Since October 2006 i've posted more than 60 presentations on SlideShare, had over 300,000 views and over 10,000 file downloads, embedded my presentations in numerous blog posts, and used the product for hundreds of talks and presentations at speaking events & conferences. it's one of the single most useful web services for business i've come across, and because of that i sought out the founders several years back, offered to help them as an advisor, and subsequently became an angel investor in 2007. In addition, Rashmi & Jon are close friends & some of my favorite people to hang out with :)
However, up until now SlideShare wasn't a service i could use to make money with directly. While the website has grown from ~5M to over 20M users in the past year, and generates an incredible amount of traffic & visibility for my talks and presentations, i hadn't really thought about how i could use it to help my business other than via word of mouth.
I am not exaggerating when i say these products have the potential to change business marketing as we know it, and are possibly the most notable advertising innovation since Google launched Adwords and AdSense. They make social media marketing measurable & performance-based.
Let me say that again.
SlideShare has just released the most significant business-focused advertising and marketing technology innovation since Google launched keyword-based text advertising in 2001.
Making social media marketing measurable & performance-based is no small thing. This marks a dramatic shift in how to use professional presentation content to drive meaningful, predictable customer acquisition for their business. Anyone can now upload their business presentations, generate targeted traffic, and start collecting qualified leads for their business. That's nothing short of groundbreaking.
we had just finished doing the typical mind-numbing bullshit VC panel on what's trendy / what's hot. (which was of course, incredibly insightful and useful... NOT). next, the attendees -- all 300 of them -- were asked to get up and do a quick pitch on the startup idea they wanted to do over the weekend. the concept here was that other people might hear the idea & want to join forces. now, not to say there aren't some flaws with listening to 300 people do a quick pitch in a crowded room with terrible acoustics, but beyond that auditory imposition, there was one other big problem:
almost all of those pitches SUCKED ASS.
big time.
after about the 4th or 5th one, i just couldn't stand it any longer. i was NOT going to sit thru an hour-and-a-half of shitty elevator pitches.
so i grabbed the mike from the next open-mouthed entrepreneur and said:
"Ok folks... if there's ONE thing i can help you with tonight, it's how to pitch. it's very simple, and i can teach you in about 5 minutes."
"Here's the secret:PITCH THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION."
"That's it. done! that's all there is... just tell me the problem FIRST, not the SOLUTION. the reason is, i may not be able to understand what your solution does, but if you connect emotionally with me on what the problem is -- and i hopefully i also have the problem, or know someone who does -- then i'll give you PERMISSION to tell me more about how you're going to solve the problem."
after that, i handed the mike back to the entrepreneur... and you can guess what they did.
yoo betcha.
they pitched their solution.
and i interrupted them, RUDELY &WITHOUT MERCY.
i grabbed the mike back and said:
"THAT WAS NOT A PROBLEM.
THAT WAS YOUR SOLUTION.
DO IT *AGAIN*."
and they tried their best, and barely got through the problem statement. then they handed the mike to the next entrepreneur. and guess what happened? yep, AGAIN, they pitched their SOLUTION.
and i again, i rudely stopped them, grabbed the mike back, and said again "Nope. that was another SOLUTION. tell me what the PROBLEM is that you're solving... i guarantee you, the PROBLEM is NOT that the world doesn't have enough RSS readers out there." again, they barely got thru stating problem.
this happened for another 4-5 entrepreneurs. they would pitch their SOLUTION. i would then be a dick, yell for them to stop, have them start over, and state the PROBLEM first. after about 10-15 minutes of this insanity, i think i scared the shit out of them, and perhaps only to stop me from berating them publicly in front of several hundred people, they FINALLY started pitching the PROBLEM.
slowly, excruciatingly, over the course of the next half-hour, the pitches gradually got better. they didn't necessarily get good, mind you... but they didn't completely suck balls. they were at least easier to understand, and by end of evening most pitches were understandable, if perhaps still crappy.
and i made a name for myself as perhaps the biggest asshole VC of the northern california area.
but that aside, i made three hundred people NEVER forget the point i was trying to make, and hopefully at least 5-10% of them will have a slightly better pitch the next time they get stuck in an elevator with a VC.
if so, then it will have been worth me being such a complete dick.
remember folks: pitch the PROBLEM first, connect with your audience emotionally around the problem, and then -- and ONLY then -- offer your solution as the remedy to that problem.
