Chris Wake

Passion, intellect and the pursuit of highly audacious goals. A winning combination.

This morning I had a rant. It’s been boiling around in my head for days. It was never a scathing indictment of any one person or thing, but a total airing of grievances against the shit way people often communicate, or do not communicate with others.

Then… I read an article on user experience by Om. It changed my whole perception—well, at least made me less angry. It got me thinking about personal interactions and our day-to-day communications as another form of user experience. 

Delivering happiness across as many touch points as often & as frequently as possible is the ultimate user experience.

This tidbit Om delivers is as true for your daily interactions as it is for your business. Just as it’s valuable to consider the big things—like whether you give those around you energy, or you suck it from the room—it’s valuable to consider the little things, because it’s the little things that can often define how others perceive your ‘user experience.’

So, my understatement of the day, Dale Carnegie was onto something when he wrote How to Win Friends & Influence People. I’ll admit that he lays it on thick when talking about some universal truths (e.g. smiles win more friends than frowns), but each of the key traits he calls out relate directly to this idea of user experience as a reflection of the way you are perceived. For instance:

• Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Too many people specifically forget this online, or simply don’t care (e.g. if I sign an email to you as ‘Chris,’ and you address your reply to ‘Christopher,’ that is a poor user experience—I feel bad about the interaction, and you look bad in my eyes).

• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. It is obvious when you are only half listening, perhaps even formulating what to say next while someone is still speaking. Take the opportunity to view the world through that other person’s words, and don’t be afraid of silence now and again. 

• Make the other person feel important - and do so sincerely. You may believe that when you pay for a product or service your payment is thanks enough for the value it brings, but imagine the joy you yourself get when your value, at work or at home, is acknowledged verbally. With enthusiasm even! Now apply that to your own interactions with others.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend, the cofounder of a well-funded, well-publicized and generally highly touted consumer startup, that left me a bit baffled. Essentially, the email said:

In the new year we’re focusing on organic growth and overall experience, less so on data-driven marketing, because nothing really worked well for us.

After my jaw hit the floor, I prematurely assumed that they were throwing up their hands, maybe buying into that old adage of “if you build it, they will come.” It was obvious from this and prior conversations we’d had that they hit a few snags in their attempt to test and measure user acquisition. This latest stance seemed a bit haphazard, however.

Of course after the initial shock, I reread the message and realized that my friend had also called out the overall experience as needing some work. Assuming, therefore, that they are not taking a Field of Dreams approach to business-building, there may be more here that I can help voice around early growth in a consumer business, and how strategy can develop over time… so:

Social activity as core to the product is your greatest mechanism for distribution.

• It’s true, you can sometimes manufacture social activity for quick wins (e.g. Socialcam)—and you can always buy traffic—though more often, sustained growth, or that which nets active over registered users, comes from identifying, and then getting users to your app’s must have experience (MHx) as quickly and effortlessly as possible. The MHx is that primary, though sometimes amorphous reason that users come back to your app. If, as my friend said, nothing really worked for them, it’s worth validating whether they’ve found that MHx, and if so, whether there are roadblocks (intentional or otherwise) that they can remove from their users’ path.

There is no strict beginning or end to Customer Development, it’s a framework.

• News flash, customer development does not stop once you’ve launched a product, or even sold a few—it is a framework for validating or invalidating assumptions with direct customer input, and that applies as much on day 1 as it does on day 1,498. The difference is that at an early stage you have the benefit of knowing every customer that uses your product, so you can tie virtually any data you have to a name, a person, and their own words on why they did or did not do ‘X.’ You need to seek out this feedback, because for better or worse, great experiences and poor experiences are two extremes that get talked about, whereas anything in between never will.

Measuring or exploring user acquisition channels, these are two very different things.

• To measure means applying known tactics to your particular vertical within known acquisition channels; e.g. running targeted Adwords campaigns, buying a promoted tweet or two, etc. etc. Essentially, the basics for anyone versed in acquiring users online. Though he may disagree, I’d contend that my friend has been treading well-worn ground, measuring known acquisition channels. On the other hand, exploring means breaking from convention, it is growth hacking at its best, if you want a buzzword. Start here by identifying your ideal customer, and now get creative thinking of ways to reach and help them in the scope of their existing life—for instance, think about what magazines they read, what their average weekend looks like, what kind of friends they have or seek out, and of course, what they do or think just before they come to your app. Just know that there is no silver bullet. You need to test and iterate quickly, exploring numerous channels until you hit on one to be exploited. 

