WELCOME TO YOUR NEW CHANNEL

I had a meeting yesterday with two bright and experienced, yet first-time-founders.

One was a top back-end engineer, and the other has extensive product management and marketing experience in several good companies.

Since, I had just finished a meeting with a UX expert a few minutes earlier, I entered this meeting and said “User Experience is crucial in B2B applications as well”.

The back-end guy replied immediately, “Not necessarily…”.

That was my first red flag.

We started our meeting and they described their product and startup.

When I asked to see a demo or a mock-up of the proposed product, they told me that they have none.

When I asked them to describe the workflow of the proposed users/customers of their service, they improvised poorly, and the process they described sounded cumbersome.

I asked, “how long are you working on this?”, “Six months” they replied.

That was the second red flag.

They planned on raising few million dollars in seed funding.

Would you invest?

A Painful Lesson

In ****, I visited a well-funded startup that was selling a ‘mobile advertising management software’ to large organizations.

Their PowerPoint presentation was comprehensive and detailed.

The CTO described the architecture of his product in length and it sounded impressive.

When I asked them to demo the product, I was shocked.

The UX and design looked as if it was 1994 all over again.

They explained that the UX/UI was not important, as the product is only a back-end management system and the users are Telco folks that are used to ugly and outdated screens.

Millions of dollars were invested in this company.

Obviously, this company failed.

A Rewarding Experience 

On ************, I visited a small seed stage startup in an old building somewhere in ********.

They described their product offering.

A system that will integrate data from multiple sources and will provide CMOs and agencies with a single source-of-truth of the performance of all their marketing campaigns in all channels.

They received an Angel investment a few months earlier, had hired 3 engineers, and decided not to draw salaries.

I asked for a demonstration of the system, and what I saw completely blew my mind.

The CTO demonstrated how he can connect to multiple sources, using a wonderful UX, easily exposing the data and the metadata of this sources, and automatically mapping these sources of data into a unified data model, which then was available for a cross channel analysis and visualization in a beautiful dashboard.

I asked about the software architecture, and the reply was a coherent state-of-the-art architecture that could come only from someone that has a deep knowledge of the newest tech around.

I was sold.

At the end of that first meeting I already decided to invest.

That company was Datorama.

The elegant and efficient UX (coupled with superb tech, product/market fit and execution) was a major selling point and fundamental the success of Datorama.

The ease of use, the rapid integration, the unified data model and the ability to view cross-channel data unified into one-single-source-of-truth, allowed them to become a leader in their domain and to get on the radar screen of Salesforce who reached out to meet them and acquired the company in the largest transaction of an enterprise SaaS company in ****** ever.

A UX anecdote

An anecdote from that first meeting.

I’m an enterprise software integration expert.

So, when the CTO was demonstrating how he connects a certain data source, I expected that he will have to manually map the different fields to the universal data tree, but I was surprised to see that they completely automated the process and used AI to understand that metadata and predict the preferred mapping of the new source to the universal data model, saving a lot of manual and tedious work.

For me, this little magic-trick created the Wow effect and exemplified the superiority of the product team.

Make it right, it pays off

UX is not about pretty graphics or just a look-and-feel; the look and feel it is an outcome, it is about usability architecture.

It is about putting the end-user in the front and asking how do I architect a seamless user experience that decouple the user from the needs-to-know or understand the underline system.

 There are many ways to solve a problem, but if you get it right the experience is right.

Right in this context it is intuitive, elegant and efficient.

To do it right the UX architect needs a deep understanding of the domain problem and its underline complexities and he/she must continuously challenge the existing assumptions.

In my mind your UX should be coherent journey among all your digital assets from the initial interaction with the lead, through your landing pages, website, demo, forms and up to the application and support mechanisms afterwards.

There is still a room for innovation and improvement in UX in almost everything we do.

With the consumerization of IT, even the “boring” enterprise users are expecting an Apple-like experience… and they are right!

Now, it’s your startup.

Make sure that your backend UX is as brilliant as you are.

It will pay-off.

