In it, I described our major face plant when launching illico, a little chat application we had spent 3 months developing as a side project. At the time, my intention was mainly to share our failure with fellow programmers on HN, and let the steam go off a little bit. After all, there's nothing better than a good laugh to compensate for a big bold FAIL.

As readers came and went (15k+ in total!), I started to notice an interesting side-effect of having hackers with brains read your prose: a number of comments were posted both on my blog and on HN, which were making concrete suggestions to improve our product and strategy.

And we started to feel accountable for these suggestions: after all, if people were taking the time to comment and suggest, it meant they cared (even a little bit), and they deserved to see their suggestions implemented. We spent a month working on this feedback, and there you go: we jumped from 27 downloads to... 57,523 downloads a week after we released our v1.1!

As a thank you note to Hacker News, I thought I'd share the feedback we got and how we went about it:

1) What the heck is your app about?

It seems obvious, but for people to download your app they need to understand what's in it for them... And so we listened to feedback, and came up with this tagline: 

Start a conversation with a group of friends over SMS and have everybody see each other's reply (even if they don't have the app). 

It's a bit long, but at least it is somewhat understandable.

2) Your app looks CRAP!

Have a look at my previous post to see what illico used to look like. Yes, it looked that bad...
So we decided to show a little bit more respect to our users, and completely redesigned the app as follows.

See the full gallery on Posterous

3) Show us a screencast

A lot of commenters said they might have gone past the creepy looks if we had shown a video to demo the app. We did it, put it on illico's website, and saw a sharp increase in downloads.

4) Tech bloggers are busy, show them what they want to see

A few comments pointed out the fact that most tech bloggers would'nt realise the benefit of our app compared to existing competition (in particular iMessage, being iPhone-native).

So when we contacted bloggers we included a nice little table to show the difference with other apps, and I believe it helped us get coverage.

5) Don't give up too easily: success takes time

As some of our projects (like twitscoop) became some sort of overnight success, we were very disappointed with illico's initial performance. I still think it's important to fail fast, but iterating at least once based on some sort of user feeback will validate your decision and help you move on (or not!).

Thank you Hacker News!

I'd like to thank the 15k HN readers who read my previous post and the few of them who provided invaluable feeback. Those 50k+ downloads are thanks to each one of you.

And if you haven't tried illico yet, maybe you will now :)

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Exactely a month later, it seems v1.1 of illico is currently under review in the AppStore. Stay tuned, it's a complete redesign... A preview of the new app can already be seen on our homepage.

And we're confident people are going to love it :)

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It all Started With the Idea of the Century: Illico 

To give you a bit of background, our startup, lollicode, has been around for 3 years, and came up with a few products in various fields, the most publicly succesfull one being twitscoop (>500k UV, >2M PV per month, 750k registered users, quite a few acquisition offers which we turned down, and decent revenues). So not 10's of millions of $ success, but still satisfying at our level.

On a regular basis, we do a bit of brainstorming to come up with a project we like, and that we think is going to be a huge success and make us tons of fame and money.

We've become used to call it the Idea of the Century.

Not.

Anyway before Christmas, after our usual 2 hours lunch (after all, we're French), our beer-fed brains came up with this idea that chat on mobile phone was crap. All the apps out there (hello whatsapp, groupme, facebook chat!) required you to sign up to some sort of social network, have all your friends install the app, and were based on notifications, which anybody following a few people on twitter or facebook will agree are becoming a nuisance and receive less and less of our attention every day.

So we decided that we'd create a chat app that would eliminate the friction identified above, with the following features:

- Free app

- No sign-up

- Would work even if recipients didn't have the app installed

- Would be based on notifications by SMS, which is the most efficient way to get people's instant attention

We also added a few bells and whistles like the ability to start the chat with a photo and map in order to provide context to the conversation.

If you want to check it out, it's called Illico (and is available for free on the App Store) - I have attached a small slideshow of screenshots below.

See the full gallery on Posterous

We thought the use cases would be multiple, ranging from having fun on a chat with friends through organising a lunch or party, through to asking for advice during a shopping session. We were convinced the app was simple enough and adressed a real need (essentially the lack of "reply all" ability on SMS).

It took us about 3 months to develop (not full time).

Marketing Phase 1: Anybody Out There?

Still warm and fuzzy with the relatively good coverage we received on twitscoop over the years, we decided that we would use the same strategy for press coverage of Illico. 

That is to say no strategy, really.

Just drop a mail to tips@rww/techcrunch/mashable/etc... with a short pitch for the app, and a few screenshots attached, and forget about it because after all, our app was the Idea of the Century, and tech bloggers would love it.

