"Pivot." It's become a buzz word among startups thanks to Eric Ries and his lean startup language. It can often be overused and in the process be stripped of its meaning. But the principle remains invaluable for startups, and large companies for that matter, to constantly embrace change. What you set out to do will probably look nothing like what you will be doing in 3-5 years. Embrace it.

This post will take more of a case study approach, introducing three "graduated" startups that started as something very different than what eventually made them big.

Continue reading "Lean Startups: Part 3 - Startups That Pivoted"

Time and time again we come across companies who have one objective for their site redesign: drive more traffic to the site. However, a site design does not drive traffic. Advertising campaigns drive traffic. This is why, when it comes to a redesign, the focus should be on conversions, not traffic. While traffic is critical to a web site’s success, it certainly should not be the primary or only goal. Sheer traffic numbers or large increases in pageviews don’t mean much if there is no action being taken by those visitors. In order to get a better idea of whether your redesign was a success, conversion tracking is key.

Continue reading "Focus on Conversions, Not Traffic"

As discussed in Part 1 of Lean Startups, learning quickly is imperative in bringing an idea to a productive and successful product. An important piece of the learn, measure, build loop is learning from the very start of any idea. The question is, how do you test your idea and learn from potential response? Enter: The Magic Test.

The Magic Test--a recipe designed and supported by Eric Ries--entails attempting to sell your idea as "magic". Before jumping into discussions about features and functionality, think of your product as solving one or two major pain points magically. You don't need to tell people how you're going to solve their problems just yet--at least not until you know that people are interested in that problem even being solved. Simply put, if people won't buy magic to fix their problem, then they won't buy your product.

Continue reading "Lean Startups: Part 2 - The Magic Test"

"Buzz buzz buzz" goes the lean startup movement. This ideology, led by Eric Ries, focuses on learning from potential users and iterating through quick builds, and has been in the spotlight recently. I will spend a couple of posts explaining the most important and useful shifts in thinking that could shape your startup.

One of the most unique contributions that Ries makes to startup methodology is a flipping of the normal "Build, Measure, Learn" loop.

Continue reading "Lean Startups: Part 1 - “Learn, Measure, Build”"

Google Analytics filters are great for excluding certain data from your reports, such as traffic from your company's IP addresses or staging server. They're also relatively simple to create.

In addition to the general Exclude and Include filters, GA also offers an Advanced filter option. In their help documents, Google does a good job explaining what to do, but not why you'd actually want to use this option. I want to share three helpful filters we've used at Viget that help make your data cleaner and workload lighter. I'll also share a few more soon!

Continue reading "Fun with Filters in GA, Part 1"

A question that plagues startups from day 1 is: how am I going to pay for anything? There are numerous different capital structures and forms of investment, but it seems like the hot topic is making the case for IPOs. While it seems like the next best thing to sliced bread for many, I sought to answer the question: is going the IPO route really worth it for startups?

Most of my college education was focused on econometrics and statistics, so instead of attempting to provide anecdotal case studies (which can vary drastically), I sought to collect data and provide empirical evidence that would provide insights on whether the act of an initial public offering (IPO) would increase or decrease operating return on assets (a measure of efficiency) and revenue (a measure of growth). This post summarizes my findings.

Continue reading "New Study: IPOs Now More Attractive for Startups"

I recently tweeted about the New York City DOT's new anti-speeding campaign. The campaign has the NYC DOT electronic signs turn a standard pedestrian icon into a rather frightening skeleton when drivers speed through the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit. This campaign got me thinking - do these ads ever work? Over the years we've seen numerous creepy, horrifying, and sensitive ads across various marketing channels. But how effective are these campaigns? Have there been any actual positive (or negative) results? I took a deeper dive into one of these campaigns to find out.

Continue reading "Are Creepy Ads Effective?"

Paul wrote about ClickTale a couple months back, noting that the heatmaps that ClickTale offers can often provide insight into what content and elements visitors are paying attention vs. what needs improvement. However, if you don't have time or money to get ClickTale up and running but you do already have Google Analytics installed on your current, there are several reports that you can use to glean information that could help inform future UX and visual design direction. Below you'll find seven reports that you may want to take a peek at before starting your redesign process.

