Archive for March, 2009

The Agony of Choosing the Winning Design: Will you get it right?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

So it’s time to pick the winning design of your crowdSPRING project. You’ve narrowed it down to the finalists: the best three or four designs. You agonize. Which one should you choose? Well guess what: It doesn’t matter. Whichever design you choose, it’s likely that your customers would choose something different. It happened to me and it’s happened to my clients.

Several months ago Montgomery Chiropractic of Belton, Texas posted a project. The owners of the practice each had their favorite logo design. Dr. Montgomery and his wife decided to let their patients decide. They took their favorites plus a couple of others that employees liked. Then the clinic patients voted. Patients chose the design below and now it’s the new Montgomery Chiropractic logo. But it never would have been chosen if the patients were not involved.

In November, I decided I needed a fresh logo for my company: The Marketing Spot. The project yielded 111 entries on crowdSPRING. I was excited about the possibilities! I had my favorites, but decided that I wanted to crowdsource the logo design all the way. So I got feedback from clients, friends and Twitter connections. Everyone who voiced their opinion got a vote. My favorite design did not win. Instead this one did:

This design wasn’t even on my radar screen during the project. But now it’s my logo and I receive frequent compliments on the new look.

If you’re really going to crowdsource your design, go all the way. Solicit feedback from your customers. Why not let them choose the winner? The final choice doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. Just pick a design and run with it. A year from now you won’t remember all the agony.

Jay Ehret is a small business marketing coach and writes The Marketing Spot blog.

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Posted in business, marketing, start-up tips | 19 Comments »

Don't Underestimate The Value Of Listening

Monday, March 30th, 2009

It never ceases to surprise me when people  think that listening to users is bad business.

Michael Arrington recently questioned Facebook’s decision to revert back to some “old features” based on input from Facebook users. In his article titled “No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook”, Arrington argues that you should never listen to your users. Arrington concludes that:

The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device.

Robert Scoble, in his post “Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now” argues essentially the same thing. Scoble writes:

My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.

Arrington and Scoble are wrong. Just ask the newspaper publishing industry or the RIAA about the dangers of ignoring what your users are saying. There is huge value in listening to your users- once you understand how to properly filter what they are saying.

Scoble writes in his post that Mark Zuckerberg “is telling people that he won’t listen to customers. Or something like that.” Assuming that’s true, I strongly suspect that Scoble (and Arrington) confuse listening with conforming. After all, how could you possibly assess whether or not you disagree with a user unless you listen? And if you don’t listen, how can you know what you are disagreeing with?

Listening doesn’t mean conforming. It doesn’t mean that you implement every feature requested by users, or even many of the features requested by users. And Scoble – it doesn’t mean that you’ll build a Volvo when you intended to build a Porsche.

Steve Jobs is brilliant not because he blindly ignores users – he is brilliant because he listens to users very hard and filters what they are saying. What happens when you don’t listen to your users? You become irrelevant.

When we started working on crowdSPRING in 2006, we conducted several detailed surveys, talking to hundreds of potential users. We asked users what they didn’t like about the then existing marketplaces and what they would build if THEY had an opportunity to build their own marketplace for creative services such as logo design, web design and illustration.

We’ve continued to run our business by listening to users. For example, we are currently refactoring 100% of our code and collaborating with our entire community to improve everything we do, as you can see in our forums.

Smart companies know the difference between listening and conforming. Smart companies listen very hard to their users – they learn to properly filter what their users are saying.

How do you filter what your users/customers are saying about your company or your products? How do you reduce the noise to focus on meaningful suggestions?

Photo credit: * Photography by Chris*

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Posted in business, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | No Comments »

Friday Fun Facts – Customer Service Requests

Friday, March 27th, 2009

As a small business startup we spend a great deal of time looking at and analyzing data to help us drive strategy, make adjustments, and better understand our customers. We try hard to not be robotic in our response to numbers, but rather to let them inform our decisions and our direction. Here is the latest in a serial discussion of some of the data we look at internally…

Just back from South by Southwest a few days ago and boy am I excited to get back to some heart-pounding data! This week we’ll take a look at customer service requests. You know, these are the little notes you send to us when you click on the Contact Us link at the bottom of any page. With the arrival of Jaclyn (DBA ‘Snow White’) last week, Jerome thought it would be great to get a better handle on which days of the week are busiest. This was pretty easy to figure out. I created a table which contained the number of support requests we received per day over a three month period. From there Excel helped me to determine how many of the tickets were created on each day of the week. Take a look at the results:

Now Jerome is not a guy who is easily satisfied. Now that we had figured out which were the busiest days of the week for him, he wanted to know which were the busiest hours. The guy is relentless. This was a bit trickier. In order to do this I needed to look at the time stamp on every ticket that came in. To pull this data for a three month period was just too much (I do have other responsibilities, Jerome) so I cheated and gathered the data for the last two weeks only, knowing that this would be a large enough sample to give the French Guy the info he was after. Again, I created a table with columns for time stamps, ticket category, ticket number, and description. Turns out that almost 60% of all requests come in between 1PM and 10PM GMT (7AM and 4PM Chicago time – business hours, how convenient):

Alright, Jerome – let’s make it interesting. What are the busiest hours for Bugs reports? Here ya go – more than 60% of these between the hours of 3PM and 8PM GMT:

What about reports of IP violations? Easy. 60% come in between 12PM and 10PM GMT:

And finally, when do our users think up great ideas for ways to make crowdSPRING better? Here’s the distribution for Suggestions, with around 65% sent to us between 1PM and 11PM GMT:

I hope the French Guy is happy and I hope that Jaclyn can be available to help with the coverage so we can maintain our reputation for speedy response times. Jerome? Happy now?

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Posted in business, community, How To, Strategy | 1 Comment »

I Love Vimeo

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

I use Vimeo to document the artists on K that come to Chicago.  When I ran into an issue of not being able to upload as much HD content as I would like early last year, Vimeo’s dalas verdugo was there to help by increasing my weekly capacity on the spot.  I mentioned to dalas that I would pay for a further increase, should they provide the service.

I am now a very happy Vimeo Plus member and continue to be impressed by Vimeo’s strong Customer Service, not to mention the agile and transparent Development team making it all happen.  I use YouTube for free, but I would never pay for the service despite the fact I get 4X the amount of views there by default.

Great products and services are simply worth paying for. Thanks Vimeo.

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Posted in Awesomeness, business | 8 Comments »

We Hired Snow White!

Friday, March 20th, 2009

It’s twue, it’s twue!

We received about 500 applications over the past 21 days in response to our ad looking for help with customer service. We talked with and met many outstanding people,  but Jaclyn Moser turned out to be the fairest of all. And so, what could eight dwarfs do but to hire Snow White? We’ve tidied-up our place and now whistle while we work, with a smile and a song.

Jaclyn and the 8 dwarfs

Jaclyn and the 8 dwarfs - (thanks to Chris Detmer!)

So – here’s a short interview with Jaclyn. We’re so excited to have her join our team and our awesome community. Please welcome Jaclyn in the comments below…


Interview with crowdSPRING’s Jaclyn Moser from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

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Posted in Awesomeness, community, Interviews, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Interview With Ron May – The May Report

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to talk with Ron May about The May Report.

Like him or not (and many don’t), Ron May and The May Report have outlasted the many Chicago tech companies who have appeared in the report over the last decade.

In this 9 minute video interview, Ron and I talk about the origins of The May Report, how it became popular, and his regrets about not moving to the West Coast.

The story Ron tells at the beginning happened when he was five. One of his grandmothers told Ron that she loved him more than his other grandmother. Ron told the other grandmother about this.

He learned at a very young age that controversy brings attention. And he hasn’t let up since.


Interview With Ron May – The May Report from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts about The May Report? Has it helped or hurt Chicago’s tech industry? How would you improve The May Report?

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Posted in business, Interviews | 8 Comments »

Friday Fun Facts – What’s on at SXSW?

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Well, for the past 6 Fridays I have written about the data we collect at crowdSPRING and how we put it to use. Today, in honor of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, I wanted to share a bit about some of the goings on down in Austin. I am sitting on a plane as I write this and looking over the great lineup of panels, speakers, and parties that await. I intended to give you a Top 10 list, but it was way too hard to cut it down. So, in no special order, here’s my list (with links) of the Top 20 events for Ross and I to attend…. I left the parties to their own separate list – I didn’t want them to clog up my 20!

1. Minority Report is Real: Sci-fi movies have long-celebrated beautiful, tangible, and immersive computer interfaces. Explore the interplay between fanciful Hollywood productions, one-off information visualizations, and useful real-world applications.

