How I found one of my favorite “new” blogs
I’ve been following FeverBee for a about a week now, I think, and I was really glad that @cwestbrook made a tweet about it. Richard Millington has some great insights, and he delivers them in nice, bite-sized pieces that suit my reading style very well.
I hadn’t really been following Chuck’s blog, either until I caught another tweet earlier today that prompted me to take a look. It turns out that Chuck is actively seeking great, under-appreciated blogs to drive traffic for.
Cool idea, Chuck. I’m in. If you are reading this, you should check it out, too.
How You Can Help End the Problem of Blogs With Great Content and No Readers
Jumbis: Now what is that idea again?
Pitch the right points.
That’s the number one lesson I’ve taken away from Startup Weekend Atlanta. So, I’ll start there. If you are already lost about what Startup Weekend is, or what I’m talking about, you should visit these posts and then come back. Not that I don’t want you here. I do.
Before I get started, let me state clearly: Jumbis.com is a platform for using social media networks to drive product sales.
In the entrepreneurial world, we are told repeatedly how important our “elevator pitch” is and that it should be ready to go at all times. Jumbis.com presents an amazing example of the impacts of a weak elevator pitch, and I’d like to share that with you.
When I wrote down my pitch for a “Turnkey Single Product Sales Platform,” I knew that I was dealing with multiple value propositions. I chose to pitch the easy revenue angle in the 60 seconds I was allotted by drawing comparisons to the wildly popular Woot! websites and similar comparisons, and I tagged on a statement to the effect of “oh yeah, and we’re going to use social media to promote the site.”
Of course, this isn’t a particularly sexy pitch for a room full of gifted developers who are looking for fun and profitable challenges, but the whole idea of “self-funding” is particularly sexy to me. So that’s the approach I took.
The idea for Jumbis.com is, and always was, to use social media networks to drive customers to an ecommerce website, by making it easy and attractive for them to refer their friends, without subjecting those friends to loads of spam, thereby losing their friendship status. The single product approach is due to the fact that from a marketing perspective, a single product is easy to digest and understand, and won’t overwhelm the customer.
Fortunately, the pitch was strong enough to attract some amazingly talented folks. Once we got into our group, I was immediately faced with the task of resetting expectations. The team had signed up for a project, but didn’t have a clear understanding of what that project was really supposed to be.
Throughout the weekend, the impression that Jumbis.com was intended to be a Woot! clone and competitor continued to thrive, both inside the team and out in the rest of the ASW2 world. And on Saturday evening our team finally tore down the mental blocks that had been driving us in a less effective development direction for the past 24 hours.
All because the concept wasn’t pitched clearly at the beginning.
Sunday morning, Yale Zhang came in with the fruits of his overnight brainstorming and made a suggestion that focused us even further on the target for presentation. After some pretty heavy selling on his part, he convinced me of a massive change to the business model itself.
When we presented on Sunday evening the response was notably different from Friday night. There was a real enthusiasm for what we were doing. Several attendees spoke to me afterward expressing interest in our next steps, and surprise at the “changes” to our product.
Now Jumbis is in a good place. Our team knows what we are trying to accomplish, and we’ll be continuing forward next week. A few will move on to other projects, and we may add a few new folks if needed, but we’ll certainly take our learnings and grow with them.
So, to sum it up for you, here are some specific things that would have likely unfolded differently had the 60 second pitch on Friday night been more effectively focused:
- We would have attracted more social media experts to the team. There were a few in the house that didn’t catch on to that aspect of the business
- Our Saturday development efforts would have been targeted more effectively and we wouldn’t have spent the majority of Saturday designing the wrong aspects of the product.
- Team members would have been more focused in their thinking and presented their game changing ideas earlier in the process.
- We would have gotten more pre-launch PR, because our message would have been clearer to the “outside” world.
- We would have probably launched with a fully functional application that could support vendors today.
I’m very satisfied with where Jumbis is today, and I’m looking forward to the weeks and months ahead as we continue to evolve and realize our vision. But there are plenty of lessons to be learned, and I felt like this one was worth sharing.
It’s easy to analyze what the successful projects did right, and what the imploded projects did wrong. I’d be interested in reading about other successful projects and their missteps along the way.
If you aren’t already doing it, follow Jumbis on Twitter. There will be more to come.
And subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ve got more to say about Startup Weekend as time allows.
I’d like to take a moment to recognize the exceptional team who helped to make Jumbis a successful project:
- Jason Daenzer - Graphic Design and UI Design
- Larry Goddard - Marketing, Copywriting and IP Watchdog
- Karthik Halukurike - Software development
- Ben McMillan - UI Design, System Architecture, Software development
- Chris Rankine - Social Media integration, Software development
- Yale Zhang - Prototyping Project Manager, e-commerce development, Procurement
There were many others involved too, including the facilitators and staff, as well as folks from other teams who stopped in to lend a helping hand from time to time. I can’t list everyone by name, but I thank you all.
I would like to give special thanks to Blake, Colin, Dan, George, Hsiu, Lance and Sanjay.
New Feature: Skribit
I’ve been putting this off for a while, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been really paying attention to how people such as Lance Weatherby, Sanjay Parekh and Colin Ake have been using Skribit on their websites. To be fair, Lance is the only one I think has actually written a post based on a Skribit suggestion, but I know that Sanjay and Colin shape thought and conversations based on questions and topics they see there.
Skribit is a really great product. It works, and it’s a product of the Atlanta startup community, and specifically Startup Weekend Atlanta, which I’ll talk about more in my next post.
The idea behind Skribit is pretty neat. The execution is even better. In the right sidebar of my website, you’ll see a Skribit widgit. Just click on the link that says “What Should I Write About?” and give me a suggestion. Or, if you like, vote on suggestions that are already there.
Skribit will help me know what the 3 or 4 of you who visit my blog regularly are interested in reading about, and should help me keep my constantly restated objective of writing more frequently.
So, now, I’ve got to post about this whole Startup Weekend thing.