Aug 20, 2010

The LeanStartup's guide to scoring a post on TechCrunch

Back in the heydays of blogging, the recipe for getting your startup mentioned in popular blogs like TechCrunch, went something like this:

• Start following the blogs of those who care about

• Be interesting and start commenting in their blog posts

• Over time, you will develop a rapport with the author

• When your product is beta, invite them to try

• Try to get a few of them to write on the same day, and start with a splash.

But by now, it is pretty obvious that the top tier bloggers are pretty much as “ivory-towered” as reputed MSM reporters. Whats more, just last week, I read in a post in Techcrunch, touting a Chrome plugin that removes TechCrunch comments. All those tips from the self-proclaimed social media experts aren’t worth the keyboard in which they were typed on. Hmm, what is a leanstartup slogging their behind off in a garage to do? Enter me.

 

I took it upon myself to come up with this flow-chart, that should this whole process as easy as 1-2-3. Here it is

Have you had luck scoring a post with TechCrunch? What has worked for you?

Aug 18, 2010

5 Tips for killer presentations

I obsess over my presentations. I love presenting, it is one of the best ways in which I can communicate my ideas (although these days, I have really taken a liking to videos too.) I have found these five tips to be very useful both on “game-day” and when I am preparing the presentation.

1. **Use humor to good effect, **especially, when starting. Depending on how well your previous presenter was, or time of day etc,. nothing like some self-deprecating humor to wake up the audience, and get then all excited about what you are going to say.

2. Lay out an agenda. Lets face it. Some people always think forward and wont be with you. Instead of leaving them wondering, tell them what it is about, so that they are with you.

3. **Use lots of pictures : **This one is obvious, yep, as obvious as exercising, eating your veggies and calling mom. Yet this is where most of us tend to falter the most.  I wish I could get away with Larry Lessig style presentations, but in my experience, a healthy mix of relevant pictures and good ol’ bullet points convey the message.

4. Improvise For example, in my Xconomy Cloud^3 talk at the Microsoft NERD center, I consciously said that OfficeDrop was like Google for your paper documents and then corrected myself to say like a “Bing”. This shows that you are not blindly reciting a memorized presentation, makes the whole experience contextual and builds your credibility with the audience.

5. Channel your inner adrenaline to good effect. Move around, use your hands, be animated. Again, these will promote how engaged your audience are with you and what you have to say.

6. **Be your worst critic : **(This is a Bonus tip for Rookies) :  Record a dry run with a webcam / Flip video and watch it. It will be painful, it will hurt, but it will help more than anything else. You will find answers to delightful questions like “Did I really do that with my eyes?”, “Is 47 ‘ums’ or ‘you know’ too much’”

Anyone can become a good presenter. All it needs is practice. Just ask Bill Gates.

Care to share any of your own tips? What has worked for you?

 

Aug 13, 2010

About Google Wave and other Google Experiments

I came across a couple of interesting articles that would be good follow-ups to my earlier post about the Google Wave Experiment . In this HBR Article, Karim Lakhani makes the case that by pulling the plug on Wave, Google has done a good job of managing the Innovation Process. It listened to its users, and based on the lack of adoption, decided to move on. I agree with the decision and the article’s assessment, yet my own thought (Lament?) is that the idea and the product could have been successful, had Google gone about it differently. They pulled the plug at the right time, but it could have been better launched, better managed so that it never got to a point where you had to pull the plug

Another link that I want to share is a post by WordStream (which I think has done a good job of attracting some traffic to itself using the buzz about Wave). Wordstream documents Google’s aborted experiments in the past few year.

The glaring thing in this list is, ofcourse, how Google could have “had” FourSquare like functionality, and maybe doesn’t have to play as hard a catch-up as it is doing now, in dealing with Facebook’s threat. I heard / read somewhere that Google is becoming the Microsoft of the 90s. I just hope that doesn’t become the case. Good Luck GOOG.

Infographic by WordStream

Aug 5, 2010

RIP Google Wave - 3 Reasons why the experiment failed

So everyone is talking about Google ditching Wave as a standalone product. Here are my three cents on why the experiment failed:

It wasn’t viral enough

Invite-only alpha for a “Communications” product is an oxymoron. Seriously, Google? I can picture this conversation happening in Google HQ, circa April 2009, a month before Launch, as the buzz was building up for Bing.

“Microsoft is launching Bing in a month’s time. We need something to steal the thunder. Are there any cool projects we can show-off”

“Yes, there is this thing called Wave. It is a totally cool way of communicating. Think Gmail, Twitter, Skype, Flickr and Google Talk in one”

“Cool. Let’s launch it”

“But it is not quite ready for prime-time”

“That is easy. Let us put an alpha label on it, make it invite-based. It worked out very well for Gmail”.

“sounds good”

Except it is not. This is a new way to communicate. Instead of making the invite a rare commodity (apparently some were sold in eBay, make it viral!) I got an invite relatively soon, **but it was useless, **since no one else from my social graph had one!

Too Radical and too complex : Even when people communicated, they just didn’t get it

And because they didn’t get it, they didn’t use it. Here is a screen-capture of a Wave between me and my friend. I consider both of us as early adopters of technology.

Obviously not “real-time” conversations! People aren’t using the system, you are not learning enough and you are creating artificial scarcity?

**Big-bang launches and radical ideas usually don’t mix well. **

Now imagine, if they had resisted the temptation of the big-bang launch, but did it more organically. They could have introduced Google Wave to Businesses First, so that you start with a critical mass of people collaborating from day one. They could then have incorporated aspects of it as part of Google Docs and ofcourse, Gmail. This way, you are also teaching people aspects of the new paradigm. This is clearly not as sexy as the Big bang launch, and clearly takes more time. But this would have significantly increased the chances of success. They should have done “Learn-Measure-Build”. In some ways, I think it was just “bad karma”. Everything about Wave’s launch went against Google’s “Dont be evil” philosophy. Between the urge to steal Microsoft’s thunder and seeing how well big bang launches are working for Apple, somewhere along the way, Google lost what it really stands for.

RIP, Google Wave. You were a good experiment that taught a lot to people outside Google as much as you taught Google. I think that is a lot more than what I can say for Buzz.

*Picture from Flickr, thanks to rjzii”

May 20, 2010

Stop talking, start acting

Stop Talking, pontificating, theorizing. Start doing. Great Artists Ship.

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