Conversations I’ve had with Michael Dijkstra around the campfire have resulted in a theory based on Greek mythology – Ethos, Logos and Pathos – to create effective landing pages.

Ethos – Do you take candy from a stranger?

Ethos is about the credibility the business portrays through its landing page. The character of the landing page needs to immediately inspire a sense of trust through the look and feel, branding, testimonials and the listing of other brands whose authority can be transferred.

Pathos – I can’t live without you

Emotionally, do the visuals and copy empathetically hook into the viewer? The landing page needs to clearly communicate what burning problem is being solved or what great benefit is being given. You need to make sure the user truly believes they need your product.

Logos – The theatre brochure

The most effective landing pages I’ve seen just show me how it works. They give me a smart image which quickly demonstrates how the solution to the problem works. Phil More once described this as creating a theatre brochure before writing the play. This technique brutally sets a stake on what the play would be like prior to its production, and allows you to have the confidence to sell your vision before it has been executed!

In conclusion, we now have a method to measure how effective a landing page is. The next time you come across a landing page, think about it in terms of ethos, pathos and logos. Are you sold? Do you want to sign-up?

The change is that, traditionally, all the software written by the Engineering Team has been locked away behind private GitHub repositories.

What confounds us the most is that we didn’t think to unlock these treasures and share them with our friends, colleagues and the web/startup community in general, a long time ago.

What upsets us the most is that Andy Coffey (Head of Design) and his merry team of trendy UI-types beat us to the punch by open-sourcing their ultra-chic and skinny-jeaned Hummingbird UI Framework (or as it’s more popularly known – “UI for the straight guy”).

However, hot on the heals of the Design Team’s success, the Pollenizer Engineering Team are proud to announce the birth of their first offspring!

The CakePHP PostageApp Lib is a CakePHP Lib class used for interfacing with the PostageApp API. It has all the mod cons including templating and attachments – and it’s even configurable via Cake’s built-in configuration class.

So go ahead – download it, use it, fork it or spoon it all night long. We’re happy to bring some noise!

We spent 2011 in talks with a number of media companies and explored all kinds of models. They all seemed too hard, and pulled our process too close to how media companies work today. A direction, we felt, would compromise our ability to succeed.

In the middle of 2011 we started discussions with the team at APN and found our ideal partner for prototyping a new model for corporate innovation that works. We have now announced our pilot projects.

First, APN has invested in Friendorse, our business that helps local people find what they need in the places that they live. This strategic investment will bring startup speed and agility to the APN portfolio to develop a new channel in their local markets. It helps us grow the business at a crucial time in its life and gives APN access to a new asset before it gets crazy expensive.

Second, we will launch a new business with APN. This is terrifically exciting because we have found the model in which to do it. Simply, it is no different to any entrepreneur that works with us. We co-invest and Pollenizer provides the execution team needed to validate the new business. We accept the power of what we each bring and begin our partnership focused on the pursuit of value. That’s all that counts.

This feels like an important step in the development of our ecosystem. Traditionally, large corporates have not contemplated work with early stage businesses. There are various reasons for this, including the following paraphrases:

“Any deal we do, large or small, needs full due diligence and costs tens of thousand in legal fees. So we don’t do deals under $2 million in value.”

“For GST reasons, we need to own the company fully so that we can avoid charging GST on media contras.”

“Anything we do, we need to do properly” = big study, full team deployment including usability team, focus groups, etc

“It needs to move the dial on our EBIT line before we can look at this.”

All these and more, gently shut the door on early stage entrepreneurs.

The problem is, the internet economy has changed. Two people in a lounge room with a wifi connection and a laptop each can launch a real business for less than a large business spends writing a scoping document. I don’t need to go over the reasons for this. You know. Powerful tools and libraries mean most of the hard software engineering stuff is done, people spend money on the internet like never before, the global market is ours for the taking, mobile web use has overtaken browsers (and people pay on mobiles) … by the time Goliath looks up, David has eaten his lunch.

We startups know how to live in this place. We work fast, we learn, we are happy to be a bit scrappy if it gets us to the next proof point faster. If we stuff up, we dust ourselves off and get back into it rather than face a media backlash about our big corporate failure. We don’t over-think things. We just do it and measure what happens. We can materially help big companies make new assets.

We startups have reached a new level of autonomy but let’s not get cocky. If our business model needs more than a few thousand users to get traction, we need help. As our startup evolves and needs to become a company (more than a validated idea), we need help. If our business needs a sales team to test selling new products nationally, we need help.

We are very excited about this new partnership. We help each other to pursue value using the tools that we each have and together we are stronger.