What would your business look like if a 100% referral rate were your standard of success.

• You should know what your referral number is (i.e. the percentage of users that have referred you to others). If you do not, find out! Consider, if a 100% referral rate were your goal: would you think differently about over-delivering each and every time; would it change your perception of who an ideal user is; would it change how you approach marketing and social media; and finally, would it change the way you communicate with users on an ongoing basis? I know too many startups that believe referral bonuses and social sharing tools are easily bolted on to existing products, but if you stop to consider what it is you are asking of your users when they give a referral, it’s a much more involved process. Not necessarily more difficult, but involved. Don’t short your own effort here.

Data can say almost anything, whereas your metrics have to tell a clear story. 

• The metrics that you track should be actionable (i.e. they must show clear cause and effect; otherwise, they are vanity metrics); they must be accessible (i.e. easily understood by everyone that needs to pull, use or react to them); and finally, you must be able to track them back to a credible source. For what it’s worth, I know some of the marketing channels my friend has used, and I know that there is real difficulty in auditing some metrics because cause and effect are unclear—this may require some creativity, especially where it relates to mobile (… still the wild west when it comes to metrics), and it may even require more in the way of testing (in terms of both time and money) than one would normally put into any single channel.

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Comments, questions or feedback? I’d love to hear them.

Life is so much easier when you make a decision within 5-minutes.

Last week I read a powerful post from Zen Habits packed with little bits of wisdom, including the above gem on making decisions. Out of everything there, this singular piece of advice really resonated with me. It deserves more than the tweet I sent out.

So, a question: Starbucks or Philz Coffee?

This is an example of an easy decision. No one will argue that making a choice here warrants any more than 5-minutes of your time. In all likelihood, you’ve probably made this decision a hundred times without even thinking about it.

How many other decisions do you make each day? And how many do not fall in this category of reflexive decision-making? I’m challenging you to be conscious of your decisions.

For one day, be mindful of the decisions you make, those you delay (Boomerang for Gmail, anyone?!) and those you attempt to avoid all together. And afterward, give yourself one day to make snap decisions—do not delay or avoid anything. You’ll be surprised how much easier life becomes, and even more surprised by how accurate your instinct is in most cases.

There are two types of people in this world: 

Those that add. And those that subtract.  

With the start of a new year, I’ve begun to assess my social relationships with this simple framework in mind. In particular, I am more aware today than ever before as to whether the relationships I have with others add to my life or subtract from it. 

I try to consciously consider each interaction I have, and take stock of whether the person I am with leaves me with more energy than I had before, or less. And I agree wholeheartedly here with Brendan Baker that it’s not a zero sum game—there are inevitably people that consume more energy to be around than others, just as there are people that leave you feeling invigorated after an interaction, no matter the context.

I am searching for those that add. And trying to add myself.

The “startups to watch” list is overplayed. Besides, if I could pick the precise time a specific startup was poised to explode in growth, I’d be investing more, rather than writing about it. 

More interesting to me are market trends, and these are a couple that I will absolutely keep an eye on through at least the first half of 2013: 

• Same day delivery. There is a potential paradigm shift in the way people purchase goods online, and I believe it starts with the players trying to tackle same day delivery (e.g. Postmates, Instacart, Shutl, etc.). It’s not so much about instant gratification—though each delivers that in spades—as it is about increasing the relevance and access to local merchants and producers. We’ll see significant growth from these players as they expand to other major metros in 2013, and I wouldn’t doubt one or two business model shifts as each refines its vision beyond their home turf.

• Disrupting education. A bit crowded, though I have yet to see any true winners. A number of startups are doing very interesting things, and arguably seeing some fantastic traction (e.g. Skillshare, Codecademy, Udemy and Khan Academy just to name a few), but I don’t believe anyone has truly jumped the gap into the mainstream market yet. The general unrest over traditional education is only increasing, and there are too many solid players in this space not to see major waves made in 2013.

On the other end of the spectrum, Big Data and Enterprise are two areas that are way overhyped right now. Add the words ‘Big’ and ‘Data’ together on a slide, and you should be prepared to duck as investors throw cash at you. Ok, it’s not quite that bad, though I believe too many players are entering this space assuming they can ‘figure something out’ with a bit of machine learning. On the other hand, too few are focused on the niche industries where a big data solution could net real results and huge revenue potential.

