memonicOfficial Blog

Raphael Cohen is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Geneva*. He most recently released his new book “Winning Opportunities“.

The book provides a step-by-step process to help you identify an opportunity, analyze it and convince the suitable decision-makers to give you the necessary resources and support. And all that without writing a proper business plan, claims Raphael. Instead he introduces his Innovation by Opportunity model of innovation, a process specifically designed to foster innovation processes driven by employees in larger organizations and corporations. It centers on how to set up the intrapreneurial process properly. From my own experience I only can confirm this. Innovation and entrepreneurship have a difficult stand in most large organizations. Instead of a focus on the opportunity most new ideas and undertakings are calculated off the board by countless versions of Excel based business plans.

Raphael’s book is a refreshing take on this topic. And an innovative one, too. You can download the book for free at the ”Winning Opportunities” website. You may pay what you want for the book once you read the book, be this nothing or 5 million.

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Disclosure: For a number of years I teach a segment on Virtual Organizations in the MBA Course run by Raphael.

At last month’s StartupCamp in Basel, Toni and I had the pleasure of revisiting our presentation called “24 Hints for Start Ups” with 24 new hints. These have inspired a new blog series, which we hope you will find useful.

Of the new tips we shared, one in particular – “Start with a good founding contract” – caused quite a stir, and raised several questions. That’s why I’d like to expand a bit on our previous posting on the matter.

A startup is considered to be cool. Quite the opposite of what “corporate”, lawyers and contracts are considered to be. Yet our experience suggest you’d better get a bit of the latter to be more of the first. Why?

Any startup is built on a strong belief in one’s idea – which comes with the assumption of greatness and economic success. We believe in Memonic, and we know you believe in your idea with all your heart. But on the way to glory, you will need to overcome a few hurdles. And in order to overcome some of them before they even occur, it is good to have a contract among the founding team clearly stating a few (contractual) ground rules for likely scenarios. For example:

• How do you decide if two of four founders want to sell the company and the other two founders want to hold out for a better deal?
• Who will provide how many shares / accepts what dilution in case of a capital increase?
• Are there any special rights endowed on founders? Any special duties to which each founder is subject?
• What happens if one of the founders – for perfectly valid reasons – decides to quit and move to Australia? What happens to her shares, at what price may she sell (and to whom).
• What do you do if one of the founders forgets that elder statesmanship is reserved for the time after the IPO and not before (i.e. you need to get rid of him because he doesn’t get rid of the cocktail glasses)?
• How do you handle the situation if one of your founders is drawn into a nasty divorce battle and half her shares (in most marriages there is no prenuptial agreement, actually to have one is another good idea) fall to her estranged husband who in turn wants a seat on the board of your company?
  (PS: if you have not yet seen “Intolerable Cruelty“, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones, go and watch it now!)
  



• Let’s suppose somebody quits; is that person still entitled to some of the rewards in case of a change of ownership in the years after he quits?
• How do you determine the value of the shares at any one time?
• Additionally, we highly recommend encoding/defining the following, too: Right of first refusal rights, pre-emptive rights, and tag along rights

Each point for itself is plenty of potential trouble. For once money wisely spent, even if it is on lawyers. Consider this your best investment in reduced future sorrows.

Oh, what fun we had!

On Saturday, the Memonic team turned up to participate in one of the Swiss Internet Community’s coolest events: StartUp Camp. This year, it was hosted in the Basel University of Applied Sciences. The location was excellent – as was the food (special kudos go out to the desserts. Yum!).

The highlight of the event, for us, was the networking – which was superb. We bumped into our old neighbors, Liip – who told us that they miss us (aww. We miss you guys, too!), and into good friends from other startups. We met engineers – and circled the rumor that we are still looking to hire for our excellent StartUp (Pssst: Memonic is a web based note-taking software. Join us!).  In fact, there was a whole job board attracting lots of attention. Check out the funniest post we spotted:

Amidst fantastic speaking sessions, we were honored to be included – with Dorian and Toni’s “24 MORE Hints for Start Ups” talk. It was a smash hit!

For now, of particular interest to the vast crowd was the segment on devising a founding contract when launching your start up. Due to popular demand, we will be launching an exciting new European START UP BLOG SERIES in this space – with an extended blog on founding contracts kicking off the fun. We hope you will follow!

Until the next time, huge congratulations go out to Dania Gerhart of Amazee for a stellar job organizing this. We hope you will invite us next year!

