I need your help!

This blog -- A Smart Bear -- is a finalist in the 2008 Weblog Awards for "Best Business Blog" and together we can win!

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This is David vs. Goliath -- most of the blogs on the list are much more widely known than my humble operation, so its inevitable that they'll get lots of votes.

And while folks like Seth Godin deserve all their success, this is a chance for the little guy to get recognized too.  I hope you'll help this little guy with 10 seconds of your time.

I know how much those 10 seconds mean to you. Anyone who has worked for themselves appreciates the value of time. Not only that, here I am hoping you'll vote once daily until polls close on Jan 13, which means I'm injecting a daily task into your already overfull calendar. (That sound you hear is undying thanks floating your way...)

Of course any other way you can spread the word would be even more fantastic -- maybe Twitter that you're voting or update your Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Any kind of shout-out can only help!

This blog is already an amalgamation of my experience and yours -- your thoughts from comments and emails and from me reading your blogs as well. It would be a victory for all of us small business folks and potential startup owners.

Go David!

If you have a blog, you want what everyone with a blog wants: More eyeballs. So how do you get them?

Well first you could remind readers to read your blog periodically. Everyone has email, so you add a conspicuous link that says "Email me when there's a new post."

Then there's RSS -- the way tech-saavy folks are able to mark all as read carefully read every post from 50 sources.  Okay, we have icons for that.

But subscriptions are just the beginning. Getting in front of new readers requires spreading the word about your posts. Of course "word-of-mouth" often means getting a post voted up on a link-sharing site like Reddit or Digg or StumbleUpon or Mixx or Sphinn.

Unfortunately there are a lot these sharing sites and you can't predict where you might get popular. Case in point -- my article about QA vs. QC garnered thousands of views from high marks on Reddit, my article about website heatmaps stuck on the front page of Sphinn, and my article about how startups morph got over 100 votes on HackerNews.

So this leads to...

And of course there's Twitter and ratings and bookmarking sites and social networking sites and soon at the end of every post you have this:

(No, I didn't make up any of these screenshots.)

Okay, okay, enough of that.  The question is: Is it a good idea to provide this much choice?

Is it better to include as many options as possible, satisfying the greatest number of people, or do people get lost in the choices, unwilling to put in the energy to find their favorite site?

There's plenty of evidence that people are happier and more motivated to act when they have choices. For instance, in one study done by Edward Deci, subjects were placed in a room with a variety of magazines and a computer. They were assigned the boring task of pressing the space bar on the computer when a color appeared on the screen; to keep their interest they were fed some nonsense about the task helping you sharpen concentration.

Half of the subjects were given instructions using words that connoted choice, e.g. "If you are willing, you can press the space bar to start over." The rest were instructed unequivocally, e.g. "Now start over. Press the space bar."

Mid-way through, the experimenter would leave the room after telling the subject that she couldn't leave for another five minutes but that she was free to continue with the computer or to stop and read magazines.

The people who felt like they had a choice in the matter actually continued the boring task longer than those who felt the task was forced upon them. With the perception that they were in control they elected to help the experimenter (by ostensibly giving them more data).

So this might lead us to believe that blog entries should be accompanied by a panoply of choices; if perceived choice leads a reader to be willing and helpful, great! And surely you wouldn't want to leave out the reader's favorite link-sharing site.

But is too much choice a bad thing? I know when I look at that array of icons I just want to hit the "back" button, not hunt around for the ones I recognize. But then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.

It turns out it's not just me. In another study, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper sold jams in a supermarket. In one case, 24 jams were on display, in the other only 6. As you might expect, the display with 24 jams attracted more people -- 60% of shoppers paused at the big display versus only 40% for the small.  But would they purchase?

Only 3% of shoppers who stopped at the big display actually bought a jam, but an astounding 30% of shoppers at the small display made a purchase. Even with fewer choices and fewer people stopping by, the display with six jams was nearly seven times as successful at getting customers to act.

This result has now been repeated in different forms, and always the result is that a little choice makes us happy, but many choices overwhelm us into inaction.

So back to the blog. Give the reader a few choices, but resist the urge to list every site on the Internet. It might mean a certain reader's favorite sharing site isn't listed, but dumping icons on the screen stops everyone from acting.

What are your thoughts on how many choices is too much?  Is there a time when having 100 choices is actually a good thing?  Which link-sharing sites do you actually use?  Leave a comment!

