1.) What problem are you solving?

We’re helping couples have kids when they want them, and not have kids when they don’t want them. We want more wanted children in the world, and fewer unwanted children.

2.) What gets you excited about the Boulder tech scene?

When we moved here last year from New York we didn’t know what to expect. We had heard that there was a good start-up scene in Boulder, but with only 100,000 people living here, I was skeptical. It turns out that even with the small population, there are an insane number of start-ups and start-up resources here. And on top of that, everyone is amazingly friendly and helpful. Apparently it’s only in the last 3 years that the scene has blown up here in Boulder. It’s fun to be part of a growing community that is excited about the future.

3.) The interaction between startups and large corporations is often a tenuous one. Better facilitating these interactions, between “startups” and “endups,” is particularly interesting to us at Undercurrent. As you grow your business, how can we be most helpful in closing this gap?

I think this comes down to relationships – make it easier for start-up founders to connect with the right people inside large companies. I think as startup founders we’re so focused on short and mid-term goals that we don’t spend the time to seek out, create, and nurture relationships like these that will pay off in the long term. So making it easier to connect and create these relationships would make a big difference. If executives inside large corporations better understood the value that startups can create, and reached out more directly to start-up founders I think more fruitful collaborations would be created. Every startup founder would love to take phone calls like these.

4.) Outside of work, what gets you out of bed every morning?

Wow, great question. Honestly, Kindara is the first thing I think about when I get out of bed! Some of our development is overseas and I’m always curious to see how it’s going each day. But over and above Kindara, I have a desire for my life to make a difference and I want to reach my potential as a human being. On the deepest level, that’s what gets me out of bed: There’s so much to learn and experience on this planet, and I’m excited to get through as much of it as I can before I die. Kindara is a great vehicle for this urge right now and I’m excited to watch it grow as I grow as a person.

5.) What advice would you give to an aspiring first-time entrepreneur?

I have tons of advice. A top 5 off the top of my head:

- Who you choose to work with will shape your future more than any other decision so choose wisely.

- Read Mark Andreeson’s classic post on Product/Market fit, and read The Lean Startup before you do anything

- Learn to sell the dream and never stop.

- Chances are you will make big mistakes and shit will go horribly wrong, but it’s never over until you say it is. Don’t give up.

- Work on yourself relentlessly: chances are you need to be a different person for this to be a massive success, so become that person.

 6.) One interesting link (it can be anything).

Kindara’s first ever ad. I recently read Insanely Simple about Apple’s advertising and it inspired me to start creating great ads for our vision at Kindara. This is the first of many called “Your Fertility. In Your Hands.” and we’re asking people to share their stories about taking their fertility into their hands as part of the launch:

http://www.yourfertilityinyourhands.com/

Five Questions and One Link is a brief conversation with the noteworthy companies we believe are transforming the way we use technology. Interested in having your company featured? Please, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

To think this through, let’s talk about lunch. For the last three months I’ve been tracking people checking-in via Foursquare to Bite, my favorite lunchtime establishment, in hopes of discovering when the crowd is thinnest. As a (very) frequent customer, I’m interested in swooping in and waiting about a minute for my lunch order to be ready.

To do this I hacked together a script using Foursquare’s API that runs every minute and grabs a bunch of data. It records the total number of checkins, a “here now” count, tips, a time stamp, and numerous other data points about the venue.

I’m happy to report that, after a little trial and error, I have cracked the first part of this mystery. On aggregate, the most checkins occur between 2:00 pm and 3:15 pm, with the busiest time being between 2:45-3:00 pm. Any time before noon or after 4:30 pm and you’re in the clear – lunch can be had in only as long as it takes them to make it.

(Click to embiggen)

Let me be the first to say that this is hardly scientific. Whenever you perform an experiment like this you’re bound to create more questions than you may have being trying to solve for in the first place. In some regards, however, that’s whole point. If nothing else an experiment like this reveals several exploration points to start uncovering a more complete story.

Raising More Questions Than Answers

Is 2:45-3:00 pm really the busiest time at Bite or is it because that’s when the tech crowd comes to Bite? After all, Foursquare’s office is only a couple blocks away, and Bite sits on the edge of what used to be considered “Silicon Alley.” The checkin time to any venue is going to vary, and the degree of variance could have easily knocked the accuracy of my data down a couple points. An infinitely long list of variables were left out for simplicity sake. The weather, for example, plays a role in how many people are willing to stand outside and wait for their lunch but is not something I have accounted for in my initial data model.

