Pakistani Startup Profile: WiXD

WiXD is a one of the first community based web startups focused on the Pakistani market, and I think it could be on to something.

It is a community where people in Pakistan can upload their music and share it with their friends.

The idea isn’t new, especially globally, but I like the super-clean treatment of it on the website. I also really like the embeddable music player they have made, which lets you embed a song of your choice from WiXD onto your website and blog.

What gets really interesting, however, is the potential this platform can have in promoting underground music in Pakistan. If WiXD adds a few more features — such as a better rating system (think Digg) and dedicated artist pages (think MySpace) then it will have the potential of giving the underground music talent in Pakistan a spot to shine and breakthrough.

After building up its platform, WiXD plans on supporting underground bands even with a virtual storefront — which would be interesting to see as a business model. I think that can work in particular among ex-pats looking for the latest music from Pakistan.

Targeting the underground is also important because upcoming artists are much more open to their content being shared. Without such a model, WiXD runs the risk of becoming another distribution channel for piracy, which can put them in pretty serious copyright infringement waters.

Even if that becomes an issue, one good thing they have on their side is that they do not actually allow downloading or digital distribution of copyrighted music, only playback. That in itself could create some interesting business models that play with the quality of the files.

Finally, it will also be interesting to see if their community thinks of more interesting uses of their platform — such as sharing poems and thought ala The Chowk, or sharing and promoting audio lectures in universities.

Regardless, I think they have a great technical engine that can allow them to do a lot over the next few months.

Side Note: Some additional things I like about WiXD is the fact that they are using a blog to communicate right from day 1, and are updating it frequently — that is a great way for a company to connect with communities.

Next: I’ll write my analysis of WiXD as a product (I told you I can’t resist that)

Simplicity = Relevance = $$$ (Great products reduce the overload of choice)

All products and businesses serve people. Successful products and businesses create relevance for the people they serve.

I’ve often said that you know you have created relevance when your customer cannot sleep after hearing or reading about your product or service — the impact on his or her life is too important for that person to ignore, because of how relevant the offering is.

One of the easiest and best way of creating this relevance to help reduce the confusion in a person’s massively overloaded lives.

Today, people are massively overloaded — with information, with news, with ads (Aur Sunao anyone!?), and with options! Just remove those nuisances, and you’re relevant to someone!

Here is a great way, then, of identifying successful product opportunities:

1- Recognizing the said overload is simple enough — how many times can each of us tolerate the Aur Sunao ad before adding a todo list item that says “Switch cellphone carriers away from Mobilink — tell friends to do the same”

2- Reducing the said overload is simple enough as well — just remove the pains!

3- Launch, highlight, and trumpet your simplicity.

The first law of media states that if you reduce the total set of media, the attention to any specific media would increase — from competitive economics it implicitly says that the fewer choices of media will also be higher quality choices, and thus there will be a high probability that they will be relevant to the segment at large.

This is a fairly common approach of creating relevance through simplicity. One way of controlling the scope — and hence quality — of media presented is by creating niche-content, such as AAG TV.

This is the approach used to simplify the overload of news and media.

But what about the overload of Choice?!

Take a look at your desktops after a few months of use, and if you’re like me they will look like a war zone. Take a look at many plugin-enabled software products (such as Firefox or MS Word) with all of their options open (a problem called Feature Creep — see the Wikipedia entry on it).

Beyond software, look at Starbucks — which now boasts over 35 different ways of getting coffee! Or, perhaps, even down to Subway, with a lengthy exam to go through to make your sub.

Finally, take a look at ANY remote control being manufactured today, and try not to wonder why God decided to put you through that experience.

We live with WAY too many options, and this can more than overwhelm the typical person. Honestly, the choices we struggle through in day-to-day life makes the Office Clippy look like a refined gentleman in comparison.

The excessive options stop us from doing what we actually set out to do, and constantly give us moments to think and measure options and make decisions. Anyone, then, who can help us sift through the options and can allow us to actually do what it was that we wanted to do, will create successful products, and if nothing else allows you to build a successful niche set of customers.

Examples?

- Quiznos Subs VS Subway — If I’m going in to have a sandwich, dont put me through an exam that makes me lose my appetite — Quiznos menu structure is a clear winner.

- ANY TV remote control VS the Apple TV Remote — This is even on the CDF Engineering test for all applicants — a 6 button remote can do everything a 50 button one can, AND looks nicer too

- ANY CRM software VS 37Signal’s HighRise — When all we want to do is keep track of our company’s interactions with our customers, why have the sales team spend more than half the day filling up forms?

