Thinking of a Startup? Spend 50% of your time thinking about customer acquisition

When I started StoryTruck, I spent a lot of time thinking about the product, it’s features, the user experience, what devices to support and so on. I barely spent anytime thinking about marketing or customer acquisition strategies and that was a mistake. If I ever do another start-up, I’ll spend 50% of my time thinking about customer acquisition strategies and the other 50% of my time thinking about the product. It’s not that I didn’t know or realize that building a great product alone is not sufficient to attract customers but the mistake I and many other entrepreneurs make is in thinking that having a finished product is absolutely essential before thinking about marketing. This thinking not only costs you time but also prevents you from building certain important viral features into the product.

In StoryTruck’s case the only way people could tell their friends about the app was by tapping the Share button and sharing a message on their Facebook, Twitter or Google+ accounts. In reality, very few users, less than 0.5% of the users took this action. Sharing was an afterthought and not integral to the product. On the other hand think about Groupon, Dropbox etc where sharing was baked into the product, which gave the user a real reason to share the product.

Thinking about customer acquisition early on does not only reduce your marketing cost but also helps you in getting the exponential growth that’s required for a startup to survive. In the absence of word-of-mouth marketing for your product, you can at most achieve a linear growth, the slope rising in proportion to your marketing budget and that’s not good enough “traction” for the angels or the VCs you may be approaching for any funding.

Here are two great books I would recommend for entrepreneurs, marketers and product managers. Both of them are on “Growth Hacking”, the buzzword in the industry today.

This is a fantastic book that lists all the marketing channels and puts a structure around experimenting various channels and evaluating them.

This one is a fantastic read and helps you rethink marketing in the digital age.

Here are some free resources on the web:

The key variables in viral marketing

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/

What are your experiences? Are small and medium sized organizations using “growth hacking” techniques too? Please share any other web resources or books that you may have read and are along the same lines.

Important Disclosure: I haven't written this post to generate affiliate revenue but I am using Amazon affiliate links to experiment this channel. If you click on this link and buy the book, I'll get a referral fee.

Why Mobile-First Strategy May Not Be The Right Strategy For You.

I learned the hard way that a mobile-only strategy or a mobile-first strategy may not work in all cases. I was rebuilding StoryTruck two years ago and there was everything going in favor of taking the mobile-first approach. 

Given that I was trying to create a Netflix-like service with StoryTruck except that it carried children's books that were to be read instead of movies to be watched, I took the mobile-first approach while considering the following points:

1. Mobile devices and Tablets are a better fit over desktops and laptops to read bedtime stories.
2. We could launch our service quickly if we focused all our resources on the mobile app. This was important given that I was bootstrapping my startup.
3. If the mobile app took off, I could launch the website in a couple of months.

It took about seven months to get our first mobile app which was an iPad app in the store. I could write a separate blog post sometime on the naive assumptions I made on building an iPad app and getting it approved. It then took us another six months to launch the Android app. While we were busy building apps, negotiating content and uploading them, we didn't have enough time to market our app. So, for more than a year our apps were only discoverable through a search in the app store and that wasn't good. 

In taking the mobile-first approach I realized that I lost the most important thing - Free Traffic via search engines. It's important to build a website even if it's not a fully functional website and does not have feature parity with your mobile app because:

1. If your user is looking for something, chances are that they go to a search engine first before visiting the app store.
2. There is more information on optimizing your site for search engines than optimizing your app's meta data for app-store searches. 
3. It's easy for people to click on a shared link and see your website than download an app.

it took me two years to get this fact and I created a search engine optimized site. Today, organic searches delivers the biggest traffic to our site.

What is your experience? Share your thoughts.

Disecting LinkedIn's New iPhone App

LinkedIn launched it's new iPhone app on Oct 23rd. Here's a quick review of the app.

Home Screen:
1. The slider-design approach puts all menu items at the top level instantly. Just swipe right and you'll see all the top level menu items such as jobs, companies and groups that you can navigate to.

