The Serious, Business side of Fabrice Le Parc

Comment être classifié Hotel 5* en France?

Sat, 18 May 2013 04:59:45 +0200

Voici la fameuse norme aux 124 critères:

http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000021530180

Il est clair qu’elle peut permettre à des établissements d‘“usurper” leurs 5 étoiles, comme la chaîne Sofitel, intégralement classée en 5 étoiles et n’étant clairement pas au niveau. Le Pullman La Défense a même obtenu 5 étoiles, et il s’agit d’un joli 4 étoiles de chaine tout au plus. Le Crowne Plaza de Toulouse…

L’instauration d’une catégorie “Palace” ajoutant des notations sur des critères d’agrément et de services serait bienvenue pour continuer l’effort de mise au niveau international de l’hôtellerie française, qui reste insuffisante pour la 1ere destination touristique mondiale.

Une tentative a été faite en 2011 mais s’est soldée par la nomination contestée de 8 puis 14 établissements.

Aujourd’hui, 265 hôtels en France sont classés 5 étoiles. Sans surprise, les viles qui en comptent le plus sont, de très loin (et 12 des 14 palaces):

- Paris: 48 (5 palaces puis 7 avec le Ritz et le Crillon en travaux)

- Courchevel : 17 (2 palaces)

- Saint-Tropez/Gassin/Ramatuelle : 17 (3 palaces)

Darn it, looks like I was duped. be2 or not to be!

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:12:00 +0200

While I was proud to never have been scammed before 2010, I then was on an almost hilarious roll which ended late 2012 when I returned to France.

Had I suddenly gotten “ridiculously unlucky” as some told me? was it because I started being well-off and wasn’t really before? each case was more surprising than the other, but there is still some learnings I thought to share.

Let me start with be2.com.

Look, it’s best to avoid criticizing this or that person publicly, and deal with it. But in this case it’s the “company” itself, and all it represents, including harming the image of web businesses.

It is strange to me that the founder, who is smart and not a dishonest person, would want to run businesses (they are tied to other similarly shady ventures) which bring nothing to consumers and barely survive by being hardly anything more than a scam.

For too long, I was convinced this would only be a transition into growth and a “good” business was just about to emerge. But there came a point where I couldn’t stand that the only way this business was surviving was because they forced and tricked users into not being able to cancel their subscription. Not only would the annual fee be deducted right away without it being clear, but to cancel, you had to send a FAX (!) to a foreign number which was down all too often, and 14 days before your anniversary. This with no reminder, and bam, your card would see another €300 charge … for a really poor service!

I mean, look at their product: besides the typos and horrendous design, it’s always been 10 years behind. If 1% of the base is active, that’ll be already surprising.

For too long, I thought there would be a break on that point too, as product was the focus of so many people. Yet nothing ever came out, and to date I’ve yet to see a more inefficient team!

Speaking of a team, they’d hired about 10 times the amount of ppl needed to run such a simplistic product, and when I finally arranged to leave, they were also getting rid of half the staff.

So instead of having to pay me a severance package, I felt like bowing out gracefully, trusted the founder and simply asked to be paid and sign a convention with the French system which would have granted me a % of my salary while I was working on Smartdate. At no cost for be2.

You cannot imagine how shocked I was, when not only did they not pay me a dime of agreed bonuses, refused the convention, and even didn’t pay last salaries.

All of a sudden, while we’d been discussing Smartdate on a friendly basis for a year, they thought of saving money by saying “oh actually it’s a problem”. I even offered they’d just pay the last salary… which they even refused. They preferred to hire (great) lawyers, who managed to drag things along forever, and to this date, I’m still trying to recover a small part of what I should have been paid. Not easy with their opaque company structure.

I really hadn’t expected such a low blow, and that will be lesson 1. In business, you can never, ever trust anyone when it comes to money. There will always be a large proportion of people (the untalented, mediocre ones) who will be so stupid as to ruin a long-time relationship for the sake of keeping some cash.

In this case, I was also naive: if the founders had no issue running a business scamming thousands of people, why would they bother doing the same to an associate who’s leaving?

Lesson 2: Think long term, and high-level, and never get involved with people who don’t have the highest moral standards. They never succeed anyways. I feel bad I never managed to convince them to change strategy and leave the dark side of the force.

Yes, sometimes you have to try shortcuts to get your start up off the ground, be bold and do PR stunts, but they can never be a modus operandi for your revenue model. Stay away from companies who scam their employees and their users like be2. Some e-commerce fake companies like Infurn (who scammed me 6 mo ago) do manage to make millions, and their founders get away with it, maybe forever. It’s the biggest mystery that with the tens of thousands of complaints, all the lawsuits, be2 is still out there.

But I feel you derive more happiness by being proud of what you do. Plus they don’t even make that much money.

____________________________________

And when you do get scammed, as you can’t always predict it (even by being the worst paranoid, which I don’t recommend) have a dedicated plan on how to get your money back, stick to it, give up when you’ve exhausted ways, and get it off your mind.

I used to ruminate for hours, but you don’t want to add that to the financial pain! I am now totally indifferent to this one, like the more extraordinary I’ll tell you about when I have a bit of free time.

Lesson 3: focus on what you’ve learned out of it. You know, the silver linings. Focus on that, even if it’s a tiny lining.

_______________________________________

FIrst page on Google. Even their self-created Wikipedia mentions they’re a scam… Now that’s funny. Bear in mind they have a whole team dedicated to bury negative comments.

When I think of it, be2 will soon celebrate 10 years of existence as a scammer. And they never changed the bogus 57% of women. Yet some people still bait.

Now THAT’s an achievement!

Wikipedia:

“This company is by some considered to be a scam^[1]. They are ubiquitous and keep erasing warnings about their extortion of money from people. Warnings about the company can be found in various locations on the Internet, for instance ^[2] and^[3]. According to dissatisfied former customers, it is difficult to cancel a subscription, the cancellation of a credit card being claimed as the only option with collection agencies being a possible consequence.

However, it is not possible to cancel the subscription because there is no email link on the site or fax number. Although the online address makes the company appear to be registered in the UK (be2.co.uk), it is actually based in Luxenbourg. For this reason the company has managed to get away with taking money out of subscribers’ bank accounts without their consent and make cancellations of memberships nearly impossible to achieve.^[10]

In Denmark, the journalist Troels Jørgensen from TV station DR has rated BE2’s matching system as flawed. Wildly different profiles were matched to exactly the same potential partners in a test performed for consumer rights programme Kontant.”

Flash news: they never managed to build a matching algorythm, and the renewal got them sued in every single country.

2 years later: lessons from the past!

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:04:35 +0200

http://www.slideshare.net/fabriceleparc/sd-investor-summary-may-2011

Deepclass : “Join the Luxury e-Retail Revolution” is coming next.

Found it interesting to see this document as I’m entering the last phase of launching of a very different business, Deepclass.

A bit the opposite of Smartdate: an innovative concept within an untapped market with barriers to entry and long preparation cycles. On products I’m passionate about.

