Sometime ago I wrote a blog post advertising a Project/Product manager position open at Pollenizer. I received a flood of applications, some good ones, some bad ones as you can expect. Today I received a nice email from James Goldie with this video attached:
Now that’s what I’m talking about! Needless to say that we are now all looking forward to meet James :)
…and I might just watch it one more time :)
Are you ready to start a web business now?
Apply for Startup Bootcamp today. It’s a practical and informative program to help you hone your idea and understand the full picture of building a successful business.
What’s the commitment? 4 nights of 3 hr hands-on workshops over 4 weeks. You will learn from a team of web veterans including Phil ‘Entreprenerd’ Morle and Mick ‘Mr Focus’ Liubinskas.
Read more about Pollenizer Startup Bootcamp
See some feedback from previous Bootcamp attendees here
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If you haven’t played with word cloud creation tool Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg, you should! You can create pretty pictures out of your website or blog’s content. Wordle grabs all the words on the page or website you are ‘wordling’ and creates cool visual models or infographics which you can customise (typface, colours, layout and more) and share with your community.
How does it work? When wordle scans your online content, it tracks the most frequently used words (and makes these really big) to the least commonly occurring words. The result is a compelling infographic you can use to see re-occurring themes and keywords in your content. This is great for market research (surveys, interviews) and to gauge sentiment on forums, blogs, twitter streams – wherever content appears! Check out the Wordle gallery for inspiration.
Here are some examples from our website.
Pollenizer.com
Bigger better full size here. From this wordle graph, we can see Pollenzier talks about partners and founders (“co-founders”) and about building businesses that get clicks (“vistors”) and customers (“traffic”) and money in the bank (“results”) because of a unique (“different”) idea.
Our most recent blog entries wordled
Bigger better full size here. What stands out? We like to talk about ourselves (not surpising) but we talk a lot about startups, ideas, business, time and founders.
Try using wordle.net or any other free word cloud tool you find online and instantly learn your business’s keywords and messaging. You could apply this idea to comparing newspaper headlines or political party’s platforms or send your sweetheart a picture message about how you feel. Have fun!
Photo Credits: BenJTsunami – See original here.
From time to time one of our portfolio companies gets to be featured on a prime time TV show (A Current Affair, Today Tonight…). This has obvious benefits for the business in terms of publicity, but it comes at a price for the poor servers that have to serve millions of requests in a very very short time frame.
In that context you can assume that your site WILL go down at some point (unless you’ve spend big bucks to build a very solid infrastructure which IMO would be a mistake in the agile startup context). So in this post I will list easy simple measures that you can take to make sure that when your site gives up, it does it in the nicest possible way for your business :)
Let me first detail the actual impact that coverage like this has on a website:
In the next 30 sec following the first mention of the site’s name, traffic will start flooding in. We are talking 3-5000 new visitors per… second. And that’s the whole challenge!
A traditional traffic increase coming from a mention on a popular blog, social news site or newspaper (Techcrunch, Digg, SMH…) brings you lots of traffic but does it quite gently. By that I mean that new visitors will come gradually across a couple of hours or even days and this is easily explainable by the fact that not everyone gets to click on your site’s link at the same time since readers would become aware of the story at a different time (as they read through their RSS feed, browse the blog, read the newspaper at the local cafe and then come back to their computer and enter the link).
On TV it’s a different story. When a show with an audience greater than 1 million drops your site’s name you get instant massive traffic as a large part of the show’s audience (the ones watching TV with a laptop on their laps raise your hand ;)) decide to have a look at your site in a very short time frame (under a minute really…).
See illustration attempt on this award winning piece:
Before the storm:
- Get your 503 page ready: Make a nice but simple error page (inline css, no images etc… ideally it should only take 1 request for your server to display this page). Explain to your visitors what’s happening and tell them what to do next (no dead end).
Example:
Have a simple form where they can leave their email address (outsource that to Wufoo for example so that your database doesn’t die while recording 100.000 email addresses…).
Have links to your Twitter and Facebook pages where visitors can follow you etc. That will give them something to look at and a way for you to get back to them. So redirect traffic to friendly places (Twitter, Facebook) that have the infrastructure to deal with the traffic.
- Have a landing page: To ease the load on your servers prepare a static landing page in the same spirit as the error page. The idea is to spare your database and servers as much as possible. Greet your visitors and direct them to what has the most value to your business (if it’s sales then direct them to featured products, if it’s membership then collect their email address, if it’s downloads for your iphone app then give them the direct link to itunes straight away, etc. What’s important there is to go to the point, successfully convert their visit and… get rid of them! Next! ;)).
