David Gildeh

A few months ago, after using what I think is a wicked service, TVCatchup.com, for 6 months, I decided to venture into their community forums and post some ideas/feedback I'd had nagging at me since using the service. It wasn't meant to be a criticism of their service, just some innocent feedback on my thoughts for them to register/ignore at their leisure. You can find the full post thread here:

So I came back a few weeks later to see what the replies were (which took some time to find as they're using vBulliten for their discussion forums and it’s hard to quickly navigate to your last posts!) and was disappointed to see instead of the reply(s) I was expecting from TVCatchup saying "thanks for the feedback, we're working on it!" or something to that measure, instead I got a bunch of replies that were pretty defensive and seemed to insinuate that I should be "grateful" for such an amazing great service!

We run a community for SambaJAM using GetSatisfaction. While we're still small and in no way get the kind of traffic TVCatchup gets, we've always taken the attitude that anyone who takes the time to post some ideas/issues on the forum or email us (people still love email which is why most of our feedback comes this route instead of the forum as we'd prefer!) gets a massive THANKYOU and where possible we go out of our way to address their concerns or put the idea on our roadmap!

I may have misunderstood the forum, I assumed the admins were employees of TVCatchup, but it appears the admins are self-motivated users, which completely changes the dynamics (they're not customer service representatives, just passionate users) so I may have got the wrong end of the stick in how I expected my feedback to be responded.

However, as TVCatcup is a business, they could take some advice from the hundreds of other start-ups (like ours) that run feedback forums for their users:

• Users are not there to serve you, you are there to serve the community
• Accept that most users are lazy, they either won't bother giving feedback in the first place, or if they do, searching the forums to see if their issue is unique or come back to check replies the next day. If this frustrates you, like it does all of us who are in love with our own products to a level our users never will match, then take a chill pill and don't have a go at them for not searching through the forums first!
• If you are going to moderate your community with end-user evangelists, then make sure first time users like me are fully aware of it so we don't assume we're speaking to your customer service reps when we see "admin" next to their name!
• Don't use old clunky forums software like vBulliten to get feedback from end users, you're just making it harder for your users to see all the suggestions/ideas and give feedback. There's plenty of affordable services like GetSatisfaction/UserVoice that are designed to be nice and friendly so you don't get duplicate ideas, and can tell which ones are the most popular easily!

No great service ever became great through arrogance. I wrote that as my reply because I thought I was talking to the employees of TVCatcup, and if that was the case, they should, like the rest of us, kiss every last user's arse that takes the time to actually talk to them in the first place! They’re doing us a service, helping us make our services great, let’s not forget that!

Anyway, it appears the admins (at least on my thread) are in fact passionate end users and not paid employees, so I do understand that in that context I overreacted. I'm not here to start a flame war with end users who put hours of their time into the community just for the love of it, but if employees are participating on the forum then make sure you're kissing every last user's arse for their feedback!

I'm currently watching Steve Job's latest keynote speech where he's showcasing the iPad, and I'm very underwhelmed after all the hype. It’s essentially an oversized iPhone, and while I love the iPhone, there are a few things that I don't think will translate to a larger device like the iPad.

My main concern is Apple's proprietary hardware/software approach. For an iPhone, this isn't a concern, every phone I've had has a proprietary operating system. The trouble is the iPad has the potential to be a proper handheld computer, and if the only software I can download is through Apple's App Store, the same way I would on my iPhone, that will severely limit what I can do on my iPad.

Firstly, even after loads of complaints, they still don't support Flash. I can accept that on my phone, because when I use it for browsing the internet, it’s usually on the move, I don't use it to browse while lying on my sofa the way I would expect on the iPad. Without flash, half the films and TV shows I watch are inaccessible, I will still need to watch them on my laptop.

This is the problem with Apple's proprietory approach and App Store, I can only download what Apple wants me to download. They shut off Spotify for ages cause it competed with iTunes, Flash is still barred because it competes with their AppStore. On a larger device, I expect more freedom, to install more complex programs and more choice, to download the way I would on my laptop - go to a website and download/install.

Secondly there's no multi-tasking, something I'd expect from a larger device. I don't want my apps to close so I can open another one, if it can run "powerful" applications like iWork, surely they can multitask some of the more basic apps like email, web, tweetdeck, skype etc. Which brings a 3rd point, without any microphone/camera or USB port, I can't do any video conferencing or phone calls on Skype!

