Product Launch Blog

TechWeek is a week-long festival, conference & expo celebrating the technology, web and interactive communities in Chicago, and is shaping up to be the biggest tech event in Chicago’s history. Names like Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the United States, Dave McClure, of 500 Startups and pirate metrics for startups fame, Jason Fried, Founder and CEO of 37 Signals, Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twillio, Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grubhub, Seth Sternberg, Co-Founder Meebo, Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist, and Brian Fitzpatrick, Head Engineer at Google make for quite a lineup.

As a proud supporter of the Chicago tech community, we’re contributing a few things to the mix:

• We’re hosting Kissmetrics Founder Hiten Shah at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle (now at almost 1300 members) on Sunday the 24th. You can sign up here: http://www.chicagoleanstartup.com/events/18471361/
• As part of TechWeek, Pathfinder has organized a panel of “intrapreneurs” – entrepreneurs within larger companies who are charged with innovation and creating new products and services. In this case, the companies are all quite large, ranging from $1 billion to $31 billion in revenues. Our panel includes:
  • Stanley Crane, Chief Innovation Officer at Allscripts
  • Matt Manzella, Driector of Strategy and Innovation at Allstate
  • Brian Chau, Director, Product Innovation at Wheels, Inc.
  • David Galante, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures
• I’m a judge at the Health 2.0 Startup Pitch Event on Monday the 25th, along with folks like Dan Philips (Director of Healthbox) and Anu Jayaraman from Hyde Park Angels. http://www.meetup.com/chicagohealthtech/events/20517191/
• As part of the Spark Chicago startup competition, we’re rolling up our sleeves with one of the three finalists to help accelerate their company towards success.

It should be a great time – we hope to see you there.

Spark Chicago is one of the most exciting event in TechWeek, the powerhouse tech conference/festival in Chicago that kicks off this Friday. Pathfinder Software is one of the sponsoring companies, and we’re looking forward to helping accelerate the talented finalists that emerge.

It’s a six day incubation contest from July 22nd through 27th, starting with StartWeekend Chicago, an intensive three day weekend in which 12 to 15 teams start building their business and pitch to a panel of judges made up of some of Chicago’s most prominent VC and angel firms.

Unlike other startup weekend events, there will be three finalists, who will then have three more days to build their companies and compete for the final prize.

That’s where we come in. For three days, one of the finalists will be working at our office, where we’ll roll up our sleeves and work with them as one team on customer development and building out their product.

On Wednesday evening, they’ll do a final pitch to another team of judges, including John Hoesly from Silicon Valley Bank, Adam Koopersmith from New World Ventures, Steve Miller from Origin Ventures, Kevin Willer from the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and Mitch Lowe, CEO of RedBox. The winner receives more than $100,000 in donated services and a sizeable cash grant.

Good luck to all the participants, and we’ll see one lucky group next Monday.

If you want to see the round one or final round judging, sign up at Spark Chicago (it’s free!)

One of the exciting things about the Lean Startup approach is that it’s applicable not just to startups, but to innovation within large companies.

As part of TechWeek, Pathfinder has organized a panel of “intrapreneurs” – entrepreneurs within larger companies who are charged with innovation and creating new products and services. In this case, the companies are all quite large, ranging from $1 billion to $31 billion in revenues.

Our panel includes:

• Stanley Crane, Chief Innovation Officer at Allscripts
• Matt Manzella, Driector of Strategy and Innovation at Allstate
• Brian Chau, Director, Product Innovation at Wheels, Inc.
• David Galante, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures

I’ll be moderating the panel, and we’ll discuss how these companies generate new ideas, how they validate them and how they bring them to market. (One hint: Some of them are definitely applying the lean startup approach to their innovation efforts)

The panel will be held on July 25th at 11 AM as part of Techweek, Chicago’s largest tech conference.

Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software’s Lead User Experience Designer, and I gave a talk on Lean User Experience at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle on June 30th. User Experience is critical to the success of a software product: Well designed apps get used and recommended, poorly designed ones get discarded. But traditional user experience is slow and expensive and doesn’t get high quality products to market faster. This is death to any new product development effort. How can you get user experience at startup speed?