Continue reading "7 Ways Google Analytics Can Help Inform Design Decisions"

I recently came across the 2011 CMO's Guide to The Social Landscape. I think this is pretty on target when it comes to figuring out how to best align your goal with the right social media channel. However, with multiple goals and channels, it can get tough to maintain a consistent brand. Your brand may come off as disjointed or fragmented, leaving customers filled with doubt about what exactly your brand stands for and where the value is, thus negating all your hard social media work. Mashable posted their 5 Tips for Maintaining Brand Consistency Across Social Media. I agree with a couple, but not sold on all of them. Below are some additional tips that can help give your brand one voice.

Continue reading "Brand Consistency and Social Media"

Latest reports on iAds tell us that Apple recently slashed the minimum ad buy for an iAd from $1 million to $500,000 in an attempt to make the platform more appealing to advertisers. What exactly does this mean for Apple's iAds? Are they hurting that badly? Is this a move to attract advertisers in lieu of the new iPad 2 release this week? Several explanations exist and there's much speculation as to how well iAds are actually working.

Continue reading "What Does the Future Hold for Apple’s iAds?"

GA is great for answering 99% of the questions I have about my website. Luckily, some other great tools exist that make answering that remaining 1% a lot easier. Here are three of my favorite:

1) ClickTale

This tool tops the list because it's spectacular. In GA, you can't easily get a visualization of where visitors are clicking on an individual page. GA's In-Page Analytics report is making progress toward that goal, but it's still in Beta and has a few kinks.

Enter ClickTale, which gives you a comprehensive view of everything visitors do on a single page. See heatmaps of where visitors clicked and moved their mouse (which the ClickTale staff says correlates about 85% with attention). You can also see in what areas of a page visitors spent the most time, and what percentage of visitors even scrolled down to a given section at all.

If that's not enough to blow your socks off, you can also see how many visitors hover over an item but don't click it and how long they hesitate before clicking it--plus a lot more. I'll forgive you if you stop reading this blog post right now and go sign up!

Continue reading "Three Tools that Make Analytics Even Better"

As a fan of both the NFL and good advertising, I'm usually glued to the TV come Super Bowl Sunday (though the "good advertising" part is questionable when it comes to Super Bowl ads). In any case, I was delighted to read that this Sunday we'll be seeing the return of some big name brands that were out-of-sight last year. The return of ads from Pepsi, GM, and Best Buy are sure to provide some entertainment if the actual game fails to do so this year.

Continue reading "Super Bowl Ads are Back Baby!"

As the smoke settles around the financial debacle, we're figuring out what the heck caused a lot of portfolios to shrink. The more I hear about what went wrong, the more I think that the web can apply some of the lessons learned.

Ok, fine--the world financial system and the web are a little different. But in both, a lot of money can be made--and there are a lot of people jumping in without a clear picture of why, or a solid knowledge of how. Here are three cautionary lessons our industry should keep in mind for 2011:

Continue reading "Three Lessons the Web Can Learn from the Financial Fiasco"

It's no secret that Viget is a huge fan of Gowalla. As an agency, we have more than 2,000 check-ins at our Falls Church office alone. The geolocation service gained early fans here not only due to its incredible attention to detail and design, but also its increasingly unique gaming component surrounding virtual items (e.g., the Moon Rock I recently picked up). Unlike Foursquare and the other services in the space, Gowalla accessorizes your check-ins with the discovery of highly designed and fun items that you can carry around and swap for others you find, occasionally redeem for physical goods, or hoard away in your permanent collection (called your Vault).

So far Gowalla has conducted a variety semi-noteworthy partnership campaigns (e.g., Gowalla & Incase, Gowalla & NASA, Gowalla & Disney), all which primarily focus on simply finding and collecting unique stamps and items. The usefulness of items in the Gowalla universe has long trailed their appeal. You can't do much with them, but they look great and are entertaining to discover and collect. While the feature has remained a quiet component of the service since its inception, it's becoming clearer that Gowalla is missing out on some great opportunities for its users to interact in more meaningful ways around these virtual goods; and to extend that interaction into the physical space. The possibilities are near endless, but here's a few, Gowalla, for you to chew on:

Continue reading "Open Letter to Gowalla: You’re Missing Great Opportunities with Items"

Continue reading "GA for Startups, Part 2: Making the Most of Marketing"