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Balancion: After a month
Balancion is a Finnish start-up that has been hyped quite a bit, and true, they come with good pedigree. I got invited to the service a while back and now have had time to use it for a month or so. The premise is simple, they will provide users a service that will kick Mint.com and rudder.com in their respective behinds.
In a nutshell: Balancion looks around your accounts, downloads the transactions to the service and “analyzes” them. Here’s my four points and issues after the first month of use.
1. Excellent customer service
Not many start-ups are this proactive in community management, even though it might be one of the most important things to do (after your product, that is). I even got a call from a guy from Balancion after we’d swapped a few messages in Twitter. Turns out the guy was the CEO of the company, Jussi Muurikainen (@jupander). During my trials I also had a problem where my bank had changed something in their process leading to a failed process and the java-hack they use to download the account information failed on itself. I tweeted about the issue and they fixed it in a few days.
Of course, they have to have brilliant customer service. They’re playing with our financial information and even a minor dent in their armor might cause distrust and could kill the service before it ever manages to even lift off. That is the main risk factor they face and it explains their slow pace in development – Jussi said they’ve been thinking of this technology since 2002 – way before Mint and the other players came to existence.
2. There’s not very much to do there
Literally, you can do three things in Balancion at the moment – you can upload your account information, sort them in categories and look at your incoming and outcoming money charts. That’s it.
Of course, the big question is that should there be anything else? Sure, some future estimations and saving planning or something similar might be cool, but that’s the main beef. Seeing how much money you have and where you have spent it. Which leads us to ..
3. Categorizing is a bitch
The categories are the most time-consuming thing in Balancion at this moment. The service uses some kind of übermind to artificially intelligenticize the transactions which are sometimes hard to understand even for a human. Let’s take an example with McDonalds: One would think that when you buy a Big Mac from McD’s, the receipt would say “McDonalds Corporation -3.95″ or whatever they cost – and the same logic would be in your bank transactions as well.
No. Thanks to franchising.
There are about a million different companies running franchised companies and since they don’t have to think about a brand or a name for their company they usually have very, very retarded names that require Googling like Sherlock Holmes to figure out what the hell this transaction is from “Alabama 1234″ and it turns out to be a local supermarket run by an entrepreneur instead of a retail chain.
4. Is it worth the money?
There was a questionnaire done by Balancion to its users, asking about basic usage stuff and then came to the interesting part – would you be willing to pay for using Balancion?
That is a very good question. During my month’s trial, I have updated my account information three times and visited the service under ten times – just because there is nothing to do in the service and it doesn’t currently give me any information I don’t already know about.
The current version I probably wouldn’t pay, but with added (useful) features, I just might – but even there, not more than 5-10 euros a month. Even 10 euros is stretching it, because I think a premium Spotify account would be better justified.
Netcycler: First impressions
I got my invitation to Netcycler yesterday and had time to browse around last night.
They describe themselves as:
Netcycler is a swap and give away service for acquiring secondhand goods. We will soon add buy and sell options as well. When you no longer need something, the service will find someone who does. It’s an alternative for consumption centered lifestyle, an easy way to minimize shopping while still getting all you need. We are still developing the service and there are plenty of new features to come.
They also warned the invitees that there aren’t many items shared yet, which is understandable as the site just opened to alpha and bugs are expected. So, the first 4 things that came up while using Netcycler:
1. It. is. slow.
I have a 100 meg connection at home and loading the front page takes 15.74 seconds. Fifteen seconds! And it’s not about great strain to the servers, as there are only 300 users currently in the alpha and I’m sure there are only tens of simultaneous users. For me, the sites sluggishness is an issue that stops me from using the site and it seriously needs fixing.
UPDATE: Did I say slow? 38.34 SECONDS to load the browsing area. That’s the average attention span of a 20-year old. Multiplied by 40.
UPDATE 2: I just got an error 500 after 37.4 seconds of waiting. It’s down.
