trendpreneur

It always seemed to me, back in the day, to be incredibly sycophantic and artificial to name drop in a job application.

You know the scene; you’re carefully composing your cover letter, and argue with yourself over whether to put in that you know John Smith, who also works at Random Company. Or perhaps Jane Doe, who you met for about 15 seconds at a networking event, when you nearly spilled Coke over her and retreated to the other side of the room, blushing furiously.

It depends, to some extent, how much you like namedropping in general, and how useful the name is going to be in your job application. When receiving a ton of random applications addressed to “Sirs” and originating from outwith the UK, a job application that gets more than a few seconds’ attention does one or more of the following:

• addresses me by name, if possible, possibly replying to a mailing list post I made announcing the vacancy;
• includes the name of someone I know who thought they’d be a good fit;
• or, should I have them, refers to employees (or ex-coworkers, I suppose) of mine that might have already spoken to me about their friend/acquaintance and this particular opening.

The second and third points are interesting, and totally go against my attitude of a few years ago that using someone’s name was too brown-nosey to bother with. The thing is that it’s fairly easy to write a job application, and especially so to write a bad one.

One really important sign that an application is worth my time is if someone else thinks it’s worth my time. Whether it’s a middleman who ’saw this and thought of you’ or someone I know more closely who’s actually taken the time to speak to me about you, having a second opinion that you’re a good fit for both my company and the job is a great help.

Of course, this can hideously backfire, or simply not work at all. It is possible to write it in an overly obsequious tone that just doesn’t go down well. More commonly, you’re referring to a third party who I don’t actually know, or whose opinion I don’t give particular weight to in this domain; though generally if they think you’re a decent enough sort to refer on, that’s a good sign anyway. Even if, say, it’s my dentist recommending a programmer, I’d assume my dentist wouldn’t recommend a complete psycho. (Disclaimer: I don’t have a dentist. Don’t try it.)

Then there’s the backfiring. Referring to someone I actively distrust, dislike or am otherwise on shaky ground with. I’ll admit there aren’t many people falling into this category, but it is possible. Perhaps it’s someone who simply has a track record of recommending people who turn out to be a waste of time.

Either way, expect me to contact the name you drop, unless (and this is the best case, of course) I’ve already spoken to them about you. It’s like an instant trusted reference. So you have to be a bit careful here, too, and not just randomly pull out a name knowing it’ll get my attention; nothing screams unprofessionalism like a phone call that results in a “What? I never told them to apply to you…”.

In an ideal world…

“Dear Jennie. I’m a Python programmer currently looking for a full-time job once I finish my current contract, and Bob Jones from Atlantial forwarded me your recent email to list. I’ve had a look at your website and…”

OK, perhaps not the most finely crafted ever, and it could backfire – Bob could be on the mailing list but I might not have met the guy or even heard of him before. On the plus side Bob might have cc’d me on said forward, and put in a brief note too. It’s all in the details.

And online?

As I was musing on this issue and composing this post in my head, it struck me that a situation in which I’m very familiar with third-party recommendations is in MMO guild recruitment. In the real world, everyone is a unique snowflake, but in games like WoW there can be very little to tell two people apart on paper. They have the same stats, the same experience, and each profess the same reasons for wanting to leave their guild and join yours. But one used to play with someone already in your guild, and the other is a complete stranger. Which do you interview first?

This can really backfire, of course. Being an online medium, people seem far more likely to develop polar opinions about someone, to magnify their bad habits, and to readily complain about them. It’s also easy for memory to blur details; you might namedrop someone you played with a year ago, who honestly doesn’t remember you. (Or, worse, mocks you for being in the same terrible guild they moved on from.)

Not only could the person you reference provide a negative opinion to those recruiting, you could also pick someone that the recruiters don’t like in the first place. It’s also a bad thing to seem too close to someone; guild officers rarely want best-friend cliques developing.

On the plus side it can work really well. Officers often fish around for recommendations on who to recruit, and if people who know you have pointed you out before, that can stand you in very good stead; you could even be headhunted! Capable, intelligent, communicative, social guild members tend to be good at spotting new potential fits, and good at assessing if someone they know would work well in the roster, so make sure your friend’s one of them – not a loot-hungry troublemaker who will do your application more harm than good.

