Zipi Doctor Appointments

Are you experiencing any startup pain? If so we know how it feels, since we've been there too. You probably have a lot of questions on your mind. But don't panic, we might be able to help you out, since we are now offering early-stage startups one free appointment per month at the Zipi Offices on Museokatu 42.

The focus is on social media related issues, however, we can also give tips in concepting, design, social media marketing, et cetera. Tell us your situation via email and we'll try to help make you fitter.

dr.zipi@zipipop.com

For more established startups we are already undertaking comprehensive analysis, customer profiling and strategic consultations. And we would like to expand this service to investors to help them analyze potential investment opportunities.

The analysis is largely based on these prinicples. And our Finnish readers can find out more about the process in this presentation.

Startup as Band

The world of startups and bands have much more in common than you might imagine. They often start out in grungy garages and go through similar teething pains: balancing ambitious and talented young people in small groups producing creative content on shoe-string budgets. The members have to make massive commitments in the pursuit of a high-risk dream. And the odds of succeeding in a startup are probably not that much better than being in a band.

Raw talent alone can make you famous (a la Google's Sergey and Larry), however, if you want to kick-start your start up its time to start thinking about what kind of band you are.

Every startup needs its lead singer. At Zipipop we have Helene Auramo, who appears regularly in the Finnish media talking about social media; for example, she has just been featured in the new edition of the popular Finnish cultural / design magazine "Image" (see above). The feature title is "Pop Star". Helene is a big fan of Gwen Stefani; which is not a bad comparison to her personal brand image: sassy, sexy and savvy.

Internet entrepreneur as pop star is not new. Probably the most famous is Kevin Rose; who founded digg.com and hosts DiggNation on his own Revision3 internet television distribution company.

In Finland, in addition to Helene, we have Taneli Tikka who definitely knows a thing or two about putting across a pop star image. I don't know him well enough to suggest who he could be compared to though. Any suggestions?



Anyway, I was thinking which other band members would startup "types" be. In Zipipop's case, I feel that Markku (Chairman) would be the lead guitar / band manager; Tuomas (Creative Director) song writer / driving bass; Taro (CTO) innovative mixer/DJ. Diana (the unofficial 6th member of Zipipop) lyrical keyboard player. And I would like to think of myself as song writer / rhythm guitar.

Helene and I co-founded Zipipop, and like all the best creative partnerships, our differences complement each other. Creative partnerships work best when there is time together, but there is also time apart. This is why it is great that she has her Digitytot project in addition to Zipipop and I have my little kid (and maybe a secret film project, but it is too early days to talk about that). Here is a quote from an excellent book I am currently reading called Life's a Pitch:

"One of the greatest creative partnerships was, of course, Lennon and McCartney. They influenced each other profoundly, but they often developed songs on their own. Many of the songs attributed to both of them were actually written by just one: yet the personality of the other still hovers in the background. That was proved when they stopped writing as a team. Without McCartney's softening touch, Lennon's work often became crudely strident; and without Lennon's attack and edginess, McCartney's work frequently descended into sentimentality."

Zipipop is rapidly making a name for itself and with Markku Silén now on board (Finnish press release) the future looks bright indeed. However, we also look forward to seeing Finland's future entrepreneur pop idols.

Bashing into things and falling over

"One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate." Paul Graham

Like all startups Zipipop too has been doing its fair share of 'bashing into things and falling over'; however, I guess the difference between success and failure is the willingness to make mistakes, learn from them and keep on going. Of course any damn fool can make mistakes, but the difference is between plain stupid mistakes and intelligent, diligent, well-intended mistakes that might have led to remarkable achievements.

Whilst licking some of our wounds, we have recently been doing some serious soul searching: On a specific level, we have been reviewing Zipiko to analyze why it is not growing as fast we would have hoped (see Rethinking Zipiko). And, on a bigger level, we have also been asking ourselves – from all that we have learned – what does it take to make a successful social web service. And in the process we developed these 10 Commandments.

At Zipipop we sometimes indulge in a bit of lighthearted hubris and, although we currently stoop a little humbled, our ambitions remain straight and tall – since if you aim for the top of the mountain you might only make it half way up, but, if you only aim half way up, the heighest you will ever go is half way up. And our goal is to see the view from the top ; )

So while we purse our dreams and trudge our way up the mountain, why not let us give you a helping hand up. Based on our hard won knowledge and experience, we can tell you where best to place your belays and guide you past some nasty precipices.

As well as public speaking and consultancy work, we are also now offering web-oreintated video production. Please contact us to discuss what we can do for you.

The 10 (+2) Commandments of Social Service Development

Thou shalt have PERSONAL PASSION:

What excites you? You have to be totally in love with a project at the start because towards the end your love will fade away and, until it starts making money, you might even end up hating it. If you start with just a good idea you will never even finish it. And you must always eat your own (dog)food.

You shall find a NEED:

If you wish to make a profit your ideas need to be valuable, ie – people must be willing to pay for them? There are plenty of good ideas that are perfectly worthy but have no business value. So find ways to turn your passions into pennies. Otherwise create a non-profit social enterprise or go into research.