We also sent the compulsory mail/tweet to Robert Scoble, who replied he couldn't test our app because he was extremely busy in Vegas (Being denied entry to a Microsoft party. Not. Boy that was exciting). 

And we waited. 5 hours. 12 hours. 24 hours.

Three days.

We looked at the logs and saw no sign of activity. We were a bit worn out by the late night work we had to put into finishing the app, and to be honest it didn't register right away.

And then it struck us: tech bloggers didn't give a fawck about our app. We don't even know if they read our email, but I bet they didn't. The title read something like "Illico brings reply all to SMS". Does it actually mean something? I bet it doesn't. Or if it does, no one cares.

Bottom line is, what worked 3 years ago simply doesn't anymore, because tech blogs are overwhelmed with press releases and calls. And our ridiculous email was never going to make it through.

A good strategy would probably have been to fly to SF, and try to show our app to people in person. Or I could have impersonated Kevin Rose. After all he managed to get his grunt - errr oink - app to be downloaded by 100k users in a week. An app where you rate burritos and see your friends do the same. An app where you need to register and that you need to pull out to take pictures of pork chops. For Christ's sake.

Marketing Phase 2: Fuck the US Tech Blogs, Let's Try Our Own Market

Slightly disappointed with our face plant in the famous land of opportunities, we decided to try our luck in our home market, i.e. the land of stripped shirts, berets, bicycles and baguettes.

Being very good at not learning from our past failures, we sent the French version of our email to French tech blogs. The title read something along the lines of "Illico brrrrings rrreply all to SMS".

With some screenshots attached.

And we waited for another three days.

26 downloads later, I can confidently say our product launch was a double face plant. If there is a mashable award for best face plant for a product launch, we'd nominate ourselves immediately.

Now I'm off for our weekly 2 hour lunch, and I'm sure we'll come up with a new Idea of the Century.

In the meantime, maybe you will download our app, or tweet the link to this post, or upvote it in HN - who knows, a major tech blog might take notice, and we'll inaugurate a new type of marketing ;)

And in a week's time we'll issue a press release to celebrate our 27th download!

Thanks for reading, and best of luck for your own projects!

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Folks at 37signals (the ones who built the famous Basecamp amongst other things) have repeatedly made the point that plans (and in particular business plans) are just guesses. And that spending a great deal of time on them is just a waste thereof.

Indeed, what’s the point to spend ages trying to figure out how your company will make money in five years time when you’re struggling to pay for your rent right now ?

It is clear to most entrepreneurs-to-be that in order to be successful, they need to have what VCs like to call a vision.

Venture capitalists like to name simple things with complicated words: it makes them look clever and worthwhile the money they get paid. Vision is simply anticipation skills. Sounds less holy, but it’s actually what it is. Good entrepreneurs anticipate well how things could turn out in the future, and execute a plan according to this. And this plan, which is rarely financial, often involves something which is the bread and butter of successful startups: strategic partnerships.

When you launch a new product or service on the web, you often target a very specific audience. And you rarely have the funds to target it with advertising. So the most cost effective and scalable way to do this is to leverage strategic partnerships with other companies, who are already successful with this target customer base. Strategic partnerships rarely happen by accident: they need to be planned, sometimes a long time in advance. They even need to be dreamed of.

As such, I think the following is a critical question to ask yourself once you have defined the product/market you want to build: “Which companies do I dream to strike strategic partnerships with in order to be successful ?”

The good news is, wishful thinking actually works. The earlier you plan to strike a partnership with company X, the most likely it is to actually happen at some point.

What’s more, very often strategic partners become good potential acquirers.

Plan your strategic partnerships as early as possible, you won’t regret it.

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You've already known for a long time that, to be successful nowadays, a startup needs to:

1. Be covered by Techcrunch. Or ReadWriteWeb if you can't get coverage from TC (be careful, unlike TC, they often know what they're talking about). Or Mashable if your startup features kittens in some way.
2. Be fluent in buzz lingo. Some company targeting a mobile large-scale network of real-time big-data social location checkins is a sure winner (they fall into Fred Wilson's investment thesis). Add a kitty in there and you'll make it onto Mashable.
3. Power your launch with Launchrock (hey, you may be a web startup, but coding a one-page form with a twitter share button is for experts!)

