Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

To come out with a solution one has to be equipped with a crystal clear problem statement document . My experience in QA/Testing role taught me how to describe a bug clearly in other words how to reproduct the bug. QA person use the product as a end user and can clearly point out the problem in the product. This experience really helped in product management work while defining the problem statement, gaps, pain points in the market.

Well written problem statements help product managers communicate both the difficulty faced in the market and the potential reward for solving the problems. If you stop and think about it you’ll see that problems are actually opportunities. New features, new products and even new industries spring up from people who see problems and find ways to solve them.

The key to successfully solving problems is understanding them. The following steps will help you express problems clearly and help you identify solutions:

1. Define the problem: Understand the nature of the problem and articulate it clearly so you understand its effects on the people you are trying to help.
2. Produce ideas: Make a list of things you can do right away to solve the problem. Be aggressive in finding the right solution.
3. Test the ideas: Discuss the best ideas with your team and test them with customers. Find out which ones resonate.
4. Choose among ideas: Choose the idea that will best solve the problem.
5. Plan for action: Write a plan to solve the problem. This plan will most often come in the form of clear product requirements that will guide the development, QA, marketing and other teams to successfully implement a product (or new product features) that solves the problem.

Well-written problem statements are an important communication tool for product managers.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Entrepreneurs think that their business idea is very good and will manage to attract VCs. For VCs, more than the idea its scalability that matters. Its a very common reason for VC to turn down your business proposal stating your business venture is not scalable. 90 out of 100 business plans are rejected citing lack of scalability, and questions hovering around scaling. So what is scalability and why is necessary to attract VCs.

Classic example i can quote is movie rental service. I worked in a  movie rental startup company, they started with Bangalore centere and within 6 months started operating in Mumbai and Delhi, this is scaling. In order to run operations/stores in multiple location it requires a head office cost and costs to develop and deploy ERP/SCM/CRM solutions. Thats is why each additional center will contribure much higher amount towards profit. This movie rental service company scaled to 8 cities and successfully raised $21M.

The point here is that if you are seeking external investment from people other than friends or family, they will want to know how they can exit from their investment - which will be from building a business that is sellable. To be sellable, you have to be scalable. Make sure you are clear about this and your business plan should reflect that.

For dotcoms, the ability for a Web site to grow at a rate comparable to that of the business itself is known as scalability.The website should be able to serve all users request seamlessly with increasing volume of online traffic. For ecommerce its just not your technology but their complete business model has to be scalable as well by entering into new product category or new market.

So assess your business plan well on scalability factor before pitching it to VC.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

E-commerce ventures have suddenly taken off in india since couple of years and lot many players foraying into this segment, some selling books, flowers, apparels, shoes etc. Important marketing and acquisition tool for ecommerce portals are affiliate programs. Affiliate program is form of marketing by which you drive traffic from one website to another.

Let’s investigate if affiliate program is really helpful and the need for your ecommerce portal. You may need to find the answers for these queries -

• First and foremost question is does your product will appeal affiliates to sell, is it good enough users will buy online, affiliates will thoroughly assess your product offering against other vendors.
• Do you have the right kind of setup, infrastructure to support the affiliate program, need to have marketing team which will work with affiliates like true partners. Ui team will be needed to handover the htmls, banners, images etc to the affiliates and guide them in its implementation.
• How easily affiliates can join your program. Steps to be taken to make sure joining is simple and hassle free.
• Do you have billing system in place to pay out their commission - billing system has to transparent and robust to display all their sales and conversion commission and can be easily accessible by the affiliate partners. Does your affiliate program stand out with other ecommerce players, why they should choose you.
• How easily you can carry out payment. End of the day what matters is the commission amount to the affiliates. Any delay or tedious procedure to redeem commission can really hamper your affiliate program.

