Do you think Mark Zuckerberg responded to the problem question with, “Facebook solves the problem of there not being efficient enough systems for stalking people.” More importantly, there were plenty of other social networks at the same time when Facebook came out, most specifically, MySpace. All Zuckerberg needed to do was go into a meeting and show that he had millions of people and a check was written (yes, that simplifies the story, but you get the point). It also brings me to my point: the only problem you have is that millions of people aren’t using your product.

Your job is to solve that problem. There are countless reasons that millions of people are not flocking to your app, but your job is to figure out how to get them to. Stop worrying about people who ask you what problem you’re solving. My guess is that many great ideas started with the phrase, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” Then someone went on to explaining/teaching the masses why that thing is cool. All the questions that investors ask you are simply ways to weed you out.

Let’s be honest, if you can answer the question: “How many users do you have?” with the response “millions”, you’ll have solved your biggest problem.

11 years ago I was at a turning point in my life. I had left Northeastern University in Boston to go to community college in Northern Virginia. I’ll save the reason why for another post sometime. Needless to say I got obsessed with self-help and business books. Think and Grow Rich, How To Win Friends And Influence People, Never Eat Alone, the list goes on. One of the core things that became insanely compelling to me was the concept that you could essentially envision your destiny and make it reality.

At the time, one of the key skills that would enable me to fulfill my destiny was coding. To be honest, I feel the same today. You can learn to crunch numbers in finance, cut people open in a hospital (doctor), read legal documents, but very few skills provide the potential to create and visually display your creation and make money from it. Yes, there are other creative skills like cooking, designing, architecting, etc. Coding is one of those skills.

As someone who spent a decent amount of time in front of a computer growing up, coding was one of the more appealing things to me. Especially since by 2001 (when I started my coding journey) there were thousands of companies that were wildly successful thanks to the power of code. I was inspired and wanted to create my own masterpiece. I decided to create a site to sell independent music online, Musical Revolution (no, it wasn’t a success). All the code I had done up to this point was HTML on a Geocities website.

Given that there was no social life in community college I came home every day and coded. I started off with ASP since I didn’t know any better. I picked up a 2,000+ page book that was boring as hell and started to force myself through it. However no matter how hard I try I couldn’t get my scripts to communicate with a database. To this day I have no idea what the problem was and nobody at Microsoft’s hosting department was able to help me.

I ended up reaching out to a friend from MIT who decided to help out as long as I used PHP. He wanted to learn a new language and PHP was getting a lot of traction in the hacker community. Of course I let him use PHP and we proceeded to develop a first version of the site. Unfortunately he had to go back to school before the project was complete so I was left trying to figure things out myself. I went out and bought this book and connected with other developers in the PHP.net forum.

Eventually I got to a point where people could register, login, upload songs, and sell their music. All this was done through brute force. I don’t say that to brag, I say it because I was going to create this vision one way or another and the only way I could get there was if I learned to code. In life, you need to do whatever it takes to get where you want to go. For me, learning to code was the way to get there. Eventually Musical Revolution shut down as I turned it into a more ambitious social network (pictured below … that also failed!).

Today, I still find myself coding my future. You don’t need to learn to code. It’s not a requirement to succeed. However if your vision involves creating a product that can impact millions of people, coding is most definitely a great tool for getting you there.

[Having a fundamental understanding of our product] allowed us to do a lot to get new users to their “a-ha” moment quickly. obviously, however, this required us to know what the “a-ha” moment was with a fair amount of certainty in the first place.

As someone who has spent an immense amount of time over the past year focusing on the details of product, this statement struck a chord with me. I remember the painful moment at Techcrunch Disrupt during which someone walked up to me to say that they had tried out the product. I was initially excited that he actually downloaded the app until he said, “It looks beautiful, but I have no idea what to do with it.”

