Welcome to podcast number four with Kim Proctor, former Web Marketing Director for the Christian Science Monitor, and her site is Customers That Click. Today, we talk about the importance of the quality of retaining and communicating with customers.

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[podcast]/_podcast/usabilitycounts.com-005.mp3[/podcast]

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I honestly believe there is no better time in recent history to do a startup than right now.

The tools are much easier to use to build websites, and there’s a lot of talent that’s on the market to help you do it. Of course, money will be an issue, but it’s even less of an issue than during boom times. I’m working with a few startups, and there’s a certain exhilaration of creating something   new.

This is something I forgot then remembered going through Startup Weekend LA, and it was interesting seeing the mix of people interact in a creative environment. All six teams got a project out the door, but each with varying levels of quality and efficiency.

There are a few caveats. I’ve been there many times before, and they aren’t all rosy dreams and promises. Startups depend heavily on having the right mix of talent; ideas of cheap, but execution usually isn’t, and it takes more high value people than truckloads of cash.

(Or, ask Microsoft about Sidewalk. Ouch.)

Some of this is written with a company in mind, but many startups now may be just one or two guys in a garage. Really, there is no better time. Read on.

There’s no such thing as first to market

Remember Excite? Web Crawler? Altavista? Shopping.com? Sidewalk?

They were first to market, but they didn’t have a product that was effective as Google. Google was very, very late in the search game. Facebook was late in the Social Media game. Who’s standing now?

Building and growing businesses is also about creative destruction. Products die and rise again. If you have a compelling story and feature set, people will flock to your site like bees on honey. It means you are serving a market that’s under served, and that you’re first to the market with something.

One person that has an idea can be a startup

All you need for a startup is the people with skills that can get it out the door. That means you need can do people that have the right attitude about being hands-on and getting things done, because at the beginning, there isn’t going to be enough money to hire a branding company, or even less to hire writers for the website.

You don’t even need a company structure: you can get it going just enough to start generating revenue, show it off to venture capitalists, and voila, you’re the next Jason Calcanis!

For example, to get a project out the door, the customers (or even better venture capitalists) aren’t going to be looking under the hood of the programming, or much less caring about the perfect user experience; what they will be looking for is a product they can use. Having the right mix of people (for example, a designer, developer, sales person and product person, with a 25 percent emphasis on each) is a great place to start. But it can be just you and a friend — or just you.

How do I know? A new client I just met with. Two people. Internet business, profitable, five years running. And now they’re looking to improve the user interface to increase revenues more.

Don’t hire your friends, it’s bad for business

As the company grows, so does the team. Founders go by the wayside (read: you’ve just been promoted to Director of Special Projects after working 80 hours a week?). Sometimes, the person that really helped out in the beginning can’t help out   later because they don’t have the particular skill set to adequately drive the product or help the company.

Sometimes, founders shouldn’t run the company after the company reaches about 100 people. This is happening with one company right now that I know of, where one of the founders is actually hurting the company.

The end goal in any startup is to get to the right size of the business, and if that means you have to fire friends or let the adults take over, do it. It’s about money, and most founders have a sizable piece of the business where they shouldn’t have to worry about cashing out if the right people are brought in.

Most founders also wouldn’t get hired at their own company, because frankly the people hired after that were brought in for the purpose of building something, while the founders had the idea.

Hire people you trust that can get the job done, but you are disconnected enough to if the time comes, you have to let them go. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever work with your friends, but what I’m saying when the time comes, and money’s on the table, there’s a good chance they won’t be your friend.

Do hire people you know and trust

In a startup, someone that isn’t pulling their weight is so obvious, you’ll see complaints for months. If you bring people into the startup, investigate their background throughly, including whether they can handle a startup environment. That means if their last four jobs were with large Fortune 500 corporations with education reimbursement and 40-hour work weeks, they won’t like a startup.

Read their LinkedIn profile, talk to their friends, reach out to the community to see if anyone else knows about them. Remember that you’ll be seeing more of this person for a while than your signifcant other, so if you have to work with them that much, you better be able to work with them that much.

Who has the money makes the rules

If you have reached out to angel funding or venture capital, or one of the founders is funding the project out of their pockets or their parents’ pockets, they’re driving the bus.

In fact, I’m going to make a crazy recommendation: at least one person on your team should be the sales or business development driving force, and they should have a track record to driving deals to completion.

I’ve seen many of company that was driven by the technology team or another team that wasn’t sales related, and that’s just a bad mix: developers aren’t trained in business, and it’s really all about the focus on the customer.

Why?

