Top 10 Tools for Entrepreneurs

Based on my Linkspank and prior experience, these are my top 10 tools that I would recommend to another entrepreneur without knowing anything about his or her business.

Here’s the countdown:

Tool #10: An all-in-one printer. Mine is an HP. The need for this is a vestige of the old fashioned world. But hey, you need to print stuff, fax stuff, and SCAN stuff. Scanning stuff is awesome. And it’s a great substitute for faxing things, especially if you don’t have a land line, because who needs that caveman stuff. Scan it, email it, and then you have a record as well.

Tool #9: An iPhone, Nokia N95, or Blackberry. They are not equal, but the tradeoffs among them are tough to settle depending on your needs. The ability to capture video with a N95 is pretty awesome. And taking pictures (and uploading them to Flickr or wherever!) tends to come in handy for guerrilla marketing, and solves the problem of owning a camera but never having it on hand. But my N95 randomly turns off, sometimes when I’m receiving a call. File that under the Bad Feature category. iPhones don’t have that feature. Using an iPhone puts you in a constant state of arousal, which is a I guess a plus and a minus. All three are needed because you need to be plugged in to the Matrix. People cite the addiction factor: have one and you can’t escape the internets. But I think if you have a little control it can be the opposite: having these puppies can enable you to stay away from your computer longer, because you can check in without booting up.

Tool #8: Google Docs. This online document and spreadsheet system is far from perfect. But Word increasingly blows chunks. Meanwhile, Google docs is pretty awesome when it comes to collaboration. You can edit the same doc simultaneously with someone else. And collaboration is really the essence of existence. All the fancy features of Word? You don’t need them, because you aren’t publishing anything with this tool (other tools for that on the way).

Tool #7: Constant Contact. I just signed up for this service yesterday so maybe I'm overly pumped about it. It’s so clearly the way to go if you have customers or people that you would like to email on any regular basis. It’s a reliable way of formatting sending HTML formatted messages, managing contact lists, being generally considered reputable by humans and spam filters, endearing yourself to readers with a quick unsubscribe option, and tracking the effectiveness of your communications.

Tool #6: Photoshop. This product is absurdly expensive, and absurdly difficult to learn. But I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone would get by without it. You should have Photoshop if any of the following are true: you have a logo; you have a website; you publish documents; you have schwag. Sure, you could have someone else take care of this stuff for you. But as CEO you are probably Head Marketer and these functions can be pretty core to it.

Tool #5. Your Blog. I don’t really like any of the blog services a TON, but Blogger has suited me ok. (Though composing and adding photos in here makes me want to kill myself.) Unless you have opened a business as an independent intelligence operative, you need a blog. Everyone’s holdup is wondering whether it’s really worth the effort. It is true that a LOT of people still don’t really know what a blog is, even when they visit one. (This is a blog by the way.) But here are a couple reasons why you must have one. First, marketing these days is complicated, and all the best ways of marketing are basically untrackable. You have to give up on being able to know exactly what the payoff is for all your actions. Instead, you figure out your strategy and go with the things that are in strategic alignment with it. So, if rapport with literate humans plays a role in your strategy, you write a blog. Second, writing shapes up our thinking, and it’s nice to have a clue about what we’re thinking.

Tool #4. Social Networks. Blah blah everyone talks about this. Some of the blog thinking applies here: it’s tough to measure the efficacy of all the things we do. But you should be on these puppies. Which ones depends on your business. I’ve used LinkedIn for job postings with some success. Probably every entrepreneur ever should be on MySpace and facebook. But it depends a bit on your business. E.g., if you’re a yoga teacher, you should be on Zaadz. Facebook is quite relevant to our user base and that’s why we have the best facebook app ever, enabling to join the Spank through facebook, login through facebook, and spank your facebook friends. Linkspank was recently written up as a way to be a part of the buzz.