He made it painfully clear that he had yet to reach his “Ah-ha!” moment. The reality is that you can run around telling everybody about your grand product vision, but if your product doesn’t effectively communicate to the user, there’s a good chance they just won’t get it. After reading Chamath’s post I would like to propose a more efficient way of achieving a “viral loop” in three steps:

1. Get initial users who get your product. In other words, get an initial user base to their “ah-ha” moment.
2. Optimize your product so that those who get it, can and do invite their friends.
3. Perfect your product so all new users who found your product through invites/word-of-mouth get to “ah-ha”.

Step one is obviously critical. If nobody gets your product, you will be dead on arrival. However if there is a core audience of people who understand the product and use it, you can move on to letting them invite their friends. Your product will not be complete however until the majority of new users can get to “ah-ha” without your personal assistance.

Simply put, that’s your objective: make sure your product can automatically get as many new users to “ah-ha” as possible. At that point, you will grow organically.

Image via Plot to Punctuation.

Sound interesting? Let me briefly explain why this model is so incredibly powerful.

What is a minimum viable community?

The source of inspiration for minimum viable communities is that developing a brand requires repetition of your core message with the people who will eventually become your customers. That message will help define how people connect to your brand, and more importantly, whether or not they do. If you find a message that resonates with your audience, you have the capacity to build a community around that message, over time offering products and services that fit your core message. Let me provide a few examples.

Apple
Probably one of the most recognized brands in the world began with a product that was not targeted at mass consumers. As Wikipedia writes, “Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—less than what is today considered a complete personal computer.”

In other words, Apple had identified their target community, the Homebrew Computer Club, and developed a product that would resonate with those who enjoyed customizing their own computer. In the case of Apple, I should emphasize the fact that their community already existed. They weren’t forced to build their own community. This is obviously a great way to get going quickly: find a community that already exists and try to get your brand to resonate within it.

Etsy
A more fitting example is Etsy, one company that has built a massive community of people who create handmade crafts. While their market has also become an incredibly lucrative business, the community is one of the core (if not the key) components of the company’s success. Building a community has enabled them to test various products and more importantly, survive through the challenges that any fast-growing company experiences.

AllFacebook
This one is obviously a bit self-serving, but when I started building AllFacebook years ago, I had no idea how I was going to build a business from it. I simply built a community of Facebook developers and marketers and tested various products and services with them. Some were successful, others were not. Yet beyond each product launch, I was able to keep a connection to the audience that had already been built. There are countless other brands that have taken similar approaches but a couple of related ones are Copyblogger and Problogger.

So those are just a few diverse examples (both in size and impact). So why should you consider building a minimum viable community?

Requires little technical experience

How many people have you seen running around looking for a technical co-founder to help get their idea off the ground? If you live anywhere near an entrepreneurial hub, there’s a good chance you’ve met countless people like this. It’s a sad state of affairs for multiple reasons, but the irony in all this is that you can attract top talent through developing a minimum viable community. Just imagine being able to tell a technical co-founder, or even an investor for that matter, that you have an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands of people that are coming to you regularly.

Costs nothing but your time

Developing a product can be pretty expensive and time consuming, but worst of all, your effort most likely will result in failure. The result is that you invest a lot of time in learning but very little time in connecting. You’ll know everything that doesn’t work, but if you spend more time connecting with your target audience you’ll have a better feel for what they need. The only expense is your time. Yes, time is costly, but you can save yourself a ton of expenses in the short-term by building up a name that becomes synonymous with your audience. Best of all, anybody who knows how to read and write can do this.

It Takes 27 Times

I don’t remember where I heard this but it supposedly takes something like 27 times of a person to hear about your brand before they purchase your product. So how on earth are you going to generate that many interactions with your customer pre-sale? I can tell you one way not to generate a connection: spend all your time building things in your startup laboratory. Your audience will be walking around getting bombarded with messages from people other than you.

Builds your personal brand

One of the greatest benefits of building a minimum viable community is that you can’t lose anything from doing it. Your audience will become not only connected with your brand, but connected with you. Even if your product fails (whenever it launches), you’ll have a relationship with your community that will last beyond your initial product launch. Which brings me to my next point!