However, one thing I did like - essentially the main use I would every buy a tablet PC, is the iBook application. When I was a teenager I used to draw designs (very similar to the iPad) for an electronic book reader, this is the ultimate application for me, especially when I travelled so much and couldn't carry a bookshelf with me. Add magazines and newspapers to this and you're on your way! Like other Apple products, they've taken what I think are clunky devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader, with very basic and unintuitive displays, and made it better. Easy to browse and purchase eBooks, add them to a library and read them the same way I would on paper. The only concerns I have are the screen will be too bright to read for long periods of time, and the battery is about a 1/3 less time than other eBook readers, only 10 hours (and of course you can't change the battery like all other Apple devices!)

The iBooks app did change my mind at the end, I am looking at getting an eBook reader, so for that purpose I may get it, now I just need to get over the fact I'm paying paper book prices for electronic books! (£20 for an eBook is a rip off, the pricing margin on eBooks is way too high considering distribution and "printing" are free!) But overall, considering all the hype, it really is just an oversized iPhone, so 3 years ago!

I'm a big fan of TED because of the wealth or thought-provoking ideas the speakers bring to the stage. While browsing through some of their videos I found this one by David Keith:

In all the talk about climate change, this is one of the most original ideas I've heard. By using particals in the atmosphere to reduce the warming of the sun, we can control our own climate. Its been proven by nature - when volcanoes erupt and fill our atmosphere with particals they reflect enough sunlight we can actually measure a difference in the Earth's temperature.

What I like about his presentation (other than his quirky presenting style) is he admits this is not THE solution, there are potentially many other hazards we could cause by doing this, and the main one being the moral-risk - if we know we can do a quick fix to cool the planet, does that mean we'll stop trying to control our emissions, the real root of the problem? However - many heads are better than one, its when the best ideas surface, and this fringe idea from some leading scientists should definately be seriously debated because based on the current climate change data, we may need to do something like this to slow down the climate change so we can give ourselves more time to address the root of the problem.

After Copenhagen, I learnt that Politics only gets in the way of needed change. We can't rely on governments to take action on our behalf anymore, we need to take the lead ourselves with great ideas, open debate, and all Government should be doing is supporting that, putting the framework in place so that people with great ideas can execute them. Juan Enriquez's talk on TED about Bioenergy raised another good idea - Governments should fix oil prices to ensure companies with great ideas don't go bust everytime oil prices dive. Thats a great example of how Government can support the entrepreneurs who have the ideas and ambition to realy address the core issues of climate change.

Let’s face it, Windows Vista was a major disappointment and one I've been stuck with for a year and a half since it came with my Dell Laptop. Slow performance, crap security restrictions, I couldn't wait to get rid of it and upgrade to 64-bit Windows Vista when it came out! I'm elated, but that could be because I've got so used to the slow crappy performance of Vista, that Windows 7 just astounds me (as it’s been so long since I saw a new OS on Windows that worked and was performing!)

Now that I've had my PC running for a week on Windows 7, I can safely say, Microsoft has fixed all the complaints me and the rest of the world had when Vista appeared. I'm not a great Microsoft fan (at any chance I'll go for an OpenSource alternative) but you have to admit when it comes to Operating Systems and Office tools, they set the standard. Look at the competition:

• MAC OS – I like the designs of the hardware, I hate the design of their OS. We rented two iMacs (the brand new ones) for our exhibition in December at SambaStream. Having used them for 3 days straight, I still don’t get why they’re so great. The fact they stubbornly refuse by default to support a right mouse button (they do if you get another mouse, but I spent 3 days holding the action key down to simulate a right mouse click!) after all these years is just the start. Another annoying thing is the way you access your programs the same way you’re browsing files, I miss my start menu when I use MAC OS. And I know I’m getting anal here, but why doesn’t it snaplock my files/icons nicely by default, instead icons lie all over the screen unaligned looking messy...
• Linux – I use Ubuntu on our servers (no GUI) but I’ve tried using the Desktop Linux distros several times. Unfortunately I have yet to experience an installation that just works without any critical issues. For example, screen resolutions, if you change the screen resolution in Windows, it will try it, if you don’t click Accept it reverts back to the old one. In the last Linux distro my brother installed it didn’t do this over Christmas, changing the resolution just left a blank screen. Fortunately we had another monitor to attach and fix it, but any average user would be stumped at that point. Linux has come a LONG way in the past few years but still has a long way to go until it’s as usable and fool proof as Windows.
• Unix/Solaris/everything else – Apart from servers, does anyone actually use these on their desktops? Unless you’re an Uber-geek, probably not...

