COMA’s Jacob Joseph on relentless product development
This is the first in a series of guest posts featuring first-hand insights, experiences and advice from personalities in Asia’s startup scene.
Jacob Joseph Puthenparambil runs COMA. He was the youngest editor at IDG at the age of 23, was launch editor-in-chief (corporate communications) at du – a billion dollar startup telecommunications company — and more recently a publisher of trade journals and a diplomat with the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. He currently lives in Singapore with his wife and daughter.
Touch. Feel. Trust.
The normal life cycle of a startup business is to come up with an idea, cool name, leek presentation and website. Once you get funded (seed, angel or personal savings) start working on your product or service and market it.
I’m from the old school of business; one that believes a product or service should be its own best marketing. No amount of branding or marketing can make up for a product or service fault, it can only enhance it or sharpen its communication tools.
Sure, you can get funded on a business idea. I get a lot of budding entrepreneurs asking my team to come up with a branding and presentation tools to make it sell to potential investors. I tell them to focus on the end customer, the investors will follow. Test you product on the end customer first, show a live demo, let your product speak for itself.
Sadly, not a lot of people take this advice. Funding is easy to find in Singapore. Go to the right B-school, hang around with the right people and you can have a few thousand dollars thrown at you. Plus the government will back you up with a few grants. The focus seems to be on attracting the investors, not the users.
The best ideas become successful businesses when the founder puts his own savings or reputation on the line to get a prototype out and attract end-users.
Singapore-based serial entrepreneur Aneace Haddad spent the last 18 months (Editor’s note: an earlier version of Taggo delivered coupons by SMS) working on his new product, Taggo. Taggo brings Facebook fan recognition to the point of sale. It’s a simple idea: become a fan of your favorite brands on Facebook, then turn on Taggo’s ‘Tap and Go Fan Recognition’ feature on the brand’s Facebook page. Register your transit card or other contactless payment card, then tap at the point of sale for fan discounts and other special privileges.
Aneace has not asked for any funding for Taggo and has solely interacted with Taggo’s beta users in its development. It’s not that he can’t get funding if he wanted to. He has been in the payments industry for 25 years. He has launched several start-ups and is the author of two payment strategy books and numerous articles.
In 1996, Aneace founded Welcome Real-time, a provider of payment software to banks in 30 countries. In 1992, Aneace launched the world’s first smart card couponing system, PromoCarte, and signed deals with 30 consumer product companies, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Colgate and others. Aneace has filed numerous patents. Taggo launched on 16 Sept in Singapore. Investors, I’m sure, will follow automatically.
Once you have a product, what makes it stand out? What makes it “go viral” and achieve business success? The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I follow a simple three-step process for most of the products my design consultancy COMA has worked on: Touch, feel,trust.
The ‘touch’ stage is you first make contact with a user. It could even be an accidental touch, like you bump into some in the train. How do you capture interest? Can you convey a message in the span of those milliseconds? In real life, your appearance, smell or the way you walk can send a subconscious message. This is the same for a brand. Your brand colours, your typography and your tagline matters. If you got it right, the user is induced to move to the second stage.
Feel. I heard of the Flipboard app even before I had an iPhone, iPad or an iTunes account. I was in love with it even before I used it. How? Why? Video. The Flipboard site had a simple YouTube video where an average Joe was giving me a demo in very simple terms on how he was using Flipboard. Sure, they could have had a wesbite with screenshot or flash animation but the video demo of an actual product in use beats all that. I didn’t want to know who was funding it or who the founders where.
Flipboard’s video demo was so powerful that I went out and bought an iPad just to try it for myself. Once I started using it, I moved to the next and most critical stage.
Trust. It’s easy to create a buzz and have people visiting your site and talking about you or your company — but what about the product? Do your users trust you? Do they trust you enough to stick their reputation out endorse you? This is something I learned when I was editor of LinuxWorld. People who I have never met, like a Linux user group member in Morocco, would vouch for something I wrote or debated because I had managed to build up trust with my work.
I tell a lot of people here in Singapore that I really like the mapping service gothere.sg, I tell it to friends and family abroad that it’s an example of great technology and design in Singapore. I don’t know who is funding them or who made it but I’m willing to trust them because they serve me, the user, repeatedly with a great service. I would buy gothere.sg rice if they decided to make that tomorrow. That’s the power of trust.
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