communication

Started thinking about the different communications channels we all use, and how well they really reach people? And not only that; how well they really achieve the end goal of facilitating good communication and actually getting a meaningful exchange going between people?

I have most of my communication channels listed here in the contact section:

http://tane.li/contact

Today I was away from email for most of the day, just a normal 8 hour work day. Meanwhile: 100 unread emails keep piling up. I also use about 11 different email accounts that all come to the same reader.

The point being: email is pretty much destroyed as a communication tool by overuse and spam. People email each other carelessly. They email too long texts that are not summarized. They abuse all sorts of mailing lists. They also email half-finished thoughts and raw mindflow that's painful to read through waiting for the actual point or call to action to appear somewhere in there. They don't consider who really needs to receive that message in the first place. They don't consider is it going to be a meaningful exchange between the sender and receiver - they just fire away something half-baked. Also one common challenge is emailing people something that asks too much of them. Too much attention, too much time, too much consideration. Like emailing them an entire book as an attachment and asking the receiver to read it and summarize it.

People also abuse the expectations and time frames of email communication: emailing each other something and expecting an immediate reaction as the reply - almost as if they had just talked with the person over the phone. Cannot do that with email. It's asymmetric communication and you should treat and expect it as such. It helps significantly if the email is short, summarized, very clear and has an indication of when a reply is expected. Without this clarity and focus emails are a massive negative time sink that just end up frustrating you and wasting everybody's time.

How are the other channels working then?

The phone: often busy with actual work and no time to answer it. I don't have a voice mail service, because I hate using one and it would just be unfair to other people who would try leaving messages there. So; doesn't work too well at all.

SMS then: works a lot better. The receiver is in control of when to read it. And the messages are never too long.

Skype: never online. When I am, it sort of works OK.

Google chat: same thing as Skype

Facebook chat: I have disabled this. Way too much spam and chatter of the interrupting kind.

Facebook messages: don't quite work, slow to reply. Reason: too much spam. (Same as email)

LinkedIN messages: don't quite work, slow to reply. Reason: too much spam again.

Private message in Twitter: works extremely well! Can only be 140 characters; so it's laser sharp and never too long. Don't get that many of them, so it's easy and fast to reply. There's very little spam in Twitter, which is great.

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Perhaps somebody should create an email service that can only send and receive emails of up to 200 characters. That could make it bearable and usable. Or would it?

How do you relate to your communication channels? Which one functions the best? Which ones don't work?

Since the Slush'09 event I have been touring with the IBP (International Business Program) across Finland, listening to startups, coaching, giving feedback and trying to give a few ideas on how to get things going. This has been interesting to me, as I am not a consultant, but an entrepreneur by class and nature. Usually I work with a few chosen companies, typically as an owner, board member, advisor etc. I have 10 successful funding rounds and several exists behind me so I know a thing or two about pitching, presenting and shaping a company to be interesting and successful. Semi-frequently I also get asked to act as a judge in a pitching competition, I'm up there presenting and talking myself about once every two weeks nowdays. So, it's been good fun with the IBP!

The project describes its own goal as : "International Business Program is offering help for digital business companies which have proved to be growth willing and estimated to have potential global competitiveness."

In essence; we try to make promising companies sprout, grow and be more internationally successful.

We have been touring Helsinki, Hämeenlinna, Kouvola, Tampere and Vaasa. The whole program has been free for the companies (sponsored by public ESR funding) and the format has been quite effective varied format: pitches, feedback, Q&A, written analysis from experts, one-on-one coaching, and plenty of good talks. It's not necessary to be a startup to participate, tho many have been clear startup cases, some even pre-incorporated ideas. While others have been actual corporations and well-established companies.

