Tag: seattle

Social Networking

Can you spare 5 bucks to fight Diabetes?

Posted on by gregmeyer
Fearless Riders

There are lots of things you can do with a fiver.

Please donate a fiver (one day’s coffee, a bus ride, a sandwich) to support research to fight Diabetes.

Fight Diabetes.

Diabetes runs in my family. We can eradicate this disease in our lifetime. I’m doing my part by riding in the Seattle Tour de Cure on May 11. I would really appreciate it if you can give what you can to help. Over the last several Tour De Cure events, I’ve raised over $5,000 for Diabetes Research, and I’d like to make that number a lot higher this year.

Please go here and give what you can today.

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Update #1 on 4/8 – $1739 raised toward the $2500 goal! This is great progress and I am looking forward to doing even better – if you haven’t already chipped in I would love your support.

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Customer Development, Life Hacks, Startup

9 Rules for Being an Effective Mentor

Posted on by gregmeyer
"Do, or do not. There is no try."
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/xtyler/

In my experience, having effective, talented, and knowledgeable mentors has been the most powerful startup accelerator that I know. The best mentors I’ve worked with do a lot of the things on this list. You can call these the 9 rules of being a mentor – they will help you provide feedback to entrepreneurs you know and respect. These are not meant to be a definitive list (you should make your own list of things that work) and will get you started toward the process of sharing your expertise with a startup team.

Rule #1: Use your Superpower (and know what it is)

Maybe you are amazing at Operations. Perhaps you understand Finance better than anyone you know. Or you can design an email marketing campaign to ensure the highest percentage of opened emails. You know your superpower (or you should) – and you can be a really effective mentor if you can leverage your experience in a way that doesn’t say “do this, or else” to the entrepreneur you’re advising.

Rule #2: Be Mindful of Limited Time

You are busy; the entrepreneurs are busy too. So show up on time, whether it’s an in person meeting or a phone call. Give people information to review before the meeting. And answer any questions promptly so that you can give the best impression possible to a budding entrepreneur about how you can do things the right way. (Bonus points awarded if you thank them for emailing you and demonstrate a great customer service affect.)

Rule #3: Give to Get

This mentoring relationship is not about you: it’s about what you can provide to a person trying to do a very difficult thing. If you do nothing else with your mentoring relationship, you should be focusing on what the other person says that they need (and listening for the unspoken, unmet needs as well.) You can also use the power of your networks to spread the word and really amplify the efforts of a fledgling business.

Rule #4: Make Introductions and Provide Context

I’m sure you’ve received more than a few emails or requests in your time where you read the email and are not sure why the person is contacting you and how they would like you to help. Providing context makes things better for you, the entrepreneurs, and anyone else they are working with. For example, “This is ____, he/she is solving this problem ____ for this customer ___ . It would be great if you could (clearly defined ask) by (clearly defined date.) If this doesn’t work for you, please suggest another resource who might be able to help.” is a short, focused way to request assistance. You may also need to do a “pre-ask” and make sure the resource is willing and able to help.

Rule #5: Build a Community of Mentors

A community is only as effective as its members, and the totality of the network provides the relationships and ideas that make the network really thrive and grow in value. Please meet the other Mentors, the other startups, and be open to the idea that you are always learning. You never know what a day will bring when you’re open to new opportunities.

Rule #6: Only Offer What You can Deliver

The relationship with your startup company will be better if you set ground rules for how you can be contacted, what you can offer, and what you’re expecting to give. (You might ask the same questions of them.) Setting these expectations up front will avoid disappointment and will make it clear what sort of communication cadence you need to build.

Rule #7: Make “Checking In” into a Habit

Set up a regular meeting with your team – either in person or on Skype – and encourage the entrepreneurs to drive the meeting using a well-defined agenda. A great start to an agenda (use your own best one) is “what I did, what I’m doing, and where I need help.” Sending answers to the same set of questions is also a great way for teams to inform their mentors – a tool like iDoneThis or 15Five or a shared Google Doc can do the trick here.

Rule #8: It’s Not Your Startup

Building a relationship with a set of entrepreneurs is exciting, and sometimes develops into a lifelong relationship. And remember that you are there to provide advice, to help frame decisions, and to be correct when someone asks you a specific question. But it’s not your startup. Remembering that fact makes it easier for you to deliver difficult and important advice, and it also frees the entrepreneurs to ignore your advice when they need to make their own way.