As you can imagine I was furious with the whole Smartdate waste, but in the end I couldn’t hope to learn so much. I also thrive in the face of adversity, and sought to confront my tendency to be too optimistic and confident when there didn’t “seem” to be enough of that adversity.

Yes, you need to be furiously optimistic as an entrepreneur - but also (kind of) plan for the 25 other plans after Plan A!

This time I’ve been preparing for 4 months, while Smartdate was only 10 months old as we were looking for a 3rd round!

In June 2011 we realized how catastrophic our losses on the US market were due to chargebacks on massive fraud: losing all subs money, all marketing invest, and ridiculous fines. Our payment provider Adyen, while large in EU, had done nothing to adapt fraud screening and flat rejected any responsibility (of course).

So while I had prepared for a speedy and lucrative exit with one of the US leaders, I hadn’t done thorough research on the risks, and no one involved either - it was all going too fast.

I wasn’t happy with the product, and already that’s a signal you have to hold off, be more patient. That also made me want to understand product and coding in depth so I would never struggle like that again. Your team is here to fill the gaps and you should focus on your strengths, but it sure helps to know enough in every aspect of your biz.

We had major “troll” issues (ppl who blackmail you with trademarks, domains, copyrights, patents for a living - nice goal in life I’d say) - and until you’ve seen it, it’s just hard to be ready for such sheer cupidity.

In the end, don’t loose sight you’re building a business, so cash is king : having such an unexpected, sudden cash flow issue wound things down in just 3 months. I was still thinking of selling, but be it that or a pivot, don’t think twice if things don’t go according to plan!

Many start-ups end up failing when they run out of cash (not that suddenly I’ll admit) and they’ve sat there doing something that doesn’t work for a year or two, as if some miracle would happen in the meantime.

No matter your mission, it’ll need constant tweaking with super-fast turnaround times: get your board on board (haha), and, above all, your team.

No matter your size, you can go down in 3 years, anytime, and that’s getting true for all types of businesses nowadays. When you’re getting started, rather think 3 months.

Keeping that in mind is is what makes the game interesting!

Being an entrepreneur has a lot to do with managing the risks you must take, not just taking risks.

Better in America

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:44:13 +0200

From time to time (well, when I have time), I’ll post a delightful feature found on a US site - totally unbeknownst to anyone in Europe.

But something which we might get to see in 5 or 10 years when people this side of the Atlantic get closer and closer to the understanding of how much more business you can do by nurturing and pampering your customers.

And no, Amazon does not count (even though they still release 1 year later here): they’re a US company and they use force to have subsidiaries in barbaric countries more or less comply with their standards.

Today, tracking your purchase on OneKingsLane.

FANCY: lessons for Deepclass

Tue, 07 May 2013 03:01:00 +0200

Believe it or not, I just stumbled upon thefancy.com. Or “Fancy”, although they couldn’t get the domain, which very strangely redirects to some random Portland real estate agency (?!)

It’s a disorganized version of what I have in mind for Deepclass. Very entertaining though.

They started long before us and have a ton of the hype factors sought after by the Valley investors. The company raised about $30M from anybody who’s “kewl”, from Dorsey to Kutcher.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1819079/high-end-pinterest-competitor-fancy-launches-commerce-platform-help-jack-dorsey

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-23/tech/31089785_1_users-fancy-groupon

Yet in 15 months, their e-commerce effort to generate revenue vs initial competitor Pinterest (whose traffic exploded for reasons not so clear as both product were identical and launched at the same time) has been pretty good, but not spectacular.

So I feel blessed to dig into what they’ve done and understand what prevented an even more impressive sales growth. Given all the stars aligned for them I mean.

From my experience, it’s just too much of a hipster thingy. I browsed for a while but couldn’t really find anything to buy, which is a bad sign since I am the exact target group.

I believe it should be easier to organize and search for stuff to buy and that you can’t put items costing $5 and $145,000 next to one another.

Not everyone with money is a 20-something who can easily get his head around a Pinterest-like concept, and not all merchants will “get it” spontaneously.

By contrast, OneKingsLane or 1stDibs have exploding revenue and traditional interfaces, so that leads me to think I’ll keep things more simple for the v1 of Deepclass, and continue to focus on getting merchants on board.

Plus, it lacks editorial content.

http://socialcommercetoday.com/44m-says-social-commerce-site-fancy-is-the-future-of-the-style-magazine/

PS : Fancy just announced yet another round of $15M right now.
What happened in the past 6 months? the new round signals it may still be loosing quite a lot.. I’ve seen their ads, also indicating their virality may have stagnated.

Avvo, Trustpilot: BUSTED! Who's next?

Mon, 06 May 2013 07:50:23 +0200

“Dear Mr (Name of CEO), following our exchanges, I have finished my investigation and would like your written confirmation that companies / lawyers / doctors cannot pay your company to delete negative comments. I would also be interested in having more precise information on your business model, as your last email was not specific about how you generate revenue.”

My latest email to Avvo and Trustpilot was blunt, and this time, got no answer in a week.

I had informed both review sites that I was writing an article for the Huffington Post, which will be published, well, sometime soon I guess. Plus it still has to be Americanized a bit as my English is not quite sharp enough for publication yet .

I first got quick responses from their PR, who suspiciously transferred me right away to their “General Counsels”.

I’d say they still have to improve their “journalist inquiry” management process - but it’s understandable, as except for a rather watered-down article from the Guardian, no one in the media seems to care that Avvo or Trustpilot trick thousands of good people a month and trample with no dignity all moral principles - and their core mission and own legal terms none the least.

How I established both let you alter at wish your “online reputation” was super duper easy as you can imagine. But I want you to read the article so let this be a quick teeeeaser.

I felt compelled to offer the story because I was somewhat angered to have lost quite a sum after hiring a remarkably incompetent corporate lawyer with raving reviews on Avvo, and buying from an e-commerce site with thousands of positive reviews on Trustpilot.

Strangely my real negative and very specific reviews always had some “issue” and were removed about a week after being approved - at some point Trustpilot, who seemed to be lacking further bogus reasons, demanded that I proved “not just with emails” that I had been a customer.

However, my very fake-looking good reviews were never questioned. How bizarre!

In the end, it costs from $19 to $49 to remove a bad review, and I’ll spare you for now the details of their “reputation management packages” - which can be very pricey.

Sadly I don’t have the time or patience to sue these websites, but I do encourage someone (maybe a lawyer listed on Avvo, but a good one) to engage in a class action.

I’m sure quite a few people would join as simple Google searches on Trustpilot and Avvo reveal scores of people who were not too happy either that their legitimate negative reviews were taken down, after being scammed because of these deceitful websites.

Who, like me, got ripped off not just by the company or individual listed, but with the abetting of Trustpilot and Avvo.

What’s really unsettling is these websites look very serious.