P.S. If you like this post, you have a choice of subscribing by email or by RSS feed and to post it on Reddit and Digg and Sphinn and email it to a friend and post it on Facebook and Twitter it. But don't feel like you have to...  ;-)

I was starry-eyed when Frank showed up 18 months after the birth of my company, Smart Bear. Picture it: Frank was a silver-haired ex-VP-of-Sales for a big, successful company. An IPO had made him comfortably wealthy, and now he wanted to hook up with a promising new startup. With his résumé and enough money that he never had to work again, he could be choosy.

And he chose little ol' me!

And boy did I (think I) needed him. "I'm just a software developer, I don't know anything about sales" I explained to Gerry, who had already unknowingly cemented himself as my mentor. "I'm just a lowly engineer, ignorant of the mystical voodoo of six-figure purchase orders. I don't even play golf! Frank has been there."

Gerry tried to explain. "There's no magic to it. I've sold companies for $100 million without stepping foot on a golf course. You have a good product, you have some customers, just keep going." Of course I didn't listen.

So Frank and I headed down the road to partnership. Frank had lots of ideas that "we have to implement, otherwise no big company will give us money." For example, we had to change our name. "Smart Bear" sounded to Frank like a dorky one-man shareware site. (Ahem...) We needed something stoic and corporate. His suggestion was "Enterprise Development Tools, Inc," or EDT for short. Big companies like acronyms, he explained, as if "big company" is an entity that can express an opinion.

There was more: We needed patents ("to keep competitors at bay"), we needed a sales team ("software doesn't sell itself"), and we needed to lighten up ("I like to knock off early on Fridays"). In fact it seemed I was doing very little right!

Fortunately Gerry finally got through. "Let me get this straight," he rightly admonished me for the fourth time, "this guy wants 50% of the company, he wants a salary while you get none, he's going to work 35 hours a week while you work weekends, he's not bringing any money to the company, and his big idea about how to get more customers is to change your name? Does that sound fair? Do you think he will really contribute that much?"

Gerry's criticism of Frank was harsh -- as harsh as Frank's criticism of me -- but Gerry was right and luckily I heeded him.

Two weeks later I landed a $50,000 deal with a "big company." A few years later we were doing millions in revenue with "big companies," still called Smart Bear, still no patents, still no sales guys. Who knew? (Gerry knew.)

You have to understand though, saying no to Frank was hard. He had the expertise, I didn't. I was convinced that he was right and I was wrong. If it wasn't for Gerry's guidance, I would have gone through with it.

So how do you separate the the good counsel from the bad -- the Gerrys from the Franks? Both sounded like advice and criticism, both were experienced, both were strong-willed, and both truly believed in what he was saying.

Here are a few things that have helped me filter advice:

• The best advice doesn't come as a barrage of statements but rather from a series of questions, askbed by someone playing devil's advocate.
  
  Rarely will an advisor know more than you do about your domain of expertise but that doesn't mean an outside voice is useless. Pointed questions force you to defend your choices. A healthy debate challenges your assumptions without implying they're false. New ideas are batted around as a brainstorm rather than handed down as gospel.
  
  In my case, Frank presented his view as a series of statements, axioms even; Gerry counched his perspective as pointed questions that required either rebuttal or agreement.
  
  In fact, playing devil's advocate is a great exercise to do periodically anyway. Find an intelligent foe, take her to lunch, and follow Scott Berkun's advice about Rude Q&A.
   
• "This is how it's done" is almost never a good reason. If the sole basis for the advice is "tradition," it's just momentum and you might be right to buck the trend.
  
  Example: Smart Bear posts its prices on the Internet rather than negotiating. Enterprise software sales are rarely done that way, but posting your price is honest and makes business sense, so we do it anyway.
   
• It's easy to cut down ideas; it's hard to create and execute them. Give me any idea and I can find someone who thinks it's dumb. So what? "Constructive" criticism means constructing, not just blasting. Look for advice with a clear method for implementation and a clear path for results.
   
• Does the criticizer volunteer a way to measure the success of her new idea? If so, the only reason not to try it is time or money. This is the guiding principle behind our marketing efforts. If not, how will you ever know whether or not it was wise?
   

• Actively develop a network of trusted advisors. These could be local entrepreneurs, on-line forums, even bloggers you like. Everyone needs a Gerry or two. Advisors won't always agree with each other of course, but nothing beats running ideas past people you respect and who truly have your interests at heart, even if their advice ends up being wrong.

Do you have more ideas for incorporating criticism into your world-view? Join the conversation and leave a comment!

"My idea isn't good enough yet" explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He was waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed our before taking the leap.

Here's a newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn't matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.

Sounds wrong?  Let's see.

In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to "beam money between Palm Pilots."  I'll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer.

