After a month booked solid with meetings between our startups and mentors, StartupYard 2015 participants have now met at least once, and often several times, with over 40 experts from a diverse range of industries.

These meetings are often a blur, so we insist that startup teams document their meetings every day, noting those mentors with whom they have agreed to speak again, or who may have promised new information or connections.

The Value of Mentoring

Mentoring at StartupYard is about more than networking. Of course, the value of networking with our mentors is inestimable. It’s certain for example, that the vast majority of the nearly $3 Million raised by StartupYard participants since 2011 came from connections made through mentors in our program.

But it’s important to keep in mind that our startups earn those investments themselves, by impressing and leveraging the mentors we give them access to. And just as important as money, mentoring sessions are real crash courses in the many hundreds of conversations that a startup is going to experience in its first year or two of operation.

It’s impossible for our startups to absorb and act upon every piece of advice they receive and every connection they make here. That’s sort of the point. On their own, startups in the early stages may find it very difficult to contextualize the various conversations they do have.

Reducing Sampling Error

Outside an accelerator, a meeting with an investor or a potential partner may be the only meeting in a week, or a month. That meeting, however it plays out, might fester in the founders’ minds for a long time, causing them to overreact to criticisms, or to become fixated on a specific piece of advice.

That one person you met 6 weeks ago doesn’t like your company name. Or he told you that you’re behind the market. Or she told you that this market is too hard to break into. Or one of a thousand other things. Or something positive, but vague: “you could be Uber for X.” What to make of that?

If the meeting is with an investor, the founders may go too far, wasting their time and energy thinking about what that person says.

I see this quite often with the startups that I mentor and meet at various conferences. I ask: “have you considered an accelerator?” “Well,” the founder responds, “we’ve been talking to an investor, so we probably don’t need an accelerator.” That might be fine if the investor is serious, and his or her vision lines up perfectly with the startups. But that isn’t always the case.

As often as not, an early investor will delay commitment as long as possible, leading the startup down a path that is interesting for the investor, but not always right for the startup. If things don’t look promising after months of talking, the investor can just walk away- nothing gained, nothing lost. The startup can’t.

Strength in Numbers

That’s a classic case of sampling error, and it works as well when it comes to individual meetings, as it does for ad campaigns and landing pages. You need a lot of data to make anything but a gut decision.

Startups used to get that data the really hard way. They would collect over years of iterating the same mistakes, and going down dead-end roads, with investors, partners, and strategies. But that’s a process few startups can afford to go through, and it leaves a lot of great ideas on the table- dead only because the founders didn’t have the time to try that one last thing that might work.

Accelerators solve that problem, by condensing this string of dead ends, self-doubts, insights (and false insights), and breakthrough meetings into an intense, but survivable period.

Reflections

I polled our current startups with a few questions about their mentoring experiences this past month. Here are the questions, and a selection of the answers from all 7 of our startups:

What’s one piece of feedback you have heard most often from the mentors? How have you responded to this feedback so far?

Cindy Dam, Marketing: TeskaLabs

“We talk about security and protection, assuming that it is obvious what we’re protecting. However, many mentors asked us ‘what are protecting, and from what?’ They were still not convinced when we told them about potential security breaches and hacks. 

Now we also mention the possibility for the customers to see reports of security-related events happening on the servers, as a way to back up our claims. Mentor Wallace Green from Cap Gemini gave us that idea and showed us how it could work.  Mentors then started to consider and accept our arguments. With those changes, it started making sense as a product that can sell itself, and that’s something we hadn’t considered necessary.” 

Elle Sidell, Copywriter: Testomato

“We’ve heard from a lot of mentors that we need to strengthen, or possibly change, our unique value proposition and simplify the way we introduce users to Testomato. These discussions have led our team to change our target group from developers to e-commerce companies.

So we’ve simplified the wording on our website, and provided clearer descriptions about what we offer and how we can help.

We’ve also cut down the amount of emails that we send to different users (i.e. different emails to different roles within each account), and we’ve created a new Application Dashboard to encourage customers to use more features when configuring tests or setting up website monitoring.”

Jaromir Dvoracek, Co-Founder: Trendlucid

“We started with a name that was really similar to another company in the same space. So much so, that some mentors thought we actually were the other company.So we really needed to define our brand.

