Arthur Chang

Pitch with a Question, Use Case, or Description?

Having a startup naturally lends you to situations where you're describing what product your company is building.  Whether pitching to friends, relatives, other startups, or investors, it's a pitch to potential customers in one form or another, and they're all different!  Some people are accustom to pitches and are able to switch into the mindset of understanding the concepts you're describing.  For others it's easier to give them a use case that applied to yourself, or possibly to them if you know enough about them.  And maybe you just have to feel them out and ask questions.

When people talk about pitching ideas, they start thinking of adjectives to describe how "amazing" or "simple" or "powerful" their product is.  Then they talk about the concepts and parts of the product that are one of those things, peppering it with those adjectives.  It's easy for someone to understand what your building, but it's unnatural for the average person to realize why it's so cool for them.  

Face it, nobody cares about something unless it benefits them.  At the end of the day, nobody is thinking about how cool a product is for a mass of people that's unrelated to them.

I've been experimenting with how to pitch FanPulse to people.  In the end, they always get it, but how excited they are varies tremendously.  Some people are excited because I've successfully persuaded them that they are the ideal user, and they can really see themselves using it.  Getting to that point is hard, and you can't rely on the person to get there themselves.  Just telling them about your product isn't going to give them enough to realize how they could use it.  Some people have the ability to take ideas and products and somehow assimilate it into their daily lives, but that takes a lot of work on their part.

What if you asked a question to start a pitch?  The question could be asking if they have a problem that your product can solve.  Let's take a quick example for FanPulse: Have you ever wanted to keep up with sports that you and your friends love, but never have the time?  This is a hit or miss for sure.  Let's talk about the misses.  The person has zero desire for sports, so the answer is absolutely no.  The person is a huge hardcore sports fan who plays fantasy and has a set of box scoreboards they visit on an hourly basis.  So no, they follow it fine.

The ideal answer is: "yeah I used to follow the Oakland Athletics, but just never had the time to keep up."  Then it's easy to tell them that FanPulse is perfect because it spoon feeds them information about the games.  It's also easy to tell them that they will also be able to talk to their friends (in real life) about sports in conversations that you're usually left out of.  But what if they're not ideal?  Well most of the time it's not going to be.

A good starting question could be super simple. "Like sports?"  Probably, if not, you'll just have to impress by explaining the cool "Machine Learning Algorithms in the cloud" you built to impress people.  Kidding!  If the person really doesn't like sports, I'd probably defer to a use case for yourself.  Then they might realize that, yeah, I could like sports too if it was this easy.  Here's my favorite: A lot of my friends are Cal Berkeley Bears fans because they went to Cal.  I didn't, so I don't really care about the teams, other than the fact that a lot of my friends talk about them.  I wanted something to help me follow their teams without needing to commit the amount of time they did.  (pause for a nod from investor) FanPulse tells me what games my friends are watching, and if it's interesting enough, I'll check-in to a game so I can get updates just for that game.  Tomorrow I can talk to them about everything.  FanPulse is my secret weapon.

I'm pretty sure people will understand my story, and see the possibilities of them being in similar situations, or at least give me the benefit of the doubt that this is totally happening to masses of people already.  The use case is probably just the tip of the iceberg, so if they are still interested tell them what the product is.  FanPulse gives you lists of games, showing which friends or general fans are following, and you can also follow by checking in.  Check-ins then give you game updates, friend activity updates, and ultimately rewards you for your own activity with virtual goods and real life monetary goods like game tickets.  So there, I just told you (and could have drawn on a napkin) the basic features we have, but you can now connect it with the problem we're solving.

So how do you pitch?  Pitch with a Question, use case, or just a general description?  How about all three?  I'd love to hear what you guys think, and please don't take any of my pitching above as the real deal, they were just quick examples I pulled out of my pocket.