DISCLAIMER: i've never really had any professional training in user interface design... and i'm sure that's obvious from my blog fonts & colors. However, i started designing & developing applications over 25 years ago, back in high-school when i developed some payroll reports one summer for my mom's company. Since 1991 or so, around when Object Builder and Visual Basic came out, most apps i've built or worked with have been in windows-based or browser-based graphical UI environments. And for the last 5-8 years or so, most startups & applications i've been involved and investing in are based on social networks & platforms. So whether or not i have any fucking clue what i'm doing, let's just say i've seen my fair share of designing visual user interfaces & interacting with social platforms.
I Like Big Butt(ons)
If there's one thing i've learned from all that geeking around, it's that UI typically works best when it's butt-simple. As a famous PayPal colleague of mine once stated succinctly:
"Users are Stupid... give them something to click on."
Wise words. You'll do well not to forget them, Young Jedi.
However it's not always enough to simply give people underlined text links to click on... rather, it's important to have strong associated visual cues that encourage users to take action. Sometimes that can be as simple as just creating a beveled, slightly rounded, 3D-looking button with a color offset and some text that identifies a Call-To-Action (CTA). Many people have become trained thru years of working with operating systems to click on things that look like buttons. particularly BIG buttons. particularly BIG buttons with pictures or icons. they are almost irresistible. Go on. Click it! you know you want to!
But -- and i do mean butt -- even big buttons with big graphics aren't always going to capture user attention. What has gradually happened over the past 10 years is that online consumer interfaces have started to zero in on basic human behaviors, recognition systems, and patterns. many of those offline interactions start with the simplest of human interactions -- looking at someone's face.
In fact, you could argue that much of the online experience these days is less about reading text, and a lot more about looking at faces, icons, and other visual representations of people.
"The FACES, You Idiot... It's ALL About The F**KING FACES!"
About 2-3 weeks ago, i was meeting with a startup about some new widget workflow they were creating. The company shall remain nameless, but they were trying to develop a new UI around people exploring other people. However, the interface was still mostly comprised of text explanations and directives. Although it was being built as a social platform, they were missing the social part.
And of course this cuts right to the heart of the matter.
As the startup founder and i were discussing alternatives, i happened to check my inbox (because i think it had been at least 2-3 minutes since my last fix), and i noticed a new LinkedIn Network Updates email -- who got a new job, who made a new connection, etc. And i thought it was curious that there weren't any visual images in the email.
Now believe me, i am a HUGE FAN of LinkedIn, and i'm friends of a lot of folks over there. And they are making a LOT of money, and are very likely to be an IPO candidate way before Facebook. But i *do* think they have done some things fundamentally wrong over the years, and possibly the prime evidence of that is their very late adoption of user photos almost 4 years after launching and the overall sparse use of faces within a social networking platform. LinkedIn is about *professional* social networking, but i don't think being professional means you have to be boring or not engaged. in any case, LinkedIn is doing just fine but i'd strongly suggest they are missing out by not making their platform more visual, more social, more viral, more engaged, and more group-oriented. but perhaps that's a longer discussion for another post. i'm still hoping they get there soon.
there was at least one other example of FAIL that i can't remember that pushed me over the edge, and i finally had to scream and just tweet out:
for many folks, the state of the art in consumer internet development is to design big beautiful fonts and flash animations and green-blue web 2.0 colors. and for Google (at least until recently with Wave), the most advanced design elements they seem to come up with were still almostly exclusively text-driven.
IMHO, the two popular companies that have actually done the best job with user interface design optimization are YouTube and Facebook. and of those two, the one that has CLEARLY done the best job around UI for social platforms has been Facebook.
