I was at ProductCamp in Dublin last week, a free event which I highly recommend to anyone responsible for managing technology products. During a talk by John Gleeson of AccessLegal, I learned about some great free legal resources that are available to Irish tech startups.

Employment Contracts
The issue that was emphasised most during John’s talk was Employment Contracts. Forget patent-trolls and ip infringements, apparently not having proper contracts of employment is the single most likely reason for a tech startup to end up with legal issues! Lawsimply, an irish legal startup currently offers a free Employment Contract template drafted for Irish law so it might be no harm to register and get your copy of it…

Also on the subject of employment law, the Irish Software Association seems to offer a good service to their members on employment issues. If you need professional advice on employment issues, Clarigen, HR consultancy is probably a good place to start.

Shareholder Agreements
An awkward but necessary conversation to have when you are co-founding a business is the shareholder’s agreement. Like the employment contract, this seems to be something that is better to get right from the start. The contract should cover issues like :
* What’s the equity split between the founders?
John mentioned a tool called the Equity Investment Simulation which helps founder’s work out the value of their shares through several rounds of funding.
* What happens if a founder leaves the company within a year, 2 years or even 4 years?
Should they still get all, some or none of their shares if they leave early? This issue is called founder vesting and here’s a nice article on vesting by a US VC.

Term Sheets
A term sheet sets out the terms of a VCs investment offer to a tech startup. At a recent event on scaling technology companies hosted by Arthur Cox, I learned that for tech startups who are raising money, the term sheet is THE crucial commercial document for the startup to review and negotiate as much as possible. However, what can sometimes happen is that founders are so cash-starved that they agree to an investor’s term sheet without fully negotiating the contract or realizing the consequences of some of the conditions of the term sheet. A good tip for startups: Arthur Cox are often happy to review draft term sheets for their clients without raising a fee.

Some useful sample term sheets available online are:
Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund term sheet
Kernal Capital’s Sample Term Sheet
Background reading on term sheets includes:
Brad Feld’s Term Sheet series

Good blogs on legal issues for Startups in Ireland include
Accesslegal
Venturelaw

I would love to get your feedback on any other legal resources and recommendations that you have for technology startups…

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Create your design strategy, no design skills necessary

If you are in the position to create a design strategy for your business, I am pleased to tell you that your efforts will be rewarded!

Creating and maintaining a design strategy saves you time, money and headaches each time you are updating your website, software app or marketing material. It ensures your business conveys consistency to your customers. It also helps to steer your design team in the right direction and makes it harder for us to mess anything up!

Planning your design strategy can be fun. What is more, a lot of the strategic decisions can be based on your understanding of your customers and your business. These decisions don’t require a designer at all. By defining your target audience, key messages & value propositions, and your core brand elements, you can develop the basis for a clear and consistent design strategy.

Here are some of the key things to think about when you are creating your design strategy:

1. Target Audience
Define your audience: Who is your target audience? What are their demographics, likes and dislikes? What are the main ways you currently reach your target audience?

Define your reputation: What do your current customers think about you right now? How would you like to improve what they think about you?

2. Key messages and value propositions
“The more facts you tell, the more you sell:” If you were giving a comprehensive sales pitch of your products/services to a prospective customer and they were willing to listen to you for as long as it takes… what would you say? How do you currently convey the facts about your business in your marketing material and in your sales conversations? Here’s a tip…write down each sales fact you can think of as bullet points, then prioritize your list in terms of the main messages you currently give your target audience. This will give you a large repository of messages that you can draw upon for websites, web and mobile apps and marketing material.

Value propositions: Now, let’s think about it another way… what’s the opening sentence or two that you would like people to use to introduce your company? What would you like new sales prospects to learn about you? What would you like your customers to learn about you?

3. Your core brand elements
Logo and colors: Do you have a logo and a color scheme that you are currently using consistently in your marketing material and in your offices? If not, what colors do you feel best reflect the identity of your business? It’s possible to make most combinations of colors look good, although some colors can only be used in small doses on the web and mobile. What’s important for you to decide is what are the main colors you want to represent you online.

Brand elements: Do you have key brand elements that reflect your business? Do you use certain icons/images or videos in your current marketing material that really help to sell your products / services or convey exactly what your business is about.

