Pollenizer: Growing Web Businesses

The past year I have had the chance of coaching great teams around the world, helping them become Agile and produce better products, have more fun while doing it and help them rediscover their passion for software development.

I’ve come across a few interesting situations which made me reflect a bit about the correlation between a widely recognised coaching matrix for individuals and how could this be extended to organisations as a whole.

Let’s first start by looking at the goal of an Agile coach:

Your goal is to a grow a productive Agile team that thinks for itself rather than relying on you to lay down the Agile law. “Agile Coaching” by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, 2009 Pragmatic Programmers.

Considering that one of the founding principles of Agile software development is that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” (and also that this seems to be common sense, right?) enabling teams to think for themselves seems like the natural progression.

Now, in large (and small) organisations, the traditional “command and control” method of management has eroded this principle. In particular in software development, the more common approach is to see “development” as one of those steps that happen at the end of a chain of events that starts with clever executives in strategy meetings devising products based on tons of dashboards and metrics, then sending that to a team of business analysts to come up with large functional specification documents, which are then in turn handed over to rooms full of coders to implement them. We have seen over and over again that this mechanistic and believed-to-be-repeatable approach doesn’t work.

So we assume that everyone will be producing better products, delivering more value faster and having more fun doing it just by changing a few things. Constructive-developmental theories, of whatever sort, introduce a few fundamental ideas one of which is that not every change represents development, which is where our job as coaches become very interesting. Change is just the first step towards development :)

Getting back to the point I was trying to make, when introducing changes as a coach, there is a model for individuals based on the skills and will of the people being coached, some call it the “High Low Matrix Coaching Model“. This coaching model states that depending on the motivation and skills of the coached person, you should adapt the coaching style to one of either “direct”, “advise”, “motivate” or “delegate”. I heard about this model a few years back from my friend (and my manager at the time) Didier Elzinga while we both worked together at Rising Sun Pictures (awesome VFX studio BTW). It’s very useful when you are working with small teams or individuals. What happens when you are coaching larger teams and you need to have a coaching style based on the organisation level of maturity (skills and will)?

So, I set myself to read more on organisational maturity (yes, CMMI and the like, which I was already somehow familiar with), as well as psychology of coaching. I was trying to find out if there had already been some research on the topic. It’s hard because when you google for “organisational maturity and coaching models” you get (apart from the suggestion on the american spelling of “organizational” ;-) ) quite a few results around the organisational maturity as referred in the CMM models, which is not really what I was after. I couldn’t find any direct correlation that would help me validate this theory of mine.

In the next few engagements, and some of the ongoing ones, I shall be using this line of thinking and report on the findings.

We live in interesting times! Full of opportunity to do things better!

I often get asked what’s the real value of ‘theoretical’ type business planning for a nascent start-up. The question that usually pops up is: why would anyone want to spend time painstakingly planning when circumstances are so uncertain?

Questioning planning is only natural. After all planning takes time, the output is ‘soft’ and generally slows down building the business. I find entrepreneurs to be passionate and impatient and generally more focused on getting things done – I speak from experience because I built, ran and sold two online businesses and neither of them had a business plan!

Nonetheless, I now know that planning is an essential component of a successful business. Planning forces one to clarify three key points:

Extracting many ideas out of our minds is valuable, and so is structuring them under some type of business logic. It forces us to structure our thinking and doing so provides clarity, purpose and focus all of which save time and money. After all, why bother running if you are heading in the wrong direction?

How much business planning needs to be done?

It depends! It depends on how much uncertainty your startup faces. Eric Ries, in his Lean Startup presentation, discussed the different problem, opportunity and solution scenarios a startup may face. These include:

This is a great starting point to identifying the degrees of certainty/uncertainty your business may face and the flexible/ focused approach your business may require. Perhaps the table below can assist.

If a startup knows the problem it is addressing and its solution, business planning should be comprehensive enough to articulate the strategy of getting from A to B followed by a clear plan of action.