Ok so we all know the above. But there's something new. And the very evidence of it struck me yesterday while reading this piece on Business Insider. In essence, it seems that there was more to the already dodgy story of twitter's creation. Ever heard of Noah Glass ? Me neither. He's the guy who was the strongest advocate for twitter within Odeo (the then-startup of Ev, Jack & Biz), managed the team to build the first prototype, and even came up with the twitter name. So what happened ? Well it's simple, once twitter was prototyped, Mr Williams convinced the Odeo shareholders that Oddeo (and twitter) were basically not going to make it, bought the whole lot back from them, and fired Mr Glass. The rest is history (including the CEO dance between Jack, Ev & Biz). Yeah I know, it's really nice.

Same for Square (Jack's new venture), where the inventor of the device to swipe cards was actually not listed as... an inventor in the patent.

Same for Facebook. I've stopped counting how many people were apparently screwed by Zuk in the process of "creating" Facebook. Anyway you'd trust a 20-something in a hoodie ?

So ladies and gentlemen, enough waiting, here is the 4th item on my little guide to startup success:

Be Evil. Screw people as much as you can. Secretly hate your co-founders. Screw your investors. Manipulate people. When your startup makes it big you'll cough a few millions to make them shut up. Those bastards.

I just hope my co-founders won't be reading this so that I can screw them big time. Success doesn't wait!

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Being native of a country sometimes mocked for its two-hour lunches, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the subject :)

I fully agree that long lunches every day of the week are unproductive and time killers, all the more if you add too much wine or beer in the mix. Rest assured – despite Mike Arrington’s allegations – daily 2 hours lunches in continental Europe during week days are a myth.

However, I am of the opinion that startup co-founders should try to meet for a 2 hour lunch on a weekly basis, for at least 5 reasons (in no particular order):

1. Communicating on issues is easier during an informal lunch, where you know you will have 2 hours to resolve and discuss them without having to make hasty decisions.

2. Food (and a reasonable amount of beverage) is good for creativity. A truly good brainstorming session needs participants to be relaxed and non judgemental. Eating good food with my co-founders (and friends) is to me a very good way to achieve this.

3. Getting out of your office / garage / bedroom enables you to think outside the box. A good lunch is the best way to discuss non work related stuff, who often happen to end up contributing to your project in a meaningful manner.

4. Making your startup succeed requires you to have a lot of faith and dreams about your project, and a weekly lunch is probably a good environment for having this kind of team “bonding” around a common vision / dream.

5. A quality often found in successful startup founders is what I’d call a passion for life. I would never work with co-founders who only like to live on cardboard pizza and redbull ;)

What do you think ? What is your way of facilitating a few hours a week of quality time with your co-founders ?

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As a web startup founder(-to-be), you may think there is one thing you will invariably need to get to the point you can actually try your idea "in real life": money. And so, because most founders seem to be doing so (at least according to Techcrunch and the likes, who have turned super angels into celebrities.), after resigning from your job (or dropping out of school) you embark on a journey to pitch for angel money. You build a nice deck of slides presenting your team, vision, product, market, needs etc. for the next few months. You calculate the cost of doing all this, which adds up to a few (tens of ) thousand dollars. And now you need to find people who will spend the necessary money for you

I don't think this is the right way to proceed.

Do you have a job ? Keep it. Are you at school ? Stay there. To understand why, let's raise the only important question: what will you be using this money for ?

• Eat and pay your rent. Well, hopefully your job already pays for this, and the safety of a job is usually a big plus vis à vis tenants. Or if you're at school, you probably have a budget (and a loan?) for this.
• Pay for servers. Not very expensive, all the more at this stage you shouldn't need more than one (maybe two ?) server(s). Remember, your goal is to quickly build a prototype and test your idea, not to recreate Google's infrastructure.
• Pay for a designer / programmer / x. If you have a great idea, but don't have any practical skills, and were not able to gather a team with the necessary skills around you, then you will fail. Whether you raise angel money or not. Having to pay to build your prototype is a very, very bad start.

And that's about it. You could still argue that angel money, by saving you the time to earn it, allows you to focus freely (and 100%) on your product and vision. I disagree.

You shouldn't quit your job or drop out of school to build a prototype that will fail to become a business 99% of the time.

Instead, you should still work hard at your job to earn money and who knows, even learn some skills that could be useful for your startup. I can hear you saying "What I learn at work / university is useless". Well that's not true, you're at least learning how to deal with colleagues and customers (sometimes jerks) which is a very valuable skill at a startup, and you're learning how to write code / build a product very efficiently with the little time you can find in the evenings and week-ends.

