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)

Coffee for thought: What’s in a name?

Wikis have been the topic of recent discussions, but here is an interesting thought:

If I were to ask you to describe what you understand by the term “wiki” in under 15 seconds, could you?

If I were to ask you to describe what you understand by the term “Online Pinup board” in under 15 seconds, could you?

More on Wiki Adoption

This text is being republished here from the comments to a previous post.

I am posting it front and center because a couple of people also asked me about wiki adoption today, and I think these might work for them.

——————-

I will admit I used strong language but it was based on some frustration. Let me tell you about our experience with wikis

We use a wiki within our company, but the first people to adopt it
were HR and Marketing — they needed a tool to help them get organized
in specific plans. From their success, Engineering and ITCOMM have
automatically shifted to the tools. I would say our adoption has been
smooth.

The road we took was to first identify areas of inefficiency in our
work, and find tools that explicitly allowed us to gain in those areas
without adding additional overheads and inefficiency. That is a
straightforward approach that most operations consultants would take.

Now the important thing is that this is an implementation of a
continual improvement process — the goal given to everyone is to
improve their ops, and they themselves find a model that works for
them. That is one of the reasons Wikis work for us, because they gave
everyone a bottoms-up approach to modifying the wiki around their
specific workflows.

In the end, they have vested interest in getting together to use the
Wiki. What’s more, all we have had to do is constantly explore new ways
of adjusting work models around wikis with the goal of improving the
functions’ throughput.

So for us, people either “get it”, or “dont get it”, and if not, we
just start doing Thought Experiments and workflow efficiency analysis
with them.

For ITCOMM and Engineering, the shift is usually more
straightforward — often because most good engineers are also well
organized in my observation.

OK, so all that background aside, I will also admit that we still
face some snags on our adoption roadmap — there are people who do not
contribute as often, or do not follow the teams’ conventions or
structure.

So I went to wikipatterns quite like you are hoping — to find answers to our adoption challenges.

To be honest, I spent 2 hours on it and all it did was give me a
migrane. Even back in the hayday when I was designing satellite
base-stations I didn’t see anything so technical as those patterns.

So obvious question is — why should I have to resort to drawing out
a map of fairies and trolls or character profiles on a whiteboard
before I can start getting enough clues to understand how to fix
adoption issues?

If I am trying to find a human solution to a human problem, why start with patterns and character profiles to begin with?

I argue that in most of my consulting career I have not yet seen any
technical people that have an influence in the day-to-day workflows of
other functions. The only thing they can perhaps to do is Internal
Marketing of Wikis (i.e. raise awareness).

However, the adoption decision for each department — in fact, each
person — is based on understanding the benefit to me from using it.

So I argue that you should definitely look to your adoption patterns
with a “sales oriented focus”. Call it post-deployment sales of the
benefits of wikis to internal teams.

I also argue that even technical people will have a hard time
actually adapting the Patterns to their specific situation. Even if
there has been some good work done in identifying “Patterns” of
behaviour, they should only be consumed by academic interests such as
the study of social behaviour in the enterprise. I have my doubts that
these patterns — atleast as they are — can be much useful.

There is no doubt that we need a “best practices for adoption” guide
for wikis, but this is just the wrong approach. As I went there, if
your customers are going to that website as a means of finding
after-sales support, then they might just end up thinking “This company
has no idea what my problems are”.

I am glad to know that you guys are working on a “marketing”
version, but all I am arguing is that we need a “human” version first.

Don’t sell me on wikis, just help me understand them in language
that I relate to… You are, after all, the person that introduced me
(the average consumer) to it.

How to ruin any chance of your software’s success (if you are a Wiki Vendor)

This could also be part of marketing or evangelizing software, but speaks of what to avoid.

If you are unfamiliar with Wikis, they are great tools to get your teams collaborating, however they have been particularly plagued by end-user adoption issues.