However, if the level of uncertainty is High or Very High, planning might be limited to providing direction and clarifying overall intent. There is no point in planning in excruciating level of detail when we just don’t know. This is where Steve Blank’s focus on customer development is key.

In any case, the table above is not an exact science. Nonetheless, it does point out that different circumstances (high uncertainty/ low uncertainty) will require different approaches to planning, methodology and measuring progress.

What if you don’t plan?

Planning does not guarantee success, nor does not-planning guarantee failure. Without planning your business can succeed, however, fortune will play a bigger role than required. Most importantly, lack of foresight and business planning doesn’t guarantee failure, but could lead to missing valuable opportunities – which is just as bad.

So to conclude, plan ahead to manage risk and uncertainty, plan ahead to foresee and avoid unnecessary challenges and most importantly plan not for the plan, but for the exercise of planning.

What do you think?

I’m happy to include some planning resources in a next post if there is interest.

Eduardo

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UPDATE: The March Workshop is sold out, so here is the April Web Focus Workshop registration details.

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Last night we had a fantastic turn out to start a new community group around lean startups.

It was a little bit opportunistic with Eric Ries, the key proponent of the concept, in town and a little bit of ‘about time, we need this in Sydney’. We only confirmed that the event was less than two weeks ago so we had to move fast.

In fact, we had to be lean. So we ran it like a lean startup.

Openly, with a pregnant wife, moving house, 8 live projects at Pollenizer and catching up after a recent flu, I knew I didn’t have the time to do a good job on the event. I wasn’t aiming for perfection, we just wanted to get started. So I tweeted out for help.

I got about 10 offers of help, including from Michelle Williams who I knew had been doing some great work in the community and a bit of that around events. I reached out to her and she said yes to helping organise. So our lean team was coming together.

Customer Development for Customer Development

Again, we wanted to be lean, and one of the principles I believe is a part of lean is to charge people money to see if they are really interested. This was important to me. I know that communities need love and I was only prepared to put the effort needed to get it going if there was enough real interest. Charging money is a great way to guage that. I would have been very happy if we only had 20 good people who cared enough to fork out $50. I really had no idea of what the price should be, but I thought if 20 people paid, at least we’d cover our costs. My goal with the two tiers was partly so that the big company people or the PR/Marketing providers could pay a bit extra (I thought they’d have it) and the startups and students could get a cheaper price. It was also a good way to see what type of people were interested.

Action Stations

We also had to move fast. We had just over one week to organise it, promote it, and make it work. Again, we weren’t aiming for the Oscars, just a solid first event. I put the event details on Amiando the day Eric confirmed he could make it. Even before Michelle found a venue. And I just tweeted it out.  Launch early! Within an hour I got some emails and DM’s with things I’d missed out. I got the hashtag wrong, a URL and more, but most of it was there. The best thing was that we got sign ups and re-promotions straight away. People were keen and keen to tell their colleagues. Good start. And the good thing was that with the event set up, the promotional machine could just start building while we worked to actually set up the event.

Monday with one week to go, Michelle go moving on a venue. She looked at a bunch of them, but at that point we had no idea how much money we’d have so we were aiming for super cheap. But we also needed a projector and a mic for Eric. And probably food since it would go on. With me running off-site workshops for much of the week, Michelle and I were SMS’ing and emailing until we settled on Bar 333. Basically we didn’t have any more time to find a better venue or better deal. It was Thursday and we needed to finalise it and tell people before Friday. It wasn’t perfect, but we’d make it work.

By Thursday I think we had about 40 people signed up – great, we had a big enough group to cover the costs and have an interesting event. Eric was currently at Webstock and communication channels were not great, but we managed to work most of it out, if very slowly, over the week. Remembering that Michelle and I have day jobs, so we were squeezing this into busy schedules.

Monday we met up a few hours before the event, Michelle arrived with the hired projector and screen, and we printed the audience lists, grabbed some pens and labels and took off to the city. We still hadn’t heard from Eric yet, though we were pretty sure he was deep in the bowels of Google working with the Google Wave team.