2. Plan B: Can an Ad Guy Bring Bike Sharing to America?: In increasingly turbulent times, it seems like more and more of us are wearing an extra hat or two in an effort to make a difference. Maybe that explains why Crispin Porter + Bogusky, one of the world’s most respected advertising firms, has joined with Humana and Trek bicycles in an audacious plan to bring bike sharing to America with a new venture called B-cycle. All three companies share one common goal: positive cultural change. It’s estimated that the U.S. could save 462 million gallons of gasoline a year by increasing cycling from 1% to just 1.5% of all trips. B-cycle can change the way we get around. And that can change our communities, our heath, our environment, and our future. Find out more about B-cycle and why Alex recommends we all begin sticking our noses in places where they don’t belong.

3. AMODA Digital Showcase: The Austin Museum of Digital Art presents a party featuring live electronic music and visual art. Expect video projections, interactive installations, and a Laptop Battle with musicians competing to outperform one another in a series of elimination rounds. Free for Interactive badge holders. www.amoda.org

4. Social Media Marketing: ‘Social Media Marketing’ is the start of a conversation about marketing communications using social media forms Ð including internet sites and mobile telecommunication sources. The book discusses the importance of data and analytics both in helping to monetize these media, and in improving the way that the owners of these media market themselves. Marketers wishing to communicate with customers, or potential customers via social media need to adopt a new set of skills and techniques to be effective. The need for dialogue and involvement, for engagement, is paramount. This book discusses solutions that allow marketers to target and measure their activities within social media.

5. Curating the Crowd-Sourced World: With all the stuff we weed through online, good filters are crucial. Who’s best-suited to determine what’s best, curators or the crowd? People have their religion about one or the other, however this panel will focus on the overlap, the grey areas and how curating and crowd-sourcing enrich each other.

6. What your Startup Can Learn from Barack Obama and Howard Dean: BarackObama.com made more money online than most startups. So did Howard Dean before him. We’ve spent so much time talking about what happened, but little about how it applies to you. We will go in depth on their strategies from the top consultants and strategists from the 2008 election cycle. We won’t be talking about what happened, but rather about how it applies to you and your startup.

7. The Future Of Social Networks: Social networks will be like air, in that they will permeate everything that we do online AND offline. We’ll look at the underlying technologies that will make this possible, how it will evolve, and the business models that will support it.

8. Designing the Future of The New York Times: What will the nation’s newspaper of record look like in the coming years? Learn about the continuing efforts of old media to reinvent its look, its feel and its mission.

9. Friendship is Dead: So what is a friend anymore? Is it a checkbox or something to collect? Have social networking tools diluted the meaning of “friend” to be someone to add to your collection? Or do these tools allow you to connect with people you’ve never met before? How does friendship differ offline and online?

10. Design for the Wisdom of Crowds: People are often dumb, so how can crowds be wise? James Surowiecki laid the groundwork in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds.” In this solo presentation, Derek Powazek will apply those ideas to the web, concentrating on how to design websites that empower people to work together to create something truly awesome.

11. Sunday Keynote Interview with Nate Silver: Fivethirtyeight.com was one of the biggest winners in the 2008 November election, successfully predicting the Obama landslide. Veteran BusinessWeek columnist Stephen Baker talks with Nate Silver, the man whose statistical analysis powered the site.

12. Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter: Statesman.com and Austin360.com are Twittering news and entertainment daily – and we’re not pushing an RSS feed. We’re using Twitter the way it is meant to be used: as an interactive, personality-driven tool. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Is this the life raft for Traditional Media?

13. Sex Ed Online: How Teens Self Savvy: Information about sexuality is out there as it never was before. How do kids sort through and use it? Bring your questions, fears and hopes and generational quandaries. Sexy prizes for the best questions.

14. Presenting Straight to the Brain: Is there a way out of the oppressive PowerPoint culture that surrounds us? Yes: skip the fonts and graphics talk, and explore how the human mind learns. When you accept what the research says about the brain, you’ll have no choice but to present a clear and compelling multimedia story.

15. Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not?: Are you building a killer web app or the next great Internet startup? You’ve considered outsourcing, but heard about the headaches. Come see four outsourcing experts share insights on collaborating across borders and time zones, avoiding project death spiral, and how smart startups are leveraging a global strategy that VC’s expect.

16. Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable: The brave new world of cloud computing is radically changing how we build web applications. What is a platform, what is a service, and how will the future of web applications be built? More importantly, how do these various clouds compare, and what do the differences mean? Are they ready for your world-rockin’ startup? In this panel, we’ll get nerdy with technical details, you’ll yell at us, and we’ll argue why your app should already be in the cloud.

