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At a recent Connected Cambridge meeting I heard Tony Milbourn (one of the ex-founders of TTP, now doing a new startup) talk about the different cognitive styles people bring with them to a startup business. He contrasted people who use the "wet towels around the head" approach to those who use the "frog kissing" model.

I guess you're familiar with "The Frog Prince" analogy about the fairytale princess who kisses the frog that transforms into a prince. If you talk to enough people and try to do enough deals, then sooner or later you'll find the partnership that accelerates the growth of your startup.

The "wet towel" metaphor refers to a highly-analytical way of doing philosophy - shut out as much external stimuli as possible to allow you to focus on achieving insight and thinking really deep thoughts. The towel is often "cold" as well, just in case you get over-heated in your thinking.

Tony's point was that in a startup with even a few employees, people will have different preferred cognitive styles and part of the success will be to get them doing the things they are best at, in their preferred style. It's also important that both styles are present - too much analysis or too little focus isn't desirable. People often associate "Entrepreneur" with the frog-kissers, but there can be too many back-of-napkin ideas, and at some point you need to focus and execute.

This idea of cognitive styles resonated with other thoughts about the different "hats" that people need to wear in a startup company. Micah Elliot covered this in a blog a couple of months back. It started with a list of 15 roles that every startup needed, but concluded by paring the list down to just four:

1. Developer - person(s) who can hack code and keep a vision of the overall architecture in their heads
2. Sys Admin - person to maintain the infrastructure, install the tools needed, and maintain the company website
3. Artist - person to do graphical work for the product and the website, user experience design included
4. Marketing - person(s) to evangelize the product in blogs, white papers and other collateral; testing the product and user support are included

There were a couple of roles dropped from the initial list as ‘surplus', namely Manager, Lawyer, and "Chef" (handles all other tasks that keep the team functioning).

How does this list of roles fit with my experience?

Well, by dropping the Manager role and by not making it explicit that these roles must interact, there is no guarantee that anything will be coordinated. Who's going to keep the project plan in their head?

The separation of Developer and Sys Admin goes against my experience. None of my software colleagues will thank me for saying so, but it inevitably falls to the software team to set up the new company with its initial infrastructure. In a web applications company, there is also a good case for blurring website decisions with technology used in development - cloud computing, SaaS, server virtualization are some that spring to mind.

Some of the clusters are equally strange. I've never seen a company with an innovative product that could be supported by Marketing alone. It requires the Developers. In fact, the feedback that comes from people using the product results in changes that are an essential part of the development, and this needs to be factored into resource planning (allow 20%) and development methodologies. The same goes for product testing - can't really see this being done by Marketing alone either. I'm also sceptical about the Artist being in charge of user interaction design. How the design looks is not the same as how the design flows.

But, the absolutely fatal problem with this list of roles is the omission of Sales. This team of four roles is going to create quite the perfect event, but it doesn't look like there will be anyone at the door to collect the audience's money.

In fact, the more I think about this list of roles the more it seems like it describes an ideal organization drafted from the "cold, wet towel" point of view. Everybody is happy in their analytical ‘bubble' but nobody seems to be getting out there to sell the product.

I was taught that startups commonly go through 3 initial phases on their way to becoming established companies:

1. Build a product. Ensure that is a product and not a technology i.e. it can be sold. Think about what exactly is the ‘product', e.g.  hardware may be the product, or it may be just a form of packaging for the software which is the real product.
2. Sell the product to as many customers as can be found. Keep note of what works and what doesn't to refine the product sales pitch. Build a model of the sales cycle - how customers were found, how long each sale took, who made the buying decision, what pattern of steps followed, etc.
3. Optimize the business model - the business model is how the company acquires money from its customers and needs to be a finely-tuned ‘profit engine'. Think about services rather than physical things.

If a startup can do these three things well they have some probability of becoming an established company.

During the initial phases, you need to allow degrees of freedom for what constitutes the best way of executing Phase 2. For example, a web applications startup that sees itself in the Web 2.0 mould might nominate a Community Manager to build a community, on the basis that it values market research less than the feedback it receives from its community. There will be a strong, direct link between the company and its users, and the product is more likely to be a service than a component. Today, most community manager roles just involve customer support with some blogging on the side, so this is quite a different slant from the norm.

On the other hand, a semiconductor startup that needs to have its chip designed into the products of a consumer electronics manufacturer is more likely to nominate a Business Development manager who will find and manage the "socket", as well as local distributors. There is a value chain, and it is vital to understand where one fits in it.

