Doing a consumer startup? You won’t make it without a daily use case.

(this first appeared as a guest post on BostInno)

Common startup stories go something like this: the founder has a problem in their life, and creates a product to address it. Maybe they had trouble planning their vacation or couldn’t find a vegan restaurant. An example I encounter a lot is the so-called “things to do” problem. “I’m bored, I want to find something to do this weekend.” It’s alluring and sexy to tackle problems like this. They’re fun.

Here’s the harsh reality: Unless your product has a daily use case, you won’t make it.

I learned this the hard way. I was the co-founder of goby, a moderately successful “things to do” app. (Note: Consumer startups are “winner take all” – you either have tens of millions of users or you run out of money. A “moderately successful” consumer startup is one that doesn’t make it.) I’d like to share a bit of our path in hopes others can learn from it.

Goby started life at MIT with serious tech that produced highly structured, semantic data from the unstructured jungle that is the web. We set out to build a travel startup with a focus on events and activities – from concerts to beaches to hot air balloon rides. Events and activities is a multi-billion dollar market with no brand owning it. Our economic case was built on the affiliate/lead-gen model – we’d refer people to providers, be they hotels or tour operators, and take a 5-10 percent cut of the booking. And maybe run some ads.

We launched the company and had solid early success – press from Robert Scoble, TechCrunch, theNew York Times, you name it. We raised a reasonable amount of funding, and grew our audience to over one million monthly app/web visits. Not bad. Not enough. Even at that scale we couldn’t generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining, or to raise financing to keep the company going. Eventually we were acquired by Telenav, a publicly traded GPS Navigation company. It was a great run, but ultimately not a success.

The biggest challenge for a consumer company isn’t building a great product, it’s acquiring users.

A full post-mortem of those years is outside the scope of this article. I want to focus on one topic: the customer/product adoption lifecycle and what it means for your startup.

The biggest challenge for a consumer company isn’t building a great product, it’s acquiring users. Product, as hard as it seems, is the easy part. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to get a million people using your product. To get a consumer A round done, you need millions (plural) of users (or have proven monetization).

This is how early adopters experience your product: they read about it on, say, a BostInno article, or hear about it from an enthusiastic friend, and try it out. In our case, they’d say, “Oh, a cool new travel planner!” They try it out, then say to themselves, “next time I plan a trip, I’ll use that.” Here’s what we encountered: People travel twice a year (often to a place they already know). So when they had a need for goby, it’s been six months since they heard about us and they’ve forgotten!

Watching our analytics we saw people were searching for things to do in their local area, not travel destinations. So, we pivoted out of travel and into a local “weekend recommendations” angle. Our use case became more frequent, but still not daily. In principle people have free time every weekend. In practice, it’s often time spoken for – housework, family obligations and so on.

People are busy. They have a problem and want a solution quickly. If you’re top of mind when they have that need, you stand a chance. If your use case is twice a year, or even once a month or every other week, they’ll have forgotten about you by the time they need you. Ben Yoskovitz captured this “attention economy” admirably in his post Grabbing Attention and Holding Onto It.

If you’re doing a consumer startup with no clear revenue model and without a daily use case, just stop.

Look at the “unicorn” consumer companies; there’s a common thread. Snapchat? I communicate with my friends every day. Instagram? I take photos all the time. Dropbox? I save files every day. Pinterest? I bookmark things every day. Foursquare & Yelp? Yes I eat every day, and go places every day. Concerts? I go to a lot of concerts, but it’s still one every other month or so. By the time I want that information, I’ve forgotten about that cool new concert finder …

Are there exceptions? Yes. Do you have a clear and proven monetization path? You might be able to arbitrage (buy) your way to success, if your cost of acquisition is less than your revenue per customer.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re doing a consumer startup with no clear revenue model and without a daily use case, just stop. Pick a new problem, or find a way to convert your problem into something closer to daily. My new startup, The Hawaii Project, discovers great books for you to read. I know people don’t pick new books every day. So I’m focusing on providing topical, interest-driven news on a daily basis driven by your reading interests, to stay top-of-mind until that time comes. Find an angle where you have a reason to be in touch with your customer every day.

More broadly, it’s common to think of your product as your mobile app or website. In today’s context-driven world, this is the wrong way to think about it. Your real product is your first-time user experience and your contextual notifications and alerts. That is how people will engage with you and remember your app.

