About Me 0094: why internet marketing

In the world of entrepreneurship one of the most important forms of currency is information. If you aren’t on Quora, you probably don’t have that currency.

Listening To Customers

One of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley nowadays is the “Lean Startup Model”, a model in which quick iterations are superior to theoretically long, drawn out releases which have a significant potential of failure. The position of Lean Startup Model evangelists is a legitimate one: if you don’t listen to your customers then you are pretty much destined to fail because customers tell you what they want. To many of those individuals I would suggest that their single landing page site which is used to test an idea is often times completely misleading. One case and point comes from a story told on Quora by Michael Flaxman in response to the question “What is the best way to test an internet startup idea?”:

Unfortunately, the most reliable way to find out is to build the minimum viable product and see how people respond to it.

The idea that you can scientifically determine whether or not a startup will work is a nice thought, but I think it’s unrealistic. If there were reliable tests you could take before launching a startup, wouldn’t startups fail at an exceptionally low rate?

I have a developer friend who wanted to build a cheaper email marketing software, but he didn’t want to make the investment in building a product only to find that it couldn’t make money. So, he found some of his competitors’ clients and asked them if they’d switch. When that seemed promising he setup a landing page that looked like it was for real email marketing software, only the software wasn’t yet built. He then bought traffic and carefully measured how expensive it was to get a “signup” on his landing page. Looking good so far. 6 months of building a clone product and he was ready to get it to some of those trial users.

Unfortunately, his users had lots of reasons why they now wouldn’t actually leave their current SaaS product and switch to his cheaper one. 6 more months of fixing bugs and adding features — including one that let you 1-click copy your account from one of his major competitors into his software — and the project had flopped. It turns out getting people to say yes to “are you interested in a better/cheaper product?” is much easier than getting them to actually make the change (and pay money for it).

Ouch! Take that lean startup people! Listening to the customer is definitely important to some extent, however I would suggest that customers don’t know what they want. That doesn’t mean that all hope should be lost though. That’s because there’s a much better indicator of what to build: the market.

Listening To The Market

While the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want, the market is a very effective gauge of it. Successful companies are those who build products that resonate with their customers. Those customers in turn tell others about the product and eventually the product reaches a significant number of customers. So how on earth do you monitor the market? Read the news, extensively research the market, and most importantly (if you are in the Internet industry): read Quora! I have a quick story to illustrate the point of this.

I have an entrepreneur friend who is constantly asking me for advice and asking for help on raising funding. My single greatest complaint isn’t about his business (e.g. that it’s a bad idea … which it isn’t), but instead that he has no idea who the other players are in the market. How can you truly become a seriously player in a market that you are completely oblivious to? The answer: you can’t. There are tons of companies who are out there doing the research for you to find out what the market wants.

Unless you are a first mover, which is most often not the case, there is no excuse for not knowing who’s in your market, what they’re doing, and what works for them and what isn’t working. The bottom line: if entrepreneurship were a chess game, no chess player makes their moves without taking into consideration the other player’s moves. So pay attention to the market!

Quora As A Place To Gain Insight

While Quora is by no means the beat of the marketplace, there is plenty of insight to be gleaned from people who post on the site. There are great responses posted about many of the toughest challenges facing entrepreneurs. Clearly, if you spend too much time on the site you are doing yourself a disservice. Additionally, not all players in the marketplace are exactly transparent about their intentions, so the deepest insight comes from those who are sharing the moves they made weeks, months, or most often, years ago.

These anecdotes can prove to be extremely valuable. Business anecdotes are one of the reasons that incubators like YCombinator have become so successful. Aside from providing money, they provide unfiltered insight from business leaders in the community. While much of the information on Quora is clearly filtered (often times so much that it’s clear the person responding has intentionally left out chunks of a story), there are plenty of great insights to be gleaned from reading the site. Do you agree that Quora has become a critical resource for any serious internet entrepreneur? Do you use the site regularly?

Congressman Bill Keating plans to introduce legislation putting limits on U.S. companies selling net monitoring equipment to repressive regimes, after news that a Boeing subsidiary sold powerful net inspection technology to Egypt’s state telecom.

