I’ve had this running debate with a handful of friends – I’d love to throw it out there for comment. The questions at hand are 1) whether companies should offer a “free trial” period for their software/web service; 2) if they do, how long should it last; and 3) what information should you ask for before starting a trial (specifically should you ask for credit card information up front).

Here are a few thoughts. I’d love to hear your opinion.

While you know that your web service is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it’s really really hard to convey the chocolaty goodness that is your product to the average consumer. You have to pull them in and offering a dry run of what you do is a good way to do this (maybe you have a free version of the service as well, but even so, you’re saving the best features for your paid users and you need to show them what can do).

Now on to the question of how long your trial should last. While avoiding the obvious cliche answer (“as short as possible”) I’d point out that many (most) companies default to 30 days. I think this is a mistake. If you can’t show value in a week or two you’re doing something wrong. And by waiting 30 days you’re just extending the number of people in your trial funnel and making more work for everyone involved (not to mention stretching out the trial and potentially losing customers). Your product should be designed to quickly get people up and running and to show value right away (see some ideas on that here). I believe your trial period should have three parts: 1) onboarding – quick and as painless as possible; 2) show value – make sure you’ve designed what you do in a way that you’re in front of your customers immediately after they input information; 3) ask for the conversion to paid – once you’ve shown them what great value you add, ask them to fork over the dough. Most companies err in all of these categories. Onboarding is too difficult. Value comes over time, not right away and the product forces users to remember to come back to it rather than the other way around. The “ask” comes too late, after people have forgotten what the service did in the first place.

Lastly open for debate is the question of how much information you should collect up front. On the one hand are people who believe that you should collect as little as possible – probably just and email – and get people into the system and up and running. On the other are people who believe that since you have their attention you should grab their credit card information up front so you can start charging if they don’t opt out. I’m in the former camp. I couldn’t find any scientific study on this, but in my experience asking for a credit card (or even having a two page sign-up form) significantly drops the number of people who get from the beginning to the end of the sign-up process. In one case, asking for credit card information resulted in 9 out of 10 people who started the free trial process dropping out.  That’s not worth the back-end trade-off of having the information to charge them later (plus the opt out thing isn’t cool in my opinion).

Your thoughts are welcome/encouraged!

I’m really not a big fan of conferences. I go to a small number every year and like most people I find that for the most part, the best part of most conferences happens in the hallways and lobby where there’s a chance to connect with other attendees. The conference itself simply becomes the framework to support making those connections.

Defrag, however, is a rare exception to this widely held view in the conference world – it’s a conference worth attending not only for the connections you’ll make in the hallway but also in the insight you’ll gain inside the presentation rooms. Organized as an interactive conversation, Defrag challenges attendees to become a part of the conversation through thought-provoking topics, an agenda that stresses audience involvement and through break-out sessions and other mechanisms that reinforce the participatory nature of the event. The high caliber of the conference attendees and intimate nature of the venue don’t hurt either.

We’ve been involved with Defrag – a conference that we produce along with Eric Norlin – for three years and each year of the conference seems to be better than the last. Our involvement with Defrag (and with Glue in the spring) reinforces for us our desire to be a part of the conversation happening around the themes that we care about – not just sit on the sidelines and listen in.

If you’re up for being challenged in a way that you likely haven’t before at a conference (unless, of course, you’ve already been to Defrag) I’d strongly encourage you to attend. To sweeten the deal, Eric is offering up a discount – valid only through September – for $300 off the conference registration fee. Use the code “septspecial1” when you register.

I’ve been involved with the Boulder ESPRIT Awards for the the last 8 years. ESPRIT is put on by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce to “celebrate entrepreneurship” in Boulder county. Each year ESPRIT honors a handful of entrepreneurs who embody the best attributes of the Boulder business community.

This year is the 25th anniversary of the awards and the program will celebrate the last 25 years of innovation in Boulder valley and look forward to some of the people and programs that are serving as catalysts for innovation for the next 25 years.

