What a difference a millisecond can make. When it comes to browsing the web, every tiny moment counts — and the fewer moments that pass between a mouse click and a fully loaded page, the better.
Speed is a bit of an obsession for most web users, and we at Preation are no exception. We fret over our Internet connections’ and mobile connections’ perceived slowness, and we go bananas for a faster web browser. This is why we released the new speed improvements to all Eden customers last summer and are continually thinking of ways to improve it further.
Given this better-faster mentality, the consequences for slow-loading pages can be dire for site owners; most users are willing to navigate away after waiting just three seconds, for example. And quite a few of these dissatisfied users will tell others about the experience.
What’s more, our entire perception of how fast or slow a page loads is a bit skewed. While we’re waiting for a site to materialize in a browser tab, pages seem to load about 15% slower than they actually do load. The perception gap increases to 35% once we’re away from a computer.
But for the precious milliseconds site owners can shave off page load times, they can see huge returns. For example, Amazon.com increased its revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of load time improvement. And Aol said its users in the top 10% of site speed viewed around 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%.
Site optimization firm Strangeloop has provided us with a slew of graphically organized stats on just how long pages take to load, why they take as long as they do, and just how long the average Joe or Jane is willing to wait around for your site.
Check out the infographic to the right (click to see it at full size), and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with site speed.
The Eden Platform is all about using your content marketing site to find new customers. This subject tends to be one of the more confusing aspects of business development. So how do most successful companies do it?
Even with huge budgets, customer discovery is more than art than science. I’ve listed the five basic steps below. The most important part of this process is to be very methodical in your approach. Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes. Be sure to pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format.
1. Classification Structure
This step is also known as segmentation. You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing – looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive. What makes a market attractive? Maybe your see alignment with your idea or product. Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities.
The segment selection process can be intuitive or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups. In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly.
2. Hypothesis Testing
With your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address. You search from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings. There’s a range of tools you can use. A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives.
What are you looking for? You’re identifying customer problems. They should be big ones – “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage. At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem. Is it dramatically better? Is it “demonstrable”?
If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development. Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group. You’re not just collecting information. This process never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come. Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in.
3. Nuance Testing
This step is easy to overlook. All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives.
You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.”
4. Customer Stories
Hypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making.
5. Solution Iteration
Tight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well.
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware.
Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley.
The new year brings a lot of opportunities for start-ups. Every start-up needs a great elevator pitch. It’s the quickest way to convey your company’s mission statement and start building rapport with potential customers. Many elevator pitches are too long, too confusing, or both. You need to make sure to keep them short, simple, and in terms that people who are unfamiliar with your business and industry can understand.
I’ve found a great framework for building elevator pitches. It’s just like Mad Libs in that you have specific blanks that you will fill out with the appropriate information. Here’s what the framework looks like:
“My company, (company name), is developing a (a defined offering) to help (a target audience) (solve a problem) (with secret sauce).”
What we want from your one-sentence pitch is to learn what your company name is, truly understand what it is that you’re building, who you’re going to sell or offer it to, what specific problem you’re trying to solve, and how your solution makes you unique.
To avoid at all times: vagueness (“we’re building a platform for SMBs who want to sell more stuff by using our software”), meaningless buzzwords (“we’re developing a post-PC, people-centric mobile app”) and empty, irrelevant words such as ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘award-winning’, ‘amazing’, ‘premier’, ‘fantastic’, ‘patent-pending’, ‘next-generation’ and the like.
Try it out! Post your elevator pitch using the guidelines above in the comments below!
What a difference a millisecond can make. When it comes to browsing the web, every tiny moment counts — and the fewer moments that pass between a mouse click and a fully loaded page, the better.
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