Yesterday, I caught about 10 minutes of a web cast from the geniuses at 37signals, a company that is about the same age as Tightrope. These are some highly successful guys that have created very popular web applications for small businesses. They were spending some time sharing their thoughts on their journey from startup to today. As is often the case when I hear other owners muse about their success and the lessons they have learned, I listened with a mix of pride, skepticism, jealousy and excitement. Without fail, there will always be a moment when the speaker will say something in such a way that articulates a reality that I have experienced but haven’t been able to fully grasp. That happened during their talk.

One of the owners of was talking about the difference between selling to a small business and a corporation. His point was that in a small business, you sell to the user, whereas with large businesses, you sell to the buyer. With the small business, you focus on what they need whereas with the large business, you position yourself against other options.

Wow. That is so true and it explains so much.

Whenever I’m in front of a university or a Fortune 1000 company, I’m always asked about competitors. I’m asked how our product is better than theirs and how we match up on features and price. I hate those questions.

A good friend of mine at NEC said that there are over 800 companies that claim to make digital signage software. 800! Even those competitors that I see every day, which numbers only about 10 or so, I couldn’t tell you about specific features or pricing on those systems. I only know that, generally, Scala is really good at retail signage or that Planar has a really cool Ken Burns affect that they can do.

I was at a dealer trade show the other night. A potential customer was asking about our system and things were going very well when she asked, “Wireless Ronin is here. How do you compare to them?”

“Well, ” I said, “They sell poison milk to school children. At Tightrope, we don’t do that, as much.”

Missing the Point

Before we started our company, JJ and I used our competitor’s solutions in our jobs. We LOVED Leightronix’s hardware. I was a HUGE Scala fan (and still am, to this day).

JJ and I worked at a cable access center where we hand-made Scala scripts to show our TV schedule and other nerds at the station wrote programs to create custom event lists for the Leightronix TCD1000. With both systems, we rarely used them as they were intended to be used.

For us, the software that came with our TCD1000 was a sick joke. We couldn’t understand why anyone would want to program their station on a 7 day week or why it lacked even basic conflict checking. Instead of meeting me where I was at, using the language that I knew and helping me with my job, it seemed to be having a conversation with a different kind of user entirely. That software was not written for any one I’ve ever met at an access station.

ME: “Run the football game at 2:00pm and again at 5:00pm tomorrow.”

What WinEM wanted to hear: “Play Deck 1 at 1:59:13pm and Take to Input 1 47 seconds later and then Take to Input 8 at 4:34:03pm and then Rewind Deck 1″.

Their software was badly missing the point.

[Note: Today, Leightronix's software is much more sophisticated. Also, to be fair, that software was much better than any alternative that was available at the time.]

When I was working for Alpha Video, servicing and training customer’s Scala systems, we worked hard to make that software easier to use than it was designed to be. 0.0% of the customers that I trained cared about how to create an interactive quiz with their system. Even fewer wanted to assign a different transition to every letter of every word on their bulletin. They just wanted to say that buses would be 10 minutes late. All of the powerful features that Scala had to offer these people weighed them down like an albatross around their neck, instead of helping them do the job in front of them.

They were saying: “Buses are late!”

Scala was asking: “What transition would you like to use for this line of text?”

As if these office professionals even understood what a transition was. Again, it was missing the point.

When we set out to form Tightrope Media Systems and make Carousel and Cablecast, we did not set out to create a more feature complete version of what was already out there. We set out to make products that do not miss the point of why they exist for the people that we imagined would use them.

My favorite example of this happened just after we installed our bulletin board system at Wayzata Schools, our first customer. I called Sharon to see how things were going.

She said, “Things are going great! Carousel is so much more powerful than our old Scala system! You can put your own backgrounds in!”

Of course, Scala had and has very powerful media capabilities. Adding your own backgrounds is not only possible, but they supported a much wider array of formats than what we did (back then, only JPEG). But she couldn’t upload backgrounds so Carousel was more powerful. For her, the user experience that Carousel presented gave her much more power than Scala did, even though Scala was actually more sophisticated.

