Category: Startups

Consumer services update – iCarsClub, veggies, and broken iPhone 5

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

So after about 2 weeks http://www.icarsclub.com finally approved my application for their service. I think it normally takes 3 days or at least that is what they say. Still no replies to my support emails or tweets. A fail then on all levels for customer service – what if I start using the service? How do I reach them?

On the vegetable front I tried this place :: http://www.greencircle.com.sg. In general it worked well but I think they could communicate a little better. I did the online order form which sends you a confirmation email. After that nothing happened but then my wife rang me to say someone left a box of veggies at our door. We didn’t know when they were coming and yes, get this – I never paid them. Still need to work that out. Veggies are good though and I will use them again. I might even pay them too. 😉

Last but not least my little girl dropped my iPhone 5 face down on the train yesterday and shattered the glass. I hunted around for someone to repair it near where I live and found this guy :: http://mworks.weebly.com. He quoted (130 sgd) over the phone and I went right over. Fixed it in like 20 mins and put a nice screen cover on it. Very friendly guy that Vincent and does awesome work. Even corrected one of the dents on the side of the phone so the new glass could lay down all the way into the phone. I may take him my bashed iPad mini and my other iPad with cracked glass. Highly recommend his work.

back to work…

Consumer services in Singapore…

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I tweeted this yesterday mostly out of frustration with trying out a consumer service here in Singapore with horrible customer service. Looking at you http://www.icarsclub.com/. I signed up over a week ago – about 2 weeks now – for their iCarDriver service where you get access to automated short term car sharing. My app is still processing:

iCarDriver
To rent and keyless enter nearby cars affordably
PROCESSING

Okay – no drama. I user their online customer support email thingy twice. No replies.

I tweet at them in a friendly, like is anywhere there kind of way, and no response. Nothing. How does a consumer company not answer any emails or tweets? Appalling.

Seems they have not tweeted in 30 days. How is that possible?

Check out the tweet search about them – just all stuff about funding and nothing about customers, traction or customer service.

Yet this is a company recently funded – https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/car-sharing-startup-icarsclub-raises-035538613.html

Maybe they are just annoyed by me, wannabe paying customer, asking for help. I just don’t get it.

But this brings me back to my other feeling about the local ecosystem coverage. There is not much depth to it. It is announcements about starting/funding, then the buzz about someone doing well and then the general industry coverage. There is not a lot about actual reviews of the service, report cards on how companies are doing and a little, but not much about the failing companies – how they failed and what the peeps at the failed places are now doing. I am not bashing the coverage or the people that cover the scene – just highlighting what I think is missing.

Will anyone with a bigger voice than me look into the iCarsClub weirdness? Probably not.

Next I will look into one of these organic vegetable services.

Fear BizDev

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

So JDFI 2014a is over. Check the videos here :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO7W6ePtwM8&list=UU77igO-PM8Ww1pWCjfYdfUw

What a great event and investors are frothing to get at the startups. awesome.

I had great fun mentoring a few of them.

I have had some follow up talks post demo day and I thought I would share one tidbit.

There is always a few big companies swarming around startups looking to grow their own business via partnering with a startup. Startups are small and looking to grow so initially the thought of working with a big company looks really appealing – a growth strategy of sorts. Well – let me warn you – many times partnering or doing some sort of business development deal #BizDev can usually be worse than not partnering at all.

Some of the pros:

– Getting users
– Getting traffic without paying for it
– Getting some PR
– Being able to tell investors you are working with or have signed a deal with so and so
– Learning from a big company

But in reality what can happen is the cons:

– It might take months to bring the project online
– You will have all the red tape to sort
– You will be at the mercy of the big company development and QA schedules
– Investors will think that the deal is more important than it really is and hound you about it. Not realizing the schedule is now out of your hands
– You might find that the cost of the users was more expensive than just buying the users via marketing
– You probably won’t learn a lot from the big company cause in reality they are learning from you
– The PR is not that big of a deal – sure it helps but it won’t make your startup

I am not saying don’t do #BizDev but have a healthy skepticism for how hard it is, how it may slow you down and how it may throw you off your core business plan.

Sometimes #BizDev is better in the middle stages of a startup than the early stages.

Just saying…

AWS does need to get a mobile story together

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am a big fan of AWS but I will call a spade a spade – their mobile services suck but really they just don’t have any.

Good article on the current situation is here :: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/08/cloud-favorite-aws-is-finally-ready-to-join-the-mobile-development-services-party/

We love AWS at Spuul and wouldn’t be here without it. Yes – you can find cheaper services to run virtual machines on – we know that but when it comes to running a global service with servers we can spin up around the globe – I still think AWS has no equals. None.

