Posts tagged Things
3 Things You Need to Know About Google’s Earnings Call
Apr 12th
Google reported earnings from the first quarter of 2012 today, and it looks like the Mountain View company is running as strong as ever – or at least stronger than at the end of last year. Revenues for the first three months of the year came in at $10.65 billion, an increase of 24% from the first quarter of 2011. Google is still a one-trick pony when it comes to earning money, with 96% percent of its revenue coming from company-owned websites or network partner sites. Advertising is still the name of the game for Google.
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8 Things Instagram Did Right
Apr 11th
With its billion-dollar sale to Facebook, Instagram instantly became the latest poster child for startup success. In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times.
An amazing run, and it wasn’t all just luck, though the company enjoyed plenty of that. To boost its chances to win the startup lottery, Instagram did eight very important things right.
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5 Things the Experts Say You Need to Know About the Facebook-Instagram Merger
Apr 10th
Depending on which hastily pasted-together analysis you believe, Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition Monday is reason enough to close your Instagram account, and Facebook is going to ruin Instagram. We’re not buying it, so instead we spent Monday interviewing a dozen experts for their thoughts and opinions on the deal.
All agreed that the deal is big, but only time will tell how big. In the meantime, they gave us five areas to watch, as the Instagram acquisition may very well shift how Facebook views content and serve as an acknowledgment that the Web is becoming increasingly visual.
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“What’s the deal worth, by normal analysis, not pie-in-the-sky valuations? Zero! Or next to zero. But so was Youtube before Google bought it and flipped it into a money-making magnet.” – Bert Martinez
“It will take months to know what it means for Facebook. The price is eye-popping, but then, so is Facebook’s expected valuation. What’s ultimately important is, did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg see this acquisition as an opportunity or a necessity?” said Brad Allen, investor relations expert at KC Associates. “The acquisition coming in front of Facebook’s IPO looks defensive. If the social media juggernaut is going to be able to justify its heady valuation, it needs to be the only rocket ride available for traders to jump on.”
While there are concerns with any acquisition of this magnitude, the people in the know seem to be cautiously optimistic that this deal will benefit three sets of stakeholders: Facebook investors, Facebook users and Instagram users. What follows is a summary of insight we received in interviews with more than a dozen social media experts and investors Monday.
Subtle Shift: Facebook Sees Future in Content Creation
The biggest hidden message in Facebook’s move Monday is acknowledging it has not paid enough attention to the content-creation side of social, according to Matthew Siegel, co-founder of Indaba Music, a musician collaboration and marketing platform.
“Before Instagram, Facebook was used exclusively to share content – it didn’t provide tools to actually create content (with the exception of typed status updates). It left creation to others – notably Zynga for games, native camera applications for photos, and record labels/Spotify for music,” Siegel said. “The Instagram acquisition signals Facebook’s recognition that it is important to have a hand in the creation of content… I may spend two minutes shooting and reshooting a photo that my wife is finally happy with, but only four seconds posting that photo to Facebook.”
Instagram Addresses Concerns About Facebook’s Mobile Strategy
Considering that Instagram secured funding just last week based on a valuation of $500 million, there are valid concerns that Facebook may be overpaying for Instagram by paying $1 billion. But there are two reasons why people who will buy shares in next month’s initial public offering of Facebook should be encouraged.
First, as we noted yesterday, it shows Facebook is willing to find new revenue streams, even as user growth slows and its advertising strategy flounders. But it also addresses one of the biggest concerns raised by potential investors: Facebook’s ability to grow in mobile.
“Instagram is the most popular mobile-only social network and the overall sixth most-used iOS app, reaching 10% of all iPhones,” said Guy Rosen, CEO of Onavo, an app download service. “Considering mobile is Facebook’s biggest challenge, as clearly laid out in their S-1, acquiring the breakout mobile-only social network is a natural move.”
Facebook is Acknowledging a Shift to the Visual Web
Michael Downing, founder and CEO of social video service Tout sees the acquisition as a reaction to services like Pinterest. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg has previously signaled that he likes the Pinterest model of site design.
“In a general sense, this acquisition on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text – and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Downing said. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.”
Facebook is Still Facebook, Instagram is Still Instagram
Yesterday’s headlines made a big deal about the value of the deal, but keep in mind that Facebook is projected to be worth more than $100 billion following its IPO. Jason Cieslak, managing director at branding firm Siegel+Gale, thinks it’s a good deal for both companies, but not as massive as yesterday’s flood of headlines might suggest.
