What variables are in your market equation?

I have been talking to a few people in the past days about unIQad. It has been great to get more people’s thoughts on what we’re building. Getting feedback from potential customers, from partners and from people who make a living investing in growth companies. It all adds to my understanding of myself, of our company and of our product.

One thing in particular that struck me and made me want to write a brief post was a conversation I had with a partner of a venture fund last week. How we have made the same fundamental analysis but have arrived at very different results. Because the variables we put into the equation were slightly different.

This VC has other investments in online advertising, so they have a pretty good feeling for the space. They had discussed unIQad at their partner meeting and he had some concerns that he wanted to share with me. Basically, he said, they were afraid that we were late to the party. That the market was already saturated and that incumbents were going to be very hard to unsettle. That it had become a game of scale and it would require too many resources to take market share.

If you look at online display advertising as the market it is today, I suppose that I would find it difficult to disagree with their analysis. Take a quick look at the LUMA Scape below, which I have snatched from here. It’s a hugely complex landscape constantly evolving. It’s insanely competitive.

So why did I disagree with them? Well, simply because we have put different variables into my equation that they did into theirs.

We see our customers differently. We see our market differently. We see our competitors differently. Maybe it’s a naïve and immature way of closing our eyes to the obvious failure we’re walking into. But maybe it’s that conventional wisdom is the wrong lens through which to view unIQad.

Studies from Econsultancy and Forrester Research show that around 3% of online retailers are leveraging the benefits of retargeting while 73% say that it’s a priority for them to start doing so. That doesn’t sound like a saturated market to me.

If we were competing for the same Top 1000 global advertisers that the rest of the LUMA Scape is hunting, then I’d agree. It’s cut-throath. But what if you look at the retailers that are outside the Top 1000 bracket? There are endless amounts of them. The people who don’t use Responsys or ExactTarget for their email nesletters but use MailChimp or Constant Contact. The people who don’t use ATG as their commerce platfor but use Magento.

So – from our perspective, we’re not so much in the display advertising market. We’re in the “get-more-customers-market”. And we have decided that the way we compete in this market is to help medium-sized webshops punch above their weight when it comes to bringing back visitors that didn’t convert in their initial visit.

Close to zero of the vendors in the LUMA Scape think about those companies. And if you analyse the market with the LUMA Scape as your reference, you’re going to end up with a conclusion like the one that the formerly mentioned VC arrived at.

unIQad has an ambition to expand the number of online retailers that do display advertising. To leverage the fact that most retailers honestly don’t care about the nitty-gritty of fine-tuning their display campaigns – they just want more customers! At the moment they don’t use retargeting to get more customers, because getting started with retargeting is complex, time-consuming and expensive.

That’s the pain we’re trying to make go away.

Sometimes it’s the subtle differences in your perception of the variables in the equation that lead you to vastly different results.

A minute of your time is worth a thousand of ours

The other night, the founding team of unIQad was pulling (yet another!) all-nighter. We were planning the next sprint of our beta-release (due in mid-December) and were loudly debating some tough decisions on the user interface.

Maybe it was too much coffee. Maybe it was too many late nights in a row. Maybe it was that he momentarily lost sight of the big picture. But one of the guys suggested that we inserted another step in our ‘campaign setup’ process. His argument was that it would require a couple of weeks of work on his part to eliminate that step. Maybe I was suffering from the fact that it was late – but I blew up completely.

Everything – and I do mean everything – we’re trying to do at unIQad aims at making things quick, simple and easy for our customers.

To provide a bit of context: I believe that nearly all software companies make exceptionally poor decisions when faced with a choice:

1. doing something that’s difficult for themselves but would make life easier for the user
2. doing something that’s easier for themselves but would make life harder for the user

Because we all don’t have enough time or resources, we want to be efficient. We want to put out more features. We want to cram as much as possible into a sprint or a release. Which is good. But it ends up being the wrong things that we cram in. We end up making decisions that make it easy on ourselves but hard on our customers. Idiocy in my opinion. But I've seen a lot of it.

And the worst part is that we tend to hide behind cover-up-arguments. The most common one is that when placing an additional burden on the user (instead of really really solving it and making difficult decisions in the PM and engineering team), we say that it’s because we want to give the user ‘more flexibility’. That’s complete and utter bullshit. In 99 times out of a hundred, it’s because the PM and engineers are either lazy or stupid. Because they’re afraid to make a bold decision.

The truth is that users very rarely want flexibility. The truth is that there are only a small fraction of things in using a software that requires flexibility. Maybe 0.1%. The other 99.9% of the time, a user (a consumer or a business user, it’s essentially the same) wants simplicity and speed in consumption. They’ll live with reduced flexibility and love it, if it makes life a little bit easier and simpler. I’m not even going to mention Apple in this context, but the truth is that there aren’t a lot of other really good examples. The main reason being that it’s really hard to do.

So – back to my René Redzepi moment. Probably didn’t win me the “Boss of the Year” award, but it made a good occasion to re-iterate the most important thing about unIQad. What our architect was suggesting was that we let the user do a little more work to save ourselves a lot of work. And in my rant against his idiotic suggestion, I ended up screaming that “if it takes a hundred hours of your time to save one minute of a user’s time, it’s the easiest f#%&€… decision we’ve ever had to make”.

We spent a couple of more hours discussing and came up with a kick-ass solution. One that will take a long time to develop. But one that will save our customers' time.

And that’s it, really.

Having thought it through, it still rings true. I’d like to think that the people at unIQad are neither stupid nor lazy (in fact, they're pretty amazing!), so I’ll leave the poor choices that come from those characteristics to others.

Think about what you do at your company when you’re faced with a similar decision.