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5 Tips for Corporate Types Looking to Break into the Start-up World

A few yeas ago, Jeff Jarvis was in Toronto promoting his book What Would Google Do.  As a VP Digital at a large newspaper, I invited him to stop by our offices to meet some key executives and to provide some input into a planned redesign of our website.

It was a nice afternoon, if a bit weird for Jeff (he was placed at the head of a giant boardroom table and asked to give his perspective on the future of media).  But at the end of our time together, I did something strangely out of character.  I pulled Jeff into my office and begged him to help me get the hell out of the newspaper industry.  

I had been a vice president for less than 6 months and though I loved the world of digital media, I was quickly discovering that I did not love the corporate world.  I wasn’t good at the politics and couldn’t get my head around working in an industry that seemed more interested in managing decline than building something new and exciting.  In fact, I was having daily dirty thoughts of working in the start-up world.

Amazingly, Jeff (who is very kind) did in fact help kick-start my journey toward a new life in the start-up world simply by making a few introductions.  

I took it from there.  And, after a little soul searching, a lot of work and a couple false starts, I’m now the CEO of Shopcaster, an ecommerce start-up that I’m currently expanding into the US.

If you feel trapped in a corporate job and long to make a break, here are five tips for making the big leap:

1.  Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons

Do you have a genuine desire to build something from nothing or are you just bored or dissatisfied with your current job?  Or worse, have you watched The Social Network too many times and are dreaming about Zuckerberg’s billions?

Start-ups are hard.

Can you handle constant uncertainty?  How about ambiguity?  Constantly changing priorities?  Are you willing to work long hours at a punishingly fast pace?  Are you capable of working with next to no resources - ie. in a tiny office space with limited staff and virtually no marketing budget?

Without true passion and drive, you’re going to struggle.  

2.  Make sure you can afford it

With all the stresses of start-up life, the last thing you need is to be worrying about your own finances.  If you get paid at all, start-up pay is nowhere near the levels of corporate pay (not to mention the lack of benefits).  

Sure, the long-term goal may be to make your millions, but the truth is, most start-ups fail.  Do yourself a favour and build nest a egg first.  Even if it takes a couple of years to get there, at least you’ll be working toward something.  And, you won’t be freaked-out about your mortgage payment when you should be focused on how to grow your business.

3.  Talk to everyone

Do your research.  Which start-ups do you admire?  Who are their investors?  Get some meetings and let it be known that you have a certain skillset and you’re looking to make a move to a start-up.  

If you’re not a techie and you’re looking for a technical co-founder, get ready for a long hard search.  It’s probably easier to find a husband than to find a great CTO.

Ask for help.  In the corporate world, we’re taught that needing help is a weakness.  In the start-up world, not admitting that you need help is a weakness.  Ask for introductions, ask for advice, ask for resources.  

But, you have to be willing to give help too.  Which leads us to tip #4...    

4.  Be willing to work for free

If you’re looking to join an existing start-up, the best way to break in is to volunteer your time and do some project work.  You can do it by working nights and weekends before you leave the corporate world.  Not only will it show the start-up team what you can do for them, but it will help you determine if start-up life is really for you (see tip #1).

If you’re starting a new business from scratch, you’re going to need a working prototype and some thoughts on a revenue model before your first investment.  That means working for free.

5.  Only make the leap if you love, love, love the start-up you’re entering

My first start-up job was at a company called CanSport LIVE where we were gathering amateur sports organizations into a digital advertising network.    I joined the company because I thought that the business model was very clever (we were selling actual soccer moms to advertisers).  

But the job didn’t give me the satisfaction I longed for when daydreaming at my old corporate job.  And that’s because I have zero passion for amateur sports.

So I had to go back to the drawing board and that’s when I found Shopcaster, a company I truly love with a mission I care deeply about.  

And let me tell you, I took a 70% pay cut for this job and I’ve never worked harder in my life, but I’ve also never been happier or more fulfilled in my career.  

I wish all you daydreaming corporate types the same.

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I Have a Confession to Make: I'm No Longer a Newspaper Person

A couple weeks ago, I tweeted about newspapers with Twitter giants Jay Rosen and Mathew Ingram.  This may not sound particularly surprising or unusual, but the truth is, I haven’t tweeted about newspapers in months.  And, it felt a little strange.  

