Guy Kawasaki posted a video from the Churchill Club's annual look at startups. It's a good look at the issues start-ups need to handle as they try to turn their idea and turn it into a product and a company.
Reid Hoffman made an important point that Distribution is a critical factor to success. The distribution channel of wholesalers and retailers is well known for traditional businesses.
For internet companies, the methods of distribution become more challenging.
I'd love to see a definitive list of distribution channels for internet companies.
Here is my starter list:
1. Partnering with companies that can provide high traffic
2. Partnering with companies with adjacent business models. (eBay & PayPal, Linked-In & Simply Hired, etc.)
2. PR
3. Company or Product Blog. This was worked very well for us in Windows Live. Each team has a blog for their product which allows us to have a conversation directly with our customers. We have links between the products so customers can learn about other products from Microsoft. (Examples: Windows Live Mail Desktop, Windows Live Messenger).
3. Community (Discussion boards & other people's blogs)
4. Invites: This works when users inviting other users will increase the value provided by the site. (Social Networks, Photo Sharing, etc.)
5. Brand: MySpace has become a brand with their controversy. The passionate users of social networks may migrate to other versions as they come out (Bebo?). However the brand will bring in people unfamiliar with the pros/cons of the different sites. Brand can bring more companies to MySpace than their competitors when they want to create promotional pages. Zillow.com is becoming a powerful brand resulting in few people realizing that they have competitors.
6. Advertising on Social Networking sites: Companies are creating MySpaces promotional pages in place of advertising. I wonder if this will die soon after being rejected by the community.
7. Buying Ads in Search Engines: This is a traditional way of acquiring customers.
The goal is to avoid a linear correlation between acquiring customers and costs. #7 is an example of linear costs, which is the downside of traditional marketing. #1 through #6 are leveraged ways to acquire customers compared to the costs.
I know there are more ideas out there. I'd love to hear other people's ideas of what I'm missing.
-Bryan
Tags: [Guy Kawasaki, Churchill Club, Startups, Reid Hoffman, Distribution, Distribution Channel, PR, Public Relations, Blogs, Advertising, Partnering]
We released a Channel 9 video on the Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop feature. See video...
Here is the link to the blog post giving the details about the feature.
-Bryan
Bryan Starbuck
Tags: [Windows Live Mail Desktop, ActiveSearch, Ads, Contextual Ads]
There was some pretty heated feedback from Dave Winer to Blake Ross after Blake talked about Firefox at Gnomedex 6.0.
Blake started by saying that people are likely to ask about the amount of memory Firefox consumes, and that they already know about it and are working on that issue -- so no need to bring it up during Q&A.
Blake expressed that he wanted the focus of his talk to be about the way Firefox grew in the community. During the talk he spoke about how a grass roots community was created and worked. They created logos, flyers, and effectively got the word out.
I saw the first hand effect of this community because my wife came home after working at the local library. Everyone that worked there was talking about how important it was to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I was curious on why and the focus was on: a) the tabbed feature and b) perception that security was better in firefox. (I won't touch the security issue, that would deserve it's own blog post. Not simple...)
His entire talk was about the efforts of the community to grow the user base. He then showed this video as one of the many used by the community.
Steve Gillmor gave strong feedback at this point. Here is my interpretation...
#1 Steve Gillmor did not like the approach of going negative and growing the user base by using the bashing technique.
#2 Steve's wanted to know why community communication didn't focus on what makes Firefox a better product.
At various points in the talk Blake didn't want to talk about features of Firefox but wanted to focus on the work of the community to grow the user base.
Steve asked what new features will be included in future versions and Blake said he didn't want the talk to focus the product and rather the community. Steve said Blake should be listening to the people at Gnomedex to receive the user feedback on the product.
I think half of the disagreement was confusion about why Blake narrowed his talk. Blake later explained on his blog why and how he narrowed the conversation.
I believe the other half of the feedback was a preference to not go negative. Instead, the focus of communication with end users should be on the specific product benefits.
Full Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. I no longer work on IE but did during IE v3 thru v5.5, and I have many friends working on v7. Even so, I always try to be as impartial on the subject as possible.
-Bryan
Our team has published a Channel 9 video listing the new features in Windows Live Mail Desktop beta. This is a great chance to get a tour of the features that are being released.
This video covers most of our current features. A few are not shown, such as Active Search (see blog post on that feature).
The WLDM Channel 9 video is available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=200389
Tags: [Channel 9, Channel9, Windows Live Mail Desktop]
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