One day the browser will be the only OS we care about, and my money’s on Google Chrome right now, but we’re still (for everyone apart from business users) a long way away from that reality, where we can use all our applications through a web browser.

Anyway, until that day, I’ll be sticking to Windows. I’ll happily switch to a decent Linux Desktop once they fix all the usability issues and 90% of my day-to-day applications work through the browser and the rest can run on Linux. As for MAC OS – overrated. Cool hardware, but their software is style over substance, looks nice but a bitch to use.

My sexy new Windows 7 Desktop!

Last week I did a presentation on how to use Google Analytics to improve your website's effectiveness in marketing your product at the Drupal for Marketing conference. I used our own website, SambaStream.com as an example of how we've used Analytics to monitor the traffic on our site and improve our content for our SambaJAM Beta Signup.

Here are the slides from the presentation on my own website - although I said I'd put them on SambaStream.com - keeping with the philosophy of ensuring we have good content for our target market (i.e. articals about collaboration, document management and SaaS) I've decided to post them here instead.

I've made the presentation available under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license. You can also download a PDF copy of the presentation below.

Ever since I first learnt about virtualisation and started using it on my laptop for playing around with new operating systems and development, I've been using VMWare. I first used the Workstation edition, but when Vista came out, it didn't support it without buying a new copy, so I moved to the free VMWare server.

The trouble is, the free version has lost a lot of the cool features I liked about Workstation, such as being able to drag and drop files directly into the guest OS. But most annoyingly I had to wait between 10-20minutes every time I started up VMWare on Windows Vista as it allocated resources the first time. It was very slow, very heavy and very clunky. But I remained loyal, and for the past year I've been using it on my laptop, waiting 10-20 minutes each time I started up the server. Fortunately as long as I put my laptop to sleep and didn't shut down, this was only a one off until I next rebooted my laptop.

However, for the past year I've been hearing my colleagues Ale and Jo both going on about Sun VirtualBox and how great it is. I resisted as I couldn't be arsed to install a new one and try it (even though it didn't really take that long) but eventually this week I tried it, and ITS GREAT! Starts up instantly, is open-source and free of any limitations, and runs Windows 7 RC like a charm! Once you install the Guest Add-ons it pretty much provides all the functionality of VMWare. One thing I don't like is all the separate windows, I would prefer all the machines to run in tabs like VMWare, but other than that its fast, no more waiting time, no limitations and FREE!

Now that VMWare is getting clunkier and clunkier with only limited free editions, I think from now on I'll be using VirtualBox, in fact I've already uninstalled VMWare, its gone...

Tomorrow I'm going to Spain for a long weekend for my friends wedding in Santiago. Unfortunately, I had no choice except to fly the worlds stingiest airline, Ryanair. It seems to me that they've gone a step beyond what any of the other airlines are doing to save costs and make more money, by literally charging for everything - including the toilets!

Firstly, you can see the first place they've saved money is their website - it looks absolutely s**t! A few thousand pounds would be all it took to make it look nicer and more user friendly, but instead we're stuck with one of the ugliest airline sites I've ever seen, and that's saying something with EasyJet's bright orange colours. If first impressions say anything, their website says it all and you won't be disappointed, they are as s**t as their website.

Now the fun part, paying. Everyone knows that a £0.99 flight isn't really a £0.99 flight once you add airport tax onto it. What you may not know is Ryanair, in an effort to save money, has now removed all airport checkin desks, so your ONLY option now is to checkin online and print out the ticket. If you forget the printout, they will charge you another £40 to re-issue the ticket at the airport, which is outrageous considering how much it probably really costs them to do print some more paper tickets. Anyway, apart from that, fair enough, saves some money for them and some time for us, especially as no more queuing and you can turn up later to the airport. HOWEVER - even though this is clearly a cost saving benefit for Ryanair - EVERYONE IS FORCED TO PAY £5/PASSENGER/JOURNEY TO CHECKIN ONLINE!!! That's another £10 for my return journey on top of airport tax! Absolutely outrageous and now seriously taking the piss.

But the fun doesn't stop there, this one isn't new, but having to pay £20 to simply load a bag on the hold is annoying but many airlines are now doing it. Only being allowed one hand luggage, and if you have a laptop as well that has to be inside that bag, which isn't allowed to be heavier than 10Kg and bigger than a small hand suitcase, that is stingy. Again, not putting luggage in the hold is saving them money, but limiting everyone to such a stingy allowance is just...stingy.