After a lot of trial and error, and especially the help of  mentor Liva Judic, we stumbled on TrendLucid. And that was it! We’re TrendLucid now.

Part of the learning process was discovering that the name didn’t have to be that appealing for the Czech market, which we worried about too much before. The Czech market isn’t the end of our long term plans, and we needed a name that makes sense globally. We have very good feedback for the TrendLucid brand so far. Especially from English native speakers. So it’s working!” 

Jan Muller, Co-Founder: BudgetBakers

“A common question was: ‘do you have automatic data input?’ That’s something that is now available in some markets, like the US.

The mentoring process convinced us that this needs to be a main focus in the near future. We have already added an automatic bank statement importing/parsing tool, which reads users’ bank statements and adds them to the budget. We are starting conversations with Czech banks so we can eventually access user data through public APIs. In 2 years, all the European banks will have to make those APIs available, so we need to be ahead of the curve.”

StartupYard is happy to announce our second “Unconference,” a non-programmed networking and thought-sharing event in which anyone can be a presenter, and where ideas matter more than personalities.

The event will be held at StartupYard’s homebase:

Node5, Tuesday, April 21st, at 18:00. 

Anyone with an interest in Startups is more than welcome to attend, and to present on any related topic, or just to listen and ask questions. Drinks, and light refreshment will be provided, and the event is expect to run until about 21:00

 

Sponsored by SoftLayer

We are also please to announce that SoftLayer, an IBM company, is graciously providing food and drinks for the event, through our partners at Node5. SoftLayer is a proud StartupYard sponsor, and will be giving a workshop on integrating IBM cloud services for members of StartupYard and Node5 on April 20th. Their participation in the UnConference brings their authoritative voice on cloud computing and big data solutions to any of the sessions they may host or attend. We’ll be happy to have them there!

From their website:

“SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. Our customers range from Web startups to global enterprises.”

How it Works

Last year,  our director Cedric Maloux ran our first “Unconference.” For those as yet unfamiliar with the format, as I was myself, unconferencing is an alternative take on a conference in which the participants help shape the talks and sessions offered.

An Unconference differs from a traditional conference or set of workshops, chiefly in that none of its content is planned or scheduled ahead of time. Instead, the content of workshops is decided spontaneously, by whomever is in attendance, and is interested in contributing.

The whole process looks a bit like this:

 

Why it Works

Unexpectedly at our last Unconference, I ended up leading a session myself in the first time bracket, on email marketing, a subject close to my heart. My talk was “The 7 Elements of the Perfect Marketing Email.” As the idea had popped into my mind at the last moment, I had written it into the schedule expecting only a few people to be interested. But about a dozen people arrived to hear me speak about a subject for which I had not prepared any material.

No matter, I forged ahead and proposed a few of the ideas about what I think makes great email marketing. And here’s the best part: because of the informality of the format, and the time constraints, the attendees were quick to prod me with a bunch of questions I had no hope of ever being able to answer completely in the given time. These questions gave me great insights into what they wanted out of my talk. For example, someone asked whether he should send mass emails to his top clients using his personal email address, and if so, how to make sure there were no embarrassing gaffes with names and personalization. That’s a question I wouldn’t think to talk about with that group. But because it was an unconference, the people who attended my workshop were quick to tell me what they wanted to talk about.

Clearly, the unconference is a great platform for launching dialogues and connecting with peers who have skill sets you may not even know about. I found myself spending the remainder of the evening reviewing my comments, and cursing myself for not adding *that* piece of information, or *this* anecdote to my talk. It inspired me to flesh out my own ideas on the topic, and the questions honed in on what interested my workshop group most.

 

What You Can Get Out of It

A big drag on conferences, it seems to me, is that much of the time, they’re vehicles for a few people to brag to each other, in front of an audience, about how successful they are. Conferences are often more about the people who’ve organized them, than the people attending. An Unconference is all about the people in attendance. Based on our experience last year, an unconference can prompt questions and debates that last for quite some time, and may spark connections with other thinkers and idea makers who you’d normally never get a chance to engage with on the same level.

The international finance consultancy Mazars, a StartupYard partner, has published a guide to business for foreigners in The Czech Republic. The guide covers areas of international investment, EU grants, Tax law, immigration and labor laws, auditing, and incorporation.

