PocketSmith

This post is springing out of my frustration today as I attempted to find the link to add Twitter to PocketSmith when writing my previous blog post.

I knew what the page I was searching for looked like, I knew it existed, however I simply could not find how to get to it.

This is a marketing failure for Twitter. I want to distribute the content I put through the web app on my own website, thereby spreading the word about Twitter. I wanted to promote Twitter for them. Then why should I be having such difficulty finding this link?

Because I was expecting a menu. The page that I remembered looked like a full page, separate from all of the others. I was looking for a phrase like “Pimp Out Your Tweets” or “Distribution” or even “Badges”, their current term for the function (which doesn’t sit quite right with me in itself). However the link, when I found it, was here:

Why must this be so hard to find?

So getting to the point - why is this a marketing failure? Here are a few points just off the top of my head:

• Breaking User Expectations - As the page is a complete separate page, not a bit of information in an existing page, I was expecting it to appear in a menu. Somewhere. Surely.
• Missed Promotional Opportunity - Twitter users are, generally, tech-geeks and web publishers to a certain extent. They publish on Twitter, chances are they publish elsewhere. Displaying their own content from Twitter get more eyeballs on Twitter. Making it hard to find this page reduces these eyeballs. There should be badges everywhere, with the value this adds to Twitter.
• Frustrating Users - I was extremely frustrated that I could not find the link in 30 seconds. I shook my fists. I threw my toys.
• Not Recognising Different User Paths - some people may set up their Twitter accounts to be complete from the start, following all options that are available immediately. I however, took a far more piecemeal approach. This meant that when I wanted to distribute the tweets, I didn’t bother scouring the Account Settings page - I had already filled in the required information there. I had entered the website URL already. Why would my attention be drawn to this area?

The lesson reverberating in my head here is how important the heuristic link between ‘page’ and ‘menu’ is. If I am looking for a page I know to be separate from others, I am looking at menus, not links internal to the page. But maybe I am just stupid.

Now I better just go and check that all of PocketSmith is bereft of this kind of drama… I have a feeling that our how-to video for matching transactions is a page-buried link… whoops!

PocketSmith is using Twitter to keep our users up-to-date with what is going on behind the scenes in real-time within the application. If you haven’t already, you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/PocketSmith (and if you would like to follow me personally, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/wigsgiw).

In order to get our tweets to display within PocketSmith, I investigated what options were available. Unfortunately for me, I spent a great deal of time on the first and second solutions, without knowledge of the third after a cursory glance at Twitter (I should have looked harder, but in reality I shouldn’t have had to. More on this later).

Twitter Method One - The Easy-ish Solution

This method was pretty quickly disregarded due to the API limits of Twitter of 70 requests per hour. There is a tasty Rails gem that allows all sorts of RESTful Twitter API calls and the like - twitter4r. Using it was a cinch; however as all we wanted to do was pull in tweets, it was complete overkill. And it took 1.5 seconds for a page to load with the requested tweets. Not ideal.

Twitter Method Two - The Hard Solution

The second option I went for was a bit of home-brew that involved parsing the public Twitter XML / RSS feed into something that was usable by our application. The advantage of this over the old method was that the API wasn’t used, and was basically a form of page scraping and transforming our tweets.

Using the Hpricot HTML parser gem for Rails, we were grabbing the RSS feed for our timeline and breaking up individual parts into an array to throw it into the view. I also included a check to see if the status “I’m ticking along quite nicely” was included, thereby removing the tweets from display - in the case we wanted to use Twitter just for important system messages.

Issues with this were that this made the Twitter feed nigh-on useless for people who wanted to keep up-to-date with PocketSmith outside of the application itself - i.e. people who actually use Twitter. In addition, if Twitter went down, PocketSmith would too (as the RSS feed was inaccessible) - although the strides in stability of Twitter meant this was nearly impossible to test, the theory was sound.

