MIT Enterprise Forum Concept Clinic

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:18:30 -0400

Delivering a rigorous mathematical proof of why Touted is a good idea

Touted was the featured company at the MIT Enterprise Forum Concept Clinic on Thursday. It was such a valuable experience. I presented an overview to about 25 people, including 3 panelists, in a session moderated by Lora Kratchounova of Scratch Media+Marketing.

Lora was incredibly helpful before and during the presentation in making sure we got the most out of it. She provided some great ideas during the session - essentially a 4th panelist - including leading us in a discussion on business models dealing with perishable inventory like tickets and hotel rooms that was particularly valuable.

Panelists

Alexis Kopekis of Propel Consulting - Alexis has great energy and provided a lot of insight on product features with a strong hook to get people excited as well as clever go-to-market strategies to build up awareness.

Larry Begley of .406 Ventures - Larry had good insights on crowdsourcing and pushed us to think about business model and competitive aspects. His perspective as a VC made a big contribution because he has a broad view of the landscape, citing trends in the investor community and the kinds of things he’s seeing too much or not enough of in the startup community.

Mike Troiano of Holland-Mark Digital - Anything having to do with social, marketing, or mobile Mike covers as well as anyone, and he seems to have great instincts on just about about everything else. My friend Russ Richmond, an advisor to the company and kind enough to try to record the conversation, said “I had a hard time capturing everything, especially when every time Mike opened his mouth, 4 or 5 great ideas would come out.”

A special thanks to Brad Rosen of Drync, who brought great advice on entrepreneurship and the intersection of mobile technology and local business.

Takeaways

1. The MIT Enterprise Forum Concept Clinic program organized by Lora and Forum Executive Director Trish Fleming is an amazing program. I strongly recommend it to any early stage startup. It’s hard to imagine anything more valuable at the concept stage than a roomful of really smart people spending three hours of their time helping you develop your business.

2. There was a strong support for the idea that people would be willing to provide information on events with good incentives built into the experience. Also good discussion on what might appeal to this person and how they might interact with the business.

3. A layer of abstraction on top of raw tweets is important. People don’t want to sift through lots of individual messages. Popular links shared is the most proven way (witness Tweetmeme) of doing this.

4. Mobile is very, very, very important. There are strong arguments for leading with a mobile app instead of web. An great example of mobile success in local business realm is Foursquare.

5. Emphasize the importance of doing real-time search on things for which people most need real-time information. Events does fit this criteria well.

6. There is an interesting trade-off between expert opinions and wisdom of the crowd. Which is the user looking for in a particular situation?

7. The notion of endorsement culture, originally suggested by Bobbie Carlton and supported by Mike Troiano’s point that endorsement can come in many forms, is very important to keep in mind moving forward.

Thanks very much to everyone there for bring so much energy and creativity to this!

Reblog: We are still in the early days (Bijan Sabet)

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:07:51 -0400

I like Bijan’s second story. We’re looking at ways to help local business owners and event organizers like the restaurant guy described here. Paraphrasing and adding to Bijan’s points:

1. Conversation is happening regardless - it’s helpful to recognize that you can’t prevent it or completely control it. Getting involved is the best way to influence it positively.

2. Opinions/reviews from the general public (i.e. your customers) are just as important if not way more important than the opinions of professional experts.

3. Your local business website, if it exists at all, could be much better. Take a look at Beauty’s Pizza for an example of a site which is of great value to the business - it has awards given out by professionals, it has customer comments, and it even makes it easy to order a pizza directly on the site for delivery. Most restaurant sites don’t come clsoe to this, and even Beauty’s doesn’t do enough to make their site a point of engagement and conversation for customers, fans, critics, etc.

4. Why not let potential customers know what’s happening RIGHT NOW at your place? In addition to new desserts, specials on the menu, and marriage proposals, how about:
- The girls from the modeling agency down the street are having a party here
- Benicio del Toro’s in town filming a new movie and has been in here every night this week for a drink?
- A local businessman is having dinner here tonight before going to Game 7 of the World Series and two of his party have cancelled. Tickets go to the first hometown fan to buy him a drink.

5. Use lots of photos - In addition to the photos of new happenings at your place, why not feature pictures of your customers. To the extent that they are posting photos of themselves publicly and identifying themselves as your customers, concerns about privacy should be minimal. Prospective customers can see and identify with the people who are already part of your culture. Guys looking for cute girls can see that they hang out there, and vice versa.

