Re: The Process is not the Point

(Cross-posted from Google+)

There's nothing worse than working hard and methodologically on stuff that no one wants to use. But how do you know whether the stuff you're building is what people want or not, until you ship it?

a) That's why lean methodology works - build fast, test fast, iterate fast

b) Some of the most successful products were not built to serve others' needs and wants. The creators set out to solve their dire problems, and it happened to be that there were million other people who had the same problem.

The Process is not the Point

There are two parts to every project…there is the Process and there is the Point.

The Process, which gets most of the attention, is the series of steps we go through to do the work. We obsess over the process…should we do wireframes, mockups, prototypes, or code right in HTML? What deliverables do we need to get buy-in? When do we do testing? What kind of testing do we do? Should we do user testing early? Late? When is the best time to get feedback? ...
 

Who is a product manager?

(Cross-posted from Google+)

Who is a product manager? It's anyone who sets out to work with multiple people to get the job done - whether a startup CEO or a small event organizer.

Product managers, by definition, need to convince other people and have them do the work. The most important skill for a product manager, therefore, is the ability to create a "reality distortion field". Steve Jobs, in that sense, is the ultimate PM best practice.

Creating a reality distortion field actually entails multiple different things: The ability to create the right vision (most of people are not dumb, so you'll need to come up with the right vision to have those smart people do the work for you), the ability to articulate the vision in the most compelling way, and general likability -- this is actually quite important, as people generally want to work for/with other people that they like.

More to come :)

The Winning Factor in a Mature Market

(Cross-posted from Google+)

This is my completely prejudiced conception of some of the car makers' user profiles:

Audi: Designers and artists
BMW: Financial junkies
Mercedes: Engineers and CEOs
Cadillac: Rappers for their SUVs
Lexus: Real estate ladies
Volvo: Suburban moms with at least 2 kids

When your market is mature enough, features may not be the predominant winning factor anymore. Think how Apple wins when their hardware quality may not necessarily be the best in the industry. In a mature market, it's all about becoming the top-of-the-mind choice for users. (Inception, anyone?)

Blogworld Expo

Just spoke at a panel at the BlogWorld Expo NYC. Just writing down some quick thoughts from the conference...

• Tumblr is very popular. The fact that this is happening in NYC only helps. They must be doing some things really right. I hear a lot of nice things about their beautiful templates, ease of content production, and also ease of content re-publishing and re-sharing. The last point is really important, because for many people writing a new post from a blank sheet of paper is a daunting task.
• Many people ask the question: Is blogging dead? The reason why people ask this question when all blogging services report nice growth is perhaps blogging is becoming too mainstream now. No one talks about email any more, and there's "email is dead" meme going on, though email is still huge and growing. Perhaps blogging is becoming like email. 
• There will always be better tools - Tumblr might see another new competitor threatening their "poster child" position that they're enjoying now -- and people will not blink when they change their tools. People don't care about technology or tools, they only care about content. (Though tools do drive usage to a certain point)
• BlogWorld Expo was held as an adjunct to the Book Expo America. The Book Expo was much, much larger than the BlogWorld Expo - the mainstream, print media is obviously still pretty big. And eventually all the print media will come online, and that's the reason why I think there's still a huge chance for social media and blogging. 
• Print media people are in general more nicely dressed than the web people.
• Blogging is such a terrible term to call the tool. Blogging as we know of it now will evolve into something totally different and better. What's not changing is people to express themselves on the internet -- tools change and evolve all the time.
• NYC is beautiful in May and the whole media and ads industry in the city is just huge.

How Companies Get Started

In Silicon Valley, you shouldn't take anyone lightly because anyone can create the next big thing (or a very good candidate to become one). 

I first got introduced to Quora back in early 2009 over email through a VC I knew. Maybe he introduced me to Quora because I was visiting from Korea -- in Korea, even back then, Q&A service was already exceedingly popular. I exchanged a few emails with Quora's CEO (Adam D'Angelo) about his "new stealth project." Who would have thought the small project would later turn out to be Quora. 

One of the tech leads that I had closely worked with at Blogger moved out of Google and joined a startup as a co-founder last fall. Whenever I asked him what his startup was up to, he would just say the company's in stealth mode. But somehow funding seemed to be going pretty well. It was only a few months ago when I learned that the stealth startup was Color.com. Well, obviously, funding was going pretty well for them, now we all know. 