Careful with rails filters

Figured out something the hard way today.  The last statement in a before filter should never yield false, unless you mean to halt the filter chain.  That sounds obvious right?  But check out this weird behavior:

Lesson: Never try to set default values like this in your before filters.  If you find yourself setting default values, try to see if you can do it on the database side (:default => false in postgresql/mysql works).  The reason is because the statement something = false, will always return false.  If that's the last thing, your before filter will always return false!  Add true as the last line and you'll be OK.  Not pretty though.

PR for Startups

Dogpatch Labs - San Francisco held a fun meetup last night with the topic of PR for Startups.  The meeting was a fairly informal general Q&A session with prepared questions from Ryan Spoon and Mike Hirshland of Polaris Ventures, answered by Venture Beat's Anthony Ha and Techcrunch's Jason Kincaid.

My co-founder, Joe, makes a good point that the meeting did an awesome job of showing us that these journalists are real people.  Not just faceless robots who don't act like the rest of us.  In fact it was definitely good to see that they were truly trying to get the best stories and has the same frustrations as normal humans do.  Biggest take-away from the Q&A session was to treat them like real people.

Some other things:

Don't use buzzwords when you pitch through emails.  Buzzwords just makes your product even more ambiguous.

Talk about competitors as well to jumpstart your description.  Sometimes it's better just to use a starting place, and then describe your differences and how you're better.  It probably won't necessarily mean the competitor will be mentioned, just that the writer will understand you better and faster.

The pitch should be only a few sentences otherwise it's too complicated for the writers to wrap their heads around in the short amount of time they're able to read.  It might be nice to include a really short video to your product, though I'd suggest at least telling them it's only 1 minute long.

Timing is important! 48 hours before a launch is a good time to make first contact with a writer.  As soon as possible when you raise a substantial round of funding, and if you put out a feature that isn't just awesome for existing users, but something really cool for people who have never heard about your product.

Feature pitches should be strategic.  Don't try to get press for features that only make existing users excited.  If it's something that will really draw other people who have never used your product, then it's worth pitching.

There's a ton of other things you can do, but just talk to them like real people, and treat them nicely!  They're not out to get you, they're just doing their jobs.  Hopefully your product will speak for itself.

Here are a few photos from the event:

Using Paperclip to save an image or file from a url

Paperclip is really good at saving images from local repositories or through forms, but there's little documentation on how to save an image from a remote location, say from a public URL somewhere.

The above uses a quick example using the Flickraw plugin to grab the most interesting photo from Flickr and saving it as a users' favorite photo.

Brinkley's First Snow

I'm totally infatuated with snow now!  I've been to Tahoe three times this season now, and I just can't seem to get enough of it (for now, hence the infatuation).  Last weekend I went up with my family to sort of hang with family as well as celebrate my sister's birthday.  We found a cabin that allowed dogs, so we brought Brinkley.  She's a small labrador / poodle mix.  The fancy shmancy name is Labradoodle.

I'm more used to pure labs or other kind of lab mixes, but dang, the poodle inside of her makes her incredibly clever and moody =)  I'm used to dogs that are so dumb they are just happy all the time and sit out of the blue even in mid trot when they hear someone shout "SIT."  Brinks is clever, knows how to get her way, and has ridiculously cute ears ;)  Here she is in her first snow!

Taxes for startups

I hate to complain and whine, especially on a blog, but taxes really warrants some wholesome bitching.  It's amazing how behind the times tax filing is in terms of the whole software and technology front.  People who deal with taxes are deep in a system that's been around for longer than some startup founders have been in existence, and the attempts at making taxes cool (online services, e-filing) are still built around the old and busted tax procedures.

It is a tragedy when it comes to taxes for today's growing tech startups that are completely started by technical founders.  It's so easy now to create a product with very few employees, and completely possible for tech people to just make something with no overhead, but when it comes to taxes, these startups get screwed.