And most people have had great experiences thanks to Tripadvisor, who, on top of continuous efforts to improve their ranking system, lets you have a decent idea of what to expect - bearing your being patient enough to read a lot of reviews to weed out the overly enthusiastic or abhorrent clients.

10 Solutions To Fix Your Marketing Campaigns

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:16:14 +0200

Do any of the following keep you up at night?

I have no idea what to test, so now I don’t bother
Our visitors are leaving our website without doing anything
We blew through our AdWords budget in a day!
Our market has dried up…

Look, all online marketers have been there. There is no miracle solution but persistence and dedication to basic principles help more than throwing your hands in the air.

Online marketing has gotten so competitive and intricate that you often get the feeling that you’re doing all that’s humanely possible and get discouraged.

At some point, I worked with an Adwords genius, and he helped me boost our CAC by 60%.

Note that landing pages are more useful when you are selling products than just one service, and sometimes info helps conversions. It’s just a matter of responding closely to a query or an ad copy.

Last, don’t underestimate how difficult email marketing is. This is probably where you have the most room for improvement.

1. The HiPPOs Are Running the Asylum

Who’s in charge here? (Source)

I’m not talking about the kind you’d see on an African safari. Rather, the suits in your company, who could be stakeholders, your boss, or senior management. The term HiPPO refers to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, where decisions are based on conjecture or “experience” and are handed down to you to implement without any evidence of their true value.

Back when testing wasn’t an easy process, you’d have to suck it up and run with these ideas, but now (thanks to the advent of many inexpensive A/B testing tools) you can diplomatically reply to such a request with, “I have an idea too – why don’t we test them?”

If you win the test, you’ll be afforded more leeway in the future while educating the HiPPO’s about the value of scientific experimentation & testing vs. random ideas. You’ll also start making more money for the company, which any smart HiPPO would be a fool to argue with.

Just remember though, if you dare to engage a HiPPO without testing, you run the risk of becoming yet another PWTMSMEBNE in the room (Person With The Most Subject Matter Expertise But No Evidence, obviously).

Stop listening to HiPPO’s, stop the assumptions, and start testing.

2. Our Visitors Are Leaking

You might want to fix that leak before your customers find it. (Source)

Sounds like a strange statement to make. Actually, here the term “leak” refers to a “link” that moves your visitors away from a page and your intended conversion goal.

But really, who’s fault is it? My guess is that you’re sending your marketing traffic right to your homepage. Thought so. This is a classic rookie mistake that even seasoned marketing vets still make. Consider the fact that your homepage probably has between 30-60 links, and who knows how many products.

Are you really surprised that your visitors are wandering around like lost sheep? We all know that sheep need a herder. Someone to guide them to their final destination. That’s your job.

One visitor, one goal, no wandering around. That means no leaks.

So how do you plug the holes and stop the leaks? Congrats if you replied “with a landing page” in your head.

Fixing the leaks with landing pages

How do landing pages solve your leakage problems? By sending your marketing traffic to a targeted landing page you’ll reap many benefits including:

A page designed specifically with one objective in mind, to attract clicks on the CTA that represents your conversion goal
A message tightly matched to the ad clicked to get there
A controlled environment that allows for optimization and accurate analytical measurement

3. AdWords Broke my Credit Card

Is your advertising spend getting you into debt? (Source)

AdWords (or any other pay-per-click platform) is probably the easiest way to blow your paycheck if you don’t know what you’re doing.

There are so many moving parts to a paid ad campaign that you may as well be playing Roulette in Vegas. The ad copy, CTA, destination page, keywords you are bidding on, competing companies bidding on the same keywords etc. – means it’s easy to get it wrong when starting out.

If you want to gain an advantage you need to follow a few key principles:

Message match for Quality Score: One of the biggest factors in how much your ads cost is the quality score attributed to each ad. This is dependent on several things, one of which being the destination page, and how closely the content matches that of your ads. The easiest way to get a low quality score for a variety of ads is to send them all to your homepage. Not only can there be multiple messages on your homepage, but if you’re targeting different keywords, there’s no way they will all correlate to the content of your homepage. By using a landing page for each ad group, you can match the message of your ad more easily and as a result get a higher Quality Score.
Message match for higher conversions: There’s also a human factor to consider when it comes to message match. If you read an ad that said “We sell blue apples” and arrived at a page with a headline that said “Welcome to the red apple store”, you’d think you were in the wrong place and leave. A landing page designed specifically for your ad will prevent the high bounce rate associated with this message mismatch.
Privacy policies for lead gen: If you are doing lead gen and have a form on your landing page, you need to add a privacy policy link to tell Google (and your visitors) that you are trustworthy. Not having a privacy policy can seriously impact your Quality Score and drive up the cost of your ads – never mind the fact that they probably won’t get shown as better quality ads/pages will trump you in the search results. Finally, place the privacy policy link right next to the email form field to give it an extra trust factor.

Again landing pages are the secret weapon that will help you keep both the ad bots and humans happy, and your ad costs and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) lower.

4. Nobody Clicks Our Email Links

It’s like your links are not even there! (Source)

Are you telling a big long story in your emails? Paragraph after paragraph about how awesome you are? If people aren’t clicking on your email CTAs it’s probably because they sit at the end of an experience that’s perceived as too much work. People then give up reading and delete your email instead.

There’s a better way to do email marketing, by shortening your emails into succinct and concise messages with a strong call to action.

How to Shorten Your Emails Without Losing the Details

Your email should be a teaser and nothing more. It’s singular goal is to intrigue your recipients enough to get them to click through to your landing page, which is where you place the full details of your marketing campaign. Your landing page is a much more effective place to do the selling after you’ve captured people’s attention. The reason for this is that you’ve got as much space as you need to tell your story.

If you need to showcase your product/service using video, a landing page is the perfect place to do this – again removing the need for a lot of written content in your email.

Shorten your next email and see how your click-through rate improves.

5. I Don’t Know What to Test, So My Tests Don’t Work. Now I Don’t Test.

There must be something in there to test, to salvage some conversions. (Source)

This is one of the most common problems in conversion optimization, knowing that you should be testing, but not knowing where, what, why and how you should be doing it. I’ll answer each of these questions in the order you should be doing it as part of your testing and optimization process:

Where

You want to start with the most high profile pages on your site. These will depend on your business, but will typically include your:

Homepage
Pricing page
Landing pages that you are using for inbound advertising traffic
And other high traffic pages (check your analytics)

What

There are some fundamental anatomical elements that are common to most pages, and these are most often what you’ll be testing.

The core value proposition of the page, usually presented in the form of the page headline and sub-header
Your call-to-action design (contrast, use of whitespace, size, location) and copy
Form length, design and position
Amount of and readability of the page copy (chunk it and use bullets for improved scanning)

Why

A big mistake is when people just try to test something without a real purpose, or a clear understanding of why they are testing. This is where your test hypothesis comes in. A hypothesis is a statement of what you are going to test and your theory behind why it will be a success (and any success criteria you can include). An example hypothesis would read something like this:

“The page does not have a clear call-to-action, and prospects spend too long trying to understand what to do next. Adding a large orange button right under the main benefits will help prospects identify the CTA and get more of them to perform the desired action.”

