Monthly Archive for November, 2010

Get Rid of your Brand

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 29, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

Brands are universally recognized as being a good thing to have—a form of crystallized identity that lets your customers recognize that they’ve heard about you, or bought from you, before.

On the other hand, brands require certain sacrifices. First, for a brand to be meaningful, you need to support it by being reliably exceptional. The «exceptional» part isn’t the hardest, because unless you’re entering a market that’s already fairly saturated (say, creating a new take-away chinese food outlet) your very existence is exceptional. Or maybe it is the hardest, but I don’t want to discuss it right now so you’ll have to wait until later. On the other hand, the «reliable» part requires some pretty sexy logistics: if Coca Cola tasted differently every time you bought a new can, the brand wouldn’t stay around for long, which means most of the engineering firepower was applied to creating an easily reproduced (and transported/stored) beverage, instead of having a great but easily messed up taste.

Second, you simply cannot be an ass to your customers. In fact, if screwing your customers over is part of your business plan, you actually want to avoid having any kind of brand that would let customers recognize you. Acquiring a non-brand is fairly easy if you stick to online-only presence, generic logos and a content-free domain name. If a bittorrent download website proves utterly unhelpful and annoying, are you going to remember its name? Was it torrentroom, torrentreactor, torrentz, torrentscan, torrentornottorrent … ?

In fact, the business model of torrent download websites can be summarized as follows:

I’ve been searching for my sanity and ended up on this page. The only piece of information here is found at the bottom: «total 0 torrents found» and basically everything else on the page is just a clever setup engineered to trick the visitor into believing my sanity can be found at these five locations. The blue «sponsored search results» heading is a blatant lie—those five lines are not search results, they’re going to appear exactly as shown regardless of what you’re searching for (except the initial bold text, replaced with your search keywords), and it’s all designed to be as desirable as possible: TRUSTED DOWNLOAD (trusted by whom?), Fast Download, Full Version, Rapidshare, sizes of 1.31 GB or ~700MB that are fairly typical of movies, and near-100% health.

Clicking through leads to a web site that will try to extract as much money as possible from you before you finally notice that my sanity is nowhere to be found.

I can accept that some people online are stupid enough to pay an anonymous shady website in the hopes of watching that movie without paying the movie publisher. I refuse to believe that anyone would be fooled more than once by this tactic. But just to be on the safe side, you don’t want people to remember you after you’ve done this to them.

This no-branding, screw-the-customer approach works pretty well for areas where:

  • Relying on repeat business is impractical
  • There are no dominant brands that own the market.
  • There is little to no contact between potential customers.

Torrent search websites are one example: repeat business is impractical for the same legal reasons as the absence of dominant brands (as soon as you become noticeable, the RIAA/MPAA shut you down), and people tend to remain anonymous while searching for torrents so there is no contact between such people.

Another example would be plumbers. Repeat business is hard to get (the better you are, the longer your customers can go on without calling for you again), there are no top-of-mind plumber brands around that people can think of, and there are no communities for people with plumbing needs to talk to each other. This is an excellent environment for all kinds of shady deals. A recent example a friend had to deal with:

  1. Your water heater takes its own life.
  2. Being a creature of the night internet, you google around for a nice replacement model.
  3. You look for a plumber who can deliver and install that replacement model. No helpful plumber reviews online, so you call several and pick one.
  4. The plumber comes, removes the dead heater and carries it away.
  5. As he works, he asks innocently why you picked that specific model, and you answer without suspecting anything.
  6. He goes back to the warehouse to fetch the new model.
  7. You get a phone call from him, explaining that he’s looking at the model right now, and it doesn’t have the feature you are looking for. But he has a cheaper model with that feature.
  8. You agree for the cheaper model to be installed. Unsurprisingly, it sucks.
  9. You call the maker of the model you initially asked for, and find out it did have that feature.
  10. The plumber does not return your calls.

What probably happened was that the plumber never had the model you were looking for in the first place, so he resorted to bait-and-switch to funnel you into buying the model he did have. Annoying, but clever nonetheless.

As Soon As Possible

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 15, 2010
in Strategy
. 4 Comments

As you might expect from a Start-Up team, we of RunOrg work alone on whatever task we have to do, with fragmentary communication during the day and frequent one-hour meetings to discuss the state of the project. We have a pretty clean road map ahead of us, but there’s a lot of unexpected or unpredictable things going on in the early months of a start-up: new, cheaper service providers on the market let us do a 180° turn on our production strategy ; an administrative process requires immediate submission of even more forms (oh God, let it end!) ; important customers show up and want to discuss our product-to-be ; something important happens in the life of one of the three associates, crippling 33% of the work force for a short while …

After a few weeks, there’s one lesson to be learned : in a start-up, there is no such thing as ASAP.

