As a general rule, I believe that you want to get users to the “goods” quickly and easily, reducing friction wherever possible.  However, sometimes this can go too far, and sacrifice the needs of the business.  I thought I would share an example from Aprizi where we did exactly that.

First, for context: Aprizi was a personalized discovery engine for independent designers in fashion and home decor (we pushed on the concept for about 15 months, and decided to wind it down in mid April, although the site is still up for now).  When visitors came to aprizi.com, they saw this screen:

The vast majority of visitors would, not surprisingly, click that big orange button. We then asked the visitor two questions with lightbox popups: what gender and what major categories were they interested in?

At this point, the user would go right to their home page with a carousel full of goodies. This FUE wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was good enough compared to other design and dev priorities we had. But we had a major problem: we were really happy with our bounce rate (typically ranged between 15% and 30%), but we had an absolutely pathetic registration rate in the low single digits.

We needed registrations because 1. we couldn’t do personalization across visits without it, and 2. we needed people’s email addresses, because email is a critical way to bring people back to a site.  We tried to encourage people to register by putting a message right in the carousel (along with messaging elsewhere on the site), like the following screenshot:

But that accomplished little, regardless of the copy used.

Finally, we decided to add a third step to the FUE where we asked the user to sign up. Nothing fancy – we just asked for email and password:

We even made it optional, so that if the user X-ed out of the lightbox at this point, they would get to their carousel like nothing had happened. However, we didn’t TELL people that it was optional.

The results: our registration rate jumped up to 40%, and our bounce rate didn’t really change. A clear win.

Good UX is about finding harmony between the needs of the customer and the needs of the business. Swing too far in one direction or the other, and you have a serious problem on your hands. This was a great example for me of how one could actually reduce friction *too far*, and that pulling back and getting in the way of the customer a bit more could lead to great results.

When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led me to email and the realization that access to email receipts could generate an incredible database of product-level shopping information that few folks other than Amazon have.

But while email receipts could be useful to a business, that’s not a value proposition to the consumer. So we thought about possible reasons why someone might let a (trustworthy) company analyze their email. I came up with 7 primary ones: a reward points system (ed. after all my time in virtual worlds, I had virtual currencies on the brain); targeted discounts / coupons; easy access to shipping info; analytics on how you spend money; receipt records and organization; 1-click shopping to buy an item again; and personalized suggestions.

Before we decided to officially start Aprizi, I “got out of the building”, interviewing lots of people and running a survey. One amusing discovery was that men wanted reports on their spending activity, but the women pretty universally said “don’t you dare show that to me!”

In the survey, we asked people to rate interest in those 7 options on a scale of 1-5, from “don’t care” to “need now!”. Here are the results, broken into 3 basic buckets:

You might look at that chart and say, “well clearly you want to focus on deals.” However, I had a discussion with a very savvy retail market researcher who warned me that it could be a red herring. Sometimes, he explained, people feel like they are supposed to answer a certain way, but when you examine their actual behavior, you will see a different pattern.

Indeed, that’s what I found when I did more qualitative research. Now, there are lots of people who obsess over deals, but I was focusing on what you might call “middle-class” customers, since I felt like the low-end of the market was pretty covered on the Internet. I found that deals and discounts were not as strong a driver of people’s actual behavior as one might think.

Note that we didn’t have “sharing what you buy” on that list of value propositions. I didn’t buy it. When Blippy and Swipely emerged and raised a ton of money, I starting asking people about public sharing and got really negative reactions. I think that was confirmed by the lackluster uptake of those companies’ initial products.

We ultimately decided that concrete interest existed in two categories: personalized deals and personalized suggestions.

Liz starting building a prototype that would integrate with gmail and pull in Amazon receipts, and I started paper-testing mockups. We also built a “wizard of oz” prototype which felt like a functioning website but was really me trying out different kinds of recommendations on people. We tested both deals and suggestions, things like sample sales and coupons, commodity products and unique items, different price points, and big brands vs indie ones.

We ran some user tests watching people (at this point, we had already focused pretty strongly on women) use the prototype, or if they were remote, trying to hop on the phone with them just after usage. The highest point of “happiness” was reached when a woman discovered a new store or product that held a designer or brand she had never heard of. The body language was amazing, and we decided to focus on trying to bottle that moment, that experience.

