On the other hand, I was using one of the games at a social networking site – I didn’t login for 2 month and recently got a mail mentioning about picking up the daily rewards (if I check/play the game daily).

These two companies have chosen two completely different path to inform the user of their inactivity on the platform. One is punishing and other is rewarding him.

The technical term for rewarding behavior is “reinforcement”. Punishment is the opposite of positive reinforcement. They have specific meanings that come from behavior modification. Reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior (increasing its frequency, making it more likely to occur in the future) and punishment is the weakening of behavior (decreasing its frequency, making it less likely to occur in the future).

Is it right to induce fear into user directly/indirectly and make them work? I don’t think so. The carrot has more power than a stick, specially in a corporate setting.

I don’t know which way your startup prefer, but I definitely like the latter option more.

What’s your take?

[Guest article contributed by Kunalkant Sen, ex-operations manager at Pluggd.in and now running his gaming startup.]

Now go back and visualize the first time you heard about a device called iPad. If not for Apple, who else could have done that? If asked “Who do you think has built this device?”, would you have said ‘RIM, Nokia, Microsoft’?

Probably not.

Easier said than done, but that’s what a company soul [read: Entrepreneurs : Define What’s Non-Negotiable. Define a Soul.] is all about and biggest validation comes from your customers when they ask:

‘Is that You?’

That is, when people tend to relate you (you as in you : the product, the brand) with a certain product/feature (of course in the right sense) without even knowing who built it.

An Exercise

Now open all the ecommerce websites in India, hide their logos and tell us ‘which is which and who is who’. You will be surprised that half of these sites never cared to built that connect with the audience – they just focused on transactional aspect of a business and spent more time on ‘Facebook likes’ than an emotional like.

Similarly, a whole lot of companies/startups are getting lost in ‘we need to win the race’ and in the whole process, they are not focusing on “embedding” their soul in the product. In fact, there is nothing that comes out as a core differentiator. And while we are talking about differentiators, let’s not forget that even a bad/ugly looking site with great content or great product (think craiglist) stands out vs. several other mediocre yet good looking products.

Long story short, answer what aspect of your product would you prefer to be related with when somebody asks “Is That You”?
Are you prepared for this question?

*Title inspired by Pink Floyd’s Us and Them. Aside, another interesting read: How Pink Floyd Can Help Every Entrepreneur [Heroes for Ghosts?]

[Img credit:wikipedia]

Product development phase will be longer than expected

You would normally set a timeline for the product to get into a Beta phase and align other marketing strategies like your launch buzz or website being live with it. Be rest assured that you will never ever meet your timelines and your launch strategies will go for a toss. Also what you set out to build and what you eventually go live with will have a lot of deviations, be flexible enough to tinker with your product position.

Focus on UI/UX

There is a saying ‘Jo dikhta hai who bikta hai’ you would eventually need to come to terms with it; the first impression is the lasting impression. Work diligently on the UI/UX of your product (a founding member with UI/UX skills will help) even if it means at the cost of a feature or two getting compromised. The last thing you want is competition coming up with a better UI/UX and your customers raving about it.

Create a kick-ass video to explain your concept

When your users (businesses or individuals) land on your page, there is nothing better than finding a 60 second video which sells your concept to them. Also keep a single objective on your website, if you want your users to take a free demo of your product, make sure the user can jump to the sign-up page from any of your pages he navigates to.

[Pluggd.in Resource: 5 Steps to making a Valley-style {Kickass} Product Video in India]

Be open about your pricing

More often than not I have seen entrepreneurs not being open to revealing their pricing with the fear of competition knowing it. But the flip side is most customers would want to jump to the pricing page and first check if it’s inside their buying power before even taking a demo. Competition will find your pricing anyway, customers won’t spend efforts finding it.

Stay away from services/consultancy based entrepreneurs

That was more tongue in cheek, since you would find them doing good business early on, and trust me that’s some temptation you would want to resist early on. Always remember the your scale of business is not dependent on how fast you make your first million but how do you make it.

Make your initial customers your PR voice

Make sure your initial customers (if happy) give you references and make a lot of noise about you. For e.g. we recently got covered on the first page of ET which gave a terrific mileage and credibility and the article was initiated by one of our customers else it’s impossible for a start-up like us to be covered there.

Market like no one’s watching you

Don’t skip a single opportunity to talk or write about your product be it a blog or an event or any other thing. Never be shy about talking about your product or concept to anyone and everyone. Your passion will be seen and appreciated, and people will refer you in their network, leverage on every possible opportunity to market for free J

On a parting note beware of people who will always give you free unsolicited advices and listen with an open mind to everyone but do what your hunch and passion tells you.

[About the author: Divyesh Kharade is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deltecs a company which endeavors to take employee and customer engagement to the next level through its flagship product DRONA. Having done his engineering from Mumbai University he also serves as an advisor on the board of one more startup. Divyesh is on Twitter at @divyeshkharade.]

Your site analytics should tell you how much time people spend on your website. If you are a start-up, and a geeky product company at that, chances are it will be less than 5 minutes. So it is very important you have an effective product video that encapsulates your raison d’être in just a couple of minutes.

Now that is the simple part. Making ‘effective’ videos is expensive anywhere in the world. You are more screwed if you are an India based start-up and want to create a valley-style video for that market, which was roughly our situation.

So how and where do you start? At this point, I request you to watch our video below because I will be referring to and elaborating on the elements in it going further. (Yes, another view doesn’t hurt as well)

OK, this is how we did it and not necessarily in this order.

Step 1: We did the heavy lifting.

Till all the product developers, due to a mutant gene in them, can turn into great storytellers, we have to rely on production companies that will do the job for us.

Ideally, you want to just give them the brief and get the best result within a deadline.

A good production firm that has a track record of excellent work, marquee clientele, and sex appeal (meaning you can brag about hiring them) could do that. But they charge you a hefty fee for having worked their bottoms off suffering boorish, domineering, and hard-balling clients earlier in their career. Unless one of them is suffering from a Jerry Maguire moment, they will be as expensive as they come. I read it here that it costs around US$15000 to make a 3 minute product video in the Valley.

Since we don’t have that money, we got a smaller company to do the job (we found them on Google). The company we chose was cost-effective but we did a lot of heavy-lifting (we actually gave them the complete voice-over script).

Step 2: We id’ed our audience

It is sweet if everyone swoons over your work of art, but you should first really care if your message is hitting your target audience. So a very important step is to identify that audience. In our case, our product Trolly is designed for online retailers, so the video starts with ‘John is an online retailer….’ . You will see the entire script and play is designed for online retailers. Here is a snapshot of the storyboard.

Step 3: We id’ed our market

Again, you will see that in our video we use anglican names and personalities. Why? Because our main market is the US. If our target market were India, we would be better off with Raj or something like that instead of John.

(On a side note, the name of our product Trolly has amused and bemused people. We intended for it to infer to a Shopping cart (a Trolley as understood in India) but Californians were amused because Trolley means a mini-Train to them. Others were bemused at its close resemblance to ‘Troll’. All I can say is none of the inferences were desired. We may have the hindsight now but we do not have the resources to go for a rebranding. Talking about it aloud like this may clear the confusion just as well, or so we hope .

Also, you would have noticed the american voice over in the video. A lot of people ask us how did we do it. No, we didn’t get the voice recorded in the US, nor it is an Indian faking an accent (Never do that. It will be what it is, a fake). There are many expats who live in India now, and in a place like Bangalore, it is not hard to find them. Our production company did a good job on this. Sometimes you get even luckier. In the earlier version of the Trolly video, we used a lady’s voice over. She had never given her voice before, but she was a natural. You can hear her voice in the video below.

The voice recording was done in a single take in less than an hour. (The video itself was done entirely in-house using Balsamic at a cost of less than $1000. We have since changed Trol.ly to trollyapp.com)

Step 4: We were clear, very clear, on what we wanted to communicate.

Now nobody knows your product better than you. That is also a problem. You want to tell everything there is about the product. If only the visitors were willing to hear all about it. Since they really can spare only a couple of minutes, we need to choose which parts of our product story we want to tell and which to leave out.

In our case, we didn’t need to tell the online retailers that Social Media is important to them. They’d probably shoot the next person who says that. We may have a chance if we empathized with them instead. Therefore the opening lines.. “John is an online retailer and understands the power of Social Media for his business. But he is overwhelmed by the options…”

From here on we focused on staying clear of any jargon or on how beautiful Trolly is under the hood, but explained how Trolly solves the problem for them in as simple words as possible.

Step 5: We chose ‘effective’ over ‘creative’.

Effective – When the video explains what we do

Creative – When we have to explain the video

The point of the light-hearted sarcasm above is that production companies perhaps feel compelled to be creative. Take a look at this.

So, while it was creative, it wasn’t effective. We wanted to make our point simple, straight, and quick. So we mercilessly asked them to chop off that part. See how it looks now in the video (see the video at beginning of this post between 0.34 to 0.49).

Conclusion

To summarize, to get an effective video done is not just about finding the cheapest production company. You have to do a lot of homework. You need to -

1. Mark your market
2. Know your audience
3. Be very clear on what you want to communicate
4. Find the right production company, and
5. Choose the style that is effective rather than just creative.

If it hadn’t been for the appreciation we got from Gillian Muessig, President and Co-founder of SEOMoz for our video (during the Social India Conference organized by Akshaya Patra Foundation), I wouldn’t have written this blogpost. Her appreciation (considering that she is from our target market) made us think we may have done something right, and therefore, sharing our experiences could benefit others.

But that said, we don’t want to be presumptuous. If you did not like the video, please tell us why and what can improve. You’d help us and others who read this post. Appreciate your comments, please leave them below.

[Guest article contributed by Kiran K, founder of Adeptocorp. Reproduced from Kiran’s blog post.]

A products’ soul actually comes out when things go haywire and you, as the developer/as the creator need to find a place to hide yourself.

So what do you do?

Apologize for the error? Throw a very generic message? Show Donuts? A failwhale?