Perhaps even more telling, I haven’t written a blog post in almost a year.  Take a look, my last post was about what newspaper companies should be focusing on in 2012.

You see, I have a confession to make.  I’m no longer a newspaper person.

My journey to non-newspaperdom has been such a slow process, I hardly know when it began.  But I think I can pinpoint it to the Spring of 2006 when I took a five day course on innovation at the Harvard Business School.  

I was the Director of New Ventures for my newspaper company and at the time was struggling to save a failing print magazine that I had created a few months earlier.  The highlight of the week was a session with Clay Christensen in which he discussed his theories on disruption and innovation.  During the case discussion, Christensen challenged me to think about how newspapers and other print media could innovate in the digital world to save themselves.  I admit that I dismissed the idea immediately thinking, “It’s not that easy for our industry...he doesn’t understand...dollars for dimes" and all that stuff.  When I pushed back at him (embarrassingly cocky of me), he just shrugged and said, “Newspapers will have to innovate, or they will fail”.  

Those words stuck with me.

Over the next three years (after shutting down my magazine), I spent all of my time learning the digital space, eventually becoming Vice President of Digital Media.  I came to understand the new economic reality of the media industry and the new drivers of value and competitive advantage.

I discovered that it was possible for newspapers to innovate their way back to prosperity if only newspaper executives would:
a) take innovation seriously and
b) get out of the way of the people trying to innovate

Newspaper executives did neither of these things.  

And eventually, like thousands of other newspaper employees, I was “structured out” of the industry.  In my case, job loss turned out to be a very good thing.  It allowed me to redefine myself through my blog, my Twitter presence and various consulting and board gigs.  But I still felt very much a newspaper person.

Now, as I watch an industry-wide proliferation of cost cutting, paywalls and cash cow milking, I’m just sad.  These great institutions are eating themselves alive due to a lack of imagination, a lack of will and a lack of courage (with a couple notable exceptions).  

I've become disconnected.  I won't return to the newspaper industry.  

In fact, I’m off innovating in the world of local, independent retail as CEO of a start-up called Shopcaster.  I work in a world where disruption and change are expected daily, things move super fast and inertia leads to a certain and speedy death.  I love every second of it.  I know I'm where I'm supposed to be.

I will always love the newspaper world and newspaper people (hell, I live with one) and I wish them well.  Perhaps there’s still time to save themselves.  Clay Christensen has teamed with Neiman Labs to offer more advice to newspapers.  And there’s some pure-play digital good'uns returning to newspapers to fight the good fight such as Jim Brady and Steve Buttry at Digital First, Mark Potts at the Journal-World and John Ferri (full disclosure - the aforementioned person I live with) returning to the Toronto Star.

But, I’m already well into my next chapter.  Watch for this blog to be about the joy and pain of growing a tech start-up.

The chart below is already proving to be more accurate than I would like to admit.  

I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.

 

Start-Up Visit: Claystone Inc.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of a Canadian rarity – a digital start-up aimed at the consumer market, rather than the B2B market.

Claystone Inc. is a dynamic home screen launcher and media player application for Android that replaces an Android device’s entire interface. 

What’s cool about Claystone is that it gives users the ability to create “content stacks” where you can queue up content such as news feeds, social media feeds, videos, photos, games, etc for a fast and seamless viewing experience.

CEO Christian Lassonde says that Claystone helps you get more done on the home screen and spend less time switching between apps. 

I’ll say. 

The first thing you notice is how lightening fast it is.  I could barely keep up during a demo as Lassonde zipped from news story to video to Twitter feed all on the home screen, all without opening a single app. 

You can even organize your stacks into categories of your choosing.  For example, you could have a stack for business news, one for sports, one for TV shows, another for games even contacts can be stacked up on your home screen for easy access.  The content in the stacks can be saved for later viewing, even offline.

Very cool.

Android’s multi-tasking ability is one of the big feature wins over iOS.  It’s easy to see that as our digital lives become increasingly mobile, a fast, flexible time saving interface will become important. 