These differences aside, the key roles are probably:

1. Phase One - Manager
2. Phase One - Developers / Hackers
3. Phase Two - Commercial Manager
4. Phase Three - Marketing / Business Analyst

The Manager (who is often the CEO and/or COO in the early stages) has to maintain the product plan and keep it meshed with the feature development plan. S/he has to watch the budgets, assign IT and other resources, make sure the payroll happens on time (and the coffee pot is never empty). Legal contracts need to be drafted and reviewed. There is some degree of corporate governance, even in the early days. Keeping as much of this away from distracting the Developers is the key goal, as long as they still feel involved and (lack of) communications are not becoming an issue.

Sales will also be the responsibility of the Manager, until at least the sales pitch can be developed and transferred to the newly-hired Commercial Manager. This is what defines the transition to Phase 2.

Finally, in Phase 3 it becomes clear that direct sales contact time is not the whole story, and that there is as much to do in looking for new revenue streams as ensuring deals are closed.

One topic that I will cover in a later entry is deciding when and how to invest money (and time) in tools that will support this phased progression. When is the right time to bring in process and the tools that support them?

We issued our latest press release just over a week ago - it went out on Cambridge Network, PRWeb and a bunch of free sites. I was interested to see how the PR would fare in terms of news coverage and value for money.

Remember:

• Releasing unlimited news items on the Cambridge Network site is free for members. Corporate membership subscription rates depend on the number of staff in the organisation - the entry level for a 1-5 person company is £115 incl. VAT per annum.

• Each press release has a separate cost on PRWeb, with the cheapest at $80 (£51.88 incl. bank charges).

• The freemium PR syndication sites carry no cost at all for the free version, although you can pay for premium services. I was interested to see what $0 got me.

Some freemium sites were hard to manage in terms of setting the press release date. In some cases I had to delay my entry to avoid premature release. This added a degree of tangible extra effort and some intangible time cost.

A few hours after the release embargo I had a look at Google News, Yahoo News and MSN Live. The Cambridge Network release was on Google news within minutes of release. The PRWeb one was on Yahoo! news a few hours later. Nothing showed up on MSN Live. I looked at a few news aggregation sites such as Newsnow and they soon had the Yahoo! feed.

The freemium sites were non-existent on the news pages, and it was around 80:20 whether it even showed up on their web sites! For reasons from PR entry to clarity of presentation now, I'd give my 'best in show' award to Online PR News. I still don't understand what goes on at openPR.com, as this is my second time watching a news item disappear into the ether!

Today I had a follow-up email from PRWeb which told me how many page impressions and reads the article had received. Their site has a news management console that gives you access to various analytics. It also gave me a search link to view the online pick-up of the press release using Google. It didn't tell me how long readers lingered over each read, which is arguably the only meaningful measure.

I'm not a PR or SEO expert, and my scope is limited to what happens when you use different web services rather than practice PR in the large, but the subjective conclusion has to be that you get a good ROI from a Cambridge Network membership. They have clearly put some work into ensuring that Googlebot regularly crawls the site, and because people post new articles on the site throughout the day, the crawl process is frequent and items appear on Google News quickly. If the Cambridge Network site also provided some analytics to help you understand the performance of your news item, it would be even more impressive.

Of course, this blog entry isn't very useful if you are outside the Cambridge area. In which case, the moral is to get your local business network to support news entry and for them to register with services such as Google and Yahoo news. It's another way to save money as a startup.

Update added 19-Jun-2009: I've had sight of some data about who actually subscribes to Cambridge Network services. Only half of the membership falls within the central CB postcodes and subscriptions for newsletters, etc are equally distributed around the world. That reinforces the point that Business networks such as this are a cost effective PR solution for startups.

Recently, I got around to reading the AIIM "State of the ECM Industry 2009" report published at the end of March. It's based on a survey of 568 respondents, with a majority (52%) from large organizations (1000+ employees). There was a high percentage (21%) of people from the local and national Government sector, and there was a distinct US & Canada (61%) skew.

What struck me about the report was that it could be seen as a prescription for smaller companies and startups, along the lines "This is what big companies don't like about themselves, you have an opportunity to do it differently". After all, one of the good things about a new startup is that you don't have to make the same mistakes.

