The Economist - required reading for global economic news and opinion.
Prospect - Excellent array of current affairs articles, all of which are thought-provoking.
Private Eye - Long-standing satirical magazine aimed squarely at the UK establishment.
Wired - Seemed a good idea at the time, not sure how much value I get from it. Probably won't renew next year.
New Scientist - interesting read for an armchair science geek, but even I'm wondering if it is dumbing-down ever so slightly these days. 50/50 chance of renewing next year.
I also get regular access to Harvard Business Review as a business school alumnus, which is always worth a read, even if it is just a reminder as to why I took my MBA and said goodbye to corporate life :)
Two things - the design is, well, okay but extremely simple.. It just doesn't have that finished look about it.
And the app itself is incredibly simple, which makes me second guess myself as to whether it is too simplistic that users won't pay the few bucks I intend to charge for it. I keep telling myself that they pay for value, not the number of lines of code...
Back when text messaging capability was a rarity on mobile phones, which were themselves rare, I was testing an SMS-based weather forecast service that I had written on behalf of one of the mobile network operators.
The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an actual handset. Only I forgot to advance a recordset through which I was looping, so the code never hit the end of recordset condition. It took me some time to notice there was a problem...
The fact that I crippled a national SMS network for a few hours was bad.
The fact that my company had to pay for each SMS, wiping out out profit for that month was worse.
The fact the handset was mine and on my first date with a girl later that evening (whom I later married) my handset kept beeping with incoming text messages (about 96,000 if I remember) was the ultimate.
The handset didn't have a silent-no vibrate function (either it beeped or it vibrated or it did both) and the SMS inbox filled up after 200 or so messages meant it took days for the inbox to fill up, me to clear it message by message, then fill up again ad nauseam.
One of my colleagues did this with our automated notification system. After his phone received about $60 worth of text messages, he panicked and shut down the server!
What does the user care about? In your example, I guess they care about bandwidth usage and personal data. So in that light, I would inform them that a small amount of game-specific, non-personal info needs to be sent to the website (server is jargon, so should be avoided) to record the score.
My point is that as much info as the user cares about should be provided in a clear, accessible manner.
Where personal data and/or legal disclosure laws apply, then more transparency and info is better.
Unfortunately, it is not unnecessary to point out that all information of all types at all times should always be rigorously honest. If you're going to tell your users something, be truthful.
Could simplification be helpful? I'm thinking that in a conservative B2B industry, offering too much too quickly from an unknown probably gets your target's risk radar bleeping.
I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.
In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.
A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.
To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.
Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!
If it helps, I spend a reasonable amount of time helping people formulate business and marketing strategy. Happy to offer a specific opinion and ideas (gratis, of course) if you want to email me.
A warning though - many 'start-up to success' books are, in my view, hampered by what I consider exceptional circumstances in the story. So you'll find a sentence/paragraph/page that basically says "so then I managed to raise $350,000 from XYZ to get me started", or "then I got stuck in a lift with Jeff Bezos for 72 hours and managed to convince him to invest". Which is great for their story, but it may or may not reflect your story.
So if you are going to try to learn lessons from the stories of others, and just to be clear let me say I believe this is a good way of learning, make sure you understand the differences between their story and yours and how those differences change the dynamics of starting and scaling a business.
Thank you for this list - I liked reading The Knack so will explore the others.
I disagree with you about your examples of exceptional circumstances. Anyone can raise 350k or be stuck in a lift with Jeff Bezos if they do the hard around it. Focus on building something amazing and you can build your own luck around. For example, 18 months ago I did speak to Bezos - I did not have anything to talk tom about (apart from asking him sign my Kindle!) so nothing happened. But this year I really do so I will find another way to talk to him (and everyone else).
That is not to say that are not exceptional circumstances. For example, only a handful of people around the world in the 1970s had the priviliges of Bill Gates, ie a childhood growing up in a school with a mainframe. But it is not worth worrying about such things - each of us has to look for the unusual advantages we have and work with those. In my case I have a genetic illness which meant most of my childhood was spent ill or in hospital. I survived long enough to train as a physician and a programmer so this year I founded a company that builds software to help patients work online with their clinicians.
I really like the feel of the site. Agree with jjs - the sign-up form put me off. I want to get started now, and add info (eg Twitter, company name) later if I choose to do so.
A little more info around the jargon would be appreciated - what's a board, how does this influence project structure etc.
The pricing is confusing, as I don't really understand how you define a board, so I can't judge whether I need 1, 15, 50 or 32,767 boards.
I know you have a link to FMi, but a little info about you guys would go a long way. Make me feel like there are people like me behind this would help me trust you with my project data a little more.
I do like it though - keen to give it a try for my own projects!
I think where one's design skills can be considered lacking, as I very much consider my own, simplicity becomes increasingly important and attractive as a design philosphy.
Plenty of white space, clear typography, showing only what is needed, and aligning vertical and horizontal edges helps hugely.
1. Go on a diet.
2. Open [web|desktop] app.
3. Select diet plan (atkins; south beach; XYZ etc).
4. Select number of people in household.
5. Select number of people on diet.
6. Select dietary options (eg gluten-free).
7. Select budget.
8. Add credentials and payment details for preferred online grocery store.
9. App notes diet plan and previous shopping activity to reduce duplication, finds recipes and extracts ingredients
10. App creates shopping cart automagically based on the above (and probably more besides) and purchases.
11. App records purchases.
I've wondered for the last 4 or 5 years since I have had this idea whether this would actually be something to pitch to the retailers rather than the consumers.
Mine also had "GPS on phone to monitor person's level of physical activity to help tailor diet to their dietary needs"
We even worked on putting this together so that the algorithm could work automatically for a family who had different dietary requirements.
