Nikolas Laufer-Edel Business and web play nice

Nikolas Laufer-Edel's Blog

Nik's digital conversation starter on Communication, Business, Experience Design, and Technology.

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Apr
30th
Tue
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Starting a business? Start with pain.

You’ve got a really cool idea you want to turn into a business, but how can you be sure people will buy it? image

If you want to make money you need to sell something people want to buy. And people are most likely to buy things that get rid of pain. Kareem, a mentor of mine, has a good analogy. Stop for a second and picture this: if someone’s hair is on fire, and you happen to be walking by with a bucket of water, do you think they’ll pay for it?

The fun part for many of us is coming up with solutions. It’s easy to dream up features. But without understanding the problem how can you build a solution? Start by understanding the pain, then instead of just having an idea, you’ll have a business.

How do you find the pain? Learn about the process your product fits into or replaces. How are things being done today? What happens before and after using your product? Who’s involved at each step? Who has the budget? And what fire are they trying to put out?



Jul
20th
Fri
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How to sort ranked items in your software

Hint: it’s not by average

So what would be a better ranking? Well, we’d probably like to see an item with 50 5-star votes before we see an item with a single 5-star vote. Intuitively speaking, the more votes, the more certain we are of an item’s usefulness, so we should be focusing our attention on high-score, high-vote-count items. 

-William Morgan



Jul
15th
Sun
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5 Presentation Design questions answered

I run a workshop based on my 5 Steps to Great Presentations. During the last session we didn’t have time to answer all the questions so I’ve answered some of them below. Enjoy! 

Good resources for PowerPoint or Keynote templates

Most templates do more harm than good, they add visual distractions and clutter to your slides. The best templates I’ve seen come by default with Keynote and I personally suggest building your own simple template. Remember, any visuals on the screen should be reinforcing your message, everything else is clutter.

Tips for building your own simple presentation templates:
  • Make use an existing colour pallet (checkout Kuler for pre-designed colour pallets rated by the design community)
  • Keep the focus on your content (imagery or typography)
  • Use a single colour, try a light or a dark background
    • White has the advantage of making it easy to add many images found online into your presentation without worrying about those images having white boxes around them
    • If you’re going to be photographed or are presenting via webinar I’ve heard dark backgrounds are best
  • If you need to add a corporate logo make it small and put it in the bottom right hand corner, usually a logo is just clutter, so if possible try putting it on the first and last slide
A simple template leaves most of the space to show off the important elements of your slide: your content and visuals. Over the years I’ve developed numerous templates, get in touch if you’d to discuss a professionally designed template for your corporation or presentation. I may also make my template available for download in the future which I use myself for workshops and client work. Signup for my presentation design newsletter to be notified.

How much information to include in your presentation

Start by focusing on the goals of your presentation, make sure you can achieve your goals within the allotted time. If you don’t have a lot of time you might need to break your goal into multiple steps and start by raising interest in your topic with your audience and giving them an avenue to learn more. This is better than overwhelming them during your talk. If this is the case, try starting with a story but don’t give the ending, or leave them with a thought provoking question.
Most people are tempted to cram too much information into a given time slot. You need to know your audience and their level of understanding of a topic. If they are experienced in the field, you can cover more ground and move faster. If they are new to the topic, you’ll have to cut how much you cover, explain concepts as you introduce them, and use more repetition.

Improving the delivery of your presentation

The way you hold yourself, your pace, your tone, and intonation are all aspects of delivery. Mastering these elements takes practice. When I work with clients I will record their talks, listen to them, and provide feedback. You can try this yourself. You will be amazed at how much you will learn and improve by watching or listening to yourself.

Software to make professional presentations: Keynote, PowerPoint, or Prezi?

At the end of the day you should use what you’re most comfortable with. 
  • Keynote is my personal favourite and what we use for all the speakers at TEDxVancouver. It has great built in tools for making small adjustments to images, has clean animations, and an interface consistent with the rest of the iLife suite. It’s only available for Mac and not suitable if the presentations need to be run on a PC (unless you want to fiddle endlessly with a PowerPoint export or present a PDF or a movie file).
  • PowerPoint has more features and can accomplish everything Keynote can and more (although that’s not necessarily a good thing).
  • Prezi is great for specific types of presentations, specifically when you providing a high level overview or concept map and then drilling down into specific details of that overview. The zooming in and out provides context to the audience as you move from the high level to the detail level. For presentations where you don’t follow this format, the animation can cause a disorienting effect.

Career opportunities in presentation design

Presentations are used everywhere within the corporate world be it for internal purposes or public product announcements. That being said I’m not aware of many roles dedicated to presentation design. There are communication firms that specialize in presentation design, you might want to checkout careers at Duarte.

