Understanding Twitter Conversations In A Snap

Twitter is quite simply amazing. It makes it stupidly easier to carry out conversations in public. Share our thoughts, news, photos and videos and express our opinions on whats going on in the world. This is power like we havenever seen before in history. We can all publish to the world. But who is listening? The short answer is me, well at least flumes.

Flumes tracks twitter and uses natural language processing to find and organise the most pertinent conversations going on right now on twitter. But that is just the start. Flumes then analyses all the tweets within that conversation and gives you a snapshot of the best tweets, photos and videos related to conversation. It goes further still and gives you analytics about sentiment and volume trends within the conversation as well as details of the gender and location of the participants in the conversations. Its one thing for us all to be able to publish easily its quite another to make sense of this information in a way that is useful and actionable.

Actionable? What is the point in any service unless it enables you to do something better. We make it super quick to make sense of social media conversations and make it super easy to take action. You can share anything you see to help create awareness and we also specifically look for petition, donation and aid organisation links being shared within a conversation. So if the conversation engages with you you can take action with a couple of clicks by donating, signing petitions, organising protests, emailing your MP’s and much more.

The mission above is pretty altruistic and we know it can be hard to make a living with these kind of aims so we are also using the technology to build products for the media, finance and event marketing industries. We also offer a range of bespoke services to help people make sense of any twitter conversation happening online.

The Technology Expert is Sleepy

When I started working for myself again last year I was looking for the next whizzy web application I could build. The more I researched the more I realised how much fantastic stuff there is out there that is just not being used. Whether it’s cloud based accounting from the likes of freeAgent or simple eCommerce solutions with Shopify, these tools offer fantastic solutions to real problems faced by cash strapped startups. But the vast majority of people are still using the old headache inducing tools like Sage for accounting and all sorts of locked in bespoke solutions for eCommerce.

So rather than write yet another fancy tool I thought my time would be better spent trying to help people adopt some of the best of breed products that I believed could save people time and money. How? Well I liked what I saw Martin Lewis doing with Money Saving Expert. He, along with his company and website, seemed to be doing a genuinely good public service advising people with free, simple advice and making a decent living out of it at the same time through affiliate relationships. I like this model. So I started The Technology Expert. I built a site with direct to the point advice and recommendations for solving real world problems with technology. No beating around the bush. I felt and still do feel that this is what people need. I have written many articles and managed to get other people to join me in doing this. Traffic has grown gradually and people seem to love the bite size twitter tips which is another story. 

But all was not rosy

I thought I would love researching and writing content and I did for a while, but that soon changed. I thought people would see the clear differentiator with what I was trying to do compared to all those many technology news and review sites, I don’t think they do (yet). The mid to late adopter audience that I care so passionately about is hard to reach. I thought I could write a quality article better than anything else out there in a few hours. I can’t. To keep quality up, it was taking a day and more per article. I have been surprised that although traffic and follower volume has been very good engagement has been low.

So, the idea is that The Technology Expert will be a slow burner blog style site that I will keep going on the side and just engage and observe the problems people have, hopefully finding the perfect gap in the market to exploit with a web application at some stage as well as sustain some income from the blog itself. Basically I want to listen to and engage real end users rather than just other web/tech professionals.

The dirty word “Expert”

The reason for the name of the blog was to create a trustworthy unbiased persona that is crucial in being an intermediary between the consumer and the businesses they are looking to buy from. This is hard. The downside of using the word “Expert” is that people tend to see it as a self promoting, ego induced title which I can quite understand as that’s what most people use it for. This was sad and problematic for me as the site is absolutely not about me, but about seeing a problem and trying to do something about it, and actually I hate anything being about me.  

It’s not all bad

Whilst working on the TTE website I fell in love with twitter, after using it rather sporadically for a couple of years previously. I can see how it is an amazing solution for engaging, understanding, learning and connecting. In a world where local communities are fragmenting and people spend less time socialising to the detrement of society I saw a problem and a solution. I had found a new path I wanted to pursue and it felt good.  I still absolutely want to continue TTE because the problem is very much there but perhaps the solution needs some work. However a lot of the solution for this and many other problems is simply connecting and engaging the right people. Twitter takes a fair amount of research, reading and interacting before it becomes a genuinely useful tool. In the process many people give up or never really get started. I want to do something about this with a new website flumes. Of course it’s not all about websites and by helping with Suffolk Digital and the local tweetups I also want to help connect people face to face, which is so much richer than the online experience.

Twitter changes

But it’s time to stop @the_tech_expert twitter name I have always felt pretty uncomfortable with. It’s time to be me, so the name is to change.

That’s the end of my self indulgent ramblings but perhaps it answers a few questions about who I am and what I’m trying to do.

Steve

My Alternative Startup Britain Advice

Recently I did a talk in Cambridge about my views on starting a business. Now I really am an apprentice in this area with no business startup track record to talk of yet. But I have made a point of working for many startups over the years as part of my apprenticeship training and also read, listened, contemplated and right now I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

The launch of Startup Britain felt pretty good to me. I love people getting behind entrepreneurship, following their dreams and trying to make the world a better place. But then I looked at their site http://www.startupbritain.org/.  In my opinion the advice was surprisingly old school, unpragmatic and, well, lazy. I was surprised to see the advice on the homepage didn’t have a single mention of customers. I have a rule, I’m only allowed to moan about something if I try and make the situation better. So I gave a talk in Cambridge last week, I’m chatting to some of the Startup Britain founders and now its time to put my thoughts online.