YouTube iterated furiously over the years to optimize UI elements & buttons, and while not always a success from a monetization standpoint, sheer usage & adoption has been nothing short of astonishing. Obviously they were doing something right. there was an incredible amount of iterative development, and an emphasis on UI element overlays on videos, and embeds on other sites, all of which led to massive distribution, engagement, retention, etc. the thing i thought was always smart about YouTube was that the interface was largely about browse-selecting one image from among several options. it was mostly a picture-driven UI. and guess what? many of those pictures are of people's faces.
Facebook -- hey, wonder whether *they* thought much about Faces? -- was started almost exclusively as a collection game around visual images. as it grew & morphed, the profile pages & pictures remained hugely important, however the subsequent innovations around NewsFeed -- again, extremely visual, lots of faces -- and also the overall Facebook Platform, and associated user invitation dialogs, all created interesting & engaging ways for users to click around, into, and on top of interesting visual data (usually faces). they continue to find interesting ways to personalize the user experience, and i don't see them slowing down at all.
that said, i do think there hasn't been much innovation around the user invitation dialogs, and that this is a place where i think a lot of interesting work could be done to a) select LESS # of people, b) who i CARE about more, c) make the faces BIGGER, and d) constrained by the CONTEXT of the current conversation keywords. altho the dialog below is about faces, it's still too many for me.
interestingly, Google Wave takes a MUCH different approach and utilizes a very graphic / picture-rich environment, and a relatively complex UI. while i haven't played with it yet, it does look pretty cool. still, i wonder if this isn't about 3 years late in the making... Google seems to be bragging about how the product has been in the making since 2007 or even 2004, but that seems like a bit of FAIL there... i mean, that's either an engineering fail for taking several years to get a product out the door (which still isn't live yet), or a management fail for not pushing them to get it done sooner. anyway, i guess i shouldn't shit on their innovation even if it's a little johnny-come-lately, but i would have to say it seems more like a reaction to the recent News feed & activity stream innovation that's been happening at Facebook & Twitter than original thinking. but maybe i'm being too harsh. what i will say is that gmail / gTalk already has some useful features based on simply associating faces with email & IM conversations. however, i'll also say that when i used to work with Jawed Karim at PayPal, before he went off to create YouTube he was showing me a visual IM client way back in 2004. perhaps the interesting & minimalist elements of Wave are derived from this very basic association... and if so then i'll be eager to see what they've put together when it ships. in any case, it's clear that Wave is emphasizing faces in a way that has never before been done at Google.
Twitter is another company that i might suggest has done some basic things right with face representations, altho the UI is rather spartan (unless you're using a Twitter client of one sort or other). and before Twitter, i thought MyBlogLog had done some interesting things with faces as well.
As i almost always suggest, the reference presentation for many of these ideas is something called "Putting the Fun in Functional" by Amy Jo Kim, Shufflebrain. AJ does a great job of explaining why the basic human psychology around collection behavior are well-suited for "collecting faces", and how this makes it easier for people to take the actions you want them to.
Brad Feld (& others) recently picked up my tweet and wrote his own piece on "all about the faces", however i think in that post he was discussing a somewhat different subject around whether faces or avatar icons work better in certain social environments. i think he also comes to the conclusion that faces are important, altho i also think warm, fuzzy, familiar avatar icons can also function in positive, user-engaging ways just like faces can.
anyway, this post has now gone on quite long enough, but the primary point i was trying to make is that many consumer internet applications can improve their UI & conversion by simply:
1) Keeping the overall UI simple
2) Use big, high-contrast 3D buttons with simple call-to-action text
3) Use large graphics & icons, and in particular use hi-quality zoomed-in faces
and of course, all of this should be done with rapid, iterative, a/b testing to measure results.
alright this really hasn't hit all the points i wanted to cover yet, but i'll stop here.
at some point in the future i'd like to talk more about how to improve invitation UI dialogs by filtering the available people & friends to focus on smaller subsets with larger facial representations. in other words, less people, who i care more about, with bigger pictures.
or then again, maybe just a big-ass picture of someone's butt would work just as well.
so i'm just re-arranging deck chairs here, i know... but there's at least 1 or 2 new slides. and a lot more funky colors, for those of you who enjoy my kidnapper-ransomnotefonts & unique style of raping the viewer's attention. Also moved the embed of the original Startup Metrics for Pirates video (from Ignite Seattle / Summer 2007) after slide 23.
ya know it's hard out here for a pimp when he tryin' to get his money for the rent.
for the cadillacs and gas money spent
cuz' a whole lot of bitches talkin' shit.
well for what it's worth, i did make rent this month, G.
but lemme tell you, it ain't easy being a Web2.0P-I-M-P.