Though Android does offer more flexibility, it's a double edged sword as the phones can seem overly complex, particularly to newcomers.  This could be reflected in Claystone’s 3.7 out of 5 rating in the Android market and is why Claystone’s mantra has become simplify, simplify, simplify.  One innovative way that they are achieving this is by adding game-like elements to the user experience.  New functionality will be enabled only as users master the initial features.

At 37, Lassonde is already a veteran entrepreneur.  A Toronto native, he spent 10 years in San Francisco where following a stint at Second Life, he launched digital ad agency Millions of Us and continues to serve as a co-founder and board member at virtual eCommerce business Virtual Greats.

After returning to Toronto in April 2010 (so that he and his wife could raise their two children closer to family), it didn’t take Lassonde long to meet up with two of Claystone’s founders Dale Darling and Prasad Maruvada.  After some initial consulting work, they soon asked him to become the company’s CEO.

The business model remains somewhat vague.  The app itself is free, so the Claystone team needs to be creative in determining alternate revenue sources.   What has been clearly established is that users do not want to see ads on the home screen of their phone.  It’s more likely that revenue will come from paid content in the form of affiliate deals with video and other content providers.  In the meantime, Claystone design themes are available for purchase in the Android app store.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Claystone is its very international user base.  A full 25% of users are Chinese, 25% are American and the app is also popular in India, Italy, Germany, France, the UK and many other countries. 

Claystone is proving that Canadians can produce great B2C digital products.  So why is there still a relative dearth of Canadian B2C start-ups?

It all comes down to funding.  To get a good feel for the state of the Canadian VC scene, one only needs visit the website of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.  So boring…so unhelpful…snore.

The truth is Canadian VC’s tend to be conservative and are fond of smaller bets (in the $100K to $500K range) in support of early stage start-ups, and lots of them.  And it seems this trend is picking up steam: 134 Canadian companies were financed in Q2 of this year, an increase of 11% over the same period last year, but the total value of those investments dropped from $355 million to $328 million.

This focus on early-stage ventures while avoiding larger investments aimed at making big, global scale plays aimed at the consumer market could hurt Canada’s tech scene in the long run.  As Mark Evans recently blogged on StartUpNorth, it doesn’t lead to the creation of a vibrant tech culture with hundreds of new tech-related jobs.  Instead, most often, Canadian start-ups are purchased by US companies and the business and its founders move south, further draining the small entrepreneur culture we do have.

I think it’s worth keeping an eye on Claystone.  I hope they’re a big Canadian success story.

 

Everything You Need to Know About Big Media Leadership in Two Simple Charts

Recently, I came across a fascinating study that I believe is very revealing of the thought process of media executives.  

Published in January, 2011 by the Jordan Edmiston Group, the study focused on C-level executives across the media, information, marketing services and technology sectors and was “created to capture senior media executives’ outlook on growth opportunities and key challenges that face the industry in the months and years ahead.” 

Seeing how I spend a great deal of time on this blog complaining about the blindly arrogant and often hopelessly illogical decisions made by these same executives, I was gratified to find everything I’ve been saying summed up neatly in just two charts:

 

1. Media Executives Still Believe That Their Problems will Fix Themselves

When asked about their expected growth drivers over the next one to two years, the top three responses were:

1. Organic growth (82%)

2. Launching new products/services (76%)

3. Expansion of market share within existing markets (70%). 

It seems to me that two of the top three answers equate to “don't do much of anything and wait for things to get better”.

Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy and one time hero of mine (he used to call his papers “athletic” because they were lean but powerful – I loved that), recently demonstrated this wait-and-see mindset when he stated in a conference call that he hoped the newspaper industry would soon “stabilize”.  In other words, there’s nothing we can do but wait. 

(Not that they do much better when they decide to launch new products and services as illustrated by Tribune’s baffling plans to enter the tablet hardware business, but that’s another blog post.)

 

2. Media Executives Still Don’t Know That They Are a Big Part of the Problem

When executives at companies with revenue of $250 million or more were asked about the internal barriers to growth, the top three responses were:

1.  Lack of talent in emerging areas (technology, Internet, etc.) (54%)

2.  Company structure slows growth/incompatible with path to growth (40%)

3.  Conflicting internal agendas. (34%)

Interestingly, only 13% of those same respondents cited lack of talent in senior management as a barrier to growth.