Once you have a hypothesis you are in a better position to make changes to a test page to compete against your original page in a conversion experiment.

How

Now that you’re ready to run a test, you need to follow a few basic rules to ensure that your experiment is a clean and uncontaminated one.

Each page in your test – most commonly the original page and one “challenger” used in the A/B test, should receive at least 100 unique visitors and often as much as 500 or more depending on how drastic the changes increase (or decrease) conversions.
Your test should run for at least a week to account for variances in time of day and different daily behaviors (weekends are often very different to weekdays).
The statistical significance of the experiment should be over 95%. This is a number that is calculated by the testing software you are using to determine when the results you are seeing are for reasons other than chance alone.

That was a brief intro to A/B testing, but is enough of a framework to stop you complaining that you don’t know what or how to test.

6. My landing Pages Don’t Convert and I Don’t Know Why

I’m confused. Surely there’s an obvious explanation for why it’s not working. (Source)

The best way to find out why your landing pages aren’t working is to ask. Ask your visitors and customers. Ask whoever is viewing your landing page and ignoring your wishes. The best way to do this is to add a live chat or survey widget to your page.

The information you get from your visitors at the point of conversion can be invaluable in figuring out why they didn’t convert and what to test to improve your landing pages – think of it as if they’re shopping at the Apple store and aren’t quite sure of the benefits of an iMac over a PC. Having someone right there to answer your questions (like live chat) can be the tipping point that encourages a sale.

Once you get feedback from talking to your visitors or asking them survey questions, you are in a much stronger position to create a hypothesis for a successful page. Which comes full circle back to my last point about what to test.

If you want to read more about how to gather and put user feedback into action, read part 4 (or the whole thing) from this case study.

7. Our Blog Doesn’t Drive Many Signups

Lots of visitors, but only a few signups? (Source)

There are three main points to consider here:

Your blog is a great source of inbound marketing, and should be considered a powerful tool in establishing your subject matter expertise and thought leadership. This is a critical platform on which to build the trust required to make people believe in you. If they respect your stance on a subject they will also believe that that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to building your product/service.
Asking your blog readers to register for your blog update emails enables you to leverage the email list by sending more excellent content to them in the future – such as ebooks, whitepapers and case studies. These documents can have subtle calls-to-action in them to turn a reader into a customer – providing an extra acquisition path.
You can also add a CTA to your blog (in the sidebar or at the end of each post) which will provide a small trickle of new customers. A good strategy for CTA design is to make them relevant to the category of the blog the reader is in. An example being, if they are in an A/B testing category, you would design your banner with a CTA like “Learn more about A/B testing”. This should lead to a landing page with content related to the subject and how your product provides the solution.

So yes, you should keep your blog, and set it up so that it is monetized using these three approaches. And don’t forget – the bigger and better your blog becomes, the wider the reach it will have and the simpler the next point will be.

8. Our Market Has Dried Up

Time to find another watering hole. (Source)

This is a prime time to begin co-marketing with companies that have customers with similar needs as your own. By getting your name in front of a new set of eyes, you can rapidly grow the size your target market. To run a successful co-marketing strategy you need to start by laying the foundation for a smart relationship, and then establish contact with a clear set of possibilities laid out for each partner to do in order to get your/their name in front of each others customers.

Some examples of co-marketing tactics are:

Sending an email to each others customer list to recommend the other company’s product, and explaining how they work together to provide extra benefit and value.
Writing guest posts for each other’s blog that shares your subject matter expertise with their readership, while staying on topic with the content of each blog.
Adding a logo and possibly partner description to each other’s website.
Exposure to social networks.
Co-promotion in contests and with special offers.
Joint webinars.

Once you have an established authority in your market, you can set up a landing page for people interested in creating a partnership. A good strategy is then to have an email autoresponder set up, so that when the prospective partner completes your partnership request form, they will receive the email outlining that a reciprocal use of the prior examples would be how you’d like to move forward (if they are deemed to be a suitable partner).

9. Our Visitors Are Coming for Dinner But Not Eating

They are showing up, but not eating. (Source)

In other words, people are visiting your website, but not converting into customers. This could be a messaging problem which you can use an A/B testing tool to optimize, or it could be that your site is designed in such a way that visitors are getting lost or not finding the important information on your pages and as a result, bouncing from the site.

To see what they are doing on your pages, you can use heat map software like CrazyEgg to discover the most often clicked areas of your core pages, and adjust the layout to place the most important elements in the areas with the highest focus.

In the example below, you can see that visitor is jumping all around the page, and ignoring the call-to-action. It’s fairly easy to theorize that the reason for this is that the CTA doesn’t stand out from other page elements (especially contrast and color wise).

A lot of people say that button color is irrelevant, but this a complete falsehood when color contrast is the problem. Yes red might not perform better than green under ideal circumstances, but if the page is dominantly green, then a red button will stand out a lot more than a green one.

If you see something like this, you can improve the placement, contrast, size and whitespace use of your CTAs. If you see people spending a lot of time looking at the navigation or other “leaks” then you know they are confused and are seeking information elsewhere than the current page. Again, if you use a focused and targeted landing page, you can remove the potential for a lot of eye wandering and homepage A.D.D.

10. Nobody Downloads Our Content

Are your ebooks being left on a virtual shelf gathering dust? (Source)

You’ve spent the time to write an authoritative ebook or whitepaper, you’ve designed a great landing page to give it away in exchange for personal and business data. You’ve sent your entire email list to the page and shared it on your social networks. And yet, you are getting virtually no new leads from the page as nobody is completing your form to get the ebook.

It’s actually fairly easy to fix this problem. Here are three approaches to building a more effective ebook landing page.

Have a preview

Amazon pretty much invented this concept with their “Take a look inside” feature that lets you read part of the book and check out the contents. Most people are psychologically hard-wired with a sceptical “Try before you buy” mentality (think about how many people steal a grape before buying them! Yes I’m talking about you… and me). If your content is worth providing personal info for, then you should make it fair by showing off how good it is in advance.

To do this, take a portion of your ebook (a chapter for example), and make it available without barrier in one of the following formats:

A short PDF document that people can download and read to gauge the quality of your work.
An embedded SlideShare presentation that walks through a series of slides constructed using ebook content.

Reduce friction

Friction is the perceived barrier to achieving a given task – in this case filling out your form. The trick here is to balance the level of friction with the “size of the prize” so that you’re offering a fair exchange. Essentially the better your ebook is, the more you ask in return. Just make sure it’s relevant data you’re collecting. Most people won’t part with their phone number to download a PDF, nor should they.

Add a viral traffic feedback mechanism

If you read the case study in part 6, you’ll be familiar with the viral feedback loop that you can use to fuel a continuous stream of traffic to your ebook download landing page. Essentially, you let people get your ebook in exchange for a tweet instead of an email. The tweet contains a link back to your ebook landing page, perpetuating the lifespan of your campaign. For best results, offer both options(PayWithATweet and exchange for an email).