Tool #3. Gmail. Email is pretty important, you know? Linkspank is an email-related business, so I have made it my business to use a variety of email solutions, including webmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, most of the stuff you know. It is no joke that Gmail is *head and shoulders* above the rest. Just the facts. It’s much much much faster, for one thing. After using Gmail, when I log into the other stuff I’m practically tearing my face off. And it wins on features, such as group chat (although that didn’t work for me today) and sending emails in the name of other email addresses, forwarding and on and on and on.

Tool #2. Air card. This is a device that you plug into your laptop, that enables you to be connected to the Internet wherever you get cell phone service. Really it's not a device so much as the service you get from your cell provider. Example: AT&T's. Ok, this one definitely does not apply to all entrepreneurs. But I refuse to bump it up or off the list. It is too sweet. Even with the advent of the iPhone, nothing beats actually being able to get on the computer and get on the Internet, basically whereever you are, and be able to be productive. The wifi network gets too slow somewhere or goes down: you switch to your air card. At the airport, you are productive at the terminal, and actually sending emails on the plane before the folks make you unplug. You are driving and get a phone call: there is a problem. You pull over to the side of the road and get online. Welcome to the world of entrepreneur ninjas and commandos. You have numchucks on your belt, submachine gun cartridges strapped across your chest, and an air card in your computer. One caveat: while these tend to offer slow but acceptible broadband in major metropolitan areas, the connection speed in more rural areas is unacceptible and you will be the slowest ninja ever.

Tool #1: The Human Ear. Ok, maybe this is super cheesy. But there is a pattern and a paradox in this list of tools and it all is summarized by my choice for the number one tool: the strangely shaped fleshy listening devices attached to your head. Here’s the pattern: basically every tool I’ve named here is a communication tool. Maybe everything boils down to communication. As a person, you process information; inside your company, you all collaborate; and on the outside, your company engages the world, markets to it, and learns from it. The trick is that all these tools are useless unless you are actually listening and processing. They just facilitate getting great information to your brain, but if your brain is encased in protective stone there is no point. Conversely, an inquisitive, exploratory attitude – that involves speaking with the primary purpose of getting other people to talk – can get you everywhere. Most specifically, to an ever-improving understanding of your customer. I’m always working on this and our recent beer & laptop event was an example that I would like to continue, to the extent that I can afford to buy other people beer instead of myself.

I mentioned a paradox, as well as a pattern. I think the paradox is that entrepreneurship, in distinction with other ways of spending your time professionally, is different most in that you have to be brave and willing to act. All these tools are about listening, learning, and thinking. If these tools had personalities, they would be cautious creatures, probably not entrepreneurs. So in that case, maybe your number one tool is your Fist. Nothing cheesy about a Fist.

And now, some runners-up for the list:

Pidgin – IM is a great communication tool, and Pidgin helps you chat with anyone without spending 20 minutes logging into everything or burdening your computer. Downsides: doesn’t stay connected perfectly, it’s ugly, and no group chat.

Jott – this thing transcribes your phone messages and sends text to you and other people. “note to self” kind of stuff. Makes you feel important. Huge drawback: transcription quality is not quite there.

Twitter – fits in the blog and social network category, and is useful for similar reasons.

Jawbone – you want to be able to have meetings on the phone, even if your changing your baby’s diaper or driving. This is part of why you want to be an entrepreneur, right? Jawbone helps you do that, by cancelling noise and giving you both hands free for unarmed combat. Downside: doesn’t work with my N95.

Firefox – for PC users, using Internet Explorer is like smoking – WHY???? with the distinction that using Explorer doesn’t even make you seem cool. The current version of IE takes about 10 second to load a tab. What exactly is happening during that time? I wonder this, for a good ten seconds, every time I open Internet Exporer or a new tab therein.

More on the Pitch: Ad Revenue Model

An interesting conversation during Friday’s pitch was around the business model.

Now, I think if you’re a potential investor in Linkspank and you’re going to choose to focus on any one part of the business to discuss and you choose the revenue model, it’s probably a sign that you are not comfortable with really discussing the business. Because Linkspank is the kind of beast that requires growth in users to make any money at all; and conversely, if you can achieve this growth than you ARE going to be able to make money.

