Holly Chen's Jambalaya Blog

Build Minimal Beautiful Product (MBP)

2011-11-21T23:56:00.000-05:00

Does Lean Startup methodology apply to mobile apps? Listento customers and keep on iterating still apply, but a minimum viable product(MVP) is not enough, said Vic Singh,founder and CEO of Tracks, at the Travel 2.0 Meetup.

For websites, people expect it to evolve, so even if thefirst time experience is not perfect, it’s easy to type in an URL to try again. For mobile apps, you get one shot. If thefirst time experience is not good enough, users are likely to uninstall the appright away.

Twitter’s researchshows that if people don’t use your product within the first 7 days after signup, they are likely not going to use it ever again.

The answer? Build a product that is beautiful for the firsttime user, and do one thing really, really well. Then keep on improving,without feature creep. When someone saysyour product is too simple, it is a good thing.

Vic also shared his insights on questions every mobile appventure wrangles with:

1. Howto treat non registered users for mobile apps?

Allow non-registered users to explore before commit. Showthem what’s possible to lure them in.

2. Howto stand out in a crowded app market?

· Use social media and organic search. Use paidadvertising when appropriate.

· Try to get featured by App Store – buildrelationships.

· Make viral distribution deals. Build partnershipwith a purpose – do not lose focus for a seemingly great partnership if itdoesn’t help with the brand.

· Most importantly, great products go viral – design inherently viral products thatusers love to tell their friends, or better yet, use it together with them.

3. Howto view competition?

Don’t panic about competition. If you act reactively, you’vealready lost. Don’t scramble when Techcrunch writes an article about acompetitor. Focus on delivering a great product.

4. Tipson creating a great mobile app logo?

Logo creation for the mobile app is an important and oftenover-looked exercise for branding. Of course you can get a logo designedcheaply on Crowdspring, but spend time up front to create a logo that conveysthe brand message. Changing logo in the middle of your venture confuses users.Finally, design a logo that stands out even within the folder on the phone.

5. Adviceto aspiring entrepreneurs?

Never give up, ever, ever, ever, ever,ever, ever...

Can a Mobile App be a Big Business?

2011-05-13T13:02:00.001-04:00

As of January 2011, there are 350,000 apps inApp Store alone, but most don’t get discovered at all. The averageshelf life of an iPhone app is less than 30 days. By 30 days out, less than 5% are usingthe app. How to emerge fromthe vast number of apps, and how to capture recurrence is especially criticalfor free apps.

Travel mobile apps are especially challenging, as mostpeople take trips just a couple of times a year. Besides selling digitalguidebooks, can travel apps make money, and become a real business?

One travel app that showed particularly impressive result isGateGuru – initially launched inDecember 2009, which many likened to "Yelpfor airports", and was featured in an Apple television commercial. Ithas had over 300,000 downloads, featured by New York Times, CNN, The WallStreet Journal, Forbes and many others.

What impressed me was that GateGurudidn’t sleep on the accolades as Yelp for Airports, they have a bigger visionas "day-of" travel platform. While TripAdvisor is for planning, andExpedia is for booking, GateGuru aims to become synonymous with"doing" travel.

Travel2.0 Meetup invited Dan Gellert,founder of GateGuru, to talk about his founder story at our May Online TravelStartup Roundtable. He was charismatic, honest, and engaging, I took awaymany valuable learnings:

1. Socializethe idea with reporters before launch. Leverage the power of exclusives.

A few months before the app launched,Dan started to socialize the idea to various reporters and got them excited. Hegave exclusives to top press, and launched with a big bang, covered by New YorkTimes and the Wall Street Journal. Thispaved the way when he approached Apple Developer Relations, which ultimately featuredthe app in an Apple TV commercial. The learning:Don’t wait until the app launches, cultivate relationships with the press waybefore the launch. Reporters love exclusive stories.

2. Havea smart pricing strategy.

At initial launch, GateGuru charges $1.99to recoup development costs. At one time it had both a premium version and a freeLite version. This echoes the Pinch Media report that mostfree apps don’t get revisited often enough to justify an ad only strategy.When the Apple commercial was about to come out, Dan decided to change the app tofree, which fueled the hockey stick growth of downloads. Since then, GateGurupartnered with airlines and OTAs to license its platform and do jointcampaigns, which leveraged the power of its data to expand the business model. The learning: initially, consider chargefor the app to recover costs, then consider free if growth picks up, and if thelong term business model requires capturing large amount of data to achievenetwork effect.

3. Takeone step at a time with bigger visions.

Many mobile apps started as a feature.Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom believes that ‘thebest products in the world start out as features’. Often features solve aspecific problem. Once you solve a problem better than anyone else, you havethe start of something that can continue to evolve. Chris Dixon also believesthat thenext big thing will start out looking like a toy.

Yelp for Airports sounded like a simpleidea, but the first version of GateGuru solved a clear problem: what places canI eat at airports? It has since added many more features like all thefacilities, security checkpoint wait time, wifi options, leaderboard, TripItintegration, etc. It’s innovating ways to partner with various players to becomethe ‘Day-of’ travel platform. The learning:start small, and rapidly evolve to get steadily better. Partner with otherplayers to grow as an integral part of the ecosystem.