So I built in a check to ensure that a successful HTTP Response was received by Twitter before we did anything else, the theory was that this would fix the issue. So with this sorted, we got it live and all was well.

Until Twitter actually went down for the first ‘live’ test of what would happen in this situation. And it was bad.

So I removed tweets from the view, commented out the code and moved on to other things. We could solve this issue later. But I now knew how to parse things from Hpricot and check HTTP response headers. Learning = good.

Twitter Method Three - The Hand-Meet-Forehead Solution

A week ago I was perusing the settings for my personal Twitter account when I saw an innocuous link within the settings page muttering “You can also add Twitter to your site here”. Oh really?

I would go into details, however it was so drop-kick simple to set up that I won’t. So now we are up and running, with a total of 6 lines of code written and a couple of javascript files included. Can’t find the link within Twitter? I’m not surprised. It is here: http://twitter.com/badges.

Another post is coming about the marketing failure on Twitters behalf in the placement of this link, so I’ll save my rant for that.

However good news - PocketSmith does not go down with Twitter, and everyone is kept up-to-date. Success, finally

Few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Ben on Twitter about Social Media Press Release. At this time, I had no idea about what is Social Media Press Release all about. Off course I did study Marketing, Communication and PR at school but they did not really teach me about news ways of promoting a product, raise a profile or build a strong brand online. There are a lot of Marketing and PR concepts that can be applied to the online word. In fact, the principles of marketing are universal, only methodologies and tools are specific.

I am going to write two or three blog posts around the theme of Social Media Press Release. The objective is to report the results of our sets of experimentation. So what’s the fuzz about Social Media Press Release? First of all, Internet can be very powerful to spread a message. I am not talking about spamming, I am talking about leveraging social media to spread the word.

To be perfectly honest, PocketSmith does not have a marketing budget, the reason being we operate as lean as possible However, Everyday we use social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Delicious to communicate, share and publish about our activities. And these tools can be very powerful for a business and virtually free (but time consuming!). Here is a definition of Social Media from Wikipedia:“Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.” In other words, it is all about building networks through different channels online. In practice, here is what we are doing:

One of our first move has been to create a Facebook group for PocketSmith, and start using Twitter (@PocketSmith) to provide users with regular updates of patches and new features. Recently. I have decided to put my head around the blogsphere and its capacity to broaden messages and reach targeted readers.

I started by listing and selecting blogs about personal finance. Technorati has been a good tool to find relevant sites. I just finished contacting the first blogs two days ago. The idea is to let people having a play with the application and let them decide if they want to write about it.

I believe we have a lot to learn from bloggers who are dedicating a lot of their time engaging dialogue with people about ways to manage their money. Getting their feedback on our application is very valuable to us and we will listen to what they have to say very carrefully!

I will keep you updated on the next blog post about the results of this campaign

I’m highly inspired by the work of the Y-Combinator, and I think we’ve mentioned a few times how our principles of grassroots web entrepreneurism are derived in part from the essays of Paul Graham and the writings of the boys over at 37 Signals. A couple of months back I met Tim and Pierre-Em for drinks, and through the course of our conversation, we discussed the notion of establishing a network of web entrepreneurs here in Dunedin - and Pierre-Em came up with the name, The Distiller. We then pulled in James and Francois, and the five of us have been quietly working behind the scenes to make this happen. This also gelled very nicely with a conversation between  Julian Cox and I around developing a summer school programme for web entrepreneurs - and so, with some good timing and elbow grease, it all began to come together.

As a tiny new startup, we understand the rigours of making an impact on the world. I believe that the strength of a startup is in part defined by the company it keeps. We’ve had fantastic support from our friends, our users and our community - and we want to perpetuate and accelerate this flow of support and the attitude of sharing amongst other entrepreneurs in our field here in Dunedin. We’re learning a lot through our first venture, and we’re passionate about providing a framework and resources for web startups similar to ours to get from idea to prototype in three months or less, at a low cost.