Rule #9: Ask the Right Questions

In best Steve Blank form, encourage your teams to “Get Out of the Building” and validate their assumptions with real customers as soon as possible. You can help them build their hypotheses by asking incisive questions, but ensure they make key decisions based on the customer insights they uncover during customer validation.

Are these the same rules I would have written when I first joined a startup? Nope. So remind yourself that your own personal rules for serving as a mentor (and for being mentored) will change over time. Your job as a mentor should be to focus on creating, communicating, and delivering unique value for the startup you’re mentoring, and to help them do the same for their customers.

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Agile Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Strategy

Meeting of the Agile Marketing Minds

Posted on by gregmeyer
John Cass, Brian Hsi, and Scott Brinker sharing Agile thoughts (photo by @grmeyer)

What do you get when you combine 10 marketers, a telepresence system, and some great food? You get the most recent meeting of the Agile Marketing meetup in Seattle – joined by some colleagues from Boston who stayed up after their meeting and shared their insights with us.

On August 29th, the crew at Ant’s Eye View were kind enough to share their space with us and host the latest meeting of the Seattle Agile Marketing interest group. Scott Brinker, Brian Hsi, and John Cass joined us from Boston, and we shared a lively discussion both for newbies (what is Agile Marketing and why would I consider using it?) and more experienced marketers (what does Agile Marketing look like when implemented in a pilot project at a Fortune 500 company?)

Scott shared his principles of Agile Marketing management, and the key takeaways I gleaned from this meeting are that Agile Marketing is still fluid and interesting; that there are amazingly talented people in the field who are pushing it forward, and that there’s still a lot to figure out. Change is at Agile Marketing’s core – one of the tenets of the idea is that you should try (like in Agile Development) to determine whether your idea is good or bad about as fast as possible – which means the challenge of sharing Agile Marketing outside of your core team is a change management task.

Good change management requires an understanding of the people, the processes, and the tools involved. The people are paramount: they are the actors who actually have to change (and who don’t always want to do something different.) The processes can enable or actually hinder change in a change management process – and likewise with the tools. So a good portion of the discussion during our meeting hinged around the idea of lining up the people with new processes and tools that guided them towards the principles of Agile Marketing but didn’t necessarily hew to the orthodoxy of the exact terms.

In other words, successful Agile Marketing deployments aren’t really deployments – the successful individual, team, or project moves a project forward in an Agile way by spreading an ideavirus. If the idea spreads beyond the silo of the team/project/department, then it has the chance to transform the business processes of the organization and help that organization be more nimble and understanding to the change that’s already happening.

But that’s the rub – to spread the idea beyond a small team, you need buy-in (enough space to try the idea), transparency (an experiment where everyone understands the actors involved, the goals and intent, the mechanism for change, and the measurement for tallying results), and the goods: results. If you start with the end in mind in Agile Marketing, you need to deliver a form of results in the language of the organization. And once you get one experiment going, running a hundred others serially or in parallel will get much much easier.

(and thanks to Joann Jen and Steve Alter for being gracious hosts)

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Generous, Social Networking

What can you do with 5 bucks?

Posted on by gregmeyer
Fearless Riders

There are lots of things you can do with a fiver. I’d really like you to consider donating a fiver (one day’s coffee, a bus ride, a sandwich) to support research to fight Diabetes.

I’m doing my part by riding in the Seattle Tour de Cure on May 12. I would really appreciate it if you could chip in $5 to help. The last several years I’ve raised over $3,000 for this cause, and I’d like to make the number higher.

Please go here and donate what you can today.

(Update 2: Now above $2,000! as of 5/1/12 – how high can we go?)

(Update: I’ve exceeded my original $1500 goal as of 4/26/12 – can you help boost me above $2k?)

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Innovation, Media Mind, Photography

Be a Tourist in Your Own Town (Even if Lord Vader Doesn’t Allow Parade Photos)

Posted on by gregmeyer

HOW TO: Be a Tourist in Your Own Town

I went to the Redmond Derby Days parade today and realized something important. Not only do I love parades (they are fun because you see things like the scene above, and you definitely don’t see Stormtroopers most days around Seattle), but they also remind you of the importance of being a tourist in your own town.