The outcome- less stress, more success!
Nice work! By defining your target audience, key messages & value propositions in a document and by creating a folder of your core brand elements, you have created the basis for a design strategy. As you develop new websites, web and mobile apps and marketing material, you will be in a position to prioritize the brand elements and key messages that work best for a particular target audience. Creating and maintaining a consistent design strategy will enable you to remove the risk from design projects you undertake, ensuring your projects are less stressful and more successful.

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I just looked at some statistics from our April newsletter which went out yesterday.

Incredibly, 42% of all opens were from either an iPhone or an iPad. Gmail, Apple Mail and MS Outlook each accounted for around 15% of the opens. This is an eye-opener for me. Luckily our email looked ok in the iPhone mail client, however we plan to do more work to optimize our website for the iphone. The image below says it all…

Are you finding the same thing happening with your emails?

If you’re not on our newsletter list, you can subscribe here. We send out a monthly email with powerful case studies and analysis of sites and apps.

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As we enter the warmer months of Spring, some of us may be thinking about the following question: How do I generate new sales leads for my business?

Perhaps what is preventing more prospective customers from contacting you is that they don’t know “How much would it cost to engage with you?”

Many businesses are happy to quote prospective customers over the phone or by email, but don’t want to publish their prices online, which is reasonable enough.

In this post, we’d like to share a case study on how automated cost estimates can be used to generate new sales leads online.

Core Sash Windows – Case Study
Core Sash Windows, the timber-framed window company, commissioned Product Fitter to design and develop an web and iPad app for automating customer estimates.

The objective of this app was to enable prospective customers to get a cost estimate for windows and doors in real-time. It has been tremendously successful in generating new leads online. Find out why…

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Email marketing software is an essential tool for digital marketers. Two software companies that are often top of mind for email marketing are CampaignMonitor and Mailchimp.

These companies are almost twins…

CampaignMonitor is an Australian based company that grew organically from a web design business. Mailchimp is a US based company that grew organically from a web development business. Both platforms offer their customers a simple user interface with great analytics, free email templates and online email editors, lots of community support through their blog, newsletter and support section and a strong api with plenty of integrations.

…and yet their landing pages communicate completely different messages. Let’s take a look:

1. Value Propositions

Mailchimp’s value proposition is “Easy Email Newsletters”: The clever bit here is the word “Newsletters”. This attracts customers who carry out the continuous, predictable activity of sending newsletters to a defined list of recipients. It also communicates that more general ‘email marketing’ which can involve more sales focused/once-off campaigns to lots of different lists of recipients, may not be welcome. I think this is a clever way to verbally repel once-off sales-focused emailers who want to take advantage of Mailchimp’s free version to spam people.

CampaignMonitor offers “email marketing software for designers and their clients”. As well as addressing designers directly as their product’s target market, they make designers a business proposition: designers can white-label their email marketing platform and resell the service at a profit to their clients. While this sounds a bit complex, somehow CampaignMonitor have compellingly presented the business case to designers, right there on the homepage. CampaignMonitor uses the more general term “email marketing” rather than “email newsletters”, perhaps because they may not encounter the same issues with spammers as Mailchimp. CampaignMonitor customers must spend a minimum of $5 per campaign charged to their credit cards to send out an email to more than 5 recipients.

2. Top Navigation

What strikes me straight away is the similarity between the top navigation of both MailChimp and CampaignMonitor. Both companies have tabs for Pricing, Features, Resources, Support and a Blog.

Campaign Monitor also add two additional tabs: Customers and Our Story. The ‘Our Story’ tab is interesting. When you click on it you learn that CampaignMonitor evolved from a web design company run by two college buddies. Since the CampaignMonitor target market is ‘designers and their clients’, I think this company background does work to create empathy with designers who often operate in similar situations as freelancers or small design agencies.

An interesting point here is that Mailchimp’s background is similar but they have avoided promoting their company background in the top navigation. One way of looking at this might be that since CampaignMonitor is trying to create a partnership with designers, displaying the company background and evoking empathy with designers becomes more important.

Meanwhile Mailchimp’s focus is on the simplicity of its product…so maybe adding a the company background in a prominent place would confuse that message.

3. Look and Feel

Interestingly both Mailchimp and CampaignMonitor show images of mobile interfaces on their homepages. Alongside the top navigation, that’s where the similarities end.