6. Get involved in the conversation - This Tweetable Eats piece on Mashable describes how food trucks are using Twitter to communicate with customers and increase sales with great success. This kind of success shouldn’t be difficult for most local businesses.

7. Let your happy customers be your marketing department - If you have a good offering, chances are you have loyal customers who are willing to put in the little bit of effort required to make this work, like posting a photo, writing a brief shout-out to your place, or populating a vibrant community that will be a testament to your brand and culture.

Our job in the software engineering community is to improve the ways to make this easy for you to manage. So, back to work …

Mark Soper

bijan:

My guess is that most people that read this blog consider themselves to be early adopters. Many of you have a blog of your own, use Twitter and/or Facebook, own a smart phone, love tinkering, hacking and trying new things out.

There are more early adopters than ever. In fact that word “early adopters” may not even be an accurate word anymore. But I’ll leave that for a future post.

But we all know plenty of people that don’t have a blog. They don’t use Twitter. They may have a facebook page but aren’t active. They dont’ share their lives online with people they know and don’t know why they should share with people they don’t know.

And even though companies like Facebook have over 250million worldwide users, we all know at some level that we are still in the early days of all of this. That is humbling and exciting at the same time.

In the past week I had two recent experiences with folks that either don’t understand or simply don’t care for the world of facebook, twitter, blogs and social media.

First story:

This weekend, we had a number of old college friends stay at our place for the weekend. It’s an annual tradition. They live in CT and NY. Three couples and their kids. None of the parents (all of us are 40yrs old) use social media. They don’t work in tech industry. They had lots of questions about Twitter and why they should use it. I told them why I started using Twitter and why I use it everyday. My wife, @laurensabet, told them why she uses it and how much she would love to see them on twitter. Even after describing it to them in detail and showing them how it works they weren’t really convinced.

But they were good sports and wanted to try it. So at the kitchen table I helped them set up a twitter account for each one of them. Some of them wanted to keep their tweets private, others were okay with the public default. It was an enlightening experience for me to see them react and ask questions. I hope they get into it. We don’t get to see them often and it would be wonderful to hear about their daily lives on twitter in addition to the monthly phone calls & annual gatherings.

Second story:

I was at a fantastic restaurant recently. I’ll leave our the name of the place to protect the innocent. The owner is a very talented person. Smart and gifted. He told me that he doesn’t like blogs, facebook, twitter, yelp, etc. His concerns:

1. Competitors could say bad things about his place online annonymously.

2. One customer with a big online social following could give his place a negative review and drown out the positive reviews by the majority of happy customers.

3. He liked the previous model where restaurant reviews where done by experts in their fields.

He had other issues with social media but those were the big ones.

My response:

1. Customers and competitors are online so the train has left the station. There is no turning back.

2. There are benefits of embracing the social web with more voices in the mix than a limited number of experts.

But I was enjoying the meal and I didn’t want to get into a full debate especially since he was so nice to us and was passionate about his views.

I believe there are plenty of things that restaurants could do to benefit in our connected world where all users are publishers/reviewers/critics/customers… all at teh same time.

Today most/all restaurants have a website. You know what it looks like. There is a menu, along with some professional photos of the restaurant and some food shots. Maybe a history of the place along with a bio of the owner.

If I owned a restaurant I would embrace twitter/facebook/blogs and do much more. In no particular order:

-I’d share the behind the scenes of the place. Just got a new delivery of bread. Take a photo and share it. Just hired a new bartender? Same. New candles? Same. New espresso machine. Same.

-I’d tweet at times about what’s going on the restaurant right now. Someone is having a birthday at the bar. One of the regulars just walked in. New dessert tonight. Special items on the menu. Things taken off the menu. Someone just proposed to their fiance and everyone is clapping in the place. These restaurants are vibrant and alive communities in their own right. They are not just a place to eat and pay your bill. Let people know what’s your place is really like!

-I would be all over twitter search to see what people are saying about my place. Have a thick skin but pay attention. Jump into the conversation. Let them know you care because you do.

I’m sure there are better ideas out there. I’ve never owned a restaurant and I’m sure it’s way harder than I could possibly imagine. But that conversation I had with the owner was also very helpful to me.

I came away with a great deal of “food for thought” (pun intended) and it also served as a reminder that we are still in the early days of all of this stuff.

Touted Blog

MIT Enterprise Forum Concept Clinic

Reblog: We are still in the early days (Bijan Sabet)