Brings you closer to your customer

Your customer will know who you are! Imagine someone random running up to you in the street and shoving something in your face asking you to take a look. While I’m sure you’re far more delicate at introducing products to the market, this is effectively what you are doing when you start out. If you don’t build an audience, you’re nothing more than a random person. Now imagine this alternative situation: Your best friend comes up to you and says “Hey [insert your name here], I’ve been working on this project for a few months, can you take a look and let me know what you think?”

If you’re a good friend, you’re going to take a look. You’re going to let them know what sucks and what’s great, and you’re already much more likely to give the product a whirl. That’s what it’s like when you build a minimum viable community.

The One Downside

Let me be clear: a minimum viable community is not made for everybody. If you want to build a mass consumer product from the get go, a minimum viable community doesn’t necessarily work. Yet the odds of you successfully launching a mass consumer product is next to nothing. With a community and a product that grows out of that community, you have a much greater chance at making it over the long haul. One other downside is that the time you spend building your targeted community is time you could have spent making your product better.

Despite the downsides, having a personal brand and an audience can jumpstart any product you launch now or in the future. As someone who has built a personal brand, I can tell you the power that it has. When we first launched Holler last year, we were able to attract over 6,000 people in a month for a product that wasn’t necessarily targeted at my core audience. Yet our audience helped build buzz that made us competitive in an overly saturated market.

I tried it further a couple weeks ago when we ran a trial at StartupStats to see how much traffic we could generate within our target audience (which also happens to be perfectly aligned with my core audience). The result was over 40,000 people in in a week and a half. This is the power of developing a minium viable community. We now have a broad community of people we can collaborate and develop product and services with.

While I won’t outline the entire process of developing a minimum viable community in this post, you can learn more over the coming weeks and months by subscribing to my email newsletter in the box to the right (if you can’t see the box, click here). I’d also love to hear your thoughts on minimum viable communities in the comments below!!

The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”. Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.

I had that experience myself at AllFacebook with this article. It was an article that I wrote following 6 months of research on copywriting. The reality is that in the world of newsfeeds and streams, titles matter more than ever before. The best content in the world will fall flat without a great title. Nothing illustrates it better than this recent Target article.

Unfortunately a story like the one that the New York Times wrote is relatively rare in the sense that an incredible amount of work had gone in to the development of it. What’s odd is that the editors clearly knew that Target knowing a customer is pregnant is a juicy story as they put it in the lede. Here’s the article’s lede:

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

That line pulls the reader in and keeps them going but they missed one critical step (and the most important step) in pulling in the reader: the title.

Update
David Singer pointed out in the comments that the New York Times article actually had more likes than I mentioned … substantially more. After figuring out a slight bug (as far as I can tell) it appears that the New York Times actually has 14,000 likes versus the Forbes article which now has over 15,000. The end result is that the title mattered but the content provided by the New York Times did not go unrewarded. However the conclusion of my article is still valid: by changing the title and summarizing it effectively, the Forbes article was able to get more shares and most likely more traffic.

Also I should add that as many comments suggest, the Forbes article was not literally stealing. I agree and the word “Stole” in my title is meant to imply that they stole the key components of the main story. This is often a winning strategy as was the case here.

We’re currently using the dashboard internally to drive some of our content, but ultimately we want to open up parts of the dashboard for free and sell access to the high-value features. The objective is not to build a site with millions of readers. Let’s be honest: the number of people who invest in early-stage ventures is pretty small. We want to go after a clear niche and build content that attracts that niche. That niche is early-stage investors.

I’ll stop there because it brings us to the topic of our next post: picking and defining your niche!

So before we develop the world’s most irresistible blog, we first need to answer the question: what are we trying to accomplish? What are we even blogging for? Answering this question will help dictate how we proceed. Too often I see people launch sites and subsequently drown out their message by spreading themselves too thin with the content they generate. I’ve made the mistake myself.

What Are You Looking To Accomplish?

