Plan.fm

It's been toooo quiet!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:28:42 -0500

The Buddy Blip news has been a bit quiet lately, but that doesn’t mean we’re not busy at work creating something useful for everyone. We’ve had a few great meetings over the past few weeks and we’ve been hard at work identifying core functionality.

One thing you may have notices if you’ve visited the site recently is that there are some visual changes. We’ve been testing out some new user interface (UI) elements and watching (through data) how our users have been responding to it. So far, things are progressing well.

We’re certainly excited about ALL of the things we’re working and we cannot wait to share them with everyone!

Tobin (:

Happiness is...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:06:00 -0400

a full access CMJ badge! (:

In other Buddy Blip news, we’ve got some cool stuff in the works. It’s been a VERY productive week, but the changes we’re making are across all sections of the site so we’re making sure it works nice and smooth before we open it up to everyone. It’s pretty exciting though. I certainly can’t wait!

Tobin (:

What? No Updates?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:13:30 -0400

So it’s _almost_ been a week since there have been updates posted on the blog, but it’s not due to lack of progress. It’s more due to the progress is unseen to you. I know there are a lot of usability issues that need to be resolved, but I’ve been plugging away at a simple REST API.

The API is for other developers, but we will be our first customers by using it to create an iPhone Application.

n’joy

Tobin (:

Oops ): Sorry, Buddy.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:52:10 -0400

Back the the drawing board on that one. This morning a friend of mine was excited to invite some people to Buddy Blip so he used the “Invite From Other Networks” feature… this unfortunately sends out to everyone in your contact list.

I’ve temporarily disabled that feature until I can create a friendly flow where you can individually select users to invite from your contacts on gmail, aol, yahoo, or hotmail.

Sorry, Buddy.

Tobin ):

October 7th, 2009 Buddy Blip Update - We've got tweets!

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:39:00 -0400

Okay, this is just a small update…

Right now you can post to twitter from Buddy Blip by authorizing Buddy Blip to update your twitter stream. There are a few bugs I’ve identified and I really need to clean up the “settings” section, but I’m excited by this update.

n’joy

Tobin (:

How would you spend $20K - Revisited

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:11:02 -0400

“If you had $20k to use towards your own technology business/startup, how would you manage it and spend it?” – That was a question I asked other nextNY members in May of 2008. At the time I had created a small fund for myself to allow me to bootstrap my startup and I wanted to find out from my peers about what they would do.

Some had humorous responses such as a huge launch party or aeron chairs, but what I really wanted to know was what should I put my money towards to most benefit my chances at success. Some of the more serious answers included development of prototypes, customer & market research, and marketing.

Looking back I feel my questions was a bit naïve. However over a year later I have a much clearer thought on what I’d do with that money. I’d spend as little as possible. Specifically I’d minimize my costs to find the cheapest way to validate my product idea.

I would start spending the money only when I feel I have a product that I feel confident would garner interest from my customers. Once I knew more about my product, customers, and distribution channels I am certain I would be confident in where spending would be effectively applied (be it development, marketing, research, distribution, etc).

October 3rd, 2009 Buddy Blip Update - We got images! (:

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:56:17 -0400

While on my flight from ATL to California I was able to do a bunch of coding. The biggest thing I did was allow users to post images to comment streams and private conversations. It mostly started with my friend Kenji posting a link about getting some Korean food in NYC’s K-Town. I thought it’d be cool to show what I’m expecting!

Take a look:

Yum! (=

Okay, aside from that I spent time working on some API REST services and administration tools.

n’joy!

Tobin (:

October 1, 2009 Buddy Blip Update & Thoughts on Usability

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:54:11 -0400

For the past two weeks I’ve been collecting data through casual user tests, A/B testing, Feedback Army, and general analytics. The most significant thing I realized from the feedback is that I’m not doing much communicating on the site. I’m not explaining to the user how I envision they use Buddy Blip. I’m only telling them what it can do and leaving them to figure out how on their own.

I came to the realization that I’ve been focusing on usable features instead of communicative features. Communicative features are functionality that helps the user understand what a product does by communication and functioning at the same time. This goes above just a simple blurb that tells what the user should do. A communicative feature should also assist the user in performing an action on your site while guiding them how to do it. A perfect example of this is Tumblr.com.

I LOVE Tumblr.