- MS Project Server + MS Sharepoint Server + MS Project Client VS BaseCamp or GoPlan – Ugh… dont even get me started on Project server series…

So… short answer to a long answer to a short question: Simplicity = Relevance = $$$

Leading companies go the extra mile in Customer Experience

If I provide consulting to you on Product Design, or manage product development, you will likely find in me an obsessive desire to focus only on User Experience.

At CDF the engineering lifecycle does not look at requirements or design — Engineering is asked to look only at “User Design”, which is a detailed description of what a user should feel when using something, even if it requires 4 more hours of tweaking code in places that makes no sense.

With product design, this same obsession expands to all aspects of the product — the brand, the marketing message, the distribution plan — everything has to reflect a story of (1) What you stand for (2) What the customer will feel by working you, and (3) How you will continue to provide that presence and insight.

But — does it really matter? The #1 Question I get from CEOs and Product Managers is “Why dont we launch a limited product which just proves the concept and then improve it over time?”

Today, I found the one-line answer I have been looking for.

Dale Wolf, part of the fantastic group of passionate experts at www.perfectCEM.com, puts it beautifully in this post:

I get asked all the time why I think delivering a perfect customer
experience is so important. My knee-jerk response is “do you want to
deliver an imperfect customer experience?”

What’s more, Dale has collected insights from leading businesses on whether or not it is important.

So, does going the extra hard work matter? HP, Dell, Computer Associates, Motorola, The Home Depot, Xerox, and many others seem to think so. Check out the post linked above for that document.

Shouldn’t you be looking into best-of-class business or engineering practices as well?

—-

As a side note, Dale Wolf was also kind enough to write a wonderful warm comment on Green & White, and such professionalism is always a treat. I’d like to highlight that comment below.

Thanks for the compliment about www.perfectCEM.com … we’re trying real hard to deliver good Cx
content, but as you know this is more a passion than a vocation. I just put up a
post that offers a download of a little research I just completed. I got tired
of colleagues who prefer to stay with a product-centric approach instead of
making the jump to Cx … the basic challenge was whether this Cx stuff is real or
a fad. So I put together a dowloadable document on 25 Business Leaders Who are
Committed to Customer Experience. It is accessable at http://contextrules.typepad.com/transformer/2007/03/is_customer_exp.html.
Best
wishes to “the other osama” — Dale Wolf

What is the Digg Effect?

Well, my humble attempt at creating some activity on digg for a recent post didn’t quite pan out.

On a side note: I believe that is because the total effort required for a new person to get digging is too much.

Today I talk about another basic term Evangelists and System Admins
should be aware of today (granted: it has been around for more than a
year now).

I’m talking about www.digg.com. Digg is a “social newspaper” — a news site where the people (YOU) decide which story on the internet is worth being on the front page of the virtual newspaper.

It is a fantastic demonstration of the effects of collective wisdom, and a great way to find news from the fringes that mainstream newspapers wont cover.

So what happens if your website lands on the front page? This article describes it well, but basically you get a sudden spike in web traffic that often your servers will not be able to handle. Digg users are proud of this “Digg Effect”.

What is so special anyway?

So earlier we talked about the Network Effect, which was a pull in interest and leads for your products / brand because of purely social or relationship-based effects. Marketing people specialized in word-of-mouth marketing spend the better half of their lives studying this.

The Digg Effect, on the other hand, is much more interesting. It is based on the idea of “collective wisdom” (cannot remember who coined the term) — that often people in a large enough number analyzing something collectively can yield better results than seasoned analysts.

The interesting thing is that this creates the same sense of insurance about a product than the Network Effect can. Even though anonymous strangers will vote on what they feel is a relevant story, collectively, new strangers looking at that will be compelled (perhaps out of curiosity) to explore other strangers recommendations.

Hmm…. maybe this is the virtual version of how all Pakistani people will gather immediately at the site of an accident?

Maybe. Or maybe it is part of general human nature to feel more secure with being one element of the greater opinions of masses, rather than the person on the fringe. It would be interesting to measure the correlation between Digg users and Social outcasts.

What do you guys think? Do you agree with peoples’ votes on www.digg.com ?

What is The Network Effect?

Understanding the Network Effect is almost critical to the life of a marketer focusing on long tail / edge-centric models.

Here is a live example of the effect in progress.

Yesterday I wrote a somewhat controversial post on this blog. Here is the traffic that resulted:

Just to be sure, yes, it’s all traffic for one post (seen below)

The thing is — almost all of these people have never visited Green & White before. So how did they hear about the blog? Why did they choose to come?