In summary, mobile apps can start as a feature, but do more faster, keep iterating and innovating, partner with other players to grow, and eventually, an app can grow to be a real million dollar business. It's not about the device or platform the product is built upon, but about the vision, the market, and the problem it solves.

Many more great tips about datacollection, cofounder, partnership, and SEO were shared at the Meetup. To keepupdated on exciting new developments of GateGuru, downloadthe app, follow them on Facebookand Twitter.

54 hours of Rollercoaster at Startup Weekend NYC

2011-04-19T21:21:00.003-04:00

Hi, I’m Holly, I’m a Startup Weekend Addict. I’ve attended two Startup Weekends and one and half Lean Startup Machine weekends. I was blessed to work with some of the best people in the New York startup community. This past weekend though, was the most emotional of all.

At this past Startup Weekend New York, April 15th-17th, I wanted to pitch something related to social travel, but not sure exactly what. When I saw the amazing live coding demo by John Britton of Twilio on Friday night, a light bulb struck and I pitched a ‘Twilio for travelers’ app, where travelers can text message each other before meeting, sort of like GroupMe but for people who don’t know each other to find travel buddies. Here began the ride.

The UP:
The idea was voted as one of the most popular ones, many people came to me and said they loved the idea, and at least five designers expressed interest to join. I was pretty confident I would form another great team like previous weekends, until later, people started to disappear into breakout rooms, and I ended up with only one designer and no developer.

The DOWN:
I panicked. I ran around the room asking everyone if they were a mobile developer, or at least know a little PHP. No one. It looked like that the project was going to die. I couldn’t believe it. I thought people loved the idea! It was just me and Wilbert Gutierrez, who committed from the very beginning, and stayed with me. For this, I’m forever grateful.

Calming down, I sat down with Willy to talk through the idea. We created wireframe of what we envisioned this to be. I told myself, I’m going to get this done no matter what. At 1am, I got home and posted the project on Solvate, oDesk, and Elance and reached out to a number of developers there. Worst case scenario, I would work with an outsourcer, or I would use my horrible PHP skills learned from two Girl Develop It classes to hack something together.

The UP:
The next morning, I ran into Adam Ullman from Tokbox, who presented the OpenTok API on Friday night. After hearing my desperate plea, he took pity on me and came on board! His colleague Jonathan Mumm, who already signed up on another project, also agreed to help out part time (who later spent much more than ‘part-time’). The universe responded!

The PIVOT:
After discussing in detail the functionalities of Twilio API and Tokbox API, and the fact that we didn’t have an iOS developer, we agreed that our app should focus on smart phone users, and we would use web tools to demo the interaction. More importantly, from the user value perspective, people may feel more comfortable with both chat and video options before meeting without giving out their phone numbers. So we pivoted from ‘Twilio for Travelers’ to ‘Tokbox / ChatRoulette for Travelers’. Jon came up with the name ‘AdventureCliq’, which everyone loved.

The UP:
I couldn’t have asked for a better team. Adam was truly a world class engineer, yet so humble and gracious. Jon was a whiz with excellent user experience sense. Willy created such elegant and clear design that all I could say was ‘Wow’. I worked on customer development and got people to sign up on our LaunchRock page. By Sunday, we had a working demo! After furiously looking for logo design help and some last minute scramble with GoDaddy hosting, we were live on AdventureCliq.com! It was such an adrenaline rush the whole time.

The DOWN:
What I regret is that I didn’t spend much time to practice the final presentation. Half an hour prior to the presentation, I mumbled a general outline. I was taken aback a bit when the team scheduled ahead of us dropped out, and we rushed to the stage (yes, excuses...). Of course the video chat didn’t get connected. I wasn’t as at ease and smooth as I should have been, and what’s worse, I forgot to thank my team on stage! What could be worse than that?!

The three minute pitch and three minute Q&A went by like 30 seconds. When I got off stage, I didn’t felt the greatest. We accomplished so much these past two days: we had a functioning live demo online instead of just mockups, with a team of just four people. Everyone worked so hard, and I didn't do as good a job presenting as I wanted.

The END:
When I was still licking my wound, people came to say how much they loved the idea and the product. After a while, I made peace with myself. It’s not about what a great presentation I could have done, it’s about the journey. What four of us have gone through, the ups and downs we overcame together, is more precious than anything else. What I’ve learned over the past 54 hours and what I do with these learnings matter more than the result. The best thing I could do to make it up to my team is to move the project forward and let them see what a great product they helped start.

