A few months back we blogged about a resource we created called Tools for Lean Startup Wizards. This consists of two parts:
This post is a sort of mid-term progress report.
The “met expectations” message is that we’ve been refining and adding to the Mindmap. The “needs improvement” part is that writing up the Framework to explain what it’s about and why those tools are important is taking more time than we’ve given it so far.
In the spirit of running lean it seems sensible to share the part that has made progress, so I just up-issued the Mindmap to a new version that captures all the edits made since January 2012.
We *still* haven’t added a visual link to it from the CogniDox homepage, because it’s off-message for what we do with our main products. We need to find a longer-term home for it.
But the link http://www.cognidox.com/toolkit will get you to the latest version. Just click on the Wizard’s hat to view the Mindmap, and from there you have access to the links.
The good life is getting a little too good at CogniDox HQ, so our tech guys Vittal and Adam have ‘volunteered’ to raise our key Average-Activity-Per-Employee metric really quite significantly indeed by taking part in a sponsored bike ride this June 2012 from Cambridge to Paris. Vittal and Adam will be cycling along with other hearties from The Free Press pub (the best pub in Cambridge, btw). Naturally, we’ll all be paying handsomely for the privilege of not having to do anything remotely strenuous like this. They’ll take the pain so we won’t have to.
The goal is to raise money for Cancer Research UK. The serious bit is that we all know someone affected by or lost to Cancer and if you’re in a giving mood today we’d love to steer you over to the Just Giving website to make a small (or large) sponsorship donation.
Choose from:
http://www.justgiving.com/Velo-Vittal
http://www.justgiving.com/Adam-Sparrowhawk
I think I’ve invented a new term – “Channel Panic”.
Here’s the context. I’ve been asked to participate in a project outside my day job. It’s a loose group of people at this stage and one of the tasks is to learn how to work together as a team. Part of that is all of us using the same processes/tools and having a common place to store files. This is absolutely the same requirement as 99% of teams in the same situation. I had a vague feeling that I/we weren’t being as efficient as we ought to be and it was bothering me a little by making me feel unprepared. So I stopped what I was doing and took a look to see why.
I go back a long way with these colleagues and the first problem was emails to me were arriving at two different email addresses (personal and work). The second problem was that everybody involved seems to be using a different file sharing service. So the inefficiency was down to the fact that I had too many channels open. I didn’t know where the message would come from, and I didn’t know where to look for the supporting information. Once the problem was identified, the solution is pretty obvious.
We talk about “Information Overload” but this seems like a more specific problem that I’m going to call “Channel Panic”. I’m defining it as the general, floating anxiety you feel because there are too many lines of communication open and too many locations to store supporting information.
I’ve had a rummage around the Internet and I can’t find anyone talking about the same thing, so I’m claiming novelty 
The nearest meme is a Clay Shirky talk at the Web 2.0 expo in 2008: “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”. To paraphrase his talk, it isn’t about the sheer volume of information – that’s always been the case. It’s that there’s just enough more information to break the systems we use to control it. It’s the collapse of the filters (“Filter Failure”) we use to differentiate good quality information from poor.
So, channel panic is the bad feeling you get when you start to become aware of impending filter failure.
Just finished my slots at the Idea Transform 2012 weekend – I was a mentor and we listened as a group panel to teams on Saturday and Sunday morning followed by 1:1 advice sessions with teams in the afternoons. I tried to keep my advice on Saturday aimed at the business plan and my advice on Sunday aimed at the presentation they give on Sunday (tonight) before a panel of judges.
The formula had a passing similarity to the Cambridge Startup Weekend I was part of in 2011, but my impression this year is that the projects / ideas covered a broader, more diverse range. I tried to think why – maybe it was because this year the call was for ideas that could transform the world as opposed to “form a Startup in a weekend”. If you stress the latter it’s going to bias the outcome towards web and mobile apps.
In that, it came closer to the identity of a typical “Cambridge Startup”, which historically has had a strong root system into academic research and ideas. It’s a formula I could see working elsewhere too.
The ideas spanned tools for education, media, clean transport, medical, fair trade and identity management. Some ideas pre-dated the event, but all the teams working on them were new-formed for the weekend. The ideas were first pitched on the Friday night and teams gathered around the ideas they wanted to work on, and only the strongest made it through to Saturday. The amazing thing is that by Sunday all the proposals started to sound quite mature.
