TEDxMontreal Talk -- Modern Parenting

It's been a pretty crazy 14 months since Theo and I decided to start HighScore House.  I've gotten pretty good at answering the questions "You guys started HighScore House?  But you don't even have kids!".  At the end of the day, I can't think of a more interesting and fun market to buildling products for.  I still come back to the fact that I'd rather be buidling the next Disney or Pixar vs. Salesforce.  

When the TEDxMontreal team asked me to speak at this year's event, I didn't hesiate to say yes.  It was a lot of fun, and I finally got to explain some of my logic behind starting HighScore House and a few things I've learnt along the way.

Here's my video from the event.  

 

Facing User Reality Sucks

I think this is one of those things you can't really understand until you're in the middle of it. One of the classic points of advice is to be embarrassed and release early, and release often. 

The problem is, when it comes time to finally show what you've built to solve problem x to the world (best solution ever, in your mind), it's so tempting to delay. It's easy to find a laundry list of things that need to be fixed before your product is pushed to face reality.

As long as you don't release and keep building, you don't have to face reality. You can continue to believe you will have 100% conversion and 100% love. The longer you can stave off reality, the more confident you can make yourself feel. It's not until you push the release/invite button that reality strikes and you see your 6% conversion, with 2% providing feedback and 98% not saying a word or using the service.

We recenlty found plenty of reasons not to push HighScore House out to more parents, who were waiting to try it. We eventually realized the reasons sucked, and we did push it. We then saw how few actually converted to users. From the release though, we did find key early adopters who will help drive the product forward and we now know the work required in getting to our first 100 users.

Reality sucks, but it isn't until you face it that you can measure, learn and build.  If it's a truly useful idea, your product will survive the "reality test,"  If the idea sucks, well, better to face reality sooner rather than later. 

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The Struggle in Finding An Addressable Problem - Lean Startups

The lean startup methodology really turns business creation upside down by focusing on a market before an actual product idea. Theo and I have been following the lean startup methodology with Ncentiv.  We knew that the parenting market was changing dramatically, where kids were becoming attached to technology in ways parents and teachers wouldn’t understand.  The question was, what was the minimal addressable problem that would double as validation of a larger addressable opportunity.

By starting with a market and focusing on data/interviews to find an addressable problem, rather than building software from day one, we encountered problems I would never have predicted.  For the last month we haven’t written a line of code and have instead spent our time talking to as many parents/teacher/psychiatrists that would give us their time.

Hitting the Walls

The first wall we hit during the process was in week two.  We looked at what we had accomplished to date and where we had to go.  Unlike coding software, the data collection process doesn’t have tangible metrics to measure productivity -- it’s actually a really vague process.  And no two companies will go through it the same way.  It felt like we hadn’t made any progress.  How do you properly measure learning and insight?   We’re lucky to have a great set of advisors who continued to tell us to focus and to refine our problem/solution pitch.  We kept asking ourselves though, how can we possibly cut off 99% of the market and focus on that 1% problem/solution fit? 

This led to the second wall, which we hit during week three and four.  The more we narrowed our focus the less motivated we became.  We went from looking at a massive addressable market to a subset of people and a minimal product offering.  This quickly became our biggest challenge. 

We struggled to stay in love with the market the more we narrowed our MVP feature set and target market.  We got stuck going in circles for about a week.  On one hand we were lucky that we picked a huge market and that we had an incredible group of parents who were more then willing to spend an hour talking with us about anything we wanted to know.  On the other hand, we had to segment them and ignore the obvious opportunities they were telling us about.  

What made it even worse was that as we narrowed our description, it was continually met with positive feedback from each segment.  And we knew, from a technical standpoint, that there was little to no difference in the offering from one segment to another. So why cut anyone out?

Finally, six weeks in, it is much clearer.  Focusing, as difficult as it was, was necessary given the reality that we were two people trying to help the same group of people as Disney and Johnson & Johnson.  Something changed for us last Monday.  It was wake up call that came in the combination of being called out by our advisors and by other pieces suddenly clicking together.  We were able to define a set of goals for the week, which we met and soon surpassed.  Finally, laser focusing made it possible to stop getting pulled between opportunities and to put all of our effort into proving our current set of assumptions.

The take away.

As we look back on the struggle to find an addressable problem while still staying motivated, we realized a few steps we should have considered. 

