Pollenizer

Remedy Tea Test tubes (by storyvillegirl)

The only way to be fantastic at creating products that customers love and keep on loving (which is a core tenant of marketing) is to have a culture of testing in your company.

When a product is young it’s easy to have ideas about how to improve them. It’s easy. There is low hanging fruit everywhere and everyone has an opinion – from your mother through to investors.

But which ideas do you pursue? That’s where leadership comes in, to prioritise and (dare I say it) focus. However, having a priority for implementation is not even half the challenge. How do you know the idea made a difference? Did your mother or the investor now low it 100 times more? Does that matter? The only way you know is by testing.

The ability for a company to be able to implement something quickly is pointless without the ability to see if it made a difference. To begin with it is easier, since things may have been broken and now they work at all, but just because something wasn’t there before and now it is doesn’t mean the overall product is better. In fact most the time more is a lot, lot, lot less.

Testing Culture

Having a culture of testing starts with the mindset and the commitment. You have to want it, because it’s not fun. It takes the inspiration down a peg or two and makes it work for it’s money. It means you spend more time looking at numbers, graphs and spreadsheets and less time working on what’s next. An big failure of many young businesses is that they move onto ‘next’ before ‘just added’ is working. Be careful about the term ‘working’ too. Functioning doesn’t mean that it actually makes the product better and that people care about it. Take Dave’s advice and try removing a feature and see if people kick up a stink. (see the slideshare below). This takes guts and that means strong leadership which forms strong culture.

Testing Structure

You also have to want it enough to make some changes. A culture of testing without the right tools is pointless. Everyone at least uses Google Analytics, but it’s not enough. You need to be able to quickly see if people are talking about the change and loving it. See if it’s changing other behaviour. If more people are coming back.  More people are converting. More paying. Paying more. Telling their friends more. Measure everything that is actually really important. Again, see the slideshare below for more on what to measure.

Testing (Your) Patience

One of the hardest things about testing is that it takes time which can frustrate the 1,000 kms per hour entrepreneur. The anal retentive team member needs to step in and pull on the hand brake. Testing takes time. You have to think about it, implement it, let it run live, analyse the results and then you learn whether it worked or not. If you’re agile and making changes every week or two, this is still 3-4 weeks.

Testing Rhythm

The great news is that once you’re team is into testing, the tools are in place and you’ve done a couple of laps/iterations  of it, you’ll start to get in the groove. You’ll start to to talk like testers. It goes something like this:

Co-Founder A “Hey, I think if we made the ’sign up’ button bigger we’d get more sales?”

Co-Founder B “Good idea, let’s test it! Create 3 versions, AB test it, and check conversions.”

Instead of how it used to go:

Co-Founder A “Hey, I think we should make the ’sign up’ button bigger?”

Co-Founder B “Good idea. Team, stop what you’re doing and make the button bigger.” A day goes by…. “Wow, that new button looks good. OK, what’s the next feature we should add?”

Absolutely no idea whether the idea was any good. Just lots of untested guesses. In fact one thing that a testing culture does is adds a little more discipline to ideas. When people know they will be tested, they really think ideas through instead of throwing them out there.

What to Test

I’d like to write the definitive piece on what to test, but it’s been written. Dave McClure, the dude of startup dudes, has put this together which is worth studying. Don’t just flick through it. Print it out and make notes. Crosses and ticks for what you don’t and do measure.

Tell me how you test

If you’re doing some testing, I’d love to hear what you test, how you test it and how it changes the way you think / run your business. Add a comment below.

Starting a business is hard. By far, the hardest part, is delivery. When we first started Pollenizer a couple of years ago we followed the Google idea of 20% time in which we would dedicate approximately 1 day per week each to internal projects. We tried to launch a small product called Goalsy like that:

Goalsy was never released after more than a year because the hardest part was delivery. In particular, the hardest part was finishing. Done ‘for free’ in ‘our spare time’ and ‘finished when its done’ is a true recipe for failure because the longest road to travel for product release is the last 1% and it needs such focus that cannot be baked from those ingredients.

I should have remembered the day I was interviewed at Google in California. I asked all the engineers what they do with their 20% time and they all said they did nothing because there was no time. All 15+ of them said that.

To deliver, people need limits, rewards, consequences.

Instead of limitless time and as-close-to-free-as-possibe budgeting, our new approach is to tightly time-box projects and invest in them fully for that time. As always we have limited capacity to invest in incubation projects but limiting the initial time investment limits the spend. Additionally, it focuses us on getting the job done, allows us to feel the pain of spending money and feel the threat of missing the date and the opportunity.

We did that with Spreets. We talked in mid December 2009 about launching a site in the Australian marketplace that was inspired by the phenomenal success of Groupon in the US. We deployed a whole team on it with the condition that it be launched with the core feature set by February 8th 2010.

Over the quiet of Christmas, our office was noisy with whiteboard sessions and sales calls.

Then we launched it on February 4th. We did it quietly, but we DID do it.

Now we are learning from it. Do people transact? Does the viral loop have its own momentum? We are in the next time box with its own set of limits.

