Disqus - Latest Comments for stevenmilstein

Re: 11 Foolproof Ways to Get New Customers for Your Small Biz

stevenmilstein — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:38:33 -0000

Kiera, great post! It's amazing to see how far a simple postage stamp can go for a Customer Wow experience. Thanks for the pingback.

Re: SXSW PanelPicker

stevenmilstein — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 09:20:58 -0000

It's like Lean Marketing meets Lean Startup & Lean Canvas. I'm sure Eric, Steve, Alex & Ash would be proud :-)

Re: Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings

stevenmilstein — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:47:36 -0000

As a techie startup, not every challenge can be resolved writing code - like Customer Development (Steve Blank). Instinctively, going out for coffee seems to align more with Lean's definition of Waste ("Any human activity that absorbs resources but creates no value", Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System.) But nothing can be further from the truth. Providing you're not going out for coffee to listen to yourself pitch, or, drink your own Kool-aid, getting out offers huge opportunities to save precious time & resources.

Recently, I started attending a weekly business networking breakfast of 10-15 regulars where we all take turns presenting what we do (Elevator Pitch) & the ideal contact we'd like to make. And while I'm the only Techie Startup, everyone else in the room is pretty much a Startup, whether they're a Small Medium sized Business (SMB), or, an agent for a larger organization. Personally, I love presenting/pitching, so I look forward to every meeting where I could tweak & tune my Pitch, hoping it aligns better with the audience's needs. It's a lot cheaper to change a 60-second Pitch than to keep cranking out scalable code that customers will may never execute.

For those who shy away from presenting, there's no better place & forgiving audience to practice in front of, week after week. (Steve Jobs doesn't wing it.) Going for coffee is not a Waste - it's a opportunity. Blowing a face-to-face potential stakeholder (employee, business partner, customer) meeting, now that's a Waste.

Thanks Mark for drawing those thoughts out of me. I feel a blog post coming on :-)

Re: Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings

stevenmilstein — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:46:34 -0000

Thanks Mark for drawing those thoughts out of me. I feel a blog post coming on :-)

Re: Google Opens Local Shopping Feature to Small Businesses

stevenmilstein — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:55:14 -0000

Courtney,

Thanks for the great insight & stats into Google Local Shopping! We offer a local buying service which doesn't necessarily compete with Google's Local Shopping, since we're targeting those who may not necessarily have web sites, product pages and may not want to feed inventory levels. In your opinion, do you think Google Merchant Center fits small and medium size businesses (SMB/SME), or, the larger ones?

Thanks for the post & any further contribution you may have to our market research efforts.

Steven

Re: Intro To Product/Market Fit

stevenmilstein — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:27:30 -0000

Nice summary! For reasons of Defensibility (Guy Kawasaki), we started with product development and iterated a few times based on usability tests & friendly feedback. While we could always find reasons to iterate, we're now heads-down into Customer Development. Better late than never, I hope :-)

Thanks for the help.

Re: This Week in Startups #50 Anniversary Show

stevenmilstein — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:14 -0000

Another great show but maybe too great. 1:27:56 is quite a chunk. But thankfully, it was well worth it to hear about the Middle School Principle who wants parents to ban their kids from social sites & text messaging. Thanks Lon for bringing that one up at 1:13:29! I love Jason's Key solution for the car / auto insurance industry & especially his suggestion for a social software site that just for kids! BTW, thanks for the indirect quote!

Looking forward to further enjoying the parsed show format.

Re: Who Let the Dogs Out?

stevenmilstein — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:23:08 -0000

And that's why I'll be seeing you at http://montrealtechwatch.co...

Re: Who Let the Dogs Out?

stevenmilstein — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:23:33 -0000

Ben,

Having worked in a Geographically Distributed Software Development(GDD), as well as, a local software lab, I can certainly attest to the advantages of being face-to-face. On the other hand, social software - even used locally, would provide many benefits. For example, chat or instant messages, wikis, blogs, shared files & bookmarking, screen sharing & capture, would be preserved for future reference & serve as a knowledge base - which will only increase in value with each iteration.

Any while some domain experts - such as start-up gurus, mentors, advisers, investors etc., may not always be available locally, 1) their online presence would still provide an everlasting value and 2) the transparent development environment would enable them, as well as, newcomers to get up to speed.

Finally, teams adopting outside-in Agile/Lean start-up methodologies need to focus on time-boxed demonstrable deliverables. Stakeholder feedback is essential for subsequent sprints/iterations. And so increasing the depth of stakeholders simply mitigates the risk of developing something in a Ivory Tower.

While social software will not be the magic bullet for start-up success, it does have the potential to mitigate certain risks, costs, redundancies and errors. I imagine, all of which align nicely with Incubator mission statements?

IMO, of course :-)

Regards,
Steven

Re: Who Let the Dogs Out?

stevenmilstein — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:33:45 -0000

Thanks for the great info! While I appreciate the value of having these start-up incubators local, are you aware of anyone doing this virtually? Is anyone making use of social software platforms to emulate venture capital incubators?

Re: Why influencers matter for customer retention

stevenmilstein — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:25:27 -0000

Dirk, you make an excellent point. The bottom-up / grass roots folks are a force to be reckoned with. In Carl Kessler's & John Sweitzer's book Outside-in Software Development: A Practical Approach to Building Successful Stakeholder-based Products they refer to them as Partner Stakeholders "who have to put your product into production and keep it running. They might be in your client’s IT shop or might be third-party service providers. Think about making it easy for these folks to keep your product running well; it will pay off big-time."

