The customisable “iTunes Blog Parts”

The fourth post in my “becoming a creative hybrid memoirs” series, describing my experiences growing Alien-Eye, a hybrid creative company in Tokyo which I co-founded in 2004. This chapter covers the period from 2008~09 or so, and describes the microblogging boom that exploded around that time and some of our exploits with it.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

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With the novelty of Mixi peaking out, the next big wave to hit the Japanese web was the micro-blogging boom around 2008 to 2010 that  made Japanese the most blogged language on the planet for a while. During this time everyone who wanted to be with it and online had a blog, It was a lifestyle accessory.

Although blogs had been around since the 90’s, they were now not just for geeks but for anyone who was brave enough to stick their head up above the parapet of Mixi’s anonymity and declare their lives open to the public (although many of the blogs were also anonymous), and web giants like CyberAgent grew off the back of new blogging platforms that for the first time pulled in celebrities from traditional media, such as magazine models and TV talents.

It was significant, not least because Facebook would not have succeeded in Japan if the microblogging boom had not broken down the “closed-ness” of Mixi. Facebook also likely benefited from the blog-weariness that followed the blogging bubble.

iTunes meets Japan’s blogosphere

During this time we had started working with the iTunes division of Apple in Japan, who were looking to grow their music downloads business rapidly, and later apps. They had already got their catalogue of Japanese artists up to critical mass, but perception lagged behind and most people saw them either as software for ripping rental CDs, or rightly more as a store, but one that only had foreign artists, hard as that is to imagine now. This time the solution was a technology hack, but one that played very much of the design iconography of the early iPod series, as well as blog-fashion consciousness of the times.

One of the strongest drivers of the blogging boom was the culture around styling your blog with the right colors, characters, favourite brands and accessorizing with blogparts, since so many of the blogs of this time were lifestyle accessories, rather than a medium for sharing experiences, ideas of opinion. Known outside of Japan as “widgets” blogparts were the focus of a lot of attention for a while, with media sites ranking and reviewing them and media spends promoting branded blogparts.

Our solution was to suck the chart data out of the music store via the RSS feeds and insert it into customisable blogparts that were designed to look as similar as possible to the iPod Mini, and later the iPod Nano series.

Crucial to their popularity was to allow them to be customised to the style and tastes of the host blog. Firstly the colour could be chosen from among the official iPod colours. Similarly the chart genre could be picked from among a dozen genres, from JPop to HipHop, meaning that the look and musical taste of any blogger could be satisfied.

Designed to scale

In general this approach, essentially a product range strategy, of creating a line up that is consistent in form and hence recognisable as part of the lineup, but customisable in the details, is a real winner in the consumer psychology of Japan. It is for instance the cornerstone of UNIQLO’s success. They popularise a line of clothes that are identical in all but colour, but then make 20 subtly different colour varieties of it. This allows consumers to buy into the same look as everyone else, while feeling that they have made a unique choice.

Our blogparts were really right for their time and place, a blogging culture hack that had the Apple brand behind them, so we knew if we got them in front of the right people they would soon take off. First we promoted them through the blogpart ranking sites, with both media and editorial placement. We also ran highly targeted banners that featured on the blog update confirmation page on major blogging platforms like Ameba and LiveDoor. We also did some seeding with music influencers who had blogs, but only a handful.

They quickly took off and within the space of 6months were on the blogs of 15k music scene influencers and fans, and had huge UU and PV counts every month. In fact, the Google Analytics tracking code we had in those blogparts gave us so much interesting insights into the blogging culture.

With such broad visibility among the digitally savvy music scene the solution played an important role in shifting perception of the store’s catalogue as well as channeling a lot of users to the store, and all this for a pretty insignificant development cost upfront and then modest hosting fees every month.

Digital music downloads have long been dominated by downloads to mobile devices, and these revenues were all controlled by the carriers. So although iTunes was always growing in Japan its inflection point was of course the arrival of the iPhone, and carriers have not had it quite so easy ever since. Although the App Store was around before the iPhone launched in Japan for the benefit of iPods, again it was the iPhone that made it take off.

So our blogparts were also plugged into the App Store chart rankings RSS feeds, and away they went driving millions more impressions on a different set of blogs for virtually no extra cost.

The widgets were initially built in Flash, and worked just fine, but after a couple of years of garnering millions and millions of free impressions every month for the iTunes Store and its products we were told that Flash could no longer exist in the Apple ecosystem. So we had to rebuild them in HTML5 in about a month, and we did, and it made us pioneers in Japan of this now near ubiquitous technology since it was not a necessity for anyone else.