We’re going to make this happen through The Distiller. Now we’ve got many plans we wish to execute under this umbrella, and relevant partnerships are already being set up - however like with PocketSmith, we needed to validate the initial concept with the market. Which brings us to our first meetup yesterday evening.

Distiller Meetup 1

Even though we only planned it at the Distiller High Council (you’d better believe it) meeting the Thursday prior, the turnout was much better than anticipated - around 40 people in all! It was really good to meet with the local crowd of young entrepreneurs, developers and designers, all passionate about what they wanted to do, and all enthusiastic about the notion of working together. I started off by explaining who we were and why we were gathered there; the other Distiller co-founders explained their backgrounds; then we opened the floor to all individuals present - and let me tell you this, there’re some great ideas out there just waiting to be built.

The feedback from the individuals present fit our initial assumptions - entrepreneurs were primarily looking for developers to help them bring their projects to fruition; other suggestions included marketing assistance, better alignment with the University and Polytech, connecting with bigger businesses, access to funding, and building a bigger profile for small Dunedin tech startups. All of which are right up our alley!

Thanks to those of you who attended, it was really great meeting you - and thanks for filling out the forms! The “Tell The Distiller about yourself” entries (which required, amongst other things, a drawing of oneself) were surprisingly entertaining. We’ll process them and get the community cranking.

Watch this space, it’s the beginning of great things to come.

Next Distiller Meetup is Thursday, November 13. Hope to see you there!

And by the interface I mean the interface in my head.

Developing an online software solution to an everyday problem means you need to look at the critical aspects of the brand being developed alongside the application.

What do we want this function to say? What do we want this design element to mean to our users? Does the look, feel or function of this little bit conflict with any of the other little bits that make up the whole? How do we want to communicate with our users through this interface, and how do we want them to communicate with us?

Without a physical product or presence, the application needs to clearly reveal what meaning the brand has - there are no other outlets for projection of brand values and meaning that you wholly control at the startup-infancy stage. The difficulty is in finding the clarity in that in amongst the mash of building new features. And having the design skills to portray the meaning, or intent, of the interface to the end user.

Because in a world where nothing is tangible in a physical sense, brand and function are inextricably intertwined in the web application space. One cannot exist without the other in a successful web application - completely unlike ‘true’ physical brands.

Last Monday we were sitting here at the PocketSmith Offices (read: my sunny lounge) thinking of how we can further pimp PocketSmith. We can’t be buying ad space on sites, we don’t have money for Google Adwords campaigns, nor the time or patience for circa-2001 affiliate marketing programs. Ultimately we decided that rather than pay to feature a large banner ad on a high-traffic site, we could just build the high-traffic site and put our own banner ad on it.

We started on this tangent of creating something that people could contribute to without any commitment at all - it is all too hard creating accounts, validating accounts, remembering passwords ad nauseum. Then we reeled that tangent back to what we are doing with PocketSmith - money and finances.

What if we built something extremely low-commitment, that tapped into people’s and the internet’s voyeuristic nature, which was fun for the user? Building something up that has to be viral in nature - after all, if we can’t spend on marketing PocketSmith, we certainly can’t spend on this little thing. And it must be related to PocketSmith, enabling people who are visiting this theoretical site to be at least primed to be interested in looking at a budgeting and financial management application.

From this spawned the idea for our brand new website - http://www.financialconfessions.net. The idea behind the site is that anyone can jump in and confess their financial sins in seconds - something stupid they spent their money on, something a little dishonest regarding money, or anything at all that they want to get off their chest.

Anyone can also respond to confessions - deeming whether the person needs to be hugged (e.g. getting caught up in an online auction and paying $100 for a small wooden figurine of a pig) or slapped (e.g. regrettably spending rent money on vast quantities of glittery, shiny objects). Then people can anonymously add comments to confessions, sharing their own experiences in a similar vein, or offering commiserations and reprimands.