The first time you create an account and log in to Tumblr, you are presented with an introduction to how to use their service. These aren’t just splash screens though. They guide you to creating a post and customizing your Tumblr account while collecting data. After three steps you’re all set and already experienced on how to use Tumblr.

Here are a few examples from Tumblr:

Tumblr instructs users how to customize their account

Now they show you how to find cool people

These are great practices and have prompted me to spend the past week building a similar set of functionality. This past week I’ve been focusing on creating a system that allows me to create communicative features on the site. If you want to take a look at how it works, just sign up for an account! Don’t worry, if you already have an account it will still guide you through the process.

Noticeable updates:

Fixed image upload bug that “lost” user images after uploading
Added “welcome” guide to help users get started
Added an announcement system to the dashboard that allows me to send updates to users when they log in.

More to come soon.

n’joy!

Tobin (:

Regarding Search Engine Marketing (SEM) on $5/Day

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:52:03 -0400

The other day I was discussing the thought of SEM on $5/day with a few peers. The general consensus was that $5/day is not really effective for generating leads on Google Ad Words, but after giving it some thought I was able to turn around the notion that the “SEM on $5/day” was outdated.

If you’re building a customer product/service that’s re-segmenting an existing market then chances are high that you are going to be running into a lot of competition. You will often see valuable keywords for your ads with high Cost Per Click (CPC) bids. When trying out Ad Words for Cupid’s Lab, I was seeing CPC bids starting at $5-$6 for keywords associated to dating. In other cases there were keywords that were a bit less costly, however they were still $1 CPC. You’re not going to get very far on $5/day. Or are you?

If your intention is to scale and bring in as many customers through the door, then $5/day is not going to work for you. However, if you’re starting out and you really have no idea how users are going to react to your product then you should spend no more then $5/day. If you are the latter, then you really aren’t in a position to scale in the first place. So fight the temptation of increasing your ad spend to introduce more people to your product.

Do you know what the current conversion rate for your product is? How many visitors do you have to your service before they become customers? Do you have a solid number or do you have an assumed number? Assuming that 1% will automatically convert is not realistic unless you actually see 1% convert and understand why.

If you don’t know these numbers, then you the $5/day allowance is where you should start. This allows you to begin the validation process of your assumptions by collecting qualitative data. From there you’ll be testing two things.

First you’ll be collecting valuable metrics about what users are responding to through your ads and whether or not you are targeting the proper keywords. You’re going to spend a lot of time refining and increasing your Click Through Rate. Don’t worry about the # of impressions your ads get, focus on the percentage of users that actually show interest in what you are selling by clicking your ad. Your actionable data should be which ads and keywords yield the best click through rate.

Next you should be prepared to collect actionable data from the users that click your ads because the sale does not end there. If you have a multi page flow for the user to follow, you need to determine the abandonment rate and why the user is dropping off through split testing your pages.

When it comes to this sort of testing you do not need significant data to find emergent behavior. Having 100 visitors test your assumptions most likely will yield the same results as if you had 1000 vistors. This where SEM $5/day works well, it helps you collect qualitative data without breaking the bank.

Once you have a clear understanding of how your customers are behaving you can begin to increase your ad spend and see if your assumptions are scalable. Until then, stick with the $5/day until you can validate and tweak your conversion rate.

September 27th, 2009 Update

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:10:00 -0400

The day job has been keeping me a bit busy, but I was able to manage to squeeze in some BuddyBlip.com time.

Here are some of the noticeable updates:

New Temporary “Logo” & Header
New landing page
Task notification system on the dashboard

Other things I’ve done is modified the server side caching on uploaded images. I’m dynamically processing the images based on how they are used. There was a small bug where the resulting image was not being cached properly

Another change was the use of Google Web Optimizer for doing A/B Tests on the landing page. I don’t think either of the landing pages are going to yield any significant conversions, but this is largely a test in exploring the process of collecting actionable data.

I have some cool things in the works for this week in regards to how Buddy Blip is used. I can’t wait to share them.

Tobin (:

Test Driving The Lean Startup Process

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:45:00 -0400

This evening I attended the fourth installment of the NYC Lean Startup Meetup where we discussed the concepts of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Fraser, Kareem, and Greg put together a great presentation about what a MVP is and opened up the discussion to the group.

Incase you don’t know, Eric Ries defines a MVP as follows:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Validated learning? What’s that? It’s the customer validation process where you make a hypothesis for your “product”, test it, collect data, and learn from your results to tune your understand of what your customers needs are.