On the top you'll see "Home" icon/menu item that displays selected current news feed items like a rotating banner on your web page. This is the most annoying of all features I have encountered with this app. It could have been better designed by displaying the total number of unread stories instead of using the web-style rotational banners.

Below the Home menu/icon is your "Profile". Tapping on it shows you all your recent activity, your connections, your groups and the companies you are following. The screen also lets you update your profile from the device - pretty cool!

Notifications:
2. Notifications occupy the top bar on the screen and are visible from the Home screen. If you are browsing jobs or participating in groups, the notifications are not visible to you. I wish they had made notifications visible from any screen like in the Facebook app. Another unexpected behavior of the notifications design is that when you tap on any notification icon, the screen slides from right to left leaving you starring at the screen for sometime to comprehend this behavior. The ideal approach would have been to slide the screen from the top or simply not use a slider approach at all.

News Feed Screen:
The news feed screen shows "Top Stories" on the top and then continues with other items in your feed. It's generally well done but the comment box at the bottom gives a little web feel to it which could have been avoided by making it a simple text link. There is no added advantage to making it an input box.

Top News Stories:
This screen will throw you off a bit at first. You'll notice that some stories use a large image with text super imposed over it and others use an image and text combination. This interface looks a little confusing as your eye constantly shifts when you are trying to scroll down and pick a story that interests you. LinkedIn for no specific reason has chosen to go with a 1-2 pattern on this screen. Every third story is shown as a large image. It would have been more easier on the eye if they went with a single pattern instead of this alternating pattern.

Functionality:
Overall the app exposes almost all the features that are currently available via the web and makes it easy to participate in group discussions, browse job listings or catch up on the news feed.  

5 Important Qualities of a Great Elevator Pitch

This was the second time I was at Tie, silicon valley to witness elevator pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs.  Eight randomly selected people got an opportunity to give a 2 min pitch to a panel of four VCs and a crowd of about 100 people. Tie conducts a pitchfest every two months and you can find additional details on their website at http://sv.tie.org/

Here are the key takeaways.

Incorporate the following into your pitch:

1. Who you are : Establish trust and build credibility at the beginning. This is the best opportunity to say why they should believe that you can get the job done.

2. Introduce your company: Try to describe what your product or service does very quickly. Here are some good and bad examples.

• We make it easier for you to manage your documents. (Bad: It is missing "how you do it")
• We try to increase employees motivation by rewarding and recognizing them ( Good: covers what and how) 

3. Describe the problem or pain you are trying to address: Tell why would someone care for your product/service

4. Market size: Describe the market size. Is it $10M ,$100M or a $1B market.

5. Conclude with a punch line and state what you are looking for. For e.g. you could say, "we want to be the Netflix of children's books and we are looking for a $1M to invest in our team and grow the company"

  

Here are some excellent tools and resources to help you craft a better pitch.

1. HBS Elevator Pitch Builder

2. Email Elevator Pitch Template

3. One Sentence Pitch Template

Pratham Books Boards the StoryTruck

This blog was originally published on http://blog.prathambooks.org/2011/06/pratham-books-boards-storytruck.html.

Do you remember your childhood days when you would sit around your uncles, aunts, grandmas or grandpas to listen to a story? I do! I remember my grandmother who narrated Ramayan, Mahabarat and other mythological stories. We would never get tired of listening to her stories. She had read those mythological books so many times and never went wrong. It was a treat to spend our summer vacation at grandma’s place. We played the whole day, had ice creams, dug some sand pits and in the night, all the cousins sat around grandma and listened to her story while she served us dinner. I wish I could get back that childhood!


Like most families nowadays, my children live far away from their grandparents. They get to meet once a year and cherish these memories for the rest of the year. I wanted to do something about it so that they could continue to bond and share fun things even while they were not together. I founded StoryTruck, which is  a social storytelling platform where you can read, record and share stories. StoryTruck was built from the ground-up with the family in mind. We paid a lot of attention to everything including the colors & the design. The concept is simple. You first pick a digital version of the book from our bookstore. You then click on the blue camera icon to start recording. Once you are done, you can share it with anyone you like. You can share it via all the social media channels and via an email. The recipient of this link can then click on the link and listen to you reading the story along with watching the book being read.