However doing some simple things on AWS for mobile is well – not simple. We tried to build our push messaging stack around it and we hit too many walls and had our messages capped per day. AWS had no concept of our user base and the ability for us to buy messages in volume. We went to PushWoosh cause it was simple and cheap. Everything else we do we hand roll behind an API that we run on AWS using AWS services. We always try to use a service versus install code on a server so we have less things to support and update. This keeps our admin headcount low. I won’t tell you how low but let’s say it can’t go any lower.

MSFT is doing a good job with mobile services but I have no first hand experience with it but I know they make some things dead simple – like push messaging, among others. AWS is never really dead simple but it works and you know what you are dealing with.

Mobile is the thing and my guess even the next thing is all about – mobile.

AWS needs to up their mobile game.

I am watching.

Any yes – Brazil really did get spanked.

Messing with your brain

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sure you have all heard about the Facebook experiment – I really don’t know what to say other than I am not surprised.

What it brings me to is realizing that a lot of us in the product world need to think about when designing our products that the human mind is complex – we tend to build things sometimes without remembering this. Meaning there is lot more to your product than the bits – you have to think about how people will react to it and how you might be able to invoke the reactions you want.

I found this video on pricing to help ton when thinking about pricing, market fit and feature matrixes.

http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-07-16-michael-dearing

Love this section:

20 bucks.

Most common answer I’ve ever heard is 20 bucks. Some people say 30, some people say 40, but 20 is a very good guess. Now, what if I told you that that toaster had a mechanical timer that allowed you to get exactly the right level of golden deliciousness that you wanted on that piece of toast?

Do you see what I’m doing? I’m reaching into your brain, and I’m playing with your idea of what is value. I’m moving around the assumptions and beliefs that you have about what makes for good toast, and what makes for a good toaster. And I’m going to do it again. This toaster that I want to sell you has faster warm up, and that ensures that there’s perfect browning from the first slice to the last slice. You know, that terrible situation where you toast the first one and it doesn’t quite toast. And you toast the second and the third and they turn out to be charcoal? This solves that problem completely.

You feel what I’m doing, right? I’m going into the command line of your human OS and I’m playing with it.

enjoy!

It’s tough to bank on Google

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

It’s Google I/O time and it’s another conference, like WWDC, that I wish I was attending. Despite that I am not going, I still need to pay attention since Google will inevitably announce something that I will have to consider building on or for. Android is still the biggest thing to come from Google, and startups, like Spuul, have to build on android. There is still some schools of thought that say stick with iOS or start with iOS and deal with android later. However, if you are doing anything at all in Asia or the emerging markets you have to be on android. Period. But I insist that the money for paid services is still in iOS. Android users just don’t pay the way iOS users do – not even close.

Like with WWDC, Google will spend the week announcing a ton of things – I won’t even bother trying to play soothsayer since I don’t think it makes sense to. But I am more sensitive than I have been in the past at taking Google products seriously.

I think the biggest problem with whatever Google will announce is deciding which products or platforms to bank on. I see android TV is already getting some pre announcement love and folks are blessing it as the new thing for Google and it’s love affair with TV. Let me be first the first to say I hope it works cause god knows the current TV ecosystem is fucked. My money is still on Apple TV cause it works, it’s dead simple to build on and we know Apple values ecosystem lock in which means Apple TV is here to stay.

Android TV? Who the hells knows. Google TV was also heralded as the savior for the TV ecosystem and the next best thing to sliced bread for developers working around the TV. What happened to it? It was promising but in typical Google fashion it was essentially a beta that never made it out of beta. I understand why Google does this but it makes it hard to know which beta projects to depend on or bet your company’s development dollars on. Once bitten, twice shy.

I am sure some big companies can jump on every new Google dream in hopes of being the front runner and to ensure that big companies stay big but as a startup I don’t have that luxury. We actually semi invested in Google TV cause it was easy to stick to HTML 5 and HLS for a host of Smart (which we all know means hella dumb) TV platforms. Google TV was almost a reference platform of sorts and mostly just worked – wish I could say the same for the supposed Dumb TV platforms which are some of the worst shipping ecosystems of the modern day web.