Over the weekend their team knowledge must have been like a bell curve. They started low on Friday with an original idea. It swelled to maximum on Saturday as they did research and listened to feedback. Now, on the Sunday, they have to whittle it back down to a simple and coherent message if they want to impress the judges in their allotted 3 minutes.
Writing this while the teams are still pitching allows me to use the cliché that they’re all winners but eventually one of them will take that prize. But I can say in honesty that I heard more than one idea this weekend that has the potential to go on and be a successful company.
Today we announced a major re-work of our Microsoft Office add-in.
For some time we’ve offered an add-in for Word 2007 only. It worked fine, and it did the job of a minimal viable product (MVP) in that our customers quickly told us that support for Excel and PowerPoint would be good too. They kind of accepted that there was little we could do for Word 2003 because of the major changes in the program architecture between the versions.
Then along came Office 14 and we found the add-in didn’t work with Word 2010. A little reminder that supporting X versions for Y applications can sap the resources of any software company. And yes. I know we’re not the first to find that out!
So we started again. Rather than develop a solution for each application, the aim this time was to build a platform that is compatible across multiple versions/applications and easier to maintain when future Office versions are released by Microsoft.
The new component supports more versions of Microsoft Office (2003, 2007, and 2010) and the most widely-used applications (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) in the Office suite.
The business benefit remains the same: to encourage knowledge workers to create and maintain their documents within the shared document repository by allowing them to do so directly from within their desktop authoring tools.
During the same period we’ve worked with and against Microsoft SharePoint in our marketplace. In a couple of our bigger accounts, the outcome was to deploy alongside SharePoint. In a nutshell it does the Intranet team site and we do the underlying document control – effectively the master reference database to avoid duplication and ensure ID uniqueness. In other opportunities it was either/or. Companies may be able to license SharePoint but they knew there was a lot more work to do in customizing it. The big benefit – integration with Office applications – was something they still wanted. So we needed to solve the problem “how can I have Office integration without using SharePoint?”
I think we’ve done a good job – the feature set is solid and its usability follows the simple-but-effective rule we aim for in CogniDox. There were design decisions about where to draw the feature line between the desktop and the web application, and we’ll listen to feedback to ensure we drew that line correctly.
The press release is on our website and goes into a little more detail about the features. If you’re reading this as a CogniDox user, the Office Add-in is available free to all companies with a CogniDox subscription license for support and maintenance.
The Cambridge Startup Masterclass I gave in late 2011 turned out (for me at least) to be a fun and pleasant experience. I spoke about the Lean Startup and tools that help a Startup stay lean.
It’s a timely topic as during that same week Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup”, announced some speaking dates in Cambridge (January 13th) and London (16th). It’ll be a chance for me to hear if I did a fair job of summarising the book!
The Lean Startup concept isn’t a step-by-step rulebook for developing a company or an idea. Yet it seems there’s an order in which tasks should be tackled, and talents become valuable at different times. There is an analogy here with Edward De Bono’s “thinking hats”.
I wanted to devise the smallest number of categories possible to list these talents and skills (which I call Abilities). The premise is that every Lean Startup needs to do all of these but it does not need to do them all at the same time. If you were to analyse any individual Startup and you found they were excessive or deficient in any one category, you could make a reasonable prediction of how that Startup will falter or even fail.
At any stage of a business plan you should be able to profile your venture and assess strengths and weaknesses in these Abilities.
The full presentation is online at http://www.slideshare.net/paulwalsh21/tools-for-startup-wizards-revised but I will summarise it here.
In my view there are 6 Abilities:
Forming is about generating new ideas for features, process improvement or cost reduction, but it is also about forming teams and wider networks. It’s also about forming a company culture – one that will hopefully be desirable and last the course when the company grows. Good research is the ideal companion to good forming.
Transforming is taking those ideas and making things – software programs, chemical compounds, books or whatever. Where software is concerned, it’s best treated as an iterative process and it’s good to keep a model of users at all times in your design thoughts.
Projecting is letting the world know that you have made that thing. It’s about spreading the message to customers, enthusiasts and investors in a way that ensures it will be noticed. Some of them will be interested enough to seek out more information.