Huh?

Let’s see, our staff isn’t qualified, our company structure doesn’t support growth and everyone is off running with their own agendas, but this has nothing to do with the quality of our senior management?

It’s not us, it’s them.

We saw this attitude play out last month with Rupert Murdoch’s assertion that he’s not responsible for the hacking scandal at News International, but rather he was “let down” by those below him.

Where are the great media leaders?  I know of two. And I do know others are trying.

Being a great leader requires doing things no one else wants to do.

It may mean re-structuring for a new reality as Clark Gilbert did at the Deseret News when he separated the print and digital parts of his business.

It may mean putting the digital talent in positions of power as John Paton did when he put the digital people in charge and fired those who could not adapt.

These were not popular decisions.  They were not easy decisions.  They were gut wrenching decisions. 

But both companies are now launching into their digital futures.

That’s leadership.

 

 

 

9 Things: My Keynote to the ACNA

The start-up world has kept me hopping these past few weeks and I've been a very bad blogger.  Time to get posting again!  And I'm starting with the keynote presentation I delivered to the Atlantic Community Newspaper Association on May 13th.

Slide-by-slide commentary is below the SlideShare.

 

Judy Sims ACNA Keynote Presentation

View more presentations from Judy Sims.

1. Title

2. My name is Judy Sims and my day-job is as the COO of a Toronto Internet start-up called CanSport LIVE where I’m busy revolutionizing the business of amateur sports.

3. But up until 2009, I worked at the Toronto Star where as VP Digital media, I was responsible for thestar.com and also launched 4 digital products in 2 years.  Though my day-job is no longer in the newspaper industry, I keep a toe in the water as a member of the PostMedia Digital Board of Advisors.   I’m going to set the stage for our conversation today with a few slides on the new economics of media.  My apologies, there will be some charts and graphs, but I’m a nerd and I can’t help myself.  But the truth is, I find that talking in scientific terms, rather than emotional ones is the most effective way to begin discussing change.

4. What we’ve seen happening over the past 15 years is a fundamental shift in the way the economics of media work.  The root of that shift is the move from a world where media content was relatively scarce to one where content is very abundant.  The barriers to entry are down and anyone can become a publisher.

5. And not only is there a lot more content available, that content has become “atomized”.  Media is now consumed in smaller and smaller chunks across a wider and wider range of media sources.  The average YouTube video is only 3.5 minutes compared to a 30 to 60 minute TV show.  A blog post is only 3 to 10 paragraphs verses 20 or more in a newspaper or magazine article.  Twitter has reduced this even further to only 140 characters.

6. And now we’re even seeing this happening in the advertising world.  Ads have become unbundled from news.  Flyers are becoming daily deals. 

7. Workopolis, Kijiji, Autotrader, Flyerland, Craigslist – the ads are the content.  They’re the prime attraction.

8. The result of this atomization is that economics of this new media world are the inverse of the old media world.  Where content was once scarce and attention was abundant. 

9. Now content is abundant and attention is scarce.

10. Okay, here we go with the charts.  The economics of media, like the economics of any product or service are based upon supply and demand.  Where supply is low, demand is high and where demand is low, supply is high.  Where the two curves intersect determines the balanced market – the quantity produced and price it sells for.  This applies to the cost of a newspaper or movie or the cost of advertising.

11. This is what supply and demand for media looked like before the Internet.  Because there were significant barriers to entry as a media company, i.e. you needed a printing press or a TV studio or movie camera, supply was relatively limited and demand was relatively high.  Thus prices were high.  In our case, that meant that we were able to charge high rates to our advertisers.  Looks good doesn’t it?  We could even do a little marketing or increase circulation by moving into a new town or subdivision and we could even grow our demand and increase the price we charge advertisers.  It was awesome.

12. This is Umair Haque.  He’s an Oxford-trained economist who has been studying the impact of the Internet on various industries.  He defines this media 1.0 world as the Age of the Blockbuster.  The blockbuster resulted in very high revenues and profits for media companies for decades.

13. But Media 2.0 changed all that.  Reduced barriers to entry have increased media supply exponentially.  All this new content has made it easier for us to find what we like online so we actually consume more of it, shifting the demand curve out.  Good news right?  Well, the problem is that the demand curve hasn’t shifted out nearly as much as the supply curve.  The result is a hyper-deflation of media prices.

