November 29, 2010

65) Dropbox Votebox

危 wēi  danger

I’ve written about Dropbox before here.  The file storing, sharing and syncing service is great, not least because of its simplicity.   In fact, I often reference it as an example of a company that did a great job of launching with ‘just enough’.  Too often companies kid themselves that they need more features, often to avoid launching (a strange defense mechanism?) or addressing negative feedback.  I’m not alone in loving the service, Dropbox now has more than 4 million users and its reach is truly global, as shown by this cool video showing its client activity:

With this success the feature requests came flooding in via email after launch, how would Dropbox ever be able to prioritise the right features?

机 jī opportunity

Dropbox’s solution is Votebox, a section on the website that lets users suggest and vote on what features should be developed next.  Votebox retains the simplicity of Dropbox while doing more than a basic forum – it enables users to nominate new features and vote on those that they would benefit from most.  Dropbox allocates regular users 6 votes per month and ‘premium’ users 9 votes per month.  Votebox also makes clear what the team is working on and celebrates new features launched.

The system is effective because:

  • Dropbox only works on the features most beneficial to its users
  • It stays true to its premium users (by enabling them to have more votes it ensures that it doesn’t just cater for the needs of the non-paying users)
  • It shares what it’s working on, reducing duplication of requests
  • The commenting feature enables debate by users, iterating feature ideas
  • Finally,  it acts as a marketing tool – reflecting the company’s continual development and often referred to by existing users – a quick Google search for ‘Votebox’ shows the number of users trying to drum up votes for their feature request.  @Dropbox:  why not make this easier and allow people to ‘share’ their requests and votes through social media?  Ironically, should I have put this idea on Votebox?

How About…

  • Remembering to only ever launch with ‘just enough’?
  • Creating an intuitive system for users to offer feedback and feature requests? GetSatisfaction (more consumer facing?) or ZenDesk (better as an enterprise solution?) might  offer simple solutions
  • Assigning importance to different user types?

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October 25, 2010

64) The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

危 wēi  danger

Timothy Ferriss, an American writer, educational activist, and entrepreneur wrote a semi-autobiographical self-help book in 2007 that was well received by friends and family.  Ferriss’ working title, ‘Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit’, wasn’t as well received.  He decided to proceed with the name anyway, liking it because it polarized opinion.  However, once he had secured distribution, Wal-Mart vetoed the title’s use so Ferriss was back to the drawing board.  He found it relatively easy to whittle the list down to 12 but found it tough to select a final name: everyone had an opinion on the best, including his agent and distributor but none agreed.  Surely he would be best going with his gut feel and upsetting either his distributor or agent?

机 jī opportunity

Instead, Ferriss decided to look for some data. He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with:  including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each.  He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle.  Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year.  At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.

His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto.  He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.

My colleague in New York, Joe Gerber has been using this approach recently with real success, it’s a reminder to me that every part of a business (including the virtual) can be prototyped.

How About…

  • Prototyping every part of your business before launch?
  • Placing advertisements into existing online networks before launch for feedback?  e.g. as Joe says how about using Foursquare to figure out “if this is worth stopping for?”

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source video: http://vimeo.com/3934635

October 13, 2010

63) Netflix

危 wēi  danger

Great businesses continually improve, prototyping new offers and services before rolling them out to the relevant customer base.  But, success criteria for innovations are often vague and ‘success’ is therefore highly subjective, particularly when innovation teams only prototype to small groups of customers.  The alternative, rolling out to large numbers of customers immediately is too risky though?  And anyway, given how quickly markets change how could the team say with confidence that any change in performance was attributable to the change in strategy?

机 jī opportunity

In my previous post about Netflix I sang the praises of the company placing a top-level strategy summary in the public domain – you can see it here.  Slide 20 particularly caught my eye, a brief slide on customer satisfaction:

I love the idea of breaking customer bases into equal sized groups, allocating each to different employees or teams and then giving them free reign to attempt to improve their group’s experience.  I imagine that this enables more offers to be prototyped and creates a competition internally to deliver quantifiable results.  I also admire the size of these groups in this case – many companies would be tempted to limit the trial to a handful of customers at most, going with groups of 10,000 enables Netflix to really quantify the benefit and assess relative performance.

The approach establishes what would be called a ‘control set’ in a science experiment and encourages agreement in terms of what success metrics might be in advance.  In fact, my colleague Elizabeth said in a talk recently that she likes to approach piloting using the scientific method:

set a hypothesis -> agree variables -> agree metrics -> agree duration -> feedback and conclusions

That makes sense, and contrary to many people’s perceptions it doesn’t need to stifle creativity. After all, the development of new approaches to pilot and the spotting of interesting new patterns in any results depend on creativity.

How About…

  • Taking a scientific approach to piloting new offers?
  • Thinking how you might divide your business into comparable units for benchmarking?
  • Tasking teams with innovating the offer to different units, then rolling out the most effective new approaches?

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