Anyway, one of the biggest things that struck me when hearing from the speakers, including people like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Paul Buchheit (Gmail, Friendfeed), and Evan Williams / Biz Stone (Twitter) was this: they launched very rough and ugly first versions of these projects in just a few days and iterated from there. These companies and products are now worth billions of dollars, but they started as small hack jobs that were designed as a quick, fun experiment.

This principle has been expressed a few ways before, but one of my favorites is by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

So in that spirit, I’ve decided to launch a quick little plugin that I built Saturday evening, after the event was over. I’d been thinking about how I’d like something like this plugin, but I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to just sit down for a couple hours and knock out the roughest, hackiest version that would still provide some value. I definitely nailed the first part (the code is ugly), but you’ll have to tell me if it adds any value for you.

The plugin is called MightyReach for Wordpress, and just like MightyReach.com will do when we launch, this plugin allows you to measure your overall social media “reach” from one place, in this case, from your WordPress dashboard. In keeping with the principle of releasing early and often, it currently only covers Feedburner and Twitter, but we have a long list of other services we’d like to cover, including Google Analytics, Youtube, Facebook, Bit.ly, and more. We also have a lot of feature ideas, but with both supported services and features, we’re more interested in what you have to say, so please contact us and let us know what you’d like to see.

Download mightyreach-wp from WordPress.org

I’ve already written about how MightyBrand started, so I’ll summarize in this post by saying that in early 2008, we got the idea to build a platform for monitoring social media and helping companies engage with their customers. This seemed like a great idea to us, and we had a lot of code from a previous project that we could repurpose for the cause.

The project didn’t seem too huge or overwhelming, so we started building. We coded throughout the rest of 2008 and watched the project grow more and more complex. We eventually launched in January 2009 and waited for the world to recognize our genius. And surprisingly, they did. Sort of.

The accolades started coming pretty quickly after launch. Fellow entrepreneurs and industry insiders told us that our product blew away much more expensive products built by large, well-funded teams. There was talk of valuations in seven-figures, early acquisitions, and astronomic growth projections. Heady stuff for two guys with no money, experience, or connections who had started a company in an industry they didn’t even know existed.

All the pieces were falling right into place. Well, almost all the pieces. We still didn’t really have any customers. We were a bit perplexed, but undaunted, and proceeded to spend the next few months adding product features, refactoring code, writing automated tests, and doing pretty much anything to avoid facing the fact that apparently no one thought our app was worth paying for.

Fortunately, we managed to stumble our way into a great relationship with an advisor, Michael Berolzheimer, who gave me a copy of Four Steps to the Epiphany, a book by a professor named Steve Blank, about something called Customer Development. The book’s title and the fact that professors tend to write the most boring books in the world made me suspect that I’d be better off propping up my monitor with it than reading it. But out of respect for Michael, I decided to at least try.

Remember that double whisky I had you pour? Yeah, well, I should have had one of my own on hand for this book. With horror, I read as Steve described the exact approach we had taken with selecting our idea, building our product, and launching it to market, and how it usually leads to market failure for almost everyone who tries it.

I’ll let you discover all the ins-and-outs of Customer Development for yourself, which you definitely should, unless you enjoy failure and ridicule. The basic idea that we completely neglected is this: talk to your customers before you build the product.

We never talked to our potential customers. I know, it’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing. But seriously, in the nine months we spent building this complex product, we never once sat down with a potential customer, asked them what their needs were, showed them our product (or mockups), and asked them if they’d use it, how they’d use it, and what they’d pay for it. Not once.

How could we be so stupid? I’m really not sure. In our defense, most startups do this. They make very little attempt to get out of their office and go talk to customers and show them what they’re working on. They don’t sell the product until they’ve built it. And as a result, they usually find that there are no customers for what they’ve built, or the customers aren’t willing to pay what the startup thought they could charge.

I think this widespread lack of customer development is due to three factors:

1. It’s more comfortable – Many technology founders are more comfortable working on the product than knocking on customers’ doors and talking to them about their needs and how their product can meet those needs.

2. Investors don’t require it – This may be starting to change, but there’s a lot of startups out there that have been funded based on the strength of the team, or the idea, or a prototype, or whatever. How many VCs want to see a Customer Discovery report based on dozens or hundreds of interactions with potential clients? Hopefully more than a couple years ago.

3. It’s emotionally risky – I think this is the real reason at the root of it. Deciding to start a company is both hard and unbelievably exciting. The emotional rollercoaster has to be experienced to be believed. And it all revolves around this idea that you have for a product or service that will make people’s lives better, and hopefully make you rich in the process. Every time you talk to a customer about your planned product and they tell you they don’t need it and wouldn’t pay for it, you get a little bit closer to having to face reality and realizing that this startup or product isn’t a good idea. And since it’s your baby, you avoid that reality as much as you can.

So what happened next? Immediately after reading the book, we determined that we were going to correct our course and fix this issue, so we mapped out a plan to do customer development right. Unfortunately, we missed something really important that led to our second big mistake with this company, but I’ll talk about that in a later post. In short, we’ve done pretty well this year, but we still have a long way to go to reach the vision we had for this company when we started, which I’ll also talk about in a later post.

For now, I want to encourage you to read about customer development, both the book and some of the excellent resources out there on the subject. And since we’re always interested in understanding our customers’ needs better, please contact us about MightyBrand and how we might be able to make our product better fit your marketing and social media engagement needs. We really do want to hear from you this time, I promise.

Thanks to Aamir Virani, Jesse Meyer, Luke Fretwell, and Alexis James Waggoner for reading drafts of this post.

The story of our name is a tale of the sunk cost fallacy. Back in 2006, we started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm that was very similar to FriendFeed or SocialThing. We originally called it BlueSwarm.org, because the .com was taken, but just before we launched in Summer 2007, we bought the .com, paying way more than we should have. Stupid. Anyway, the launch went OK, we got some press, but after awhile, we realized that the space was crowding fast and it was a difficult idea to monetize, so we put it on the back-burner.

Meanwhile, we launched a little side blog called MightyBrand that covered personal branding through social media. We posted there occasionally, but not much. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas you do on a weekend that gradually lose steam over the next few months.

In early 2008, we decided to take the codebase from BlueSwarm and re-purpose it to be a social media monitoring platform for brands. This is where the sunk cost fallacy comes in: because we paid so much for the BlueSwarm.com domain, we really wanted to use it, so our social media monitoring platform for brands and companies was also called BlueSwarm. We went through these mental marketing gymnastics trying to relate it to what we were doing: “Who’s swarming around your brand?” We launched an alpha prototype under BlueSwarm and applied to YC as BlueSwarm.

Finally, about six months later, we realized that it probably wasn’t the best fit, and it suddenly dawned on us that MightyBrand was actually a pretty good name for what we were attempting to do, and would grow with us as we expand beyond monitoring. So when we launched our public beta in Jan, we completely re-branded as MightyBrand.

The lesson? Don’t hold on too tightly to a domain, name, idea, or project just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on it. If the future for it doesn’t look good and you have something better on the table, go for it.

PS – If anyone wants to buy BlueSwarm.com, .net, and .org, email us

Interview with Jolie O’Dell

Pictures of SF New Tech Demo

Note: To any event producers out there, we’d love to demo MightyBrand for your audience and talk about how to build strong brands online using social media.  Just contact me at ryan@mightybrand.com.

Redesign
We pushed a big redesign of MightyBrand (and this blog), including a new brand with color scheme and logo, done by our good friend Luke Fretwell.  We’re really excited about the redesign and we’d love to know what you think.  Post in the comments!

Speed and architecture improvements
We’ve spent the last two months working on some massive architectural improvements to allow the site to continue to scale and grow as more and more users signup.  You should see a big improvement in the speed of the site compared with the last few months.

Homepage demo
You can now check your brand’s social mentions right from the MightyBrand homepage, just to get a taste of the value that we add.  Check it out!

SF New Tech Demo
A few weeks ago, I was thrilled to be asked to present MightyBrand to a couple hundred attendees at SF New Tech.  The event went well and I’ll be posting about it later today, so stay tuned.

Partnerships
We’ve been hard at work on some really exciting partnership opportunities that we hope to be announcing very soon.  In the meantime, if you’re an agency or marketing firm and you’d like to offer MightyBrand to your clients, please contact us and discuss it.  We’ve got some great solutions that we’d love to tell you about.  Check out our partners page or contact us for more info!

MightyTweets
We launched an experiment in micro-monitoring called MightyTweets.  You can now get notified via Twitter when someone mentions your brand on blogs, forums, Digg, and Twitter itself.  For more info and to try it out, just follow @MightyTweets.

You
MightyBrand exists for you and we were able to spend a lot of time in April getting to know our customers and understanding how we can help build great brands.  There’s nothing we’d rather be doing, so please contact us.  Thanks for making it such a great month…we’re really excited to see what May has in store!

We take full responsibility for the mistake and want you to know what we’re doing:

1. We’ve identified the exact issue and taken steps to correct the immediate problem.
2. We’re going through all of our email code to ensure there are no other major bugs.
3. We’re re-evaluating our procedures for testing new features across the entire app.
4. We’ve tried to contact those affected by the error; please contact us if we missed you.

Again, we’re sorry that we made this mistake and we’re hard at work to make sure it never happens again.  We completely understand if you’re upset (we are);  If you have further concerns or questions, please contact us at support@mightybrand.com or call me at the number below and we’ll make it right.

Ryan & Ben
650.646.3914

If you were one of the original users on BlueSwarm, thanks again for your feedback and testing of our early efforts.  It meant a lot to us and we hope you’ll find even more value on MightyBrand.

Pricing plan changes
We’ve added a “Solo” plan that lets one user track one brand for just $12 / month. The other plans have been adjusted as well.

Affiliate program
We’ve launched an affiliate program to let you earn some recurring revenue by referring others to our service. Read more on our Partners page.

Filter by source
On the conversations tab, you can now select exactly which types of conversations you’d like to see.

Search your results
Search through your conversations and mentions by keyword or phrase.

Manual refresh
Addicted to MightyBrand? Keep hitting the refresh button and getting new results.

Misc. changes
We’ve tidied things up here and there to try and make it more intuitive and easy to use, so let us know if we’re heading in the right direction.

We’re really excited about these new changes, as well as the next round of changes that we’re hard at work on. Please let us know what you think, and as always, we’re grateful for any feedback or suggestions you might have.

PS – as with all major changes, there may be bugs and issues, so please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know if you see any issues or problems. Thanks!

BlueSwarm.com – Listen To Your Customers

The philosophy behind this product is really a simple one: customers talk on blogs, Twitter, and several other social channels. If companies could learn about these conversations about their brands or products, they will be able to give the people what they want. Thus, BlueSwarm was born.

Thank you to everyone that cast their vote for us, and thanks to KillerStartups.com for the excellent write up.

If you’re passionate about helping others build their brand using social media, then this is a great opportunity for you to share your knowledge. We are looking for writers who can write a substantial post a couple of times a week and post a daily roundup of links to resources around the web for the off days.

Contact Ben Rasmusen (info at mightybrand dot com) if you’re interested. Thanks!