All together we'v had 33 companies participating so far. Here's my list:

Siltaloppi Productions - Videoarkisto.fi
Fitness Media (Maximal.tv)
Elixir
JoinMeTube
Advant Games
Citynomadi
KLOK
Steam Republic
XMLdation.com
Kutalab (djonline.fi)
Wavesum
Solver
Pallo.com (in stealth mode, therefor no link)
CTS Engtec
Jalusta Technologies / Aptual
TWID
Simosol, Ltd
Mediamaisteri
IT-Palvelu.net
Mikrolinna
Webbinetti S&T Ky (kaitafilmi.fi)
Viestix, Ltd (Breeze Tags)
SongHI Entertainment
Red Tail
Rolohub
Zokem
Floobs
Illtags
Ball-IT
BRIIM
Futuuns
Fambit
Aito Technologies

We also had a bunch that joined up, but bailed out for some reason or the other ;-)

I have been there throughout all the sessions and have listened to each of those companies pitch, given them all feedback, and written them some notes. There have been a few other established industry people doing the same. Namely the crew of Accelerando. and Timoteus Tuovinen from DOORStories.

After hearing 33 companies pitch (and naturally bunch of others outside this program as well) it becomes quite apparent what we need to focus more on here in Finland. One of the main points in illustrated here in this picture:

Which candy is the most delicious? The best thing, based on solid Finnish technology? Can't say huh?

Often enough neither can I.. This repeated quite a few times in the pitches and presentations of our companies: not really paying enough attention to differentiation, competition, competitive response and uniqueness..

If all the competitors in your market are like bridesmaids dressed up in their pretty black dresses. Then your startup simply HAS TO BE the gorgeous white bride that clearly stands out from the crowd.

Sounds simple enough? Differentiation, uniqueness and standing out clearly from your competition is one of the most essential things any company should have figured out. Also when you pitch your company it should be one of the first things you illustrate. Illustration can happen (or should happen) through captivating action; like showing the audience a demo of your product etc. It is OK to say it, but even better to show it; how much you differentiate from your competition.

In 2008 Jason Calacanis wrote these two (first here, second here) excellent posts about presenting and "how to demo your startup". Read them. Study them religiously. Take them seriously and act on them. This is amongst the best advice I have seen out there.

Differentiation for a startup is more important than things like relevance or price. It's more important than your revenue model. Get it figured out first and worry about the revenue model later.

I also like two kinds of companies: those that pick an opponent and go and pick a fight, and those that just ignore all the competition and mold themselves to be so different from anybody else that they just about create a category of their own; they go their own way.

If you have longer than a few minutes to demo or pitch your startup (some of the 33 companies there had a full 30 minutes), then you can go a bit deeper and use a structure like the one here by Sequoia Capital. It is also simultaneously one of the best structures to follow as your business plan slide deck.

Many companies I heard pitches from have excellent products, existing customers, many references and showcases on the market. But did they show them? Almost universally; NO. only very rarely did anybody show us any proper real cases and executed references at all.

One of the best things you can show in a pitch is a real demo of your product. Engage the audience with a story, a real showcase, show them a reference, talk about what you did for that customer, how valuable it is, and how it's different from the ability of your competition to deliver the same amazing value. You should do this as the first thing of your presentation (you should start with this) the rest is much more interesting if this first part arouses the interest of the audience.

What's the worst kind of presentation then? Here's a small list:

- Starting with your name, title and industry background (usually everybody in the audience can read; and they have been reading some preparatory material already and know your name for example).
- Going through the general market first and not even mentioning what it is that you do (general market is only interesting if the product is).
- Using only bulletpoint slides, preferably in black and white (boring everybody to death)
- Not showing your excellent product, despite the fact that you do have it
- Speaking only technical stuff and ignoring the minor things such as competition, differentiation, customer value, and revenue model... etc

A 17 part list of good pitching.

The opposite of this is an engaging exciting presentation that goes right to the point and really leaves the audience reeling from sheer awesomeness of it. What could it include then?

