But that backfires when tight focus is used as an excuse for sloppiness. One thing taking all of the attention at the expense of all the other small things can backfire — specifically, when a user doesn’t have a well-formed understanding of the product or service and is searching for cues.

Small things matter a lot

I recently opened up a bag of arugula, that bitter green of haute cuisine and yuppie punchlines. As I was about to pile it haphazardly on plates, I spied a single wilted leaf. This prompted me to dig further — what if I’d bought a bad bag? What if it had spoiled in the fridge? Sure enough, closer inspection revealed others. Even the slightest imperfection reinforced my perception that something was amiss.

This happens every time your users see a mistake.

As product managers, we use the application or product we make almost every day. We’re going through a normal, familiar pattern. We know how we’re supposed to use it. We’re focused on the task and process. We’re not judging quality, or trying to decide whether we like it.

On the other hand, new users are in a different mental state.  They are exploring and evaluating – meaning they’re open to even the tiniest suggestion that something’s wrong. They’re searching for cues, and incredibly receptive to new information

New users are open to suggestion

In Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis, the hypnotist can often make a subject enter a state of increased receptivity to new ideas by interrupting an existing pattern of behavior. Confused by the sudden interruption, they become unusually receptive to suggestions. One form of this is a Handshake Interrupt which “establishes a waiting set, an expectancy.”

Have a look at this to see what I’m talking about; it happens around 2 minutes in.

The point here is that with no existing patterns your new users are in a different mental state.  Until they’ve formed an opinion of your product’s usefulness, they’ll be looking for reasons why it’s not for them. Tiny mistakes suggest to them other problems, and ultimately, to dismiss you outright. And with little else to go on, they’re likely to rely too much on these perceptions (known as an Anchoring Trap — thanks, Alex!).Fresh eyes during usability testing are vital for just this reason. Similarly, small errors such as bad punctuation, improperly resized graphics, backgrounds that don’t quite line up, and inconsistent font sizes — shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly. Buy your most critical Font Nerd a pizza and listen carefully to their criticisms. New users will derive similar impressions from your product or service.

This is the wrong question to ask. It presumes that I (not the expert on hair) have a preference that’s relevant.

(Sure, we’re creatures of habit, so we may well have a preference, and hey, we’re paying for it so we get to choose. But bear with me.)

What a stylist should be asking is questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and “how do your co-workers dress?” Perhaps they’d ask, “Do you have time to towel and blowdry it in the morning?” Or maybe they should wonder, “Do you play sports like wrestling in which hair length is a factor? Are you on a team that needs helmets?”

A good stylist would try to discern a pattern of needs (which the customer knows a great deal about) and then applying their domain expertise (cutting hair) to choose what’s best. In many companies, the people in charge of product direction are like stylists. Which causes lousy product decisions.

I believe that you shouldn’t ask a customer what they want. We’ve all heard stories of innovation — from the Sony Walkman to the Dodge Caravan — that were rejected by consumers. On the other hand, companies like Apple, who famously omit focus groups from their design process, do well.

That doesn’t mean there’s no need to survey. It’s just that you shouldn’t survey for what people want. That’s boring. You should survey for what people need, which they often can’t articulate. Companies that ask their customers what they want fail to innovate. It’s a problem famously described in The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen

In Apple’s case, this means looking at the emergence of broadband; the preference for buying songs one at a time; the frustration with tapes and CDs that don’t store enough music; the broader adoption that can be gained through easy user interfaces; and the feasibility of an Internet client/player storefront.

Maybe that’s why the folks in Cupertino have such tolerance for weird hairstyles.

There are ten distinct stages of defining, testing, and launching a web application. Each stage has some tools you can use, involves different people, and focuses on different kinds of data collection.

If you go through these stages in the wrong order, you’ll waste time and money. Do them in the right order—using some of the tools we’ve found here to help you along the way—and you’ll be much more likely to launch the right product at the right time and make it easy for your customers to access you.

Concept

In the concept phase, it’s important not to be constrained by what’s possible. Avoid technology; instead, focus on needs, how you’ll make money, and how you’ll get adoption. In fact, John Stokes of Montrealstartup told me about a Washington, DC-based startup incubator that insists its participants write no code for the first month of their three-month term.

Workflow

This is where you stitch together the concept. I’ve mentioned Productplanner, and I’ll do it again here. Ideally, you want a big, blank wall with lots of drawnings of screens. I’ve even done this with push-pins and colored yarn to represent links.