In short affiliate programs are not easy to set and run it. Having said that portals like shaadi.com, simplilearn are doing well from their affiliate programs.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

I met an entrepreneur recently and was shocked to find his free trial period runs for 60 days i.e 2 months, Wow awesome isn’t it. I was wondering isn’t it too too long free trial period and they should focus on migrating customer into a paid customer. Question arises what is an ideal duration for free trial period 1 week, 10 days, 2weeks, 1month? And also what information you should seek from users before initiating the free trial offer

But before that another question arises why you are offering free trial. You have come out with a new product/web service and would like to pull in users to use your system. So in order to pull users into the system you have to offer dry run of your system. So would you enable all features to be accessed by user during the free trial period or would like to insulate some features in the free trial period.

In general as a norm companies offer free trial period of 30days, i firmly believe if a customer will become paid customer after 30 days, it can happen in 14 days also. If you can’t show them the value in a week-10days time, time to look at product positioning and product features. In free trial period onboarding of customer should be the primary goal and show value by making sure you have designed fantastic product which will address customer need after they input information.

I personally believe you should never ask for Credit card information during trial period, though u will charge their credit card after the trial period but this act can really put off your potential customer and they will drop out.

Do share your stories on free trial.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Most of the startups i came across recently are confused about the product launch and marketing launch, They assume product launch and marketing launch is one and the same.

In simple words product launch is making your product available to the customers in the public, no alpha/beta customers while marketing launch is announcing a product, start the PR activities and kick off marketing activities.

Company adopt the launch strategy which suits their business and fits well in their business plan. For example Taggle internet ventures started off with PR campaigns and marketing activities before launching the product. Their objective was to build the sales pipeline before launching the product.

When to go for marketing launch

A marketing launch establishes startup positioning. If you are confused or don’t know what the right positioning is for your startup, do not launch. When you launch with the wrong positioning, you have to spend extra effort and money later cleaning it up

Startups have to know their business model. Most startups launch before they figured out what business they are in. Always pay attention to your fundamental driver of growth. If the product needs to be tweaked for better conversion rate, do it before the launch.

Startup should know what the success metrics are for the launch. If you are confident on your strategy you will definitely know the success metrics.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Have you evaluated how well your website helps visitors meet their goal in an efficient and engaging way, if not i recommend these simple E’s for user friendly designs -

• Effective:
  Watch some people try to complete some goals. Look out for the results of each task – was the goal completed? Was the attempt successful. You might want to ask the person if they felt the task was completed successfully, since sometimes they’re not aware they’ve made a mistake and think the task was finished properly, which is important information to make a note of.It’s a good idea to let the person know that you’re testing how well the system helps them do something, rather than testing the person themselves, as this puts people under a lot of unfair pressure. And often the person hasn’t made a mistake, they’ve made a reasonable attempt to do something logical – you just didn’t happen to anticipate that way of working when you were thrashing out the design and the interactive features your product needs.

• Efficient:
  It’s also helpful to time users as they complete a specific scenario. You can compare this time against someone who’s more familiar with your product, as they can play the role of an expert user.  Look for places where the screen layout or navigation make the work harder than it needs to be and the person ends up struggling with the system.You can also write down the most efficient way to do the task and count each time the person deviates from that efficient method.

• Engaging:
  Watch for signs that the screens are confusing, or difficult to read, by asking the person to think aloud as they have a go at the task. You can also ask the person at the end of the scenario “How would you describe your experience using this system to do that scenario”. Always try not to ask leading questions like “Was that easy for you?” or “I thought that was difficult for you to complete, how did you feel about it”.

• Error Tolerant:
  Create a test in which you think mistakes are likely to happen, and see how well users can recover from problems and how helpful the product is. Count the number of times users see error messages and how helpful the message was and how they could be prevented from happening in the first place. If it’s a complex, important  system for employees or customers, you’ll probably want to make sure common mistakes are eliminated during training sessions.

• Easy to Learn:
  Try not to prompt the person if they come unstuck using the product. Sometimes the person will fix it themselves very quickly without any prompting from you – what I call a “Kayak Moment”. Even if they don’t fix the problem, it’s helpful to see how they go about solving it. If the person is having real difficulty, it’s OK to give them a brief prompt to get them back on track.When you’re briefing people before the session, control how much instruction is given to them, and give each participant the same information. This means during the sessions you’re testing the product, and not the effectiveness of the briefings.