That person in the startup will be the driving force to getting customers because 1) they will know what the customers want, and 2) their primary, first, only and last concern is figuring out how to build product that actually makes money. That said, the sales person or money person should be reigned in once in a while, especially when proposing features that will help one small client instead of scaling the greater client base.

In any case, you’ll get the occasional stupid feature because the venture capitalist wanted it, or dad with the trust fund it was a good idea. That’s okay, just limit the damage.

Think Harry S Truman: the buck has to stop somewhere.

There’s never enough money, so plan for it

Jason Calcanis sent out a great note earlier this week about money relating to startups (and few know better than him). His key points were, “what ever you have, stretch it.” That means cutting deeply, cutting swiftly, and showing the investors, one of them you, that you’re serious.

There’s this thought process that everyone internet company should be be big, and that, frankly, shouldn’t be the case. He stated in his email that some companies seems to get more done with 25 people than 40. I remember working for Stamps.com when we were at 550 people, and I kept thinking, “There’s too many people here.”

Lo and behold. They cut.

If I had one piece of truth for every entrepreneur out there, this is it: don’t over hire. Focus your energies on hiring people can run as fast as possible, and focus only on the most important features. If you don’t have enough people, don’t build it, because if you hire too many people, you’ll be cutting those people later.

If you really, really need people, hire contractors that you know are going to leave sooner or later. How do you know there’s too many people? You’ll know. When you have four or five non-performers, you’ll really know.

Every startup has a ramp up phase and a ramp down phase to the real business. Startups should be structured and planned accordingly.

Your carpenter shouldn’t be designing the house

While everyone has an opinion about web design, user experience, product management, and other marketing points, that doesn’t make them uniquely qualified to manage a project through 38 iterations of a logo design (except, of course, if I’m the consultant). There’s a reason you’ve brought together the people on your team, and they should be allowed to do their jobs.

That doesn’t mean their shouldn’t be opinion; if you’ve hired some good people, though, ideas that aren’t as effective will be shown as so through discourse and disagreement, and well thought out answers will lead to the path of the righteous product.

It’s about everyone realizing their role in the company and not interfering to a negative aspect other people’s roles. Someone has to be the drummer or the base player, and it just might be you.

There are a few drummers that come to mind (Guy Kawasaki, Ringo Starr, Adam Clayton), and they seem to be doing okay, right?

Don’t build on some exotic platform

Every once in a while, I hear of a startup of that builds on some exotic software platform like OpenLazlo. That platform might have some advantages, especially in a rich media environment, but here’s a couple points to remember:

• If it were so good, everyone would be converting to it. Software likes a good stampede, and while there may be caveats to using .NET and Java, there’s a reason it’s everywhere: there are a lot of developers using it or with experience in it.
• It’s going to be really hard to find developers if the site’s built in Python and Ruby on Rails. Developers love a new technology, and startups are the green field of using it. That means all those maintenance projects using other languages go by the wayside, there are no tools, but there’s this promise of building it really fast. Until, of course, you have to hire more people outside of your circle of friends. It’s a really bad idea to set your sights on a technology that you’re going to be paying developers a premium later.

There’s no harm on developing on PHP if it gets you out the door and beyond, and there’s no harm also developing a site as throwaway code if you know and plan for it.

Focus on features people will use, instead of silly administration tools used by five people once a month

The best thing about a recession and a lack of money is that companies do more research on figuring out exactly what their customers need or the product features that are required to get the project out the door, instead of just throwing stuff against the wall (read: Google). This is because money is tight, and every dollar counts.

If you are building features, focus on the ones that help the greatest number of people — for example, a feature that helps 100,000 people is better than one that’s going to help 100 people once over a year, and it has a lot higher return on investment — because that’s where the value is.

Make a big long list of features, write them up on a whiteboard, and guess (really, guess) how many people will be using a feature, what percentage of the time, and if it can be done by hand.

This could mean going into the database directly to enter information, or relying on less than automated tools. If it’s more of serving a small group of people some manual work that can easily be done, don’t do the feature.

Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good

Thinking that you’re going to have every feature perfect on the first version is an unrealistic expectation; that’s why it’s the first version, and the early versions of most software usually suck (read: Microsoft Windows). That said, that gives you a lot of room to get better, and that should be your goal — do just good enough today to improve upon later. Your users will excuse a few issues at the beginning if you’re upfront with them.

The first rule: work in iterations.

Agile development is an awesome culture for startup development, because the team knows there are going to be areas to refactor, and parts of the software that just aren’t going to be working. Knowing that is a huge release of stress, and allows the team to move forward.