  • Write everything down.  This is one the best ways to drastically narrow your scope, it’s easy to list four or five options but having to pick just one and describe it fully really focuses things.   
  • Pitching everyday.  Just like writing everything down, when you force yourself to articulate what you're doing (even if you have no idea or even if it’s going in the wrong direction) it helps you to iterate much faster.  You can kill an idea effectively when you’re actually able to explain it to someone and witness their reaction.  People tend to love your idea when it’s vague, as they develop their own picture of what it will really be.  -- What we found to really work well was building a baseline pitch deck and iterating on it every day based on what we had learned.  By taking the last 30 minutes of the day to review it, our focus and message became clearer. 
  • Balancing macro and micro visions.  This idea is practiced in buddhism and game design and it’s a real art.  Being able to hyper focus on just the tip of the iceberg while staying focused on the entire iceberg is tough.  It takes practice and discipline but it is crucial.  Doing it properly allows you to see how your MVP will actually lead to the bigger vision. 
  • Take all the “ands” out.  This was a trick we learned late, but it’s a great way to get to the crucial part of the problem solution.  Instead of saying:  We help parents to fix the problems in their child's daily routine and to encourage them to try new things.  Say: We help parents to fix the problems in their child's daily routine.  Even the second one seems too big, so to take it one step further.  Say:  We help parents to fix the one or two main problems in their child's daily routine. 

We failed to do all of the above, and I can’t say for sure, but I really feel it would have helped keep the vague process slightly more structured.  If nothing else, I’m sure we would have saved a week or two of wandering.

No one said the Lean Startup methodology was easy.  Like any good exercise, it takes real discipline.  It’s tough to not start writing code after your first positive interview.  It’s also tough to know you’ll likely throw away weeks of work.  But it’s all part of becoming smarter.  I do feel that we are going into the MVP stage smarter than ever.  As we stay disciplined through our MVP testing, I am confident will be even more savvy, and that we will be in a better position to pivot our product to the best opportunity.  

Next Up

Now we are confident.  Not because we found the best problem/solution mix, but rather because we found one solution that we can quickly test and on which we can iterate.  We will spend the next few weeks building and quickly getting our product into the hands of customers for testing.

 

It's All About the Ups and Downs

The saying goes: the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.  What this leaves out are the huge failures and mental downs along the way.  The other part that is left out? The frequency of downs.  

This applies across the board, from personal to business decisions.  You have two fundamental choices: play it safe and stay steady or push for something more and ride the waves.

The fool I am, I’ve chosen to go big.  It started with the decision to leave PEI for a much more expensive (and opportunity filled) city along with a more expensive school.  This has paid off already with the amazing Year One Labs opportunity, but has been equally filled with downs.  The downs include less time with family and friends, going  broke frequently, landlord issues and so on.

I’ve learnt a few things to stay sane throughout this process.

 

  1. Focus on the big picture and take a step back.
  2. Remember, it doesn't have to be intense/stressful, but odds are the alternative is going to bore you to death.
  3. Use everything as a learning opportunity, particularly the downs.  All it takes is a few minutes of reflection, and then you should be able to explain the all important why/how.  

 

Learn from this all.  Constantly remind yourself how much smarter and experienced you are. Be grateful that you’re learning from the ups and downs and that in no time these new skills will become second nature.

nCentiv and YearOne Labs

When I made the moved to Montreal three years ago, it was to expose my self to a highly engaged and competitive entrepreneurial culture.  School was a good way into the city.  Since moving here I have met incredible people who are driven to innovate and take the necessary risks.  

I’m excited to announce that I am finally making the jump.  As of today I have stopped school and have joined YearOne Labs.  I will be working with Theo Ephraim to build a next generation product.  Details are still slim, but we are calling it nCentiv for the time being.  

I couldn’t be more excited to be joining YearOne.  The current companies are moving fast and crushing it.  Theo and I are gaining access to an incredible group of advisors and surrounding ourselves with incredibly talented people.  I can’t wait to put all my lean startup reading/theory to practice as we move to find product/market fit. 

The next few months are going to be fast and fun. 

Startupifier Weekend 2010

Startupifier's Bootcamp is coming up this weekend.  This our second event and our goal remains the same to help in creating an entrepreneurial culture in Montreal and amongst students.  While our first event was about networking and meeting the community the bootcamp is all about building real products.
Anyone with an idea and interested in executing it should be registered - you can do so here.
The event is taking place October 22-24 at McGill Thomson House, thanks to McGill Research and Innovation, Montreal Startup and BDO Canada.  The event will be an opportunity for students from different schools and different backgrounds to collaborate and build out prototypes of ideas over 48 hours, in time for the demoes on Sunday at 5.
The crowd picked winning team will also win some great things like:
  • workspace from One Year Labs
  • consulting from Mark MacLeod
  • $1000 from Montreal's Hopper*
*On the Hopper note - the prize will be awarded if enough people follow them on Twitter and Facebook. So check out this great company and help us secure a great prize!