But revenue is still important :-), and like I said I thought it was an interesting conversation. It’s a chance for me to try to clarify my thinking, improve it with your feedback, and also if you don’t know any of this stuff and you’re vaguely in the business than heads up.

I told them that Linkspank had some exotic opportunities for business models, but that we would start simple and turn on contextual advertising once we hit one million users.

“Contextual advertising” (currently limited essentially to text advertising) is advertising that is placed on the page and chosen according to what the page is about, as determined by a scan of the text on the page. You get a Linkspank about the Nicks, and next to it are advertisements for Nicks jerseys, Nicks videos, Nicks tickets.

This kind of advertising makes such a small amount of money that you need to be serving massive traffic for it to get you anywhere, but it has an advantages. First, you can turn it on about as simply as flicking a switch. Google and other services are the ones actually providing the advertisements. There is no need to sell advertisements, find advertisers, any of that crap. This kind of advertising is (basically) what has made MySpace and facebook businesses that rake in lots of cash.

Here’s the model I showed for how linkspank would make its money:

So, when we have 1 million users, we make $33 million in revenue per year. Here’s how the calculation goes: you have so many users, and the view so many pages, and they click on one or more of the ads a certain (very small) percentage of the time, and you make so much money per click, and you add it all up.

They found the number too high and we took it from there. The ads per page is not really disputable – if you’re going to put 6 ads per page than ok then! The CTR (click through rate) per ad is a little more disputable. If your ads look cool like facebook’s, and not ugly like generic AdSense ads, maybe your CTR will increase a little. Or it might for other reasons. But certainly I have seen real world examples where the CTR is at least this low. I think it’s worth considering a case in which the CTR is 0.1%. (That would cut the $30M to $10M).

The page views per day per user is the key number. Well, sort of. The REALLY key number is the top figure, the number of users. As I contend, the key question for this business is the growth. But this second line is key. It currently asserts that on AVERAGE every spanker will view 150 pages per month, which is a lot.

The second line really involves forming an opinion about how growing size will affect the stickiness of the site and user activity. Users are not currently viewing 150 pages per month; they are viewing more like 10 to 17, depending on how you count.

So why would the figure multiply by 10 when the site grows? It wouldn’t necessarily. It depends basically on whether your site actually does something, or people sign up for it and it’s crap. Let’s contrast LinkedIn and facebook (speculatively, not like I have inside numbers). Both are supposed to become richer and more valuable for you the bigger they get, the more potential connections you have and people you can learn about or whatever. Most users will confirm for you the following reality: facebook strongly benefits from having all your friends on there and it makes it much easier to stick around longer. In contast, LinkedIn for most people is a site that they visit occasionally to approve someone’s connection request and then they pop out. Every now and then someone will spruce up their profile. But they don’t seem to be doing much more than they were when the network was younger. I don’t quite think LinkedIn is crap, but hey these are the (anecdotal) facts on this particular issue.

So far all our data indicates that Linkspank will go the way of faceook on this issue and not the way of LinkedIn. The fundamental logic of what spanking is also supports the claim. Will this really bring us up to 5 page views per user per day? I’m not sure that anyone can answer that question definitively. I’m willing to consider a lower forecast. It still shapes up to a very profitable business – IF you get the growth… which once again is the real question.

That really just scrapes the surface of the conversation, but it's enough for Saturday morning. :-)

Results of Pitch at Deloitte Tech Venture Center

Bananas are the hottest thing, you should invest

I took my hacking, raspy self to Waltham today and pitched at an "investor roundtable" hosted by Deloitte. Launchpad and Atlas were there, and some other folks. DFJ and Spark were supposed to be there but I don't believe they were.

Summary: they conceded that they weren't part of the target market. I also noticed that they weren't too well acquainted with the market space. I am routinely baffled by how little people understand online advertising. Meanwhile, the guy who thought he knew the space suggested (inadvertantly) that I instead build another delicious - which is a deeply troubling suggestion on a variety of levels.

