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By brantcooper, December 21, 2011 3:40 pm

When you hear concepts over and over, you often wonder is it because it’s swarming or because your ear is newly attuned to it?  Did you know there’s a lot of people who believe that the #11 has super powers and that’s why when they look at the clock, it’s always 11 after?  Seriously.

UX is hip.  And rightly so.  I thought I’d share a theory why this is so and what impact it might have on your startup.  This despite the fact that I’m relatively new to UX concepts.

The 90s

Painting with a super broad brush, the 90s technology revolution which saw the introduction of PCs and networks into businesses was driven primarily by increases in productivity measured at the business level.  Reduction in support staff, increased internal and inter-business communication had a measurable impact on the business.  While the technology was expensive and the immediate net benefit small, it grew enough in the late 90s to, at the very least, portend benefits to come.

It was far from smooth-sailing.  The effective lifecycle of a PCs was only 2-3 years.  If you had a network of 100 nodes, you were easily paying 100K/year to hardware and software to keep things running at a pretty basic level.  Some medium sized businesses were seriously thinking of packing it in until costs would come down or larger benefits could be realized.

If there’s one thing that seems to be true in technology, it’s that future benefits are easy to imagine and don’t come quickly enough. In other words, the industry pretty consistently over-promises and under delivers.  Technology in the 90s was mired with buggy (Microsoft) software that bogged down trailing hardware and arguably was maliciously incompatible with (buggy) legacy network software (Netware).

An emphasis on UX was nowhere to be seen.  Of course, that’s not exactly true, Apple had it in spades.  But the extra dollars required for an improved user experience had little impact for the average business user on business productivity. A reasonable argument could be made that this was a short-sighted view, but the view was rational. If you triple the price tag, you must triple the productivity. The Macintosh made headway in businesses at the departmental level, where the impact on productivity was significant; in other words, where specialized graphic-intensive applications were put to use.

The UX experience on the PC was crap and no one wanted to pay to improve it, since you could still reduce the administrative support to principal ratio even with crappy systems.  That it took a IT guy several weeks to implement buggy MS Mail to SMTP gateways and the end-user process to send such an email sucked didn’t matter relative to the time and money savings of sending proposals at the last minute vs sending hard copies via Fed Ex.

The 2000s

As the Internet emerged as a business productivity tool, the primary beneficiary was the department.  The browser as a standardized UI for internal applications reduced IT supports costs and offered some freedom for departments and business units from their dependency on IT.  As SaaS emerged, this independence accelerated.

The early user experience on the browser was horrible and often worse than that of desktop or client/server applications.  But the benefits from a lightweight interface and reduced dependency on IT outweighed the superior UX experience.  Further, technical limitations on the browser thwarted efforts to improve the experience.

Today

While I’m sure there will be a whole new revolution in business and departmental productivity, likely brought on by human-computer interaction technology (think Kinnect), today’s story is about personal productivity.  Applications built for the desktop stand-alone, mobile, browser-based SaaS are all about improving user productivity.  The two primary ways to achieve this are 1) work within existing flows; 2) mimic the offline world.

I chuckle when I see marketing slogans “We’re going to change the way you work!”  Really?  See ya!  Why do dating sites fail? They don’t replicate how human beings meet.

The tricky thing is that you need to improve productivity enough to justify the costs without changing behavior so much as to make the product undesirable.  How do we do this?  With superior UX, of course.  How do you nail such a thing?  It should come as not surprise that my recommendation is deploying Lean UX design principles.  You must understand the it is a delicate, learning process.

“But people are so different!” you rightfully lament. Yep, the one size fits all is dead. While investors and industry pundits hand-wringing about copycats, features-not-products, thinking-too-small, etc., the entrepreneurship world is producing 1000s of startups to figure out how to solve common problems across a wide-diversity of people.