“That’s the same homepage everyone has. It’s boring.”

I hear this quite a bit. As our first month of mentoring for StartupYard 2015 rolls along, we have 7 companies preparing to soft-launch their services and products, mostly with new branding, and some with entirely new names, over the next few weeks.

And we have this kind of conversation a lot. As they pick a name and take their first stabs at branding themselves, most of our startups suddenly become ambitious about their marketing language, site design, and logos. I love to see it, really, because it’s a sign of keenness to be bigger, better, and newer than the competition.

As they’ve all been working on their positioning statements for the past few weeks, and have gotten more comfortable with their value propositions, their go to market strategies, and their growth predictions, our startups start to feel that they’re experts on their own brands. As they hear more about calls to action, marketing campaigns, and branding generally, they start to get the itch to experiment with their own theories about their would be customers.

I find myself, on the other hand, being constantly discouraging; constantly talking about “consistent visual grammar,” and the “grammar of your design.” This often elicits blank stares of incredulity. What is “design grammar?” And why do we need that? Our Executive-in-Residence Philip Staehelin suggested to me earlier this week that I write a blog post to try and explain. This is that blog post.

The Great Sameness

A big part of this settling-in process is our startups exploring the branding of their competitors. They browse websites and check pricing and features, and they get used to what the market is focused on, looking for their edge. Our mentors also suggest competitors and potential partners they should look at, and the startups get very well versed in their market.

And then, it all gets a bit boring. We have a startup that is working on a competitor to Shopify or Volution, for example. Check out those two sites, and you won’t be surprised by what you find. Some variation in the choices of headers, a different call to action: “start for free,” instead of “get started,” or “get started now,” or one of 10 other possible variations. On the surface, they’re much the same.

Whether it’s B2B or B2C, a SaaS or a consultancy, the web has been taken over by a sameness in the way online companies communicate through their websites. Why is that? And why would that be a good thing?

Boring is not Boring

The answer is not sexy. As VWO points out, it’s because landing page design is more science than art. Companies with huge volume in SaaS products, like MailChimp, Mint, Shopify, Slack, and Dropbox, all use essentially the same layout for their homepages, and similar layouts for campaign landing pages. These pages have been tested, tweaked, and perfected using the collected data of tens of millions of visits to similar sites.

Companies with high inbound traffic pay expensive consultants, or use tools like Attensee or Optimizely, to collect fairly precise data on exactly how each piece of text, each image, and each particular call to action performs best- and they have the ability to tweak the site’s appearance for different regions, and even different types of users, to maximize the site’s conversion rate.

We seem to be arriving at a sort of paradox. We know, scientifically, which sorts of things work (or at least don’t fail) on landing pages and home pages, but that makes a lot of these sorts of pages look the same. Boring and safe is the rule. So their boringness, seemingly, would mean that they wouldn’t do as well as they do, because they’re not special. And yet, if they didn’t perform well, they would be changed. So what’s the deal?

Impress Me, but Don’t Surprise Me

This sort of thinking is the sort of thing that many startups struggle with early on. They begin to believe that “different,” and “surprising” are the same as “good,” and “effective.”

A sales director I worked with early in my career gave me a sound piece of advice that I’ve always remembered. He said this:

“If I asked you to show me 4 fingers, what would do?”

I held up 4 fingers on one hand.

“What if you held up two fingers on each hand?”

I hadn’t thought of it.

“Wouldn’t that be weird? When your customer gives you their attention, like clicking on your website or signing up for a newsletter, they are usually asking for information. They are not asking to be surprised. They are asking to be persuaded.”

There are many ways to hold up 4 fingers. However, his point was that doing something a customer doesn’t expect, even if it *is* surprising and impressive, is not necessarily going to make them trust you, or buy from you.

A “surprising” website, with a novel design and fancy layout, may make an impression on your prospect. But that impression is as likely to be: “this company is clearly good at making impressive websites,” as it is: “I trust this company to do whatever it is they are trying to sell me.”

Holding up two fingers on each hand might make someone think. But it might make someone think: “this guy is an asshole.”

Rather, “impressiveness” that translates to someone actually buying your product, is found in your descriptions and demonstrations of the product itself. The product should be impressive. The way you talk about the product should be in view of that impressiveness.

If you have a product market fit, then your marketing of your products should get out of the way as fast as possible. And the best and easiest method of getting out of the way, is using a visual design, a way of doing things, a “grammar,” that your prospective customer is likely to be familiar with.

Wanting a “creative,” and “different” website is natural. You want to be different. But “being different” about the way you present your products -if they are good products that the customers actually want to buy- is usually going to be a waste of your, and more importantly, the customer’s time.

Think about it. When you walk into a car dealership, you look around for the person who can answer your questions about the car. You expect that person to be in a suit, maybe with a nametag, so that you can recognize him or her easily. If someone came up to you in cutoff jeans and a bolo hat, smoking a cigar, you’d certainly remember that. But would you want to buy a car from them?

My guess is no. Because you didn’t come into the shop to appreciate a creative salesman. You came into the shop to appreciate and learn about a car you’d like to buy. The salesman wears a suit because he doesn’t want to distract you from doing exactly what you want to do anyway.

That is where the sameness of design comes from. As products get better, more specialized, and more powerful, the trappings of how we talk about them, and how we present them online actually get more straightforward. As we are all more comfortable with the ideas and the types of products we are discussing, the need for bells and whistles slowly diminishes.

A Mature Market Means a Shorter Sales Cycle

My father once took me with him to buy a car, when I was a little boy. This was in the early 90s. The salesman called the morning of the visit, and we spent hours talking with him about the cars my father was looking at. He took us to lunch, and on a drive in the car my father wanted to buy. They went through pages of options for the car, discussing all of them. They haggled some more, and they had coffee. They discussed financing. We spent 6 hours at the dealership.

This year, 25 years later, I bought the first car I could call my own, for my own family. The saleswoman was pleasant, and offered me coffee. The meeting took less than an hour, including the test drive.

Why? Because I had spent time at home configuring the car I wanted to buy on the company’s website. I had printed out the options I wanted, so when I got there, the deal was practically done already. She gave me a few pieces of advice, trying to upsell me on a few items. That was about it.

A car salesmen of a century ago would have been expected to take their clients to dinner, visit their homes, and work a sale for days or weeks. That was done because customers weren’t familiar yet with what they were buying. Trust in the dealer translated to trust in the product. But today, a Google search is a click away. Trust is statistical; scientific.

The web has followed a similar evolution: today, people expect the sales cycle to be short, and they’ll punish you for making them jump through any hoops. Every step between the customer and the content, or between the customer and the purchase, is a step that some customers would rather skip, and a step that is likely to diminish trust, rather than enhance it.

Clean and Frictionless are Two Separate Qualities

In our last cohort, one of our startups showed me a landing page that was nothing but an image, and a headline with a provocative question. It was something like: “Do you believe in True Love?” There were two large buttons: Yes, and No.

“Ok…” I said. “And now what?”

“Well,” the founder said, “It inspires you to click on it to give your answer.”

“Ok,” I said. And I clicked “no.”

Another text appeared: “Are you sure?”

:Facepalm:

I got what he was trying to do. Our generation has been raised on a diet of “interactive,” that promotes the idea of interaction without actual engagement with anything. It’s a ploy. Like having a popup in a video game that says: “press X repeatedly.”

But at least in a video game, the designer would be trying to trick you into feeling like you’re having fun after you’ve bought the game. We can tolerate trickery of this kind. It’s expected, and we’re already invested in the product. But for a landing page?

First, the visitor has already clicked a link or entered a URL to get to the site. That’s 1 action. Now they’re being presented with an “activating” action that doesn’t accomplish anything they haven’t already decided to do.

Would the prospective user be much more likely to download the app or buy the product after being activated twice? Not likely. Would the person who clicked “yes,” then be significantly more likely to download the app, than that same person would have been, if they had not been “activated” in this way? I don’t think so. And there would be no way to test it anyway.

Second, this sort of landing page is a conceit that people recognize for what it is. But whereas we’ll accept this kind of trick in a video game as part of the experience, a landing page has no “buy-in” from a visitor that ensures they’ll put up with your nonsense. They would have to click to get to the site, then click “yes,” and only then would you even get a chance to persuade them to buy or look at or download something.

