How to Generate Feedback for Your Startup (three simple ideas)
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There are many more smart people outside of your organization than in
it. Michael Moritz mentioned that to me recently, and I think it’s a
Bill Joy quote but I can’t remember.
Anyway, it’s as true for the humble three-person startup as it is for
Google and Microsoft. It’s simple math, and with global communication
friction reaching zero you would have to be a fool to not tap the
world for ideas.
Of course, asking the world for ideas is a sloppy process. If Google
put an anonymous suggestion box on every search result would they ever
be able to digest that information in a way that helped the business?
Probably not. However, as a startup in the search/research space I’d
love to drink from that fire hose.
Scale is a paradox: it’s the goal of all startups, and the curse of
the ones that transform into large organizations.
The same holds true of blogging as many of use have learned: you put
your voice out there to be heard, but at some point the echo back from
the back of the stadium becomes so distorted and freakish that you
long for your coffee house days.
I’ve tried a couple of ways to get feedback on my latest project and
they’ve worked really well. These ideas are fairly obvious I guess,
but since most folks haven’t tried them perhaps you’ll find some value
in them.
I wrote about this last November in a post called “The Community CEO”
which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/communityceo
Question: Do you have any ideas on how to engage people in your
startups development?
I’d love to hear them. If you do hit reply please state if you
DO/DON’T want it included in a follow up post to the Jason list at the
top of the email. Now on to the three simple ideas.
LinkedIn.com’s Q&A service
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Shortly after launching Mahalo I asked folks on LinkedIn’s Answers
service what they would do if they were the CEO of Mahalo. The goal
here was to get feedback, but also to create empathy and engagement
with the product.
If users can understand that we’re humans trying to build something
helpful we move from being an abstract object in their minds to
something more like colleagues. We’re all trying to make our way in
the world, no one has all the answers, and asking for help is a humble
and worthwhile action no matter who you are.
Isn’t this part of Barack’s appeal in fact? He looks for feedback and
doesn’t claim to have the best answer, but rather the best process for
coming to an answer. (note: I’m not Barack promoter, in fact I haven’t
decided who I’m voting for yet–just making a point here).
On LinkedIn folks want to connect with you and they want others to see
how smart they are. As such, the answers on LinkedIn are massively
more considered than those on Yahoo Answers.
You can read the feedback here: http://tinyurl.com/linkedinceo
Flickr Photo Focus Group
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Our pages are designed to be 50% content and 50% links–a hybrid of
Wikipedia/About and Google/Yahoo if you will. Currently we put links
on the left and the content–an abridged Wikipedia article in scanable
format–on the right. Over time we’ve watched in our labs as users
gravitate to the right to read the Guide Note–if they see it. So, we
decided to mock up a page with the Guide Note on the left.
I posted it to my flickr account and twittered it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoncalacanis/2451705655/
The result?
Views: 4,714
Comments: 231
On-image notes: 55 (as in folks posted a note on the image).
Offering folks the chance to comment about an idea, combined with the
promise of some schwag worked really well. Of course, there was way to
much information to sort through on a detailed basis, but the trends
were clear to us.
Also, most of the feedback came in on the first day. Are we going to
A-B test this? Sure, but the early feedback from designers was very,
very helpful.
eMail list suggestion box
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In one of the first emails to this list I asked folks for feedback on
how to make Mahalo better. The winner would get a free DASH GPS unit
(no, not getting paid by them, just love their product so they gave me
a few to give away).
Got over 100 emails almost instantly and I read these while playing
poker (I’m getting crushed right now for the record. Was up 6,200 for
the year and now up only 1,000–lost $5,200 over three games in a
row–brutal). While playing poker I read these on my Blackberry as
they came in (wait, is that why I lost?!?). The result was a non-stop
stream of consciousness about how people view the product. The top
three asks were:
a) A cleaner homepage
b) A customizable homepage
c) A mobile (specifically iPhone) version of Mahalo.
A sample of the suggestions follows below, and for my money the best
suggestion is to clean up the homepage. The first person to send in
that suggestion was Marques Stewart, who works in IT (
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marquesstewart ).
Thanks Marques. You’re also invited to the TechCrunch50 event as my
guest ($2,995 ticket otherwise!) if you can make it to San Francisco
on Sept 8-10th.
Mahalo Suggestion Box: Selected Comments
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Adam P. from Australia suggested a mobile version of Mahalo for the
iPhone. Brandon S. and Keith C. had this idea as well.