Arriving at the venue it was packed with chairs as if we were having a massive hens night. After furniture removal, Eric arrived with a very sore throat after a day of constant talking. A cup of tea and two Vicks Vapour Drops and we were going to make it through, though he wasn’t sure if he’d finish his full deck of slides.

Then the night took off;

• People turned up, grabbed a free drink (Though some people who were late missed out. Sorry, that’s the way it goes. Come earlier next time.)
• Most people were actively running a startup which was great.
• Eric gave an excellent talk doing a full hour on Lean Startups and telling some good background stories to make the point.
• I won’t try and paraphrase Eric, instead you can see the presentation and full deck of slides below.
• A few questions from the audience before I let Eric’s voice rest and everyone else mill about and chat.

Eric Ries Lean Startup Lessons Learned Presentation

Eric’s Slides

Some Photos

Eric Ries espousing some home truths about startups

The crowd of founders at lean startup sydney

Mick Liubinskas intro at Lean Startup Sydney

Lessons From This Lean Event

So we did it quickly, cheaply and with a big goal if really seeing if enough good people were really interested in this. After talking to people after the event I think we definitely showed this was true.

For a quick sprint, we also learned a lot;

• Pricing is ok for corporates and service providers ($90), and $45 probably ok for startups. Should have a $20 option for students. If you’re not willing to part for one night out drinking money, then you’re probably not that interested.
• Honesty is interesting since we don’t check what category you’re in. 99% of people paid into what I’d guess was the right category.
• The venue was pretty, but chairs could have been laid out a lot better and a second mic for questions would be nice. I’m not sure Sydney has enough good venues for events like this.
• Food was ok, but not spectacular. We didn’t spend a lot of money on it, and compared to other events I think it was reasonable.

So what’s next?

• Join up to the global group – Lean Startup Circle
• Join the Sydney group for event updates – Sydney Lean Startup Circle. We have some money left over from last night to run the next event.
• Check out the Lean Startup Wiki
• Eric is hosting a talk in San Francisco and will be streaming it out. Pollenizer will aim to host a Jelly at our office on the day to watch and hang out. More details to come.

Thanks to everyone for turning up and being positive. Very exciting to be a part of a growing, energetic community.

Thanks to Eric for giving up his time to give such a useful talk and for really driving some new learnings into the starutp space.

Big, big, big thank to Michelle Williams who got stuck into this quickly and did a great job in such a small space of time with a terrible brief from me.

There is so much game theory in product design. Here is a terrific, yet slightly disturbing, journey through our game-packed world.

As difficult as it may seem, you need to know this if you make consumer web products. Especially if you want to make revenue.

My question to you: Can we design authenticity and depth into digital product design or will it always be one-step removed? I like to think that we can.

Wow, amongst a flat-out, full-on week I’m poking my head up for a brief second to say;

“Hey, Pollenizer is two years old today!”

And I’m so proud. Proud of the team and crazy hard work they’ve put into building the more than dozens of great web businesses.They are fantastic and I can’t say enough to thank them for their volunteered creativity, energy and care.

Proud of the community to come together and even make a company like Pollenizer possible – really, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Very proud of Phil, my business partner, for riding this crazy rollercoaster of getting started, working it out, building the team, financial crises, clients being great, clients being awful, going to Europe, really growing Australia and still walking in each day with a smile and a big ball of energy. Plus, doing all of that while being high integrity and a rock-solid belief in what we are and what we do.

I’m also proud of myself. Pollenizer didn’t exist two years ago and now it does. And it was hard. Hard to do the work, hard to work it out, hard to really try and look after customers. Hard to run the business, grow the business, administrate the business. I say that I’m my own boss – I get to choose when I do my 80 hours a week.

I’m also proud of our failures. Failed systems. Failed ideas. Failed projects. People we thought would be fantastic but we didn’t fit each other. I’m certain most of my learnings have come from them so all I need to do is increase my failure rate and make sure I don’t make the same mistakes twice.

