Yes, it’s true. We’re going to give away the most important thing ever in our third blog post. It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to divulge such information right away, but hey, that’s kind of the way we do it.

Before we get to the absolute most important thing ever, allow me to preface this post. We at Intrigo deal with Entrepreneurs and small businesses exclusively. On a daily basis, we meet with our clients, and see many of them succeed, and some of them fail. That’s the unfortunate reality in being an entrepeneur, sometimes it just doesn’t work. And when you’re working with entrepenuers, sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you do, or what kind of product you create, sometimes the business you’re working with doesn’t make it. So what does that mean when you’re thinking about striking it out on your own and starting your own company? Well that’s where we get back to the absolute most important thing ever. It’s the one thing that we look for whenever we work with a client, even before we start to evaluate their products and business plan. It’s also the one thing that will allow you to fail, get back up, try again, and succeed in the long run. It’s the one thing that you need in every single employee, and the one thing you need with everyone you contract with, work with, heck even associate with.

Okay, so are you ready for what that one thing is that can make or break everything?

PASSION

That’s it. The one thing that we look for in every client, every employee, every contractor, is passion. In my entire life, including two years of working for Intrigo, I have not seen anyone or any business make it without passion. It’s the only piece that can motivate you at the beginning, keep you focused through the tough times, and relish the success when you find it. Now, here’s the good part, how to look for it.

Passion in your Clients

This is one of the most important pieces when we at Intrigo identify the clients that we work with. We get tons and tons of business plans and business ideas that run across our desks. We try to meet with all of them regardless of how we feel about their plan or their product initially, because passion and conviction in their product and idea can overcome faulty plans through sheer determination. Regardless of whether or not you work in a consulting field, passion is the best indicator of a possible long term relationship. Passion in one’s company means that they’re more apt to recognize effort and delivery. This means that you as a provider

You like things that are gratifying. And by this, I mean they affect you. It might not be life altering, but it forces you to pause.  The physical world provides us with daily gratifications embedded in music, phones, and cars.  It’s what distinguishes successful products. But when it comes to web applications, I continuously see a lack of respect for creating a gratifying web application. How does this happen (over and over again)? In the upcoming weeks, I will be writing a series of articles on gratifying UI. Today’s post is an introduction to the different directions I will be investigating.

Vital Web Applications
My mornings are pretty routine. I wake up at 5:30, unplug my Blackberry, and read through my emails. Then I get up, let the dogs out, maybe eat a little cereal, and eventually bring my Thinkpad out of standby. Groggily, I open Facebook to see if any of my friends are in relationships. 30 seconds later I check bank account balances followed by Google analytics, and eventually read some blog postings.  After I’ve completed my morning status check, I login to Basecamp where I remain for the next twelve hours. I’m making a point and it is not that I wake up early and work long hours, it’s that I checked Facebook first, followed by several other important web applications. Each of these web applications could change my life at any moment; i.e. a girl that I’ve liked since 6th grade could become single or an unexpected financial transaction could be processed. The information that each application provides is vital. And that’s how you make a good web application. You create an application that becomes part of someone’s morning queue.

Niche Authorities
Being a reliable, on demand, resource works too. Not every web application aims to be a daily staple. In fact, most web applications that want to have a fighting chance, try to be a niche authority. They succeed by doing a better job, solving fewer problems.

I suspect a general user’s interest is highly underestimated. If a user is looking for a widget, the user WANTS the widget. They don’t want anything more than to purchase the widget. So then why am I also required to create an account, check boxes about newsletters, and asked about extended warranties before I can pay? If users have a successful first experience, they will return creating future page views allowing new opportunities to collect more information.

Does your user interface birdie par?
I’m always jazzed to play golf until I actually play. After slicing the ball into the rough on my first stroke and ricocheting it to the opposing fairway on my second, frustration mounts. With a slightly better third stroke, I put the ball 50 yards shy of the green, but still in the trees. The pitching wedge brings me within feet of the pin. Three strokes later, however, my putter is found lifeless in a nearby lake while I contemplate seven strokes on a par three.  The first hole was much different for my golf buddy, Eric. He shot a whopping 320 yard drive out of the blocks laying him up for a comfortable 20 yard pitch. With both strokes perfectly executed, Eric makes the ball magically disappear with an inaudible tap of his putter.  If golf skill translated to Internet skill, Eric could adapt to complexly convoluted web applications like he can to bunkers, hills, and lakes.  But most users can’t, and those who can will find easier alternatives. Like a golfer attempting to birdie par, building an interface that users master before losing interest will improve conversion.