1. Debunk the great idea myth

We all hope that we’ll get that eureka moment and a flash of inspiration gives us an idea worth millions. But thats just us being human and lazy. The reality is its very rarely an idea that makes a business successful but instead the execution. Execution takes longer and is harder work than having ideas so we tend to sit back thinking “When I have that great idea I’ll do X”. Most of the biggest businesses in the world didn’t invent their space, they didn’t have massively innovative ideas they just did it better than the other guys. Just look at Facebook, Ryan Air, Pizza Express. They all jumped into market spaces that had some well known competition and executed better. Facebook just created a better social network than MySpace, Ryan Air came to budget airlines copied the Southern Aurlines and Easyjet model and just executed really well.  Pizza Express definately didn’t have the idea for Italian/Pizza chains. They just did a damn good job of a resturauant in one place, it got popular and they took it from there.

Look at some of our most successful entrepreneurs. Richard Branson made his initial fortune in music with a record label. He didn’t have big bang ideas here he just added a little creativity to a tired industry, the artists liked it, he hustled, worked hard, risked a lot and finally succeeded. He then did a similar thing with Virgin Atlantic. Identifying a tired industry that needed a dash of creativity, fun and better execution. Again it took a ton of risk, hustle, charm and hard work to actually create the successful business.

So pragmatism, creativity, charm and hard work create successful businesses not big ideas!

2. Don’t write a business plan it will suck

Plans are guesses and the type of 3 year projections you are meant to make in business plans are just going to be plain wrong for a startup. Within mature businesses you can make these projections with a degree of accuracy and there may be lots of money riding on the plans so the hard work pays off but for startups, no, no, no, its a waste of time.

Instead get out from behind your computer screen and test the market. Connect with potential customers understand what they would pay for, understand what people love and hate about the competition, and then create something quickly. Its hard getting feedback at an early stage because most people will just say “that sounds interesting”, “oh cool, I’d use that” etc. But what you need is cash feedback because until they’ve paid for it you can’t be sure. So spend less time guessing where your business may be in 3 years time and build your product quickly and cheaply and test it on early adopters. Richard Branson tested the market before he’d had his idea for the Virgin Atlantic business. He couldn’t get a flight for the right price so he chartered a plane and sold all the seats. He got in front of customer, made them pay and proved the market without having to buy a plane, writing a business plan or having a logo designed. If you want to understand more about this then take a look at the Lean startup and Customer development movements. Its all about getting to market quickly and evolving your ideas based on customer feedback. When you need to get your business model down on paper try The Business Model Canvas. Its designed to make sense at a glance, be easily changeable (your plans will change) and easy to communicate, something that a traditional business plan doesn’t achieve.

The biggest argument I here against these ideas is that they work fine for low capital business like software products and professional services but not for capital intensive businesses. Well I don’t fully agree with this either. You need to get creative. The Virgin Atlantic example is great here. Most people would agree running a transatlantic airline is capital intensive but chartering a plane and selling the tickets is much less so. I have recently come across a great lean example in the restaurant space called The Truffle Pig. Its a popup restaurant that uses someone else’s venue somewhere in Suffolk every couple of months. What a fantastically pragmatic way of testing the market, getting feedback, building a brand without splashing the cash on a building, refit and permanent staff. Its a fantastic example of a minimal viable product. So if you think creatively even capital intensive businesses can create minimal viable products on a shoestring.

But some businesses need to grow quickly and why not take £3 million in funding to get you there so you can out grow and out execute the competition? Well if you have that option then perhaps its worth thinking about. But in general I’ve seen funding make businesses slower to get in front of customers and that means slower the get the feedback that results in getting the product right. By embracing constraints you will generally engage customers more quickly, build simpler products and services (people love simple) and spend your time on customers instead of investors. Surely thats going to build a better business. Sure, if you have customers, have a validated business model and want to scale more quickly then I think there is a strong argument for taking investment.

3. They Say “Get a logo” and I say “Don’t bother”

There’s just so much to do with your startup to make sure you offer a decent product/service to those early adopters. They don’t give a damn about your logo. Take a look at one of my favourite web design sites http://siteinspire.net and notice how many of these beautiful designs don’t have a logo. Sure a god logo is nice to have but its not essential and maybe later you’ll have tike for the “nice to have’s”

Rework

My single favourite resource which underpins my philosophy behind career, starting a business and running a business is Rework by the guys at 37 Signals. This book will literally take you a couple of hours to read and could save you months of work. With gems like “Underdo the competition”, “A kick-ass half is better than a half-ass whole”, “Inspirastion is perishable” and “Embrace constraints” this book really hits you in the face with a simple, fun, pragmatic alternative to the way most of us think and work.

Useful resources mentioned in this articles

Customer development
Lean startup
The Business Model Canvas
Rework

About the Author

After 10 years coding, architecting and managment in crazy startup environments Steve decided to start writing in the 3rd person and building his own businesses to try and make the world a better place. With heady ambitions for flumes to be the best place to track and analyse conversations online Steve is getting close to a minimal viable product. He’s really trying hard to follow the lean startup and rework principles.

Welcome To My World

The blog starts again, and this time its the real me.