And finally have you ever paid to pay? Yes that's right, Ryanair will slap on a £5/journey payment charge to pay using pretty much any card except Maestro Electron (and I don't know anyone who uses that!). Considering the only option is to pay by card, wouldn't it be fair to at least give everyone an alternative apart from a barely used card? All my cards are Visa, and at least on other airlines my Visa Debit costs nothing to use, but on Ryanair its a flat charge, take it or leave it.

By the end of it, my £3 return flight cost £100 including all the hidden extra charges and taxes. Not very cheap at all really...

I can't wait to get on the plane tomorrow and experience the usually very crappy customer service, probably induced by the very crappy pay and working conditions Ryanair holds dear to themselves. I just Googled "Ryanair Stingiest" and it came up with multiple stories in the major UK papers - one talking about how Ryanair was going to charge their own staff to use the plugs to charge their mobile phones. Right now the toilet idea hasn't been started (to charge you to actually use the toilet on the plane) but that really is taking the piss (excuse the pun). Apparently they're also looking at making passengers stand on planes to make more room, I wonder how much extra it will be to breath one day? I can imagine them adding an "air" charge on checkout and handing out canisters only to the customers who added it on :p

I'm all for experimenting and innovation, but Ryanair has gone way beyond that to officially become not just the stingiest airline, but most likely the stingiest company in the world. And for a few quid more you can fly EasyJet or the other European airlines which don't treat their customers like sheep being transported to the slaughter house, just a shame none of them flew directly to Santiago...

I spent some time with some new business entrepreneurs this morning at a seminar on Raising Revenues by Prevista. I went there in the hope of learning some new ideas for my own start-up, but found out that I was several chapters ahead of the group and left early (it was really setup for beginners). I offloaded a few good ideas on the group from what I'd learnt and came out realising that the past year, I've really learnt a lot and should start sharing this stuff! It was this same epiphany that led me into Drupal consulting after attending a similar seminar last summer and ending up teaching the class about website marketing!

Firstly, I couldn't help but notice so many people there today still think of advertising as marketing. Get a product or service up, and then start advertising to find customers. Not only is this wrong, its costly and IT CAN KILL YOUR START-UP!

No start-up should be advertising. Advertising is a one way conversation from you to your market (if you're lucky enough to know exactly who they are!). If you haven't tested your message face to face with actual customers, how do you know your message works? How do you know the market you actually think is your market is actually your market? Until you've spoken directly to customers, and sold a few times, you simply don't know anything, its only assumptions, and assumptions are dangerous!

Advertising should only be used for two things:

1. Growing Your Business - Once you know exactly who your market is, and what messages they respond to (from selling to a few of them already), then advertising could make sense. That way you aren't wasting money advertising to the wrong people with the wrong message and you can be confident that your messages are effective.
2. Brand Building - Advertising won't make a sale, it will however re-enforce your message and brand in your market. Once you have a solid and growing business, then you can afford to spend some money building your brand to ensure it stays in peoples minds.

Both of these are for later stages of your business, not the first stages. I don't expect any business to advertise in the first 2-3 years (if ever) of life. During that time you should be directly talking to customers through the web, cold calling, trade shows and most importantly networking. All your customers should be people you found or were referred to. Once you start hitting a home run, and you find the same people respond to the same message for repeated sales, then you know that you can broadcast that message successfully and get a positive response.

My only caveat to advertising is web advertising such as Google Adwords. The difference for this form of advertising is that done properly, you can actually monitor accurately the response to several adverts relatively cheaply. Not only are people searching for your product (so you pretty much have solved finding your market) you can also tailor your advert messages over time to see what works and what doesn't. Its another way of "speaking" directly to your customers, and done properly can start paying very handsomely. However, even then, I would suggest this is done later on in the business once you've spoken to a few customers and made some sales, as when you're paying up to £15 per click for some popular key words, you'd like to be sure that you're messages are strong and you are pulling in paying customers!

In future blogs, I'll share some of the techniques I've tried and loved that can hopefully kickstart your business.

Sad news today, as the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died today from a cardiac arrest. To say MJ had an impact on my life is an understatement. When I was a kid, my next door neighbour, Ann, introduced us to Michael Jackson after we saw Moonwalker in the cinema and were amazed! (In fact we actually went to see Roger Rabbit, but after the film ended my Dad told us to stay low in our seats to see what the next film was, turned out it was Moonwalker. Good parenting!) After that I became a hard-core fan, buying all his albums and learning his dance moves, from which I won a lot of dance competitions at the school discos and still has influenced the way I dance today (without the kicking and ball grabbing of course...)