Along with this, participants will have an opportunity to hear entrepreneurs and investors speak on relevant topics and mentors will be available to help answer teams product questions.  Our speakers and mentors include so far:
For more information check out the website or send us a note.


 

 

I hate "ASAP"

I hate ASAP. It’s awful business jargon that has made it mainstream.  It comes across as the asker assuming the other party won’t be doing the requested task anytime soon.  And technically "as soon as possible" means right now, which makes the asker sound as though their requirement should be the number one priority of the receiver.  Let's just drop this whole ASAP thing.

The iPad Adoption Curve

I am still trying to figure out how the iPad is going to fit into my everyday life. Although, I have noticed two phases in adopting it.

1) holding is believing.

After seeing the video demoes and watching the ads I figured the device was cool, but how cool? It's not until you hold the iPad that you realize how incredible it is. Something to do with putting the hardware in the background, or some crap like that. Holding it was enough to covince me it was cool, but i wasn't sold. It took a few more weeks before I cracked and bought one. Just playing with the demoes I wasn't sure what I'd do with it.

2) customizing it.

It's not until about a week of use that I "got it", the tipping point comes after tweaking and adding apps. Suddenly the device becomes personal and I finally saw it's value. The iPad is whatever you need it to be. I'm still fitting it into my day-to-day but man it's cool.

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Startup Square Soiree Speaker Videos

The three speakers from the Startup Square inaugural event.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder and CEO of Standout Jobs (@standoutjobs) and blogger at instigatorblog.com talks about starting his first business in University and continuing on the entrepreneurship path.

Ben Yoskovitz (Standout Jobs) - His life as an entrepreneur from Kyle Seaman on Vimeo.

Marc Gingras,founder and CEO of Tungle.me (@tunglerocks) spoke at Startup Square (@susqr) about his path to entrepreneurship.

Marc Gingras (Tungle.me) - His path to entrepreneurship from Kyle Seaman on Vimeo.

Olivier Cabanes, co-founder of Bolidea (@bolidea) speaking about what to expect for those considering a career path as an entrepreneur.

Olivier Cabanes (Bolidea) - On being an entrepreneur from Kyle Seaman on Vimeo.

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The Basics of Product Design - Part 1: the Pyramid

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Denzil “Denny” Doyle this week and in the run of one hour I learnt more about product design then my years of school could ever teach.  He broke it down into three components, complete with three simple diagrams.  Here is the first one: the Pyramid.

He explained when you look at a product their are three components; the technology, the product and the market.  And the goal is to have a pyramid with technology on top, the product in the middle and the market on the bottom.  He also warned, that far to often a companies product is the inverse pyramid.  This is achieved by building a product that is highly technical, but only applicable to a very narrow market.

The final point related to this graph was simple, when it comes time for growth or new market opportunities adding new technology to the product needs to maintain the ratios.  So for a little more technology you need to be able to achieve far more market potential.

The story he told had was about a company that he was involved with that made a seismic measuring device.  It effectively displayed what damage occurred after a dynamite blast at a mine site.  The technology was very advanced and successfully changed the industry.  The company was then presented with the opportunity to apply only slightly more technology, including RFID chips - which were just coming to market.  By doing so they could apply this product to the baby market and the company began developing RFID clips that were put on newborns to prevent the abduction of them.  With only a little more technology the company walked into a $20 million+ market that grew very fast.

Keep it simple.  The idea is reiterated in the book Rework.  They describe it as taking the “Judo approach”  get the best result with the least effort or input.

For those not familiar, Denny Doyle is a pioneer of the Ottawa tech scene.  He is chairman of Doyletech and author of “Making Technology Happen”  a highly regarded technology textbook (which I am still trying to track down for myself).

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The Nicol Entrepreneurial Award

I had the privilege of presenting theShelf, with Chad, at the 2010 Nicol Entrepreneurial Award competition in Ottawa.  The competition was started 6 years ago as a result of the vision of Wes Nicol, founder of Tartan Homes.  He is a strong believer that entrepreneurs are what will put the country back on track, he is also focused on showing students that career paths exist outside of the corporate world.
 