14. And we are in fact seeing this in action in the online world where supply of advertising inventory is much higher than demand.  And, technologies are being created everyday that make the purchase of advertising inventory increasingly efficient and increasingly complex.  As a result, there has been downward pressure on advertising rates both online and offline.

15. Umair Haque believes that we are witnessing the end of the Blockbuster Age

Three Things Newspaper Companies Need to do Now

Tomorrow, I will join the digital advisory board of a very large, and, assuming they’ve read this blog, very brave newspaper company.  After almost two years of firing my unsolicited opinions at the newspaper industry, I must say, it feels nice to actually be asked for them.

 Here’s some thoughts I’ve been having about newspapers lately:

1.  Newspapers need to stop swimming against the current of the Internet.  It’s a sure way to drown.

Wikipedia lists one of the 8 behaviours associated with downing as “trying to swim in a particular direction, but not making headway.” 

Watching newspapers committing to strategies that are sure to fail is to stand helplessly on the shore as they thrash against wave after wave of inevitable digital upheaval.

Where the Internet is about openness and abundance, newspapers are attempting to recreate scarcity by moving toward the closed environments of iPad apps and paywalls.

Where the Internet is about receiving information anywhere, anytime, News Corp is about to release “The Daily”, an iPad app whose publishing schedule follows an old-fashioned, once every 24 hours news cycle.

Where the Internet is collaborative, many newspapers are continuing to engage in one-way conversations.  In fact, to some, community interaction is considered a “gimmick” rather than the fundamental factor that has lead to the development of the web as we know it.  As Clay Shirky said recently: “We have greatly overestimated the value of access to information and underestimated the value of access to each other.”

I’m not saying don’t ever swim against the current.  Sometimes it’s necessary.  But that kind of risk should be undertaken by only the very strongest of swimmers.

2.  Newspaper executives need to determine an audaciously awesome vision for the future of their companies, and then align their organizations to make it happen.

It’s simple.  To be controlling and defensive is to contract.   To be open and visionary is to expand.

Have you ever noticed that there much of discussion about “the future of newspapers” but no real conversation about “a vision for newspapers”?  We all talk about how the Internet is changing things and how uncertain everything is and how uncomfortable that makes us all feel, but not about how awesome it could be.

Ah, vision.  What happened to that?

Many of the world’s best newspapers were founded on a vision.  The New York Times, the Guardian, and my old workplace the Toronto Star were the products of visionaries who wanted to change their cities and nations for the better.

But somewhere along the way, that changed.

Perhaps newspaper executives are too focused on very real short-term economic issues such as crushing debt and shrinking revenues to form an inspiring long-term vision.  Or perhaps the day-to-day 24-hour news cycle has created a culture where long-term thinking is not required or valued.  Or perhaps newspaper executives have simply been unable to adjust to the ever-shifting world of new media, the resulting lack of understanding and fear leading to paralysis. 

Having a clear vision and aligning resources to it works, even for media properties in the 21^st century.  It resulted in the Atlantic turning its first profit in decades in Q4 of last year. 

What if newspaper executives imagined the best possible outcomes for their newspapers and then aligned their organizations so that they had the means to achieve those outcomes?

And what if they created that vision without ever using the words “still”, “once again”, “regain” or “recapture”?

Perhaps a newspaper could become:

A platform that facilitates the coming together of individuals, organizations and governments to solve a city’s great problems: poverty, education reform, joblessness, environmental degradation, transportation, budget deficits…

A platform that facilitates interactions between consumers and businesses –whoever, whenever and wherever they are.

An interactive and continuously evolving guide to living, working, shopping, playing, parenting and doing business in a city.

Who knows?  But it’s time to start thinking about it.

3.  Journalists need to stop looking at new Internet developments as frightening or frivolous trends and start looking at them as tools that can be used to achieve a vision.

You cannot succeed on the Internet without using the tools that it affords.  In my opinion, refusing to use these tools is the same as refusing to use a telephone, tape recorder or word processor.