LEARNINGS:

Tell a great story. Pitches were 60 seconds. Presentations were 3 minutes. To convince the audience, you need to relate to them. Justin Isaf is a master in this. He’s one of the best story tellers I’ve ever met.
Relax and have fun. Work hard, but when it comes to presentation time, don’t take it too seriously. Enjoy yourself on stage, look like you’re having fun, and the passion and confidence will come through.
Practice your presentation. Leave at least an hour prior to the final presentation and go over the flow with all the team members, including testing the demo multiple times on different machines. The WeTrip.It team did a fantastic job on this, to the extent that one presenter forgot a word on stage and another team member completed his sentence right away.
Believe in yourself. When things look doomed, don’t give up. The turnaround may be just around the corner. If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will come to save you.
Don’t be over ambitious. Especially in an environment like Startup Weekend, there’re limited things one can accomplish, makes sense to pitch something small enough and launch 80% than pitching a grand idea and launch 20%. I learned this from Jonathan Wegener and took it to heart this time.
Proof of concept comes first. You don’t need to do serious coding from the get go. Lots of hacking can be done to test whether the idea is feasible. What matters at the beginning is how much your users and audience understand your vision, can play around with it and give feedback, rather than launching a real product. Be creative in your workaround. Sometimes this is your only option anyway.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who made the project possible: Adam Ullman, Jon Mumm, Wilbert Gutierrez, top notch talent I’ve ever met in my career. Jeff Domke, Wendy Hu, Andrew Cornett, Andrew Kirpalani for logo design help. John Britton and Isabel Summers for the advice. Volkan Unsal for your support when I most needed it. And everyone who took time to fill out our survey! Check out AdventureCliq.com, and click on 'Download' to enter your email to be notified when we launch (Yep, conversion tracking!).

Picture credits to Solvate.

My First SXSW Part 2: SxSW 2011 Flash Mob!

2011-04-07T16:06:00.002-04:00

My first Flashmob. It was awesome! Definitely a highlight.

From another angle:

SxSW 2011 Flash Mob #sxswflashmob

Travel 2.0 Meetup with Founders of GloboMaestro.com

2011-03-28T14:39:00.004-04:00

What I love about featuring a new startup is that it couldbe very intellectually stimulating for the participants of the roundtable. Thinkabout it as a Startup MBA Case Study. Just like thinking about your own startupidea, figuring out how to design the product, market it, acquire and retainusers, negotiate partnerships, hire people... In an hour, you’re going throughthe journey with the founders who have just been through the process for thepast year.

For the April Travel 2.0 Meetup, we’re featuring Nicole Cotroneo and Mark Jolly, founders ofGloboMaestro.com and Globorati.com.

GloboMaestro is the web's first collection of true localtravel experts. These experts are top hotel concierges whose business is todispense insider advice to travelers every day. Partnered with prestigioushotel brands, including St. Regis, Fairmont, Mandarin Oriental, The Surrey andThe Bowery Hotel, GloboMaestro empowers concierges to get out from behind theirdesks and bring their local know-how directly to consumers via personal blogs, highquality videos, and direct interactions.

Nicole Cotroneois a seasoned news reporter and contributor to The New York Times and TheWashington Post, among other publications. She is a regular travelcolumnist for Delta Sky magazine. She also authors the popular food andtravel blog, NY Girl Eats World, and has been seen on television as aguest judge on The Food Network.

Mark Jolly is a longtime contributing editorat Condé Nast Traveler, and has been published in numerous toppublications on both sides of the Atlantic. A product of English-Iranianparents, he has lived in four continents and has reported from over 60countries.

What intrigued me about GloboMaestro is their slick design,unique content, and smart business model. To consumers, it is the place to gethigh quality video and blog content about hidden treasures of the city; to hotels, it is the place to market their highquality service, showcase insider access of the concierge, and build relationshipswith customers via social media channels.

There are several areasthat would be great learning from Nicole and Mark:

As most hotels have a corporate parent, sellingto headquarters could be a long and bureaucratic process. How did they overcomethis hurdle? What is the most effective way to navigate the complex ownershipand management structure and sell to hotels?
Operating a successful luxury travel siteGloborati.com, what prompted them to start a new business? What are the mostimportant learnings from working on Globorati that are benefiting their secondventure?
How do hotels measure success of this effort?How do they measure social media ROI?
How does GloboMaestro maintain editorial controlwhile getting paid by the hotel?

I’ll be asking Nicole and Mark all these questions. Whatwould be yours? Check out GloboMaestro.com before coming to the meetup, and getready for a night of great discussions and learnings!

Time: Wednesday April 13, 2011. 6pm

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Travel20/events/16963820/

My First SXSW Part 1: General Impression

2011-03-27T18:00:00.001-04:00

It’s been a week since I came back from South by SouthwestInteractive. Finally got to sit down and reflect this surreal experience. In three posts, I'll write about my general impression, interesting companies, learnings and regrets.

General Impression:

As they say, SXSW is a big tech party, or geek spring break.For two weeks, Austin turns to a big amusement park. Conferences are held atboth the Austin Convention Center and various hotels downtown. You seebadge-wearing panel goers everywhere, small groups of people sitting in theconvention center and hotel lobby discussing the next big idea, eager entrepreneurspitching investors, startups marketing themselves in many interesting ways.

I have never seen such concentration of hipsters in my life (living in New York, that's a pretty strong statement):

Just a regular street corner with nerds, business people and musicians:

Posters (Below photos courtesy of Jeffrey Donenfeld)

QR codes:

Free food:

Food trucks (This one is sponsored by Groupon, of course):

Late night favorite:

And of course, parties and music:

This last one is taken by me at 3am on 6th Street, it can rival Time Square on a Saturday afternoon!