I don’t know what the landscape ends up looking like.  If big businesses swoop up  lean startups who have successfully unlocked one or more beachhead market segments, they can’t kill the innovation or roll it up into bloatware without creating a new startup opportunity.  Similarly, is it possible for one SaaS or mobile product to solve similar productivity problems for a mass of varied segments?

I welcome your thoughts in comments!

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By brantcooper, September 12, 2011 9:12 pm

As an early believer in Lean Startup movement, I can perhaps be excused for my unbridled enthusiasm for the release of Eric Ries’ new book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Not however, for the reasons you might expect.

In fact, some early adopters of Lean Startups — those who have already bought into the framework to the extent that they’ve applied its practices into their high tech startup — might be a tad disappointed.  They might have to look a little deeper; there’s no vanity steps to success herein.

Why? In the end, this book is not written for them. But rather, like any good entrepreneur, Eric is aiming at the Mainstream market.  According to Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, you can’t address the Mainstream market the same way you learned to do in the early adopter market.  (Hence the chasm.)

In my opinion, for example, early smartphone adopters diss’ the iphone, because Apple targeted the Mainstream, not them.

Eric’s intentions are easily discerned from his definition of Startup:

“A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

This is clearly not intended to speak (only) to high technology startups, but rather to anywhere uncertainty exists. In my opinion, this is the strength of Ries’ book: it is a call to action to anyone inclined to take action to make things better despite facing severe uncertainty.  There is no boundaries to where you can exercise your entrepreneurship.  And though Eric doesn’t state so explicitly, true entrepreneurs are those willing to admit to the uncertainly within the institutions they inhabit AND to develop solutions that solve problems in the face of that uncertainty.

This definition applies to social entrepreneurship, non-profits, education, government, large successful businesses, and any business with technology risk or market risk, including yes, high tech startups.

Think about this for a second.  If true, the problem with the failure to innovate facing many hugely successful businesses is not that they don’t “act like a startup,” but rather that they don’t understand their own uncertainty.  Most people recognize that many governmental institutions face extreme inefficiencies and could benefit from new products and services designed and implemented in new ways.  The roadblock is, perhaps, that in a society overly dependent upon the advice of “experts,” we are unable to admit to the uncertainties we confront and therefore fail to unleash the creativity necessary to build new systems to solve big problems.

Conversely, those who claim to know everything, in other words face no uncertainty, are either not part of a “startup” or simply not truly entrepreneurial.  The arrogance of certainty leads to doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Make no mistake:  there is much here for high tech startups. Entrepreneurs who are still figuring out how to apply the principles to their businesses have much to learn here, but Eric describes less how to do it and more how to think about doing it. (Teach a man to fish and all that.) Personally, I have found that there are multiple layers of understanding to be had in the Lean Startup world and most of us are just scratching the surface. While some will look for more specific action items, Ries’ approach is honest, since there is no such thing as a startup blueprint.  While “Build, Measure, Learn” is easy to grok, the actual practices one has to put into place to create a learning environment that induces change, that produces products that people care about is hard.  No, It’s really hard.  And it’s one thing to do it in a high-tech startup of a couple of people and it’s another thing entirely do to it in a startup environment of 10 people and it’s another universe to do it in static, change-averse cultures that are in the most dire need of disruption.

Eric’s “stuffing the envelope” analogy, for example, is illuminating and one I hadn’t encountered before.  It turns out that stuffing envelopes one at a time is faster than differentiating the tasks and doing them in batch mode.

“What if it turns out that the customer doesn’t want the product we’re building? Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to be wasted.”

When in execution mode — i.e., when uncertainty has been eliminated — you can optimize processes for speed or cost.  When in learning mode, however, crippling inefficiencies can occur if you’ve optimized execution on the wrong parameters and then learn your assumptions were wrong.

Eric offers stories that run against the grain, which lead you to think differently about how to solve problems, such as increasing efficiency through less specialization and the fastidious elimination of metrics that enforce false certainty (vanity metrics).

