Jun 03
Artur Nowakproduct development axure, balsamiq, mockup, prototyper, software, wireframes
6 months ago I started to draw wireframes of MindWideWeb. At that time the system was only in my head, but I had pretty good idea how different pages would look like and how would they behave. To communicate my ideas to my partner and potential investors I had to show them something, not just talk.
So I started to look for wireframing software, which would be inexpensive, easy to use (I can work with complex software, no problem, but it was the first time I was designing wireframes and I wanted to do it fast) but at the same time advanced enough to capture my ideas and share them.
I picked for Balsamiq Mockups for few reasons:
- it’s cheap, and in fact I asked for a free license and I got one. Thank you Balsamiq, you can be sure I will pay back one day.
- Multiplatform. Because Balsamiq is running on Adobe Air it works on PC and Mac, so I would not tie my work to one platform. I could run it on my MacBook Air during traveling and on turbo-charged PC at home.
- Super easy to use. Everything is pretty self-explanatory, so I could start wireframing immediately.
- Export to PDF. Very soon this became one of the most important features. It allows to export few mockups to a single PDF file, every mockup becomes a single PDF file, but links between mockups (application screents) are clickable in the PDF, so anybody who has Acrobat Reader can not only see the mockups, but also interact with them a little bit. I used exported PDF as a demo to my potential investors, just send a small PDF attachment and you are done. Of course such PDF could be forwarded to anybody, even your competitor, but that’s a completely different story. NDA? You can try :-)
I used Balsamiq Mockups for few months to develop an online, interactive demo with Tomek, MindWideWeb’s CTO, who lives in another city. We were communicating regularly over e-mail and Skype. I sent Tomek a PDF with first mockup, but actually I could not use this format later, because changed PDF file would not show what was actually changed, or what needs to be changed. I could include comments in the file, but it was just a free text, so I was mastering the art of describing visuals with words. Mockup in Balsamiq was my own tool to draw ongoing changes to the mockup, but not a tool to communicate them.
Another feature which became a drawback is lack of interactive elements. MouseOvers, OnClicks have to be documented verbally, so an interactive and Ajax-packed application can not be well sketched and demonstrated. If you add a lack of templates and a need to change every single-page mockup due to changed tagline, which needs to be on the top of very page – well, I guess it’s time to think about more advanced tool.
I’m pretty sure that I will continue to use Balsamiq like paper and pencil – very fast sketching tool, which is easier to share with remote coworkers than paper.
Now, deciding what should be the next tool is not easy any more, unless you don’t care about spending $600 for a single license, because that’s the cost of heavy-weight wireframing applications: Axure and Justinmind Prototyper. The second is actually slightly less expensive, but still, that’s just the cost of a single license, if this tool becomes standard in my team it will only multiply. Worth considering. iRise is out of question, an application for $6,995 per seat would have to read my mind.
I’m also looking and less expensive tools, in fact there is plenty of them. This time I need to consider few options:
- Online application or desktop application? Quite a few wireframing tools are web-based, and this allows collaboration, instant sharing etc. Also, online app makes multiplatform no-issue.
- Design-rich or pencil-like sketch? To which extent should the mockup be skinable and allow almost finished design? This became quite important question to me, because I found a big gap between my imagination of the application look and feel and what was actually implemented in the prototype. If course I’m not a designer, but sometimes I want certain design elements to to have particular look, for example 5-star rating.
- Scenario support. I’m not designing a static design-rich portfolio-type page, but an application, which is highly interactive and full of privacy control. I’d like to be able to build this into the wireframe: how the page looks like to not logged-in user, to a friend, to follower; how does it look if the user will choose different global options. I’m not sure if any of the available applications would include such scenario-based options. Maybe this is close to mind-reading functionality of iRise? Nice, if that’s the case, but I won’t spend the amount of money needed to develop my application for a wireframing application. Easy choice.
Without further, detailed investigation, I’m quite impressed with Justinmind Prototyper, especially by the fact that I could make the mockup look and behave like the finished application should. To achieve this I will need to do quite lot of work myself, but then developers will know exactly what I expect, on a pixel and single click level.
Another big, maybe the biggest advantage is that I could perform early verification of my ideas with my potential customers with wireframing application only. I will be able to show them how it will look like and get feedback before single line of code is written (and wasted). It’s not only about usability, it’s about product verification
Jun 03
Artur Nowakstartup 1997, altavista, amazon, america online, excite, geocities, inspiration, letter, netscape, prodigy, shareholders, startup, yahoo
In 1997 Amazon didn’t sell CDs yet, only books. I became Amazon’s customer in late 1998, when I purchased several CDs (the order history is still online). I’m reading the 1997 Amazon Letter to Shareholders, becasue it’s still a great source of inspiration for a startup. For example, in “Our Employees” section Jeff Bezos writes “It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy.”