You must provide CONTENT:

Users must have content from the beginning. This can come in the form of community driven, user-generated content (Facebook) or readily available content from other sources (Spotify).

Find and connect to NETWORKS:

The new networked economy requires that you find existing or, even better, growing networks to which you can connect with. Nowadays this means providing and making the most of existing APIs. "As the number of nodes in a network increases arithmetically the value of the network increases exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value for all members." (Kevin Kelly, 1999) Facebook is the prime example of this and Twitter is currently making the most of network effects.

Define thy DISTRIBUTION strategy:

What channels are you going to used to spread your service? Considering connecting through such services such as: email, Facebook, micro-blogging, calendars, etc. Blog, micro-blog and make friends with bloggers. Be honest and think big to avoid being boring. If you are not comfortable immersing yourself in social media find an advocate who is.

Never underestimate the power of CONTEXT:

What is the context of your service? Both in terms of community and space. Identify communities that will connect with your service and determine where and how they can access it. Context will have a huge impact on how your users related to your service. Should it be designed to work best on large screen or mobile formats? Should it be a desktop web application?

Work hard to find the PLAY:

Do you have any game elements? You should think hard about what makes it fun: reward systems, role play, social interaction / recognition, etc. Amy Jo Kim has identified the following key components: collecting, points, feedback, exchange and customization.

What are your levels of COMMITMENT:

Some users can be put off if the commitment levels are too high. To find out more read this blog entry Commitment Levels in Service Design.

You shall implement your METRICS:

Are you getting your stats? Right from the beginning you need keep a close eye on the frequency and direction of user usage, so that you can iterate and fine-tune.

Thou shalt not be afraid to CONFORM:

Genre films (Westerns, comedy romance, etc) work best when they meet around 80% of the audience's expectations – with only about 20% innovation. This is a safe ratio to follow when designing your user experience. "A convention is a cultural constraint, one that has evolved over time. Conventions are not arbitrary: they evolve, they require a community of practice. They are slow to be adopted, and once adopted, slow to go away … Use them with respect. Violate them with great risk." – Norman, D. A.

Know thy TYPE:

Are you creating a lovable or a pragmatic service? For a lovable service you can push the boundaries and risk some annoying elements because the users will be inclined to in their hearts to forgive you. Or you can go for a service that is efficient and makes a big effort not to be annoying and users will be grateful for your consideration.

You shall do a controlled RELEASE:

If your service has too many problems you will end up shooting yourself in the foot and all your marketing efforts will be wasted. Web users are super fickle, so don't build up their expectations too high. Instead invite them to help you develop though closed-Beta releases.

Sharing Life

Zipiko has on a number of occassions been compared to Dopplr. Take this Techruch entry for example "Zipipop (from Finland) is a start-up that is developing Zipiko, a mobile service for sorting your social life on the go, as in, broadcast where you’ll be at a certain time in the day. Think Dopplr, but on a much more granular level perhaps."

And according to Dopplr's latest press release it “is leading the way in intention sharing services online." This is interesting to Zipipop, since we have previously blogged about Dopplr being an early example of what we are calling intention broadcasting systems (IBS). However, Dopplr is not a fully-formed IBS, since it lacks the fundamental 'coordination' phase; which means that you can easily end up getting too much direct and sometimes intrusive calls/messages. A complete IBS should be handling and coordinating the meetups more passively – something that Zipiko does well.

However, the Zipiko system is not able to let you know which city your buddies are going to be in until they have already arrived and shared an event. So it dawned on us that there is a good potential here for cooperation – especially since we are both in the business of intention sharing and we also happen to we live in the same neck of the woods.

So in the spirt of Zipiop's first official slogan 'Sharing Life', this is how it could work:

Dopplr allows people to know when they will be in the same city and then Zipiko allows them to easily arrange their get-togethers – kind of a Blogger/Twitter, macro/micro relationship.

@Dopplr posse – Let's meetup at somewhere, sometime soon: As Bogie says, "This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship."

Startup Ideas and Painting

'Fecundity' by Richard von Kaufmann (2004)

During the first year at Zipipop we constantly debated how open we should be with our ideas. At the very beginning we even made people sign NDA's and this had some benefits: people realized we 'meant business'; they (maybe) felt privileged being invited into the inner circle; and it forced us to think hard about how we wished to present ourselves to the world.

However, since ideas are only valuable if they can be implemented, we soon realized that fast implementation, and accredited distribution, are by far the best way – in an industry that moves at breakneck speed – to protect a web-based idea.

By freeing up and putting our ideas 'out there', we were then able to more effectively garner input from the bright and busy intellects that flock around Zipipop; enabling us to refine our ideas faster and thereby making the implementation stage quicker and more efficient.

There are some that say that ideas are cheap and to some extent that is true. However, I really like this article about startup ideas by Paul Graham because it distinguishes between good ideas and valuable ideas: valuable ideas being great ideas that people want and are willing to pay for.