Anyway, to resume the summary: I think they weren't 100% understanding what Linkspank is. And how can you invest in something you don't understand, right? Agreed. They suggested that I go look for a younger angel investor, which I think is a good call. (The investment I'm looking for is $200-500k, depending on timing and other factors, so it's borderline between angel and group of angels or institutional.)

Internet Site = Must Do Demo

The thing I puzzled over most was whether to include a demo in the pitch. It's the Google way of doing things and I was always sold on that. But I was dissuaded from the idea over the last week, by the fact that my practice pitch listeners didn't want to hear the pitch.

In retrospect, I think it's absolutely true - none of these guys want to see a demo. But it's laziness on their part not to want to see one, and it should be my job to force them to see it. Considering investing in a consumer Internet business without seeing the site in action is like considering investing in an ice cream shop without tasting the ice cream. If you wanna do it, go ahead, but seriously.

So, I think in the future I will insist on a demo, even if this means requiring a presentation time of 30 min (without questions). I know that's longer than the norm, but it's fine because I don't want to do business with anyone who won't take a look at the product.

The need for a demo was underscored by the fact that Linkspank's on-paper stats are astonishing, and they still had trouble winning the group over. With no PR, we've grown to 1300+ users. 67% are active in a 2 month period, with 8+ invitations to join the spank sent out per user. The average session on the site in December was 3.7 hours. The business makes sense on paper. There's not more much I could have told them statistically to convince them without having already had a thriving business :-).

Next Steps

The only part of the outcome I disliked was the idea that no one on the East Coast would have the vision to invest in this idea. I was hoping to get outside the box a little by putting Linkspank here instead of there. But (so the story goes), while there are plenty of techie and visionary people here in Cambridge, they aren't angel investors but rather poor kids.

At any rate, next steps are to look a little more globally, and reach out to angel types and get their advice. It will be fun, because I love talking about the business and I'll get some more meaningful interaction with cool people. And I'll insist on the demo :-).

Pitch: Improving the 10/20/30 Rule

I'm working on Linkspank's pitch a bit as I mentioned. So far this is basically consisting of having conversations with some of my brilliant friends and colleagues about it.

One advisor checked with me that I would be following Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule. And I was like, "Of course!" And I do think about that rule. But I'm a contrarian guy and when I hear the words "of course" (even from my own mouth) I start to examine them. So after I got off IM, I was sitting at my computer with a raised Vulcan eyebrow. "Of course?"

Could the 10/20/30 rule be improved? Of course. :-) The improved version is the 0/10/20/30/1000 rule. How catchy is that? It's Guy's rule, plus a 0 rule at the beginning and a 1,000 rule at the end.

0: The ideal number of slides that you actually get through in your presentation. This is not a trick - you bring your presentation to use it. But the best presentations are stories, and the best stories hook the listeners immediately and have them so mesmerized by what they're hearing - sitting on the edges of their seats, eyes boggling, mouth agape, drooling - that the use of slides would actually be jarring and disrupt the magic spell that is occurring. What will you possibly ever remember from this little blog post? Maybe the Vulcan "of course" eyebrow, maybe the number zero, but at any rate the elements of a story.

The other rule to append:

1,000: the whole picture is worth thing. So far, one of the most effective parts of my attempts to explain Linkspank to an uninitiated person has been this picture:

Spankmaster

Depending on what you watch on TV, this picture is just a guy, or it's a picture rich with associations and meaning (and usually immediately triggers a smile or laugh). This picture reduces the time that it takes me to explain my target market by about 30 seconds, which is a lot of time.

Summing Up

If you happen to be on my wavelength, you may have thought that the 1,000 rule boils down to the 0 rule, since good pictures boil down to telling a story. I think actually that's true for the 10/20/30 in general: it's about telling a story. The 10/20/30 parts of it are pointers for keeping the attention and understanding of your listeners.

Of course.

The Pitch

Linkspank will be pitching to investors this month and it seems like a perfect thing to blog about here (protecting the identities of the investors, of course).

This won't be the first time I've pitched Linkspank to investor types but it's pretty close. On the other hand, Linkspank's business planning goes back almost two years.