Why are you interested in starting a blog in the first place? Is it because you love blogging? Is it because you want to make a living from blogging? Perhaps you are so passionate about something that you want to simply share that passion with the world. Whatever your reason for developing an online publication is, you better be clear about your objective. When I started AllFacebook my personal objective was to “build a popular blog”. That was all I wanted to do. But how can I measure success?

At the time, I was aiming to get the blog listed in the top 100 blogs on Technorati. Since then, Technorati has become much less meaningful, however I was able to reach the top 50. That happened to be my measurement of success, but what is yours? And more importantly, how will you know when you’ve succeeded or whether or not the actions you are taking are getting you closer to where you want to be?

So step 1 in building an irresistible blog is to clearly define your objectives and how you will measure success or failure. Write this down!! If you are blogging for money, becoming one of the most popular blogs in the world may not be necessary because the only indicator of your success will be how much money you generate. Any action you take will be focused on increasing your bottom line.

Some Common Objectives

When it comes to blogging there are a limitless number of objectives that you could go after. I honestly didn’t know what I wanted when I started blogging because I was simply feeding my addiction to Google Analytics. I literally would do just about anything within reason to figure out how to increase my traffic. I’ll fully outline each of those tactics throughout this series. But let’s go over a few common objectives that I’ve seen people set:

• Feed your traffic addiction – This was how I started and to be honest, this tactic alone can result in a worthless site. You’ll spend day and night trying to increase the volume of mediocre posts in an attempt to generate traffic. Then you’ll try to write killer articles but for some reason your traffic won’t jump because in reality, the post isn’t that great. You’ll build an audience but the audience doesn’t matter to you because all you want to see is numbers move up and to the right. I don’t recommend using this one
• Become known as an expert – Want to get published on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications? I managed to pull this one off by becoming the leading expert on Facebook. You can do the exact same thing on literally any topic in the world. Becoming an expert is typically best for generating consulting gigs.
• Get hired – I wrote about this in a previous post, “The Secret Formula To Never Being Unemployed“. Blogging is literally a guaranteed way to start getting job offers. If you write often enough on a niche topic, many people will assume that they can’t hire you because you cost too much. Trust me, that’s a great position to be in.
• Build your personal brand – This goes along with getting hired, but it works for anybody. Whether you’re a writer who wants to get published or an investor who wants to get access to top notch entrepreneurs, building your personal brand can change your life.
• Generate “passive” income – I put the word “passive” in quotes because I’ve never heard of a passive income system that didn’t require a massive amount of up front work. However if you can generate a large volume of niche content, there’s definitely an opportunity to create a passive income stream.
• Promote an existing business – You may already have a successful business but most businesses can benefit from having more customers. Building a blog can be an incredible way to boost your customer base.

Know What You Want

The point should be pretty clear by now: blogging can dramatically improve your life but before you start plugging away at new posts, you need to know why you’re blogging in the first place! Write down your blog objectives, hang them on your wall or put them in a place where you can see them every day. By the time you’ve finished following this series and have begun writing, you will be well on your way to building an irresistible blog.

Make sure to subscribe to this ongoing series entering your name and email in the box to the right!

Over the coming months I’ll outline every step of the process. From picking a topic, to how frequently you should write, to figuring out a way to generate some income from your site. I’ll also break down the technical aspect of creating a killer site layout that will help you dramatically boost your subscriber base. It’s time to finally follow through on your plan to build an audience and do something that will permanently change your life for the better!

If you want to follow along, I suggest signing up for email updates via the form to the right.

A 20 Percent Response Rate

For those who aren’t aware, Holler was an iPhone application that we developed for facilitating ad hoc meetups. People could broadcast out to their friends that they were interested in getting together (e.g. grab lunch, have drinks, etc) and their friends could reply directly to them.

When we first launched Holler there were all types of problems with the product. Aside from glaring bugs that needed to be fixed, there were some fundamental issues with how the product was developed. As we started contemplating what we were missing we began adding features that would smooth the on-boarding process (the process through which new users become active) and bolster our invite response rates. What do I mean by invite response rates?

