This blog aspires to be a meeting point, a tertulia, for friends of Puerto Rico, wherever they live, to talk over the vital role of innovation in the story of our future. Jump in! The water is warm. -Marcos
In spite of the offensive language, you just have to acknowledge the brilliance of this iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo video…it just nails the comedic delivery.
A non-profit recently invited me to talk over their approach to social media. Since we live in public, here are responses to their questions:
How do we start?
First, based on your buyer personas and keyword research, build a listening station so you can track your audience and make your presence known where and when your customers already are…that is what social media is all about. The master of listening is Chris Brogan, co-author of the excellent Trust Agents.
Who do we listen to?
Social media gurus, are a dime a dozen yet masters of the medium include Brian Clark on blogging, Laura Fitton on Twitter, Mari Smith on Facebook, Brian Solis in public relations, and Gary Vaynerchuk on video. A fantastic starting point is to invest 16 hours into Inbound Marketing University, look up the speakers on each subject and follow them.
What do we do with our email list?
You have gold! Turn them into social media profiles through Flowtown as a starting point for social media campaigns. Convert your current subscribers into advocates for your cause, and that means giving them the tools to do so. Fanatize them.
Isn’t this too much work?
It would be, except that you should do in public what you would have done in private. Need to deliver a presentation? Any reason it cannot be on Slideshare? Or converted into a screencast on YouTube? If you are composing an email, any reason not to cc: post@posterous.com? If you find a great article, any reason not to share through bit.ly on Twitter? The trick is to gain leverage from your everyday activities.
What’s the big challenge?
Well, in Puerto Rico, the social mediasphere is not quite developed, particularly if targeting a niche…the interpersonal word-of-mouth has not quite migrated online yet, so the challenge will be to ignite engagement. So what’s the solution to that? Ah….
The internet was supposed to be the end of Silicon Valley, given how this new communication infrastructure would remove the advantage of proximity. Well, here we are 15 years after the Netscape IPO, and as far as I can tell, the Zyngas, Facebooks, Apples and Googles of the world still come from one place. Yet the advent of Lean Startup methodology, among others, and the dramatically lower costs of startup launch have led to a renaissance of founding activity worldwide.
The very insightful Dave McClure and the Geeks on a Plane noticed, and fueled, this globalization of the Silicon Valley state of mind, and have capitalized on it once already with the Startup Visa movement, aimed at sourcing entrepreneurs from abroad to come build their companies on the most innovation-friendly financial system in the world, which is the United States’.
There are yet more ways to play this trend: As our friend Jason Calacanis is fond of saying:
…and if you are a startup founder, finishing often involves meeting a deep-pocketed venture capitalist or an even more deeply-pocketed strategic acquirer. Well, last time I looked there was a scarcity of them folks where I live in Puerto Rico, and in most places worldwide. That means that global startups that actually succeed in making a significant gold find are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea:
Their third alternative is to wait for those follow-on and exit options to appear in their locale, or for an adventurous and hard-working venture capitalist brave the planes and trains and make it to their country. I am not a betting man, but I don’t like them odds.
Today I had the opportunity to collaborate with a friend on their website development, so we dug into his digital strategy: here’s the outline we followed:
1. Who are your audiences? This is all about identifying your buyer personas, so you know that you are targeting your offer correctly.
2. Now that you know who they are, how are they expressing their problems and concerns in Google? Don’t lift a finger without performing the relevant keyword research. My favorite tools are semrush.com for competitive intelligence, the Google Keyword Tool to verify search volumes, Google Insights for Search for trends and Google Adwords, which also allows you to test the copywriting of various advertisements with the conversion rates they are delivering.
3. Now that you have built a keyword collection, it is time to build a listening station, which puts you in position to engage every whisper across the internet that is relevant to your buyer personas.
4. Of course, set up Google Analytics, so you can power your analysis of where your site will have an impact…we have not built it yet!
5. Now that you have market intelligence by intercepting the search and social channels, you are ready to start tweeting and blogging, with full knowledge that you are engaging your buyer personas, because you talk they way they think!
Whew! That’s as far as we got today, and we have not even started yet.
Never felt more at home than in a group of minority technology entrepreneurs this week at the New Media Conference, organized by Innovation Generation and BlackWeb 2.0. Too bad I had just started the Base Camp portion of Strength for Life, and could not exactly partake of the stream of goodies, but no matter…the event was a revelation.
We were talking Media and Technology, so the event made for some rather interesting combinations…a Nuyorican pitching a revolution in shopping to Robert Townsend himself inspiring a roomful of innovators to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn outlining policy measures to an introduction to a 20X return on a moribund satellite network, there was something for everyone.