Here micro-observations so far:

1. Even though your pitch will be a PowerPoint, it's better to introduce your business to people (before you have a meeting) with a 1-2 page Word document. PowerPoint isn't meant to stand on its own, but prose is.

2. Getting a meeting with investors is much easier than winning them over. So I think it's worth it to focus on your message, not the meeting. I think connections are useful only when no one is giving you the time of day, and if your connections will vouch for you so strongly that it will help investors believe in your management ability.

3. I view investment as a partnership and courtship, and I think most investors do too. You don't just want a match, you want a good match with all kinds of signs of mutual fit. If you're feeling too hungry, you're probably missing something. And it takes time, and it's impossible and undesirable to seal this kind of deal instantly.... so there's no need to try. At first, focus on the basics of your business and the caliber of person that you are.

Do you agree? Maybe it's obvious stuff. Anyway, more to come.

Recap: HBS 2008 Entrepreneurship Conference

Today was the Harvard Business School's 2008 Entrepreneurship Conference: Life Outside the Box. Being in the neighborhood and feeling a bit daffy, I checked it out.

Wait a minute... they're IN boxes... and wearing suits.

Thanks to the Entrepreneurship Club for putting this event together!! Here's my assessment. Logistics - good. Speaker & keynote lineup - great. Keynotes - good. Panel topics - good. Panel moderation - mediocre. Schwag - good. Food - mediocre. And last but far from least, Networking - good.

The keynotes emphasized the need to be bold, take action, get your ass out and do stuff, and be prepared for people to think you are crazy or doing things wrong. I think it's a great message and I don't get tired of hearing it from successful people.

Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal, gave a cool summary of how to find a good startup idea: it is at the intersection of two circles - (1) Good Ideas and (2) Ideas that People think are Bad Ideas. The intersection of these two circles basically are overlooked opportunities... great areas to move into. Of course, while (2) is easy to determine, (1) is not. But I think it's an accurate summary of what entrepreneurs who aren't strictly lucky might chalk part of their success up to.

The biggest "delta" (that's business school wimp talk for an area for improvement) was the panel moderation. In the three panels, the moderators, students and profs alike, gave mealy-mouthed introductions, asked spineless questions, and made no contributions in framing or summarizing what was said. They should take a lesson from James Schrager, or just listen to NPR a bit more. Modest improvements would have doubled the value of the panels.

BUT I was glad I went, despite my general dislike of sitting still and listening. And I met some cool people.

Should Entrepreneurs go to Business School?

I’m an entrepreneur who attended business school. I was an entrepreneur before business school (I had an unsuccessful startup on the side) and I went to business school with the plan of starting a business – which ended up being Linkspank. Many entrepreneurs are vocally against attending business school, citing it as a “waste of time” or worse. Today I’ll share some of my thoughts on the issue, and provide a little test for whether you or an entrepreneur you know should attend business school.

Reasons to Attend Business School for Entrepreneurs

I attended business school (the University of Chicago GSB) for three reasons – to get education, to have the life of a student, and to meet people who I could work with as entrepreneurs, investors, or advisors.

1. Get education: this exceeded my expectations. Here’s what I think I learned in business school: strategy, marketing, and some “business sense” in other fields, like investments, accounting, and finance. But I also felt that I got a broader education, like the kind of education that you get in college. Because of this latter point, I felt that whether “it was worth the money” to go to business school is a no-brainer “yes”. What would you think of someone who challenged whether it was worth the money to go to college? That feeling is (probably, depending on what it is for you) my first reaction when I hear people say that business school is a waste of time or money.

2. Have the life of a student: This one is two-pronged. First, I was sick of corporate life and psyched about being a student. I ended up being much busier than I thought I would be but I still think that being a business school student (even at Chicago GSB, which is tame relative to other “Tier 1” schools) is just hands-on way more fun than working. People who are working seem to forget about that – they have forgotten about having fun and they’re thinking about their 360 degree evaluations, salaries, and promotions.

Additionally, I wanted to start a business while I was in school. I think this is an underdiscussed opportunity for entrepreneurs. It’s hard as hell to start a business on the side while you’re working. It’s much easier (though not necessarily easy) to start one while you’re in school. Also your resume and finances are basically taken care of in one way or another.