There’s more to come. Eric briefly tackles the quest to bring disruptive innovation to the enterprise. At this point, I’m not sold on the methods prescribed.  Ries says he aims to “protect the parent organization from the startup” thereby turning the conventional model “on its head.” The premise seems to be that senior management “springs innovation” onto existing managers.

I’m not sure this is the case.  I think it more likely that senior managers are more distrustful of low margin, small market experiments run by kooky internal entrepreneurs then they are of managers who continue to execute on current products.  Futhermore, there is no real head flipping here since these are really two sides of the same coin. Maybe big company departments need protection from fast moving startup people, but startups need “protection” from the problem of being measured by the same criteria (e.g. profit margin) as existing product.  Big company R&D centers are rife with products that never see the light of day.

My take is that big companies are going to look more to startups to solve the problem of disruptive and even sustaining innovation.  An economy bustling with 1000s of Lean Startups is conducive to enterprises waiting for small entrepreneurs to prove the market before the big guys move in.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The Dark Side The book is perhaps a bit heavy on the development side of the house, but for anyone envisioning innovation, this is the right place to start.  Eric’s discussion of applying the “5 Why’s” is instrumental to understanding the implementation of fail-safe processes.  It would be interesting to see  these principles applied to the dark art of sales and marketing.  Instead of traditional loss reports, what would a no-blame-game 5 Why’s look like to dissect a failed sale?  Poor Customer Support?

But this only means that new ideas of how to apply Lean Startup principles need to be tested, validated and shared.  When discussing my book, the Enterpreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, with Steve Blank, he remarked how the school of thought he pioneered “is what it preaches.” Eric’s book demonstrates that.  Not only because Customer Development is an important aspect of Lean Startups, but because Eric’s own vision and elucidation of Lean Startups has evolved tremendously from when I first heard him present his ideas in June of 2009 in China.

The Lean Startup movement is a framework entrepreneurs of all stripes can use to innovate in their industries. All those who adapt and practice it – who make it their own – will continue to advance the Lean Startup framework.

Comments (8)

By brantcooper, June 8, 2011 12:27 pm

I just did.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted:

f***ing hard telling clients maybe their “baby is ugly.” #lsmSF#leanstartupMI#EntrepreneurDownDays

The pause that followed was a deep void.  It was emotional.

During the next week of reflection, a non-early adopter, but loyal user of the product called the founder to  announce that he would not after all, pay for the product. Not at the proposed price, not at the price they had argued for, not at any price.

So he fired himself as Founder and CEO of his company.  And then he fired me.  (“I no longer need your services.  But in the future…”)

We talked briefly about his future, including possible pivots and leaps, but essentially, the gig was up.  I admire his self-awareness and the honesty with which he evaluated his situation.

Can you do that?

Yes, it’s difficult to know when to kill your idea.  Yes, you should be knocking down walls to work.  But the market is the final arbiter, not your hustle.

There’s a whole slice of our society based on non-transparency, on not being totally truthful. It’s necessary for polite society.  You don’t always need to hear your haircut sucks or you look fat in that outfit.  But this is a problem, too, when you really need to hear the straight dope.  As a startup founder, you need to surround yourself with people who are willing to speak the truth.

You need to talk to investors who won’t grinfuck you, e.g., those who makes intros to a bunch of other investors, instead of telling you why he thinks you’re not fundable. You need advisors like Dan Martell, who challenge whether you got the stuff, or Patrick Vlaskovits, who will kick your ass because you’re spending more time documenting your business canvas then actually outside the building testing your business model.  Truth-telling is why I admire Eric Ries, who is willing to challenge the most fundamental media myths surrounding startups and “visionaries.”

Gravity’s Zipper

You will be exposed.  If your idea isn’t what you’ve built it up to be in your mind, it will eventually fail.  Believe in  yourself, be skeptical of your idea.  Surround yourself with truth tellers.