I’m the event chair this year, which means for the first time since I’ve been involved, I actually don’t have that much to do although I will be emceeing the awards dinner (which promises to be both fun and funny). In addition to the dinner there are a handful of events that are worth checking out:

• The Technology Alliance Breakfast. A showcase of new and emerging technology from the CU Tech Transfer offices.
• Breakfast/Lunch Series. 3 separate events with panelists representing the past, present and future in different industry segments.
• Onsite  Tours. Featuring Sterling Rice Group and People Productions

The action all takes place on October 6th. You can find more on the ESPRIT site or you can email me directly for more information.

Hope to see you there!

Lijit quietly released a very cool new widget for users of their service (that’s you, right?). The new Lijit Welcome Wijit greets site visitors who come to your site via a search term and gives them a relevant roadmap of your site as it relates to the search query that brought them there. It’s great for your site visitors who now have additional context for their interest in your content. It’s also great for publishers who can now create a more sticky experience for their users and expand the cross pollination of their content. From Greg Keller’s post on the Lijit blog, the Welcom Wijit is about:

• Welcoming new readers to your site when they’ve linked in from somewhere else…e.g. a search engine, blogroll that includes your site, etc. They land on your property and they get a true ‘greeting’ to say thanks for stopping by!
• Better content discovery: Readers landing on your site for the first time will have an initial experience right off the bat of mining your content. What is old to you is all new to your new readers! Welcome Wijit will help them find it easily.
• Tools tools tools for your readers: The Welcome Wijit by design is about improved loyalty and return visits. The Wijit offers features to quickly add your feed to RSS readers, My Yahoo and iGoogle home pages to ensure they have you earmarked for return visits.
• Pre-selected search results: When a reader is searching the web for something and they stumble upon your site, Welcome Wijit knows that search term and will provide a pre-selected list of the top 3 relevant items fitting that search on your blog, within your content and throughout your network…given them a true ‘feel’ of the Lijit search experience.
• Advertising opportunities: We’re committed to doing what we can to make you more money! Similar to your Search Engine Results Page advertising, Welcome Wijit provides Google Ads to ensure more relevant ads are seen and clicked through by your readers.

Below is an example from VC Adventure, which shows what you might see if you come to my blog after searching about how to get a job in venture capital:

You can see the Welcome Wijit under the main nav bar – set up with a welcome message, easy way to subscribe and a search box set to expand the search term the user arrived on to the entire blog. Readers can easily see my Lijit Network, view my RSS feed and search my site. The reader also has the option to expand the wijit view for even more information (the search is then populated with results from my blog and tabs to expand that to additional content I’ve generated elsewhere and my expanded network).

Installation is a breeze (it took me about 2 minutes) and can be done from your Lijit account (if you’re already using Lijit search there’s no new code to insert into your blog. Check out the Welcome Wijit page at Lijit for more info.

As you know, I’m no fan of AT&T.

With that in mind I couldn’t help sharing this piece of news: AT&T is now offering customers the ability to pay up and purchase a 3G Microcell to use in their homes (since no-one it seems actually gets descent service at home). The device supports both voice and data usage (presumably the latter is only marginally useful since most consumers with data devices connect to their home wifi networks in house).

For the privilege of better coverage at home (and the added benefit to AT&T of presumably offloading traffic from their cellular network to customer’s internet providers) you’ll get charged $150 for the device (ok – that seems fair) and $20 additional monthly service fee (what?!? – an additional monthly charge for helping AT&T clear traffic from its network, shift cost to your internet provider and extending coverage where Verizon and other carriers already have it?).

Rock on AT&T!

(hat tip Jeff Kohn for the pointer to the news)

I receive a large number of “check out my new cool bright shiny web thing” emails. I’m amazed at how crappy the user experience is on many of these new tools. Sure – if I spent 20 minutes setting it up and clicking through a bunch of different layers of the application I might find out how great it is, but honestly, if the site doesn’t grab me in the first 30 to 60 seconds I typically close the browser tab and move on.

I understand that it’s a challenge for application designers to figure out how to move a user through their system and many designers have a big vision about what their app can do. But often what’s lost is basic design and a logical progression. Many of these apps lack basic user experience common sense.