We are all quite busy, and it’s easy with the multi-screen temptations of mobile, social, and cable to forget how fun and important it is to go to a shared place, have a shared experience (In Real Life) and have a reference point to life in a small(er) town. And that town need not be Redmond, WA. It can be wherever you are.

The Challenge: Find One Thing You Ought To Visit

When someone comes to visit your town, don’t you usually go into overdrive mentally to find the one thing that they ought to do, eat, or visit so that they can have an authentic experience? In Seattle, that might be go to a baseball game, visit the Pike Place Market, walk the streets of Queen Anne, enjoy the Japanese Garden at the University of Washington, or any one of a hundred different things. So why don’t you do any of these more often?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to pretend that you’re coming to visit town. And I’m going to make a mental list of the places we should go sightseeing. Then, I’m going to visit some of them (maybe one a week.) Once I do, I’m going to try to look at them with new eyes and see if there’s something I missed.

Every Day Is Not A Parade

It’s true that annual events can be boring – I’m not suggesting they are always as exciting as seeing Lord Vader striding down your street – but there is always something new that you could be finding. So go find it. And then tell someone about it. Because in the act of sharing that “familiar” thing with a friend, there’s the opportunity to discover something new. And try not to take too many pictures of Mr. Skywalker. There’s that Force thing to contend with if he gets upset.

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Career, Customer Development, Customer Service, Customer Strategy, Food, Generous, Innovation, Marketing Strategy, Product Thoughts, Productivity, Social Networking, Startup

HOW TO: Go From Eating Pizza to Building a “Disruptive” Startup in just 54 hours

Posted on by gregmeyer

This weekend I participated in an amazing event at Startup Weekend Seattle. I found some great new friends, got the opportunity to pitch amazing ideas in front of a crowd, and contributed to an epic journey: building a complete startup from a pizza dinner to a working prototype with media buzz and excited potential customers in just 54 hours.

As I gathered my thoughts on my plane ride this morning, I wanted to share the semi-live blog of what happened so that we could share not only the successes that we achieved over the weekend but also the many decisions, missteps, fails, and pivots that our amazing team (Yijen Liu, Adam Loving, Forest Baum, Myk O’Leary, me = Greg Meyer, and Scott Nonnenberg) made to build the almost-finished (and already winning accolades) service to Wake up with Friends: ShakeupCall

Just the pitch from Startup Weekend, Please …

If you just want to hear the pitch, go here to see a video of our pitch on GeekWire. Or, keep reading …

The Story of ShakeupCall

Once upon a time … a successful team made choices and used agile techniques to stay focused and have fun. This allowed us to dodge a number of difficult problems and still had a great time to build a great almost-done product. Let’s start with the beginning of Startup Weekend (cue the way back machine …)

Friday Night, 6pm: Meet and Pitch

The beginning of Startup Weekend is a bit of a melee. Over 200 people attended, and 60 people pitched. But first, we had a “lightning round” where we practiced pitching nonsense ideas (some of which were pretty awesome) and then it was time for the main event. Yijin, Adam, Greg, and Forrest all pitched … very different ideas. So how did we end up on the same team?

Survival of the Fittest Idea

The pitching is really only the beginning of Startup weekend – where the next 30-60 minutes looks like a rugby scrum as individuals first sort by indicating their top three choices using sticky notes, but really what’s going on is the grouping of people into likely teams with complimentary skills. Everybody seems to need a designer, and there are not enough of them to go around. Add to that the mix of developers with different skills sets and preferred tools (and the randoms like us business types who can do many different things that might not be related to the task at hand) and you have an interesting challenge.

Friday, 10 PM, Adam’s “Early Birds” idea gels around a team

Forrest and I both had lukewarm support for our pitch ideas, as did Yijen, so we decided to form a team with Adam, who had already found Scott and Myk. We decided that we liked the “Early Birds” idea – make a gamified social experience where friends could help each other get healthier by competing to wake up on time – but we weren’t sure about the name, which we felt was quite similar to Angry Birds. At this point in the process, 4 hours in, we had accomplished the following:

  • Formed a team
  • Considered a few options for business models for a “social alarm clock” game
  • Narrowed to a basic technology platform of Heroku, Ruby on Rails, and Twilio, and thrown out the idea of making a pure mobile app (emulated or otherwise)
  • We also didn’t have a designer.