This is so often the case when you get metrics back about your social performance. Knowing the frequency of likes, comments, or checkins is a great start to the story, but insight – knowledge that can drive action– requires us to understand the meaning behind the activities as much as the activity itself.

John Winterkorn, a fellow Associate Strategist at Undercurrent, thought it would be a good idea to try and correlate my Foursquare data with actual customer counts – and it is. We went out a couple times in half hour increments to record the activity, matching head-counts to the figures Foursquare provided. That is providing us with a richer insight, but we need a more substantial sample before we can say anything meaningful.

Set Yourself Up For Experimentation

What experiments like this do better than anything else is remind us to keep asking questions about the data we’re being presented. Data provided by tools like Foursquare Merchant Metrics, Facebook Insights, and the like are a great place to start, but they’re by no means what you should be measuring your success by in its entirety. We’ve built numerous data mining scripts that explore these data sources in ways that are unique to our clients’ objectives for this precise reason. Often, we use these tailored scripts to provide the larger context for the results we get from off-the-shelf solutions, that is, to validate the data we are seeing and access knowledge we can turn into insights.

If you’re interested in running your own experiment, give this post some love by tweeting about it and in return I’ll share the source code that collected the data.

Mr. Porter excels at offering a consistent, considered, online experience. Everything they create –from The Mr. Porter Post, to their online journal, to the tailored email I look forward to most in my inbox each week– is well-crafted, detail-oriented, and integrated into their larger strategy. It’s some of the best shit out there and one of the reasons I hang out on their website more than most, even when I’m not shopping. I expected just as much from the Mr. Porter Global Treasure Hunt. 

The idea behind the hunt is a simple one: Download GoldRun –an augmented reality iOS app– head to a location marked on a map, snap a photo, share with friends, and earn a reward for your participation. What came of it, though, was an experience out of character for Mr. Porter.

Not A Whole Lot of Hunting

Within an hour of the game going live, I was out the door and had made my way to the location nearest me – The American Thread Company, located in the historic American Thread Building in TriBeca. Upon arrival, I looked up and down for an object I thought Mr. Porter had planted for players to engage with. This is a treasure hunt after all, so I was looking for something eponymous with Mr. Porter’s brand sensibilities and which looked like it would appeal to Mr. Porter shoppers.

After a few minutes of doddling around the lobby (where I was rudely dismissed by building security), I snapped a photo of the building’s exterior on a whim. A virtual Mr. Porter bag appeared on screen. I sent it through to the application, and unlocked a promo code for free NY Premier shipping on my next order. Fair enough– not the most compelling experience, but more than nothing.

Thinking there was more to unlock I walked to the next closest destination, The Standard Hotel, and went through the same process only to find… the same promotion I unlocked 30 minutes ago. Since the rules prevented me being rewarded with free shipping more than once, the incremental value of continuing this hunt was effectively zero. I gave up and returned to the office, leaving two locations unvisited.

Not A Whole Lot Of Treasure 

On the whole, the Treasure Hunt lacked the continuity, polish, and personalized approach Mr. Porter  usually delivers. What is most disappointing is that the event suffered from some flaws common to many digital ventures.

1. The cost of participation outweighed the potential rewards. The perceived value of participating in the treasure hunt was the chance to win some awesome apparel from Mr. Porter, from Lanvin shoes to Paul Smith cuff links. These prizes are available to participants not by completing the hunt, however, but by signing up to participate and being entered in a sweepstake. Since you are entered as soon as you sign up, the value of the additional effort of completing the hunt is effectively zero. Free shipping, while not an insignificant prize in itself, is only available once, and as such the hunt effectively ends at the first location you visit.

The prizes available are reasonably valuable, so it is not difficult to understand why they are being offered via sweepstake than as rewards for participation, but ventures like this need to provide rewards that compel participation. Had different rewards been available at different locations, I would have visited them all. An event like this provides fun opportunities for Mr. Porter to partner with either the destination businesses (The Standard would have been an ideal partner) or with services that facilitate travel between them. For example, it would have been fun to set up shuttles between destinations for Mr. Porter customers to demo Uber, a bad ass, on-demand car service.