17. Beyond Apple TV: Next-Generation Systems for Acquiring Content: Products like Apple TV and Roku’s Netflix Player are fairly recent examples of cutting-edge IPTV developments. As IPTV trends toward increased adoption, similar products must help fuel the market. This technical session will discuss requirements and challenges for building next-generation IPTV systems and services using both off-the-shelf and customized components.

18. Happiness (or Not) In Startups: All this talk about having a creative workspace, a nice boss etc. Should you be happy at your startup job, or should you work until you fail or succeed? Intrinsically, shouldn’t your days after a startup be the happiness you are working so hard for?

19. Tuesday Keynote Interview with Guy Kawasaki: In 2006, Chris Anderson introduced the concept of the Long Tail. His soon-to-be released book will talk about the power of free. Will his theories stand up to the tough questions of venture Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki?

20. Posse Blogging: Never Blog Alone: The thrills and tribulations of co-blogging. What’s it like riding herd with other bloggers? This panel of gritty bloggers discuss their experience blogging together on the same topic, but separately on their own blog. Be prepared for a shootout at the blog corral as these blog slingers agree and disagree.

Not to mention the part-ays:

1. SXSW Interactive Opening Party Hosted by frog design (): Celebrating its 40th anniversary, frog design will once again host the legendary opening night party for the 16th annual SXSW Interactive Festival. Featuring a surprising line up of uniquely Austin entertainment, this not-to-be-missed event brings together digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs for an unforgettable evening. For more info.

2. Adobe 12th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony – Presented by Adobe: The Web Awards Ceremony is the centerpiece of evening activities at the SXSW Interactive Festival. This year’s emcee is “conscious comic and vigilante pundit” Baratunde Thurston. The SXSW Web Awards are presented by Adobe, Web Awards Supporting Sponsors are Convio and All Web Leads.

3. SXSW Interactive / Film Fusion Party Hosted by Whrrl and JavaFX: Red Eyed Fly 715 Red RiverWhrrl and JavaFX invite you to join us for an evening of food, drinks and world-class entertainment at the official SXSW Film & Interactive “Fusion” party! Hosted bar and appetizers, the launch of Whrrl v2.0, and world premiere of Sparhusen, featuring actress Illeana Douglas.

4. SXSW Interactive Closing Party Hosted by Media Temple: Hot new venue with lots of surprises in store. Be sure to stick around for this end-of-festival blow-out.

And then of course, there is one more “must-see” event (our panel, that is):

Is Spec Work Evil? The Online Creative Community Speaks: The ‘no-spec’ movement has long held sway in the design community but the web has created a new model for design that allows a freer exchange of ideas and inspiration and more ways to enter the design profession than ever before. What does social creativity look like?

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Posted in Awesomeness, business | No Comments »

Friday Fun Facts – The "Springy" Awards

Friday, March 6th, 2009

As a small business startup we spend a great deal of time looking at and analyzing data to help us drive strategy, make adjustments, and better understand our customers. We try hard to not be robotic in our response to numbers, but rather to let them inform our decisions and our direction. Here is the sixth in a serial discussion of some of the data we look at internally…

We set a new record the other day when a project closed with a HUGE number of entries. It started me thinking… Which projects on cS in our first 10 months in business have broken new ground, crossed new frontiers, and parted new waters (um, OK maybe not parted waters…). These are certainly worthy of recognition. Wait, not just recognition – how about an award? The envelopes please…

  • To the project with the most entries: 729
  • To the project with the most comments left by a Buyer: 612
  • To the project with the most creatives participating 166
  • To the project with the highest ratio of comments to entries: 4:1
  • To the project with the largest award paid out: $4,000
  • To the project with the largest increase in an award once a project was underway: $700
  • To the project with the largest new award added once a project was underway: $500
  • To the crowdspring Creative with the most projects awarded: 48 (forgive me for using this two blog posts in a row, but this person was awarded another project since last week!)
  • To the crowdSPRING Buyer with the most projects posted: 10
  • To the single day with the most projects posted: 34
  • To the single day with the highest award total paid out: $16,525
  • To the single day with the largest number of Customer Service requests received: 99
  • To the single day with the largest number of site visits: 10,227

Now recognition and awards are all well and good, but the accomplishment that inspires us the most is the way our community has grown in a short ten months. We came out of our Beta last May with just over 200 registered users and today we have more than 21,000 Buyers and Creatives using crowdSPRING! (To save you the calculation on that one, it comes to around 70 new users per day!)