The evidence is here:

Notice all of the gmail, yahoo, and lums squirrelmail accounts.

So what does this example have to do with marketing?

Doesn’t controversy sell? Ok seriously.

Everyone who read the post proabably forwarded it to their friends and their friends and their friends.

If this was a product, I would just have to market this to one person — and the news would spread across the social networks to where people will be diving over each other to buy the product.

Provided ofcourse, that the product is actually valuable. Scratch that .. that the story around the product is valuable.

So, the product is a blog post, but maybe the story in these emails was “This raving madman is shunning lums — all students: organize yourself in groups to march out and burn buildings until he stops because we will be destroyed unless we defend our university”

That’s a good story, and it certainly drove people here in hordes with pitchforks and silver stakes.

A good actual physical product can do the same thing: A good product will automatically create a good story around it that people would want to

• explore for themselves to make their own opinions about
• give them an incentive to participate in the story of the product (by either sharing with others, or refining it for themselves)

Did anyone hear about or use this software Napster? Did you know they only ever marketed that product to 50 people?

They called up 50 students in 50 fraternities in 50 universities in America. “Hey man, there’s a cool new software which lets you share music files with your buddies”. That was their total marketing cost.

How many users did they have when the illegal version was shut down — 5M? 50M?

So now you know what a network effect is — the challenge: How to make one for something not controversial.

Nice video to showcase the Rise of the Edge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

The perfect software tool for the Edge-Centric Online Marketer

Check out www.serph.com for a brilliant product — something that I have been looking for recently for our team.

This is a search engine that searches social media — all sorts of blogs, social networks, ratings or answers websites, and other community oriented pages to find what you’re looking for.

If someone is out there talking about something, you are likely to find it.

It sounds much more promising than Google Blog Search, the recently announced Yahoo! pipes (which can be made to provide similar functionality) and Technorati’s Where’s the Fire.

Um.. why are we talking about this for Pakistan?
Although it is irrelevant for people marketing to Pakistani markets, this could be invaluable to the the handful of product companies in Pakistan focusing on US markets, such as Scrybe, PixSense and others.

Kudos Series-5: Scrybe’s marketing and rollout plan

I have written before that today you can save big on marketing costs, and I will say it again: Edge-centric business plans can give you massive economies on your marketing and production costs.

Scrybe — the calendar programI covered earlierr — is doing just the right things with their outreach. They are living proof that you can be sitting in Islamabad and still be able to top silicon valley!

So why is Scrybe’s marketing costs so low? Because they very accurately understand how the world has changed, and the advantages of this post-networking Flat World

They realized that YouTube is is a great way of getting attention, and they knew that their product can raise eyebrows.

Their total marketing cost has been the time taken to develop a simple product demo video. They put it in YouTube; it was voted upon until it rose up within its ranks.

Then, they tipped some blogs about it. Realizing that blogs is fast becoming the news source of choice — especially for people in the tech business (their primary target market it seems) this was a great way of spreading the news.

Suddenly bloggers all over the world — that they never paid to endorse the product — wrote the good and bad about the product (like I am doing) and within just a month or two many of silicon valley top people are aware about the potential of the product that a small company in Islamabad is building.

The other good thing they are doing is with their rollout plan — it is systematic.

So Scrybe guys: kudos.

With that out of the way, what are they not doing right?

They can cut down on their production costs if they follow the firefox model of openinig up their product to extensions.

Mainly though, they are not positioning their product right. Despite a great ‘context’ concept to introduce into calendars, I dont think they are targetting Joes — or even normal business users.

Maybe catchign all the nerdy hardcore users first is part of their plan of capturign lead customers, but I feel that the product might just be too focused only for silicon valley to really gain traction in consumer markets.

We will have to wait and see how it goes.

The innovation that is shaking up the entire Media industry…

Throughout the history of the industrial age, certain types of ideas, or products, or inventions have reshaped the way people thought about the world.

Starting with electricity, to the assembly line, to (later) personal computers, the internet, cell phones, and even today, every time a groundbreaking new technology appears on in the horizon, it has the potential of shaking up industries.

One of the main reasons this innovation is successful is because it is immediately relevant to the people who use it. The invention is thus usually made at the Edge of the industry, where consumer needs are solved by consumer-solutions themselves.

It is fairly methodical — any company that focuses on edge-centric product innovation will have a high chance that their product will be adopted by customers at large.

