Single-Person Startup Vs. Having a Co-Founder

by Jason Mosley on July 6, 2010

in Headlines

Read Write Web recently posted a great article called “Going Alone: Thoughts on the Single-Person Startup”. It talked how founding a business alone can be more risky and difficult then founding one with a co-founder.

Even with what looks like hard road to travel alone not having a co-founder is not an excuse. The article stresses that point and the fact that there are other factors that dictate a startups success and failure.

Check out that the article and let us know what you think.

Are you or someone you know a single person businesses in Pittsburgh? Let you know, we would love to hear you story.

[Photo by lensbug.chandru]

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DeviceKnit Gets More Use From Gadgets

by Carrie Smith on June 21, 2010

in Profiles

One look at the business cards of DeviceKnit co-founders John Ganotis and Jordan Messina will tell you these guys aren’t your typical entrepreneurs. Listed as the chief espresso officer and chief tea officer, the recent AlphaLab grads have a knack for setting themselves apart (and employing humor while they’re at it).

DeviceKnit began as a web application for Ganotis and Messina to keep track of their gadgets and share ideas of how to use them with friends. Both were often asked to help setup electronics for other people and like finding new uses for devices they already own.

“I was always tinkering,” Ganotis said.

The best use Ganotis found was using the Wii remote, which he describes in a video on DeviceKnit.

Messina said he is looking forward to using GoogleTV with the iPhone.

Working from their interest in devices, Ganotis and Messina thought to expand the network by including more users and to make a profit through pay-per-click and affiliate sales. They decided to apply for the Spring 2010 AlphaLab session after Messina heard Resumator founder Don Charlton on the podcast This Week in Startups. Charlton had mentioned AlphaLab during the talk.

“I looked up Don after I heard it and emailed him last June,” Messina said.

Now that the program is over, DeviceKnit has moved in to office space with fellow AlphaLabers CloudFab in the Hill District. The building is owned by Dale McNutt, who is calling the location “Startup Town” and offering graduated pricing for new companies. Ganotis and Messina agreed that the community of local business owners in Pittsburgh offers a lot of different groups to get involved with and provides opportunity and guidance.

“Everyone is pulling for each other and giving a helping hand,” Ganotis said.

When it comes to funding, Ganotis and Messina are hopeful about their prospects and can self-sustain from profit in the meantime. Receiving support will enable the two to grow the community for DeviceKnit at a quicker pace by allowing them to move forward with development and gain users.

Ganotis and Messina are working on development along with the help of an intern from Duquesne University. The private beta for users who sign up is expected by the end of June, with a public beta to follow.

Not to be forgotten are the efforts of “Pluggy,” the logo for DeviceKnit, which can be found on Twitter. Pluggy was described as a “plug with an attitude” and picked from several designs submitted to 99designs.com, the site Ganotis and Messiner used to solicit ideas for the logo. Plans for Pluggy include t-shirts and stickers. The stickers, as Ganotis said, may find their way onto devices in different stores (some with angry faces to show Pluggy’s disgruntled opinion).

Eventually, Ganotis and Messina hope to expand DeviceKnit to include person-to-person sales, similar to how craigslist operates. No matter how the business expands, the initial idea for DeviceKnit remains the motivation behind the company.

“DeviceKnit is about sharing ideas and getting inspired by what others are doing,” Ganotis said. “Too many people are trying to reinvent the wheel when they should be figuring out how it works.”

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ModCloth raises $19.8 Million in VC funding

by Jason Mosley on June 2, 2010

in Headlines

The Pittsburgh Business Times reported that ModCloth, a Strip District based online indie clothing company, raised $19.8 million in the largest VC round of 2010. They plan to continue to seek funding until they raise over $30 million in funding.

I am really happy for these guys and there a shining example of what can come out of the Pittsburgh startup community. What started out in a dorm room is now a large company with offices three cities. I can no longer call ModCloth a startup but I am still going to follow these guys closely.

Very quickly they moved from startup, to small business, to an internationally known brand. I think my only concern is that as they gotten bigger, their quality has dropped. Still I don’t think that is enough to stop them from growing even larger. All the girls I know that complain about the quality, still buy over $100 worth of merchandise from them monthly (no joke).

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AlphaLab Demo Day Features Five New Startups

by Carrie Smith on May 17, 2010

in Blog

Demo Day at AlphaLab featured recent program grads DeviceKnit, 80 Degrees West Interior Design, Inc., Black Locus, PhotoSynesi, and Shoefitr. Let’s go ahead with a description of each of the companies before I get into the nit and grit of who stood out (after all, you may want to judge for yourself).

DeviceKnit: “A consumer electronics content and community site focused on helping people discover new uses and connection options for their devices.” With so many newfangled gadgets out there, figuring out how to connect them all (or even what they all do for that matter) can be confusing. Here’s where DeviceKnit can help. “We are the neighborhood nerds,” CEO John Ganotis said. The site lets you pick what devices you would like to connect, then tells you what you need to connect them and where to get it. Pictures are provided in case, like me, you have no idea what different cables look like.