Well, the team at Asana ( mentioned earlier in Online Task Management Services For Startups and Small Teams) does interesting things with error messages.

When you encounter an error message on the site, you will see these random sentences in the error messages. So while reporting an error, just share these error messages and Asana team will diagnose the problem.

How does it work?

Imagine representing 32 bits of information (numbers up to 4 billion) as a sentence instead of a jumble of digits. Each sentence can have the same predictable structure, and the number will be used to choose words from a dictionary to fill in that structure—like Mad Libs.

One possible sentence structure can be: count + adjective + plural noun + verb + adverb, e.g. “6 sad squid snuggle softly.” We can divide the bit-space of the number like so:

• 5 bits for the count (2-33, so it is always plural)
• 7 bits for the adjective (one of 128 possibilities)
• 7 bits for the plural noun (one of 128 possibilities, which we made all animals just for fun)
• 7 bits for the verb (one of 128 possibilities)
• 6 bits for the adverb (one of 64 possibilities)

Now, given a dictionary containing words categorized in this way, we can generate 4 billion unique (and sometimes very memorable) sentences. In Asana, the ID used to generate the error phrase is random, so the same sentence is unlikely to occur twice. It collects a bunch of useful information about the crash (stack traces, log snippets, application state, user and session information, etc.) and automatically groups similar problems and imports them into an internal Asana task list [Asana blog].

That is, you aren’t shown a stupid stacktrace, but random sentences which makes the product look less sucky (and the sentence helps Asana team in debugging).

What’s the Big Deal?

Not much if you ask logically.

Products are about perception and the way you handle error messages speaks of your product soul. Basically, it’s the last mile in your product user experience and is often neglected.

And focusing on such ‘neglected areas’ is more of a UX/support service than anything else. It actually defines who you are (as a company).

What’s your opinion?

Aside, if you plan to have similar error messages in your product – download from Github.

But the key question is – “How do you promote your own product and still be helpful?”

Take a look at this pic:

Google Chrome - Offline Vs. Online Mode

The offline part is what you see when you are not connected to the web – i.e. Google is really helpful in suggesting that ‘you are offline’ (i.e. gray icons). And the moment you are online, the icons are back in colors.

What’s the common thing? The ‘Chrome Web Store’ icon which is the first icon (and cannot be removed) is the icon one that maintains consistency in different browser states. Everything else changes. In short, Google is promoting its own product and at the same time is being helpful.

A smart product management move? Actually a very very smart move.

These are unnoticeable yet smart moves by companies that creates a brand, that creates presence in one’s sub-conscious mind.

What’s your take?

These days my search results page has started to look a little different. I see links that friends have shared earlier. I see a lot of the sites and links I’ve been to earlier, sometimes in a different context. Briefly, there were even Twitter feed results from my friends – though those have thankfully gone now.

Search results’ personalization has been the holy grail for a while now. After all, you’re shown – one imagines – what you want!

The heuristics that govern ranking are built around behaviour. To start with, linking to pages and sites indicated authority for them. And we all know that the euphemistically named SEO, link exchanges and other such mechanisms often manage to game this assumption of natural behaviour.  And now the half-baked model of what a click on a link implies, or something my social group shares, makes the possibility of a SEO-self-goal very possible!

Why do I say this? Let me explain.

For starters – and we all have heard this numerous times – the first page of results is very very important, the second less so for users, and you’ve more or less lost us by page three or four. So those first few results are not to be trifled with!

I often go to a search engine to discover things I’m not sure I know about, much less know for sure that I want. Sometimes one search yields answers to what I might be looking for, sometimes not. Sometimes I’m researching stuff for a couple of days, and click on links which seem like they might have answers end with wild goose chases.

Can’t trust all my own clicks-in-the-past now, can I? Why let Google do it?

In the worst case scenario – when I’m looking for “other” stuff since the links I initially found did not really work for me and/or my understanding or depth of a topic I’m trying to get deeper into using Google has expanded – promoting stuff I already found – especially recently – is in fact counter-productive.

Things are on an even more uncertain ground when its shares from friends that’s part of the SERP. For one, I might’ve already seen content from friends. For subjects which have opinions, points of view and insights rather than plain facts, I would like using a search engine for a wider world view than one that merely echoes that which I’m comfortable with or familiar with.

Whatever you want it to be!!?

Of course there’s a case for including results I’ve shown an interest in sometime in the past. And for product and other factual information, my friends’ shares are immediately useful.

But their integration with “pure” results – which one assumes are based on relevance, and by trianing – on authority – in the current form is naive at best. Here’s some directions this could start maturing in over time:

While designing products, individual mindsets, groupthink etc are very often ignored in design and product creation. Watch this video to really understand what paradox of choice means:

Sameer Shisodia from Pluggd.in team (and cofounder of Linger/KindHost) adds:

1. See “Occupy” all around you. See the Story of Stuff. Look at AirBnB (and of course, Kindhost), TaskRabbit, ride share programs and other collaborative consumption. Consumer attitudes may be changing. Consumption driven attitudes, marketing, production etc right now. This may not always be the case, and there’s evidence to point to possible opportunity in alternative models.

2. Aspirational demands – as the video says – are a major marketing tool. For too long stuff has been sold on the basis of feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency. Might that change? Should we start looking at genuine need – and genuine use cases more than those created by aspirational gaps? Are startups already better suited to solve real pain points rather than market driven, created ones – those need big $$ to sell. Are bookshares more than future than FK ? What else is possible?

3. Be a friend of the user. Empathy will do muchhhh more than hard-sell. Help user derive more post buy satisfaction and reduce buyers remorse. Use social to improve self image and collective endorsement of a decision – choices are more about conformity!

4. Take away the need to be different in everything. Its ok to be average in stuff you’re not interested in – no pressure. But the one thing user *is* interested in – makes him/her part of your TG/adopter etc – and engage way more deeply.
What do you think?

[Contributed by Pratyush Prasanna and Sameer Shisodia.]

The basic reason for this development in user behavior was because what he could see did not work for him. Hence he has stopped seeing it altogether.

Keeping that white space untouched on your site is worth more than adding another marketing pitch there. He’d be better off not seeing anything that doesn’t work for him.

Here are some common examples of the users having developed a blind eye for marketing pitches because of irrelevancy, inaccuracy or it just did not work for some reason.

1. The daily deals business: The whole Groupon industry was although started as social media marketing but soon boiled down to email and SMS marketing. There was no targeting and we received SMS/emails everyday. After 30 consecutive days of receiving non-buy-able deals (for any reason) you realise that there is nothing relevant for you in there and slowly the mails/SMS are as good as spam for you. The situation is so bad that the whole industry is dying. The economics of high cost user acquisition isn’t working. Though most players haven’t shut shop but have changed the business model.

2. The free tickets: OTAs have long been offering “free tickets” as promotional offers. But the offer comes with a heavy string attached, viz. 15 days advance booking, only base fare off, only on selective airlines and routes. The whole maths comes out to be a discount of whopping Re.0 as the base fare is mostly NIL for 2 weeks advance bookings.

This promo has been so badly exploited by OTAs that it has become irrelevant for users. Recently, I saw a similar offer from an OTA best known for its UI. Although the discount was coming out to be Rs.1400 for a flight I wanted but they had gone down to a level of inflating fuel surcharge and other fees. Again, they managed to get my attention but nothing beyond that. They underestimated their user’s intellect.

3. The free Reebok watches/sunglasses: This one is an epic. From buying an airline ticket to getting a new prepaid mobile connection, branded watches are a sureshot free gift being given out everywhere. It is mostly Reebok watches worth Rs.2500 or in some cases it is sunglasses/watches of Reebok/Polo/Giordano/UCB with similar tag price. You wear one watch for a month and you will lose respect for Reebok as brand and also turn a blind eye to all such deals.

The typical cost of those watches are Rs.90 (for retail orders) and the sunglasses are for as low as Rs.18. What kind of marketing study tells you that somebody who can afford air travel would wear such a thing?

The situation is so bad now that it’s embarrassing to wear anything Reebok. Dilution of Reebok’s brand value is a separate case study but taking your consumers for a ride with a offer like this kills your brand’s potential to grab attention in future. Hence a blind eye for any watches as free gift.

An online apparel store was recently giving out a FastTrack watch free with purchase of Rs.1500+. The Reebok watches from my earlier experience made me think twice even about the FastTrack deal. Not only the company but the industry at large suffered.

4. The breaking news – No matter when you switch on the TV, there is always some “breaking news”. In the pre IndiaTV / AajTak era, there used to be one breaking news in a week or so and that grabbed everyone’s eyeballs. Today, even a cat stuck on a tree is a national TV breaking news. The blind eye was sure to happen. Now all we are found doing is flipping channels, form one breaking news to another, playing “I ignore you”.

5. And most importantly – The unsolicited SMS spam – This was so painful that a regulatory intervention was required. In this case though, marketeers could have killed the relevance of a communication technology all together.

Lately, we have seen quite regular mailers from the most respected Indian eCommerce company for their new product categories. The first two category announcements were not useful for me, as a result I deleted the last one without reading. Not sure if I might as well go on to unsubscribe their mailers all together.

Still today most web companies decide their direct marketing based on materialistic resources. What some of the online marketers don’t realise is that the real price paid is in terms of user’s attention. And unfortunately, user attention is not as cheap as your mass mailing software subscription or your bulk SMS package.

Although, ‘I am the end user‘ is a bad premise for any product decision but for this one case putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes would make your decisions easier and fruitful in the long term.

I have one parting question, did Dr.Batra himself receive the “Dr.Batra’s Clinic’s hair solutions” SMSes daily? Did he not feel like pulling off his hair?

Dear Marketeers, do you subscribe to your own marketing messages? Do you think it’s time to promise value and deliver it as well?

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

Following are three kinds of  feature execution that are very annoying to a user and yet it is seen very often on the web.

