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.

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.

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.   

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!

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

Dan Blaker officially joins our team as our Project Manager, becoming the third Portland based member of our team. Dan’s going to be starting on our project with UGreekRow, as well as being our resident musicologist in the Portland office. Dan and Micheal now get to officially fight it out over who the best DJ is at Intrigo.

We couldn’t be more excited about having Dan join our team. His experience, talent, and personality are perfect fits, and attest again to why we love Portland and its people so much. Not to mention, Dan become the first ever Dad to be a part of the Intrigo team!

Also big news is another member of our Tucson team, Fadi Chalfoun, has officially announced he’s moving to Portland with us. Fadi had worked as a developer for us throughout his college career, and will now be joining us full time in the Portland office. He’s already done a ton of work on projects such as On Demand Safety, and soon to be launched projects Notehall and Casa Video. Expect to see him tagging along with us as we begin our migration this summer. By the way, Guillaume’s move is now only about two weeks away. The office is starting to fill up, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

People of Portland prepare yourselves, here we come!