While this might seem awfully old-fashioned, there’s something organic and accessible about a wall full of screens to represent navigation. You can put post-its of ideas on the various pages, and if put new designs atop old ones so people can quickly leaf through prior designs.

Wireframes

Once you know the concept and workflow, it’s time to refine the wireframes a bit. Tools like Balsamiq (thanks to Austin for the pointer) or Axure make this easier, but you can use Powerpoint in a pinch.

You can use your wireframes to do “paper prototyping” where you ask people who aren’t familiar with the app to “use” it, moving their finger as if it were a mouse.

The result of all this work is a set of requirements documents that describe the product. Then developers go off and code furiously.

QA

Once you have code — either an individual component or the whole application — it’s time to do QA. You should have a list of all the things each page is supposed to do, things like “when you click the login button it takes you to the home page.” The initial QA testing plan is where you check each of these things. It’s a test to see whether the code does what the requirements documents said it would.

Some people rely on spreadsheets for this stuff, but if your app is of any size, you probably need to integrate it with a bug tracking system like Fogbugz, Trac, Jira, or something similar. Ultimately, you’ll write scripts to run these tests automatically and that will become your regression testing system.

Don’t forget to run browser plug-ins like Firebug to see what’s loading slowly and what’s missing. Two great services for checking page performance are Webpagetest and Website optimization.

Unusability

If you know the app works, you still don’t know whether it’s unusable. Unusability testing looks for dumb things — places where everyone gets stuck. While you tried to eliminate these back in the Workflow phase, the reality is that you won’t find all the problems until you actually watch people using it.

The goal here is to validate the assumptions of the requirement document. Usually, you want to do an unusability test, then go fix what you found, then do another one. So don’t get five people in all at once to do testing — iterate. Test users are precious.

Set the test user up at a machine, and project a copy of their screen on a wall for all to see. If you like, you can use screen recording software like Camtasia. Encourage the test subject to talk about what they’re doing. And — most importantly — no coaching. It will be incredibly frustrating to watch someone try and use the app, oblivious to the big, red button saying “click me” in the middle of the screen. Bite your tongue. Watch them suffer. It’ll make the development team that much more eager to fix the problem and try again.

Also be sure to vary the browser, monitor, OS, and if possible connection speed. You may find certain resolutions make buttons invisible, or that when the connection is slow users will click something repeatedly.

Usability

While unusability was about finding dumb mistakes, usability testing is about making sure your target market can use your app or site properly. You’ll need to get users that represent your target demographic in. This means the same age, gender, and online experience, ideally from similar industries. If you’re building a site for truck drivers, get truck drivers to test it.

It’s harder to find targeted testers like this, which is why we did unusability testing first — we don’t want to waste our targeted testers on dumb mistakes we could find ourselves.

Situational

Once targeted testers can use the app properly under the comparatively ideal conditions of your office, go and watch them using it in their place of work.

This means it’s time for a field trip. If they’re truckers who will access the application from a pay terminal in a truckstop, go watch them doing it there. You’ll learn about other constraints such as noise, lighting, privacy, distractions, and time limits that weren’t obvious.

Alpha

Once you’ve completed situational testing and done the best you can, it’s time to roll out your stuff to alpha testers. These are people who expect problems, but want to try it anyway. At this point, instrumentation is essential. Let me be as blunt as possible on this point: It’s stupid to roll out software without analytics. You simply can’t know what worked and what didn’t.

Google Analytics is the de facto standard here. Install it, and use it to figure out what people are using and what they’re not. This tool can also show you where people are clicking, but I’m partial to the heat charts and A/B testing capabilities of Crazyegg for this stuff. You’ll augment your analytics with other tools as you get closer to release.

Alpha testing is about getting data in the aggregate, rather than from individuals, and using this data to improve the app. In the alpha phase, you probably know many of the users and can solicit feedback from them directly. Remember to train them to take a screenshot whenever they have a problem, and to send it to you as part of their report; this will help to identify client-side problems and to reproduce issues.

Beta

Beta is a broader release of alpha code. With alpha, you knew there were issues. With beta, you think it’s ready for release, but want to be sure. Because a beta will go to a larger audience, you probably want to include more feedback tools in the form of services like Kampyle or iPerceptions, or forms you embed yourself from someone like Wufoo, Surveymonkey or Google Docs’ Forms.

If you want to replay some user sessions with a relatively lightweight service, check out Clicktale. Other products like Tealeaf do this on a more industrial scale, as well as fixing other blind spots in your monitoring.

