Finding Free WiFi

A Nail Problem

Watching the Daily Show tonight, and the guest author said 'To a man who has a hammer, every problem is a nail problem,"
Quoting (though a bit off) Mark Twain.

Makes more and more sense every time you read it.

What To Do When You Screw Up

So. This Happened. Papa Johns printed out tee-shirts making fun of the most popular player in basketball. Um? No words really.

I understand how it starts... some Wizards fan at PJ corporate says oh, that's funny, Lebron James crybaby shirts, we should print those and hand them out. Get a chuckle from the folks at the office...but shouldn't someone STOP them before actually going through with it?

Regardless, it happened, so today Papa Johns probably sold 2 pizzas in the state of Ohio. So what do they do? Something very smart. They offer $.23 pizzas to all Cleveland residents. Lebron James' number. Well done.

But why are they limiting it to one-topping? They're going to lose a bunch of money anyways. Why not offer a free pizza, any pizza on the menu, anything you can dream, to every Cleveland resident? You want to get back on their good side...don't short change them with one-topping.

Very creative solution though. I'm impressed. Would be interested to see Papa Johns pizza sales before and after in Cleveland...so if you happen to find a graph somewhere let me know.

Presentation Simplicity

If you ever present anything to anybody...you need to spend 70 minutes of your life watching this video.

Garr Reynold's speaks at Google (sorry, can't embed directly).

Be Confident, Not Arrogant

On Alyssa Royse's entrepreneurship blog at the Seattle PI, she interviewed some local bigwigs asking pitching tips...good timing after my post the other day.

My favorite line:

From Janis Machala, startup guru:
"Be confident, not arrogant."
Most people haven't learned the art of walking that line...granted I probably haven't either...but advice worth thinking about in everything you say about your business.

Some Things I've Learned

A year or so into this whole 'starting a company' thing, some stuff I've learned, in no order what so ever (they may be obvious, but we sure didn't learn them in business school):

• No matter how basic you think something is, you have blinders on, and it will still confuse some of your users/customers.

• Nothing is better in a business than a great, random, unsolicited testimonial from a user.  Well, maybe cash is better.

• When someone pays for something, they have much higher expectations of the product than someone who uses something for free.  Those expectations take a lot of time to manage.  It's worth considering if your product is ready to  be purchased yet...even if you have customers who will pay.

• People use your product in ways you never imagined, and don't do things the way you want them to.  Fighting them or trying to force them to use it the way you want them to is a waste of time and effort.  Letting your users define your product makes much more sense.

• Treating every user, even the ones who want to remove their account, like the most important thing on your schedule is good business.  They should be the most important thing on your schedule.

• Everyone in your company at a startup is first and foremost a salesman followed closely by a customer service representative.  Their third job title is CEO or CFO or VP of whatever.  Sales and customer service are your first job.

• It's easy to forget about HR requirements in a startup...including your own.  Sometimes taking 30 minutes to drink a beer away from the computer is good for the bottom line.

• The easiest way to not overspend is to not have any money. 

• Never hire someone who can't do something better than you can...even better if you only hire people smarter than you.

• For all the stress and heartache and late nights and financial forecasting spreadheets and Ramen noodles, there's nothing like watching an idea come to fruition.  Except for maybe cash.

Kidding.

Go build a startup.  You won't regret it.

When Anger-Dispersion is your Primary Job

Some jobs are tougher than others by nature.  I can't imagine it's easy to run a funeral home, or run customer service for a crappy product, or be the airport worker whose job is generally to tell people either that their flight is delayed.  Customers come to these people pre-agitated... making their job a thousand times harder. 

My car needed some work recently.  A lot of work.  Expensive work.  After it had had more expensive work a week earlier.  I wasn't happy.  It's easy to blame the service guys  My attendant did a good job of listening...but he didn't make me relate to him.  He didn't give me his story.
Photo: Creative Commons Credit: 177

My father had something similar happen to him a few years back, and he was equally agitated after needing multiple trips to the dealer in the same week.  His attendant stopped him and explained that he was driving a high-end car and that their job was to give him high-end service.  They weren't paid commission and they don't see any money by recommending more service; they simply love working on cars, and they don't want to put their name behind a car that doesn't work.  If something's wrong, they want to fix it.

