Has Kickstarter just gone International?

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:48:00 +0000

Check your Kickstarter.com front page! Has it changed? Mine is showing Tokyo, Japan just below “the fold”! Does this mean Kickstarter has opened to International projects? Not yet! At least not according to their project submission page:

You are a permanent US resident with a Social Security Number (or EIN).
You have a US address, US bank account, and US state-issued ID (driver’s license).
You have a major US credit or debit card.

Still, this is the first major overhaul of Kickstarter’s front page and it definitely points toward an international expansion in the near future! Design-wise however, I think it’s an eye-sore. I even questioned my eyes and started thinking may be I’ve hit their staging server!

The other major change is the “Your Friends” tab, which was implented in late March. My personal observation is that it had significantly brought up the inactive backers’ return rate, resulting in overall higher project funded amount!

“Inactive Backers” were probably one of the main hurdles Kickstarter needed to overcome. People who came across a cool project reported on the web, came to Kickstarter to back it, but then never returned to back another project! So far Kickstarter had done a great job curating their front page to keep it fresh and interesting, but from a user’s point of view, it’s still a hit and miss. The new “Your friend backed X project” email has been amazing to me! I began recieving news about what my friends are backing and it had prompted me to back a couple of projects myself! (Even though I’m a big fan of Kickstarter, I belong to one of those “inactive backers” bunch.) Another thing that struck me was how prolific some of my friends are, almost everyday I see a few of them backing a wide range of projects! This has been interesting as well, as before this Kickstarter was sending out their own “Projects We Love” emails, which was a complete flop, nobody gives a shit! Now, I’ll open each of those emails to see what my friends have backed, again!!

Still, I think Kickstarter can take a page from what I did for Makible on this! Backing a project is a highly personal experience and we’d like to share with our friends “Why am I backing this project!” So, allow backers to write a message after the backing process, and then include that message in the email sent out to his friends! This has been one of the most praised feature of Makible.com.

Lean Startup and UX: Why You Shouldn't Build Anything to Start With!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:36:07 +0000

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloneofsnake/6593023245/in/photostream)At last week’s Startup Monday at BootHK, Jason Crane gave a talk on “How to UX your Startup’s Product or Service…”, there were a lot of good lessons in there, and as a first time entrepreneur who until recently thought he knew everything about agile, lean startup and customer developments, it was an ironic reminder of how little did I really know! It prompted me to tweet out saying I’ll write this blog post about “UX & lean startup & how u SHOULDN’T build ANYTHING to start w/!”You see, I really was no stranger to the whole agile & lean thing. First learned of and started using Scrum back at Yahoo in around 2006, I became quite passionate about it and started attending agile meetups. I brought all that experience with me to Japan, where I directed the development of LEGO CUUSOO, a groundbreaking crowdsource product design service for LEGO! I had to educate the managers on building MVPs (Minimal Viable Product) instead of fully spec’ed out final product; weekly timeboxed sprints instead of long features development; burndown charts instead of Gantt charts… etc etc. It was a great success!In April of 2010, we also arranged for an overnight Tokyo simulcast of Startup Lessons Learned at the Tokyo Hackerspace! That’s where I first heard about the term MVP (which I was already doing), and other great insights in customer developments and continuous integration. Fast forward to late 2011, I moved to HK for my first startup - Makible.com, I talked about doing all of the above… but somehow, things weren’t working out. It wasn’t until we got an unexpected acquisition deal that really snapped me out of it and thought “Hey! I should’ve done this & that!”So, what’s the one thing that I should’ve done before anything else?GET CUSTOMERS!Honestly, even though I thought I knew the importance of lean, agile, MVP… at the end of the day, I was still building without talking to customers! When you don’t talk to any customer, building even just a login page is TOO MUCH!! I was so passionate about my idea that I fell into the same “build it and they’ll come” trap! When customers didn’t come, I was sort of lost for a while, thinking about “how to genuinely connect with a community and serve their needs, so they’ll come on board Makible”. Well, it’s true that genuinely being part of a community helps, Threadless’s co-founder Jake Nickell told me that, but then where do I start? I had no clue! It wasn’t until the recent unexpected development that I finally got my head cleared! I reached out to my successful entrepreneur friends, picked their brains, gotten many good tips! (I must thank Stephen Forte in particular!)So… back to Jason’s “How to UX your Startup”, much of it was about validating with your users early! It’s so true, but I believe a lot of people will still fall into the same trap as I did. The one point from the presentation that I liked most was Lao Tzu’s quote: “The journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step.” Applied to startup and customer development, you could say “The journey of one thousand people strong community begins with a single person!” That’s it! Go out and start with one single person!!Getting back to Makible, I’m now looking for 3 more product designers to work with. (I’ve found 2 already.) The plan is to work closely with 5 designers with a lot of “hand-holding”, get them to use Makible’s site from beginning to end, post up one design each, get their feedback and make improvements. And then repeat for another 5 designers… do a few iterations like this until success! So, if you know any good product designers, please send them my way! You can reach me directly at my email - nicholas.wang@makible.com.

UX on Nick Wang

Has Kickstarter just gone International?

Lean Startup and UX: Why You Shouldn't Build Anything to Start With!