I thought it would be interesting to interview some other people doing start-ups. I am sure many of you have seen all the shirt companies out there, Threadless (they rule), Busted Tees, etc&So to find a new one launching I was a bit skeptical. Lets here what the founder of AntiClothes, Bryan Hewitt has to say&

How did AntiClothes get started?
AntiClothes was launched in August, making it 2 months young. We started the concept about a year before that, and it finally all came together then.

What made you become interested in doing your own business?
Ive got an expensive habit with loving cars. Oh, and people uglying themselves up with crappy t shirts. I wanted to make things that felt like a warm hug every time you put it on. Its like a replacement for a significant other. Those are so overrated!

Whats missing in the t-shirt business online now and why do we need another one?
Simple, consistency. So many companies are pushing our fresh designs every Monday, but most are forced ideas. We may move into releasing every week, but right now we wait, pick the best idea, then design. After we design, we filter even more to what we dig the most, and think our customers will like the best. You cant show up with just one or two good designs, and the rest fillers. You need solid ideas, executed to the T (oh god, puns), every time.

How do you plan on people marketing AntiClothes shirts?
Were promoting through standard channels, banner ads, traffic plugs, but we have alternative marketing methods in mind. We are launching a viral campaign, based around video. I put viral in quotes because its never really something you can predict, or create, but you can damn sure use the tools available to try. Ive spent a lot of time researching what has gone viral on video sites, as well as what seems to be popular amongst our target market of 18-30.

Our first video is coming out on Youtube in about a week or so. I had a cartoon version of myself created, and I teach YouTube obscenities in sign language. Inspired by this lovely gem: YouSuck T Shirt . I want to give each shirt its own video. Some will be completely random, and some will be based around the shirt.

There are many t-shirt companies, how are you going to stand out?
Were the badass of the group. Youve got Threadless who focuses more on a designer/art type ts, and BustedTees who focuses on the joke and not the design as much. Both are great companies, but were what would happen if you smashed the two together and threw sprinkles on top. Our shirts arent novelties, they help our customer stand out. Strangers come up to me and compliment certain designs I wear, and that reaction our customers get as well, will help put us on top.

Biggest challenge and greatest so far?
Designers who flat out suck. Weve went through a good piece of change with artwork that never came out right, or we just didnt receive. We need a vast array of styles for our line up, and though you can find one solid designer out of filtering through 10, we needed more than that. What I advise to people is to search outside your niche. This is risky, but will pay off incredibly if you can find someone with raw talent in a similar field, and get them to filter it to yours. Weve had people who are street designers, comic artists, but they raw talent is there - and once they channeled AntiClothes vibe theyve made us great pieces.

A second challenge has been the fact our competitors have hundreds of designs, when we were starting out with 16, and now were up to 20. Im aiming to get us to around 24-25 within a month and a half, then keep expanding from there. Selection is important, most people appreciate a good amount of our shirts. The more we have, the better a chance of some one finding their clothing match made in heaven.

Anything else?
Yes, Im on a mission. Companies like SnorgTees, which I feel have some of the lamest shirts, are managing to do well. I feel I need to save their customers from buying such horrid t shirt fashion faux pas. AntiClothes is here people, we can save you!

Also, feel free to check out AntiClothes, drop some feedback in this blog post. If you like anything enjoy 10% off with code okdork. Dont forget to check back here and there too! We only have 20 of our designs up right now&plenty more coming!

I was outside of the ACL concert last weekend and this Christian guy came up to my friend and me to convert us to Christianity. Being the great Jew that I am he gave up instantly but he came back to me with a killer question.

pic of me at corcovado (christ) in brazil

Do you want to go to heaven?

Besides the fact Jews get an express pass to heaven, HECK Yes I want to go to heaven! Thats like asking someone do you like fun? No one says no to that. (excuse the double negatives).

How can you learn from this and make your site better? On our new site we had some text stating for people to join and some benefits below. We changed it to list the best benefit on the top and others below. Our conversions jumped 100%, from 10% to now 20% users sign up when they get to that page. Worth it?

Bottom line: Display the ultimate benefits they will receive from your service and test it. Something they cant say no to.

Bonus Idea: Get 1-2 of your users to rewrite the copy on your site. (Thanks Rachel!) They will have some interesting ways for you to think about the language they prefer to understand.

Can I get an amen?

All day on Techcrunch, Techmeme and other tech sites there is a good coverage and some not so good about start-ups that are doomed for failure. Surprisingly, they all missed the story of my resident in the dorms from Berkeley, Johns Wu, who by himself created bankaholic.com and sold it to bankrate.com (a public company) for $15,000,000. Thats a lot of 0s!

Whats the moral of the story?

Focus. Johns started out just doing cd rates and became the #1 term for it on google. Then he expanded to other banking categories.

Relevance. There are 1,000s of personal finance sites. Most of the people just consume some information. You go to his site to find deals and sign up for them. Thats the point.

Monetize. Just like what my old company Mint.com is doing, Johns picked a lucrative category where clicks will pay out $50+.

Bottom line: Next time we go out for burritos, Johns is going to treat;)

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link

At 13 I started working at a Popcorn stand in Vallco Mall.

Yours?

At Facebook we never did testing or looked at analytics. At Mint, Aaron (CEO) was very very methodical and even flew in his dad who is a usability expert. We did surveys, user testing and psychological profiles. This was extremely useful in identifying the types of users we may have on the site and especially for seeing how people use the site. I never really did this before and was AMAZED how people use the site vs. what I expected. Most people know I am very practical or as my ex-gfs call it cheap. Anyways, here how our new start-up user tests.

