4Food will be bringing an innovative approach to fast food

I am excited by what I have read about 4Food, posts like this from uncluttered white spaces, a soon-to-be new restaurant in New York City with the motto of “de-junking fast food”.  It is still 32 days away from opening but it is already generating buzz around its unique use of social media and crowdsourcing. This place will be fun to visit.

I reached out to the 4Food team to learn some more, read on.

Q.  You are exploring some very cool uses of social media, social business.  What prompted you to begin down this path?
A.   The idea was to incentivize our customers to market their own products in a way that was relevant to them so that they would develop equity in the brand. The money saved on marketing helps us provide better quality ingredients while keeping our prices reasonable [The basic W(hole) burger is $5].
 
Q.  Your use of crowdsourcing to generate the menu is a very creative idea, how did you come up with this?
A.  See the founder story animation.  Once I’d punched the center from the patty (to enable it to cook “quickly & evenly”) I had to find something to do with it with the hole. I had the idea to fill it with a vegetables scoop in Nobu (feasting). I discovered that scoops changed  the taste profile of a burger like toppings transform pizza, and that a burger could be further customized by choice of cheese, slice, bun and condiment. Given that there are more than 64 million ways to build a W(hole)burger, it seemed logical that customers might want to name their own. So we give each new build an SKU and incentivize customers to market their burgers inside and outside 4food by paying $0.25 each time one of their builds is purchased. Best selling burgers feature on the Buildboard chart.
 
Q.  What are the early results of this effort?
A.   People we don’t know and that have never sampled 4food have been clamoring to create and name their own burgers.   More than 80% of people who register complete a 4food profile, which is extraordinary.
 
Q.  Are there others that you are learning from, modeling your efforts with?
A.  We are primarily learning from our own mistakes because we’re not aware of any other restaurant that uses social network marketing or crowdsourcing in this way.
 
Q.  What is your thinking on the ROI of these efforts?
A.  Our intent is that ROI from our technologies will be expressed in:

• Low cost viral customer acquisition
• Repeat business
• Reduced customer churn
• Lower marketing costs

4food has also invested in nutrition tools and an in-store Community Kitchen Commissary, from which we expect a social return in empowerment and improved health.
 
Q.  What tools are you using as part of your efforts? 
A.  We leverage Facebook and Twitter, and have developed a suite of tools [“We Know You Better”]  that enable Users to create smart online profiles [“4food Nutritional DNA”] and receive smart recommendations, by profile, by day, by time of day. This tool set also groups Users by diet (by DNA), and facilitates automatic promotion of User builds to the most relevant groups.

Regarding social media tools, we’re mostly using Tweetdeck but also use standard applications such as Google Alerts, PostRank and FriendFeed, but mostly rely on custom software to generate analytics and prioritize blog posts and bloggers and their relevance to 4food.

Q.  Have you looked at doing anything interesting with Foursquare checkins, giving the Mayors Burger special placement or something else fun and cool?
A.  FourSquare – there will definitely be a deep integration. We understand the power of leveraging the platform and engaging with that community. We don’t have any specifics to share right now, but we’re looking at unique and interesting ways to integrate 4Food.   In addition, we display 4food-foursquare check-ins on our 210 sq ft media wall throughout the day.

Q.  What has surprised you the most about the use of crowdsourcing menu ideas?
A.  It is early days but the differentiation is startling.  Our system works that two people can build the same burger and marketing it competitively using different names/messaging, so we expected to see quite a lot of beef patty + brioche + chili + BBQ etc… but that has not happened (yet).  We also use crowdsourcing to generate real time product purchase information to guide the replacement and introduction of new scoops on New Scoop Tuesdays!

Q. What is the coolest burger idea you have seen so far?
A. We really don’t want to pick and choose as in this case cool is defined by the community – so the coolest build will be the one at the top of the Buildboard chart!

Q.  Will you deliver?
A.  Yes, starting 2-3 months after launch – once we are certain we have our in-store service optimized. Meanwhile we have developed a very cool social ordering platform that allows users to invite friend to join them for a “FEAST” at 4food or (after 2-3 months) to be delivered directly to their office or home.

Today’s Social Support Communities are not for SMBs, what are you supposed to do?

I attended a Webinar on Social Business Strategy last week, hosted by Bob Thompson (who writes for Customer Think), with representatives from Lithium, HelpStream, and SAP.  As they discussed their solutions I noted the following:

• Lithium and HelpStream are true Social Support Communities (SSC), SAP is an example of CRM Using Social Extensions (CRMUS).  If you are unfamiliar with these terms read here.
• Lithium has a much slicker interface than HelpStream.  SAPs solution still looks like your father’s CRM system, database-like with lots of data everywhere.
• For SSC, Lithium has the most impressive list of Enterprise customers and is clearly the front-runner.