Last week together Thommy from namics we presented our approach to User Centered Design. Here a few insights from the last 1.5 years developing Memonic.

All starts with your product vision. Many product visions comprise a “Jack of all Trades” approach to product development: Your product should satisfy all and everything.

However being a bootstrapped startup puts you on a collision course with this vision: To do everything at once with limited resources simply does not compute. What now? Do usability tests first.

How did and do we do it?

Right from start we started testing: First with paper-based tests of screen mockups. Simple and effective: Get people to look at your mockups and test their reaction. Just one rule: Close family including girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands are ruled out. Just too close to you and inclined to give biased positive feedback. Family doesn’t want to see you fail. A quick walk to the next coffee will provide plenty testers.

In our case we started with a visual interface. We still believe that a visual approach is a good way to remember unstructured information. We all rather remember visual cues than textual ones. Simple test: Distribute all business cards ever collected on a table, mix them, add one of your own cards to the mix, and take a step back. You will recognize your card immediately based on visual cues: The logo, the specific typeface of your company.

Our interface model at first look as follows:

Then we started testing. Find here the use cases on which we based these tests. Each test consists of a pre-condition preceding the test, the goal of the test, the actual tasks to execute and the expected outcome of the test. Once our users started testing we watched and transcribed.

We tested in cohorts of three: Three groups of three people testing each story three times over an interval of a couple of weeks. The following graph outlines the shifted starting points of each test group. In between each test we worked hard on improvements. Starting with paper-based testing we moved to early html prototypes.

One of the more interesting aspects of this setup is the fact that say in round 4 we test the browse & organize stories by an experienced team (Group A) and people just joining the test program (Group C). Thus we got feedback from experienced hands as well as newbies (at our interface that is).

The user feedback for our first ideas was really good for the visual idea and the browse aspects of the interface. Small wonder: People are used to this type of interfaces by now from smartphones and tablets.

Yet we received thumbs down as soon as we asked the testers to organize their clips in groups and start working with these sets. Simply didn’t work.

A change of course was required: We thought long and hard about notes and note taking. A note is similar to an email: a subject (or none) and some content. The next iteration of our interface thus was based around the email paradigm.

A number of iterations later we were at the current interface. And we know there is ample room for improvement. Yet following the startup stance of “release early – release often” we opted for user feedback instead of ebony tower thinking.

Today we have setup some continues tests run on User Testing.com and we rely on direct user feedback. We receive plentiful feedback. Boris, a guy from the Belorussia even sent us a carefully crafted 8 page usability review of Memonic.

Note taking in the Internet realm is a relatively new. Thus there is no dominant design yet like say in email interfaces or word processors. Even though they differ from supplier to supplier the core feature set and user interaction patterns are the same.

That leaves room for much advance in user interaction design and usability improvements of any such note taking application including ours.

Stay tuned.

Today I attend – as probably the only Swiss attendee – the F.ounders conference here in Dublin. Dubbed the “Davos for the tech world” it has indeed an amazing number of people in attendance. Next to the poster children of the Internet revolution – Chad Hurley from YouTube, Niklas Zennstrom from Skype, Jack Dorsey from Twitter, and many more – a number of more humbler earthlings are present. 

Next to being a really great networking event – the conference started yesterday evening with a Dublin pub crawl - we got today to sit down and do some serious business. A number of high profile speakers, like Peter Sutherland (Ex-WTO chief) or Justin Lin, elaborated on the economic climate here, there and elsewhere, the current investment climat, dos and donts in VC and angel investing in startups, the future of the web (duuh…. big one).

The most impressive moment actually was this morning when Caroline Casey, a blind impaired activist made such an entrance that half the audience at first did not understand that she’s actually blind. She seems to be a pro at that telling that she already had blind dates without the opposite party noticing that she couldn’t see him for more than an hour. She made a passionate plea to not let a billion impaired people be left aside. It’s a bit market that with ingenuity will produce great companies doing well, and doing good in the proceeds for people with disabilities. 

In parallel the Dublin Web Summit takes place. A gathering of roughly 600 people from the Irish Web tech scene it is the perfect spot to mingle with local talent. Despite the recent and ongoing economic vows Ireland boasts a vibrant tech scene on par with any other big startup place in Europe like London or Berlin. 

(For folks looking for my presentation slides. They are to be found over here.)