Deliver real value on a first time visit, proactively re-engage with them and you’ll earn their attention.

The “Ratings & Reviews” model is broken. There’s a better way.

 

Reviews2
From restaurants (Yelp) to hotels (TripAdvisor) to books (Goodreads) to household goods (Amazon), the “ratings and reviews” model is everywhere. So much so that The Onion wrote a satiric article about a woman who dared to eat at a restaurant without reading the Yelp reviews.

But increasingly, the “ratings & reviews” model is perceived as broken and corrupt.

People believe reviews are manipulated on all fronts. They think businesses write bad reviews about their competitors. That businesses write good (but fake) reviews about their own businesses. That Yelp, for example, asks for money to suppress bad reviews (Yelp has been found not guilty in court). Businesses are at odds with customers over reviews: Fed-up restaurant owners fight back over Yelp reviewsYelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor wage continual warfare over bad or fake reviews: Yelp Starts Showing Evidence Of Review Fraud.

There’s a lot of money at stake based on the outcome and incentives are skewed. This isn’t lost on consumers, who are increasingly cynical about the ratings and reviews they see online.

As a result, the “ratings & reviews” method of discovery and decision making is breaking down.

It’s not just restaurants and hotels. Closer to home for The Hawaii Project, the Books world has seen a number of scandals around purchased or fake book reviews, with a number of companies in the business of getting more reviews for a book (and they’re not going to be bad reviews!).

And even if the reviews aren’t fake, there’s an even deeper issue. They just aren’t that helpful in the end. Unless I have a relationship with the reviewer, I don’t know how to evaluate their review — do they share my tastes and values? No way to tell. They may not like something, not because it’s intrinsically bad, but just because it’s not for them (in the hotel space, studies have shown that most 1-star reviews are for bad service, but that most people value location and comfort much more than “service”). In the world of books, JoJo Moyes’ book Me Before You is rated 4.3/5.0 on Goodreads, with over 215,000 ratings and 30,000 reviews. Is it a good book? Probably so. Will I like it? Probably not. But I’m sure as hell not going to read 30,000 reviews to find out!

This isn’t helpful. The ratings and reviews decision-making model is busted. Too much noise, not enough signal. It’s time to replace it with something better.

In the music world, people often discover new music by listening to the curators.Pitchfork. Rolling Stone. The Radio. Your favorite DJ. Gramaphone Magazine.Apple’s new Beats music service leans hard on Curators. There are some great curators out there in other areas. Robert Scoble for Startups. Maria Popova for intellectual ideas and books. Jason Hirschhorn for Media. Even Kanye once called himself a curator! But who has time to keep up with all that?

The additional problem with books is that the curators’ tastes often don’t agree with your own, and the volume of books is so much larger. One minute The New York Times Review of Books is reviewing ‘‘Great Men Die Twice,’ a Collection of Sports Reporting by Mark Kram’, the next they are reviewing ‘Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing’ (a study of 17th century Dutch painting). Nothing whatsoever to do with each other, and neither interesting to me, personally. Imagine trying to figure out what to read by wading through all that!

Ratings and Reviews work when there is Trust and Context. Consumer Reports is useful because I trust them to be unbiased. My friend’s review of a restaurant works, not necessarily because I share their taste, but rather I have context for their opinion. I know them and how they think and what they like. On most major review sites in any domain, either Trust or Context (or both) are missing.

There’s a better way. I call it Personalized Curation.

Imagine if every day you had time to read what all the great curators and reviewers were recommending in your areas of interest, skipping the irrelevant things and highlighting the most personally interesting to you.

Systems that perform this “Personalized Curation” for you will become the norm over the next few years. People don’t have time to ready everything — there’s an explosion of content out there. You need some kind of agent who can assimilate all of that, and bring you the relevant bits. Because of the complexity of the problem, these agents will be domain specific. Music. Books. Movies. News. Hotels. And they will be contextual and pro-active. They’ll know you’re at the airport and need a great book for the flight, and bring it to you. They’ll know your wife’s birthday is coming up and bring you some great restaurant ideas.

This is beginning to happen. You can see the beginnings of it in music with Apple Beats and Shuffler.FM. Flipboard has been nosing around this for News for some time. And at The Hawaii Project, we’re doing it for books. If you’re looking for great books read, give us a whirl!