It's probably a bit all over the place, but just to give you an example that SXSW is not only about panels, but more about getting to know your fellow conference goers in a social setting. If you got a few beers with someone, it's much easier to connect for business later on, than the usual office / powerpoint style.

Many people came just to take it all in and feel the vibe. For me, seeing all the startups and entrepreneurs, whether 'made it' or not, gave me the energy to push forward long after the conference. Sitting down at a random table in the lobby and chatting up with people, finding out it's someone who founded a dozen companies, is the type of serendipity that make me love SXSW.

Learnings from Travel 2.0 Meetup with Wanderfly.com Founders Cezary Peitrzak and Christy Liu

2011-03-26T01:28:00.001-04:00

Travel 2.0 Meetup was very excited to have co-founders of Wanderfly.com Cezary Pietrzak, Director of Business Development, and Christy Liu, Director of Marketing, to talk about their founder’s story. Here are my learnings:

Design is Essential: Wanderfly is driven by three major components: Marketing, Technology, and Design. Their clean and slick design is among the best I’ve seen lately in travel startups. I love it when startups value the role of user experience and design. Jack Dorsey said:
And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.
Wanderfly is not only visually beautiful, but also intuitive, following user’s thought process of using a few critical filters to find travel inspirations, offering budget estimate, as well as detailed activities recommendations. The flight and hotel search functions are very easy to use too.
Building Partnerships and Integrate with the Ecosystem. As an unknown startup, establishing partnerships could be challenging. Wanderfly’s approach was to start with the smaller guys first, and work their network. Wanderfly integrates beautifully with Foursquare, Eventful, Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, Nile Guide, Kayak, Hotels.com, Yelp, FindEatDrink, etc., and charge for certain partner content (very smart).

Think Through the Business Model before Rushing Into Products. This is a controversial topic. Many believe otherwise and are totally justifiable. Wanderfly team spent 6 months planning, interviewing customers, creating business cases, before working on the actual product. They knew that affiliate model alone cannot sustain the initial phase of the business, so they explored additional revenue streams of partner content sponsorship and B2B solution to power other companies. I believe this served them well to quell the skeptics and to raise funding.

Building a Team with Shared Vision. I love the story that all of Wandefly’s co-founders were friends from University of Pennsylvania. They knew each other and worked together for years, their visions align, and have great dynamics among themselves. An important reason they attracted their Director of Technology is that they were already friends from Penn and knew he was looking to go into the startup world. Having done the leg work of establishing the company and showing traction was essential to attract great technical talent as well.

Cezary and Christy were amazing presenters. They were honest, open and generous with their time to share their lessons learned with the Travel 2.0 Meetup members. The New York tech community is lucky to have such amazing young startup founders who are changing the world. Remember to follow @Wanderfly @cezinho @christyjliu on Twitter and stay updated on their Facebook page and blog! If you were at the meeting, share your thoughts and learnings too!

More pictures from the event here.

Travel 2.0 Meetup with Founders of Wanderfly.com

2011-03-07T04:14:00.002-05:00

Admit it, sometimes we just want to escape. From the crying kids and unwashed dishes, from the demanding boss and office politics, from the craziness or routine of our lives. But we often find ourselves asking: So…where to? There are so many exotic places in the world, how can you pick one that fits your time, budget, and interest? It was pretty hard until Wanderfly came along. On Wanderfly.com, simply answer a few questions, and you’re in to discover a world of wonderful destinations that you may never heard of or thought about going before. In a few seconds, you also get an estimated cost of the trip. I love the clean and slick design, and have spent hours and hours just browsing all those fabulous places and let my imagination wander.

What’s the secret behind this amazing New York tech startup?

All of us know that travel is a huge market, but most of the money is made during transactions: air, hotel, package bookings. A travel inspiration site like Wanderfly comes very early in the decision making process, would it capture enough transactions or generate enough leads to be profitable?

Even though many of us love thinking and talking about travel, most Americans travel once or twice a year, if ever, especially to international destinations which seems to be Wanderfly’s focus. Would the volume big enough to attract advertisers and realize sizable revenue?

Everyone talk about how hard it is to find a technical cofounder at startups. The founders of Wanderfly.com: CEO Evan Schneyer, Director of Marketing Christy Liu, and Director of Business Development Cezary Pietrzak were classmates at University of Pennsylvania. None of them are whiz coders, how did they first get their idea off ground, find the director of technology, sign up an amazing board of advisors and raise $1 million funding from investors including Charles River Ventures and Jason Calacanis?

And most importantly, what’s next for Wanderfly? What are they cooking up to make travel more social?

These are the questions I’m going to ask them during the Travel 2.0 Meetup’s Online Travel Startup Feature Disucssion on March 17^th, 2011. The co-founders of Wanderfly will share their founding stories in an intimate and honest roundtable. What questions would you ask? Join us!

