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: 

• Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet
• Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organization
• Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up

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.

“…a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model.” -Steve Blank, Teaching Entrepreneurship-Logistics

Emphasis on the “temporary.” A lot of people like to say they’re interested in startups (just look at a lot of twitter profiles, you’ll see), but that seems ridiculous to me. Startups have their charms, but most of the fun seems to be had by those running profitable, sustainable companies. That’s what I’m interested in and the sooner we can get Pocket Tales there the better.

It’s like when people say they love puppies. I wonder if they hate when their puppies become mature dogs. Puppies make a ton of mess and are mostly a chore. No. I’d much rather have a fully trained dog.

I feel lucky to be interested in something that isn’t so fleeting. Puppy lovers are just setting themselves up for heartbreak.

The problem is, it’s hard to find a fully trained dog suited to you and your personality and that’s true of companies too. It be near impossible for me to get hired as the CEO of a profitable consumer web application that is as much aligned with my interests and skill set as Pocket Tales (or let’s be honest, the CEO of any promising web application, aligned or not).

So I put up with the startup mess, and even learn to appreciate its charms, because one day it will be a fully trained (i.e. “profitable) company. I’ll probably even miss how in the “startup” days it was easy to change direction or how quickly we could make big decisions.

Profitable companies, like fully trained dogs, just aren’t as easy to teach new tricks.

If our first press release at Pocket Tales has taught me anything it’s that the press:

1. Doesn’t read closely
2. Is not as concerned about facts as you might think

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. I only have two data points to speak of and they’re both online publications. No offense to my fellow bloggers, but your average print publication does a lot more fact checking than your average blog.

Our first press release was announcing our participation in the 2010 SXSW Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition (we finished as a top 3 finalist if you were wondering.) I’ll admit the only reason we bothered to write a press release is because we knew we would very likely have our story picked up by Inside Indiana Business and if you follow IIB then you know for the majority of their stories they just publish the press release.

Except, IIB wrote a short introductory paragraph to our press release with a few mistakes. Here’s what they wrote:

Two former Orr Indiana Entrepreneurial Fellowship winners have been asked to pitch their new online reading video game at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition, next week in Texas. The developers of Pocket Tales say the game helps children develop critical reading skills.

Here’s what’s wrong:

• The Orr Fellowship isn’t something you win. It’s a program you’re admitted to, a lot like a fraternity or a sorority
• Pocket Tales is not a VIDEO game. Not even close.
• We’re not developers in the technical sense of the word. Founders would have been a more accurate word

The second news outlet that picked up our story was a casual blog called Tech Cocktail. In their story they misrepresented our launch date and misspelled my name multiple times.

We’re grateful for the coverage and if anyone from Inside Indiana Business or TechCocktail is reading this I hope you don’t blacklist stories about Pocket Tales, but it was an important lesson for me to learn about working with the press - no matter what facts you provide them, they still might make their own assumptions and get your story wrong.

Last week, my partner Yaw Aning and I were preparing information to file our taxes. Like an old couple that’s been married so long they hardly notice the passing of time, we suddenly realized that very day was our one year anniversary for forming Pocket Tales.

(I’ll pause for gratuitous congratulations)

I didn’t attach any significance to the anniversary until I read a startup failure story about EventVue and how they tried a number of product “pivots” in an attempt to save their dying business.

In this scenario it sounds bad. It sounds like pivoting is a characteristic of failure - but that assumption is wrong.

Fred Wilson, the legendary VC blogger, once noted that 2/3 of the successful companies he’s invested in, had to make a hard pivot some time in their rise to success. Even EventVue says their mistakes included not pivoting sooner and not fully committing to the pivot.

And that story about EventVue is what reminded about something I’ve tried to sweep under the Pocket Tales rug. It suddenly gave a significance to the anniversary. Pocket Tales has pivoted 4 times in one year.