At the Meetup we discussed some examples presented about what an MVP is, but at times there seemed to be some confusion about what the purpose the MVP was really supposed to do. The concept isn’t to just introduce a new product, but also and primarily to create something that allows you to collect data to validate your hypothesis with the minimum amount of effort (time, money, resources). With that data and your validated learning you build a new product that is (most likely) a derivative of your current MVP.

Since I’ve been very captivated by the concepts of Lean Startup, I wanted to give it a try. I have a product idea for a problem I’d like to solve for myself. However, I want to validate my assumptions about the customers who I believe would use my product.

My product idea is a social utility that allows people to manage their casual plans (such as getting together for drinks, attending movies, or meeting up at the gym).

My first hypothesis:

Users do not use twitter, facebook (statuses or events), or evite to plan causal events. Instead they use email, im/chat, and their phones (text or calling) to make plans.

My MVP is a simple survey that asked about what methods users used to communicate casual plans. You can view it here: http://bit.ly/43GUkf How is a survey an MVP? It is a product that helped me acquire data to validate my hypothesis.

As you can see from the chart above my MVP validated my hypothesis that email, texting, and chat were more likely to be used than facebook, twitter, or evite like services when making casual plans.

Granted I did not have a large sample size and by no means is my survey considered scientific, however it does allow me to identify emergent behavior of my potential customers.

With this data and observation I can apply this to my next MVP which will have another hypothesis (most likely related to email, chat, and texting) and allow me to collect data in which I can validate my hypothesis against. If my hypothesis is flawed, then I will look to why and reform a new hypothesis and try again.

Yet another update...

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:58:06 -0400

Made some more fixes for bugs that you probably didn’t notice were there and also opened up the service for anyone to join. Check out the nifty new landing page…

I’ll be setting up Google Web Optimizer tonight with a few variations of the landing page.

Oh, and yes (= there’s an iPhone App in the works.

Quick little update...

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:50:07 -0400

This morning Mark’O pointed out that I forgot something important with this weekends release. There was no way to search for people on the site. I just added a way to search people by name. You’ll find it under “Find People”.

n’joy!

Tobin

Finishing up a day of work and getting ready to enjoy a pretty...

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:49:10 -0400

Finishing up a day of work and getting ready to enjoy a pretty sunset as I ride back to Brooklyn!

Release Update

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:46:23 -0400

It’s been a bit of a long and productive week!

Got 100+ results for my survey by Monday
There was the 2nd Shackshack Next NY event on Tuesday.
My birthday on Wednesday
Got back on track with a 7 mile run through Brooklyn on Thursday
Met with David Rostan of SocialYell.com on Friday
Did some work for the “Day Job” on Saturday

Fortunately I’ve been able to get a lot of work done on Buddy Blip! Here are some notable changes and updates:

You can now find & invite members through their AOL, GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail accounts.
You can now invite people by email address.
You can post something to do that is not linked to an existing venue
Cleaned up the Inbox & Conversation pages
Cleaned up Buddy List
Made http URLs in activities, comments, and conversations clickable.
You can upload profile photos

I’m really excited about the results from the survey. It validated a lot of what’s been on my mind as to what people currently do and who my real competition is. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that and I’ll be posting my findings a bit later this week.

Thanks!

Tobin

Buddy Blip Survey #1

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:10:00 -0400

Buddy Blip Survey #1:

I’ve created a short survey (one of many to come) to identify user behaviors in the current market place. If you have a moment, please take the survey!

Take it here: http://bit.ly/43GUkf

Thanks!

BuddyBlip & Lean Startups

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:31:31 -0400

I became an immediate fan of Lean Startups after first reading about the topic. As both a virgo and an engineer the idea of testing hypothesis and making decisions based off of the findings is something that resonates with me a lot. The thought of not assuming that I know what I’m doing makes me feel like there’s a lot to be learned. It’s quite a humbling approach.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking with “customers” and validating the problem I’m trying to solve. In the coming week I’ll be rolling out my functional MVP and testing out my hypothesis by conducting user interviews.

My Goals:

Create a product I would use on a daily basis
Create a product that is useful if only one person uses it, but becomes more useful if it’s used socially.
Spend less then $100/month to support the system
Build a functional MVP in 4 weeks

Some posts which have inspired me to try this out: