The art of adding features to any product or service is this:
Those who need or want the new features can find them easy.
Meanwhile those who don’t need or want the features don’t even notice them. They are invisible.
Sounds impossible to do, but I think the team at twitter are doing a pretty good job of it. The way I’d try and achieve this would be by making sure the visual structure doesn’t change, and the sequence of events to use it is not interrupted.
shhh – here comes the controversy.
Here’s why you should book your seat at Startup School Sydney – as Melbourne attendees share their thoughts on the event.
Money back guarantee to Blow your Mind! Click here to book – Startup School
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb8Zngdcu_o]
I was asked during one of my live twitcam sessions the title of this blog entry, with the number 3 in front of it. What are 3 things needed to build a web community. This is the answer I came up with right on the spot.
Participate: Use the service, website and community you are building. Be an avid user and of it yourself, even though you own it or built it. I use rentoid more than anyone and love it. You are not part of a community if you are a spectator. You need to be involved in it. Listen, create, help, assist, but not rule over. It’s not a kingdom or a principality, it’s a community, which means that all participants are equal regardless of their status. It doesn’t matter, if you are the customer or the creator of the community, everyone matters. It should be evident in the organic dynamics that all of the community are valued. everyone has something to offer and add that we can all benefit from.
Share: Share not because you expect something back. Share because we are all humans, and this is how humans roll. We are great at being there for each other a providing support. Doing stuff for the benefit of others for reasons that go beyond the financial. it was once said that the perfect day is the day you help someone who will never have the chance to repay you.
Keep costs low: Not for any economic reason, other than building things of incredible value like communities take time. If you build an expensive infrastructure for your community there will be too much financial pressure on making it work quickly, and communities don’t work like that. They are organic and take time to find a balance and set of values and systems. If you have too much cost associated with what you are doing, your behaviour will become non-community like. It just wont work.
Startup Blog says, Start building.
As you know I’m running my startup school in Melbourne this weekend. we all know that boring stuff really sucks, so why do ‘note’s pages’ have to be boring as well. No reason. But every time I see a great presentation with excellent stimulous, there’s usually a blank page with no stimulous to write on. Not at startup school. Here’s our rad notes page below….
It’s not too late to join us if you’re not doing anything this weekend and are in Melbourne – come along.
http://www.startupschool.com.au/
Sometimes it’s worth being even just a little bit awesome. We don’t need to change the world, maybe just having a little bit of public fun is enough. The usually conservative BBC did that for me today when I realised the following: The BBC video player has a volume which goes to 11.
It’s what I call unexpectedly awesome. I was delighted. So much that I’ve linked here to little video of Warren Buffett being interviewed. Upon which you can learn something and also pump the volume up to 11.
Startups – do something a little bit awesome.
I was lucky enough to be on a judging panel at Melbourne University with David Clarke the CEO of Webjet. A $500m company which he founded, floated and built. After the students gave their business pitches (the subject was Internet Marketing) he gave a simple closing speech with some poignant insights. Here’s a snippet.
Amen.
Sure we live in a mash up society. It’s acceptable to bootstrap. It’s OK to learn on the job in the digital arena. What’s not acceptable is to get worse. To not reach previously set quality benchmarks. In any business, no less your start up. All of the self made youtube stars invest time in the final production of their content. People expect a higher level of quality these days especially if we want to gather long term fans and loyal viewers. Production values matter. What was acceptable in 2004 in not acceptable in 2009.
The first thing you notice in the video output of these highly subscribed Youtubers is production quality: Hotforwords, Community Channel, Kev Jumba, Happy Slip, Fred and others.
So when Miley Cyrus throws together a home made video of her leaving twitter seen below, we realize how much value her producers add to her usual output – seen underneath.
Home made Miley
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU]
Produced Miley
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA]
I myself, need to improve the videos I make for rentoid.com. So I’ve recently been investing a lot of time learning how to use iMovie editing software.
The lesson for startups is to invest in our digital output. A little more effort in production can be the difference between gathering customers and looking like an amateur.