We decided to come back at 9am having picked a few domain names and to hammer out the functional model of the app and the branding by Saturday at Noon.

Later on Friday Night

Domains are picked. Technology platforms are bootstrapped.

Bright and Early on Saturday Morning at 8:45am, We Get Started In Earnest

We decided that the most important thing in the morning was to have breakfast, so we enjoyed the food spread and coffee from Trabant and got to work.

Our goals for the morning seemed simple. By Noon, we wanted to reach our first Agile goal of:

  • Writing user stories on sticky notes and starting to prioritize them
  • Take an initial swag at the branding, which became “Wake up with Friends”
  • Bootstrap and build the development environment

To do this, we split tasks, with Scott, Myk and Adam working on the technology; and Forrest, Yijen, and I brainstorming on marketing collateral. The developers did some magic to get everything going and managed to stay on task despite the fact the three of us were chattering, gesturing, and writing on whiteboards and easels to work on these marketing ideas:

  • Concept and source the logo art (thank you @ebencom);
  • Write a customer development survey to assess purchase intent and user interest;
  • Determine how best to get a reasonable number (50+) of answers to get a representative sample;
  • acquire Twitter handles (@shakeupcall and @shakeywakey) and populate them with content;
  • create a “name squeeze” or subdomain at http://get.shakeupcall.com to allow people to sign up and share for a service that wasn’t live yet. (it helped that @thomasknoll is amazingly nice and had a great tool for this in @launchrock)
  • Produce a Facebook page and figure out how to get it enough “likes” for a custom name (25)

By 11:30am Saturday we are in Good SHAPE.

Awesome! We bootstrap the environment, use GoDaddy to find some domains, quickly write some content and get social, and BOOM. We’re not sure what we’re selling.

Maybe we’re not in such Good SHAPE.

Enter Mentors – one of the keys of Startup Weekend and an essential component to tweaking these nascent ideas and building them into viable business models in such a short time with the resources available. We were lucky to have help from Adam Philipp, who suggested that we were being too cerebral and that maybe we should just own the humorous aspects of sending an audio file via a phone call to someone in the morning to help them wake up. Eugene Hsu, another amazing mentor, convinced us that we needed to punk and Rick Roll our friends for the best effect. And thoroughly muddying the waters in a helpful way was Kate Matsudaira. So now, we needed to do some serious customer development.

To the Cloud!

To test our ideas, we posted our SurveyMonkey survey using our favorite crowd tool, Hacker News. We used a catchy closed title, “Have trouble waking up?” and added the word “startup” to indicate that we were non-traditional marketers, and then all voted up our idea. We got lots of answers.

Our First Monetization: Ourselves.

Proving the adage that there is always a business in selling pickaxes to miners, we quickly hit the choke point in SurveyMonkey’s free account of 100 responses. So we needed to plunk down some cold hard cash to keep our fledgling startup going: $24.95 for a month’s service. While we were waiting for more answers to roll in, we continued our marketing efforts:

  • Forrest and I added twitter handles to the Tweetdeck and iPhone applications and broadcasting the value proposition of the business and some funny messages through Twitter and Facebook
  • Yijen worked on wireframes for the various pages of the app and corrected some of our user stories and UI designs that were misaligned
  • Forrest had a strange fascination with oddly hilarious sounds, which made us laugh, but we weren’t sure how to make it part of our application.
  • And the dev team worked on, and on, and on…

Saturday 5PM, WORRIED DEVS. TOO MANY FEATURES

At this point we were sort of tired, kind of hungry, and we had been single threading and working on individual tasks rather than forming, storming, and norming as an entire team. And then some of these individual efforts came together in an amazing way.

