For Kindle Time to Cross the Chasm

In: Strategy

9 Jun 2010

Amazon is known for the go-to source for buying books online (and other gadgets) and also hosting platforms.  The company recently took a big stab at consumer electronics with its Kindle device.  Seth Godin points out on his blog about how Amazon might want to tweak its strategy.

“We take this opportunity to bring you live to the scene of a tech product Crossing the Chasm.”

Simply put, Kindle is in the chasm.  They had the innovators and early adopters jump on board and try it.  Now, they find themselves staring up the cliff of the Early Majority.  Looking at a chasm on the bell curve, it kinda resembles the notch on a gun sight.  And that’s exactly what Apple is doing with the iPad – loading the gun and sighting down the barrel on the Kindle. First Mover or Fast Follower…

Hunter or Prey?

Steve Jobs recently mentioned, iPads are selling at a rate of 3 per second.  Apple is coming fast and has the brand momentum and design experience down to take over the electronic book market.  Coupled with the fact it has the distribution channel sewn up with iTunes and the tightly integrated App store, it’s time for a duel in the street and only one gunfighter is going to walk away.

Next up: some strategies for Kindle to scale the rock wall and get in with the Early Majority to keep moving and not get shot dead in the chasm.

The Google homepage

In: simplicity-in-tech-award

4 Jun 2010

technology marketing rule: keep it simple like the Google homepageThere is an old joke in software that the more releases that come out, the worse the product gets.  The human urge to add more and more is just too strong to resist.  It seems going from Version 1.0+ is all about keeping engineers and marketers busy – the result being bloatware that frustrates users.  (ahem, Office 2007?)

But what about those that have been strong enough to resist this temptation?

Well, it’s high-time they get a little recognition for their self-discipline.

With that mind, I thought it would be interesting to do an ongoing bit on technology success stories around simplicity.  Less is more and that deserves an award in over crowded tech world.

Our first award recipient is Google’s homepage.  In an interesting article from FastCompany, Marissa Mayer talks about how she is the gatekeeper for keeping this ridiculous simple interface:

Here is how Mayer thinks about the tension between complexity of function and simplicity of design: “Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open–and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.”

Swiss army knife indeed.  Remember Google wasn’t the first search engine and if you can recall Yahoo’s homepage circa 2002, you can see why they won the race.  The signal vs. noise ratio on competing search engine sites was overwhelming.


Like too much sugar in your cereal, this User Interface (UI) makes you gag a bit.  Google is not a design company and as the FastCompany article states, they were limited with HTML skills so simply slapped up a box on the homepage and kept working on the back-end algorithms.  (Don’t you just love engineers?)

This haphazard accident led to a great user experience: You hit the homepage and you had but one option and that pulled you into Google’s funnel immediately to use their technology.  The results were much better (algorithm technology) but the interaction with that technology was dead, stupid simple.

Key takeaway: Can you refine and design your product or service so it’s as Marissa says, “a Swiss Army knife”? – plenty of functionality to do all sorts of tasks but easy to pick up and not get hurt?

Why Apple is Winning

In: Branding

1 Jun 2010

New York Times photo of iPad preview(Image from New York Times)

Mark it down on your calendar -  The New York Times recently reported that Microsoft has been eclipsed by Apple as the most valued tech company in the world.  (As a result, many blame Steve Ballmer for Microsoft’s innovation challenges and are calling for the board to step up and replace him.)

Let’s break down how Apple is on top.

Branding: It’s the brand stupid.  They’ve done it with branding – obvious in retrospect.  Step back to early 2000′s and it wasn’t cool to be running anything with an Apple on the outside.  You were kind of a freak.  But when you create something with an elite feel to it – people want to be part of that tribe.  Apple Part II has never been about putting a machine on every desk and in every home – like Gates famously said.  Nope.  The price point of a Mac is expensive for a computer. So is an iPod as an MP3 player.  But people want it to be part of the cool kid crowd.  The most brilliant move in the brand’s reincarnation? Those white ear buds with crappy sound quality…it let everyone know that you had the coin to fork over for an iPod and we’re cool enough to use it.

3 simple characteristics of Apple’s brand success:

  1. Simplicity: Ever try to install a new printer on a PC or even try to connect to a foreign wireless network? – It can be a real pain.  For most middle of the road tech folks, they just want to get online or print off their vacation photographs.  Apple gets this.  If you use a program like iMovie, you see how they’ve made it intuitive to do something that can be pretty complicated otherwise.  They strive for simplicity in their product line and while not always achieving this, they fully-leverage it as a competitive advantage.
  2. Seamless User Experiences: Apple has built a loyal following of evangelists by building fantastic experiences. Ask someone using a Mac about how they handle their calendar and you can be pinned down with a 30 minute lecture.  Ever had anyone pontificate on how much they love Outlook?  Seamless user experiences such as buying and listening to music have lowered the frustration bar and have people gushing.  From how you run an iPhone vs. a Blackberry to building a custom playlist using Genius in iTunes – there is a bit of surprise magic in all of it.
  3. Platform: When you own the platform, you own the market.  I see this more and more across technology fronts in B2C.  Most people gloss over how powerful iTunes is as a platform.  Jobs did the unthinkable and gave away a free download and music organizing program and quickly owned digital music purchases.  Once the user was used to this experience they simply integrated the Apps store and we’re off to the races.  iTunes is the foundation for Apple’s growth as it is the gateway to the exploding mobile market.