For those who don’t know, I’ll recount them for you:

December 2008 - We form “pocket tales” at Indianapolis Startup Weekend as a children’s eBook iPhone app. The only money spent is on a domain name.

February 2009 - We become “Pockettales” and try to sell a service helping self-published authors convert their printed books into iPhone apps. We spend half of our startup budget (roughly $10K) on development. With our connections at Author Solutions we think we have a quick path to making significant money.

August 2009 - Although Author Solutions says they’re definitely going to do something with the iPhone in the 4th quarter, we decide that the idea isn’t big enough to wait that long (our 20’s are fleeting). We decide to go after something bigger and more worth our time - creating a children’s ebook platform. We are bolstered by the positive response we receive at SproutBox. The old direction goes to http://www.booktoapp.com to die.

November 2009 - “Pocket Tales” has a severe identity crisis and it goes beyond how we capitalize and space the words. What are we? Are we selling eBooks? Are we a recommendation engine? Are we a reading game? We decide we’re all of them and start designing mockups. We spend a significant portion of our remaining budget.

January 2010 - We learn that the game aspect of our application is way more compelling than we thought. Teachers, parents, and kids all seem to love it. At the same time, they’re none too excited about eBooks, which is fine, because selling eBooks is riddled with obstacles (digital rights licensing anyone?) and building a game is fun. (I still believe one day we’ll sell eBooks)

Pivoting doesn’t mean we’re going to be successful, but if you remember the majority of successful startups pivot, which means pivoting is a valuable skill for any startup founder to have. If you look at the history of Pocket Tales, I think it’s hard to argue that we haven’t learned to pivot or that we’re incapable of fully committing to even a drastic change in the right direction. (Just don’t call us “flakey”)

One of my favorite short stories is “Porcelain and Pink” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story starts out with an introduction and a phrase I’ve memorized for some reason “Mistaken identity is the old rusty pivot upon which the plot turns.” I guess I memorized it because it gave me a less cliche way of referring to a cliche.

One of the greatest cliches in the life of startups is startups pivot. Next time you feel like the world is asking you to do the impossible and predict your startup’s future (like how much money you’re going to need to raise in 24 months), give them your best answer, and then focus more of your energy on convincing them of your ability to pivot.

Most smart people will trust that more than your ability to predict how many employees you’ll need two years from now for a business that isn’t even making money yet.

I rarely think of entrepreneurs as inventors, which is a shift in perception compared to just 20 years ago. I suppose it has something to do with how much innovation today comes from a semi-intangible realm - the realm of software, the internet, and information - compared to the more tangible realm of lightbulbs and bifocals. Edison and Franklin were thought of as inventors first and entrepreneurs second, if they were thought of entrepreneurs at all.

Furthermore, Society’s prototypical inventor is the person who assembled the product that ended up in the hands of customers. No one thinks of the “business” person behind the scenes who established the company, set up the team, raised the capital, etc as an inventor.

Here’s a test for you - Have you ever thought of Sam Walton, Ted Turner, or Mary Kay Ash as inventors? I didn’t think so.

Let’s change our vocabulary for a minute. Look at it this way -

Sam Walton is an inventor. He invented the big retail company.

Ted Turner is an inventor. He invented the modern media company.

Mary Kay Ash is an inventor. She invented a new kind of direct sales company.

Why is changing the language such a big deal? Because we’re more willing to accept failure as part of the inventor’s path to success than we are the entrepreneur’s.

Oh I know everyone talks about how most startups fail and you have to be willing to accept failing over and over again, but there is a huge psychological gap in the subtlety of looking at what you’re building as a new invention vs. a new business.

Edison’s famous quote which by now has become a cliche - “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - sums up how we perceive inventors. On the other hand, if Mary Kay Cosmetics hadn’t worked, would we have painted Ash as succeeding in finding one way to sell cosmetics that won’t work?

No. We would have just said she failed.