Suppose I’m your core product developer (not a very bold assumption) and you need me to fill in some administrative form, because you’re in charge of asking for a government grant. There’s a pretty tight deadline, so you tell me to send back that form ASAP. The problem being that almost every single other thing I need to do needs to be done ASAP: set up the production server backups, correct that bug that sends ten thousand password recovery e-mails for every single request, submit some critical information for a conference we’re attending, and give some developer from FoobarCorp technical details about our API. So, there’s a chance that by the end of the week, I’ll be done with your form, unless the server dies at 11 p.m. the day before and I spend the night bringing it back to life.

You know that the administrative form is a 10-minute task that needs to be done by Tuesday evening and that could win or lose us $25,000 but I don’t have any information about it other than its urgency. Why is it so important? I know why the server backups are important because I’ve put them on my todo-list myself and I have an intimate knowledge of what is at stake. I know what it means to receive ten thousand e-mails for a single password request. I just cannot feel the same about an administrative form that you dump on me. In fact, the only reason you said it was to be done ASAP might be that for the last few weeks I’ve been passively filtering out any non-ASAP requests from you. The oral equivalent of writing V!agra instead of Viagra to get your spam e-mail past the spam filters.

It’s nothing personal. It’s just a consequence of three environmental factors:

  • Everyone is overworked, so tasks that are not blatantly important might be postponed forever.
  • We’re equals, so you can’t give me «drop everything and do this now» orders.
  • You didn’t give me enough information to decide how important your request is.

This is a nasty mix. To get over it, there are two simple rules you can follow.

The first rule is the requester’s responsibility: always add a deadline to your requests. If you tell me that you need those forms for Tuesday evening, there will be no ambiguity as to the urgency of the matter — I could have questions about the priority (is this form more important than setting up the server backups?) and it’s up to you to defend the importance (this could win us $25,000) until we agree on whether the action is must-have ($25,000? of course we’ll do it), nice-to-have ($250? I’ll see if I have time…) or ridiculous ($2.5? are you kidding me?). Basically, we’re working together to help me fit this new task in my own mental priority queue.

The second rule is symmetrical: always ask for a deadline. «We need to frobnicate the product as soon as possible» could equally mean «drop everything and frobnicate the product immediately or we’ll be sued to hell and back» or «make a mental note to add frobnication on the Q3 2011 wishlist» and whatever level of urgency you thought you heard is probably not the level the requester intended. You can ask for a deadline explicitly, or you can provide a plausible deadline based on your current load — do whichever you believe fits the situation, both are ultimately equivalent.

I’m Terribly Disappointed with Myself

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 10, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

I know it sounds sad, but actually, I wish I could be even more disappointed with my self.

Many successful people around me (and by successful, I mean the target of my secret envious hatred) have a strange and yet obvious personality trait: they believe the things a person does are an accurate reflection of that person’s quality as a human being. For instance, they might be convinced that a person who wakes up at 9:00 am on a Tuesday is a lazy sloth that is subtly inferior to non-lazy non-sloth types. What reflections a given action casts is ultimately a consequence of their upbringing, education and personal beliefs — in two men kissing each other in public, one may see perversion and shameful sin where the other sees courage and happiness. You will never hear these people utter «well, he can live his life however he wants» about anyone — in anything, they see either grandeur or mediocrity, but never open-minded neutrality, and anything that may sound like neutrality is either polite self-censorship or bored indifference.

These people are sincere. Not only do they say that waking up at 9:00 on a workday is irresponsible, but they wouldn’t be caught dead waking up at 9:00 on a workday. The noble, respectable thing to do is to wake up at 7:00 and they will do so because their pride and their opinion of themselves depends on it.

And that is why they’re successful. Let me explain.

Everyone wants to be successful, because everyone hates mediocrity. And yet, if I asked you «What’s your plan for being successful?» it would involve a lot of hesitation and a lot of things that are oddly reminiscent of things you are already doing (ironically, that’s also what the successful people would answer, but at least they’re right). The biggest issue with being successful is the lack of a road map.

The end result is a descent into mediocrity: when you were a small child, you wanted to be an astronaut. When you were in middle school, you had lesser yet prestigious dreams of having a great job and living in a great neighborhood with a great family. As you get older, your job and home expectations get increasingly lower as you find outsome of your objectives are too difficult to achieve, until you decide you’re lucky to have whatever you ended up with.

Those people who have a sharp opinion about every single thing around them? They have a much easier time avoiding that slippery slope, because «I guess this is acceptable» grey areas are simply not a part of their world view. If they took a second-rate job anywhere, it would sting like sharp, rusty jalapeño-coated needles. They have a ten mile wide road map with «you are not here» written all over it in blood and tears of shameful disappointment. No wonder they ended up where they did. And they cannot find any excuses, because they’re not just trying to impress their friend or keep up with the Joneses: the only judge of their eventual success is their own opinion of what is great and what is not.

Are you happy with yourself? With your job? With your home? They never are.

It sounds like a sad life. But I ask: is a parent not constantly disappointed with specific things their child does, and still proud of him at the same time? The way to stay sane is to constantly remember that things should be better, and yet to be proud of the life you lead.