You need to worry about scale and performance, too. Of course, I’m partial to Coradiant when it comes to user experience monitoring, but there are lots of other good products to keep an eye on web performance. You’ll need a synthetic testing tool like those from Gomez, Keynote, Alertsite, Webmetrics, Pingdom, and others.

Release

Finally, you’re releasing the product. At this point, your focus should be on intentional misuse — someone trying to break the application or hack their way in — or on error reporting. You’ll be using performance management tools (to guarantee uptime and responsiveness) and analytics tools (to optimize conversions.) For smaller companies, something like Clicky is a good complement to Google Analytics as it provides more drill-down to individual users. But if you’re looking to do more complex things, you’ll be after Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, or similar tools.

Now ignore some of what I just said

These stages all need to happen, and in an ideal world they would.

Sometimes, though, business priorities will require that you launch before you’re done. That’s fine; just be sure to worry about usability, unusability, and situational use even after launch.

I recently overheard a VC say “if you’re not embarrassed by your application when you launch, you waited too long to launch it.” While that’s not true for every kind of application, it’s certainly a good way to get feedback fast and to create a sense of urgency. And for rapid prototyping, you may combine some of these steps.

So take the phases with a pinch of salt; they’re not hard-and-fast steps prior to a release, but they all need to be considered. Following them will ensure a better final product that customers adopt more, use more, and are ultimately more likely to pay for.

Normally, I try to keep this blog focused on startups. But I wanted to share some of what I saw while there; I believe it holds some important lessons for entrepreneurs as well as a few guidelines for how to run your businesses in the coming drought.

On my arrival last week, I walked past Lehman Brothers mid-meltdown. Town cars were parked three deep, and suited executives with confidence-inspiring grey hair fled the guarded doors into the safe embrace of stretch Lincolns.

The rank and file had a different fate, however. Bewildered middle managers, identical but for the splash of color around their necks, walked blinking into the bright sunlight. Satellite trucks from the major networks were parked across the street, their cameras trained on these now-unemployed workers, hoping for a tear, a dropped box of office supplies, or a soundbite for the evening news.

But I’m not sure the decay sank in. Every conversation I overheard that week had something to do with the meltdown, but most of them looked at its silver linings.

• At Interop, buyers seemed undeterred by the market fallout — after all, it meant record numbers of trades filling their networks, which meant bigger machines and more tools to manage them. Spikes in traffic are good news for virtualization companies, too.
• Web2Expo’s startups weren’t fazed, and finances were seldom on their minds. Web startups are valued more on aspirations and eyeballs than cold, hard dollars. Built atop pay-as-you-go cloud computing, these ventures are less dependent on large injections of capital than they were a few years ago and can often be launched from a Macbook, a coffee shop, or a dorm room.
• Buttoned-down hardware architects and pony-tailed Quants roamed the crowded halls of the Roosevelt Hotel at the High Performance on Wall Street conference. There, exhibitors like Microsoft, Cray, Rapidmind, HP, Sun, and dozens of boutique hardware companies promised to squeeze microseconds out of banks’ automated trading systems.

Ironically, these are the very systems that turned complex derivatives into a financial house of cards and allowed deregulated banks to lend many times their worth at unrealistically low rates. If there’s one thing I learned last week, it was how much banks depend on technology to make money. Here’s a quick lesson I got late one night in a bar from a colleague who should know:

For every dollar a bank has, it can lend out several dollars to others. This is based on the thinking that not everyone wants their money back at the same time. If they did, you’d have the kind of run on the bank that triggered the great depression.

The ratio of money held to money lent — the leverage — is therefore key to the bank’s profits. Banks that can demonstrate that they analyze risk well are allowed more leverage, so they have tens of thousands of computers crunching numbers. Greater oversight means more strident restrictions on overlending, and as a result, more investment in risk analysis.

The TV networks weren’t helping matters, either. They could have explained deregulation, or lobbying, or the banking system. But none talked about Teapot Dome, or Eisenhower’s rant on the military-industrial complex, or the abandonment of the gold standard, or the cross-party Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (all of which, IMHO, are required reading for an informed electorate this year.)

Instead, many news stations furiously pointed their fingers at a political party, a natural disaster, a religion, or an industry rather than taking a step back and looking at the big picture. This is a tragedy: If any city has the media clout to explain things, it’s this one.

New York is media central, and most companies there pride themselves on their openness. Walk up to NBC, or CBS, or ESPN, and you can stroll their historic properties or watch a show being filmed.

Not so with Fox News: The windows are opaqued, affording no glimpse of goings-on to curious passersby. You can’t cross their courtyard, and a lone guard intercepts people who stray onto their property or take pictures. Rows of heavy concrete “flower pots” make the place look more like a threatened embassy than a News Corporation.