Here’s a slide from one of my early investor decks on our “learnings” from all the customer development work we were doing:

I was also getting a lot of signals that people were increasingly interested in smaller or more socially conscious brands, but that it was really hard to make sense of all the noise in the market. What should be a fun shopping experience online was a serious chore. Our decision to focus on becoming a “Pandora for shopping for independent brands and designers” led to a rethinking of the product and our business model, but that can be the subject of another post.

Ultimately, we generated a decent amount of enthusiasm from thousands of users, but we struggled with the investor community. They respected Liz and my backgrounds, but being mostly men, didn’t personally get what we were trying to do. Aprizi was too complex, the “long tail of design” was too unknown, and we made the fatal mistake of delaying connecting the dots to revenue and instead focused our efforts on iterating the product experience. That might work in Silicon Valley, but is very tough in New York.

I do still think that Aprizi tapped into a big problem and someone, someday, will become very successful by solving it. But I can understand the hesitation of investors as well. We had pivoted our business model three times, and while I thought that we could get it working, I knew that there was risk remaining in our e-commerce strategy. I remain proud of what we accomplished with just 2 full-time people and a mere $35K in capital. Ultimately, having a family, I had a limited runway to make it work. We’ve cut down the servers to a bare minimum, but if interested you can still see the product for a little while longer.

So what was the $9.4M you mentioned in the title, Giff? That’s because I woke up this morning and saw the Techcrunch headline that “Project Slice” had raised $9.4M to — guess what — help you manage your email receipts, the concept we had long left in the dust (including throwing our email integration code in the dustbin).

Now I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that raising a lot of money is NOT an indicator of success, but it inevitably raises the question, did we make a mistake? Did we follow our noses off a cliff instead of into the fruit trees?  Maybe Project Slice will prove our pivot wrong. Offermatic is another West Coast company that has raised a lot of money that could show that we were wrong in our conclusions. Entrepreneur to entrepreneur, I have to wish them the best.

We *are* seeing a trend right now where VCs hand enormous sums of money to entrepreneurs with a “previous win” long before product-market fit is established. Granted, that in itself is nothing new, but the volume is higher than the preceding decade.

Startups are a series of judgement calls, and you make the best ones you can based on the information you have at the time.

I don’t regret the 15 months we spent working on Aprizi, not for a second.

It has been a while since I have done an Aprizi update. The shorthand is that we are deep in the pugilist-state of the entrepreneur experience. We have had some wins, we have taken some blows, and we fight on.

In the “fun news” department, Daily Candy featured Aprizi at the top of their national email one week last month. In just one day we got over 5K new uniques (1,000 of whom came back again that very same day), with a 12% bounce rate, 9 min avg time on site, and 45% registration rate. I was happy that day.

The big challenge as a bootstrapped organization is building and maintaining momentum with ridiculously few resources. We are stretched more than ever because earlier this year, after focusing our full time efforts in 2010 on Aprizi (we opened up our beta in the Fall), we started consulting in order to support both ourselves and our basic operating costs.

I did speak to quite a few investors, and while a round looked promising in December, a critical party backed out and we were not able to rebuild momentum to the point that a round was worthwhile (at small levels, one might as well just bootstrap). A year ago, Jules Pieri of Daily Grommet wondered out loud whether I would have an easier time pitching a female-oriented concept to male investors as a man myself. The short answer is no. So many investors fall in or out of love with an idea in the first few seconds, and it is tough trying pitch ideas that they cannot relate to — but that is only one factor.

Liz and I have pretty good credibility as technologists and product designers, but it has not been enough, especially when you mix in fears of the fashion space getting crowded. At first I beat myself up, until I started talking to other, solid local entrepreneurs. I realized that raising money in New York remains a brutal task, no matter what you might read in the media. (Part of the reason why this blog went so quiet is I didn’t want to write about any of this.)

But when it came to the site, we had too many women raving about Aprizi to pull the plug on the business simply because a round was not forthcoming. In mid-January, we decided to stop distracting ourselves with investors and self-fund through consulting. So these days, several days a week one can find us doing a different kind of pitching, i.e. pitching in on tech and product design at Birchbox.

Birchbox has an awesome team, a great business model, and is growing like gangbusters, so it is a fun place to be, but there are two obvious downsides to bootstrapping: 1. context-switching hurts productivity in a big way; 2. progress and momentum on Aprizi has inevitably slowed down because Liz and I are stretched so thin. It is psychologically tough, but better than quitting before we have given Aprizi a proper chance.

What is next for Aprizi?
We recently expanded our curator team and are making a bigger push into homeware, because our goal has always been to create a personalized window shopping experience for emerging *design*, not just fashion.

