Kill a feature, “Fix” a feature

Dave McClure, of Startup Metrics for Pirates fame, often recommends the seemingly drastic step of killing features, just to see what happens. If users freak out, then that’s a valuable feature, put it back in. If not, well, you just made your product better, separating the chaff from the wheat.

Now most folk are going to be hesitant to take such a drastic step, and might be a hard sell to management or the rest of the team. Here’s an alternative I think might work:

Fix a Feature

What I mean by “fix” is that you take that feature and all of its buttons and inputs, as well as user flows, error messages and edge cases, and turn it into a sensible default.

• Profile picture? A link with their name is good enough.
• 20 different social networks to choose from? Add Facebook & Twitter, and be done.
• Multiple users per account? They can share 1 account.

Most times (and I know I do this a lot, being product-focused), we believe that customers won’t love us if we don’t build in 1,000 ways to customize the product. And each time we start down that road, we create a whole mess of wireframes, workflows, tests, and feedback that we need to work through.

When customers start to balk about needing more freedom — when they’re annoyed they can’t do something they really need to do — you’ve just validated a need, and learned something about how your customers work.

How to Drive Visitors to Action with Wordpress

This is a strange post to be writing, since I’m going to tell you how to create a very rudimentary facsimile of our upcoming social marketing manager using only your Wordpress blog. I think our upcoming product is much more powerful, so I’m not that worried. Anyway, let’s get on with it!

Get your visitors to take action!

The nature of blogs, syndication and search has created an environment in which your bounce rate (the number of people who visit only one page on your site) is probably very high. So how do you lure visitors into exploring more of your site, signing up for your newsletter, or buying products?

You could try banner ads, but hardly anyone clicks on (or sees) them. You could write another blog post, but those get buried amongst all the others. The truth is, there’s not much in the way tools for adding marketing messages to websites.

Marketing messages are unique: you want them to be persistent during their lifespan, following your visitors everywhere, and then you want them to disappear, to be replaced with the next offer.

Here’s a simple method for adding a customizable HTML message to all your blog posts that you can use to drive visitors to action.

How to Drive Your Visitors to Action with Wordpress

Requirements:

• One self-hosted Wordpress blog. This might work on Wordpress.com sites, too, I don’t know.
• A theme with a functions file (functions.php).
• Decent knowledge of Wordpress will help — a lot.

Register a new dynamic sidebar

Under the Appearance menu, click on Editor. Select the Theme Functions file (functions.php). Add a new dynamic sidebar with a unique name, I used “Action” in the example below.

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Action',
'before_widget' => '<div class="action">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));

Paste the new dynamic sidebar into your posts template

Now, find your posts template. It could be Main Index Template (index.php) or Single Post (single.php), or something else. Basically, we’re looking for the template file displays individual posts. Into this file, paste the following code after the post div (usually <div class=”post”>). Make sure the name (“Action”) of your dynamic sidebar is the same as what you entered in the Theme Functions file above.

<?php if(is_single()): ?>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Post Action Message') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Note: You’ll notice that the first and last lines of code above check to make sure that we’re on a single post page before displaying our “Action” sidebar. If you’re pasting this code on the Single Post (single.php) template, these lines (1st, 4th) aren’t necessary.

So what’d we just do? We added a new dynamic sidebar element to our theme, placed after every post. In Wordpress, dynamic sidebars can be filled with widgets, little bundles of cool functionality. Usually, these contain many widgets and appear in a column next to your blog posts, but we’ve got special plans.

Add an action message

Now, click on the Widgets link, under the Appearance menu. You should see a large list of widgets in the middle of the page, and a list of sidebars on the right. Find your new “Action” sidebar and open it. Drag a “Text” widget from the middle of the page over the body of the “Action” sidebar. You’ve got it right when a black dashed box appears.

Once you’ve added the text widget, open it and add whatever message you want. You can include HTML links, too.

