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

In my previous blog entry “Importance of Personas in Web Marketing“, I talked about the challenge of marketing in the dissonant Internet without first figuring out who your buyers are. In this blog, I’m going to briefly walk you through how we figured out one of our buyer personas for my startup, MiNeeds.

Step #1: Get Permission to Ask Questions
A month prior to launching the alpha version of MiNeeds website, we put up a very simple one-page prelaunch webpage on MiNeeds.com domain. This page hinted at what MiNeeds will be, and allowed users to enter their emails if they’re interested in receiving more information about it. Our goal was to collect visitors’ emails and earn their ‘permission’ to contact them further.

Step #2: Send Survey
We sent out an email survey to the people who signed up on our pre-launch page. The survey contained questions such as age and gender, and others specific to the services my company, MiNeeds, provides. MiNeeds website allows people to find local services and receive bids from service professionals on your needs. So one of our goals from this survey was to learn: who are the people shopping for local services? Hence, the buyer personas for MiNeeds.

Step #3: Analyze Results and Discover your Personas
We got an astounding 800 responses. We analyzed the respondents and learned that one of our personas is: women in their late 20s to late 40s. Their responses indicated that they make most of the decisions at home with regards to whom to hire to deliver services. They make the call for selecting the appropriate healthcare providers for their families, baby/pet sitters, home-related services, etc. With this piece of information, we defined one of our buyer personas. This substantially helps our marketing efforts since they can be a lot more targeted since we know who our customers are.

On the other hand, with online surveys, your audience will each get to do their surveys without any outside influence and at their convenience. And with one or two gentle email reminders, your response numbers can be great.

Best Regards,

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

Meet Pleo, the cutest infant dinosaur born this century! UGOBE is the mother designer. When it got pregnant with it, it knew that the internet is a great ally to propel its message about its coming product.

If you’ve attempted to do online marketing, you’ve realized how overwhelmingly chaotic and fragmented the Internet is. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of online social communities, blogs, groups, you name it! Where to start marketing and who-to could be a daunting question many face when they start attempting to market on the web.

The marketers of Pleo at UGOBE realized that in order to do an effective online marketing they needed to develop personas of their target audience. Initially UGOBE thought that the perfect “buyer” persona is children between the ages of 7-12. This is very logical, isn’t it? If you look at Pleo, it’s a captivating baby dinosaur with those wide eyes, engineered with senses of sound, sight, and touch. How can children not be the right persona!?

UGOBE found that it wasn’t right about the children being the main buyer persona. To determine the appropriate personas, they sent out an email survey (and regarding surveys I recommend reading my previous blog: The Business Idea) to 1,900 people who had registered at the pre-launch site they put together for Pleo. The biggest surprise they learned from this survey is that one of their main buyer personas is: women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s! Those women found that Pleo was wonderful and brings out a nurturing instinct that makes them fall in love with him.

The marketing team for Pleo now knew who to target for this persona. So, they developed a marketing message targeted for these women. And they positioned Pleo as the cute family pet.

Before you start marketing online, I highly recommend you research and define your buyer personas. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of effort and money targeting people that might not be interested. Besides, your marketing message might end up being too broad and not targeted. Defining your personas before you start executing your marketing is important as you saw with Pleo’s example. It could reveal some insights about your buyers that you never thought of. In my next blog, I’m going to tell you how we developed personas for my company, MiNeeds.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, 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

Brand performance is an interesting concept. The performance of a brand starts with the name of the company, supported by the tagline, messaging of the main specialty and differentiating aspect, and delivering on the same idea flawlessly, in harmony, through the customer interactions.

Picking a name is so important and not an easy task. It has to shine and has to be supported in unity with the rest of the branding elements. Picking a name is really a combination of art, marketing and consumer psychology. There’s a list of principles to abide by when picking a good name, among them are : Is it easy to pronounce, does it hint at the specialty, is it ownable?

Look at the story of eBizJets: Such a great name isn’t it? Without the tagline, slogan or the logo you get a sense of what the company does. eBizJets was an “aggregated charter”, a unique specialty as an answer to “fractional ownership” jet companies like NetJets. eBizJets would search thousands of affiliated charter operators to find the best deal for its business customers, promising them a value through better rate and flexibility. The business grew into a leading player with this model. Soon after, they faced a trouble. Somebody else claimed the ownership of eBizJets trademark, filed a suit and won. After that, eBizJets changed their name to “Sentient”.

Now, just imagine that you saw this name on a billboard or heard about it from your friends. What does that name mean? It’s not Sentient Airlines or even Sentient rent-a-jet, but just Sentient. It definitely violates the top three principles of a good brand name. This case study was covered in Bill Shcley’s great book on branding “Why Johnny can’t brand”.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder MiNeeds.com - A new way to shop local services 

After the silent launch of MiNeeds 2 months ago, we’ve been testing the idea and services we offer in the market from a variety of angles. There are channels of information flowing from existing customers (both consumers and service professionals), interactions with people in the industry, competitive analysis of the market, mentors, investors, friends, etc…the list goes on far enough to include my mom!

Clearly, we had to do one thing much better: positioning and branding of MiNeeds. As the founders, Raed and I both had a very strong “technology angle” when we originally conceived the idea. We did a lot of research in the market but we didn’t really focus on branding too much. We believed in the potential of what MiNeeds is capable of, but communicating it in the market was a challenge.