3. Meet entrepreneurs, investors, advisors: I got lots of GREAT advice from my fellow students. They are sub-average contributors as spankers, but far above average as advisors on product and strategy. Not many of them were entrepreneurs. Many of them have offered to stay in touch about investment.

Reasons Not to Attend Business School for Entrepreneurs

(If you are taking a loan,) You’ll be saddled with debt after school, and as an entrepreneur, you may find it difficult to pay it.

The professors and students around you are likely to bash good ideas.

You won’t learn “real-world” stuff – you still have to learn that by doing.

Business school will not help you decide whether you want to be an entrepreneur. In fact, if you’re on the fence, it may even push you away from being an entrepreneur. (Arguably that’s a pro if it’s the right path for you.)

The Test: You’re an Entrepreneur. Should you go to Business School?

Answer the questions and add up the points. (Sorry it's a little ugly, the formatting on Blogger sucks.)

1. I know what kind of business I want to start, or I am already running a business that I will keep running.

Exactly (-5 points)

Vaguely (+2 points)

No (0 points)

2. How willing are you to forgo income and feel poor after school? (If you are financially independent give yourself 0 points for this question)

Willing (+5 points)

Maybe not (-5 points, 0 points if you would pay for school with a loan)

I’m willing to be poor, it’s the time that is the issue (-10 points)

3. I plan

To start a business during school, even if it means slightly worse grades, and a hectic life (+5 points)

To start a business after I graduate (-5 points)

I have no plan (+0 points)

4. Picture this – you go to business school, but you don’t end up with the real-world knowledge you need to start your business. Your professors seem to doubt that you have the necessary experience too. You:

Go into consulting for two years (0 points)

Just wasted my time (-5 points)

Start your business anyway (+5 points)

Scoring:

5 points or higher -Go to business school, and start something.

0 points-ish -You may want to go to business school – but are you sure you want to start a business?

-5 points or lower -Don’t go to business school. Start something now.

FYI, I would have scored a 10 on this test two years ago. I’m not sure if this test actually makes any sense but hopefully it was thought-provoking.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do Lists (Entrepreneurial Lifehacking)

Two cliches of entrepreneurship are managing yourself and wearing many hats. At the heart of all this is To-Do List Management. A boring subject, but one which holds the key to our productivity and happiness.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do's:

1. Noting them in a daily work journal (a document)
2. Listing, scoring, tracking them in a spreadsheet
3. Storing them in folders in my email
4. Keeping them in online "sticky note" applications
5. Using Jott to send them to myself via phone.
6. Writing lists on pieces of paper

I have experimented with these for a long time (except Jott, that is recent).

My findings: -- summarized from lots of testing :-)

Since I have a very high volume of items (feature requests, little notes, micro-bugs) the spreadsheet method is required. I need a method that is simple enough that I'll use it, but which can organize and prioritize hundreds of to-do items.

Email, Jott, and paper lists are all useful ways of recording items to make sure they get into the spreadsheet. If the to-do item is very small then it might be dealt with before it makes it to the spreadsheet.

Paper is good also to take items out of the spreadsheet as the Daily To-Do List.

Smaller notes:

I tried the email method during a campaign to keep my emai inbox clean. That campaign worked and I rarely have more than 20 messages in my inbox now. But the email folder method wasn't working for me because I was wasting time by sending myself emails and it was difficult to get myself to visit the folders.

I think the folder method works for less pressing items, and maybe for lists that are only 20 or 30 items usually.

Jott is pretty cool. I think it's more cool as an on-the-fly communication system. But it's good for a quick reminder of a micro-feature that you can send to email and copy into a spreadsheet later. If you could jot to a spreadsheet that would be cool, but the internal mechanism for managing your Jotts is primitive.

I think paper is a really really good method... but it's easy to lose paper and hard to organize it. Sometimes I write notes and they end up useless in a pile. I think written notes have an expiration of 24-72 hours. I think paper is good for copying a list of what to do and then thinking out on paper exactly how you are going to do those things that day.

