Editor’s Note: This post was written by Jesse Rodgers. Jesse is the  CEO of TribeHR, the Director of the VeloCity Residence at the University of Waterloo, organizer of StartupCamp in Waterloo and an allround great guy.

Jesse stopped by my offices in Toronto to chat about sales, marketing and PR (convenient of @jevon to write about the same topic recently). Jessementioned that the TribeHR team had left Waterloo and were holed up in a hotel room in Niagara Falls. They were living together, working together, writing code and being more productive than they could with the distractions of family, friends and the strong community in Waterloo. I was amazed at the commitment of the team to step away from their personal lives and get the next version of TribeHR built before they head to SxSW for the Small Business Party. You can read the update or watch the caffeine and other stimulant-driven vacation summary. There’s lots startups can learn about improving productivity by going on vacation together.

Barrel to go over the Falls

Over the month of February the TribeHR team has been taking advantage of low hotel prices in Niagara Falls and turned a suite at the Hilton into our office (we were at the Marriott, but the Hilton is $20 less a night and has king size beds). The goal for this little retreat to the romantic city of Niagara Falls: get TribeHR polished off, implement our new user interface, get our go to market strategy figured out, and start executing on all cylinders.

If it works, we will be a stronger team (who can put up with each others snoring) and will have made some awesome progress. If it fails, then we know our team isn’t as good as we thought.

Other cities we thought about were Montreal and Toronto. Toronto would have far too many distractions for us so we had settled on Montreal (we would have loved to work out of the Knotman house). The problem there was that those of us with young kids would be too far away to head home if we had to. So here we are in Niagara Falls, in a tiny hotel suite, working our asses off.

In terms of work hours put in, when you do this, it’s pretty crazy. While in a hotel room, assuming you ignore the casino across the road, you work from around 8am to 12am, take out eating time, it is around 14 hrs or so of ‘work’ per person. It is a crazy amount of focus and the results are great, at first. Once all the easy stuff is taken on, we then have to address the bigger problems and we start to slow down. But we can work through it and it’s a heck of a lot easier when you have completely removed yourself from your routine.

At the end of week 2 we have learned the following:

• It takes 5 min to turn a hotel room into an office but the wifi sucks, the tv can’t use a PS3, and anything but pizza is way overpriced.
• Not having kids wake you up at 6am doesn’t mean you won’t be awake at 6am.
• The US side of the falls gets a rainbow in the afternoon.
• The Starbucks coffee is never hot, Tim Horton’s wins
• As a team we can take each others grumpy moods and swear it out until everyone is laughing again.
• Hotel chairs spin really well, and provide a great distraction near the end of the day

Why have we done this? Because we are still a very much a bootstrapped startup with plenty of distractions (wives, kids, other commitments) in Waterloo, and if we are going to get anything done while things are still so early, we have to immerse ourselves and get to work. It’s uncomfortable and exhausting, but it’s productive, energizing and we love it.

StartupNorth and The Art of Marketing are giving away 2 tickets to the March 7, 2011 conference in Toronto. The conference features:

• Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) on Creativity & Innovation
• Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) on Social Media & Word of Mouth Marketing
• Jeffrey Hayzlett (@jeffreyhayzlett) on Brand Strategy & Growth
• Dr. Sheena Iyengar (@sheena_iyengar), on Consumer Behaviour & The Psychology of Choice
• Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Brand Measurement: Metrics & Analytics

It’s a great line up of speakers. I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki speak in the past. He hosted a conversation with Steve Ballmer at  Mix08 in Las Vegas. And comedy ensued:

Guy has written a number of books that I have enjoyed reading including: Reality Check, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy and The Art of the Start. Very entertaining speaker, and I’ve been told that we should try to organize a startup hockey game for him while he is here.

I’m most excited about hearing Dr. Sheena Iyengar. I did not know that she was born in Toronto. Her TED Talk about The Art of Choosing and cultural biases is a very engaging and insightful presentation.

Giveaway

This is a giveaway. We have 2 tickets. The tickets have no cash value. Someone from StartupNorth will randomly select 2 emails submitted before 11:59:59 EST on Feb 27, 2011. There might be a skill testing question. Please only one entry per person. What’s an entry? Your name and email address. It’s our promise that we will always respect your privacy. From time to time we may email you to inform you about future events, or updates about the giveaway.

Entries are closed.

