Feedback & Improvements from Paul Singh OFFICE HOURs
Thanks again to Paul Singh at 500Startups for working with us to bring OFFICE HOURS to Toronto. Congrats to the startups from Toronto and Montreal who Paul selected to meet with!.
From Cdling’s perspective this was a great improvement over our first experiment with Howard Morgan. We learned a lot from the cycle with Howard but we had to push all aspects of it. Not that Howard made it harder in anyway, but everyone else involved was simply uninitiated to the prospects presented by an awesome global class investor open to meetings in such a transparent way, and we had to chase people afterwards to get feedback.
This time we were getting feedback full blast as the event approached and we have had several hour long sessions with amazing founders, mentors and investors, who have been full of both straight forward and complex input on how we can improve.
We had many more startups who pushed through our shortcomings in UX, ask questions, figure us out, reach out for very credible opinions and use the system to make things happen for themselves. WE CROSSED A WHOLE BUNCH OF VALIDATION POINTS FOR CDLING. Thank you to the startups who discovered our MVP. You saw us for what we are. Another lean startup just like you.
The best news of all is that, “How can I help?” and “I think you guys are on to a good thing.” were comments made with greatest frequency. We are grateful.
Everyone we talked to understood that we are a work in progress, that we recognize and apologize (in the most sheepish Canadian manner possible) for our shortcomings but these experiments are an essential part our our lean customer development focus.
Before moving on, we realize that we have not heard from everyone. And not everyone will be so understanding! If you have any input, positive or negative, please email me at michael at cdling dot com so that we may have an opportunity to listen fully to your thinking.
Here are some highlights of the most specific feedback that we received:
1. Get your language straight: Internally we tend to think of “making a trade” or “a bet” as a form of sharing an opinion. From our earliest days, we wanted to stay focused on being consistent with the idea of “sharing an opinion” and steer away from the perceived gamble of a “bet” and the potential complexity of “making market trades”. During recent changes we have melted more of the “market” activity into the background of the user experience. We have more to do. In the short run, we have replaced “Place a bet” buttons with “Share opinion”.
2. Adding comments: We previously only had the ability to add comments to a startup profile while you were expressing an opinion against any of our milestone questions. We have had several occasions now where startups want to release links to news like traction indicators or their performance at a pitch competition or similar, which would encourage players about their prospects. The new ability to add comments without expressing an opinion against the milestones, enables startups to share more freely and it also enables players who already have a position, in fact all players, to share information that can back up their position. For example, if a player already has a prediction about when company x will hit a milestone and they read a TechCrunch article that analyzes the opportunity in this startup’s sector, a player can share this link which can lead to an increase in the value of their position (i.e.their reputation as a player on top of innovation.)
3. Improve Flow of Engagement: “I need to send this to my most cherished advisors, mentors and investors - these are the most important contacts in my life! They need a VIP workflow.” Ouch. We hear this the loudest. You will notice incremental changes. We still don’t want to mediate that invitation and exchange because it is really valuable to you. We don’t know how much we should be involved. We need to learn more about the exchange of social capital from users. Soon no login will be required to see startup profile pages. This way when you send the link/url to your startup profile, your trusted connections will be able to see it to get oriented without going through the hassle of logging in. We are going to publish a sample email that you might want to adopt. We still need to authenticate anyone who shares an opinion though and LinkedIn is our best way to do that. Oh yeah, and we are ditching the waiting list. We are still screening every member who joins. And you can expect us to close the gate or introduce other quality controls on who is admitted as we move forward.
4. The Sting of Transparency: We had one Founder who we greatly respect proactively engage us and politely tell us, “You are fucking with my business man! This is basically “Hot or Not” for startups!” and we know there have been a few emails floating around exploring these sentiments. We can see why at this stage, it can feel that way. We are asking for some patience on this one. We are a Founder driven business. We are constrained, moving methodically towards a larger picture. We have not released our Cdling Scores and that whole aspect of our UX - the part where you can clearly and intuitively see the real world reputation of the players expressing opinions - is not apparent yet. We have a thesis that we are not making the market for your startup, we are only mediating the existing market. We are shining a little broadband into an area that was essentially in the dark and that is going to benefit startups in remarkable ways. As we move into beta, we are thinking that you may want us to introduce a kind of special status that you can claim for your startup like “stealth mode” or something more accurate that lets you establish a signal that is aligned with your current posture towards the market.
5. Resources Page: We now have almost 450 startups (about 100 from NYC and initiating coverage on >40+ Baltimore/D.C. startups asap!) and almost 700 players. Wow. What a great Cdling community. Take some time to check them out. They come from over 60 city/regions. Over 35% have post graduate degrees. 20% of them are women (mostly Founders & developers). The quality of this player set is emerging as a tech market researchers’ dream panel of talent, experience and expertise. This has not gone unnoticed by service providers for this community. And we have had a few approach us. So we are considering ways to introduce quality resources like legal advice, banking services, consulting, recruiting, design … without introducing advertising that will clutter the experience. Look for something on this that is not crap. If it seems like crap, tell us and we will kill it.