...especially in these Good Times we got going on around here. banks going belly up, people losing their homes & jobs... damn. people so fucking scared they voted a brother into the white [sic] house. i guess that's progress, but now we got our asses in both hands worrying about credit card debt, mortgage foreclosures, and wondering whether we gonna get PAID. better go slap the shit out my startups and make sure they come up with the Cash-Money, G. damn straight.
now listen up bitches:
Most of the time, entrepreneurs think about 2 types of users:
Simply put, there are "HOs" who contribute content to your site (they give you their stuff, or "put out"). The rest of the people on your site are the "Johns" who visit & view the content... and might even pay you some cash money (if it's good shit).
However, typically a 3rd & very important audience is forgotten about, which is quite likely even more important than either of the two above. this is the group of people who promote & distribute existing content / refer new users, altho they might not ever contribute any original content themselves:
These folks help share, digg, tweet, email, & embed your content, promote it to new audiences, and bring users back to your site. They are the"Pimps" who distribute your content. And most likely, they are WAAAAAAyyyy more important (relatively speaking) than the Johns or the Hos.
(disclaimer & note to self: i'm pretty sure at this point i have now lost most of my female audience, and/or anyone with any shred of class or civilized sensibility. for those of you still with me, i hope you find the rest of this post worth the crass language & white-trash upbringing i am helpless to remove from my discourse)
See, most folks probably design their site audiences like this:
1) first, let's get people to contribute content, so i'll emphasize THEIR needs and orient the site & features around CONTRIBUTORS (HOs).
2) next, i need to make sure people who are just average VISITORS (Johns) can view the site well, so i'll build lots of ways to use & experience that content. and hopefully they're share some of it too, and maybe we'll "go viral"!
3) lastly, some of those folks who are contributors will probably help DISTRIBUTE content too, so i'll give them a few tools to help do that, but they should already be motivated to help distribute so we don't need to worry too much. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
Now, there are already several errors in assumption/prioritization here:
people who DISTRIBUTE are not necessarily the same people who CONTRIBUTE (translation: "PIMPs ain't HOs")
even for those who do both, it's possible the higher-value action is to DISTRIBUTE, and yet most UI design emphasizes CONTRIBUTE features & actions higher. but Contributors need Distributors and/or Affiliates to help bring in Visitors. ("HOs need PIMPs to get JOHNs")
most of your VISITORS ain't gonna do shit except check out your content for free, jerk off on something they like, then skip town before paying you one goddamn cent. ("window shopping is free & easy, except in Amsterdam... but PIMPS help make sure JOHNs pay up de HOs")
thus, the way most people manage audience looks like this:
HOs
Johns
Pimps
however, the order you should REALLY use is THIS:
Pimps
Johns
HOs
that's right folks. The Internet works just like the Ghet-to.
Pimps go FIRST, bee-atch.
and if you don't like it, then Step OFF!...
cuz I'll beat your ass with my Pimp Cane and Cup and one mouse click tied behind my back.
we now return you to your regularly schedule SesameGhetto Street programming:
in no particular order, here are links to a few new books, blogs, & presentations i'm falling in love with lately (plus a few not-so-new-but-awesome old ones too).
apologies to all the amazing folks i'm forgetting about... i'm sure you are many and wonderful, and i'll remember just as soon as hit publish. will try to add some more if i can.
Steve Blankis a pretty sharp guy, and one of the best folks in the valley on technology marketing. He teaches at both Stanford and Haas/Berkeley, and besides being an academic he's been involved in several startups and actually knows his shit. His book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and his presentation on "Customer Development Methodology" are must reads for tech entrepreneurs.
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Steve Blank
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