KnownSense

Product design: Go beyond the normal.

I’ll tell you a story. 15 years ago, I used to be a writer. One of my first bosses would catch me if I did shoddy work and ask me to spend more time on my stories. I never knew how he did it. Until one day he told me that he just searches for double spaces in my copy. Yeah, double spaces, like this “  .” Ok, so I learned the fact the if you don’t pay attention to the very last little detail of your product, no matter how strong your product, it still feels half finished and potential customers will delay clicking “buy.” Anybody in sales will tell you that a delayed sale is a lost sale or at least a sale with increased costs. As a start-up, you don’t need that happening.

Even the big guys make mistakes. A lot of product companies are suddenly getting things wrong. Shorter product cycles, the extended nature of the supply chain and partner credit across large manufacturing keeps new products coming out faster and faster. Risk is increasingly spread out to suppliers and in some cases, customers. It’s the nature of the market today, failing often, succeeding once and scaling up the success. Some companies seem to succeed by failing, often at the cost of the customer and others make sure they never fail the customer.

Some good case studies would include:

• -Tata motors for the Nano failure, and a whole lack of attention to detail.
• -LinkedIn for their half assed attempts at selling you a premium account.

Let’s look at both for vicarious reasons.

The Tata Nano: There was hype, there was pride, there was waiting, and filling forms in triplicate but there were not many sales. Puzzling! Didn’t make sense to me either. Was it the shape? It was not remarkable looking. It did look like a little bar of used sunlight soap though. Was it the interior? Nothing stand-out there either. I didn’t understand it until until I heard it. It was so un-car like when I heard it for the first time, I really didn’t understand how a product manager could approve it in the first place. It’s an auto-rickshaw in disguise. This attitude just exemplifies the Tata story for me till date. Test it on the customer, and see if it works. It truly is the people’s car. This is why you typically don’t see huge queues outside Tata showrooms for their first time launches of home stable vehicles. Meanwhile I feel sad for the suppliers and the retooling they will have to do.

The LinkedIn Premium account. Everyday they keep restricting you even more. So finally one day, you end up upgrading to a paid account, and then suddenly you don’t see what you paid for. No visual indicators, no indicators to show you the premium features on the main screens. Nothing. You end up thinking it’s a waste of money and un-subscribe and then you miss little things, and you have no idea what it is. I only wish they could highlight the damn premium features for paid users.

The exception: The one company you won’t see making mistakes like this is probably Apple. Unfair comparison, I know, but I can’t help it. Apple’s launches are so pixel perfect that minor problems end up being big news stories. When you have a CEO who practices his presentations for a week and lavishes his attention to detail, you have products that make customers queue outside.

Meanwhile, our Tata Nano is dying a slow death, in the sidelines. The sad lonely death of a promise un-met. Similarly, I see far too many start-ups with muggy design, chopped up photos, smudged graphics, silly interface mistakes and a lack of attention to detail that makes it seem like it’s temporary. It just seems like they are passing the risk to you, the potential customer.

What do you think? What other case studies do you think are relevant? What little things do you notice? Do you have quick tests for quality as well?

Privacy: Insert coin to ring bell.

Saw this interesting little vintage ad on boing boing, a doorbell that keeps marketers away by asking them to deposit a coin to ring the bell. It used to be that people valued privacy. Now though, if you value it and refuse to divulge too much online you are easily labeled a recluse, a loner, an introvert, and someone who is a “little off.”

Historically, getting through privacy has been expensive and required research and leg work. Increasingly though, for marketers, data aggregators and governments, it’s cheaper to get to know you. Here quickly are ways to profile someone you don’t know:

• -Facebook and aggregated social profiles
• -Friends leaking information about you, tagging
• -Cookies and trackers
• -IP loggers
• -Location trackers
• -Referrers
• -Click tracking
• -Comments and opinion
• -News and article preferences
• -Online purchases and payments

As a large firm marketer and sales guy I see profiling getting easier everyday. If done well, both companies and you benefit. But increasingly, I am troubled. I can see that with publicly available data overlays it is easy to profile someone. Once profiled and aggregated, this data becomes easier to leak as well. What troubles me is that spooks, governments, identity hackers and others have access to levels of data and overlays that can give out a lot more. Add the ability to intercept traffic or harvesting DNS queries, and you have a full profile of someone you really want to know.

What you end up getting after a detailed profiling exercise is: your age, your interests, your current location, your kids, your political leanings, your emotional triggers, your food, your current concerns, your social groups and separations, your affiliations, your reading interests, your travel plans, your financial profile and liabilities, health and allergies among others. The list goes on. Most of these are a couple of requests away. What you need to realize about the stuff you do online is that the Internet does not forget. and you do not have control of information once you release it.

From the odd-bag list above, you probably perked up a little at the fact your kids might be tracked as well. Creepy right? Not as much as what’s probably happening already. How do you know? Notice how many kids appear in TV ads these days? Children are a target audience with a disproportionately large influence on purchasing behaviour within households. If marketers are targeting children, they definitely want to know them as well. Knowing people requires data. The data makes it creepy.

