Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

Kevin Vigneault - Project Manager :

A few years ago, Nina Wanat moved to California. After working as a screenwriter and attending law school, she figured out what she really wanted to do was attend culinary school. Nina decided to start a blog called Sweet Napa to, as she put it, "remember all that I was learning -- everything from preventing exploding pies to shaping chocolate dolphins."

It turns out this blog was more important to her upcoming business strategy than she most likely realized at the time. When she later conceived of her business idea to sell high-end candy bars ($5 a piece), her blog became the testing grounds for various recipes she was coming up with. She created prototypes for orange, whiskey, coffee , banana, and coconut flavored candy bars and solicited feedback from her readers to gauge their interest. Her transparency not only helped her see what worked and what didn't -- it also attracted a loyal base of readers. These people would become her first group of paying customers when she later launched her candy bar business at BonBonBar.com.

Here are three lessons we can learn from Nina:

1. Be public about your product ideas. Don't develop products in isolation and then solicit feedback only after you've invested hundreds or thousands of hours developing a production-ready product.
2. Business strategies should be focused, but not product-specific. If your business is contingent upon the success of a single product, your chances of success are much lower.
3. Try out lots of ideas, but be selective about what you actually release to production. After trying all those candy bar recipes, BonBonBar had two candy bars available at launch (they have four now).

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist : If you listen, people in and around the web refer to "community building" on a regular basis. This makes it seem like a community is like a house: you start with a foundation, and every piece of wood you buy gets you closer to achieving your goal. Toss enough money, and you'll end up with something that at least passively resembles a house.

Hopefully, most have learned better by now. A successful community effort is, first of all, grown, not built. This isn't Field of Dreams. Instead, you need to lay the groundwork and then spend the time, effort, and attention necessary to help things catch on. Kevin Vigneault and I have talked about this a few times, and we've settled on the analogy that growing a community is like starting a fire in the wilderness. It's the middle of nowhere, you don't have a flint or a lighter, and you need to get a fire going.

Continue reading "Growing a Community is like Surviving in the Wilderness"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

January 9th must have been a scary day for the Mobile Web. Steve Jobs stood on a stage at MacWorld and told the entire mobile industry not only that it would be competing with its much-rumored iPhone, but that it finally lets users browse the “real web,” and not just those plain, boring “mobile” sites. Every company, consultant, and developer who had spent time or money working on a great mobile site to give their users a better mobile experience must have felt like they’d wasted their time. And here we are, just over a month after the coveted iPhone hit the hands of consumers, and they are all quickly coming to find their reliance on none other than the Mobile Web.

Just days after the launch, and even before the launch, scores of iPhone-centric sites were popping up, including the iPhone version of Digg and the slick suite of Leaflets from the guys at Blue Flavor. Now, a month later, there seems to be an iPhone site for almost everything, from reading various newspapers to tracking your fuel mileage.

Why would iPhone users, with a mobile web browser that can parse and cleanly display full-size web pages, gravitate toward these special sites, which often have a more limited feature set and a more ordinary appearance?

The answer is context. Content is still important, but context is king on a mobile device. If you have a device, like the iPhone, with a small screen, a limited ability to enter lots of text, and a slow or latent connection, the last thing you want is to have to zoom around different parts of a page, type in a load of text, or wait while twenty-odd connections finish loading your one page.

Instead, you typically want to complete a specific task, and don’t want extraneous “features” or “information” to get in the way of making it happen. Let’s pretend you live in the DC area, even if you don’t, and you want to take the Metro. On an iPhone, you have to wade past news headlines, advertisements, and links to information about the Board of Directors before finding the route planner. Then, you have to type in your origin and destination with the on-screen keyboard. Once you submit, assuming you typed correctly, you wade past that other info again to find the next train.

Compare this with their mobile site (which doesn’t work on the iPhone, since it’s old-school WAP, but should work on other mobile phones) or the iPhone-centric Meenster. Within three finger- or key-presses, and no input or scrolling, you can find the same information. These sites recognize the limitations of the mobile platform—even the iPhone—and provide a user experience that helps you do what you came to the site to do as easily as possible.