80 Degrees West Interior Design, Inc.: “An online design space providing a new and better way for do-it-yourself consumers to collect design inspiration, organize their decorating projects, and collaborate with professional interior designers.” Thinking of decorating? 80 Degrees West is a website that gives users the ability to organize design projects in an online notebook where they can store photos and ideas, get feedback from family and friends, and ask for professional input.

Black Locus: “A SASS cloud-computing platform that gives small and medium online retailers a similar level of analytical sophistication as larger e-tailers.” So you’re a small to medium web company with a need for market research. Welp, Black Locus is ready to give you the info you need for pricing, marketing, and inventory management. Users are able to implement recommendations with a click of a button and track the impact of each recommendation over time.

PhotoSynesi: “A premium online service delivering professional reviews and feedback to amateur photographers.” Digital cameras with auto focus lenses have led to an increased market of amateur photographers, many of whom spend money to attend workshops or similar events for professional critiques of their work. PhotoSynesi provides more readily available feedback at a lower cost.

Shoefitr: “Technology for online retailers to help customers find the correct size and best fitting shoe.” Not a lot of people buy shoes online. The reason? Shoes sizes are unreliable and the hassle of having to send a pair of shoes back that don’t fit outweighs the convenience of Internet shopping. Shoefitr wants to make the experience easier for the consumer and retailer by letting you choose a shoe size of what you want to buy based on what you already own. So, if you’re wearing a size 10 Nike and want to buy a New Balance, Shoefitr guides you through picking your exact shoe, then figures out what would be the best size of the new one. As one retailer said of Shoefitr “This is bitchin’.”

I was most impressed by DeviceKnit and Shoefitr. To start, I could see the utility of both without much effort. I don’t know what to do with half my electronics. I have returned shoes I bought online because they didn’t fit. I’m also a pushover for a good presentation. DeviceKnit and Shoefitr gave smart, interesting, and enjoyable overviews of their companies. The CEOs seemed generally enthusiastic about what they are doing, and they made me correspondingly excited.

Where the other companies fell short for me may have been because of consumer bias. I’m not a do-it-yourself type making 90K a year (80 Degrees West), I don’t have an online retail business (Black Locus), and even if I was an amateur photographer, I don’t think I’d pay for criticism unless I was trying to become a professional (PhotoSynesi). What I can say is they are certainly hitting niche markets and have the research to show that someone, somewhere is paying for these services. Whether they want to begin paying for online versions of those services is a consideration. I should also mention that 80 Degrees West and Black Locus both offer free accounts with limited, but useful options.

On a final, perhaps random note, I noticed that for whatever reason, smashing your company name together is all the rage with startups. DeviceKnit, PhotoSynesi, Shoefitr. Just saying.

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Create a more compelling experience for your users through game mechanics

by Guest Post on April 6, 2010

in Blog

This post originally appeared on Steve Klabnik‘s blog and is reproduced here with permission. Steve is the CTO and co-founder of CloudFab, an AlphaLab graduate. If you would like to write a guest post for Startup Pittsburgh please contact us.

Ever wonder why some websites are so addictive? Certain sites always keep you going back, time after time after time. Well, I can’t speak for all of them, but there’s a subtle reason that some sites draw your attention on such a repeated basis: They’re actually games.

Wait, games?

Try a little thought experiment: If I say, “Yeah, he’s a ______ addict,” what are the first few things that pop into your mind? For me, top two are “heroin” and “World of Warcraft.” I’m not sure what that says about me as a person, but ignore that for now. What makes these two things so addicting? Why are they basically synonymous with the word “addict”? Lots of people smoke pot. Lots of people play Call of Duty. Lots do both, and in copious amounts. So why don’t they get the same label?

Heroin: it’s a hell of a drug

Yeah, that reference is to cocaine, another famously addictive substance. Oh well.

Heroin is the poster child for addiction because it’s got a built-in viral loop. That sentence sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It’s very easy to start out with, as it’s snorted. No scary needles or anything. You get high really quickly, due to its chemical properties combined with the fact that your nose is already close to your brain. It gives a really intense high that is also fairly short. As you do it, you develop both a psychological addiction as well as a tolerance. You simultaneously develop a deep desire for more of the drug as you need a larger quantity of the drug to get the same high. Eventually, it becomes more and more difficult, but you’re so addicted that you get over your fear of needles and start mainlining.

World of Warcraft works the same way. It’s easy to try, as there are mechanisms to invite your friends, and the system requirements are fairly low for a video game. The first few quests are super easy, and so you hit that quick reward. You get addicted to “Ding!” but it takes longer and longer every time you do it. Eventually, you max out on levels and have to start doing other things to get your fix. It may sound funny, but it’s absolutely true. People talk about “relapsing.” They speak of “craving.” That’s why WoW has so many subscribers.

How to replicate this success

I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to make your site as addictive as heroin is, but many sites use the same basic psychology to keep you coming back. Game mechanics are one of the tools they use to develop that psychological addiction. This is something we’ve been seeing more and more of lately, but it isn’t really being talked about explicitly as a major trend. I really think that this stuff is really important and useful.