While there are a thousand things we need to do to improve the Aprizi’s product and business, the big next step is to implement our e-commerce model. It is critical to connect the dots between our “personalized discovery engine” and actually selling products.

As part of this focus on e-commerce, a couple of months ago we decided to shift entirely away from user-generated content. We “hid” our bookmarklet tool so that only our curators, or people trying out for the curator job, would see and use it.

By keeping Aprizi’s database entirely curated, we keep quality high, we safeguard our focus on independent and emerging designers, and we ensure that everything added to Aprizi is actually actionable by a shopper (i.e. purchasable and in stock). These are some of the key things that differentiate us from some of the other interesting startups in the “discovery as entertainment” field, such as Svpply and Pinterest.

Of course, killing the UGC angle went against the recommendations of many investors, who thought that UGC was necessary for scalability (I completely disagree). My belief, after having spent years dealing with UGC, is that it can be great for community engagement, but it is not great for actually selling products.

I miss some of the viral dynamics that come with UGC, but feel more confident in our business model. I have been doing startups too long to be comfortable with the “get hot, raise money and figure it out later” mode that remarkably seems back in vogue among certain investors. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt and little else to show for it (not counting some good friends and excellent lessons).

So here we are, slugging it out. But all in all, things could be worse: we have over ten thousand people using our product regularly, I have the best co-founder I could ever imagine, a team of dedicated curators all over the country, and we are able to pay the bills and continue to put one foot in front of the other.

Now, us entrepreneurs tend to be a foolishly optimistic lot, but I feel world domination coming on any moment, don’t you?

I regularly talk to small and medium-sized designers and business owners in the sectors where Aprizi plays. It is always interesting to hear about their challenges and tactics for success. They are entrepreneurs just like we are in the world of tech. Some of these interviews get converted into posts for The Tail, Aprizi’s blog. I wanted to highlight one in particular.

Sunny Woan is a lawyer by day, emerging handbag designer by night, in the process of getting her first collection ready for launch. In creating her new brand, Taryn Zhang, Sunny has charged up a steep learning curve, hunted down great mentors, and tackled her entrepreneurial venture with determination, high standards, and flexibility in the face of challenges. A lot of people are asking themselves what the future of retail looks like. You might be intrigued by this perspective from a fresh voice on the designer side. I am highlighting two excerpts from the interview below, and you can read the whole thing over at The Tail.

How important is selling online to your business?
Sunny: The only reason designers are so enamored of brick and mortar is because people still superficially judge success by it, similar to how some folks judge how successful you are by the car you drive. It’s nonsense. The real profits to be made is via e-commerce. Me personally, I can’t even remember the last time I really went shopping at a store. Who has the time? I like to multi-task shopping online with something else, and get it done that way. My husband and I, and pretty much everyone in our generation and our circle of friends, buy whatever we need short of groceries online. Marketing, publicity, and sales on the web are critical to my business, and should be critical to any start-up in the 21st century.

What tips would you share with other independent businesses who sell online?
Sunny: With small businesses, I would say take the opportunity to get personal and be personable. You have a chance to interact directly with your buyers, to provide superb customer service, not unlike back in the days of old Americana when Mrs. Cooper of Cooper’s General Store on Main Street would greet you by your first name when you walked through the door, and she’d ask how your kids Johnny and little Sarah have been. The Internet is our new Main Street, and an opportunity for us to be almost subversive in a way, and bring back a more local mom-and-pop feel, as ironic as that sounds, considering how global it actually is. It’s a chance for small businesses to thrive and take away a piece of that pie from the big conglomerate corporations, so make that opportunity count. Think of yourself as not just here to build a business, but also here to build a community.

Read the full interview here.

On Friday, I gave a 20-minute talk at a product design conference organized by Ty Ahmad-Taylor (CEO of FanFeedr) and Hard Candy Shell (the talk shared the same title as this post). I discussed mistakes and lessons from Aprizi’s journey. I don’t think it was videotaped, so I am going to take advantage of this flight to California to write down some of the salient points here (and include thumbnails of the slides). Longtime readers will recognize many of these statements.

First, we assumed that the audience had read Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Second, if you are unfamiliar with the term product-market fit, it was coined by Marc Andreessen, and I think of it as basically meaning that you have the right product for the right market at the right time.