Lately, money’s been on everyone’s mind, so I thought I’d talk about having “enough” money.

What is enough? That’s a hard question to answer. To most, enough is at the far end of a rainbow; indefinite in amount and far away in time. It’s odd though, that something so important remains undefined. We like to know exact details of everything else in life, but why not the definite amount of enough? I blame it on Vegas.

I love slots. So much that I’ll reserve hours with the five cent slots on every trip. My biggest problem is winning. Within ten minutes of my first spin, I win. I don’t win the max, but I win enough to walk away profitable. Do I stop? No. Should I stop? Maybe. I don’t stop because I could win more. It says right above me that I could win more. So I keep spinning until I’m broke. I’m not really broke, just $40 bucks down.

So for a second, let’s pretend it’s not me in Vegas, but you. You’re a tech savy, guru, living in downtown Portland. You recently sold your Prius in lieu of Zipcars. A little hungover from your Vegas vacation, you hop on a plane. But on this plane ride home you scribble some notes on a napkin, pocketing it as your disembark. Late in the night, you can’t sleep because images of the napkin notations are zipping right and left. So you get up. The napkin quickly grows to a legal pad. Excited, you take some additional vacation days. You talk the legal pad into the beginnings of a business and eventually a prototype. You call your mom. She tells you to write a business plan. If you are picturing this dramatization, imagine me holding a large red stop sign. Before you do anything else, I have a question. How much money do you want to make (in a year)? And why did you call your mom?

I ask every start-up this same question. Some say millions while others say thousands. But from my experience, this is a deal breaker.  To most seasoned entrepreneurs, paying yourself is the last thing on your mind. But you have to at some point, and when you do, how much? After spending months crafting a business plan, have you actually thought through how much your satisfaction costs.

Understanding what’s “enough” is important because it will determine your company’s culture and direction. When I left IBM and started Intrigo, I was determined to make the same salary within a year. This meant that once my moderate salary was met, I had enough and the business could grow with the rest. Don’t misunderstand that I don’t like earning bonuses, but when it comes to start-ups, those first few years are all you get. And if you have money to grow, grow.

To illustrate this differently, I’ll use a client example. We have a client who wanted to make $12 million in their first launching year. And for two years, that revenue point has dictated a large scale, expensive marketing plan with high costs. But for those past two years, they have never received enough investment money to pay the required marketing costs. When we recently re-evaluated and decided to instead market to a single city, costs dramatically decreased, the campaign moved forward, and people started adopting. While the original revenue point does not directly convert to salary, their high expectations of “enough” crippled and cost a lot of money.

My point is: before you do anything else, figure out how much is enough. Then build your business.

On a side note…

While Intrigo is a open source, web application house, we tend to help clients with far more than custom PHP. This is by accident. We don’t ever intent to rework business plans, but without challenging our clients, our applications wouldn’t be successful. Applications and business models should intimately interact, but as application development inevitably exposes business edge cases, business models must change. I spend most of my time planning for and moderating these exposures. Even though Intrigo is highly technical, this blog tends to address issues of a less technical nature. I mean to communicate the common difficulties that more technical start-ups encounter.

For months, I have been watching our new business revenue steadily decline. Why? Well the easy answer is the economy. We work with start-ups, primarily funded by investors who are reevaluating their investments. And while contracts disintegrate, our workforce wants to get paid. For a small company like Intrigo, the effects are dramatic. So the once mighty and all powerful Intrigo is not so mighty. Being graced by years of luck and an unnatural sense of optimism, I’ve gotten an unpleasant taste of reality. But that’s ok. And that’s my point. In the start-up game, failure dominates progress. Without it, you never truly understand what must be improved upon. With each mistake comes a new model of thought. To most, this is uncomfortable. Those individuals should not be entrepreneurs.