Two key things happened that galvanized the team:

  1. We got a tweet from the Director of Engineering at Hark.com – this was important because it gave us a different way to monetize than the initial way we considered – and opened up the idea of sending really annoying (but potentially viral and social) clips to one another.
  2. Scott got Agile on all of us and took us to the Agile Woodshed – he led us through three rounds of feature prioritizing and cutting such that almost 50% of the development schedule was cut 24 hours into the 54 hour project. Scott, Myk, and Adam also tasked Adam with determining the method of sending and concatenating audio with Twilio (thanks @rahims for all of your help), to validate the input of the user’s simple math problem, and to bootstrap the alarm page. I got the job of building a slide deck and Yijen worked on the licensing and business model. And Forrest continued to listen to funny sounds.

Saturday 8pm, I go home. And finally spend a little family time.

But not much.

Saturday 9:30pm – I plan to Build a Slide Deck and Go To Bed.

I started building a slide deck and making sure that the Facebook site had enough likes for a custom name. And that was going pretty well, until 10:14pm.

We had received an effective “Cease and Desist” – though not formally sent by a lawyer, a competitor had noticed us and had asked us to stop what we were doing, 28 hours into a startup. On the one hand this was amazing validation of our concept and market presence; on the other hand, it was very annoying that we hadn’t realized this before.

So, we changed our Tag line: The Social Alarm Clock Wake Up With Friends.

And this meant I had a little work to do:

  • Change the existing collateral to remove the phrase
  • Analyze 330 survey responses (and notice that we had almost 100 people waiting to get our app)
  • Make the slide deck
  • Wonder if Adam was still awake.

5:30am Sunday – The Critical Path to Development is 3 hours old.

I couldn’t sleep, so I got up to work on the social channels and to ask for Clif Bars from the Seattle Startup Weekend Crew. I noticed that Adam had sent an email at 2:30 demonstrating that the basic idea that we wanted to do – use Twilio to send a phone call to you having a selected audio file and a user-supplied message read with text-to-speech software – worked! Also, Adam built the simple math problem.

I set a ShakeupCall, called myself, and it worked. Brilliant!

Finding Product/Market Fit – 9am Sunday

At this point, we needed to finalize what we were building and for whom. Fortunately, the survey data was giving us more than directional information on demographics of the people who liked to send funny messages to their friends: 90% 18-34 year old men. (BROS! Well, not quite, but you get the idea.)

To make these people happy, Forrest, Yijen and I decided that the model of the YouTube viral video most closely matched the kind of content young men might send to each other to be obnoxious and social. And since we wanted to build an app that would also socially humiliate someone who didn’t finish their ShakeupCall validation correctly, we thought the noises and sounds should be as obnoxious as possible.

We then got fantastic feedback from Enrique Godreau about how to license content. And I told him about Sleep.fm asking us to stop, which made him smile. Eugene Hsu also encouraged us to think BIG and to think SILLY – because people like that too. Forrest and I used this opportunity to find awesome songs on http://turntable.fm and to rapidly iterate through the kinds of songs you would or woudn’t like to hear in a phone call to wake you up. When Yijen added annoying YouTube viral videos to the mix, we realized that Forrest’s audio skills could be used to create a montage of really annoying viral sounds – and that would make a great demo. So off he went to do that.

1pm Sunday – Bugs are Scuttling about, and Devs are Cranky

By early Sunday afternoon we had most of the app together but there were some things (layout, CSS controls in the template that we bought to mitigate design risk) that just didn’t work. Myk and Adam and Scott worked togther to determine the things that needed to be cut and presented those decisions in a quick Scrum session where we cut a few more features. This made us a bit sad, but we wanted to create a really great demo that we could try beforehand, and we were running out of time.

The teams both engaged in peer activities – devs peer programming, Forest and Yijen and I hacking words out of the slide deck and rearranging it so that it made more sense given the changes in the application and the changes in our business model since the previous night. Scott figures out how to post to Facebook effectively and Myk builds a date/time picker to make the choosing a bit easier.

2:30pm – We practice the demo for the first time. It sucks.

The timing isn’t quite right, I’m not sure what I want to say, and a few of the slides are wrong. It’s good that we have a little bit of time to practice before our 4pm deadline to do a sound check and pick our presentation slot. Demos #2,3 and 4 go much better and there are some parallel UX tweaks on the web site that help us tighten up the view.

4:02pm – We go do our tech check, and realize WE HAVE NO CONTINGENCY PLAN FOR THE PHONE CALL.

