Lessons Learned from Technorati to OffBeat Guides: A ZURBsoapbox Podcast with Dave Sifry by Dmitry
October 06, 2009 in ZURB, Business and Startups with 2 comments
We had an amazing event last Friday with a great turnout, delicious food, and an animated discussion with Dave Sifry. Dave spoke at ZURBsoapbox about the lessons he learned from founding Technorati and starting OffBeat Guides. He shared some truly great points about building great products and growing start-ups. You can find a copy of the full podcast below.
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The crowd at ZURBsoapbox focused in on Dave Sifry.Use data, not your own ego
Technorati was an ego project for Dave. As both the product manager and customer for Technorati, he decided to build the site as something cool to satisfy his own needs. He would think of features to add and the team would run with the ideas he proposed.
There were no analytics or any data measurements of how these features were converting customers. Dave used a loose measurement of how many people were writing him emails about the new feature or how many people were talking about it on the internet.
Technorati lacked the discipline of evaluating if new feature ideas would help them achieve their conversion goals or simply satisfy the person who came up with the feature.
"It's not about what Dave thinks should be added to the product, it's about what the data says about the feature. "
Jeremy and Mark getting excited before John starts talking.Understand your
business model
Technorati was founded by Dave in order to build something cool. It was a search engine so the natural way to monetize it was ad revenue. The team found that people using Technorati to search were looking for blog ranking, compared to people who searched on Google for information on a wide variety of topics and products. As a result ads did not work very well on Technorati.
The first step, Dave says, is to figure out your business model and sell your services around it. Then you set a conversion goal and test the conversions to see how well you're performing.
If you're planning beyond 6 months, you're just guessing
Investors love five year plans, Dave says, but the reality is that if you're planning feature functionality one year out you're wasting your time. Ideal time for planning features is 3-6 months. Going further that 6 months you become inflexible to changes in the marketplace.

A product is like a pregnancy; no matter how many people
you throw at it, it still takes 9 months.
A smaller team, Dave says, is always better for a young product. It's easy to throw people and resources at issues which arise. The key to a successful product is to find as few people as possible to deliver the product. Adding more people to a project just slows down the product. A talent pool ratio of three designers/coders to one business person is the best makeup for a start -up team.
Be of service
After Technorati closed their funding Dave had one question facing him: If Technorati succeeds what would I be most happy to see from the business? The answer which he had was: Be of service. Dave mentioned that all of us want to be of service to something more than just ourselves. All of us want to change the world. The job of a business, he says, is to make money, but if you're making money and being of service to the world you know you're on the right track. Hence, before any new feature is added in Technorati or OffBeat Guides the same question is always asked: Are we being of service to our customers?
Measure your virality
Viral is a strategy you can understand if you can measure it. The key is to make your customers into product evangelists. To move your customers from sub critical mass to critical mass you need to measure your virality.
"If I put out a tweet, how many people will retweet this information? How many people will pass on the message you give them? If your coefficient of virality is 1.0 then you're growing fast. If it is 2.0 you're growing insanely fast."
There are tools to measure all these things, the trick is to make sure you have a good handle on these metrics.
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Photos from all the ZURBsoapbox talksDave Sifry's blog




This product development diagram highlights the conversations (arrows) that different business units have within a company. The customers reside on the outside of the circle and the UI is in the inner circle surrounded by business unit conversations.
A close-up shot of the mission statement brainstorm. In this detail we explore the concept of a soapbox metaphor.