Enterprise apps are in vogue now as well, and for good reason—revenue. Consumers are fickle, and cheap. Enterprise customers have budgets, and are fine paying for products or services. Will they pay for your me-too communication or collaboration tool—hell no! The problem here is that too many startups are focused on the sexy problems like communication and collaboration, rather than the hairy, sometimes niche problems that have a greater chance of success. If you’re building for the enterprise, find a real problem and build the simplest, most bare bones solution for that one problem.

Email is too often the default. Think before you integrate.

• Text Messaging - Instantaneous engagement/ response.

• Email - Hours later… your emails may get opened, but average response times are far from immediate.

• Facebook - Days later… messages and notifications often get lost or ignored.

• Twitter - Like skywriting, its impact can be incredibly fleeting.

And the dark horse? In-app notifications and messages; these are way under-utilized. If you can engage with your users when they most need or want to engage with you, and make that experience better, you can basically forget about trying to pull them back later because they’ll WANT to come back.

Put down the books. Focus on understanding your business and crafting your message—that is your top priority. Assuming you’ve already pitched a Seed round, you know the basics. Ideally, this will be a conversation covering your successes, your lessons learned and your plans going forward, and less of a presentation.

• Traction trumps everything, but you define what traction looks like. Read these: How do you define ‘traction’ for a start-up? & Startups: How to Communicate Traction to Investors.
• Investors want to hear about your lessons learned—if you are learning, it means you are trying things and taking action—and action speaks louder than any words here.

All that aside, if you haven’t read it, you’d do well to read Venture Deals by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson in preparation for negotiating the arguably more complex term sheets you’ll soon have rolling in.

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I posted the above response to this question on Quora, but thought worthwhile to share here as well, as people often ask about ways to prepare for their pitch and how it varies between rounds.

Using new words to describe an old idea does NOT make it any better, or any worse. It’s just lazy, and will only push you into lazy habits of thinking.

Find a voice and use it—take a fucking stand on something.

Man, I want to love @mailchimp, but their editor is *killing me*. Has cost me hours of productivity.

— Brendan Baker (@brendanbaker) July 6, 2012

First, I’m a MailChimp fan. They have a solid product with an engaging user experience. It’s quirky, fun and useful. But that doesn’t mean everything’s perfect. Far from it. I’ve almost thrown my computer multiple times in frustration over dealing with their editor, and it’s almost certainly hindered the frequency of my communication with Spotwag’s users.

So what makes someone stick with a product, despite frustrations?

Take another example. I had a similar frustration with Posterous. I really wanted to love the product—I was a big fan of the promise behind Spaces, and I’d followed Sachin’s progress for some time, so I believed in the team. But fuck was that product frustrating! I lost more draft blog posts than I’d care to remember, and couldn’t figure out some of the most basic product features to save my life. Finally, I quit. Now I’m posting to Spotwag almost daily, and I’ll never look back.

The difference comes down to personality—whether you can build a product, OR a product with personality. Both products have frustrated me, and arguably do not live up to their promise of simplicity, but I quit one while I’ve stayed true to the other. I’ve stuck with MailChimp because it’s endearing, and there’s a sense of whimsy every time I login. I can be frustrated by it, but I’m frustrated in much the same way I can be with my dog—he doesn’t know better, so I’m quick to forgive.

In contrast, Posterous was built to serve a purpose, and you can see that in its design. There is no similar personality in the product, so when my frustration built up over its faults, I had no equalizing emotional connection to the product. It was easy to quit.

Products live and die less by the function they serve, and more by the emotional bond they are able to create with their users. Users will make exceptions for products they have an emotional connection with… not forever, but for far longer than they arguably should.

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Building personality into your product is really hard, but it will pay dividends. For more on the how to, read this post from Jason Shen on How to Give Your Product Personality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile apps lately, especially as I’m starting to learn how to code for iOS. And here’s some of what I’ve been considering…

• Distribution is built-in. There are benefits to building on top of a platform, and in this case, distribution is a major one. Users download countless apps from the App Store everyday based on what’s trending, new or noteworthy. There is no equivalent for the Internet, unless you look to—you guessed it—other platforms. And even then, nothing has even come close to the ubiquity of the App Store.

• Sharing is more natural. Surfing the Internet on your computer is a solo mission in all but the rarest of cases, so web designers are very deliberate and calculated in their design around social sharing. Mobile is a different story. Not gonna lie, I whip out my phone in social situations—probably more than I should—so the app I’m playing with, or the game that’s sucked me in often becomes a topic of conversation. This is sharing no one can design for, but it’s happening all the time, and it can be hugely additive to any traditional sharing features in your app.