Branding, which is a function of positioning in marketing, is such an important concept that without done properly, any great product or service can easily be doomed to be lost in the ever cluttered markets of today. Focusing on branding, we did an iteration on MiNeeds to really sharpen the focus and the message we’d like to communicate. There are great resources on the topic of positioning and branding. During the holidays I was in NYC to spend time with my family and it was a great time to do more research on the topic. I also went to Boston for a couple of days and continued on my research in Cambridge. The popular bookstores of Barnes and Noble as well as Borders both have a different allocation of subjects in their physical stores. The bookstores in NYC are definitely richer in the subject of economics and investment strategies and lighter on technology compared to the selections of the same stores in Seattle. At the bookstores right next to the Harvard campus, there’s a whole aisle dedicated to books from Harvard Business Review. It’s actually fascinating to see how different the content of the same bookstores in Boston, New York City and Seattle are.

Branding books are really fun to read. I read about 8 books and perhaps shuffled through another 10 during this time. While the principles of branding is pretty much the same across most of these books, they really vary on the language, case studies and the way the material is presented in terms of arguments and structure. “Brand it like Beckham” by Andy Milligan was definitely a fun read to see how the principles of branding was applied to David Beckham as a commercial property which I picked as the title of this post.

What we went through with MiNeeds, in theory, was what is called the Positioning Paradox. We did an iteration over MiNeeds to break out of the paradox and I feel pretty strongly about it now. Next post: What is the positioning paradox, how we deteceted it and what we did to get out of it.

Not more than a decade ago, TV advertisements were the most dominant way to reach the masses and spread the word about a business, a service, or a product. Back then, television was the main hub that people used to get information and learn about their local community, its news, its services, and so on.

Today, the internet is rapidly replacing the traditional media, such as TV. People have become dependent on the internet to perform research about local services and businesses. Having credibility online has never been more crucial for businesses that want to continue to have an edge in their industry and local community. Therefore, businesses must be focused at presenting themselves in the most personable and approachable methods online. They need to educate their potential customers on the internet about their services and products.

The best way to educate your customers and let them know who you are and what services you offer is to meet them personally. Customers want to meet you and learn about you and your services. Therefore, creating an online video that describes your business values and services and possibly show your office space – is an extremely effective way to allow your customers to meet you before they even hire you.

One of the main advantages of online videos is that customers can learn about you at their convenience, whenever they do a search on your service. Unlike TV, your online video doesn’t just air at a certain time on a certain date; it is always there to stay. Anytime a user is searching for you, they can find your video and meet you online.

At my company, MiNeeds, we highly encourage businesses to create extremely personal service profiles so customers can learn more about them. We’ve been closely monitoring the profiles that contain videos and comparing them against other business profiles within the same industry category with no videos. The findings are amazing! In a nutshell, businesses that added online videos on their profile pages substantially increased their traffic. Moreover, their traffic became multipliers of the amount of traffic that other businesses are getting within the same domain that did not have videos.

In my next blog, I’ll be sharing some case studies from service providers on MiNeeds that created online videos, and share data on their traffic and how videos altered the way they think about marketing their business.

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

We are getting close to launching our beta for my startup, MiNeeds. We’ve gone through a very exciting initial stage for our website. So far, my business partner, Deniz, and I have funded the company ourselves without outside funding. And while we know we can go on organically for a while, we recently starting exploring getting funding to get more leverage so we can pound the market with our website.

We are researching tons of books, blogs, websites, and getting great mentorship on the topic of funding. In the next few months, I’ll be blogging about everything I learn so this information will hopefully benefit some of our readers. Please feel free to contact me anytime if you are going through funding and need to brainstorm. In this blog, I’m going to start with the concept of funding from a very high level. I will summarize the types of funding and share notes on each.

There are two types of funding:
1) Debt: money borrowed
2) Equity: traded for ownership of the companyThe choice on which route to take is a personal preference.

On Debt:
• You keep control of your company and don’t report to anyone
• Usually you pay interest instead of giving ownership
• Typical Investor type: Credit Unions & Traditional Banks
• The key element is price: the price of money you borrow should always be less than the return you expect from spending it.
• Credit card & such short-term loans have the highest interest rates. Long term loans, particularly those backed by assets, are cheaper.
• Business loans from banks typically don’t go for 30-year terms. They usually are 15-20 yr, and many times 5-year loans.

Investors, Credit Unions, and Traditional Banks: usually like this type of funding (Debt) when the business is backed by hard assets such as: Real Estate or Heavy Equipment (such as: PC Leasing). This way, the physical assets can back the loans given. That said, some banks do invest in startups not backed by heavy assets. They usually view such investments as long-term.

On Equity:
• If you issue equity, you reduce the amount of the pie you own, but you potentially improve your creditworthiness since your debt is less/none.
• Typical investor type: Individual Angel Investor, VC, Mezzanine Lenders
• Equity partners usually don’t demand their return until one of the following:
    o Business is sold
    o Business is liquidated

• Equity can come from a long-term loan:
    o Some entrepreneurs use funds from a 30-year home mortgage to fund their startups.

Combining Debt & Equity:
As businesses start growing, many of them seek out a mix of debt & equity with funding. Several of the texts I researched pointed out that: one of the keys to achieving maximum growth for your company us to use a mix of equity and debt together. The benefits of such a hybrid are:

• Equity provides your business with an asset base that can help with bank borrowing.
• Equity money is an asset that banks can use as collateral. And that gives the business and its partners better credit scores to be able to pursue additional borrowing.

Mix the various types of loans so you can preserve your cash flow + keep interest rate low. Successful models, that receive various funding types, mix it up so they have some loans with lower interest rates and others with higher, and they have their equity to leverage more borrowing if needed.

Increase your Numbers –> Become a Stronger Negotiator:
Whatever model you decide to pursue initially, your best bet is to build a successful business so you can negotiate from strength. The definition of a ’successful business’ is difficult to classify for a new business. In a nutshell, you have to prove to the world that your ‘numbers’ are going up! These can be: revenue numbers or your number of customers (in the case of online service websites). Always measure your performance, continue to improve it, and you’ll definitely increase your worthiness and negotiating strength when it comes to funding.

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