A special thank you to Karen, my wife, for putting up with me saying “Honey, I think this is going to be a big week at work” for about 93 out of 104 weeks.  I think she knows I love what I do and would be more painful any other way, but I still appreciate the support.

That thanks goes out to all the partners of the Pollenizer team who have put up with late night calls with Pollenizer India and Europe, long days, weekend work, and other assorted madness.

Another thanks to the companies, founders, and teams who gave us a chance to show what we could do. A company that preaches agile, says we can’t give you even an estimate, asks you to trust us and gives you lots of homework is not an easy proposition to buy in to. But, you did, and we did our darndest to do a fantastic job each time. We certainly couldn’t have done it without you and we’re so proud of what you’ve built with sweat, toil and care.

The next two years…. I’m so excited. We’re getting better and better, bigger and bigger, faster and faster. I’m loving it and can’t wait to see the things we build with you.

Thank you!

I attended the Growth Summit in Sydney last week and also MC’d and spoke in the Tech stream on day 2. Here are some of my notes from the days. Big thanks to Karen, Cara, Larna and the crew for organising. Next year it would be great to have wifi with more live blogging/tweeting.

I’ve bolded some of my favourite bits.

Verne Harnish:
Routine sets you free

Read read read:

• Bill Gates – Think week – read 18 hours a day for 7 days.
• Eric Smidth “Time to Read”
• Tom Peters – “Outread your competition”

Leadership traits

• Listen more, talk less
• Less statements, more questions.

Are you playing not to lose? Play to win.

4 decisions

• People
• Strategy
• Execution
• Cash

People
Books -> Keith Ferrazzi – never eat alone, who’s got your back. top 250 relationships.
Google alerts following top 50 monthly, 100 quaterly, 100 per year.

Books -> Ooops -Aubrey Daniels – management waste of time and money

Strategy – One phrase strategic plan.

Pollenizer – A great services business with a portfolio of web businesses.

Books – > Reality Marketing Revolution
- do you say us or we more than you or your?

Execution

Books -> Atul Gawande – The checklist manifesto

Cash

Books ->Built to Sell – John Warrillow
- is everything you’re doing adding value to be bought out.

Average age;
India 24
China 32

1 billion in middle class by 2020

Hermann Simon – Hidden Champions

Ogilvy – four ps. Four es

• Product – Experience
• Price – Exchange – value
• Place – Everyplace
• Promotion – Evangelism

David Meerman Scott

7 bloggers for Harry Potters ride led to 350 million views.
Private showing.
Webinar.

Buyer personas;
Startup founders – looking for help to build it.
SME Directors – looking for growth, ready for investment.

On the web, you are what you publish.

Most over used phrases -

innovate
please to
unique
focused on
leading privier
commitment
partnership
new and improved
leverge
120 percent
cost effective
next generation
flexible
world class

One of the top 3 buttons used when web browsing is the back button.

Email marketing metrics
mailer mailer

1. talk about customers, not you and your products.
2. Lose control
3. Put down roots
4. Point people to your site at all times.

Guy Parsons

Lean Transformation

• Maximise value
• Minimise waste
• Delighting customers
• Growing people

• Flow production
• Flexible, capable processes
• Bullet proof processes
• Organisation by group.

What is your companies operating system?

Make sure you measure the success

Eliminate waste:
- salesforce
- proposals
- reporting
- blockages
- meetings
- doing things multiple times.
- having less optimal people doing the work.
- project switching “No, I’m working on this now”
- Unfinished work.

Look for when nothing is happening or things going backwards.

- leveraging existing templates.
- Internal training

Toyota Processes:

1. Correction/rework
2. Overproduction
3. Material movement
4. Motion
5. Waiting
6. Invetory
7. Process
8. People

Waste is a symptom of the root cause;

Value of Pollenizer;
- Lowering risk
- Faster results
- Bigger results
- More enjoyable

Look at time

Understanding demand;
- how many startups – controlling it.