“There is a cautionary tale in this space where this has been done before: Flickr being acquired by Yahoo, and even HP’s purchase of Snapfish,” Cieslak said. “I think it is safe to say that neither acquisition was a massive impact for both companies. Nice, but not transformational.”
All That Said, This Deal May be Worthless
Keep in mind that Facebook is paying $1 billion for a company with no business plan and that was valued at $15 million just one year ago. Money isn’t everything – Instagram has, after all, created a product that people love and, more importantly, encourages them to engage, create and share content.
But money is something given that Facebook will reportedly have its IPO next month. Marketing consultant Bert Martinez doesn’t expect the deal to impact Facebook’s IPO one way or another and says an Instagram merger was inevitable, given the company has been courted by both Facebook and Google in recent months.
“What’s the deal worth, by normal analysis, not pie-in-the-sky valuations? Zero! Or next to zero,” Martinez said. “But so was Youtube before Google bought it and flipped it into a money-making magnet.”
Image courtesy of Dan Frommer.
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Sponsor Post: 7 Things to Consider Before Building a Private Cloud
Apr 6th
Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Not so long ago, if you were like many CIOs or ops managers, you were consumed with issues related to providing power, space, and cooling for corporate datacenters. As the capabilities of server hardware continued to increase (Moore’s Law stands the test of time), the workload generated by a typical application could no longer completely consume the resources of a single server. Vast amounts of valuable resources were sitting idle and burning capital with their power, space, and cooling requirements. Then datacenter virtualization stepped in and helped to solve many of these problems.
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RightScale architect Brian Adler has hands-on experience developing private and hybrid clouds for organizations in a wide range of industries and with diverse use cases. In this private cloud video, Brian answers the most common questions he’s asked about private clouds.
Virtualization Is Just the Halfway Point
With the implementation of multiple virtual machines (VMs) running within the same physical host, the classic setup of one server per physical host was expanded to a many-to-one relationship, providing huge cost savings. But once that vast improvement to the classic one-to-one design had been found, the issues regarding the procurement and provisioning of those resources still remained.
You could compress more computing resources into the same physical and power footprint, but getting new VMs provisioned could still be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Typically, you would file a support ticket with the IT department, which often resulted in separate tickets for the compute, network, and storage administrators. Manual action was then required on those tickets to provision the resource.
Achieving an Automated Private Cloud
For many organizations, creating a private cloud effectively eliminates the provisioning bottleneck of the datacenter virtualization model while also preserving cost savings because the same many-to-one relationship exists between VMs and physical hosts. And by automating the procurement and provisioning of VMs, ops teams can more efficiently provide these resources to any or all members of their organizations.
7 Key Considerations
But a private cloud may not be the solution in every situation. When evaluating whether a private cloud is the right choice for you, start with these seven considerations:
1. Workload and Infrastructure Interaction
Choose the correct workload for the infrastructure, or tailor the infrastructure to a specific workload. For example, if the hardware allocated for your private cloud contains high-performance CPUs, then a processor-intensive application would be compatible within the confines of the available resources. If high-bandwidth I/O is required, and the disk drives in use are not up to the task, then you may be required to update the storage systems to meet the demands of the application.
2. Security
If you have a known application workload footprint in terms of CPU, memory, and storage utilization and have stringent security considerations, then a pure private cloud configuration may be your preferred choice. In the private cloud environment, all application traffic (and therefore all data) is contained locally within the organization, which can meet your security compliance needs.
3. Latency
You can generally achieve significantly reduced network latencies in a private cloud because traversal of the public Internet to the end user is typically not required. And you can optimize storage performance in a private cloud environment with the use of high-performance storage hardware and the configuration of high-bandwidth connectivity to those devices.
4. User Experience
Because private cloud infrastructure is typically closer in geographical proximity to your internal users than public cloud resources, their user experience is improved through decreased latency and increased application performance.
5. Cost
A private cloud environment is in most cases less expensive on a VM-per-hour (operational expense) basis compared to a public cloud, and storage and network costs will most likely be significantly reduced. Data ingress into a public cloud may be free, but egress is typically charged on a sliding scale based on total bandwidth consumption. Because of this, a public cloud can prove prohibitively expensive for high-bandwidth applications.
Cloud infrastructure software is a fundamental component of a cloud-enabled data center. Commercial and open source solutions provide for the provisioning of VM, storage, and networking resources, whether these resources are virtualized and running on a hypervisor or on bare metal infrastructure.
6. Automation
You should also decide how to automate the deployment of resources. One way is to use monolithic standalone images for the deployment of your server instances. Or, if you have a cloud management solution that allows for boot-time dynamic server configuration, you can use basic “vanilla” operating system images, which save time because you do not need to create new images when you make changes to the application or deploy new applications on your private cloud.
7. Cloud Enablement
Cloud infrastructure software is a fundamental component of a cloud-enabled data center. Commercial and open source solutions provide for the provisioning of VM, storage, and networking resources, whether these resources are virtualized and running on a hypervisor or on bare metal infrastructure. Additionally, a cloud management solution abstracts the underlying cloud API and presents a consistent programmatic interface, which allows access to the underlying cloud resources regardless of the cloud infrastructure software used.
As with many complex technologies, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model for building a private cloud. But by first evaluating whether a private cloud is appropriate for your use case given the guidelines above, you’ll be better prepared to develop a private cloud architecture that supports both your technological and business goals.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Eye Movement Study Reveals Six Must-Know Things About Facebook Brand Pages
Apr 3rd
The Facebook Timeline that brand pages were forced to switch over to last week is “flawed,” according to an eye movement study of six brand pages by SimpleUsability, with many of the new features going unnoticed or being misunderstood.
“The average user doesn’t fully understand the new layout, or interact with it in the way intended,” said Guy Redwood, managing director of SimpleUsability. “This will likely change over time, but as the mechanics of obtaining ‘Likes’ has become more difficult for brands, they now need to drive engagement more than ever.”
The study tracked user eye movements when visiting the Web-based brand pages of American Express, Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Gap, Coldplay and Manchester United. In addition to pointing out problems with brand pages, the study found certain features on the pages as currently designed were more important.
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What follows are the six big takeaways from the study for brands still working on configuring their timelines.
Cover Photos Aren’t As Important As You Think
Facebook has made a point of insisting brands can use their cover photos as opportunities, and a whole cottage industry is springing up on helping companies design cover images. But users in the study either ignored the cover images entirely or disregarded it as “advertising space.”
They also didn’t pay much attention to the profile picture or apps directly beneath a cover page. In most cases, a user’s first action when landing on the page was to scroll down and get themselves oriented with what they were viewing.
Timeline is Actually a Valuable Feature
Timeline’s biggest benefit for brands, according to the study, is the ability to tell a brand’s story. The Timeline design is particularly effective in accomplishing this online, but users also liked the ease of finding the “About” button on brand pages. In many cases, users said it was easier to learn about a brand than it was on a corporate Web site.
The Timeline Only Works if It’s Current
Users got confused if a timeline appeared to be outdated. While there is benefit in going back and filling in a corporate history, most users in the study did not look beyond one month in the Timeline’s reverse chronological hierarchy.
Users Notice When Their Friends “Like” or Interact With a Brand
The best way to get a user to interact with your brand is to get that users’ friends to interact with your brand. Users are more likely to interact with a friends’ comment about a brand that they consider timely.
More Data Needed to Measure the Effectiveness of Pinned Posts
Brands can get around the problems presented by Timeline’s reverse chronological hierarchy by “pinning” a post to the top of their Timeline. But so far, few brands are using the pin feature and, when they do, they have little impact on users, according to SimpleUsability.
Users Rarely, if Ever, Interact With Apps
That could change over time, as users get more familiar with the Timeline layout. But for now, very few users are even noticing the customizable app buttoons. When they do, it’s almost exclusively to look at photos.
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Solving a Spectrum Shortage for the Internet of Things with 2G
Mar 23rd
Fifty billion Internet-capable devices – if that indeed is the number – capable of communicating sensor data through the networks we use today, probably won’t have Ethernet plugs. And if they’re mobile by nature, they won’t rely on Wi-Fi routers. If soon there are more devices communicating over the Internet than there are people, states the general presumption since the 50 billion projection was first quoted last year, there simply isn’t that much wireless spectrum to cover it all.
