We do a lot of networking. I mean, A LOT. Naturally, after a spending half your day frantically organizing business cards and realizing that networking is replacing your social nightlife, you start to find the events and organizations that are truly worth going to.

Here’s a shout-out from the heart to Boston World Partnerships.

Few organizations in Boston that we’ve experienced bring the diversity of people together you find at BWP events. It’s not just mass crowds of service providers, startups, or those fancy corporate people. It’s a healthy mix of everybody brought together with a common cause – to keep Boston cool enough to dissuade you from moving to San Francisco. While they can’t [yet] change the weather, they are on a mission to help you grow your business and get people working together on raising the bar in Boston.

I like the range of events in terms of intimacy. You do have the large, free-for-all networking events, which are great for getting into the scene and meeting lots of people, and they also have smaller gatherings like strategy sessions for startups which allow members and connectors to have more relaxed and helpful conversations with each other. The focus isn’t to just meet more people and collect business cards, BWP brings those together who are enthusiastic about working with other people grow businesses here.

And every once in a while, they have a hot event at a cool Boston venue. Next Tuesday, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary at the Liberty Hotel with some wildly successful speakers and an awesome guest list.

We’ll be there.

- Matt Boynton

We’re excited to be sponsoring the MIT100K Business Plan Competition and have the opportunity to help the winner boost their web presence, which can help an early-stage startup have an edge when seeking more funding or funding their first customers.

Why is this important?

Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.

If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.

When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.

We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:

“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife

We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton

We’ve always been slightly suspicious of formal public relations efforts. It works for lots of companies but in a social networking world public relations has a harder job remaining credible and authentic. We’ve been working on our own ideas and learning from our friends at Grasshopper to build a simple sales-orientated buzz process.

Although still in a state of refinement here is the process and some specific tasks associated with each step. Keep in mind this specific checklist is in context of creating buzz for Fresh Tilled Soil so the relevant audience targets would be exchanged for each appropriate client should we go that route:

Buzz Process Checklist:

1. Read through the list of design blogs that are looking for contributions and add each one to a spreadsheet (use Google docs if you can so we can all have access to it and make edits if necessary) Read more

A new FTS client, RetireLife, has been working with our UI team to launch a website for their start-up company.  FTS’ user interface web designers are now in the final stages of creating a comprehensive website, designed to fully support Retire Life’s business model to get the company up and running.  The young entrepreneurs behind RetireLife are a group of Babson students whose entrepreneurial objective grew out of their own personal experiences with friends and family members; they recognized the struggle their parents’ generation was experiencing as their grandparents aged.  There were very few resources available to their parents, (the Baby-Boomer Generation,) who have become the caretakers of their aging parents.  These Babson students realized that they, Generation Y, would inherit this same problem fifteen to thirty years from now, when their parents, (from the even bigger Baby Boomer Generation,) grow older and need the same type of care.  RetireLife.com helps assuage the tension and anxiety surrounding the very difficult, sensitive issue of caring for our aging loved ones. Read more

As a business that sees hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups every year we have started to develop that kind of sixth sense for what works and what doesn’t. Apart from all the prospect and client startups we see every year we have also had several of our own businesses. We currently have a significant stake in five early-stage businesses and are negotiating a sixth. A few weeks ago we discussed how our little web design business has become the ideal startup incubator and listed some of the success factors we’ve experienced. If we turn the spotlight on the people that run those successful businesses for us we see some patterns too.

Here are the key success factors that we look for in both our client’s and our own investments: Read more

This video was played at TED and followed by a standing ovation. So beautifully simple it doesn’t need any description.

Last Friday we had two great meetings that have confirmed that Agile development practices and product prototyping are going to be web entrepreneur’s most valuable tools in the coming years. The release early, release often methodologies of Agile and Scrum combined with the velocity that you can create work with prototypes is totally disrupting new product development cycles. What we heard in these meetings was pleasantly surprising.

The first meeting we had on Friday was with Jo Tango, founder of Kepha Partners, and self-proclaimed “business builder”. Jo and his team manage a $100 million fund which is aimed at very early stage ventures across several markets. What was surprising for us to hear from Jo is that he’s looking for entrepreneurs that are spending more time working on a prototype than they are on their presentation decks. “We’ve invested in teams that have a 2-page PowerPoint and an awesome demo”, Jo told us. We too have heard too often from VC’s and investors that an entrepreneur’s deck and pitch can make or break their chances of getting funded. Jo disagrees with that approach and focuses on what startup founders have already created, whether it’s perfect or not. His team is looking for iterative traction from a demo or beta release not a fancy PowerPoint.

The meeting that followed was a short but fruitful conference call with Medtronic CIO, Mike Hedges, and his application development team. We’re currently designing an app for Medtronic that will be disruptive to their primary market of pacemaker sales and support. We’re using our hybrid of Agile and prototyping to get this big project done in digestible bite-size pieces. As we talked about using this approach for several upcoming projects, Mike reminded us, “no need to talk about Agile and prototypes. You’re preaching to the converted”. Old habits are hard to break. Until recently we felt as if preaching about Agile and prototyping was falling on deaf ears.

The alternative to this approach is what most tech teams are used to: a long series of meeting to decide what to do, impossibly trying to predict obstacles, writing bible-length tech specs, working with frustrating offshore resources, endless QA cycles and launch delays. Traditionally large companies, like Medtronic, have relied on other larger companies, like IBM and Sapient, to deliver end-to-end technology solutions. Now it seems those companies move too slow for them. Application development teams are looking for small, nimble partners that can iterate and update prototypes on an almost daily schedule.