1. Start with a real demo or real reference case, show your product
2. Immediately explain what we see, how awesome and easy it is
3. Followup by what value it creates (problem it solves), how vital it is to the customer (how well it solves it)
4. Go into differentiation; show a few key competitors and explain why you are superiorly unique to them
5. Head into how much money you make and how
6. Next only one or two sentences about the market opportunity (why this is hot now?)
7. Showcase your excellent team in a memorable way
8. Throw in all the awesome customer references and wins you have accomplished. Show pictures, video or live demos of each quickly
9. Do the grande finale with a call to action: do you seek funding? customers? partners? state it!

In a short pitch my opinion is that you should totally ignore these:

10. No long introductions of yourself and your work history, plz. (it may be interesting that you are a paramedic by training, but it's certainly more interesting after you tell us about your amazing company first)
11. Explaining the history and evolution of the market (forget it, no time)
12. Financials (boring, forget it. If they like your company, they will ask and talk about the finances later on.)
13. Technical stuff about the product (unless its globally patented and very very cool like an anti-gravity machine, forget it. It doesn't matter how exactly it works underneath, it only matters what you use it for).

Besides the content, what else should you concentrate on?

14. Good open and exciting body language. Move around, engage the audience, make it SHOW that you are excited about the opportunities of your company!
15. maintain a good contact with the audience: have constant eye contact. Don't stand behind a podium or a laptop. Always use a wireless presenter when pitching so that you don't have to be there to push keyboard buttons.
16. Answers all questions after the pitch in a short efficient and honest manner. Challenge the people asking them: ask for justifications, more details and examples of what they really mean etc. Engage them in an intelligent rapid-fire conversation
17. Make your presentation materials very visual. All pictures and video and live demos would be the best. No text (except single words or a few words at the maximum) and absolutely NO bullet points and boring slides. A decent tool to use for this would be www.prezi.com

.. OK enough about pitching. What else did I learn from ICP clinics?

We have great companies and great products here in Finland. We need to be much much better in presenting them. We also need to think about differentiation, uniqueness, competition and summarizing it all much more. Growth potential is there, we just need to shape it out!

If this post has managed to grasp your attention and you want in; good news! That can be done. There will be a full day IBP camps coming up that you and your company can join:

IBP Camp Helsinki: 20.4.2010 (topic: internationalization and funding)
IBP Camp Hämeenlinna: 7.5.2010 (topic: partnerships and networks)
IBP Camp Tampere: 6.10.2010
IBP Camp in UK September/2010

The camps cost a negligible sum each (200 EUR + VAT) and there's room for only 20 companies: so joint up now! (there's a link below)

There are also more up and coming clinics (these pitching and coaching sessions):

Clinic Tampere 17.-18.5.
Clinic Helsinki 8-9.9.
Clinic Vaasa 23.9.

There's also a full GoToMarket package that you can apply for; the best companies get it. That means very competent people to help you out for a strongly supported fee (ESR public funding up to 75% and 10.000 EUR)

You can apply to all of those through this form here.

Don't be tied up with your digibusiness! Join us and we'll tackle the challenges you have together. I hope that the links and lists on this blog post would be a good start to take your company further.

Godspeed!

It took me a while to get the video online; I'm currently here in the Finnish countryside, barely within the reach of the interwebz (and the trip isn't on my Dopplr, shame on me!). Converting the video from an "obscure digicamera format" into something that is reasonably sized and compliant with online video services took a while.

But here it is: Fruugo's presentation and interview from SIME08. Janne Waltonen of Fruugo gives a talk, and then sits down with Ola Ahlvarsson for a brief interview.

Fruugo talk in SIME by Taneli for http://tane.li from Taneli Tikka on Vimeo.

If you have read all the interviews available concerning Fruugo, then there isn't that much additional substance offered in this video. There are a few bits and pieces of stuff thou. This Arctic Startup post from before the appearance on stage has most of the info:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/fruugo-to-arcticstartup-on-tomorrows-pr-lau...