The Hawaii Project

 

Launching Today. We find great books you’d never find on your own.

books2After nearly a year of development, it’s time to raise the curtain on The Hawaii Project. Come on in — the water’s fine!

People are drowning in new books (Bowker says the number of books published is up nearly 500% since 2008, and that even excludes the indie books published with no ISBNs!). Some say “the glut is good”, but readers are left adrift on an ocean of new books trying to find the books that matter.

Yet, online book discovery is broken. The US book market is $15 BILLION and the most common discovery method is offline word of mouth. Broken.

Here’s why:

  • People are busy. Nobody has time to search & browse for stuff.
  • The ratings and review regime is corrupt & broken.
  • Social Discovery is the wrong model — my friends don’t read what I read.
  • There’s some great curators out there — but their taste and mine only sometimes align. And who has time to keep up with them all?

What if there was something that watched what the curators and influencers wrote about, then brought the relevant things to you? Kind of like Medium or Flipboard, but for books? A kind of Personalized Curation? 

The Hawaii Project watches a curated slice of the books web, figuring out what the curators, influencers and tastemakers are writing about, and then matches it to the books, topics and authors you love — bringing you great books matching your interests. Great books to read, and a highly tailored news feed filled with interesting articles to read about books and subjects you’re interested in. The curation ensures the innate quality is high, the personalization ensures it’s relevant.

In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring this in more detail, but for now, the best news is: it’s available NOW. Just head over to http://www.thehawaiiproject.com and sign up. A basic account is free.

Reading and literacy are powerful forces for good. We started The Hawaii Project to share our love of books and to use entrepreneurship to create an engine to generate cold hard cash that we’ll share with deserving literacy non-profits. So the less fortunate of us can still grow to love books and learning. We generate revenue through our Premium Accounts, and 10% of our revenue goes to fund 3 great literacy non-profits.

Join us and Do Good by Reading Well.

 

Pirate Hunters, The Search for the Lost Treasure Ship of a Great Buccaneer. By Robert Kurson.

Screen Shot 2015-05-30 at 9.40.26 AM“If you like pirates, meet me in New Jersey”.

With that, Kurson is off to meet John Chatterton and John Mattera, world class divers and treasure hunters, who are chasing the ghost of Joseph Bannister, one of the legendary (but real) pirates of the Caribbean, and his ship the Golden Fleece. Only one documented pirate ship has ever been found – the Whydah, off the coast of Cape Cod.

Kurson does a great job not just of telling the tale of the search for the Golden Fleece, but of taking you inside the world of treasure hunters and paying homage to the grand old men of the industry. Tracy Bowden owns the lease rights for treasure hunting in the Dominican Republic (or Hispaniola as the pirates knew it). He’s got a lead on the shipwreck site, but is too old to chase it, and Chatterton & Mattera are masters of the new technology-driven world of ship finding. He brings in Chatterton and Mattera to go after it. On their first visit to his house, Chatterton takes a break to go to the bathroom. Upon walking into the bathroom he finds a bathtub full of “pieces of eight”, spanish silver coins. The bathtub has about 5 million dollars worth of treasure in it. Throughout the hunt for the Golden Fleece, the partners visit other legendary treasure hunters to seek advice or information, some humble men worth millions and others flashy.

Chatterton and Mattera are just about to launch on a search for the San Bartolomé, after years of prep. But the lure of finding a true pirate ship is too strong. They abandon their quest for the San Bartolomé and they’re off to the Dominican in search of the Golden Fleece.

Kurson does an admirable of job of weaving the history of pirates into the book, including interesting diversions such as how limbs were amputated after battle (turns out in that era, being in the Navy was probably the best place to have an amputation done as they were the best at it). And he visits many historical sites such as the museum in Key West were one of only two remaining original Jolly Roger flags is kept.

He also explores the details and dangers of deep sea diving and treasure hunting. Chatterton and Mattera are both larger-than-life figures. Chatterton is a long time diver, TV host, Vietnam war medic, and treasure hunter, while Mattera grew up rough-and-tumble, dancing on the edge of organized crime in New Jersey (he knew many top figures in the Gambino crime family, but escaped the life to become first a policeman, then a celebrity bodyguard, and then a commercial diver). Kurston brings them and their story to life in a way that would make a great movie. There’s the exciting bits, the ambush in the Dominican where gunfire is exchanged, and the quiet parts, talking to old fishermen and doing research reading ship’s logs and newspaper articles in an off-the-beaten path library in Seville, Spain – a real life Da Vinci code scene. Pirate Hunters has so many twists, turns, false starts and crazy discoveries, it would make an amazing work of fiction or movie, yet it’s all true.

