Five Signs Of Fatal Start-Up Engineering

Engineering Fail

The numbers are not with start-ups. Depending on which statistics you believe, 90% of all new products fail, and even a veteran entrepreneur who has experienced IPO success, and has venture capital backing, will only succeed 30% of the time. Many factors have to be in place to make it in the long haul, and in my experience, your most likely failure will come from engineering.

To be fair, Engineering has the hardest job by far. Usually, marketing and sales only needs to be comparable to competitors, while engineering has to be better... and this all assumes that the value proposition of the business is valid in the first place. But if you find yourself in a business where the following points are happening all the time, run, do not walk, to your next opportunity

1) Road maps to nowhere.

If your scrum session never seems to address aspects of the business, or stays fixated on certain points while keeping other fields fallow, this is a major red flag. In most fields, standing still is falling behind, and if every aspect of the business isn't making some progress, you are likely to spend much of your time putting out different fires, rather than achieving a superior position.

2) 100% drama for release.

I have been at start ups where new releases happened during business hours, with no one on staff expected to trouble-shoot into the small hours of the morning, or with an unforeseen emergency kicking in over the weekend. At other stops in my career, every release caused held breath, thank you emails for heroic hours, and some team members fixing a major break point at an inhuman hour.

It is great when you have a team that's willing to go the extra mile, and if you have the camaraderie to kick through major challenges, there's nothing better. But if you are running into this every time out, it's a sign that your team either can't say no to overly ambitious plans, or just don't have the horsepower to deliver what's been promised. Neither situation will endear you to investors, clients or prospects. And in the long run, this will be fatal, because it will shake core confidence in the business.

3) Serving internal over external clients.

Helping internal teams work smarter, not harder, is a fine and noble goal... but at some point, it needs to be balanced against what might be required to support emerging business lines. Especially if you aren't suffering from intense employee turnover, or can't show that the internal comfort will result in increased business, making the staff happier than the people who pay the bills is a fundamental mistake.

4) Communication issues.

Not to be impolitic about this, but Engineering frequently brings in talent that is international in scope, and who may have issues in communicating with other aspects of the business. If your team is keeping to themselves to an extent that's nearly total, it leads to an easy "us vs. them" situation that's far from healthy. You are also at risk when communication is highly regimented or restricted from similar factors. This is also an easy factor in high turnover.

5) One way or no way.

Creativity in finding solutions is critical in getting a start-up to fruition, and so is timing. Your internal team may not be the best choice for getting to go live on individual projects, especially if the project involves competencies that are outside of their comfort zone. When an internal team isn't willing to concede projects to outside experts, or able to staff up to cover the shortfall, you've got a team that is putting their comfort in front of what's right for the business. You wouldn't put up with this from any other department, and you shouldn't do it with engineering, either.

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can hit the RFP box on the top right of the page.

Rhymes Wtih Beagle: A Marketing Tale of Horror

Will For The Win

Part of a continuing series of moments from my career, in which great breakthroughs came from great setbacks. The point, as always, is to work away from fear, and learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for better stories.

One of the greatest gigs of my life ran for five and a half years, with an annual revenue rate in my department from $4 to $14 to $40mm in the first three years. I learned more there than I have at any gig before or since, and formed some of my greatest friendships and relationships in business. Somedays, I really think someone could make a movie about that company.

And it all fell apart, shortly after the lawyers came.

First, some background. My role at this company was to lead custom ad creative projects for behaviorally targeting ad placements. Our final product was a proprietary ad format that was co-branded for the advertiser and the ad company. So our clients could provide their own art, but waiting for that would delay go lives, and usually leave money on the table, since they were not attuned to this kind of work. It was also a "white hat" moment for the ad company, since we were providing "free" creative... with the caveat being, of course, that the cost of doing the art for the client would be more than covered by greater performance.