The economics of New York may be changing a little, too. Even the stratospherically wealthy are tightening their Gucci belts a little; one story talked of how a socialite was forgoing her birthday-present facelift in favor of a more modest Botox treatment.

Meanwhile, most citizens seem oblivious to how this all affects them. Frankly, I’m surprised everyone isn’t withdrawing all their money from certain banks that dabbled too much in sub-prime mortgages — but for some reason, that hasn’t happened yet. Yet venerated brands like Washington Mutual are so bereft of assets that nobody’s bidding for them, forcing bailout engineers to step in and take over bad debt and bureaucracy, turning the free-market US into what is — at least temporarily — one of the largest socialized governments in the world.

The clothing store in the front of the Lehman Brothers building said it all.

As I left the city this morning, delegates were filing in for the Clinton Global Initiative, which aims to ease the ills of the world by encouraging its leaders and captains of industry to help out. Across the city, at the UN, George W. Bush was giving his final address to the nations of the world, while Iran’s president Ahmadinejad waited to take the stage later in the day.

With Times Square thronging around us, my Iranian cab driver and I drank in the events of the week and listened to the speech. I looked up at the landmark Lehman Brothers sign to our left.

Normally, the Rednod blog is about startups. This time, it’s about shutdowns. The world’s finances are in a flat spin, and America is on the cusp of an election that will decide much of the next century (this excellent piece from Worldchanging is well worth your attention on the matter, particularly if you’re planning on selling technology to Americans.)

If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s never been more important to focus on the fundamentals: Getting to revenue quickly, finding a niche that sustains market ups and downs, being frugal with spending and questioning every dollar, avoiding debt, and waiting as long as possible before diluting your cap table or bringing on investors that aren’t in it for the long haul. IPOs are nowhere in site, and running on your own fuel indefinitely is a prudent decision.

We’re watching large public companies — indeed, entire industries, from housing to travel to finance — collapse. For startups, this is indeed the best and worst of times.

I’ve been talking to several participants about what worked and why. I’m going to try and share those here, though it’s silly to try and capture the zeitgeist of an event that was as much about participants and venue as any kind of organization. It’s a long read, as much for others to see what worked as it is for me to remember what worked when it comes time to plan the next one (and yes, there will definitely be a next one. If you want in, mail me.)

I was lucky enough to get in front of crowds early, first at university and later as the policy-based networking guy for 3Com. But it was when I started presenting and organizing for Interop (which is coming up this week in New York) that I really saw how events ran. There’s a lot of organization behind the scenes that makes things run smoothly.

But the conference world is changing. I think this is a reflection of marketing in general (Mitch Joel does a great job explaining this.) Broadcast marketing is long gone, and good marketing these days is an interaction, a dialogue between marketer and audience, often on a personal and individual level. So the traditional talking-head-on-a-podium model is boring: If I wanted that, I’d just download it.

As a result, many of the conferences I’m involved with try to mix it up. Panels are the most obvious way, but it’s audience participation that’s most effective. The Unconference series of events, of which I’ll be running one in New York this week, are a good example of this. The “camp” movement (no, not that camp) including Barcamp, Startupcamp, and Cloudcamp, is a self-organizing event that has nearly no structure.

Here’s what I’m finding worked at Bitnorth. Some of this won’t apply elsewhere (we weren’t trying to sell anyone anything, for one thing.) And some of it might be a bit controversial. Sorry.

Just enough structure.

This is key. Most people aren’t leaders. Not that they can’t lead, but rather, they’re expecting some form of guidance. At Unconference, we provide several topics (cloud, social networks, mobility) and themes (ROI, open platforms, security) and then let people debate them. This is usually enough to start things off.

At Bitnorth, we had a format (some speakers and panels, interlaced with audience participation.) You need to walk the line between telling people what the topic is without flipping on the passive bit in most people’s heads that says, “okay, I’m being served, I don’t need to participate.

Plan early, plan often.

When we started thinking about Bitnorth it was back in April. People told us we were daft. We still left things so late we couldn’t get the entire building to ourselves. If there’s one thing Interop showed me, it’s that you can’t start too early. At New York’s Interop this week we’ll be planning next May’s content. Had we not started planning and marketing the event in April, we wouldn’t have filled up the space we had or had nearly as interesting a group of attendees.

The girls factor.