1. I have it but not now – A common feature that you will notice in this category is “Live chat support”. A feature that is seen ‘offline’ more often than online. A pic of a typical call center girl that you click for support but only to your dismay. Features that are available for only part of a day are a serious NO when you think of a web service. The shop here should remain open 24hrs and remain open with the same service level.

Installing an open source chat app on your website is not what it requires to switch ON the service. Switching ON the service partially only makes the user turn a blind eye to it.

Tell us when was the last time you used a live chat support on a site?

In one online mobile recharge startup, they couldn’t manage a 24hr support team so one small change they did is to not show the chat support link at all when the chat wasn’t online. They did not have enough programming bandwidth to play with the open source code, all they did was replace the ‘chat is offline” pic with a 1 pixel transparent pic. So either it was not there or it was online. A little product-management-trick helped three folds – saved a click for the user, added some extra white space to the site and increased loading speed. Most importantly, it did not create any expectation for the user.

2. I have it but not for this one – The “Menu” field on your restaurant listing site or the “ticket availability” on your movie listing site are some examples of this. Even if you have data for 10% of the listings you want to quickly launch this as a feature and exploit your SEO.

In this case, you may show the info for the ones available but you would do much better not showing the specific data field at all for other records than showing a ‘not available’ message after a click. This takes little effort in terms of programming but helps keep the user for longer time.

Though this applies only when the product manager in you wants to create a long lasting product experience than a short term SEO traffic with high bounce rate.

3. I have it but approximately- This is the worst kind of trap to fall into. On web giving wrong/expired info is a sin. Whether it’s the “live cricket score” that is 10 minutes stale but doesn’t say that or the talk-time credited for a mobile recharge. Having information for the sake of it only diminishes your product value. If the user cannot depend on it, he will never stick to it.

–

It is either there or not there, partial availability does not bring out a strong predictability to your product. While you are working on the next big release, also look at P2/P3 features and ensure that the product management decisions are ‘same’ across the board.

So what are you changing today? Know of any product that is taking these little decisions seriously?

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

1. Login to Twitter

1. Disconnect Internet

2.  Try tweeting (i.e. hit the ‘Tweet’ button).

And this is what you get:

Did you notice that Twitter takes the blame on itself for site misbehavior, instead of suggesting you that you aren’t connected to Internet?

I earlier wrote How Helpful Are Your Error Messages [DNA of Great Products] and compared how Chrome, Firefox and IE treat a very common use-case  (i.e. accessing the web when you are offline) in a different fashion.

So why is it that developers do not throw exact error message? Well, because it means iterating into deeper logic layers/‘else’ statements and that translates to higher utilization of processing resource (and time).

Fair point.

But if you OWN the product (as an entrepreneur, product manager) and bet your life on it, would you not throw helpful error message and earn some product love?

If you have a web application, do take a look at how you are handling error messages – do you blame yourself for the error, or you empower the user with a useful error message so that the user can take corrective action?

A lot of that is probably a function of company DNA and their approach towards customer support/service.

I am not really sure why Twitter doesn’t provide a helpful error message, but one logic could be that Twitter is known to have scaling issues (failwhale et al) and that’s why (maybe) they have taken a defensive approach to handling error messages.

But is that useful to the user? NO.

Tell us how do you treat error messages in your product? What’s your take on Twitter’s approach?

Social Graphs are all around us today – some like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter have extremely high adoption rate and have provisioned development frameworks for existing and new products to leverage social graphs behind them. Each of these social graphs are distinctive by type of connections and mindset its users have developed towards them.

Google+ has been left outside of this discussion – cause in my personal opinion it is yet to find itself a distinct social graph. In current position – Google+ overlaps with lot of existing and established Social Graphs. More notes on Google+ can be reserved for a different blog post.

Existing Social Graphs (everyone knows this):

• Facebook – Social Networking for friends, (close) colleagues and family. These are users with whom you have interacted in real life.
• Twitter – Loose social connections, people you know or are acquaintances with. Typically people who are celebrities, known professionals, subject or domain expertise are followed by others.
• LinkedIn – Professional and Business contacts.
• Email Contacts – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc – all people or contacts whom you have/had private conversations over emails.

There are other Social Graphs like – YouTube, WordPress, Flickr.., those who are limited by its mindset or domain; also limited ways to leverage those social graphs.

Every Social Platform has Social Mindsets & Product Norms:

Social Platforms – no matter how big in user base, its users over a period of time have developed strong mindsets, product usage norms and social norms. They are usually not said or stated, but followed subconsciously by its users.

• Facebook -
  Product Norm: Users can share status, comments, updates, photos, videos with “known friends”
  Social Mindset: Informal, between friends, perceived closed group communication.
  Social Norm: Example – Do not keep on updating status at same pace at which they tweet.
  .
• Twitter -
  Product Norm: Follow like minded people, domain experts, known professionals, celebs, etc
  Social Mindset: Open conversations & thoughts expected by followers.
  Social Norm: Example – Retweet what you agree on, etc
  .
• LinkedIn -
  Product Norm: Strictly Professional & Business oriented. Make connection with people you have worked with or intend to.
  Social Mindset: Share professional or company updates; Industry news & views
  Social Norm: Example – Do not post jokes or Facebook-like status updates.

Social Mindsets and Product Norms are difficult to break:

Users follow social mindsets and product norms subconsciously, they learn to follow it over months or years of product usage. Over a period of time, they become so strong that such platforms itself are not able to foster adoption for new products & features they introduce. Some examples are -

• Facebook attempted to take on Foursquare with Facebook Places – but did not make much headway. Interestingly – there might be an 100% overlap of Foursquare users with Facebook.
• Twitter struggled with getting usability for Lists feature. Users have added people to lists – but not following them for tweets. Twitter acquiring TweetDeck might be another sign of product usage norm.
• LinkedIn struggled with its product LinkedIn Answers – while Quora scaled.
• Google launched Google+ through GMail, but now struggles to keep continued engagement and adoption of Google+.

Because the Social Mindsets and Product Norms are difficult to break, products that leverage Social Graphs outside them become successful. (Facebook abandoned deals, but maybe it should acquire Foursquare as it is more valuable than Groupon, & LinkedIn should acquire Quora)

Some Perfect Examples of Social Products:

1. Zynga – Leveraged social graph of Facebook and introduced Social Games like CityVille, FarmVille and others as a Social Application.
2. Foursquare – Leveraged social graphs of Facebook & Twitter to introduce a location based check-in product on Mobile.
3. Quora – Leverage social graphs of Facebook & Twitter to introduce a Questions product as a destination website.

The 6 Basic Principles of Building Social Products:

1. Social Graphs are already Established.
   Do not reinvent the wheel and try to build social graphs again from scratch on your product.
   .
2. Social Graphs get built over a period of time.
   a. Over years – Users have made friends on Facebook, added professional contacts on LinkedIn or followed people on Twitter
   b. It will take loads of time, effort and patience if you try to build them again.
   Google+ is attempting this – we can wait and watch if it succeeds.
   .
3. Don’t build Social Products for sharing content & driving additional traffic.
   a. Most social products are built with this intention – sharing content and hence driving more traffic
   b. Existing social graphs are powerful and already allow sharing of content to drive viral traffic.
   .
4. Build Social Products that add value to users.
   There are many tasks and products that can be built outside existing Social Platforms which can add value to end users. While existing social graphs are established, users have a Usage Mindset about them, this is biggest incentive to build innovative social products.
   .
5. Don’t arbitrage value through your product.
   There is immense value in integrating directly with social platforms like Facebook & Twitter, do not try to arbitrage this value through your product. Users (if it is a B2C product) or Merchants / Publishers (if it is a B2B product) will at some point of time realize this and abandon your product to integrate/use directly.
   .
6. Don’t build – but leverage Social Graphs!
   Rome was not built in one day! And so are Social Graphs. Choose the one that fits most with your product use case and leverage it.

Building your Perfect Social Product:

Foursquare, Quora, Zynga did it, so can your product. Introducing established social graphs to new products. Key is understanding what you manage and what you don’t – Social Graphs are not owned by you, your product is – seamless integration with your product makes it scale up virally.

It helps you in -

• Viral User Acquisition
• Introducing your product to user’s existing social graphs
• User activity on your product generates updates for Social Graphs, which acts like contextual marketing.

Identify what are the validation use-cases for your product, allow consumers to share the same with his Social Graphs. Few examples are – Foursquare checkins, Questioning & Answers on Quora, reaching a level completion milestone on Zynga while playing its games and others.
.

Solving the Chicken and Egg problem:

Social Products have more than one first users. Every initial user who registers to your product has his own social graph, he is the first user of his social graph.

The Chicken & Egg problem here is – what do you show to such first users who do not have any friends or activities to look at. Ask hard questions and look around for examples of successful social products.

First User Questions (FUQs) -

• Facebook’s first user question – “Whom do I add as a Friend? Who will see my wall-post?”
• Twitter’s first user question – “Who will read my tweet? Whom should I follow?”
• Quora’s first user question – “Who will answer my question? How can I quickly get a answer for my question?”
• Foursquare’s first user question – “Where should I check-in? Why should I check-in?
• Zynga’s first user question – “Whom should I play CityVille with? How will my City grow?”

Try to figure out how these platform solved the first user question. There are multiple ways to do it, but idea is doing this right. The biggest challenge for any social product is solving the First User Questions – the approach and execution here makes or breaks your Social Product.

Validation Cycle of Social Products:

Defining Validation Cycle for your Social Product and reducing the time to validate it is the key goal for Product Managers. Validation cycles are reduced when you are at scale – thats a easy task cause at scale most of the things you do is just optimize based on data/feedbacks.

Take example of Quora – product validation cycle means getting answers from people with best knowledge about it. Since Quora has scale & adoption today – you will see few questions getting answered within minutes or hours of submission, while few take days to see first answer. But in its initial days – the validation cycle was not so short.

More crucial moments are in the first 10,000 users scenario. Have patience, learn from initial user feedback and pain-points; validation will be slow and takes time in initial days of adoption. Also to due slow adoption cycle in early days – the early adopters of any social product, don’t necessary get the best experience.