2. There was little feedback or narrative to drive me forward. Other than the initial instructions, the application provided little guidance or feedback about my progress through the hunt. Despite being a treasure hunt, there were no brand appropriate clues to uncover or decipher. There was little feedback from the application about what to do at a location, leaving me waving my phone around in the air and annoying security at The American Thread Company. I can accept that the application chosen isn’t set up to deliver a rich narrative experience (Mr. Porter didn’t build a custom app, nor should they necessarily have), but the lack of guidance works to the detriment of the entire experience. The level of customer service Mr. Porter customers have fallen in love with was missing too and in fact, came through most clearly when visiting the various destinations. Even when I unlocked the promo code through the app there was no indication that it had been transferred to my Mr. Porter account. That tight integration Mr. Porter normally has wasn’t there this time.

3. Lack of integration with existing customer profiles. This is perhaps the greatest letdown I experienced. GoldRun didn’t connect with my existing customer history– the application didn’t know I am a founding member of Mr. Porter (I have been using the site since very early in its life), my purchase history, or even my name. While there are undoubtedly privacy concerns with releasing too much customer history, data like this could have been used to bring the hunt inline with my experience with Mr. Porter online. Instead, I needed to start a brand new account, effectively forcing me to restart my relationship with the brand. Rather than feeling right at home, I actually felt distant from the brand.

Integration, Integration, Integration

This last point is a regular source of frustration with many of the digital experiences brands offer. The lack of consistency and coherence, especially when you start deviating from your browser and start playing with the mobile and tablet apps companies build, is not only a frustration but a missed opportunity for brands. It results in the blooming of multiple pockets of experience rather than the creation of a coherent digital profile.

If you’re building something similar, take a step back and think through if you’re matching the experience you’re designing with the expectations you’ve already set with your customers. I promise they’ll be thrilled to see you take the time to make their life easy.

And yet, you (or someone around you) thinks of the competition in a primarily direct way. Look at a tracking report. Which companies are included? Probably those companies that make exactly what you make, and go after exactly the same target.

Unfortunately, traditional understandings of “competitive set” don’t take into account the way the world works. As soft data becomes hard, and information about everything is broadly distributed, you’re no longer competing with fellow automakers, fellow vodka distillers, and fellow airlines. Market leaders in every category reset expectations for every company that aims to sell stuff to the modern consumer.

This means you have to rethink how you design your products, services, and experiences. You have to set your sights on being the best in the world, bar none. It’s no longer cool – or acceptable to shareholders – to be the best in your category. This isn’t just about “digital,” or “social media.” It’s about the way humans understand the world around them.

Why? Because people aren’t reading your positioning PPTs.

As people receive more input – photographs, advertisements, movies, tweets, packaging designs, even shipment notifications from FedEx – their hunches about brands become ever more informed and ever more sophisticated. Consumers don’t restrict their thinking to the other companies in your category, they compare experiences they like with ones they don’t. Put a tacit understanding of how retail is supposed to work (see Apple) up against a broken but similar system (see the Departures Terminal at JFK) and you have a problem in the minds of your consumers.
This is an old discussion, thankfully enough. It started at Harvard in 1903, when Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce put forward three basic propositions that offer a logical way to explain human “illogical behavior”:

1. People don’t understand things until they experience them.
2. People use a set of perceptual judgements – created from their life experiences – to form perspectives through inference.
3. People’s internal hunches about new things are formed when they put together two or more perceptual judgements of disparate origin together to create a single insight.

What to do about it.

In other words, this rising mental tide threatens to overflow brands’ boats, rather than lift them along the way. But all is not lost. Here’s three ideas for how to move forward in the face of smarter, more intuitive consumers.

1. Brands compete not just with direct competitors, but with everything people come into contact with everyday. So learn what you can take from successes outside your direct competitors. Idea: build the Zappos of the banking industry, instead of trying to recreate Mint.
2. People and businesses are getting more connected, not less.Look to create internal connectivity where there was none before. Idea: put IT and Marketing next to each other; put your social team closest to your engineers; watch what transpires.
3. Design is the great differentiator. As more people see more great design, the desire for design goes up, not down. Idea: hire more and better designers; barring that, enroll employees outsidethe design function in a multidisciplinary design course. 

But if you only take one thing from this Dispatch, take this: Digital has fundamentally changed who you need to consider a competitor. With finite resources, a luxury watch consumer isn’t just choosing among pilot watches at a $2,500 – $5,000 price point. They’re also thinking about the new Macbook Air, and a down payment on that new BMW coupe that caught their eye.

Act accordingly.