Rather than make the Mobile Web irrelevant, the iPhone has instead done just the opposite: mobile applications are more relevant than ever, and iPhone users are quickly choosing to use services that have chosen to offer sites that provide them with a better user experience.

When considering whether or not the investment in a mobile-centric site is worth it for your company or project, consider two quick questions:

• Would someone using a mobile device have a reason to need your service immediately?
• Does the information needed require a form to access, or is it found more than one click into the site?

If so, you probably have a significant audience that would be better served by a site tailored to mobile, and when you serve users’ needs quickly and effectively, they’re not only going to come back, but they’ll do your evangelizing for you.

The Mobile Web isn’t dead: it’s just getting started.

Brian Wynne Williams - CEO & Co-Founder :

The New Year is here, so here are some thoughts on how you can improve your site in 2007.  Some are quick things you can implement right away and some are things to keep in mind if you’re in the planning stages.  Whether your web site is a marketing channel for your offline business or it is your business, these tips are relevant (in no particular order).

• Study your web analytics reports regularly. Knowledge is power.  Know what your users are doing (daily), and then do something about it (often).  We recommend HBX for advanced needs; but, even if you don’t have in-depth analytics requirements, just plug in Google’s code.  It’s free and easy to do.


• Optimize your site / app for search engine indexing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around for a long time, so if you haven’t been focused on SEO you’re already behind.  There’s a lot you should do; but, the basics are straightforward: (1) select the right target search terms; (2) optimize your code, design, and content; and (3) earn inbound links.


• Keep accessibility in mind. There’s a balance here, as Kara describes, but awareness of the major issues is half the battle.


• Blog at least twice per week—or not at all. Should you even have a blog? Keeping up one the right way is time-consuming; but, if you do it right, it can be a big boost to your organization.  Blogs aren’t just under-featured content management systems anymore.  It’s not the publishing technology that matters, it’s the tone, content, and discussion.


• Focus on usability. Technologies like Flash and Ajax can help tremendously; but, they can hurt if used poorly.  Whether you’re trying to attract new users, earn regular readers, or convert customers, it’s all about making a user experience that’s intuitive and enjoyable.


• Think mobile, but only a little bit. The web is about information.  People want to get that information whenever, wherever.  That means mobile.  Build for the desktop browser, but keep the mobile option in mind with just a subset of your content and functionality.


• Go open-source, for the right reasons. “The technology is free” is nice; but, you can’t build a successful online business by making every decision based on cost.  For most businesses, open-source tools like Ruby on Rails offer more flexibility, extensibility, and scalability than their closed counterparts.


• Make your content available via RSS. Why not?  It’s easy to do and while the masses still want content pushed at them via email, your RSS subscribers will grow over time.  Don’t know what RSS is?  Ask Stephanie.  Then, use a tool like FeedBurner to manager your feeds and track your audience.


• Widgetize. Whether you’re building the next great Web 2.0 app or just want to push your content onto other sites, you have to be thinking about widgets.  A simple example: make that RSS feed available on other sites.


• Understand social media. Sites like MySpace and YouTube are dominating the online audience, and sites that understand how to tap into these networks will have a big advantage.  Don’t spam or trick people, just participate.


• Really engage your visitors. We talk a lot about visitor conversion here—ways to persuade your visitors to take action.  Be thorough in your thinking about what actions users should take because a single action isn’t good enough.  It makes your users binary—they’re either in or out, a customer or not, and then they’re gone.  Engage visitors with comments on blog posts, email subscriptions, or RSS feeds—anything that will entice them to come back.  By building communities and allowing visitors to engage with each other, you’ll find maintaining an active audience to be much more sustainable.

There’s plenty more you can do and each bullet here could be a blog post (or a white paper ... or a conference ...) in itself.  The point is progress.  Perpetual improvement.  Will the web boom continue in 2007?  That depends on whether you do your part.