Joe Bezdek discusses brands at Founder Institute mentor session

Joe Bezdek, cofounder of FatPencil and DivX, gave a presentation on branding for Chicago Founder Institute.  My major takeaways from the talk are:

1.  The #1 danger is that people will forget you in 5 minutes.
Someone must remember you in order to decide if they care about you.  For first time entrepreneurs, this extends to how you talk about your idea to other people.  Many people I talk to are nervous about about telling anyone their idea.  My response is "you are lucky if anyone actually listens to you when you are talking about your new startup."

2.  Brand = emotional attachment to you or your product.
The experience of drinking wine is not equal to the physical product of wine.  MRI's show that your brain reacts differently when drinking the same wine if told it costs more.  Your brand changes how someone feels about using your product.

In other words, a better brand will allow you to succeed even if the actual product is inferior.  Match.com nailed the brand in dating during the 90's.  My product One-and-Only.com (already the name is a problem with the dashes) was larger by a factor of 2 in terms of traffic and revenue.  They sold for the same amount even though we beat them on most other fronts.  Not paying attention to brand cost me approximately $50 million.

3. Avoid the zone of "Meh".  Take whatever you think some customers won't like and play it up.  One easy way to define your brand is by emphasizing who shouldn't like it.  By definition those that relate to the opposite will be attracted.  One example he gave was a restaurant with a sign saying "Nothing you eat or drink here is good for you."

4.  Different not Better.  Details can establish a vibe about your product.  Especially for startups, details can be free and make your product feel better.  An example is the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google search.  Didn't cost very much but establishes an emotion.

Resources mentioned:  The Brand Gap, Zag, and A New Brand World.  I will be checking out these books and passing on good ideas.

Takeaway on Bing Gordon's talk on how to be a great CEO

Bing Gordon gave the keynote at 2011 Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.  His speech centers around traits of good CEO's.  Much of the talk is more relevant for CEO's of later stage startups (50+ employees),   however one phrase he used is relevant to anyone.  What determines "killing it" in your business.  If everyone in your startup is aware of what they have to do to make the business turbo charged, it makes a huge difference.

When scaling our dating business, we built a web page we called the "money page."  It told us how much money we had made and how the key ratios of our business were doing right up to the second. All of our top management would constantly hit this page to see how we were doing.  It was also a key indicator as to what type of conversation I would be having with them in the near future.  This doesn't mean we had this page day one, but it grew organically out of trying to answer the question, "What is the score today?  Are we winning or losing?"

In Bing Gordon's keynote, the tactical information was around the 20 minute mark where he discussed gamification, social, and mobile tactics.  The major points were:

Gamification:

• make your users fill like a hero and get +25% engagement
• badges for accomplishments double hours per week spent on application
• virtual assets can increase customer life by a factor of 3

Social:

• social obligations create lock in - Solo play versus Guilds
• gifting not competition (only boys 15-25 prefer competition)

Mobile

• if app doesn't prove valuable in the time it takes a stop light to cycle it is no good
• SMS is dominant communication channel among younger users

Do you look like giant work generator to potential developers?

I realize that not everyone is going to be a coding superstar.  However, anyone can learn how to contribute to a technical project.  It could be as simple as learning Illustrator to create basic graphic elements.  At a minimum, you should be able access your startup's code and fix typos.

There was a great article in Forbe's, The Rise of Developeronomics by Venkatesh Rao.  It discusses how hard it is to attract developer talent.  This is very true for first time entrepreneurs.  If you have neither money or reputation, what can you do?  When I started my dating site,  I was exactly in this position.  So I rolled up my sleeves and taught myself how to program.  At every point it came down to this question, pay someone $20K to do some piece of technical work or buy a $40 book and read it?  I had the $40 but not the $20K, so I became an avid book reader.  My partner was no technical genius either, but he could pull up the site and move elements around.  I can't tell you how much this skill helped in reducing tension on the project.  After programming most of the night you don't want to hear, "Hey, you misspelled a word on the homepage."

The more you know about building your own idea, the more rapport you can build with technical people.  It increases your ability to attract developers by making you part of the team.  You are a "doer" not a "talker".  It lowers your cost by allowing you to understand the trade-offs in time and effort for different design decisions.

There is nothing more pathetic looking to an engineer than a broke idea person with no experience.  You are a giant work generator, a monkey looking to jump on their back and work them to death.

Learn HTML, CSS, how to lay out iPhone apps, something, anything, to make you "one of the boys."

Why is it so hard to give a good elevator pitch?

I was watching a video of the company Smarketplaces pitch venture capitalist Mike Suster.  When they open with their elevator pitch, the first attempt was:

"We provide a market place service for bloggers.  We enable them to easily embed a content driven community marketplace into their site."

