Kelly Smith | Made in Seattle

Tip o’ the hat to Peter Cooper for this link: Your name on toast.

It’s all about getting one’s attention in this over marketed world isn’t it? Crazy ideas just have to keep getting crazier apparently.

So says TechCrunch. Yea right. Is this anything like how TV killed radio and radio killed newspapers and email would kill regular post mail? People never seem to understand that mass mediums don’t die. Honestly, I’m always a bit surprised that authors with SO many readers and so much success make such ridiculous claims. Actually [...]

I posted over on my blog at Curious Office early this morning about some thoughts I had regarding business plans I’ve looked at lately. Usually these types of posts relate more to my own thinking about what I’m doing and how I can improve our prospects with ImageKind. I think in any start-up you have this initial ‘grace period’ where you get to build and deploy your concept without necessarily being expected to know exactly how and what the market is going to say about your service. Most investors know you don’t have a crystal ball or the ones that do don’t expect it to work 100% of the time. But, as in any venture, there is finally a time to get on top of what’s really going to provide the results you’ll be satisfied with. Even after just a few months since launch I think at ImageKind we’re entering that critical phase.

This is really just another way of saying “what things do we need to do to really move the needle?”

As I think about the answers to questions everyone in our organization should internalize in a super crisp way I suppose I also realize that this Q&A exercise is pretty much standard fare for any thriving business.

Do we know what our unique place in the marketing is?
Do we know what things are driving new users to us?
Do we know what things we are doing that are keeping our traffic up? Or is it just happening on its own?
Do we know what marketing levers have impacts and which ones do not?
Do we know which products to prioritize? What should be merchandised?
Do we know where to find new customers?
Do we have a customer retention strategy that will keep our current customers in tact?
Do we understand how people find us? Where do we get our visitors? Why?
Do we know how to get in front of active shoppers in our sector?
Do we know how to take customers from our competitors?
Do we have a partnership strategy that will result in a better bottom line?

It’s ok not to have clarity on everything from the outset. But it’s important (for us) to be relentless in our search for the right answers to each of these questions. In my experience it is VERY easy to put answers in place for every one of these considerations but its another thing to have a high degree of internal confidence that your answers are right on target. I’m not interested in a marketing plan. I’m interested in the right answers to the tough questions.

My friend Marcelo Calbucci over at Sampa is starting to put together a new blog list that specifically calls out all the interesting Seattle tech blogs as a counter point to much of the daily reading we all consume which stems from the Silicon Valley.

I expect this list to grow quite a bit over the coming year so do check it out and forward your own blog to Marcelo for consideration!

http://blog.curiousoffice.com/?p=106 This is a post I just threw up about product merchandising which may not impress you with its prose but I thought the data collection provides an interesting competitive snapshot for our new start-up ImageKind.

http://youtube.com/w/?v=_dIya1aJJKA

I won’t say who sent me this document from Ignition Partners though I am fairly certain that it is not considered secretive. Some curious readers may find it interesting. This is an Ignition Partner’s (Jonathan Roberts) perspective on how to launch a company successfully.

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Ten Steps to Launching an Early Stage Company

In general, Ignition companies follow the following ten step plan to success:

1) Determine your main value-add.
• What is it that you’re good at?
• Where is your unique advantage? Focus on that and build from there.
• When thinking about your initial offering don’t over reach. If the first phase of your business plan is too broad by definition you’ll end up doing things you don’t understand very well. There are lots of inherent risks in doing new things. When you are new you often don’t know what you don’t know. It’s fine to have a vision of where you do want to go, but it’s important to have a very pragmatic starting point.
• Who are you like? Best way to figure out who you are is to triangulate with what you are replacing and who you are like. Windows was replacing MS DOS based applications and was like the Mac. People understood it as something that makes your PC into a Mac. This allowed us to very clearly position it as something that “made PC’s easier to use”. I’ve had other companies position themselves as the “Oracle of Unstructured Data” or the “Salesforce.com for Recruiters”. Anyway, it allows you to more clearly figure out who you are and who you are not.
• A winning strategy has the following components: a) A great vision; b ) Place to start to day; c ) A plan to scale between the two. You should think through your strategy in this order.
2) Evaluate the market and determine who your customer is and what they want to buy.
• Understand. Try to make it something they already understand versus something new you’d like them to consider.
• Need versus nice to have. A “need to have” is something that you are already planning to buy and all that you have to do is convince them to switch vendors or more than like take on an additional vendor.
• A “nice to have” is when you are trying to educate and convince somebody to buy something they are not buying presently or solve a need that they don’t currently have.
• In terms of who the customer is, you need to go beyond simply identifying the companies or organizations that buy, but who specifically in the organization that buys.
3) Determine your competitive strategy. How do you fit with in the context of the marketplace? What “play” should you run? Are you a trying to win a drag race or execute a fast follower play? Are you trying to pincer a competitor between an advanced or basic offering? You don’t need to start from scratch. There aren’t a million choices. There are only five based on how you assess the overall market landscape.
4) Determine your positioning. Why your version of the solution is this situation is better than anyone else’s? Translate this into messaging that your target audience find both easy to understand and memorable. Finally, roll all of this up into a case for your company or product based on the situation in the market that makes your product or company necessary. See the fourth bullet point on point number 1. Usually it is easiest to start with the man on the street positioning and double back on the “X that does Y for Z” construct. My favorite focus group question is to ask a customer, how do you describe this product or service to a friend?
5) Identify the key trends you’re going to exploit. The way for a new product or service to displace an established service is to align with trends that are bigger than any one company. Major trends in technology include the exploding power of the micro-processor, the pc economy, and internet standards. In each instance the large established players resisted the trends and were either displaced or had to adapt to them.
6) Produce the product or a proto-type of the product at minimal cost and sell it to a few select customers. You’ll learn a ton along the way. You’ll validate your proposition and your target customer. You’ll also get a much better understanding of your profit structure.

7) Fully deploy with a handful of customers. In other words, it is better to have one really good customer than three folks who are simply sampling your goods or services. The reason is that when you are a new company potential customers will want to call existing customers before they buy. It is really, really hard to scale a business if you don’t have reference-able customers.

Acquire the next handful of customers primarily through word of mouth. In other words, ask your first happy customer to refer you to three others. Make them happy.

9) Use PR and momentum to project your product, offering, or company into the market. In other words, win the thought leadership battle. If you’ve aligned with key trends in the marketplace, have happy customers, and are showing momentum you should be able to convince key influencers that your product’s success is inevitable. If you’ve done this right than customers will start believing it is “when” and not “if”. You than need to create the perception of overwhelming momentum so that you play to both the motivations of greed (e.g. the desire to get a head of their competition) and fear (the anxiety about being left behind).

10) Scale. Here is where you have a Web Site, tighten up your product positioning, find additional partners ect. The key thing is to keep your cost structure low until you are ready to scale. At this point you should have a good sense of what your revenue is before you spend the dollars. Most new entrepreneurs try to scale too early before they really figure out what they are selling and who they are selling to. They spend a bunch of dollars on the front end and ironically it actually hurts their ability to refocus their business towards a better outcome.

I’ve integrated Adobe’s Lightroom beta into my photo workflow (alongside Photoshop of course) and it’s a seriously fantastic product. Wonder how I got by without it. And, my friend Steve Lacey over at Google points out they have a great podcast too. Indeed! Check it out. Great find.

Check out the pics of our recent tour to Walla Walla to sample some of Washington’s finest wineries to include Abeja, LeCole, Reiniger and Pepper Bridge.

I love the States but I have a rant. Driving back from Walla Walla this last weekend proved what I’ve always felt. Americans can’t drive. In particular, they don’t look in their rear view mirror and they don’t pay attention to signs like “Keep right except for passing”. Here, people are perfectly happy to roll down a two lane road side by side at the same speed…blocking both lanes and everyone behind them. Flash your brights on them and it means nothing. Worse yet, THEY’RE the ones who are insulted. Are you kidding me? Try that in Germany and you’ll get run off the road or ticketed. And that’s how it should be. Here, people force you to pass on the left OR right which is unsafe and unpredictable. Typical US drivers will parade along down a 1 lane highway for miles until a second passing lane opens up. Inevitably, they will all then move over to the left. People like me then pass them all going down the right lane. Ridiculous. And, one thing you can be sure of…90% of minivan drivers do not use their rear view mirror. The only way they’ll know you’re behind them is if you honk. Just don’t expect a reaction. They’re perfectly happy going 40 in the left hand lane and nobody is going to tell them otherwise.