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 

There’s the concept of a message losing its power to reach out and stick in the market, the more it is diluted. In every aspect of branding, you say the most by saying the least. You go further by being leaner. Bill Schley and Carl Nichols in their fascinating book “Why Johnny can’t brand” call this the Universal Paradox: the narrower you focus, the wider your message goes. All the feedback we’ve been processing on MiNeeds so far has been in line with what the theory and basics of branding suggest.

I like backing our empirical data with what the theory suggests and after this my partner Raed and I were even more determined to lean down to one single muscle of MiNeeds to be the branding message. The core of what we do. The message we’d want to stick and be remembered with.

MiNeeds is a big platform targeting to enhance the interactions in between local service providers and consumers. It has a powerful search engine as well. But the core of what we do is really to introduce a new way to shop local services, where consumers post their needs to receive bids from local service providers. It’s a paradigm changing phenomenon that instead of consumers doing the search, they are actively searched by interested businesses.

That was what our vision was to begin with, but along the way, since we built way too much technology to make it happen, we were trapped in the positioning paradox.

It’s like putting the pieces together in the triangle paradox. The way you arrange the components in the below triangle leaves extra space. Where’s that one extra square coming from?

Well, I’ll leave it up to you to point to the source of this apparent paradox in the above picture, but for us it was too many components speaking out too loud.

I’m glad to say that we did a great iteration on how we brand MiNeeds. Our main page tells the story clearly with animated characters now. If you’re interested in how we got out of the positioning paradox, check out our new page.

Of course, it’s just an opinion until it’s tested and approved by the market. For those of you closely watching the evolution of MiNeeds, I’m greatly interested in what you think of our all-new sharpened up branding. Comments and questions are welcome.

I’ll write more about the principles of branding and what we’re doing to apply them to MiNeeds in my upcoming posts.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com

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.

In my previous blog entry, “Using Online Videos to Expand your Business“, I talked about how online videos are starting to play a substantial role in business marketing. I also mentioned that I’ll be sharing some case studies that show the powerful effects online videos can have for small businesses.

Below, I selected two case studies that I was fortunate to witness for a couple of business members of my company, MiNeeds. While analyzing the effect of the videos that we created for those businesses via our filming service, we saw some extremely inspiring findings.

Case Study #1: A Chiropractor
Holly Hochstadt practices a very unique style of chiropractic care, which is a gentle style care from a holistic perspective. Holly decided to create an online video for her business and post it on her service profile page on MiNeeds (click here to view it).

Soon after her video was posted, we closely tracked her service profile page to monitor if there were any changes in traffic. It was incredible what we saw happen! The traffic on her page went up by multiple folds compared to before. Traffic numbers to her page at one week were over a 1000 unique hits, and continued to be higher than other chiropractors’ pages on MiNeeds in Seattle area.

Case Study #2: An Artist
Consider Erika Brumett. An extremely multi-talented artist in oil painting, wood burning, candle making, you name it! Erika recently created an online video on her service profile page (click here to see it). While tracking the traffic numbers for her page, we at MiNeeds noticed a spike in the amount of traffic Erika’s profile page was getting soon after her video was posted on her page.  

We notified Erika of the traffic outcome. Inspired by the reaction of clients and the increasing traffic due to her first video, Erika bought her own simple camera gear and started filming herself while creating the art pieces. Her goal is to show clients how each art piece is made. Also, give her clients the opportunity to hear, in the artist’s words, what each piece means from every angle!

Imagine buying a piece of art and getting along with it such a video clip from the artist. What a unique smart gift! It’ll be hard to believe that clients won’t be loyal to such an artist for life! 

Summary & Thoughts
Online videos have the ability to give small businesses a great unique exposure on the Internet. It’s an easy low-cost method to stand out. It gives the business strong branding. And the fact that online videos are available for online searchers to view at anytime is a great advantage for businesses.

In the coming few years, I believe that we’ll be seeing a dramatic transformation in small businesses’ focus on utilizing online videos to deliver their messages/advice and describe their products and service – to the world wide web.

I’m very keen on having my company, MiNeeds, continue to monitor, track, and analyze online videos’ effectiveness for businesses. In the next few months, I’ll be tracking direct sale returns based on online videos for businesses on MiNeeds. I’ll definitely be sharing any interesting case studies that arise so other small businesses can leverage.

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