Journaling your work is important I believe. But it's a big jumble. The journal has two purposes. One is like writing on paper - temporary thinking and quick access - but it's tied to the clipboard on your computer. The other is the emergency haystack - if you're looking for something and you don't know where it is, you can always dive into the haystack.

Many people comment on the soothing aspect of creating lists. Write a list and you feel control over your life. I think it's even more true for a spreadsheet. You have to put some work into the spreadsheet. I have a dorky model where I rate todo items on how important they are to the business. It takes a lot of time to do that... but hey, how can you march without a strategy? Plus having a strategy is much more comforting :-).

Entrepreneurial Lifehacking

I've been meaning to post for a while on "Entrepreneurial Lifehacking" - tricks and strategies for being organized, happy, productive as an entrepreneur.

Today I'll just warm up by listing some of the topics I've been thinking about and working on:

+ Daily routines
+ Which to-do's to delete entirely and avoid
+ How to organize and prioritize to-do's
+ Use of phone, email, and meetings
+ How to digest maximum news in minimum time
+ Experiments with Jott.com
+ Phone gadgetry, including the N95 and the Jawbone

Hmn... that sounds like a pretty boring list now that I write it out. But doesn't everyone like to be more productive? :-)

A Formula to (actually!) Use LinkedIn... and an Answer to the Classic Puzzle

This post will be rough but I wanted to share a formula for using LinkedIn.

Background: I want to start having some conversations on the Linkspank contest sponsorship program. To get various industry perspectives and advice, I need to make some connections.

The Formula:

1. Have a purpose. Most people on LinkedIn don't have a purpose for networking. Which is fine (unless you ask the Never Eat Alone guy). But you need a purpose to do this - getting a job, hiring someone, or in my case, setting up chats with people to get advice.

2. Search for the people you want to contact. E.g., I want to speak to someone from Orbitz, so I search LinkedIn for "Orbitz."

3. Sort your search by degrees of separation from you and throw out everyone higher than degree 3. They are too far away. InMail, referrals, all that stuff on the site - not going to help you with these guys (or anyone).

4. For each person you'd like to contact... (we'll call that person the "match")
a. Visit their profile and confirm you want to contact them.
b. See on their profile page which of your contacts connects you DIRECTLY to that person. We'll call that person the "connector."
c. Contact "the connector" and ask if that person is willing to send you the "match"'s contact info, and also to send an email to the "match" mentioning as much.

5. Contact the "match" by phone and email... and do whatever it was that you were setting out to do.

Notes

(i) Referrals on the site don't seem to work too well.

(ii) Anyone further way than 2 is not really reachable. Who gives a fuck if the CEO is your mailman's chiropractor's husband?

(iii) Observation (ii) gives us our answer to the Classic Puzzle - "who is worth adding as a contact on LinkedIn? Is it worth it? Why am I always logging in just to approve requests and then leave immediately?"

"What is the point of this crap?" Answered!

Answer: connect with someone if you know them enough to ask them the favor in #4. Which is not really all that well - you don't have to have worked with the person. But it's a good reason to build your network with acquaintances who you respect and know a bit about.

Stumbling on Happiness...as an Entrepreneur

I've been reading Stumbling on Happiness. I won't review the book, but merely apply some of its observations to entrepreneurship.

Finding #1: Control, rather than outcomes, is key to happiness.

Corollary #1: To be happy, be an entrepreneur.

Finding #2: We are happier with irreversible decisions than reversible ones.

Corollary #2: When applying Corollary #1, do it boldly.

More Fun with Menus

Lao Tzu writes:

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.

Spank Tzu may have written:

Governing a small startup
is like playing with a large pinyata.
Beat the crap out of it.

In other words, I am often pushing changes too quickly to be able to measure their effects scientifically, or let things take their course fully. :-)

Today's experiment is a further push with menus. I am proud (so far) of some of the recent menu changes described in this previous post, but I still faced a problem: the browse menus on the right weren't being noticed by people.