The lesson here for a tech marketer?

  • Fight for your user.
  • Prototype with a ruthless focus on simplicity.
  • Look for ways to build a platform.

Can an 8th grader understand?

In: Branding

28 May 2010

Quick: recall one marketing message you’ve heard today that stuck.

Struggling to remember?

This comes as no surprise to most marketing people – we’re just too busy with all the noise.  And if you look at the way media is consumed the big winners are companies who give us filters for our channels (iTunes, XM, Hulu).  I can and am becoming increasingly willingly to pay to tune you out.

Yet, when we sit down to sketch out a marketing plan and work on messaging for tech, we slip into verbose BS and think everyone wants to know that “Our cross-platform compliant framework and proprietary work-flow system allows for real-time analysis of your needs.”

Have the courage to cut the crap.

Instead, try and make your messaging so simple an 8th grader can understand it.  This is a huge challenge to boil it down to simple language focused on benefits.  Be prepared for internal resistance from CEO’s and CTO’s that freak out the technical jargon is missing.  (Most people think marketing is so easy that anyone can do it right?).  They also fail to realize 99.9% just don’t think you’re technology is that special.

Solution?

Tell a story that makes it easy for your target market to get a taste of the benefits.  Bite size chunks with a bit of stickiness have a much better chance of getting recalled.  You can also go into the tech terms and specific jargon on a deep page within your website.

If an 8th grader can get it, in between texting and Facebooking, you’ve got a chance at being heard.

O’Reilly’s Guerrilla Marketing Tip

In: Technology Startups

20 May 2010

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/10/tim-oreilly-get.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheTechnologyBlog+(Los+Angeles+Times+Technology+Blog)

Inc.com recently ran a great article on Tim O’Reilly.  He’s the guy who founded the company that writes all sorts of computer manuals – if you work with software engineers, chances are you’ve seen their books with a black and white pencil sketch of an animal on the front.

O’Reilly media has gone on to become the company in tech circles for conferences and education resources.  Starting out, he took a different and brilliant approach to launching his company with some clever PR and marketing work…

In 1992, O’Reilly published The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog and, at the last minute, added a chapter about the World Wide Web. At the time, there were roughly 200 websites, none of them run by companies. To market a general-interest book from a small publisher about a relatively obscure topic, O’Reilly devised a novel marketing strategy: He would turn himself into an activist. He hired the former director of activism from the Sierra Club and devised a campaign that treated the adoption of the Internet like the effort to save the rain forests. He mailed copies of the book to every member of Congress and then went on a media tour in New York City and Washington, D.C. “I was saying, ‘The Internet is coming; the Internet is coming,’ ” he says. And O’Reilly Media had the only book that could explain it to you.

The strategy worked brilliantly. Many of the first mainstream newspaper articles about the Internet were pegged to the release of O’Reilly’s book. “Internet Provides Way to Tap Into World of Information,” was the headline in the Chicago Tribune. By the time dot-com fever hit, O’Reilly was the expert in the field. The Whole Internet sold more than a million copies, a huge windfall for the tiny publisher.

You can read the whole article here on Inc.com.

Bonus Points: How can you position your new product or service as a “cause” like O’Reilly did?

People Buy the Why Not How

In: Theory

17 May 2010

If you haven’t spent much time on the TED website, you’re missing out on some fantastic ideas.  Recently Boulder-based VC, Brad Feld, highlighted a wonderful video from TEDxPugetSound by Simon Sinek.

This is worth taking the time to shut off any distractions and grab a notepad for jotting down all the ideas it will inevitably spark…

Why is this video important to a tech marketer? Typically, we find ourselves trying to communicate how the technology works to our audience. As Sinek points out, we need to consider a little evolutionary biology and get to the part of the brain that controls decision making – to do this the question of marketing becomes not “How” but rather “Why”.

Jot this quote down and put it next to your monitor: “People don’t buy what you do but why you do it.” – Simon Sinek

Check out around the 11 minutes mark when he hits on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation – great stuff.  See if you can anticipate why Tivo missed the mark with positioning the product…

Strategy for Getting Strategic Partners

In: Partnerships

13 May 2010


The hardest time in the arc of a startup is marketing when you’re fresh out of the gate.  The sales people need a brand to leverage against in pitches and yet the brand is still being built.

In short – nobody trusts you or cares.