This is the observation most likely to get me labeled a misogynist. But it bears saying, particularly at a technology event. So here goes: Don’t make the event a sausage-fest. Early on, some of the women involved in planning said they didn’t want this to be a technology-for-technology’s-sake event. We tried to make sure there were women at the conference. And this made a huge difference to the chemistry.

Men (who, unfortunately, continue to dominate many conferences) behave in three distinct ways on a camping trip, and this plays out at conferences to a degree.

1. If there are only men attending, they’ll try to burn something or blow something up. This is just par for the course: We can’t go kill the pig, so we’re going to play with fire instead. It often results in injuries or much rejoicing; sometimes both.
2. If there are single men and women attending, there will be posturing and preening, and lots of attention lavished on the women. Then, around 11 PM, couples will mysteriously vanish. The next morning, neither party will want to talk much, and the mood will be broken.
3. If there are men and women, but most of them are in relationships, then the discourse tends to be interactive and more cerebral — less fire-breathing, less swagger. IMHO this was a balance we achieved at Bitnorth that made for a less-geeky, more-conversational event.

You could consider this sexist (and I don’t want to put lipstick on a conference.) But my point is conferences are made up of men and women, and the tone of the conference is heavily influenced by their interactions. Men are dolts and like it or not this changes how things go.

Keep them wanting more

Bitnorth lasted Friday night to Sunday noon. Most of the feedback I received was, “make it three days!” or “add more Birds of a Feather sessions.” If we’d had more content, I think folks would be talking about it less. We also didn’t want to dry up our creative reserves. If people leave wishing for more, it’s likely they’ll return.

Schedule flexibility

We had no idea how things would go. We had a panel of precocious kids (which was hysterical) that was supposed to last half an hour, and we let it run a whole hour. The ability to adjust the schedule mid-conference was great.

This also worked out when it came time to adjust the order of Short Bits: If things were getting too geeky, I could swap out the order of presentations on a board near the front and steer the tone of the discussions. Gone are the rigid conference calendars (which, of course, wreaks havoc with things like keynotes.)

Scheduling usually happens because you’re paying someone to be there (like the massage therapists we had on Sunday) or because you have multiple “tracks” and let people switch between them. This is almost always a recipe for disaster, as it constrains the discussion.

Add variety through brevity, not parallelism

This is a bit of a strange observation. If you want to get twenty ideas across in one day, the usual approach is to split it up into three tracks with hour-long sessions. At Bitnorth, we sliced things up the other way: Get people to convey a simple idea in 10 or 15 minutes. If you don’t like the topic, you can change quickly. It’s conferencing for the ADD generation. I think having a single track, but keeping the presentations short, worked to our advantage. It made it easier to adjust scheduling and also kept the content varied.

If they speak, they won’t grandstand

At a lot of conferences, I see someone in the audience grandstanding or posturing. I see it most on panels, when one panelist wants to monopolize the topic. Nothing kills a panel faster than five people agreeing with one another and repeating the same platitude.

By having each person present something they cared about, they all knew they’d have the chance to speak their minds. They got to put their best, most valued foot forward. That made it easy to start a conversation about the topic, since they’d already given the preamble. This sentiment is well understood in the Web2.0 conference world. Foocamp says,

Be Prepared to Demo or Speak: Foo Camp is as much fun as participants make it. Be prepared to lead or participate in a session, ask interesting questions, show off what you’re working on, and generally leave your mark on the weekend. It’s a little like Burning Man in that there are no spectators, only participants. People sometimes ask “what can I do to be invited back” and your best bet is to make a (positive) impression by engaging and presenting.

Mix fun and work

CAMMAC has had weddings for a hundred. They’ve never run out of cold beer before us. 25% of the budget went to Saturday’s party, and that doesn’t include the Wii, table tennis, campfire, or poker tournament (all proceeds to Kiva.) Sunday, we had guided hangover meditation and chair massage. ’nuff said.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours

The other thing that a participative conference does is make people comfortable presenting. If they know everyone will be participating somehow, they’re more likely to be comfortable. I had people who gave great presentations come over and apologize, saying, “I never present. I’m not very good at it.” They rocked! Others, who sat out the speaking stuff, also said they’d present next time because they saw what it was like.

It was important for us to have other ways people could help. Some folks worked on promotion, or logistics, or even running Birds of a Feather discussions. But once a few people got up and spoke, everyone realized that it was a very informal model.

I believe most people have a fear of speaking, but it’s a fear of speaking on a topic they don’t care about, behind an austere podium, in a big room, wearing a suit, staring at unreceptive strangers. Give them a subject they’re passionate about, a willing audience in scruffy clothes, and only ten minutes, and they’re fine.