While I have asked several of these companies for information on pricing no one has officially responded.  Fortunately, people like the readers of this blog and my community on Twitter (and now Google Wave) weighed in, providing a lot of insight.  I promised to keep exact prices out of the post because they were not official answers from the companies, so here are rough estimates on total costs as well as things to take into account with these solutions.

• HelpStream appears to be the most expensive in terms of licensing.  My understanding it that it will cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars range.  Lithium, so I am told, is less expensive to strart but charges per view.
• The SSCs of today do not come with CRM capabilities built in, they integrate with your existing CRM.  While the companies will argue that this is a cleaner approach for you I disagree.  This will require higher cost in terms of maintaining multiple systems, additional IT headaches, and possibly more integration headaches as you must work with two systems.   Also, if you do not yet have a true CRM system you will want to go out and get one.
• • In the future I argue that SSCs must come with their own built-in CRM capabilities, but that is a discussion for another day.
• Services costs, for integrations as noted above, SSC setup, branding, etc.., are also very expensive.  I have not received good data here, still hoping for more and I will update you once available.

As you look at the information above it should be clear that deploying the above SSCs will set you back a lot of money.  Is the investment worthwhile?  If you are an Enterprise company seeking to actively engage with your customers I argue it’s a must have.  Work with the SSC provider of your choice to get the best deal possible and then get it deployed.

On the other hand, if you are a Small or Medium-sized business I would argue you simply cannot afford to get into the game with these providers.  While other alternatives may be available in time, I would recommend the following, very light-weight, SSC approach:

• Ensure your employees are aware of the pros and cons of working within the various social networks.  Give them guidelines on what to monitor, how to respond, etc.  Don’t ask them to preach the company line, but ensure everyone becomes a soldier in your social army.
• Setup a Twitter account for your business.
• Setup a Facebook account for your business.
• Have your support staff install Tweetdeck.
• Use Tweetdeck to monitor traffic for your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• Use Google blog search and Google Reader to setup searches for text related to your company.
• Monitor each of these tools, helping customers, and potential customers.
• As you have information related to your industry share it with your social communities.  Do not make the message about you, just participate.

Is the above perfect?  No, far from it.  It is inexpensive though and will get your company into the game.  While you won’t have the same tools as the bigger players you won’t be running around in the dark either.    Go out there and get your Social Business Strategy rolling, deploy your Social Support Community, and keep in touch.  I would love to hear how things are progressing.

John

How I became a Silverlight expert

Okay, you caught me, I am not a Silverlight expert. I do, however, play one on TV and feel qualified to discuss Silverlight at great length….

Before I begin though, how did I get here?  The Swimfish engineering team is reasonably sized with teams in three offices, 2 in the US, one off-shore.  We’re doing well and, to a large degree, knowledge and skills are fairly well spread out.  We have been working on a very cool piece of software for an upcoming pilot and the date has been tough all along, getting harder day by day as the team works through some interesting issues with Silverlight…

Now, it became apparent yesterday that we were not going to hit the pilot date without some quick thinking or some major chopping of features….  I’m not a fan of chopping unless necessary so I did the only thing left to do…. I stepped in myself and became a Silverlight expert.

The team responded to the fact that I was with them late into the night, will be again tonight to ensure we’re on track.  Did my expertise at fixing typos and adjusting item positions save the day?  While my coding skills are clearly legendary they did not make a major difference, the real pros got the job done.  My willingness to join in, to be part of the solution instead of just throwing it into their laps is what got us through night 1.

I always believe that great leaders must know how to delegate.  If you don’t you will never lead a team of more than one.  However, great leaders also need to know when to roll up their sleeves and get into the middle of things.  Are you willing to do that when the time comes?

Oh yes, let me tell you something I learned about Silverlight…. First….

John

Reflecting on startup hiring

I have been focused on hiring this week, as I’ve already discussed.  I love the entire process, from writing the job posting to reviewing resumes to chatting with people on the phone.  It’s a great way to meet people.

I read an interesting post on The “Top 7 Hiring Mistakes for Startup Businesses” which does a nice job of summing up the process;  I’d recommend giving it a read.  My only disagreement with the post is point # 4 which recommends against hiring generalist.  This is dangerous advice.  Start ups are full of ups and downs and there are times you must lay off staff to make ends meet.  It is far from ideal, in fact it’s horrible, but it is a reality.  I have seen this in every start up I have worked in (4 total) and we  were fortunate to have these jack of all trades on the team.  It made it possible to have people that would write code, design UI, and write help.  It made it possible to have people producing marketing materials, making sales, and even answering the support lines.  Would we have been better off with specialist?  Yes… If we had the money.  The generalist saved the day.