While this is a very lengthy topic, I will just point to one such innovation occuring today. Specifically, blogs and podcasts.

A nice “layman” summary of the impact Blogs and Podcasts and Youtube is having on traditional means of media is found in this article

In a nutshell, the media industry survives on Attention. Blogs and Podcasts offer an on-demand, user-created source of news, media and information and thus is significantly cutting into the time spent by people into traditional media sources.

Because of rapidly declining revenues, newspapers and TV / Movie publishers have had to scramble to switch their distribution strategies to an all-online distribution model — witness the growth of iTunes Movie Store, Universal’s support of YouTube, Blockbuster introducing online rentals etc.

All in all, most traditional media companies are faced with an immediate need of adopting one or more of the following in their operations

• User-gernerated content
• User-added value on published content (i.e. comments)
• On-demand media sourcing (i.e. RSS to Movies-on-demand)
• User-scheduled programming and content distribution
• Content (e.g. news) covering micro-communities
• “Anywhere” access to content
• User-controlled content filtering and management
• Separation of media source and presentation ; Media aggregation from multiple sources.

In Pakistan, blogs and podcasts are still a ways away from becoming a significant source of information. This cannot happen without a critical mass of internet users, and with a more invovled approach to using the medium to communicate within communities. (I.e. If anyone wants to be a Contributing Author of Green & White, please contact me — I’ll only be happy with more contributors)

However, that still does not mean that the Edge does not exist among Pakistani consumers. Interactive on-demand TV could be very well received in Pakistan — so could media aggregation.

Most certainly, community-driven news services is the need of the day here — whatever happened to Local News coverage?

Geo seems to be willing to take steps in the right direction, with podcasts of news footage and RSS feeds on its website.

PTCL also seems to have something in the pipeline with its flagship IPTV Project we keep hearing about.

Lets see what can become a disruptive innovation that is relevant to Pakistanis amongst this.

Kudos Series - 4: Mobilink PCO — Excellent business and market strategy by telecom operator

Now here is something that I can happily extend kudos to. This is a small lesson in good strategy.

Telecom companies are running commoditized businesses these days. So locking in the most volumes in the shortest amount of time is the key to success.

So, what do you do if you are a telecom operator and you find that some upcoming competitors have technology that can help them roll out networks faster and cheaper than you?

If your target market for rollout is the vast rural landscape of the country, what do you do if you know that the total cost of implementing your technology for network rollout is higher than the competition, and will probably take longer to actually do so with a traditional approach? What do you do considering also that in your target markets, the comparative value of your brand is only nominal

Answer : You focus on the edge (well atleast to a basic extent)

1. Take out all traditional costs from your rollout plan, by engaging the people at the very edge of the network. Considering the market is rural people, give them a direct financial incentive to consider your products.

In case of Mobilink, convince the people at the edges of the network to operate their own self-serving calling facility.

Results: Your total spend on marketing and sales for the edge would be next to nothing compared to returns. You could get a free slew of micro-franchises with people constantly promoting the usage of your services within communities of trust

2. Adopt a “minimum deterrance” strategy for technology roadmap to make the rollout costs comparable with competitors.

Rather than marketing micro-service plans (i.e. individual cell-phones), offer single products for communities themselves. If a village of 15 houses can share a single connection, so be it.

In case of Mobilink, positioning the product as a PCO rather than an individual connection.

Results: They only need to support one-to-two channels per 15 or so houses. This requires a lot less infrastructure to cover large areas, and the network can be rolled out very rapidly

3. Open up the revenue model based on the value of the money at the edge

Rs.1000-2000 may not mean much at all in cities, but it is significant money elsewhere.

People within the rural target market will be willing to pay premium for phone facilities, but their premium will still be insignificant perhaps to the telecom operator itself.

However, it will still be significant to the people at the edge.

So, you open up your revenue model and make the people part of your risks / rewards structure. They promote and sell your services, and operate your products responsibly. They are able to keep the small premium that the other people in those micro-communities are wiling to pay.

Sharing revenue with these people could perhaps be the best marketing tool for the target customers.

4. Take the right message to customers

Take time and care to understand exactly what would actually peak the interest of your customers from an advertisement.

It is not a jingle, not some silly demonstration of heroics or dominance — it is a human-to-human message about a better life.

The story should clearly describe the business case to the edge. The story should touch on the emotional undertones of a better life. The store should be clear and straight — in fact, it would be more of a sales call than a marketing one.

In short, you would do what Mobilink did. Its a great ad for the product and strategy.