Everyone is guilty of looking at an app and saying "Wow that would be easy to build". What we don't see are the 1st release, the revisions, the decisions and the steps it took to mature the app to that state. We especially don't see the sacrifice the builders took to create that app, how many hours did they NOT spend playing with their kids while they were building that app. How many long nights did they put in?

It's easy to judge, easy to say someone got lucky and certainly easier to call someone gifted than to follow their lead and put in the sacrifice to build something special. It's much easier to call someone lucky then to bust your ass when the outcome is questionable.

George C. Wolf, a Broadway director says To make a show go from good to very good is very easy. It's a series of bold, smart things you have to do. But to make a show go from very good to brilliant...it's an endless series of details. An endless series of unbelievable details that lift it." You can see him say it at 3:17 in the video.

In app development, get the first, less version out there. Then, guided by user feedback and your own vision start iterating. Add features, take away features and polish. Iterate the features, the interface and the design. Ultimately this is the difference between your app and there app, who has the right features and who has the polish.

LessConf3010 will be in Atlanta Georgia, May 21-22, 2010.

LessConf is a conference with talks ranging from startups to design to marketing to business. It's a casual two-day event in Atlanta Georgia with awesome speakers here to inspire you. Each speaker will have a 45 minute talk followed by a 15 minute Q/A session with Steven Bristol.

LessConf3010 Speaker List

1st Day

2nd Day

Forget your logo, that's not your brand.

There's no longer such thing as branding. You can absolutely have a brand, but no one can perform "branding." For the same reason when you build a house they don't call it "housing," they call it roofing, plumbing, flooring etc. A brand has ingredients, many moving parts, which can consist of the following:

• quality of your product or service
• the speed you deliver it
• the support you give your existing customers
• the tone/look/feel of your product and advertising

Your brand is a byproduct of your actions. All these ingredients are equally important as the other. If you have a great support, great speed to deliver and your product is crap then your brand suffers.

And if you think that because you're a service based business this doesn't apply to you? You're wrong, you've got a brand too. How fast do you return emails? How soon do you engaged a potential customer? Do your customers feel like you have their best interest in mind? That's all a part of your brand.

In years past "branding" meant to come up with a logo, business card, letterhead, color guide etc. At that time "branding" was very important, it's what your customers and potential customers would see. But now, we live in dark times, your brand is less about the font on your logo and more about the important things. I know, it's scary to think you can't hire a designer and wham, you're branded. But that doesn't work because building and maintain a brand never stops, it's a constantly changing animal.

There is nothing more vital to your success than your brand. But it's impossible to focus on "branding" you must focus on all the moving pieces, the ingredients of your brand.

Addict: A person who is so longing for happiness that s/he makes a series of bad decisions until those bad decisions have become an incredibly strong habit. At first these decisions gave the appearance of leading towards happiness, but they do not, and once the habit is formed it is very, very difficult to change directions.

Is this how you are? Maybe not with drugs or alcohol, but are you like this about something? Have you lost sight (or maybe you weren’t aware in the first place) that all you wanted was happiness?

Are you like this with your business? Did the first few decisions work for you and now you’re just desperately repeating them over and over, because you’re unable to change tactics? We all fall into this from time to time, but once you realize it you can break free and make good decisions again, not just the same decision.

I’m Steve, and I’m a businaholic.

The latest trend in web app brochure design features a screen capture of the app on the home page. Does this screen capture really help sell the web app? Does it really answer any of the questions a potential customer has before signing up. How many people go from this screen shot directly to the signup page? I think a screen capture is a waste of valuable space.



We decide to replace the static screen capture on LessAccounting's brochure home page with a quick teaser video. Below is the 1 minute teaser video. I think anything over one minute is too long: a long video doesn't lure me into signing up, it bores me into leaving. The purpose of the video is to answer the user's question "Should I sign-up and explore, or is this app a waste of my time." We asked Adam of VJIX Creative to put together this video for us. We gave him some talking points and then left him alone. So far this video is being viewed by a large % of our visitors.



Over the next few weeks we'll be running A/B testing with and without the video, stay tuned.

Our surprise guest was Jason Fried of 37signals.com via video chat. Jason talks about the business philosophies of 37signals and other insights into his work day and inspirations.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who runs a small web consultancy and is looking for some consulting work. A great website design can help your consulting. But if no one is coming to your site then no one will notice the new design. If your current site is good enough your time is better off networking, blogging, talking to people and helping on open source projects.

Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe of Contrast.ie speak about web conventions at LessConf 2009. Follow Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe on Twitter.

