Russ Wallace

Great article for startup sales teams. Perfect is the enemy of good; we all know that. But sticking to that philosophy is challenging when it feels like every single decision is make-or-break.

Just do it. Put yourself out there, be honest and eager, and most importantly, get really good at asking important questions that qualify customers and teach you how to sell to them.

“What are your thoughts so far?”

“Is this a problem you’ve seen?”

“Who all is talking about it? How are you planning to solve it at the moment?”

“Do you have any projects on your roadmap that you think would be a good fit?” 

“Who else is involved?”

“What would it take to get started on a proposal? What would you like to see in a proposal?”

Etc.

expectlabs:

Given the recent introduction of Echo, the voice-driven virtual home assistant device from Amazon, we’ve received inquiries about how MindMeld’s voice interface platform compares to Amazon’s Alexa, the brains behind Echo.

We have our own Echo here in the office and have a lot of fun playing around with it. It’s a great platform and does many things well. In particular, we’re excited that it’s opening minds to how useful voice can be as an interface for anything, beyond just mobile phones and tablets.

There are a few separate components to Amazon’s Alexa offering:

• Alexa: Amazon’s intelligent virtual assistant.
  
• Echo: The cylindrical speaker Alexa inhabits.
  
• Alexa Voice Service: Enables Alexa to “live” on other hardware/devices, freeing the assistant from only inhabiting the Echo.
  
• Alexa Skills Kit: An SDK to give Alexa new capabilities.
  

As a platform for building custom voice functionality, it is the Alexa Skills Kit that may have distant similarity to MindMeld. However, there are key differences in focus that distinguish the two services’ primary use cases. Indeed, in certain situations, Alexa and MindMeld can even complement each other, pairing up to harmoniously deliver a strong, flexible voice solution.

Let’s dive deeper: Alexa has built-in functionality of its own (such as searching Wikipedia, telling jokes, and setting alarms), but with the Skills Kit, Alexa acts like a switchboard operator between discrete applications. For instance, in Amazon’s own example, a developer of a horoscopes app could equip Alexa with the ability to answer queries such as:

• “Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes for the Gemini horoscope”
• “Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes about Gemini”
• “Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes to tell me the horoscope for Gemini”
  

In these queries, Gemini occupies what Amazon calls a “slot.” In this case, it’s the Sign slot, representing a fixed set of astrological signs. For a query of a particular structure to be possible, developers must specify example utterances following that same form. Developers also need to include at least one example utterance for each of the possible values of fixed-set slots like Sign.

Combined with the Alexa Voice Service, the Alexa Skill Set makes it easy and quick to build a simple app that is highly device-flexible, opening up exciting possibilities for hardware creators and developers of simple IoT applications.

For some applications, hard-coding all possible sentence structures and slot values is time-consuming enough to become an impossibility. This is where MindMeld enters the picture. The MindMeld platform has been built from the ground up to be optimized for large custom content collections. With MindMeld, any domain can be converted into a knowledge graph that defines all relevant concepts, their related ideas, and their likelihood of showing up in a search.

When the custom knowledge graphs are connected with MindMeld’s state-of-the-art NLU technology, the real power of the platform comes to the fore. With MindMeld, several hundred sample queries can power an application with human-like understanding of potentially millions of unique queries. This opens up the possibilities of a voice interface for any complex, large-vocabulary domain.

At the end of the day, MindMeld is built to offer a white glove, custom experience. Alexa is built to offer a mainstream, one-size-fits-all experience.

We’re betting big customers will prefer the former.

(via expectlabs)

We’re refining our sales materials at Expect Labs, and something basic occurred to me the other day: marketing materials are really just the answers to the top questions our sales prospects have.

Everyone knows you need to talk to customers early on at this point. But in crafting our sales strategy, I started to lay out the patterns we’ve seen so far. And one pattern is that before a prospect can know if they need MindMeld, they need to believe 4 truths:

1. The voice and AI capabilities available as of the last few months are something entirely new. This isn’t Siri, this is a new generation.
   
