Are you working on a truly disruptive technology? Here’s one sign that you are — people who hold incumbent positions in the industry express frustration and skepticism at your work. The good news for you is that these same skeptics are your future allies. All you need is an intense focus on product, and a steel-lined gut to engage with them and find out what they are really upset about. Hint: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.
As it turns out, a couple Microsoft BizSpark teams take a thoughtful approach to measuring market sentiment as they rollout their products, and the lesson to be learned from their struggles is that whenever there is confusion and anger, and maybe a healthy dose of skepticism about the impact your product will make on the market, you have a really good opportunity to leverage those emotions and key influencers to make your product and your marketing better.
But as any founder can tell you, this is always tough news to hear. How can you keep working on a product when it feels that the very industry you are here to help is out to get you? Simple. You can do two things:
1. Focus intently on product, and work slowly on your story as you build, build, and build
2. Engage with your critics to turn skepticism into a helpful collaboration
You Know Something Is Cooking When A Bunch of People Come Up To Smell The Dish — Add Salt
Take the conversation on a Facebook page run by Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at the Altimeter Group. In the post, Owyang points out that recently launched AirPR is angling to give the top 1 percent of the PR professionals in the world a place for leveraging new client relationships, a model that is played out on a social commerce platform that is a little like Angie’s List. Unlike Angie’s List, the reviews are not public. FYI: AirPr is a BizSpark member.
Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, founder and CEO of this PR marketplace, weighed in during the weekend conversation, addressing questions about the vision and tension about whether the platform was selling “snake oil” to the profession. What immediately became clear was that anything new — and disruptively new — not only creates tension. It also seems to create a lopsided conversation, where people who don’t understand the market play lump observations into a collective sense of dissatisfaction with anything new. This shows any careful observer that something is actually wrong in the marketplace. All the startup is doing is addressing it. In addressing it, the company will take the barbs.
Fouladgar-Mercer tackled this by listing out the steps his company was taking to help (rather than destroy) the industry. He knows a little about what he is talking about; he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Shasta Ventures, and worked at Sierra Ventures for a time:
Our vision is to (first) solve the latent — and overt — issues in the PR industry using technology as the driver. The goal was and is to build an amazing team, which includes the best and brightest minds in both technology and communications so that we can have a 360 degree understanding of what those problems are. Not based on a hunch, or speculation, but on actual data – both anecdotal and quantitative. I’m proud to say that we’ve been successful in doing that thus far. With regard to any PR engagement, the key is not necessarily how many years of experience (I mentioned it only to answer a specific comment), but the quality of the talent. Just like everything that is evolving, the story – our story – isn’t nearly finished. In fact, it is evident that all marcom functions will continue to change and evolve, hence this discourse – and we welcome it. It’s been great to see, and I appreciate the thoughts. Additionally, we have several success stories from customers on our site in terms of Marketplace, and I am confident that there will be more! Last point: we are having a blast and learning a ton along the way
This offers a really cogent lesson for other BizSpark teams who are doing the same kind of thing in their spaces. Your focus on product is your PR. When you embody the problem and focus on the product’s addressability to that problem in the marketplace, you are well-armed to be your own PR machine. It gives you a reason to keep working, even when there are a lot of questions. It’s the ammunition you are going to need to make the product better and make the conversation more meaningful for skeptics and supporters alike.
Jerry Reynolds, founder of social travel calendar Plandree said that he discovered early on that he had to be just as focused on the product, because he knew it was set to disrupt notions of what travel apps do in the space. He didn’t want to push something out there and see what happened. He wanted to spend a lot of time on the problem.
“The challenge in creating a company in today’s startup environment is the notion ‘to be viable you have to launch early and iterate quickly.’ On some level that is indeed true. But when you are attacking a problem that really wants to change how an industry works, you have to focus on the foundation,” he says. The foundation is how the current market doesn’t serve something stuck in the customer’s mind — a something that is missing.”Plandree has set our official launch day a couple of times and missed because certain things just were not right.” And that’s okay.
When The Industry is Up In Arms, Engage
Josef Dunne, a founder at Babelverse, a new platform for interpreter services, started his company with co-founder Mayel del Borniol because he was so frustrated with not being able to hire an interpreter quickly enough in Greece; he knew something had to be made to fix it.
