kdykes

KDYKES: a great visual to illustrate where to engage on the social web after analysis & monitoring.

And for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there's another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review.

KDYKES: Check out the full article to get insights into the amazing power of using customer reviews as a social web tool - a defined, managed process to engage with customers & learn from their insights.

The Read It Later API

As developer Nate Weiner explains on his blog, "as a solo developer, it's just not possible for me to develop for every mobile device and browser." That's why he decided to open up his API so others could build apps that do everything his does including tagging, syncing, account management, and more.

Hopefully, this new openness will encourage other developers to step in and help build applications for Palm, Android, Blackberry, and Chrome or implement the good features he hears suggested to him on a regular basis.

There's a good chance that developers will jump on this opportunity - and not just because Read It Later already has a user base of 1 million that grows by 5000 new users per day - that's just one incentive. The other is that API is open for both free and commercial applications, meaning the first (or best) apps developed for new platforms can actually earn money for their creators, just as Read It Later has done for Nate on the iPhone.

KDYKES: Pay attention to this innovative use of an open API that provides a revenue-sharing incentive for developers who create a pipeline of paid subscription users! Go read the full article on RWW.

By opening up access to product and pricing data, retailers spread their market wings

By Paul Demery

As good as BestBuy.com is at engaging and serving shoppers, it reaches only about 0.069% of the online consumer market at any one time. And though that puts the retail consumer electronics site among the top 50 retail sites in terms of traffic as measured by Compete Inc., Kevin Matheny, senior e-business architect for Best Buy Co. Inc., is hoping to at least double that percentage.

“Now BestBuy.com is all we’ve got, so if online consumers aren’t interacting with BestBuy.com they’re not interacting with Best Buy,” he says. “But if we can get consumers to also interact with us online outside of BestBuy.com, by giving them more places to do it, we hope we can see the time they interact with Best Buy on the Internet increase to about twice the time they spend with us now.”

To spread its wings in online retailing, Best Buy has opened up to software developers the application programming interface, or API, to its online product catalog. In the forefront of an API-sharing trend that industry experts say is growing among retailers, the retailer is enabling outside software programmers to develop applications, including new shopping web sites, that display product specifications, images and pricing from Best Buy’s back-end databases.

And because most developers build these new applications on speculation without a contract or upfront payment, Best Buy is often free of the financial risk it would typically take on with commissioned work for new applications, Matheny says.

John Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of BestBuy.com, says the API program, dubbed Best Buy Remix, will leverage the abilities of thousands of developers to come up with new ways to engage online shoppers beyond the confines of BestBuy.com. “It’s what we hope will be a new, fundamental way of doing business,” he says.

KDYKES: They go on to say in the article... "Over the next three years, we’ll see 25% to 30% of the top-tier retailers with API practices.” This shows the power of such an API program for online retailers.

Are you comfortable with:

• Chaos – startups are disorganized
• Uncertainty – startups never go per plan

Are you:

• Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.  How quickly will you recover?
• Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else.  Can you recognize and capitalize on them?
• Creative / Pattern Recognition – can you think “out of the box?”  Or if not, can you recognize patterns others miss?
• Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? 24/7?
• Tenacious – can you keep going when everyone else gives up? Can you keep giving 200% despite all the naysayers who don’t believe in your idea?
• Articulate – can you create a reality distortion field and have others see and share your vision and passion?

And I remind them that they should be bringing some type of domain expertise (technical or business) to the table.

This is the minimum feature set for founders.

KDYKES: The top 2 - chaos & uncertainty - are seriously important. If you don't have the stomach for it - don't take yourself and your family down that road!!

Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step

If you want to build an online service, and you don't test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, you're crazy. That's the conclusion I've come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. So I thought I would walk you through exactly how to run a "fake landing page" test using cheap tools that require no technical skills whatsoever.

Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. If you're worried about disappointing some potential customers - don't be. Most of the time, the experiments you run will have a zero percent conversion rate - meaning no customers were harmed during the making of this experiment. And if you do get a handful of people taking you up on the offer, you'll be able to send them a nice personal apology. And if you get tons of people trying to take you up on your offer - congratulations. You probably have a business. Hopefully that will take some of the sting out of the fact that you had to engage in a little trickery.