Example – My twitter profile (twitter.com/beingpractical) was created in Sept 2007; I had the First User Question syndrome. Same was the case with my profile on Facebook, LinkedIn or Orkut (Orkut showed me – “Bad, bad server. No donuts for you” 1000s of time).

Should it be an Application on Facebook or Destination site:

“Why is this not a application on Facebook?” is also a question you will hear from Investors. While there are different answers for this question when it comes from Investors, but for a product decision make your judgment based on -

1. Your product idea or concept or product use case should deliver real value. The value should not equate to addition of features on Facebook.
2. There are Social Graphs outside of Facebook that you want to explore.
3. Facebook would want people to interact with people; not with applications.
4. Product or Business use case qualifies to be a destination site outside of Facebook – like a Quora or Foursquare.

Remember again – Social Mindsets & Product Norms on Facebook are difficult to break. If your product requires to explore Social Graph and is outside the Social Norms of Facebook – it can be a destination!

The Key Questions to answer before getting started:

Have good answers to all of these questions before starting with build your Social Product -

• The task your product is planning to solve – do people do it in real world socially?
  Social Products are reflections of user behavior in real world – People play games together, People want to hear answers from persons with best knowledge about it, and so on. If people don’t do such tasks in real world – they will not do it on a Social Product as well.
  .
• Is it a feature on Facebook or Twitter or any Social Platform?
  Feature products don’t last. Identify if your product can be a feature on Facebook or Twitter.
  .
• If B2C product – Is there a value to do this task outside of Facebook?
  Check and check again – Is your product idea meant to be a application or destination.
  .
• If B2B product – Is sharing and driving traffic to merchants / publishers the key aim?
  There is no harm if it is one of the propositions, but this should not be the key aim of your B2B product. Many social commerce products on top of Facebook project sharing & driving traffic as their core benefit. Marketers are smart, at some point of time they will self-integrate this on their Facebook pages.
  .

Always keep these things in Mind -

1. People drive Social Platforms & Products. Not features!
   Features are how you want users to drive your product. But it is always people who drive it – make your features people-centric; not people feature-centric.
   .
2. Engagement should be People to People
   People don’t login to Facebook everyday cause it is Facebook, it is cause there friends are there. Same will hold true for your Social Product.
   .
3. Don’t arbitrage on User Value
   Consumers & Businesses will eventually figure this out. So don’t do this in first place.
   .
4. Don’t be Evil
   People love their Friends & Social Circle / Connections more than they love your product.
   Don’t mess with them. Don’t spam. Don’t be evil.

Happy Building your Social Product.

[Guest article by PJ/Reproduced from his blog]

Just to go by the set of events in the past few weeks, it is beyond doubt that, User Experience (UX) professionals are living in exciting (and challenging) times. Exciting, because the whole domain of User Experience is growing at an unprecedented rate. Over the years it has gained enough traction that it has now become the core of discussions across boardrooms. The stakes have increased and that is precisely why the role has become more challenging over time.

On the other hand the rise of social technology has had a huge impact on the very functioning of the UX field. I do not think there is any other field that has embraced Social Media to such a large extent. That has opened the gates for a huge opportunity for discussions and collaborations. Sub-consciously we UXers are getting inputs from a gamut of sources, and what we are actually doing is Co-creating UX.

Just look at the things around you and you would be surprised by the word experiences and the frequency with which it appears in discussions. We are surrounded by it to an extent, that we end up looking at in almost everything we are doing. It features in the transport system we use, the restaurants we visit, the cities we explore to name a few. It is something that is un-avoidable and definitely not something that can be ignored.

The Need for Co-creating UX

With the internet reaching masses and the smart phones usage increasing exponentially, and the industry leaders getting a run for their money from competitors who are trying to reach the masses and at a much lower cost, there will definitely be a need for more and better experiences to be created. Moreover this is not just going to be limited to one geography or medium, but a global community spread across platforms.

The UX community today is subjected to close discussions with the Technology and Business teams also. It is these other teams who are also playing a crucial role in the Co-creation process.

The belief is further strengthened when one tries to understand this simple 4 point theory of co-creation as outlined in the book “The Power of Co-creation, (Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis J Gouillart).”

The four points for co-creation, mentioned are

1. Experience Mindset

2. Context of Interactions

3. Engagement platforms

4. Network Relationships

The same can be extended to understanding the Co-creation of UX. The following would be useful to people in Business, Technology, and just about anyone who is interested in UX.

a. Experience Mindset.

It is pretty obvious now, that the user experience is something that is the driving force behind the success of a product and service. Therefore one cannot ‘not’ have an experience mindset. We now have more organizations understanding the value of it and investing in it. New age CEOs and other company heads understand it and are willing to take that extra time to invest in it.

From performing civic duties to doing reservations to engaging community to a plethora of other tasks, everything is being governed by the level of experience it provides during and after consumption and usage.

b. Context of Interactions

For any UX, the context is important. Often there is a challenge to understand the difference in context. The differences come from cultural norms, from consumer behaviour and the situations in which co-creation is happening. A classic example is while designing for users who are located in the different locations; the designers fail to get a proper understanding of the context. This is also important when designers have to work in a domain they have never worked before. One way to solve the problem would be to have a domain expert be a part of the co-creation of UX, so that their inputs ensure that the requirements are being understood properly.

c. Engagement platforms

This is one thing which I believe poses the maximum challenge to designers. It is about getting the User Experience to be consistent across platforms. When we talk of platforms, it could be an online or an offline platform. The online could then further be spanning across the web, the hand held devices, the large scale data driven centers. Within the hand held devices there again could be a span across tablets to mobile phones to other electronic or non electronic products. The offline could be community gatherings to one-on-one meetings. The Internet binds a lot of the platforms together. From being only an informative medium to being a medium to entirely depend on; internet and related technologies have come a long way. Internet has become the Universal source of information for millions of people, at home, at school, and at work. We now talk of the portable web, with the portability spanning across hardware (mobiles, Tablets, desktops) , software and other platforms. However as designers we need to understand the User experience is not only in the Internet and there are things beyond that too.

d. Network Relationships

At the very core of UX is the user. So, all it boils down to is the users and how we build our networks to take care of those relationships. Maintaining the relationships would cover things like providing feedback, engaging in discussions, being open to criticism, encouraging others to co-create, and also rewarding others. Incentives works wonders and can often be used a tool for inviting others into the co-creation process. The designers should work towards building systems in which these relationships thrive.

Having said the above, the whole notion of Co-Creating the UX does face some problems.

The platforms are still evolving. What was a luxury a few years ago is now a mass produced and consumed entity. This has led to trends changing over a short period of time. With the more globalized world we live in, and we blindly follow what’s successful in one geography to the Varied User groups, we are constantly in the risk of jumping the signal too soon and land up in a not to pleasant UX situation. Lastly, with more stake-holders being involved in the co-creation process, the stakes are much higher than we fathom.

It also becomes crucial to the design community that the UX education happens amongst the people involved in the co-creating experience. It would only lead to healthier and more constructive conversations and better co-created systems. The impact of Co-creating UX need not be felt immediately. The results could show over a period time, like in the case of an online community. Co-created User Experiences will evolve over time.

Conclusion

As one of my favorite design teacher, Erik Stolterman puts across in his book ‘The Design Way’, “As human being, we continuously create things that help us form the basis of the world as we know it. When we create these new things – tools, organizations, processes, symbols and systems, we engage in Design. Design is therefore such a natural ability that almost everyone is designing most of the time – whether they are conscious of it or not.

The above holds so true when we are looking at Co-creating the User experience. It requires UX designers to engage in discussions in a more detailed manner and understand various aspects, which were earlier thought to be done by others. UX designers need to share more stuff and always be open to collaborate. They should share their ideas though a channel that reaches out to a larger audience and be open to discuss things.

All of these would only go a long way towards a healthy system where we are all involved in the Co-Creation of the User Experience.

[This guest post has been Kshitiz Anand. Kshitiz works as Design Strategist at Kuliza – a Bangalore based social technology firm. You can read more of his blogs on the Kuliza blog]

I have been associated with the startups for a little over the past 5 years. In this time, I have witnessed a lot of improvement in the startup ecosystem in India. Everything from raising capital, getting experienced advisors, to recruiting a talented team has become significantly easy. We have also had some much needed success stories either in terms of exists, buyouts, or pure growth.
However, the mortality rates for startups are still very high. I have always been curious about reasons for startup failures and possible mitigation strategies. The reason for failure certainly does not seem to be technology challenges. The majority of startups in India are not really technology breakthroughs (nothing wrong in that at all). Majority of them are either trying to solve an unaddressed problem or improve an existing solution.
Most startups just seem to fail because of lack of market adoption. So it seems to a case of either incorrect understanding of the customer needs or not creating the right kind of mouse trap. It is interesting that both of these are classic problems associated with using a product development model to take a new product/ offering to the market.
The product-centric model is a process that evolved in manufacturing industries and since was adopted by the consumer packaged goods industry in the 1950s and finally became the de facto standard and an integral part of the tech startup culture till recently.

Startups following this model start with defining a concept and associated business plan, then get into product development, followed by alpha-beta test, and finally product launch. The model is not really bad, in fact it is a great approach if you are building an offering where the customer’s problem and the solution are well known (e.g extending an existing and successful offering). However, we all know that the majority of startups are dealing with ambiguity not only in one but both of these areas (i.e. both the customer’s problem and possible solutions are not completely clear at the start).

In such situations, this model is sure to lead to disaster because of its inherent disadvantages. The issue with this model is that it is purely focused towards product development. All the goals and milestones are associated with defining the scope of the product, achieving development milestones, and then shipping it out the first set of customers. There are no real milestones associated with marketing or sales other than creating collaterals, developing partnerships, and creating a sales force. I like to term this problem as the cocoon effect. The cocoon effect is when a startup functions in a closed environment and just keeps working on developing the product in isolation. This results in feature bloat (i.e. over engineering) and in most cases the market / customer completely rejecting the product.