So extremely simple and straight forward. This is reflected in the time-to-market for Financial Confessions as well - 7 days. Having said that, I bashed out the core functionality of the application in around 10 hours overnight. I love rails. However all the other important things (e.g. design, refining the feature set and functionality, getting the thing working in Internet Explorer) took the rest of the 6 days. And having said that, we also have this other little application and userbase to take care of in PocketSmith, so we weren’t exactly 100% focused on Financial Confessions for that period of time.

It is also worth mentioned here that the app is deployed on Heroku, meaning that deployment took all of… 6 seconds. Seriously. More on this later.

Anyway, this blog post marks the day after the launch of http://www.financialconfessions.net - jump in, check it out, and confess your financial sins.

Ooo, I do love a good agile environment.

We’ve been pretty busy getting our ducks in a row for the last few weeks. As a brief respite from all this startup stuff, I’ll tell you a little story about how a few years ago, my laptop was fixed by nature’s little mechanics.

James and I have had rough luck with our MacBook Pros to date, which leads me to wonder whether or not the standard of Apple’s manufacturing has slipped a good number of notches in these past few years. We love our Macs, but James had to send his in within the 14-day RMA period due to intermittent lines on the screen. And then of course, there was the beer incident, in which a cold brew was knocked into this RMA-ed machine, and much hilarity ensued.

I guess it was only a matter of time before something happened to mine - and sure enough, three months in, here I am working on James’ trusty 1.42GHz iBook. Coding and designing on 1024×768 is a humbling experience, but I am terribly fond of Tiger and how robust it is. Admittedly, Leopard has been disappointing on the stability front, and on average, application startup time just doesn’t seem as snappy as you’d expect on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo machine. 

My MacBook Pro is in for service due to a faulty keyboard and trackpad - an issue that debuted two weeks ago and became progressively worse by the day. The machine would wake from sleep without a working keyboard and trackpad! After some time it would come back, but it wasn’t until I found a post on the Apple support forums that I learned a quick fix for the issue.

Older MacBook Pros needed a keyboard firmware patch, but the newer ones seem to require a more holistic approach: shiatsu. Firm pressure applied to the area between the keyboard and trackpad, presumably to release some tension, the chi starts flowing, and the machine allows me to type again.

Of course, after a week of massaging my laptop, I start to think that this is an untenable situation. Especially when I’m not getting any backrubs in return. 

I digress. The above has nothing to do with nano-technology, but it helps put the story in perspective.

I may work my machine hard, but these three months are a blip in comparision to the service my other laptop, the original G4 Titanium Powerbook, has given me: over 7 years. Try to imagine a PC laptop that old which is of much use nowadays. In 2001, the Powerbook was way ahead of its time, with its sleek profile, Airport (few people knew what Wi-Fi was back then) and FireWire (I would use this to connect my Generation 1 10 Gig iPod to it later that year).

It would’ve been closer to three months than seven years had this first machine not been impervious to my clumsiness. That was how long it took before I knocked a half a bottle of V energy drink onto the keyboard, necessitating a quick power-off and a good amount of time flipped upside-down (both the laptop and myself). Fortunately the plastic membrane under the keyboard shielded the innards from the spill, and the Powerbook was up and running again in a couple of hours.

I joke that since then, the machine has run at twice the speed; but in reality, the problems began after most of the liquid had dried up.

V, like most energy drinks, is loaded with sugar. Sweet, sticky, syrupy sugar. And sure enough the next day, my keys began to stick to the bottom. You would depress a key and wait for a few seconds before it popped back up again. Great if you were a thoughtful writer, or if you had no arms and could only type with a pencil in your mouth. Or if you were both. For me, it rendered the computer pretty much unusable for the foreseeable future.

I tried many times to clean the area under the keys - believe me, I’m now very intimate with the delicate constructs of the original Powerbook keyboard. The sugar however had solidified into tiny gluey globules, gunking up the little hinges that facilitate the keys’ press action.  