Janne Waltonen doesn't launch a product or service, but rather talks about the upcoming launch, without showing any previews at this point. Audience is being asked to participate and get in touch - always a good idea. In this context the "witness the Fruugo launch" -headline was a bit off, but I'm sure it is being placed there by the conference instead of the company itself. Janne does a good job in mentioning right at the start that they don't actually launch anything right now.

One of the funniest answers to "do you online shop?" - question is "I think it's boring" ;) highlights one part of the existing problem for sure.

Ola also brings one good point to the table in the interview by saying that if somebody is a retailer that's selling only in a few countries, then Fruugo sounds like a rather good prop in expanding the market to additional areas. Certainly sounds like an opportunity many might go after.

Fruugo seems very careful in trying hard not to oversell and hype, but instead bring the expectations down and keep a cool head. I have the feeling that it won't be easy for them to pull all of that through. As Janne says on stage; it takes a lot to come up and build anything new in online shopping.

The startup I'm currently heading, www.runtoshop.com, is also in the online shopping space, more specifically in the social shopping space. We don't consider Fruugo to be a "head-on primary competitor", but then again we haven't seen what they have got "under the hood" yet. Sounds like the business models and concepts have a supporting fit for each other.

Looks like we (the public) still don't know much about Fruugo, and will have to wait until January'09. Then again that's only about 45 days away, not much of a wait, or is it?

After seeing the video, what do you think? Did they give a good impression, or was something amiss? How does the story continue from here?

I spent a big part of last weekend with my Whisky Syndicate in our annual meeting. Its really not as much of a whisky syndicate as it is a group of business people keeping in touch and sharing views, interests, a healthy sense of humor, and the latest challenges in their respective fields.

One topic of discussion on Saturday was about communication in big organizations and what's it like in many companies currently. People complain that there isn't enough communication and not enough openness. It is as if they would want managers to report to them daily on what they have been spending their time on. And in those organizations that have gone a bit into this the reaction has been that "why there is little to tell? Are you hiding something?" which is interesting. People seem to assume that if they are being told 3 things then there must be at least 8 things that they are not being told about. There seems to be plenty of demands for pretty one-sided transparency and full rapport, which doesn't really work that well, as the big organizations have noticed.

Startups in many ways are blessed for being able to run a much more direct and simple communications. The lower number of people and the often entirely shared physical space makes it a lot more effective and straightforward. Check my previous entry on Agile Management for some ideas:

http://tane.li/2008/agile-management-startups

In startups you can get rid of most of the communication problems by things like:

1. Share stuff on various places; Google Docs, Basecamp, Shared network disk etc. Keep it up to date.

2. Have a wiki for something that's being edited often and edited by many.

3. Have everybody on Google Calendar or similar, and get them to share their cals as a mandatory thing. Makes it easy to check which customers are our sales guys meeting next week for example.

4. Have the dev team's calendars in there too, to check when things like sprint planning and retros etc take place.

5. Use the whiteboards and post-its. They really convey information more effectively than any online system would. As long as you all share the same space and use them as tools daily.

6. Keep meetings open: everybody is welcomed to attend, team members are the ones conducting the meeting and doing the talking, but everyone can observe silently.

7. Remind people not to divert from reaching after their goals and objectives. They can listen on to other stuff as much as they like, just as long as it doesn't hurt reaching the objectives they should be going for.

When ever anybody "whines" about communications ask them to be very specific: name 5 things or topics, how would they like to hear about those? From whom? etc. It usually turns out that an agile management process would take care of pretty much all communication needs.

Processes like Scrum are more of a communication processes than actual development/engineering processes. They can be quite successfully applied in generic communications as well.

What should the big corps do then? Many of the problems seem to come from the attitudes of people and their old fashioned fixed ways, resistance to change etc. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff to "educate" to any big corp. employees before they can communicate effectively. However making it a part of their score cards makes it a priority rather quick and directs people towards communicating better - and who knows, maybe even to adapting Agile processes for it.