So we’ve turned off the bad TV and changed to showing tweets on our big TV in the office.

You can send your tweets to us by using hashtag #pollenizerhq

We also pick up Mogeneration and BookingAngel who share an office with us.

The Tweets:

Tag Cloud;

The application is Visible Tweets developed by Cameron Adams from Sydney.

I was interviewed by the Terence at Board Room Radio for their Commsec Entrepreneur Series just before Christmas. I had a great time at their office chatting with the team. Board Room Radio itself is a super interesting business that has managed to thrive in a competitive marketplace by being highly focused on delivering high quality video insights for the corporate world. They asked me about Pollenizer and this is what I said:

Part 1

Part 2

As part of Growth Summit conference this February 17th and 18th in Sydney, Mick is MC-ing the ‘Technology to Drive Growth’ workshop. We’re very happy to be able to offer half-price tickets to Pollenizer friends and family – a saving of over $400!

The workshop will give great insight into which technology solutions are available, and how they help grow  your business.

Other speakers include:

• Mike Walsh,  Tomorrow
• Geoff McQueen, Hiive Systems
• Jason Noorman, MYOB
• Stephen Belfer, YTechnics
• Michael Carter, Business Fitness
• Sam Shetty, Netregistry
• Tim Parsons, Quickflix.com.au
• Kate Carruthers, Digital Business Group Pty Ltd
• Stephen Collins, acidlabs

The workshop includes roundtable discussions where you’ll be able to chat with the keynote speaker, and discuss business automation, customer acquisition strategies,  and social and mobile technologies.

At the end of the day, you’ll have a greater understanding of how to maximise your online presence, and how technology can improve profitability and scalable. Plus resources and diagnostic tools to take with you to help you get started.

Technology to Drive Growth Workshop

When: Thursday February 18th, 8:30am – 4:00pm

Where: Sydney Convention Centre

My colleague Mauricio and I were confronted with a very practical problem yesterday that left us thinking quite a bit about user-centered design.

We are in Barcelona working at a client site and on the way back to our company apartment, we got a bit distracted talking about software and, as we walked down the stairs at the Plaça de Catalunya station, we realised that we were on the wrong platform. We had gone down to the railway station instead of the metro. We walked upstairs and as we tried to exit through, the ticket validation machines didn’t allow us to get out, it displayed “ticket not validated at entry”. Now, we were getting confused since we had purchased our tickets that morning, we had been able to get in. After a couple of tries, we walked towards the station master and quickly explained to him our situation. He looked at us and immediately took two “exit tickets” out of his pocket and told us “yes, that’s normal, you cannot exit in the same station you entered”.

Exit Ticket

Now, someone must have created that rule, right? Mauricio and I could immediately think of many user stories that would see a client exiting from the same station that they entered and we couldn’t understand under which circumstances you wouldn’t want someone to be able to exit (remember we were using a valid ticket that had been accepted to get in and we had a valid ticket when trying to exit through machines). The most amazing thing is that a decision was made to create an exit ticket, print it, modify the systems to accept it, instead of fixing the system. Why would one put such a restrictive rule onto a user that holds a valid ticket?

Our next step is now to try this exit ticket at other stations. Could this be a master exit ticket that allows us to exit from any station? That would be even more interesting :) If you have any ideas about this system and why it’s this way, I would be very interested in your comment.

This week, Bruno has flown into Barcelona with a team of scrum ninjas to work with Very Large Telephone Company, to implement Scrum across the company over a three month process. At Pollenizer, we are known for the agile way that we work. We are, shall we say,  fanatical about Scrum in our engineering teams but we generally love the whole concept of agile, iterative, lean, self-organising, hyper-productive ways of working across all of our teams. Read this even if you are not an engineer.

This post is for people that want to know where to start implementing Scrum in their business. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber invented the Scrum software development process in 1993. I have dug out a couple of videos from Jeff and Ken that will provide the primer you need to get started. WARNING: It’s a couple of hours of video, but tightly packed with useful stuff.

If you basically understand Scrum, skip to the final video for the real gems. Otherwise, go through in order.

First: Read the Wikipedia article to get orientated.

Now, grab a cup of tea and watch Ken give a talk on the basics or Scrum and how it changes a software development process.

Finally, watch Jeff go one level deeper as he explains some of the finer points to Google engineers.

These are the methods we use in our projects and they are also the methods we can help you implement in your own projects. If you need some help, let us know.

There are hundreds of reasons why people never get around to developing their terrific start-up idea. Not enough time, money, experience … What’s your excuse?

Following the recent launch of Commercialisation Australia, the time is ripe to give your business idea some legs.

Image by jurvetson

There are four kinds of grants available under the Australian government’s new Commercialisation Australia body.

1. Skills and Knowledge (a) grants up to $50,000, and gives you access to specialist advice and services, including market research and analysis, business planning and intellectual property management.
2. Skills and Knowledge (b) grants up to $200,000 over two years to assist in the recruitment of experienced executives.
3. The Proof of Concept grants between $50,000 and $250,000 to assist with testing the  commercial viability of the business model or idea for a product, process or service.
4. Early Stage Commercialisation offers repayable grants from $250,000 to $2 million to undertake activities focusing on enabling a new product, process or service to be developed to the stage where it can be taken to market.