That’s like making your prospective car buyer pay for a test drive. Only a highly motivated buyer would bother. I told the founder that if he did that, he could expect a >50% bounce rate on the landing page, and no positive effect on the bounce rate for the homepage it was linking to.

He launched the page and payed for Facebook ads, and the bounce rate was high as I had predicted, with no effect on the download rate for users who passed the first design hurdle. So he took the page down, and let users go right to the homepage. Lesson learned.

From Design to Content

Design in any mature medium, over time, becomes less baroque. Less “unique” in broad strokes. People learn what works. Everything gets to be more shorthand, and conventional. Gone are the salad days of edgy web design, with MySpace pages and GeoCities domains, replaced by white space, edge to edge. The new watchword for web design best practices is “clean,” not “shiny.”

Take a look at a prime example of an historically “edgy,” homepage, that has become progressively more conservative over the years. There’s a good chance you’ve visited. It’s Apple.com.

Do you sense a trend here? Discounting its first few iterations, which reflected the lack of clear web design principles in the age of GeoCities (and clearly before Apple considered e-sales to be vital to its strategy), the site had a “brochure” layout that was common in its time. The first web designers were, after all, magazine and textbook publishers, and those design principles migrated from the older media.

What’s interesting is when Apple introduces, around the time of the release of OSX, an “OSX Skin” for its websites. Here, the company is clearly trying to impress the visitor with the overall visual appeal of its operating system: a taste of what you’ll get when you buy a Mac.

In today’s terms, then, this would be like turning the Apple homepage into the screen of an Apple Watch or a mockup of iOS, and making the visitor navigate the operating system, to see how impressive it is. Surprising, yes. But would that be a boon to sales?

As we push forward in time, Apple stubbornly sticks to its “Mac Os” skinned visual design, but the design departs further and further from the actual contemporary operating system. The design settles, starting in the late 2000s, into a hybrid of the magazine and top margin button layout that we’re all familiar with. It’s sleek, it’s Apple, but it’s also ordinary. You know it when you see it.

While we can be sure that Apple actually had a hand in making this the prototypical design for most tech company homepages, we also see that once it’s set in place, it dithers less and less, and experiments become less frequent. We have found something that consistently works. The design has become the background. Our focus is on the content of the pages.

Design is the Background: Content is Everything

As our experience of the web has fragmented between tablets, mobile, browsers, apps, Social Media platforms like Facebook, the individual “design islands,” that used to constitute individual websites, have become more and more difficult to distinguish.

Publishing platforms like Medium or even Wikipedia do away with as much design as is possible, leaving only room for the content they contain to be found, catalogued, and displayed.

So, “impressive” design has become anathema to the web experience, as the quality and volume of the content available on the web has increased. We don’t want people looking at our websites anymore. We want them going straight to our content and products.

Because unlike 15 years ago, our content and our products can sell themselves; people are familiar with the notion of online business, and they don’t need to be reassured, they need to be given frictionless access.

The web has transformed from a “global village,” of boutique shops, to an expo, where everyone has essentially the same amount of space to display their wares: and the quality of their offerings determines everything.

That fragmentation and decentralization away from home pages can be seen in many places- particularly in SaaS products. How many people who use Dropbox actually go to Dropbox.com?

Instead, Dropbox has made itself integral to many of the things people do all over the web. Likewise for Twitter. I doubt that many web services 10 years ago would have imagined that they could activate and maintain customers, for years, without those customers having to bother ever visiting their websites.

Increasingly, traffic and eyeballs are concentrated on a handful of central platforms like Facebook, Google, or Reddit, from which the majority of readers browse the content of other pages.

This is becoming true of e-commerce as well, with e-shops being migrated directly onto Facebook. There may come a day when launching a successful SaaS will not even require a dedicated website. That day may be sooner than you think.

Why This Makes Design More Important

You may have concluded by now that I mean to suggest that the grammar of your of your site design, your product design, and your marketing are becoming less important. On the contrary. As users become more and more fluent in up-to-date principles of web design, they become attuned to deviations from the norm.

That attunement can be to your detriment if your design is sloppy or jarring. Or you can turn it to your advantage, by trusting your site visitors to follow clear, consistent, and focused visual and messaging cues. Trading flash for subtlety is just the first step.