Instigator Blog

Tomorrow morning I board a plane at 8:30am for San Francisco. It’s my first visit there.

I missed the TechCrunch Party but my Standout Jobs co-Founders made it.

And it looks like Fred and Austin had a great time.

Fred was on Ustream.tv, but apparently the sound wasn’t very good. Oh well!

I’ll be in San Francisco until Thursday morning. I’ve got a few meetings and events I’m attending, including Loic Le Meur’s and Hugh MacLeod’s dinner tomorrow night and a dinner hosted by Mohr Davidow Ventures on Wednesday.

I’m looking forward to meeting a slew of great people, and if you’re in San Francisco and want to get-together, send me an email or reach me through Twitter or Facebook.

See you there!

Whether we like it or not, email is still the primary mode of communication online. That’s not going to change any time soon.

We’ve got instant messenger, Twitter, Skype, message boards, project management tools, messaging applications, etc. The list of ways to communicate online is endless.

But email still rules the day. And it still works.

Of course, the problems with email are clear. People are overwhelmed with the volume of email they receive. They scan and skim instead of reading things in-depth.

The result - when asking a question via email - is a strong possibility you don’t get the answer you need. You might not get an answer at all…

And that’s frustrating. You can’t keep asking the same question over and over, and presumably you’re asking the question because you really want an answer.

Tip: The last question you ask in an email is the one that will get answered.

People will skim your email, get to the bottom and see a call to action. If you’ve peppered your email with other questions, it’s very likely people will miss them, or won’t bother responding. They will key in on the last question.

1. Be careful about adding a PS question. This is typically the most casual question, it’s an attempt at extracting just a bit more information and continuing the conversation. But it’s rarely the most important question (although sometimes it can be!)
2. Put questions on their own line. Even if this doesn’t make complete sense from a reading/writing flow perspective, do it anyway. Make questions stand out.
3. Make the last question the most important one. The one you need answered.

It comes down to smart copywriting.

Sending email is about telling a compelling story and encouraging action. Don’t fool yourself: Email is a great sales and marketing tool. It’s a great research tool. It’s a great relationship building tool. But to extract value from email means writing in a well-formatted, easily digestible manner.

And if you’re asking questions in email - focus your energy on the last one you ask. Make it count, because that’s the one people will answer.

Lots of people love the beach.

Tall people. Short people. Fat people. Skinny people. Bronzed beyond George Hamilton people. Deathly pale people.

There’s just something about stripping down to the bare necessities and letting it all hang out. The interesting thing about the beach is that no one seems self-conscious. It’s rarely flattering and in some cases downright disturbing. Watching a flabby guy in a bright green thong parade across the hot sand just doesn’t do it for me. You?

What is it about the beach that allows many of us to discard our outer shell of clothing, and with reckless abandon allow our least attractive parts to bounce about willy nilly? What, indeed…

Expose Yourself on the Beach

I recently spent a day at the beautiful Parc Jean Drapeau - 5 minutes from the heart of Montreal.

It’s an amazing location: beautiful water, sand, BBQ and great play areas for young kids. It’s amazing how few Montrealers know about it, because it’s the closest thing to a tropical vacation spot that we’ve got. And it’s the closest thing to a vacation I’m going to get in the next couple years…

While at the beach you can’t help but notice the flesh. Lots and lots of flesh. But no one cares. People are exposing themselves in a very, very personal way…and no one is covering up. It’s not all Baywatch models either; every shape, size, culture and creed hangs at the beach.

It makes me think about blogging. (Say what now?!?!)

Expose Yourself on Your Blog

Whether you like it or not, blogs are personal. They wouldn’t work otherwise. Of course they have a business purpose; just like social networks, blogs can be used in a hundred different ways for professional reasons. But business is personal, and blogs have their roots in an open, conversational, relationship-building style.

So if a blog is personal and professional, where do we draw the line?

How much of your personality goes into your blog? How much do you expose?

It might depend on the topic. News-focused blogs won’t have as much room for personality. But most of us write blogs as a means of establishing our personal brand, building meaningful relationships and growing our businesses. There’s lots of personal “stuff” in there.

Chris Brogan exposes himself a great deal on his blog (and through Twitter, Facebook, etc.) He talks about his work and his personal life. Following Chris is more than just a learning experience; it’s a personal experience.

Don’t Show Me Everything, But Keep It Real

Exposing yourself doesn’t mean revealing every detail of your personal life. It does mean you need to approach blogging with an authentic voice. Overly crafting your message can siphon off too much personality if done incorrectly. The information you’re providing might be valuable but the delivery becomes staid and distant.

Your blog should drip with your personality. You should feel free to include personal stories as a means of truly connecting with your audience. The more you expose, the more your audience will as well; and that’s how community is built.

So feel free to be a beach. (Or at least enjoy it!)

photo by pocketshoot.

When raising money from venture capitalists or angels, you’ll want to meet as many as possible. They won’t all invest, but each time you pitch, you get better. Each time you pitch, you get asked different questions, get different opinions and ideas. It’s worth it to pitch as many people as you can, as often as you can. Wil Schroter says it perfectly, pitch everyone, all the time.

Some questions will get asked over and over. And you’ll discover those patterns quickly enough and adjust your pitch accordingly. If you have a less-than-stellar answer to a question that gets asked once or twice, it’s not a big deal. But if your weaker answers are to the most common investor questions, you’ve got a problem.