KDYKES: This is a great approach so you don't waste time or money on an idea that is not fully baked. Go read the full article.

Faith-Based versus Fact-Based Decision Making

Posted on June 5, 2009 by steveblank

I’ve screwed up a lot of startups on faith.

One of the key tenets of entrepreneurship is that you start your company with insufficient resources and knowledge.

Faith-based Entrepreneurship
At first, entrepreneurship is a Faith-based initiative.  There is no certainty about a startup on day-one.  You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. You leave the comfort of your existing job, convince a few partners to join you and you jump off the bridge together.

At each startup I couldn’t wait to do this.  No building, no money, no customers, no market?  Great, sign me up.  We’ll build something from scratch.

You start a company on a vision; on a series of Faith-based hypotheses.

Fact-based Execution
However, successfully executing a startup requires the company to become Fact-based as soon as it can. 

Think about all the assumptions you’ve made to get your business off the ground.  Who are the customers?  What problems do they have?  What are their most important problems?  How much would they pay to solve them?  What’s the best way to tell them about our product?…

Ad infinitum. These customer and market risks need to be translated into facts as soon as possible.

You can blindly continue to execute on faith that your hypothesis are correct.  You’ll ship your product and you’ll find out if you were wrong when you run out of money  

Or you can quickly get out of the building and test whether your hypothesis were correct and turn them into facts.

KDYKES: Tremendous insight (1) test your idea with customers as soon as possible (2) transition blind entrepreneurial passion into fact-based decision making and (3) if it will fail, make it fail quickly so you burn less time/money.

X: How would you sum up your investment philosophy?

ER: Beggars can’t be choosers. Oregon is sort of a secondary market. Every year, there are 10 or 20 companies that really deserve funding. We have to be kind of opportunistic here. If we can find an entrepreneur who really knows their technology and their market inside and out, they’ve been part of a larger company like Intel or HP, they’ve also been part of a startup, and they know which 20 customers they’re going to sell to first, because they’ve already worked with them and they know their pain, and they really have domain expertise, drive, ambition, and skills… We focus on the people

KDYKES: Tremendous perspective on how they select companies/teams to fund.

Question: What is common between AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, eBay, Amazon, Google, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Windows Vista, Autodesk 3ds Max, LEGO MINDSTORMS and the Apple iPhone?

Answer: Let’s see. At first glance - software and hardware, OS and Web 2.0, developer tools and productivity applications. But they are also all market leaders in their field and they all have APIs (Application Programming Interface) that are used by many companies to build businesses and products on top of them. The value to third-party developers is to avoid recreating the functionality in the base product and as a result, simply focus on creating value-added functionality. Third-party developers also have an automatic installed base of millions to which to sell.

KDYKES: Another example of the tremendous power of baking your API into your business model from the very beginning - & using it as leverage to rapidly accelerate your growth.

API’s Are The New Marketing Platform

If I was a CMO, I would take some of my marketing budget from traditional media buys and creative work and use it to hire a small group of extremely talented web developers that have experience using API’s to develop simple and easy to use web applications. API stands for application programming interface and it serves as a platform for web applications to interact and share information with other applications. A practical example of this are Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, though they reside on a desktop, they use the Twitter API to send and receive tweets, which means that you don’t have to go to your Twitter.com page to use your account.

The future of marketing is about companies developing useful applications for their customers that extend web services that the customers are already using. This replaces the current model which is to use web applications to communication with customers.  The problem with current social media marketing is the noise. A company is one of thousands, sometimes millions of users and it is easy to get lost. Developing applications via API’s provide a way for companies to break out of the crowd and at the same time create value for customers.

Brands will need to become conduits that facilitate consumer communications instead or interrupters that intermittently drop in advertisements.

KDYKES: The use of web services & engaging the developer community to build apps using your API is quickly becoming the most powerful form of what is commonly referred to 'Social Media Marketing'. The web is decentralized - so you must take your products and services to the users where they spend time already. Let the developer community create innovative approaches that you and your team may never have thought of.