The problem we found is that it doesn't work for the consumer market. We focussed too much on the idea and not enough on consumer behaviour, which if we had done our market research would have shown this to be not so good an idea.
We found that the dietary consumer market is focussed on selling you early into things you wont use, because the people that generally need these products have low motivation.
Those people who buy dietary books, supplements, exercise equipment etc generally purchase them and might use them for a month or two before essentially "giving up" at best. That's why most businesses targetting that large market are focussed on getting your money early, because relying on longterm revenue is a bad idea.
Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig use a similar model, although the diet plans they use are actually loss leaders so they can sell you their other products, which is where they actually make their money. The diet plans in the long run is where people stop going, but they've already extracted value out of you by purchasing their material.
That makes sense. But it reminds me of search engines cluttering up their portals with ads, and having pay-for-ranking search results - which also made sense. That was the market before google. I don't know if an analogous change of market exists for diets.
Well the thing is that is one of the conclusions we came too after having built a prototype. I'm not a skinny guy (nor was my partner), we built the thing for personal use and after several months of use we had found that it was simply too much additional effort that a simple meal plan could accomplish on is own. There were several things we didn't account for in our initial design.
1) Battery life on the mobile phone... Keeping your GPS on during waking hours is a big drain in current generation phones
2) People sticking to the plan (ours was designed so that you could go "off plan" if you felt hungry and it would adapt) ... during early testing if you skipped things, it could go out of whack
3) Motivation, we let several people use it, not including ourselves (about 15 all up) and we monitored the use and we found that in almost all cases (except 1) that people just stopped using it after around a month, with it's novelty wearing off after about two weeks. That's when we started to look at how the business models of other Dietary businesses work.
Basically, it had little more than novelty value - a simple meal plan and exercise would have achieved the same result.
(On a personal note, I found it just as easy to ride my exercise bike while watching TV and eating smaller portions to keep losing weight, I just bought smaller plates and glasses to change my perspective of the amount of food I was eating.)
Please take this with a grain of salt, as a possible perspective (I don't know if it's helpful or not). Let me detail the roles in the analogy:
You made a search engine. You found you weren't making any money, so you studied how other search engines made money, and you found that they had ad and paid-position results. You didn't like that, so you didn't continue. Then google took the approach of trying to give people what they want (fast, uncluttered, relevant results), and then later (literally years later) working out how to make money from it (this was a whole project in itself: text ads, relevant to search, priced by auction: adwords, seemingly "inspired" by goto/overture).
Your point 3 (motivation) seems to be the show-stopper. My suggestion is to consider if there is a way to solve this problem - not in order for you to make money, but in order to help people diet. Illustrative examples (recall that I don't actually know anything about it):
- Make it continually novel, with new content being added all the time (like HN, or WoW), or the "achievement unlocked" of some games, or Nintendo games. Or a new diet every week. Or even as a platform with new perspectives on the diet coming out each week or day (like a daily horoscope or cartoon maybe?). Don't know if this would work, but the idea is to attack the problem of novelty wearing off.
- Or expand on the solution you found in your personal note: tell people to buy smaller plates and glasses; and buy an exercise bike, with instructions about how to set it up with the TV. Maybe this seems trivial and obvious, but I'm guessing it wasn't the first thing you tried yourself - maybe encouragement and guidance would make a huge difference for some people.
Maybe it seems that you can't make money from this; but (I believe that) if a business finds a way to help people, it will find a way to make money. The thing that is potentially exciting is that maybe there is a fantastic way to be extremely helpful to people in dieting, that all the other businesses have missed, because they were focussed on the business model that worked - instead of doing that, find a better way, like Google did.
It sounds like you've done a thorough and intelligent job (and also that you are sick to death of it), and that you were excited about your solution, not about the problem. Let me emphasise that I really have no idea if there exists such a solution as I'm outlining - I just wanted to communicate a focus on your customer's problem, not business models. Reading back that previous sentence, it sounds kind of rude to me, but I hope you'll understand how I mean it.
oh I understand what you're saying, the thing is we over-engineered a problem which has a pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise).
With our solution, we figured with the addition of the GPS, we could also do things like warn people if they went into the wrong place... eg walked into a mcdonalds, it not only could let them know that they shouldn't be there, but perhaps could provide them with alternatives close by, so instead of just a mealplanning solution but also a mentoring thing.
But in the end, it was just a novelty which wore off.
pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise). I agree, but it doesn't yet seem to be a solved problem for many people - in practice. Still, that's a different question
Yeah, the problem with diets and exercise is mostly a continuous motivational problem if anything I figure, which is why the current business models are set up the way they are.
People are really motivated for the first few days/weeks, after which their interest wanes it seems. That's why it's set up as a "pay early" type thing.
Honestly, I think something like the wii fit is a step in the right direction. Make it fun.
Along these notes: a recommendation engine for food called "WhatShouldIHaveForDinner.com" that takes all your favorite foods and suggests recipes and/or local restaurants (go to Crazy Ivan's Ukrainian Cafe and order the borsch), keeping dietary issues in mind.
Prospect - Excellent array of current affairs articles, all of which are thought-provoking.
Private Eye - Long-standing satirical magazine aimed squarely at the UK establishment.
Wired - Seemed a good idea at the time, not sure how much value I get from it. Probably won't renew next year.
New Scientist - interesting read for an armchair science geek, but even I'm wondering if it is dumbing-down ever so slightly these days. 50/50 chance of renewing next year.
I also get regular access to Harvard Business Review as a business school alumnus, which is always worth a read, even if it is just a reminder as to why I took my MBA and said goodbye to corporate life :)