It's easy to say, harder to do, but in my experience the degree of "start as you mean to go on" that smaller companies can muster is a good way to keep the growth curve as accelerated and smooth as possible. When you have to switch-in a new process or workflow, it can be a massively disruptive force at a time when you can least afford disruption. Of course, cost is a factor - many a person has left behind an expensive ERP system at their former company, unable to replace it in their new startup. But with the growing availability of Free and Open Source software packages, that isn't the only factor any more.

So what ails the larger Enterprise in their Content Management, and how can SMEs adapt this as guidelines for a better strategy?

By inverting the AIIM ECM findings, I'd say they are:

(1) Start with a low-cost strategy and keep to it - never think that you will switch to an expensive solution at some point in the future. Make other requirements such as compliance and legal discovery a sub-set of the cost saving requirement.

(2) Treat e-mail usage as a dangerous drug - if you become over-dependent you will find it impossible and/or expensive to quit. If e-mail attachments become the main method for communication, it will get out of control more quickly than you'd prefer.

(3) Don't allow documents to be buried. It isn't enough that it was ready by the deadline and reviewed at the meeting. It also has to be just as easy to find in 6 months time.

(4) Beware multiple solutions. It's easier to let two teams 'go their own way', but then very hard to re-integrate them. Keep asking why does it need to be different and whether anything can be done to integrate them across the top.

(5) Don't abdicate business solution decisions to IT only (even when it is a part time role done by one of the engineers or founders). This is as important as all your other strategic decisions, and it will have a very significant impact on your company culture.

(6) Get support directly from vendors rather than consultants. They have up-to-date knowledge and it is in keeping with low-cost guideline #1.

(7) Enterprise content will become a large repository quicker than you think, so the earlier you start to think about Enterprise search, the better.

(8) Blogs and wikis are useful, but remember they are content too and will need to be included in your records management.

I'm hardly neutral on this topic, but I don't see or accept why any startup or small company cannot develop a short strategy paper that sets out their business solutions needs and priorities. If they can't afford Oracle or SAP using third party implementers at this stage, it is totally not a problem. In fact, guideline #1 says it would be better to find an open source alternative.

A short time ago we agreed to do a joint press release with another company, and I offered to do the logistics. I thought it would be a good chance to try out some of the free press release syndication services I'd been reading about, especially in this blog from the company behind the LEADSExplorer service.

It would be slightly different for me, because I would default to using my membership of the Cambridge Network and their facility to post news. So that was where I started. Once you have your member login, it's a matter of using their web-based form. Nothing difficult - a title for your PR, a summary, the body of the PR and any (optional) graphics that you wanted up to a maximum size of 70MB. It allowed me to set a date for the release - I wanted a release early in the following week. It all took at most 10 mins to enter my PR using cut/paste from a text file. Most of that time went on re-sizing my image file to fit.

After that baseline was established, I tried some of the free services. I had already registered for the ones I wanted.

I started with PRZoom. It has a fairly clean user interface but the process of getting from what I thought was a successful registration complete email to Submit a Press Release was more fraught than I'd imagined. Some of the user interface terminology was loose - "post", "submit" and "edit" used in less than obvious ways. It turned out I had to check a box acknowledging I'd read a note. Entering the actual PR wasn't too bad but the summary was limited to 250 characters so that required a bit of re-work. I couldn't upload images without a Premium account ($120-$399 apparently)and you need that also for RSS feeds. Impressions of this site overall not good - despite the San Francisco contact address, poor use of English.

Next up was PRLog. Again, a fairly clean interface but not hugely elegant. The user interaction seemed much simpler. It encouraged me to enter a business profile first, which was good apart from the brevity of the field. That allowed me to upload a Company logo. Then on to submit the PR itself. Again a limit of 250 characters on the summary but at least I could re-use what I'd done for PRZoom. It also allowed me to upload an image, with a maximum size limit of 100MB. It was possible to set a release date in the future (and it gave me a password that I could use to see it before then).

I then tried Online PR News. This has much more of a Web 2.0 feel. It offers a free submit and a $6 SEO service. I was tempted by the SEO offer but noticed that PayPal was the only payment method on offer . It was easy enough to complete and it allows image sizes up to 100MB. I had issues with it forgetting my news category whenever I navigated back but not that hard to re-select. You can also download free and useful collateral on writing PR from here. So far, best of the bunch.

Next, I tried PRMac. This was never going to work, because it is moderated to refuse non Apple/Mac news, but in the interests of research for you I went ahead. First problem was the title limit of 70 characters - too short. Also, couldn't set links or add images. It talked about a way to set release date but I could not find it - I think it's a human intervention thing when you embargo it on the PR itself. It offered me extended distribution for $18.75.