My Dream Desk and untapped business for Deepclass

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:03:00 +0200

This stunning 10ft wide (3m) desk was made on order by Maxim Old in 1971.

Intrigued, I paid a visit to the gallery owner, who has no website, does not read email or answer the phone (in a typical old-school French fashion).

I told him about marketing and the internet and he gave me a brief puzzled look, as if I was talking of a very distant future.

Anyway, he could “let go of this piece” (which he only took ONE photo of and is not exposed in his gallery) for €20.000. Wait, no, he said, €30.000 ($40,000, yes the price of a house in many places)… “sorry, that would have been a bit cheap, wouldn’t it?”.

He showed no interest whatsoever in making the sale as he was shouting “280.000€” ($370,000) to someone inquiring about 2 non-distinct armchairs.

I was really wondering, since he seemed to be doing pretty well, how on earth does he sell such absurdly expensive stuff (besides the few items in the tiny gallery), while not “marketing” them in any way?

And what would happen if I managed to make a lot of people aware all these objects exist?

The Desk, he said, has been sitting in a warehouse for 3 years now.

My gut feeling is by featuring his collection on Deepclass, I could decuple his sales overnight (and with a 20% commission, make good revenue).

Can’t wait to tap in all the hidden treasuries of France and Europe and make them available to foreign buyers (not surprisingly I did not see a French person in that gallery or any of the other surrounding ones).

Amusing - but it’s still true that no one can boast being...

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:38:00 +0200

Amusing - but it’s still true that no one can boast being an “awesome social media marketer”. It’s still a lot of experimenting and empirical stats.

10 Completely Insane Social Media Statistics

Some things about social media are hard to put into words. When you’re trying to become the first degree of Kevin Bacon in your own burgeoning social network, you quickly learn all about stock-photo scavenger hunts, brand-obsessed Facebook stalkers and that weird internal struggle that happens when you’ve been tweeting as a cartoon bear for so long that you actually begin to think like a cartoon bear. So when you find yourself at a dinner party talking to a handsome stranger and you’re asked to elaborate on what you mean when you say “the wacky world of social media marketing,” how do you explain these things?

You don’t. Trust us. Something will get lost in the translation, and you’ll just come across as a giggly weirdo who lives on the Internet. Don’t go down that road. Stick with the facts by sharing one of these 10 surprising social media statistics instead.

1. More people own a cell phone than a toothbrush. There are over 7 billion people in the world. An estimated 4 billion of them own mobile phones, but only around 3.5 billion own toothbrushes. We urge you not to use this stat as an excuse to spend your brushing time playing Draw Something instead. (60 Second Marketer)

2. Over 5 million Facebook users are under the age of 10. This is despite the fact that the legal terms and conditions prohibit anyone under the age of 13 from using the site. So where are these kids’ parents? According to Forbes, “95 percent of parents were aware their kids were using the service while 78 percent helped create the account.” Cool moms of the world, take note – helping your underage kid sign up for Facebook is the new letting your kid drink in the house. (Forbes)

3. Twitter users are 33% more likely to be Democrats. That’s compared to the general U.S. population. So if you have a particularly scathing Obama joke, you might want to tell it at a cocktail party instead of on Twitter where the audience will be stacked against you. (Convince&Convert)

4. Companies ignore 70% of Facebook questions. When Facebook fans post their questions online, only 30% of them receive answers. That’s a shockingly low interaction rate, but many social media marketing experts see this Facebook fact as an opportunity. If you’re willing to engage customers when you’re competitors aren’t, separating yourself from the pack is easy. (Social Bakers)

5. 80% of Pinterest users are women. Although this statistic gives Pinterest the largest gender divide of any of the social media giants, it’s not altogether surprising – have you ever seen how many “dream wedding” boards there are on Pinterest? We expect to see more male-centric brandsmarketing with Pinterest soon, however. Why? Because “food” is currently the fastest growing topic on the site. Who doesn’t like food? (Mashable)

6. Users spent $1.85 billion on virtual Facebook credits last year. At that price, we could have bought around 50 private islands and five $100 million yachts. Or, you know, a bajillion Farmville chickens. Looks like the people have spoken. (Wired)

7. Moms are the biggest supporters of branding on Facebook. If your brand isn’t tapping into the mommy market, you’re missing out. When they aren’t tagging you in embarrassing childhood photos or questioning your relationship status, Facebook-friendly moms are liking brands more than any other group. (Mashable)

8. Facebook’s population is more than twice as big as the USA’s. The population of the U.S. is nearing 314 million. Facebook boasts over 800 million users. If you’ve only gotten a hundred of these users to like your page, you may want to rethink your strategy for branding on Facebook. (Facebook)

9. Lady Gaga is the Queen of Twitter.Mama Monster has over 26.4 million followers – only slightly less than the entire population of Afghanistan. That’s 65% more followers than Barack Obama. We think it probably has something to do with the outfits. Sorry, Mr. President.

10. Every second, more than an hour of video is added to YouTube. How many of these hours of content feature sleepy kittens? Never enough. (Socialbakers)

It pains us to admit it, but even the savviest social media marketing guru is no Don Draper – and you only have to make it through a few episodes of “Mad Men” to know that’s probably a good thing. Social media geniuses don’t necessarily bleed charisma and mystery, but on the other hand, they’re not downing a fifth of bourbon and inhaling two packs of Luckys every day just to keep their clients happy. So the next time you’re at a fundraiser and the subject of social media comes up, don’t climb onto that soap box. Don’t brag about how you raised your Klout score from 40 to 50 in one week. Impress your audience with one of these social media statistics instead. You never know who might be listening.

Good design is good business. And it's a vision for what you create.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:30:10 +0200

However, design is more than just how something looks. At the bottom line, the way it works — the nuts and bolts — what it communicates and how well an idea is presented is the underlying factor to innovation. Design is the process used to solve problems in a creative way, and across a variety of mediums. Rather than help you just decorate your business, project or product, we will help it to communicate more clearly, be more informative, persuade better, be more efficient, increase sales and above all delight.

Just like design is more than just the appearance, development is more than just the plumbing. We carefully craft everything with an “inside out” approach as part of the design process. The pieces that no one sees receive as much attention and articulation as the outer layers. The underlying system and flow of information in our products is efficient and reliable. Our custom administrative systems make managing your site fast and simple.

Designing for the internet and applications has a fast feedback loop, and it is constantly rewarding. It is becoming evident that communicating with your audience online is more than simply putting something up. It is the quality of the experiences that are digitally created that matter, and to be able to create something digitally that engages humanity is a truly wonderful thing.

— A pleasantly written view on webdesign by LaCroix Design, http://www.lacroixdesign.net

Responsive web design!

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:06:00 +0200

So after a month of distractions with various companies (I like to keep thinking forward), and less pleasantly my biceps being ripped off and subsequent muchos painful surgery…

I am moving on with the development of a finalized version of Deepclass.

