Me: Do you know how you always forget people you meet and then don’t see for a while?

Potential Customer: Oh yes, that happens to me all the time

Me: Well, Stronico helps you remember people by showing you where they fit into your life.  You can see their interests, their friends and how you know them in the first place.

Coming up with that is an illuminating exercise.     “Visual Contact Management” is an accurate description of what Stronico actually does, but most people don’t see the utility in that description.

Question: What do you do?:

• Audience: Technically unsophisticated:
  Answer: I build websites
• Audience: Of average tech savvy (an iPhone or Android owner, but no more):
  Answer: I’m a computer programmer
• Audience: Technically Savvy – able to set up WordPress and remove viruses from a friends computer:
  Answer: I do the backend programming and database development for websites
• Audience: Technically sophisticated, but not similar to me, e.g. graphic designers and pure DBAs
  Answer: I’m a .Net developer, specializing in backend programming and database development for websites
• Audience: Technically sophisticated, and similar, e.g. another .Net developer or PHP developer and the like:
  Answer: I do ASP.net/C# and Sql Server, mostly for the backend of sites

When I describe Stronico it goes like this:

Question: What is Stronico?:

• Audience: Technically unsophisticated:
  Answer: Stronico is an application that helps you remember people
• Audience: Of average tech savvy (an iPhone or Android owner, but no more):
  Answer: Stronico shows you how you know people so you don’t forget them
• Audience: Technically Savvy – able to set up WordPress and remove viruses from a friends computer:
  Answer: Visual Contact Management – It shows you who you know and how you know them, that way you can remember the people you just barely know
• Audience: Technically sophisticated, but not similar to me
  Answer: Visual Contact Management – it shows you your social network and helps you utilize your weak ties
• Audience: Technically sophisticated or network theorist:
  Answer: Visual Contact Management, it helps you utilize all of your weak ties and helps you see how your social objects define your social network

• Audience: Not musical
  Answer: I’m a singer-songwriter
• Audience: Some knowledge
  Answer: Old School Country, like O Brother Where Art Thou
• Audience: Knowledgeable music person
  Answer: I’m play bluegrass
• Audience: Bluegrass fan
  Answer: I’m an old time guitarist and singer
• Audience: Old-Time (it’s genre of American folk music)  music fan
  Answer: I sound and sing like Dock Boggs

photo credit: simonlesleyphoto

• Programming: I create useful code generation systems
• Business: I am easy to work with
• Personal: I explain technical matters well, with good use of metaphors
• Photography: Good use of black and white, along with “I can’t believe you went into that neighborhood at night with expensive photo equipment”
• Music: I write wonderful Appalachian Bad man ballads, mostly in the style of Jim Thompson, all from the bad guy’s point of view.  The songs are the first things someone mentions when they describe me to someone else (or so I have heard from many people).

Of all these, the last is the most useful.  I am considering making the Stronico marketing have a sinister delivery.  The product remains the same, a brain helper to remember the weak ties in life, but I will make the marketing have a film noir quality.

photo credit: Sebastian Fritzon

1. QuickBooks
   Problem: I am terrible at accounting in general, and QuickBooks in particular
   Solution: Spend 10 hours taking free online classes, break this up into one half hour per day
2. Elevator Speeches
   Problem: Whenever I talk to someone about Stronico I start from scratch every time
   Solution: Create 10 second, 30 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute pitches.  Run these by interested parties and refine and rehearse
3. Uneven progress in the Stronico Venture
   Problem: The venture breaks down into long unfocused slogs of marketing and development
   Solution: Create master plan, with deadlines and goals
4. Fame and Goodwill
   Problem: Not enough people know about Stronico
   Solution: Continue prospecting, apply it to the intelligence gathering aspects of Stronico, and make contact with relevant bloggers, then refine the approach.
5. Metrics
   Problem: There are no good metrics for Stronico, either in profitability, marketing, sales, web hits, etc
   Solution: Create spreadsheet listing weekly goals for all of the above, have second row be the actual numbers.

photo credit: JoshuaDavisPhotography.COM

Here I go with my attempt.  I first list the “off the top of my head response” and then the edited response so I can show the evolution:

1. What problem are you solving?
   Original: The problem is a faulty memory for names, faces and connections.
   Edited: People can only remember a limited number of names, faces and connections.  As social networking expands and corporate life gets more erratic we encounter more and more people we will never see again, and could be useful to remember.  The downfall of a large social network is that the quality drops as the size increases.
2. What is your solution?
   Original: Showing the user how someone is connected to him or her.
   Edited: Stronico documents and show the history and context of  how one person is connected to another, as well as companies, events, and families.  This information is usually locked in some gated form in a corporate database – Stronico lets the user own all of his data.  The customer can use all of the social network and the quality of the social network will scale (Editing Note: Perhaps the slogan should be “Scaling the Social Network” or something like that)
3. Who is it right for?
   Original: Salesman, entrepreneurs, and nerds.
   Edited: Primarily it is for people who need occasional close relationships to a large and diverse group of people. At first blush, this means Salesman, entrepreneurs, and nerds.   To use the jargon approach, this is for people who need to utilize “weak ties”.
4. What will it do for those people?
   Original: They can keep track of their social network, they can also play matchmaker and favor-doer
   Edited: They can have a stronger social network.  Social networks build on themselves to some degree –  they can utilize their social network better than normal, which allows them to play matchmaker and favor-doer for everyone they know, making them someone people will go out of their way to meet
5. How does it work?
   Original: A web based system that shows you your social network, as well as how everyone is connected to you.
   Edited: Stronico shows you who and what you know in terms of a social network.
6. What are the reasons someone might NOT buy it?
   Original: Their occupations are not tied to their social network, their life is static
   Edited: Their occupations are not tied to their social network, their life is static, or they are literally anti-social.
7. Why should they trust you?
   Original: I wrote the program for myself, so it was designed to work for someone.
   Edited: They do not need to trust me, the utility of the application should speak for itself.  (This question does reveal a weakness of the marketing plan and product design.  The program grows progressively more useful as time goes by, but how to convince the potential customer of that beforehand?)

I’m ending the editing process now, as I’ve taken up twice the time allotted for this, but it was a useful exercise, and I intend to revisit the questions and make them more coherent over time.

photo credit: robynejay

[Setup - In the early days of CNN and Turner Broadcasting Ted Turner would prowl his office building and drop in unannounced into random meetings.   One day he walked into a meeting where people were planning a cross-channel week-long special on dinosaurs]

Speaker – “Okay – now all we need to do now is come up with the name.”

[Assembled marketing people] – “Prehistoric Times”, “Before the Comet”, “Things That Walked Tall”, etc, etc

Slowly Ted Turner raises his hand.

Speaker (nervously) – “Yes Mr Turner”

Ted Turner: “Why don’t you call it “Dinosaur”

Speaker (nervously) – “Well, Mr Turner, we were looking to convey a bigger brand and feel than simply calling it dinosaur.  Does anyone else have any other ideas?”

[Assembled marketing people] – “A Different Kind of Tail”, “Some Were Vegetarians”, “Jurassic Park – For Real!”, etc, etc

Ted Turner: “Why don’t you call it “Dinosaurs”

Speaker (even more nervously) – “Mr Turner, that’s still not what we’re looking for.”

Ted Turner: “About twenty years ago I started a cable news network.  You know what I called it?  Cable News Network!”

The marketing people named their special “Dinosaurs“

In Sum: The Turner Rule: If  you cannot decide quickly on a marketing matter, just be obvious.

photo credit: mil8

Give the tribe a badge. The cool thing about marketing the iPad is that it’s a visible symbol, a uniform. If you have one in the office on Monday, you were announcing your membership. And if it says, “sent from my iPad” on the bottom of your emails…

Since Stronico is intended to a be a tool for elite salespeople, why not give them a physical token to reinforce that eliteness, say a challenge coin of some kind.  That would dovetail nicely with upcoming secret society marketing ideas as well.

Since I’m going to the Startup Atlanta Meetup tonight, I think that will be it for the blogging today.

• Blog Name
• Internet Power Score, defined as a function of inbound links, number of comments, and the number of twitter followers.
• Inbound Links
• # of Comments Last Five Posts
• # of Twitter Followers
• Blog URL
• Blog Description
• Contact Person
• Contact Email
• Twitter Name
• Created

Anything I’m missing?  These are the people I’m going to be contact early for advertising and advice.

And before anyone says anything, yet, it did occur to me to have a special website only version of Stronico where one could track different power players on the internet (the power score could be displayed as size!) but that is a few version away.

photo credit: AndYaDontStop

The community was quite nice, and the venue, Ignition Alley was cool too.  Ignition Alley is a co-working facility about four miles away from Stronico HQ which is on my short list of places to go when I need an office.   I had a great time meeting everyone and the event was quite well run.

And now, the contestants!  We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity.  I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better).  I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested,  and vice versa?  This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc.  That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation.

And so, with no further ado, here are the startups from last night.  I’m going to omit descriptions of the startups as those can be found on their websites.

• RocketDispatch – they send notifications to people in a variety of ways, in an ad supported model.
  1. Problem Solving – 6/10
  2. Actual Customers – 3/10 (it’s always that way with advertising)
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 3/10 (it’s also always that way with advertising)
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 5/10 (they need the free customers before they can sell the advertising, beyond that, it’s not too bad)
  5. Remarkability- 8/10 (“They call, text, and email people for you” for you is the shortest description I can come up with)

  Total Score:25

• Core Motives – they provide information on customers.
  1. Problem Solving – 6/10 – information on customers is great, but how is it actionable?  That was not obvious about the product.
  2. Actual Customers – 3/10 (while the target market is sales people, the pricing is such that they would be dealing with corporate purchasing departments.  Corporate purchasing departments are the great complicators of life)
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 2/10 (there is no simple way to do variable pricing)
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 10/10 (I don’t think they would have a chicken and egg problem at all)
  5. Remarkability- 2/10 (The current message presupposes a lot of knowledge that is hard to distill into a few words.)

  Total Score:23

• Net-Arb- Internet Aritration
  1. Problem Solving – 9/10 – It is the internet solution to an existing dilemma, so a high degree of problem solving.
  2. Actual Customers – 9/10  Problems and money in the same person
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 10/10 One price can’t be more simple
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 10/10 (I don’t think they would have a chicken and egg problem at all)
  5. Remarkability- 10/10 (“Resolve legal disputes online” – 4 words, that’s hard to beat)

  Total Score:48

• NapStay- Rental Property
  1. Problem Solving – 8/10.
  2. Actual Customers – 4/10 – I don’t know much about this market, so it’s hard for me to guess, but the problems and the money do not seem to be concentrated in the same person.
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 7/10
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 2/10 – this is a big factor
  5. Remarkability- 5/10 (Describing a broker is never easy)

  Total Score:26

• Neybor- Marketing for Real Estate
  1. Problem Solving – 7/10.
  2. Actual Customers – 9/10 – They serve small city newspapers (with local monoploies, something they mentioned quite late in the presentation).
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 3/10
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 8/10 – not a big deal
  5. Remarkability- 7/10

  Total Score:34

The winner, by a larger margin than I would have thought is Net-Arb.  I liked the entire evening and will certainly be attending the others, and hopefully presenting Stronico at the April event.
photo credit: jm3

And yesterday was the highest traffic day in the history of the blog.  I’m not sure why, but the middle of the week tends to do far better than other days.

And in case anyone was wondering,  I’ve been building out the public side of the site lately.