But Google TV was a dud and once it looks like a dud the normal Google response is to not really kill it, that’s far too easy for them, but to let it just limp along pretending to be alive but we all know it’s actually the walking dead. Then Google got Apple envy and decided to make chromecast which on paper, plus based on sales, seems to be rocking. But some studies are showing that it’s not being used much. This doesn’t surprise me cause unlike an Apple TV, chromecast is not super user friendly. Yes it works, but it is a pain to setup and is buggy as hell. I am actually hoping that Google will re affirm their commitment to it during I/O, fix all the bugs and double down on it since I think it has legs.

As a techie though it is shocking how much Google forgot to ship with chromecast. Security for streams was not something they focused on but has improved some with updates. At Spuul we still find that HD content with encryption creates brain freezes faster than swallowing a Magnum in one go. The real shocker with chromecast though is there is no easy way to serve video ads with it. Yes – a video product from Google that doesn’t even have a premium content focus has no hooks to any of the standard video ad platforms – not even Google’s own video ad platform. I find this quite comical since if they aren’t going to focus on premium content, something folks pay for, one would think they would make it easy to stream free content with ads.

I hear Google is going to announce something new on the TV front, which I guess means Google TV is dead, but this action will call in to question what the plan is with chromecast. My guess is Android TV has different goals than chromecast so one would hope both platforms are a go and will see proper investment by Google. However, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Android TV getting all the attention while chromecast starts to whither on the vine.

I will be watching the announcements and doing my best to read the tea leaves as to what Google makes that actually will still be going strong in a few years.

Time to update my Google minus account via my Vizio Google TV chrome browser.

How to become a product manager

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Just got the chance to check this out :: http://www.slideshare.net/isouweine/how-to-become-a-product-manager

I had the distinct pleasure of working with Isaac some at Yahoo as well as just chatting with him a bunch when he lived in Singapore. And yes – I have missed him a ton since he left.

It’s a great deck and one that I think about a lot since at Spuul I don’t have any PM’s but someday we might. I always wonder how a startup grows into acquiring or growing PM’s and how I would transition over to letting them manage things instead of the way we do it now.

I think a longer post needs to be written about the PM in a startup versus the PM in an established company. I am sure Isaac has lots to share there given his time at Yahoo and his new tenure at Frank and Oak.

Thanks for sharing Isaac!

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 5

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

Part 4 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/25/koprol-the-inside-story-part-4/

Yes – we closed the deal. My hope was to bask in the deal closing success and enjoy the moment but unfortunately there was not a lot of time to do that. All sorts of stuff needed sorting from deciding how to announce the deal, to sorting out the structure of operations and of course just dealing with all the demands placed on the newly acquired team. Koprol was now our emerging markets baby – everyone inside of Yahoo wanted access and people outside of Yahoo wanted to interview the principals. All good. I think Yahoo’s bonus from the deal was the huge amount of positive, organic pr. Something Yahoo was not normally used to.

As far as the event itself – the announcing the deal to the public, we planned for a medium sized private event where all the regional bloggers and media where invited. At this time there was some notion of activity around Koprol and Yahoo but there had not been any leaks and no one had forecasted what had actually happened. I was proud of both the Yahoo and Koprol team for not having leaked anything. I am sure many people suspected something but no one called it. The event allowed the Koprol guys to announce the deal and the APAC management to introduce themselves to the community at large. Corporate stayed out of it and the excitement of the deal took center stage. All in all I was proud of the moment and of Yahoo.

Post deal announcement my friend from the IGTF and I spent some time in Bali hanging and trying to come up with some basic plans. Apart form this celebration and a few post deal parties at some of the regional events the air of celebration was exhausted quick since the need to get down to business was at hand.

Fortunately the IGTF lead for the deal was still at Yahoo and focused on making this work – this along with the APAC team focus allowed us to plan next steps. The goal being to grow the product in the region, learn from it and see what the team could offer Yahoo in ideas for emerging markets. Apart from the this the rest of the details needed to be worked out.

There were lots of open issues:

– what to name or brand it?
– long term reporting structures
– dealing with logins – yahoo users
– scaling points of interest
– platforms to grow into
– how to scale the team in Indonesia
– how to engage the rest of Yahoo
– how to spread in the other Yahoo regions

Post closing the Yahoo APAC marketing team started to discuss the branding and of course wanted it to be called Yahoo Koprol. Part of me resisted this cause I felt that the best way to conduct the experiment in the large would be to not overly influence it. Koprol was tiny and Yahoo was huge and it was assumed everyone knew Yahoo and no one knew Koprol. The idea was call it Yahoo Koprol and everyone would feel better about it. The focus groups mostly alluded to the same answer but for me I was more interested in using the resources of Yahoo but yet trying to not over Yahoo everything.