Add some styling

Lastly, you’re going to want to add some style to your action messages. You can paste this into your style sheet as a starting point. Customize it to blend in.

.action {
margin:20px 0;
font-size:16px;
line-height:150%;
border:2px dotted #a90;
background-color:#ffd;
padding:15px 10px;
}
.action h4 { font-weight:bold;}

Ta-da! We’re done

As you can see right below this post, that’s what you get. The message is easily editable via Wordpress to contain whatever text and/or links you want, so you can drive visitors to sign up for a newsletter, follow you on twitter, etc., and you can style it however you like.

Obviously, we’ve got a lot more great features in our soon-to-launch social marketing manager, but I wanted to give you a taste of what adding action-oriented marketing content to your posts can do to improve your site and your business. Hopefully, this will help you squeeze every last drop of value from your hard-earned Google juice.

Don’t forget: Send us a note on Twitter @heyindieinc if you’re interested in being part of our early beta. If you made a 2010 resolution to get serious about social marketing, improve your conversions, grow your social presence, and increase your ROI, then HeyIndie can help.

5 Ways to ID Your Minimum Viable Product

I thought I’d try to outline some thoughts on this tweet I saw this morning.

@startupSQUARE: Someone Please Write a Blog Post about Minimum Viable Strategy http://blog.startupsquare.com/customer-development/someone-please-write-a-blog-post-about-minimum-viable-strategy/ #leanstartup #entrepreneur

Here’s a few key ideas:

#1: Pivot for continual, incremental improvement
If you’re afraid to pivot, then either you haven’t found the right idea yet, or you’re a glutton for punishment. Your loyalty isn’t to one specific idea, your loyalty is to making the world a better place. Keep poking until you find your customers’ pain point, then solve it.

In my experience, finding MVP has been very difficult, because I’m a product guy, a tinker. I look at technologies and tools and imagine what I could do with them. This leads to a lot of cool ideas with very little business potential. In fact, HeyIndie started out with one of these ideas. Thankfully, through some very basic customer development, we figured out there was no business there. But the knowledge we acquired was instrumental in our pivot, which changed not only the product features but the market focus as well. That’s a lot of change, but it only appeared after we came up with the new product idea, and we were so excited about it, we didn’t care about losing the original idea.

#2: Do something valuable for a large number of customers & do it often
This is my version of business model 101, but it’s super important. In order to have any chance at growing into a real business, your solution must have a high value, for a large number of customers, and it should occur as often as possible. At least two of those numbers should be big. If they’re all “ehh”, then it’s going to be hard to get paying customers. There’s always exceptions, of course, but you’d better be a ninja if you expect to pull it off.

For our original idea, we could argue a large, growing number of customers, but our value proposition was variable to weak, and it occurred infrequently. Not a good mix, especially online, where everyone is accustomed to getting things for free.

#3: Learn and validate your ideas via customer interviews
There’s one way to learn about a customer segment. Go talk to them. They are the only ones know what’s happening today, and what they need to move forward. There is no one else. No journalist or analyst can give you this information. You have to get it yourself.

I am a product guy, as I mentioned, so I don’t naturally tend to phone calls, interviews, etc. So, I hired a friend to help out. I can’t pretend we’re following Steve’s advice to the letter, but we’re getting in front of real customers and learning a lot of valuable and subtle insights into what they need to be successful. And it feels great to be able to inform your product strategy with that knowledge, knowing it can help your future customers kick ass.

#4: Plan to charge for your product
This one’s controversial in some circles, but the key word is “plan”. You will find that “free” or “paid” greatly affects your decision-making process and priorities. Whether you end up actually charging or not, adopting a “paid” mentality keeps you more focused on adding value.

I like focusing on a paid product, since I think it keeps the product focused. If you’re gonna charge, you need a clear value proposition, which counter-intuitively requires a smaller feature set (more features muddies the core value). We haven’t bothered to add a subscription module yet, because we don’t need it for alpha testing, which we plan on using to define our pricing strategy. We need real customers using our product in real situations to gauge our true value first.

#5 Get close to the money
Maybe this one’s obvious, but the further away from the money you are, the more difficult it’s going to be to get some of it.

Our new product is a tool for social marketing that improves your ROI. It also includes some basic analytics that can help prove it’s worth the cost. After interviewing several potential customers, we shifted our focus to an area we knew had value: we can help you sell more product — now that’s close to the money.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
In sum, I think finding MVP is all about iteration. Just assume you’re going to get it wrong the first time, but plant your flag anyway. You have to start somewhere, and it’s inevitable that customer interviews will lead you in new and surprising directions. That’s what everyone means by “fail fast”: no matter how good you are today, you should always be striving to be better tomorrow.

Lean Startup Update: January '10 Edition

Feature freeze!

Here at HeyIndie HQ, we’ve been following the principles of lean startup development, as outlined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis. I don’t think we’re following to the letter, but you do your best when bootstrapping. I feel good about getting out of the office to meet with potential customers on a regular basis, and being really focused when it comes to our feature set.

So far, we’re learning a lot about how our customers work: what their needs and pain points are. There’s a lot more to customer interviews, of course, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition, being bootstrapped means we’re still working on other projects, and sometimes, progress can be slow. But extra time can also be your friend, allowing ideas to ferment and the best ones to bubble up to the top.

At the center of all this, we want to build a great product. Something that’s clearly useful and fun to use. Riffing off Andrew Chen’s post, Minimum Desirable Product, I can see where we are mixing and matching strategies to suit our situation. We are very focused on design and user experience, for example, since that’s our core competency. This is a bit dangerous, because we’re reacting to our own tendencies, not the market, but again, if possible, you always want to make the best impression possible. It’s a balancing act.

We’ve been working on this product for about 4 months now, 3 if you don’t count December, which was pretty much a wash given the holidays (again, bootstrapping has its minuses). But I feel like we’ve been focused on our initial product vision and getting to alpha testing.

So, what haven’t we done?

• No payment processing. It’s definitely our goal to launch as a subscription service. But we have to make it through an invite-only alpha first, and we don’t need to charge anyone for that. We have a couple possible subscription management vendors in mind, both with simple RESTful interfaces, so integrating payments when we need to will be a snap.
• No “fun” features: We have some great ideas to give the service some extra “kick” in the fun pants. But those are complicated feature sets that we don’t fully understand yet.
• No advanced analytics: We’re collecting a lot more data than we’re displaying right now. But we know we don’t want to be Google Analytics, so we want to be very strategic about adding new stats.
• No mobile support: We’re going to need this at some point, but until we gather some data, we won’t know how important this feature really is. Better to wait and see.
• No platforms: It would be easy to get caught up in building plugins and interfaces, but we’re going to wait until we know who our customers are.

Great ActionBar Background Images

Creating a great background image for your ActionBar will help it stand out while still complementing your website design. But there are a few principles to consider when creating your own background image. Read the rest of this entry »

Create Great Email Header Images

You’ve probably already taken a look at our guide to Great ActionBar Backgrounds, and if so, you’ll be happy to know that creating great email header images is just as easy.

Below you’ll see the image we’re using in our emails. It’s a simple 500 pixel wide by 100 pixel high PNG-formatted image. It contains our branding and a little bling. That’s really all you need. If you choose not to add an email header image, it will be replaced with a hyperlink to your website, using your site name as the link text.

Our email header image

Here’s what the image looks like in a shared email (screenshot from Gmail). The text at top (“Tim Barkow says”) is the sender’s message. The text in the dashed box is the message, with a link back to your site. The About text below is your site description (change this via the Site Settings menu link).

Sample email sent via HeyIndie send-to-a-friend

Here’s another example email.

Shared email from SMITH magazine

That’s all there is to it. Adding an email header image adds extra punch to your shared emails, but be assured that even without an image, these messages will outperform simple text emails every time.