The most important goal should be getting something out there that accomplishes to goal 80 percent of the time, and keep working on it.

Lastly, remember, 90 percent of startups fail, learn from it

There’s a reason only three startup ideas have survived Startup Weekend around the country: most startups don’t see the light of day for all kinds of reasons, mostly because there wasn’t enough thought put into developing the product. That goes the same in the real world, sometimes for not having enough cash, sometimes for having a poor product strategy.

It all depends on your attitude — if you remember that it’s the ride of the lifetime, you can live it and enjoy it. Forget about the money, and remember the joy of creating.

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One way to generate publicity for your firm is to become known as the “go to” expert in your field. Your business’ goals will determine whether your aim is to make a name for yourself nationally, locally, within your line of work, in relevant online communities or in some combination of the above. What can you do to establish yourself as an expert? Try some of the following tactics:

• Give Talks. Speak at meetings of community groups, trade associations and any other organization whose members would be interested in your area of expertise.
• Publish Articles. Write a regular column or series of articles for your local newspaper or for magazines or websites that are read by your target audience.
• Join Online Discussion Groups. Become a regular participant on the most popular discussion boards for your target audience. Be sure your signature line identifies who you are and includes a link to your firm’s website.
• Write a Newsletter. An informative newsletter can help establish you as a knowledgeable expert.
• Write a Book or E-Book. If you’ve been writing articles, turn a collection of them into a book. Even if you publish it yourself, this will make you a “published author” in your field.

Although becoming known as an expert requires an on-going effort, the benefits – increased exposure, leads and sales for your business – can make it all worthwhile.

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This is was once cutting edge Flash work. Scary.

Jakob Nielsen probably thought it was 99 percent bad.

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There was a certain mailing that I was on, and they were reacting to a post by Joel Spolsky naming the program manager as the owner of User Experience in some software teams.

I’ve actually held a position called Program Manager in the Microsoft model, and it was great: I got to work with great developers, and I gained a lot of knowledge about the technology I was working in. Personally, I would love to do that job again.

Back to the UX folks and their comments about the article.

Their opinion was slightly irritable (them being a bunch of cantankerous UX people like me, and I can be even more cantankerous at times). The way I look at it, Joel handed us a gift horse in the mouth. Here’s a well respected member of the software community saying emphatically that user experience matters.

He established:

• The most important function of a program manager is to design the user interface. Sure, we should know a bit about programming, but our job is to show through out experience and knowledge what an effective user interface is, and to help developers implement it.
• He established the value of functional requirements in some form as a deliverable that’s important to the process. That is more than, as he so rightly pointed out, 37signals has done over the years. 37signals is some kind of darling of the web community, and while they do some good stuff when if comes user testing, functional requirements is something they say not to do.
• He set the ratio of program managers to developers at about one program manager to four developers, exactly or close to what I preach. That, my folks, is job security. When I worked as   a product manager, that was a well oiled team. We produced a lot of good code, and I felt I could handle enough of the workload without working too many more hours.
• He also set that discourse and communication is important to great user interfaces. This includes conflict, iterations, data, testing and all the other fun methods that we do to get where we need to go. He basically established that there was value to that last mile.

Frankly, that was one of the better posts I’ve read for a while on any blog.

Great, you say. He didn’t say kind enough words about us UX folks, saying that anyone out of college could do it. Well, not completely true, but we do have to listen to him.

Why?

• He’s very well respected in the software development community.
• He has a company that’s very profitable based around a subscription model product that might not be the best looking product in the world, but developers love using it because of it’s ease of use and simplicity (try saying that about Bugzilla).
• He has a blog that gets a lot of traffic.

That said, there’s points in his blog post that could generate some disagreement; it’s up to user experience professionals to build bridges of understanding because, frankly, we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining who we are, and what our value is.

On to the disagreements.

He did say that someone right out of college could do the job; I disagree with that.

Being an advocate for the user and the business takes training and/or experience, and isn’t something you can just learn from the programmers you are working with — they know less about user experience than you might — in the same way that a web or print designer needs seasoning even when right out of school.

They can’t learn typography to an adequate level unless they use it, motion design doesn’t just come to you, and more importantly, some of this field is something you can’t teach. You just have to have the skills and mindset for not only understanding the user but also understanding the business. That takes experience in design, domain knowledge, an understanding of what you don’t know, and where to go find it. They have to learn to fail, and learn from their failings so they can succeed.