Surveys

Always follow up shortly after the event to find out what worked and what didn’t. I always ask three questions after an event:

• What would you change?
• What would you add?
• What would you not change?

That third one’s the kicker, and people often forget to ask it. With Bitnorth, a resounding number of participants said, “keep the ‘Disconnect to Reconnect’” theme. Which was important, and brings me to my next point.

Be where you are

You see, the music camp we were at had barely any network connectivity (one satellite terminal) and no cellphones. People were astonishingly, unusually present. I fretted about the lack of connectivity for a long time, even going so far as to have Dan Koffler from Syntenic set up a local intranet with a file server and Wifi.

You know what happens when you take away people’s networks? They focus on the people they’re with. It was great.

Have a loose theme

This year at Bitnorth, we had the theme of “the other 99 percent.” The idea was to look at how the rest of the world — not just Arrington’s 54,000 friends — used technology, and how it was changing their lives. If people strayed from the topic, we didn’t care. It was more of a subject for discussion, and it guided some of our invited speakers (Jean-Francois Dumoulin on bringing broadband to the population of Northern Quebec, and Tamu Townsend on using social networks to promote awareness of bone marrow donation.)

Too often, conferences are about a thing (“mobile telephony” or “green technology”) without a human aspect. Humanizing the topic so people talk about the consequences (“life when we’re always connected” or “is technology the planet’s friend or enemy?”) makes the conversation more personal and more engaging.

Everything’s intertwingled

Several people pointed out how inter-related things were at the conference. Chinese invention of movable type, and encryption.  Podcasting, and audio design for movies. Broadband in the arctic, and the lousy performance of social networks over dialup. Investment communities in Dubai, and entrepreneurs in the third world. And so on. Everyone found connections to other subjects.

To me, this is the mark of a successful conference. As organizer, you have an important role to play as a match-maker, connecting subjects and people to one another.

Getting the right people there

It takes a lot of faith in your participants to run an informal conference. But you also don’t want to be elitist and only invite your friends. I think Bitnorth lucked out on three fronts.

1. People put some skin in the game — $300 for a weekend, all expenses paid, was a bit of money, not so much that it was prohibitive but enough that they bail at the last minute
2. The facilities weren’t exotic. The food, in particular, was very much what we remember from school cafeterias. The first night was muggy, and all our feet hung off the beds. So if you weren’t prepared to be a bit scruffy, this wasn’t for you.
3. People were expected to have something they care about vocally. This meant many people who would have just shown up, didn’t.

So once the dust settles on conference season, we’ll get to work on the next one, with some of these observations in mind.

I was at Web2Expo earlier this year, and Website Magazine (pictured below) was exhibiting. I find this tremendously confusing. I imagine the target market of people who like to read about the web on paper is roughly the same as the market of people whose assistants print their e-mail for them.

But what I find most curious is that web analytics provide so much better data on the effectiveness of advertising, it’s almost irresponsible to use print media to reach people. And since magazines usually make their money from print advertising and sponsorship, that’s got to be a losing game.

It’s not going to happen for you. Most of the time, people won’t work to try and understand a new approach. And no amount of education is going to change that.

This is a fundamental challenge for entrepreneurs. We’re deep in the product, conjuring up reasons why it will win in order to attract investment and keep our employees motivated. But just because the rank and file is drinking the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean the rest of the world will.

There’s a great example of this, and it’s not just a small company example. It happened to the word processing industry.

Back in university, I worked in the school’s computer lab to pay for some of my beer.^*

The curriculum for non-comp sci students included three products: DBaseIII for databases, Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets, and Wordperfect for word processing. Of these, the one I had the hardest time explaining to people was, surprisingly, Wordperfect.

People would type their documents out using the monospaced, 80-characters-per-line screen. Then they’d print the document out on our fancy new laser printer in proportional, Times Roman font and everything would look wrong. They’d type a line of text and hit [enter]. Sometimes, when the line of text was nearly 80 characters, they wouldn’t hit [enter]. The result was a ragged printout, wasted paper, and a confused look on their faces. Try as I might, it was abundantly clear that people simply weren’t able to grasp the concept.

Remember, these are mostly commerce students. And they were stumped more by text formatting than by building and managing desktop databases. Not understanding proportional fonts was a common point of confusion, and there are lots of pages devoted to explaining it. The concept of hitting [enter] at the end of a line was so ingrained, so obvious, that they couldn’t grok it. We’d tell them, “only hit enter at the end of a paragraph.” Nothing.