Persuading is how you take that initial interest to a level of adoption where they use your software or read your book. If your product has minimal viability, so too has your business model. Knowing where it can be improved takes research.
Collecting is how you get rewarded in return for the value you’ve given them. Bear in mind that Lean Startup disasters are often pricing-related.
Protecting can be about patents and intellectual property, but it is also about making sure your e-commerce server stays up during your peak sales period or avoiding your site being hacked.
In the slides I give examples of how specific tools can help enhance these Abilities.
Some tools fit closely with the Lean concept, others not at all.
Over the last few years I’ve gathered information on literally 100s of software tools and what I found interesting was that they could be readily sorted into one of these 6 categories.
The tool I prefer for sorting is a Mind map, and I created a mind map (using an open source tool called Freemind) which can be found at www.cognidox.com/toolkit. At the time of writing it has hyperlinks to somewhere in the region of 300 tools. I can’t claim that I use all of them, but I have tried to keep the list down to the ones I think are best. The list excludes tools that are constrained in usage (e.g. only run under one OS) and they are all standalone (web browser add-ons typically not included).
Hopefully this will be a useful resource for others – if you are looking for a tool to help with web site SEO, for example, follow the Projecting path of the mind map.
To use it, hold down your mouse to drag the image around the screen, and left-click on any node to expand or contract it. Clicking on any link will open a new tab or window onto a web site for that tool. In most cases you can download or register for free or a small fee, so the pricing is Startup-friendly. When you are finished browsing the mind map tool, just close the window.
The intention is to add new tools as they become known, and also to capture more of my notes about the value in each tool. But that’s for another day.
As an aside, this is an example of content (a Freemind .mm file) that is managed using CogniDox. When I add items and up-issue the version there, it is automatically published to our website (the document entitlement rights are set to public). Freemind is an open source tool. Our website is managed using open-sourced Joomla, and extensions are available to display Freemind maps in a Joomla article (http://www.waltercedric.com/old/downloads/joomla/851-freemind.html). I mention this as an example of the type of “virtuous circle” Startups should be looking for in tools. This is a powerful way to help me with Projecting, but the tools involved cost us time rather than money.
When I was asked to teach a Cambridge Startup Masterclass the first obstacle was to choose a topic. In the end I opted to talk about the Lean Startup and the tools that would help a Startup stay lean.
That’s the first challenge: What is a Lean Startup? During the class I’ll summarise the work done so far (mostly by Eric Ries in his book “The Lean Startup”).
Everyone tends to think of “Lean” in this context as being short on money and having to make do on free or cheap tools. That can well be true, but it’s really more about cutting out the waste of time and/or money. Even if you have just closed a funding round, calling in the SAP or Oracle consultants to implement a million-dollar system is usually just about as dumb as lining the staff car park with new, expensive sports cars.
It’s certainly true these days that excellent software tools are available for little or nothing. People have grown to hate “company systems” and are unimpressed when it takes only seconds to upload and tag personal photos yet days to find a company document.
But, even if you had the money to spare, there’s no assurance most software tools will move your company forward, let alone accelerate growth. Many of them seem to be carriages that have lost their wheels – usually around the time the designers were acquired by the BigCo now selling it.
When you offer to talk about tools, there’s a huge risk it will turn into a “My Favourite Bookmarks” session. I may be thrilled with some tool I use, but I can’t expect you to feel equally excited until I show that it meets a need. If that need was to find new songs that are just like the songs that you already like then maybe that part is easy. But we’re talking obtuse Startups: a word that has Alice in Wonderland abilities to mean just what you choose it to mean – neither more nor less.
So I can’t (and won’t) just sit there opening boxes containing one glittery tool after another.
The other way to segment it might be to try sorting the tools by job title – you know, CEO tools, Tools for Finance, Tools for Legal, etc. Two problems with that: job titles are not well-defined either, and anyway a Startup will probably not be able to fill all these roles.
So I want to sweep away the job titles and find the tasks underneath. There are things a Startup needs, and you set tasks to do / get / achieve them; and it helps big-time if the people doing the task are good at it. Well-executed tasks need great skills or abilities.
My best shot at this is there are 6 core Abilities. I label them as:
There are 6 ability types, but it doesn’t at all follow that the ideal Startup is 6 persons. Knowing what you should be doing is the first step towards covering for what you are missing.