This is where this story would end if we all put our faith in presumptions instead of technology. Last January, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report (PDF available here) that foresaw a world of intercommunicating devices as a critical component of a healthy global economy. It noted the term “Internet of Things,” but settled upon the more industrial term for the concept, machine-to-machine communication (M2M). The report created use cases for M2M devices that were as simple as automotive speedometers registering relative speed, perhaps to other devices within the same car, to brake monitoring systems that communicate a car’s relative ability to stop to insurance companies. But the system that could make M2M both ubiquitous and inexpensive, the report made clear, is ironically the same system that carriers like AT&T are begging to decommission: the 2G network.
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Winding Down and Winding Up
2G wireless technology could be the most convenient, most efficient, and most ubiquitous communication network for M2M devices presently available, the OECD report claims. However, the world’s major wireless carriers have either begun decommissioning their 2G systems, or are planning to.
As the OECD report reads, “2G networks are scheduled to be decommissioned and replaced by 4G networks in the coming five to 15 years. Building an M2M solution that only functions on 2G may not be future proof. However, there are very few or no 4G modules available and it is not expected that 3G coverage will become universal.”
Mobile Network Operators (MNO), the report makes clear in multiple places, are built around service to people. The driving force in delivering service is customer satisfaction, which for people often consists of somewhat more than an ACK signal or the lack of one. So not only the technical but the financial infrastructure of wireless networks would need to change if they are to address the demands of a device-driven network. For example, one customer may operate tens of thousands of simultaneous devices, as opposed to the average three. Imagine how the billing system would have to be reconfigured. And when devices in those networks cross one another’s territories, consider the roaming agreements that MNOs would need to make with one another. “For many MNOs the systems aimed at supporting service to consumers are not capable of meeting the demands of M2M users,” says the report.
But even these factors will become moot points if the underlying network ceases to exist. This from Alex Brisbourne, the CEO of KORE Wireless, one of North America’s major current providers of M2M technology to carriers and infrastructure support systems. As wireless carriers are busy winding down their 2G services in preparation to shut them off, says Brisbourne, the spectrum frontiers for M2M are being relocated to 3G and 4G systems that are neither ubiquitous, consistent, or relatively cheap.
“Folks have got to stand up and start thinking about how they’re going to deal with 3G and beyond in M2M,” Brisbourne tells ReadWriteWeb in a recent interview. “On the other hand, I think the carriers need to be more affirmative and communicative with regard to their planning horizons on 2G and 3G support. Otherwise we’re going to see people, frankly, getting their fingers burned. They’re going to deploy [M2M], and suddenly find people have taken their network away.”
Major carriers see the remaining benefit of 2G technologies in terms of amortization – how long they can continue to offset expenditures. It will be difficult to persuade carriers to keep 2G going with the promises of revenues from M2M services alone – revenues that could be “microscopic,” says Brisbourne, in comparison with what carriers reap from data plans from human beings. “Clearly the slaves that all the carriers are playing to, honestly, are smartphones and their customers who are being locked into $50 to $80-per-month contracts.”
But the argument that there isn’t enough spectrum anywhere to accommodate the flood of incoming M2M devices, Brisbourne believes, is something of a straw man. KORE Wireless’ projections indicate, he tells us, that assuming M2M adoption grows at the high end of analysts’ projections, by the year 2016, all M2M communication worldwide may still be manageable on a total of 5 MHz of spectrum – “a tiny sliver of the network.”
A Little Practical Incentive
Brisbourne cautions us that he does not perceive the carriers’ motives, placing people above things, as being “disingenuous” in any fashion. “I think they’re driven by very, very practical business considerations, and the efficiency of the licensed spectrum is one of them,” he says. But the CEO has an idea, and it starts like this: “The average Joe in the streets doesn’t need to have a 2G phone.”
It involves a kind of going-away present. “Some of these people have still got a Nokia brick dating back 10 years, that have got things like a dialpad on it… If I want to get rid of the last 5 million 2G phones in the world that are on my network, all I do is give them the incentive to come in and get a nice, bright, shiny new Samsung free of charge, and all those people will flock in and take it,” he suggests. “It’s just a matter of incentivizing people to come in and do it.” In fact, he adds, it may be prudent for carriers to offer those dialpad users simple feature phones as an option instead of smartphones – because maybe they don’t want smartphones anyway.
Once the phones are replaced, carriers can then act like the 2G nodes are being shut down like VHF TV channels a few years ago… only not actually do it. “What you possibly do is keep it, almost unbeknownst to many, for certain aspects of 2G.” Brisbourne likens it to the maintenance of circuit-switched data in telephone systems – a half-century-old system still in use today.