What has worked for you? Why? Do you have any disaster examples on how not to do it? I would be interested to get a few comments on this, and perhaps later go deeper into examining good startup communication processes.

As a startup you don't have the money to be fooling around with all sorts of expensive marketing stuff, especially the kinds that produce dubious results, right?

There are entire blogs that devote themselves to go through various topics of startup marketing. Here are a few:

http://www.startup-marketing.com/
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198

Over the years I have learned (often through trial and error) what works in startup marketing and what doesn't. Here's my take on that:

The stuff that does not work:

1. Tradeshows / Conventions / Big organized events. These typically cost too much for a startup anyways. But even if you would get some government money or something and would be able to scrape together the budget to go there; even then they are too much of an effort for a startup to properly organize. They often require a full team of people to be there for multiple days, and that can ramp up quite a cost. Unless your product is very mature and already successful in some other market (and you are just bringing it over to market of the Tradeshow) I would not recommend attending. Not even if you get to "piggyback" with a bigger company inside their stand. Not worth it.

CC Attribution: TechShowNetwork@Flickr

2. Roadshows and trips for a series of meetings. Startups often go on one of these trips way to early; your product is nowhere near complete enough and all you end up doing is getting some lukewarm half-interested response that ends up wasting everyones time. If you are looking for partners and/or customers, there are better ways to do that than for example: to organize a series of 15 meetings during an expo in another country. The amount of followup you have to do, and the magnitude of discipline it requires will most often ruin this opportunity for a startup.

3. Paid advertising in print, tv, or "traditional media". Again startups do not have the budget, and it very rarely works. Have you noticed that just about 100% of advertising in traditional media is for products and stuff that is already very much complete, perhaps successful in another markets, or at least already being adapted by a significant customer mass? There's a reason for that: nobody launches and introduces their products in traditional media for the first time. Because it is simply a very ineffective place to do that. Stay away as a startup.

CC Attribution: Mrs Jackson@Flickr

4. Old fashioned sponsorships. These are designed for well-known larger corporations that already have a name and want to steer their brands more towards what ever it is that they are sponsoring. Nobody ever remembers a tiny unknown startup from the sea of sponsors the thing (what ever it is) is going to have anyways. Just about everything in this category is a waste of money and resources for a startup. Be very critical when anybody tries to sell you a sponsorship. The only kinds of events where that might actually work for a startup are something like www.slushhelsinki.com and even then; be critical in your assessment ;)

5. Big time "presence". Advertising agencies and such always claim that in their business the company office needs to have a certain kind of 'presence' and that it acts as a marketing tool for them. Maybe, who knows? For startups that certainly is not true. The focus on office space with startups should be your own team and employees, not marketing or really any outsider as such. Spending boatloads of green on your office deco just makes you look like an irresponsible spender in the eyes of who ever is financing you.

6. Fancy physical marketing materials. Another classic category of marketing that doesn't really turn into any incoming cash flow all that easy. Some startups notoriously spend a lot on making fancy and glossy marketing materials. I have never found this to be so useful - the material is outdated in a few months anyways, and I am yet to encounter a person that had made a purchasing decision ("I will buy something from this startup") based on the glossy materials the startup had. You can make materials, just make modest ones with actual information and substance in them. Not A3 sized pictures of your pretty office manager and a customer reference list that is hopefully going to be outdated in a few months anyways.

Stuff that does often work:

A. Going for leverage. Leverage = small bets, potentially huge gains if you get it right. Do small creative things. Lots of them. Figure out what works and do more of it.

B. Make yourself easy to be found. One of the best marketing things a startup can do almost for free is to make itself and its products as easy as possible to be found and discovered. Try to always think in terms of "how will the customer find us?", "where can we be discoverable where they are looking?" etc. Use what ever comes to your mind and followup on the different sources on how you customer actually did discover your; was it through Google? Through the company website address in your office window?

