  • Wrong people end up in charge
• Learn most from people who have failed
• Don’t look at startup success for an example
• All look at and value the person over the idea

If you made it this far, well done! It makes me wonder…..are there any services out there websites out there that give a transparent overview of the various incubators, accelerators and related programs? If not, perhaps we should create one. I’m not thinking anything overly complex. Just a simple table, that covers all the services out there, allowing you to filter by requirements or geography. If you’ve previously done research which you can contribute, or are just keen to help out, hit me up at pwattsmail [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you enjoyed this, you may also be interested in my notes on How to Select Your Angels.

On May 18, Orrick held a panel titled How to Select Your Angels, featuring Jeff Clavier, Jared Hansen, Rob Hayes, Mitchell Kapor and Naval Ravikant. It was an enlightening discussion and full credit to Orrick for putting it together. Below are the notes that I scribbled down. They are unedited and unorganised, but a few friends have found them useful, so I’m putting them up here in case they help somebody else. Enjoy!

• Unique and hard to do is attractive
• What strategies do you have not to fail?
• Bar is higher. You need to have done more before you’re considered fundable – need traction
• Stay away from trends and celebrity (daily deals!)
• Mobile and cloud are good
• Expect to see something that works and maybe evidence of revenue otherwise you’re at a disadvantage
• There is so much supply of possible deals – up to the entrepreneur to prove
• Won’t even take a meeting if there isn’t a URL to visit or social proof
• Kick ass entrepreneurs and big ass markets – two ass-es
• If you haven’t done it before, they need other ways to assess your ability
• Structure of the team – expect developers and doers – a team that’s moving
• 12 out 700 investments made in a quarter
• Kick ass product – three ass-es
• Interesting, differentiated, understand customer funnel
• Admit they pass up good deals simply because there’s too many
• Shouldn’t do a company unless you have an irrational passion
• You can raise money, but that’s a prison
• But you still need a good idea
• Important for an entrepreneur to listen and take feedback
• Even if you’re turned down you can learn from it
• Do something hard
• If you’re not getting funded, don’t sell harder, focus on your product
• Incubators – get out what you put in
• Access to mentors
• Structured and fills the gap in knowledge
• Not so good to meet investors but good for networking
• Coworking is very valuable for the cross pollination
• Incubators – there’s so many entrants that those who make it through are actually smart and interesting
• Usually leads to higher likelihood of investment due to connections because you also learn
• Not all are created equally
• Inevitably you are shaped by the culture of the incubator so be aware and pick something that matches
• Each has a Yoda
• Beneficial to be in the same room as people with the same experiences
• Incubators are like colleges
• Their emergence point to the failure of MBAs
• Sole entrepreneurs – its uphill
• Investors admit it’s a obstacle
• Get people as passionate and dedicated as you and smart enough to bring it forward
• Not different to pitching investors
• Keep your eyes and ears open
• A lot of value in knowing when to stop and try something different
• Valley is tolerant of failure if there’s learning
• But sometimes its better to change course
• Not a linear march
• Often get it right second third time
• What is the next set of meaningful milestones you need to meet
• Works backwards from second round to work out first round
• Always too optimistic
• Add a big buffer because shit happens
• But times are changing
• Valuations are way bigger
• Raise as much as you can because it will be harder to get more later and you have to meet the expectations
• But sometimes too much money dilutes urgency
• Prospect of running out of money concentrates the mind
• Set out clear milestones
• Only do what you need to
• Raise accordingly
• But a clear relentless plan is preferred
• You can waste a lot of time in a failing idea
• Less cash brings the issue to a head
• You don’t want to get lazy / frivolous
• Raise as little as you can get away with but know how much you need and include a cushion
• Valuations are what the market will bear
• Syndicates – seeing lots of people
• Founders aiming to give no one control
• But then who will stand by them when things shift
• Know what everyones job is in the syndicate
• Who’s gonna help build the team raise the next round
• Traction determines valuation
• There is no pattern, no mathematical formula to valuations
• Initial syndicate is part of the startups foundation
• Add value at different components of execution
• Twitter followers are nice but experience and battle scars are better
• Period of structural uncertainty
• Three types – experienced angels, inexperienced that write checks, and VCs that are trying to reinvent
• A big syndicate could add uncertainty
• No one knows how they’re going to unfold
• Understand that if you take a small investment from sand hill its only so they can put money in later – lack of alignment
• The ‘new angels’ are great but they have no idea about pricing
• The VC doesn’t care because its penny change
• But the real angel has seen thousands of deals and will offer you less because they understand true value and can get you there and make the second round better
• When you get a high valuation investors can feel like they have overpaid and results in negative relationship
• Comes down to who you want to work with who has expertise not just money
• If you’re in the position of deciding its good problem to have
• Worry more about building a team
• Select investors as you select a team
• Strategic investors not until series c
• Convertible notes popular 2 years ago
• Now harder to raise because quality investors don’t want to
• It lowers the potential investors available
• Don’t mistake a fast start for a short course – still a long difficult process as always
• Prefer equity but will do notes if its happening
• Better to get terms out of the way early
• Different every case
• Sometimes you might want to defer the creation of terms
• How much time do investors devote to the company?
• Depends on the stage and need
• Don’t really schedule
• Early on establish a protocol
• Sometimes better for someone in the network to help
• Thinking about a social term sheet that sets up agreements for interaction
• Fair for both sides to know what to expect
• Particularly first time entrepreneurs should know what to expect from investors and what investors expect – for example metrics dashboard
• Most successful companies struggled at some point
• The differentiator for angels is how they handle shit hitting the fan
• Access to other companies within the portfolio is a big feature
• Investment is not a science yet, its an art
• This is a lottery ticket business