Even if carriers don’t go for this idea, the CEO says, carriers need to come up with some explicit plan for adopting and maintaining M2M. And if it’s 3G instead of 2G, that decision needs to be made now, so MNOs, device makers, and service operators can build consistent services today.
“You can’t sit there saying, ‘My feet are dry, my feet are dry… oh, God, I’m up to my knees in water!’ as the tide keeps on coming in,” says Brisbourne, in his classic storytelling mode. “If the tide is coming in and the move is toward 3G, then people with M2M services that depend on wireless connectivity for their very viability need to plan to encompass it. And for that, they need to have a clear, publicly stated direction – not behind-the-scenes murmuring about the timeline for those services to be in play. Otherwise, we do the industry a disservice. And in my opinion, the carrier community is not doing as robust a job on this as it ought to be.”
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5 Things I Learned About the Future from Stephen Wolfram
Mar 15th
Lots of the knowledge dropped at South By Southwest Interactive is vertical. In the sense that tech people use that word, “vertical” means focused on a particular market or problem and all its implications from top to bottom. Talks tend to be about the business of this or that, or the makers of one app will talk about how they did it.
A precious few talks are horizontal, though. They consider the challenges and opportunities in tech across all disciplines. On Sunday, Stephen Wolfram performed that role in his talk, “Computation and Its Impact on the Future.” In his view, we’re at the dawn of an age of computing that’s as important as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, if not more so. Here are five key takeaways.
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Nature Is A Computer
One of the first slides Wolfram showed us was an image of the output of his beloved rule 30. It’s from his set of “cellular automata,” arrays of cells with only two states that change state over time following basic rules. They demonstrate that you don’t need a complicated program to produce fabulously complex bodies of information.
Wolfram thinks of computation as a new kind of science. Once you realize how well patterns of information describe the shapes and functions we see in nature, you start to see how the rules – or programs – that produce those patterns are fundamental. It might be that the whole universe can be described by one program. “Even among the first few thousand possible programs,” Wolfram said,” there are a few that are not obviously not our universe.”
Once you observe the intricacy that can emerge from such basic functions as rule 30, the natural evolution of this complex universe begins to seem more possible. “This is nature’s secret,” Wolfram told us. Take life on Earth for example. Genes need only to encode the right kinds of simple rules to express amazing diversity. This Conus textile shell has a beautiful pattern reminiscent of rule 30.
Programming Is Easy
Fortunately, when you see things the way Wolfram does, that means programming is easy. Since simple rules can produce complex results, creating those rules becomes a matter of simply observing the world and understanding the way it operates. Science!
That’s the thinking behind Mathematica the programming language Wolfram created. It powers Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” that takes users’ natural language questions, assembles some Mathematica programs and computes graphical, interactive answers.
Mathematica is full of basic mathematical and scientific rules. They’re the primitives of the language. While San Francisco software developers toil to write the best mobile photo apps from scratch, Wolfram demonstrated Mathematica to us on stage by writing photo filtering software off the top of his head with a few lines of Mathematica code.
How? All it takes is an understanding of the properties of light, graphs and digital image formats, and those are all baked into the language.
Data Are Good For Our Health
We can take the science of computation up a notch if we have more data. That’s why Stephen Wolfram has been collecting personal data about himself for decades. He wanted to understand his patterns and habits better, so he started tracking his typing, emailing, phone calls, walking and more. He’s started to apply his own tools to his personal dataset, and it has taught him some illuminating lessons.
But we’ll take this much further in the future. Wolfram argues that computation on personal data is the future of medical diagnosis. The way medicine works now, we take measurements, compare it to the literature and produce a diagnosis. “Naming it is not the key thing,” though.
The key is to understand the context of our health condition by watching our bodily trends over time. Then we can know on a personal basis how to react medically to a particular state. We can do that by constantly collecting medical data about ourselves and computing new solutions.
Computers Belong In The Classroom
It’s easy to believe that the Internet is destroying our brains. You know, just like the calculator did </sarcasm>. Now that answers are constantly, instantaneously available, we don’t have to keep them in our heads anymore. Conventional wisdom tends to assert that this makes us dumber, but Wolfram argues the opposite.
