emotional connections as a principal target and utility as a side benefit,” he said. “That gives you a lot more stickiness and a lot more affinity, in the real sense of affinity. Lots of ‘affinity’ products fail because startups have failed to engineer emotion into the product.”
Your liabilities are just as important as your assets. You build a business plan to take advantage of your strengths, but you also need to engineer the business plan to minimize the impact of your liabilities.
That was Khosla’s preamble to a question for Johnson about ArmedZilla’s liabilities. Johnson replied that one challenge for the startup would be figuring out how to “open the right doors” and “play well with others” in a field—veterans’ affairs—with many existing organizations, interest groups, and service providers.
I don’t believe in business plans. I have never seen one that was accurate. If you are going to do anything, do a flexible plan that says, “Here is what is important, here is what I’m trying to test, and here is the sequence of testing I’m going to do.”
Johnson seemed set on building ArmedZilla as a standalone social network as the best way to serve his target community, but Khosla urged him to question that assumption and test a different approach—offering an ArmedZilla app within Facebook. “I would want to test both,” he said. “One of your liabilities is reaching all of these people, getting them signed up and started, and you should look for any way you can to reduce barriers.”
Appoint one person in your company who will be at every senior staff meeting and will only represent the users, the end consumers.
Khosla made this point to Davis of Relevvant, who spoke about the power of social data to help brands like MTV or Victoria’s Secret send ads and promotions only to the most receptive audiences. Khosla took the consumer’s point of view, asking “What’s in it for me?” No matter how targeted the mobile ads, Khosla said, they might still come across as spam-like. Having an executive appointed to the role of “consumer advocate,” Khosla said, would help the company to remember the end consumer-“the guy who makes the final decision.”
It’s fashionable to use the word “social,” but you want to be very clear what the value proposition to your consumer is of this word “social.”
Speaking with MacManus of CodeLesson, Khosla said he thought the company should look into ways to expand beyond its existing instructor-student interactions and allow students to help each other. “That makes the experience better for the person learning, offloads some of the burden on your professionals, adds scalability, and has the student who helped feeling really god about what he contributed—he is now a member of this community.”
A very specific value proposition is valuable.
This came up in Khosla’s interview with Zerply’s Karltorp, who said the company was struggling with how to expand beyond its initial market of Web designers to the larger community of creative-class professionals. Khosla said it was a good strategy to start out with a product for a specific group—“To get intense involvement, look for narrow niches, where you can get purity of branding and word-of-mouth propagation,” he said. But to get really big, Zerply might need to formulate a plainer value proposition. “Many years ago, we started a business school in Hyderabad, India, and we
