Internet Tech Boston

Software engineers hate maintaining someone else’s code – they don’t know for sure what will happen when they change it. Sales people can’t  give presentations created by other people effectively – their styles rarely match. Don’t get me started on designers – ask them to make a minor edit to another designer’s work and you’ll have a complete brand new design overnight.

Digital marketers, however, love to copy. They emulate best practices. If a tactic has proven to work for someone else, then it will be scooped up and replicated in short order. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at how Twitter has grown.

Perhaps there is something to learn from our fellow technology professionals. Just because a something works for a marketer in Company A, does it really mean it work for yours? Maybe – if you’re talking to the same people, and addressing a similar business need. If so, you’re probably competitors and have just lost differentiation.

Don’t get me wrong, marketing is a tough job and it’s getting tougher and tougher to reach and hold people’s attention and get them to take the action you want. You’ll need new methods of engagement and conversion tactics constantly. Don’t let that need to “feed the beast” drive you to move in herds. Keep your eyes open and measure what’s happening with these new programs. Don’t be afraid to stop them if you’re not seeing what you want.

This past January, I started producing a weekly live video webcast at work called PTV Live. Even though it’s only a half hour once a week, my co-workers were pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to keep it going for more than a couple of months. Even though I had never done anything like this before, I was confident I’d be able to get it done. After all, all I really had to do was give our opinions on blog posts and news about online video marketing. As my father-in-law says, opinions are like . . . well, let’s just say- everyone has one.

In the past few months, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed. I’ve been able to meet a ton of new people and learn a lot because of my interactions on these social sites.  But, creating lots of short form content is a great deal different than the long form blog content I’d been used to. I have not been able to switch gears to keep all these content creation engines humming.

Well, it’s 5 months later. I”ve successfully produced 20 shows, and been followed by and have followed several hundred interesting people. Not bad! But, looking back on my efforts,  I can see it’s had a dramatic affect on this blog. My twitter digest, once just a single post in a week of other content, has taken over as primary content, like a virus that has eaten up every other decent idea for a conversation I’ve had in the past few months.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned about myself and blogging. I’m not sure if these are universal rules. I think they might be.

1. Short form content is not long form content. Don’t install a Twitter Digest widget on your blog platform. Having your Twitter stream in a sidebar is one thing, but having an automated bot post daily or weekly entries gives you yet another reason not to post to your blog. You’ll end up with 33 consecutive posts titled “Tweet Tweet, My Week.”
2. Cut your losses with old, half-dead posts. One of my ideas was to do a running column titled “Heads-Up Tech” – pitting 2 similar web technologies against in each other. I had been dragging my feet on finishing up a decent column about Last.fm vs. Pandora. But then Mashable released it’s Pandora vs. Last.fm post. Yeah, it’s professionally written, but I still couldn’t get over how much more better and more complete it was. I stared at my draft post, off and on, for the next 6 months until I finally just deleted it.
3. Share less, explain more. Last week, I tried Sessmic Desktop after being a happy TweetDeck user for 9 months or so. There were some key features missing, and it didn’t make sense to me to learn a whole new UI that offered basically the same feature set as the one I was used to. My 140 character mindset fired off a quick missive and moved on. Yeah, it was great to share my thought, but it would have made a better “Heads-Up Tech” post.
4. A blog is about content, not widgets. In the 6 months that I haven’t been writing content, I’ve installed dozens of themes and played around with bunches of widgets. I had fun playing with the technology when I should have been writing.
5. It’s just a blog. I’m not writing for Time or Newsweek. It’s ok to write a post that’s . . . Ok. No need to win the Pulitzer each and every week. When I have a thought, I’ll write about it quickly and get it out there.

One last thing – an apology. I’m sorry to those who had subscribed via email and to my RSS feed. You thought you were signing up for one thing, and got something else instead. Here’s looking forward to a different approach for the rest of ‘09.

I recently joined the Harvard Startups usergroup. Today, I was replying to a question posed to the community and about half-way through, realized it was a blog post.

The question: How does one promote online marketing and lead generation services to an audience that is primarily used to only exhibiting at conferences. What strategies can be used to drive this audience away from exhibiting at conferences and focus more on utilizing online marketing?