At the heart of their attempt to find the shipwreck is the mystery of Joseph Bannister – a career captain and pilot, highly successful and trusted. But one day, he “went pirate”. History is silent on why such a highly respected, successful captain would do such a thing. If you think it sounds like an episode of Black Sails, you’re not far wrong. Mattera ultimately develops a theory for what happened to Bannister, and, without giving anything away, this theory ultimately becomes a major turning point in their quest.

Pirate Hunters is a fantastic book. I read it in one sitting and I’m not sure I took a break. It’s about pirates and history and the thrill of the chase, but ultimately it’s about chasing your dreams and not settling for the easy way in life. Chatterton and Mattera almost give up more than once, and could easily be doing other things for less effort and more money, but they nearly sacrifice everything in their quest.

(ps: I love a book that points you to other great books. Pirate Hunters is a winner here too: Kurson points me to The Buccaneers of America, an amazing first-person contemporary account of Pirates. You can get the book for free online. The Library of Congress has also made an extremely interesting online version of the original book in Dutch with wonderful illustrations. It’s too cool, check it out: http://www.loc.gov/flash/pagebypage/buccaneers/)

(I received a copy of Pirate Hunters through LibraryThing’s wonderful Early Reviewers program, in exchange for a review. )

Dying Every Day, by James Romm

d“Nero fiddled while Rome burned…” You probably have this phrase running around in your head, even though you mostly have no idea who Nero was. It’s even less likely you know who Seneca was.

James Romm’s “Dying Every Day” is an accessible and intriguing biography of Seneca, the man behind the throne during the reign of Nero. Seneca is a study in contradictions: a Stoic philosopher, author of any number of letters, philosophical tracts and plays extolling the virtues of a simple, virtuous life, he was at the same time Nero’s “consigliere”, complicit in any number of foul deeds and deeply entrenched in the corrupt court of Nero. Intrigue, Poison and outright murder of political rivals was common. He was also present in the courts of Caligula and Claudius. The parallels to Thomas Cromwell as portrayed in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” are striking.

I found the book deeply interesting and educational, and an easy read for a history book. The title comes from one of Seneca’s letters, “Consolation to Marcia”, in which he expounds the Stoic philosophy that to be born is to begin dying, and that death is always with us. “We are all of us dying every day”. But equally well might this apply to Seneca’s slow spiritual death, essentially trapped in his role as Nero’s right hand.

For years Seneca served first as Nero’s tutor during his early years, then as his primary counselor once Nero became emperor. There’s a great Greek word for this, from the book – Seneca was called a tyrannodidaskalos – “tyrant-teacher”.

I learned any number odd facts from the book. Seneca’s brother Gallio was proconsul of a territory in Greece where the apostle Paul was preaching, and after a disturbance Paul was brought before Gallio (who like Pilate “washed his hands” of the matter). (Paul was a Roman citizen by the way). Eventually Paul invoked his right as a citizen to an appeal before the emperor and was shipped to Rome. While there’s no documentation of a meeting it’s entirely likely Paul met the emperor, and there is evidence (somewhat sketchy) that Paul became friends with Seneca.

Seneca also became fabulously wealthy during his life (likely through questionable use of his office), and lent a great deal of money to tribal leaders in Roman Britain. The uprising of the tribes led by the woman warrior Boudicca can be traced to Seneca calling in his loans.

The book chronicles the twists and turns of life at court – the intrigues, the murders, and the shifting alliances that allowed one to stay alive when a wrong word would get you killed by the emperor or a rival. Along side that it covers Seneca’s writings and how they influence or were influenced by events. The book is well worth the read, but in the end I wasn’t entirely satisfied. Much of the book seems speculation (phrases like “he must have…” or “likely” crop up a lot) and I don’t feel I really got to the heart of the contradiction in Seneca’s character – but the historical facts are so spare, perhaps that has to wait for a work of fiction. There’s great material for a historical fiction novel in there….

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