Matt C. suggested a digg spy service where you could watch searches on
Mahalo. There are some major privacy issues with that (think someone
searching for their own name + keyword), but we do already have a
dashboard to watch other user activity on Mahalo. It includes links
suggested, guide note edits, and message board posts. You can find it
here: http://tinyurl.com/mahaloua
Cody suggested letting good contributors make pages about themselves.
Actually, anyone can create a page about themselves on Mahalo right
now–notable or not. To create a page just visit:
http://mahalo.com/Special:Createpage
Henry B. suggests a bi-weekly or monthly podcast “about Mahalo’s
challenges, struggles, ideas and also solicit ideas from the community
to better Mahalo.” That’s a good idea, I think we’ll get on that.
Adam M. suggested starting a twitter feed “and post once a day with
the Mahalo page of the day.” Good idea Adam!
Marques S. suggested cleaning up the homepage she explains: “People
like to have a good majority of their news/search in the upper area of
the browser and Mahalo should try to capitalize on that. I believe
that having to scroll down to see alot of the features that Mahalo has
to offer isn’t a good UI choice.” I agree, great suggestions, and we
are working on a new homepage.
Brad McCarty suggests we integrate tighters with FriendFeed: “Let’s
say that you create a Mahalo page – once you’re done editing, you can
choose to have that page auto-linked into your FriendFeed stream. The
same idea could hold true for major page updates, etc.” We’re in touch
with FriendFeed on this one already. It’s clearly a great idea.
Max D. suggests a random key on Mahalo, saying a “Stubleupon
type of button to get a random Mahalo page” would be killer. We have
one, perhaps we should market it? http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Random
David S. has a great idea along the lines of our “show us your Mahalo”
project: “give away something very cool… to the person who gets full
camera time during either; the All Star Game, or one of the
Conventions coming up. Camera time being: A sign, painted body,
banner, etc… that has Mahalo loud and clear, and has something about
the event that can draw the cameras attention long enough to give you
free advertising that could be ultimately priceless.” That’s an
interesting idea.
Paul L. says “I think it would be nice to see the rankings of # clicks
per link for each Mahalo page.” I agree, this is something we have on
our list. It’s groovy to see which page is clicked the most by users.
Steve H. smacks us down about the homepage as well: “My recommendation
is to unclutter the main home page. Make it streamlined and something
you don’t have to page down to start your topic search. The
‘featured’ list is way to long and distracting.” I agree. It’s my
fault and we’re fixing it. Kieran H. and Matt B. also say clean up the
homepage!
Daniel R. has suggestions about the homepage as well: “the main
suggestion I would have would be to be able to personalize the mahalo
front page once you are logged into your profile. Nothing fancy, but
there are some sections I like to see, but others I don’t care at
all.” Agreed. Personalization of the homepage might only appeal to the
top 2% of the audience, but we want that 2%! Charles M. M., Russell
E., Bobby E. and Steve K. also suggested we make a personalized
homepage.
Kevin W. had a lot of suggestions, among his best was “* To help drive
traffic, how about a referral program where you earn a couple of
points for everyone you get to visit the site. You can then redeem
your points for cash, music downloads, Mahalo merchandise, or
whatever.” I love this idea. In fact, we’ve been thinking about doing
this since day one, but we’ve focused like a laser on the core
product. Maybe next year on this one.
Nathan P. suggests coming up with an incentive program for folks who
make the site better. We’ve been thinking about this from the start.
However, it’s very complicated and we’re going to focus on it after we
have the core functionality of the site completed (i.e. new homepage,
perfect Guide Pages).
Josh Rappoport asks “how about Mahalo Follow for Safari?” I love this
suggestion and we did a massive search for Safari developers. Turns
out there is no plugin structure for Safari, so we would have to hack
it and that would be cost prohibitive. I’m bummed too.
Alan J. suggests “using the API from Dash to incorporate Mahalo.com
into the DASH unit itself.” Brilliant! We’ve put it on the list.
Benjamin T. suggests focusing on mobile and supporting OpenID. I can’t
believe we don’t support OpenID already… we should. I gotta figure
out how that one slipped through the cracks!
Russell N. suggest “A simple rating system for each article. 1-5
stars or something like that. Simple, quick and easy.” Not a bad idea
at all.
Jonathan R. says “make the Top 7 and Guide Notes bigger and stand out
from the rest of the page.” Good point.
Patrick C. suggest we add polls to Mahalo. I like this idea a lot.