Here's the pitch. Alice wants to give Bob some money, but Alice doesn't have cash or her checkbook. There's no ATM around. Both Alice and Bob do own palm pilots and they both previously installed MoneyBeamer and, despite having forgotten all their normal modes of money transfer, they did remember to bring their palm pilots. MoneyBeamer will allow Alice to send money to Bob. Well actually it won't, but it will remember that Alice wants to send Bob money, and once Alice gets back home and connects her Palm Pilot with her computer, and after she dials up to the Internet, MoneyBeamer will contact a server and transfer the money, provided of course that Alice has the money and didn't secretly change her mind in the meantime.

Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You'd be wrong though -- it was PayPal. Their work with encryption was combined with an idea for a consumer-targeted on-line banking system made it the easiest way to send money by email.  They were sold to eBay for $1.3 billion.  Today they process $2,000 in payments every second.

....

I'm sure you won't recognize this web-based sensation:

This is Game Neverending: An in-browser multi-player on-line game "with no way to win, nor any definition of success." (Sounds like a lot of Web 2.0 companies to me.) It never saw the light of day.

What was most interesting (to its alpha testers) was that people could share game objects by dragging them into chat windows.  They saw this as a useful enhancement to chat applications in general, so as plans for the game fizzled out the engineers created a Flash application for real-time chat plus file-sharing with a particular emphasis on image-sharing.

Unfortunately the Flash application was only real-time -- your pictures didn't stick around when you closed it. And this was fatal because it turns out people were interested in the sharing part more than the real-time part. So in yet another upheaval they rewrote the Flash application as a regular website and lo, Flickr was born. Now it's the largest photo-sharing site in the world with 3 billion photos and 5,000 more uploaded every minute.

....

Of course a rant like this wouldn't be complete without self-deprecation, so let's accompany the Ghost of Christmas Past into the annals of my own company, Smart Bear.  My first idea was a product called Code Historian; it could dig through the history of a file and show you what changed.  Accurate name, but turns out to be almost useless.

Like an adolescent, the company went through many embarrassing stages (forgive the broken images, 'tis the way of the Way Back Machine):

1. Mar 24, 2003: Hideous.  "Do one thing and do it poorly."
2. Dec 22, 2003: Fugly.  "Three products... is that enough for a Suite?"
3. Oct 10, 2004: Lame.  "Everything above the fold, most expensive first."
4. Jan 11, 2006: Getting there.  "You really need a graphic designer.  No, really."
5. Sep 10, 2007: Ain't bad.  "At least you admit 'code review' is all that matters."
6. Present day: Nice.  "Hey, where did those other products go?"

At one point we were selling six different tools; the only one that mattered in the end was Code Reviewer.  Perhaps a screenshot will make this clear:

The point of all this isn't to berate anyone for their crappy ideas. In fact, just the opposite -- the point is that it doesn't matter what your first idea is. First, it's probably wrong. Second, the only way to find the right one is to try the wrong one and see what happens. You won't find it by fiddling around with PowerPoint slides and Photoshop mock-ups.

So get out there and make some mistakes!  As Neil Davidson said recently:

You don't need stratospheric growth and a billion-dollar addressable market to bootstrap a software company. A $50,000 market opportunity is enough to get you off the ground -- once you get started you'll figure out the rest.

(Neil is the co-founder of Red Gate.  It started as yet-another-online-bug-tracking-system that no one cared about but is now a popular purveyor of fine SQL database tools with 95,000 customers to their credit.)

Do you have stories of bad ideas leading to good results?  Have you seen an idea succeed without changing?  Leave a comment!

Pop quiz: Which of the following two paintings was made by Leonardo Da Vinci (a Renaissance painter from the early 1500s), and which was made by Pablo Picasso (a surrealist from the early 1900s)?

Trick question! Both are Picasso's.

Picasso didn't start out doing crazy, inventive things; he first learned the rules of standard, classical painting and proved himself a master of that genre.  A genius in fact -- he completed "The First Communion" (the painting on the left) when he was just 15 years old.

There are those who look at "Dora Maar au Chat" (the painting on the right) and can't understand how it can even be called "art," much less good art, important art, certainly not worth $95 million dollars, which it sold for at auction in 2006.

But "The First Communion" proves something important: That Picasso painted "crazy stuff" because it was exactly what he wanted to paint, not because he wasn't able to paint "properly," and not because it was the only thing he could do.  It was a choice.

The choice is everything. Had Picasso never proven he could paint classically, he could be dismissed as a hack.  When you know the rules, you're allowed to break the rules.