The reason this mental exercise has become important to me is because Pocket Tales hasn’t progressed as planned. Our actual path hasn’t even resembled Plan B, Plan C, or even Plan D. Additionally, the “failures” aren’t coming from likely places. It’s not that we’ve put a product out into the world and it got rejected. We haven’t gotten that far yet. If we had, it’d be easy to see the parallels between building a lightbulb that “failed” and needing to take it back to the shop and try again, or “iterate.” That type of failure is perfectly understandable and socially acceptable.

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The Indianpolis-based mobile answer service ChaCha and I have had a tumultuous relationship.

It started out great, like most relationships do. I’m talking about Autumn 2007 through Winter 2008. I loved ChaCha and I used it often for serious reasons (What’s the address of the Broad Ripple Brew Pub?), for curiosity’s reasons (What does the Pope’s brother do?), and for laughs (NSFW).

I showed ChaCha off to all my friends. They loved it and used it to.

Then something happened. I’m not sure what and I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but in ChaCha’s quest for a sustainable business model, their service completely fell off a cliff. I stopped getting responses to my questions, or if I did, it would come 30 minutes later. Sometimes I was told I was out of questions (see below). Sometimes they would ask me multiple tedious questions about what phone I was using, and after I answered they would then tell me I was out of questions (to this I would scream outloud “But I haven’t asked a question in 4 months!)

I stopped using ChaCha then, which should have ended the drama, but there was another event that would really add to it…

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When Yaw and I decided to start Pocket Tales before we had a programmer on board (we must be idiots right?) we knew hiring was going to be one of our biggest, most important challenges.

To be frank, it’s been a much bigger challenge that we expected, but a few months ago we made our first technical hire. Jeromy Darling joined our team just before Thanksgiving as our frontend developer. This particular hire came as a surprise for a couple reasons 1) He’s located in Minneapolis and we were sure we wanted someone from Indianapolis 2) He wasn’t referred to us and usually the best hires are referrals.

We’re ecstatic with the result, but it was a long road. Below are some details of our process which should help anyone out there trying to hire technical resources in Indianapolis:

Our Strategy

Hiring is important but we believed it was also something that could still be bootstrapped and done well with a lot of time and effort, something Yaw and I had plenty of. Our strategy was to offer a compelling position (livable salary, co-founder’s portion of equity, cool job, great company mission) and to blast it out to as many relevant friends and sites as we could.

Additionally, we knew were going to need to hire multiple skill sets to complete our application, so we posted 4 positions (Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, Graphics/UI Designer, Rich Internet Applications Developer); however, our intention was to only make one hire in the beginning and we were leaning towards hiring a Frontend or Backend Developer first.

What We Were Looking For

Here were the most important qualities we were looking for when we started our search. I put them in order of importance:

1. Experience building web applications
2. Unbridled enthusiasm for our idea
3. Available to work full-time
4. Ability to fill multiple technical roles (e.g. Can do both graphic design and frontend programming)
5. Desire to work for a startup
6. Located in Indianapolis
7. Able to serve as a technical lead

These qualities were required for all 4 of the open positions we posted.

Sources of Job Applicants

Below is a list of how applicants heard about our job openings. Most of these are sites where we posted the job ourselves; however, a few are job aggregator sites. In total we had 145 applicants and we invited 23 for phone interviews. We invited 2 people for second round interviews, although that number would likely have been higher if we decided to fill some of the other positions we posted.

Website (http://www.pockettales.com/)
35 total applicants
7 invited for phone interviews
It probably goes without saying that you should post your job openings on your website or your blog. Note: This “source” is a catch-all bucket for us. If someone contacted us and we didn’t know where they came from we put them down as “website.”

Craigslist (http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/)
34 total applicants (including Jeromy whom we hired)
5 invited for phone interviews
We only posted our position to the “Indianapolis” section of Craigslist. I wanted to post it to more cities but the Craiglist spam bots are aggressive and undoubtedly would have flagged and removed my multiple listings. As it turned out, my listings did get flagged the first time because our 4 job openings contained a lot of similar language. Despite the spam bots, you will get the most spam from Craiglist.