I want to stress that this was focused on PRE product-market fit, when you are still iterating on the problem you want to solve and how you can best solve it.  Here are the six points that I covered:
1. Focus on the Value Proposition
2. Qualitative not Quantitative
3. Focus Groups are Evil
4. Own Customer Development AND UX
5. Let Some Things Suck
6. Beware the Siren Song of Investors

I’m going to skip discussing my background in this post — for that, you can click here.

As for the context of Aprizi (currently in open beta), let me ask you a question: have you ever walked down a cool city street and enjoyed discovering a cool boutique with beautiful, unique products? Well, we want to bring that experience and feeling to the Web. Aprizi gives people a fun and (increasingly) personalized way to discover boutiques, independent brands and emerging designers online. We focus on design and lifestyle-centric products. We’re not a marketplace like Etsy or Boticca, but rather a discovery engine.

When Liz Crawford and I started Aprizi last December, we knew that we wanted to make online shopping both smarter and more fun, but it has been quite a journey from that point to the present. Some of our initial hypotheses held up, and some died under the customer development sword. Our journey consisted of hundreds of interviews across an arc of paper testing, manual alpha (i.e. me behind the website as the hamster on the wheel), a crude first beta, and finally now, a baseline beta product which I am really happy to have as our true starting point.

We made some mistakes and learned lessons along the way, so let’s dive in.

1. Focus on the Value Proposition

This sounds like such an obvious statement but teams can get lost thinking about their own needs rather than what the customer needs. Let me highlight with one of my moments of idiocy. At the start of Aprizi, we got obsessed with email receipts. We thought, “there is item-level purchase data locked up in people’s email inboxes — we can parse it and that would open up so many opportunities!” I was doing lots of customer interviews to figure out which were the best opportunities, which was fine and good, but on the coding side, we started building and testing this email infrastructure.

Thankfully, we woke up after a few weeks and realized that building this infrastructure had *nothing* to do with testing what the customer wanted. It had to do with what *we* wanted, and the data we thought we needed. We put the code on the shelf, got our alpha up to test things that the user might care about, and never looked back. Our business has evolved and we have not touched that code since.

I will give you another example, which I saw in effect with a social games company. The team was so concerned about monetization that they built a virtual goods system before they had even properly tested whether their game was fun, or iterated it to the point that it actually *was* fun. Monetization is important, but “fun” had to be their core foundation. They put their needs ahead of the customer.

Many ask “which hypothesis should I test first?” Definitely think through which assumptions are biggest and most risky, but I think it is always wise to begin with a focus on the value proposition to the customer.

2. Qualitative not Quantitative

I’ve said this before — metrics are really important, but the startup echo chamber can over-emphasize their importance in the early days. The closer you get to product-market fit, the more critical metrics become, but they are not all-important while you are still trying to figure out the right product for the right customer.

If you are trying to solve a gnarly problem, you need to look people in the eye, read their body language, hear their tone, and understand their deeper motivations. You need to watch people using your application, or talk to them right after, not stare at sterile numbers. Beware the “local optima” problem (optimizing for a small problem/market). Yes, install metrics and try to think about which metrics you should really care about, but dig into the human side.

On this line of thought, I think surveys are awesome for objective data, but troublesome for subjective data. Example: at the very start of Aprizi, I did a survey of about 60-70 people and got great factual data about their shopping habits, but also got a huge red herring on desired value proposition. By far, the most popular “solution” the survey takers said they wanted had to do with deals/discounts. However, in a classic case of “what people say is often different from what they do,” when I really dug into their true behavior, very few of the people I had targeted actually oriented their shopping behavior around deals.

Aprizi’s true “eureka” moment did not come from metrics. Instead, I was watching a New York City school teacher try out our alpha. We had given her a bunch of different kinds of recommendations to see what got a reaction. She spotted a tote bag from an an independent artist with a small online store. Her face registered curiosity and she clicked through to the store. Then she lit up and I watched her spend 10 minutes gleefully browsing around this woman’s website. At the end, she turned to me with excitement and said, “I *never* would have found this!” At that moment, all these little things I had been hearing and seeing finally sunk in, and I thought to myself, “THAT is what we need to bottle!”

3. Focus Groups are Evil

To properly express my disdain for focus groups, I asked my 5 year old daughter what the most evil thing in the world was. The answer, of course, was Cruella De Vil. And Cruella is actually an apt metaphor, because that’s one of the problems you can get: a dominant personality taking over. OR you get terrible group think. We tried a focus group early in Aprizi’s journey and it really was not effective, at no fault to the participants.