It turns out that the Lean Startup model offers a framework to manage these 6 abilities, and helps you understand which ability is optimal at different stages of the product cycle.
The mantra of the Lean Startup is to keep the product cycles short and focussed. Each cycle is like a quest to discover something new, or earn some new level. The abilities of your team shape the success of the quest. Your best plans will be challenged by unforeseen circumstances. It all soon threatens to become a bit “World of Warcraft: The Startup”, with Quests, Guilds and Mages over-running the place.
Luckily we can stick to reality by talking about the best tools to strengthen each of the abilities when used in the Lean Startup model. So when you are forming new ideas, what are the best tools to capture the thought flow? When you want to test something you have built (transformed) what are the best tools to do user testing? As you persuade a customer to sign-up, what are the best tools to help you keep track of the relationship? And so on.
Anyway, that’s the small quest I have set for myself next week in a session entitled “Stay Lean: Your Startup Toolkit”. It’s one of the Cambridge Startup Masterclass talks that take place at ideaSpace, and this time it’s my turn. My aim is that each person there will discover at least one tool that’s new to them and that they’ll use regularly from the next day onwards.
All the details are here:
http://startupmasterclass.co.uk/programme/cambridge/stay-lean-your-startup-toolkit/
Although I’m in a Startup business I admit I’ve been confused about what is happening to UK Government support in this area. I had a vague idea that the regional development authorities (in my case EEDA) were on the way out due to their funding ending around now (Nov 2011). Where does that leave other services such as BusinessLink?
I would have carried on in blissful ignorance but my better half who works in Education wanted to know how her students might get access to good information and advice on how to become self-employed or start a small business. Naturally I had to put aside my work to research this immediately for her
One impression I get is that there’s been a surge in the number of people offering independent advice – some of it well-organised and thought-out and some of it very much a ‘one man outfit’ where results may be a little more variable. In some ways it’s a reaction to the confusion – if the Government is axing the service, better step in and provide an alternative. If that alternative is good, then fine. But to risk messing with the startup dreams and aspirations of (especially) young people is not.
So what are the facts?
Well, the regional bodies are certainly going, going gone and seem likely to be replaced by something called LEPs. Why and how they came about is a mystery to me, but I am unskilled in the art of Quango creation.
UK Government has not axed the centralised BusinessLink, but has rather given it something of a facelift. The new portal (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/newservices) gives you a choice of whether you want guidance through the startup process (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/mynewbusiness) or whether you need advice more on how to survive and grow to the next level (http://www.improve.businesslink.gov.uk/).
My first impressions are that both sites have a lot of useful information and resources (a lot of it in short video form). Some of it isn’t cutting edge advice – for example the video on Business Plans is a little bit old-school and won’t appeal to Lean Startup enthusiasts. But I can live with that. If you are lucky and have access to high-calibre services such as Startup Masterclass (http://startupmasterclass.co.uk/) then good for you, but if I was cut-off from those services then these BusinessLink web sites would be a good safety net.
And there are even buttons for Twitter (@BusinessLinkGov) and Google +1.
The other web site they recently launched is also interesting. It’s called Mentorsme (http://www.mentorsme.co.uk) and it’s a sort of online dating service connecting entrepreneurs with experienced business mentors. Naturally I tried it out – Cognidox Ltd is a “growing” company based in Cambridgeshire, so who can I talk with to be mentored? It gave me just one local business coach contact, four national organisations and two online-only organisations. None of whom were familiar to me (and that’s not a good thing).
Like many similar websites, it seems like a skeleton with the content “yet to happen”. Which is exactly the wrong approach for a web-based business so they didn’t follow their own advice really.
But that’s correctable. So I would say to all my contacts who provide professional services and startup mentoring / coaching services: Get your name and contact details on this site. We’ve already paid for it with our taxes so it makes sense to get behind it and make it work.
I’d like to see the Mentoring site “grow a pair” to use a rude expression. Put up recommendations and reviews for the mentors. Crowd-source whether or not “Jane Doe” is a true source of inspiration and a genuine aid to the startups she’s helped. That would be better than any sort of attempt at regulation for “Small Business advisors” or similar.