MailChimp’s look and feel has a definite focus on simplicity. Alongside the big smiling purposeful Monkey with his mail delivery bag, a three word message “Easy Email Newsletters” take up the bulk of the page. The lanaguage used is simple and focused on functionality: “design email newsletters, share them on social networks, intergrate with the services you already use, and track your results”. There’s no mention of customers, there’s no pricing, just the simple ‘Sign up free’ call to action. I don’t fully get the last part ‘It’s like your own personal publishing platform”- isn’t my blog/website my “personal publishing platform”?

CampaignMonitor puts together a more more complex message on their landing page. Designers can not only send and track emails, they can also resell the solution to their clients. Understandably the focus is on the deal between CampaignMonitor and Designers. “100% rebrandable”, “Mark-up, resell and profit” and ” Set your own prices and automatically earn a profit” feature in prominent location on the homepage. The language used is also interesting. Emails are “beautiful”, analytics is “powerful”, it’s used by “leading” designers. The focus is on design aspirations and the ability to make more money.

Results

For two products that are extremely comparable in functionality, support and resources, its amazing to see how different the landing pages are in many aspects.

CampaignMonitor persuasiveness: 8/10 As a web designer, CampaignMonitor addresses me and I can appreciate this. I haven’t yet been persuaded by the profit-sharing approach because I find it easier to give our clients transparent pricing, but I can see how it could be compelling, especially to companies who only focus on email marketing.

MailChimp persuasiveness: 7/10 I like the simplicity and starkness of mailchimp’s homepage. That said, I feel a bit uneasy by a marketing tool that calls itself “easy” and has a massive picture of a monkey… it just feels like it might over-compromise on features for the sake of simplicity. However that is just my personal taste.

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Online invoicing aplications are growing at a phenomenal rate. Two of the emerging leaders are Freshbooks, with over 3.5 million users and Tradeshift, who recently raised $17million in investment capital.
Let’s take a look at the homepages of both of these apps and see what we can learn…

1. Signup form on the homepage:

The most standout feature on both homepages for me is that like facebook, both of these online invoicing apps have their signup form on the homepage. They’ve also kept their sign up requirements to an absolute minimum- all they ask for is the Company name and an email address. Kinda takes the effort out of signing up, doesn’t it?

2. Value proposition:

We see two different approaches to value being offered:

* Freshbooks offers a 30 free trial, so by signing up you are indicating that you potentially intend to make a purchase/subscription in 30 days.

* Tradeshift offers ’100% free online invoicing’, which sounds great, but also make you wonder “how these guys are going to make money, and what are they going to do with my invoicing data?” This is kind of answered on the Enterprise page. Tradeshift plans to charge larger companies for providing them with a system for managing their expenses/ supplier invoices, it seems…

In web 2.0 theory, Tradeshift with their “100% free online invoicing” should win the battle for new signups. However invoices contain sensitive information and business owners may not feel comfortable with “100% free.” Note: I am a big advocate of Sean Ellis style freemium, but a social networking type of ’100% free’ for business software just makes me wonder, what’s happening with my data?

3.Look and Feel:

* Freshbooks emphasizes customer service with their toll free phone number in a large font, and their customer service prompt: “Don’t be shy, give us a call”. They use their 3.5 million users, a testimonial from CPA Practice Advisor and the Rackspace hosting logo to validate the quality of their service. Interestingly they have their physical address in a prominent location on the homepage to indicate that they are a real-business with physical offices, which users will identify with, rather than a ‘virtual business’ which could disappear overnight.
* Tradeshift emphasizes a clean Apple-esque look and feel, with a screenshot of a demo invoice appearing prominently on a large Apple Mac screen. “100% free” invoicing is the clear message of their homepage, but again it makes me wonder how much I can trust them with my data. Tradeshift also show a language menu at the top of the page, with German, French, Spanish etc language options which as a European, is definitely a bonus.

For me, tradeshift needs to show more customer validation and give me more reassurance about my invoicing data. Tradeshift could also get a bit more ‘real business’ by providing some kind of contact details. Most people are extremely happy to get useful software for free, but invoices contain valuable and private business information, the trust factor is hugely important, I think.