Let me start by saying, this is a long process – be prepared for frustration along the way. Traditional marketers are generally very scared to try new media strategies for a number of reasons, mostly because it’s new and people don’t like change, but also because it’s threatening. Here’s how I’d advise you to start:

1. It doesn’t cost us anything to try this. You don’t need anyone’s permission to start a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or a Ping.FM account. You can probably easily get the budget for a Constant Contact account to send regular email marketing. Focus on how little cost (both money and time) it is to start an online marketing program. How can they say No?
2. My Online programs are here to help make your offline programs better. Send email marketing ahead of the conference to increase your company’s awareness. Live-Twitter about the conferences. Bring a video camera and tape as much as you can. All these activities help both their conference, as well as your grow your online community-base. Focusing on Win-Win situations helps reduce their fear of you and what you represent.
3. Track EVERYTHING. Most traditional marketers don’t track metrics. Sad to say, but they leave the barn door wide open. They just spend money on the next conference. If you track followers, click-throughs, traffic, leads, and EVERYTHING else, the upper management will start to drool over your success, then you’re ready for step 4.
4. Explain to Senior Management what they could get if they gave digital marketing a decent budget. You were able to attract X amount of opportunities/dollars with your limited budget. But, if you had a team of people working for you, and better tools, you could easily do 10X. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for – when they decide “Gee, maybe we should skip one of those 15k conference sponsorship fees and give that budget to the digital marketing guy to rebuild our website . . . “

Good luck, and remember that you have to change mindsets. Much of this is not about proving that online marketing tactics work, it’s the interpersonal dynamics between the agitator vs. the status quo. It takes awhile. You will be scoffed at, at first. Then, you will become their enemy. You can not control their response to change. But, you will succeed because it’s been proven thousands of times over that digital marketing is more effective than a 100% offline strategy.

Has anyone else been through his process, successfully? Let me know in the comments below other ideas I didn’t touch on.

Continuing the effort to raise awareness of Boston area based Internet Startups, this month’s guest post comes from Dan Haubert, Co-founder of TicketStumbler. I talked with Dan at TicketStumbler, a Y-Combinator that launched in August 2008, not only to find out more about the company, but also about how he saw themselves fitting into the Boston area web entrepenuerial sector. This guest post continues a series on Boston area startups that includes Matt Wiseley from EditMe and Abby Kirigin from TipJoy. Thanks to Dan for his time and sharing his thoughts.

Mamet: What’s the compelling reason to use TicketStumbler instead of more well known companies TicketMaster?
Haubert: The biggest advantage of using TicketStumbler is the ability to pick your seats while comparing hundreds (or thousands) of listings at once. This allows you to find the best seats at the best price. At Ticketmaster, you’re never able to select your seats – you just hope Ticketmaster spits out something you like. If Ticketmaster ever changes this, we’ll include them within our main site listings. Furthermore, at our site you can compare multiple events at a given venue at the same time. For example, if you know you’re going to be in Boston for a week, you can compare all the relative Red Sox games.

On the ticket blog we include Ticketmaster offers & links. If the event is expected to sell out, your best bet is probably Ticketmaster as the prices are fixed. However, most events don’t sell out so you can often find tickets below face value at TicketStumbler. And since we’re in a recession, this is more true than ever. NHL winter classic tickets were going for below face value as were many NCAA college bowl games. Finally, if the event is sold out and you want tickets, TicketStumber allows you to browse everything that’s available as prices can vary widely.

Mamet: How does TicketStumbler make money, or plan to make money?
Haubert: We receive a percentage of every sale directly from our ticket providers (e.g. Stubhub, Ticketsnow, Razorgator). The cost is the same going through TicketStumbler as it is going straight to one of our ticket providers. TicketStumbler is, and always will be, free.

Mamet: As a Web 2.0 software company, how have you been helped or hindered by being located in Massachusetts, as opposed to California?
Haubert: To be honest, I still don’t know exactly what web 2.0 means. For us, Boston has been a major advantage. Our burn rate would have almost doubled had we moved to San Francisco, and we would have almost certainly needed to take on additional investor funding (as of right now, the only money we’ve received has been from Y Combinator). Not having to worry about that has allowed us to focus on our product. The major advantages of San Francisco are: more investors, more talent to hire and a stronger startup community. We’ve been fortunate to have investor interest from both coasts. We aren’t hiring, but we would love to see a stronger startup community in Boston. Tom and I are both big fans of San Francisco so we’ll probably move out there eventually. For now, Boston is great and Bruins games are awesome.

Mamet: Is this scalping? Am I going to get into trouble if I use your website?
Haubert: TicketStumbler actually doesn’t own any tickets; we’re just an aggregator. A good analogy to use is thinking about us as an Expedia or an Orbitz. Expedia doesn’t have any physical planes – TicketStumbler doesn’t have any physical tickets. The scalping laws have largely been revoked and usually don’t apply to online ticket sales. Major League Baseball signed an agreement with Stubhub as did the Washington Wizards and numerous NFL teams. People are realizing that allowing safe, free markets is a better solution than regulations that don’t work or are ignored anyway. That said, I’d still be careful buying from a street scalper as there’s no certainty that the tickets are real. All of our ticket providers offer 100% guarantees.

