My new company just created its first post for our new blog. It’s an odd choice. There are no deep explanations of our service, no hard sell. Instead the first thing we decided to do was to talk about a the purchase of a competitor. Here is the first part of the post:
So why would a perfectly sensible person choose this as the topic of the company’s first post? Sometimes a subject chooses you. Let me explain.
Our plan
We are practitioners of the leanstartup and customer development methodologies. That is to say, focus on building your product as quickly as possible with the minimum feature set you think is required to satisfy the customer problem you’ve identified. Launch, test and iterate. Conversations with potential customers=great, PR before product/market fit=missed opportunity.
Blogging
Blogging can fall on anywhere on the conversation<===>PR spectrum. And the left-hand side of the blogging equation certainly fit into our plans. But being deeply focused on speaking with customers (one on one) in combination with building a product and the billions of other details associated with building a business on limited resources leaves little time for anything else. Obviously blogging can be a brilliant way to create a dialogue with like minded people around the world. It can also be a giant sinkhole for time and productivity and frankly I remain concerned about living up to the commitment to blog regularly. Entrepreneurship is all about making hard trade-off decisions and up until now, blogging was too far down the list.
Changing Needs Meets Timely Opportunity
Up to this point we’ve had perhaps 60 anecdotal customer conversations and are up to about 15 formal recorded interviews. We’ve just begun to open the aperture to increase the volume of interactions. We’ll still regularly talk with customers and potential customers one on one but as a consumer oriented business we need to broaden the conversation meaningfully in order to really learn what we need to know.
The opportunity hit us when Cake Financial was acquired by E*TRADE a few days ago and decided to shut down – straight away, no warning, leaving customers out in the cold. Compared to Cake, our service has some similarities and what we think are big improvements and radical new features. What better group of qualified potential customers than Cake customers who are now without a service they liked and enjoyed?
The Punchline
We wrote a post directed at Cake customers to create a conversation. The result is that our first post for blueleaf talks about a competitor and we think it’s right on strategy. What do you think? Love to hear your opinion.
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At 7:14am @johnprendergast became self aware (of Twitter’s power).
I just got Twitter. Yup, just now, sitting on an American Airlines flight waiting to pull back on its way to Chicago. How do I know? How do I know the time and how the hell do I know that I really just got Twitter. It was visceral, like a kick in the head that actually cleared the haze. Plus… I checked with someone.
So what did it? Frustration, engagement and serendipity. Here’s the story.
I was killing time reading my main tweetstream on my Blackberry when I hit a frustrating roadblock. I couldn’t retweet something. So what you say. Well, I saw something that was incredibly compelling to me about curing blindness in India both alleviating suffering and creating incredible data about how the brain works. I wanted to share it, I had to share. Fucking Twitterberry! No way to RT.
I was so frustrated I did something I’ve never done. I shouted into the wilderness. “Why can’t I retweet from Twitterberry? Argh! #UXFAIL”
And the wilderness . . . answered @TravisDrouin “@johnprendergast I had the same complaint about Twitterberry; made the switch to UberTwitter and love it. Find it on oneforty com”
Holy shit! I just stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, yelled “Hello” and the canyon friggin answered. I don’t know Travis and I hadn’t yet begun following him. Yet he broke through the haze. He made me understand that I could do this on any topic that’s on my mind, any time day or night from anywhere on earth. That can’t happen anywhere else but on Twitter.
Many of you get this already. You’ve experienced it. Many of you think you get it because you aware that it happens. Many of you are deluded. For you and the rest of you who’ve never really given it much thought, let me tell you why I think this hit me so hard.
I too was deluded. At an intellectual level, I get twitter better than many. I’m the guy who’s been explaining Twitter to my less technically inclined friends. Funny since, I don’t have much of a following and until now hadn’t fully groked Twitter. That said, I have an advantage, her name is @pistachio. Well actually, her name is Laura Fitton but among the Twitterati it is @pistachio that is renowned. If you’re curious why, click here. She’s a friend and a sort of personal social media coach to me. I am a tough case, apparently slow on the uptake.
When @pistachio speaks about Twitter, she often talks about soft concepts like surprise, delight, love and serendipitous connection. In fact in some ways she sees her own life as a one big serendipity engine. And therein lies the power and surprise of Twitter.
Twitter is the world’s serendipity engine. Whack! Booyah! My head hurts.
I can now speak to the wilderness and the wilderness will, at times, speak back. And the more I speak, the more likely I am to get a response. I can now create my own serendipity by being transparently, authentically me and I can get help, encouragement, connection and the occasionally needed dope slap in 140 characters from people who I don’t yet know, who don’t yet know me and who hadn’t followed or paid any attention to me up to that point. Brilliant, scary, unnerving and surprising. My very own serendipity amplifier.
And serendipity is a funny thing. To get it, you’ve got to experience it. Otherwise it’s too easy to trivialize. “Someone helped me, that’s nice.” No, not just nice, amazing! You just created your own luck you knucklehead!
To experience serendipity you’ve got to be in the flow of events and participate to create the opportunity for random events to take their course, cross streams and eventually, wham, serendipity. Which means that to get Twitter, you’ve got to experience Twitter, for a while. That is Twitter’s challenge and opportunity; Helping the impatient and unlucky experience enough of Twitter to get it so they stick and stay engaged.
Lots of very smart people have said these same things before. But this time, I’m saying it because, now, I get it.
Originally published on www.comingunhedged.com
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