In a customer development interview, you want to start by talking generally about behavior, then talk about a possible solution to a problem, and throughout you want to keep your antenna really sensitive so you can drill down into the “whys” of people’s responses. You simply cannot do that effectively when you are managing a group of people.

4. Own Customer Development AND UX

Don’t let your company and product design become a game of telephone. You need the person designing the UX to be the same person (or people) talking to customers. You do not have to be a graphic design expert — anyone can use Balsamiq, and anyone can look at 5 comparable websites or mobile apps and decide what works and what does not work.

We had a short-lived experiment. I am an adequate UI designer, but not the best by any stretch of the imagination. At the start of Aprizi, I thought to myself, I know some really good UX/UI folks, and they’re willing to help me out, so why not start with the product being *that much better* with the hand of a pro!

Mistake. While this designer was super helpful in giving us a start in the right direction (for which I am highly grateful), the problems quickly became evident. The designer knew tons about usability, but just wasn’t close enough to the user’s problem. Even more problematic was that my thoughts about the product and marketing were evolving far too quickly to do anything but drive this designer absolutely batty. We needed too many iterations, and I knew I had to take back over the design or else threaten a good friendship.

5. Let Some Things Suck

When you are still hunting for PM-Fit, you have to let some things suck. It is hard for people like us, who take pride in our work, but it is necessary. You really could spend a lifetime optimizing the wrong product and go nowhere.

At this super-early stage, focus on learning. Only do what is “good enough” to learn. The definition of “good enough” varies tremendously depending on the product and customer, so you have to use your own judgement here.

In Aprizi’s first beta, we had a web form that I’ve written about before, so going to skip details here. I came to hate this form with a passion. We learned some useful things through the questions asked to the user, and the metrics showed that conversion was not a huge problem, but when I actually watched people get to this page, I saw them stop dead in confusion. Obviously, you never want that to happen; you want to always give people an action and get them to the sexy sauce as fast as possible. So did we fix or remove this page? No we did not. It killed me, but this form wasn’t getting in the way of learning, which was our true goal. Once we had learned what we wanted to learn from beta-1, and got to work on beta-2, this form was happily taken out back and shot.

6. Beware the Siren Song of Investors

I got a lot out of talking to investors early on in our journey. We weren’t trying to raise money, just looking for advice. You can learn about competitors, business model ideas, and the many ways similar things have failed before (VCs never have a shortage in this department). However, for all the well-intentioned, intelligent advice you will get, you need to be careful around the product.

Investors know what is hot right now. That is part of their job. Digging deep into a gnarly customer problem — that is your job.

When we talked to investors, we kept on hearing “you should focus on deals!” Why? Because Gilt, Groupon and Woot were out there killing it. Deals were the rage. However, in startups, as hockey players say, you want to: “skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.”

So my caution is don’t act like a cat chasing a lure perpetually out of reach. Sometimes the new hotness can reveal opportunities — take Yipit, for example — but you need to really think about the problems and customers *you* care about.

The reality is that investors don’t want you to build what they say you should build; they just want you to build something successful.

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So there you go — roughly my six points for the talk.  The folks in the room then asked a whole bunch of great questions, and you should not hesitate to do so either, whether in a direct email to me (giff.constable at gmail) or in the comments below.

Big company people are used to delegation, resources at their disposal, and the benefit of a strong brand name. As startup people, we have none of that. Our job description is “whatever it takes.”

Like most founders, I wear a lot of hats at Aprizi. While I had been creating the product mockups in Balsamiq and Photoshop, I had not actually been implementing them. My CSS skills were very rudimentary, but we had a talented web-dev friend helping us out and this allowed me to focus on other important things. In our latest product push, however, he was not going to be available, so I had to decide whether to take the time to learn CSS or to pay someone to handle implementation for us.

We only raised $35K at the start of the year and had purposefully pushed off trying to raise more until this Fall. We choose our expenditures very carefully. In this case, it was far more useful to save cash for something I cannot do, such as our iPhone app, than something i can learn.

So I picked up a book, CSS: The Missing Manual from O’Reilly, and knuckled down for several days. To be honest, this is the first book on CSS that actually made sense to me. It felt painful to put other activities on hold, but the time investment really helped us leap forward once I got up the initial learning curve. I admit, wearing my scrappy “product designer” hat, I really enjoyed digging into the dev environment and making the changes I wanted without having to wait on anyone. It is the kind of thing you have to do as founder, but rarely can justify doing as CEO once you start growing, so I try to revel in it while I can.