Joe and I started a side project at some point, and decided to put a LLC around it so that we could start getting payments and roll in the dough without the legal problems.  Great!  We're both engineers who count by typing out for loops and += characters, so we decided to spend over $3000 to allow LegalZoom to handle all our legal things and to pay for the ridiculous minimum $800 tax fee (twice within a year, which still boggles my mind).  But the problem is, they don't file taxes for you when it comes time.  So here it is, the most horrible time of the year.  Not because we owe taxes, not because money is tight, it's because we have no time to read the millions of pages of documents that describe how you can be eligible to be a dependent, or get military status, disability status, or are grieving for something.

Can I just type in my LLC name and have it tell me what information it needs?  Hit submit?  Put my paypal credentials in and be done with it?  I have my paperwork, all those weird EIF, FEIF, SSO, SOS numbers and paperwork, but what and where does this all go?

A few lessons I've learned so far in this desolate demise of death:

• Don't get a freakin LLC until you make more than $1600 a year
• If you decide to stop working on anything, kill your LLC or else you'll have to pay $800 the moment January 1st rolls around and you're still LLC'd up.
• Don't do a multiple member LLC, it does you no good, and you have to file a crapload more documents because of it
• Don't ever even think you can figure out which forms you need to fill out.  And when you think you've figured out the right form to fill out, it asks you to submit 3 more.
• TurboTax is crap, it doesn't work on a Mac, it charges you $150 to download a Windows only version.  Unless you have anything less than a multi-member LLC, it's Windows only.

Am I the only engineer that has started a startup without a business person / cpa to help me along?  Taxes are such a big barrier for a company to get started and keep going.  It's a complete farce to startup mentality.

First photo is loosely related.  Took a picture of a foosball table at a cabin we rented in Lake Tahoe.  Taxes are like the bars impaling soccer players horizontally while they're trying to play the game. ;)  I really hope I can figure out these taxes soon so I can stop stressing over them.

Food Photography

My very first food photography! Other than a few small snapshots here and there, I finally had a photo gig for food. Of course I never charge for any of my photos, so this was mainly for me to learn and have fun! I got incredibly hungry during the shoot, and the owner, Chef Andrew Johnstone, was very generous and gave me lunch and a gift card!

I was a little worried about taking good photos of food, so I sort of just looked at some photos online of food photography and thought I could do it myself.

I brought along a huge gold/silver reflector with stand, and used natural lighting. I bounced the natural lighting from the front of the restaurant so I wouldn't create any crazy shadows on the opposite side. Worked out really nicely! The gold brought out all the warm colors.

I shot with a 105mm f/2.8 macro first, but then decided to go with a sharper 85mm f/1.4D at varying apertures. I wanted shallow depth of field, but just enough to show all the details of the contents of the plates, and blurring everything else. A nice PC-E lens might have worked out better. So I ended up using the 85 for most of the shots while on a tripod. I found the sweet spot at the distance I worked at (4 feet away or so) to yield good results around f/2.5 or so, giving enough detail in the plate without getting an annoying background.

I angled it slightly to give you a better sense of the food rather than top down. I had to make sure I didn't get the blue walls into the shot, so the close 85mm crop worked wonderfully.

Towards the end I decided to get a group shot of all the plates, which is when I realized how much more interesting the shots were with a wide angle!!!! Argh, I spent so much time with the 85 only to realize I should've played a lot more with my 20mm f/2.8!!!

I ended up getting some super exaggerated areas of the food, and also captured a lot of the "ambiance" of the restaurant as well with the wider lens. The f/2.8 was great for creating a shallow DOF in these shots as well.So I was able to get a closeup of the food, while showing it staged in the restaurant. AWESOME! Not the greatest for a menu, but for promotion and website use, it would be perfect. I would highly recommend everyone try using wide angles wide open for food photography! I loved it.

The 85mm yielded generic shots of the food with plenty of detail, great for showing off on a menu. The 20mm resulted in fun shots worth posting on Flickr and as promotion for a website.