Low-Cost Software

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 5, 2010
in Strategy
. 2 Comments

Low-Cost is all about having a dirt cheap base product, such as plane trips, combined with additional fees for almost every single thing you can imagine, such as carry-on luggage, using the restrooms during the flight, or wearing a blonde wig. In the B2C and B2IB (Business-to-Itty-Biz) worlds, the Low-Cost model works when it seems fair. Asking people to pay for what they use is fair in two ways:

  • Share the cost: What I use costs the company money. They went to great lengths to drive the base price down, so it’s only fair that I participate in any additional expenses I cause.
  • Avoid free riders: If I don’t have heavy luggage or use the restrooms, I won’t have to pay for the kerosene spent carrying around other people’s luggage or the water for their restroom usage.

That’s why a Low-Cost model cannot charge for wearing a blonde wig : the wig doesn’t cost the airplane company anything, so there’s no reason they should charge you for it.

This obsession with fairness goes head-to-head against traditional economic theory. In a traditional economic world with purely rational agents, everyone agrees that a printer that prints 100 pages/minute costs more than a printer that prints 20 pages/minute. In our real world, if the 20-pages printer is the exact same hardware as the 100-pages printer with a speed inhibitor tacked on, bloody murder will be screamed. Of course, big businesses don’t care — it’s a game everyone plays, so they’re going to negotiate discounts and settle for the higher price anyway — but if you’re targeting the B2C/B2IB market and they find out you’re into that kind of backstabbing, you’re done for.

If you’re going for a product with multiple prices, or with additional features available for a fee, remember that customers will be looking at the price difference through two very different lenses:

  • Is it worth it? Does that $5 feature provide me with happiness or productivity that exceeds $5?
  • Is it fair? Does that $5 feature cost the provider anything close to $5, or are they just gouging me for the fun (and gross margin) of it?

In the software world, we’re all concentrating on the first question, but we had better keep away from the second one : writing software is dirt open-source cheap.

It’s fair to ask for some money when you’ve spent weeks working on a feature. It stops being fair when you cripple your software to create a cheaper version. And by «cripple» I do not necessarily mean removing or blocking existing features: willingly straying from the optimal design to be able to monetize a feature that would have been an immediate consequence of that optimal design.

Are you providing some of your users with daily backups, instead of guaranteeing that you will never lose their data?

Are you trying to sell data recovery features by selling a product without a revision history tool?

Are you actively fighting third party data conversion tools to force customers into buying your own data extraction plug-in?

Are you limiting the number of anything (users, posts, files…) that the users are doing with your software on their computers?

Know Thyself

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 3, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

What do you enjoy about this project? What do you utterly hate about it? What’s the long-term motivation that keeps you working on it : fame, money, passion, something else?

What are the day-to-day activities that you love doing? What would you rather not do? Do these match your actual skills, or are you unskilled in what you love and hate what you’re skilled in?

When and where are you the most productive? Are you a regular worker, or do you have infrequent bursts of productivity?

I’m glad you took the time to know all of these tidbits about yourself. It really helps.

Have you told the people you work with? Have they told you what makes them tick? If not, how do you know you’re working with them and not against them?

Sorry About That

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on November 3, 2010
in Random
. 0 Comments

Welcome to a geek’s worst nightmare: the server just went down. There’s no more blog, no more web site, no more safe online backup of your family pictures, and your victor@nicollet.net e-mail is deader than a wooden piece of… wood. Turns out, my hosting company had a little accident where hard drives suddenly couldn’t be written to anymore.

Now, of course, nicollet.net is not what I would call a production server. On a real-life production server where the disk cannot be written to, sirens would start wailing, system administrators would be paged in the middle of the night (on a week-end), monitoring software would send cryptic apocalypse prophecies in their summary e-mails, and statues would cry blood. For my blog, everything continued to work in read-only mode for what appears to be half a day, until I decided to log in to the server and found out I couldn’t.

So, I rebooted it (from my hosting company’s online administration tool) and waited for it to come back up so I could investigate.

It didn’t. For half an hour. I kept refreshing the web page that shows the server status in my hosting company’s server rooms (mine is in 08H06) until I found out the page refreshed itself automatically.

And when it came back online, I stumbled upon the geek’s second worst nightmare: the private key of my server had been changed. In non-geek terms, this means that the server had been replaced by another server, possibly as a consequence of a hostile take-over by a random hacker (I’ve had this happen, and it’s very annoying) or an unexpected hard drive re-format.

After a few minutes of frantic searching, it appeared that my server had been replaced by a special rescue server that I was allowed to use to salvage whatever I could from the smoldering heap of its former self. That server, of course, had a special password that was sent to me on my e-mail address. All of you who guessed victor@nicollet.net, you get a cookie. All my attempts to have that password sent to another address failed miserably, until I finally gave up (because I have, you know, a Start-Up to start up).

It took about 12 hours for my hosting company to find out what happened, revert the changes and reboot my server. No data was lost (except for that e-mail that Steve Jobs sent me about our secret project together, which I guess I’ll never get), and everything works like a charm.

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