Customer development and the lean startup

Steve blank a serial entrepreneur from the valley articulates this problem in his book the four steps to the epiphany (if you are a founder and have not read this book, I would urge you to pick it up ASAP). He defined a better alternative to the product centric development model. He proposed the use of a “customer development model“, where the customer and his needs were at the heart of the startup’s approach and not the product.

This model focuses on understanding the customer and constantly validating your solution with them till you get it right and then starting with outreach programs and company building initiatives. This model works really well when the problem that is being solved is not completely understood.
Eric Ries another serial entrepreneur from the valley used this model and further extended it for software tech startups to even account for ambiguity about the solution to the problem. He proposed that startups should use extreme programming methods to come up with quick release cycles. This prototyping based approach can help startups to arrive to the optimal solution without losing too much time or resources. Such agile startups would in turn be able to increase their chances of success.

Even though the lean approach is a great way to run your startup, you may still have to deal with the issue of funding while in the prototyping stage. Even if available, it may not be smart idea to raise serious capital as you are still not at a stage where you fully understand your customers, the problem or know the right solution. You could raise funding from angels but finding the right kind of person is always very hard. I think there is better way to solve this funding problem using the social web.

Kick-starting your passion

Recently, I read about how some startups used crowd sourcing based approach to raise funds to kick-start their business. Kickstarter is the largest online crowd funding platform for creative projects in the fields of Art, Dance, Film, Music, Photography, Publishing, Theater, Food, Design, Fashion, Technology, Games, Comics and Journalism. It can help startups raise capital directly from their potential customers (i.e. people who share a common passion with the founders for a problem).

• Members are only allowed to raise funding for projects. A project in this case is something with a very clear beginning and end. This makes it easy for the community to decide whether a project is completed as per expectations ( it is actually good for the entrepreneur because there will be no ambiguity about your progress )
• The projects cannot be related to charity, causes, self-help, or As-Seen-on-TV products
• The funding cannot be used to hire programmers/developers to build your website/app

C-loop is a great example of a startup which leveraged the kickstarter platform to raise capital and build their business. Ivan Wong, a professional sports photographer struggled with his camera strap while taking snaps. He checked with his brother, Ben, and friend Anne Bui (a programmer) and all of them seem to have the same problem.  So they went ahead and designed their own solution. The idea was to connect the strap to one point on the bottom of the camera—the threaded tripod mount—instead of two points on the top.
They quickly built a prototype that wasn’t pretty, but it worked and called it the C-Loop.
The team needed $15,000 to produce the initial lot of C-Loops, which they could take to the market. Through kickstarter they were able to raise $63,163 in their funding period which was used to develop 1,800 c-loops. The engagement on kickstarter also helped them to book their initial pre-sales with the very same people who funded the project. They now have distributors across the world and have also launched other successful products like the Spilt Strap (an ergonomic accessory for camera, laptop bag, duffel, or guitar).

• Discover a problem and validate if others seem to have the same problem ( understand your customer really well )
• Create a quick prototype solution. It does not have to be pretty, it just needs to work and solve the problem ( kind of like a jugaad)
• Use social platforms like kickstarter to discover others who suffer from the problem enough to be willing to fund the solution.
• Use the funding to build the first version and ship it out to initial customers who have funded the project.
• Collaborate with these initial customers to improve offering and get great stories of how they were able to improve themselves by solving the problem using your product / service
• Use these studies and learning then to scale your outreach efforts and leverage the initial set of people as your product evangelists. This is the perfect time to also look out for venture capital if you want scale quickly or just focus on growth through smart viral with your initial passionate customers as the base group.

This model ensures you build something that you and your initial customers are truly passionate about, there is a clear purpose to your venture which is validated by the funding from potential customers and the best part, there is clear profits (however small you remain as a company).
I truly hope we see more Indian startups following this model and create startups which collaborate with their customers using social platforms and create more long lasting businesses. What’s your take?

[This guest post has been written by Kaushal Sarda. Kaushal works as a chief evangelist at Kuliza – a Bangalore based social technology firm. You can read more of his posts on the Kuliza blog.]

“We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent.” –Harry Sonneborn, CFO(McDonalds)

Let me admit here that CCD (Cafe Coffee Day) is pretty much my office these days. I spend almost 2.5 days/week (cumulatively speaking) at CCD and like I earlier mentioned [Read: What Business Are you In – Case Study: Cafe Coffee Day], CCD is not in the business of selling coffee, but is in the business of enabling business (meetings) + relationships (dating included).

Having said that, my preference for CCD has gone down – and here is why.

First, What Is A Product?

A product offering has two parts – Actual Product and the Augmented Product.

- Actual Product is what you sell [e.g. the physical product].

- Augmented Product is why people buy your product for.

In other words, Actual Product is the tangible part (i.e. a cup of coffee), while Augmented is the value-addition/perception which may/may not be tangibilized (example: comfortable meeting place/easy to locate a CCD joint etc).

In short, Augmented Product enables decision making, when competitive products deliver an undifferentiated product.

Coming back to CCD example, I recently noticed that they have started charging separately for WiFi access (~INR 30/hour). And on the other hand, another outlet, Gloria Coffee does a smart thing. You can avail free WiFi after you have bought something from the outlet. And the WiFi credential is valid only for 1 hour. So in short, if you want free Wifi (augmented product), you pay for the actual product (fyi: a lot of UnPluggd2 operational planning was done @Gloria Outlet/Indiranagar).

Given that a place like Bangalore witnesses a whole lot of business meetings at these coffee outlets, who do you think has a “better product”?

The discussion context is : How would you design pricing for such products? Your options are:

a) Include WiFi price in the product, but keep it for premium customers (i.e. free WiFi only when customer buys something/Gloria styled).

b) Exclude the price and charge separately (CCD styled)

c) <Share your idea>*

The key to answering this is knowing how you want to position your product. If you position your coffee outlet as “FREE WIFi Zone”, you attract a certain target segment (maybe, less of dating couples). And if you simply position your outlet as “WiFi Zone”, you tend to have more dissatisfied customers who expected “Free” as the default keyword (“what!! you are charging INR 30 for WiFi? WTF!”).

As a product guy/girl, what would you do? How will you identify pricing? What are the other important attributes you need to know?

What’s your opinion? Do discuss.

* I am assuming that you are equally sick of coffee at CCD (or any other place) and the augmented product actually enables consumption of the actual product.

These guests will come from different industries and will share their insights on a very frequent basis. The first article that goes live as part of this series is written by Sanket Nadhani, who heads Marketing & Sales at FusionCharts.]

Startups: Good Looks Are More Than Just Eye Candy [Is Usability Overhyped?]

I like talking to our customers whenever I get a chance, over phone or at the expos we exhibit at. I try to understand how they are using FusionCharts and how they see their charting requirements evolving. And at the end of these conversations I typically end up asking – So what made you choose FusionCharts? Nine times out of ten, pat comes the answer – It looks great!

What? You sell because you look good? Not because you help save time, cost, have more features or any of those things, I hear you ask. Well….yes we get you started in fifteen minutes….have a no-nonsense licensing….are pretty comprehensive…but the main reason users purchase our charts is because they look good. So much so that we recently changed our tagline to just convey this one message – Stunning charts for Web & Enterprise. And today, I would like to talk to you about how good looks are not just about the eye candy. Not just about the five-second gratification of the eyes. It is a lot more than that.

I will talk about products in general here and not restrict it to the charting niche, to make it easier for you to relate to.

Builds perception

The first appearance of a person forms the perception we have of him. They way a person dresses, his posture, his greeting style and handshake go a long way in determining what we think of him. Similarly, looks alter the consumer’s perception of your product in a long way.

People believe that what looks good is good. The perception of better looking things working better pre-use is commonly accepted. Post-use, not so much. In his book Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, Don Norman cites the examples of researchers in Japan who has set up two ATMs that were exactly identical in function and how they worked. The only difference was the buttons and screens were more attractive in one of the ATMs. People faced fewer difficulties with the attractive machine, which means it actually worked better. What looks good is good, post-use.

This perception is pretty simple to explain. When we are using a beautiful product, our brain is relaxed and more likely to find solutions to problems. However, when we are tense, our brain gets a sort of tunnel vision where we only see the problem in front of us. Put simply, what looks good is good.

Builds credibility

To put together a good-looking design, it takes a lot of time and attention. People feel that since so much attention has been paid to the design, the same amount of attention would have been given to the core functioning of the product as well, which implies that it is a good credible product.

In a study done on website credibility by Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University, half of the consumers (46.1% to be exact) out of the 2,684 people who took part attributed the credibility of the website to how it looked. This made design way more than important than other well-accepted factors like name recognition (branding), information clarity, accuracy and affiliations. What was most surprising that the credibility-related comments about visual design occurred with the most frequency for finance sites, a domain of websites where information and its surrounding functions are supposed to be the king. Case in point, mint.com, a personal finance web app. Mint.com, pretty much unknown three years back, used good design to build credibility strong enough to convince people give their credit card numbers to a company with a dot.com in its name, not to forget all of their online banking passwords.

As people use the web increasingly each day, for finding health information, storing financial data, making travel bookings, they need to instantly determine whether a website is credible or not. They need to know whether they can trust the website or not? This is where design is the big differentiator. Easy and quick.

Increases Engagement

The web is getting wider day by day, and the marketplace more crowded. The time to shape the experience of the customer with your product is very short. Time spent on the website is the new hits received. In a situation like this, good looks can be the big differentiator between you and your competitor.

A better looking design will focus the user’s attention on your product and he will spend more time with it. He will get to know more about what your product can do for him, try those things out and ultimately see that it “works better,” is “more usable” and definitely “more comprehensive.” Who really wants to use boring products full of gray that reminds them that they are sitting in cubicles and talking to machines? Not only that, a good design also leads to an excited user. It gives him something memorable to go out tell his friends about. What else can you ask for?