I am thrilled to have met many very talented designers and developers, too many almost, which is very new to me.

I wanted to share some info on what everyone speaks about and what I feel is great when you have a “content” website. As for Deepclass, there is definitely a benefit in having the same design for desktops and tablets, but the shopping experience will yield the need for a specific mobile version, down the road.

Anyway here’s the beast:

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

Mashable called 2013 the Year of Responsive Web Design.

A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, an extension of the @media rule.

The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element.
Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, most commonly the width of the browser.

Fund Raising: it's very difficult... if you are doing something "average".

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:34:00 +0200

I absolutely disagree with that:

You need metrics in this ballpark to raise a series A, based on @angellist anonymized stats: pic.twitter.com/YtybCGkBoq

The guy contends “nowadays” you need a start-up that has already proven its concept and makes significant money to raise just $1M.. (because of one example?)

I’d say it may be the case if the potential is small and team and product are average / undistinct and have been at it for 2 years. And then it’s not really “venture” capital, nor a “Series A”.

And it’s a shitty deal for the company, unless these 1M are 10% of stocks max.

When you get serious investors to believe you have something great, you show them how fast you can deliver, there are still quite a few who will give you 1M to start out and 5M+ when you have traction.

The concept and the entrepreneur matter a lot, of course.

For instance, I didn’t manage to find the real disruptive angle for Smartdate. I think a new project I’m involved with has that disruptive potential, and I’m working hard to make it happen as I was very frustrated with having to close down Smartdate after the most improbable series of tough luck. The “silver lining” is that I’ve now seen all scenarios that an entrepreneur, who has to be driven by optimism, would deem unlikely to happen, and that I’m not going to overlook the same things once again!

Then, it was “a dating site” (which 90% of investors despise and see no exit out of, often rightfully).

I hadn’t managed to find talent in France, one reason being most French are many years behind Americans in web dev and design … and its retarded labor cost, the other the nature of the business (top talent is also not attracted at all by dating ventures). For the same job ad for Deepclass I get 10 times more resumes than I would for Smartdate.

I still managed to raise $8M “easily”, in a much less favorable context than now.

You quickly learn that the amount is not as important as the people behind it, the conditions and the timing.

Our incapacity to deliver a good product prevented necessary pivots to the concept.

Having a shitty product and a subpar and unmotivated team were clear red flags I needed to stop right there until I had convinced the board to do something else with that money. Especially after we’d been robbed of several million (I’ll have to explain to whole story, it happened so unexpectedly that it would be comical if we hadn’t all lost hard-earned money).

To conclude, I am always conspicuous when hearing “these days” it’s “so difficult” blah blah. On the contrary we are seeing a new “dot-com” boost in the US (not in Europe I agree, due to a lingering of the recession, the result of absurd variants of socialist policies).

In France we’re also 5 years behind the US when it comes to our economy falling apart ;) and sadly our sluggish, state-controlled system, the conservatism of most people who don’t have the luck to read US publications and have a culture of dreaming big or innovate, ensures the country stays in that recession state for the longest time.

It’s just like people who blame not finding a job on the “recession” in the US. It’s over folks!

Yes there is unemployment, but also lots of growth in many areas and maybe you’re just not attractive to employers, so it’s the first thing to fix, not the economy :)

To conclude, it’s crucial to aim for “big” when you are starting a web business. I am skeptical on the future of businesses who painfully raise 72k $ after 2 years of hard work “to do another city”. It doesn’t really work like opening restaurants, you need massive usage to be worth something, and quite simply to generate enough margins!

That usually involves having enough experience for the founder or the founding team (which shouldn’t be more than 2, absolute max 3 people- you can’t decide fast enough if you’re 8). It involves successes and failures - one could argue that if there is actually an entrepreneur who hasn’t failed on anything, he hasn’t tried enough routes. Even Zuckerberg has encountered many failures with Facebook, latest being FB Home, but so far he’s always managed to never let them bring anyone down.. quick pivots are key.

.. and the need to know as much as possible on every aspect of your business.

I suffered in the past of not being tech savvy enough and and I taught myself.. in the end it’s difficult to be a great entrepreneur without knowing what’s in the engine. Just like a great baker will have spent a lot of time doing each baguette and pastry himself!

Time for a more upscale, intellectual Facebook?

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:03:02 +0200

For once I don’t find this one too tacky or gooey, and it relates to the usage of Facebook, which isn’t great to discuss ideas and after a while seems too trivial and inconsequential to me.

You get a lot of (uninteresting) feedback when it’s mundane events or comments, or pics where you look sexy… which is entertaining to most people, especially under 25 or 30- but much less when you put forward business or social trends.

LinkedIn hasn’t manage to elevate the debate for now and the business topics discussed are pretty low-level.

I don’t want to sound snobby, I enjoy browsing Facebook sometimes (less and less though) but expressing a need for a platform where you “discuss ideas”, and meet people.

There are interesting comments on The New York Times for instance, but the “social” aspect isn’t there, nor a lot of feedback.

I’d be interested in looking into building a new platform that focuses on ideas and knowledge, a social network with Wikipedia-like content.

Feel free to PM me if you too are getting a bit bored by Facebook, if you want to express yourself in more than 140 char and without hashtags…

Another French myth that collapses : our "best in the world" health care. Just decent.. if you're rich.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:57:00 +0200

While I could already testify how ridiculously inferior our administration and justice system are compared to the US (think 10 times slower and 4 times less efficient, so if you bitch in NY, you would die here!).. I had never experienced being seriously hurt and having to undergo surgery.

Well a huge piece of furniture was falling as I was moving it and a reflex had me extend my right arm to prevent it from falling. I heard two loud pops and got dizzy with pain: my biceps has torn itself out of the elbow.

It’s gross and very stressful aesthetically (adios gym for a while).. and you have these images of guys with atrophied biceps hanging weirdly..

but now two days on it doesn’t prevent me from typing or working normally. I just carry my arm in a scarf when I walk and can’t use it, but I can type, talk or walk.

Luckily typing only involves the forearm.

However, if you want to fully recover you need to be operated on within a week. In the meantime you have to do an MRI so the surgeon has a better idea how to tie back your muscle when he cuts you open (gross).

So I called 15 “public” hospitals, meaning that my expenses would have been reasonable (not free as I am not indigent). NONE could operate before 7 weeks, let alone even schedule an MRI in the meantime (“you’ll have to do without it”).

So I was left after quite some research with a very expensive clinic that can do all that by Friday, and it’ll cost me… an arm! (haha)

And it is expensive, like in America… but the surgeon gave me 20 sec and there were 60 people in the waiting room. Why? because there are hundreds in a public hospital, and you can’t get an appointment.

I did my Lasik in the US and was stunned to discover no wait, tons of helpful, compassionate professionals - and I’m pretty sure that when you go to an expensive clinic they at least explain the procedure, which my surgeon had no time to do.

