Involvd.com

The art of leadership could not be put better than this surely …

Involvd is a big fan of the Lean Startup methodology as popularised by Eric Ries and Steve Blank (Eric’s doing a webinar later today if you’re interested) and we’ll be following the methodology for as long as it continues to drive the company in the right direction at the right speed (or until something even more amazing comes along).

I’m not going to go over all the detail that has been covered elsewhere as that would be a waste of everyones time but rather pick out bits from our experiences as we go through them that we have tweaked slightly to meet our needs better. Hopefully the will be useful for you too.

Little bit of background. We’re a web startup, will be a SaaS offering though not a subscription-based service to begin with (that doesn’t mean we will be Freemium either so please calm down biz dev bods!) and therefore have quite a bit in common with Ash Maurya’s CloudFire product.

Ash laid out his processes for the Customer Discovery and Customer Validation phases here and here and they are well worth a read if you’re just starting out and need a helping hand up (a true love for process-flow diagrams is a must).

I think the main reason I fell in love with the Lean model when I first read about it was when I saw that a key part of the process was to ‘get out of the building to validate the business model by talking to your customers’. Music to my ears as second only to a good process-flow is my passion for sitting down with people and talking about new business ideas. Now I had the best of both worlds, a process and an excuse to talk.

I’ve tweaked his “Problem Presentation” interview structure slightly which is what I’d like to share with you today. Point of process – don’t take notes but listen to, talk with and record the conversation using your nifty iPhone voice recording app. If you’re writing you’ll miss the all important key emotional cues that is the other half of the story.

Our process goes like this:

1. Lay out laminated cards randomly on the table in front of the potential customer where each one has a ‘problem’ on them that the customer might currently be experiencing
2. Ask them to pick their top 3 problems and discard the rest
3. Ask them if they’d like to add any of their own in place of one or more of their top 3
4. Ask them to rank the 3 they are left in first, second and third place (where first = biggest problem)
5. Ask them how they currently solve these problems today
6. Ask them how these solutions work for them right now (i.e. let’s hear how happy or pissed off they are with their current situation)
7. Briefly describe our product (with a few wireframes if appropriate as sometimes it’s easier to show and talk rather than just talk)
8. Ask whether our product would solve their top 3 problems better than their current situation
9. Ask them whether they would pay $X/unit to use our product
10. Ask them if there is anything else they want to add – Ideas? Criticisms? Feedback? Quotes?
11. Ask them for referrals

The major difference between our process and Ash’s is at the very top with the stating of the problems. In mine I don’t state my view of the world first and let them build on top of that, I ask them to create their own using a suggested but not exclusive set of answers.

Asking them to build on mine is effectively leading the witness. That’s OK but you need to bear in mind that if you lead the witness there are only three types of responses you get in return and only one of them gives you what you are looking for. Let me introduce the personalities:

1. The lazy people - The vast majority are those people that if given the opportunity to not think too hard about something then they will invariably take it. They might look like they are thinking hard and even fake the thinking process by talking about a couple of pieces of low-hanging fruit but if you delved into their mind at that moment in time it’s barely ticking over. They would just simply prefer to not work too hard and will most likely just agree with what you’ve come up with (no good)
2. The bloody-minded people – If you are interviewing business leaders then these people may actually seem the majority to you. If you are interviewing Joe-public then you will see this a far smaller category compared to the ‘lazy people’. These people don’t like to be told how to think and will always flex their intellectual muscles to try and impress you by choosing completely different problems to your set (again, no good)
3. The fair thinkers – These are the people you need as these are the ones that are going to give you their honest and well-thought-through opinion. It’s very difficult to find them though and even if you do you must catch them at the right time as there’s a chance they’ll slip into one of the above categories

Much better to take all of these characters out of the equation altogether and put them in a situation where they are forced to form a well-thought-through unbiased opinion. Using cards does just that.

3 minutes, 2 slides and a founder …

What is (will be) Involvd.com? That’s the million dollar question (hopefully more) that I get asked most often at the moment.