Mamet: Given that you’re up against some big names in TicketMaster and LiveNation, how do you plan to spread the word about your service and grow your customer base?
Haubert: Just as United Airlines & Delta aren’t direct competitors with Expedia, Ticketmaster & Livenation aren’t direct competitors with TicketStumbler. Ticketmaster is already a partner and once Livenation introduces their affiliate program, they’ll be a partner as well. We’re not trying to compete with them (although we compete somewhat for traffic). Our goal is to include as many tickets as possible and let fans pick what tickets to buy and where to buy them from.

Mamet: If you had a 2 minute audience with all your potential customers, what would you say to them?
Haubert: I’d tell them that we have over $1.5 billion worth of tickets on our site to almost any event imaginable. If they were first time users, I’d tell them to give us a try for MLB & NBA games where below face value tickets are abound.

Chris Carroll is a colleague of mine, who works in the Professional Services group as a Customer Support and Operations guy. He’s kind of a crazy S.O.B, but we all like him anyway. Turns out he likes to make video. Guess he’s a perfect fit for PermissionTV. Yeah, he makes the usual, goofy user-generated-content/football-in-the-groin stuff. But, what he’s really passionate about is making good video. So, we gave him some time and tools to do what he’s passionate about. The Result? Well, press play and you’ll see. Creative minds always amaze me. Look what one guy with a good idea can pull off . . .

This morning, TweetDeck v0.21b was released, providing a boatload of small, but much needed, user interface improvements. For those of you who don’t already know TweetDeck, it is a Twittter client. It’s different from some of the other ones out there, in that “it aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” TweetDeck is my Twitter client of choice.

But, for those that know and love TweetDeck, the biggest drawback has been its management of empty space and overall width of the application. The UI was just a little on the “clunky” side. It looks like the development team heard these complaints and have addressed them in the latest release. Aside from overall “compactness” in the standard layout, this version of TweetDeck now comes with a setting for “narrow columns” which is pretty handy, reducing my application width by a full 20%, allowing me to add a new column into my display at full screen, if I choose to.

Another nice improvement is an apparently new integration with a site called TwitterCounter.com. This provides an auto-generated @ reply sent from TweetDeck Services to you that provides follower statistics and, even cooler, projections of follower counts based on current rates. Here’s what my first TwitterCount message said: “@msmamet followers 193, added since yesterday 3, average growth per day 1, predictions: tomorrow 194, next month 223 (twittercounter.com).” It doesn’t look like this is a true @ reply sent through Twitter, but rather it’s generated by the application and put in your “Replies” column – so it’s private. I suppose if you like to brag, you could always Retweet it.

I’m still exploring the list of changes, including a new spellcheck feature, but overall it looks like this release has made the application markedly better. I encourage you to download it and try it today. What are some other Twitter clients that you use and like? I’d like to know your thoughts about it!

Last night I had some fun with the local Boston Twitter community at the NogUp at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square – not the Tommy Doyle’s in Kendall Square. I saw some folks I had met before, @recklessstudio and @girlgamay, and was able to put a few faces to names – folks like @jeffcutler and @cmajor.

It was a small, low-key crowd. The Monday before Christmas and immediately following a 1 to 2 punch snow and ice-storm definitley kept the Twitter masses away. But, it was a nice time just chilling with a few beers and getting to know some folks I don’t know all that well.

Of course, being a TweetUp, many of us spent a good amount of time Tweeting the whole shebang. Check out the shenanigans! Highlight of the evening was Jeff Cutler playing Santa Claus and giving out a few gifts to those who attended.

Thanks and looking forward to the next one!

Most businesses, especially small to medium sized businesses, are run poorly. That’s why they don’t all succeed. Not because they have bad ideas, or bad employees, but because of poor execution. I focus most of my professional energy trying to execute well. I use that word, “well,” purposefully. Well is not perfect. Well is not poorly.