It is obvious why that is the case : You go into an office that is functioning well and start pitching technology (problem 1), you introduce a WHOLE NEW Concept of Wikis, something they have never heard of before (Problem 2).

What happens when they still aren’t sure about adopting your software? You make one of the biggest marketing blunders you can think of.

You make one of the most complex and technical user guide to Wikis that you can think of, and force it down people’s throats, as Confluence has done with www.wikipatterns.com

Why is this such a huge mistake? What is the point of promoting the flexibility of wikis, if you are forcing people to constrain themselves around definitions and terms that they dont want to learn!?

Isn’t that ironic? You say that Wikis will unleash bottom-up innovation by giving people freedom of expression within the enterprise, then force them to think one certain way about their people.

Now, can you imagine their salesman coming into your office with a pitch akin to “Well you will have a wiki, and identify your fairies, and trolls, and champions, and put in the Poker pattern to get things started” Huh!?

What if I just want to see who “gets” wikis in my team, and who “does not” and explore ways in which those people can make themselves more efficient using wikis?

This was a bad, bad move on Confluences part, and it does nothing but turn their leads further away.

How this case study relates to evangelism
It comes down to Lesson 1 we had earlier in this blog — do not start explaining something in technical terms, and rather focus on the benefits I can have in my workday with the software. Confluence could have done much better, but I wont explain how.

Cogilent Systems launches brilliant white labelled hiring product in the US

The number of Pakistan based companies vying for success in the online US market is increasing. This supports my ongoing thesis that nowadays it is possible to do so with a few catches.

Brightspyre is an interesting corporate hiring portal that companies can rebrand for their own websites. It is an interesting model, and Cogilent has racked up an impressive client list, especially because of their delicate focus on business relationships over technology.

Recently, however, they have lauched something in the US that I feel is even better.

www.personforce.com is a completely white labeled online hiring product that allows any company to host their own little version of monster.com for themselves.

You can see what that means here: http://stanforddaily.personforce.com . If you want candidates from Stanford, then post a job there (you know our telecos could afford them too).

This comes at the right time, when fully monetizing web traffic is becoming realizable — some notable ones include www.techcrunch.com, blog.guykawasaki.com, www.gigaom.com and others, who are actively run job postings on their blogs.

Why is this interesting? Because it has the potential of breaking out into the edge — if all types of event managers in Austin, Texas visit austin.citysearch.com in their to day to day work, then citysearch.com can put up a job board just for them. Then companies who want event managers know the best place to look for those people.

Another interesting thing about this is that Cogilent removes the burden of creating a brand for the board from itself — most of the website owners themselves will actively promote and expand their brand, and Cogilent should benefit from providing the platform.

Now all Cogilent has to do is figure out how to make their sales and business management automated as well — unleash an army of niche-focused resellers or managing partners and they can just sit back and enjoy their sales rack up.

Ideally, make a web-enabled portal to let the average Joe home-worker run “sales and business management” for his white-labelled HR portal business that he can promote in his specific communities — wow that would be something. Imagine the small Joe in a small town in Ohio running around selling personforce to local churches, high schools or community colleges.

Good product Cogilent, and good luck with it.

How to evangelize software - Lesson 1

We’ve been looking for Product Managers recently to join our team and try to change the world with us… but interviewing potential candidates is such a disappointment sometimes.

Familiarity with the software product business and how that relates to sales channels would be necessary, but the “6 years in the IT sector as project manager and then MBA from abroad” types do not know it either.

So I’m actually going to try and write small tips for the people who are thinking of applying, so that we just save each other the effort.

Lesson 1: Software Features do not matter.

As part of our hiring process we keep asking people a simple question about evangelism, and the wrong answer is to start listing down features.

Do not put the burden on your customer to understand and adapt your product with their situation. Be a better salesman and help the customer connect the dots.

So from Sales 101 you should know that all your product does is convert a person’s NEEDs into a BENEFIT. Those are the two places where you should focus your writing.

