Pitching Enterprises vs. Pitching Small Businesses and Freelancers

If you're designing an SaaS product that's useful to large Fortune 500 enterprises, web design freelancers and everyone in between, I have news for you: you're not. You're designing a product that will be wholeheartedly rejected by everyone.

Users vs. Buyers

In enterprises, your users are not your buyers. In small businesses, the people who use your product are the ones who are paying for it (also see Why Enterprise Software Sucks). In enterprises, you're designing to solve the problem of the buyer and not the user. In SMBs, you're user-driven and they are the ones who decide whether to pay you or go with someone else.

Different Care-abouts, Different Products

Enterprises care about:

• Control
• They want to be in control of all aspects of the solution (kind of like a benevolent dictatorship), maintaining permissions and the like.
• Confidentiality
• The data used and generated by your solution must be secured (preferably hosted internally)
• Continuity
• They need to know that you're not a fly-by-night operator who will just sell and then disappear. They need to know that you'll be there to support and upgrade your product for a long, long time.
• Customization
• Whatever you have is not good enough, customizations have to be made to bolt your solution onto their existing stack.
• CYA (cover-your-a**)
• There's a reason why "Nobody every got fired buying IBM" is an awesome pitch.
• Cornucopia of Features (I'm trying to maintain a C-alliteration here so bear with me)
• They need all sorts of features that will assure them that your product will serve their current, future real and imaginary needs.
• Sometimes, Cost
• How expensive are you that they start to care?

Small Business care about

• Cost
• Cost of the product can make all the difference between usage and rejection
• Getting things done
• Your product better be good at something that makes or saves money. It just has to earn or save more than it costs. They will not have patience for bells and whistles.
• Ease of use
• The ideal ramp-up time for your product is zero. No introductory training, no customizations. Just log in and get to work.

Users care about

• Getting things done
• Ease of use

Pick a Side

There is almost no way that you can create a product that's easy to use, packed with features, future-proof, customizable and lets you get things done from day 1. Pick a side and work from there.

Startup of Interest: Clipboard

Clipboard is a web clipping storage site much like Evernote.

I had heard good things about Clipboard and wanted to try it out. I have to say I was not disappointed. The UX of Clipboard is just so smooth. Very impressive.

First, you add the Chrome Bookmarklet which, upon clicking, shows up as a hovering widget like this:

You can expand that widget to get more functions but the most-used one (clipping) is right out in front:

Clipping cannot be easier. Click the Clip button, choose a rectangle of content (you can also choose a whole page). I suspect that it uses <div> hierarchies of the page to create the rectangles.

Clicking captures the content and allows you to annotate with notes and tags.

 That's it. The giant wasp has been saved for posterity on my clipboard.

Didn't I tell you it was smooth?

The Best Google Adsense Embed I've Seen

Ironic Sans puts Google Ads right near some vintage ads from days of yore.

A Handy Guide to Figure out where you stand on Affiliate-Link Pinterest Bots

This post was triggered by the case of the super-successful Amazon Pinterest bot wrangler and the resulting discussion on HN.  In case you don't already know the background, here's a summary: Steve (the wrangler) set up thousands of fake accounts on Pinterest, had them work with each other to vote up pins with affiliate links in them and ended up earning $1000 a day when people clicked on the links.

Here's an easy guide to find out where you stand on this whole issue:

10: Steve is right (and smart). There's nothing wrong in what he did.
9: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using fake accounts is just wrong.
8: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using automation is just wrong.
7: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using low-cost MTurk web workers to pin your items is just wrong
6: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you and your team of Pinterest cross-promoters without any automation or fake accounts

5: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you (no automation)

4: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be products that you've actually used

3: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it's not going to be by you (Pinterest, bring back Skimlinks and monetize, you poor thing).

2: No affiliate links. It screws up the equation.

1: I hate affiliate links. If I see it, I'll go to Amazon without clicking on a link, buy something for a $1000 and then add a screenshot of the purchase as a comment.

Startup of Interest: GrabInbox

With Ping.fm transitioning to a paid version courtesy of Seesmic, I was on the lookout for another service providing functionality similar to it. Then, at some point, I signed up for Buffer (though I haven't used it too much yet) to schedule my social submissions. Looks like now I found an app that does both: GrabInbox.

It has the big guys set up to go (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). I'm just testing it out with Twitter for now.

 Based on my timezone (India), it figures out the best time to tweet. Why is it that websites and apps think GMT+5:30 is Kolkota? We *have* other cities.

Here's my Twitter account as seen in GrabInbox:

Other Goodies:

• Baked-in Analytics
• Bookmarkets & Chrome Plugin

Twitter's Automagical Advertising Approach (What if it goes awry?)

Twitter's ad came out a couple of days ago. It's does a reasonable job of explaining how to put promoted tweets and products work for you. You can promote yourself in two ways: promoted tweets and promoted accounts.  It's pay-for-performance, in case you were wondering (you pay when users interact with your tweet or follow your account).

What caught my attention about Twitter's pitch was that you really don't have to do *anything* extra except pay. No searching for long-tail keywords on Google, no setting up Facebook ads. Nothing. According to the video, Twitter will look for and get your account promoted in front of people who have interests similar to your current followers.Twitter will figure out your most effective and popular tweets and promote them to this new audience as well. No new content is created. Twitter just adds a layer of zero-effort promotion on top of your usual activity.