The Result

Freshbooks persuasiveness: 8/10. The only thing preventing me from going ahead is, “hmmm is 30 days enough time for me to decide if I want this system AND that also means I’m going to have to change the way I invoice for the next 30 days.”
Tradeshift persuasiveness: 7/10 Lovely looking and free software is always welcome. However I don’t think I would fully trust this site with my invoicing data.

Please note: in the above post, I am looking only above the fold on the homepage. I’m sure if I just scrolled down a bit on both pages, I’d find lots more persuadable factors, but I didn’t.

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It’s so tempting to add new features to your app. New features give your product something new and fresh. New features give you something to get creative and excited about. Usually a customer or prospective customer has suggested the new feature so it also gives you the sense that you’re adding more value. However, make sure you don’t get stuck in a new features trap.

The New Features Trap
The new features trap is when you keep adding features to your app until it becomes heavy, bloated and hard to steer. Just like athletes, the best performing apps are often lean and trim, with a clear, penetrating focus of energy on continuously improving the features necessary to win customers and revenue and the ability to ignore the features that don’t help them to achieve their goals.

The Danger
It’s easy to get caught in the new features trap, in an effort to meet customer requests and expectations, especially in the early stages of building an app. Product development builds up a vision of an ideal product with feature lists adding up to several years of development, and the sales and marketing team sell based on promises of future features. This leads to a never-end cycle of new feature development and an ever fatter, heavier, slower product.

Just say no
Have you noticed how simple most of the leading web and mobile apps are? They tend to do one thing and do it really well. They do it so well that their customers pay them money for their product as it is, without the conditional “I’ll buy it, if it can do this as well.”

“How is this possible?” you may ask…”My customers all want to do things a different way”… Here’s how: By listening to what is behind the customer’s request and thinking positively about your current feature set. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, show your customers and prospects how your app currently handles the task.

Note: If your app just can’t handle the task, is there a simple and universal solution you could tie in to your current feature set, in a day or less, to give them what they need?

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Have you ever looked at a map of the World upside down?
Well, here it is.

The funny thing is, just by turning something upside down, it can look completely different! Now try this with a business opportunity you are looking at…

Maybe you’ve got an awesome product that should be doing better, so it could be time to take an upside-down look at your target market…

Maybe it’s hard to make the money you want at the current prices you are charging, but is it because your prices are too low… or too high?

I’ve challenged myself to look at our own business upside-down to see where we can innovate. All I can say so far is that it’s not as easy as turning the World upside down!

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Writing an SMS on an iPhone 4 versus on a Samsung Galaxy Ace
iPhone 1 – Android 0

There’s lots of difficult user interface design choices that we, as web developers and designers, make everyday. Allow me give you just one example of this: the iPhone and Android mobile touchscreen keyboards. Let’s get more specific and look at what happens when you attempt to write an sms message with an iPhone versus writing on a Samsung Galaxy Ace Android phone.

The iPhone designers decided to put a really big space bar at the bottom of the keyboard. There’s also two other buttons: one for the numbers keyboard, and the other for the return key.

In a similar sized space, the Android designers decided to add SIX buttons!! Alongside the space bar, numbers keyboard button and return key, there’s a full stop key in the middle, as well as a settings button and a microphone button. I can understand the full stop, but the other two just seem a bit much… So let’s see what happen’s when you try to type an sms.
Firstly on the iPhone, yes… i’m writing my text and everything is fine, this is easy! Now let’s see what happens when you try and write an sms on the Android phone… Aarrgh, you end up hitting the full stop key when you mean to hit the space key!

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Until recently, I spent a period of about 3 years only reading serious, non-fiction books. I read about customer development, web business models, and inbound marketing. I read about the housing crisis, the rise of China and the history of civilization. I read it all – once it was serious, relevant and helped me to learn something new.

Then about 6 months ago, I picked up a spy book by John Le Carre, an awesome writer! The content were beautifully written, thoughtful and completely irrelevant. I read about double crossing British spys secretly working for the Russian secret service and innocent bystanders getting caught up in the chaos.

And suddenly I could write again… Getting caught up in an imaginary fictional world, you start paying attention to the phrases that captivate, the descriptions that inspire and the psychology at play behind every word.

No longer did reading and writing seem like a monotonous input/output system for communicating data. Suddenly expression became important, and the music of language returned to my writing.

If anyone is struggling with their copywriting, here’s a tip. Go buy a fictional book you haven’t read since you were a teenager, and let the words sing out of you!

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