Food photography is fun, makes you really hungry, but not sure if it's THAT interesting to me. I'm much more about taking photos of the preparation of the food, the people behind the scenes, and the cool details of a restaurant. But alas, here it is! Enjoy this series.

Week 12 through Now

I guess it was inevitable for me to begin to lag on some reoccurring task, such as blogging weekly about the early days of the startup life.  But it's a clear sign that everything is so incredibly dynamic, that structure and process is impossible and more often times more crippling than beneficial.  The old saying that "every day is a new day," starts to translate to, "every hour is a new hour."  Ideas and goals can change almost by the hour if not earlier.  Tasks to do can't be scheduled as confidently as before, and never can we schedule anything that's not totally independent of what happens in the next hour, a week later.  Because of this constantly shifting life, I had to put blogging aside for awhile.

The product finally seems a little matured and polished now, which is an awesome feeling!  We're left with bugs and new features that constantly improve what we have already.  There have been a few scary moments where we pivoted a good amount, and everything has turned out well.  One of our biggest drawbacks has basically been solving the problem of the app only being fun when you have a bunch of your friends in it with you.

As a cofounder, I naturally had tons of friends, and played with the iPhone app and even the web app (when it was in beta until a few days ago) while engaging with tons of friends.  What we didn't have enough experience with was the emptiness of the app when first joining.  There were enough cool features you get without friends, like game updates and what not, but the enjoyment with apps these days, and sports in general, is the social aspect.

Since we started focusing on those areas, we've created a lot of awesome solutions that have proven to be highly successful in making people enjoy the core features of the app, and to start inviting and making new friends throughout.  I won't get into the details of all of it, and these are just super high level problems a lot of startups have, but it's a good lesson to remember: put yourself, as a founder of a startup, in the position of a new user as often as you are in the position of a veteran user.  It's easy to get into the trap of becoming a power user, and making the app awesome for only those types of people.  Wakeup calls you get with feedback emails, google analytics, and user testing isn't going to help.  You have to make sure that you're building this app for yourself, at every layer of the application, to fully understand how to build and improve your product.

The last few weeks have been awesome for us.  We have started on our full fledged mobile web app, "web" being the key here, so that it's cross platform on all mobile devices that have a browser.  No more excuses for those with a BlackBerry, or a Palm Pre, or Android phones, it's gonna work across everything!  On top of that we released a desktop web app (meaning non-mobile) with all the bells and whistles and more!  With good design and a really good understanding of our product from constant usage of the iPhone app, the web version was almost a no brainer in terms of all the decisions put into how it was built and designed.  The flows and interaction feedback have all been built according to our own experiences with the app, and the tons of different types of feedback we've received.  It's not even considered a "first" rev of our web app, this seems more like a 6th or 7th rev because of all the stuff we've already done on the iPhone.

In a way, it might have been better to make the web app first, then to make a companion iPhone app.  The cross sections between users and friends who like sports and have an iPhone app is small.  Going with a web app, then mobile web, we could easily tell everyone to get it, and then later offer up a fun little native app.  Also not completely holding your entire company at the mercy of Apple's app store is a good thing.  Before the web app, Apple's (often strange) policies could have completely ripped us apart.  But of course, there were many many other reasons to go native on the iPhone first which did no harm in attempting.  In hindsight, going for a web app first probably would have been a smarter choice.

Working on the web app on top of the iPhone app has revealed a ton of different layers of what our product can become.  There's huge potential here, and it's getting even more exciting.  On top of organic and viral growth, we decided to do some fun "guerrilla" marketing outings.  So, we hired some models to go with us to the tip-offs for March Madness in San Jose to help promote the app.  The models did a great job at attracting all sorts of people (dudes), and getting the brand out there.  The girls we worked with were really savvy when it came to tech promotion, and they were able to help everyone understand the app, and most importantly, to download and use it.