I’ve always seen the corporate world most similar to engine power. How many horses you got under that hood? Well James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, needed a way to sell his engine to a society that relied on horses, the industrial power of the day. He did some fancy math and determined that 33,000 ft-lbs./minute represents one horse power. While a bit optimistic, the number is still used today. Up until car manufacturers refocused on fuel efficiency, measuring cars by their horse power was common. For large companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, it’s all about intelligent horsepower. The more they have, the more they produce. So when you go corporate and I mean work for a company with over 50’ish employees, you’re a horse. More horses equals more power, as long as the company keeps feeding it’s horses.

On the other end of the “make money” world, you have the brand new startups and small entrepreneur based businesses. For them, it’s not about horsepower; it’s about efficiency and innovation. Hiring few specialized workers for the least amount of money to produce the best new thing in the quickest amount of time. Pulling from physics, I like to call this the “coefficient of innovation.” Whenever I meet with a new startup, I care most about how long they can sustain poverty and persevere through failure. If a startup can overcome the coefficient of innovation, they’ll at least moderately succeed. But overcoming is not easy. In fact, it’s a natural barrier of entry to success.

How does one succeed? Let’s first answer the question of how one starts. You have an idea. You are excited. You get others excited. You get money. And you begin to work. As time passes, the original excitement is converted to optimism as you hit the first of many roadblocks. Each of these distractions slowly chips away and the optimism becomes pessimism. People get frustrated. People get very frustrated. People loose faith. The thing about people is that they are influential. People like to believe in something, and as the owner it is your duty to re-invigorate their original beliefs. While it seems so simple, the dark side is quite tempting.

Some of us Portland business owners have lost some good talent because we neglected to see how good things really are in these bad times. Intrigo recently launched Ugreekrow.com, Wirehire.com, and Notehall.com and they’re all rocking through adoption. Before that, we launched close to 80 other projects in three years. But some recent, perfectly timed, events have clouded the once bright and cheerful optimism that previously propelled Intrigo. So I’m restructuring. And once again I’m very optimistic. My mother skeptically challenges my optimism as do several others, but what do we have without it. My point being, don’t ever give up, just restructure your approach.   

In case you’ve noticed that we’ve been a little light on the posts recently, it’s all because our great clients have been keeping us so busy. In fact, so busy we’ve got three big launches coming up in August!

Here’s just enough to start whetting your appetite…

We seriously can’t wait for the grand unveiling. Check back soon for updates and to see them in action!

There’s a lot of early adopter angst out there. As a company, and as a geek, I play around with new applications and ideas every single day. I have more accounts than I can remember, and certainly way more than I use (which to be perfectly honest comes down to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, find me and add me :-)) Each day another web2.0 company comes along that promises to revolutionize the way I communicate, the way I work, and we all know that all but a rare few quickly drop out of our rotation and our use.

Product ideas don’t come quickly, don’t come easily, and there is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme. Sure, there are exceptions, applications become platforms and grow exponentially, all of a sudden there’s another 23 year old millionaire, but that’s playing the lottery.  One thing we continually preach is building your business around a mission.

Take, for example, the guys from UGreekRow (full disclosure, an Intrigo client). They’re entering a market in which they’ve seen a couple other competitors launch within their niche hoping to capitalize upon the success of social networks, trying for that get rich quick bandwagon type mentality. Meanwhile, the guys at UGreekRow have taken a completely different approach, focusing on how their product can improve the lives of Greek members. Instead of taking your run of the mill social networking features and pasting them onto a niche site, they’ve spent countless hours researching and meeting with Greek organizations and members. Their goal was to understand the biggest challenges and needs of the Greek system, one which they were deeply involved with during their academic career, and one they deeply care about improving and promoting.  They have then built the idea for their application around using social tools to address the most pressing needs of the Greek community.

This hasn’t guaranteed their success, but it has given them a tremendous springboard to jump from. They already have a large group of users itching to sign-up, and more importantly they have tremendous credibility within their community. Rather than being just another social network, they’ve used their core mission of promoting and improving the Greek community to position themselves as a company that cares about their market, in so doing engaging and growing their community while giving them tons of flexibility for future growth.

I think that’s the beginnings of the recipe for a sustainable, successful company.