It was a huge process. Working on a startup is tough in the most ideal contexts, but a geographically displaced team from another culture made this harder. We knew we could not do this casually and we needed to make an investment. We worked closely with the Jugs to:

• grow the right kind of engineers (attitude, experience, career path) around a senior team who knew our platform and companies well
• implement scrum for rapid iteration and speed of learning
• implement a training program (Pollenizer University) to train new recruits before placement on a business
• commit to a single development platform (PHP/Zend) and a core framework of tools for rapid development of Pollenizer projects
• implement processes for dealing with language barriers and requiring clear, proactive communication via Jira and Skype.

The transformation over the three years was substantial and inspiring.

In mid-2011, we re-configured the Pollenizer model around the idea of “pods”. Pods are small, cross-disciplinary startup teams that sit together in our Sydney office. They use our methodology to conceive, launch and validate new web businesses in tight 4 month cycles. The Sydney team started to move faster and the overhead of international communication and late nights for the team became unsustainable.

With regret for the guys in India, we decided to move our entire operation to Sydney. Now all of our platform engineers sit inside the pod.

The economics of web businesses mean that we need to be pragmatic. We need to find some way of getting it done. 4 engineers in India can cost less than a single engineer in Sydney and this is helpful for an entrepreneur with limited resources. It is the difference between doing it or not doing it.

Pollenizer India has become X-Minds. If you need a way to get things done offshore with a group of engineers you can trust, I’d drop Jugs a line (jugs AT x-minds.org) and have a chat.

It won’t be a perfect experience. You will be frustrated with the timezone difference and struggle to communicate sometimes. But it might be the difference between doing it or not doing it and I always opt for the former.

• Techrice
• Technode

Both are published in English while being based in China.

We have asked around our network and there are people travelling from far and wide to attend. It may be a great opportunity for you to get the DEMO experience (for a fraction of the cost of the US) and introduce your business to Asian investors and media. Also a very efficient way to mainline your way into the community from across the region.

See you in Singapore at the end of February?

Dates to note:

• 25th January 2012 – Applications Close
• 1st February – Shortlist will be notified via email and invited into Pollenizer for an interview.
• April 1st 2012 – Autumn Semester begins

What is Coachy? 

Coachy is a new marketplace where coaches are matched up with people who want to learn new skills with 1-on-1 live video sessions.

At launch, Coachy is starting with French and Guitar lessons but as we learn and grow we’ll be adding more segments to the mix.

What would you like to learn? (seriously, we’d love to know! Tell us on our Facebook page)

With Coachy, you can learn from the comfort of your own home at any time suitable to you. Plus, you can learn from people all over the world.

As we’re in beta, we’re keen for feedback of all kinds. To learn as much as possible, we’re currently offering free lessons in return for a quick survey afterwards. If you’re keen, please drop us a line at hello [at] coachy [dot] com.

Or if you’d simply like to keep in touch, sign up to our Facebook or Twitter feeds.

We hope you enjoy Coachy!

Should you white label?

White labelling your product might sound like a great way to have a second revenue stream and make some fast cash, but it is hard, a big distraction and often just means you’re not strong enough yet.

Ideas in no particular order:

Focus – If you want to be a direct to customer business AND a white label business when you’re a startup you are going to find it very very very hard. It’s two different businesses. Different customers, different products, different marketing, different all round. White label is a great business model – so if you want to do it, do it, but close down your direct to customer business and focus on White Label.

Not ready – often times when you speak to potential customers early in your life as a business they will ask if you white label. What they are really saying is “You’ve got a good base idea here, but our brand is stronger than your product and our skills can finish it off.” That’s fine, it just means that customer is not ready for you yet. Don’t bust your gut to look after them because most likely they still won’t be happy. When someone wants a white label product they expect it to really work. Most likely you’re not going to be able to give them this and you’ll spend a lot of time trying to keep it going.

Scale – white labelling can get you a small number of large customers, but often not a large number of customers. Make sure you’ve got your market worked out and pricing else you might sell yourself into a corner.

Customer contact – you also lose contact with the users. There is now someone between you and the daily usage. This is harder earlier on when you’re still concocting your magic and need lots of good feedback.

Brand – you’re brand is now a behind the scenes brand, not an in-front brand. That’s fine, lots of great companies are like this, but just be aware.

Got any good/bad white label stories to share?

There is quite a lot to learn from spammers when it comes to landing pages.
Check this one out: http://paleorecipebook.com/

The structure goes as follows:
#1 Hook
#2 Value (bullet points)
#3 More value (details)
#4 WOW! BONUS!
#5 OMG! More bonuses.
#6 Did I mention bonuses?
#7 Reviews
#8 More reviews. All these ppl can’t be wrong right?
#9 Buy button
#10 Security
#11 Buy button again

Notes:
- They don’t bother wasting precious below-the-fold space with the buy button.
- Content is king. Lots of work writing it all.
- Show the value. Be clever on how you articulate the value (top it off with “Bonuses”).

Bonus! (ha!)
Read this post by Fred Wilson on what made the Code Year landing page successful.

Bonus 2
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