How big a can a widget be?

The blogparts also spawned a second bigger technology project which began when a small ISP portal site offered iTunes a tab on their portal in exchange for weekly updated content that would then fuel click-through purchase on the iTunesStore and hence affiliate revenue for the ISP portal. Building HTML pages every week was never our cup of tea, and besides would have been an inefficient investment for our client, so we hit on the idea of developing on top of the blog part engine to create fully automated main-column embeddable widget, and called it Partner Parts.

From the get go we saw Partner Parts as media product that could be used by multiple online distribution partners, from bigger portals to music community sites to web magazines, with minimal costs and total scaleability. Where the blogparts worked to distribute to the long tail of personal blogs, Partner Parts targeted the mid to high traffic site properties.

Unlike the blogparts, in order to work with multiple partners and for them to be able to customise their own widgets the system need to have an account structure and basic CMS, and a team to maintain them, and yes put them all in HTML5! I.e. more like a real web product.

We built this into a really solid solution, and got up to around 15 partners in Japan, and at one point we were in discussion with various Apple markets around the world to help them adopt the system. But the talk fizzled out and although we kept it going in Japan it never reached the scale we had hoped.

When hybrid teams don’t work

In retrospect I can connect the success of the iTunes Blogparts and the experience of trying to productise Partner Parts to the biggest blunder I have made in business. Their relative simplicity compared to the reach they were able to achieve gave me first hand experience of the scalability technology can give you, and a thirst to do it again, only bigger, and with the IP owned by us. I started trying to build out a development team within Alien-Eye, paid for by client projects, but aiming to build out our own products.

Of course the blogparts would have been nothing without the the massive content platform Apple had established with iTunes, its conviviality through the RSS feeds, and the momentum that the Apple brand had with early adopters consumers at that time, so it was in many ways a false lesson in instant scaleability. We were just joining a couple of dots within the realm of the brand.

We were not the first digital agency to try to spin off a product, or pivot to a product strategy, and were not the last either, and while I am sure there are success stories, it seems to be a pretty hard thing to pull off. I believe having a hybrid team of technologists, marketing experts and project managers is actually pretty ideal, but they have to be focused on the same thing. To make the technology product you really need to be focused on it, and perhaps riding your luck on the marketing stuff leading up to making the transition, so you can get to a minimum viable product as quickly as possible then bite the bullet, fire your clients and get investment, not necessarily in that order. We lacked that focus, not least myself, and we also never found a leader for the development team, so the DNA of the company at the top was all marketing in background, and that makes it really hard to recruit, retain and have a technology vision to inspire and direct developers.

In the end the combination of the 2011 Touhoku earthquake and tsunami and a bubbly job market for developers in Japan at the same time brought about a mercifully swift end to the internal dev team experiment, but not before we had made some great mobile apps, social games and other projects I will be writing about in following episodes.

Incidentally now and Lowe Profero we have a couple of hundred developers in our office in Beijing doing development work for all the offices in the network, including ours. Having this kind of scale and competitive price advantage combined with quality assurance is the way to go.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 4: Blog Culture Hack appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

An initiative aimed at supporting international web / mobile brands grow in Japan, and developing Japanese growth hacking talent

I was recently interviewed for a Japanese creative industry magazine “Project Design” to talk about the relevance of “Growth Hacking” (Japanese article here), the approach to growing web and mobile startups that has come to prominence in recent years, to established and non-web businesses. I was interviewed in Japanese, but wrote up the main threads of the conversation in English below.

First of all though some context. Why was I being interviewed about Growth Hacking? I have been a involved a lot with startups one way or another. I have had numerous startups as clients over the years, companies with a good product-market-fit for Japan for whom my company has effectively been the growth team for the Japan market. Also through my role as a mentor for 500 Startups, Silicon Valley’s top accelerator program, where I offer advice to founders and growth hackers on how to grow in in particular, but anywhere for that matter. I also run Growth Hacking Japan University, a 7 week lecture course in Japanese that I have run twice now, and plan to run again soon, teaching growth hacking techniques and strategies to Japanese founders and aspiring growth hackers, and learning a lot from the participants at the same time.

Most of the time I work with bigger established brands, including cloud tech companies and web services, for whom we (Profero Tokyo) position ourselves as “the performance engine” that drives incremental results in one or a combination of marketing areas. I would not describe this work as “growth hacking” per se, but being so focused on KPIs and striving to create operational efficiencies, actually the work has a lot in common with what a growth team in a web startup would be doing, and this is recognised by several of our client partners. Ginger-Software, the disruptive native English writing technology, founded in Israel, is one brand for whom we fulfil this role in Japan.

