Ravensbourne Again: Improving Your Business in One Weekend

Last weekend Minibar held an invigorating 2-day conference at the Ravensbourne College – London’s newest, most state-of-the-art place for technical creativity. It’s just opposite the O2, and is the only building around resembling a 9-storey block of Swiss cheese. If you are down there, take a look!

The presentations covered everything to do with improving your web-business. A consistently-made point was the need to understand your business from the customer’s point of view. This is crucial, but easy to overlook; Jon Bradford suggested that we technologically-inclined souls tend to focus on our technology and ideas rather than the value we can create for customers. We’ve got to think about the “pain we can take away” and what the customer wants us to do for them. If you do this, making your delivery snappy and honing your conversational skills for more listening to your clients, then you’ll have a good pitch.

Judging by the hum during the lunch time, participants had not only learnt plenty from the presentations, but also found the workshop sessions invaluable. They could receive feedback and assessments from peers, and for free! For example, Oliver Brooks, from CompletelyNovel.com, encouraged the seminar participants to work through a sample business idea, using the principles they had just learnt.

Jay Bregman explained to us how best to manage software developers. He is from the innovative eCourier – the company that changed London’s courier market by using real-time best-route-learning software, and was a company lucky enough to have our very own Christian Ahlert as a founding member. He recommended producing carefully iterated contracts to help monitor the developers and discussed weighing up whether to out-source or keep the work in-house. Another tip I picked up was that, since talent is so important, you can offer equity to attract the best developers.

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Margaret Gold led us through some key concerns of on-line marketing, emphasising the conversational nature of this brave new market. Your content needs to generate something worthy of being talked about, and something for those googlebots to find.  Her PR checklist is as follows:

“Within the first 100 words of your press release, include the terms that your customers use to search for your product. Then post this on PRLog, BigNews and openPR and let the googlenews bots track these. If you publish a few similar releases every week, re-using the same keywords, then hey-presto, your company will climb the search engine listings. Simple!”

If you are too busy to tailor your own content, Christian mentioned Textprovider, where you feed in what you have been doing and they create blogposts for you. It’s a cheap way of crowdsourcing dynamic content. Another thing under the column of nice things we learnt, usertesting.com sounds great. For a small fee, “normal” web users can talk you through their experience of your site. It’s a great way of seeing how you look from their eyes.

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Malcolm Coles told us about the exciting world of SEO. His hint was to have content on what people search for. Once again, consider the customer! Continually tweaking and checking the indispensible Google analytics will see your ranking rise. Competition naturally is highest for the most popular words, but unpopular words are no good, so it is important to strike a balance. Oh, never forget to make the HTML title meaningful for both bots and for people. Capiche?

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Jon Bradford closed off the weekend by talking about the entrepreneurial spirit, saying that in the last few decades it has become much easier for people to make businesses out of the things they are passionate in. There is a wide variety of places where you can get funding from, but angel investors, through their experience and black book of connections can provide much more than money. They have already had business success and want to rekindle the excitement of starting projects and they are naturally drawn to people who deliver, rather than the ideas themselves.

Yet the venture capital climate is changing. Smaller cheques are being written and fewer businesses are finding investment. Jon told us that customers, and the goodwill they bring, are the best form of funding. Traction with them is vital for business growth. And, after all, it is easier to engage with existing customers than going out and getting new ones.

- by Hamish Hartnell, weekend survivor