MiNeeds Blog

I’ve been writing about branding and positioning for a while. In this post, I want to mention an important component of branding : the emotional engagement.

In marketing, any effective and successful message does have an emotional component to it. It’s simple: people act on emotions. Among the emotions that engage the people the most and trigger action, “fear” seems to be the most exploited one by the marketers. I won’t be judging the ethics of advertising messages here but if you look at car and insurance commercials you’ll know what I mean. Even baby diapers and tissue paper is sold on fear as we all are familiar with the usual pattern of a disaster scenario in commercials, followed by a solution offered by the feature of the product.

From a branding perspective we thought of ways to create the right emotion with MiNeeds. We went through a lot of iterations on what kind of emotion we’d like to evoke with the brand. We were designing an internet service company for the consumers and the focal point of any emotional statement of the brand would be on the website itself.

Expressionism & Branding:
Back in school, I took several classes on aesthetics and history of art. It was my way of getting my mind off of heavy logic and math exposure from computer science. What stuck with me during those classes was the usage of emotions in expressionist art form.

Expressionists were opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe at the time and they emphasized artist’s subjective emotion, which went beyond the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted or altered. To evoke intense emotional expression, violent colors and exaggerated lines were used in paintings. Expressionists were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than the objective reality.

Take a look at “The Scream” from Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter who was a major influence on German expressionist movement. Such a masterpiece…I have always been fascinated by the power of this painting to express and create emotions.

We wanted MiNeeds to evoke the right emotion and were in fact inspired by the expressionist art forms to communicate it in a composition using the web site as the form. You’ll see the elements of expressionism on our new design with hand drawn elements and vivid colors. There are some conflicting goals of designing an intuitive, high performing, fast loading site versus using colors and images to do the emotional-engagement part right. In my experience, that was the most challenging part

This is only one of the ideas went into branding MiNeeds to make an overall and unique brand statement. A unique way to shop local services, a unique business model, with a unique, highly differentiating and expressive user interface. Did we reach our goal? The market will tell. Actually it has been telling us for a while. With the feedback we’ve been receiving, we’re in the process of making a few enhancements on the design of MiNeeds. Will it move it a bit away from the expressionist theme? Perhaps in the sense of vivid color usage and heavy emphasis of hand drawn elements. But in the core sense of heavy emotional engagement, it will be even better positioned.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of Http://www.MiNeeds.com - a new way to shop local services

On the background, I am hearing the inspirational and victorious music with high strings. The sun is rising on the still hot battleground in this misty morning. Yes, we’re alive! MiNeeds is live! Now, you have a new way to shop local services.

We’ve been working really hard in the last couple of months on the next version of MiNeeds. Raed and I have been sharing some of the challenges we’ve gone through during the development cycle in this blog. After thousands of re-prioritizations and tough calls on both technical and marketing problems I’m glad to finally announce the all new and superior MiNeeds.

So much thinking, brain-power and pure sweat went into this release and there’s nothing like the feeling of a great achievement after a long stretch. We applied a lot of branding and positioning elements to the new site. The flow is much smoother and the experience is much cleaner with the new site.

Check it out and if you have any comments to make, please send me an email. If you are looking for a service or have a service to offer, try the new version of MiNeeds and let me know about your experience. After this point, our journey will take a turn into a stage where we focus more heavily on marketing and engaging with our customers.

Best,
Deniz Erkan - co-founder of MiNeeds.com - A New Way To Shop Local Services

Have you ever tried to build a table without tools? Try running a company without some. In a startup, your resources are scarce, yet your workload increases by the hour. Before you know it, you’ll have way too many moving parts that you need to manage closely: technology, website, customers, employees, a million emails, marketing, funding, partnerships, bills, and much more!

Your ability to manage all the clutter will be put to the ultimate test. And in many ways, in order to execute and deliver on your timelines and keep everyone happy, you must be organized. In my previous blog, I covered lesson #1 to shipping on time: Shave you head. In this blog, I’ll go over lesson #2, which covers some tools and tips that saved our lives, in my company MiNeeds, in allowing us to constantly keep the ropes pulled together and stay organized.

1) Evolution is a Must

You have to continue to evolve your organizing tools as you grow bigger. The good news is: if you’re small now, you should be able to get away with using a few simple tools. Then continue to invest in using better organizing systems when things get busier.

2) Easy Organizing Tools

My partner Deniz and I, having spent 8 years in Microsoft prior to starting MiNeeds, immediately applied all the tools we used at Microsoft.

