Nail It....then scale it

Yesterday I had an opportunity to sit down with a good friend and trusted advisor who gave some excellent advice with regards to a product release, or even a company startup. His name is Lee Gibbons, and he has been a pioneer in the LDS media space and has also founded several successful businesses. Needless to say, I value and respect his opinion greatly.

While discussing the build and potential release of a facebook application that would behave in a very specific way and would allow members to reach out like never before, he gave two pieces of advice. He said,

First nail it...then scale it.

What this means is that sometimes ideas must be proven on a smaller scale before they can be "sold" to larger audiences. "Nail it" is a charge to "go and do" and means to create a prototype, in its simplest form, and figure out how this thing will work, what kinds of features will it have, exactly how will it behave, etc. And of course we'll need data. So after we build it we'll want to perform a limited release just to see how it is performing and if it is actually being used. Then, with a successful limited release it becomes easier to take that data and prove the concept so that the idea can be embraced and implemented by the greater organization.

He also said

fire a cannon down your own street first.

This means that if the product doesn't create value on a small scale it likely won't have legs on a large scale.

What this means is that you should make a little noise with your initial launch among your own peers and network. If people don't come outside and take a look around to see what all the fuss is about, then you probably don't have something remarkable enough to be a purple cow.
Lee said he learned this lesson the hard way and he has two failed business experiences to show for it. In each situation, he felt he was really on to something and he built the thing without "nailing it" or "firing a cannon." In each instance, a consultant he was working with warned him that it wouldn't work. "If this will work for legal people, why aren't lawyers back in Utah already adopting it?" his consultant asked. Lee would respond, "Oh, that's different...they are not part of a large agency like the big firms here in New York." The takeaway? If it (insert YOUR IDEA here) is not adopted by the few then it most likely will not work for the many.
I was grateful to hear both of these pieces of advice as they seem very sound and can likely save me alot of time and frustration. He also had another very interesting comment wherein it felt like he was speaking directly to me. He made the comment that if an idea will not leave us alone, and just keeps coming back to our mind then it becomes our stewardship.

And this is one idea that I just haven't been able to shake. So now comes the hard part...nailing it.

Email no longer rules?? I think not...

I recently read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Why Email No Longer Rules... . The editor references email as being more suited to how people used to use the web when we actually logged on and off and were our own content pipeline managers and cites social networking experiences such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Wave as more relevant for today's communication preferences. The article makes some excellent points that I would agree with, but I cannot say that I necessarily agree with the foundational argument that email no longer rules.

For one, people are switching to new ways to connect using much more interactive methods such as networking sites, SMS, and instant messaging. But this doesn't necessarily make email any less relevant. Email is used by many organizations both in the private and public sector as the communication method of choice to send messages both internally and externally. One reason for this is that it leaves a digital trail - a way to track who is saying what and an excellent way to pass on information that you simply can't do by way of a text or comment on a social networking site. Email growth last month was 21% while social networking site adoption was closer to 31%, so email is certainly seeing slower growth, but my thinking is that it is still highly relevant if you are talking numbers of users worldwide.

Secondly, email has already passed the spam test. It has been hammered on by spammers for nearly a decade until the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 came about. Social sites have yet to endure the test as spammers are only now finding ways to infiltrate those spaces using fake accounts and bots that ask to add friends automatically. What will happen when people start to get barranged with spam in their social networking sites the way we once will in our inbox? My thinking is that usage will not wane but the adoption rate will be affected.

Finally, there is a benefit to turning off and tuning out. Just because a communication channel encompasses a quicker turnaround time does not necessarily make it better or suited for all types of communication. I know many people who are fine with sending a message and then waiting for a turnaround response. Imagine the thoughtless society we would wither away to if EVERY communication warranted a response within 5 minutes? We certainly wouldn't have time to ask the right people the right questions or put in the amount of thought necessary for an enlightened response.

I am not saying that email is king by a long shot, but that it is still highly relevant in both private and public communications and will continue to be throughout the next decade.