Value statements from customers;

“My idea will blossom at Pollenizer.”

“I won’t be able to do this by myself.”

“I’m looking to grow a business and it will be bigger with Pollenizer.”

“I don’t know who to trust with this. You guys have great references.”

“I don’t understand the technology side.”

Flow

Level production – level selling.

• Kaikaku – revolutionary change
• Kazien – gradual change

NPS – Net Promoter Score

• Would they recommend you to friends or family?
• 9 or a 10 is positive. 7-8 is neutral. 1-6 is negative.

Value from the Customer/s point of view:

Must incorporate all stakeholders – shareholders, customers, suppliers, team.

“Plans will not survive the first contact with the customer.”

3 Statements;

1. Go see – go on floor and spend time with the work.
2. Ask why why why why why why why?
3. Show respect

Short: Eric Ries from Startup Lessons Learned and Lean Startups is talking in Sydney Monday March 1st, 6-9pm. Register here.

Great news. We’ve been talking to Eric since we were on the same startup mentor group at Seedcamp in London last year. We wanted to try and get him to Australia to talk to the startup crew and kickstart lean startup circle.

Luck has gone our way and Eric has leveraged off his keynote at Webstock in Wellington to drop by Sydney for a few days.

I love focus and Eric is the master of telling great stories on what works and what doesn’t work with starting up a startup. And he’s no academic – he’s been through the good, bad and ugly to learn his lessons the hard way.

We’re also going to use this as a way to kick start the Sydney circle of Lean Startups. I hope you can make it.

Register here

Future Workshops

Mick Liubinskas – Web Focus Workshop
– learn how to apply focus to your startup or web business. A practical program with a small amount of participants.

We’re at Growth Summit this week and thought it would be useful to share one of our most valuable tools: Pollenizer’s Site Page Strategic Plan Template

We are big fans of Verne Harnish and the Rockefeller Habits. One of his most powerful contributions to our business has been the idea of a one page strategic plan to focus the company. Each quarter, we gather together to review our core values and objectives and to plan where our focus lies for the next quarter. All startups should have one of these.

Verne has a ton of stuff online, including templates, that you can use to build one for your business.

• Resources to roll your own strategic plan

We love it because it is simple and it keeps us focused. It doesn’t take a long time to do or become a burden for the team in the daily rhythm of the business.

We’ve remixed it a bit so that it works for our business and we have moved it into the form of a mini website. We use Google Sites so that our global team can view and update a single source of truth easily. We thought you may like to use it as a template.

• Pollenizer One Site Strategic Plan Template

Let us know what you think and if you use it.

Australia struggles to innovate. I know this is not caused by a lack of ideas or a lack of vision because I live in a world of Australian entrepreneurs. Indeed, what this community gets done, against all odds, is extraordinary.

The National Broadband Network in Australia is an opportunity to throw the genius, energy and passion of the Australian innovation community at a context for changing the world. I think it is a once-in-a-century chance for Australia to build, and then refine with real customers, next generation internet products that will compete on a world stage. We can’t imagine what new, multi-billion dollar companies are going to emerge from the this platform for innovation.

So let’s get started! Let’s show the world what we can do! Let me get my hands on a population with 100 MBps connectivity.

Well, so far, its all been rather under-whelming. Lot’s a of politics (thank you Telstra), lot’s of bureaucracy and a big focus on the hardware. There is practically no company, large or small, (that I have spoken to) that is exploring what it is going to do with this network.

Now look what’s happening. The US is coming, with Google at the helm, doing what we should be doing.

Official Google Blog: Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network.

Below are three things that Google is focussed on. Here’s what I want to know. Who has even identified these issues in Australia, let alone started work on exploring them?

• Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
• New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
• Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Oh, and Google is trialling connection speeds 10 times faster than the ones NBN is still making policy on.

If you know of some cool stuff going on in Australia around the NBN that will cheer me up, please let me know.  In the meantime, I’ll initiate my 5 year plan to leave the country and go to live somewhere that I can stretch my legs.