There’s a great, raw post on learning from failure at Raganwald that talks about “inventing a great solution to a problem no one cares about…” This is something which is all too familiar to a lot of us. It is definitely possible for something to be really cool and for nobody to give a damn. Mid-way through the post, there’s a section on selling that really resonated with me.
But something I learned from selling Macintoshes back in the day is this: only make one sale. Convincing someone they have a problem is one sale. Convincing them you have the solution is another. And convincing them that today is the day to act is a third. If you have to do all three at the same time, you are doomed.
This is why experienced companies distinguish sales from marketing. The first two steps are marketing, the third is selling. When you are a new company, you don’t have the resources to market and sell. You have to work with an established pain point (eliminating the first hurdle), then use PR and limited marketing funds to get the word out that you have solved the problem (the second hurdle). You only have time and energy for the third sale, separating customers from their money.
Changing behavior is really hard and whether you’re selling software or convincing someone to use your website, having to make multiple sales just compounds your problem. If you’re not alleviating pain, it’s going to be a tough slog.
There’s an interview on John Battelle’s blog with Udi Manber (formerly at A9, now at Google) that discusses universal search and what’s coming next. Udi’s reply to a question about next steps really made an impression on me.
Q: I’m very interested in the next steps. Without telling us too much (if you would like to, why, please do), what are the interesting problems in search right now that you feel well positioned to address?
A: As search gets better, user expectations rise even higher, and we need to improve at a faster rate. Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals — making results more relevant, more comprehensive, for more users, in more languages. Much of this work involves pure algorithms, deep understanding of search and of the web, and just plain hard work. Just the way we like it. It is not sexy to the outside world and it doesn’t make headlines, but it has the highest impact. Most of the advances in pure ranking that we’re making aren’t obvious to users — they just find what they’re looking for more often and they take it for granted. Just the way it should be.
There’s no question that you have to continue to improve the foundation on which you’re building. I think this holds true for anything you’re trying to master. You’re never done when it comes to getting better at the basics.
Another powerful idea in here is the notion that as the tool gets better and better, it disappears and users start to take it for granted and focus on the task they are trying to accomplish. It’s something we should all be striving for.
At Judy’s Book, we get a significant fraction of our traffic to our deal and tag pages. In the site tree structure, these are leaf pages. Odds are that a visitor that lands on a deal page is not going to click on an ‘About’ link or click to the home page to see what the site is about.
This means that you have to think of every page as though it’s your site home page. It needs to do whatever job it’s expected to do (in the case of a deal page, it needs to describe a deal and drive a user to convert) but it also needs to tell a story that allows the user to determine what your site is all about.
Sorry for the flood of random Google junk today. Every time Google launches a new version of Desktop, I try it out in the hope that it doesn’t slow my machine down too much. Apparently, this version can now index mail I haven’t received yet.
I tried to log in to my Google Calendar today and got this:
Good to know that even Google has issues from time to time.
Any website that’s focused on delivering content to users has pockets where users won’t find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if someone were searching for a rhinestone ipod case that attached to the outside of their jacket and you didn’t have any deals for that particular item, you could return a polite “Sorry, we didn’t find any deals for you” message. Or you could do better. You could construct URLs for the user using their query which would conduct a search on Amazon or another site that would be likely to return something that could keep their flow going. At Judy’s Book, we need to do a better job with this. Currently, we operate in the “we don’t have that” mode and we need to be in the “well, we don’t have that at the moment, but you might find something useful through one of our partners; let us help you get there.”
It isn’t always easy to find an appropriate transition, but then again it’s not easy for users either. Doing work so users don’t have to is generally a good lens with which to look at every page on your site.
Posted on June 6th, 2007 in Humor | Comments
The legal drinking age in Holland is 16 and students have developed powdered alcohol. Somehow I think the USA would have a problem with this.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.
The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gramme packets that cost 1-1.5 euros ($1.35-$2).
Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
“We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks,” 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.
As you try and translate your product plans into reality, inevitably, you are faced with making tradeoffs between desired features and ease of implementation. You have to walk a line between your perception of user value and time-t0-market. In general, I tend to lean towards simplification to get things moving but it’s important to recognize when you’re in danger of crippling your product. In addition, the temptation when something is released to move on to the next thing - this has to be avoided; especially if you released with some rough edges. You don’t want your user experience to die the death of a thousand cuts. By all means, simplify, release and iterate. Just make sure you iterate.
The best way to improve your ranking in Google search results is to give your users something they care about. I’m a big believer in being smart about SEO but anytime you start doing things that don’t benefit users to boost short term search rankings, you’re headed to dangerous territory. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore SEO best practices. Quite the opposite in fact. Making sure search engines can make sense of your site is critical.
Seth Godin has a great post about this on his blog:
It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.
Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.
I think Seth is spot on with one exception. I think you need to be smart about using best practices for search discovery from the outset. Google organic traffic is like gold and having a good knowledge of SEO best practices (or working with someone who does) from the start is incredibly important.
P.S. Seth also points to a NYT article by Saul Hansell that takes a look at Google’s Search Quality group. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in search.
Software development at a startup is hard. In oder to get through the process successfully, it’s important to remember that things will never evolve the way you expect. If you can stay flexible but still remain focused - i.e. stick with the goal, but accept that your route may meander from time to time - you’ll get there.
In theory, building a product is a predictable exercise that involves the following (high-level) steps:
- Problem Identification & Definition
- Initial Concepts/Iteration
- Functional Spec/Iteration
- Technical Spec/Estimates
- Development/Testing
- Alpha/Beta/Release
- Maintenance
Software estimation is a notoriously difficult activity, but even if it were not, there’s a ton of unpredictability in the system. Even with perfect estimation, I’d be willing to bet a significant amount of money that the schedule will not be exactly what you expect.
In practice, the real world intrudes on our theoretically deterministic system. When it comes to things that can go wrong, “the list is long and distinguished” (movie anyone?)
- Competitors and Partners do unexpected things
- Users can’t remember which of their pets’ names they used for their password
- Individuals discover that stuffing a post with 50 tags helps their SEO; that’s nice, unfortunately it screws the user experience
- People get sick, go on vacation, have bad days
- Hard drives fail
- OS upgrades change functionality you were relying on
- Once you get live data in prototype page you realize your design was wrong
- etc. etc.
You will also do yourself a world of good by keeping your development chunks bite-sized. This has multiple benefits, not the least of which are making a large task seem manageable and perhaps more importantly, helping you build momentum as you check items off a list. Momentum is infectious and it’ll help keep the product moving forward when you hit the inevitable rough patches. Another benefit of incremental development is the ability to adjust if you need to.
Even though you have the ability to change course every two weeks, it doesn’t mean that you should. Something that seems obvious in theory but is really hard to keep sight of in practice is that you’ll get there faster if you commit to a course of action rather than constantly second guessing yourself. When I say this, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t step back every so often and ask “Does this still make sense?” but rather that you shouldn’t adjust your priorities daily based on what’s happening around you. (By the way, as someone in charge of the product, making sure this doesn’t happen is your job.)
Trust in your vision but don’t be blinded by it. As with all things in life, easier said than done.