Builds an Emotional Connection

Humans are social animals, all of us learnt at school. They are relationship-seeking creatures. They tend to form an emotional connection with everyone and everything they come across over and over again. All the product purchase decisions aren’t as rational as they are usually made out to be. They aren’t entirely made on sensible things like technical capabilities or product pricing. Emotional bonds like a good rapport with the people behind the product, a long-term association with the product or the product being “just perfect” are also major decision-influencers. As is good design.

A good design triggers a stream of positive emotions from the brain. An emotional connection makes a person stick to a product, never mind the extra bucks he has to spend for the product. It fuels his creativity. Increases his productivity. It is the only way he can work. All other options fail for him. That is how strong emotional connections can be.

And if you are still not convinced, here’s the magic word.

Apple.

Motivates and Sets Expectations

Till now, I have been discussing how good looks affect the experience the outside world has with your product. In this final point I am about to make, I will bring out how a good-looking design motivates your internal team and inspires them to create a better product on the whole.

In this excellent blog post by Chris Campbell of Wufoo (a company I highly admire) on the importance of design in business, he mentions how good design creates a sort of a ripple effect, sets higher expectations and inspires the overall development to create a better product on the whole.

“Good design in our company doesn’t just sell products. Good design fosters collaboration, communicates strategy, sets expectations, improves the efficiency of a team, and most importantly inspires and motivates like nothing else.

When you start out with a beautiful and awe inspiring wireframe or prototype, your expectations about that product and everything associated with it is expected to also be beautiful and awe inspiring. If the initial expectations for a web application are low by bad or no design, then bad practices seem to find their way into the code, the web site marketing, and even the attitudes toward customers by employees. When you start with great design as a foundation, there is a snowball effect on the quality and execution of a product from start to finish.”

It’s almost like Chris has written those words for our team. I don’t have anything else to add.

Final words

Good looks are a part of the very DNA of FusionCharts. Every time a new member joins us, we tell them on the very first day – Everything coming out you has to look wow. Every chart, every product, every website, every brochure….heck even every email you send. Make it look good is the don’t be evil for us, except that we will never drop it.

[Guest author: Sanket also writes for the FusionCharts blog talking about usability, charting tips & tricks and mostly about all the behind-the-scenes fun. He loves his food and beer. Follow Sanket on Twitter:@sanketnadhani. ]

[PS: If you want to be a part of this selective list, do connect with us.]

That place left me wondering as to how many like me would not have shown courage to ask for the price or to face the embarrassment of finding it unaffordable. The chocolate lounge would have so many more customers if there was more information available without asking.

Every evening while returning from office I pass by a street side Pakoda stall. The smell of Pakodas always tempt me to grab a hot plate but I never did so. I am a vegetarian and most places in my neighborhood are ‘pure’ non-vegetarian. The few vegetarian places, write ‘pure vegetarian’ in big bold letters. More so, there is a butcher center just next to this Pakoda stall. I have always been complaining of not getting good north Indian snacks in Bangalore and even tried MoMos with Ketchup in the same quest but never tried those Pakodas. Today my Kannada friend brought a little surprise for me, some hot Pakodas. I enquired and it was the same place that I pass by everyday. I was disgusted for once but then he told me that the vendor was a Brahmin, he can’t even talk non-veg, forget about selling non-veg.

Well, the fact that he was a Brahmin wasn’t written on his face. Although the prices were written on a board along the stall but apart from numbers everything was in Kannada. I wonder if he has lost many customers like me just because they couldn’t figure out what he was selling.

Very recently I was hunting for a good deal on group buying sites for a nice eat out. I saw a very attractive deal at one of the more popular sites. A good 50% off on a-la-carte but the menu was not available on the site. I googled for the restaurant and to my surprise another competing but less popular site had a deal for the same restaurant but it was 30% off on buffet. The menu was mentioned and looked sumptuous, nothing less than what I would have ordered with a-la-carte. I bought the deal immediately.

Thinking of it later I felt that the more popular site lost a customer just because it did not have enough information on the site. Although saying a-la-carte shouldn’t have required mentioning the menu but still it helps me make a more informed decision. It reduces my risk. Although live chat support was available on the site but I did not bother asking someone without googling for it.

Your product perception will always be influenced by your surrounding and the presumptions that your customer carries. It helps to be explicit and upfront. Not everyone would invest in asking for more information before making a decision. In the world of web and organised businesses the first thing you would want to do for your customer is help him take an informed decision.

Almost every time you go to a new place, the ease you feel is much to do with how much information is available. If you have traveled in Mumbai local trains and Delhi Metro, you will know how much of a user experience changes just by having enough information.

Go change your product page. Put all the information upfront, be honest. More information helps me consider your product while making a decision. You won’t even know how many customers you are losing just because they don’t find your communication informative enough. Keep iterating the communication as the market conditions change.

What’s your opinion?

img credit

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

‘We have shutdown our product and moving on to something new’.

But these days, the buzzword is ‘Yay! We have pivoted!’ That is,

‘We have shut down the product and moving on to something new’.

“Pivoting” – that is the ability to adapt your product to the market needs stems from a basic notion that companies have a certain hypothesis built around product offering; and as you go about building the product, you realize that market needs are (much) different from what you have built. So you make the necessary changes or simply scrap the product and move on to something else.

In short, pivoting is a fast decision making process enabling fast failure. But here is how it is used:

“Pivoting: What you call being wrong when you want to feel better” [via]

————

What’s wrong with Pivoting?

Nothing. Experimentation is the key and given that one can experiment for cheap and can really do small hacks/experiments at a relative lesser time/cost (as compared to 90s), it surely makes sense to try out new ideas/concepts.

What’s important is that the earlier approach of software development (i.e. Waterfall model) is no longer relevant and is replaced by agile development methodology which enables companies to churn out products/features very quickly.

The challenge here is that a lot of startups mistake product launch as success (yay! our first release is out!) and do not follow the boring part of building a business.

- For them, a product is just the productization of an idea.

- And productization of an idea is restricted to launching the “MVP, i.e. minimum value proposition” release. That is, the focus is not on building a product business (which is beyond the product launch, i.e. marketing/customer acquisition/sales/support etc), but the entire focus is purely on product launch.

And after the initial sweet feeling of getting the base version out, they realize that the product was built in a silo and literally has no serious takers. Or in some cases, it involves quite a bit of peripheral activities like sales/marketing which doesn’t really sound fun!

So they pivot. That is, move on to a new idea, without giving 100% to the present idea.

Fundamentals of Product Business

Doesn’t really matter if you are a lean or a mean startup, but the reality is that fundamentals of product development/building a business hasn’t changed much. Building a successful product business involves pretty much the good old way of understanding market needs, launching a product (GTM), product marketing/positioning etc.

With the new fallback option of ‘Yay! We Have Pivoted’, a lot of startups simply skip the “understanding market needs” part and directly go about building the product. There is a hurry to get the alpha release out in the market.

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer [Steve Blank]

Not that one needs to spend a lot of time in market research, but you need to have certain hypothesis around the problem you are solving and keep validating this hypothesis (with potential customers) as you keep building the product.

What’s worrying is the misplaced expectation of overnight success post the product launch (badly inspired by Silicon Valley stories).

Yo-Yo Cycle of An Ideating Entrepreneur

In all practicality, these are the four stages of an ideating entrepreneur (via).

The third stage is called “Crisis of Meaning”. You’re past scared. You feel despair. It’s as if you’re standing on the edge of a cliff ready to jump, and you begin to think “Today the rollercoaster’s going off the bottom of the track for the very first time.” You feel helpless and you’re both terrified and frozen.

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there. ~Josh Billings

For entrepreneurs, persistence is the key (Angry Birds creator, Rovio went through 52 failures!).
What makes the cut here is how correct/dynamic were your hypothesis at point 1, i.e. Uninformed Optimism state and how quickly you can twist ‘n’ turn before crashing out.

But the latest trend is now to comfortably call it quits (‘Yay! We Have Pivoted’) at point 3 and start off from point 1 with another fresh idea (that is, repeat the cycle).

The bigger question however is

- Are you learning from your mistakes? Do you really imbibe these learning?

- Do you accept failure (and then, move on)? Are you imbibing learning from past failure (i.e. ready to commit new mistakes) ?

Think about it! Are you using Pivoting as a comfortable exit path to not build product the right way (oh well! there is no right way, but there surely is a wrong way that starts with no contact with customer during the entire cycle)?

What’s your take?

Ofcourse I chose the last option (why lie?) and this is what I ended up with:

That is, unlimited free use of the program is only available to people who fly very little!

And here is why:

WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue to use it after a 30-day trial period.

Global greenhouse gas emissions are currently around 5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year, and probably need to be reduced by at least 80% have a good chance of avoiding dangerous warming. Most computer users are responsible for far more emissions than is sustainable. For example two short-medium distance return flights can be equivalent to over 1 tonne of emissions¹: more than an average person can safely emit over an entire year.[from Wordweb licensing page]

So in essence, the company is taking a much higher position (i.e. Green/Environment Friendly] to drive users to transition to pro version.

Don’t you think this is a damn cool strategy to weed out free users – assuming Wordweb hasn’t seen significant conversion to pro and a time has come in the company to really define the future plans/call it quits? After all, beyond a certain point you’d just give up on free users and say “F.O” to them?

What’s your opinion on this strategy?

PS: You can still make the free version work with a simple hack, but I leave that to you to find out.

Now why is this trend gaining momentum?

The very foremost reason is – it is easy to piggyback on the bigger player’s success which has already crossed some milestones on the road to success. You have a full-fledged user base (customers) from the very first day. Another attractive reason is that some not-so-old companies have struck gold in this business model (Read Zynga).

Meet the Don

My question – Are you playing safe?

This thought stemmed from a news item some days back stating that developers of Twitter apps would be held against higher standards going forward and there would be stringent enforcement of terms and conditions. Whether this was or will be finally put into action or revoked is not the point. The point is that Twitter CAN do it. All the other companies too (Read Google, Facebook, Apple) have similar powers over their respective platforms. They can loosen the strings or stretch the strings (example: Google will not open source Honeycomb anytime soon) at any time as per their interest. Now, isn’t this just too big a risk or external influence if your complete business is based on these platforms.