Social Media.  Many a journalist hates Twitter because “it’s not journalism”.  I honestly don’t know if it’s journalism or not.  What I do know is that it’s a fantastic tool for disseminating information, rallying communities and tracking trends.

Aggregation/Curation.  I can’t understand why newspapers have not sought to create a Huffington Post – like aggregation site around not just news but also vertical content areas such as parenting, health, automotive, sports, business, etc.  These sites would attract loyal and engaged users and deliver advertisers a healthy ROI with minimal cost to the publisher.

Online Gaming.  Newspapers could use online game dynamics to engage a community in solving a city’s large problems.  Before you dismiss the notion outright, watch Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk on how “Gaming can Make a Better World” and then consider the implications of Cubeduel’s “Who would you rather work with” game built on the LinkedIn platform.

If I were a newspaper executive trying to align my resources to achieve an audaciously awesome future, my next hires would be community managers, curators and game designers.

What would you tell a newspaper company executive team if you had the opportunity?

 

 

Newspaper Execs: Still Denying, Still Crying and Still Lying to Themselves

A few years ago, I took a course at Harvard Business School where I was privileged to hear Clay Christiansen deliver a lecture on the “Innovator’s Dilemma”.  What struck me was how in case after case, the managers of disrupted businesses repeatedly made decisions that appeared to be sound – they focused on their best customers, reduced costs, etc – but actually hastened their own demise.

The assumption was always that the disrupters were creating cheaper, inferior products and were scraping the bottom of the barrel for the least desirable, poorest, most unreliable customers – and good riddance to them!  I mean, who wants to go in front of a board of directors and say “We’re going to invest millions to offer an inferior product to our worst customers!”

But the thing is, the disrupters always end up improving their quality and efficiency until they are able to offer something equal or better to that of the incumbent.

Sound familiar?

Last fall, I wrote a post about the lies newspaper executives were telling themselves.  The post was born out of the frustration I was experiencing as I watched a group of very smart people repeatedly do remarkably dumb things, killing their businesses in the process.  And now, more than a year later, as these same execs dilly-dally with pay walls and iPad apps, I can only say that things are getting worse, not better.

It seems to me that there are two camps of newspaper executives.

First, is the very small camp epitomized by the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and JRC’s John Paton.  These execs aren’t afraid to face an uncomfortable reality.  The economics of media have changed.  What was once scarce is now abundant.  Large cohesive media products have become unbundled because the bundles no longer make sense.  The mix of news, information, advertising and classifieds were simply the result of an industrial age manufacturing process.  Or as Jay Rosen asserts, every process that is practiced at a newspaper can be traced back to the needs of the printing press.

The first thing a realistic news exec needs to do is understand their disrupter.  And once they understand the Internet, they will know that their survival rests on becoming of the Internet, not merely residing on the Internet. That means becoming a platform.  That means being open. The Internet is not just another content distribution method.  It is social.  It is collaborative.  That means accepting that they are no longer publishers or broadcasters having a one-way “Gutenberg era” conversation with the masses.

Next, a realistic news executive has to admit that they don’t know where the business model is going.  That takes guts.  Especially in the boardroom.

As Rusbridger put it in a recent lecture in Australia:

It's developing so fast, we forget how new it all is. It's totally understandable that those of us with at least one leg in traditional media should be impatient to understand the business model that will enable us magically to transform ourselves into digital businesses and continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web, never mind the bewildering disruption of web 2.0.

But first we have to understand what we're up against. It is constantly surprising to me how people in positions of influence in the media find it difficult to look outside the frame of their own medium and look at what this animal called social, or open, media does. How it currently behaves, what it is capable of doing in the future.

It takes balls to stand in front of a boardroom of mostly old men (why aren’t Rafat Ali, Mike Arrington, Om Malik et al invited onto mainstream media boards?) and say that the future is still concealed behind a dense fog.

They can’t tell the truth because the truth doesn’t have an obvious business model.  Yet.

So instead, they do the easier thing, appeasing boards with business plans that look good on paper, especially to people who are not of the Internet. 

So along come the steering committees, working committees, pay walls and subscription models and the dream that consumers will be willing to pay for their rarified opinions despite the countless free alternatives.  And along come the $30 million iPad apps that attempt to recreate scarcity by rolling back the clock to when news was a once-a-day occurrence and the public didn’t expect to comment, contribute or find links.