And so much for the “equality” of care! Waiting 2 months meant that I would NEVER have recovered more than 70% of my arm capability and my muscle would never have taken its shape back.

So if you’re poor, too bad for you.

This country is just going down and only the French think “it’s better here”. They scoff every time I tell them that a lot of our stuff is very far from the level that you find in the US. Until they’ve lived there, not just visited.

Health care: OK it may be better if you have no money at all, but anybody else.. way inferior and weighs down the WHOLE economy. OK our drugs are very cheap.

But any paid treatment I’ve received in the US was way superior. You should see some doctor’s “offices” here. And ironically, there’s only one “nice” hospital, the most expensive in the country, the “

Tolerance : millions of people keep marching to promote homophobia or fascist values.

No need to shoot the ambulance, but I sadly noticed the ONLY e-commerce website which delivered me on time and reliably, out of all the purchases I made.. is Amazon.

Not only do all the others have crazy delivery times (how about 6 months for that table?) but they will tell you 1 month down the road they no longer have it, or be absurdly late. The concept of commercial gesture being unknown, you’re even lucky to be refunded.

It just makes me ashamed.

I love the French as persons, the relationships we can have with people (except the intolerant biggots ;). The humour, the culture, the uncertainty, the weirdness, the fact that we never discuss practical mundane stuff.

So many Americans no longer know how to converse casually, all they do is tweet, text - and any talk is like a boring business meeting with various aims (get money or connections or sex from you, or organize something or tell you what they did today).

But pretty much everyone in France stopped believing that they could be the best in the world at something, abandoned the concept of pride that drives even the least cultured Americans. It started in the late 1800’s and never stopped getting worse. No one seems to want to take action, and those who would like to can only abandon, stay and make do with the system, or like millions, leave.

There’s a saying that “impossible isn’t French”. It’s long, long been forgotten.

What a blog post will look like in 2020

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:12:06 +0200

I believe that if you want to have success in the present you must anticipate the future. No crystal ball required.

Why? Because you want to sniff out trends to ride them. If you only act on what’s already happening, you’re getting sidetracked to second, third or even worse, fourth place. Like driving a Ferrari with two feet slammed on the brakes. Screeeech.

So, how can one even try to predict how content marketing, in this case blog writing, will look in the future ? Well, we have to remember the fundamental laws:

Nature is lazy, hence, we’re lazy. We want maximum results with minimum effort.
Content in the future will be based on this principle: Consume the maximum amount of content with minimum effort, whatever, whenever, wherever we want.

The following predictions represent my opinion and not the truth, so if there’s a time traveler from the future in the audience, don’t eliminate me with your ray gun because my predictions didn’t all come true in 2020. Cool?

Let’s roll. Six possible futures of the blog post in 2020:

1) High-end, low-end blogging styles.

I believe the normal 500 – 1000 word blog posts will enter oblivion because content will serve one of the two emerging reader camps:

Snippet readers – According to FastCompany, Facebook updates make for the most memorable writing. Strange, but it makes sense. With the ever-increasing battle for attention, people crave minimalistic, write-it-like-you-say-it content. Mini-blog posts that can be consumed like fast food, not rich in nutrition, but they give you the essentials.

Long-form essay readers – On the other site we’ll larger sized articles (1000 – 7000 words and more). These are going to be evergreen, in-depth articles, almost mini ebooks, that require more sitting and attention but reward you with more brain nutrition (aka valuable information!). They can be offered for a minimal fee, let’s say .99 cents or 2 dollars (think Kindle-single) or will be infrequently published in longer time intervals.

2) Mobile optimized content psychology.

I’m not talking responsive design and bigger fonts. I mean writing specifically for the mobile person in mind.

In Japan for example, cellphone novels are all the rage. They are romance and paranormal based stories in messaging style, created in a way that makes them readable on the go. Smirk all you want, but these sell up to 400,000 units per digi-novel. Even if you don’t plan on writing e-novels, this comes with mass inspiration for possible blogging ideas :

One thought one paragraph. Wayyy more white space to allow eyes to breathe. Simpler structure and bite-sized chapters so people can read between breaks / commute / waiting. And even more white space.

America’s best-selling fiction author James Patterson already implements this style. Maybe we should too.

3) Real time blogging.

This is the old model: Write a blog post, publish it, share on social media, wait for comments = clumsy and time-consuming. In the future, live blogging could be the alternative.

A content creator could say: Real time blogging from me, every Monday and Thursday. At a specific time, people show up online and interact live with the creator.

Baratunde Thurston did something like this with his last book. Fans could go online and see the words on the screen as he was in the act of writing.

4) Co-created content creation (alliteration ahoy!)

Like the example above, the idea of the author writing “to” their audience will be outdated. It’s going to be more of a dialogue. Mark Schaefer has often said the comment section on {grow} is better than the original posts. Well, now the comments can BE the post, as he could live-write a killer post, and YOU, the audience, could participate and share your info and expertise directly into it, in real-time. Think of it as valuable commenting live-embedded into the post.

5) True global blogging.

Most native English speakers don’t understand how few people in the world actually speak and understand English.

I live in the so-called European Startup hub Berlin, and even here most people can’t understand English that goes beyond High School level. Meh.

The advancement of online translation will change that. Every person with zero English skills will be able to instantly AND perfectly translate your blog post into their native tongue. And I mean perfectly, not awkward Google translate style.

Forget about only Europeans and North Americans commenting on your blog. The next comment will come from a Nepalese village girl that digs your article on advanced social media metrics.

6) Blog posts will be screen independent.

In a few years, people (including our future selves) will look back and laugh at our midget screens. In 2020, only savages will use static screens. Blog posts and digital content won’t be read on your portable screen, but everywhere “on” your surrounding.

How?

Well, you use your micro-chip infused glasses (like Google Glasses) and / or contact lensesto project the required information straight into your environment. Walls, streets, storefronts, heck, even your car could be used as a background for your digitally projected content. Information is going to be (screen) free.

Do you see where all this is going?

In a few years the blog post you know and love will no longer exist. Au revoir.

Just like diary-like journaling turned into blogging, blogging will turn into a different content style that will fit our ever-changing attention span and habits.

Forget how people do content marketing now and focus on how it will be done in the future. It’s time to blog back to the future.

Stunning web design. The wow factor. 432 PARK AVE.

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 05:28:00 +0100

http://www.432parkavenue.com/

Manhattan shows another example of its being the world’s most thrilling and dynamic city with this jaw-dropping $40 million a unit development.

The design is top notch and a model for the very latest techniques to seamlessly display content.

Working on it for Deepclass :)

Top focus points for Deepclass in 2013

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:16:00 +0100

1. Building a “wow” innovative, scalable, aesthetic product with great features and intrinsic VIRALITY

2. Hiring hands-on talent both in Paris and NYC

3. Convincing hundreds of businesses to sell on Deepclass, and thousands of curators to get involved

4. Spending as little money as possible and invest in marketing only when I know users love what we have to offer

5. Sticking to a mission that fuels our company culture: create the first one-stop lifestyle destination for demanding people

Know what you are FOCUSING on

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:02:06 +0100

Basic stuff from Michael who I got briefly acquainted with in NYC - and qualifies as a really seasoned and respected entrepreneur.