There are a couple of different mechanisms that web sites can incorporate that fall under the realm of “game mechanics:”

  • Collectibles: Any sort of item you can accumulate. Sometimes comes in “sets,” which are finite lists.
  • Points: A concrete number that lets you compare two people.
  • Levels: A target number of points, you gain the “level” when you go over that number.
  • Trophies: A special kind of level that’s unrelated to points. You get it for some other arbitrary reason.
  • Rankings: A place where you can go to see how many points, levels, and trophies others have
  • Tournaments: A competition between people.

We’ve all heard these terms used in games. But in web sites? Okay, let’s try those things again:

  • Collectibles: Gowalla items. Facebook “Gifts”
  • Points: Twitter followers. Facebook friends. Number of feedbacks. Reddit Karma.
  • Levels: eBay “Power Sellers.” Foursquare “Super Users.”
  • Trophies: Badges, of any kind. “Achievements”
  • Rankings: FourSquare’s Leaderboard. Klout. Listorious. Hacker News’ top list.
  • Tournaments: I actually can’t come up with a good example of this. Thoughts?

The same feedback loop happens on these websites. You say something interesting on Twitter, you gain another follower or two. You say something else, another follower. You check in, oh look, you’re the mayor! You sell an extra hundred things and get your Power Seller discount.

That’s the hard stuff. It’ll get you hooked, and coming back for more.

Where’s all of this going?

This is the current stuff that’s being done with game mechanics. But where could we go, in the future?

A while back, there was a huge debacle over ReadWriteWeb and Facebook connect. To give you the basic idea, ReadWriteWeb is a blog that talks about everything Web2.0. They wrote an article entitled “Facebook Wants to be your One True Login.” Read the comments. Notice something funny? Due to some Google magic, if you were to Google “Facebook login” the day that was posted, that article would appear at the top under the “Google News” results. Now, RWW uses Facebook Connect for their commenting system, and a ton of people apparently don’t know how to use the Internet. So when they said, “Hey, I think I’ll go to Facebook today,” they Googled “facebook login,” clicked the news story, and went to RWW. They then ignored that RWW is a blog completely covered in red that looks nothing like Facebook, scrolled until they found the Facebook icon, clicked it, logged in, and then said “wtf, this isn’t my facebook? Why’d they change the interface again???” This happened a week after a middle-sized interface upgrade on Facebook, for extra hilarity.

Now, I won’t comment on those people or that situation directly. But one of my favorite Hacker News posters, patio11, posted a really interesting comment about the situation. I’m linking to the person he’s responding to, for context:

Pyre: Facebook can’t improve their interface to make users not type “facebook login” into Google as a way of accessing their site.

patio11: That is a failure of the imagination. They certainly could — whether it is worth doing or not is another question, but hey, that is what God gave us A/B testing to figure out.

“Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for [Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type facebook.com into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we’ll give you 5 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!”

Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into Facebook the next five days you use the service, we’ll award you a Facebook Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!”

On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial — check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the “Was Shown Facebook Login Course” population and “Complete Facebook Login Course” population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them.

How cool would that be? Now the game mechanics aren’t being used just to increase engagement, but to actually teach people how to use your site or service. It’s classical conditioning; reward people for doing the right thing, and they’ll keep doing the right thing.

Game mechanics are your MVP

So how’s this stuff relevant to your startup? Well, I think this idea ties in really well with the concept of a Minimum Viable Product. Here’s the idea: Build your MVP, and then build game mechanics in. Unlock new features based on game mechanics. This gives you a few advantages:

  1. Your new users only get the most basic experience, which is still useful. It’s a simplified, streamlined experience.
  2. Users only get the new features added that are relevant to how they use the site itself.
  3. You can “fake it till you make it” by implementing the features that are most useful to your users. Is everyone getting Badge A and not Badge B? Implement Feature A Level 2 first!

I think that this makes for a really strong experience, if done right. Foursquare kind of does this already in a crude way with their Super User features. But I think it could be taken to a whole new level.

Think about this: Facebook, where you can only friend people, update your profile, and send messages at first. Soon you unlock the ability to use applications. Then the ability to create pages and groups. The interface slowly unfolds in front of you. What about Reddit, where posting comments is all you can do at first? A hundred upvotes gives you the ability to downvote. Ten comments lets you post stories. (Hacker News sort of does this already, with a minimum karma before downvoting is enabled.)

If you could pull it off, I think it’d make for a really compelling user experience. It does bring one extra design skill that many people may not have, though: balance. Game designers are used to this already, but your potential “Power Users” might not like having to wait to get more advanced features. Then again, this might also solve some issues, like spam. If you had to have 100 positively moderated comments before posting a story on Digg, it’d be much harder to just sign up for spam accounts to submit bogus stories.

This idea can be taken in a lot of different directions. I’m sure I’m only barely scratching the surface with this idea, but I think it’ll go really far. What do you think? Any interesting mechanics I’ve missed? Any really interesting thoughts for how services can incorporate game mechanics? I’ve decided to re-open comments, but if nobody uses them, I’ll just shut them off again. Let me know what you think.

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