2. People are using voice capabilities every day. This isn’t just a wow feature; it’s a must-have if you want to be where your customers are.
3. Building a voice interface requires much more than just voice recognition. Small vocabulary, command and control voice interfaces are easy with Google’s voice rec and some regex. But consumers want large vocabulary, flexible, machine learning-based interfaces, and building those requires an army of PhDs…or MindMeld.
4. The time to start building these interfaces is now. You’re losing visitors every day to competitors if you can’t accept voice traffic.

We know these to be truths, because we know this space inside and out. But potential customers don’t, or sometimes they know one or two but not all four.

Once we identified these truths, a plan for marketing became easy–build white papers, blog posts and webinars around each of the 4 truths. Then confirm that potential customers believe all four of them, and educate those who don’t.

Again, I think this is a basic realization, but the point of this blog is to be Silicon Valley for dummies. I prefer to have things explained to me in the simplest possible terms; people here love to make everything sound complicated.

The takeaway–if your startup sells something, and you’re stressing over a marketing plan, start with the questions your customers are asking. List the top 4 or 5 that are not obvious but that are essential for getting customers to realize the value of your product. Write a white paper for each, explaining your answers in depth. Make visitors submit an email to download the white papers, and run traffic to the form. 

Presto: lead gen 101 for your startup. Pro tip: use Pardot to build and track campaigns like this.

expectlabs:

At MindMeld, we understand that a seamless UI can make or break your app. Therefore, we’ve released three important widgets that come bundled in our JavaScript SDK, along with a reference app to tie it all together. Our Starter Voice App is a fully working application, and can be used on its own or to complement any pre-existing MindMeld app.

Read More

(Source: expectlabs, via expectlabs)

These are the notes Google shared when I asked about guidelines for creating an Android app that could get featured. Notice the word “could”–nothing guarantees your app will get featured, but if you follow the advice below, you’ll be in a great position.

These may be shared elsewhere, but I had never seen them all in one place, so here you go:

First, start with Google’s app quality checklists:

1. Core App Quality

2. Tablet App Quality

3. Optimize your App

Also pay attention to the following resources for App design:

• Follow the latest design best practices outlined in the Android Design Guidelines. Here are a few essentials: overall navigation, Action Bar, drawer pattern, and Pure Android.

• Watch: TuneIn increased user engagement by following Android design

• Watch: Expedia goes beyond the Design Guide

Support multiple screens, from phones to tablets and devices in between.  See Google’s checklist on Tablet Quality and Tablet Optimization Tips in the developer console.

• Watch: NY Times adopted a responsive design and saw tablet usage increase 500%

• Watch: Hotel Tonight has seen over 50% of their recent growth on tablets

Use the Android Asset Studio to generate great-looking assets for your app

Quality and testing

• Test your apps to ensure they meet the Core App Quality Guidelines. Continue to Improve App Quality after launch.

• Listen to users and respond directly to their reviews on Google Play.

• Watch: Text+ integrates user feedback from Google Play into their product

Utilize beta testing and staged rollouts to get feedback from users early and often on changes and new features

Address a wide range of devices including those with older platform versions by utilizing the Support Library and choosing the right minimum and tablet API levels.

Take advantage of Unique Android Features and Google Play Services

• Where it makes sense for your app, make use of unique Android platform features to further engage your users, such as Homescreen and Lock-screen widgets, Rich Notifications, Share via Intents, Live Wallpapers, Beam, and Daydreams.

• Watch: Any.do uses unique Android features to maximize engagement

Leverage Google Play Services such as Google Maps, Location APIs, Google+ Authentication, Photosphere, and for games, Google Play Game Services

Monetize with Google Play In-App Billing - Users in 130+ countries can buy via credit card, directly thru carrier billing on 20+ carriers or with Google Play gift cards in select markets.  The simple purchase-flow reduces friction and users never leave your app when completing a one-time purchase or recurring subscription.

• Watch: Pandora increased revenue by 397% using subscriptions + in-app billing

• Watch: Evernote reduced churn by over 40% using subscriptions

Create an attractive Google Play listing:

• Make your Assets work for you.  Include a well designed feature graphic in your Google Play listing.  Localize your feature graphic, screenshots and description to improve conversions globally.  Create a great looking icon with the Launcher Icon Generator.

• Provide screenshots specifically for phones, 7" and 10" tablets in each supported orientation. These are used preferentially when users browse the Play store from their devices.