2. The concept
Freecycling and 2nd hand stores are really trendy at the moment. Similar chains are buzzing in Facebook as well, the problem there is the people. People want too much and want to give too little. Even in Netcycler it’s “I’ll give away this old, used USB cable and I want a full 7mm wetsuit in change.” I believe this can be evaded by adding some sort of category of “value” to the items, an average retail price or something similar – you know, “how much would you expect to get for this item on a flea market.”
In order for the service to work, it has to have movement, a sense of urgency. Otherwise is stagnates and it becomes cluttered.
3. Adding items
Adding items has been done very well considering the amount of stuff out there. Sure, it would be even nicer to have a product number search tool that would decipher the information of my DVR, but the questions we logical and simple in their hierarchical method. Doing this right is one of the most important tasks in designing a service like this – especially when their goal is obviously to go multilingual in the future.
4. Usability
Sure, the basic site and its navigation is very standard 2.0 usability, can’t go wrong there. But there are still a lot of places where more information would be appreciated, while setting up an item to be given I get a prompt asking for me to “select meetingpoints” with two options of public and private meetingpoints.
First of all, meetings and points are two different words – and what do they have to do with recycling? Did this become a dating service? Can I get that camera by meeting someone in a forest doing “services”? There’s no explanation on what I should do and I can’t even skip this as I could skip the previous steps (such as a photo and description).
So, fixy fixy, more descriptions and explanations to forms, please.
UPDATE: After clicking OK to the meeting point question, there popped up another popup below the latest popup saying that it’s a place where I meet my contacts. Would have appreciated that info earlier. Maybe people could insert these meeting points already while setting up their profile?
All in all, the concept has promise and as soon as they can fix the lagging, I’ll start using it more efficiently. All the other things are minor user experience improvements – and I would appreciate seeing Netcycler to use the expertise available in Finland, I mean, just using Twitter in Finland gives one great resources to get feedback.
Friday Zen – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world
Now we just need a _tad_ bigger house to make it bigger than this.
Technology or Business?
After you’ve figured out that you really want and need a web site, you come to a very important crossroad. This fork has two different paths and usually people don’t even realize the existence of the other.
Let’s go back a bit. Imagine you walk to an advertising agency to do a print campaign. Do you care which Photoshop version the AD has on their computer or what color is the handle in the scissors the copywriter used to cut pieces of paper from a magazine? No you don’t. At least, hopefully you don’t ask these kinds of questions. You should naturally be more interested in the results and the cost and how it can help you. Right?
Then why are you even thinking about PHP and SQL as a client? Do you really care which content management system (CMS) you have? Can you honestly even say that you know what a content management system is and if we told you that “yes, this is it.” – would you know the difference?
The sad thing is, we, the industry are the reason the clients are scared. We wanted so hard to make ourselves irreplaceable that we scared our clients out of their minds while marking our territory and it will take a long time to fix this. Of course, this is also a result of incompetent people in our field – the blind are leading the blind. When the client or the provider both don’t understand what they’re selling, it becomes a vicious cycle of misplaced trust and “I-sure-hope-that-this-project-won’t-blow-up-in-our-faces” kind of tech thinking.
So, the other path? It’s very simple. It’s common sense. You’re doing a website for a reason – hopefully a business reason and it’s up to the agents of change to find the way to reach those goals. A CMS won’t solve your problems, it’s like buying a massive tool kit from your local hardware store every time you need a hammer.
I’d like to change the thinking from:
“I’d like to live in a house.” – “What kind of tools do you want us to use?”
to:
“I’d like to live in a house.” – “Could you tell us about your space requirements?”
Actually, if your builder – ever – asks you about which tools he should use, leave the project.
Concentrating on technology creates another problem: Micro-management. In the beginning of the project you should have a very broad look on the big picture, as soon as you start talking about the content management system, you’re already too deep – should you even know about a content management system apart from the simple risk-analysis delivered by the seller (which always seem to have no risks what-so-ever.)
So, if you’re a buyer – the next time someone tries to scare you with magic words, ask them about the business impact.
And if you work in the industry (.. you are reading a blog ..), teach your colleagues and yourself to stop scaring the client and spend a minute to research the business dilemma we’re here to solve.