Today, this isn’t a problem. It’s not because we all understand monospaced fonts and paragraph markup. It’s because Microsoft came along and decided we shouldn’t need to learn about all that. And in doing so, they came to dominate the word processing market.

Microsoft had a word processor, too. And while very early versions used monospaced fonts, they were quick to embrace graphics mode (albeit without the right fonts) even prior to Windows. Word was What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG.) No more wondering if what you’ve typed will come out right: You can just see it.

“Word was the first application with such features as the ability to display bold and italics text on an IBM PC … Although MS-DOS was a character-based system, Microsoft Word was the first word processor for the IBM PC that showed actual line breaks and typeface markups such as bold and italics directly on the screen while editing, although this was not a true WYSIWYG system because available displays did not have the resolution to show actual typefaces. Other DOS word processors, such as WordStar and WordPerfect, used simple text only display with markup codes on the screen or sometimes, at the most, alternative colors.” (Wikipedia)

Using graphics for text seemed like a silly idea to many people at the time. Remember that word processing wasn’t a common skill back then; often, it was the domain of secretaries and administrators. Microsoft’s graphics-based word processor was sluggish, often taking seconds to catch up with fast typists. Professional typists, trained on Wordstar, considered word processing a “trade secret”: If you knew how to tweak a document’s arcane “Reveal codes” mode (analogous to editing HTML directly) then you were the wizard of the new steno pool.

But WYSIWYG dramatically increased the total addressable market for word processing. Instead of forcing customers to learn new paradigms that contradicted with what they already knew, Microsoft did the hard work for them. Graphics caught up, Word became more usable, and Microsoft won. They didn’t just make it easy to grasp: They actively courted Wordperfect users with a “wordperfect mode” blue screen and key mappings.

A great overview of the Microsoft and Apple battle talks about this:

In 1991 Word Perfect released Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS and Word Perfect 5.1 for Windows. Word Perfect was the biggest application of its day, but the company failed to adapt quickly enough to the popularity of the GUI … the famous but complicated ‘Reveal Codes’ feature which was rendered essentially obsolete by WYSIWYG editing.

Within a few years, Microsoft crushed everyone else. Here’s a chart from UT Dallas that shows the dominance of Word for Windows and how Word for DOS paved the way:

You may be thinking this just proves Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, but the UT Dallas piece does a good job of refuting this.

Microsoft Word was a superior product at a time when consumers were rethinking their adoptions  …

In 1994, Novell bought Wordperfect for $1.4B. Two years later, it was sold to Corel for roughly $124M (some components were kept and some sold, making the actual amount hard to value.) Today, Corel’s entire market cap is $237M, less than one time annual revenues and just 64% of its estimated value.

Ouch.

Clearly, you want to be Word, not Wordperfect. Opinions vary on why Word was able to overtake the incumbent. But I have a few ideas that apply to any new venture:

• Hang your hopes on a disruption. Microsoft realized that a new technology, the graphical user interface and mouse, would be a disruptor for the word processing market that would help average users produce complex documents that rivaled professional design applications.
• Don’t fight city hall. By making the product accommodate users, rather than trying to educate users about the complexities of layout and Reveal Codes, Word had a less steep learning curve and less explaining to do. When you’re explaining something, it means the benefits aren’t self-evident. And that’s bad. Your startup doesn’t have the time or the money to change the way people behave.
• Make it easy for people to move. Microsoft has always been able to import others’ file formats, and offers conversion tools. Sometimes they’ve been nasty about this (not letting people save back into imported formats.) But by making the screen background blue, or supporting Lotus’ “/” commands, people felt comfortable trying out the new product.
• Identify the barriers to adoption that limit your target market. The printing thing was such a headache that word processing seemed like a profession. Today, it’s just something we do. Microsoft has consistently tried to make its products appealing to everyone, giving them the largest possible markets.

* I have another way of paying for beers, but you’ll have to get some in me before you see that.

Marketing is increasingly about attention, and less about product.

Most competent people can build a competent product or service. But in today’s world of instant attention, it’s often more about how to succeed in the market than how to get the product right.

I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Robin Axon, formerly of VenturesWest (and candidate for the coolest cyborg name of a VC ever.) We were chatting, as often happens among Canadian entrepreneurs, about The Canadian Ailment. Despite tremendous competence in product design, we never seem to make it North of the Border in the same way the US does. Even US bookstores, apparently, know this instinctively.  But more on that later; back to Robin.