Every time a user registered for Holler, we prompted them with a screen that suggested they “Holler at your friends” at which point they would select their contacts from their phone’s contact list. Once they selected their friends and typed in an activity that they wanted to participate in (e.g. grab lunch) it would literally text message their friend and say “Nick O’Neill wants to grab lunch. Click here to join them: http://holler.com/somelink”

Our response rate on our initial invite system was approximately 20 percent. For email marketers in the audience, you may be thinking “that’s an awesome response rate!”, however only a fraction of the people who actually clicked converted into users.

Achieving An 80 Percent Response Rate

We thought about this process for a couple days and quickly came to the conclusion that the flow was too broken. I looked through our Twilio logs and noticed messages like “Who the hell is this?” and “New number?” and one of my personal favorites “Who dis?” It was obvious: the foreign phone number was a serious problem. Yet something was interesting about this phenomenon: the users weren’t ignoring the message. Typically when you spam someone, you’d expect them to ignore the message, but because this came from a friend, they replied.

So how could we enable a conversation to occur in which the user of Holler explained to their friend that they were testing a new application? We came up with a solution: add private messaging so the invitee could reply directly to their friend and make the message more personal. The message would now look something like this: “Hey John, it’s Nick O’Neill. I’m going to grab lunch. Interested?” Immediately our response rates jumped 400 percent. Success!

Things Aren’t Perfect

Despite the huge surge, things weren’t incredible. Despite the improved communication, people weren’t getting together. By analyzing an anonymized log of communication among users, we were able to figure out that many people didn’t get together. For those who did, their subsequent hollers weren’t receiving responses. Additionally, users who didn’t broadcast invites to their friends and chose to broadcast invites to public Holler users were subject to far lower response rates.

Unfortunately, a non-response in Holler is a powerful motivator to stop using the service. Out of 6,000 people who registered for Holler (this is without any substantial marketing), we had less than 50 relatively active users. There was an additional 100 to 200 people who were opening the app following a push notification from a public group. The bottom line is that the numbers were pretty abysmal. For social applications, you want to get much closer to Facebook-like engagement levels where 50 percent of your monthly active users are returning daily.

While we had close to 25 percent of monthly active users returning regularly, the vast majority of users (well over 90 percent) were not returning to the app. As a result of these numbers I figured it was a good time to pull the app because in the events space, generating a highly active user base is something that is insanely challenging. If you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments!

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How It Will Happen

Yesterday while grabbing coffee, Paul McKellar, entrepreneur in residence at SVAngel, presented a great idea when I brought up the concept of Twitter bootstrap themes: serving up CSS files on a per-request basis. It’s a model that Typekit has been using for a while now: charge people based on the number of pageviews they get to their site. It’s a significant contrast to WordPress Themes which have historically been priced on a per theme basis.

Clearly WordPress themes have a much greater audience: millions of people use wordpress to power their blogging activity. However there are countless startups that are using Twitter Bootstrap as a quick way to get up and running without having to wait on a design team. Take Swole.me as an example. I found them through Twitter last night and immediately recognized the design. If you want to know other sites that leverage Twitter Bootstrap, you can check out this blog which is dedicated to covering all the sites built with the framework.

By charging on a pageview basis, theme creators could quickly start generating revenue without much risk to the developers who simply want to get ideas out there. Obviously there’s always the opportunity to charge a flat-fee, but this market is not yet as large as wordpress. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became just as large though: developers and hobbyists are the ones responsible for the success of WordPress.

The market is definitely similar: people who want to quickly get a nice-looking site up and running without a lot of configuration. Granted, Bootstrap doesn’t exactly have a powerful back-end to power their system but that’s also the beauty of the product. With the rapid adoption of Twitter Bootstrap, I’m willing to make a significant wager that we’ll see a emergence of a cottage industry built around Twitter Bootstrap themes.