How much to spend in a website?
Right, in our previous posts in our continuing series Web101 we have talked about:
- Why do you need a website? – Have you really thought it through?
- What should it contain? – You’re not building a site for you, but your users
- Why you don’t need a community? – Because it’s your house, not a club house or a mall
So far, you have figured out what kind of needs you have. We all have our dream houses and during the process of getting a new house, most of us have to compromise. Naturally, like in the real world, a big wad of cash can help you further – and the same applies for websites.
Feeling depressed? No need, like we spoke in our second installment, the houses online can expand at will. So you can get started with just a room with a toilet and expand it when it becomes more relative. But how much you should pay? That is the question we will be softly fondling today.
Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures. – Leon Trotsky
I get a lot of people asking me how much should a website cost. Naturally, this question is completely trivial as we don’t have any information available to us. So, let’s stop talking about the web for a while and concentrate on business.
First, is the site you’re creating a profession or a hobby? If it’s a hobby, you’re already used to spending money for no return and it’s a miracle you’re reading this text – no surprisingly, many companies run their websites like it’s their hobby. But let’s take it that you run a company that sells stuff.
Direct marketing has taught us many things, most importantly that clients have prices. If the stuff I sell would be something big, for example an cruise ship that costs (hundreds) of millions, that leaves me millions in profit – I would bet that getting a client would be worth a larger investment that for a company that sells $8 sandwiches.
I’ve come across hundreds of people – no matter the industry, who see the web as some kind of a horn of plenty that will bring hundreds of new clients in hours for nearly any money.
Bullshit.
The first thing you need to do, is to figure out how much a client is worth to you and how much you’re willing to spend per client.
Naturally, you won’t get every client you pitch, so you have to calculate your success rate. Let’s assume, that you can get 10% of the clients you have spent X amount of money to get. The thinking here is, that should you spend $20,000 to pitch to 4 clients worth $100,000 each with a 25% success rate or would it be less risky to spend $20,000 to pitch to 40 clients worth $10,000 each with a 10% success rate?
(For those who haven’t found a calculator in their computer yet, or have issues grasping basic math: The first option produces 1 client of our 4, resulting a profit of $80,000 ($100k client – $20k investment) while the second one produces a profit if $20k as we get 4 clients out of 40 all worth $10k each minus the expenses of $20k.)
Sure, the first option must feel like a bigger risk. Instead of spending $500 euros you are spending $5000 euros per lead to a single client, but I can guarantee that the buyer who gets 10 times more attention from you than from your competition will notice you much more – resulting in an increase in your success rate.
This is where most websites fail. They are following the trend started with search engine marketing. People expect that quantities are more important than the quality of the visitors and that’s why they don’t put their money to their clients, but instead try to build a massive machine (a housing complex if you will) that can take as much people in as possible.
So, how much should you pay for a website?
Nothing and everything.
Calculate how many clients more you can take per year. Calculate the worth of client lead. Estimate your potential success rate. Set a target and calculate how many leads you need to have to generate in order to get to your goal. Multiple the number of leads per the client lead price and you should have your marketing budget estimate.
Then you (not an agency) start to think on where your clients are. Who are your real clients? No, no, no. The CFO and the CEO are quite unlikely your real clients. They might be in your Christmas parties and fund raisers, but they’re not the ones doing the research with different options. Your clients are always many, they are a legion. You have to take all of them into consideration. You have to speak money to money people, you have to speak tech to tech people and business into business people.
This is where the web and its capabilities to personalize excels.
And that is how much your website should cost.
Why you don’t need a community?
Have you heard the latest news about communities? They’re the shiznit! They solve all your problems. It is a scientific fact (in vitro) that most people would love to come to your website and create you content and comment everything on your site – positively of course!
Yeaaahh.
“If you build it, they will come”
You know where that’s from? It’s from a movie from 1969 (that’s 3 years before ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet was created) that is called the Field of dreams.
Some spineless nitwit realized that people like to group up online, and after that they insisted that everyone should have their own community. I mean, everybody wants to be the cool cat whose house looks like Vin Diesel’s pad in xXx. You know the one with a skateboarding ramp, a helipad and a huge party going on 24/7 – Isn’t that what you have every day?