This was really the entire crux of our new found paradox – how does one take advantage of all that Yahoo has to offer and get shit done but not be saddled with all the bullshit of Yahoo that is notorious for not getting anything done. This is where my Yahoo career probably nosedived as I stated to assume the role of protector as someone wanting to do the right thing for everyone but yet having to piss people off along the way.

There was the local team, the Koprol team, the users, Sunnyvale and the world all watching and everyone wanting a piece. Yahoo wanted to learn from the team, the world wanted to interview them, the users wanted a growing product and the Koprol team wanted to try and please everyone – there was no easy way to do this but my full time gig become trying to make all this happen. I am sure I failed – but I learned a lot along the way and I think everyone else did to.

Decisions were quickly being made – the product would be called Yahoo Koprol, the product would keep the multi login system although would need to make the Yahoo stuff the real login and we would start throwing some marketing dollars at promoting the product in Indonesia. In theory this was all good but there can be too much of a good thing since the product was still really new. The idea of marketing a hong product might make some sense but the offer on the table was to do a TV commercial for Indonesia. At first reaction one thinks hell yeah – let’s do that but then reality sets in and one realizes that the product may just not be ready for something like a TVC. Here is another decision that needed to be made in that we wanted the marketing help but we honestly wanted it to come later however the TVC budget was there and needing to be used ASAP. Looking back I think we should not have done the TVC since it made us put off some product evolutions to prep for the TVC and we were forced to make some decisions around the features or the marketable features so that the TVC would have the message Yahoo wanted for the region.

Essentially it meant accepting more compromises for what the team would be working on and how the product would be presented by Yahoo to the region. It was all too soon really since we wanted to experiment around product features and we wanted to grow it more organically or within the Yahoo ecosystem prior to doing any hardcore marketing. Yes – the TVC was well done and it made a huge difference in users but it was probably also the wrong kind of user and it meant Koprol was getting a huge amount of attention both within the company and around Indonesia. Other groups at Yahoo were slightly peeved at such a young product getting so much money since marketing money had to be shared around the region and the product was having to deal with rampant growth without the time to work on engagement and making it a better product. It was a mass tradeoff that in my mind wasn’t worth the hassles.

This began the journey for what ultimately started to cave the entire experiment – Koprol was now expected to be the hero product for the region with the idea that market it enough and it will be big rather than building the best product and figuring out how to make it something the region desires versus flogging it. This is actually a typically Yahoo dilemma since there are ways between marketing dollars, PR and the front page to unleash a firehose on something within or outside of Yahoo that will result in mass traffic but won’t king make something that is not ready or is not a good product. Koprol now had the firehose but it really needed more time to mature first.

JFDI 2014A

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am back to trying to focus my efforts outside of Spuul in one place again this year – which is JFDI batch 2014A.

http://jfdi.asia/portfolio/

Last Thursday I met with with a few from the list but I think some have already changed their names. I will wait to see who I end up spending the most time with since it is usually up to the teams to ping me for follow up.

For now I have had the most conversations with http://storyroll.co/ and http://stylehunt.com/ . Storyroll is fascinating since it is some guys from Lithuania coming to singapore, frying their asses off, to make a go of the program. I figure I can help a bit given my video and consumer product background. For stylehunt I am always partial to the Thais and it turns out I am from the same part of the world as one of the founders which is cool.

We shall see who continues to bug me as the program rolls on and I will see what kind of impact I can have. Exciting stuff!

Before I get to my tiny advice column I will recall the dinner we had with Werner Vogels and some of what we learned from talking to him. The key takeaway I had was that Amazon is still lots of small teams working on lots of projects. As big as Amazon is today the small team ethos is still going strong. I dig that. The other thing Werner mentioned was how the team still writes the marketing one pager, the FAQ and the press release before any code is written. I love this. I should try to do this at Spuul as well.

It’s good advice to focus on what you want the customer to experience and then work backwards to make it happen. I am sure there are tons of ways to do this or to manage the process but the basics are pretty clear. Don’t code or draw pictures first. Take the time to write out what you hope to build before building.

Obviously this may not work for everyone who has already started making something or is in the program however I think for those who are in the JFDI program there is another way to handle this.

This is the advice I was giving out on Thursday to the companies I met individually with. I have seen a few batches go though the system and generally if one can keep themselves organized and productive leading up to investor day then the odds of success, as far as the program is concerned, are much higher. Fall apart, lose track of time, bicker, try to build too much, or lose sight of the product – will lead you to a bad investor day.