Since I’m on the subject of hiring, I wanted to share with you a few mistakes to avoid when it comes to the job application process.  I have seen all of these this week:

• Applying for a job and not including your resume.  I have received almost 40 applications through craigslist and 4 of them were sent without the resume attached.  I will not e-mail you back.
• Sending an application e-mail without any attempt at writing a cover letter.  Come on, make an effort and tell me why I should open your resume.  If you don’t make the effort, I will not either.  I received five e-mails with no message.
• Having typos in your resume.  While not a deal breaker you are failing to make a good impression.  Spell check please.
• Including the names of your references in the resume.  While not a bad thing when I know that your middle school vice principal is one of your references I have to ask myself how successful you have been in the first few years of your career.

How is your hiring going?

John

Hiring, getting back to basics

This week I shifted into hiring mode as I have several positions that we are trying to fill.  These positions have been open at Swimfish for a little while and filling them is now becoming a critical need.  With the high unemployment rate you would think we would have easily filled the support, development, project manager, and web designer positions we have open.  So what gives, why haven’t we filled them yet?

• Hiring qualified talent is hard, always.
• Hiring requires focus.  Life in the startup-lane is always crazed and you are balancing countless priorities.  If you want to successfully hire the right people you must focus on it.  You need to clearly identify the job needs, identify if you need recruiters, and work closely with these recruiters that you have brought on board.  It will not happen without focus.
• Our Support and Development positions are in El Segundo, CA and our main office is in Danvers, MA.  It is harder to recruit outside of your own backyard.  Ask your network for help.

Alright, so today began with focus on hiring, how did I approach it:

• Reviewed all open positions to ensure they were clear and accurate.  Sometimes you will write a job description and find out a month later that it is no longer valid.  Keep it valid.
• Reached out to my personal network, my LinkedIn network, my Twitter network.
• Posted the El Segundo position on twitter.  It’s not in my backyard and a $25 investment to post a job is money well spent.
• Repeat step 2.
• Repeat step 2
• … You get the idea.

Seems simple, right?  What were the results:

• Nearly 30 applications for the Support job in the first few hours, more continuing to come in.  The majority of these came through Craigslist but have 5 or 6 more leads through the networks.
• Have 4 new leads for project managers.  All of them are high quality and came from my network efforts.
• Have 3 leads for graphic designers.  This is a 3 week consulting gig and the leads were off the mark.  The issue is not the network in this case, the issue is with the job description.  I will go back and update it

Not bad for one person leveraging the power of their network.  Imagine the number of resumes you should be seeing.

John

A community-developed post on finding your next startup

I believe that your social media communities should provide value to all participants in the community.  In that vain I asked those in my Twitter community for their advice on selecting your next start-up.  While the responses were not large in number they did provide some valuable information.

• Good advice from Rizwan Iqbal:  Good advice from Ask people about the company culture and if possible visit the office at least a couple of times un-announced just to check how the environment is generally. Sometimes people might not appreciate your visit but at the end of the day, they would be glad you did.  Also check out the link that he shared with me here.
• Advice from Rob Brucker. Rob suggest checking out this site to find a job (most of these are vc’s looking for people for the start up they are funding), then do a cross reference between linked in and the company, find out who’s in charge of hiring.
• David Szego shared his thoughts, “Pitch a plan based on how you’d do things to make employees happier – not why your widget/service is “better”".  In other words, come prepared, show the people in the company you’re giving thought to what differentiates them from other companies.

Can you help extend this social experiment by providing your responses via this blog?

John

Why Seagulls will never be Entrepreneurs

While I was tempted to have the subject of this post be something like “Seagulls:  They taste like chicken”, I thought better of it and decided to get right to the point, business is serious stuff and there is no room for humor. 

The Swimfish office in Danvers, MA is in the second building of a small office park with two other buildings surrounding us.  We recently had a a seagull who spent weeks pecking away at the door of building three.  Fascinated by its’ reflection in the glass, it would simply peck the day away.  While I can’t be certain, I believe the seagull was oblivious to his lack of progress.  Eventually, the building’s owner had fake owls put up near the door, the seagull left, never to return.

Too many leaders spend their lives acting just like that seagull; going through the same motions day-in and day-out, expecting results to improve if you just keep repeating what you have always done.  You must always take time to evaluate the tactics you are employing to ensure they are best suited for the circumstances at hand.  Weekly, if not more often, take moment to look around and make sure you are not like that seagull, attempting to pursue a goal that is not right for you or your team.

As business leaders take away one more lesson from that seagull and remember that the threats to your business are not always obvious and you must look beyond your narrow view of your business to understand all that is occurring in your marketplace.  Sometimes you are watching out for the wrong threats.

We never did see that seagull again.  I hope that it has found someplace else where it can not only survive, but thrive.  If you have a second, could you pass the honey mustard sauce?  This chicken salad sandwich is missing something.

