Fred's Blog

Report on “what’s been done”, not “what can be done”

12 May 2011

When working with a big group of people there is sometimes a tendency to spend lots of time coming up with theories and ideas, without anything real to show for it.

Here are some words you want to avoid when assigning tasks at meetings: “Look at”, “Investigate”, and “Study”. Instead you want to give people tasks with words like “Solve”, “Fix”, and “Do”.

For example, compare these two projects:

Improve the speed of X 10%
Investigate how we can improve the speed of X

Which one would you rather work on? Number two feels a bit safer, but I guarantee that number one is way more fun.

Minimum Viable Product

9 May 2011

Fred Productivity 1 Comment

The Minimum Viable Product is a great idea when developing a new product or service. The idea is to create a real product with just the absolutely necessary features, and get it out to real customers as quickly as possible.

There are two main goals with this approach:

Avoid wasting time on features that will change
Get real feedback from real customers as quickly as possible

You can do market research until the cows come home, but there is only one way to really test the market for your product. Get it into the hands of your customers and see how they react. And more importantly, see if they will actually pay for it.

Market research is useful, but it is never the real thing. There are things people say they won’t pay for and they will, and there are things they say they will pay for and they won’t.

So, get your big marker out, scratch out 80% of your new product’s planned feature set. Then go ahead and launch your next great Minimum Viable Product.

Promote Word-of-Mouth

7 May 2011

Fred Other important stuff 1 Comment

Word of mouth is a great way to market your company. It is free, it comes from a trusted source (a friend), and it spreads really fast.

There are lots of things you can do to help word of mouth happen. Here are two ways to get started: conversation starters and prepping.

Conversation Starter

This is anything that helps people start talking about your company. Typical examples are t-shirts, stickers, pens, etc.

For DoneDeal the conversation starter is often an email someone sends to a friend with a link to a specific ad on DoneDeal. Or they might share an ad on their Facebook page. The ad might have a cool or funny photo, or it might show a cool car, cute pups, a bike with super-duper go-faster-stripes, or anything else interesting.

Emails and Facebook entries can be great conversation starters, but real-life items can work even better. For example, we often use prizes for competitions as great conversation starters (t-shirts, beer koozies, balloons, etc)

Prepping

Prepping is when you coach people to tell others about your company. You educated them with stories and anecdotes that they can bring up during conversations.

For example, customers who know how your company got started might discuss it with a friend over a beer. Any interesting facts they know about your product or company help them talk about you more often.

So, go on, tell your customers more about yourself, your life, your company, and your product.

Read more about Word-of-mouth marketing on the clever TrendWatching site.

Forgiveness is Easier than Permission

6 May 2011

Fred Productivity 1 Comment

I like this quote:

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission

If something seems like a good idea to you, go straight ahead and make it happen. Most of the time people will love what you have done. And in the odd case when people are not happy it is easy to say sorry.

Much bigger and cooler things would happen if we all stopped asking for permission, and just got things done instead.

Try DoneDeal in 3D

1 Apr 2011

Fred Other important stuff Comments Off

3D glasses We are testing a new technology on DoneDeal, where you can see the site in 3D. It creates a whole new experience when you browse a web site, and it enables us to create totally new and different ways of navigating and using a site.