You can learn all about how the competition is run here.  What is amazing is the exposure to so many incredible people in such a short period of time.  From the organizers, such as Peter Eddison of Reid Eddison to the incredible panel of judges the competition has so much to offer.  Wes has achieved his vision of bringing together entrepreneurs, not to compete but to meet and inspire one and another.
This year’s winners are from Brock University and they had a very cool product called the “Perfect Patch”, which they hope will change the organic strawberry market going forward.  My favourite team was from the University of Victoria, with a product that had the potential to flip the Pet Fish industry upside down.
It was humbling to be amongst so many smart and innovative people and I’m really excited to see this competition continue to grow.
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The Launch of the Shelf

I just posted this over at the Shelf's blog, but I figured I might as well share it here as well.  A little back story:  My friend Chad and I had the idea to try and solve the problem that every college student faces - buying and selling textbooks.  We set out last June to try and develop a solution.  All the work has led to what you can currently find here. 

Also, just some advice, if you are a college student I really don't recommend launching anything during exam periods - it's amazing how little importance your exams will suddenly have.

From the Shelf's blog:

It's a big day for us at the Shelf,  since June 2009 we have been working to build a system that would finally make the process of buying and selling books tolerable.  We are thrilled to announce the launch of our beta version.

The focus of the this product was to fix the fundamental issues that students currently faced when buying or selling books.  We started by identifying the key pains involved for both the seller and the buyer.

For Sellers:

  • The act of listing your book: up until now this required posting flyers in multiple locations our filling out long descriptive online forms
  • Managing those listing: it was one thing to get your listing posted, it was whole other thing to manage them.  The particular problem was when you successfully sold your book and all of those listing remained in place.

For Buyers:

  • Finding books: given that sellers would post everywhere it had become a real chore to find listings that were still active and of quality.

We have developed what we feel is a core set of tools that will help eliminate these annoyances for both sides.  This includes one click listings and easy management of listings and orders and comprehensive search tools and book notifications for buyers.

You can find out all the the Shelf has to offer buyers on it's how page.

We are very excited to finally let everyone try it out.  If you have any feedback for us, please don't hesitate to contact us.  Any bugs/glitches, feature requests, comments or any sorts of questions are welcome.  We want to built the best product possible, and you can expect to see more features rolled out over time.

Thanks and enjoy the Shelf!

If you are a student or know a student in your life send them on over!

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Boxer the Horse

Any music lovers out there should check Boxer the Horse, they are a great band coming out of Prince Edward Island.  They fill most east cost music stereotypes, have a new CD coming out shortly and a fancy new website (disclaimer: which I helped build out of love for the cause) to boot, which you can check out here.

Video of the band live from 19 King.  Enjoy.

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A few startups worth checking out.

I've been playing with a few recently released products for the last few weeks and I think they are worth checking exploring.  If for no other reason then slick interfaces, and the concepts behind them.

 

Threadsy presented at TechCrunch 50 and it a communication manager that I've been using for gmail, twitter and facebook.  It has a gorgeous design and does a great job at managing the different news streams.

 

 

Thoora also presented at TechCrunch 50 and I recently saw the lead developer present the product at StartupCamp Montreal 5.  Thoora is a very innovative news aggregator that pulls in news from all sources and ranks it based on reactions.  It's great for getting a quick overview of the latest and breaking news.

 

Brizzly.  I just started using Brizzly a few days ago.  Brizzly comes from Thing Labs and they are still in private beta but the code "leosentme" should work to get you in.  They have basically redesigned the twitter home pages with significant enhancements.  You can view photos and videos in your newsfeed, and direct messages have been redesigned to feel more like instant messaging. 

 

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Chris Shipley at Startup Camp Montreal

Chris Shipley had a great opening keynote at StartupCamp Montreal 5, highlighting 10 things entrepreneurs should not avoid. She covered all of the basics and the few I think are worth highlighting are:

Vision and Focus
This is a given, and it's mentioned all the time.  But Chris went on to explain the difference and how it is critical to manage the two.  Vision is the big picture, where are you going? How are you changing the world?  Focus is the micro view, is critical to achieving this vision as you need to pick you little battles to win first.  She ended this point with "You can eat the elephant, just one bit at a time."

Measurement and Metrics
This a sections that is often overlooked and it should be used to answer the simplest question - how do you define progress or success?  Is it through page views, unique visitors or number of users?  If you aren't measuring how do you know when you've reached milestones? Or worse, missing milestones.

Yellow Lights
Chris gave a story about a startup that planned ahead for the next 3 months, they were going to shut down a division if certain things didn't come through.  The 3 months were reached and the contacts still weren't coming through so the company tried for another 2 month.  In the end the division was shut down but at a much higher cost then it should have been.  Most startups are smallest enough to fail and ignoring the yellow lights is a quick way to do it.