It’s a colossal waste of time.

In the meantime, smart competitors are discovering new holes in the market and new needs to fulfill.  Bloomberg Government, Demand Media (love it or hate it, it’s growing) and Flipboard are all products that could have been created by mainstream media companies.

We are officially in the post-Gutenberg era.  A new kind of thinking is required.  That is where time and money need to be spent.  That’s where the media industry’s best and brightest should be.

One Weekend Was All it Took

My favourite presentation at Toronto’s DemoCamp this afternoon was by the guys at TaskAve.com.

TaskAve is a simple but brilliant web app that combines maps + tasks + alerts.  It allows you to set a mobile alert that will trigger when you are in a particular location.  The alert reminds you of a task that you should do at that location.

In other words, if you keep forgetting to pick up your dry-cleaning when you’re at the mall, you can set an alert that will remind you as soon as you enter the mall - or walk by the drycleaners.  The alert will appear at a distance from the target of your choosing.

There’s even a business model.  If it achieves a decent amount of scale, TaskAve will have loads of location and purchase intent information.  That would be of great interest to retail advertisers.  If Lowes knows that I intend to buy a new faucet at Home Depot, they can send me a special percent off deal on faucets.  Or, Home Depot can send me an add-on deal, perhaps for bathroom tiles or paint.

Love. It.

TaskAve has some potential.  But that’s not what was most impressive about the presentation.  What’s truly jaw-dropping is that TaskAve was created just two weeks ago at an event called Toronto Start Up Weekend.

A group of five, made up of developers, designers, and product and marketing people created TaskAve in about 48 hours.  48 HOURS!  Complete with a monetization plan!

Phenomenal.

Compare that to a newspaper I heard about recently that has been working for over six months on their iPad app.  They have not one, but two committees working on it: a steering committee and a working committee.

Pathetic.

Newspaper executives need to wise up soon and allow real innovation to occur, without committees, from the bottom up.

The barbarians are at the gate.

 

The Boston Globe’s Paywall "Strategy" Makes Me Crazy

Last week, the Boston Globe announced a rather bizarre digital strategy (or stragedy as I like to think of it). 

Next year, they will be launching a new paid site (free to print subscribers) called BostonGlobe.com, which will include “news and feature stories, commentary, analysis, photos and graphics”. 

The Globe’s existing site, Boston.com will remain free and include breaking news, weather, sports and entertainment guides.  They are calling it a “one stop source for all things Boston”.

Neiman Labs describes it as a “Doubleminty Strategy” – BostonGlobe.com is for the “niche/loyal” audience and Boston.com will be for the “mass/casual” audience. 

This is a terrible, terrible plan. 

First of all, who the hell builds a successful website by targeting a “casual” user base?  Online businesses need highly loyal and engaged audiences to succeed.

But of course, they’re not really trying to build a new business; they’re trying to protect an old one.  And that’s where the strategy gets really ridiculous.  While offering free information and services to “casual” readers, they’re going to punish their “loyal” online readers by charging them for what has until now been free. 

But of course, they don’t really care about the freeloading loyal online readers.  The real objective is to protect the old, dying, print business.

Forget the long-term.  Forget anyone under forty-five.  Print must be protected because that's where the profit is.  For now.

The limitations of their strategy are painfully obvious.  Why do newspaper executives continue to make such silly decisions?  

I’m not saying that paid content will never work.  But you have to stop and think about the products you are selling.  Non-targeted paywalls and metered systems are not innovative.  They are just a way of doing the same thing while expecting a different result.  And that definitely won't work.  

You have to create truly unique value.  It’s called product marketing.  And it’s the way most businesses generate revenue.

In January of 2011, Bloomberg will be launching Bloomberg Gov, a “comprehensive, subscription-based, online tool that collects best-in-class data, provides high-end analysis and analytic tools, and delivers deep, reliable, quick and unbiased reporting from a team of more than 2,300 journalists and multimedia specialists worldwide. It also offers news aggregated from thousands of the top trusted news sources from around the globe.”