But the paragraph which stroke me most start like this: “We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners…”
Who are these strategic partners? How was so important in websphere, that Amazon reported partnership with them as a strategic achievement? Well, the strategic partners were: America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy. If you are young enough, you probably don’t even know who they were. And that’s my point: these companies were internet giants in 1997, but vanished (OK, except for Yahoo!, but who is using Yhaoo! anyway?). How could this happen? Reading Amazon’s rerport for a year, when cumulative customer accounts grew from 180,000 to 1,510,000 is a great inspiration and lesson learned – the “Obsess Over Customers” strategy paid back for Amazon, so we can learn from it even today. But wouldn’t it be interesting to understand how the big fishes failed? The collapse of leading companies of 1997 web commerce reminds us that failure is the destiny of most companies, even those who were big players and enabling partners of startups like Amazon. On the cheefull side: even if current market seems to be saturated, changes will come and some companies will take over market leadership. This is not the end, the game continues. We can enter the game!
May 21
Artur Nowakquotes apple, funding, money, quote, startup, wozniak
“All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever” – Steve Wozniak
Not having any money to start a business makes you creative and focused. Not having done it before makes you naïve about how difficult business, which is good, otherwise you would not start the business.
May 21
Artur Nowakquotes apple, atari, college, funding, hp, jobs, quote, startup
“So we went to Atari and said, „Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even build with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you”. And they said, „No.” So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, „Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet”” – Steve Jobs
May 21
Artur Nowakquotes adobe, apple, innovation, kawasaki, quote, xerox
Chuck Geschke (Adobe) on the reaction of the spouses of Xerox execs to a demonstration of PARC technology in 1977: „They loved this stuff. They sat down and played with the mouse, they changed a few things on the screen, they hit the print button and it looked the same on paper as it did on the screen. They said ‘Wow, this is really cool. This would really change an office if it had this technology;.” (Unfortunately, the Xeorx execs didn’t listen to their wifes, and that’s why Adobe and Apple exist today.) – Guy Kawasaki “Reality Check” (the book I read currently and recommend to all entrepreneurs!)
Feb 19
Artur NowakLinks entrepreneurship, link, startup
Instigator Blog by Benjamin Yoskovitz – great source for practical tips for startups, which I’m going to read all very carefully and most likely apply.
Feb 17
Artur Nowakstartup business plan, market, startup
One of the fundamental questions I needed to answer in my business plan was: what is the size of the market you are going to operate in?
Is it really such an important question? My second thought comes from lecture of multiple articles written by angel investors, who know the markets, and it seemed to me that market value estimation wasn’t that much important for them. They know the markets much better than I do, after all they are successful entrepreneurs, not beginners like I am.
Of course, a young entrepreneur must have some market numbers, just to show that she did her homework.
So, estimation of market size seems to be only a homework. Two questions:
- What is my your market?
- How big is it?
First I thought that my market is e-learning. My product will support self-learning, using digital techniques, so in a way it is e-learning. The data I could google was over 5 years old. Ancient times, no good! I found one fresh report, but they charge $4,000 for it. I could build my product for this amount! (OK, half of the product)
I finally found some data in the article “Skillsoft: the E-Learning Industry Takes Another Blow”. The data comes from the $4k report, thank you informationweek.com for the quote :-)
(according to Global Industry Analysts, 2007) the 2010 global e-learning market was projected to generate nearly US$53 billion in revenue by 2010. The global market for self-paced e-learning actually reached US$27.1 billion in 2009 according to a 2009 Ambient Insight report.
The size of e-learning market was US$27.1 billion in 2009. Much smaller than expected, but still big enough for me ;-)
Yes, I look at these numbers without too much attention because in a way the market size is irrelevant for one reason: the product is innovative and not directly comparable with existing products. “Innovative product” sometimes sounds risky to investors’ ears (“yes, nobody got this idea before, you are a genius and we will you all the money we have”), but it is less “scary” once one understands what it is: a clever combination of existing, well established products. That’s the kind of “genius” I am – I just put things together to create something new.