The branding helped, as everyone would at least check out the crowd around a group of girls promoting something and wearing FanPulse t-shirts.  Later when we went bar hopping, people would come up to us and ask about it, saying: "we saw FanPulse earlier, what is it?"  Of course the translation is: "We saw some girls wearing these t-shirts, what is it all about?  can we see the girls again?"

I'm not saying this is going to make or break the product, but getting the hardcore fans in early, and then evangelizing to some degree is definitely worth it.  We'll see how things go on with March Madness, it's really giving us some awesome activity within the app.  Photos of the girls (and dudes going nuts):

Street Photography

It's so amazing capturing the streets of San Francisco, at least this part in Union Square.  I wanted to try to show the people who roam the streets, and the beauty of it in the night.

Sure it's beautiful, and it's easy to just click the shutter release, but this is probably one of the hardest forms of photography I've tried so far.  There's nerves first of all.  "How will the person react when I take their photo?"  You're always afraid that you're gonna make people pissed off, or create super awkward situations.  It's more often that people are camera shy than really love their photo taken.  A lot of people, especially girls, probably freak out and think you're a crazy person.

I've never gotten into weird situations, usually people just shuffle away quickly.  I guess I might be lucky that nobody's in a horrible mood.  There's also patience.  You can't pose these people, nor do you hang out with them all the time (that would be called stalking), so people are fleeting.  It's also hard to just walk around over and over, sometimes it's too crowded, sometimes the backdrop is ugly, or who knows.  There's so many variables it's hard to really feel confident to find a good shot.

Walking around yields people who are standing or hanging out and not moving much.  If you want non-stationary people who are walking themselves, you'll have to post up somewhere.  We found some good spots where there was awesome background and great people walking past.

Anyway, it was all a great experience, and a lot of fun watching people.  Here are some pictures starting from the day to the night:

What makes a game fun?

The success of a game is how fun it is.  There are so many different types of games today, some are very apparent like XBOX games that people spend hours perfecting, some are games that people are playing without even realizing, such as amassing the most Twitter followers, or gaining badges for checking into venues around the world.  The latter examples shows how games can be applied to common tasks to make them more interesting.

Novel things to do while doing common activities is exciting to people.  It gives them more to accomplish than they're used to, which adds to the productivity of their day.  Games are addicting and fun when you can get something to brag about to others.  You see a lot of clans, squads, and close friends appear on their own outside of some actual games and some built into the game as a community of friends.  This huge social collaboration is a way to brag about your headshot skills in dust, or your badges for insanely awe inspiring taste for good food around the Marina district in San Francisco.

The best quality of a game is to induce obsession.  Obsessions including people who visit a location or watch a sports game and MUST check-in to tell their friends and earn rewards to later brag with.  Obsession to go up in ranking on a leaderboard of counterstrike clans by practicing daily whenever possible.

The obsession does not necessarily came from pure gameplay, but what the game allows you to do outside of that game.  In StarCraft clans, you check message boards of friends, gaze lovingly at your #1 spot on the world's best clan leaderboard, and sometimes even enter in tournaments.  For FanPulse you can talk to your friends about sports because you know what games they watched and got knowledge from it as well.  You can check leaderboards, and brag about your fandom.

Just inserting a badging system into your app isn't the golden ticket of changing a regular utility or common everyday task into a game.  I've seen some people try it, but sometimes it just comes off as lame!  Gowalla was lame in putting their badges up, nobody really cared, but then they gave them a twist.  They had history behind them, they were rare, it was like gambling when you checked in!  You looked like a check-in fiend, but took that risk to find that special rare item that might be hiding after the check-in.  Suddenly the game of getting badges was fun.

Amongst all the other incredibly important aspects of games, one of the keys to fun and ultimately success is the ability to earn bragging rights.  Let's make things like eating out, following sports, and driving to work, fun =)  Game on!

(photo taken of my two friends Iris and Sonny playing a game of Chess. Might be a good example of a game that doesn't necessarily have bragging rights, but also doesn't make money like Farmville)