On Friday, we put up a new beta version of Aprizi (for those lacking context, we’re trying to solve the problem of how much of a chore it is to discover great but smaller brands, boutiques and designers). We have some bugs to kill, and the personalization stuff has not really been put in yet, but it is a much better starting point.

I don’t bill myself as the best designer in the world, but I hope you like the new site. Please let me know your feedback at giff@aprizi.com.

Today I am working on some UI/UX changes to our product, and thought I would quickly talk through a UI example (soon to die under my axe) from our beta. Some context: in the spirit of getting a beta up as quickly as possible, our first user experience (FUE) was pretty crude. After registration (also soon to disappear), the first thing everyone saw was this screen:

These three questions were basically what I asked our participants during our “wizard of oz” alpha. While not ideal from a user-experience perspective, they had the distinct advantage letting us learn about the interests of our potential customers in an open-ended way.

The screen was simple enough that most people made it to the next screen, but it had quite a few problems as well.

First, it required the user to type. Useful, as I said, from an MVP “learn from users” approach, but in general I recommend having the user click rather than type.

Second, it made the user stop and think. Not everyone had a quick answer to the first question, “what are you shopping for now?” Key point: try not to put the user in a place where they can get stuck. Instead, make things flow and get them to the real action as quickly and fluidly as possible.

Third, and this was the biggie, this input screen put people in a “search” mindset rather than a “browse” mindset. By typing in items, it felt like a search query. It led to the assumption that we would have a very deep and very broad database, because otherwise we would not let the user type *anything* in, right?

If they typed in “pleated grey flannel pants”, and nothing showed up because we’re not trying to solve the “find pleated grey flannel pants” problem*, the user would be disappointed. Master-of-the-Obvious tip: disappointment is bad. Key point: when you are designing your interface, make sure you think through the expectations your UX might create, because your design exists in a context of other products which have come before.

Other minor notes:
About 50% of the people saw and appreciated the suggestions on the right, because it gave them more context for the questions. The other 50% tuned out the right column because that’s typically ad space.

Lastly, know that even on a relatively simple screen, people are going to miss what seem like obvious UI elements. In this screen, while it might seem logical that the user would type something into each text box and either hit <Enter> or the “Add” button, in some cases the user never saw the Add button at all.

I don’t know if all this is interesting or merely obvious to everyone, but there you go!

* So what problem are we solving? We want to make it less of a chore to discover wonderful products/designers/boutiques in the ‘long tail’ of e-commerce. This direction was one of the critical decisions from our beta.

This is a guest post from Julie Dinerman, the Columbia University student interning with Aprizi as part of the HackNY program, which paired area students with startups. I think HackNY’s organizers Hilary, Chris and Evan are creating something very important to the NY startup ecosystem, and we are really pleased to be among a great list of startups to get to work with a “Fellow”. The photo above is Liz Crawford, my co-founder at Aprizi, and Julie (on the right) at a recent Geek Girl NY dinner. I asked Julie to share some of her thoughts from the internship after the first few weeks, so here is Julie in her own words:
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I feel lucky to be working at Aprizi as part of the first class of students on the HackNY program. One of my goals for the summer was to see what working outside of an academic setting would be like. Being paired up with a small startup company in New York sounded like an excellent opportunity to learn about working in business and industry.

I am discovering that startup companies have their own culture within the world of industry. My first week at Aprizi presented me with a whirlwind of new terms and concepts from business and especially the startup tech business that I was completely unfamiliar with. A taste of the ideas that came my way would include how to find ‘venture capitalists and angel investors’, what it meant to be in ‘open beta’ and that the ‘tails’ of the marketplace may be as rich in resources as its peaks. I also see that startups come with good and bad. I love the casual atmosphere in our office that is typical in the startup community. There is a lot of creative freedom that comes with spearheading a startup, but there is also a lot of pressure to make an excellent product without a lot of resources. And you can only hope for a happy ending.

On my first day at Aprizi, Giff and Liz met me for lunch and began explaining their vision for the website. I was impressed by their enthusiasm and I thought Aprizi sounded like an interesting concept. After taking a good look at the website, it was hard to believe that all of the coding and curation was done by a team of only two people. I was excited to jump in and start helping. Giff invited me to sit in on some of the meetings he and Liz had and I began to understand a little bit more about the company’s growth and development strategies for the next couple of months. They are working to build the site piece by piece. Throughout the process, they plan on making changes and additions that are guided by the feedback they get from their early users. This seems like a smart plan to me.