What’s to remember, as most people understand they should focus on a few things and DITCH the rest (which can be heartbreaking ;) is to make the effort to WRITE THEM DOWN SO REALLY THINK ABOUT THEM AND REFLECT ON THEM.

I don’t believe it HAS to be 3 things, 4 or 5 could do, not more otherwise it’s not focus.

___________________________________________________________________

I’ve started 4 companies and have invested in 25 more. And I can say, with supreme confidence, that I have made or seen almost every mistake possible.

I’ve hired the wrong people. And fired the wrong people.

I’ve raised too much money (yes, it’s possible). And too little.

I’ve launched products that not one person used and have pivoted so many times I’m still dizzy.

None of these are fun to live through, I assure you. But they are not nearly as fatal to a young company as the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make – FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS.

Successful entrepreneurs focus exclusively on efforts that matter and are able to tune out the rest. People who focus succeed. It’s that simple.

A critical difference between a startup and a large company is resources. Specifically, time and money. And having little of both is oftentimes a godsend and leads to some of our best work. Just look at your favorite indie movie!

Google can give its employees 20 percent of their time to pursue their crazy ideas. If Buddy Media had done that, we would have been out of business.

Focusing is not a natural exercise for many entrepreneurs. More ideas pop into my brain during my morning shower than many people get in a month.

So in order to focus, you need to build your “focus” muscle and train your brain to focus and stay focused.

Volumes have been written about how to do just this. One of my favorites is “Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time” by Dr. Paul Hammerness, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and Margaret Moore, an executive wellness coach and codirector of the Institute of Coaching.

But you don’t need to read books to bring focus to your entrepreneurial life. Here is an exercise I use with entrepreneurs I have invested in to make sure they are truly focusing on the right things.

I ask a very simple question: What are the top 3 things you need to accomplish in the next 6-12 months to give the company the best chance of long-term success?

I push them to be specific. And rank the responses in order of importance.

Is creating the best product most important? How about locking down distribution? Are those both more important than monetization? How about hiring the right people? How about raising money? Is business development important to the business this year?

Most entrepreneurs I speak to can’t name their priorities right away. And if they can, they aren’t written down anywhere and they haven’t been communicated to the rest of their organization.

If an entrepreneur can’t name their top 3 priorities without hesitation, how will the rest of the company know? It’s bad enough for an founder to work on the wrong projects. But if the entire company is not focusing in the right areas, game over!

Without focus, young companies can FEEL like they are accomplishing a lot while in reality accomplishing nothing. They solve problems that never existed in the first place. And launch products with no market.

With the right focus, entrepreneurs can change the world. I’ve seen it so many times, upclose and personal.

If Mark Zuckerberg had not focused on the photo-tagging feature years ago, Facebook would not be the world-changing company it is. If Twitter had not focused on 140 character messaging, it would never have survived. Where would Apple be if it decided to focus on watches instead of phones? Or if it focused on selling the most number of units rather than designing the best products and profitability? You get the idea.

The single most focused entrepreneur I have ever met is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. He has an epic and well-documented process and tool called the V2Mom that has helped him build Salesforce into Forbes’ most innovative company in the world (two years in a row!).

In one of my first meetings with Marc, he told me that everything he has written down over the past 14 years has come true. Does he have a secret genie granting him wishes? No. But he has been able to get his entire company focused on core priorities over and over again.

I encourage all leaders (of companies, of divisions and of small teams) to write down the top 3 areas of focus somewhere visible in the organization and communicate them to the entire team.

By doing so, you are not only able to focus on what is most important, but you are also able to eliminate distractions, which is the biggest gift you can give as a leader.

Update on Deepclass: Strategy!

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:48:00 +0100

“One of the golden rules is to avoid spending money scaling the business before you have really nailed what customers want and how to reach them.”

Since January I’ve been moving steadily and fast on Deepclass but with no precipitation.

For instance we’ve just limited our membership to 12,000 members and we’re now moving on the product to launch social curation.

Thus far we’ve spent nothing as I conceived the whole product and CRM myself, as I wanted to understand what the challenges here where. Marketing is one crucial thing but I had suffered too much with Smartdate (or even more be2) before being ~~crappy~~ unsatisfactory products, and never figuring out what resources I precisely needed and how to find them.

The Smartdate experience turns out to be invaluable in terms of avoiding mistakes and defining the right strategy.

Insights on why start-ups fail

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:47:00 +0100

Clever people @punchlime pointed that out to me:

In one of the biggest startup surveys ever conducted, Startup Genome discovered why most startups fail. Their report, based on data from 3,200 high growth internet startups, revealed that 70% of the startups fail due to premature scaling.

What is Premature Scaling?

Premature scaling happens when a firm is focusing on one dimension of the business, and advancing it out of sync with the rest of the operation. This is typically a result of not synchronizing the five core operational dimension of a startup: customer, product, team, financials and business model.

Startups are on their way of chasing an idea, they live in continuous uncertainty. One of the golden rules at this stage is to avoid spending money scaling the business before you have really nailed what customers want and how to reach them.

Venture investor Michael A. Jackson of Mangrove Capital Partners puts it like this: “Getting venture money can be like putting a rocket engine on the back of a car. Scaling comes down to making sure the machine is ready to handle the speed before hitting the accelerator.”

Startups need to manage the process of going to market efficiently and all this may take longer than founders expect.

Why should a startup grow sustainably?

Here are Startup Genome’s main findings on premature scaling, based on their analysis of 3,200 high growth technology startups:

1. 74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling.

2. No startup that scaled prematurely passed the 100,000 user mark.

3. Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely.

4. 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold.

5. The team size of startups that scale prematurely is 3 times bigger than the consistent startups at the same stage. However startups that scale properly end up having a team size that is 38% bigger at the initial scale stage than prematurely scaled startups, and almost surely continue to grow. Startups that scale properly take 76% longer to scale to their team size than startups that scale prematurely.

6. Inconsistent startups are 2.3 times more likely to spend more than one standard deviation above the average on customer acquisition.

7. Inconsistent startup outsource 4-5 times as much of their product development than consistent startups.

8. In discovery phase 60% of inconsistent startups focus on validating a product and 80% of consistent startups focus on discovering a problem space. In the validation phase, where startups should be testing demand for a functional product, inconsistent startups are 2.2 times more likely to be focused on streamlining the product and making their customer acquisition process more efﬁcient than consistent startups. It’s widely believed amongst startup thought leaders, that successful startups succeed because they are good searchers and failed startups achieve failure by efﬁciently executing the irrelevant.

For more information on premature scaling, go to Startup Genome or watch the Startup Genome video by Stanford University. Download the full report on premature scaling by Startup Genome here.