In this episode, we talk about how difficult the challenge will be for the poor soul who joins up with us in the role of Chief Creative Officer. We are currently hiring for a co-founder level role to help us with design.

The hope is that if we find the right person we can give him/her the keys to the boat on everything from:

• Brand identity, colors, logo, and market positioning
• User experience design
• Design for usability
• A seat at the table discussing feature inclusion and product management
• Data visualization strategy and implementation
• XHTML/CSS/AJAX production
• Growing the team in terms of creatives as the site grows

Bottom line, as we draw out in the episode, I think that design is key for consumer internet, but design is even more important for a project like ours, where we have complex ideas to convey to busy people, and we need to compel action.

If you know anyone, we would love to have the conversation.

Transcription

Hi. I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.  This is Episode 2, “It is the Design, Stupid!” The reason why I want to talk about design today is it is the topic that has been blowing up all around the blog sphere. It is the topic of conversation including last night at the bar. Couple of us from the founder’s Institute developers and business folks alike, we were talking about how projects right now can live or die by design. Dave McClure did an excellent blog post this morning about the importance of design to start up, particularly in consumer internet.

In my case I am in a B2B situation, but I am selling small businesses and so many of them are small and they behave more like consumers in many ways than they do traditional enterprise selling but I think more importantly than design and its role in acquiring customers, I think for me, design is essential. Good design is essential because what we are trying to do is we are trying to communicate very complex concepts to people who are very busy.

This is not something that people would come in and just check and tweet every once in a while and wait and track it over time. We are talking about communicating with busy, busy target market, concepts like customer profitability and brand equity and what it means to push payables and accelerate receivables and how it can impact the bottom line of a business, help business improve. So the content has to be there and I take ownership of that. Technology needs to be there and I need a CTO to own that along with me but we are hiring a Chief Creative Officer, Chief Design Officer, UX Hero, whatever title makes sense. We are hiring in a co-founder level, higher on the creative side because the work that needs to be done involves state of visualization and creating simple, interactive, accessible visualizations of sometimes very complex data, but it also involves the context around that and try to explain and open up these complex concepts for small business owners who is way too busy to sit down and go to Wikipedia and figure out what customer profitability really means.

Then, as if that is not enough, once you communicated all of that, you then need to compel them into action. I can enter a database and I can write the recommendation engine and say alright under these circumstances small business owners would be well advised to take the following actions. You know boom, boom, and boom and if they do there is bottom line impact of $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000. I can quantify that no problem and if I am there in person, I can compel a small business person to do that. I have built a career in making recommendations for large organizations in how they can improve their business. I know that concept very well and I know the content and I know how to convince people but in a website environment where people are in more of a self-serve environment, the design needs to do that. The design needs to compel a busy person who doesn’t care….who doesn’t care about our startup, who doesn’t care about charts. It needs to compel them into action.

So I think you can hear through all of this that really this is a very high priority. We don’t want to shop it out to a good UX house and let someone sort of whack it together for us and then keeps tweaking. We don’t think that getting everyone in the room and having dialogues with customers…hey what do you need is going to do it because a lot of these customers don’t know what they need. We need someone who can make you know make this content fly off the page and really compel action.

So if you are that kind of a person, or if you know that kind of person, we would love to hear from you whether you are interested in joining or not is really not the issue at this stage. I think we just want to have the dialogue so that we head to the right place you know thinking about the right thing. Are we reading the right blogs?  I read Feltron, I check out New York Times. It has great data visualizations. These are the guys whom we are thinking in New York are doing a great work. Well we want to hear from you and we want to make sure that we are talking to the right people so that we can find and hire.

Anyway, that is all for today. That is my confession. My confession is we are dying to find the right designer. If you know the right designer reaches out to us.  Let’s have a dialog about it because you could really bring someone on and quickly. We want to take the time to find the right person but see what happens so. Look forward to the dialogue. Cheers.