Nobody is going to like what you do when you disrupt old markets, or entrenched positions, but most people in the industry will benefit from the result of your work, and especially if you do the second thing in the list: Engage. You will find that when you engage and really ask questions about what makes them so upset, they become - in some cases - your secret allies. However, most people are on the fence about change.
The issue here gets really rocky. How do you engage when you have apathy, at best, and dislike, at the worst? One answer: you need to understand their struggle, because at the end of the day, you are really there to help them. Again, it’s so not about you. It’s about making something in service to other people.
And here’s why it’s hard for an incumbent.
Incumbents know that any proof of success they see in others using the new technology is also proof that something is erasing the gains they hold, which leads to a tension, and often paralysis. Incumbents then feel threatened by their own lack of progress, which they will continue to blame outwardly on the market disruptors. Which means, you have to serve a rather unexpected need. More than anything, you have to help those incumbents move on from the paralysis.
Dunne told me in a Facebook chat recently that “a lot of these industries also cannot understand how a small team of say, three - four people, can make such an impact nor how we can have ‘credibility.’ Yet they LOVE what we are doing and HATE it! But [then they] don’t often understand how startups work, how we’re lean, we’re small, and how we don’t have 10-storey offices.”
“That pattern does happen among people we have come up against, yet when we meet them in person, they are sometimes completely changed by our encounter, and if you get an incumbent who is sooo against you, to then understand what you are doing and support you and defend you,” says Dunne. “Someone who is established in the industry, they change and understand us more after a F2F encounter, only to become as much of a supporter of babelverse and defending babelverse as they were against it.”
“Some are just on the fence,” he says, “But at least that is progress.”
Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Chromecast. Sundar Pichai, the Senior Vice President for Android, Chrome, and Apps, detailed the specifics about the USB device designed to give users a way to connect their phones, tablets, and laptops to their TV screens.
Chromecast fits into the USB slot of any HDTV, and since it is the size of a flash drive, there is no bulky box to fit into your entertainment system. Currently, it supports content from Netflix, YouTube, and Google Play Movies and TV, but it will expand its realm into Pandora and other services soon.
Android tablets and smartphones are compatible with Chromecast, no question about it. But Google has gone the extra mile to include iPhones, iPads, and Chrome for Mac and Windows for compatibility with Chromecast.
While Chromecast effectively turns your attached device into a remote, you can still multitask. Sending emails, browsing social media, and surfing the web are no problem while you stream Netflix.
Google has also integrated a new extension for the Chrome browser that is currently in beta. IT allows you to project any browser tab to your TV, via Chromecast, so watching news clips or videos from non-apps is fluid and easy.
By Google's own numbers, only about 15 percent of people know how to view online content on their TV. In the hopes of capturing the large audience available, Chromecast starts at only $35, which is considerably less than Apple TV and Roku, which can get up to $100.
It is available now on Google Play, Amazon, and BestBuy.com. However, it will be available in-store at BestBuy starting July 28th, and for a limited time, Google is offering three months of free Netflix to go along with your purchase.
“It’s all about the people,” said someone important, at one point, in humanity’s history. While I’m too lazy to delve into whether someone of actual, historical relevance made any such proclamation (although, I’m sure someone has – right?), there’s no denying the truth behind such a statement. For Tim Wolters, this is an essential truth that companies must apprehend when thinking about company culture.
Wolters is the co-founder and CEO of RoundPegg, a startup that provides a platform to allow companies to quantify their company culture and utilize that in hiring, developing, and engaging employees.
Including RoundPegg, Wolters has founded or co-founded a total of four software companies. Through these experiences, he knows firsthand the kinds of mistakes that startups make, especially when it comes to issues of company culture. Indeed, even for RoundPegg itself, there were some mishaps regarding its company culture and its early engineer hires.
Company culture is essential to any company’s operations, especially when it comes to talent retention. A 2011 survey, conducted by Burston-Marsteller and the Great Place to Work Institute, found a strong correlation between company culture and employee retention for companies in that year’s list for “World’s Best Multinational Companies”
A company is nothing without its people – its employees build the foundation for what a company can actually create or provide in terms of goods or services. A company’s culture is cultivated through its people, and it is this important lesson that – in Wolters’ mind – companies must learn if they want to continue to grow.
Watch Tim talk about the importance of company culture in this video:
Today, Treehouse launched an iPad app so you can learn programming from the comfort of your tablet.