He had a pretty clear theory about what ails us, which I’ll paraphrase (badly) here:

Canadians try to succeed with a product, but Americans succeed with a market strategy.

Ask a Canadian why they’ll win, and they’ll probably cite a feature or a technical merit. “We have 30% more capacity” or “ours lets you sort by user.” By contrast, an American entrepreneur is as likely to cite an unfair advantage: “I know a guy,” or “there’s a new law coming out next week,” or maybe even, “I have a way to get every college kid using this in three months.” Anything that will make them stand out in the RFI, on the search engine, or at the watercooler.

Think about the recent Twitter exodus. We’ve seen Plurk (Twitter with timelines!) and Identi.ca (Twitter, but open source!) At the same time, you’ve got Friendfeed (“Our word-of-mouth comes from frustrated Twitter users, especially the heavyweights!”)

Which one sounds American? You guessed it: Friendfeed.

To be sure, Plurk and Twitter look great. I’ll probably get a lot of heat for dumping on fellow Canadians, particularly those with visibility and traction. But I think the point is still valid: Standing out is something that isn’t on most Canadians’ radars.

This is especially true for those who haven’t built a company with a global demand. Sadly, most Canadians that think like this have long since moved South, and there are precious few left in Canada.

One way to find your angle is to do the opposite of what people expect.  I was reminded of this in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

California’s recent legalization of gay marriage has created a flurry of weddings. If you wanted to capitalize on this, you might start organizing events, or ordaining ministers, or promoting your hotel as an ideal venue.

I walked past an enterprising bookstore that zigged when others had zagged. Their window display? Divorce and broken marriages.

Intentional or not, they’d taken a very different tack. If everyone’s talking marriage, why not focus on separation?

Whether it’s a renewed interest in pre-nuptial agreements or people trying to leave someone because now they can marry their longtime love interest, it’s a different approach that stands out.

If you’re trying to stand out from the crowd, spend some time thinking about opposites. If people charge a lot, make it free. If people make it free, charge a lot. If everyone worries about proprietary, go open source. If everyone’s seen as high-tech, stake out the low-tech position. It’s an excellent mental game to play, and often leads to new strategies and angles.

It’s a message that’s echoed in books like Blue Ocean Strategy: Don’t compete on the terms of the market — find a new market. The alternative is to race after everyone else, and see if you can beat them at a game whose rules they’ve already defined.

Tim O’Reilly said as much at Foocamp (by way of Jesse Robbins, via Twitter): “Going after the money is the surest way to end up chasing someone’s ass.”

Instead, try going after the different. Take the one less travelled by. You’ll either fail spectacularly or find your groove.

This campaign does three things really well. If you’re trying to put together a marketing effort, you should:

• Know the purpose of your marketing effort. A lot of times I have clients tell me, “we need to do some marketing.” They’re often surprised when I push back. But unless they know what outcome the marketing should have — and how to measure it — it’s a waste of time. The Nova Scotia Liquor Commission clearly wants to sell more wine, and can measure sales of wine that accompany beer purchases.
• Know your target audience. This picture’s taken in the gigantic beer fridge. There’s no wine in this room. It’s where the men go to get cases of beer. Nagging reminders from housewives with facemasks and towels on their heads might be stereotypical, but their target market notices them.
• Repetition, consistency, and simplicity. Every message is a variation on, “while you’re getting beer, bring some wine home for your wife.” There’s no way to mistake it. It’s something even a beer-obsessed weekender can grasp.

When it comes to beer, nothing beats Nova Scotia brewery Alexander Keith’s focus. They even have a bar (the Lower Deck, the “official home” of Keith’s.) Revel in these gems where a mad Scot channels Mike Meyers, some of my favorite ads of all time.

Spilly Talker

Label Peeler

Who’s With Me?

Beer Eulogy

Beautiful. “Often, I’d dreamt of a lake of beer. But not like this. Never like this.”

BTW, the actor who played this Scotsman was arrested on charges of child pornography, and Keiths has since pulled them. Sick bastard, but the ads are no less funny.

Like mugs, for example. I was at a Starbucks in the Bay Area recently and someone brought in their own mug to avoid using paper cups.

Unfortunately, Starbucks tracks cups by writing your name and order on them. It’s how they survive the chaos of the morning rush. So the same company that says, “save the planet, use a mug,” puts those mugs in paper cups to keep track of them.

A lot of startups have a great idea, but they fail to think it through all the way. This is a great example of the consequences of thinking it through. If you have a concept, you need test cases. You need to describe your end user in great detail, then build a prototype, then watch them use it, and then iterate quickly.