Some solutions

Though it is generally not advisable to target too many markets, but in this case it is almost like a necessity. Instead of targeting just a single platform, try and diversify into multiple platforms. A good way around for this could be working on a cross platform technology. This way, even if a single company plans to tighten the strings or make its platform less developer friendly, you would have other platforms to rely on. Another way is to make a killer product and make it more addictive than the original product you were piggyback on. A very good example is Zynga – Today Facebook gains quite a good amount of user visits and more importantly increased user stay time on the website solely due to Zynga products. For some of us Facebook users, Facebook would just not be the same without Mafia Wars and Farmville.

What’s your take? If you are an app developer, how do you plan to keep yourself safe from the clutches of platform owners?

[Guest article by Pooja Gupta.]

Recommended Read: Of Mafia World, Platforms and App Developers [Get Entrepreneurial]

“When to Pivot” is a very difficult question to answer, but here are a few early signs that you need to keep looking.

a. Hypothesis.

First build a hypothesis around the core of your product (“People want to write short messages/get instant gratification” Twitter’s probable hypothesis before the first release). Validating hypothesis is a function of who you are talking to. A lot of startups tend to talk to other startup peers or friends ‘n’ family (Friends and Family – Are they Startup’s Best Friends?) during ideation phase.
Talking to potential customer always helps (heck! this is a no-brainer, but how many startups actually do this?). Infact, some of the startups tend not to reach out to customers for the fear of negative response.

After the first release, ask yourself if your hypothesis stands correct and you are close to the reality?

b. Too Soon To Pivot?

“Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources”
-Eric Ries

After all, it’s a high speed chase game and as an entrepreneur, you are simply running against time/resources. Your goal is to minimize the waste and keep running till your find a product/market fit. A lot of startups tend to avoid a fundamental conflict that questions the basic vision of the product.

As a startup, track metrics like a ninja and track the important ones (and not the only ones that are going up).

c. What Exactly is Pivoting?

Pivoting is not A/B testing. Pivoting is change of direction. Pivoting is about change of vision.
To give you an idea, InMobi (earlier mKhoj) started as a local deals search, realized that  it will take a good number of years to build a solid business around it and immediately pivoted to building an ad network (Naveen shared the details at the last UnPluggd event).

How much of code was thrown in the entire process? Heartaches? Can you really handle so much of heartache – in the hope that next vision will bring the much needed success?

Pivoting at times is also about solving a similar problem (similar to the one you were solving earlier) and using a different approach. And at times, it’s about solving a related problem (which need not be similar).

Pivoting is not an art – it’s pure science (i.e. driven by numbers and hard facts).

If you are a startup that has pivoted, do share your experience.

[img credit]

The above screenshot expects me to remember Version 5 of the document and asks me questions which Microsoft Windows used to ask during WIn 95 days [Please click OK in order to connect the mouse?].

What’s your take? It’s time Google gets back to its roots?

Before you answer, take a look at error messages browsers show when there is no Internet connectivity (all I did was that I launched the browser with no Internet connectivity).

Firefox Error Message

As generic as it could get.  Lists out all possible options.

Helpful? 1/5.

IE Error Message

Internet Explorer does Firefox ++, i.e. lists down all possible options and also suggests what else can I do, now that I am offline – i.e. a good way to surface few features.

Helpful? 1.5/5.

Chrome Error Message

Chrome clearly tells you that ‘you are not connected to Internet’ and suggests steps you should take to fix the problem.

Helpful? 4.5/5 [providing a shortcut to Internet connection closes the loop).

-

So why is it that developers do not throw exact error message? Well, because it means iterating into deeper logic layers/‘else’ statements and that translates to higher utilization of processing resource (and time).

Fair point.

But if you OWN the product (as an entrepreneur, product manager) and bet your life on it, would you not throw helpful error message and earn some product love (look, Chrome got some love and adds to perception)?

The question to answer here is “Why Stay Mediocre?”. (just because everybody else is?).

Opinion? Do you think such decisions are a function of organization/product DNA?

* Opera, thanks to caching showed the last opened webpage, i.e. no clue of your offline status, until you click a link. Helpful? We leave that for Opera to answer.

Recommended Read: Running a Startup is Sexy, Building Business is Boring. You Decide

In this article, I am sharing some of the predictable/unpredictable examples that I have come across. Do share yours.

1. Rediff

The last story will be semi-porn/masala in nature. And mind you, that’s a sticky story (i.e. stays there even if you change tabs). My guess is that this gets the highest CTR (click thru’).

The predictability part is that this story will always be semi-porn/pure masala in nature. Irrespective of what’s happening around the world.

2.  Nokia Vs. Apple

Predictable: Apple. Features work as-mentioned. Touch works as-promised.

UnPredictable: Nokia. Most of the times, it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Is it predictable?

3. Broadband Connectivity

You are always sure that you will never ever get the promised speed. [So you always opt for higher speeds, pay more and essentially predict the degree of unpredictability]

Also, on the dark side of predictability is Sify. You know the broadband connection will go off the hook, once it starts raining (100% predictability here).

4. Blue Collar/White collar workers.

Predictable: If an auto mechanic says ‘5 Minutes’, you know that it means 30 minutes. [i.e. you predict the margin].

UnPredictable: Promise made by banks like ICICI on their service, i.e. Quality of Service [a case of over promise, under delivery?]. Sometimes it takes few days for them to really understand the situation (and sometimes the query is resolved within 30 minutes). The thing is that it’s still unpredictable.

5. Chrome Vs. Others

Predictable: Chrome speed (right from boot to autosuggestion)

Unpredictable: Mozilla (these days).

6. Bollywood

Shahrukh Khan is predictable. Aamir Khan isn’t. Johny Walker was. Big B isn’t.

There is no pattern here. They all are heroes in their own terms [the saying that goes in Bollywood is that “If you are predictable, you are replaceable”].

7. Courier Service

DHL is predictable (you can track on real time basis).

Most of the local courier companies aren’t.

Tell us if you pay higher price for predictability, or most of the times you end up checking out the local ones?

8. Payment Gateways (PGs)

Most of the ecommerce websites know that payment gateways are unpredictable. So what have they done to cope up? They have integrated all possible PGs, in order to increase predictability.

So the more unpredictable they (i.e. PGs) are, the more they see of each other – is there a lobby here?

9. Bargaining

Right from rickshaw wala to local shopkeeper, everybody is up for bargain. And hence we always give it a shot.

But the moment we enter a shop that clearly says ‘Kings don’t Bargain’, we shut our mouth and buy the product.

Predictability (of bargain and lesser price) goes for a toss once we see the ‘No Bargaining’ board.

Similarly, you don’t bargain at a brand outlet/mall, but will do at a kirana store. Why? Do big brands kill the predictability of ‘personal attention’?, in this case?

10. Help us find the 10th example.

Tell us what’s around you is so damn predictable and unpredictable. We will update this post with our reader’s comments.

By the way, do you think that number/quality of articles on Pluggd.in is predictable?

[With inputs from Naman and Pratyush].

What is Price? How is it determined?

Solve the mystery if you can, with the following clues:

P = Perception

When the ‘Zodiac Grill’ – a very sophisticated restaurant launched at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the menu did not have prices. Guests were free to order what they wanted, and then leave behind a price for the meal as they deemed fit. There were no eyebrows raised if guests left behind $1 as long as they thought that was the value of the meal they had enjoyed.

As it turned out, The Zodiac Grill received more revenue for meals served than they had estimated. Guests had enjoyed the ambience, the food and the service and had rewarded the restaurant with a price based on their ‘perception’ rather than what would have been printed on the menu.

The Zodiac Grill today has a fully priced menu and the launch experiment helped the hotel management tremendously to ‘price’ the service appropriately.

I see an interesting pricing model being followed by the digital enthusiasts who make free ‘plug-ins’ for large publishing platforms like WordPress.org. Subscribers of the wordpress.org platform are free to download all these fantastic plug-ins and then are prompted to ‘donate’ a few dollars to the developers if they feel like it. I am sure that the sum of donations received, generates more money for the developers than they would have earned if they were to price each plug in.

If you are a new start up or a business entrepreneur, try and gauge the prices of your product and services based on what your customers perceive it to be worth. It may be the best way to discover your true value.

R – Revenue Build

Many businesses I know have certain revenue targets in their business plans. They aspire to be say a $10 million Topline Company by the 3^rd year of starting up. Pricing then begins to work backwards and they price their products and services accordingly.

Is this the way to build and price your services? I have a contrarian point of view. This approach may damage the value creation.

For the sake of giving an example, let’s assume that you have a Magical Goose that will start  laying eggs very soon.

• If you decide to sell the eggs even before they are laid to discover later that your Goose is slower than normal in laying eggs, you may land up killing the Goose while trying to force it to lay eggs. To illustrate, MySpace was spoilt early on by Google when they received guaranteed revenue commitments from Google who exclusively took over selling ads on MySpace. Past the first year, Google figured that this was a loss making deal for them (they made less revenue from MySpace ads than what they had guaranteed to pay MySpace) and did not renew their agreement. But by then, MySpace had got addicted to ‘revenue’ toplines and went ahead and ruined their site by spraying ugly ads all over the site and aggressively selling them. MySpace, as I remember looked like a website that had only ugly ad hoardings all over and this quickly drove away lots of their users. The lure of only generating revenue ruined MySpace forever.
• On the other hand, if you determine the price of eggs before they are laid, you may land up selling ‘golden’ eggs at the price of ‘normal’ eggs. Facebook managed this beautifully – they took their own sweet time to just to understand their ‘Magical Goose’ and what it was really going to be valuable for. It’s amazing to see how slowly and elegantly they have sold ads (so they priced their golden eggs appropriately) and more so, introduced non obtrusive revenue streams like ‘facebook credits’ – a la creating value from the feathers of the Magical goose in addition to the eggs it lays!