One could hope for breakout success, killer metrics, a sick viral loop or a crazy amount of pr – but pinning your success on the things that may not happen is not very smart. If these things happen consider them a bonus but instead focus on the event. The investor day. Imagine yourself or your team up there presenting, have a vision for what you want to say, make a few slides now that will be the boilerplate for that final day and focus on projecting now what you will accomplish on that stage.

Then work backwards to make it happen. Manage each week precisely enough, don’t go crazy about it, to ensure that you are meeting your weekly milestones that will add up to your successful investor day.

As a member of an accelerator program you are in a time compression chamber. Manage it will and you will succeed.

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 4

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

Part 3 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/04/koprol-the-inside-story-part-3/

The process for acquiring Koprol was kind of a chaotic one at best. For my part all I could do is step aside and let the corp development team work their magic. I was involved in helping to complete the technical due diligence process and to act as a chaperone for all the comings and goings to the Koprol team. I was not involved in any of the deal negotiations at all since that is the responsibility of the corp dev team and by design the people agreeing to the tech or the initial product desire are not involved. This is to keep it from getting personal and to make sure there is no funny business.

One of the big worries was how much strain the acquisition would put on such a small company since the needs and wants of the Yahoo deal could easily put too many requirements on the small team. My singular worry was that in the event the acquisition did not go through how would Koprol survive? This one was tough cause the due diligence process and the post acquisition integration needs were already keeping the senior management quite busy but the rank and file needed to keep working like nothing would happen. So my goal, not sure I kept it, was to try and stay close enough to keep the acquisition moving forward and to help mitigate any issues while encouraging the team to keep building according to their plans and goals. Of course I was in and out of their office all the time and was talking to the management team daily. There was much to do in both prepping for the acquisition and planning for post acquisition activities.

At this point the process of closing the acquisition was in place and it was just going to take time on the due diligence side plus working through the negotiation and legal process. So in other words I sat back and let the corp dev machine do their thing. We had lawyers, integration specialist, security specialists and even had the Yahoo APAC marketing team working on the acquisition message plus post acquisition marketing. Even the outside PR companies were brought in – will talk about the post acquisition press plans later. It felt pretty incredible but also scary as shit since anything could go wrong and of course something did.

This is something never mentioned in the press or the public story cause no one was suppose to talk about it, it nakedly exposes how big companies are so messed up, but as we neared the due date we suddenly lost our core sponsor. To be clear the due date is the CFO of Yahoo being presented with all the info, the price, the plans and then deciding at the moment to sign or to bail. My feeling was as we neared this point there was no bailing out but turns out even at this juncture it is quite easy to not close the deal.

As I stated in the beginning the person running product at the time and who also was overseeing the IGTF was the sponsor of the deal. Without a sponsor there is no deal but I never really thought about what would happen if prior to closing the deal we would lose our sponsor. I don’t blame our sponsor at all – life goes on and people leave companies and at that point more people were leaving Yahoo than ever. Of course the sponsor did the best he could to transition the deal and to make sure that the CFO knew what was going on but unfortunately at big organizations the sponsor is key and without the sponsor deals generally just die.

I remember the call with trepidation – all of us involved with deal, on the line from various corners of the world with the CFO making a case that the deal was almost concluded, the IGTF would go on, the corp dev team was still for the deal but that yes – we lost the sponsor. Shit. Already I was coming to grips with how to tell Koprol and how to unwind something that was months in the works. I was a nervous wreck. The Indonesian country manager and I were discussing how to tell the market if the news leaked out that we tried to buy Koprol but pulled out knowing that no matter what we would say the market might paint us as the big evil company. Keep in mind, as stated before, Yahoo already tried to by one Indonesian company but pulled out for various legit reasons.

What can I say other than I am very thankful that at the time the APAC Yahoo management, who used to carry a lot of power, decided to lobby heavily to keep the deal alive. They had plenty of good reasons – Yahoo could use a good SEA story, Indonesia was (is) a hotspot and the ramifications of a failed deal might be worse than a small deal, closed, possible going south due to a lack of sponsorship. In theory APAC stepped in to play the sponsor role. It took a lot of convincing and unfortunately the downside was having to agree to some APAC metrics that now forced us to push things a lot more than the original IGTF plans. In hindsight this is another juncture that probably influenced the overall outcome.

We did the deal with the devil. Deal was closing but now we had to push things harder and faster than what made logical sense.

Part 5 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/04/27/koprol-the-inside-story-part-5/