Does the innovation work for me or against me? Will it help me to grow in the market or will it develop new market? TBC…
Feb 16
Artur Nowakdistribution distribution, lesson learned, mistake, Twitter
If I say something about Twitter in marketing context, my followers will get scared and will block me immediately.
Let me explain first: I genuinely believe that my product will make a difference for many people, it will help them learn and turn information from the web into durable knowledge. When I started to use Twitter I found many people who are active in elearning area, and through their tweets I found lots of valuable articles, discussions and reports on the subject.
What’s more, when I was reading some of the reports, I got really amazed: “wow, this report is describing the needs of 21-st century education, need to use technology in learning and need to formalize informal learning, that EXACTLY what I want to offer!”
I honestly believe that my presence on Twitter is not about “marketing”, it’s about staying in touch with future customers and about providing them with relevant information, and – eventually – relevant product.
Now, the main point of the post…
I found few prominent Twitter users, whom I’d love to have as followers. They are gurus, I learn a lot from them, I’d love to talk with them about my product, someday. I knew them before Twitter from different web channels, blogs, portals etc. Frankly speaking, I started to use Twitter because they were active on Twitter and I wanted to be close to their tweets and regular communication.
Of course I started to follow them right away. Very few of them followed me back, although they follow many people.
Why?
After few weeks I follow about 1,300 people and 350 follow me back. Now I think I know the reason: when you are “fresh” on Twitter and only few people follow you, prominent Twitter users will not follow you, unless you are Bill Gates. Simple as that.
Therefore, if you want to be a smart Twitter user (or just smarter than I was) – don’t follow the people whom you want to follow you until you build reputation on Twitter.
When you follow somebody, the followed person gets a notification, e-mail, and probably will check who you are. That’s the most neutral way to attract somebody’s attention. Attention of a person, who should pay attention to what you tweet! If you don’t have reputation (very few followers, few tweets), you will loose this opportunity.
It gets harder to attract attention later. You need to write to the person directly and this will sparkle a thought “what does he/she want from me?”. High chance to be perceived as another marketer.
Feb 15
Artur Nowakstartup business plan, icons, startup
Peter Hilton came up with brilliant idea to visualize a business plan with… icons. The idea comes from Creative Commons and is not only a proposal to visualize main points of the plan, but also standardize the content of technology startup business plans. And this is what I find very valuable, since “traditional” business plans contain many points which are not applicable to tech startups, and vice versa, many points important for startups are not covered, or not highlighted enough (e.g. innovation, intellectual property…)
It looks a little cryptic at the beginning, but Peter’s presentation explains it all in one minute.
If your memory is not visual, this is still a good exercise – to go through all points (icons) and prepare an answer – how this applies to my business idea?
Feb 15
Artur Nowakproduct distribution, pitch, product, value
I bought a book by Mirko Düssel “Handbuch Marketingpraxis” (“Manual of Practical Marketing”, Polish translation, I would struggle with German version), which is quite good. The main purpose for me was to go through the book asking myself questions like:
- does this rule / point / thought / paragraph / etc apply to my business idea?
- if so, how? Did I miss something in my business plan?
- what can I learn from this and use this to my advantage?
- etc…
Systematic overview of all marketing ideas. Like a check list – yes, I know this; wow, that’s something I need to consider…
Of course I jumped right away to product section. You start a company, because you have a product, right?
So, what are the benefits of a product?
- Basic benefit. If you have dirty underwear, you need a washing machine. Simple as that.
- Supplemental benefit. A property of the product beyond basic benefits. A washing machine can have special function for fragile fabrics and be power-efficient.
Now, I asked myself: what is the basic benefit of my product? Of THE PRODUCT I want to bring out to the market and sell it.
I was shocked: I could not tell!
I have a nice list of advantages of my product, but they were all supplemental benefits, making my product competitive against current market offering, but the basic benefit? “Learning” I thought. But “learning” doesn’t tell much, it doesn’t even point at what I think is the real purpose of my product.
After few moments of fast brainstorming I found the answer, although it is far from slick marketing slogan. You learn new things from the web every day. How much do you remember after few days, after a week? The basic benefit of MindWideWeb is it will not let you forget all the information you find daily on the web, it will make information stick, it will turn it into your knowledge.
That’s still a story, more like elevator pitch, not “a benefit”, which should be contained in one sentence. Maybe because we are creating a completely new product, which doesn’t exist yet.
More work to do, no question. But I’m glad I stumbled upon this fundamental question: what is the basic benefit of your product? Yeah, like I don’t know… uh, wait, I don’t! How embarrassing!
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