• Include concise and compelling description that speaks to your targeted audience.

• Improve marketing your app.  Use the official Google Play Badge to improve conversion rates & make sure you are linking to your app properly.  Use the Device Frame Generator to create beautiful marketing materials.

They also share many more useful resources if you want to keep digging:

• Android Developer Site - which focuses on Designing, Developing, and Distributing your app on Android and Google Play

• Android Developer Blog

• Android Sessions at Google I/O 2013

• See how other developers are succeeding on Google Play on BizDevBites

• See some great example apps in Google's Editor’s Choice apps

This is a great blog post from Swrve about mobile best practices. The post title emphasizes marketing automation (probably for SEO), but I think the points they touch on relate more to your app’s user experience.

Key takeaways:

Apps need tutorials. Just because you managed to get someone to download your app, that doesn’t mean they know why they did it or remember what it does. Figure that person is a frequent app downloader: almost one new app per week. So your app should always begin with a tutorial that reminds the user:

1. What does this app do?
2. Why does that help me?
3. How do I get the app to do that?

The tutorial is the most important part of your user experience, so you should focus on your analytics and optimize it for leading users to repeat app usage.

If you’re going to make an ask, prep the user first. A lot of app builders bombard new users with requests on first launch: approve the app’s permissions, connect with Facebook, allow push notifications. 

Don’t do this, especially for push notifications! They’re too important.

Depending on the type of app you’re building, you could get as low as a 30% acceptance rate on a request to allow push notifications. And once a user denies that request, you cannot ask again. The user would have to delete the app, then re-download it and launch again in order to change their mind.

When a user says no to push, they’re gone forever.

So you need to prep the user for the request: wait until they’re happy with your app, then explain how push notifications will make them even happier. This is contrary to web thinking, where you want to reduce the number of clicks to get to an action: when it comes to a once-in-a-lifetime push notifications request, inserting a couple of extra taps to prep the user is worth it.

Similarly, don’t just spring a request on every user to rate your app. Your app rating is hugely important to your acquisition efforts; we’ve found that a 4.5-star rating or higher on our clients’ apps can result in 10X+ the number of organic downloads. 

To get those kinds of ratings, you need to ask the right users and prep them first.

1. Find out first if they love your app (if they don’t, get them to give you feedback directly via UserVoice or even email, NOT on the app store). 
2. Then say thanks and ask nicely if they’d be willing to rate you on the app store. 
3. Last, optimize this request and stay on top of it in your analytics. Don’t set it and forget it; always be improving.

For more awesome insights into how you, as a performance marketer and/or product manager, can get the business results you need from your mobile app, I highly recommend the content on Swrve’s blog.

For the most part, reading tips on blogs is a waste of time. That’s my main tip if you’re new to Silicon Valley: beware the trap of thinking reading about work is working. It can consume you.

But if you’re at an impasse and need some specific tasks you can perform now to help your website or app get more attention, here you go:

- 16 Explosive Content Promotion Strategies. This is pure gold, similar to the SlideShare on What to Love & Leave in SEO in 2014 & Beyond. Writing is marketing, but people have to read what you write. So you need actionable ideas for how to get people to share your writing.

- The Pros, Cons and Costs of the Top Ten Content Distribution Platforms. Related to the above link, sometimes you need traffic today, not a month from now. When I ran media buying for DoubleUp, some our best converting traffic came from Taboola. Yes, those clickbait articles that show up as suggested reading on your favorite sites. They’re there because they work. If you’re buying traffic, you’d be silly not to try it.

- 13 Killer Link Building Strategies. Robbie Richards is a helpful guy. SEO is a long-term game (think months or years, not weeks; SEO will not save a company on the brink), but if you add 1-5 new links to your site every week, you won’t spend too much time on it and you’ll be setting your site up for free traffic. This could mean passive income (or inbound leads) for you down the road.

- The Fastest & Easiest Way to Get Wikipedia Backlinks. This is the 14th link building strategy following on the above. Tasks like this have a low impact in the short-term, so be smart about how much time you allocate to them. But my advice is to do something like this–low commitment now, high potential value down the road–for 15-30 minutes a week. Think of it as a productive coffee break, nothing more.