In summary

Namedropping’s all well and good, and can make you stand out to a time-pressed recruiter (of whatever form). Just do your homework, especially on the name, and don’t make stuff up – then everyone will benefit.

I read an interesting post interviewing Chris Anderson, exponent of “Free” (as in beer) — one of today’s emergent business and social models. It’s an interesting topical conversation, what with Google butting heads with Microsoft over Chrome OS — ‘course, the idea of a free operating system competing with Windows is a crazy brand new innovation, innit.

It’s a move we’re all watching intently, of course. As Ben Parr outlines, this is all part of the Google Revenue Equation: the more time you spend on the web, the more Google benefits. Wave and Chrome OS are just feeding into that. This attitude to ‘free’ couldn’t be more different from the free-as-in-speech approach of the GPL and OSS activists, but do today’s Internet consumers actually care?

One of the points that grabbed me from the Anderson interview was right at the end:

…the games world is the most interesting laboratory for freemium right now, and I follow it more closely than any other industry.

Gaming’s been innovating with payment and subscription models, with delivery, with publicity, with ways to grab audience and ways to get people doing social things for yonks now. Create a social network or platform and sooner or later a killer game comes along, whether it’s throwing sheep at people or building a spy ring.

What I find fascinating is the emergence of a single type of game across Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone: if this is the future, I want out. There’s a standard formula for these games: pick a setting (Mafia, Spies, Pirates, Zombies, Vampires..), think of a few vaguely thematic quests, think of an excuse for people to fight each other, do quests, buy items to become more powerful, and (occasionally) feed a social aspect in: friends can be part of your spy ring, or mob, so the more friends you have playing the game the more powerful you become, etc.

These games are absorbing for a few minutes and fairly decently playable if you’ve got nothing else to do, because there’s a sense of constant improvement – yes, it’s basically a textual grind-based MMO that occasionally makes itself relevant by involving your friends. But with six among the top 25 free games, what’s interesting to me is how it all feeds back into this ‘free’ idea.

Why are these games free? They support themselves with ads and various point systems. Install apps from the same developer and get points, complete specific sponsor activities (sign up to spammy websites, for the most part) or exchange cold hard cash. The Spymaster guys are candid about revenue: high revenue per user, and doing fantastically against comparable products. Seems like when there’s an edge available over friends, there’s no shortage of players willing to pay, in money or time.

So how does this feed back into freemium? Ultimately, games work well with ad-supported systems, especially those which actively require you to do something like install a partner’s product, because the results feed straight back into the ingame reward system. People aren’t stupid, and if five minutes filling out a survey makes them a virtual millionaire, they’ll readily sign up.

But in the world of web apps, where there isn’t such an obvious kick-back, and where advertising rings are tacky, it’s doubtful the kind of model being used to great success with the clone army of text-based RPG/MMOs will ever take off. Certainly not in the enterprise world; some consumer web apps might make this work, for example, filling out partner surveys or advertising to have an ad-free Spotify for 24 hours.

In the end, it’s all about consumer effort vs reward. We have smart consumers. They understand things aren’t actually free to make, but they’re getting used to things being free to consume — and becoming blind to advertising on top of all this. The freemium users of today are often supported by the premium users, with the product itself acting as enticement to switch from one camp to the other; but what if the free users could support themselves, in much the same way these ad-supported gamers do?

I’m surprised there aren’t more hits for “time twacking“. It’s a horrible, horrible phrase, but before you string me up for murdering the English language, let me explain.

Time-tracking is a really cool thing to do. Why? Because we have faulty memories, and we like monitoring and planning. Nobody can reasonably be expected to remember by 5pm on Friday what they were doing on Monday afternoon. But knowing where your time over the week goes is invaluable, whether you’re a run-of-the-mill employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer juggling clients.

There are some gorgeous time-tracking solutions out there, yet I personally just have an allergy to typing stuff into a web app.