Time: 6:30pm, March 17^th, 2011

Location: NYU-Poly Incubator, 160 Varick Street, 12^th Floor, NYC

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Travel20/events/16499732/

Giorgia - Gocce di Memoria

2011-02-15T04:01:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite Italian songs: Gocce di Memoria (Drops of Memory) by Giorgia.

Was rewatching La Finestra di Fronte (Facing Windows) tonight, a movie about two people passionate about each other didn't end up together. One line stuck with me:

Does everyone who leaves you, always leave part of themselves with you? Is this the secret of memory? If that's true, I feel safer, because I know I will never be alone.

Many people enter our lives, we may never see them or talk to them again, but memories about them may surface at an unexpected moment, triggered by the most inconspicuous things. Memories are the only things who can unite us with people who came into our lives and have left a mark. That said, when you have a choice, ask yourself whether memory is the only thing you should hold on to.

A pretty good translation of the lyrics: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/Gocce-di-memoria-Gocce-di-memoria.html

Travel 2.0 Roundtable with Founder/CEO of Jetsetter.com Drew Patterson

2011-02-08T23:59:00.001-05:00

The private sales model has been very successful in the fashion world, it’s only natural for other industries to consider applying it. Even their homepages all look pretty similar with a big splash picture and a sign up section. We’ve seen

private sales for home: One Kings Lane, Eziba, The Foundary, Décor Insider, Achica, 2M Collective;
private sales for beauty: Market for Drama, Beauty Story;
and of course, private sales for travel: Jetsetter, Tablet Hotels, Vacationist, TripAlertz, Voyage Prive.

A number of larger Private Sale sites offer combination of several segments:

Gilt (fashion, home, travel);
Ideeli (fashion, home, beauty, travel);
RueLaLa (fashion and travel);
Hautelook (fashion, home, beauty, travel).

We also see crossover between private sales and group sales sites: group sales site LivingSocial plays in the private sales for travel space with its Escapes section, private sales site Gilt plays in the group sales for local experience space with Gilt City.

The space is obviously super hot right now. Where is the industry going? Are there any differences in applying the same private sales model to different industries? What’s their secret for success? Travel 2.0 Meetup invited Drew Patterson, Founder and CEO of Jetsetter.com, market leader in the private sales for travel space, to talk about his founder’s story on February 8th 2011.

An industry pioneer, Drew was part of the founding team at Kayak.com where, during his five-year tenure as VP of marketing, he played an integral role in reshaping the online travel. Prior to that, Drew cut his teeth as director of distribution and revenue management at Starwood Hotels, where he forged new distribution channels with online travel agents including Expedia and Travelocity. Drew has a BA from Harvard and MBA from Columbia.

Some of my learnings from the meetup:

Find the right partner when you first get started: For any web business, building the initial user base is extremely tough, Jetsetter was able to get a head start by partnering with Gilt and tap into its large member base of similar target demographic.
Apply great UX and design to capture consumer interest: User experience design is playing a more and more important role in consumer internet, beautiful and inspiring pictures help build user habit and encourage impulse buy.
Personalization is the future: Personalized experiences and recommendations is an important focus for Jetsetter, and it sounded to me that Jetsetter has more ambitions eying the entire travel vertical, instead of only the hotel segment. Considering that they've signed up 1 million users in a short year and half, I’m sure we’ll see many more exciting products coming out soon.

If you attended the meetup, what did you find interesting from the discussions? For everyone, what do you think is the next big trend in the private sales industry?

Travel 2.0 Meetup Featuring LocalBigWig.com

2011-01-13T17:07:00.007-05:00

What you need is the hole not the drill - Collaborative Consumption was named by TIME magazine as one of the top trends of 2010. It describes the model of sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting that have been enabled by advances in social media and peer-to-peer online platforms. Rachel Botsman’s TED talk championed the idea, and we’ve seen a revolution happening from neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing to luxury designer dresses, from co-working to peer-to-peer lending. Sharing living spaces, led by CouchSurfing and AirBnB makes travel accommodation so much easier. LocalBigWig, a new startup based in New York, makes it really easy for homeowners to rent their houses with travelers for extended stay.

Different from nightly or weekend rentals, LocalBigWig’s home rentals are generally booked for longer period of time, and are entire home only, mainly by business travelers on temporary assignment or relocation, and families that wants more privacy of the entire home. These segments are not well served today and LocalBigWig found the niche to tap into their needs.

As of January 2011, LocalBigWig is already in many metropolitan areas such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami. It's expanding rapidly to all US and Canada.

What are the secret projects they’re working on? Ray hinted: video, social media, and hyperlocal content.

What’s their biggest challenge? Keep the system open, but not being left out of the commission. Just like any marketplace, sufficient communication among buyers and sellers are essential to make the deal happen, but a total open system may enable buyers and sellers to bypass the intermediary and make the transactions directly. They’re implementing some clever ways to solve this challenge, if you want to hear more, and other insider stories behind the scenes, come to Travel 2.0 Meetup’s Online Travel Startup Discussion on January 17^th in NYC, and listen to Ray himself telling the tales of his journey!