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy my notes on How to Choose the Right Incubator for Your Startup.

“Finally, to date we’ve received very little feedback from our members.  We hope that means that everything is going well and that the software does what you want. ”

Yep, everything’s dandy. Just sit back and wait for the checks to roll in.

As the credits rolled to box-office smash, The Social Network, we were given a rare treat: a real Beatles song. Licensing of the official Beatles catalog is extremely rare (once in the past two decades), but 2010 has seen the flood gates opened. Along with The Social Network, both Dinner for Schmucks and an upcoming Japanese film, Norwegian Wood have licensed official music. Add to that the release of their catalog on iTunes and 2010 has been an oddly popular licensing year for The Beatles. So what’s changed?

Well if you like to dabble in conspiracies, all this comes suspiciously soon after the death of Michael Jackson. As you may know, he famously bought the publishing rights to The Beatles’ music in 1985. Interesting. Of course, licensing responsibility typically rests with labels, so this is probably just a coincidence, but perhaps his death has simplified matters. Whatever the case, it’s good news for fans. After being subjected to countless covers over the years, there’s hope that we could be hearing a lot more of The Beatles in theatres going forward.

Consistency is the easiest way to ensure that a website does what the user expects it to. Clicking a button should do the same thing every time. Take the website’s logo for example. It always points to the home page. Simple. Yet companies are failing to follow this rule when implementing sub-domains. And not just any companies. The culprits include Apple, Facebook and Twitter.

Take a look at http://developers.facebook.com/. You can navigate here from the Facebook.com home page, but good luck getting back. It doesn’t feel like you’ve moved to a new site (all the branding remains the same), but when you click the Facebook logo, it no longer takes you to the home page. In fact, the whole page doesn’t contain a single link back to Facebook.com. Amazing. Now go to http://dev.twitter.com and http://developer.apple.com/ and you’ll find the exact same thing.

This may sound like a trivial complaint (“Click the back button!” I hear you scream), but it’s such an unnecessary cause of friction that it’s worth mentioning. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself going to the address bar and deleting a sub-domain, just so I can return to the home page. No user should ever have to do this. Especially when the solution is so simple:

a) The brand logo could always point to the global home page, while a portal logo (in this case, “Developers”), points to the sub-domain home page.

b) You could add a “Home” link, elsewhere on the page. It’s not that hard!

A sub-domain may act as a stand-alone website, but it’s still an integral part of your brand. Failing to acknowledge this with a simple link back to your home page is just poor design.