In the real world, the landscape and markets are always changing. By the time you have completed the first round of development, you’re already behind the changes the market is absorbing. That leaves you with obsolete features and dissatisfied end users. In Agile development, you build small pieces, test them and let the feedback guide you to the next small piece. By ensuring units are kept small Agile development can help mitigate many of the issues that case large unmanageable applications to emerge.

So if you are an entrepreneur and you’re trying to launch a web project what should you be thinking about?

• Team work: Every project we do has two or more UI experts working on the same designs so we can double check our own work. Never have one person doing the thinking in a vacuum. A designer sitting in a corner trying to figure out the complex user iterations for each story is a disaster waiting to happen. Small nimble teams with open spaces work better than overly funded all-star teams. You’ll be surprised by what Agile and prototyping can accomplish. Our team recently prototyped an entire 50-plus page application in 2.5 days.
• Keeping everything small: By keeping the design and development teams small and by breaking big problems into small problems we eat the elephant much quicker. Trying to solve big problems by having big meetings with lots of senior level people only slows things down. In one recent case we were able to double the pace of delivery by reducing the client team to four people from the initial ten. Informal and small teams make the process much more flexible and agile (with a small ‘a’). Changes can be made quickly without breaking related elements or upsetting the course of action.
• Tracking and accountability: We use Basecamp as a management tool. I’m not a big fan of complex project management tools. Basecamp is super simple and doesn’t encourage you to add unnecessary complexity. If you can’t break down the project into small stories and tasks there is no system on the planet that will help you track your daily work. Basecamp to-do’s allow us to immediately assign responsibility for each task and to follow up each morning during our Universal Backlog reports. Constant feedback on where we are on the overall task lists make it  easier to make higher level decisions maintain focus on the product vision or mission.

Our new office is a beautiful space. The space is located in the recently renovated Watch Factory in Waltham, MA. The building is located on a bend in the Charles River which affords us an amazing uninterrupted view from almost every window.

We selected this space for several reasons but mostly for it’s open plan layout. Our designers, developers and marketing specialists all work collaboratively eliminating the need for individual offices or cubes. This might seem either obvious to some and foreign to others so let me explain how physical space influences our somewhat virtual work.

Almost every project we do requires team work. Designers often work closely with other designers and digital strategists to determine the best UI and aesthetics. Physical barriers like walls and dividers reduce the opportunities for teams to ask questions and talk about ideas and obstacles. We believe that projects are successful when small decisions get made every day instead of waiting for a weekly meeting to deal with accumulated big decisions. We go so far as to ask that no one takes ‘ownership’ of a desk but rather chooses to sit where it makes the most sense on that day. Desk and chair arrangements change daily and follow no set floor plan. This gives teams the flexibility to work together one day and split up to collaborate with other people the next day.

As defined:

blog [blog]
A weblog.
intr.v. blogged, blog-ging, blogs
to write entries in, add material to, or maintain a weblog.

overload [v. oh-ver-lohd; n. oh-ver-lohd]
(used with object)
to load to excess; overburden: Don’t overload the raft, or it will sink.
n.
an excessive load.

Be careful, combining the two words mentioned above can be an extremely unhealthy combination, especially for someone trying to launch their own blog. If you are someone developing your own blog, you will more than likely find yourself hunched over your computer, dishing obscenities into the air, on your sixth double shot espresso from Starbucks, wondering why you ever thought blogging would be a good or even fun idea. Sounds pleasurable, right? Or you may be like many of our clients and hire an outside firm to create your blog, but once it’s done how will you populate the blog and keep the momentum going? Fear not my friends, a blog can be launched successfully and you can avoid “blog overload” as long as you are prepared with the proper tools. Anyone can create a blog, but only a few blogs come to full fruition and are truly successful at mastering the blog-o-sphere.

Launch [lawnch, lahnch] – to set going; initiate: to launch a scheme.
You should only launch your blog when it is complete. Sounds simple, but more often than not individuals rush to launch a blog before it’s entirely ready. Launching a complete blog means that the blog is working correctly and that all information is present. Forgetting to add a contact or about page may decrease your blogs overall success, or potential leads you receive from the blog. Take your time. Review the template, navigation and make sure every element of your blog is functioning properly before the big launch.

Read more

Skill #4: Financial and Employee Management is Daily Task

Do you know how much cash you have in the bank? Do you know who owes you money and how late their payments are? What’s your sales pipeline look like? Who’s the person in your business most likely to leave in the next 6 months? What projects are profitable and which will lose money?

If I called you any time night or day would you have these answers at your fingertips? The only way you can know these things is to have systems which are updated daily. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is you need to know what’s going on every day. Don’t wait for the monthly management meeting or the annual sales conference to get the bad news. Know every day how the business is doing.

We use a series of very inexpensive web-based tools, project management systems and processes to monitor our business. We’ve even gone so far at to use our iPhone’s to monitor or bank accounts, projects and profitability. On a recent trip overseas I was able to check in on the team and the fifteen or so project we were working on. In about 5 minutes I was able to check on the work progress, project and employee profitability, accounts receivable and payable and cash flow.

We use a daily list of tasks to manage everyone’s schedule. These tasks are broken down into simple daily to-do lists. Each morning a team member will check the backlog and know exactly what their priorities are. The managers can check the aggregated to-do lists, called universal backlogs, and see who is doing what.

If you’re a manager you need to be spending about 30 – 40% of your day working directly with your team members. This might be a series of short meetings or updates. On the days that I’m in the office I walk around and ask each person a series of informal questions. Some examples are,  “what are you working on?”, “anything you need help with?”, “any client or project issues that you need some help with?”, “is there anything blocking you from getting your project done?” and “have you spoken to your client contacts recently?” I find that by doing this daily I can solve lots of small issues instead of waiting until review time when the issue has now become a monumental festering problem.