That's a story.  That makes sense.  Yeah, the thousand dollar service bill still stings, but it's harder to be mad at the service guys when you look at it through their eyes.  Great form of anger dispersion.

Seth Godin called it 'pretending you care,' where the meter maid apologizes that, despite a great story, once the 'yellow button is pushed' she's required by law to finish writing the ticket.'  She then recommended that he contest it in court, where she said he'd probably win, and thanked him for coming to New York and apologized for the hassle.'  (Too bad he made up the story).

So, if your primary job is dealing with people, and it probably is, next time you have to disperse some anger, don't be afraid to make it personal.  Humbling yourself and explaining the full situation, even though you just want to keep yelling or through out the 'sorry, it's not my job,' just might smooth everything out.

Having a Conversation with Powerpoint, or, 5 Do's and Dont's of Pitching

We've given a bunch of presentations, demos, and pitches this past week...a few new rules for myself that I learned listening to myself and others.
My new Do's and Dont's for presentations:
1.  Don't open with an audience question, especially if you're not sure that the VAST majority of people are going to raise their hand.
2. Don't laugh at your own joke...life doesn't give you a TV show laugh track...either the audience thinks its funny, or it isn't funny  (or they're sleeping).
3.  Don't use the word empower.  Please.  I'm begging you.
4.  Don't name drop.  If they aren't a part of the story, then the name you just threw out, unless it's your CEO who just so happened to make a billion dollars selling ice to eskimos, is useless, and confusing.  Either cut them out..or rewrite the story.
5.  Don't follow the script.  Yes your pitch has to hit the 10 key points... but nobody ever said you have to do all 10 in order.  Our pitch became significantly stronger when we rearranged the marketing, team, financials, solution etc etc slides to fit the story we were telling.  Don't jump from your marketing to your team to your financials to your competitive advantage just because the slide prompt had them in that order.

Creative Commons- CogDogBlog

1.  Do watch Steve Jobs.  Read Presentation Zen.  Stop looking at your slides.  Bring a human brain.
2.  Do have a conversation with your powerpoint slides, and with the audience.  Jobs and others do so well because they aren't pitching or preaching or yelling or stumbling...they're just talking.  Your slide deck is like your friend that's hanging out behind you, integrate it into the conversation you're having with your audience.  Introduce them.  Make them friends.  It sounds weird but speaking
with ease between your .ppt file, your audience, and your brain just makes everything work.
3. Do seed the crowd.  I gave a speech a few months back to a room of over a hundred.  My teammates and girlfriend were there...and it was quite a pickup to see her being the first to laugh at my bad jokes.  If you're in a smaller room, find the object that you can focus on when the room's smiles fade...or, if you're able, place someone there to smile the whole time so that you can come back to them for a pickup in the middle no matter what the tone of the room is.
4. Do be present.  If you don't know what I'm talking about in #3, then you aren't looking at the people you're talking to.  Don't go into your own little talking world; understand the room, what's happening, and either feed off the positive energy or figure out how to draw them back if you lost them somewhere in the financials.
5. Do have stuff.  Humans like stuff.  Our physical representation of our customers pain point tend to be far more memorable than any slide.  Props work.

Come Watch Athleon pitch...some more

Has been a crazy week of pitching for us, through the nPost demo event, the UW Business Plan Comp, and finally through coaching for NWEN's Early Stage Investment Forum, the last of the 'open' events we'll be pitching at.  Tickets (I believe) are still available.  We got the last time slot...so please stick around/or feel free to show up later in the day.
http://www.nwen.org

Seth's Internship

I wrote about a month ago about Seth's Internship. Have had a few opportunities to see different people's plan's to try and land the gig... and while Jeff Widman would be my top choice...this guy put in the leg work to contact me as well, something I look for in all my interns.

Good luck guys.

Google's Plan Next April

Should be to spend random days in April doing their jokes. Would fool a lot more people. Yep.