• Development cycles are faster. False? Pretty damn sure, but who cares. What matters is that it appears to users that more is happening behind the scenes with mobile apps, primarily because updates are evident—I see that there’s an update available, and must accept it, whereas websites can be updated daily and I almost never know about it. Users want to know that you’re working, and that they can expect greater things in the future.

• Users own their apps. Surfing the Internet is a lot like window shopping, and downloading an app is a lot like receiving a present—with the former, I’m willing to give it a glance before deciding to move on or dive in, but for the latter, I actually feel some obligation once I’ve received it to give it a spin. Similarly, there’s a greater likelihood that I will come back to an app once I’ve downloaded it—to give it a second or third chance—whereas if I’m turned off by a website, it’s far less likely that I will ever return.

Funny enough, this hack has virtually nothing to do with how you work, and everything to do with how you think. When I consider productivity, I imagine the massive volume of things I was able to accomplish in a relatively short period of time—in this case a single day—that is productivity for me. 

So what’s the secret sauce to being and feeling more productive? A checklist. A simple no frills daily checklist. The easiest way to accomplish a lot is to map out the steps you take to get from zero to hero every day.

No, I’m not a dumbass. This isn’t revolutionary, and you’ve heard it or read about it in any number of places. The problem is that it’s incredibly easy to screw up.

The best thing you can do for yourself here is to stop thinking big, and start taking notice of the small stuff. I for one have a tendency to stack my checklists full of ALL of the big projects, deadlines and what not that I have in front of me. It’s incredibly intimidating, and the absolute wrong way to approach it.

• Step 1 — Sit down for 5-minutes every night and draft a quick checklist for what you want to accomplish the following day. Keep it realistic, but push yourself. The biggest pitfall I’ve seen or experienced… too many people think they can do this in the morning, before they “start” their day. News flash: your day starts the second your eyes open.

• Step 2 — Front-load your checklist with 2-3 items that are relatively easy to accomplish. Again, think small. For me, this means getting in a morning run, and walking my dog. The biggest pitfall I’ve seen or experienced… front-loading with the most important thing you need to get done that day. Yes, prioritize your checklist around what NEEDS to happen, but know that you are FAR more likely to power through your list if you have a few small wins!

That’s it. Try it, you’ll be surprised.

Found this through @Mashable today, and thought it worth sharing here.

Fear is the single greatest hurdle any of us will overcome in our struggle to launch a startup, and Michael does a remarkable job expressing that in a fashion that is both meaningful and moving. A truly great story.

No one sets out to be ineffective, but it’s easy to pick up the habits. Too easy.

Consuming more than you create -
Effective people tend to create a lot of content. Content can mean a lot of things - but the rule is always the same, create more than you consume. Ineffective people, on the other hand, spend the majority of their time consuming the fruits of others’ labor. They are consummate lurkers.

Watching your own vanity metrics - 
Everyone suffers from some level of vanity. A need to be liked. The Internet feeds that need, keeping popularity at the forefront of any online identity with lists of ‘Friends,’ ‘Followers,’ ‘Connections,’ ‘Re-Pins’ and even the ‘Like’ itself. Ineffective people tend to feed on these popularity metrics, whereas effective people recognize that these are shallow indicators. Effective people focus more on engagement and strength of relationships; they create quality content to solicit engagement from others, or seek out interesting people and proactively engage them on their own terms.

Starting the day responding to others -
Ineffective people allow others to set the agenda for their day. They start their morning reading or responding to others’ requests. Effective people approach each day with an agenda for what they want to accomplish, start their day tackling a task crucial for accomplishing their goal, and respond to others when (or if) it works with their agenda.

Prioritizing the wrong activities - 
Busy work. It’s quite literally work that keeps you busy; it saps your time, but gets you no closer to your end goal. Ineffective people tend not to recognize busy work, and therefore, they prioritize tasks that will not move them any closer to their goals. Effective people recognize busy work for what it is and waste little to no time trying to appear busy when they know there are more important tasks to be completed.

Relying on multi-tasking to “save time” -
Multi-tasking is a scam. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time may be the only true form of multi-tasking worth doing. Ineffective people use multi-tasking to appear busy, or to fool themselves into believing they can reach their goal faster by making minor progress on a lot of things at once. Effective people have a secret weapon to saving time. Focus. Effective people know which tasks are important for reaching their goal, and they focus on each one after another.

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I originally posted this to Quora here, and it has since received an overwhelming amount of positive and informative feedback. I’m glad that it resonated.