At Profero Tokyo we are very conscious of the hybrid team we bring to each brand partner, the skill sets that combine when our specialists work together to create additional value, both through coming up with ideas that cross disciplines, as well as synergies that drive efficiencies for our clients, and in this sense we have embraced the growth hacking philosophy.

Here are my notes from the interview:

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Growth hacking can inform the philosophy, techniques and most importantly the hybrid teams that established companies should bring to new business models.

Growth hacking needs an agile environment

The whole point of Growth Hacking is to grow a new business model as quickly as possible. That objective is shared by many established companies when they start a new business division or launch new products, so in principle there is nothing stopping big companies from “growth hacking”. However, growth hacking works best in the purest sense when nothing is held sacred, allowing the product-market fit to be established without constraints, such as “brand XXX’s target are always YYYY type of consumers”. Nurturing this sort of agility into the culture and environment of a big company is very hard to do, hence why companies tend to become less innovative as they get bigger.

One way of looking at what changes when you go from a small agile startup to a big established company with many stakeholders, existing customers and partners, is to think in terms of where the efficiencies are coming from, since all business models need to be creating efficiencies of scale of some kind or another if they are to grow.

In small companies with very little baggage and a small cohesive team internal efficiencies should be off the chart, but because the business model has no scale yet in the market, it enjoys minimal external efficiencies. As companies grow and gain momentum in their market they go through a tipping point beyond which they have broad awareness among their audience, people know what to expect, they can enjoy economies of scale when purchasing, and in general external efficiencies get better. But at the same time they tend to become more complex internally with multiple management levels, physical and social distance between employees in different departments, more complicated decision making processes and more friction in general.

So a lack of agility within some big companies would likely prevent a growth hacking type model to whir within it. But in its purest ‘bootstrapping’ sense growth hacking is not always necessary or the most efficient route to success anyway. Where a new business division can leverage the strength of established business models and a symbiotic ecosystem can be created, such as Apple succeeded in doing across its hardware and software business, then that is the quickest route to success, and Growth Hacking doctrine would demand that that is the route taken. iTunes was never a standalone music store. The App Store only exists because of Apple’s mobile hardware. Building out an consumer ecosystem in a pre-planned way can be the right approach, provided you get the strategy spot on.

Having said that, I remember reading an interview many years ago I think after the iPod took off, in which Steve Jobs said that his main role was insulating his R&D team from being influenced by the commercial influences elsewhere in the business, nurturing a free-thinking environment for a group of super smart product designers and developers. Everyone knows what happened after that. Although I would not call Apple’s astounding run of innovation growth hacking, creating a free thinking context in which experiment can happen and a tight team can work fervently together is I believe also necessary for the growth hacking scenario.

Rapid Prototyping cycles for product-market fit

So when is Growth Hacking relevant and possible for big businesses? At its heart Growth Hacking is an ongoing series of experiments, each one built on the intelligence gained from the those than ran before it. This is essentially iterative prototyping, a concept that is no way a new idea for big companies, but in the case of web startups they are doing it in public, or to anyone who will pay attention, and getting feedback directly to tune the product and the marketing mechanics at the same time. For many reasons not least the desire to keep new developments unseen from competitors, it is harder for big companies to do this process in the open.

The iterative method is founded on data. If there is no way to capture the performance of the product as data and use that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the product and market it better then forget the Growth Hacking idea. It’s something else at that point. This may well limit true growth hacking to web and mobile companies where the products are literally plugged into the market itself, but I am open minded on this point. All kinds of products are getting hooked into the internet-of-things now, and reporting performance data back to engineers and designers. Either way it does not stop other companies from using the ideas and approaches that are bound up with growth hacking.

Implicit in the argument above is the assumption that the marketing model and the product experience can co-evolve together. Often when companies get big and established one ends up downstream of the other. In many growth-hacked web services these days, the user experience itself comprises viral mechanisms that bring other users in, so that the product does its own marketing. Even if the viral effects are not wired into the product in this way, the product and the way it is distributed needs to allow for really short prototyping cycles. This principle is something that big companies could learn from, or at least aspire to this ideal, since often they place marketing downstream of R&D, which can end up in the miserable scenario of trying to sell products that are unsellable.

Connect customers & growth team directly

Spelling this principle out in terms of the people involved, the ideal is to short cut the feedback loop between those designing and creating the product and its ultimate customers as much as possible. The word “growth hacking” feels very cold and technical, not really the ‘human insight based thinking’ that we like to boast about in marketing, nor the ‘customer centric culture’ that corporate CEOs work so hard to advocate in their companies. In a way though the growth hacking approach is the MOST customer centric approach there is, provided that the data being collected and used for optimising with actually does represent the value the customers are bringing to your brand and bottom line, in both the short and long term.