These tips will help you evaluate your product and find out how well it meets your users needs. Post up a question if you’d like more tips on how to do this sort of evaluation.

Marina, vcBytes.com ; Marina is an UX manager at eBay.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for measuring website usability and the user experience.

Before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

See Page Views not Hits

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 10 graphics on it, the server records this as 10 “hits”, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits overestimate website traffic. Page views are a better reflection of the number of eyes that gazed on your content.

Are there Enough Visitors to Create Meaningful Data-Sets

The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.  The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

Why People Leave Quickly, assess it

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

When Do Visitors Click Out of Your Site

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

Do Visitors Type in Your URL?

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivations. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Marina, vcBytes.com

To achieve maximum effectiveness, primary calls-to-action (e.g., add to basket) are usually placed at the top of web pages. Yet, it is equally important to include calls-to-action at the bottom of the pages, too.

You might lose customers who have not selected a call-to-action from the top and will just exit for lack of further push from you. Such calls-to-action are determined by the goals you have set for the site or page.

They may consist of links to the following:

1. Contact details

Contact information should be seen at the bottom of every single page of your website if this is what you want your users to do. Your email address and phone number, along with a short, friendly message like “We’d love to hear from you” can produce more results than a curtly worded “Fill up the form to make an enquiry”.

2. Registering or Signing Up

If getting users to register or sign up (e.g. for a newsletter or an event) is your site’s main objective, place an appropriate call-to-action at the bottom of the page that follows your sales message. If you exerted time and effort to write killer copy, you must end it with a call-to-action so the user knows what the next step is: sign up.

3. Related Products or Services

The user may not find your main products or services to his liking. As he scrolls down without making any action, display images or descriptions of other products or services at the bottom of the page so he’ll have other options to purchase instead of leaving the site with his needs unmet.

4. Social networking bookmarking services

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Digg store web pages and recommend them to other users. Placing a link at the page bottom to these sites will automatically add your web page to users’ bookmarks on that site if they click on the link. The list of users’ bookmarks is open to the public, making other users and search engines aware of the existence of your site.

Guest Post by Marina, a UX manager at eBay

The definition of a landing page is simply “the first page that visitors hit on your site”, so it is not strictly a certain page but any page that a user “lands” on. All websites have landing pages, whether they like it or not, even if it was not specifically designed as such. Understanding this is a key part of good website marketing.

anding pages can have a substantial impact on your e-commerce website. A poorly-developed one can hasten its breakdown just as an effective landing page can drive traffic to your site,  respond to calls to action and make your business website a success.

One vital measure of the effectiveness of your ecommerce website is the “bounce rate”, or the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site without making any other click. The bounce rate is inversely proportional to the effectiveness of the landing page. Basically, this means that a high bounce rate indicates that your landing page isn’t compelling enough for the visitor to pursue his interest or take some other action.

Most users prefer to skip information which is irrelevant to their needs. They want to get directly to their search, hence the need for a landing page that delivers just that. They are spared the time and hassle of having to navigate through layers of data when they already have an idea of what they want. The bounce rate is a key measurement for determining the effectiveness of landing pages.

Another measure for landing pages is the success of a “next action”. It might be purchasing the product, requesting more information, signing up for a free trial, etc. A concept that is intrinsic in creating effective landing pages is “alignment”. This is the connection between your source (where the visitor came from) and your landing page. The more connected they are, the higher the success of conversion.

A good example is a banner ad for a specific product from a beauty products company. Clicking on the banner ad and being directed to a landing page showing the exact same product yields a higher conversion rate. Conversely, if the alignment is absent, there will be a significant drop in conversion rates.

In general, a landing page must stir these positive emotions in a visitor for it to be effective:

• Credibility
  Your page must be able to capture the visitor’s trust by presenting a credible appearance. Get rid of red flags, such as lack of contact information, typo errors and wrong grammar, use of incorrect jargon, low-resolution graphics, and excessive use of Times Roman font.
• Recognition
  Your page must provide your visitor a “This is what I’m looking for!” moment upon landing.
• Persuasiveness
  Your page must be able to convince visitors that your product or service can help them achieve their goal. Keep in mind what attracted the visitor to your product in the first place so you will understand what he is looking for.
• Action
  You must highlight an action for the visitor to take while he is in your landing page.