We don't yet know if Color or Quora will stand the test of time and come out as true winners -- the true Next Big Things, or the next Facebook or Twitter if you will. But they are indeed very interesting companies that attract huge amount of interest from the tech community right now. It's always interesting to see how these interesting companies begin in their early years: often it feels so quiet, where the founders say they're just doing a small stealth project. This is why in Silicon Valley, you shouldn't take anyone for granted. 

This is like GM and Verizon working together

South Korea's SK Telecom announced (link in Korean) partnership with Renault Samsung Motors of Korea on various "Phone to Car" (P2C) services. What they mean by Phone to Car service is mainly synching the phone's multimedia content, such as music playlist or map data, to the car.

Imagine you carry your mobile phone, get in the car, and the car's built-in navigation system and the stereo system automatically recognizing your phone's map data and playlist, and give information based on that. Your car will be able to do lots of interesting things -- such as letting you know the current traffic situation of your favorite routes, or playing music or video files from the last point you paused.

SK Telecom also announced a plan to install Wifi on all gas station operated by the SK Group (SK Group, one of Korea's mega conglomerates, owns SK Energy (the nation's leading oil company), SK Telecom, and many other companies). Your 5 minutes of time at the gas station can now be used to update data on your car's various information systems, such as GPS. 

This is almost like GM and Verizon working together. Once again, Korea is where lots of interesting ideas are being developed and marketed fast. Look to Korea for more interesting stuff.

Why don't you build "x for your country"?

In the startup world, it's a common knowledge - almost a cliche - that ideas are a dime a dozen, and it's all about execution. If that's true, then my question is, why aren't there more companies trying to take an existing, compelling product idea from the Silicon Valley and take it to another market and launch a similar service there?

Copying to your country is a very, very viable startup strategy - almost to the point where it could even be called a no brainer. In the business world in general, there's no shame in "creative copying" -- that's how many great companies as we know of today originally got started anyway. Even if you are taking someone's idea exactly as it is and blatantly copying it (which would be a rare case, as most entrepreneurs have innate desires to be creative and resist just stopping at copying someone else's idea), it's still only something like 1% - the other 99% is execution.

If you read Techcrunch every day even if you're not living in the US (which seems to be just about everyone who's in the web industry these days), you're in a really great position, because you're on top of the latest trends and developments in the US/Silicon Valley and also are very familiar with your home market. Try to identify the next big thing (or at least something with greater potential to be one), and just launch it in your country.

Can this approach succeed every time? Perhaps not. I think these different factors can work together to create a perfect storm:

1. Your home market has to be sufficiently large. Keep in mind that this is often determined by the size of the population who speak your language, not necessarily your country population per se. Some of the important languages on the web outside of English include Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Hindi. German, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese can have some traction too but are not one of the top major languages of the world.

2. Your idea has to be universally appealing. Taking something that can only work well in a certain country/culture (e.g. US-specific business models) won't work very well. Your business should be appealing to anyone in the world, i.e. it has to touch upon the basic needs and desires of any human being. These "universal needs and desires" might include things like dating, saving money, getting recognition from social peers, gaming mechanics, getting into good schools and getting good jobs, etc.

3. Often the business models that work best for "copying to your country" are the ones that involve actual transactions and revenues. Some countries have disproportionately smaller online ads market size compared to the real-world economy size (think China). Ads are not the only way online services can make money, especially in markets like this. This could be one of reasons why there are such a high number of Groupon clones around the world.

So why don't you start building "x for your country" now? I don't necessarily mean launching yet another Groupon clone in your city. I mean keeping a close eye on the current developments in the Silicon Valley, identifying potential "next big thing" candidates, and then developing a local version of that service before it becomes too big and mainstream.

By the way, this "x for your country" might be the strategy of Kai-fu Lee, ex-Google China head, as has been quoted here:

The "fast follower strategy" is a time-honored tradition in the business world. As long as you're not doing anything illegal there's nothing "wrong" with it. From consumers' perspective it helps bring new products and business models to new markets faster. And from a business perspective, if the original comes in and whups you, too bad, and if you get a good exit, well, the money's green. Good for you. 

Almost all great Chinese companies started out as clones but then evolved into something original and innovative to fit the market. Tencent started out as an ICQ clone and evolved into a social network with games, whose social and virtual goods model was then imitated by Zynga. Tudou started as a YouTube clone and has now evolved into its own media company, producing original content and original formats. So maybe that's what Lee is betting on.