We realized we can record the phone call and place it on a phone for playback if things don’t go well with the web server or the network, which makes us feel … a little better.

5:00-5:05pm eat Dinner.

We refine the slides a bit more, relax, are nervous, and then relax a bit more. It feels like we might be done with Part 1 of this Startup Weekend idea.

6:00 pm Sunday – the Pitches Start

Some of the pitches are awesome. Others, not as awesome. Nerves. There’s a break. We figure out some presentation tips while we’re on deck which represents another risk but it makes everything look a bit slicker.

7:40pm Sunday – we’re on!

And then, we pitch. Wow. The Crowd Loves It. Whoa. QA. We do ok with that, then stumble off stage in an adrenaline-fueled haze. (Hi-fives and fist bumps all around.

At 9:00, the judging starts.

We try to figure out who our team likes for the audience prize, and wonder who will win prizes. @Heuge and I set @ShakeupCall messages for the next morning, as we’re both getting up early. And then, it happens. We win the special prize for “Most Disruptive”! 60 pitches. 23 teams. 3 winners. 3 special awards. Awesome. And we go to the bar to celebrate.

At 1am, I am packing for an international trip to go to Canada.

This is not enough sleep.

5:45am Monday morning, standing in line at SeaTac Airport.

My phone rings – oh right, it’s that ShakeupCall I set for myself at 5:45am. I listen to the call, and it’s DIFFERENT! I’m confused, and then my text-to-speech tells me “Congratulations on Winning a Prize at Startup Weekend from Kevin Croy” and he’s giving us mad props.

AMAZING! I get it. Shakey loves me. I answer the simple math problem (5+2) and I post my thanks to Kevin on Facebook. I can’t wait until he sets his next ShakeupCall so that I can compete with my friends to send him the best wakeup call.  (A side note: the math problem is something I had no problem handling at a noisy airplane counter when I was running on only 3 hours of sleep – it was an accidental and solid customer validation step.)

We owe some thanks.

We wanted to thank all of the teams, judges, and sponsors. And especially Rahim from Twilio, Marc Nager, Eugene Hsu, Adam Philipp, Enrique Godreau, Bob Crimmins, John Cook, and Rob Glaser. And Amazon for being a gracious host.

What’s next?

There’s clearly a market.

Our survey (n=430) indicates

  • 24% will definitely buy at $3/month
  • They skew disproportionately to 18-34 year-old men
  • 100+ people want in on this.

And we did it in about 144 (8 + 20 + 20 hrs each) dev hours.

This is just the story of 1 team and how we did what we did – Startup Weekend is so much more than that and is a great event to build your startup in 54 hours (or just to meet some amazing people.) We haven’t figured out the whole business model or the individual items we haven’t yet fixed. But we’re going to work on it. And in the meanwhile, I can schedule a @ShakeupCall for myself to wake up and have more fun.

If you like it, Tweet it and share the word!

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On Writing, Photography

Why I love working in Seattle

Posted on by gregmeyer



Pioneer square

Originally uploaded by gregmeyer

Working in the city of Seattle in the Pioneer Square area is a bit gritty. It’s nothing like gliding to work in the gleaming eastside office towers of Bellevue, pulling into the parking garage, and going up 16 floors of a LEED certified building. Instead, it’s a bus ride filled with people of all walks of life, a walk from the bus stop through a vibrant area of the city, and a reminder that a 100 year old building can be useful again in a web 2.0 (3.0?) world. It’s a bit of a romantic notion, and I love it.

Cities have been around for thousands of years because there is a certain critical mass required by (and inspired by) trade, commerce, and people. Even in the age of the Internet, it’s a great reminder to walk around in the downtown core of a city and see that location does matter. You can surf the internet from anywhere, but you can’t always walk around the corner and find a great restaurant or a place to hang out or see people who aren’t just like you alongside people who might be just like you.

I love the city, even when it’s a bit grungy and smelly. Pioneer Square reminds me that the industrial core of Seattle has come back to life with the information industry of the 21st century, and I’m glad to be a part of that (it also helps on the days when it’s sunny.) Working in other parts of the city might have been an easier commute, but now I feel like I’m part of the neighborhood.

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