This lesson applies all the time. Let's take a cardinal rule of advertising: "Never use negative words in headlines." You don't want people associating negative words with images of your product, not even subconsciously. It's important both for advertising and branding.

Volkswagon broke this rule with fantastic results:

"Lemon" is about the worst thing you can say about a car, yet there it is. Gets your attention, doesn't it? The fine print underneath is brilliant with an casual style that is as effective and relevant today as it was in the 1960s:

This Volkswagen missed the boat.

The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn't have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.

There are 3,389 men at our Wolfsburg factory with only one job: to inspect Volkswagens at each stage of production. (3000 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.)

Every shock absorber is tested (spot checking won't do), every windshield is scanned. VWs have been rejected for surface scratches barely visible to the eye.

Final inspection is really something! VW inspectors run each car off the line onto the Funktionsprufstand (car test stand), tote up 189 check points, gun ahead to the automatic brake stand, and say "no" to one VW out of fifty.

This preoccupation with detail means the VW lasts longer and requires less maintenance, by and large, than other cars. (It also means a used VW depreciates less than any other car.)

We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.

It's effective only because the authors understood how to break the rule. They played with words exactly enough to get your attention but not so subtly that you missed the point. Without appreciating the rule, the balance might not have been achieved.

There's no rule that can't be broken, so long as it's broken with purpose. Rules exist to guide us -- a reasonable default when we don't have a better idea -- but they're not a straightjacket. In fact, the truly innovative, inspired ideas are frequently the result of breaking a rule that no one else is willing to break.

But if you never bothered to learn the rules, you're probably just mistaken.

P.S. Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Blasco y Picasso López.  It was so hard, even Wikipedia got it wrong!

What rules have you broken? Do you see someone breaking a rule they shouldn't have? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

However you feel about Snoop Dogg, you have to admit he's good at producing hit records.

Mr. Snoop is inundated by new artists vying for his attention. A nod from the great Dee-Oh-Dubba-Gee can launch a career. On MTV Cribs, the Doggfather showed us how he vets sample tracks. It's not what you think -- a sound-proof room with a dizzying array of equalizer knobs and $50,000 speakers. No, he takes these tracks and plays them on a little cassette player on the floor.

A cassette player. On the floor. Turned up a little too high so it crackles and distorts during the loud parts.

Why? Because songs have to sound good even on a cheap car stereo with distractions and tiny speakers and an obnoxious guy in the back spilling you-don't-want-to-know-what on your velour seat covers.

So how do you get a song to sound good in the real world? Music producers suggest that you should use crappy speakers when mixing tracks. If it sounds good on crap, it will sound good anywhere.

This principle applies in an odd way to your company's pitch. As much as you'd like to believe otherwise, your prospective customers have as many distractions as a group of teenagers listening to the car stereo.

This is true regardless of the medium. Your web page competes with announcements of "You've got mail," instant messages about funny YouTube videos, and the ultimate escape of the "back" button. Your magazine ad competes with a ringing phone and the pull of a more interesting picture on the next page. Your 10-second pitch at parties and tradeshows is dulled by cocktails, the din of the room, and the more interesting story in the adjoining conversation.

These aren't even "competitors" in the "products, features, services, benefits" sense. It's competition for attention.

So what can you do about it? A few quick ideas:

• Record your pitch in a noisy environment (a bar, a playground). Play it back; does it still make sense when you can only make out sixty percent of the syllables? Ask victimsfriends to point out what's engaging and what's not.
• Lay your printed material on a table and cover up different parts of it with a magazine. Your entire message doesn't need to shine through, but is it eye-catching enough for someone to notice the fragments, to become interested?
• Use marketing techniques that repeat a message. Distractions and other priorities will come between you and your target most of the time. Repeating often enough (using newsletters, blog, Twitter, Facebook) can push some of your communications through the chaos.

It's not enough to be compelling when you have 60 uninterrupted, full-attention seconds.  Your pitch has to work in the noise.

Do you have more tips for cutting through the noise?  Join the conversation.

Joy of Heatmaps
Have you seen those awesome heatmaps where eye-tracking equipment records exactly how people look at web pages?  It teaches us where people look first, where they dwell, how they read, and generally how to optimize page layout.

Some examples:

• The Eyetrack III group shows that the top-left corner of your website is viewed first and most frequently, that people just read headlines, and that people read about five headlines per page regardless of how many headlines there are (so make 'em count!).
• An Eyetools study quantifies the value of being ranked 1, 2, 3, or more in a Google search and the relatively low value of appearing in a Google ad.
• Another Eyetrack III study shows how placement, styling, and size affects advertisement effectiveness of by a factor of 8.