Below are a few thoughts on how to accomplish a strong first impression:

• My username should be my email. I have too many usernames as it is and unless I’m transacting financial information I want my log-in to be relatively basic. Plus you can likely pre-populate this if you’re using an invite code or something similar and already know my email address.
• Don’t force me to use a funky password (symbols, etc.) – again, too much work unless you’re collecting secure information from me (in which case I probably won’t sign up in the first place….).
• The sign/up should gather the absolute minimum information acceptable – don’t collect more than you need and lose users interest in the process.
• Once I do the sign-up I should be in the app – please don’t take me back to the sign-up page and make me fill in the information I just gave you.
• The first time I log into an app I should be taken to some kind of set-up wizard that helps me get started. Don’t dump me into some dashboard and force me to figure out what to do to get started.
• Leverage existing sing-up infrastructure (Google, Facebook, etc).
• Let me put in an amount of information that’s comfortable to me and then show me how you’re going to make my experience fun/interesting/valuable (for example don’t force me to upload my contact list on my first visit – I’m not going to do it; think incremental information collection for incremental benefit – don’t overreach.
• Do something useful for me right away. This is the 30 second logic. If what you do is a cool as you think it is, I should get a glimpse of that in the first 30-60 seconds of interacting with your application.
• Once you have me interested, give me a clear, but relatively unobtrusive nudge to put more information in to take it to the next level
• If your application is social in nature, give me an easy way to integrate my social graph (twitter, Facebook, etc.) and then show me who else I know is using your service.
• Your dashboard/home page should be well laid out and everything you can think of should have a link to the next page (don’t force me to use only the top nav bar to get around your site; if you’re showing me a table on the home page, for example, the table headers, cells, etc should be live links to a place to enter more data into the site for example.
• If you ask users for feedback and they send it to you, be sure to keep them in the loop about what changes you’re making (and acknowledge their email; I can’t tell you the number of times I sent a few ideas to a company who asked me to check out their site never to hear back).

I’d love to hear some more ideas on how to accomplish a good first experience for users. It’s on my mind in particular right now because I feel like in the last month I’ve tried to engage with a large number of new applications that completely failed to capture my attention (one in particular stuck me on a homepage where I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to input the data that the system was supposedly designed to track; I failed completely and haven’t been back).

I was recently talking to someone about an issue in one of their portfolio companies (this was not a Foundry or Mobius company). The issue was pretty serious (it related to safety standards at the company that were being ignored and a resulting accident at the business) and the person relating this story was (understandably) pretty worked up and asking me what I thought they should do.  My advice?

I can’t say that I come by this naturally (I can be pretty excitable) or that I was a particularly good practitioner of my own advice earlier in my venture career, but I’ve managed to reign myself in and strongly believe that the priority in any interaction is simply to not panic or over-react. Every situation is better viewed from a calmer perspective and without question your judgment is more solid and reliable when you’re thinking with a clear head. It’s not just that things are often not as bad as they seem (in the example above I think they were actually worse than they originally appeared) or that everything will eventually work itself out (sometimes it doesn’t) but rather that with a little perspective and by giving yourself enough time to assess the situation and consider your options you’re almost always going to make a better decision.

A few days ago I received a note from Plaxo in my inbox that said in part:

As you probably know, Plaxo was acquired last year by Comcast and is now a business unit of Comcast Interactive Media (CIM). Not surprisingly, given the above focus, we’ve been working on enabling interoperability between Plaxo and other CIM Websites. In advance of rolling out this common identity system, we’ve developed a unified Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that will apply to Plaxo and the other participating Comcast Websites, providing consistent protection and eliminating the complexity and potential confusion of having different terms and policies for each Website.

Among the things that were updated in the policy was the section pertaining to what information Plaxo could use. Specifically they are now able to make use of “Demographic portions of your data (such as zip code, gender, or industry) and usage patterns may be shared with our trusted partners who deliver advertising to you on our behalf.”