With StoryTruck, I hope to help bridge this distance with a story. My children can now, listen to their grandma read a story. They can treasure this for many many years and probably share it one day with their grandchildren as well.

If you would like to try StoryTruck, visit http://www.storytruck.com

-Mohan Rao

Founder & CEO
StoryTruck 

Nuggets from Social Media Summit

Cisco hosted a two day conference in partnership with Ragan Communications. Here’s some interesting nuggets.

• 57% of B2B companies acquire customers through corporate blog and 67% through Facebook.
• 70% of customers using social media to connect with friends and families. 23% connect with brands.
• Who owns Social Media? Public owns it and businesses must just engage.
• What brands think their customers want from Social Media and what customers actually want are very different.
• Messages to businesses on using Social Media – If you don’t lead others will and you won’t be in control.
• 54% of companies still block Facebook because they see no business value.
• Social Media is not just Facebook and Twitter. It is your blog, video site, product reviews and anything where people talk about you.
• 34% of Americans have used Social Media to rant or rave about a company, brand or product.
• Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a product than non-fans.

Flickr photos : http://bit.ly/iwjRM5

Twitter tag: #ragancisco

Books recommended

Facebook Era by Clara Shih C

Takeaways from TiE Social Media Marketing Panel

We had an awesome panel yesterday at the TiE office in silicon valley. If you missed the event, here are some key takeaways from this panel.
Panelists

'Social' is old but happens a lot faster and at a larger scale now.

'Social' is where people shared their likes and dislikes with friends they met. Word-of-mouth marketing has existed since ancient days. The new twist on 'social' is that it happens faster and reaches a larger audience.

'Social Media' is about building relationships.

The best thing that social media marketing has brought about is the two way communication in real time. A great example of a well done social media marketing is the Old Spice commercial. It is important to engage and get your audience to participate to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Content  calendar is helpful

Having a Blog, Facebook fan page or a Twitter a/c is simply meaningless unless you can constantly refresh them with new content. The worst thing you could do is to have presence on one or more of these channels and not update  for a long time. So, having a content calendar forces you to think and be disciplined about your social media activities.

Goal should not be virality; instead try to touch your audience

When you make a video or blog about something, your goal should be to try and touch your audience. Your article will go viral only if it touches your audience.

'Like' is social proof

If you are on a table with 10 other people who use iPhone, then you fall into the social proof trap and think that you should get one too. 'Like' is a tool to display social proof. If a website has 800 likes then the 801th visitor will feel more inclined to like the website.

'Like' is light weight sharing

Like is also a very powerful and simple tool that could be used to share. Before socialmedia, people shared links via emails and this was not public. But, now when you click on the 'Like' button, you are sharing with your social graph in public and this carries more weight.

Who's winning ? Google or Facebook?

The answer to this was very clever and interesting. It is both because your use of these tools depends on where you are in the purchase cycle. If you are still discovering, then you would go to Google but if you have identified a product then you would go to FB for social proof.

What is one idea that entrepreneurs can work on?

Priority Inbox for all social media channels.

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TiE is the largest network of entrepreneurs and organizes many such events through out the year. TiECon is the largest conference of entrepreneurs and is happening in May. If you are an entrepreneur, this is one event you don't want to miss.

 

Bootstrapping? How you can keep your cost low.

If you are an entrepreneur and are bootstrapping, then you are probably going to watch every penny you spend. Here's how I kept my costs low when I founded StoryTruck . At the very early stage I only cared about these two.

1. Infrastructure Costs

• I used my home as a office space and avoided renting an office space. This alone saved hundreds of dollars.
• If you are building a web based product, look for hosting services. Although Amazon's EC2 is the default choice of entrepreneurs, if you look around, you'll notice that there are cheaper and equally reliable services. I chose to go with My Hosting's VPS solution for a fixed monthly cost. 
• You'll  need a good reliable source repository and bug tracking system. I chose SourceRepo because it was the cheapest. After a year, I can say it was the cheapest and it is reliable!