Sensing the paradox here?
Let’s continue with the house analogy, if only to see how far I can stretch this thing. Let’s think of places where communities gather. Surefire places are schools, work places, malls, hobby enthusiasts, sports, parties and causes. Notice a trend there? All of those things already have a house where they take place. They couldn’t meet up unless they already had a place. Through their existence their houses are already built.
People gather in places that other people are in. Not because there’s a big sign on top of a secluded house that says “Community here.” I mean, would you go and hang out in a house full of strangers just because their front porch had a sign that said “forum”?
If you would, I suggest you learn martial arts.
This is the main problem with communities. They already exist and people won’t just leave because someone creates a better mall or a bigger expo area – if the people won’t move, the others won’t move either.
Do you really want to spend a big chunk of your house building budget for building a community room for your house that you’re not even sure anyone will use? If you’re Ashton Kutcher or Xander Cage (that’s Vin Diesel’s character’s name in xXx) – you probably already had one in your previous flat and people swarmed it constantly. But the chance is that you are not and you’re just wasting your money and most of all, creating huge expectations for yourself which I can guarantee – will be disappointed.
What should your website contain?
Hi and welcome back to our jovial playground of “how you can purchase a website for yourself or your company in the near future and not get depressed enough to try and swallow a shotgun after your project has crashed and burned because someone made basic mistakes.”
So, if you read the first and previous part of Web 101, you know that I will be talking about houses as an analogy for building websites – because they’re not very different. We came to a shocking end by leaving the protagonist thinking what kind of house they want.
Just like companies, the homo sapiens has been around a lot longer than houses. We had the bare minimum by living in caves and like websites, houses are a new invention and they have been getting better and bigger all the time. Everybody would like to have the biggest and bestest and most expensive house, even if they wouldn’t actually need one. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see, I’m getting all scientific here) people need the simplest things to survive.
And the same applies for websites. This is why more and more websites are even more specified and they usually serve a single purpose – and they’re effective. Of course, you might have different needs. So let’s spend a moment, thinking what kind of house do you need. Sure, you might need a bowling alley and a full size yoga studio, but I am pretty sure that most people can survive and function without them.
We could go even further and start to categorize people on what they need. Not demographics, target group analysis or segmentational studies, but something even better – Common Sense. I know, it’s unheard of, but bear with me.
Let’s start up with a few basic rules:
Most houses need to have the basics in order to function – toilets, kitchen, bathroom – just like every website needs the basics such as a working navigation, some channel to contact and relevant content. The way and quality these are done can make or break a house. These rooms are very important because they have a function by default. The other rooms are just rooms that might be anything depending on what goes in there and who will live there.
Which takes us to the main point – the inhabitants.
In real life, most houses and buildings are built by people who will not live in the house and websites are not any different. Just like companies don’t build their retail stores for themselves, but for their customers – why would the website be any different?
So who will live in your house? Is it a family with two kids and a dog? Is it a single bohemian night owl or perhaps a middle-age DINK unit. They all need a house, but they all have very different needs. They need a different amount of rooms, they have different requirements for location. These people and their needs define the function of the room and the site.
There is one big difference between houses and websites however. A very important one.
Websites can be expanded without limit.
I understand that people build extra rooms and floors because expansion is not easy or cheap, but with web it’s actually cheaper to expand later than building big from the start. Actually, if houses could be expanded (reasonably) like websites – if would make a lot of people happy. Imagine moving into a house, thinking that some wall should be elsewhere and the roof should be higher – and you could do it.
My point, start small – learn from your mistakes and your inhabitants and then expand. If it will be necessary.
So, we’re at the end again – before you go and see the agency who won’t spend the moment asking you the important questions, think who will be living in your house before you build or even plan it. Think of it as a business case.
Have a good midsummer, it’s a good day.
Why do you need a website?
Since working in helping people create websites for the last decade or so, I’ve noticed that there are many simple things people skip when they’re doing their planning. I work as a planner, and a planner is a person who looks at the client straight to the eyes and should tell them what they need instead of what they want.
So, you heard from your nephew’s sister’s cousin, who graduated from community college that he read a business paper that said that Dell is selling $3 million dollars worth of computers through Twitter. Or you might even have a website for your company that does whatever and you’ve been to a website. Even better, you’ve had your company for years and are experienced in working with ad agencies and they’ve told you that you really, seriously, swear to god, need a website.
So be it.
The initial question you should ask yourself is why? Why do you need a website?
Let’s go back a bit. How many of you have ever built a house? Sure, you’ve probably lived in a house all your life since you obviously can afford a broadband connection. But how many of you could actually build one? Of course pretty much everyone with opposable thumbs could set up a shack somewhere from twigs and moss, but a real house you go out and buy when you win in the lottery?
Now, every self-respecting person goes through a lot of things before buying a house. Can I afford it? Is it big enough? Does it have all the things I (think I) need? Does it need renovation? Are there any hidden costs? Is it in a good location?
The list goes on forever. It’s something we go through for months. Of course, the people with the assets can get more and what they want – even if it would be astoundingly retarded, but the normal mortals need to ask themselves why they need this particular house.
I’ve used this house analogy for years after getting tired of banging my head against the wall with people who thought building a website would be any different that building a house. It’s not.
So, back to the question of building houses. As we’ve established your acquaintance with houses, you probably know that there are many kinds of houses. There are big houses, small houses, tall houses, expensive houses, poor houses, warehouses, office buildings, supermarkets, community centers, opera houses, movie theaters, restaurants, airports and apartment buildings. Not to mention igloos, tee pees, tents, shacks or the Pentagon.
Like those examples, web sites are just as different. But since it’s a physical thing, it’s easier to understand that your company might not have the capital or necessity to build an opera house or an airport. Even fewer need the Pentagon. Most people and companies are just fine with a big house – and we all know that those come in more sorts than there are people.
So let’s say you want a big house and you’ve went through your accounts to know that you have money for it. You wouldn’t go house shopping, if you wouldn’t have the money for it, wouldn’t you?
All right, you have the money and you need a new house. Good for you.
Then you have to start thinking about how the house should function and what kind it should be. This is a good time to look at examples and get someone to help you. Even house-building professionals use other professionals to do stuff, you need people like plumbers, electricians, architects, lumberjacks, foundation layers, project managers, painters, bulldozers, trucks, cement mixers and nails. Lots of nails.
If you still think your nephew knows how to do all those things, he should be elected the president of the world for life.
I’ll leave you to think these things for a while and figure out what you think your dream house should be like.
Our first robot! Meet Drobo
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am a total gadget freak. Not a day goes by when I wouldn’t want to upgrade everything I have in my hub of entertainment, but eventually my nearly Vulcan logic wins and I do nothing. There was one thing, however that caught my attention like a two foot steel pole impaling my car while I’m driving it – the Drobo.
Since I’ve been digitizing my life since the 90’s by hooking up my PC via S-video to a then really awesome and technical CRT screen, data storage has always been an issue. It’s been divided on multiple disks and even there are brilliant softwares like Boxee available it’s been a hassle. Then came Drobo.
Drobo stands short for the company it’s named for: Data Robotics.
Drobo products provide scalable, safe and thoughtfully engineered storage solutions. Designed from the ground up with the needs of professionals and small to medium-sized businesses in mind, Drobo combines the most straightforward user experience ever created with a feature set that scales as rapidly as your need for additional data capacity — all at the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.
Yeah, marketing talk. Basically it’s a really smart and convenient data storage robot that can expand up to 16 TERAbytes, which makes it an ecological investment as well. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.
Wedding Music Video that rules
Brian and Eileen got married, glad for them, but they had Lockdown projects to do them a wedding video and it’s the perfect way to end the arduous and long work week. I can’t understand why we didn’t do anything like this.
Brian & Eileen’s Wedding Music Video. from LOCKDOWN projects on Vimeo.
Have a good weekend all!
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