Then the second entrepreneur jumps in with:

"Embeddable Ebay or Etsy on their blog site."

Mike gives them the advice to only use the second pitch.

At Founder Institute we give first time entrepreneurs advice in Pitch Bootcamp to follow the format:

My company, ______, is developing (concrete product) to help (a target audience)  (solve a problem) (with secret sauce).

An example that fits their pitch into the forma would be:

Our company, Smarketplaces, is developing an embedable Ebay / Etsy for bloggers to monetize their traffic by making it easy to sell items related to their content.

Great video showing a professional investor giving honest feedback about what he is hearing.

Making better presentations - Presentation Zen style

One of the critical skills for starting a business is creating powerful presentations that sell.  You could be selling to customers, potential partners or raising capital.  I have working on improving my skills in this area and had the chance to talk to someone who prepares presentations for Oracle's top level management.  My question was, "What two books do you recommend reading that will improve my presentation skills." Her answer was Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte's Resonate.

I feel confidant about my ability to talk in front of audiences but have struggled with the slide presentation piece of this, so I resolved to read and apply both books.  I started with Presentation Zen.  It has a killer slide deck at the start by Guy Kawasaki selling "Why buy this book?", which I have used several times to show entrepreneurs the basics of the book.

The bottom line is that each slide should consists of a beautiful image with as few words as possible.  The presentation consists of you telling stories around the point you are trying to make.  You should not put everything you are going to say into the slide.  Shockingly, people can't read the slide and listen to you at the same time.  If the audience requires a written explanation with full details, leave behind a handout.  The point of the presentation is to get them interested in engaging with you about your idea further.  They are not going to write a check at the end, so overwhelming them with details will kill their interest.

The best outcome is a group of people leaping out of their seats wanting more information and further interaction.  Once I reframed the purpose of the slides as to support my storytelling, it became much easier to create the slide deck.

Another part of the process that had stopped me before was sourcing the images for the slides.  I would get overwhelmed or tell myself I couldn't find images that matched my point.  So I challenge you to do the same thing I did to put this into practice.  I took an existing slide deck and sat down over several days and forced myself to convert it to the "Presentation Zen" style.  I used iStockPhoto.com at a cost of $1-$2.5 per slide for images that knocked my audiences socks off.

The results were gorgeous.  I have never presented such high quality slides to support my speaking.  I will share one which turned out great.  One of the lessons we have to convey to new entrepreneurs is that hiding their ideas is not a good strategy, since without a track record, they will be lucky to get anyone to listen to, much less steal, their ideas.

So here is the slide I used to communicate this idea with:

There were several stories I shared while showing this slide, but the slide was a great visual support.

Next post, I will discuss what lessons I learned from Nancy Duarte's Resonate and how I was able to up my game from Zen.

Running Founder Institute's Silicon Valley Winter Sessions

I am excited about getting involved with Founder Institute.  We will be starting the Silicon Valley winter class on December 14.  If you are interested in applying applications are due Dec 4.  Over the past two years this outstanding program has helped entrepreneurs launch companies by mentoring them through the start up process.  With over 25 chapters around the world the institute is building a global network of business leaders.

We have a great list of mentors that include: Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.tv, Craig Kanarick, co-founder of Razorfish, Bob Rosin, Head of Business Development at Skype, and many more.

I plan using this blog on a regular basis to share what I learn from helping 30+ companies launch their idea over the next 4 month.

Should be a great ride.

Breakthrough on turning ideas into splash pages

I had an amazing day, yesterday. Met with another entrepreneur to work on a new project. For the first time in my life I was an active contributor on the creative side of the process. He had many creative ideas for this product which is geared toward the Indian matrimonial process. I was able to listen and synthesize graphic images to test the different ideas.

I cranked out logos, logos with gradients, different colors, sizes, letters kerned. Then we looked for imagery around Indian weddings. Grabbed examples and synthesized images to go on the splash screen. We ended up here:



Still not finished, but the experience of being able to finally work productively with graphical tools such as Photoshop and Fireworks was exquisite. The breakthrough book for me was, Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature .

I tried to take a chapter a day and work through the examples using the images he shows in the book. It is small (a great attribute in my opion) and instead of trying to describe every feature he sets out to build useful workflows for the majority of work.

It also requires some CSS knowledge to lay out the images on the page which I had built up over the last year. The feeling of cranking directly on what the user sees is great. Combine that with the ability to code the backend and test rapidly using splash screens, I think I am getting close to having a toolset for trying multiple ideas over the next year or so until I find one that sticks.