Our business was, however, highly controversial. We delivered ads that were based on the user's clickstream, in a medium with 100% deliverability and viewability -- a targeted center square pop up browser window, or, less often, a sliding window in the bottom right, or an additional window that was given less priority than your current browser. The ads were the price that you paid for downloading a supported application.

My company believed that since consumers had chosen to take on these additional ads (and confirmed this choice on a significant number of confirmation screens), and that since these ads were appearing in their own browser windows, an aggressive display model was justified. We also made uninstalls as easy as possible; 2 clicks and a simple wizard, which took less than a minute on a decent connection, would send you on your way without our ads.

Millions of users downloaded our application, and millions uninstalled it. So this seemed pretty cut and dried internally, and to the venture capital that backed us, and the hundreds of clients that used us for lead generation.

To the e-commerce and content sites that triggered these ads, and believed themselves to be negatively impacted by this business?

Not so much.

Lessons learned?

1) Do not trust anyone to read anything.

To get our stuff required significant time and interest, mostly though clicking on agree statements. Uninstalling the work was a simple matter of using Add/Remove Programs (it was only a Windows product, by the way). We told consumers how to shut down the application on every ad we ever ran. And to a significant portion of the audience, and in more courtrooms than anyone should ever be in, none of that mattered, because...

2) Take point, take pain. 

"Take point" is an old military term that describes moving to the most exposed, or lead, position in a live combat exercise. As the leading provider in a new advertising method, my old start up took point for old-school media content providers who needed an easy "hell in a hand basket" column to write, any activist who might equate e-commerce with intimate speech, and, well, anyone who wanted to tell you what the Internet was, and was not, for.

The funny part is that, if you look at what's done with cookies and profiles now, our position was pretty much proven correct by history. But many of the companies that have profited from this atmosphere didn't get to wear the tar and feathers that we did.

3) Your best analytics are not your first analytics.

Over 50 different programs drove sign ups to our application under an aggressive distribution campaign. Most of those applications were judged on cost per lead. Only much later, when we saw revenue per user per month at a channel level, did we learn just how little some of those low cost per leads were generating for us, and how the poor lead list was also the most likely to get loud with complaints. Cheap leads can be very expensive.

4) If you don't want it read out loud in a court of law, don't put it in an email.

Legal discovery is a phase where your company's communication systems can be utterly shut down in a massive search for anything that might be of relevance to a case. It's also about as conducive to doing business as turning off the power while letting loose vermin,  and about as much fun to live through. By the way, once you are served with a discovery order, deleting those emails is the same as the wilful destruction of evidence. So the "cover up is worse than the crime" cliche is accurate.

Having gone through this once, I've got the lingering lifetime habit of writing "rhymes with beagle" in response to dicey discussions, and picking up the phone to close a thread. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I suspect I'm not the only person from those days to have this habit. Needless to say, you don't need to use email in a way that puts your business at risk.

5) Negative actions will define a brand more -- much, much more -- than positive ones will.

To many who were in business during my company's rise, the eventual failure of the enterprise was something to cheer. After all, the end of an aggressive advertising medium rarely causes much in the way of regrets, and it's not as if our critics were hoping for our successful IPO. Our brand was defined by the method, and bad PR and lawsuits, much more than for anything else.

But for those of us who worked there, there was little in the way of angst or mixed feelings. We knew about our charitable works, how amazing our engineering achievements were, and the strength of our hires. To this day, I draw on the insights derived from the data, and rely on my fellow alumni in the industry to provide me with leads and references. I'd hire just about anyone who worked there in a heartbeat, and honestly, there's no finer praise that I can bestow on a co-worker.

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Seven Reasons Why UFC Is Winning

Why Can't We Be Friends

Last Saturday night, one of the regulars in my poker game hosted his own tournament in a brand-new basement space, and invited me over. The night at the tables went well, but that's not really the point. And yes, this will get back to marketing and advertising soon enough. Anyway...