And BTW, I actually liked the team that I met yesterday.

They were smart and responsive.

Still thinking about them.

I believe that “positive feedback” accounts for the death of many startups.

“Positive Feedback” is when a Prospect (potential customer) tells you that he likes your product, and that he really enjoyed meeting you.

But you leave that meeting with no hard action item or clear intent of the prospect to order a product from you.

Sometimes they will take more meetings with you and your team, and everyone will feel good, but no business will be generated.

Sure, it’s easy if a customer pukes all over your product.

You clearly get it.

You need to change the product.

However, it is much more difficult to understand whether you are on a good track when customers meets you and tells you “good things” about your offering.

We have a saying “if the customer tells you that your product is VERY interesting, kill the product and search for a new one”.

A lot of times entrepreneurs are shocked with this approach.

I have seen too many startups that are encouraged by good words of analysts, journalists, consultants, business partners, potential customers and judges in pitch contests.

They get compliments for their visionary offerings, and nice presentations.

They are all getting “positive” feedback and people “like” or “love” their ideas.

The “vibe” is good.

But when it comes to actual business transaction or to actually buy your service or product, suddenly things start moving slow.

When talking to these entrepreneurs in the early days of realization, they have many reasons for the slow pace in deal closing:

“We are in ‘enterprise-sales’ and it takes 9-12 months to close a deal”

“It’s a sales process, and we scheduled a meeting for the end of next month…”

“Our marketing material is not good enough”

“Our prospects have many projects in the pipeline and they don’t have time for our implementation just yet”

“The market is not there yet”

“They told us that their current fiscal year is all planned out already, and they will put us in the plan for next fiscal year”

….

All these are just ways for the customer to tell you that your product is not important enough for them, and in the ongoing balance of “must” and “nice to have”, your product is on the “nice-to-have” section.

Your prospects and advisers are simply polite, but you simply can’t afford that, since your burn rate kills your cash and the competition kills your market.

Add to that “False Positives” and you are really in the swamp of oblivion.

False Positive is when one or three customers actually order your product, not because of the product, but because of good relationship you had with the account or a well-connected sales executive that helped you close a deal.

Usually, you identify “false positive” when a customer buy the product, but is not using it.

You may sometimes get these feedback from such customers:

“We don’t have time to put it in production”, “We are waiting for resource allocation…”.

Usually it takes over a year to fully understand that the Positive Feedback we got was absolutely false and caused us to spend so much time, resources and money.

Since most of the startups are at cash status of 18-24 months, this put them in a horrible position where they need to “pivot” with limited to no cash to finance it, leading with most of them to the "spiral of death".

Therefore, I recommend you, listen carefully! Be very attentive! Be true to yourself and clear the noise of the good words.

Look for clear indicators that you are reaching a good product/market fit, and act upon them.

Don’t try to force fake reality.

Update your investors, talk to your customers.

Don’t stop asking questions.

Change your product or offering until you start getting these purchase orders in a predictable and consistent manner.

May the force be with you.

next week.

"Sugar kills".

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Everyone knows that marketing today means creating content. Marketing guru Seth Godin said it best: “Content marketing is the only marketing left.” But it turns out that while every marketing manager creates content, about 70% of them claim that it isn’t working as well as they had hoped. There are many roadblocks on the way to creating quality content that people will be willing to consume.

Writing content starts with the understanding that while an organization is good at what they do, they aren’t necessarily good at writing content about what they do, let alone promoting that content online. At this stage, organizations hire content writers and dictate what they should be writing about. The problem is that content writers, who know and love writing, don’t know and love your organization. They are simply forced to write content about it in order to make a living.

This content ends up promoted online with clickbait headlines tempting the potential reader but give some credit to your target audience. They will immediately recognize shallow content created for marketing purposes only, as compared to quality content passionately written by knowledgeable professionals out of a true desire to be beneficial. The best online content has been written by experts in their field who are passionate about what they write, and who, for the most part, do not get paid to write it. So, how do you create such content? Well, you don’t create it, you find it.