As Liz helped me install the necessary software and files to start working, Giff suggested that I help in the curation process as well as the coding. Being an Electrical Engineering student that doesn’t spend too much time shopping, I hesitated. Giff encouraged me by explaining that Aprizi recommendations are meant to come from lots of different styles and perspectives. I began to think of Aprizi as more than just a personal shopping website to connect users with products they already know about. Rather, Aprizi is being designed to help people discover cool things that they would love but would not have found on their own without a lot of searching. Now, when I find a cool item online, I excitedly add it to the database.

My favorite part of this internship is that I get to learn about programming in a supportive, hands-on environment. It took a little while to get my machine set up and to learn the basics of JRuby and Rails. When I was ready to begin, Liz gave me a couple of introductory tasks and I was thrilled to see my changes appear on the website. I have been working on some small improvements here and there and I am excited to get started on my bigger project which will add a search feature to Aprizi.

All in all, I am having fun learning a lot and finding cool things for the database. I hope you check back on the Aprizi website soon for the awesome new search feature!
- Julie

Aprizi has been in open beta for six weeks now.  These last six weeks have been an intense blur, a fire hose of information, and going open beta was the best possible thing we could have done.  We are making some fairly big near-term changes because of this process.  Here are 8 thoughts on the latest phase of our customer development process (see parts 3, 2, and 1).

For those new to the blog, Aprizi is building a “Pandora for shopping”.  We are creating an entertaining, personalized experience that helps people discover cool new products and stores, especially those located slightly deeper into the “long tail” of ecommerce.  While many things are currently being changed, you can play with the first version of our “minimum” beta at aprizi.com.

1. Interact with Customers However You Can
At this point, 400 people have used the beta and that has been a solid sample to accomplish our “learning” goals.  We have talked with beta users over email and phone, and have physically watched over their shoulder as they have used the site.  We wanted to answer some core questions: Do people care about what we are creating? What aspects of our MVP (and vision) are getting the strongest reaction? What will get us to product-market fit?

For the first several weeks, I tried to email every single person who signed up for the site.  I asked them to get on the phone with me, or at least answer some questions over email.  When it comes to learning from a user, in-person is best, then phone, then email, but any interaction is better than none.  As Steve Krug says, nothing beats in-person observation for pointing out UX flaws.  The number of people willing to talk to you is an important signal.

Talking to customers is addictive, and I found it to be a great stress reliever.  An excited, happy user is the best cure for stress about your startup, but frankly any customer feedback at all feels good. Substance over theory, baby. Do not be afraid to get on the phone with customers — you might be surprised at how pleased people are to talk to a company that actually gives a damn about its customers!

2. Stay Flexible
You might find that you need to give yourself a daily quota, i.e. “I will email X new customers every morning”, but keep on evaluating your time involvement. At first, I reached out to every single new user. Then time demands forced me to scale back to just the new female sign-ups, since that is our primary demographic. This week I am pretty much putting customer development on hold. The reason: we have made our decisions on what comes next for the business, and now we need to roll up our sleeves and get there as quickly as possible.

3. Don’t Optimize for the Wrong Things (or “let some stuff suck”)
During a beta process like this, you are painfully aware of the limitations of your crude product.  While we worked hard to fix immediate technical and UX issues, we tried not to lose ourselves in optimization.  Making the MVP really solid was not our goal; finding product-market fit was our goal.  If a problem was getting in the way of our learning, we fixed it, but many things were left on the backlog.  This is easier said than done, because as you talk to more users, you start hearing the same problems over and over again.  Between your pride and a natural instinct to make customers happy, you will feel a massive urge to FIX it.  One of the great things about having a co-founder is you can keep each other’s well-intentioned, but poorly-prioritized impulses in check.

4. Ruthless Prioritization
As a small startup, your eyes will always be bigger than your stomach.  This is actually a good thing, because it forces you to be absolutely ruthless in focus and prioritization.  At Aprizi, we have a massive list of ideas and improvements.  We have made a conscious decision to back-burner development and marketing effort tied to user growth, while we focus on product-market fit.

This can require some forbearance in your discussions with outsiders.  I cannot tell you how many people have said “you should add [insert 'share links', FB Connect, Twitter Auth, etc]“. All in good time. We have to get the core product right first. Anything else is putting the cart before the horse.

