• Less Is More. If you can remove features from the service in the near term, it is beneficial for everyone.  Your developers will have less work, your users will have less learning curve, and you’ll more clearly be able to interpret early usage data.  If you’re not familiar with the term Minimum Viable Product, google it, might be helpful.
• Use Sensible Defaults. Whenever possible, pick something for the user, and only allow them to change it if they need to.
• Stub Future Features. To get better ‘interest’ data on specific future features, you can create links/buttons to non-existent features.  ie:  ’Click Here to Change the Answer Duration’ –> This feature is not yet implemented, but we want to see how many people would be interested in using it.  Would this feature be useful to you [Yes] [No] Leave us additional comments…  You can count clicks and get very direct comments about each prospective new feature.

The protocol for providing critical, constructive criticism is an oft-overlooked aspect of being an active and valuable participant in entrepreneurial networks and is a delicate topic I want to tackle head-on in this post.

Sometimes telling your entrepreneurial colleague that their ‘baby is ugly’ is the best thing you can do for them. Time is the most valuable resource we possess and helping entrepreneurs figure out where best to spend their time is critical. When bad ideas come to light, honest, thoughtful criticism, delivered clearly and respectfully can be invaluable.

Delivering criticism is always a delicate art. These issues can make it even more difficult:

• If the entreprenuer has already committed time and/or money to the project
• If it is a labor of love, created from a some emotional personal experience
• If it is a close friend – or worse – family member
• If you are successful and they are not
• If they are successful and you are not (’success’ is of course relative)
• If your assessment turns out to be wrong

Be conscious of these issues, but when you’re asked, delivering your opinion is not just a favor, it’s the right thing to do. Here are my suggestions for handling the situation:

• Confirm they actually want feedback. Sometimes people are just floating ideas by and don’t really want feedback. Make sure you understand the inquiry and they really are asking for your feedback.
• Follow the basic rules of critical feedback:
  • Say something nice
  • Deliver the bad news
  • End on a high note
• Explain Your Position. Thoughtful feedback is 1000 times more useful than flat, terse criticism. If the idea is entering an already hyper-competitive market and has no competitive advantage, then ask questions to help illustrate the scale and complexity of the competitive landscape.
• Share Your Perspective. If you are a successful entrepreneur, there are probably more than a few critical attributes which you look for in new opportunities. Share them and discuss how they may be missing from the idea at hand.
• Suggest Next Steps. Great businesses rarely become successful in the same form they start out in. Sometimes an OK idea can lead to other more interesting opportunities, which can lead to a great insight, which can lead to the next YouTube, Google, or NetFlix. However, sometimes ideas are just bad. If you’re sure that the direction is wrong, be honest: ‘I think you should look for something else’
• You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know. If I was asked to provide feedback on a new company for an innovative automobile engine, I’d have to recuse myself from providing much feedback. I drive a car, I know there are lot’s of cars sold, but short of high level ‘market’ stuff – I’d be out of my league. Let people know when you don’t know what about the domain or market being discussed.

There is a time and a place for white-washed, head-nodding agreement, and avoiding conflict. Unfortunately, the circle of trust formed by entrepreneurial peer groups is not one of them. As a fellow entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to provide honest feedback, help educate other entrepreneurs and ensure that the Founder Class creates value and innovation and doesn’t waste time on poorly conceived ideas.

For a single-person household, the form consists of 10 questions. YES, 10 checkbox and fill-in-the-block questions. There are 7 additional questions for each person in the household.

While building such a form now would be pointless in terms of e-enabling the 2010 census, I suspect it might create a news event to shed light on how the US government is failing to leverage technology to automate systems in concert with available technologies.

Such a point is especially germane as we look toward an increasingly federalized healthcare system, and an IRS in need of significant reform.

Consider this an open invitation to join up with a few good web developers to put the form online one saturday – just to prove a point.

• Large, clear, concise Primary Headline
• Large, germane product shot when appropriate
• Large, direct Call To Action (CTA) above the fold
• Multiple additional CTAs throughout the page
• Minimize off-page navigation
• Short, prioritized Key Features list
• 2 Columns
• Testimonials
• Pricing
• Human face(s) for testimonals or in images
• Highlight search terms (of referred traffic) in page
• Use A/B and Multivariate Testing
• Optimize page for fast loading
• Measure, Tweak, Repeat

3 Key Questions:

1. What is offered?
2. Why the prospect should care?
3. What does the prospect need to do?

A few other optional ideas you might want to consider:

• Orange may be the best color for CTA buttons
• Design for least-common-denominator browsers – could be 800×600 and/or mobile

Now that I’ve made the mental leap to make a change, it’s time to evaluate the options:

1. Get AT&T to fix the service
2. Jailbreak the phone and swicth to T-Mobile (the only other GSM provider in the states)
3. Buy a Palm Pre, Android, or HTC phone

After a stop at the local AT&T store, the manager helpfully submitted an on premise service request – apparently they will actually check my home address and make make adjustments to the tower.  She literally said they might ‘turn the antenna’.  Needless to say, I’m not optimistic that will resolve the issue.  She also confirmed that the Santa Monica area does suffer from ‘capacity problems’, and that AT&T is in the process of adding capacity in the area.  Promising, but who knows how long that will take.