Thus the quintessential growth hacking metrics-based process of experimentation and optimisation is in simple terms a way to short cut the ‘prototype > test > iterate’ loop and make it spin as quickly as possible with the least separation between market and product evolution. This efficiency is what underpins the “fastest route to success” philosophy at the heard of the growth hacking movement.

Anyone who has worked in a science laboratory or R&D lab recognises this process, and so in a sense growth hacking start-ups have effectively put the lab at the centre of the business. In too many big businesses not only can the R&D department become a costly appendage, but the scientific approach often loses out to internal politics or other constraints, or else the R&D amounts to just tinkering with existing formats because the bigger vision has been forgotten or become obsolete.

Defining the necessary conditions

So I believe big companies can benefit from growth hacking style approach to growing a new business model, but they have to set up the context to mirror to some extent that of a startup in the following ways:

• It should be run by a few people who “own it”: passionate about the idea and strongly incentivised to make it work, ideally through equity ownership
• These leaders should be given the responsibility to take decisions without committee agreement, leading to forthright decision making and accountability
• Allow risk taking and accept failure as a natural part of the process. Experimentation is needed to hit on the right formula, and you are unlikely to hit on it first time.
• Start off with as few people as possible. The last thing the leaders need is a big team to manage before they know what it is they need to be doing.
• You need to create an efficient, no-fat-on-the-bone base upon which to build out a profitable model. Too much resource early on, either people or money, will lead to inefficiencies that will at worse kill it prematurely, or else get baked into the business and restrict profitability later on.
• Give the business brand-independence, enough for it to be able to tell its own stories and connect to a distinct audience that becomes its early adopter customer base from which an early majority can be recruited.

The importance of a brand narrative

This last point about the need for brand independence is often forgotten I believe, but companies whose founders understand how to grow a brand often take off faster and win big in the long term. This is because they are making the technology mean something more than what its features would imply on their own. In my experience people often forget that the experience people have is fundamentally different depending on what they are looking to get out of it, and this is dependent on how well it is branded and the communications around it. No first time user touches a feature set without preconceptions, so framing this interaction and the ongoing usage is the role of the brand.

Founders and companies with simple, powerful brand identities and compelling ideas around their technology, such as Phil Libin with Evernote’s “remember everything”, or Mark Beniof’s with Salesforce.com death-to-software narrative, are so good at selling their technology story that we forget just what masters they are at branding. Both men had plenty of business experience before founding the companies that made them famous, and it shows.

I would say that successful startups always have a strong “founders story”, a vision to make the world better, core values, that for better or worse get baked into the brand perception from early on. Even if they are not a consumer-facing brand, this narrative is important for getting others excited about its potential, which is always necessary. These stakeholders are the investors, journalists and early hires in tech startups. But the same thing goes for new business models springing off big business, where the equivalents would be the board members, the individuals transferred in or hired into the business as well as the consumers who would adopt the new product.

So although it is very hard to generalise about how business models should get built out, the brand story and how it enables businesses to captivate each subsequent audience as it builds its following is one, and the other is the way the internal team expands.

Growth teams and growth hackers

It is my belief that team structure is the most important area of growth hacking for big or established companies to take note of, not least in starting off slim, but what type of people are brought into the mix.

If we generalise a growth team into specialists and generalist, a room full of generalists is not ideal, but then nor is a room full of specialists, and yet this is often the make up you see.

You definitely need deep vertical expertise. In a web start up you might have an SEM specialist, a PR specialist, a contents marketing / social media specialist and product developer as the first 4 members of a growth team. The challenge is getting these relatively diverse skill sets to work cohesively together so that much needed synergies emerge. It is even harder in big companies where these verticals might already exist as distinct departments, potentially physically separated.

In order to get them working synergistically you need someone who can speak all all their respective lingoes, and who has a sense for the difference between just showing up in that area, and actually driving competitive advantage. Who is that person? It needs to be someone who has themselves dived into these skill sets at one point, not to the extent that they became an expert in all of them, but typically in one area at least.

These multi-skilled individuals are the sort of people who, being quick learners, dive headlong into a knowledge specialism for a while, get to the point where they understand 90% of it, can perceive the nature of expertise in that last 10%, but do not fancy spending the next 3+ years to perfect those skills themselves. And then they move on to another vertical. They get bored as quickly as they get inspired, but rather than being a weakness, it equips them with a rare combination of literacies.