I may be in the minority here, but I’m actually happy to have non-personally identifiable information used by third party ad networks in an effort to serve me better ads. And, in fact, I’m shocked at how little information it seems these networks actually know about me. For example, despite all the time I spend searching on Google, on Google docs, Google groups, and other Google sites, I was shocked at how little they actually know about me (see my post on exposing Google cookie information here). I’m involved in a handful of advertising related businesses and I understand a lot about how the advertising ecosystem comes together to try to figure out what ad to show what user. We talk about things like “behavioral targeting” a lot in the industry but it’s surprisingly limited in its overall use and effectiveness (there are a handful of very specific categories that advertisers and networks are looking for – most of the rest of us don’t make the cut). State of the art is to categorize based on location and possibly a cut at your gender (either indirectly based on the demographics of the site you are visiting or slightly more directly based on the usage patters that have been observed). While there are a handful of companies out there that are trying to take this to the next level their reach is so far pretty limited.

So rather than be upset at Plaxo for taking the information it knows about m to build a better business and a smarter advertising ecosystem I say the more the better. I’d like to see more ads about cycling and home building and fewer urging me to attend the University of Phoenix.

I recently participated in a Thomson Reuters webinar entitled "Boosting Returns with Web 2.0 Technology". The seminar was targeted to VC and Private Equity professionals and focused on how investment firms can use social media in managing their investment business. 

I was reminded of the mew media technology bubble that I live in a few months ago when I spoke on a similar topic at the PEI Investor Relations and Communications Forum. When I asked the crowd of about 150 people how many were on Twitter and a single hand went up I realized that I had my work cut out for me (I might have guessed that that when I walked into the room and was the only person wearing jeans, but that’s another story)…

Because of my experience at the PEI forum (realizing that most VC/PE professionals are still just beginning to understand social media and how they might use it for promoting themselves or their firm) I focused my presentation for the Thomson Reuters webinar on the basics of social media (and reinforcing that there are a handful of firms – primarily early stage VC firms – that are active users of the technology). I highlighted how we’ve used social media at Foundry Group and specifically the benefits we’ve gotten out of being extremely public about our investment themes, our reasons for investing in specific companies, etc (see the slide that highlights the Lijit search tag cloud on our blog). The builds in the deck don’t come through SlideShare, so some of the slides are busier (or more confusing) than they were when built up correctly, but you’ll get the idea. One of my co-presenters, David Teten of Teten Advisors has a post up about the seminar as well (along with a link to his slides).

My wife received an email this morning from AT&T that said in part:

Our systems have detected that you are transmitting a substantial amount of data while roaming in areas not directly served by AT&T. The Terms and Conditions of our data plans (including unlimited plans) provide an "off-net usage" allowance that is equal to the lesser of 24 megabytes or 20% of the megabytes included in your plan.

I was surprised by this, not only because I hadn’t completely read the terms and conditions (I subsequently did and it’s in there – they can go so far as to cancel my account if they don’t like my network usage – on net or off, voice or data) but mostly because our phones were registering that they were on the AT&T network in all of the places that we travel to regularly.

I called customer service and learned a few interesting facts: 1) despite the phone indicating it is on network, sometimes it isn’t (in our case the town where we spend many of our weekends turns out to not be on their network); 2) AT&T has a new policy of going after "abusers" of the system (the Ts&Cs aren’t new – their aggressive enforcement is); and 3) going after abusers means that if we continue to use off-net data services they will either cut of our data when we’re outside of AT&T’s coverage area or simply terminate our account.

I can’t be the only person to see the unbelievable irony in AT&T’s action. Not only do they have one of the lowest quality networks in existence, and a very limited network outside of the major metro areas, and aren’t actually identifying to customers when they are on network vs. off network (presumably to give the perception that their limited network is actually larger than it really is), and they are the exclusive seller of one of the most powerful (read: data consuming) smartphones, but now they are threatening to cut off our service for using our phones for what they were designed for. My wife summed it up perfectly (and I think reflects a sentiment that is widely held): "If they didn’t have the iPhone I would drop AT&T!"

Even more amusing was the fact that my call to customer service was terminated when the call was dropped (there are many many dead zones around Boulder). My wife joked that we should send AT&T a termination letter stating that we weren’t going to honor the contract because their network coverage was so poor.

I think AT&T is walking into a PR nightmare if they start shutting people off like this. It’s one thing to have a crappy network. It’s another to punish your customers for your shortcomings.