Spiga

‘ My Predictions ’ category archive

Selling… Seduction… same difference

May 03, 10 by Craig

On an entirely separate blog I have a full write up on seduction. The other posts contain steps for how a guy would seduce a girl, I think it’s actually quite pertinent to selling sighing business. Before you start making to many assumptions about the other post let me explain a little further, but dorm the selling side within business.

You see in selling something there’s usually a lot of sides to what you’re selling, just as there are to a person. The real key to this is to know which features are relevant, while you might like the option of mind reading, a more likely one is to become friendly early. Become buddy and friendly with them quickly, commiserate with their woes and try to bond with them over similar experiences. This will make the initial conversation over what they’re looking for much more constructive. And while I say this is a conversation about what they’re looking for, what you should be asking is what their pains are.

For every pain that exists, theres 5 to 10 ways to solve it. However if you miss the pain points and problems they’re having, you’re more than likely to miss on the pitch. IF you are able to get the pain points correctly it simple becomes a process of guiding them in ways to solve their problem. This process usually starts with dissecting the fundamental issues in the process, then building it back up with your product or solution being the backbone. In the same way it’s hard to win someone over on a 1 on 1 personal level without knowing what they want, you can’t sell to someone that doesn’t have a problem, and won’t be able to pitch well without knowing it.

Why The Cloud Will Finally Work

April 05, 10 by Craig
The cloud has a lot of technical arguments going for it. The problem is consumers don’t understand the cloud, they don’t understand virtual storage and growth and syncing and the complexities of things. The average consumer is generally pretty dumb, they just want to be able to do things and it just work. If they ask a question they want an answer, not the deduction behind the answer. It’s why I loved mint.com so much when it launched. I gave it accounts and it told me everything I wanted to know. If it was wrong I seldom noticed it, such as classifying a purchase into a wrong category. My suspicion is that 98% of the users don’t notice much of the mis-classification that happens. They look the first time and it looks pretty good so they trust it, because if you look at 90% of purchases and classify them, why use mint, why not just use excel, or even go back to a paper and notebook?
Cloud is that same type of issue, it needs to just work, users need to just expect their document to always be the same. I think the iPad but more specifically MobileMe will have a great shot at doing this. The reason the iPad will play a role is now the average consumer will have more than 1 device. They’ll have their laptop/desktop and an iPad. This user will want to work on the device, and more than just email. Having their application open a file, work for 15 minutes on a train/bus, turn it off, walk in their front door and open the same file on their computer will really bring cloud storage/computing to a consumer. Because apple controls the reins on the primary applications where this has value:
  • Pages
  • Keynote
  • Numbers
Because their control these and the cloud, the experience will be good, when there’s a single device/ecosystem its easier to focus on experience which they’ve done well.
This will push the expectation on developers to deliver the same kind of experience with the cloud, it’s going to become the norm now. Not because its cost effective, not because of the technical benefits, but because it’s going to be transparent to users, and users are just going to expect it from now on.

Valuing Employees

February 27, 10 by Craig
A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensation for them is to make sure they’re happy. Sure the business should make sure they feel like you’re worth what you’re being paid, but usually there is no question about this, or if there is you’re quickly escorted out the door. While this is an interesting model, I think it can be much simpler, but companies usually confine themselves too much in giving credit to employees.
There was another recent occasion where a statement was made of ‘no more playing stick them up, until next year’. When I first thought about this, I knew I didn’t like the statement, but was unsure of why. The reason is that there can be several reasons why employees leave. Only one of which is compensation. If you feel you’re being adequately compensated for the job you’re doing it makes sense.
But there’s another reason thats very clear in the valley but less clear in other parts of the country. Paul Buchheit at Startup School this weekend in Berkeley said it very well: If you’ve been at your job too long, QUIT. Meaning if you’re comfortable, you know the people, you know how to do your job, and you’re not being challenged, then you should go somewhere where you are challenged.
So what does this have to do in regards to playing stick em up? Well if you’re at a comfortable place you should be compensate appropriately that’s fair. However if you’re at a comfortable place, you should either find ways to be challenged there or move on. If you’re challenged there it means your role over time will change, there’s not a standard guide for how quickly you become experienced in that role. It it’s two weeks, then salary should be re-evaluated then, if it’s 3 years salary should perhaps be re-evaluated yearly to keep up with changes in value to the dollar, but nothing more substantial to that.
At the end of the day it means you have to deliver value to an employer, and as long as your doing that the employer should recognize you for the value you deliver, based on merit, not based on policies laid out. Whether you jump to an extreme of merit/value being very clear such as a Joel Spolsky method, or follow something more traditional of a large company, the bottom line is you should give your employees what they’re worth, and as an employee its what you should expect.

A coworker (@danfarina) and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensation for them is to make sure they’re happy. Sure the business should make sure they feel like you’re worth what you’re being paid, but usually there is no question about this, or if there is you’re quickly escorted out the door. While this is an interesting model, I think it can be much simpler, but companies usually confine themselves too much in giving credit to employees.

There was another recent occasion where a statement was made of ‘no more playing stick them up, until next year’. When I first thought about this, I knew I didn’t like the statement, but was unsure of why. The reason is that there can be several reasons why employees leave. Only one of which is compensation. If you feel you’re being adequately compensated for the job you’re doing it makes sense.

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Who will filter the stream first?

January 26, 10 by Craig

Facebook is where I have more noise than any other social site, twitter may even tie facebook at amount of sheer content I receive in my feed. With regards to the ratio of what I care about to what I see facebook is a lot better, due to their news feed versus live feed. However, their news feed is still very often off. I wrote some time back about web 3.0, and how essentially showing what I want to see is what the web will become. You’ll take the vast amount of content and distill it into what I want to see. People seem to be taking very half-hazard shots at it and its quite a let down.

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Issues Aren’t Always Bad

January 25, 10 by Craig

I often encounter people whether at my office or at other places of employment that are distraught after getting an earful from a manager from some problem arising. The problem usually isn’t in their control, and therefore they don’t understand why they get heat for this. Most managers though do actually understand when issues come up, however what they don’t appreciate is late notice, lack of problem solving, and dictating what should be done next.

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Forget Doing Something Better, Do Something Different

January 21, 10 by Craig

I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.

With marginal improvements you have to:

  1. Convince the customer it’s not good enough today
  2. Convince the customer that you’re better
  3. Convince the customer you’re worth the headache of changing

While a lot of companies focus solely on taking an existing problem and solving it better than someone else has, I have my doubts about how reproducible this model is. If I’m a large company with lots of resources I’m going to keep iterating and improving myself, which means a smaller company really has to have some magic bullet that will displace me.

In contrast if I address a problem that hasn’t been solved my life instantly becomes a lot easier. I no longer have an argument of something not being good enough today, it becomes a question of value and how much its worth to solve the problem. Haggling over price is a conversation I’d rather have than trying to justify value and convince a customer they’ve been wrong in their choice for so many years.

Over the coming days I’m going to be posting a few of these examples/ideas and why I like them. Many of them are still being thought through, and while as I sort them out, I’m generally happy to publish high points about them. The even bigger key here is that success is typically in the execution and less so in the idea, though even then I’d prefer to execute on something that has less battles than something that from the onset has more. By doing something that is being done today you get no advantages of penetrating the market.

Parallelizing the Product Process?

January 20, 10 by Craig
A few days ago I was told things needed to be parallelized, not serialized with regards to the process. To me there could not be much more of a detrimental approach.
To give some background there is currently some selling going on, as the case often is with selling you sell the next version of what you’ll have. Or really sell what you think customers want, and that gives you validation if you should build it or not. I’m generally quite happy with this process, assuming you’ll have some time to test the market out, then build it. In fact this is the way a lot of businesses proceed and is a valid process. My problem isn’t with this process, it’s that I was told that we have to deviate from this process due to time constraints.

Who Cares About Visitors?

January 19, 10 by Craig

The web is becoming saturated. It’s no longer the pimply faced 20 somethings living in their mom’s basements that are the key users and the source of most of the traffic on the web. Now you have communities for pregnant moms, sites for elderly widows looking to date, and social sites for kids from the time they’re able to talk. So now that the web is hitting its saturation point of types of people interacting it becomes a critical issue to take advantage of those users and get them to do more.

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Behavioral Targeting versus Contextual Advertising

January 14, 10 by Craig

There’s a continual shift that seems to be happening on whether contextual advertising is better than behavioral. It seems that most people are becoming bigger and bigger on behavioral, and assuming that contextual has reached it’s peak. After meeting with a company that at first started to do both, blurring the lines, taking advantage of each when they had appropriate data it started to become clear that they more so have their place and time. Behavioral and Contextual shouldn’t be direct competitors.

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Does Authenticity Matter?

October 09, 09 by Craig
I’ve thought for some considerable time now about Twitter and how I feel it actually has more value than facebook with regards to advertising. The difference is context. However, I want to take a moment to look at it from a different angle. There is another key factor that drives the value of the network and the way you can monetize it, The authenticity of the network.
Facebook is as authentic of a network as you can have, you have you, you are you, you’re not FunChick21, or MotorcycleGuy42, You’re Craig Kerstiens. You have a birthdate, which is likely you’re birthdate, you have a job that is your job, you have friends that are you’re friends. Facebook is probably as close to a virtual representation of your true life as you can get on a social network.
Then you have Twitter. Twitter is probably as inauthentic as they come. You ARE FunChick21 or MotorcycleGuy42. You have that name, and that’s it. You have friends, but they’re up to you, it’s a one way relationship, not confirmation of friendship. For that reason you have 1,000,000 people following Ashton Kutcher, and he follows under 100. You’re friends could be celebrities, they could be friends, they could be random people that you liked their tweets.
Facebook from an ad perspective I know almost everything I could want to about you from an ad targeting perspective. Few sites could give much more demographic info that I’d want to target effectively. Twitter I have next to nothing, I have a user name, and the content of what you say.
So there’s an advantage to facebook. But then you have the context of what I’m trying to do. If you’re facebook, you have users engaged in the site not wanting to leave. If you’re Twitter you have users that won’t be on the site for beyond 60 seconds. Getting them to leave shouldn’t be an issue, which means if you can drive where they are leaving to it should work out well for you.
But there’s a final piece. It’s a heavily growing marketplace, that really neither of the major communities picks up on, and it’s virtual goods. Virtual goods exist in either form of network, but neither seems to take advantage, meanwhile it’s the entire basis behinds such communities as World of Warcraft. How will they start to roll into mainstream networks, that’s yet to be seen, but I’ll be curious if virtual goods can become dominant in authentic networks or if they’ll primarily reside in inauthentic networks as they do today.

I’ve thought for some considerable time now about Twitter and how I feel it actually has more value than facebook with regards to advertising. The difference is context. However, I want to take a moment to look at it from a different angle. There is another key factor that drives the value of the network and the way you can monetize it, The authenticity of the network.

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