Yet what really mattered was the level of commitment in the room, Juan Pablo with the National Hispanic Entrepreneurs’ Organization, Kety with Latinos in Social Media, and on it went. I could tell that many lasting relationships walked into the room and many more walked out. It is exciting to walk the journey with so many others…Looking forward to it.
Though I lived in Silicon Valley from 1987 to 2000, it was not until later that I began to grok and process the experience. Upon return, I told my friend Mike Soto, “The key technology in Silicon Valley is partnership,” meaning that the trick is really about how the entrepreneur slices the opportunity payoff (and spreads the risks) among the founders, the employees, business partners, venture capitalists and (though I did not know this part at the time) the exit investor, whether that is an acquirer or the public markets. A couple years later I reconsidered my take, “Silicon Valley is not a source of technologies…it is a source of business methods.”
Nothing made that clearer than the absolutely brilliant Startup Lessons Learned Conference yesterday. Eric Ries & Co. put on a great show and, more importantly for The Rest of the World, they were gracious enough to offer a free simulcast, which was hosted in Puerto Rico by Nustream Internet.
Well, I fell in love with the Eric’s vision. I feel in love with Randy Komisar’s heart. I fell in love with Steve Blank’s poignancy and magnanimity. In short, us entrepreneurs may well die penniless, but we will have a good life doing what we most love.
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SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, March 2, 2010 — Could a single young engineer beat a Fortune 500 company in creating jobs? If that young engineer is Russian-born Sergey Brin dreaming of forming something called “Google,” the answer is Yes.
What if geniuses brought their ideas to Puerto Rico when they emigrated to the United States? Advisory firm Spectrum Group intends to make just this happen through a mission to Washington, District of Columbia, March 3-5, 2010 to support the Startup Visa legislation introduced on February 24, 2010 by U.S. Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). The bill would provide a path to U.S. permanent residency (“green card”) to foreign nationals that obtain financing from U.S. investors to create U.S. jobs, including Puerto Rico.
“When Davids are beating Goliaths, attracting global innovators matters more than attracting global investors,” said Spectrum Group Managing Partner Cesar “Tito” Montilla. “With the passage of this bill, we will be able to compete for the best ideas in the world.” The Spectrum Group intends to tap its extensive network of local investors to finance entrepreneurial ventures in sectors where Puerto Rico is globally competitive.
The Startup Visa bill proposes to offer immigrant entrepreneurs a two-year visa if they can show that a qualified U.S. investor is wiling to invest $250,000 into the entrepreneur’s venture. If after two years the immigrant entrepreneur can demonstrate the creation of five jobs, $1,000,000 in investment or $1,000,000 in revenue, they would receive permanent legal resident status. More information about the bill is available at www.startupvisa.com.
“If tomorrow every immigrant entrepreneur took their companies back to their home countries, half of Silicon Valley would shut down instantly,” explained Spectrum Group Partner Marcos Polanco, citing research at the University of California at Berkeley. “The secret to economic development today is that these new companies are creating twice as many jobs as old companies.”
About The Spectrum Group:
The Spectrum Group is an advisory firm that over the past 10 years has raised over $100M in private investment to create over 7,500 jobs in Puerto Rico. The firm anchors a network of over 200 accredited investors and focuses on real estate, industrial, media, biosciences, energy and information technology ventures.
Contact: Marcos Polanco
Partner, The Spectrum Group
Phone: 787-529-5892
Email: marcos@clearshore.us
Source: The Spectrum Group
252 Ponce de León Avenue
Suite 802
San Juan, Puerto Rico 00917
Phone: 787-620-1010
###
Si vieron la película “Cars” ya tienen el marco para entender la economía puertorriqueña. En esa película, el flamante automovil “Lightning McQueen” termina en la ciudad fantasma de Radiator Springs, local que prosperó en la época de oro de la Ruta 66, vía al gran oeste americano. Esa época terminó cuando una nueva autopista echó la posición estratégica de Radiator Springs al olvido.
Nuestra isla de mágico primor cayó estratégicamente en la ruta de riquezas española cuando en 1539 Carlos V ordenó la construcción de El Morro, posicionando a San Juan en la ruta de los galeones colonizando el Nuevo Mundo. El sistema económico español basado en la extracción de oro y plata duraría siglos, pero las minas no producirían para siempre.
Puerto Rico se encontró el siglo pasado en la intersección de una nueva ruta para la creación de riquezas: la explosiva demanda estadounidense por productos manufacturados al finalizar la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Todos los caminos conducían a través de Puerto Rico, ya que la Compañía de Fomento Industrial no enfrentaba competencia global en la atracción de los manufactureros de la época.