And can I just say that, in the context of earlier criticism (http://www.cognidox.com/blog/post/91-how-do-you-spend-35-million-on-a-website) well done for buidling at least one of the web sites using Open Source technology (Apache, Drupal, jQuery).Quite why it didn’t make sense to use the same technology for all three sites is a matter for another day.
Just been reading about the Internet outages and stability issues yesterday – it was traced (maybe I better add “allegedly”) to a bug in Juniper’s edge routers – code which controls the BGP (border gateway protocol) tables. Think of BGP as a big table containing the best or only routes an IP packet can take. It’s pretty necessary stuff to keep networks networking. According to the report in The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/07/global_net_outage/), the bug caused router devices to core dump and automatically restart.
Juniper seemed to get on the case quickly, and they’re able to say already that “a software fix is available, and we’ve been working with our customers to immediately deploy the fix.”
Think about this for a moment…
There is a crisis and senior executives at your company are in an agitated state demanding action. After hours of investigation and remedial coding (not to mention some fast-track QA) there is a fix available.
Now how do you get that fix to hundreds of companies who use your software in their networking products?
We had this scenario often enough when I was software VP for a semiconductor company and it was for this reason we developed the Licensing features in CogniDox. In a scenario like this we would have a product (let’s call it the “Router 1000″) which contained the latest version of our embedded software (let’s call it “RouterWare 5.1″). Now we had an even newer version “5.1.1″ containing the fix.
CogniDox is set up containing records of all customers (Licensees) and there would be a license for RouterWare 5.1. This license would be applied to a whole set of documents in CogniDox, including the zipped file containing the images for RouterWare 5.1. When the new version of the software was ready, it would be uploaded, issued and approved. It was then published (usually by a Product Manager or a senior Software person) to the customer support web portal.
Every customer contact who had that license was automatically emailed and told how to download the new software. As they did so a record was kept of who had downloaded. A day or two later when someone asked about this, it was easy to say that “85% of the customer base has downloaded it already”. The other 15% were also easy to identify, in case Marketing or Sales wanted to contact them to see why they hadn’t downloaded. If one of those 15% called in to report the same problem, the quick remedy was to suggest download and upgrade.
Nothing completely cancels out the stress of an urgent fix-to-the-field, but this level of automation certainly helps.
I was at another excellent meeting last week of the Cambridge Product Management Network which as the name implies is a special interest group for product managers working in the area.
The speaker was Elizabeth Ayer, a Product Manager at Red Gate Software, who was doing a rehearsal for an upcoming talk in Boston (the place with the other Cambridge). It’s shaping up well based on what I heard.
Elizabeth’s focus was on finding the pain of your present and future customers. Every start-up knows the drill: “what is the pain point you are addressing?” And “is your product a vitamin or painkiller?
It’s a curious analogy, when you think about it. Especially when in the real pharmaceutical world people seem happy to spend on both, or even on (ahem) “performance enhancers”. What it comes down to is that if a product or thing literally does cure a pain, then the degree of brand loyalty to it will be unsurpassed. People will literally tell their friends. And that’s what you are after no matter what gizmo or gadget you are pushing.
Elizabeth pondered the dilemma whereby most of us can’t explain our body pains to a doctor, let alone describe the shortcomings of e.g. our knowledge worker tools to a passing product manager looking for feature enhancements.
Most of the talk was about breaking the barrier and getting into the zone where people could talk about requirements. To switch metaphors to fishing, it may be ok to use a cast net for mass-consumer products but you need a rod and line to catch the niche user.
Much of it comes down to the skills of talking and listening. And knowing when you are hearing about the problem and not the pain. And not getting hooked on acceptance or resignation, nor getting sucked into the rational.
But those are Elizabeth’s points and I look forward to when she can share them on-line with us.
For my part, I started to recall a ton of Psychology research into the (alleged) fallibility of human reasoning and communication.
If a trained counsellor can’t have an un-biased conversation with a client, what chance the untrained product manager? To use yet another metaphor, what’s the chance of asking a question without adding “cognitive contamination” to the answer?
There’s no silver bullet, but for a quick fix the least we can do is read up about some of the ways that we fool ourselves with language and thought. We could do a lot worse than start with the useful list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia.
My top five are:
p.s.
Recommended reading and sources (both open as PDF):
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1986) Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions