Oz Analytics

Preparing For Commercial Launch

Following lean principles, we are quickly drawing to a close our beta testing period. At Six Degrees Of Data we're all hoping that the world is ready for a radical new way to use documents and web pages.

At least we won't die not knowing.

A big thank you to all our testers who identified a number of bugs and suggested a number of future features. Your help has been invaluable and as promised we have listened to you.

Bridger version 1.0 is coming later this week with the following requested enhancements:

• Summary texts and the full text original documents now include color-coded hyperlinks to all bridges. The links are to dynamically created profiles. This feature can also be switched on and off as you wish from within the screen.
• Help is now available within most Bridger screens. These include short instructional videos and step-by-step instructions to guide new users.
• We now have a YouTube Channel with a dozen or more videos to help you get the most out of Bridger. More videos are appearing each week.
• Easier navigation through further gesture support. Swipe left and right to move back and forward through most Bridger screens - or use the browser buttons. Your choice.

Finally, and best of all, we have decided to keep Bridger 1.0 completely free for all users. So point your smartphone and tablet browser to www.sixdegreesofdata.com and see how Bridger can transform your documents. It's free to use and there is nothing to install.

So it has been a busy couple of weeks.

Until we release 1.0, there are new videos to check out. Of course, as you use Bridger in the coming days you will see the features mentioned above being introduced. Try them out for yourself and, as always, all feedback is welcome.

Not Seeing the Wood for the Trees

I recently blogged about blowing off beta testing as a stage of product development. I'm not sure all I said is valid but the first learnings from our beta users was right on the mark.

The public beta we launched a couple of days ago is already paying dividends. No pivot yet but a key learning is that people are finding it difficult to understand what Bridger can do. I blamed the users but cooler heads have prevailed (luckily). And this applies to many/all of the screens. One of the team is familiar with Wix and he showed how they embed short help videos all over their site.

This seems like a good solution. A pop-up screen with a 30 second video and some basic help text works well for them and as Pablo Picasso said "Good artists copy, great artists steal". So this is what we will do in the coming weeks before we launch Bridger 1.0.

As a side note. Picasso also said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" so I'm not sure I should be quoting him.

A little digging into Picasso's stealing quote also reveals that he even stole (and mangled) the quote. This time from a W. H. Davenport Adams who wrote in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists” published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1892:

“That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”

Let's just say I am learning from Wix and applying best practise ...

Google+ and Bridger

A surprising (for me) outcome of our work creating Bridger has been how often I use it in conjunction with my social media interactions.

I guess that I shouldn't be surprised as Bridger is a universal document and web content analyser and we want to have it play nice with as many file types, applications and platforms as is possible. This includes Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like.

My use of Google+ has been growing over the last year and I now find myself relying on it to keep me informed in a number of areas - both professionally and privately. It's also our platform of choice to hold Six Degrees Of Data meetings and chats.

So Google+ has ingratiated itself into my work habits and the following short video shows you how Bridger enhances the value of social media by analyzing the documents that your communities share in Google+:

You can also check out our other videos on YouTube and Bridger is now in Public Beta so you can try it out for yourself. It's free to use and there is nothing to install.

Scary Level Of Customer Engagement

At Six Degrees Of Data, the team and I have been struggling with a number of issues but always at or near the top of our list is ease-of-use. This is because what Bridger does is complex and difficult for many users to understand. We figure that explaining how we do semantic analysis is less important than making sure someone:

1. Understands what we do and why
2. It is as simple to use Bridger as it humanly possible.

If we can do this then we have a chance of building a user base, then a company and perhaps even a viable revenue stream. Dare to dream.

The scale of this challenge was bought home to me this morning when I received another Lean Startup newsletter by email. The topic was 'Rapid Iteration for Mobile App Development' by Sarah Milstein. Given the stage Bridger is at it sounded interesting so I read on.

The newsletter proved to be an interview with Mariya Yao, the founder and Creative Director at Xanadu. Mariya had some interesting things to say about customer engagement but I've got to be honest - some of what she says is a frightening. 

Here's what she says about what's needed to succeed:

"There are two questions that I recommend startups use to differentiate between being liked versus being loved. First is the question Sean Ellis popularized, where you ask your users, "How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use our product?" and have them answer with either, "Very Disappointed," "Somewhat Disappointed," "Not Disappointed," or "I no longer use the product." Sean did research across hundreds of startups and discovered that companies that had fewer than 40% of their users answer "Very Disappointed" tended to struggle with building a successful and sustainable business.

The second question is known as the Net Promoter Score, where you ask your users, "On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?" You mark those who answer 0-6 as Detractors, 9-10 as Promoters, and 7-8 as Neutral. Your Net Promoter score is the percent of Promoters minus your percentage of Detractors, which should be a number between -100 and +100. The world's most successful companies typically score around +50, and top performing tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon regularly score over +70."

Wow - that's quite a hurdle to jump.

Note - the  Sean Ellis referred to in the quote is, I think, a long time blogger on the topic of startups and marketing. You can find his blog here. He says that he is taking a break from blogging but past entries are well worth reading.

 So back to being scared.

Being an analyst at heart, I want to be able to measure the level of love and the net promoter score for my app. It is still early days for Bridger but if it is possible I want us to bake into the app a way of measuring these things.

As I read on, Mariya offers up a proxy I think we can use: "A popular metric for measuring retention in the mobile games industry is DAU / MAU, or daily active users divided by monthly active users".

If we can we will combine this with some direct market research of our users at the end of the next stage of development - a public beta of Bridger.

I'll let you know how we do in a few month's time.