The problem seemed to be that the menu was located to the right of the page:

Browse menu at the right of the page

... where spanker eyes were not travelling to.

So let's try the menu on the left side...

Browse menu at the left of the page

Along the way, this inspired a shortening of the dark gray box at the top left, which was probably warranted anyway. (With regards to the other post, note the formatting of this menu somewhat like Facebook.)

The main trade-off of putting the browse menus on the left is that they have eliminated the "random profile" listings and the Spankathon/contest reminder. But I want to experiment with more sophisticated ways of sharing information about people and the contests in the context of the home page anyway... hence the experiment is underway! I'll get back to you on whether people browsing behaviors change.

Linkspank has no competition.

Linkspank has no competition. I'm totally serious. Really, I mean come on, what's the competition?

Ok, I'm kidding. In talking with me, one of the things people are most obsessed about is "competition." So I've had the opportunity to think about it and talk about it and so it's an Inside Linkspank kind of topic.

bring it, biatch

How I Don't Think about Competition: Laundry List Comparison

Don't create a list of companies that seem reminiscent of Linkspank and worry about whether they are "already doing" what Linkspank is doing, and whether we "need" something like Linkspank.

thinking inside the box

In my opinion, that is the DEFINITION of thinking inside the box. :-)


How I Do Think about Competition: Consumer Opportunity

Start with the customer. Competition is forever a secondary business question - second to the user and what the user wants.

Thinking about people is how good stuff gets started. I started working on Linkspank because I remarked to myself,

You know, Andrew, procrastination is too much work, it's not as fun as it could be, and it's still really primitive. When I get an email forward, I have no idea where it came from and I don't know whether my other friends saw it. Wouldn't it be nice to know that?

(one man's dream come true... or on the way at least)

(and again)

Also, despite search engines and websites, it's still way too hard to find all the good stuff out there. There are videos that hit the web and are viewed by 3 million people in a week. How do you know what they are, which of your friends are watching them? and it's just too hard to find the stuff you are really going to like - especially new stuff.


When I go to YouTube, I know there's a lot of great stuff. But it would be way better if I could see what my friends were watching, what they liked, and if I could share things with them more easily and save it all to watch it and share it later.

There are all kinds of ways to share links - you can email them, "share" on sites like YouTube, Break, eBaumsworld, you can post on MySpace or share on Facebook, and there are all kinds of techie sites like stumpleupon, digg, delicious, etc, -- but I've tried all these things and I just am not that impressed. Sharing is too technical, too much work, and you still can't do half the stuff I want to do.

Basically, all the stuff out there sucks. And I can imagine a site that doesn't suck. Maybe I should try to make that. Wouldn't that be fun?

And that's how I got started. We created a "customer manifesto" of sorts. And we had a team of people and we researched the idea. We found that Linkspank (as it would later be called) would not be for everyone, but that there was a real opportunity.

there must be a better way

You can only talk about competition in my opinion once you have an opportunity to do something new in mind.

Now, if the opportunity is real, then by definition your competition is failing in some way. They aren't addressing the opportunity, or not that well. Take Digg, which is a great site but suffers from both issues. First, it doesn't really address sharing with friends in any real way (it's a "wisdom of crowds" application, not a friends site or social network). Second, it doesn't really address it right - it's too techie and hasn't grown beyond a slice of the web population.

Even though lots of people have been working at this problem, they have not solved it yet. People still share using email above all - and while email is ok, it's easy to imagine a better world for people who share more than like a couple links per month.


No Competition is Usually a Bad Sign

If there is a real opportunity, then you should expect competition. If there is no competition, you either don't understand the market, there is no market, or you're WAY ahead of everyone. (Of the three, the last is the best, but it's still a rough place to be.)


So How Do You Know if You Can Compete?

If you're competing just on speed, don't bother. The trick is to solve the problem better! And in a rich, interconnected way, as explained by Porter's concept of strategic fit.

To my mind that means, the more complicated your problem is, the better chance you have at being able to compete - if you can solve it. :-).

Just one competitor's thoughts.... ante up.