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There are certain world changing innovations that few if any people could have predicted. A lot of web 2.0 fits into this category - Twitter for example. I think even Facebook’s influence was a huge surprise as was blogging.

On the other hand, there are inevitable world changing innovations that almost everyone could have guessed would be successful. I’ve always said the dominance of ebooks is inevitable. I think the iPhone was an obvious idea just hard to execute.

Another inevitable idea I think few people are talking about is wireless electricity.

I think wireless electricity will be as big if not a bigger trend than battery technology, which seems to be on everyone’s “hot” list. (People talk about batteries the way they used to talk about plastics) People are working on this, and the technology is getting ever closer to being put to use.

Take a moment and really imagine a world of wireless power. Get past the joy of not having to plug in your cell phone, and think about bigger things that require power.

Take your car for instance.

People are pretty skeptical about electric cars. Yeah, we all talk about how cool they are, but most of us don’t consider ever owning one. Recharging your car just seems impractical.

But what if instead of recharging a battery, your car is actually powered by electricity that comes from towers built alongside the road? Hell, if Verizon can make almost the entire U.S. map red with cell phone coverage (my apologies to AT&T and Luke Wilson), certainly we can get full wireless electricity coverage in major cities?

What if airplanes were powered by electricity from solar-powered satellites? How cheap could we make it to fly from San Francisco to New York?

Okay, that last one is REALLY far-fetched, but that’s the point. I can’t begin to guess how wires and heavy batteries are currently standing in the way of some major innovations, and how breaking free from these wires will open the flood gates.

If I was in any way connected to technology around wireless electricity, I would work 24/7 to commercialize it. The possibilities are endless and about as much of a sure thing as you’re going to get in revolutionary technologies.

Few people know this, but Author Solutions located in Bloomington, Indiana publishes more titles per year than ANY other major publisher, and by a long shot.

How do they do it? For starters, they don’t discriminate when it comes to authors.

Author Solutions is in the business of helping authors self-publish their books. They can help with almost everything whether its editing, creating a cover, printing, commissioning illustrations, setting up a website, getting distribution, email marketing - you name it and Author Solutions probably offers a service to help your book succeed.

This is a big deal, especially when the publishing industry’s world has been flipped upside down by BOOMING ebook technologies like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble nook.

What’s more, in this internet age of the “user is in control,” self-publishing is the ultimate example of independence. Traditional publishing companies are just “the man” who is keeping you from sharing your thoughts with the world, and with the low cost of internet marketing and print-on-demand technologies, who needs them?

Followers in the publishing industry are very aware of Author Solutions influence. When someone publishes that many titles how can you ignore them? And while its true that a huge majority of their titles never see any commercial success, more traditional publishers are starting to look at self-published successes to find their next hit.

Take for instance Author Solutions’ recent partnership with Harlequin. Harlequin is essentially using AS to help find shining stars that would otherwise go overlooked.

(See More + Video After the Fold)

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ExactTarget continues to be Indianapolis’ premier darling. Even the location of their offices on Monument Circle, the heart of downtown, is the perfect analogy for the position they hold in the Indianapolis tech community.

As much as I look up to and try to emulate ExactTarget, I think too often their success is used as proof that the Indianapolis startup community is thriving.

As this Indianapolis Business Journal article jokes, the Indianapolis tech community didn’t get ExactTarget back in 2000: “They couldn’t even raise $1 million,” recalled Kidd, now a senior vice president at Indianapolis-based Walker Research, who admits to scratching his head at just what the entrepreneurs were proposing to do back then.”

What I wonder is, has this mentality really changed? If ExactTarget started today, and email marketing was just as much a new concept as it was back in 2000, would it have an easier time getting funded?

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about Indianapolis, but the vitality of a startup community is proven by the accomplishments of…well, startups. ExactTarget hasn’t been a startup for 9 years.