Pero las minas no producirían para siempre. No solo enfrentamos la competencia global sino también el hecho ineludible de que la manufactura, de representar el 26% de la empleomanía estadounidense en 1960, solo representó el 11.2% en el 2007.1 (Y no nos confundamos…la vasta mayoría de la inversión foránea en Puerto Rico procede de los Estados Unidos.) No nos sorprenda entonces la pérdida de 50,000 empleos puertorriqueños en la manufactura durante la última década.
¿Será la Isla el próximo Radiator Springs? Lo será si no aceptamos el reto a nuestra sociedad de identificar las nuevas rutas de la riqueza y posicionarnos en ellas.
Here are some references that speak to the question of building services businesses online. First, note that I did not say “software businesses online”. The business is made of software, but it is a service business in continuous contact with its customers. That has massive implications in terms of how the company is built and behaves, yet for the moment the most important is that the company is set up to learn and optimize continuously based on actual user behavior. That is what Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics are all about. In Analytics, in particular, take a look at the Goals…they are specific tasks that we want the visitor to accomplish. If they visit the home page, the main goal could be to sign up for the service. This is an eye-opening video on the subject: http://is.gd/5IfMc.
We also need to be aware of what makes the site addictive, like a game. Indeed, it will help to never user the word “user” and call them “players” instead. In a way, our job is not just to build the functionality of the service, but also to leverage design, testing and analytics to “sell” players on achieving particular goals in the website. This is crucial to what will create success. Take a look at how Wufoo accomplished this: http://is.gd/5IfQf.
The above fundamentals are different enough that you end up with a completely different way of building startups: they are now data-driven and have specific methodologies. Some of the most promiment proponents of this new style is Eric Ries (http://is.gd/5Igok, startuplessonslearned.com) and Dave McClure (http://vimeo.com/6925856). The mission is to discover the functions that are completely addictive…that players would be terribly dissapointed if they did not have anymore (http://is.gd/5Ihgr). As you can see, product strategy and interaction design are crucial, and Dan Olsen (http://is.gd/5IiG1) is one of my favorite practitioners.
That’s the front end, and you can see why choosing something like Ruby on Rails or Django are crucial…you need to iterate rapidly as the company learns what matters and adjusts accordingly. This is the “continuous deployment” that Ries talks about…the operational efficiency of the learning process is the competitive advantage.
On the back end, the key is to implement in ways that are infinitely scalable and represent pay-as-you-go solutions that don’t require up-front investment. That’s why in the beginning there is nothing better than Amazon Web Services. In particular, given the way this service works, their hosting of Hadoop (http://is.gd/5IiW2) is tremendously useful. Later the software gets migrated to data center racks…the costs are excellent at the beginning but skyrocket later. In general, everything is mashed up together from existing operating services; a good example is http://recurly.com/, which can handle the complex billing functions.
In general, if the service is built according to the iterative-learning-process approach, backed by infinitely scalable infrastructure and leverages low-cost resources (oDesk.com) animating cloud-based services, it will need dramatically less cash to get off the ground, find the customer sweet spot and subsequently scale.
“Throw a stick to a dog, and it chases the stick; throw a stick to a lion, and it chases you: be like the lion.” - Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche
When no less than Paul Graham boiled down the essence of great entrepreneurs, he came up with two words: “relentlessly resourceful, ” opposing them to the hapless. When Steve Blank distinguishes entrepreneurs from everyone else, he zeroed in on their “relentless action towards a goal,” different from those going through the motions. Similarly, one of the most chill-inducing quotes I’ve ever heard is Dennis Waitley’s, “Failures do what is tension-relieving, while winners do what is goal-achieving.”
I felt the chill because I had to fess up..fess up to habits of tension-relieving, hapless motion. Hardly lion-like.
Yet it would be a mistake to classify you or me as one or the other. Being relentless is nothing other than habitually asking ourselves, “What vision is worth pursuing?”, and “What does it look like to have achieved it? and then, “What does the vision call for now?” Stop for a moment, dear reader. Do the exercise. What are the answers? You know them in your gut. Leaders act on that knowledge. Everyone else works for them.
“Become unstoppable by not stopping.” - Brian Tracy
So how do you build that relentlessness muscle? Resolve to let your focus rest on the shining star of your vision, so it can guide to you, instruct you and strengthen you. Bask now in the joy you will bring customers, employees, partners and investors with your accomplishment.
The answer to the question is “Yes, you have what it takes.” You are the lion.