Techniques to Use with Landing Pages

Read the rest of this entry »

Potential ecommerce customers will typically scan a number of web sites before deciding on one to buy from, so it is important that your web design be structured for usability. Usability is a subjective rating of how easy a web site is to use, and in the case of ecommerce, how likely it is that a potential customer will be converted to a real one.

Avoid a Cluttered Layout :

Web surfers won’t take enough time to get used a web site unless they’ve decided that a web site is really where they want to be. So, your web design should make it clear to visitors what it is that they will find on your ecommerce web site. A design layout, cluttered with too many options, won’t give the visitor a clear idea of what they can or should do on your site.

It could be that you have exactly what they are looking for on your web site, but if your layout design looks like a pizza with “the works”, potential customers might get stuck in the cheese and never find their way to the product they want.

Make it Easy For Customers to Find Products Different Ways:

This is especially true if you have a large number of products in your ecommerce site. Make make room in your web design layout for navigation in product categories that will allow a potential customer to browse products by price, by name and by the date added. Some customers will be looking for something inexpensive while others will want to browse your newest products. You want to give customers the shortest route from their entry point to what they’re looking for, and this will help narrow down that distance.

Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. In simple words Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc. then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Things to consider before implementing Freemium business model-

• Freemium may work for u if u have: great long term retention rate, product value increases over time, low variable costs.
• Create a business service with business processes which is highly robust, so it is scalable and doesn’t need large numbers of people to grow.
• Analyse how user use your system and assess the data, you will come across gaps in the system which you can address through premium service and it means more sales.
• Make sure you show them the value of features and how they can leverage features coming with premium subscription.
• Have reasonable pricing for premium subscription, if its too high competitors can cause dent to your business. High free user base tends to keep away the competition.
• Tease users with data on premium stuff and thus continue to entice them.
• Dont try to target 40-50% user base to convert into premium users, 10% conversion is too good rate.

This week i will focus on “Product Launch” and every facets of it.

Your product is nearing completion, beta testing is wrapping up, the product is looking in good shape and its time to turn attention towards bringing the product to market and making the best possible impression.

A well executed launch can mean the difference between success and failure for your product. If you do it in right it can give you substantial initial revenue momentum and set up your product up to beat its competitors.

Types of Launches -

• Soft Launch
• Minimal Launch
• Full Scale Launch

If you intend to make a e-commerce application make sure you adopt a simple checkout process, or you already run an e-commerce app pay attention to checkout process, assess and analyze the drop and dig into the root cause of it. Just when you are about to close a sale Unfriendly shopping carts kill your site’s ability to convert sales.

Studies have shown that the average online business website loses about 75 percent of its shoppers during the shopping cart stage of transaction, which is a huge loss in terms of business. Why they drop off and how this trend can be reversed by following simple steps -

1) State total price clearly - Be honest upfront and provide total price at the first step rather than inflating the price at the final step of checkout by adding Tax, VAT, shipping charges etc. Inflated price is real shocker for users and they feel cheated and they had assumed the price displayed before checking out is the final price. Afterall honesty is the best policy :-). Recently i dropped out from checkout process at Bigshoebazaar since shipping charges was introduced at the last stage and it inflated the price.

2) Simple Checkout process - Emphasis and hence design of shopping cart should be such that it should be easy for users to buy. Try to make your check out method a short, one page affair. Having them fill up too many pages with useless information will only drive them away.

3) Include Progress Indicators - Customers need to know where they are in the shopping process. This holds truer for e-commerce sites. Label the steps clearly to let the customers know where they are in the check out process. Some of them, especially those new to online shopping, want to check and double check their actions. Make it easy for them to navigate back and forth through the pages. It gives confidence while buying and merchant credibility is built.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com