You have no customers. No word of mouth referrals. Maybe no press – aside from a lame press release announcing the launch.

Much like your parents told you, the company you keep speaks volumes about your character.  Use this to your advantage and brainstorm about who your company would like to hang out with.  Do you have a service that extends an established platform?  Some nifty way to save a customer time by blending two products together?  (You should already know this from doing a good points of differentiation exercise)

Here’s how you approach your partner’s marketing team:

  1. Research.  Google around and find the players. Check out their LinkedIn profiles. Follow them on Twitter – in short, understand what their interests are and listen for a bit.  Look for ways to bump into them at a conference or two.
  2. Whiteboard. Picture and diagram out areas of crossover.  Try and come up with two really strong opportunities.  Keep it to two though – too many “We could this together AND” can come across as desperate.  Use Guy Kawasaki‘s “So What?” test where you pretend you have a little elf on your shoulder whispering “So what?” in your ear.
  3. Approach. From your research target your ideal company. Typically, a CMO or Director is going to be pretty busy. Look for support staff that might have more time to hear your pitch and get them to slide you in front of the head honcho. Bonus – get a dialogue going and listen to how you can make that employee look like a rock star internally. Webinars? White paper? Presentation at the industry conference? If you do this correctly with results, you’ve got a fan on the inside and your collaborative good work will get noticed by the big players.

In startups I’ve done I’ve been constantly amazed at how a simple trade show booth conversation can yield opportunities for partnering.  Get a card. Make a note and begin building the relationship.   Whether it was Intel, Research in Motion – almost all were open to brainstorming ways to integrate our technology into their product mix.

We were fortunate to team up with Google and having these projects on our website and in our pitches made it immensely easier to establish credibility and eliminate the fear of a new vendor.

80/20 Rule for Software Product Development

In: Strategy

10 May 2010

When your software product development team comes to you and says, “What is the complete solution the market is asking for?”

Tell them to only solve 80% of the problem.

Why 80%?

With the volatility of technology and the rise and fall of software, you have to be nimble and responsive to the market.  Think Microsoft wouldn’t love to have this advantage back in its favor?  Also, solving 100% of the market’s problem kills you on the resources front.  That last 20% is usually pretty tough to pull off.  You might tie up months in getting the really tricky parts of the code through QA and in the end it only is going to matter to a small number of customers.

But once it is live, chances are you’ll have bloated, buggy code and immediately start doing either damage control in the market or devoting time to bug fixes.  In the end, this takes a company’s focus on the next Big Thing.  That’s where you should be spending 80% of your time.

From 37Signals “Getting Real” eBook:

“The key is to restate any hard problem that requires a lot of software into a simple problem that requires much less. You may not be solving exactly the same problem but that’s alright. Solving 80% of the original problem for 20% of the effort is a major win. The original problem is almost never so bad that it’s worth five times the effort to solve it.”

Use this 80% rule as the mantra in all decisions going forward.  “Yes, we can build that but does it push our solution beyond 80% ?”

Note: It’s really, really tough to pull engineers away from a problem when they’re 4/5ths of the way to solving it. It truly goes against everything they’ve been taught and believe in.  Offer them an olive branch by having a new, sexy problem waiting in the wings.  Make sure it’s so sexy though that they won’t mind the bait and switch.

What tech do you need?

In: Technology Startups

4 May 2010

Budding tech entrepreneurs – here’s a tip: ignore the dollar signs.

When sitting down to plan a start-up, most eager entrepreneurs start with writing a business plan and financial model, and then look at what that exit will be after dilution of a few rounds of investing.  Yet, this rarely provides break-through companies.  In some sort of weird karmic business law, the most widely successful ventures don’t start with an idea of how much the founders will exit out with.

Case in point: Apple, Google, Facebook, (and maybe even Twitter).

The common factor in all these giants is that there was no clear-cut path to profitability when they started.  In fact, if you go back and read the history of these companies you’ll see that they were geeks (Steve Wozniak) playing with the  technology that they wanted in their daily lives. Case in point: Wozniak wanted a computer, could build one, and set about making democratizing this tool to the masses. (See origins of Apple)

So here’s the kicker….

Build something you need: what do you wish you had in your life to make it easier?
Exercise: Define a common daily problem and brainstorm the solution using technology…
For example, let’s say you’re a parent.  Your kids mean everything to you and keeping them safe is your top priority.  What technology could help you achieve this?

  • Problem: Monitoring your kids at different stags in life.
  • Possible Solutions: A GPS app to monitor your kids when they get their driver’s license. Yep. That could scale and is being done. Or how about a vital signs monitor for newborns that updates to a web server via your home WiFi and you can check via your phone.

By focusing on building a “killer app” with a remarkable solution, the money eventually comes.  Note: this may not be on the timetable that an angel investor or VC wants.

The whole trick here is to identify a problem that lot’s of people have.

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