2. Development Costs

The next biggest cost is your development cost. If you are a developer yourself, then you can probably get away with this. But I found that I needed some help so that I could spend my time on other things. I addressed it as follows.

• Choose your programming language and platform wisely: I chose Php over .Net because I could find more Php programmers and at cheaper rates.
• I also found that hosting a Php site was far cheaper than hosting a .Net solution in terms of the hosting cost.

What do you think? Are there other ways of shrinking costs?

Three tips for publishers from Disney

Disney publishes a number of children's books online at Disney Digital Books. This is an interactive story reader which brings some great books back to life in a fun interactive way.

Disney's Underkoffler talked about what sells in the children's apps category and mentioned the following.

• Keep it simple. Add fewer bells and whistles.
• Fine tune your marketing message. Remember that there is a buyer (parent) and then there is a user (child).
• Old is gold. Old content turned into apps and digital content is in demand.

Most importantly he noted that "Disney hasn’t seen any cannibalization in the digital channel, in fact, digital has only helped increase overall sales." You can read the original article in MediaBistro.

What are your thoughts? Has your digital content done better than you imagined? Has it cannibalized your other channels? Tell me in your comments below.

How Cisco uses Facebook for building its support community

Facebook is not only for sharing those awkward pictures that you took in a bar with your drunken friends or telling how much you liked or hated the local restaurant you ate at. It can be used as an effective medium for many more purposes. Facebook provides an eco-system where a community can engage, participate and share common interests. You can find a community on Facebook for almost any topic. Search for a topic and you are sure to come up with something. Given the size and the active nature of the Facebook community, does it make sense to create a technical support community on Facebook?

Cisco has taken a bold initiative to experiment with this idea and although it’s too early to measure the outcome, it definitely seems to be headed in the right direction. CiscoSupportCommunity , a fanpage on Facebook has nearly 50K fans and is growing fast. In contrast to the common perception about Facebook, you will find a great deal of technical conversation on the fan page . You’ll notice fans posting questions and answers in near real time. Cisco has gone a step further in experimenting a concept called ‘Facebook Forums’. This is a real time conversation between the community and a technical expert at Cisco. The event takes place on the Facebook fan page and fans get to ask questions and receive instant responses from the expert. This event has grown in popularity and a sample of this can be seen on this Facebook Forum .

So, for those of you, who thought Facebook was not for geeks, think again. The world is becoming more connected and there is nothing wrong in joining a Facebook community. For the skeptics, I say, Facebook is a tool and it is up to you how you want to use it.

How do I take my idea to the market?

Many budding entrepreneurs have great ideas but don't know how to take the next step, or the anxiety and fear forbids them to make the next move. If you are one of those, don't despair. Here are a few things I recommend.

Step 1.

Talk about your idea to your closed ones like a friend or a spouse. See if they are excited about it? Talk to a few more of your close friends and see what they think. It's ok to tell them you are considering of getting into this seriously and ask them their honest feedback.

Step 2.

Do a search on the web to find if someone else is already doing it. Don't be heartbroken if someone else is because chances are 99 times out of 100 you'll see that your idea has already been implemented in some fashion or another.

Step 3.

Now, don't give up if your idea was already implemented by someone else. Try and see how many other people are doing it? Is there room for improvement? Could you do it at a lower cost etc.

If no one has implemented it yet, try to answer the question, "Why?" . Chances are that the business model didn't scale or there was no real need for it in the market place. Spend some more time doing your research and talking to your friends and exploring the idea. If possible talk to someone who has some start-up experience and see what they think about your idea.

Step 4.

Once you have a gut feeling that your idea is viable, you should check if there's a need to prototype your idea. I would recommend a prototype only when there is no real product out there similar to your idea. If there's one, then you can point people and tell them that you are trying something similar yet with these differences.

If you are building a prototype, make sure it has enough feature so that you could show it to people, let them use it and get their feedback.

In my next post, I'll share with you how to find the right people to help you build your prototype.

In the meantime if you would like to share your experiences, please add a comment.