- Don’t do last minute changes / tweaks. If minutes before the program starts you decide to upgrade the database well… you are minutes from a disaster :)
- Have your whole team on standby: Often the large audience shows are on outside of the regular office hours (that’s why they have large audiences :)). So make sure that you are organised with your team so that you have everyone you need around you.
- Beware of collateral damages: You shouldn’t have your email application running on the same servers than your website but in case you do beware that your communication tools will go down with you site… Which would leave you with no live site and no way to reach your system admin etc… So as much as possible silo your tools so that when one goes down it doesn’t have a domino effect on your whole infrastructure.
During the storm:
- Watch the conversation happening and engage: Make sure that your team is ready and watches the Twitter, forum and Facebook conversations. Your competitors will certainly be there trying to collect the traffic and doing so by eventually damaging your brand name. So you need to be there and engage.
- Don’t panic: No live changes! And if the site is down so be it. Just stay calm and no, standing behind your tech team asking them “is it back?” every 2 seconds won’t make it come back faster :)
- Collect the data: Monitor the traffic and record everything you can for later analysis.
After the storm:
- Keep your eyes open: It’s current practice for shows to share footage across the network’s channels and the piece on your startup can be aired again the following day in a different show and at a different time. So beware of the second wave of traffic the next day.
- Learn from your mistakes :)
Is there anything that you would add to this list? Let me know in the comments :)
I’ll be curious to know what coverage in a show like Oprah does to your site… Apparently something in the lines of “ten months’ worth of average daily volume in one day”.
For years we have been preaching focus. It aligns your team, simplifies most things, combines your energies in one direction and generally makes life better. This applies to us as much as it does to the companies we work with, and now we’re further tightening our focus.
Our goal: Invest our team and money in 10 web startups by June 30, 2011.
1. Starting Up
2. Customer Development
3. Growth
If you’d like to talk to Pollenizer about being a co-founder in your next web business, come to a bootcamp or contact us here.
If you’d like to invest in some of our web businesses, please contact us here.
Signing NDA’s is impossible for Pollenizer given that we see about 20 new businesses a month.
We certainly keep all information confidential and never, directly chase a new idea brought to us from someone. Pollenizer’s integrity is and must be on public show and our reputation depends on living it.
Openly though, it’s rare that any idea in the web business space is unique as they all tend to share and build on each other.
I’d also say that it’s impossible to pursue a business without sharing it.We’ve found that it’s speed of learning, not protection of ideas that wins. You’re idea will evolve, revolve, devolve and evolve again before it even gets close to being something someone wants to steal.
For these reasons, it is rarely ever worth paying money to protect your idea. Doing so takes precious money and even more precious time and 99 times out of 100 it is going to be wrong by the time it’s in place. Spend the money learning and getting the business working first.
Doing a trademark search can be a good idea, to see if anyone else owns the brand you’re about to build (slowly over years).
I saw Steve Hopkins post today on hypotheses based testing and thought I’d share some ideas we’ve been using at Pollenizer.
A lot of startups we see and work with are getting better at doing customer development, but they sometimes aren’t quite sure what to do with the results. Very rarely do you finish one lap of the testing with an absolute clear answer and a simple view to what needs to be done next. Normally it’s murky, confusing and conflicting.
Important to do before hand is to set some metrics of your expectations. Afterwards you’ll be tempted to justify results in the direction that suits you, which is normally what you have as your best case plan.
Here is how we set them and what we do next;
What is minor and major? That’s up to your brilliant instincts as a future billionaire founder. :-)
This week’s Pollenizer Podcast is a little different, where I talk with the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s chairman Margaret Simons and Secretary Melissa Sweet. I am also on the board, which you can read a little bit more about here
The Foundation was set up to explore new approaches to news through technology – more specifically the web. We are about to launch our first start-up – YouCommNews.com and I speak to Margaret and Melissa about what they are hoping to achieve with the project. The site was built using the open source technology of US-based Spot.Us – we chat a bit about that and the broader challenges journalism is currently facing.
I hope you find it interesting.
You can also download the podcast here
This is a guest post by Chris Hitchen, CEO at getprice.com.au in celebration of Mick’s new son, Samuel.
Startups and babies…
In this week’s podcast I talk to Mark Pesce, one of the co-inventors of VRML. Mark and I chat about what drives him to take an idea and see it through to completion. What’s more important for success, the person or the idea?
We also, chat about his new project Plexus – a personal, portable and private social networking tool. Very interesting stuff!
Have a listen and add your thoughts.
Those of you who want to download the podcast, can do so here.