He also shows that great ideas come out of a long process of trail, error and adjustment. Zipiko has only been in development for less than five months, however, the fundamental idea came after more than a year of brainstorming and 'do-search' within Zipipop.

First we developed the idea of POPs (personal opinion polls), one of which was a date-picker, this then inspired us to work on a more full-on event organizer designed to cope with every imaginable scenario. For a small company (only three partners at the time) we clearly, in retrospect, bit of more than we could chew. But then we got hit and carried along by the mighty Facebook wave.

As a 'test' (or a subconscious excuse to deviate from the 'monster' project), we decided to do a couple of Facebook applications to see how we could later integrate our services into the exploding platform. We caught the tail end of the wave as it swept over Finland in the summer of 2007, and we soon became know locally as the Facebook company. For many months the event organizer was put on hold as we implemented a whole bunch of in-house and third party Facebook apps.

However, right from the beginning we had a conscious plan to develop for mobile platforms, and in light of this Facebook was a good playground for us: the discipline of delivering apps with a clear purpose, inside a restricted screen space, has prepared us well for small screen challenges. And it was our Going for One? Facebook app that was the direct predecessor to Zipiko.

The Paul Graham article also makes some nice analogies to painting and it reminded me of one of the greatest things my high school art teacher would constantly tell us; "Don't wait for inspiration, just start painting and the ideas will come." This method is almost infallible, however, there are times when you will spend months fiddling on a large respectable oil painting that people might – if you every finish it – smile upon approvingly; and then there are those rarer – more valuable – works, produced in a flurry of inspiration – usually as a break from that never ending project – that people will rave about.

This last phenomena has parallels with many famous web services, for example: flickr – the photo sharing was just part of a bigger game project; PayPal – the service was originally supposed to be a way of exchanging credit between handheld devices; and closer to home there is Habbo Hotel – started as a project to help promote their friends' band.

So far we can propose that: Great ideas come form an abundance of mental doodling, brainstorming and 'do-search'; great ideas are worthless if left in the dark; and for a startup, great ideas need to come with commercial value.

In light of all this we have decided to publish some of our ideas, since even if we fail to implement them before competitors, we can at least gain some beneficial recognition from exposing them to the light of day.

Why Did Twitter Win the Race?

I’m a fan of Jyri Engström’s theoretical work. And, although Jaiku (as we know it) has lost the race against Twitter, his experience helming a startup at the sharp edge of web development definitely enhances his insights. And I will be comparing his recommendations to Zipiko in my next blog.

I used to say that Jaiku was the best service I never used. However, I have recently rediscovered its joys. One feature that we prefer is the way that Jaiku streams the comments into conversations; whereas you can’t see all Twitter comments in one page. Now that Jaiku is currently closed (now open again, 27/8/2008) - to new users, I feel very lucky to have an account.

The Jaiku-Twitter battle is of great interest to us since Jaiku, like us, had Finnish roots and we must try to avoid the pitfalls that they fell into – but what are those pitfalls? We have been bouncing some ideas around the office and these are currently the most likely contenders: location, mobile app v. web-based/SMS, API and name.

Location: Twitter, being based in San Francisco, was able to generate buzz in the industry that spread out to the public; whereas Jaiku generated interest in Finland – but it kind of stopped here. Twitter was also used extensively at the crucial South by Southwest festival (Austin, Texas) in 2007 – we hope to do something similar.

Finland is an excellent place for doing controlled launches, since there is a small tech savvy population and the language naturally restricts growth. However, once we have ironed out the Zipiko system, we must immediately start doing some old fashioned legwork promoting the service in English speaking counties.

At the end of this month we are doing our first marketing campaigns at some key Helsinki universities, which we will then try to replicate abroad. And we will be looking into the possibility of a San Francisco foothold when we go there for the Mobile 2.0 conference in November.

Web-based/SMS v. Mobile Apps: Twitter put more emphasis on developing a web-based service using SMS to link to mobiles, whereas Jaiku initially put more emphasis on its mobile apps. However, Twitter has suffered recently from having to make some severe cut backs related to its SMS service due to high costs.

We are currently focusing on the web-based/SMS approach and, in regards to SMS, we are fortunate that our system will only generate a fraction of Twitter’s SMS load (one Tweet can generate thousands of SMS). However, we are aiming to put discreet sponsorship messages at the end of our SMS invites, which should appeal to advertisers and users alike since we can match both their needs more closely thanks to our knowledge of user intentions, eg – going shopping, see a great offer. If this proves successful then the more SMS the merrier.

API: Twitter had a more straightforward API from early on.

Name: This one is still being debated, but to my English ear Twitter not only matches the activity perfectly (birds and people twitter) it is more ‘sticky’, whereas people can’t even decide whether to say (Y)jaiku or (G)jaiku.

We thought very hard about the name Zipiko, which so far seems to being doing the trick. To zip somewhere is to go quickly and k looks good with z and ko rhymes with go. But you will decide. However, if Google had been a useless service would it be such a great name? After all:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet." (William Shakespeare)

We welcome your advice on these issues so please do comment – especially Jyri.