Combining data, analysis and tools to create a product that is truly valuable to a large and moneyed potential audience - why that’s an awesome idea!  If a product offers utility and exclusivity people are much more likely to be willing to pay for it.

Could the New York Times or Washington Post have developed this product?  Absolutely.  But they didn’t.  Nor did any other newspaper company.  And I’ll tell you why. 

First, smooth seas don’t make skillful sailors.  Years of near effortless success have created a group of executives incapable of true innovation.  (Yes, there are exceptions, don't send me angry emails.)

And second, journalists don’t want to think about the content they develop as a product created to meet the needs of a buyer.  They believe they are above that.  Due to the church and state tradition, they’ve never had to think about how the bills get paid.  And because of that, they too are at a complete loss when actual business innovation is required.

For an example of how the Boston Globe should be experimenting with paid content, I’ll turn, as I often do when discussing newspaper innovation, to Scandinavia.

At Sweden’s Aftenbladet, newspaper executives are experimenting with a “freemium” model.  News and commentary on the site remain free, but users are also offered a “Plus” service, which can be paid for in micropayments or by subscription.

According to Media Shift:

“The Plus service includes lifestyle material, such as over 200 different travel guides, health articles, and reviews of cars, gadgets and other products and services. There are also instructional guides for everything from buying an apartment to dieting or owning a pet. The paper also charges for select news stories, such as those that have to do with the Swedish Royal family.

The service's most popular content are the health articles, travel guides, the yearly lists regarding taxation in Sweden, and the reviews.”

Ah!  Just like Bloomberg, they’re charging for utility and exclusivity.

A small group of editors select the material to go behind the paywall.  Product development manager Elsa Falk stated in an interview that, “We are very much entrepreneurs here at Aftonbladet, and it has been good enough so far.  Now we want to apply more strategic thinking in our plans."

Good idea!  If only they had applied strategic thinking to their plans in Boston!

But actually, the Boston Globe got it completely backward.  They’re charging for news and commentary and giving away the utility for free.

What if Boston.com truly was a “one stop source for all things Boston”?  What if they offered utility?  And what if one couldn’t get that utility anywhere else?

Well, they’d have to make significant improvements to their existing product.

Here’s some ideas:

• Help your readers cut through red tape.
• Help your readers find things that are hard to find.
• Use data, analysis and tools to create ultimate guides to things your readers care about
• Help your readers maneuver in a busy life in a big city

It will take time to determine what will be successful.  It requires experimentation.  It requires a product management philosophy. 

But it’s time to get started.  Don’t you think?

 

 

 

Why Newspapers Aren't Winning Online: Until You Believe It, They Won’t Buy It

I’m continually amazed by the work Journal Register Company CEO John Paton is doing to transform JRC into a media company that will survive well into the 21st century.  I devoted a post to him and have Tweeted about him so often, I’d be in danger of becoming president of his fan club if not for the even more frequent Tweeting from Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others.

Why are we all so enamored of John? 

It’s simple.  He believes in the digital future of the news.  He believes that in the long-run, the Internet will be good for the news industry, good for the communities he serves and good for democracy.

It’s not just John.  Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian and Jim Brady at the soon to be launched Washington DC site TBD.com believe it too. 

It's called leadership.

As Simon Sinek says in his recent must-watch TED Talk, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.  Understanding this simple truth is how great leaders inspire action.  If you communicate an authentic belief and readers share it, they will interact with your site for their own sake, because it feels right to do so.

The sad truth is, for most news organizations, “why” they are online has nothing to do with a belief in the power of this new medium.

At one time, news executives had a great "why".  They sought to reflect, affect and connect the communities they serve.  And it worked.  Their newspapers became very successful.  But somewhere along the way, the "why" changed.  The focus shifted to making money.  Lots of money.

As the world started to change around them, online became a necessary evil.  But they’ve never really believed in the Internet, or understood it.  Nor have they valued the its ability to enable community and collaboration. 

If they did, they’d be a part of it.  They’d be blogging and Twittering.  They’d be putting the digital folks in charge of the newsroom.  They’d be creating the Complete Community Connection.  They’d be looking at the iPad as a new medium, (the fifth screen after movies, TV, computers and phones), and create something new instead using it to preserve the look and feel of print.

But they’re not.  And that means they’re not doing their jobs.