My man has a fine new big screen TV, and had also splurged on the Ultimate Fighting Championship pay per view. I've been moderately familiar with the sport from just general cultural awareness, but had never seen an event up close. And while I'm long past the event horizon for becoming a fan, it's clear from just one viewing as to why the sport has made such inroads in certain demographics. Let's get into it.

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1) It delivers what it promises.

In 11 fights, there were definitive winners (knock out or submission) in six events, with clear decisions (unanimous judging) in four others. If what works for you in sports is a clear winner and a clear loser, there really isn't anything more definitive than the end of an average MMA contest.

2) There's no "slow" play.

There doesn't seem to be such a thing as pointing your opponent to defeat, a la Floyd Mayweather, in a long and boring event where only the most discerning eye seems to acquire any worth from the contest. With so many offensive disciplines on the table, defense in UFC seems to be a case of ending your opponent's efforts before they end yours. Waiting them out, not so much. Which makes for a far more compelling spectacle.

3) There's a set schedule.

UFC events are numbered for a reason, and that reason is that the people who are watching this one seem absolutely locked into watching the next one. Which will be in three weeks, and the one after that is already on the calendar as well. Unlike boxing, where fans have to sometimes wait for years to see the fight they want, UFC fans know when their next fix is coming, and can plan accordingly.

4) It's pretty much impossible to not watch.

As noted above, I'm not a fight guy. I was in the room to play poker. But when the fight was live, the game was not, because that's just the nature of two people who might, well, fundamentally alter the course of the life of the other, in front of you. There's a reason why this sort of thing goes back eons, and why the competitors who seem more skilled at drawing the ire of the crowd get even more attention than anyone else. You can call it a train wreck if you like, but you're still watching.

5) There's no learning curve to new viewers.

Football, basketball, baseball: all have fairly arcane rules that can cause a new viewer to, well, ruin it for experts in the room by asking basic questions. As advanced mathematics come into play for player evaluations, the barrier to entry increases, because no one wants to explain all of that as well. UFC has more strategy and statistics than a casual observer might imagine, but you really don't need to know any of them to understand what's going on. Two people are trying to do massive and sudden violence to each other. You can ignore the statistics if you like.

6) It's (cheerfully) niche and exclusionary.

If you find this kind of sport to be morally repugnant, or the human equivalent of cockfighting, or something that just shows the worst of human behavior glorified and made fiscally lucrative... well, you aren't going to be watching it. Ever. Which means that the people who are watching it don't ever have to hear from you, as football fans have to during the run-up to the Super Bowl, or baseball fans have to with people who think their game is dull during the World Series, or basketball fans, or hockey fans, or soccer fans, and so on, and so on. There's big money in MMA (UFC is said to be worth $2 billion now, or 100X what it sold for in 2001), and yet it still has the feel of a shared secret, without watered down fantasy league fans or office pools.

7) It's going to get bigger, and probably better, with international scalability.

Like big special effects movies, you don't have to show massive artistic worth to make this product cross borders (or, likely, even a translation). There's a reason why boxers used to be worldwide celebrities. MMA fighters may not have the same level of appeal or career length, but so long as the events come out routinely and avoid high impropriety, there's no reason whatsoever to think the top of the wave is in sight.

Is there a gating element on the horizon? Well, sure. The nature of the sport is primal and exclusionary, and at some point, a fatality might occur in a high visibility event. (Some Web research tells me that there have been a handful so far in lesser leagues, but so far, the incidents have been less than boxing, which isn't exactly the highest of praise.) That potential might keep mainstream advertising away, though there's certainly a lot of big brands already on the telecast. The history of combat sports is one of inevitable corruption, because gamblers only need to get to one person to create fraud. That's probably going to happen here, if it hasn't already.

But in terms of what I saw in the room? Mainstream sports wish they had this level of attachment from their audiences. Which means it's also a DVR-free experience, and a high value marketing and advertising opportunity for targeted demographics.

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.