We need your votes to speak at SXSW

Steve and I are hoping to speak SouthbySouthwest (SXSW) 2010. If you haven't heard of this conference you've been living in a cave and let me welcome you to the world outside.

If we're not speaking at SXSW I will blame you personally. :)

Two weeks ago we launched LessCabinFever.com, start to finish it took less than 40 total man hours. In this blog post I'm going to tell you how we did it and why we consider this a successful product launch.

What is LessCabinFever?

LessCabinFever is a directory of laptop workers that are interested in exchanging homes for a short period of time. We call them work-vacations, a vacation from working in the same place. Basically, do you work from home? Would you like to work from another city for a week?

Why we did it.

We built this app for two reasons. (1) I want to work from somewhere else about four times a year. Some place nice, some place new. (2) It's so easy to write a blog about launching early and waiting on building that feature that seems so important. We wanted to practice what we preach.

Here's how we did it

Budgeted time, stuck to it.

We estimated 40 total man hours to launch this project. We knew it would be tight but we wanted to push the comfort zone of the constraint. We wanted something that could be built in a weekend.

Code Base

The code base is LovdbyLess.com. With some minor tweaks, adds and mods we were able to get the app to the current state in 27 hours. LovdbyLess gave us a lot of the core features we needed. Are there other features that could have been added? Yes. Would they have made the app something more to talk about? Probably not.

Design

I purchased the logo illustration from istockphoto.com for $10. The logo took 15 minutes to create. The overall app design took 12 hours total, including writing the markup for the app. I believe "design" is hard to bid for a consultancy, many clients want collaboration and collaboration costs money because it makes the process longer. Would it have been worth it for me to create the logo by hand, taking a few more hours? I don't believe so, this logo is good enough.

Overall

We spent another couple hours testing the app and talking about the next set of features. Overall we're pleased with the app. It's not perfect, it's not bug free, but we stuck to our budget and launched something. We're excited, so far has been well received, users are talking and people are tweeting about it.

Going Forward

The app isn't on the front page of digg and we're not worried about the whole world seeing this app. A few people per day are adding their homes and we're excited. Once a few hundred listings are in the app we'll spend some more time making the app better and easier to use.

Launch is the Starting Line

We always caution our clients that launching an app is the starting line, not the finish line. We know all too well that for this app to reach people and be useful it will take time, marketing, attention and love.

Consider this a success?

I call this a success for many reasons. Working on a project with a looming deadline and then launching it on schedule is exciting. Building an app and forcing yourself to make tough decisions is a great process. Going from paper to launch in an extremely fast time is a great way for a consultancy to flex their muscles.

• Build something people need and love. People will talk about it.
• Release, release and release. Release it before you think it's ready, you're wrong, you don't need that feature.
• Your app will probably fail, most of them do.
• Be ballsy, don't follow the herd, make a courageous moves.
• Build something you want to use. Continue to use it, feel the user's pain.
• Google AdSense isn't a revenue model.
• Find the cheapest, fastest way to 500 paid users. People will pay for your app, if it's good.
• Design is an iterative process, not just development. And you won't get it right the first time, so don't sweat so much.
• Don't scale until you actually need to. (The front page of Digg does not count as need.)
• Don't spend any money.

In my last test results blog Kevin Burg said ...
With equal weight to both buttons you may tend to read the whole text on both buttons as a sentence, and instead of going BACK to the beginning (Try it) you go with the last thing you read (See the tour). How about flipping them – “See the Tour or Try Less Accounting Free”, and configured like the 2nd option?

So I ran this test for thousands of users over the course of 12 days. The results were surprising.

Conversions 12.3%

Conversions 13.8%

In college my web teacher pushed that the first element a visitor should see is the logo. They needed to notice the logo first to build brand recognition.

The web has changed.

Your site's content will make and re-enforce the story you're telling to your potential user. More websites are giving more visual weight to their content first. Like this.



Here's the visual key points I try to show.
1) Who is the user? Quickbooks users
2) What questions do they have? What does this app do? Does this app suck less than Quickbooks?
3) How do I get started?

This experiment ran for 8 days on LessAccounting.com, using the Google Website Optimizer. This test was a follow up experiment after I tested the layout flipped. That experiment rendered a 2% conversion increase (from 10%-12%).

11.9% Goal Conversion

12.3% Goal Conversion

My Theory

With the "see a tour" styling as a link instead of a button there is more of a focus on the sign-up button. However there is less visual weight in general to that area. In my next experiment I am going to add some visual weight to that area and try to keep the focus on the sign-up button.

Thoughts??