She said: “I want to put a background in this message.”

Carousel said: “Here is a button that you can click that opens the file menu that you are familiar with. You’ll be able to find your picture, because you already know how to use your computer. By the way, when you pick the background, I’ll automatically resize it for you and put it behind the text. Placing the file in the right directory isn’t necessary, I’ll take care of that for you, too. Just find the picture for me and you’re done.”

It didn’t miss the point.

The Day After

I imagine that in large companies they know all about their key competitors. They have their price list. They know every feature and how to discredit ones that their own product does not have and pump up the ones that the enemy does not. They go to battle.

When it’s time to make the next version of their product, the marketing department will create a grid. Each competitor is in a column and every feature gets its own row. Check boxes, numbers and stars litter the cross points, showing in stark detail how their product stacks up. This chart is presented to the powers that be and the top features that are costing the most sales get thrown at development and then… POOF! Now their digital signage system uses AJAX… whatever that means.

Repeat the above paragraph enough times, and their software slowly turns into crap.

We have never done that. As I said, I don’t really care what our competitors are doing. In fact, I’m even skeptical of the feature requests from my own customers. There is some truth in what Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.”

Simply put, we don’t want more features in Cablecast and Carousel. We want a better product and a better experience.

We are driven by what happens the day after our user gets their system up and running. What does their day look like? How can we save them time? What can we do for them that they didn’t even think of that will make them a fan of our products and our company?

I like it when we come up with little features that show our customers love. These are the ones that I can’t sell in a demonstration, but they are the ones our users find by accident when they update their system to the newest release. Things like, revealing the amount of overlap in a conflict when I hover over a show in the Cablecast schedule or adding the version number of the players to the Carousel interface to help customers who are upgrading. These features won’t show up on a bid specification, but they make our user’s lives better.

Which gets me back to the challenge of selling user experience and work flow to buyers who like qualities that are quantified on a spreadsheet. How do you convince Johnson and Johnson that, in spite of the fact that our system lacks some bullet point that Cisco is advertising, our digital signage system will make their lives better than theirs will?

Less is More

I remember a shootout I participated in with Matrox and Leightronix. Matrox was showing their digital signage product, Leightronix was showing their automation product and I was showing both.

The woman from Matrox was up first. As her demonstration started, I began to wonder how I could escape the building without being detected. Their system looked awesome. Their demo content was better, there system could do more and it was much prettier. Carousel 3.0 was looking pretty thin, by comparison.

But then something happened. She kept demonstrating the product. And demonstrating… and demonstrating… Every little piece of the software was given its due time: “Here’s how you enter the serial port command to force the Mini-T to do something, like play a tape! Here is where you set the baud rate and the stop bits for the serial port…” On and on this woman went. By the time she was done, her system was too complicate, too expensive and not for me.

I had my confidence back.

The truth is that with 800 competitors, there are probably 30 signage systems that in some way, shape or form can do everything that Carousel does. Why bother selling on features? Features are commodities. Any idiot programmer can hack out a missing feature given enough Red Bull and motivation (the promise of a better job title and more Red Bull).

What you can’t copy is design and execution. You can’t copy software quality and user experience. Again: better product, better experience.

When I show Carousel, I’m really selling simplicity. I show how you can select a template, type your message and schedule the bulletin to display. In 15 seconds, an untrained office administrator can post a message about the blood drive without bothering anyone.

If a signage system does not have that “feature”, then, well… it sucks. The most expensive signage system in the world is the one that shows the company mantra and logo because nobody knows how to update it.

After the simplicity is demonstrated, I let the customer show me what is important to them. Multi-channel? Got it, here is how it works. How do I manage hundreds of players? No problem, let me show you. But all along the way, remember, your staff will enjoy using it.

So the buyer might stand in the way, waving their chart of features and their carefully crafted bid specification. But at the end of the day, it’s the user that counts. While buyers buy things, users keep those things bought.

We’ll just keep our eyes on the user.