With that in mind, here are some of the more common questions investors will ask:

1. So what’s your business all about? The wording of this question will change, but this is the classic “elevator pitch” question. Translation: “In the shortest amount of time possible, grab my interest by the proverbial you-know-whats.” Sell them quick, with something simple and powerful they can remember; and keep reiterating that message throughout your presentation.
2. What’s the barrier to entry for competition? For Web 2.0 startups this can be tough. The question comes from VCs and angels that might not be as familiar with the overall industry and the ease with which many web applications can be built. They’re looking for a real technological barrier that might not exist. Some answers that might help you skirt this topic: launching big, building a devoted community, key partnerships and/or customers (before launch), we’re cooler than everyone else (this won’t work.) None of these answers are great (for a host of reasons.)
3. What’s going to stop big monster company in your space from copying you? This is almost identical to Question #2 but it’s more commonly asked because there’s always competition. And, it’s usually from the “big bad wolf” company that’s got tons of money, lots of market share, a huge staff and years of experience.

   For starters, don’t say, “What competition? We don’t have any“. There’s always competition.

   Secondly, this is a tough question to answer. What is stopping “big bad wolf” company from copying you instantly and smashing you like a bug? Generally, you can argue:

   • We can move more quickly.
   • Big bad wolf is too busy managing what it’s doing to innovate.
   • They’ll acquire us rather than copy us (if you have examples, use them.)
4. Why are you raising the money you want to raise? The amount you’re asking for is critical. Make sure you’ve done your financial homework. Don’t tell them your numbers are conservative, just explain to them how you arrived at them.
5. How far does that money get you? Have a good answer to this question. Couch this in product and financial terms, i.e. “It gets us 6 months past launch, when we expect to be cash flow positive.” The best way to think about this is to calculate how long the money will last if you earn zero revenue. Count backwards by 4-6 months and that will tell you when you need to start the process of raising more money. If the money is only going to last you 4-6 months, you need to start looking for more money almost immediately (which isn’t a pleasant thought.)
6. Do you have any customers? Have you spoken to potential customers? Investors are looking for traction, or at least the inkling of traction. As soon as possible, try and get a few potential customers to say, “Sounds interesting.” You might even use them as references. This raises the comfort level for investors and helps answer the question, “What’s the market?”
7. What’s your marketing strategy? For early stage companies this is a very tough question. Chances are “just getting to freaking launch” is what you’re thinking, but that’s not good enough. And “launch big” is equally uninspiring. Think about presenting a timeline of events and customer acquisition numbers that you’re anticipating, tied to marketing. Throw in a variety of strategies that you’re going to do or researching. Marketing will be critical to your success, so you better plan for it sooner rather than later.
8. What are you coding in? Investors do want technical details. This is an easy question to answer at least (assuming you know!)
9. How are you handling the technological infrastructure for scaling? Like I said, investors want technical details. They want to know that you’ve thought about the behind-the-scenes technology to support your system. When you get on the front page of TechCrunch, will the server hold up? When customers are signing up faster than you can process their credit cards (don’t let that happen!), will the system stay running at a reasonable speed? The further you get along in the process with investors, the more technical details they’ll want.
10. What’s the team look like? What are your backgrounds? Investors want to know the backgrounds of the founders. If you’ve got people on staff, they’ll want to know who, why you hired those people, and who else (and how many) you need to bring on board. They’ll want to know how quickly you expect to grow the team over time as well.

Although there are common questions you’ll get from venture capitalists and angel investors, what’s more fascinating is that each investor will ask different questions. You can’t be prepared for every question, but even if you get new ones, the more comfortable you are pitching (because you’ve done it so many times), the better.

If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…guess what, it’s a duck.

A blog is a blog is a blog.

Not quite the same analogy, but you get the point.

Jakob Nielsen suggests that people write articles not blog posts. He differentiates them by saying that blog posts are often, “…quickly written, shallow postings”, while articles are, “…thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.”

Part of his argument is simply semantics, which I find generally pointless. David Armano, who does a great job writing “articles” and “blog posts”, has suggested that we don’t even use the term “blog” at all. It brings baggage with it from the days when blogs were mostly personal diaries.

OK, there’s some baggage, but the term also differentiates from other words that could be used. There will always be people who don’t get it; but if we’re constantly trying to massage or whitewash what we do in blogging for “everyone else” we lose some of the core value blogging brings.

• speed of publishing
• experimentation
• conversation
• relationship building

I’d rather say, “I blog,” and help people understand what that means, versus “I’m a personal publisher” or “I write articles on the Web”.

Articles are meant for magazines, where the ability to respond is extremely limited. How many of us have written “letters to the editor?” Articles denote a certain finality — “I’ve written the definitive piece on X, end of story.”

Blog posts can be anything you want them to be - short, long, researched, opinionated, funny, serious, full of images, linked to everyone else, extensions of other conversations and ideas…

Matt Ambrose makes the point that content quality is key not whether you call it a blog post or article. Of course he’s right.

But Tony Hung is also right when he says that one or two off-quality posts won’t kill a blog, as Nielsen thinks.

Blogging is about experimenting, discovering what works for you and your audience. That might be a slew of one-line insights, or it might be a book-full of 40,000 word essays.

If we have to worry about calling blogs something else, and calling blog posts articles, what happens when we look at even “newer” means of publishing content and building business relationships. I can only imagine the debate on social networks and their role in business. (And trust me, there’s nothing to debate: Facebook, Twitter, etc. are business tools.)