There’s no better email and scheduling client than Microsoft Outlook, I highly recommend not relying on web clients to organize your emails and schedule. Non of the available web clients today are anywhere close to what Outlook can provide for with.

A great folder sharing platform is Microsoft Groove. It allows you to create a folder system, just like the one you have on your hard-drive, and share it between you and others. Any of the collaborators can modify/add files and all updates will sync to your Groove view automatically. You can see who updated what and when. The only downside to this tool is that you must connect to the internet in order for your changes to sync to other collaborator’s views. You can work on any of your Groove files when offline.

We used Google docs for a bit too. The great thing about it is you can do real-time collaboration on documents. Which means that you and I can write a document together, without having to be in the same room, and we’ll be able to immediately see the changes applied as we type them. The downside of Google docs is that you have to be connected to the Internet to modify them. That usually caused us to abandon using this tool. That said, I read a few months ago of a plugin Google created to allow people to edit documents offline. But then again, the notion of a plugin or download sounds complex so we didn’t use it. I think Google should just download this offline piece to your machine when you sign in to docs without asking you to download it separately.

3) Growing More? –> Invest in Better Tools

One of the challenges we started having at some point after we founded the company was that the product, MiNeeds, and our team kept growing. So, we needed a tool that organized our thoughts, ideas, documents, bugs we found, and communication between the team so we don’t lose any important little details. My partner, Honor Gunday, created a phenomenal tool that did all we needed. It improved our efficiency at least 50%. The most important part is that all those little notes we were worried about losing before are documented and tracked now appropriately.

Fortunately, I feel very good about the focus and organization of our team at MiNeeds. It did take us time and continuous effort to create an organized system, definitely well worth all the sweat. We even created guides for new employees to ramp them up quickly on the tools we use. We’re now on target to reach our ship date for beta by the end of this week. Wish us luck!

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com: A New Way to Shop Local Services 

At my company, MiNeeds, we’re marching towards our beta release which we’re targeting to have live by the end of this week. We’ve had very little sleep in the last few weeks to make this happen. There’s nothing more satisfying though than seeing it all come together beautifully.

In this blog and the next, I will share a few learnings from this period that would benefit entrepreneurs to get laser-focused in order to ship your release on schedule.

During my 8-year career at Microsoft, what I found most astonishing is the number of times we slipped off our release dates. We had some of the fiercest and most seasoned entrepreneurs under one roof and we still slipped! Here’s our core sins, in my opinion, and what to do when you come across those:

1) Shave Your Head  There was a tradition at Microsoft where the general managers would shave their heads when their product approaches a release date. The idea is to inspire employees to be laser focused on nothing but releasing the product, not even your hair! Deniz, my business partner, shaved his head a month ago. And while I haven’t, we knew it’s time to be super focused in order to release the beta of MiNeeds by the end of February.

Unlike Microsoft, if you are running a startup, you know your resources are limited. So, being focused on what’s really important during this period is crucial. What really helped us stay laser focused is:

Deniz and I created a list of all the items we, and our development team, are working on. This list consisted of our development work, website design, marketing and branding work, user experience modifications, and so on. We placed those items into two buckets: 1) Items necessary for this release, and 2) Next release Items. Then, we took the first bucket of items and divided them into three lists: A) Must have, B) Should have, and C) Nice to have lists that we need to complete for this release.

2) Follow ONLY your Sacred List = the ‘Must-have’ List

The most important of these lists is the Must-have list. This should only include the bare minimum you items you need to complete in order to ship. So when creating this list, brainstorm with your partners to identify which items are must-haves in order for the product to be released. Review this list over and over, and you’ll see that every time you review it you’ll find one or more items can be removed from this list. DO IT and don’t hesitate.

The Trap:
Don’t fool yourself by keeping those ’small’ unnecessary items on this list. No matter how tiny the item/feature is, trust me, even if takes one or two hours to implement, those little ones are your worst enemy. They quickly add up and they will make you slip.

If you haven’t already read my blog, “The Greatest Sins of an Entrepreneur“, I highly recommend you read it since it covers the gist of what I’m trying to tell you here which is: to cut features early and not to over engineer your product.

In my next blog, I’ll write about utilizing the right tools to organize your tasks, documents, and communication with your team. I’ll explain how being extremely organized pays off a lot in the long run especially as the product keeps growing and the clutter grows along.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com: A New Way to Shop Local Services