Online Travel Startup Discussion - Featuring LocalBigWig.com

Time: January 17^th, 2011. 6:30pm-9pm

Location: NYU–Poly, 160 Varick Street, 12th Floor, NYC, 10013

RSVP, and see you there!

Ne Me Quitte Pas

2011-01-05T00:56:00.000-05:00

Jacques Brel, Belgian singer-song writer recorded this song in 1959. With plain and even a bit awkward staging, he just looks at you in the eye and hits right to your heart, with desperation.

"Ne me quitte pas" ("Don't Leave Me", aka "If You Go Away") is written after he was thrown out of his lover's life after she had an abortion because he refused fatherhood of their child. It's about the cowardice of men, regret, and inability to love.

Trade-off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don't

2010-11-04T02:55:00.003-04:00

Why Motorola Razor had such a cachet and then fell flat as the free phone your grandma gets?
Why Starbucks changed from a premium coffee brand to an uncool place to meet?
Why some products and services catch on, and others don’t?

Last night I went to a talk by Kevin Maney, author of Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, who believes that this is a matter of trade off between Fidelity and Convenience. Fidelity is the experience of something, the cachet, the feeling a product speaks to your personal identity, think Apple or Gucci. Convenience is ease of access, low price, how ubiquitous something is, think McDonald’s or MP3.

Think a coordinate or four quadrants with Fidelity on Y axis and Convenience on X axis. When Razor first came out, it was expensive and hard to get, thus on top left corner, as a high fidelity product. Then Motorola flooded the market with millions of Razor phones and anyone can get it for free when signing up a new contract, thus it went to the lower right corner, as a high convenience product. Similar story for Starbucks as it transformed from a cool identity brand to be on every corner. For products that neither has the cachet to be a cool product, nor has the ease to access, it falls in the lower left ‘belly’ where no one wants it – like when Kindle first came out. But it’s nearly impossible to be on upper right ‘mirage’ as it confuses users.

On surface, it seems to be one of those concepts that are branded well but don’t go far from just saying – either give user a good experience or make it real cheap to use. But I thought it’d be a good exercise to look at the web from this angle: An obvious example is Facebook: when it first came out, was a high fidelity exclusive product, which contributed to a lot of its success and cachet, then it became everybody’s social network, clearly moving towards the high convenience quadrant.

In online travel industry, membership-only sites like Jetsetter, Tablet Hotels, ASmallWorld, play in the high fidelity quadrant - they capture higher income, more engaged users but their numbers may take a while to build up. Sites like Tripadvisor, VirtualTourist, Yelp, NileGuide, Tripit play in the high convenient quadrant - they serve a broader audience, though may take a while to monetize, until reaching a certain number of users.

Then you have CouchSurfing – it’s free to use, and it gives you a tremendous pride to be a couchsurfer. Geocaching - anyone can seed or seek a cache, and people feel fantastic when they go out of their way to find a cache. WAYN – it’s free to use, and you share great life experience with the world. Foursquare – it’s easy to check in, and it makes you feel you’re part of a secret society of mayors. Have they cracked the code to shoot for the mirage? Is the rule of unattainable combination of high fidelity and high convenience still apply to the web, when most sites are free to use and claim to offer high value to users?

Maybe it is about playing in both quadrants – provide access to everyone, but it takes effort to really achieve certain status, which gives user great amount of pride. So it builds traffic and recurrence at the same time. For those who do achieve the status, it provides both fidelity and convenience, and the rest of the community all strive to achieve that.

Another way to look at it is, arguably, all of them are high fidelity products as users need to put in a lot of effort to build such status to gain the pride. Maybe 'convenience' in web doesn't mean 'ease of access' but more 'ease of achievement'. Everyone startup's situation is different, so one may choose the 'membership/invite' only route, or open up to the world but keep the community special enough and make the achievement seem super precious to users.

How to Start If You're Just a Person With an Idea

2010-08-18T15:42:00.001-04:00

I came back from a startup showcase last night, energized, and pressed. Saw some interesting companies and amazing work. Chatted with one of the founders - they started in October 2009 and have already launched an amazing looking site (second version) with paying users and impressive advisory board - that's only 9 months from concept to market! His takes on how to get started if you're not a tech person:

1. All three founders are from business / industry background, none of them are developers. They hired a design / development shop with one project manager in New York and 2 guys in Romania. In hindsight, he said it may have been a mistake because the New York person didn't add much value and they could have just used those two Romanian guys from ODesk.

2. He suggested not hiring overseas developers as the quality is usually low and you can't really tell until it's too late.

3. If you do use those services and 3 weeks in it's not working, be quick to cut your losses. Pay a quarter of the cost and run.

4. They used that Romanian team to build the first version, and then hired their own designer and developer to create a second version, which is looking great.

5. Even though none of them have a tech background, they still did it by hiring outside help. It would be very helpful to have a tech co-founder, but it's very hard to find the right person. They just didn't want to wait.

6. 10K is about the standard to build a first version of the site. Of course depending on who you use and what type of site you build, the cost can be 10K to 1M. It’s possible to build something with 2K, but expect to spend 10K for your first version / working prototype.

