Another Video From Aaaron Patzer, Founder of Mint -
First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.
Anyway, some of my big takeaways:
“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”
“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.”
“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”
“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”
“There’s a big difference between adding a feature to an existing product and building a product around a philosophy.” — Dustin Curtis, I don’t laugh at startup ideas anymore
I wrote a response to a post on Smaller Indiana by Doug Karr about the 21 Fund and their mission.
In particular, I was responding to this quote: “(Steve Hourigan) shared that the benefit of the fund really isn’t the money as much as it is the education that they could be providing companies with the right resources.”
My comment:
“I really enjoyed this post and your commentary on the 21 Fund, although it has left me confused about what the 21 Fund’s mission is - but I think that’s the point. Their mission isn’t what I thought it was or what most people think it is.
I’d be interested in hearing more about what “education” the 21 Fund is providing. I think the industry of educating entrepreneurs is already oversubscribed. I shudder to think how many productive hours have been wasted teaching a group of “entrepreneurs” the different ways to finance a startup. I say wasted because most people who consume this knowledge will never end up starting a business or are years away from using it.
Financing a startup is just one of those subjects that comes up a lot. There are plenty of others like which corporate entity to choose and how to hire your first employees.
This type of entrepreneur education feels good but it doesn’t move the needle. This type of generic education is a Google search away and the doers, the people who start businesses and create value from nothing, don’t usually get their entrepreneurship education from sitting in a classroom.
Most of the education someone needs when starting a business is very time sensitive and subject specific. For instance with Pocket Tales, my biggest issue today, June 9th, is redesigning our application UI. We also have a lingering issue of hiring a tech lead, and that is actually a place I think the 21 Fund could really help the state of Indiana.
How can we better match technical talent, whether it’s software “technical” or medical “technical,” with business talent to form stronger founding teams?
How can we imbue more people in Indiana with the attitude of “screw it, let’s do it,” instead of training them to sit in classrooms consuming knowledge, further delaying the act of creating until they know all the answers?
As you and I both know Doug, you never know all the answers. You only hope you can find the right answer when you need it, and you don’t have the time or the resources to think much beyond today’s bottleneck.
Just my two cents about most of the entrepreneur education I see.”
“Nail it before you scale it” — @msuster http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/06/08/steven-blank-kills-it-at-greycroft-ceo-summit/
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“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso
Learning From Game Design: 11 Gambits for Influencing Behavior -
For obvious reasons (i.e. Pocket Tales is a social reading game) this link is extremely valuable to me.
The biggest choice you’ll make in looking at this list is what gambits not to implement. Focus is key, especially if your application isn’t a game, so decide what behaviors or outcomes are the biggest priority, and design your “game” elements around those.
“His scarcest resource was his youth and the energy he had to put into startup ventures when he has no kids, no mortgage and no major encumbrances.” — Mark Suster’s Blog
Have you ever heard someone say that you should sell the benefits not the features?
I don’t get it - I mean, I GET it, but really I don’t get it.
I heard this a few times when I was at Cantaloupe.tv and I was responsible for a sales quota. I heard it from sales consultants who would come in to coach the team and I would also hear it from amateur sales consultants - in other words, a sales guy who has had some success selling but has never had to teach sales.
I know what they’re getting at. They’re trying to caution against going into a sales scenario and giving a presentation or having a conversation that’s just a feature dump. Usually, when you go into a meeting and do a feature dump, you end up with the potential client/customer/user thinking “So what?”
“Don’t tell me about features, tell me how this is going to benefit me.” That is the general idea.
That makes sense for extremely complicated products - like something IBM would sell - but it doesn’t doesn’t make sense for a lot of consumer internet companies.
The customers of CIC’s have the advantage of having probably tried a lot of your competitors’ products. They probably came looking for you, rather than the other way around, and because they’re so well informed about the market, they know how certain features will benefit them better than you do.
Thus, when they come to your website, they want to very quickly find out what features you have to see if you are finally the company that can solve their problem or if your feature set also has gaps.
What they don’t want to find on your website is some obscure language about “benefits.”
I encountered this today when I went to Tungle.me. The first language I see on their homepage is:
The first two are benefits, and the last is a feature. This tells me little to about how the application actually works. If I go to their “learn more” page, it’s a lot more of the same thing.
Does anybody actually go to Tungle.me not expecting it to provide all these benefits? Does anybody actually get any value out of the text on their homepage? This sounds like the language you’d use if you were trying to get me to COME to your website. I’m already there so I must know how you might be able to benefit me. Now tell me more.
Compare this to Proposable. Sure, their homepage has “benefits” language - “Painless Proposals.” but what you can’t miss is the big “Features” tab at the top of the navigation, and even better than that, their “Pricing” page outlines the features and costs perfectly.
I still need to try it to know if it’s for me, but I feel a lot more confident investing my time into trying Proposable having at least reviewed the feature set at a glance, than investing my time into Tungle.me.
“Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. But if everybody is looking for me to make their decisions we’ll never get anything done. I felt like I had done the hard bit and chosen people that I truly respected and I would rather empower them to make decisions and accept consequences.” — Mark Suster http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/