Not T-shaped, but “rake-shaped” talent is key

In management theory they are similar to the T-shaped people, but actually more like a “rake”, or Japanese “kuma–te” meaning “bear’s claw”. You heard it here first! Ideally you can find one of these talents who also has leadership potential, and build the team around them, since they can be the bridge that gets the teams working together efficiently.

These sorts of people are rare and hence very valuable assets, especially if the areas they can bridge between map to the necessary skill sets of your business, and have the communication skills to forge a team spirit. These sorts have been key drivers in the growth of the US silicon valley tech startups, where they are highly prized but they are even rarer in Japan. These people represent the “growth hacker” archetype, and so perhaps more so than “growth hacking” the approach, it is this archetypal skill set that is most important to highlight beyond web and mobile startups.

In Japan deep vertical expertise is celebrated and rewarded. Finding your craft and plugging away at it for a lifetime earns you respect and career progression. This is no bad thing, and Japan’s ongoing success as an economic force is built on this tradition. Japan does not have a shortage of specialist, I believe.

However, the way companies and careers are structured it makes it hard for multi-disciplinary careers to be nurtured within companies, and hence there are not many growth hacker types around, and I believe this is a limiting factor on Japan’s economic success going forward that needs to be addressed.

The post Growth Hacking for brands and how to grow a hybrid team appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Image: A broccoli x cauliflower hybrid sold in Japan

 Welcome to my new blog!

Why now?

I have been writing pretty regularly over the years, some of which has been going up on line, but most of it never gets out of my Evernotes. I have been feeling a mounting inner pressure recently to get more of it out in the open to start some dialogues and share ideas with others. One excuse I was using to not get a blog going with regular updates was the fact someone else owned JamesHollow.com, so once I got hold of this domain I had no excuse to not get it together.

I have also been piecing together the knowledge required to set up and run a blog like this one from scratch so I can be totally self sufficient. I have been frustrated by not being in control of my own publishing before and so for this one I wanted to be totally self sufficient. Thanks to plug and play hosting solutions and the brilliance of WordPress and all the tools and communities around it these days, that required knowledge is pretty accessible all of a sudden.

Why the “hybrid thinking” theme.

Recently it dawned on me that I am living a “hybrid” life, or rather I realised that I could use the concept to pull together a bunch of consistent characteristics of my life. Hybrids are genetic combinations in the original meaning, a bit like my children being half Japanese and half anglo-saxon-celt! But these days the word hybrid has been applied to many things, not least cars and many other types of technology too. My focus however for this blog is on the hybridisation of ideas, behaviour and cultures.

My family life is a hybrid of Japanese and British: igo classes followed by cricket practice; udon for lunch but roast pork for dinner. What does this mean for my kids? I am really not sure, but am definitely in the process of discovering.

Likewise professionally I run a company, Profero Tokyo, which is a hybrid culture. We are about half Japanese, half international including a few international Japanese. A lot of our work is with international businesses and brands that are well adjusted to Japan, not least thanks to our efforts, but are certainly note Japanese in their DNA. One way of looking at what we do is as an interface between Japan and the rest of the world, bringing ideas and their conduit brands in, and taking Japanese brands and their associated ideas out of Japan too. To do this we have to be this hybrid culture that is not one nor the other, but both at the same time.

In this sense of the word we all grow up in slightly “hybrid” contexts, there is no such thing as the “normal British company” or “standard Japanese upbringing” and all companies and families are a blend of influences, but the contrasts that I both enjoy and am challenged by on a daily basis are a little more extreme than most, at least compared to my own previous experiences.

I believe that with highly contrasting hybrid cultures there is a greater chance of creating a really original and special offspring, just like the hybrid vegetable depicted above with its miraculous fractal structure, but also a higher chance the result ends up a bit messed up!

Who would be interested in a blog about my hybridised life?

That is a very good question! I will touch on themes that I believe are relevant to anyone trying to nurture a positive hybrid culture or environment, whatever the mix is. There is no doubt that what I write will be coloured with the context of Tokyo,  as well as the uniqueness of Profero: a company founded in London but with global curiosity at its heart from the outset, but I will be trying to draw generalised conclusions from my local examples.

I also believe that Japan will play more of a pathfinder role in global society, coming up with all sorts of hybrid solutions as it confronts various socio-economic issues before other countries inevitably meet them themselves, and so I intend to proactively imagine what that role will be, pick up examples of Japanese technology and social trends that might be indicative, and based on these rethink Japan’s role in the world.

The post A blog about nurturing hybrid culture appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.