“The Iranian and Egyptian protests have taught us that social media can be as powerful as any gun,” said Rep. Keating (D-Massachusetts). “Companies that are selling technology to countries that are using it to perpetuate human rights abuses must work with Congress to make this right.

“We should have the same safeguards – such as end user monitoring agreements – that we do when we sell weapons abroad.”

At issue is a company called Narus, which makes powerful deep packet inspection technology that can monitor the net’s fattest pipes to see what traffic is passing through — including reconstructing online phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, and web surfing activities.

Tim Karr, the campaign director for the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Free Press, noticed last week that Narus had sold its surveillance technology to the state-run Telecom Egypt, as well as to other repressive regimes including Saudi Arabia.

Karr says its time the U.S. government realized the power of such equipment to repress people and put limits on its distribution. That’s especially true in light of evidence from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt that social networking sites such as Facebook can be powerful tools for organizing, publicizing, recruiting and sustaining pro-democracy forces, according to Karr.

Mubarak’s regime, which was toppled Friday after weeks of protest, was so threatened by power of the net to allow citizens to mobilize that it took the extraordinary step of shutting down Egypt’s internet and mobile phone networks for almost a week in late January.

During the protests, Egypt also imprisoned a number of online activists, including Google executive Wael Ghonim who administered one of the Facebook pages that served as an online café for organizing the protests.

It’s not clear what technology, if any, Egypt’s once feared intelligence services used to track them down.

But, as Evegny Morozov argues in his recent book “The Net Delusion”, social networking tools can make it easy for a repressive regime to track down activists. That’s clearly seen in Tunisia, where a government controlled ISP stole Facebook usernames and passwords in an attempt to erase anti-government pages.

That’s why Karr finds Narus’s sale of its technology to Egypt so egregious.

“Narus basically gave a hammer to a Mubarak regime that sees its political opponent as nails,” Karr said. “Congress or the state department can convince them to disclose the ways they are selling this tech and to whom and for what purposes.”

Egypt in particular galled Karr, since the Mubarak regime routinely jailed bloggers, and is counted as one of 13 “enemies of the internet” as compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

Narus declined to respond to multiple voice mail messages left for its CEO Greg Oslan this week.

Controversy is not new to the Sunnyvale company, which was founded in 1997 and purchased by defense contracting giant Boeing in 2010. The company first came to notoriety in 2005, when it was found to be the processing brain behind the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of the internet inside an AT&T facility in San Francisco.

Last year, the company announced it was marketing a new product called Hone, which could connect multiple online profiles to a single person, helping governments track down criminals and subversives.

In an interview with PBS’s Frontline, a Narus marketing executive lauded the power of the equipment to “peer into pipes” but stammered nervously that he had no idea if their equipment was being used in that room.

Narus isn’t the first company to come under scrutiny for selling electronic monitoring equipment to repressive regimes. German technology giant Siemens AG and Nokia sold mobile phone and internet monitoring equipment to Iran in 2008, prompting a boycott and backpedalling by the companies.

However, nearly all carrier-grade phone and internet equipment now ships with so-called “intercept capability,” thanks to a 1996 U.S. law called CALEA which mandated that all U.S. phone networks be capable of very sophisticated wiretapping.

In 2002, the FCC — at the behest of the FBI — extended those wiretapping requirements to the internet, prompting major manufacturers to build those capabilities into their equipment as defaults.

These federal requirements also benefited Narus, whose powerful monitoring equipment is used by many of the nation’s telecoms to provide the legally required wiretapping systems needed to comply with U.S. government wiretapping orders.

Activists can often evade the worst of such surveillance using encrypted communication tools, but even these are now under assault by the FBI, which is seeking to have Congress require that encryption technology have backdoors for government surveillance.

Egyptians capturing the revolution with their mobile phones and digital cameras. Credit: SierraGoddess

benchcraft company scam

About Me 0094

Thursday, February 17, 2011

why internet marketing

Listening To Customers

Listening To The Market

Quora As A Place To Gain Insight

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