Final tip - If someone is not willing to take only equity, offer him $50 an hour with some equity to get started. It's not much but lowers the risk of the developer never getting paid.

Top 5 Tips on How to Find a Tech CoFounder

2010-08-18T03:58:00.003-04:00

Many entrepreneurs face the challenge to find a tech co-founder. It feels like 80% of startup founders in New York are business people with great ideas and looking for someone to build it, and developers usually have their own pet projects that they're busy coding for. It's tough to find a developer who's willing to take equity to build something, and finding the right partner to be in it for the long term is even harder. San Francisco may be easier but New York is definitely challenging.

So what do we do? Here are my top 5 tips to find a technical cofounder:

1. Go to meetups that developers actually go – Like Ruby and Rails in New York City, The New York Python Meetup, or other meetups that sound so technical that you want to just run away from. Those are the places that real developers hang out. Not those find a CoFounder events.

2. Look for young developers. Established developers rarely want to take equity stake only or risk to work with a new startup. You have a better chance to find a college senior or recent grad who’s a tech whiz that loves to build. They may be 20 years old, but may have 5 or even 10 years of experience!

3. Use startup resources to get the word out. Tell everyone that you’re looking for a tech co-founder. Post on StartupDigest Classifieds (HelpAStartupOut.com), StartupOneStop.com, TechCofounder.com. Pitch at tech events and ask for referrals. Even if people can't think of someone right away, it may register in their minds and open dialogues.

4. Be patient. It’s tough, especially finding a technical co-founder that will share sweat and tears with you and truly believe in your vision for the next 3-5 years or longer. It’s true that it'd feel like marrying the person! We all know how hard it is to find the right partner. Keep looking. Don’t give up. Believe that someone is waiting for you, somewhere. (OK, now it starts to sound a bit cheesy...)

5. Don’t wait! I know it sounds exactly opposite of the last point. What I want to stress is that you shouldn’t wait for the perfect cofounder to show up. If it doesn’t happen, still keep pushing forward. Learn to do wireframes and markups yourself. There are some great tools out there that don’t require coding knowledge. Hire someone to do your prototype. Maybe taking a chance on Elance and ODesk IS the right option for you. It could be crappy, but it’s better than nothing. You can take that prototype to do more customer development and improve your idea. If you get some traction, maybe the right person would be more willing to join you.

Finally, a practical tip – if you’re concerned about quality of overseas outsourced talent, get quotes from 3 of them and develop in parallel. In total you will end up paying the same amount as one U.S. resource, but you may get some interesting ideas and a good sense of how well someone works and can choose him for bigger projects that may eventually save you money.

What has been your experience finding a tech co-founder? Share your tips!

Game Mechanics 101

2010-07-08T17:35:00.015-04:00

With Foursquare’s $20 million new investment and $95 million valuation, everyone in the web space suddenly realized the power of game mechanics. People don’t generally think about Foursquare as a ‘Game’ like World of Warcraft, but it’s fun and engaging, which is the essence of game mechanics on the web.

One fundamental dilemma I’ve been wrestling with is – what hard problems do sites using game mechanics solve? Penny auction sites such as Swoopo has very clever design and insane economics, and I stayed up until 2am many nights just to watch the item I’m bidding. It’s incredible how much time and money I’m drawn to spend on such sites, but, what pain does it solve?

Is it paying too much for high price gadgets? I don’t really need an iPad, it’s nice to have, but I don’t feel pain trying to get it, and I’m probably OK with paying as much as everybody else does. Is it boredom? I could have watched How I Met Your Mother for the 5^th time, and that doesn’t explain why I’m willing to stay up way past my bedtime and end up with panda eyes (a girl’s nightmare!). Is it my emotional need to win over other people or seek pleasure from seeing others lose? Maybe, but it’s not like fulfilling this need is such a hard problem or pain in my daily life.

Ultralight Startup’s panel discussion on Gaming Mechanics and Marketing was an excellent intro to game mechanics. Gabe Zichermann, who recently published Game-Based Marketing, answered my doubt with a simple question: Who don’t like to have fun? Maybe the pain IS that we don’t have enough fun in our daily life, so we resort to games like The God of War and SpillDaMilk or ‘entertainment shopping’ sites like Swoopo to stimulate our nerves to release the chemicals that make us feel good?

Looking deeper on what people are looking for when playing games, Bartle’s Player Types tells us: contrary to popular belief, only about 20-25% of players are there to achieve an objective or win (Achievers). The majority, up to 75% of players are there to interact with others (Socialisers). A fraction of players are there to discover (Explores) or to see other people lose (Killers). So when design game mechanics, we need to address both achievement and interaction. I think Foursquare is great at addressing both, which is their sauce for success.

Valuable advice on game mechanics design from a fantastic panel consists of Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Eric von Coelln, Chris Sullivan, and Gabe Zichermann:

Reward early, reward often, don’t penalize failure
Every step has a small pot of gold but the holy grail is always outside of the immediate reach
Non cash reward is better than cash reward
Not only design to make game fun, but also think about preventing people from gaming the system.
At the beginning, don’t over-think. Just leave some room for scale and design for flexibility
How to measure if it’s a good game design:

· · Can this game make you smile occasionally?

