We went out for Sushi last night (Ken, my wife Cheryl and I) and had a very interesting conversation. Conversation between us tends to veer towards problems and solutions (at their essence potential business ideas), this one was about creating a town based on current web-based app/small business thinking, in the process revitalizing the concept of community and what would makes a town interesting to live in (not bad for a dinner conversation!).
First we detailed the various things that are necessary for a town to remain interesting over time (in no particular order):
1. a grocery store & farmers market
2. a sushi restaurant
3. a dive bar (e.g. a run down corner bar that doesn’t necessarily serve your fav. beer, but it’s a still a great place to hang out)
4. a club-like bar (e.g. where you can buy cocktails)
5. at least 2 coffee shops
6. 2-3 different sized live venues (to stay entertained of course!)
7. wifi throughout (didn’t think we’d forget that did you?)
I’m sure there were a few more details, but you get the idea. Now the interesting part…how to populate the place (and keep the jerks out).
Stealing a little from Eric Ries‘ Minimum Viable Product strategy and a little from Google’s Gmail invitation rollout we decided that the best thing to do would be to only build the absolute necessities first. We’d seed the initial population by sending out beta invites to let’s say 1000 people. These first people would need to be self-starters, not necessarily entrepreneurs, but people that aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty even if “it’s not their job”. In my opinion they’d probably mostly be small business type people as these people would need to be very understanding of the need to adapt as necessary.
As these first people “signed-up” to move to town it would then be determined which of the necessary features (listed above or suggested by resident feedback) would be next on the list to be completed.
Based on use of this new community, and established trust) each of these people would 5-20 invites that they could use to invite more people to move to town (exact criteria would need to be worked out to base the # of invites on).
A few questions do remain though…would BetaTown be self-policing? What about a hospital? Can we unfriend citizens?
We’ll probably need some funding for this one (something I’ve never had before) and probably need to compile a list of ideal town candidates…ok, maybe we need to see a few other ideas through first before tackling this one!
This entry was written by , posted on February 15, 2010 at 10:03 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
To the 3 people that regularly read this…sorry, but it’s another post about my experiences launching and learning with Manpacks!
It’s been a whirlwind 2-3 weeks since launching manpacks.com, it managed to exceed my expections for a ‘launch’ and it’s also managed to reinforce a number of things that I’ve always believed and have long stated but didn’t have my own data to back it up until now.
The short version – I’m not retiring any time soon, nor will I be stopping work for my Hashbrown clients. Sales have been brisk, and topped our expectations for the first month for sure, but that doesn’t mean instant money or immediate returns, there’s a lot of hard work still to be done and I can’t wait to get to it (both Manpacks and Hashbrown and other stuff too!). Also, like anything worth doing there’s been a lot to learn, a lot of surprises, and best of all it’s been an incredibly fun ride so far and I don’t want to get off of it.
So, what were some of the things that have been reinforced to me?
Clean, simple and refined design along with clearly stated copy is an absolute must (I think we almost nailed this one out of the gates, but ended up making some changes and I’m really happy with what we’ve established and where we’re headed).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Outdated, doesn’t matter, and don’t waste your time (or money) on it except (and these are a must to ensure good search engine results) to write clear, concise copy that states exactly how you want the product/service to be understood and ensure your code is accessible and standard compliant – see? No black magic here. To share a statistic, in the first 2 weeks of launch our total traffic from search engines has hovered around 2%. Rather than spend time on SEO make sure you make your product/service interesting, and tell a story that makes others want to share (and a little humour doesn’t hurt either, but I don’t think it’s required).
One lesson we’re addressing is ensuring a good amount of detail about what you’re selling – prove to the people visiting your site that what you’re selling is worth their time and money. When we launched I created, what I thought were some fun, simple illustrations of each of our products that really fit the feel we were trying to establish. This simply wasn’t enough, yes we got sales that exceeded my expectations, but based on literally 100’s of bits of feedback we should’ve had more. We’re working on that and it’s at the top of our list now to be our next major addition to the service.
Another bit of information I kind of always knew but didn’t entirely have any proof to back it up was that just because you manage to get 10’s of thousands of eyeballs to look at your site doesn’t mean they’re going to buy. I would much prefer 100 unique visitors that are targeted and likely to buy than 10,000+ visitors that are un-targeted and “just curious”. That said, by generating that kind of traffic there is a trickle-down effect that results in a number of sales, but don’t expect to see any great conversion percentages! Also, for the most part people’s first visit seems to be curiosity and/or “research” and then they return to buy, so don’t get hung up on your bounce rate initially (do make changes if it is persistently high over time though!).
Also, remember, a website is not a printed page, nor is it a static screen – it can be, and should be, changed, adjusted, edited, etc. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve made some buttons bigger, changed their colors, changed the text on them, edited some call to actions all of which have almost immediately seen a change in conversion rates – time will tell if these were related or not, but at the amount that these changes cost (especially at launch when you’ve really got nothing to lose), experiment! You can always change back, for the most part people aren’t watching or 100% paying attention to you yet. Just make sure you learn something from any mistake you make!
I think that’s it for now, but I’m sure as this experiment continues I’ll learn a whole lot more and be surprised by what the data ends up telling us – and I can’t wait!
This entry was written by , posted on February 8, 2010 at 7:59 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
One of the most common “comments” about manpacks I’ve seen is that it seems like it’s awfully lazy. Which makes me wonder about these people as they clearly haven’t thought this statement through.
What about that remote control in your hands while you’re watching tv? You can’t walk 5ft to the tv to switch channels?
How about the software you’re reading this on? Why didn’t you just write our own program instead of using someone else’s?
How about something as simple as matches? What was wrong with banging two rocks together to get a spark and start a fire?
Now, I’m not trying to say that Manpacks ranks up there with the invention of the lighter, or toaster or even the remote control for that matter, but humans have a long history of making things that allow us to be a little lazier – I would go so far as to say it’s the very essence and mark of a successful invention.
To be fair, I’m not saying being lazy means not working your ass off, rather I’m saying you need to know when to be lazy so you can increase your efficiency with something else, there are plenty of books and blog posts that back this up (especially in the software development arena) – for me being lazy usually means i can complete more work (work isn’t a dirty word to me, I enjoy what I do – you should too…but that’s another blog post).
The very essence of processes like Getting Things Done (GTD) is to remove items from your brain so you can focus on the things that really require thought – one of those (to us) is to not have to think about buying certain things that we know we always need, are always wearing out, etc. Automating the little stuff to focus on the bigger stuff is a matter of efficiency (ya that’s probably another blog post too).
Manpacks is about being lazy, however, it’s about being lazy in one area so you can focus and be more efficient in another.
This entry was written by , posted on February 6, 2010 at 10:21 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.