Comments (4)

By brantcooper, May 9, 2011 5:46 pm

Whether there’s a tech bubble or not is an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere. (Reading guide is below.)

I fall into the “boom before bubble” pack. Having lived through the 90s’ bubble, there’s no way we’re there yet.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be one, but my feeling is we’re skating a razor’s edge off one side of which looms another wave of  housing foreclosures and a doom & gloom Sequoia presentation. Investors herding like sheep around darling Silicon Valley startup memes is not in itself bubblicious, it’s SOP.  Sheep investing affects supply and demand conditions that result in higher valuations.  Good or bad, that doesn’t in itself represent a bubble.

The Internet bubble was about more that overvalued startups. Horowitz and Graham argue other dynamics way better than I can (see links below), but I think it’s important to point out that bubbles dramatically affect the entire economic climate. The bubble was “our” version of 70s inflation.  The bubble caused a huge migration of people to the SF Bay Area. Salaries went through the roof (not just for engineering talent.) So did cost of living.  In the 90s, the housing bubble was inseparable from the Internet bubble. The buying of lots of different goods became irrational.

And there’s the final point.  Frankly, as long as the voices saying we are in a bubble remain as strong as those who say we aren’t, it’s hard to say we are.  There’s was very little dissent in the 90s or perhaps more accurately, that dissent was easily drown out by the ignorance of the mainstream media. But that isn’t the case today, either.

The Best Way To Avoid a Bubble

Think globally, act locally.  Successful startup ecosystems in Boston, New York, Boulder and a few other cities eases pressure on Silicon Valley prices for EVERYTHING, including startup valuations.  Yes there are advantages to investing in startups in large ecosystem like Silicon Valley, including access to partnerships, vast amount of resources and M&A opportunities, but there are pitfalls, too.  Strong entrepreneurship exists outside Silicon Valley, as many of the past “big wins” show.  Local non-SV ecosystems frequently have strong, yet  underemployed resources, lower engineering costs, employees less likely to jump ship, and local environments arguably more attractive that Silicon Valley.

But where’s the money? San Diego’s Avalon Ventures is the only VC with an active fund. Tech Coast Angels, who laughingly claim “lean startup” as a tag, is infamous among entrepreneurs for their six month plan for not investing, rather for any risk-taking activity.  Local support organizations like CONNECT server clean tech and life sciences well, but their vanity metrics fail to reveal their inability to attract and help Internet and software entrepreneurs.  There are about a dozen San Diego angels on Angel List, most of whom have no San Diego investments.

I have heard similar stories from other startup cities, even the bigger cities that seem to be thriving.  There are several problems:

• Many local investors are “old school,” believing they sit in the catbird’s seat and can wait for for entrepreneurs to knock on their doors.  (Not going to happen.)
• Many local investors follow the lead of Silicon Valley investors, rather than striking out on their own.  (Angel List helps solve this, plus lower $ amounts should increase risk tolerance.)
• Investors don’t know how to connect to local entrepreneurs. (Entrepreneur groups are thriving and investors need not fear being swarmed.)
• Many entrepreneurs don’t know how to connect to local investors. (Entrepreneur groups help with this, too.)
• Some entrepreneurs either ask for money based on ideas or are not building “real” startups. (Why do you think I evangelize the Lean Startup framework?)

The crazy result is local startups going up to Silicon Valley to find funding and then experiencing a tremendous amount of trouble to move there AND local investors investing in Silicon Valley companies.  This circumstance not only represents a failure to support San Diego’s economy, but also serves to increase the pressure on the Silicon Valley bubble, er boom.

Please let me know your thoughts on the bubble and local investments in comments.

_____________________________

Here’s a short guide on bubble opinions:

Yes, there’s a bubble

Steve Blank (post)

Paul Kedrosky (post)

Mike Maples (TechCrunch)

No, there’s no bubble.  (Yet.)

Henry Blodget (slides)

Paul Graham (article)

Ben Horowitz (post)

Howard Lindzon (post)