The promo code: LD27 gives you a $50 discount off the regular ticket price, or $100 discount for groups of 3 or more for The Art of Marketing March 7, 2011 event.

I was excited to attend MeshU (maybe a little too excited). I love it when events over deliver. MeshU was a fantastic conference. I saw two of the best in-the-trenches startup sessions with Sean Ellis and Dan Martell. They both presented ideas that are changing how I think about product design and go-to-market activities. April Dunford then added an updated framework  for product marketing which was a great evolution of traditional product marketing. Sean Ellis added his model for Key Elements of Massively Scaleable Startups that presented a new idea of the marketing basics that need to be present for high potential startups.

Key Elements of Massively Scalable Startups - A Marketing Framework based on April Dunford & Sean Ellis

The breaking down of 4 elements coupled with traditional strategy and tactics make for a very effective marketing evaluation of most startups.

Gratification Engine

The Gratification Engine was a new piece of the marketing activities. What differentiates must have products and services? How do you reward your customers? How does your application turn “cold prospects into highly gratified customers”? This is a change in my thinking about the role of making your users feel like rockstars.  

“you can’t force customers to want, need or like what you have created.  Building an effective gratification engine is an iterative process driven by a lot of prospective customer feedback.  Once you get the basics right, your process of gratifying users can be optimized with tools like Performable for landing pages and KISSmetrics for full funnel tracking/improvement (I’m an advisor to both).” – Sean Ellis

 It builds upon seminal work of Kathy Sierra about engaging users. The Gratification Engine pushes this out beyond the existing experience but treats the conversion and effectiveness of new users.

Making a Bestseller by Kathy SierraHow fast and how far can you take your users? by Kathy Sierra

 Where this hit home for me was starting to think about the game mechanics used for upsell and cross sell offers for new customers. Dan Martell, Dave McClure, Marc Gingras and I had breakfast at StartupCampMontreal and discussed how to build effective offers for existing customers to invite their friends to an application. There was a great discussion about using game mechanics around the offer. You have existing users that if they invite new users, i.e., their friends, where if the friends sign up that both the friend and the user get new unique functionality. It changed my thinking about many times I’ve received an offer to sign up from a friend for a service, and how the effectiveness of this would change with some basic game mechanics:

“Jevon has invited you to join X. Jevon is 1 sign up away from enabling the super awesome next level feature. Sign up now and enable the feature for both you and Jevon”

This all has to be done in an open, honest and unintrusive manner. But it’s about how do you enhance the lives and experiences of customers and potential customers. There are great opportunities to use game design and mechanics to help improve the experience and conversion rates in web and mobile applications.

Photo by Darren_Hester

Mike McDerment from FreshBooks gave  a great presentation on the basics of web application marketing metrics. He focuses on the metrics, systems and reporting that all companies should be building into web and mobile applications. It is a must read for any entrepreneur building a web application.

Metrics

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

How much does it cost you to get a customer? It’s a simple enough calculation, how much do you spend on sales and marketing to acquire each customer. Roll up your staffing costs, your ad buys, your outbound marketing, etc.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

How much revenue do users generate? How do you track it? Does it change based on segment? How do you increase it?

Churn

What percentage of your existing customer base leave every month? This is different than CPA because this is about customer satisfaction and retention. Don’t think this is important? According to April Dunford churn is a killer. “The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%”

Lifetime Value (LTV)

How long does a customer continue as a subscriber? Does their ARPU change over time? Do you have ways to increase their spend or reduce their churn?

These basic metrics are expanded by Dave McClure in AARRR! Startup Metrics for Pirates. Where the metrics are divided into 3 main categories:

1. Get Users (Acquisition, Referral)
2. Drive Usage (Activation, Retention)
3. Make Money (Revenue)

It seems so simple on surface, but as CEOs and startups we need to be committed to building the systems and metrics into our products. I was just floored at MeshU when I heard Dan Martell talk about the Flowtown.com Startup Immune System where they are beginning to use the lower level business performance metrics to automatically rollback design changes based on performance against the baseline. You can only start doing if you’re building on top of metrics. The idea of having automated your software deployment and sufficiently built business metric baselines that you could autoroll back poor performing changes. At Nakama, I wanted this so much. Not because I had bad developers but because we often made design decisions based on limited customer feedback and I wanted the system to protect me from my own hubris.

Metrics are good place to start. One of the best ways to understand how your company is performing is to begin measurement. Mike has done a great job