Next up, I acquired a first generation iPhone to test a jailbreak and a T-Mobile SIM.  Fortunately, the phone was already jailbroken, so after a few updates, I dropped in a T-Mobile SIM, and the phone was running.

The ability to compare an AT&T iPhone and a T-Mobile iPhone side-by-side was eye opening.  I’ve heard lot’s of speculation that the iPhone was at fault for service problems – different provisioning of towers for iPhone users, a weaker radio, lot sof reasons, but nothing I could confirm.

This test was in no way scientific, but here’s what I observed:

• Visible difference in the number of bars on the phones.  In most areas of my Santa Monica residence, the T-Mobile phone show more bars.
• Several areas where there is no reception for AT&T, but a few bars for T-Mobile.

I made several test calls – simultaneously calling both phones via Skype – as a conference call.  In 4/6 tests, both phones rang. In 2/6 tests, the AT&T phone never rang and the calls went straight to voicemail.

Disappointing results by AT&T to be sure.  At this point, I plan to give AT&T a few days to attempt to resolve the issues, then on to figure out which direction to take.

Screen diagonal and price

1. Write down a few positive life goals, mantras, or other statements that The Secret, Napoleon Hill or Tony Robbins told you would make you happier and more successful.  Some examples:
   • Practice a Random Act of Kindness
   • Exercise every morning before work
   • Build $1 Million in net worth
2. Turn elements of the phrase into an acronym.  Look for opportunities to swap out words for numbers or symbols, and emphasize the important words with some capital letters:
   • to, too, two = 2
   • for, four = 4
   • money, wealth = $, $$
   • I = 1,!
3. Use the phrase as a password for those sites that require complex passwords with combinations of letters (incl. mixed case), numbers and symbols
   • Practice a Random Act of Kindness = p1RAOK
   • Exercise every morning before work = Xemb4w
   • Build $1 Million in net worth = b$1Minw!!!

In chapter 1, he built a little film company called Pixar that helped a bigger company Disney stay relevant during an otherwise tough time for the mouse.  Since Pixar’s films represented the lion’s share of revenue during their relationship, and Disney never developed any of their own digital skills, they picked up Pixar – along the way making Steve Jobs the single largest shareholder of Disney stock.

In chapter 2, while music industry exec played ivory tower games and attempted to turn off the internet with attorneys and fruitless DRM efforts, Steve took the novel approach of vertically integrating music distribution with the personal computer and a line of devices that turned digital music into mobile assets that you could pack in your pocket. These efforts have put Apple on a path that today controls over 70% of digital music sales and could account for 28% of all music sales in 5 years.

In chapter 3, Steve decided that he could apply his smarts to the telecommunications industry, in one fell swoop, creating more innovation with the iPhone than the industry had seen since the creation of the mobile phone itself – fundamentally changing the way people interact with their phones.

Obviously much more can be written about each of these chapters, as well as the previous period which led to this series of breakthroughs, however the point of this post is a prediction about what I believe will be the next major chapter in the Apple Story:

CHAPTER 4: Re-inventing Television

Image: Dan Wiersema (http://www.danwiersema.com/)

Like music distribution and the mobile phone, the television industry finds itself in a transitional period.  The industry has been devoid of significant innovation since the advent of color.  HD, cable, satellite, DVRs, and now Internet TV are fairly obvious, incremental improvements, but even these improvements lfailt to deliver a fulfilling user experience.  It’s the same vacuum that was felt by the music industry, and the mobile phone user before Apple delivered their solution.  It’s a huge market to boot, and Apple now knows everything it needs know to enter in a meaningful way.

Here are some of the factors that frame this prediction:

• Apple has significant investments in flatscreen manufacturing with Samsung and LG
• the current Apple TV box is a test, to learn things about the market and user experience
• The experience of flattening hardware ala MacBook Air enables Apple to fit lots of gear in the back of an LCD case
• A line of high quality, flatscreen TVs with wifi + storage + an elegant remote + great media browsing UI would be a leap ahead for the TV marketplace (my Motorola DVR remote control has more buttons than my computer keyboard – count ‘em) – clearly an area where some iPhone like UI magic could assist

I’d suggest that Apple’s entry into the convention TV marketplace is inevitable – guessing when is a much harder task. Analyst Piper Jaffray suggests it will be in 2011, but I think we might hear something as soon as at the June 2009 Developer Conference.

There are many more reasons why this is a great next step for Apple – share your thoughts in the comments.