Us Intrigees have hopped on the OpenID bandwagon. For me personally, becoming involved in the Portland community and companies like Vidoop and JanRain have really opened my eyes to the prospects and work going on with this piece of technology. Most of the conversations I hear about OpenID revolve around usability, including our own Nathan Bell’s thoughts on putting OpenID in the browser. However, I myself am not a tech guy, and see a bigger issue with adoption that needs to be addressed by those of us in the believer catagory, making it relevant to the majority of users.

The true promise of OpenID, in my opinion, is not just the ability to have a uniform sign-in, it’s the things that you can do once you have a unified sign-in. We often neglect what the web is and always has been, an avenue for communication. Every killer app that we use online, is killer because of it’s ability to improve our communication. Portable social graphs, ease of connections, and reputation building are examples features that greatly enhance the usability of almost any application, and are really only possible once a user owns their online identity. However, much of the benefits of the features comes once users switch to OpenID as their primary authentication process.

So while much focus has been placed on making OpenID more usable, I don’t think we as application developers have leveraged the capabilities of the technology to make it more used. The majority of internet users simply do not have enough accounts or frequented applications to have the legitimate need to unify their sign-ins. While they may think it’s cool, it’s not a huge obstacle to remember 10 usernames and passwords. But once we start making applications that leverage the power of a consistent identity, is when even the average user will begin to say, I need to switch to OpenID, or unify my online identity.

In my opinion, I say we stop working on ways to make OpenID work better, but focus on more ways to make it work for us better. Then we can get the technology to move forward.

Thoughts?

There is no bigger decision for most entrepreneurs than the first one, deciding the time is right to make a go of it. It’s the reason why I see post after post and book after book that are all about what you need to do to prepare, to plan, when the time is right, analyzing market and personal conditions…

Well my personal position on every single one of these items is pretty simple, who cares. The reality of starting your business is that you’re going to fail. No matter how good your planning is, how strong your product is, you’re going to make mistakes, have missteps, and deviate from every plan that you made prior to starting. The real question you need to answer is, are you ready to fail?

The beauty of failure is the opportunity to learn. To see in stark reality mistakes you made, and opportunities to avoid them. To capitalize and grow, not only your business but yourself and your person. Shedding the fear of failure allows you to recognize what it is, just another bump in the road so you know how your car reacts, giving you the chance to avoid and correct the next time. 

I work at Intrigo knowing that I’m going to fail, and that’s exactly why I chose to do it. 

This is poached from a conversation we had with one of our clients about making money on Facebook. I really wanted to post it, if not only for the insight, but for how much it reminds me of high school in Flagstaff. I’ve only slightly modified Dan Blaker’s words..

My initial thoughts about the world of Facebook apps:

There’s a small (but noisy) subculture of young import-car aficionados in Portland. They tend to gather on weekends in parking lots with their Hondas and Mitsubishis etc. This subculture is broken up into three subgroups: people who don’t have cars, people who have flashy cars, and people who have good cars.

If we break out Facebook users into similar subgroups, I’d say most Facebook apps cater to the flashy-car people. That is, the apps are fun and look cool (like a giant spoiler or under-car neon) but they don’t really do anything useful. And just as you can buy all manner of pretty (but useless) ground effects from a massive number of vendors, you can trick out your Facebook profile with a million pointless apps. Unfortunately, the lifespan of most of those apps is pathetically brief—people quickly get bored of flashy things.

For a Facebook app to be useful and persistent in the Facebook experience, it needs to have a real-world result. If an app saves people time or money or helps them legitimately connect with friends, they will integrate it into their routine and recommend it to others. This is not “viral” but it is sustainable and potentially very profitable. So let’s make the app equivalent of a new performance chip or a 3-inch mandrel-bent exhaust, not the equivalent of Altezza lights or “Type R” decal.

Nathan Bell, one of Intrigo’s founders and current head of Special Projects, will be joining Rick Turoczy’s (of Silicon Florist fame) “startup delegation” to the Greenlight Greater Portland launch event tomorrow.

The GGP is a mostly private sector regional development group that consists of a lot of representatives from Portland big business. Rick has put out a general call for input from the Portland startup community to gather feedback and questions that could be passed on to the GGP.

You can read all about it on Silicon Florist, or on Nathan’s blog post.