Each successful applicant will be assigned a Case Manager to help identify what specialist advice they need and where to access it. Business Mentors are also on hand to give invaluable skills and know-how.

After much learning and networking, you may find yourself with a thriving business!

Am I Eligible?

You need to be able to show that:

1. You have a need for funding.
2. Your project has significant commercial potential and you have a sound commercialisation strategy.
3. Your project has a high level of innovation and there is a credible market opportunity for the outcomes of your project.
4. You have appropriate management expertise and a sound business strategy.
5. There are significant national benefits resulting from the project.

All participants in Commercialisation Australia are required to financially contribute to the costs of their commercialisation project.

What Should I Do Now?

Check out the Customer Information Guide available on the Commercialisation Australia website for more information

And next, complete the pre-application checklist to confirm your eligibility

Good Luck!!

Hot Tip: The Commercialisation Australia Board assesses applications first against the  ‘Need for funding’ criterion.

Flat Eric on a Saturday Afternoon (by DeaPeaJay)

Instead of having my morning coffee over my inbox, I sit in the cafe and read. It’s one of the best parts of my day and I highly recommend it.

Pollenizer currently has more than 10 live web businesses that we’re working with, and another 10 at least that we’re talking to about starting. We’ve got a fast growing marketing team and endless amounts of projects to work on.

But I still find time to read.

Whether it’s audio books, eBook readers or actual real books (with paper for Gen Y’s reading this), books are still one of the best ways to really learn something new. The increasing trend towards shorter, smaller, briefer, 140 characters is great to a sense of what’s going on, but it’s insufficient to actually change the way you think.

Committing to a book generally means immersing yourself and reading about the same thing over and over and over again. It’s only after those 300 pages or 5 listens of an audio book that it actually sinks in and make a difference. That’s why book summaries are crap. It’s not about a little gem of an idea that you can plug in, it’s the slow and steady addition and evolution of how you think.

My days are busy from the moment I get up. New emails, meetings to prepare for, things to research, news to read and ideas to think up. Despite this, I prioritise between 20 and 30 minutes each morning (or most mornings to be honest) to sit in the cafe and read. I get my caffeine, some time to think and some time to read.

Yes, I also read at other times and listen to audiobooks as I walk to work, but I find it’s the time in the cafe when I don’t just read, but I think about the content, make notes and take actions as a result. It’s the most powerful reading I do.

If you’re in the crazy tornado of a startup, young web business or billion dollar web enterprise across 200 countries, carve aside some time to really read. I guarantee it will be worth it.

While working with one of our clients over the past few months, we had a large “us and them” divide between their business and technical staff. We quickly realised that we needed a common language that would build a bridge between the two groups. Of course, being a BDD adept, I thought that User Stories (as nicely described in Dan North’s article) would be a great language for that as they provide a natural way that’s business and technically agnostic, it sees the features from the perspective of the user/consumer and provides a series of acceptance criteria which describe the important conditions that the feature needs to fulfill.

What we saw was that writing user stories in this format brought the business and technical people together as it wasn’t centered around the technical implementation aspect of the feature or the business jargon. We all learned to “step into the user’s shoes” very quickly and were able to have conversations with a certain formalism were we could understand each other. As a technical person, I had to force myself to think of a feature in terms of how the user was going to be using it and not in terms of its implementation, at least not during the time of writing the user story, which gave me the freedom to decide on the implementation at Sprint planning or during the Sprint itself.

Don’t be fooled by the simple formalism of the user story format, it’s actually very hard to write features down using this approach however the benefits are way more than the effort. Especially having a good set of acceptance criteria (I will describe this in another post) is invaluable!

I can’t really use any of the examples from our client, however I will use the one from Dan North’s article (read it, it’s a very good description of the characteristics of what a good user story looks like) so that you can see how a user story might look like and how self-explanatory it is:

Story: Account Holder withdraws cash

As an Account Holder
I want to withdraw cash from an ATM
So that I can get money when the bank is closed

Scenario 1: Account has sufficient funds
Given the account balance is $100 And the card is valid And the machine
   contains enough money
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should dispense $20 And the account balance should
   be $80 And the card should be returned

Scenario 2: Account has insufficient funds
Given the account balance is $10 And the card is valid And the machine
   contains enough money
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should not dispense any money And the ATM should
   say there are insufficient funds And the account balance should
   be $20 And the card should be returned

Scenario 3: Card has been disabled
Given the card is disabled
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should retain the card
And the ATM should say the card has been retained

Scenario 4: The ATM has insufficient funds
...

While doing some research for this post, I found this talk by Martin Fowler and Dan North titled “The Yawning Crevasse of Doom” in which they go over this problem and come to the same conclusion, that “the biggest difficulty we face in software development is the communication between customers/users and the developers”. Now I wish I had seen their presentation before my engagement as it would certainly have helped me with some more concrete arguments (also using a reference like Martin Fowler or Dan North is extremely helpful ;-) ).