To get to where I’m at, I’ve been working the web for almost 15 years (something that few can say), and I draw from all my unique experiences to develop user interfaces for my clients. That experience includes a background in writing, design, business and software development. As we all know, sometimes the greatest failings of people without the knowledge they need think they know more than they do; only as we get older do we realize how much we don’t know.

Great software architects architects are made, not born.

Joel, because of the peers he worked with Microsoft, learned wisdom far beyond what most program managers and user experience professionals would ever hope to, and he has used to it to advance software development. But this does color his view of the world, and it’s up to us to talk about where we have come from, so we can advance from all fronts, not just by being lucky enough to work at a company that at least was trying a process.

As the user experience field grows, it’s great to have other respected voices establish benchmarks that there is a need for user experience. Now we just have to work with them for everyone’s benefit.

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I came across this post on SitePoint, and noticed the page navigation. Eight pages. I have a few articles that should have been broken up into a few pages, and this article could have been condensed (how much can you say about successful freelancing?).

The main reason it was eight pages, it seems, is that there’s a poster ad on every page.

Users.

Hate.

This.

There’s a good chance very few people actually made it the eighth page.

This could have been a several part series — keep bringing the users back — or there could have been some editing. Users don’t mind scrolling if there’s some payoff, or the content in engaging. Gauge the content first, to see if people actually want to read it, and see if there’s ways you can break it up other than paging it like this.

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I’ve been there. Oh, I’ve been there.

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I’m working on an e-commerce project, and we’re trying to streamline how people buy items. There are a few difficult points that we’re dealing with on the site, but one interesting aspects of going through the process that most user experience architects would completely gloss over during their analysis.

We live in a world where it’s great we’re concerned with the user, but more importantly, there’s a business there that has real needs for customer conversion. This puts user experience at odds with business goals: how do you guarantee that people will checkout?

When you walk into a supermarket, you pick up what you need, walk over to the counter, and pay. More often than not, there’s someone behind you, and — you can’t leave. You have to buy that milk and cookies, and if you don’t, you have to return them, interrupting the flow of the purchase process with the person behind you.

In the virtual world, there is no-one behind you, but because of the anonymity of using the web, it’s okay to leave the milk and cookies right there. You never ever see that in the real world.

Buttons during the checkout process give users exits, some of which allow you to leave the milk and cookies right there.

It’s great that they can return to their bag, but by the time they get to the checkout process, they know either what they want to buy, or they’re looking for a shipping price (which is an indication of a user experience that needs review).

I usually remove buttons, and limit their interaction with other parts of the checkout process. Most users will select the back button if they are looking to return to other parts of the checkout process, and that is usually evident in the reports the web analysis tools display. More importantly, you’re reinforcing that they’re in a checkout line, and they should move along. I think we coddle users too much, trying to give them every opportunity to move around, especially if the site we have is based on a business.

That’s one way I resolve business goals that are more important the profitability of a site. What do you do?

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Welcome to podcast number four with Marc Danziger, a social media and project management consultant, and his blog is Charmed Particles. Today, we talk about the importance of the quality of community, and how it can affect the business goals of a company.

Download the MP3.

[podcast]/_podcast/usabilitycounts.com-004.mp3[/podcast]

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Sorry for not writing.

It’s been a wind down mode from Startup Weekend LA. It was a very successful event: six projects got pretty close to out the door. I don’t know how many other projects are continuing their work, but the team I joined is exploring continuing our work. There will be more on that later.

One of the concepts that came out of the weekend is having literally only two and a half days of product development time makes you focus on two things:

• Being innovative in ways in using the other team members to get work done
• Focusing on features that are absolutely essential to getting the product out the door, and everything else was gravy

We were lucky — I had the framework from another site that I could use to build the idea, but most importantly we split up the tasks of what we had to do early on, and for a few of the features, we were able to delegate the work so no one person was absolutely getting killed. I had a small content editing tool and a primitive but effective framework so the other team members could add data to the site.

Additionally, we focused on what was going to get us out the door but using a form of Scrum development and listing all the features on yellow post-its on the wall. This allowed us the to prioritize — not formally, but you get the point — based on need of the feature for a proof of concept demo. This is different than product development for a real product, because you can fake some things in a demo (like administration screens are totally unnecessary if you have PHP MySql Admin, and can access the database directly).

The result? By 2 p.m. Sunday, we were tired, but we had enough of a site that we could demo, and even more importantly, a site that we could eventually turn into a production product for a short amount of time until we migrated it to a real platform. That was actually one of the discussions that we had: preparing to launch a site that we all knew was completely throw away code, but something that could be migrated to a better architected platform.

What are your startup stories? How did you effectively get sites out the door while focusing on just the essentials?

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