It’s called Curation. Instead of creating your own unique content and trying to make it look presentable, we’re suggesting you go in a different direction. Let’s track down the best online content pertaining to your field and create audio summaries of these articles for your busy customers. Instead of your brand being identified as just another company with a blog, this is your opportunity to turn your brand into the one that tracks down the most interesting and relevant articles on the web, and helps your customers stay up to date with everything that’s happening in the industry with minimum effort. Which brand do you think will be perceived as the most useful?

This is your opportunity to create a high-quality content infrastructure using an innovative and precise platform. You can use it to feed in the content yourself or let the Summurai team do everything from you – from tracking down the articles, through to creating the summaries, recording them, and uploading them online.

We’ve already mentioned that audio has a competitive advantage in being easy to consume as a secondary activity. But we haven’t discussed another, much more interesting advantage that audio has. Audio content allows you to break the ice and create a warmer, more emotional, and more personal interaction with your customers. When you start out creating your audio content, you’ll soon be asking yourself what kind of voice you want to represent your organization’s message and brand. When we’re no longer using the cold, impersonal tone of printed text, we must choose the right presenter to best convey your brand.

Who would you like your customers to meet, and what tone of voice should he or she have?

Making content accessible using a friendly human voice is not a gimmick. It simply can’t be done any other way. When you or your customers consume audio content as a secondary activity – say, while driving – most of your cognitive resources must stay focused on the primary activity, and not on deciphering some strange voice. So, if we hear the voice of a robot or very official-sounding narrator, our cognitive system chooses the easy way out and simply filters them away. In order to pass through this listening barrier, the content must be delivered in a down-to-earth manner, in a tone similar to that of a friendly radio host, or the person sitting next to us in our car. Only this type of content will register with us.

When you start your journey creating audio content, it’s important to remember not just to read the text, but also to understand how the text can break the ice and come across as a friendly conversation. Try asking yourself who your customers would rather be talking to, and what kind of hat your representative needs to be wearing while recording their narration. This will help you identify the most suitable voice for your brand.

Let’s summarize.
If you’ve come this far, you have gotten to know Summurai personally. You know who we are and what we can do, and you have experienced our Summies for yourself. Now you are ready to offer this new communication channel to your customers. We’ll be thrilled to help create this new content format for you and make it accessible using the tools of Summurai.

Twitter came out in 2006 and opened the door to a world of brief content by limiting posts to just 140 characters. Vine joined the game in 2012 with videos limited to just six seconds long. Facebook posts with 85 characters or less show up in larger font. Instagram videos are limited to fifteen seconds, while Facebook Stories are limited to twenty.

Are you looking for in-depth content? Ted Talks were originally designed to be 18 minutes long, but in recent years, the people over at Ted realized that 18 minutes can feel like an eternity, so they shortened the duration of some of the Ted Talk to just five minutes.

Even learning has changed, and terms such as ‘micro-learning’ - bite-sized education over an extended period - have become more acceptable.

Generation Y came up with the culture of ‘TL;DR’ – ‘Too long, didn’t read’ – and made it clear that unless we offer brief and precise content, they simply won’t be there at the other end.

Let’s have a look at the world of digital books. Once Audible successfully popularized audiobooks at the expense of printed ones, services such as Blinkist and Instaread have popped up offering audiobook summaries, where the main idea of a book is conveyed in under fifteen minutes, to varying degrees of success.

The content we at Summurai have chosen is aimed to be just three minutes long. We chose three minutes because this duration offers a fine balance between getting in-depth with the material while focusing on conveying a message, without any superficial fluff getting in the way. Is your message too long? It might be a good idea to split it into two Summies. Like we said, think sushi.

But creating brief content that maintains quality is far from easy. Mark Twain once wrote, “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”

Creating brief and focused content is much harder than writing long, arduous texts. But this is precisely what we at Summurai specialize in, and we’ll be happy to create this content for you and allow your brand to be identified with easily digested content that offers great added value.

In an age of information overload, when so much content is thrown at your customers from so many directions, quality content is the deciding factor. Most organizations realize today that only truly quality content, created with the intention of adding value, can help build enduring brand loyalty.