“Education today is based on the industrial age,” he told us at SXSW, “not on our coming computing age.” According to Wolfram, the power afforded to students by computers should take education to a higher level. Instead of rote memorization of facts and abstract rules, teachers can now give students increasingly hard real-world problems to solve. They have powerful tools at their disposal to do the math for them; what they need to learn is how to use them.
“You don’t need professors to tell us generic facts,” Wolfram said. “You need humans to apprentice to.”
Humans Still Matter
To Wolfram, computation is as important a human innovation as agriculture or manufacturing, “maybe bigger.” Yes, the whole universe might be computing all around us, but the human discovery of how to do it on purpose is a pivotal step.
The line isn’t as clear between “intelligence” and computation as we’d like to think, Wolfram says. A simple rule that’s computationally sophisticated could trick us. Wolfram doesn’t believe in general artificial intelligence, only more computation specialized to our kinds of problems. Since we, too, are specialized for our own problems, we’re improving ourselves by getting better at computation.
Wolfram talked about how, in times of historical upheaval, people tend to turn to the wisdom of the ancients to figure out what to do next. “For the future,” he said, “I have this suspicion that we’re going to be The Ancients.” By reorienting our civilization around computing, we’re on to something big, and it’s still the very beginning.
Image 1 by Nonenmac via Creative Commons
Image 2 by Maksim via Creative Commons
Image 3 by Rling via Creative Commons
Image 4 by Quchen in the public domain
Image 5 via Stephen Wolfram
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Conversion Optimization: 5 More Things to Test
Mar 7th
You’ve run your share of testing to win over the HiPPO’s, you’ve proven your mettle, and won some deserved attention from your peers. What’s next along the golden path of optimization? Where do you go for follow-up ideas on what and how to test?
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Geek Health: Things You Need to Know [Video]
Mar 2nd
If you work behind a computer or live like a geek I think the following video could be helpful. Dr. Weil talks about diets, energy drinks, milk, vitamins, the importance of Vitamin D, fish oil, cell phone use, eye problems, teas, dark chocolate benefits and much more. When you are young you think you can [...]
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8 Things to Think About Before You Make Your Next Product Pitch
Mar 1st
St. Louis became the 22nd city to have a branch of the Founders Institute today. The operation helps entrepreneurs in a very structured four-month paid mentoring program. It involves intensive coaching and has resulted in more than 700 startups, with over 40% of them receiving funding. We have written about FI before here.
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At the St. Louis kickoff meeting last night, I heard about one of the group’s signature tenets, what you need to know before you make your next pitch to a similar entrepreneurial group. These come from FI’s founder, Adeo Ressi. He launched his first business at the ripe old age of 22 back in 1994, and eventually sold it for $600 million.
As I was listening to local VC Kyle Welborn go through these items, I was struck how these can be used the next time you are thinking about making any pitch for something new, such as a product idea or a project for your own company. So let’s take a look and see what they are.
- First, share your idea frequently. This really isn’t a question, but gets at the heart of what anyone who is trying to do something new is all about. The more often you try out your idea on others, the more you tend to think about it and rephrase or reformulate it. And don’t worry about someone else stealing your idea. You might even find someone else who is simpatico to partner up with.
- Simple ideas win over complex ones. This seems pretty obvious, but is worth repeating.
- Have a single revenue stream. The best businesses, and the best products, have focus. Don’t muck things up with making it more complicated. This isn’t to say that you can have multiple products with different revenue streams.
- Identify your ideal and hopefully sole customer. This doesn’t mean that you are trying to make a sale to a limited market (see below). Just that you again focus on someone who you know in your mind is the ideal customer. As a writer, I started out my career with similar advice, keeping in mind a particular reader as I was writing my stories.
- Small markets suck. While you want focus, you also want your idea to find a large market with plenty of potential customers. Many firms have died trying to find a very small niche. That isn’t to say that you can’t find a niche and dominate it – just make sure it is a sizable market.
- Explain your idea in less than 10 words. Keep this short and sweet. At the pitch meeting last night, prospects had a minute to do their pitches. Some did it in less time, which was pretty awesome.
- Have a secret sauce. You need to find something that you can do better than anyone else, to establish your own street cred and also the value of your approach. Explaining that sauce (you don’t have to go into details) is what makes the pitch come alive.
- Be original, be new.
At the meeting, Welborn put together a MadLibs kind of structure to the ideal pitch:
I am developing (my idea) to help (my intended audience) to solve (my particular problem) with (my secret sauce).
Good luck with your pitching!
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