Want more?

Be sure to follow me @nikDOTca on twitter, signup for my newsletter, or subscribe to this blog via RSS. I’ll be posting more Q&A on presentation design.



May
3rd
Thu
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Don’t break your (implicit) brand promise

Your brand is a promise to your customer. As a conscientious marketer you are aware of this, you know that consistently communicating and upholding this promise is paramount, but you also realize that each customer is unique and may be buy for myriad of reasons. Understanding why people buy gives you the opportunity to understand what implicit promise lie at the heart of your relationship with that customer.

Example: You promise customers you’re the low cost provider of a service. Your marketing and positioning paints this picture, your communications, your actions, everything you do, reinforces this promise. But there may be other reasons that people buy. Maybe they are fed up with their existing provider nickel and dimming them or making accounting “errors”. They are switching not just for a better rate but because they want a more forthcoming provider. Making the switch to you, as the low cost provider, carriers with it this additional implicit promise. So what happens when you need to increase prices? Even if you’re still the low cost provider, if you don’t handle the communications around your price change properly, you’ll be breaking that implicit promise. However, if you understand that customers have this implicit promise you can craft your communications on the price change to not only reinforce your promise of being the low cost provider, but do it an an open and honest way, to preserve that implicit promise,

Take away: Understand why people are buying and understand what promise your brand or product is making to your customer. Then consider those promises in your communications and your actions. Brand loyalty is about building trust, and you build trust by keeping your promises.



May
1st
Tue
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Branding should come after Customer Discovery

There are four steps in Customer Development. The first is Customer Discovery where you identify who your customer is and what pain point you’re going to solve.

A good brand is a promise to customers and positions you relative to alternatives and competitors. But what kind of promise are you going to make if you don’t know who your customer is or how you will truly solve their problems? And how can you position yourself against the status quo or competitors if you don’t know who they are? I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your brand early on, just don’t obsess over it, yet.

When to brand in the Customer Development process

The next step, Customer Validation, is when you start putting money towards marketing, making it a natural time to revisit your brand. This insight resulted after a great conversation with my colleague Paul over rebranding. It especially makes sense if it’s something you’ve been putting off because you were too busy doing what you’re supposed to be doing in an early stage startup, finding product market fit.



Apr
28th
Sat
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Build an infinite Customer Development pipeline

Can you start aggregating or creating useful information about your industry? Can you compile it into a monthly newsletter? Can you offer options to tailor content to your subscribers and at the same time better understand which customer segments they fall into? Can you personally reach out to people in specific segments or send out surveys to learn from them?

Congratulations, you’re building an ever growing custdev pipeline, not to mention a proprietary marketing channel.



Apr
9th
Mon
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Focus + Your early stage startup

Having recently joined an education technology startup my focus has been on finding a “repeatable and scalable business model” that makes us profitable so we can spend our energy building the world’s best learning experiences. I’d like to share that journey with you.

The approach I’ve been following is called Customer Development or CustDev for short. The term was coined (to the best of my knowledge) by Steve Blank and if you’re interested I recommend his new book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, as it boils down a lot of entrepreneurial business theory into a practical and structured process.

So what is CustDev? I explain it to my business friends as: “validating one’s business model through customer research” and more colloquially as: “increasing the likelihood of your business succeeding, by asking potential customers if you’re building a company they would do business with”. Here is a graphical overview I made of the Customer Development process:

Customer Development has four steps which are divided into two categories: searching for the business model and executing the business model. As an early stage startup you’re probably still searching, and as such will likely be joining me at the Customer Discovery step. To get you oriented here is a quick overview of the different steps:

  1. Customer Discovery translates company vision into a series of hypotheses which are then tested. 
  2. Customer Validation proves the business model you’ve come up with in step 1 can scale into a profitable business.
  3. Customer Creation ramps the business model into production with a focus on sales.
  4. Company-Building codifies business process into procedures and marks the graduation from a startup to a big company.

The Customer Discovery process walks you through defining assumptions about your business model, testing these hypotheses by speaking with potential customers, and then measuring your success by having you face the realities of your business model’s viability. You’ll then either move on to Customer Validation or realize you still have more to learn and go back to start the Customer Discovery process again, but this time armed with new found insights.



Jan
29th
Sun
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Urban skiing. Epic. Watch this full screen.



Dec
30th
Fri
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Learn “Startup Metrics 4 Pirates” (AARRR)

Dave McClure shares his experience working with startups. Watch the video and follow along with the embedded slide show below.



Nov
24th
Thu
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I’ll take you through the fives steps of preparing to give a great presentation in this short video. Enjoy.