Treehouse helps you learn Objective-C, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and SQL with over 1,000 videos made by real teachers. Then, you can practice right inside the app with Treehouse code challenges. This model has already attracted 37,000 active students.
The app has a special keyboard with common coding symbols to make programming on the iPad easier. Students earn points for lessons they complete, so employers can tell when they're job ready.
But Android students will be disappointed to learn that the iPad app contains none of Treehouse's Android content – founder and CEO Ryan Carson says Apple prohibited it.
"They said, 'Oh, you teach Android, we can't approve this app,' and that seemed crazy to us," says Carson.
Apple told him it broke the App Store guidelines by "promoting a competing platform," says Carson. Looking at Apple's documentation, the only guideline that seems to fit is 3.1: "Apps with metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected."
"There's some really weird behavior going on," says Carson, claiming that the iPad apps for Lynda.com and Udemy have Android content. "We don't know if it's just a random oversight by Apple or if there's something worse going on."
"We don't want to make Apple out to be the bad guys, necessarily," he adds. "We got through it."
Technology makes our lives easier, no doubt about it, but the argument could be made that being digitally connected at all times affects our health in negative ways. Back problems, headaches, blurred vision, you name it. The bottom line is it never hurts to take a quick break and go see the sunshine every now and again.
So the engineers, designers, and visionaries that work with At the Pool, a Los Angeles-based social startup, are promoting everybody to take the pledge to get offline via their platform. They have made it their main mission in life to bring some semblance of humanity back to the web by actually getting off the web.
"We are really on board with the pledge," says David Zimmerman, business developer of At the Pool. "Our number one priority is to use our technology to better our members."
At the Pool was designed to bridge the gap between online and offline interactions by connecting individuals with similar likes and interests in the physical sphere versus the digital one. Thus, they bring an elegantly simple solution to the table for eliminating the issues inherent with being digitally connected all the time.
If you have an afternoon meeting and it happens to get canceled, At the Pool can help you make the most of the few-hour gap in your day. Meet up with a potential new friend for coffee, or find a person to hit the gym with.
Think real-world swimming pool when you think At the Pool. What do people do when they go to the pool? They are hanging out with friends, meeting new people, sparking conversations, and relaxing.
However, since the web platform is not entirely conducive to accomplishing the goal of connecting on the go, the team has decided to make a much-needed move to the mobile world. At the Pool will be launched on iOS in September as an optimized and highly upgraded version of the website.
"If you remember, ten years ago people actually got offline and interacted in the physical sphere," says Zimmerman. "We want to hold true to that trend because it is better for your physical and mental wellbeing to engage in those offline relationships."
Start a conversation, get involved with your community, do something good for the environment, and spend more face time with your friends. Soon enough, you will not even feel the need to pull your smartphone out – unless you have the burning urge to meet another awesome person with At the Pool.
Today, DC-based Revolution Growth announced its biggest investment ever, $40 million for Bigcommerce. Chairman Steve Case will join the Austin startup's board.
This is Revolution Growth's second announcement in July, following Optoro, and the third ecommerce startup in their portfolio. Bigcommerce hopes to leverage Case's expertise in small business, partnerships, and international expansion, gained during his time as cofounder of AOL.
"We thought we were passionate about small business. He's on another level," says Mitchell Harper, who cofounded the company with Eddie Machaalani.
Bigcommerce creates software for small businesses to set up an online store, manage orders and inventory, and get more visibility. Founded in 2009, the startup has now signed on tens of thousands of users and processed over $2 billion in orders in their stores.
Bigcommerce prides themselves on democratizing access to technology for even the smallest of small businesses. Instead of paying thousands of dollars, businesses can pay $25 to $300 per month for a store that can be set up in an hour.
Machaalani claims their secret sauce is something called a "success squad," a team of Bigcommerce employees whose job is to train their customers in ecommerce and online marketing. They teach business owners to build credible websites, do SEO and Google AdWords, manage email campaigns, and more. This service comes as part of the Bigcommerce package.
Before this round, Bigcommerce had already raised around $35 million. They will use the new funding to expand their add-on apps (like live chat and analytics), market their brand, and double the team to around 300 people.
"I always say Facebook is synonymous with social media, Salesforce is synonymous with CRM, we will be synonymous with ecommerce," says Harper.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
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