Strategy Blog: Post

Brian Wynne Williams - CEO & Co-Founder :

This past weekend, I was in Home Depot looking for a somewhat uncommon electronics device. I figured it was a long-shot that they'd have it, but it was worth asking the young guy with the orange apron who happened to wander by aimlessly. Once he understood what I was asking for, he looked both ways (slyly), leaned closer to me, and whispered:

You should go to RadioShack."

I squinted and nodded knowingly -- as if I'd just been given an insider tip -- and thanked him.

But why the whisper?

If you don't have a product that I'm looking for, why would your co-workers or employer be upset with you for sending a loyal customer (I was in that dang Home Depot three separate times this weekend) to a semi-(at best)-competitor who might have exactly what I'm looking for?  You might be missing out on a couple of bucks (assuming I bought the not-quite-what-I-want alternative) but you're solidifying your position as the first place to go for knowledgeable advice and information.  You're sacrificing (just barely) short-term gains in exchange for strengthening the long-term relationship of trust with the customer.  Shouldn't that be behavior be rewarded, not frowned upon?

Maybe it is rewarded and this young guy just slept through that part of training.

Emily Bloom - Regional Director :

Andy Rutledge describes “the client factors” that designers should consider when calculating project price estimates. I’m not a designer, and I don’t do a lot of estimates; but, I loved his post.

He confesses that the pat answer of “I need more information” before estimating costs, while usually true, is sometimes another way of saying, “What I really need is to spend more time talking with this person, getting to know her; her communication skills, her attitude, and her personality.” Getting to know the person is at the core of making a realistic price estimate.

He goes on to describe the “ideal client” and how to estimate the cost of working with someone who lacks these traits. His list of an ideal client’s characteristics jumped out at me because the constellation of traits seems ideal not just for a client, but for a coworker, boss, or job applicant. (Heck, maybe even a spouse? Just a thought.)

I had three immediate questions: What’s the essence of these “ideal” personality traits? Am I like this? (I want to be ideal; who doesn’t?) Ok, so maybe I’m not; but, what should I do?

Continue reading "Effective Teams: Ideal Traits for Creative Partners"

Brian Wynne Williams - CEO & Co-Founder :

I recently enjoyed a Scott McNealy speech in which he discussed the benefits of open source software. One topic was security, and he explained his view that open source software is inherently more secure because so many people have seen the code that there are no "secret" vulnerabilities to exploit. Lots and lots of people have "kicked the tires" along the way.

This reminded me of one of the reasons we launched 4 new blogs recently. A goal was to better connect and share with our communities of peers. By taking what had been internal discussions and putting them out on our blogs -- in some case continuing the "discussion" part via the comments ourselves -- we involved lots of other people to kick around our ideas and help make them better. We fully expect our peers to smack us around when we're off base. In some cases, we're just sharing something we've learned. In others, we might come right out and ask a question. In all cases, when the community does take the time to engage in the discussion, we feel like everyone comes out ahead.

It doesn't have to be a blog. I encourage anyone to take their ideas out of their own company (without violating any confidentiality agreements, of course), and share them. One of three things will happen:

1. If your ideas are solid, you'll earn praise and goodwill for contributing them to the community.
2. If they're shaky, you'll collect valuable feedback to improve them.
3. If they're downright shoddy, you'll figure that out sooner than you would have otherwise, which is still a good thing.

If you share often enough, you'll probably have all three experiences, and you (and your company) will be better off for it.

 

Kevin Vigneault - Project Manager :

A few years ago, Nina Wanat moved to California. After working as a screenwriter and attending law school, she figured out what she really wanted to do was attend culinary school. Nina decided to start a blog called Sweet Napa to, as she put it, "remember all that I was learning -- everything from preventing exploding pies to shaping chocolate dolphins."

It turns out this blog was more important to her upcoming business strategy than she most likely realized at the time. When she later conceived of her business idea to sell high-end candy bars ($5 a piece), her blog became the testing grounds for various recipes she was coming up with. She created prototypes for orange, whiskey, coffee , banana, and coconut flavored candy bars and solicited feedback from her readers to gauge their interest. Her transparency not only helped her see what worked and what didn't -- it also attracted a loyal base of readers. These people would become her first group of paying customers when she later launched her candy bar business at BonBonBar.com.

Here are three lessons we can learn from Nina:

1. Be public about your product ideas. Don't develop products in isolation and then solicit feedback only after you've invested hundreds or thousands of hours developing a production-ready product.
2. Business strategies should be focused, but not product-specific. If your business is contingent upon the success of a single product, your chances of success are much lower.
3. Try out lots of ideas, but be selective about what you actually release to production. After trying all those candy bar recipes, BonBonBar had two candy bars available at launch (they have four now).

Kevin Vigneault - Project Manager :

At Refresh DC a couple nights ago, Sean Greene from LaunchBox Digital gave a piece of advice I first heard in business school and have caught a few times since. It's that when starting a new venture, you can't strive for incremental improvement; rather, you must aim for dramatic innovation.

To illustrate what this means, let's use the example of DVDs vs. Blu-ray discs. DVDs were a huge innovation that changed the way people interacted with their video playback devices; no more rewinding tapes at the end movies or fast-forwarding for five minutes to get to a particular part. Recently, Blu-ray discs have incrementally improved upon DVDs. With greater storage capacity, they can deliver full-length movies at a higher resolution. But they don't change how we watch a movie, they just make the experience a little better. Here are a few more:

• Nintendo Wii vs. Playstation 3
• Netflix vs. Blockbuster Online
• Twitter vs. Pownce

In those four examples, it's probably better to have been the innovator than the incremental improver. But, does a new company have to dramatically innovate to be massively successful? Think about these companies:

• Firefox - There were a ton of browsers before Firefox came around in late 2004. It's now used by about 18% of the market, but it didn't fundamentally change what a web browser was. To many who were hungry for something besides Internet Explorer though, it represented a better option.
• Facebook - Facebook serves the same basic purpose as a host of other sites, including MySpace and Friendster, which are both well-trafficked and older than Facebook. Users possibly looking for something less cluttered than MySpace or cooler and newer than Friendster flocked to Facebook.
• Digg - Slashdot was around in the late nineties. Digg launched seven years later. The big change was simply the lack of any editorial oversight as to what made it on the front page; not exactly Earth shattering innovation, yet they get about 20 million unique visitors per month.

From this small list of examples, it appears at least possible to be hugely successful by incrementally improving an existing product. But is there any potential downside to striving for dramatic innovation? Well yes; you can burn yourself out trying to come up with the "game changing" idea before you even get started. Sometimes, you need to get your feet wet before the really good ideas start to flow.

So, you shouldn't necessarily reject the idea of getting into a market that already has some competition, even if you don't (yet) have the game changing idea. You can compete if you have specific expertise in an area, passion for that industry, and a good team. Sean provided another piece of advice, which is that there's a lot of money to be made by hitting singles (profitable businesses), instead of trying to slug home runs (billion dollar acquisitions). And to hit these singles, you don't necessarily need to change the whole game.