So how does this fit into evangelism? You just have to let these people know that (1) you had similar needs and issues from your life and (2) your life was made better by some THING. That THING could be software, a business, a friend, your new pet dog, what have you.

So dont talk about features please. Do not talk about it during interviews as well. Just tell a story about your product that becomes interesting for them.

For a great example of story telling, you should either study (and I mean take notes!) Steve Jobs keynotes, or even look inland and study (and I mean take notes!) the Scrybe videos.

Faizan does a wonderful job of talking but his own pains, and about how he is excited about Scrybe helping him out. This heartfelt enthusiasm is the one major reason that company has seen so much publicity for free.

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.

Squidoo still lives?! Interesting…

Linking to Seth Godin made me also look at the startup company he is a co-founder of — Squidoo, and it seems like it is still live despite all odds.

First, a little background for “us Web 0.1 Pakistanis”. Seth Godin is one of the leading Marketing Consultants and presenters in the world. His presentation style has great passion and simplicity. His marketing recommendations are following very closely by most of Silicon Valley.

Early in 2006 Seth announced he was putting all of his latest marketing theories to work in a company called Squidoo, and people took notice.

Despite the hype, however, they missed the hype curve , and got fairly poor reviews of the product.

About a month ago, the site had gone down as well, pretty much meaning the end of the idea.

Not so! Squidoo is live again and it seems to have a better interface for both the site and their lens

Q: Argh Osama you’ve had too much coffee — why should I care?

Well, I am only curious to see if the Squidoo model can work. I am curious because I am trying to study Network Effects in marketing.

The Consumer Hype Curve

Part of the challenge of marketers is to build hype among the customers for upcoming promotions.

What a lot of marketing people will not understand is that the customers build hype for themselves and you have very little control over it.

E.g. If Mobilink puts up a half-page ad in a newspaper that shows a film actor and says “On Jan 10, Mobilink will introduce a new ad on TV… see it” that is not going to help at all.

If GEO tv or DJuice spend three weeks paying for huge billboards with random hints such as “Aur” and “Save your thumbs…” that wont do much except confuse or annoy consumers.

Let’s keep the discussion of creating hype for another time. If you are curious about it you can read Seth Godin’s POV of it.

The questions is, what happens after you’ve created this hype? Click the link below for that discussion.

Bumps on the road to Scrybe, and the risks of Flipping the Funnel

Scrybe recently mentioned on their blog that they will be delaying the next beta phase by a bit.

Whats more interesting is the comments, and it shows Scrybe’s hype plan backfiring just a bit. Their eager customers seem to be losing their patience after 3 months of waiting for a beta invite and no clear communication from the company to address their concerns.

This is perhaps one of the biggest risks of the “Flipping the Funnel” technique promoted by Seth Godin and I will try to briefly outline it.

Flipping the funnel is an edge-centric way of marketing in the new world. It involves finding people who get passionate about what you believe in, and empowering them to market your product for you. It involves using innovating marketing channels such as YouTube, blogs and Digg to get the word out about your product.

This can also happen in Pakistan even without YouTube and Digg being a central focal point of culture — look at what the “Captain Safeguard” campaign is doing for children all over the country, it’s pretty amazing.

However, the trouble is that once someone has ‘joined your army’ in promoting your product, you had better take care of him or her. I will detail this more in my next post, and I’ll just summarize it here.

The risks of Flipping the Funnel include the following:

• People will certainly promote your product to their friends for free. But they will only promote their perspective of your product. Your efforts should thus ensure that your lead customers get an accurate picture of your product.

• More importantly, if you are unable to recognize them and keep them in the community, they will conciously demote your product.

The second risk is much bigger than the risks of traditional advertising, but so is the ROI if you do it well. The important thing to remember is that if your marketing plan relies on building passion among a niche, keep track of your community’s emotional vested interest in your product.

As for Scrybe, I hope they can communicate quickly, and I hope that those comments represent the minority.

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