I next tried PR-USA.net. It took me a while to find where to login - scroll right down to the bottom left corner, but after that the Submit a Press Release was easy to find. I noticed in passing when the PR entry form was displayed that the site was built using Joomla!, and so what happened next came as something of a surprise. I should mention I'd been using Firefox 3 up to now. It wouldn't let me cut/paste into the summary and body fields unless I changed my user_prefs first. I switched to IE and it worked (well, after I allowed it to access my clipboard each time). I couldn't see any way to upload an image.

The blog referenced at the beginning of this article came down in favour of The Open Press. Currently, they have a security problem with their Forum software which is preventing on-line registration. I registered by email and entered my PR text. Nothing difficult here, but nothing stood out either. One problem was I couldn't find a way to embargo the PR until the required date.

I had used openPR.com once before and not been impressed by the results, but it was worth another go. The entry procedure was easy and intuitive, and I was able to upload an image. The choice of news categories was a bit limited. The preview feature was better here than on others.

Finally, I tried a paid-for service. In a previous company I had used PRWeb and liked it. It was donations-driven back in 2006, when it entered the market as a competitor for BusinessWire, but it has become more corporate since then. As I'd started with a paid-for service in the Cambridge Network, it seemed like a good idea to finish with one.Their cheapest option is called Standard Visibility, and it costs $80 per PR. It was easy to enter the PR and set a release date as I wanted. I couldn't do Anchor text at this price level - that would take SEO Visibility at $200. It told me at the end that I was position 107 in their rankings.

So that's stage 1 - using these sites to enter the PR.

Now, the whole point of using these PR services in the first place is to see what happens when the release date falls and the PR is released. I'm not hugely bothered where I end up on their individual web page listings, but I will be interested to see what happens on the search engines.

More on that when I have it.

 

I wanted to make a short video - like a movie trailer - that would introduce the company and yet be lighter than most of the other content on the website.

I'd been reading about services worth paying for as a startup (which also raised discussion on Hacker News). One of the services mentioned was making a video and the recommendation was Animoto.

Now, I'm not convinced that making a video is such an essential service for a startup but then again I found it was so quick and easy to do that it isn't really worth a long debate. Some parts of doing a startup are just fun, and this ought to be one of them.

So, Animoto is a video creation platform that lets users create professional-quality videos from their own images and music. You can supply both the images and the music, one or the other, or work with their library. A simple way to start would be to save a Powerpoint presentation as individual images (e.g. Save As > Other Formats > JPEG File Interchange Format). You then upload all these images to the Animoto site.This is a low-res solution that is quick to upload, but if you want higher-res take the longer approach.

You can then either choose music from their library or upload an MP3 from your own collection. Obviously, it's not a good idea to violate copyright when you do that. There's a limit of 10MB on file size (or 10 minutes, but that is less likely to affect you).

It's possible to make short demos for free, but I decided quickly to sign up for the  All-Access Pass ($30/yr) so that I could make a longer sample. Needless to say, you can pay more for additional services.

I didn't much like the music on offer in their library. I wanted the video to be slow and measured, taking time over the key points. I like ambient music and listen to many net labels. One in particular is the Breathe label, and I was especially impressed with contributions from a musician called Dimitris Diavatis, whom I believe is based in Croatia these days. So, I emailed and asked if I could use one piece ("Toxic") - it was issued under a Creative Commons license with attribution, non-commercial and non-derivative terms and this website is commerical, so I needed permission. Very graciously, he said "yes".

Going back to the video, you need to think about your Powerpoint in a different way. The old rule about 2-3 mins per slide does not apply so you effectively need to see the slide deck as a cartoon flipbook - lots of repeat images, one simple message on each and definitely a 'billboard' approach to the messages on each image.

My All-Access pass gave me the option to make a 1/2 speed video (i.e. pause longer before transition to next image). This seemed to fit really well with the ambient music so that's the way I went. Animoto meshes the images with the music (so rock music would produce more jerky image transitions) and each 'take' is different. You have little control over it all (but do use the highlight option for key images) and you may need several takes before you find the one that works.

As I say, making a video isn't an essential to-do for a startup. But it falls into the same category of advice as refining your elevator pitch or re-working parts of your business plan. It brings your attention to the essentials of the business. Just like a movie trailer brings audiences to the movie.