Upstart

I am going to keep you guys updated with the state of our marketing campaign here at Upstart. Firstly, it’s important to realize that the marketing efforts are based on everyone involved with the business – so here at Upstart that would be @pgager, @chrisincambo and myself, @jensendarren. We are all blogging, all tweeting and all promoting our startup in anyway that we can. We are studying, reading, researching, learning, testing and generally having a lot of fun getting the word out about our product! Not to mention, of course, we are building it too

So where are we at and where do we want to go?

• Blog running for about 1 month
• Analytics running for about 1 week
• 100 unique visitors
• 32 unique visitors in one day
• 3% have signed up to learn about our beta launch

We are a startup just like the clients who we hope will use our software. We have the same issues as every startup. We are experiencing the same hurdles, challenges, pit-falls and rewards. We are just like you, in fact! In a nutshell, without going into the specifics, we have an online, subscription based software that we want to tell the world about.  In particular, we want to tell our potential clients about us. Currently our potential clients are other software startup companies but this will broaden to encompas other industries once we reach this beachhead.

What are we doing about marketing?

Your reading it! No seriously, the blog plays a big part in our marketing campaign but it’s more than that. For example, we are already using our software with some of our other startups and clients to make them aware and get real early stage feedback on the product. Additionally, and this is the fun part, we are all heading out to Singapore this evening to attend a web startups conference – Echelon 2010. We have worked tirelessly over the last few weeks to get the product in a presentable state for this conference so that we can demonstrate it to any interested parties. Having said that the real benefit of attending this conference is to listen to other startups experiences and use that a way to feedback some features into our software.

Conclusion

Blogging, tweeting, emailing, talking, using and sharing the product early on as well as attending conferences like Echelon 2010 will certainly create some buzz. It will be interesting to check the Analytics for this site to see how many people we talk to in Singapore check us out and if they send a referal to their contacts. Currently, in our very young age that we are, we have had exactly 100 unique visitors (highest unique visits in one day was 32), which is not bad since we only started blogging regularly this month (and we only setup Analytics last week)!

The real win is that out of the 100 unique visitors we have have 3% signup to be notified of our product release! Again, not bad turnaround in my honest opionion! I would like to say a big thank you to all 3 of you!! I hope there will be many more to come!

I was reading something recently that dealt with the issue of partners, tending to take a rather negative view of the idea, whereas I tend to take a much more positive view of the arrangement. This got me thinking about what it was that I liked about partnerships for startups, and in particular for bootstrapping.

The big differentiation between bootstrapping and other startups is the investment required, both in time and money. Although bootstrapping requires a serious, ongoing commitment, it is not an all or nothing approach involving betting the proverbial farm on success. Bootstrapping would often mean that other sources of income are required (such as a steady job) during the startup phase. Bootstrapping also means in many cases, a limit to how much time can be dedicated per week or as someone once said a startup need only take as much time as a hobby. Despite this, I see the following main benefits of a partnership:

• By pooling your time, you can reduce lead times in getting your product to market
• Decisions need not be agonised over and a consensus position can often be reached quite quickly
• Partners normally (and perhaps should) bring a range of expertise to the venture. One person might be specialised in software development, another in business development and another in marketing. As long as there is a common vision, there is a much greater likelihood of success
• A recognition that the contribution made by each person will vary, depending on the stage of the product. Some people favour monitoring and measuring these inputs and apportioning equity accordingly, but I disagree. As long as everyone shows a willingness to contribute and make themselves available at all times, that is enough.
• The business maintains momentum by everyone constantly egging each other on to complete on time or challenge each other to achieve more in a shorter period of time. Procrastination, the enemy of productivity becomes almost impossible.
• Never have to hire. With 2 or more partners and the right, scalable, business model, you may never need to hire anyone. Imagine that; no contracts, no policies, no retention plans, no “us-them” and potentially, no office space !
• Never have to seek funding. In a partnership, you have x times many sources to emergency cash to see you through the tough times, (though of course as a good boostrapper, you should aim to fund yourself through strong cash flow)

So what makes a partnership work ?

• High levels of trust
• A common vision of the product, which develops over time though constant communication, but always remains focused on the shared objectives
• Free exchange of opinions and ideas and healthy debate over product direction
• Frequent communication, “poking” someone when something is coming on a little slow
• Responsiveness to requests and comments within a reasonable time frame
• An inherent acceptance of equal ownership of the product/idea
• A relationship that extends beyond a normal workplace colleague relationship. If you are not socializing with you partners, then you probably will be soon. This all goes to the heart of understanding your partners; their strengths and weaknesses and how best to get the most out of each other.
• Your partners are of a similar age/experience level. This will mean that there is a more even balance of power in the partnership and debates/decisions will more likely represent the consensus view rather than the more experienced partner.

Is it just me or is the story about the waterfall being bad and agile being good starting to get a little old? Maybe I mix in the wrong circles, but I don’t know a single company still using the waterfall. I only see software companies that use a flavour of agile or follow method-c (chaos). The waterfall’s no longer relevant, so why do I still hear about it so much? It’s like a broken record.

Our industry is already past the waterfall and we’ve now entered the reign of the agile native. Developers that have never known anything but agile. I know because I’m one of them, and so are the dozen people currently in the lab with me. Not one of us is over the age of thirty.

We still like to sit around the camp-fire sometimes and have first generation agile immigrants tell us tales of hardship and woe from the old-country, but they are just that, tales. They hold little relevance to our current day to day problems and hold less relevance with each day that passes.

Admittedly every hero needs a despicable villain to accentuate their own greatness, but it’s time to accept that the waterfall, our arch nemesis bit the dust years ago and all of us standing around in a circle kicking a corpse is not doing our cause any favours.

If we really must have an arch rival to attack then let’s start attacking method-c. Thanks to it’s ability to do a pretty good impersonation of agile, it’s a far more challenging and deserving opponent. I mean, it’s very difficult to sell agile to a team if they already think they are agile.

The best way to feed traffic to your blog is to consider each and every post you make as your baby. Take care what you do before, during and after each and every blog post that you make and you will see your traffic fly! Here is my own personal checklist of tasks I go through for each post I make.

Before: Take time to harvest some keyphrases

Use Google Keyphrase Tool to find a set of long-tail keyphrases that are related to your post. The long-tail keyphrases are the ones that are more specific and have fewer searches made and therefore less competition. Make a list of these keyphrases and include the most relevant and valuable ones in your title. Sprinkle the rest evenly throughout your post. Creating a captivating title is probably the most important part of creating a blog post -  so be sure to check out this post for other tips on creating blog post titles.

During: Write, write, link, write, break and breath…

I don’t want to say too much about this phase. All I will say is that the post should be focused, short, clear and provide some kind of value or interesting idea for your readers. Most importantly, you’ve got to have something to write about! I recently read a blog post on overcoming writers block and tips on creating a suitable environment for writing.

In between During and After: Don’t just hit Publish!

Wait, take a break, get others you know to read the draft, read the draft again yourself and make corrections. Maybe even wait 24 hours before hitting that publish button because you never know, you might have a great idea to add even more value to your post!

After: Now the fun starts!

This will be a list of things to do, not necessarily in any order (although I would Tweet first!):

• Tweet your post. Personally write the tweet yourself and shorten the link using bit.ly or ow.ly so that you can monitor click through rates and don’t forget to include a hash tag (many people are following these)
• Email all your colleagues that you have made a post and ask them to send out a Tweet on their time line
• Ask your colleagues to comment on your post – this gets the discussions rolling!
• Find related blog posts and make useful, relevant comments linking back to your post
• Search for related hash tags in Twitter and join a conversation and follow those with a similar interest
• Network with bloggers in your niche make them aware of your post and see if they will give you a mention in one of their posts
• Answer a related question on sites like StartUps.com, OnStartups.com or, if your a teckie like myself, on StackOverflow.com
• Send out a link to as many channels as you can, either directly or by feeding your Twitter time line through them. For example, I feed my Twitter time line thought Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also use Ping.fm to send out to a large number of social network sites in one shot to save you heaps of time! I have prepared a list of channels at the end of this post.
• Update your email signature to link to your latest post. An interesting idea I picked up from a problogger article on how to promote your next blog post.
• Respond quickly to the comments you receive on your post to keep the flow moving

Final Thoughts…

Please note that there are still other ways to promote your blog like offering a newsletter or RSS feed for example. However, I won’t discuss these here since I wanted to focus on how to promote each individual post. I’ll save wider blog promotion for another time!

List of blog promotion channels

Promote your blog post to as many of the following micro-blogging platforms, social networks, Wikis, directories and blog aggregators as possible. Here are the most popular that I can think of  (in no particular order):

Twitter
Tumblr
Identica
Facebook
StumbleUpon – but be careful here, I have had my account blocked in the past for submitting too many links from the same domain. It’s best to use StumbleUpon to submit other sites that you like too.
Plurk
Digg – check out this post on how to get to the front page on digg
Delicious
Reddit
FriendFeed
Squidoo
Wikipedia
HubPages
botw
dmoz
Technorati
MyBlogLog
BlogCatalog
BlogCarnival
vox
Blogs.com
AllTop
Regator

I just read an interesting post titled Why We Don’t Write User Stories Anymore on Pawel Brodzinski’s blog. As the title suggests he’s stopped doing user stories in favour of MMF’s, this was interesting to me as I’m of the opinion that the two aren’t mutually exclusive and in fact should be used in unison.

User stories are simply a writing style, a style where a specification is written from the users perspective as opposed to that of the developer or product owner. The advantage of this approach is in keeping the team focussed on value generation.

MMF is also focused on value generation, that’s what the second M is for. If something isn’t marketable to your customer then it has no perceived value, raising the question of whether it’s worth doing at all. But unlike user stories MMF is a state, not a writing style.

You see a story is evolutionary, it has a life cycle and passes through numerous states on its journey towards completion or the scrap heap. They usually start as an epic, some huge story with so little mental investment that it has nothing more than a name. Names like ‘Android Version’ or ‘Maps’ sitting precariously as the foot of the backlog.

Given that no one has a change of heart, as the stories above them get picked off, these epics creep up the backlog until the day that they’re so high they can no longer be ignored. They now get treated to some additional brain cycles and are broken down into a series of smaller stories, at this point the stories tend to gain some extra meta data in the form of a description or if you are of the BDD persuasion something in the following format “As a X, I want X, so that X”.

The lucky ones will eventually make it to a sprint planning meeting or the planning column of a Kanban board. At this point the story is split and broken down into even smaller stories, we use MMF as a benchmark in this process, a thin red line that we shouldn’t cross.

The story has now reached the critical stage in it’s journey, it’s now an MMF, it’s now important, it’s now a first class citizen and it is now that it will be showered with attention by the team, product owner and stakeholders. Decorated with well crafted acceptance tests and sent on its way to begin it’s glorious journey towards deployment!

Part of being Agile in software development is releasing early in order to pick up early adopters, evangelists and the like so that you can get some feedback and, more importantly from a marketing prospective, get your product in the the social feedback cycle.  This means that your product jumps from pure marketer-generated awareness and consideration channels to a mix that also includes user-generated channels on the social web. The diagram at the end of this post shows how the classic marketer-generated purchase funnel has been disrupted by social media.

The Reward

Done correctly the rewards can be fantastic! Your early adopters will love your product, write positive things about your product and generally be doing you a huge marketing favor!

The Danger

If your product is not well received, you may be in for a shock when the social communities backlash against your product and you find yourself in a situation that may feel difficult to get out of. Negative comments and discussions are left looming on the web for all to see for eternity and you might feel overwhelmed with failure…

Conclusion

While it is good to release early – make sure that you release only the features which are working without any problems. It does not matter if the feature is not quite finished – as long as it works and will not confuse your valuable early adopters!

Finally, however your product is received, always engage with the community! Monitor your product on the web to see who is talking about it, read what they are saying and most importantly, communicate directly with them. Ask them why they think the product is good / bad and keep the conversation public so that you can be seen to be an open and transparent startup. Convert doubters into evangelists (by making the product work in the best way possible), and keep your evangelists happy by continuing to offer them pre-release previews of your product so they can continue to spread the good word!

Social Feedback Cycle

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Classic Purchase Funnel becomes the Social Feedback Cycle

I’m off to echelon27 in a couple of weeks with the co-founders of Upstart and it will be a great opportunity to see what is going on in the region as well as mixing with some great minds from parts of the world. Startup communities are springing up all over the region with country based community sites, forums and meets. Some of the most active are in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong but there are growing communities in places like Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia also.

Many of these startups are creating mobile and web apps and many of them are bootstrapping, especially in countries where the seed funding/incubator market is still in its infancy. The International Finance Corporation cites lack of access to capital as one of the reasons why certain economies may have proportionately fewer service based startups. Bootstrapping (the art of doing much with a little) offers some interesting possibilities, not the least of which is to avoid (at least in the early stages) onerous business registration and reporting requirements that exist in many developing countries.

One of the keys to their success will be to glean knowledge from startup success stories in other places and applying them to their own situation. Consuming as much information as possible from blogs, forums and print will help to build understanding of where and how to market their idea/product. Building enough confidence to participate in global forums and other community discussions will also be important in order for to gauge how their product will be received in a global marketplace. It is also be important for to stay well grounded, remembering to create solutions that the creators themselves would use, rather than taking to flights of fancy.

Despite the challenges, this region has shown a remarkable ability to adopt technology very early out of both curiosity and necessity. Take for example the very high rate of hand phone vs. fixed line ownership in countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. This, combined with a very young and growing population and increasing interest from foreign firms seeking growth opportunities, is certainly going to make things interesting in coming years.

We all feel compelled to fill the day by being ‘busy’, whether or not we have something REALLY important looming or we are in a lull between mission critical moments. Either way, there are numerous distractions awaiting us that demand our attention, whether or not that attention is deserved; email, twitter, facebook, social news sites, blogs, forums, YouTube etc etc. To quote:

“Communication is becoming an end it itself, rather than a means to an end, or outcome” Jason Freid.

Bootstrapping, in particular often requires that we make optimal use of our time as it is often done in snatches between the job that pays the bills, family and leisure.

So how do we go on a low information diet ?

Start by digesting the information on your terms and at your choosing, rather than having is avalanche into your Inbox, your screen or your phone. Tag and file newsletters, emails and alerts automatically for later digestion. This will help to separate general ‘noise’ and what is really important to the here and now. Sure you need to keep up with the goings on, but not all day, every day.

• Unsubscribe to all those lists that you signed up for over the years.

• Don’t bother following celebrities or people who have no relation to your life or your interests.

• Get out of of the habit of browsing the news or general surfing. Stay informed with Google alerts and read them in weekly digests.

• Change your homepage to something simple; a short to do list for the day (no more than 5 items) or a sub-page on your favourite website with a more specific focus.

• Set aside specific time to check your email, answer blog posts. Shut it down the rest of the time.

• Shut down your chat channels except for specific times of the day. If something is urgent enough, they’ll call !

Take a step back, re-assess your direction and re-focus your energy on the things that are really important and produce results. Spend more time with family/friends (with your phone offline !). Minimise interruptions, the enemy of productivity.

“Very rarely is a question important enough to stop people from doing what they’re doing. Everything can wait a couple of hours, unless it is a true emergency. We want to get rid of interruption as much as we possibly can, because that’s the real enemy of productivity.” Jason Freid.

We all experience different workloads/demands/stresses at various times, so the trick is be prepared for the busy times by becoming leaner and more focused. This may mean that you may appear at times casual and relaxed, (or even absent) but hey, the results will speak for themselves !

Today the subject of time sheets reared its ugly head. Someone was actually trying to make the argument that time sheets had a role to play in an agile organisation. In my opinion once you’ve reached the point at which you’ve so far distanced yourself from value generation that the metric used to gage performance is time, with no relation to throughput or quality, then it’s time to scuttle the ship.

I would rather have one employee who turned up for an hour each day and added real, quantifiable value than ten staff who put in eight hours of time wasting crap. You know who I’m talking about, they make up 80% of the work force!

Tracking time is only acceptable when it’s measured in context, for any business involved in production that context should be value generation. Scrum and Kanban already have this covered with velocity and lead time,  both use time but the key difference is that value generation makes up the other half of the equation.

If for billing purposes you need to figure out how many developer hours have gone into a project, then take the number of people on the team, the start date and the completion date and do the maths. Don’t subject the whole team to accounting for every minute of every day, it’ll do nothing but create mindless drones and mountains of hugely inaccurate data.

If that maths is too complex because you or your team are juggling multiple projects at the same time, then stop and repeat after me; multi tasking is bullshit. Take one project and see it through to completion then start the next, if you have three months to complete two projects, then spend six week on one and then six weeks on the next, do not run them in parallel. Switching between tasks generates waste, time sheets generate waste, waste + waste does not equal agility!

In this post, I intend to provide some ideas on using Twitter as a marketing tool. If you are not sure what Twitter is, then I have included an excellent video Twitter in Plain English at the end of this post.

Let’s assume that you already have a twitter account and you know the basics of using Twitter. So what else can you do and how to leverage the power of Twitter as a marketing tool?

Keep your tweets personal

I don’t recommend automating tweets too often. Sure you can write tweets to send out at a later date but try to avoid automatic tweets for example, when creating a new blog post. It is far more personal to hand craft your tweet after you have posted your blog post. Your have a far greater chance that someone will click on the link if you do.

Mix up your tweet styles

Examine your Twitter timeline right now. How does it look? If your timeline does not appear to have a mixed style of tweets it could put off potential followers, or worse still, some of your followers may unfollow you! So what do I mean by tweet style? Your tweets should be a mix of:

• occasional thoughts
• statements
• quotations
• questions
• pleas for help
• links to interesting news or articles you have read
• and, of course, links to your blog, your product or service that you are promoting

Your tweets should NOT be all links for example – your followers will get link overload! Your tweets should NOT be always about your product either – your followers will get tired very quickly (even if you think your product is worth talking about 24/7!). If you mix your tweets up a little using the different styles mentioned above, you will keep your followers engaged.

Use your Twitter profile name everywhere

If you have an online persona then try to use the same name for all your online marketing efforts. Obviously use it for your Twitter name, but also use it as your screen name on other sites which you interact with, your email address, your Skype ID, MSN ID, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn – in fact everything that ties your contribution to the websphere as possible. Then it is easy for interested parties to tie all your online dots together simply by Googling your Twitter name!

Make use of Twitter tools

There are many tools available that have been built on top of the Twitter data services. Most you can live without, but there are a few that you can’t – particularly if you are using Twitter for marketing. Here are some of my own personal recommendations:

Hootsuite - From the site: “With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.”. Probably the most useful part of this statement is being able to measure your success. For example, if your post includes a link and you “shrink” the link using the Ow.ly url service that is provided with Hootsuite, then you can monitor the click through of that link directly in Hoot suite.  Another great thing about Hootsuite is that you can have multiple Twitter profiles (as well as Facebook, WordPress and others) and have a team of tweeters working on your accounts with different logins and access restrictions. Since it is a web application, written using Javascript, it will work on pretty much any browser so you can manage your campaign wherever you are. Not to mention, of course, there is an iPhone app available too. Be sure to check it out!

Twitterfeed – Automatically feeds all your blog posts to Twitter (and more). I know I mentioned earlier that I don’t recommend doing this since it is always better to write a personal tweet to promote a blog post, at least you know that this service is available and is probably the best one to use for this purpose.

Tweetbeep – If your familiar with Google Alerts then Tweetbeep will require no introduction since it is alterts for Twitter. From the site: “Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates”

Twittercounter – This services is essentially the Alexa for Twitter accounts. You can monitor number of followers over time, number of tweets over time, number of retweets over time and several other metrics. More are being added all the time. This is a very useful service to measure how effective individual tweets are.

Trendistic – This useful tool allows you to examine trends in the twittersphere. Just type in term and see how it has been trending recently. This is useful to see how effective your campaign is to get others to tweet about your product or service.

Tweet at least once a day

You need to keep your timeline fresh with at least one tweet a day. This keeps your followers in the loop and ensure that they don’t forget about you!

New to Twitter?

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