Fun stuff!  But of course you can't afford retinal scanners for your website.

Clicks aren't eyes, but it beats blindness
We can't track eyeballs, but there is something we can record: mouse clicks.  Enter Crazyegg, an on-line service that records all mouse clicks on your website and produces pretty click-heatmaps.

Of course the question is: It is useful to know where someone clicks?  If you had that information, how would you use it to change your website for the better?

Answer: Heck yes it's useful. Here's how it helped us.

Show, don't tell
The first revelation came from our book-ordering page.  We have a yellow box near the top of the page with the obvious options: Order the book or view sample chapters.  Here's what it looks like:

The click-heatmap of this section looks about like you'd expect; plenty of clicks on the clearly hyperlinked text:

Now it gets interesting.  This yellow box is followed by a list of subjects covered in the book, then the book order form, then the table of contents with sample chapters.  Hence the yellow box, allowing you to jump over the subject matter.

The subject matter list was not hyperlinked.  Oops:

We should have just listed clickable sample chapters instead.  (Which also would have satisfied the usual benefits vs. features rule.)

The click-heatmap made this error clear.  Don't just talk about your product, show it!

Tweak the menu
The next insight came from our side-bar menu.  Here's the heatmap:

Our observations:

First, people are most interested in "Features & Screenshots," "5-minute Demo," and "Licensing."  People are interested in seeing it work and finding the price.  Probably these links should be repeated on other pages, especially the product's main page.

Second, no one wants to sit through a 40-minute demo.  This valuable real estate could be promoting some other page -- "Why review code" or "Whitepapers" or "Pricing" or "ROI" or anything else.  We'll keep trying things until the click-test proves people are interested.

Third, people do see and interact with the sidebar menu.  That sounds obvious but with previous website designs we had trouble with people not noticing the sidebar or not understanding that the main sections expand. Now we know the current design works.
 

Bigger click areas
An interesting feature of Crazyegg is that you can separately view clicks that were "successful" (i.e. hit a hyperlink) and "unsuccessful" (i.e. un-linked text, images, or whitespace). When we compared the two types of click we discovered that some areas of our website weren't nearly as clickable as they ought to be.

Take these info-boxes on the front page of our website:

The heatmaps of successful clicks show that readers want this information:

Now compare with unsuccessful clicks:

Our error is clear: People click everywhere in these boxes, not just the teeny hyperlinks at the bottom. They clicked on box titles, images, descriptive text, even blank space. This evidence shows the entire area is important.

In fact this was a general trend across the website: The larger the clickable area, the better.

Filter the noise
Then again, some highly-clicked areas should not be hyperlinked.  Here's a normal, no-graphics, not-hyperlinked paragraph of prose from our Code Collaborator main product page:

It's full of clicks!  This looks more like eye-tracking than click-tracking.  When I first saw this I thought something was wrong with the Crazyegg software.  Then I thought maybe "ensure reviews" ought to be a hyperlink since so many people clicked that phrase.

But once this image got around the office, about half of us said "Oh yeah, I click on words while I read too.  Nervous habit.  Or when I'm reading to someone."

So this turns out to be noise.  Interesting noise, but not actionable.

The downside to Crazyegg
Not all of my experience with Crazyegg was positive.  The gripes:

1. Your website takes longer to fully load with Crazyegg.  In my tests with a home broadband connection, it takes between a third to a half of a second to load their 20.5k Javascript code.
   
   This is mitigated around this by putting their Javascript snippet at the end of the page, right before the </BODY> tag.  This way you incur the delay after the page had fully rendered where a user wouldn't notice it.  [Thanks to Hiten from Crazyegg tech support who supplied the correction to this section.]
    
2. The Crazyegg management interface is really slow.  It can take minutes for a page to appear.  On some occasions the pages never load.  It took me about an hour to retrieve the screenshots for this article.  This doesn't affect your live website.
    
3. If your website has dynamic content, the heatmap is meaningless.  This isn't a technical failing of Crazyegg so you can't count this against them.  Still, it limits its applicability.  Hopefully your more interesting pages aren't constantly in a state of flux.  Perhaps you can freeze them for long enough to collect some data.

In the end, these problems are just a nuisance, not deal-breakers.  The advantages in improving our website vastly outweigh these minor pains.

Conclusion
You really have no excuse not to try a click-heatmap technology on your website.  It's inexpensive, it's easy to set up, and the information is invaluable.  So get started!

Do you see something in these heatmaps that I missed?  Do you have a favorite website analysis tool you'd like to share?
Leave a comment!