Re: Boarding Party

stevenmilstein — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:21:33 -0000

Chris, it's nice to see you folks branching into open source. Best of luck!

Re: Question: Are you using twitter for customer support?

stevenmilstein — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:37:41 -0000

One of Twitter's endearing qualities is simplicity. After it's "@" (Reply), or, "D" (Direct message), you have the remaining 140 characters to get your message across. Another powerful aspect of Twitter is it's ability to broadcast, as well as, persist these messages. This means that anyone can pick up on a previous conversation and breath new life into it.

Traditionally, if you're in customer service, or, support, this is probably the last thing you want. Imagine you've been working on an open "ticket", playing round robin with the customer and perhaps development, you finally close the matter and someone, out of the blue, shows up with a new wrinkle. You may never be able to close a ticket again.

Granted, I'm pushing it a bit, but not much. The primary issue here is, Twitter is unstructured and traditional customer service and support need structure. And for good reason too! Customer service and support are legally binding. Customers pay money, in one form or another, for support and perhaps maintenance of the product, or, service. Once we, as providers of these products, or, services accept our customer's money we are on the hook to deliver for a certain period of time.

So how do we convert this Social Content 2.0 that lives not only in Twitter databases, but in all the social networks, from casual conversations into legally binding action items? My guess is you don't. I think if you try then you'll stifle the casual conversations and pollute your service/support systems.

This is what I think you need to do with your customer service and support folks:
1. Explain to them the journey they are about to embark on in the new social networking frontier.
2. Take the time to onboard, or, train them on how to the tools.
3. Encourage them to use the tools in their personal lives first so they can appreciate their new found power and enlightenment.
4. Arm them with a core message so they'll always know how to handle themselves. Read Chip & Dan Heath's book Made To Stick about Southwest Airlines' "THE low-fair airline".
5. Follow other companies leads, like Dell, and create their social network accounts with their real names suffixed by the company name. For example: DirkShawVignette. Real people want to relate to real people. Not silly unprofessional icons and bizarro, or, no empty profiles.
6. Create a company web page listing all of their accounts so others can a) validate these people actually work there & b) discover more Twitter accounts to Follow. Look how Radian6 does it. Look to them again when you're ready to scale your monitoring process.
7. To protect the richness and integrity of your Social Content 2.0 and not blur the line between it and your customer service and support systems, I would move some of traditional inside the firewall systems to the outside. Moving to transparent development means anyone, customer, or, not, can participate in the development and debugging process. That means you can see any defects already discovered in the system along with the internal and external conversations revolving around them. The same for feature requests. Maybe someone already asked for exactly the same thing, only slightly different. Go ahead and add your $0.02. The same for usability features. Maybe you're having trouble with a particular feature. Could it be you're the only one? Maybe, or, maybe not. At least you can check it out for yourself.

My guess is you'll see a reduction in backend customer service and support costs, an increase in overall customer satisfaction and a happier, more fulfilled development team that's not only more in touch with your market but also your new flock of evangelists.

IMO, of course :-)

Off you go now. Good luck trying to fit this into 140 characters. That's what tinyurl is for.
Thanks for inspiration! I'm going to blockquote this stuff and repost on my blog.

Re: You are the President of Your Career

stevenmilstein — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:48:51 -0000

Great and timely advice Chris! For those who haven't read Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, may I suggest you watch this YouTube trailer. Also, take a look at Garr Reynolds' Career Advice '08 - SlideShare - especially slides 98-100 for a great Steve Jobs' quote

Good luck to all!

Re: Question for You While Preparing for 2009

stevenmilstein — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:31:31 -0000

I have to agree with many of the comments above. Personally, I'd take a whack of those bullets & make them perquisites for the bootcamp. Why not blog a Prerequisite To-Do List with Chris' Preferred Bookmark and let folks go off on their own to get them done? Maybe even give them an estimate of how much time they could expect to spend on each task. Personally, I think this approach is not only more scalable and containable, but it also ensures participants that you'll get to the good stuff.

For me, that good stuff would not be the technology behind Chris Brogan but the classic Chris Brogan we read everyday. That would be the value add for me.

And speaking of Classic Chris Brogan stuff, it would be very much in your persona, and your curriculum, to link to some of your contributors. As I comment here, I'm number 26. That means there's potentially 25 links ahead of me who could make that list. IMO, of course :-)

Re: 40 Ways to Deliver Killer Blog Content

stevenmilstein — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:43:31 -0000

Classic Chris, once again! Thanks for all of them but especially #27 & #35.

Re: Bob- The Next Chapter

stevenmilstein — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:51:45 -0000

Bob, if you haven't yet, go read Seth Godin's Tribes http://sethgodin.com/sg/. If you have read it, then it appears to me that already have your own tribe waiting for someone to lead them. So instead of waiting for the inevitable poor evaluation, or, your employer licking their chops just itching to fire another employee, I would take you're social media show outside the corporation and be the voice for that tribe. Do that, and my guess is your soon-to-be ex-employer will soon be a listener - either before, or, after the competition.

Re: How Alltop Powers Bloggers

stevenmilstein — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:02:36 -0000

Once again, great & practical suggestions! But I do have a question:

How does alltop.com differ from technorati.com?

Re: The Myth About Batman

stevenmilstein — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 08:49:39 -0000

Classic chrisbrogan.com stuff! Exponentially adding value and forever seeding the social network we'll all thankful for.