It’s a difficult one to answer quickly as we’re aiming to be a very broad-based service. Maybe it’s easier to answer what we’re not:

• Not a social network though we will be highly social
• Not a community though many of the features will be designed to foster community interaction
• Not a project management application though will definitely be used as one
• Not a collaboration tool though you’ll find it harder not to collaborate if we do it right

How about the largest online purveyor of the finest productivity porn then?



Productivity porn (aka ‘productivity pr0n’ for those old-handers) are those little tips, tricks and techniques that one can use to maximise one’s productivity. Most often, it refers either to objects that we can use to help us like index cards, post-it notes and to-do lists or to organisational systems like ‘when to do your email’, ‘when to answer the phone’ and ‘how to structure your diary’.

Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Ning and most recently Skype fame wrote a cracking article on productivity porn here (now in archive).

I have since implemented his ’index card the night before system’ and can tell you it works extremely well (especially for those that work from home like I do). I would also love to be in a position one day to ‘not keep a schedule’ like he did in 2007 (from the book, A Perfect Mess). Not sure I’m quite there yet professionally.

As a descriptor for what Involvd.com will be I think it marries pretty well. Every part of the business model is 100% focussed on our primary aim of increasing the productivity of individuals and groups. The hypothesis being that if people are more productive then that will leave space in their time-poor lives to do extra stuff of greater personal and social value that they maybe feel they don’t have either the time, inspiration or inclination to do right now. Crying out for some productivity porn as you can see!

I also like the initial reaction I get when I use the term.

If I get asked more out of politeness than interest what it is my fantastic new product is going to do the ‘porn’ word never fails to inject immediate attention into the conversation.

Take, for example, my pitch to Startup Bootcamp last Friday. As I was last out of lots on stage with the audience a little jaded I felt I needed to inject a little pick-me-up into my short. I decided, therefore, to give my new product genre a little run-out. A lady on the front-row exclaimed, several others gasped and plenty drew sharp intakes of breath that almost demanded me to explain myself (OK maybe a little more dramatic than it actually was but it certainly got more than if I’d gone with my original intro).

That’s all the ammunition I need to know I did the right thing and judging by my conversations after the session I could tell the rest of my pitch had piggy-backed in on the attention. The video will be online soon so I promise to post it up here once I have access to it (thanks for a fantastic night Alex Farcet).

This raises an important personal question however. If this venture goes nowhere then I’m likely to hear nothing about this again. If it’s successful however, I run the chance of being known as the Productivity Porn King for the rest of my career … hmmmmmmm … that sounds like a lose-lose to me … ah well, publish!

Today is a big day for Involvd.com as I am launching the much anticipated recruitment campaign on across Copenhagen and the internet.

I am looking to build a large experienced team of IT professionals located in and around the Copenhagen area. If that’s you, you will be able to choose for yourself what you work on, when and how you do it. If you have experience with open-source technologies and the development process that will be an advantage (though not essential as long as you are a fast learner).

I can promise you I will work tirelessly to create an environment for you where you’ll meet, learn and work with like-minded technical people on a cutting-edge product.

You are, and will always be, my most important commodity and therefore you will work for a company that will include you as a shareholder when the prototype launches. Those of you that make the largest impact will be offered employment when funding is secured.

If all of that sounds good then the first step is for us to meet, get to know each other and discuss the project and your contribution in detail.

Call me … we’ll have a lot of fun

PS A big thanks goes to my good friend and hugely talented copy-writer Hugo Bone (www.hugo-bone.com) and his man Rich for putting this poster together. All your time and effort is very much appreciated

PPS Contrary to how the poster might look to the casual observer this project is not all about money. We will certainly be looking to turn a tidy profit but it’s not my absolute core purpose. I had many debates with Hugo about this message as it definitely made us both, at different times, feel a little uncomfortable but we wanted something that would make an impact on the passer-by and I think it does that. Do you?