Surround yourself with smart people
She summed it up perfectly with the idea that the founders should be the dumbest people in the company. As a founder or leader your job is to live the vision and values of the company and be involved in every aspect of it.  You may be good at one specific part of the business but if you pretend your the best at all your only fooling yourself.

Don't neglect details
"Pay now or a lot more later" was the outcome for avoiding this point.  For startups without a number of staff the founders often spend most of there time on the sexier parts of the business.  Accounting, finance and other mundane tasks might get pushed aside.  And it is as simple as not staying on top of your accounting that when it comes time for due diligence your out $100K in accounting fees in what could have been 1 hour a week for the last two years.
 
Lose site of values
Values are like the road your taking to get to your vision.  It determines how your company makes decisions.  It's very easy to write these values down on a card and never act on them again.  Any good company know it's values and lives them everyday.

Culture
Chris described two types of culture, accidental or deliberate.  The latter is what everyone should be striving for, it's created by the founders the first day and all employees entering the company embrace it.  Accidental culture is what happens when the founders neglect instilling culture into the employees and the employees take it into their own hands to do it.  Often when the employees build the culture the companies success is the last thing at it's core.

Chris finished her keynote stating: "At the risk of sounding like Nike, Just do it".  She talked about the number of pitches and ideas she hears and in the end the best advice was usually, do it. 

Roberto Rocha also wrote a great article inspired by StartupCamp about improving your pitch using principles of journalism.  It's worth checking out. Read More

Kevin Rose presentation FOWA London

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

 

The Future of Web Apps London conference happened last week and Kevin Rose gave a great keynote outlining some key strategies to help a web app grow from one to one million users.  Check out the vimeo page site for videos of other great speakers from the conference.

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IDEA: Montreal Parking 2.0

Montreal has adopted a great new bike system called Bixi, and it seems that it's catching on and will likely be expanding to more cities.  One of the coolest parts is the iPhone apps available for it.  Bixi has opened up the station data to allow developers to use the iPhone to get real time data for the number of bikes available and docks open at each of the 300 stations.

A cool product I'd like to see involves the city using the parking terminals, that are on every street in downtown Montreal, to start building similar apps to display available parking spots.  Every time you pay for your parking you select your spot and time length, the city should establish an API for developers to access and display this information on a variety of devices.

The city could take this data and install parking availability signs on street corners, significantly reducing parking frustration and wasted time.  They could also turn the evil up (and increase revenue) by increasing the meter maids efficiency with devices that only show spots that have expired.

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Tom Tom on the iPhone

Tom Tom's GPS iPhone app has been released. I've seen a few videos of it in use and it's pretty impressive, but it's price point of $99.99 is ridiculous and works well to eliminates the compulsive buy factor of most App Store apps.

I've become incredibly dependent on the iPhone's built in GPS over the last year and have become more and more frustrated my Google's loose directions, leaving a bit of mystery as to the east of west exit you want. I never bothered to upgrade to the 3GS and lack the compass as a result, which I am sure would eliminate some of my problems with the mystery directions.

I was intrigued with Tom Tom's app, figuring it would fit in well with what I need, then I started to wonder how much good it might really be.  For $99.99 you get both Canadian and US maps, which seems nice, but when you figure that your using the 3G and Edge network for the app it pretty well eliminates using the app outside of Canada, unless your in love with data roaming. The usefulness of the app is completely cut in half.

Secondly, by relying on Rogers towers (in Canada) I'd also be dependent on Rogers coverage. I just did a drive from Hamilton, ON to Brackley Beach, PEI and for about 15-20% of the drive I was without reception. A GPS is not much good when it can't tell you where to go.

And finally, my last concern is with mounting the device. I devised enough tricks as it is to use the built in GPS and remain safe while I'm driving, I don't think it would be practical to forever hold the unit to get the full benefit of turn-by-turn and I really don't think duct taping the iPhone to my dash is realistic option. Tom Tom does have a mount unit, which will also increase your GPS signal, but I am hearing some pretty high price points on it.

For $50 more I can get the same functionality in a device that will work anywhere in North America and designed to always have reception while conveniently mounting in my car. It's a cool app but I just can't see forking over the cash to buy it.

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Fred Wilson Disruption Talk

Fred Wilson gave a  talk at Google on the topic of disruption.  It's a topic I'm incredibly interested with and it's always nice to hear someone like him share his views on it.  He didn't have anything terribly shocking to say but summed up what the current markets are looking like.  I particularly like his views on hacking education.  Check out the video below.

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