Enter Lean UX …

This may be generic advice, but it might not be a familiar concept for those in IT working within a large organization doing validated software:

Once you adopt the practices described in my previous blogs about regulated software, you will find that you aren’t working alone anymore. The tight feedback cycles allow you to regularly check-in with the business and involve them in building the software. Once this happens, priorities and features will change. Early on they will change often. Don’t discourage this as its a good sign things are moving in the right direction. The people talking to your customers are directly involved in building features your customers will use. This is exactly what you want because it increases the likelihood that you will produce a better product. Now that you have left your IT bubble you must partner with your stakeholders rather than simply delivering to them on a regular basis. How do you effectively partner with business and marketing? Here are the difficulties you will likely face:

• Goals are different
• The phases and corporate dialect are different
• The time frames and processes for decision making are different
• Required documentation will be different and address different goals
• Stakeholders will feel comfortable giving verbal requirements, but you must document them, get them formally approved and finally build them into working software

How do you partner with the business and still meet your commitments? Follow the practices we presented earlier and stick to the following principles:

• Consistent focus on activities that add business value
• Build trusted partnerships
• Constant customer engagement
• Continual process and practice improvement
• Be collaborative and transparent
• Work together: No heroes, lone wolves, or cowboys
• Pay attention to the team and adapt as needed

Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software’s Lead User Experience Designer, and Bernhard Kappe, Pathfinder’s CEO are giving a talk on Lean User Experience at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle on June 30th.

User Experience is critical to the success of a software product: Well designed apps get used and recommended, poorly designed ones get discarded.

But traditional user experience is slow and expensive and doesn’t get high quality products to market faster. This is death to any new product development effort.

How can you get user experience at startup speed?

Enter Lean User Experience

The Lean Startup Approach (practiced in both startups and innovative large companies) is a way to find market opportunities and to create products and services that serve those markets in a sustainable way. It focuses on validated learning and reducing cycle time, rather than simply building fast.

Lean User experience is an adaptation of user experience design to work within a lean startup approach. Design decisions are treated as hypotheses, and validated as quickly as possible. We use techniques like targeted brainstorming, user visualization, story walls, story flows, low-fi prototypes, story videos, customer testing and priority diagrams to rapidly get direct feedback from end users and stakeholders.

This powers an agile development effort that generates working software in very short cycles. Overall, this combination of Lean Startup + Lean UX and Agile Development quickly reduces uncertainty and risk, reduces waste, speeds development and increases agility.

To find out more about Lean UX and how you can implement it, join Bob and Bernhard on June 30th at the Lean Startup Circle

To register, sign up here: http://www.chicagoleanstartup.com/events/18470561/

We hope to see you there.

In a recent article, John Gruber masterfully compared Google’s and Apple’s software strategy. He insightfully concluded that Apple solved the software distribution problem through their app store therefore doesn’t have to rely on browser based software. As a result of that, they can have all the benefits of native apps. Read the article, I was impressed by its sobriety.

He does have a grave misconception that spans technologies in his following thoughts:

I’m biased, insofar as I consider Apple’s strategy more appealing than Google’s. But that’s because my interest lies in having the best possible user experience — the best-looking UIs, the lowest-latency responses, the smoothest animation, the most elegant designs. I share that interest with Apple.

The error is that Apple strategy does not lie in betting on native apps for “the best possible user experience”.

There are many Widows native apps that are horrendous. Flash, Java and HTML5 are all able to deliver equally good user experience. Most importantly, it is tremendously simple to create awful software in Objective-C, especially Cocoa. No, it’s not about the native apps vs. browser apps vs. any other apps.

Apple strategy lies in their approval process for the app store. That’s why you never get to see all the under-performing, ill-designed nonsense. Because it never get’s to your device.

I can conclude this because I’ve been developing for Flash platform for 10 years where that problems manifests in its fullest. People would often mention to me how they hate Flash because of the annoying advertising banners and non-usable web sites. I on the other hand have experienced some of the best software in the world in Flash.