Historically, I get a lot of flak from professionals in all the companies I’ve been in, whose primary interest lies someplace else. Usually, these well-intentioned people are just focused on talking rather than executing. Sometimes these people are less well-intentioned and just want to maximize their own benefits. This constant struggle between me vs. them is wearing.   Occasionally, I’ll come across a book, an author, or a presentation that revitalizes me and reaffirms my beliefs in what I feel is the “right way” to run a business. The “10 Laws of Building a SaaS Company” presentation by Bessemer Venture Partners is one of those. Here’s a Cliff Notes version of what I learned:

1. Your key monthly business metrics are: CMRR Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, Churn, Cash Flow. “Bookings” is for suckers.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) are the best indicators of long term value creation.
3. Tune before you scale. Stop at 3 sales reps until at least two of them are making 100k MRR quotas. “You need at least 2 to 3 sales reps that are productive and efficient on their own, without a lot of executive support, before you step on the gas.”
4. Separate your “hunters” and “farmers” and pay them all on CMRR growth. “Orient all your [sales team] compensation plans around CMRR, not around bookings.”
5. Focus your business dev. efforts on business service channels, not IT channels. IT Channels are not good for SaaS companies because there isnot a lot of hardware and software needs when your product is purchased, because you’re providing it. Also, there aren’t a lot of professional service deals because it’s not an implemented product.
6. By definition, your sales prospects are online. Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful SaaS business.
7. Stay local – prove your business in North America first. Only after reaching $1M in CMRR should you consider overseas. Save Asia for post-IPO.
8. Single instance, multi-tenant, single datacenter. Have only 1 version of code in production. “Just say no” to on-premise deployments. “You can get the worst of both business models if you have a highly fragmented, on-premise model with the subscription economics of revenue.” This made me think of 37 signals, immediately.
9. The most important part of software-as-a-service isn’t software it’s service. Monitor,  gather feedback, and then benchmark. You can drive a ton of Product Marketing and Product Management insights from all having all customer data in single instance. Simply tracking usage of your customers gives you significant insights into your product. I thought of Hubspot.com when I heard this.
10. Be prepared to cross the desert. SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment captial to fund 4+ years of runway. Load up for the long trip and pace your consumption of calories! (dollars)
11. Bonus Rule. You can ignore 1 or 2 of these rules, but not more. Great companies innovate, but pick your battles. This “bonus” rule made me laugh. This first excuse that poor leaders of companies give, when faced with the overwhelming data that their current strategy and tactics aren’t working, is something like “Well, this companys is so different from all the other companies out there, the normal rules don’t really apply to me.” Obvioiusly, the folks at Bessemer have heard this too. (Probably a lot more times than I have. . .) and decided to throw this Bonus Rule in. You’re not that different. You’re just a bad leader.

I just updated to Wordpress 2.7 and right off the bat, I’m pleasantly surprised. First off, upgrading was a breeze. All my plugins are working just great. Second, the amount of new features and UI improvements is quite significant for a “minor” numbered release. One of the new features I’m currently using is the “QuickPress” box right on the dashboard that enables you to quickly jot down a blog post in a small window. This reduces a couple of clicks and, an obstacle, to creating posts – enabling me to generate more content. In short – a good use of UI to solve a problem. I’m also enjoying a NetVibes-like customizable admin, that lets me move blocks of information around and organize as I see fit. Very nice! I look forward to exploring more of the features available in this release. Good work so far!

How about others using WordPress? Share your thoughts on where it hits (or misses) the mark in the comments below!

Last week, I attended the VideoNuze Leadership Breakfast Panel, moderated by Will Richmond. The breakfast panel was part of the larger CTAM conference and was held in the Hynes Auditorium on Monday morning. Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of this type of venue. The room was setup like a wedding reception – large round tables with fully set place settings and waitstaff floating around picking up dirty dishes. There was little space in the room for networking. I guess it wasn’t really a networking event. The purpose of this panel was to educate the audience on How to Profit from Broadband Video’s Disruptive Impact.

The panel itself was comprised of bigwigs in the online video market, who mostly played it safe when answering questions by Will Richmond or the audience. With high level executives present from competitors Google/YouTube and Amazon video, I was anticipating at least a little point-counterpoint. A couple of times, Will prompted his panel very directly to take the gloves off and engage in a more “spirited discussion.”

Overall, the key theme discussed was “convenience.”  Aside from Next New Networks stating that “competition” will breed new “features” in online video, there was absolutely no talk about what the exact features are, or how specifically, online video might disrupt the traditional TV-based subscription model.

This is the second event I’ve been to that’s been sponsored by VideoNuze and moderated by Will Richmond. The previous event was MITX’s “In’s and Out’s of Making Money on Online Video.” I found the discussion at that event to be pretty surfacey as well. Maybe that’s because Will seems to be such a nice guy – I met him at the VideoNuze VideoSchooze (a social mixer, not a panel discussion). There’s a fine line between being accommodating vs. being a push over, and I won’t pretend to know how to continuously be on the right side of that line. But still, my 2 cents is that Will needs to develop a system to challenge his panelists and tap into what they are passionate about. Passion on the panel would inevitable spread to passion within the audience for the topics.

What do you think? If you’ve hosted, moderated, or be on a Q&A panel, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to stimulate spirited discussion without coming off too pushy. What works and what doesn’t?