Do You Need To Move To The Valley?

Sep01

Do you really need to move to the valley?  I get asked this question a lot.  The better question should be - Why should you move?  Two years ago, on this day (Sep 1st) I boarded a plane destined to San Francisco with nothing more than a suitcase and a mountain bike.  I had no plan. I didn’t know anyone.  All I knew is that I wanted to be where all the action was.

Here are the reasons why.

To Play a Bigger Game

This is powerful, so read it slow.

“Are your goals worthy of your life?”

That was the question that got stuck in my head the summer of 2008.  Essentially, was I thinking big enough? Was I playing a big enough game?  Even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, I knew I would figure it out and go big.

The great thing about San Francisco is you’re ALLOWED to think big. HUGE. Be Crazy!???

Imagine that.

Actually, if you don’t - people will question you on it. Why aren’t you going after a huge market? It’s the same energy / time, isn’t it?

The reality is, people here are playing big games and if you want to belong, you need to do the same.

It’s been quite liberating actually.

Scare Yourself Every Once In A While

If you don’t do something everyday that scares you, then you’re probably not pushing yourself far enough.

Here’s a simple exercise: Every time you buy something today, ask for a discount. Yep, everytime.  How do you feel? Scary right? Well, after a while - it goes away and you’ve grown as a person.

When I moved, I made myself a promise that I would continue to do so.  It’s gotten to the point now, that if I’m asked to do something, or go somewhere’s where I’m like “???? What, How, What do I say, etc” - I say YES by default.

Eventually I figure it out.

Yes, sometimes I fall flat on my face .. but overall I’m way ahead and probably learned the most about myself and the situation in those moments.

Moving to San Francisco was scary, but it was also one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

Getting Advice From The Right People

Here’s a real simple question.  ”What % of your conversations (or friends) are related to your startup / passions?”.  Since I’ve move to San Francisco - I would say for me, it’s easily 85%.  When I was in Moncton, NB (Canada), more like 5-10%!?

It’s not only the conversations, it’s the people.

I have a belief that you should ONLY seek advice from someone who’s DONE what you’re trying to accomplish.

That’s a huge idea if you think about it.

The beauty of this city is there’s an endless list of people who’ve already paved the road for you. It’s like everyones paying it forward.  It’s a beautiful thing.

If you can drink from the fire hose, the information and experience is here.  It’s intense and fun all at the same time, so be sure to set some time aside to actually DO. :-)

(I would’ve love to list everyone who’s given me advice and pushed me forward over the past 2 years, but it would be huge.  If you got my email - you’re one of them.  Just wanted to say thanks!!)

Feeling Alive Everyday

When people ask how I like San Francisco, I always say “… out of 10, it’s like an 11″.  Honestly, it’s like they created a city around all my passions (startups, running, great food and snowboarding).

This city is full of amazing opportunities to experience the most ridiculous things in the world.

I remember one day I came out of my apartment and there was a group of 50+ people standing there not wearing any pants?!  I guess I didn’t get the memo re: Don’t Wear Pants Day.  Everything from Facebook F8 event to Bay to Breakers, this city will make you feel alive!

So What’s Next?

With things moving quickly at Flowtown, I don’t see myself doing much else.  I’m the type of guy that once I bite into something, I don’t let go.  Will I travel, yes.  Will I continue to advise startups, of course.

All I know is that I feel absolutely fulfilled right now, and want to keep that feeling.

So, with that - thanks for being a reader, supporter and friend.

If were friends, met in person, or even exchanged tweets, please leave a comment .. would love to hear from you.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

A/B Testing for Social Media - Speaking at SM Marketing 2010, July 8th 2010

Jul02

Do you hate the word “social media expert”? I do.  Even more so, I hate being involved in social media marketing conferences that doesn’t bring the thunder.  I’m all about REAL tactics and strategies.  Tell me what worked, what you’ve tried and how it moved the needle.

Yes I believe social is about relationships, but at the same time you can still learn how to increase opportunity and optimize your time invested.

With this in mind - I’d like to announce a conferences that I’ll be participating next week that delivers on this promise, it’s all about evidence based marketing.

Social Media Marketing 2010 - San Francisco - July 8th, 2010

A/B Testing for Social Media

Panelist: Hiten Shah (@hnshah) – KISSmetrics, Dan Martell – FlowTown and Chase McMichael (@chasemcmichel) - Infinigraph

Overview: Over the past decade or more, A/B testing has proven an invaluable method of marketing testing to optimize landing pages, emails, ads, and text. Learn how to apply the A/B testing methodology to your marketing campaigns for increased social media engagement. Find out what the experts are currently using as engagement metrics, learn major pitfalls to avoid, and hear their take on everything from optimizing blog post lengths to optimizing websites for most searched keywords

Register with this link and use discount code: 10smmsf1 to save 10%

Hope to see you there!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

3 Ways We Use Flowtown For Customer Development

May23

Is this post a little self serving? Yes. (I’m a co-founder of Flowtown).  That being said - we use Flowtown every day in our customer development processes and after showing several startups how to accomplish this, I figured it only made sense to share it with the rest of the lean startup community.