However, as I grew out of my Michael Jackson phase around the age of 11, my younger sister grew into him, and never grew out of him since! I ended up having to chaperone her to all the UK Michael Jackson fan club parties, which all seemed very political (I've never seen so many club members argue so much), and full of what I can only describe as Michael Jackson FREEKS! The funny thing was when I later saw a documentary about Michael Jackson fans, and I realised I'd met all the main characters from the parties with my sister, some of whom were pretty much stalking MJ at the time!

But one day a few years back, Michael Jackson came to the UK and the club actually invited him to come to a party they had organised in his honour. My sister HAD to go, so I HAD to go with her. I ended up standing about a meter from Michael Jackson hanging off the side of an open-top double decker bus going through Soho, as I tried to get a good picture of him for my sister, while being pushed and shoved by loads of screaming Michael Jackson fans! We later ended up in Equinox, in Leicester Square, where everyone bitched about the club managers only meeting Michael and how unfair it was, and Michael sat and watch a show of many of the people in the documentary, doing imitation dances of him to his music. At the end he came on stage and my first thought was "Wow, his balls have finally dropped!". Turns out his profile high-pitched voice isn't really like that in real life...

Unfortunately by that time, for me, his music had become crap, nothing compared to his Thriller, Bad and Dangerous albums, and I started to look at him differently, as a bit of a wierdo, or "Wacko-Jacko" as the papers called him, especially with all the child molesting allegations. Surrounded by the MJ fan club fans, made me think the whole MJ scene wasn't for me, and so until my sister bought me a ticket to go see him in July for the O2 concerts, he was really a relic from my childhood. Sure, every now and again my friends would get me to do my Michael Jackson dance party-trick, I'd listen to his older music, but for me he definitely wasn't the Michael Jackson I'd been a fan of back in the eighties.

So now that he's died, while its sad, especially as I was saying it would be cool to go to the O2 arena just to see him live once before he died (I said the same about James Brown a month before he died too - maybe I should stop saying such things!) I don't feel like this will affect me the way it definitely will affect my sister. Hopefully I'll restrain from telling her all the jokes I've just heard (already) since he died (its like Princess Diana all over again) but probably not...and while I may joke, and not feel that much after all these years for someone who was really just a poster on a wall and an album in my CD collection, I do think he was a legend, and his influence on my childhood and my sister will always stay with me

By the way...I just found out Elton John sang "Don't Let The Sun Go Down on Me" at a party when they heard the news. This guy seems to have a song for every tragic celebrity death, can't wait to see what he brings out for the next one!

Every now and again, a book comes along and you think "WOW! I wish I'd read this before!". This is one of those books. "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Gary Blank. While I've read a lot of books about start-ups and entrepreneurship, all of them tell you pretty much the same thing, but nothing specific enough to act upon. This book is a roadmap for anyone launching a product based company, but particularly for online-services such as ours. It fits in so nicely with what we learnt from our trip to the US, what successful companies must do and why so many start-ups fail.

For starters, it focuses on the customer development model. The traditional way a lot of companies start is this: build a product, launch it, get a sales team to sell it, and hopefully you'll get some customers and become successful. In fact in all honesty, it was the way we were going about things (even though we knew better!) until we got a reminder from all the guys in the US to sell it then build it! I think on our side, it was much easier with our technical backgrounds to just build what we thought would be useful, based on our experiences with working for large clients in Accenture, than actually go around talking to lots of potential customers, and I think it took us seeing it to believe it (as we did in the US) that you could actually sell something to someone before it actually existed. But I know we're not the only ones to do this, in fact loads of start-ups do it, and thats why they fail. 

This book essentially states the obvious - why would you build anything until you know you have a market for it? Lots of books talk about market research, business plans and the such, but none of them give you a clear process of how to reach potential customers, validate your idea and assumptions, build your sales material and positioning while you're talking to your market, and effectively modifying your product (if needed) as you go along, so that by the time you launch, you have a product people want AND some initial customers. I think if we'd read this book at the beginning we could have shaved 6 months off our sales cycle while we try to find our initial customers. What hit me is it pretty much validated everything everyone in the US was telling us, to the point I was thinking "they must have read this book too!". 

So if you're about to launch a start-up around any product, you HAVE to read this book. Unfortunately its only available in the US right now, so you'll have to buy it and ship it from Amazon.com in the US, it took a couple of weeks and cost around £33, but is well worth the wait and money! From now on this book has become our bible and roadmap to launching SambaStream!