Revenues are important but should not become the death noose of your business as it begins to rev up.

I – Insights

What do people pay for? If you can really examine the finer detail of what consumers really want to reward you for, then pricing can really be made to work for you in a far more profitable way than you could imagine.

Examples are aplenty. It’s well known that kids buy McDonalds ‘happy’ meals for the toys, and more often then not, their parents then eat the ‘happy’ meals. In India, brands splurge on MTV just for the association with an iconic youth channel more than the actual media reach it delivers. Chinese customers are happy to pay much more for a Gucci bag made in Italy than an identical Gucci bag made in Korea. So, in the case of McDonalds, MTV & Gucci, beyond their core offering, it’s intangible value drivers based on their consumer insights that is also being aggressively priced.

When we sell ‘Advergames’ (branded games), we calculate the time spent by consumers playing the game and hence interacting with the brand. So assume that 200,000 unique players play a brand game for 3 minutes, we have delivered 600,000 minutes of engagement to the brand. Next, we compare how expensive buying 600,000 advertising minutes would be on television and then price our offering very competitively. In this case we have an insight about how our customers (brand owners) VALUE media – not by impressions but by engagement.

 

Insight – ‘Advergames’ deliver engagement not impressions

When I made socks in my father’s Company, I began walking around in European Clothing stores to discover what kind of socks I should be selling to them. During this process, I stumbled upon an amazing insight – the price of Baby Socks for new borns (as young as 3 months) were the same as the price of Men’s socks as large as shoe size 12! When I dived deeper, I realized that it was mothers who buy socks and they were equally attached emotionally to their newborn child as they were to their husbands and hence didn’t differentiate the price of baby socks vs. men’s socks.  Now, baby socks weigh 10% of Men’s socks and hence are 90% more profitable to make. We started our export business making Baby Socks!

Try and go beyond the obvious reasons why consumers are buying your products and services. The real price you can charge them may be hidden in that insight.

C – Costs

You cannot escape measuring costs and then making sure that it’s more than covered for when you start pricing your goods and services. But wouldn’t that make a business just another usual small time business?

If Zynga – the Company behind Cityville and Farmville would have added its costs of servers and salaries and then divided it by the number of players it served, it would have logically priced the game service as a monthly subscription. Instead, they offered all their games as free to play and sold only in-game virtual items. In the a few months, millions of gamers bought virtual gifts for their friends (beer on Poker tables) and pink tractors for their farms! They compensated Zynga multiple times over to what they could have otherwise paid for as a monthly service.

To drive home this point – when you buy seeds in Farmville, you pay for a virtual item that is nothing but an image on your screen. You pay for the electricity to fire up that image on your screen and even for your Internet broadband connection to play Farmville. For Zynga, the money of the Pink Tractor has almost no cost and is an almost hundred percent profit!

So understand costs, but don’t adopt ‘only’ the costs plus formulae to make money. You may well be missing the Pink Tractor hidden in the mud.

E – Endearment

I think this is the most amazing dimension of Pricing. Apple for instance has mastered ‘endearment’ pricing.  Consumers like me just have to buy Apple products the moment they become available because I simply LOVE Apple. When my Macbook costs 100% more than a similar laptop, I don’t even think twice before buying it.  If an iPad costs $499, it costs $499. I don’t go out and look for comparisons and then decide to buy it or not. The same applies to Fashion brands and the likes. For example, why do you pay $1499 for a black Armani Jacket when you could buy a very similar looking Jacket from Gap at $199?

I don’t think consumers compare prices of brands they are attached to and just pay what they are asked to. As we all know, when you are in love, ‘price’ comes second.

If you can make your consumers fall head over heels and blindly in love with you then you can charge them anything. That’s the ultimate nirvana of Pricing.

[Guest article by Alok Kejriwal, Founder of Games2Win. Reproduced from Alok’s blog]

- Think about it – why was Digg so popular a few years back? Because you were pretty sure that you will find the most interesting piece of technology news there [though finding interesting news has become more social/democratic now, thanks to Facebook/Twitter].

- Why is Techmeme the homepage for most of technology news hungry readers/bloggers. Because, there is a certain trust (built over a period of time) that if the news is worth it, you will surely find it on Techmeme (in short, it saves time as you don’t have to go through so many sites).

- Why is HackerNews the homepage of geeks/hackers? Same as Techmeme, i.e. if an article is worth it, you will surely find it on HN. That is, predictability of trustworthy content (which is mostly startup/tech related), which otherwise is difficult to find.

- Why so many people hate ToI (TimesoffIndia) newspaper, yet read it? Because you know (alright, don’t admit!) that there is a good coverage of local news, apart from national news (spiced up with page 3 celebrities and bikini babes). In short, there is a certain predictability of ToI’s coverage (which goes with your taste).

- Why do we spend so much of money on security features/services? Right from computer (anti virus) to your car (anti theft), though probability of a mishap is always 50:50 (if it has to happen, it will happen).

The key here is Predictability. People pay for predictability. Predictability of a system, irrespective of the company, founding team, employees.

That is, the P word stands for

• Predictability – of the system, process and eventually, delivery.
• Process, which drives the predictability factor.

Why is Predictability of Your Service So Damn Important?

Because Predictability builds trust. Predictability builds loyalty. Your audience knows exactly why they read your blog, use your product, subscribe to your business services.

And predictability is not always frontend – it needs another P, i.e. Process discipline.

Think about it – Why is Flipkart able to scale up so fast? Because they have cracked the offline/delivery process and over a period of time, the system has built an element of predictability its customers are aware of (and appreciate).

As a startup, you have arrived when your product has a certain predictability built to it. That is, the system isn’t dependent on you, Mr. founder.

And predictability is a function of attributes of your offering (Flipkart: shipping/delivery. iXigo:cheapest tickets, Cleartrip:UX etc etc).

Say you run Pluggd.in, how do you build predictability? Is predictability in the number of posts? Depth? Breadth of coverage?

Answer this for your startup offering. Write down 5 different attributes of your service where you want to bring predictability.

And do remember that predictability also brings boredom – so break free.

What’s your opinion?

Image credit: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

4 Actionable  tips to increase productivity of employees at work

1. Announce to the world “What are you going to do today?” -Every morning like we are required to mark our attendance on the employee register, make it a rule for every employee (including the founder) to post on the company/department mailing list mentioning, “What are you going to do today?” and another mail at the end of the day saying, “What did i do today?”. It’s a basic ToDo list that you share with everyone who works directly with you. The accountability and commitment that would be required now is much higher than for a task list that sits in your private calendar. (Read: How to Keep up Your New Year Resolution [Seven Rules] )

I know a few companies who have tried this and every employee felt the difference in their own productivity. Suddenly there was competition amongst employees to make their ToDos longer and also achieve them. All this also because the founder was appreciating and questioning the tasks everyday.

2. Ask them “Is this the best possible? / Are you happy with this?” – So this guy who you expected to create this superb deck of slides for the client presentation has just delivered something worse than your 5 yr old kid would. You probably want to f*ck his a** off right there. Instead, ask him politely “Are you satisfied with this?”. And now wait for him to come up with a list of elements he can improve. Don’t phrase the question against him but with him.

You will see how much he can add to his own work that he had declared was complete. This would happen without the cost of sounding bossy or demanding.

3. What are you doing now? – So this mid level manager is enjoying his afternoon coffee and browsing through the FB pics. Drop by his cubicle and say a casual “Wassup?”, let him figure out the answer in a minute. Your work is done. Make him feel that somebody is around and is actually bothered about what he is doing today, doing now. The idea is not to make him answer you, but answer himself.

4. Let him set deadlines. – A basic rule while setting product time line is to let each of the members involved set their own time lines. This will make them more committed to it. If you think the dates are not as you expect to be, just follow step 2.

While managing a team, you can probably get all work done by asking simple questions. You only become bossy/snobby when you start answering your own questions.

Read: HR Management Tips

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

The Groupon Story –From WordPress Blog to $5Bn Company [Lean Startup]

Groupon started off as a WordPress blog and followed the cheapest way to do concept validation.

Building a Successful Business –The Mint.com Story (Interview with Aaron Patzer)

“Most investors told me not to bother to start a personal finance business. We had all the site securities  and product features, but the biggest thing we did for trust was to have a highly secured website. Trust is an emotional thing – you know if you are walking down a street in the night – the person coming from the opposite direction is a threat or not. Same thing with websites. We have a pixel perfect website that added to the trust.”

“Small is Big” – Of User Intent and How Great Products are Built on Small Features

One of the main reasons why users prefer one product over the other is trust – and you don’t gain trust by putting up your uptime numbers. You gain trust by helping your users in their decision, by helping them to not commit mistakes when they are using the product. You gain immense trust when your product exactly understands the user intent and is a ‘F**king Cool” experience.

Freemium Series

• Business Model 101: Making the most of the free users

• Business Model 101: The Free, The Mium and Mel Gibson

• Business Model 101: Number Crunching before you try Freemium

• Business Model 101: Why startups often fail at Freemium

Examples of Successful Product Companies/Collections

• Dropbox Founder, Drew Houston on Zero to Two Million User Jump [Lean Startup]

• Why Wesabe Lost to Mint? Product Lessons

• So you have an idea. Do you start with Product or PoC? [Aardvark Story]

• Product Management Resources For Startups [A Collection]

• Creating Differentiation in Crowded Market – Few Examples

Product Management Vis-à-vis Other Roles

• Product Messaging: What Language Does Your Product Speak?
• Use Case: Building Product For Negative Use Cases?
• Hiring: How Indian Startups should Hire Product Management Function?
• Sales: What do you sell? Holes or Drills?
• Base Role: How Products are conceived, discussed and Destroyed (Product Management)
• Usability: Can Product Usability be an afterthought?

We will restart the Product Strategy workshops in 2011 – expect more focus on this category, as we continue to explore the product startup ecosystem.