It wasn’t until a fateful afternoon that summer that a solution presented itself to me. It was a hot afternoon in Subang Jaya, and I’d decided to crack open the Powerbook to do some work. The good thing about 36-degree (C) days was that the sugar melted a bit, making the keys more usable.

I left the machine on a table and popped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Upon my return some minutes later, lo and behold: ants. Little black ants. Thousands upon thousands of ants in a trail, leading up to the Powerbook, and sure enough - into the keyboard, where they swarmed about under the keys in an alarmingly frantic fashion.

All I could do was stare.

Shooing them away didn’t work. Blowing on the keyboard didn’t deter them from their task. I opted against reaching for a can of Mortein as I couldn’t bear the thought of the oil, poison and dead bodies in my Powerbook, not to mention a thousand ant-souls perished by my hand. So I did the only thing I could - I left the ants to it and went outside for the afternoon.

When I got back, there was not a single ant to be seen. They’d sensed the sugar from what must have been over twenty feet away, come in, cleaned up, and left. With surgical precision, no less.

And as for my Powerbook? The keyboard worked like it was brand new again. And it’s been perfect ever since.

That is, until I spilled half a glass of Riesling into it earlier this year. Now that finally paralysed half of the keys - but by then, many generations of Powerbook had come and gone; I found a replacement on Trademe for $25. 

And that’s the story of how an army of little ants fixed my laptop. I wonder if there’s a business model in this?

Epilogue. The G4 Powerbook is still going strong, and while it’s had plenty of travel and adventures involving bumps, falls and cats, it has never failed me. At 400MHz however, it’s reached the end of its OS X upgrade lifecycle (which is probably a blessing, considering how flaky Leopard can be). But its low power consumption means a 4.5 hour battery life with a 74 Watt-hour aftermarket NewerTech battery.

Ok coming back to business after this piece of soap opera

At the beginning of the week, we had the opportunity to demonstrate PocketSmith in front of 7 staff members from a local branch of a bank. Following this appointment, we took the time to map out where are we now and most importantly, where do we want to be in the future. Setting up goals in the various areas of the business helped us to visualize our plan of actions over the coming weeks (and make us realize how much we have on our plate ahah

Jas and I have now 30 days before flying to Malaysia. Prior to our departure, we have plenty of work to do to, including:

• Keep improving the product. We have received tens of feedback from people requesting new features or improvements. We are considering all of them and trying our best to come back to everybody.
• Enhance user experience by introducing new support tools (a FAQ is on its way) and replying to individual inquiries. We are also trying to use community based app (such as Facebook) to let people dialog about their experience. It is still very experimental but we will eventually get there!
• Share our story with lots of people! I will be in Auckland for few days before going overseas (from the 12 to the 15 of Novembre). I will meet Ben Young (the same Ben from the previous story)  and hopefully some people from the IceHouse.

Plus a tons of other tasks/missions that are waiting for us!

I am pleased we took this time together as it encouraged us to re-focus our energy and time toward measurable goals. Go PocketSmith!

So Jas and I had a talk…

It started with Jas telling me how what I do is awesome for a 23 years old French guy in New Zealand. Cool. But I don’t want people to think what I do is good because I am French and English is not my mother tongue. So I asked him “what do you think my job is within the team?”. I didn’t really liked the answer so I wouldn’t report it here ahah But anyway, the fact is it doesn’t seem to be clear what I do for the business. In order to give you an idea of what I do, let’s use the story in my previous post. I wrote down a comment that wasn’t representative of PocketSmith. So what is PocketSmith? How do we promote it outside? What words do we use to describe what we do? Answers to these questions could be found by having a group discussion focused on PR (Public Relations). Fact: Two weeks ago, I organized a PR meeting. James and Jas were too busy to bother. Too bad

This story illustrates perfectly what I am supposed to do: Put some structure around the business (sounds familiar? I am the one without the huge development load. I can focus on the big picture and:

• Keep an eye on our finances. Alert my partners if we need to re-capitalize the business. Make sure we can pay our bills on time (ok at the moment, it is pretty easy cause we don’t spend much
• Formalize our strategy to make sure we are all at the same page and we don’t miss any opportunity. My work provides a guideline for our startup.
• Do some researches of our competitive landscape, potential partners in New Zealand and overseas and press people to contact.
• Provide a structure to keep track of : Nb of PocketSmith users, Feedbacks sent, Bugs found… Basically I want the team to be able to find any information related to PocketSmith within a minute.
• Organize and update the “To Do List” (we use a free version of Basecamp) that Jas and James can rely on.
• …

There are a lot of problems associated with these missions. First of all, It is very “underground”. It is not as rewarding as developing a cool web app from scratch. Moreover, being a young Operations Manager for a tech startup is not an easy place to be in. Basically, I am trying to provide the structure to grow the business faster whereas we have adopted the “entrepreneurs mindset”. Working for a startup means having NO business structure and NO business processes. And that is what makes a startup attractive: flexibility. The challenge for me is then to find the right balance and take advantage of strenghts from both worlds.

In my mind, I am building a wall. If I fail to build strong fondations, the wall will collapse one day. I don’t want that to happen. Jas and James are my brothers. I got their back!

We are so busy now that we have to “stream” your work, i.e. keep working on things to do. James and Jas are even busier as they have to keep building the product and ensure its maintenance. My job is then to make sure we are not only reactive but proactive…I guess I have to stand up and Just Do It…

Two months ago, I wrote a blog post with the title “Five things to know and do when you’re the co-founder of a web startup while not being a developer nor a designer“. At this time, I was confident my energy and my skills would bring value to the business. Recently, I felt that my own business partners who are also my friends and brothers did not see the real value of my work. Let me illustrate my feeling with this small story:

A week ago, I got an email from StartUP Magazine introducing the New Zealand Top 10 Internet Startups 2008. I forward it to the goodguys (Jas and James). No reply. Few days later, I decided to check what it is all about. In fact, StartUP partnered with Squidoo to implement a voting system that let people register to their site and cast their vote for their favourite startup (You can vote here). Sweet! I registered PocketSmith and announced to the team we are part of this exciting adventure

• First issue: Jason reported to me that the link to PocketSmith in the list is broken. And we cannot edit or even delete the entry. Damn. I contact Ben Young (on a Saturday night) by mail asking him to delete the entry so we can create a new one with the right URL. Thanks someone in the sky, Ben is super reactive and nice and we got it sorted the next day (after few other unexpected changes that had to be made - Ben, I own you a bottle of Champagne Unfortunately, we already had sent an email to our users so we missed a chance to encourage them to vote for us…

• Second issue: I had a look at random comments at the Squidoo NZ Top 10 web startups and decided to post a nice comment to give people an idea about where we come from and what we do. A comment let by Clairednz “Event Finder, Xero, Rock Star Recipes, Menu Mania, Get Staffed, AliveWorld all look to be over 2 year bracket….” kind of encouraged me to make my post young and dynamic. Unfortunately, it was judged too enthusiastic by my business partners.

• Third issue: Jason sent me an email explaining why I should change or delete the post because it is not representative of PocketSmith. Don’t get me wrong. Jason is absolutely right. I do need to be very careful about what we say in public. However, the way I was told I made a mistake was just too much. So Jason told me not to take it personally (easy and James agreed. Cool. Nice way to finish a working Sunday. I decided to call for the day and come back home. Sent an email to the guy. Got a reply (wootwoot!) by James saying I should come onboard the day after cause I need to “put some structure around my work” Damn they did not understand anything… That was just too much. I came back home without knowing what to do…

This morning, I woke up quite late and started working from home. I did not really want to see the guys. I just had a chat with Jason who, as usual, understand what I feel, and told me I will pick me up to have a coffee in St Clair. Honestly, it is the first time I almost say no to Jas… Anyway, Let’s have a coffee and talk…

If you want to know what did we discuss about and if we solve this issue, read my new post “Just Do It’