· · Can this game make you lose hours of your time?

Stay away from real world redemptions, either cash or prize. Implication in legal, financial, tax, regulatory, etc.. It’s much easier if everything stays in virtual world.

On a side note, I wonder if Bartle’s Player Types, which is mainly based on MUD players, is transferable to all web user behaviors. It may be too generic as web user in different categories may demonstrate very different behavior types and various statistical distributions of such types. Though using Bartle’s methodology or other analytical and statistical tools, ambitious researchers can embark on a quest for online user behavior types by category (could be generations, gender, industry, ethnicity, region, etc.), and maybe someone can even come to a statistically valid general conclusion of all online consumer behavior types and their distribution. Now that’s what I call a breakthrough!

Creating a Marketplace

2010-06-22T15:32:00.002-04:00

Last night I went to the ‘Innovative Marketplace Meetup’ with panelists from Etsy, AdBuyer, and FirstMark Capital. I’ve been interested in platform-mediated networks for a while, and re-read Professor Thomas Eisenmann’s HBS Module Note before this meetup. Excellent real life application and examples from the panelists.

Some interesting points:
• How to retain value – once connected, users are likely bypass you as intermediary, need to find that toll gate to keep the value on your site.

• Microeconomic needs to work out – if network charge a small transaction fee, it needs hundreds of thousands of transactions to stay profitable. Make sure to work out that math.

• Acquisition cost – for a network that focuses on long tail and smaller businesses, the acquisition cost may be prohibitive in comparison to the revenue. Then you know it’s not a business.

• Transaction fee model or subscription model – test both with different groups and see which one works better. Transaction fee model needs a bigger number of transactions to make economic sense, but can quickly ramp up initially. Subscription fee model may have a hard time to ask commitment upfront without showing value, but longer term may be easier to scale.

Discussions sparked this long time dilemma: on one hand, if no one is pursuing an obvious idea, it’s probably because it’s extremely hard or doesn’t make economic sense to do, so the likelihood of you fail is high. On the other hand, if no one is pursuing an idea that you feel there is a pain and need, if you can crack it, it could be a great opportunity. The question is: how do you crack it? And, how do you evaluate if you've cracked it?

How to crack a hard problem?

Think about cheaper, simpler alternatives to current solutions. Clay Christensen's books are fundamentals.
Talk to potential consumers, understand how they live their lives, they feel the pain and may have suggestions already that just needs someone to build it. The Lean Startup methodology explains this process perfectly.
Look at other similar industries and fields, and see what their solutions are and whether they apply to your field.

How to evaluate if you cracked it?

Talk to your customers! Show them your wireframes / Minimum Viable Product and ask if that solves their problem, and if they're willing to pay for it, for how much. Customer orders are proof of product-market fit.
Don’t be afraid to talk about your idea with trusted circle of network. There is always a risk that someone will steal your secret sauce, for example, when pitching to investors, they may pass that information to their portfolio companies or even unconsciously to other startups that pitch to them. Be careful not to give away the core secret. Be clear about why you’re talking to them. Build a core circle of people you can trust and share ideas with that can provide valuable feedback – it could be your ex-boss, coworker, schoolmate, fellow entrepreneurs, or contacts built from going to meetups!

Website Redesign: In-house or Outsource?

2010-05-19T20:27:00.003-04:00

Last week was memorable: the website I currently work at finally launched the redesigned version, after an entire year of effort. From identifying the need to redesign, to finding a design firm, to design and implementation, we made mistakes and learned valuable lessons.

After identifying areas to improve based on user feedback, we had two options: have the in-house designer to make gradual changes, or hire an external design firm to make focused efforts.

Generally, user experience design and graphic design are at the core of consumer interaction, and would be best if product team, UX and graphic can work closely together to brainstorm and refine product features and requirements. There were also concerns about cost, and on paper, design in-house was many times cheaper than outside firm, especially that we operate on a regional distributed model (aka cheap resources overseas).

We decided to use an external design firm, for three reasons:

Our team doesn't have UX / IA expertise, and was based on another continent from the product manager. Hiring a new IA and more designers required time to ramp up, and we may lose valuable time-to-market.
In-house designer may have better insight to the site functionalities, but since he was deep into it, he may lack the out-of-box thinking that we needed for the redesign.
Our primary target market is female, but our team was mostly consisted of single guys, who may view design and user experience differently from female. We felt that we would benefit from the industry and user experience expertise of an outside firm.

It looks like a no-brainer now, but we went through a lot of discussions to make this decision. Sometimes in startups, especially lean startups, cost could be a daunting consideration. My advices to startups in similar situation are:

First, evaluate objectively the capabilities of existing team, what potential bias they may have and whether they can get pass that.
Try best to have product, UX, and creative work closely together, preferably in the same room, if not, at least try the same time zone. Communication is key.
Evaluate not only cost on paper, but adjusted cost over time, as well as the cost of potential loss of market timing. Sometimes, you may find the more expensive option actually turns out to be the more economical and effective one for the long term development of your startup.