communication

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".

There's one thing that's been bugging me since I opened my blog and have been following the kind of mentions and writings it has received in other blogs and the media. I have also received some interesting feedback about this issue already.

My rant about this matter is directed towards people who have an ongoing rapport with the public in the form of PR and at the same time exercise this behaviour in private. This is just to say that I understand why your Average Joe without a public life can be quite opinionated in private, whereas I have trouble understanding this particular two-faced bahaviour often demonstrated by politicians, association leaders and yes, even CEOs:

There's a long tradition in Finland to communicate "behind closed doors", perhaps a lot more than people like to admit, and certainly more than in many other cultures.

This seems to be yet another issue where there's a bit of a generational gap in existence: older and (therefor) more experienced business people tend to incline more towards this behaviour than the younger ones. Now its a good question that: have they learned to be that way? Or is it something that comes from value + attitude base they grew up with? Younger people almost automatically feel different about sharing and voicing opinions publicly. That is sort of what the whole megratrend of social media is all about: the person of the year is you (or was 2 years ago), and everybody wants to have their own voice and be known etc. I'm not saying that's perfectly healthy either ;) just that: 1) there is a difference, and 2) it affects how people communicate.

The really unacceptable part of the traditional "behind closed doors" finnish -style of communication is how much of an inner circle thing it is. Its the part of Finland and finnish culture that acutely reminds me of Kekkoslovakia. Since opening up this blog the opinions and remarks voiced here have already been judged as "unprofessional" and "scandalous". It seems that you really don't need to say much in this country to annoy some people?

Finally I get to the point; my precise problem is this familiar scene that repeats itself over and over again every day in Finnish business culture: a group of business people get together. Maybe they are just a random group, maybe they are freemasons, maybe members of some association or club. What happens is that they get slightly drunk and start communicating stuff that is essentially just plain dirty gossip, rumors and stuff they are too scared to "say out loud". Their audience is not large, its a limited group of people, and later if anything they said comes back to haunt them, they often claim not remembering it, being drunk, or they change their statement faster than you can say "HYPOCRITE!". Then the whole thing repeats: the next time they "sit out an evening" with business people they build more gossip on the gossip they heard the last time, and it gets around and around and around.

Why exactly is it "professional" to do this two-faced gossiping routine behind closed doors, but it is "unprofessional" to voice even a slightly different opinion publicly? Explain that to me please? It all sounds like a rather fresh pile of horse pucky - not to mention being the behaviour of a bunch of cowards.

One popular theory states that people do this "behind closed doors" act because it used to mean something; exclusivity, membership benefit, being privileged to hear it, etc. Maybe in an ancient time where information wasn't getting around as fast as it is today, and things were less transparent, maybe that was at least partially true. Telling from what I see: today people don't do this routine that much with hard information, its the opinions, insights, perspectives and such that are kept back behind closed door. Things like "You know that he is out of money, right?" or "the CEO there is going to get fired next month, I know someone in the board", or "me and few others are working on blocking that story from being published", etc.

I'm a member of many associations and "closed clubs" my self. So where's the openness part then? The openness is in not changing your opinion and not being afraid to say it. Remember folks: it IS legal in this country to walk around with a voice recorder in your pocket and get absolutely everything on tape without asking anyone (all the conversations you yourself are a part of). So why even try to have two opinions on the same issue: one public and one private? Having the same opinion in private and in public is honest, ethical and professional in my book. How come people have different stands on this issue then? Difficult to say, maybe they have nothing to say themselves so there's an upside in preventing anybody from publicly saying anything at all either.

Just look at these few loud mouthed, opinionated, and very successful people: Mark Cuban (he has said things like "When I die, I want to come back as me" and "cut your credit cards, if you use a credit card you don't want to be rich"), Jason Calacanis ("fire people who are not workaholics"), Bill Maher ("If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you Pope.").

Why is shutting up in public and gossiping like there's no tomorrow behind closed doors idolized in Finland as "professional" behaviour? If they gossip about you and your company: would you rather have the discussion openly or circulating around as a one-sided rumor?

From my university studies on ethics I keenly remember that the only correct business ethic is to: always stick to the truth, and to never fake reality (lie) in order to gain value from it. Being opinionated "behind closed doors" and then changing your opinion if you got caught outside your little circle is precisely that: lying in order to gain value from it. How do you feel about this?