Anyhow, January 28th, 2011 was data-privacy day. Take control now. Make it expensive for marketers to ring that bell.

The pay button: payment options for Indian developers

An Indian pay story.

The web has some inspiring stories of single developers making it big. If you’ve been coding away with the hope of striking gold someday, you’ve always faced one minor hiccup — getting paid. In India, getting rich requires that you be rich already. Ditto for payment systems, if you aren’t rich already, sorry, you are just too risky to be getting money for work. Hello, Catch 22!

So when Subbu created a simple real-time tool for project management and wanted a “pay button,” I was more than surprised. Usually this is where you give up. But then, believe it or not, Subbu had someone who wanted to pay! And so the search began.

The criteria.

 The providers we looked at included Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal, CCavenue, EBS, 2Checkout, AlertPay and ZaakPay. Surprisingly though, one of them eventually worked. The requirements for a dev friendly payment system were simple:

• -It had to support recurring billing
• -It should allow easy integration, API, documentation, support
• -It should have charges, commissions, and fees that made sense
• -It should support Indian account access and withdrawals
• -It should accept payments from within India
• -The service needed to be cheap enough for a single developer to use without taking out a mortgage
• -Finally, it was also important the service provider approve the request without a hassle or asking for “multriplicates.”

How did they fare?

Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal: Given their brand names and amount of tech they commandeer, you’d think that they would be easy, right? Wrong. These are your official sand traps. Dont spend too much time here. A couple of reasons why they probably suck right now:

• -They don’t accept payments from within India.
• -They don’t support recurring billing.

CCavenue: You’ve seen them a couple of times already. Maybe you paid a telephone bill online or bought a book online. They looked a little clunky at the time but yet you kept that in mind as an option to explore. They even accept USD. But…

• -They don’t support recurring billing.
• -Their charges are meant for enterprises. They are expensive for an average -Internet start-up.
• -Their application screening takes about 3 weeks, and if you are a single dev, you are “too risky” for them.

EBS: No recurring payments, no USD, not until April 1st. That date makes me wary and brings back childhood memories of bad jokes. Move on.

2Checkout: These guys came close. But their documentation is horrible. They don’t have a single place where you can find help. Support is also not that great. Next!

ZaakPay: Desi bhais, seem dev friendly, but might be too early right now. But we have some hope with these guys and hope that they make it. Having a dev friendly setup is critical in India. The founder even managed to mail us back! Sweet.

And the winner for now is …

AlertPay: Similar to 2Checkout in that they offer recurring billing, wire transfer and you can define your items/products and a recurring period. They don’t have a joining fee. But they charge 2.5% + 12 INR to withdraw money. They charge another $15 for a wire transfer and $4 for an international cheque. But you need to check if your bank accepts international cheques. They hold your money for 14 days before releasing it your account.

API and help docs on their website were decent. You create plans on your AlertPay account and then use the code it generates to integrate it within your website. They will send you an email and a HTTP post when a customer successfully pays. They also have a cancel subscription API that you can use to programmatically. But it’s still buggy and doesn’t work. You also can’t implement an upgrade/downgrade feature from existing plans. This isn’t smooth.

They have a test mode as well that lets you test the whole e-commerce integration without an actual credit card. Once you are done with testing you can just disable the test mode go wait for the money to start trickling in.

Anyways, if you are a dev and have done something similar, let us know. I know I would love to hear similar war stories. Alternatively, if are a payment service provider, let us know if you meet the above criteria.

Wanted: Sales person with existing relationships.

How often have you seen an ad like that?

These ads should make you think. What is it about a sales guy with relationships that makes him/her so important to another organisation? How ethical is it to expect sales people to walk in with existing relationships? Why wouldn’t a sales person with an “existing relationship” ready to be poached end up starting his own company? Is there a certain point at which it makes sense to open your own firm? Does this mean that sales people working honestly at other firms are losers for not seeing an opportunity to bud off? This line of thinking is wrong. How many sales freelancers have you seen? Not many? There is a reason for it.

What such advertisers don’t realise is that relationships exist primarily between firms; one seeking a service and the other providing it. A star sales guy with “relationships” is not delivering anything other than a promise of service to a customer. Articulating a value proposition is very different from ensuring a flawless delivery. Satisfied customers create the “relationship.” Fulfilment is entirely a function of your delivery organisation and no amount of opportunistic sales poaching will help you deliver. Ever.

The next time you advertise a job like in the headline above, you might be advertising yourself as a company to avoid because you haven’t really understood the dynamics of being truly customer centric. You also might be advertising yourself as a firm that doesn’t care about customers, sales, ethics, or the value of delivery. Your prognosis for the long term is bad no matter how many sales guys you hire. I might as well give you some tar and feathers right now.

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