1. Finding Early Adopters

One of the biggest challenges for most startups is finding early adopters for their application.

Early Adopters: Passionate, early users of new technology or products who understand its value before mainstream markets. Acquiring early adopters is important to jumpstart product adoption. (p.17 - The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development)

They become extremely important in providing feedback on product features, competitive landscape, the market and potential business models.

3 steps to helping you find them within your teams network:

  1. Using Flowtown you can easily import all your existing contacts manually or by using one of our import methods: CSV, GMail, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.  From there we analyze them and create a rich social profile.
  2. Now, using the occupational search feature - you can look for individuals who may have have experience in the market you’re targeting.  For example - here’s the search we conducted within all the founding teams contacts: CMO/CEO/COO, Social Media Experts / Consultant, Founders / Co-Founders, Marketer / Marketing and Community Manager.
  3. From there you can create a contact group from this search result and send them an email or tweet to connect with them. (tip: in person - get out of the building :-)

Bonus Tip - Here’s a list of people that you can ideally learn a lot from:

  • Industry consultants
  • Developers with domain knowledge
  • Founders in similar market addressing a different customer
  • Investors with an interest in your market

2. Learning and Engaging Your Users

Once you start having users - you can then do a variety of things within Flowtown to understand and engage with them better:

  • Create Twitter List from a User Group: Using the ability to create groups based on location, occupation or social network you can use this to engage with them on twitter.
  • Timed Survey Automation: Flowtown has the ability to schedule a customer discovery survey (ex: using Survey.io) to all new users 2 weeks after they’ve activated or sign up for your application.
  • Customer Advisory Board (CAB): Creating a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) contact group, you can then add customers and others individuals from your target market that have agreed to provide feedback and validate ideas before building them by sending simple emails with either surveys, product screen shots, screen casts or mock-ups.

These are just a few ways you can use Flowtown to interact with your users and potential customers.

3. Real Time Notifications of Target Users

Using the our web hook integration, you can setup your sign-up flow, newsletter subscriptions or contact form (ideally using Wufoo) to add that person to a Flowtown group.  From there, you can setup a social notification to be emailed anytime someone meets one of the following filters; twitter influence, occupation or location.  For example - anyone that signs-up for Flowtown that has either a Klout twitter influence score  >=15, occupation is either a Founder, Co-Founder, CEO, CMO, Marketer or lives in San Francisco - I receive an email like this.

From there I typically do one of the following:

  • Ask them what problem they feel that Flowtown would solve for them
  • Ask them to join our Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
  • Ask them how they heard about us
  • Ask them for a 15 minutes phone call and conduct a customer discovery interview
  • Say hi to an old friend!

… Final thoughts

Most startups fail because they’re building something that nobody wants and they run out time and/or money before they can learn their way to success.

Hopefully you’ve adopted Customer Development (CD) within your startup and find some of the tips I’ve provided useful in regards to learning exactly what it is that’s going to make your product a must have.

Did I forget anything? I would love to hear from you in the comments.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Conference Tour: SLLConf, Lean Startup Intensive, Montreal Startup Camp, AIM Conference, MeshU and LessConf

May03

Speaking has always been a way for me to deepen my understand around a specific topic, as well as a way to gain a larger perspective around issues that face a the startup community.  I always get more out of it then I put in (it’s a bit selfish that way #honesty)!  With that being said, I’m super excited to be participating in 6 of the most amazing startup conferences in North America.

Startup Lessons Learned (videos are online) - San Francisco, April 25, 2010

Flowtown Case Study as a Lean Startup.

Lean Startup Intensive (Web 2.0 Expo) - San Francisco, May 2nd, 2010

Flowtown Case Study as a Lean Startup: This will be a similar case study to the one we presented at the Lesson Learned Conference with one additional slide on the techniques that we’ve since implemented that have had the biggest impact to our results.

Startup Camp - Montreal, May 5, 2010

Unconference Moderator:  Montreal + Startups = Super Excited!

Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference - Halifax, May 14-15, 2010

Startup Marketing Tactics: User acquisition, Conversion Optimization, Metrics and Channel Testing.

MeshU - Toronto, May 16, 2010

Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer App

In todays world of open source, cheap computing power and APIs, it’s not if you can build it, but should you build it. The #1 startup killer is running out of time to “figure it out” before you get traction. Lean product development is the methodology that allowed companies like PayPal, Yelp, Ardvark and up and coming Flowtown.com (profitable in two months) to pivot into their market to become a dominate player.

There is a science behind the approach and in this talk I’ll go over customer development, feature prioritization, split testing, product metrics and agile development as approaches to increase your probabilities of succeeding as a startup.

http://meshu.eventbrite.com/

LessConf - Atlanta, May 21-22, 2010

Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer App

If you plan on attending any of these conference, be sure to leave a comment with your Twitter name and a note on why you’re going (what do you hope to get out of it) and I’ll be sure to reach out to you and help enhance your experience.

See you on the road!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Read older posts in archives