John

Music software company on the move: ArtistData

In my former role, as the CTO at Sonicbids I had the pleasure to meet with many bright entrepreneurs in the music industry.  One of the people that most impressed me was Brenden Mulligan, Founder of ArtistData.  Brenden came across as someone truly passionate about helping the entire music community, and he is someone who “gets it”.
 
Artists have a challenge similar to corporations who are embracing social media, keeping their information up to date on a multitude of web sites.  I know several artists and they struggle to keep their information (calendar, profiles, videos, etc..) up to date across half a dozen, or more, web sites.  ArtistData simplifies this challenge in a very simple, yet powerful way.
 
Brenden recently shared some powerful stats about user adoption of their tool.  I promised not to provide exact numbers but it’s worth noting that they have thousands of artists using the platform and more than 700,000 updates have already taken place.  Impressive numbers considering they have spent no money on marketing and the product that is still in beta.
 
If you’re interested in learning more, check out Brenden’s interview on WeAreListening
 
This product will make a big difference to any artist out there.  It may also one day, be a product that companies should investigate for managing their social media outreach, as the same challenges are becoming increasingly apparent in Corporate America.

Sunday coding is productive coding

Okay, truth be told I would have much prefered spending time with my wife and kids, but there are days where work comes first, today was one of those days.    At the end of the day though I’m happy to say we are looking good to posting a new version of the Swimfish Milestone Tracking Matrix tomorrow night around 10 PM ET.

While I’m mentally drained I did want to mention a couple of topics that are worthy of discussion, would love to hear your thoughts (either as comments or tweets), when you have time.

• What is the best way of generating a web-based installer for your web applications?  While I generate web deployment projects I have to believe there is a better way.  Has anyone had success with other methods?
• Why is it that the best software defects are found in the last 48 hours of a product release? 
• At the end of the release what processes do you follow to deploy new builds to your QA team?  We are constantly deploying new builds as fixes are rolled out.  What’s your approach?

I’ll fully explore these topics in upcoming weeks, looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the meantime.

John

Post-mortems in startups

Post-mortems can often be a large waste of time.  I remember years ago setting in large conference rooms with a hundred other people, grouped by tables of 8 to 10.    We would spend anywhere from a half day to a full day discussing problems we encountered on the project, possible solutions, all the while filling up reams of paper with ideas.

It was exciting at the time.  Dozens of bright people thinking about all the great things we could do better, and committing to solving all of the project woes the next time.  Next time we would get it right.  The problem, of course, is that all of those reams of papers rarely translated into real change.  We would all go back to our daily routines, busy with our “real jobs”, and we would often repeat all of the same mistakes.

We were not the exception.  Many teams try to use post-mortems and set unrealistic expectations.  I’ve used the following simple approach for a while and it works; it can also work for you.  For those that work for me now, this is the post-mortem process that begins this week.  Here are the keys:

• Do not start the process too early in the startup’s existence.  In the beginning you are focused on getting product to market and are defining a baseline process.  You need to give it a few months to shake out.
  • I know this sounds backwards, why wouldn’t you focus on process improvement right at the beginning?  As your team is coming together you must have a strong hand on laying the initial framework.  You need the team’s buy-in but you must also steer the ship with confidence and poise, letting people’s creativity fully flow into getting their core jobs done.  Once everyone has hit their stride begin looking for improvements.
• Make sure everyone understands the following.  The processes that are currently in place are acceptable for where the company currently is, but not for where it must be in 3, 6, 12 months.  You must continue to get better or the company may not exist in 12 months.
• The post-mortem must be a regular part of your schedule.  The optimal schedule for me has always been 4 – 6 weeks.
• When you meet, here’s what you should do:
  • If you are the manager of the team DO NOT TAKE OVER THE MEETING.  Facilitate the meeting, make sure everyone is involved, but you are just one voice in the room.
  • Make sure everyone has a chance to speak about what challenges they encountered since the last meeting.  Don’t propose solutions yet, just note the challenges.
  • Ask everyone what worked great.  Make sure you applaud the things you are doing well.  I am certain you’re doing more right than wrong, don’t lose sight of this.
  • As a team, identify the one or two biggest pain points from the list you’ve come up with.  One is best.
  • Once identified, discuss how you will eliminate or at least minimize this one items impact between now and the next meeting.
  • Now, the important part.  As a team, commit to improving this one item.  A single item does not sound ambitious.  However, in a startup the insanity of your daily lives makes it hard to commit to solving too many problems.  Pick the biggest problem and eliminate it.
• When you leave the meeting, summarize the meeting, noting what has been committed, and schedule the next meeting.
• Now, the important part.  With every daily standup, remind people of the post-mortem committment.  Make sure that everyone is following through on the changes the team agreed upon. By the next meeting it will be a natural part of your process, ensuring you have one fewer painpoint.

Do you use post-mortems today?  Do they work or are they inneffective?  Let me know.

John