Now if only we had a little statuette to hand out. Anyone up for designing the “Springy” award?

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Posted in Awesomeness, community, crowdsourcing | 8 Comments »

Increasing Conversions Using Google Website Optimizer

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Earlier this year, Jason Fried of 37signals shared in the Signal v. Noise blog results from an experiment with the signup page for one of their products, Highrise.  Prior to reading Jason’s post, I hadn’t heard about Google Website Optimizer. Thanks to Jason, Google Website Optimizer has helped crowdSPRING to optimize numerous pages to increase conversions.

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps you test and increase your site’s conversion rates. You can test variations of text, images, and other content. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy to use and provides a very compelling way to test and increase conversions.

We’ve used the Website Optimizer for numerous tests on our site, including the home page, our “how it works page”, and on certain other pages to test specific elements. If you wonder whether the effort is worth it – it absolutely is.

Let me illustrate by showing you how crowdSPRING optimizes to increase conversions. On our “Post a Project” page, we let the buyer set the price for their project. We’ve set minimums in every category (example: $200 for logo design in standard projects and a higher price for stationery design).

When buyers post projects, they often wonder how much to pay. To help them set a fair price, we do two things on our “Post a Project” page. First, we include a short factual statement that helps buyers understand the average level of participation when the award is less than $300, compared to the average level of participation when the award is more than $300 (the amounts in this example are for logo projects).

Text Comparing Participation below and above $300

Second, we try to visually help buyers understand whether the amount they’ve entered is LOW, AVERAGE, BEST, etc. To increase conversions, we try to find ways to show buyers why they should offer awards higher than $300 in logo projects.

At the moment, we are testing two different approaches. In the first approach, we are using color bars to signal to the buyer whether their award is reasonable. A buyer who enters the minimum amount in their project ($200 for a logo, for example), sees a red color bar with the text “VERY LOW”.

Color Bars - Low

Color Bars - Very Low

A buyer who sets a higher award amount ($1000 for a standard logo project, for example), sees a blue color bar with the text “BEST”. We have color variations and different messages in between those two examples.

Color Bars - Best

Color Bars - Best

We’ve been using “color bars” for a while, but have wondered whether we can improve in this area. So, we are testing a different approach at the moment – a speedometer to communicate the same information, as you can see in the two examples below.

Speedometer - Very Low

Speedometer - Very Low

Speedometer - Best

Speedometer - Best

What did we learn?

We are not finished with this particular test, so we don’t have final results yet. We are seeing some conversion differences between the “color bars” and “speedometer”. Would you expect to see a difference? Why? Can you suggest another combination that we should try that could help us to increase conversions?

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Posted in business, How To, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 11 Comments »

I am NOT the Director of Puerto Rico!

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Hi!  I’m the new PR Director. And in case you’re wondering – it’s true – Ross did think PR stood for Puerto Rico!

So, I’m sitting in my office at my previous job, when all of a sudden I get this email from a co-worker with the subject line “hmmm, you should really check this out.”  Of course I dropped what I was doing (I’m sure I was facebooking—is that even a word?) and checked out the job write up from a company called crowdSPRING.

They had me at ping-pong.

Now I wasn’t exactly looking to leave my position at the time, but the write up was so intriguing I had to investigate further.  Must wear shorts and flip flops – check, plus if you have a rolodex – check (I’m not kidding, I have an actual rolodex – I think I started it in 1966.) I recall it also saying something about media relations skills, writing skills, bla bla, but then I saw it – must play ping pong.  Hello—I’m only the Sirt Basement Ping Pong Champion of 1989!

So I decided to send my info in.  Around my second or third go-around with Pete, the Director of Marketing, he referenced The Bachelor – SOLD!  I knew I must have this job.

Long story short, I researched the company, checked out the industry, met the team and knew it was a no brainer.  I jumped ship and am now spin doctoring away in a basement in the West Loop.  I came from a position in which we were considered the “media darling” and am now at a company that may be looked at as a boat rocker of their industry.  If you know me at all, you know that I am definitely considered more of a boat rocker than a darling, so I feel like I fit right in.  I am extremely eager and excited to get the word out about this exciting company that is helping revolutionize the design industry.

Be on the lookout for crowdSPRING hits in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Comm Arts, and of course, OPRAH.  Oh yeah, I said it.  Mike told me if I get us on Oprah, he’ll buy me a zebra.  Game on.

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Posted in business, community | 18 Comments »