“Prioritization for Pirates”: One interesting exercise is to categorize your backlog of development work using Dave McClure’s AARRR “metrics for pirates”.  For each piece of work, label it one of the following: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral or Revenue.  Think through which of those AARRR issues are most critical to your business at your current stage.  Make sure you include non-customer-facing work like infrastructure needs.  I’ll note that analytics / instrumentation dev work does not fit neatly into this exercise, but it is obviously something that cannot be ignored.  Arguably this exercise was overkill for our stage, but it still helped me think through our business in an interesting way.

5. Independence & Judgement
Your job is not to abdicate vision in exchange for market feedback, but rather to synthesize that feedback with your vision.  You internalize, synthesize, hypothesize and test, all in the name of charting a better course for your business. In some cases, you might find yourself disagreeing with users.  Be careful, but don’t be afraid to stick by your guns.

For example, I’ve had people saying extremely vehemently, “if you are going to show me a recommendation, you *must* show me price,” or “your default really should be a traditional grid view, not this carousel.” In both cases, I disagree. I have a vision of a shopping entertainment experience after watching and talking to a whole bunch of users. I believe that I’m right.

You might notice that I have made no mention of split testing.  We do not have the time or resources to do split testing.  Some might consider this heresy, but I believe split testing will be really important for the *next* phase of this company, not this current phase. We are still more in the realm of qualitative feedback and judgment calls, not quantitative optimization.

6. Exercise Patience
I think patience is a big part of the lean startup methodology. While time feels like the enemy when you are bootstrapping, don’t leap ahead with your first, immediate conclusions.  It takes time to internalize all the feedback you are getting from the market, think through possible paths, chase a number of new hypotheses, and lock down firm decisions for how the business needs to evolve.

While our long-term vision of a “personal shopper” has remained remarkably consistent since Aprizi’s founding, this open beta has brought major shifts to our near-term priorities, thinking, and even our core business model. In weeks 1 and 2, we had guesses. By weeks 4 and 5, we were feeling confident on our directional and design changes.

7. Continually Re-Evaluate (except when you shouldn’t)
At the start of most weeks, I try to take a blank slate approach, and think, “if I were starting today from scratch, what would I do?” At the end of every week, I try to write up a summary of the week to our two F&F investors.  Without getting too deep into the weeds, I try to cover the major accomplishments and learnings of the week, immediate challenges, and the questions we are trying to answer for the business. I find it to be a great mental exercise.

Product development work always takes longer than you want, so take advantage of this reality and keep on re-evaluating your conclusions.  However, there are times when you need to put everything else on hold, hunker down, and do nothing but product execution. That is where we are for the next several weeks.

8. Talk to Anybody & Everybody
I have not just spoken to beta users during this process. I recommend talking to other entrepreneurs — they are a phenomenal sounding board for ideas. While we won’t look for funding for a few months, I continue to have the occasional meeting with investors because we learn so much from their questions. I should note, since this can be a topic of debate among entrepreneurs, that I have really enjoyed meeting with many of the younger VCs in the New York area — some great feedback. I also continue to have informal meetings with potential distribution partners, because those future needs might affect our current design decisions.  I learn something from absolutely every conversation.

Conclusion
I haven’t spent much time talking about our specific decisions (more on that another time), but I can say that I am 200% glad we opened up the beta when we did.  The last 6 weeks have improved focus and clarity.  We have made some important changes to product design and even our monetization plans.  I am more excited about Aprizi than ever, and my confidence is very much tied to the rigor of our customer development work throughout our short lifespan as a company. Onward and upward!

Aprizi appeared in The New York Times today, in an article on privacy and innovation for consumers.  In my quote, I tried to emphasize that this is about an honorable agreement with the customer, not some kind of bait and switch.  There is a new wave of startups where everything is above-board and totally opt-in.  As a consumer myself, I much prefer this to the murky world of data co-ops where retailers track and share data behind my back both online and offline. (I’ve written about respecting the consumer before)

I’ve got a long post brewing on the last several weeks of Aprizi’s open beta.  We made a decision to prioritize discovery of interesting products and stores, rather than deals.

Our “customer development” efforts have very much affected our design decisions and immediate priorities.  We saw  so much delight on people’s faces when it came to discovery (both of products and stores), and it fit well with our early focus on curation and personalization.  An interesting quote I keep hearing variations of: “This [discovery] is so [fantastic] — I *never* could have found it through Google or Amazon!”

But for all that we have rapidly and considerably evolved over the last 6 months, our long term vision has remained remarkably consistent, as has our target customer base.  So much to do!