If eventually, you end up with a functioning prototype, which you can confront to the reality of a market, either:

• You fail quickly, but hey, the good news is, you still have a job (or the prospect of one if you're at school), and you can try a new idea tomorrow
•  You experience what I'd call "failccess", which happens more often that you'd think.  It's a mix of failure and success. Basically, if you were living on angel money, you would eventually fail despite a few positive signs. Your product has something in it, and you found a few customers. Not enough to survive though. Maybe if you had some more time you would be able to turn this venture into a real success. If you had kept your job, you'd have some infinite time in front of you (well, limited by boredom maybe). And you may well end up with a hit.
• You find lots of customers and grow very fast, in which case I can guarantee you will have to make the decision to quit your job / drop out of school very quickly. But you will be doing so for something proven, and raising money (if really need be) will be very easy, at very advantageous terms for you.

You don't need a business angel if you want to succeed quietly. And Peter Thiel's initiative to pay kids to "stop out of school" is stupid.

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Many friends around me seem to have the same problem, and it takes them sometimes several days to answer emails (and to me an acceptable answer can just be something along the lines of "I'm on it", "Agreed", "Let me think about this" - in a nutshell, at least a polite acknowledgment that when you receive something it doesn't go straight to the trash)

Having no such issues, at first I thought they surely received at least several hundred emails a day (I get about 150/day, and don't use gmail for work related stuff). Actually they don't.

So I decided to write a blog post and unveil the truth.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS EMAIL OVERLOAD. AND YOU CAN ANSWER MOST EMAILS IN LESS THAN 10 MINUTES.

The answer to the so-called email overload is not in a magic algorithmic thingy that will automatically feed your brain with what's important and what's not.

Here's the 2 step magic procedure:

1. Use a specific email address for everything ecommerce/newsletter/events related (gmail is a good one). Read it once a day (3 minutes).
2. Use the FIFO approach. FIFO stands for First In First Out. This means that, unless you're in a situation where reading emails is rude (in a meeting / at a restaurant etc.) or you are in the process of doing something so important that it requires 100% of your attention (this never happens for more than 10 minutes), then as soon as you receive an email, READ IT. It takes on average 5 seconds. Why ? Because either the title indicates it's some crap you don't even want to read (half a second to realize, happens 30% of the time), or it's a real email (1 minute to scan max). And then: ANSWER IT. It will take you on average 1 minute to do so (less than 10 seconds 75% of the time, where a 3 word answer is all it takes).

I can hear you already: "Wait a second. I'm so important and have soooo much work that sometimes I need 100% of my attention for more than 10 minutes at a time." If so, you have a serious ego problem. Like everyone else, you don't have the capacity to allocate 100% of your brain for more than 10 minutes. You can afford to spend 30 seconds every 10 minutes to deal with emails.

I assure you that not having an email overload issue, and answering emails in a prompt, concise, and polite manner won't make you look less important.

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My previous venture was a startup in the data mining field, leveraging the incredible amount of information available on twitter.

Our business model was extremely simple and relied on a one-line equation:

Revenues = (Number of businesses interested to know what’s on people’s mind) x (Relevance of the “twitter population”) x (Value of the data to these businesses)

with:

• Number of businesses interested to know what’s on people’s mind: pretty self-explanatory, almost every consumer oriented business falls into this category. Add politicians, government bodies and lobbies in there and you have a sizeable market.

• Relevance of the “twitter population”: not every social / gender / age category is represented equally on twitter. However, with a bit of cleverness and algorithmic magic, it’s pretty easy to know the degree of relevancy of twitter’s users to a particular business. And guess what, as twitter becomes more popular, more global, this relevance will naturally increase.

• Value of the data to those businesses: whereas for some customers this data can be just viewed as a nice “add-on” to their usual market research, for others it can be priceless.

And so in the past years, twitter became a big pipeline, with lots of data flowing out (the “firehose”), and small startups drilling small holes to get some of that stream, do some analysis and resell that to clients. Making actual money.

The clever executives at twitter said: “Oh no, all these guys are making money, but we want to become the next google or facebook, not just a utility with all the value elsewhere.” And they decided that the best thing to do… was to close the firehose and make startups (and big companies like google) pay for it. Very clever ! Lots of millions. Well at least tens. Without much potential to make more. And a lot of value flowing out of the window. Twitter, by installing a meter on their firehose, did exactly what they didn’t want to do: they turned themselves into a utility, therefore reducing their value tremendously.

Months later, twitter is still nowhere to be seen in terms of monetization or innovation. They reopened advanced search in new twitter. Awesome. Sure to make them lots of money.

WTF are you doing, twitter ?

Go buy one of the small startups specialised in data mining (targeting actual paying customers), because this is what your business model should be.

All the dickbar and sponsored tweets bullshit is just a pale imitation of google adsense – implemented by someone who apparently has little clue on how to separate noise from signal.

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