So, how do we make sure that the content we’re producing truly is valuable to our customers? Since we come from the world of user experience design, we can use an established model from our field for this purpose.

A few years ago, a researcher by the name B.J. Fogg from Stanford University created a model that evaluates our capacity to influence the behavior of our users or customers. The basic assumption of the model is that when the customer encounters your content and decides whether to consume it or not, their decision will depend on a combination of two parameters – motivation and ability.

The motivation scale deals with the simple question of whether the content we are offering is of any value or benefit to the customer. The headline hinting to what our content is about, together with the attached photo, will determine the user’s decision whether to click on the link to our content or ignore it. That’s why convincing headlines that promise value work so well, even if the actual content does not always live up to our expectation.

The second scale we measure is ability, that is, how hard or easy it will be to consume the content. Once the customer has reached the actual content – say a printed article – they will have to decide whether to start reading it. People have a real and proven difficulty reading texts, so the average time dedicated to reading a blog post is just 37 seconds, which, between you and me, is not enough to read anything.

When we started out with Summurai, we created a scale to measure global content quality. We called it V.E.R. – Value/Effort Rate – meaning, the rate between the effort invested and the value gained from the content. We have found that nowadays, most texts we encounter leave us feeling like they were simply not worth the effort we put into reading them. Even with podcasts, there is often a huge gap between the length of a podcast and the value we got from listening to it.

Summies, our audio summaries, offer the highest value to effort ratio available in the digital world. Three minutes of content carefully diluted and edited in order to offer the most value, presented in an audio format requiring hardly any effort to consume, and accessible at the times that the users are most available to learn more. We also add in the full script of each Summy in text format, giving the users another way to choose to access our content.

We live in an age of endless information overload. On the one hand, we all have a real need to know a lot more about more topics, but then again, the amount of global content is increasing at an astounding rate, while the quality of content is steadily deteriorating. And how are we ever going to manage reading everything that we find interesting with the little time we have available, anyway?

The role of the Summurai team – our curators, writers, voice artists and editors – is twofold. Firstly, they ensure that bad content does not make its way to the designated audience. Secondly, they identify the quality content and chop it up into small and precise pieces of content, which will convey all that is needed to know in the most accurate and minimalist way possible.

We have created a new unit of content which we call a Summy. The Summy is the sushi of the content world. It is small, accurate, and super effective. It’s composed of around 300 to 400 words, and is served up as audio and text, making it easily consumable at any time. A Summy can be a short piece of content, or a summary of an academic treatise, article, blog post, video, podcast, or online lecture. You can create your own Summies, or you can get our Summurai team to create them for you.

Our Summurai team can write standalone Summies or locate the best articles and online content, summarize them, and voice-record them.

In the age of machine learning and algorithms vying to replace humans, we are on the side of humanity. So all this is done by our team – not by machines. The summaries are written only by people with knowledge in field and an understanding of the article’s topic.

We pack the Summies into SummyBoards – content playlists in various topics. A SummyBoard can be a closed playlist or one that is regularly updated. It can be open to the general public or require registration, and its content can be free or paid.

This content board is “webby”, meaning that it’s available as an online link, without the need to install an app, or any other barrier standing in the way. You can send links to a full playlist of Summies or to a single Summy.

The SummyBoard is a white label – it will take on your logo and branding and become another content channel in your relationship with your target audience. You can either host this content channel with us or place it under your own domain.

SummyBoards and Summies are created using Dojo – a super-advanced management system of our own creation, which we just love. Dojo lets you create Summies and monitor their performance with statistics that show you what works and what can be improved upon. You can also add call to action buttons to your Summies – a link to a purchase page, a phone contact, or navigation to a physical location using a mobile phone.

Summurai playlists are a new means of giving busy audience access to your content. They can form part of the sales process, accompany your user experience processes, provide an alternate platform for your blog or online content marketing, or they can even be used as a means of communication for your team, to keep them updated on what they need to know. We’ll elaborate on these cases over the next few Summies.