Like anything that's so simple and easy, there is potential for things to go horribly wrong:

• Promoting tweets to people who are similar your current followers means you run the risk of either amassing a large mass of "clones", having a small initial population of skewed interests determining your follower accumulation trajectory. or both.
• How do you split test a tweet?  How can you measure and improve your advertising effectiveness? All you can do is promote and pray.

List of (64 and counting) Places to Submit your Startup for PR

A laundry list of sites that I'm collecting on an on-going basis. A lot of people (I'm one of them! how about you?) are going to need this list later. Add new ones to comments and I'll update!

Beta Lists/Influencers:

• Beta List
• MoMB | The Museum of Modern Betas
• Invite Share - Everyone is invited!
• Hacker News (Do this first!)
• HackerStreet (HN India)
• Hackful (HN EU)
• inspiredBeta - Discover New Beta Apps, Business StartUps, Cloud Services & Communities
• startups | Startup Meme - The Unofficial Web Guide
• AngelList
• Connect With Startups on CoStarter
• Beta Invite Links (InviteOnlyBetas) on Twitter
• Tip Us | The Startup Foundry
• Innovageek: The free showcase for worldwide technological advances - InnovaGeek
• Launch Feed | Home
• Submit Your Startup – Rate My Startup
• D.I.Y. Startup news | Your startup news – no politics, no exclusives, no embargos and no bulls#$t
• BetaCandy • startups pitch influencers and early adopters.
• GreatStartups.com
• Startup Ticker
• StartupLi.st • Find. Follow. Recommend startups.
• BetaKit 
• Startups.fm
• StartupStats
• Greatest Web Apps
• Gen-Y Startup
• Startup Booster
• Tech Hunger
• BetaBait

Listing your app:

• Web 2.0 sites and Startups - Ziipa - Suggest
• Submit a New Web 2.0 App! - Feedmyapp 
• Online tools and applications - Go2web20 
• Submit Startup | Alltopstartups 
• Simple Spark - Add a Web App to Catalog 
• Submit a Startup | GreatStartups.com 
• Submit New Startup « StartupTunes 
• Netted: Contact Us 
• AppVita 
• Most Built : Building the new web. 
• Apps Mania 
• Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips 
• Directory with 2303 Web Application Reviews - AppAppeal 
• Wikkid Apps » Totally Legendary Web Application Reviews 
• WebAppRater | Submit your Web Application for Review 
• Web 2.0 applications, listings, reviews, news, articles and all about web 2.0 from Neo Binaries - your definitive web 2.0 guide 
• AppUseful | Web 2.0 Applications Directory. User Reviews of the Best Web Apps. 
• Web.AppStorm | Web Applications Reviewed, Rounded Up & Explained 
• Showcase | SingleFunction 
• My First Startup 
• NetWebApp - Web 2.0 Apps And Sites Directory - Latest Web 2.0 Apps And Sites Added 
• Startup Meme - The Unofficial Web Guide 
• Go4webapps.com - Web2.0 Sites, Web Apps, Web applications, Apps Reviews, Web development, 
• MakeUseOf
• Web Dev 2.0
• On The App
• Net Web App
• Rev 2
• Tech Pluto
• AppSumo
• New Startups
• Productive Web Apps
• Minisprout (back after they fixed the Chrome malware warning)
• Startups100
• Consultiq (Bay Area)
• Apps400
• startUPpers

Any more?

Shawn+Sean's Airtime is getting ready to launch

Airtime, the brainchild of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, opened up for early access ONLY via Facebook. What's Airtime about? According to the site, Airtime is a "live social video company" and not may other details are present on the site.

You'll notice one thing when you sign up for early access though? Airtime wants to access *everything* on your Facebook profile. The authorization page asked me for everything including my chat history. Looks like Airtime is not just Facebook-enabled but Facebook is an integral part of the experience.

Ohh, their Twitter account is devoid of tweets as well. 

UC Browser: 0 to 18% India market share in 7 months

I was looking through a pretty interesting site that tracks internet browser usage trends and naturally was curious about mobile browser statistics in India. Opera was and is #1. Nokia is #2. But the real story was a contender coming out of nowhere to capture nearly 18% of the market to be close to being #2. What is this browser making giant inroads into the Indian mobile user base? UC Browser.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile Browser Market Share


Digging deeper, I found it's not the upstart that I assumed it to be. Apparently, UC is the most popular mobile browser in China.  That's all well and good but this is a Chinese export doing well in India. Normally, all I hear are stories about their own special versions of Twitter, Groupon and Facebook for internal consumption. A Chinese browser doing well outside China? That's curious,to say the least. What is driving this adoption?  I poked around till I found their patent page which, to me, appears to doing a much better job of selling the browser than their main page! I was surprised to see that the UC Browser has a lot of features such as page compression to save bandwidth and cloud-accelerated browsing. So, for a cost-conscious country like India, I can see the appeal. If I saw "save on bandwidth consumption", I'd just skip to the end and click the big bright download button.