How to get people to test for you

1- Recruit people for free on Craigslist.com. Get normal people who you think may use your site. You can also message people on facebook or yahoo groups and/or forums related to your topic. Post that you are looking for X (football, shopping, etc..) fans. The main goal is to get ideal users of your site. Asking Silicon Valley friends is relatively useless, unless you are building valleywag.
2- In cafes, go up to people who are on computers or look like a user you may want on your site. I did this and it was a nice way to meet women. Hey, not gonna lie:)
3- Prepare your questions ahead of time so you can compare responses instead of having random stuff from each user. Use surveymonkey.com to create surveys.

Questions to ask ahead of time

a) background - learn about them. what sites do they go to. how do they normally invite friends to things. who do they hear about things from. what do they do for fun. (these ?s are useful in shaping your product/experience)
b) objective based - Figure out what you want to learn from them specifically. Then create questions to make them do ACTIONS on your site. Can you please add a friend? How does someone post a new item?
c) Ask them to speak outloud and tell you what they are thinking or confused about.
d) Follow up. If they didnt do what you expected, afterwards ask them what they thought about it or what made them do something else.
WARNING: DO NOT TELL THEM WHERE TO CLICK OR SHOW THEM ANYTHING.

How to do the actual testing:

a) Record. Ideally you can record the audio and screen cast of the session. Snapx is a great video capture tool, also techsmith.com has some neat tools. Audacity, for sound. I didnt pay for these but you can if you want to show / remember what happened. I just took notes on a textpad file.
b) Watch. Adobe has a great free product called acrobat.com where you can use connect and do remote user testing for free.
c) Projector. If you have one use it. Nice to see on big screen instead of creepy style and peering over the side of a person.
d) Automated. My mentor showed me this site Usertesting.com which is AWESOME. For $19.95 a person they will get you someone in your target demographic and provide you a screencast of them using your site and show you bugs and other cool stuff.

Rinse wash and repeat. After you implemented the changes that you received from a few people, get fresh new people in and see if they notice the difference. Jakob Nielsen did research and you only need 5 people before you see overall site issues/trends. If you are a small start-up like ours, you dont have the resources or time to be testing forever. I can say that the ROI on this type of stuff is insane, I know you may not do it or have not read this far in the post but DO it. At least 1 person, if its not worth it I will buy you a burrito.

Any other ways that people do user testing?

With our new startup one of our BIGGEST challenges is getting email into inboxes, and we just started sending them:O If youve ever ran a website with more than 20 users, I am guessing you know my pain. I know Ted has written up some great tips on making your email work. So has Auren.

I saw this in my inbox today and was quite impressed. MyYearbook.com added a mark as spam and and block myYearbook email in their email. This may seem strange for a site to add these links in their own email but its genius! Basically, ISPs (gmail, yahoo, etc&) look at the %age of people who hit the spam button and then reduce the likelihood future emails will get into the inbox. This way, means the ISP never know and the person will never receive an email from myYearbook again. Everyone wins:)

Andrew asked this question on his blog that I think about quite often.

link to photo

Lets compare some differences between app users:

Which kind of user do you want?

I was surprised after I posted about a car accident where a drunk/underage driver hit us on my twitter, over 10 people emailed / called / IMed. It was great. The response time from friends / followers was insane! My chest hurts a bit but me and my friends are alright.

Have you ever been in a car crash?

If you havent noticed in the past 4 months slowly all the techies, bloggers, VCs, soccer moms, etc& refer to compete.com for all site traffic.

WTF happened to Alexa? Remember them, we use to clamor over those #s for our sites and others to prove that we are worth some valuation .

And before that a few of us checked out technorati.com to see how we stacked up in the internet world. Theres also quantcast but Im not sure who actually uses that.

So how did this slowly happen under our eyes? Honestly, I dont know but it was really interesting to realize this last night. I can take a stab at how they did it:

- Their traffic was more accurate and reliable than Alexa. Their data comes partially from ISPs which is actual traffic of sites and not as skewed where Alexas came from browser and toolbar installs. Which tend to favor IE users.
- They had great blog posts comparing many interesting sites that got picked up many blogs.

Whats the future? Google Trends for websites (maybe)

Why do I compare traffic? It helps me determine which sites are relatively succeeding and then analyze them to see how they got to that point.

What do you think?

I have talked about this issue with many people over the years. When you move to a new place, how do you make friends? On many social networking sites its easy to list and index all the friends you currently have. But what about the friends you dont have yet&

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If I didnt mention to you before, I recently moved to Austin, TX. Huh? WTF! What are you doing there? Mostly, I am getting ready for SXSW next year, kidding;) I moved here for a few reasons:

- Burritos. They have more burrito places per capita than any other city in America.
- Talent. UT Austin is a huge talent pool and there are not as many start-ups out here recruiting or being built.
- Money. The cost of living is much cheaper. You can rent a house for $1,000 or less. Gas is $3.50 and burritos are less than $4.
- Change. I am not sure how long I am staying here but every-time I have visited I have an amazing experience. I wanted to get a change of scenery from the Bay Area and be around more non-tech people.

So what does this mean?

1- Anyone can come crash / visit me whenever they want.
2- There are so many sites out there for current friends. What about ways / ideas to introduce and discover new people that you should know&
3- I am curious how people make new friends. My business partner is out here so I have him and a few people from when I have visited Austin in the past. I wanted to throw the challenge to you about how you would make new friends in a completely new town.

Some ideas I have to make new friends:

1- Join a club / group: chess, biking, bowling, table tennis / tennis. I can find them on meetup, craigslist, facebook and google searches
2- Reach out to my existing network here.
3- Go to church / synagogue. Not my ideal thing but I know my Jewish mother would be extremely happy.
4- Try dating websites? I dont really want to date but at least those people are looking to make new friends.

What would you do?