C. Great product is your best commercial ever. If you have good enough product you will be quite successful in turning all of your customers into active PR people and advocates of your product and brand. Just look at Apple how that's done. Getting people to passionately talk about your stuff only requires that it is truly excellent. www.IRC-Galleria.net originally spread like wildfire in the Finnish upper secondary school system (or high school) because of word of mouth, which was the direct result of people talking about what's going on there and how active the place is. Money spent on getting the customer experience right with your product is money spent on marketing.

D. PR and articles. This is the way to go for a startup. Usually requires no money, just plenty of planning, effort and time. Try to get as much free PR and articles out there as you can. Be open about what you do, be visible, be easy to discover, be loud, etc. Talk to journalists, issue press releases on important stuff - research and find out how this stuff is done and possibly get a partner to do some of it for you. Some of the recent PR successes in the USA by finnish startups have been possible because companies like www.tripsay.com or www.xihalife.com use a local PR agency there, that does this stuff for them. www.dopplr.com does their own PR, and are very successful in doing it. www.muxlim.com works with a Swedish partner on this. Hiring somebody to help you might increase the cost, but often it is worth it for a startup: quite minimal cost, and potentially big rewards.

E. Barter deals. Barter deal is where you exchange something (not money) to get advertising or something comparable to advertising. If you are a big huge website like www.irc.fi then this is something you can use very effectively to get all sorts of visibility stuff for zero money. Other startups that start to have some traction can also try to go with barter deals in different kind of things; banner exchanges, having your logo there, having your intro there in the partners newsletter, integrating a link to your partners website, etc. RunToShop does this frequently with many partners and it is both cheap and quite effective; gets you attention and allows customers to discover you.

F. Viral campaigns. Viral campaigns are perhaps more suitable for startups than anything else. Try to get as many of these going as possible. These are potentially almost zero money campaigns that may yield unexpectedly huge rewards. In 2007 iLike managed to get some heavy leverage going by jumping on the virality of the new Facebook apps and they notoriously got 300.000 new users every day and went from small numbers to 6 million users in no time at all. How to repeat that? Think about what could "go viral" with your product, and then try to make that happen. Be creative and try different things. Usually the things that utilize a paradigm shift just like iLike (eh..) did there are the ones that hold the highest potential virality.

G. SEO/SEM. Optimizing your search engine traffic and spending some on search engine marketing is "teh shit" these days, isn't it? The thing about SEO/SEM is that it really seems to work, and it is cheap enough for just about any startup to benefit from it. Do what you can yourself, but I recommend finding a good partner with references from your specific field to join forces with you. A good SEO plan takes at least 6 months to execute and for the results to show, so don't give up early.

CC Attribution: ByronShell@Flickr

H. Be your own brand builder. Talk about your stuff. Use every existing free service out there. Register to places such as www.stumbleupon.com, www.getsatisfaction.com, start a company Twitter, a blog if have the time (and somebody eager to write it). Mane a www.crunchbase.com profile for your company. Etc. Have conversations about your startup with people. Ask for feedback and opinion. Participate in industry events and meetups for some networking. Try to get into your customer segments' events. RunToShop team visited "ChildFare" this year for only a few hours with a mission to talk to potential partners exhibiting there. The result? Tens of contacts, about 10 signed partnership deals and a lot of attention for Run. Besides it was fun to talk to people while they were trying to put a fake tattoo on some kids arm for example.. a welcomed change for the daily startup life ;-)

I. Competitions, fun, and modern sponsorships. Competitions and fun stuff with startups work pretty good. Consider holding a couple of good compos. Preferably with prizes that you got free (or bartered) from your partners. Organize parties for the audiences that are important to your business. Consider sponsoring something in a non-traditional modern way. As an example: www.muxlim.com is sponsoring the TechCrunch Brunch at Slush.

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..and that's it! I ended up with quite a list. The most important thing in startup marketing is to be agile; to decide-do-measure-evaluate-change and do that cycle over and over again rapidly. This is a bit of a stupid slogan but it really works: "do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn't".