So this is what hit me last night, at 2am, embroiled amidst caffeinated insomniac thoughts of hair dye and giraffes: why isn’t there a Twitter time-tracking app?

Maybe there is. In fact, I hope there is, because I want to use it. Lazyweb?

In case there isn’t, and someone’s out there looking for something to build (hey, that ’someone’ could be myself in a few months’ time.. who knows):

Let me constantly microblog what I’m doing, in an enterprise context, on a private level, so I can look back and figure out what I’ve done. Use hashtags or another way of formatting keywords to mark out specific types of task and use some simple natural language understanding to automatically graph and plot my time.

Aha! A bit of Googling later and I find Tempo and Twistory. Both potential solutions… but without the latter ‘intelligent’ part, in a way.

The problem with all this is it does require discipline. You gotta tell Twitter, or whoever, what you’re doing. Plus, as you can only go back so far with tweets, I’d suggest setting up an API script to archive your tweets at close of work on Friday (or Saturday, or Sunday…). And yet, the advantage of using a fairly free-form entry method – one that’s close at hand, too – and building your own intelligence around it is you can add in extras, like an end-of-day mood summary, comments, notes, etc. Maybe step 1 is to start tracking now, and step 2 to build in the AI later…

There’s one thing entrepreneurs have, and have to manage with the utmost precision: time.

It’s all too easy to get beguiled by the promise of events, networking, pitching, business development, seminars, courses, lectures, speakers, dinners, lunches, breakfasts, workshops, clinics and one-to-ones.

But it’s also easy to end up running around from one reasonably-pointless event to another, without spending time on the important stuff, like actually running the business. It’s the classic problem, it feels like work, but it isn’t.

The important thing is to learn to say no – and initially, it’s hard to figure out which are the opportunities you should be saying no to. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurship is all about? Seizing opportunities? Well, yes.

So how do you balance? How do you deal with the fact that even at the most useless of events, you’ll probably meet someone useful? How do you weigh the constant need for networking and creating awareness of your business with the need to code, to sell, to design?

Sadly, there isn’t a perfect answer. If there was, I’d be rich. But the easiest thing is to practice – to carry out post-mortems, figure out why event X was good and event Y disappointing, keep track of who’s going to which events, send others on your behalf, watch online, take notes, do a cost/benefit analysis (in your head!) of travelling and time out.

Recognise when things are more important than free events, no matter how much your internal voice says “free! It must be good!”.

But also recognise that if you work in a darkened room for months on end, without learning, socialising, mingling, spreading, selling, getting feedback, asking for help… you’re setting yourself up for failure before you’ve even started. There’s a balance for each of us – and each of us has to find it ourselves.

(This doesn’t just apply to events, of course. Even opportunities, odd jobs, guest-speaking, article-writing, etc, etc, can sap time and energy away from the core of business. However, it’s easier to get flattered into, or oversold on, free events that turn out to be a waste of time.)

We’re being given pitching advice up the wazoo here at Ignite Cambridge. Yet the main pointers to websites are all printed, and some out of date. So let’s pass on some of the wisdom, and track down in-date versions of the links:

• Structure of an investor pitch – very similar to the TechCrunch advice I already blogged, and worth a second writeup all of its own. A quick google turns up this guide by Tom McKaskill (PDF) which is wonderfully thorough. Key points to answer: what are you looking for and what are you going to do with it?

• Sources of non-equity finance:
  • Grants from BusinessLink (although personally I find the website almost impenetrable. Even if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool geek like me, see if you can talk to someone. Seriously.)
  • NESTA grants and awards
  • Geographic or sector-specific sources like the Scottish Arts Council
  • R&D grants e.g. the EU Framework Programme 7, LINK Collaborative Research, Export Marketing Research Scheme, research and development tax credits, and the Enterprise Finance Guarantee
  • More grants listed on j4b
• Local investors (Cambridge): Cambridge Angels, the Great Eastern Investment Forum, IQ Capital, Amadeus
• And more links from the University of Cambridge
• Finally, some presentation tips; I don’t have a link to the stuff we were learnt, but googling some of the key tips turns up this wonderful eyesore of a site with some genuinely decent advice.