Roundtable Event - Faster, better, smarter - Ink from chase

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf360 {\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 TimesNewRomanPSMT;} {\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} \margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0 \deftab720 \pard\pardeftab720\ri720 \f0\fs22 \cf0 [WALKER] Being here in San Francisco is really interesting I think because so many technology businesses start here and I think it\'92s definitely interesting with the panelists we have today. I\'92m excited to hear from you guys, both from the perspective of building technology that represents the core of your business but also ways that you\'92ve used other kinds of technologies that you did not build in order to help you grow your business. Chad Jennings, who is the VP of Product at Blurb.\ \ [JENNINGS] We give people free software, or web software, and tools to make books and that\'92s our goal is we want to help people tell their story.\ \ [WALKER] David Lieb, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bump.\ \ [LIEB] My goal originally with bump was to build something, hopefully learn a little bit and make maybe enough money to pay for a year of business school. Bump now is the seventh most popular iPhone app of all time.\ \ [WALKER] And Morgan Missen, the Head of Talent at Foursquare.\ \ [MISSEN] The biggest risk of hiring is a false positive. Social Media is a great solution for that because you can rely really heavily on referrals and networks.\ \ [WALKER] You guys \{Blurb\} published more than million books last year, in 60 countries around the world and you\'92ve done that with a staff of about 80 people.\ \ [JENNINGS] We actually don\'92t own any of the presses, and printing, and binding and papers that these are built on so our goal was to say, \'93Look, how do we build this business not just to support this one printer in Seattle but how do we build a worldwide business on top of that.\'94 \ \ [WALKER] How many of you guys are familiar with the concept of agile development.\ \ [JENNINGS] It\'92s not rocket science it\'92s just saying look, here\'92s this devoted team you give them direction and it\'92s not so top-down and you\'92re trying to release something every week. So it\'92s breaking up really large complex projects into these much smaller components that I think has been key to allowing us to move quickly.\ \ [WALKER] And so the beauty of agile development of course is that it\'92s cheaper, you can save a lot on cost because you\'92re not presumably building things that waste a lot of your team\'92s time and in theory it\'92s also faster.\ \ [LIEB] Teams who are building software, where if they feel they are actually accomplishing something every one week or two weeks or whatever the cycle is, just from a psychological point of view humans like to make progress. \ \ [WALKER] Nowadays it\'92s so much easier to start a business, to start a software company\'85\ \ [LIEB] Yeah it is. You know, I had the idea for Bump on October 13\super th\nosupersub 2008 and that night I emailed Andy and I said, \'93Hey I got this idea have you ever programmed on iPhone before or Mac before?\'94 And he\'92s like, \'93No.\'94 And the next day he went and bought a Mac at the Apple store and within one week we had a first prototype built. It\'92s amazing. Right now we have 45 million registered users an those users are supported by basically two people.\ \ [WALKER] This idea of running on the cloud is one that people are really curious about.\ \ [MISSEN] Yeah I think one thing we all discussed is utilizing Google Apps and I can\'92t think of many startups that don\'92t use it, using documents and spreadsheets totally replacing Microsoft Office Suite. Mail, chat within mail, and Google+ is now a part of it, all of the calendar all of those things being able to sync and be web based or mobile based I couldn\'92t imagine not being able to do it especially moving from, for me, Google to Twitter to Foursquare just on your first day knowing exactly what you need to setup and even knowing your favorite background colors for it has been great.\ \ [WALKER] Another sort of hot topic that I\'92d love to talk about is social media.\ \ [MISSEN] Social media, I can\'92t emphasize enough how important it is to put yourself out there and define what you are as a brand and really be engaging, because if someone were to happen on to your Facebook page and you have only got a couple of likes and not a lot of content there and you haven\'92t done the profile photo it does more harm than good actually for brand perception.\ \ [WALKER] I see a lot of small businesses who are so nervous about putting anything out there because one sort of feels like this is going to represent me and it has to be perfect right from the beginning.\ \ [MESSIN] I think it\'92s Jeff ***, the CEO of LinkedIn, who said that \'93If you\'92re not embarrassed by your first product release you waited too long\'94\ \ [AUDIENCE] Quick question for Chad, he mentioned this website, F-Neo?\ \ [JENNINGS] F-Neo.com which is a remote testing tool that puts a little survey that pops up on the front on your site and says \'91Hey are you interested in talking to someone right now about your experience?\'92 And then you get a little recruiting list and you can call that person up right now and say \'91Hey I see you\'92re online, what are you looking for? Do you wanna share your screen with me?\'92 And so that one-to-one experience is really good.\ \ [AUDIENCE] How\'92d you guys build your user base?\ \ [LIEB] I met one at the Chicago Tribune, I told him what we were doing and he wrote a little blog post about it. And I asked him, \'93Okay, how do I get other media outlets to pick this us?\'94 and he said, \'93I don\'92t know, you should probably tell David Pogue at the New York Times.\'94 So I took the one blog and I wrote to David Pogue like, \'91Hey the Chicago Tribune says that you should pick this up.\'92 And Pogue tweeted about it so I took Pogue\'92s tweet and sent it to the next person and said, \'91Hey the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times is writing about us, so you should really write about us.\'92 And so that built it up just enough to get that engine started.\ \ [AUDIENCE] Once you have those users what are you focusing on to retain them and to grow that user base?\ \ [JENNINGS] On Monday we are going to put out 10 designs of one single page, our Make page on Blurb where you choose what tool you make, and this is only using Google Analytics and Web Optimizer, you know we get these 10 designs developed and really quickly get them up and see which ones wins and that will help, if that increases our conversion one percent you know over the course of the year that\'92s another three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand dollar type thing.\ \ [WALKER] Service based businesses or content based businesses, it\'92s actually a lot easier to get people back to your site because for a lot of those sites it\'92s really just about visibility.\ \ [AUDIENCE] Based on your knowledge of the cloud what are the risks, if any, that you\'92re aware of?\ \ [MESSIN] Theoretically, anything is hackable and I think we\'92ve seen that and especially in the past few months, and I think you have to operate as such.\ \ [LIEB] If you design your system correctly it\'92s more secure then if you have a computer in your office, it\'92s just the way things should work.\ \ [AUDIENCE] What percentage of the users actually come through paid advertising compared to word-of-mouth and PR?\ \ [LIEB] Zero for us.\ \ [MESSIN] Yeah, I was going to say ours is 100 percent the latter.\ \ [JENNINGS] We do have a big online marketing team that we\'92ve really invested in the last year or two as we\'92re trying to reach that hump, how do you get from nine million to twenty million and now a hundred million, and at the end of the day we have to start spending money. And we spend $60 to acquire a user who will end up spending $100 on Blurb.\ \ [AUDIENCE] From the agile perspective how do you marry the vision with user feedback?\ \ [LIEB] I guess there\'92s three things when you\'92re thinking about building something, it\'92s why are you doing what you\'92re doing? What are you specifically doing? And then how do you go about doing that thing? So it\'92s the why, the what, and the how \'96 and the how is going to change on a daily basis, the what is going to change on maybe a monthly basis, and hopefully the why doesn\'92t change that much.\ }