How can those two impressions co-exist? Because Adobe doesn’t have an approval process for Flash software. Anyone can create and distribute whatever they can manage to compile. In such an environment, all kinds of good and bad work is going to show up. Bad work also gets associated with Flash and Flash ends up having a bad name.

Apple is smarter than that. They decide who is good enough to be associated with their brand. It’s their show and they are running it well.

Their interest lies in their brand image and profits, like of any other business. “Best possible experience” therefore, has nothing to do with Apple’s software and everything to do with how they run their business.

In a lean startup, marketing is a process of discovery using fast feedback loops, just like customer development and agile development. Customer interviews and the process you use to get those initial interviews will give you some initial information and validation on your positioning (unique value proposition) and channels. But that’s only the beginning. You’ve got to test your messages and your channels, because your assumptions on those are likely off target.

This lesson was brought home to me again on a project we recently launched:

A survey platform for the Peterson Group called SnapCAPP that can be used to gauge audience priorities across a series of attributes and relate those to their preferences among brands (such as advertisers, publications, web sites, political candidates, etc.). The business model is pretty straightforward – collect information on the audience and sell that to the brands.

The first application of the survey tool that we rolled out, Farmsurvey.com, is targeted towards farmers and farm publications.

Reaching farmers has proven to be a challenge. We assumed that farmers were not actively searching to fill out 20 page surveys on the web, and that as a result, search advertising and SEO around the survey was not likely to result in great conversion statistics. We ran some tests on this, with prizes like an iPod Touch and cash (cash was king) and confirmed our assumptions. We hypothesized that channels that targeted more passive audiences would be better, so we tried email, banner ads on agricultural publications, classified ads in craigslist and other sites, posting in various forums, and even twitter. Of these, email performed the best, but even that did not result in a cost per survey respondent that would make the project economically viable.

Testing Facebook

My brother (and business partner) Dietrich had suggested that we try Facebook, but I was very skeptical. Why would Facebook work for farmers customers when channels directly targeted at farmers didn’t? Thanks to my brother’s insistence, we tried it anyway, and lo and behold, Facebook converted extremely well. In fact, it proved to be by far the lowest cost and best scaling channel we had – less than 10% of the cost of the next best channel. This definitely improved our project’s viability.

Why did Facebook Ads Work?

We think it’s because Facebook lends itself well to targeting based on lifestyle and interest areas, and farming is as much a way of life as an occupation. Farmers on Facebook identify themselves as farmers (unlike, say, small business owners), join farming related groups and causes, and are fans of of farming related pages. You can target people based on these and other demographic characteristics. This turns out to work really well for farmers.

We did a fair bit of testing of ads and landing pages to different demographics on Facebook. Here are a few samples:

We were able to get great data on various subgroups such as dairy, corn, soybeans, etc. One very friendly looking cow ended up being the best overall performer, except with Dairy Farmers, where a milking device ended up outperforming everything. One area where we had little success: Hog farmers. We just couldn’t catch very many, and we don’t know why.

We’re now trying a few other things on Facebook – including promoting the FarmSurvey fan page. We are using content from our survey results, as well as other content relevant to farmers to attract fans. Here’s an example message:

Recurring theme: what to do when you retire from #farming — selling, putting land in conservation trusts, estate planning, etc.

Getting people to like your page has a number of benefits, including the fact that you show up on many of your fans feeds. This has resulted in another low cost source of completed surveys.

Getting Customers on Twitter

For the advertisers, we found another channel worked very well: Twitter. We happened on this by accident. As we were testing twitter as a channel for farmers, we got an inquiry from a major brand based on these tweets. We thought this was intriguing. We started participating in these threads using some findings from the data we had collected, and found ourselves getting inquiries from the top brands in the industry as a result. It is currently the best source of leads for FarmSurvey. We think that because Farm Survey’s potential customers are primarily advertisers that are interested in how farmers and others relate to their brand, many are watching their brands and farm related threads and hashtags on twitter.

Neither Facebook now Twitter were our first guesses for best channel for each of these groups. One more reason why you should do customer interviews and do a lot of testing.

Lesson Learned: Don’t let your marketing assumptions get in the way. The best channels may surprise you, so go out and test them.