Here’s the simple story of how a simple app in the Windows Store gained 10,000 users in just a few short weeks. It’s all about not being perfect.

This blog post was written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager of The Microsoft BizSpark Program, a community of 50,000+ startup companies and their founders in 154 countries.

The Problem with Perfect

Perfect does not accurately describe a business.

Perfect can’t really describe a market.

Perfect doesn’t work well to define a product-market fit.

Any founder will tell you that starting out with this expectation is definitely going to lead to problems. You can’t get to perfect by drafting out a vision to perfect. You need to depend on something a lot more innate to your experience – a full-on encounter with a problem.

But you can get to big numbers – large downloads, investment money, big customer accounts – by doing a few simple things.

The first of these is, DON’T SEEK PERFECT. DON’T EVEN USE THE WORD.

Start With Wanting Something Better By Experiencing Something Bad

Johnson's drive to create an app started with something a lot more tangible than a market idea. It was a sweaty party where nobody was doing anything, except looking down at their phones. 

Co-Founders Naaman (left) and Lawrence Johnson (right)

For Lawrence Johnson, a communications graduate from the University of Houston, that problem was a philosophical one – social loneliness in public spaces, especially at parties. Call it smartphone ennui.

So many people were looking down at their phones during public events that Johnson basically thought the world had lost its meaning.

“In public spaces, social media has become anti-social. Seeing friends and family glued to their smartphones instead of interacting with one another while at social gatherings was painful,” says Johnson.

He and a group of three friends created Hurl, which takes any YouTube video (for now) and “hurls” it across the room to any internet TV for public broadcast. Your first thought might be that this is still narcissistic. You would be wrong. Here's the app being hurled to the giant Jumbotron at Texas Stadium -- the largest TV in the world. 

In a hot bar in Austin, Texas recently, this created a party of DJs, and opened up the public space in a way you have never experienced. And at recent house parties and events, this app has basically turned everything from music experiences to dance into a hugely public affair.

“We’ve revived the tribal experience, telling new stories, beating new drums all around the newer, warmer fire,” says Johnson. Okay, points off for calling the electric blue of the big screen tv a fire, but you get the point.

One Day, Everything Digital Is a Tribe Echolocator

According to Johnson, one day we will be able to use our mobile devices as a launching platform from which you will be able to move your personal, private crowd-seeking or connection-seeking behavior and displace it from the phone to an outer device that influences the public space.

“The idea is that anything with a URL (uniform resource locator) will be compatible with our platform. H-URL. Nowadays everyone is working with API’s but HAPI just doesn’t have the same ring!” says Johnson.

It says something that most college parties devolve into drunkenness and oblivion. We seem to be innately – genetically? – averse to really communicating with people in big social events, and more prone to collective interaction.

But collective interaction is what makes us human, and whether we like to admit it, or not, collective behavior is at the root of everything “individual” we do. Just look at things like shopping and voting candidates for public office.

We go shopping for clothes to look like everyone else with the same tastes, and fit in.

We cast our individual votes – by the millions – to join others in casting ballots for the “right” person to represent “our” interests.

Hurl is one of the first apps that takes a distinctly individualistic experience on a distinctly individual device and makes it “socially acceptable” for mass consumption of what is going on on that screen.

This is the kind of thing that should be very interesting to brands, and other video providers like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon.

Says Johnson:

With Hurl, we are building a platform that empowers brands of all sizes to interact with audiences in a variety of ways. Whether its friends sharing the latest viral video from YouTube or a bar owner letting patrons know about an amazing drink special, the goal is to transform TV screens everywhere in to objects of real social interaction.

The Four Pillars of Adopting Simple

The question, though, is how did such a simple mechanism get to be so popular and what are the pieces to any company that make for this kind of interaction and success (what some call traction)?

There are four simple pieces: 

1. A cohesive team
2. A unified sense of values and vision
3. Simple execution of a simple task
4. A sense that the consumer forgets the simple task and changes behavior through adoption

Hurl accomplishes a somewhat technically complex cloud-based thing very simply, because there are no complex pieces to the culture of the company or the vision of the team.

1. The team has known each other since before college

 “Our team has known each other for over 10 years now,” says Johnson.  

2. The team never struggles to understand WHY they are doing what they are doing.

“We understand what motivates one another and have vested interest in leaving a positive legacy behind. We share a vision about where technology is headed and firmly believe in our ability to influence its course."

3. They boil down what they are doing into a very simple idea, and execute it.

“Every Hurl screen is a platform for sharing ideas and we’re all about that.”

4. And the consumer gets it.

 You can learn more about why Johnson and his team are doing what they are doing by watching our half hour interview with him on The BizSpark Show.

We talked to Tracy Lee, CEO of Dishcrawl, a 125-city foodie networking series that works kind of like a pop-up food festival at restaurants around American and Canadian cities. We talked to her today to figure out how she started with no investment and got to a point where she quit her job in the financial sector when she realized that she had an actual company with a thriving business model. 

Here's the full archived show. 

Are you working on a truly disruptive technology? Here's one sign that you are -- people who hold incumbent positions in the industry express frustration and skepticism in your work. The good news for you is that these same skeptics are your future allies. All you need is an intense focus on product, and a steel-lined gut to engage with them and find out what they are really upset about. Hint: IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU.

This post is written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager for the Microsoft BizSpark program, now serving 75,000 current and alumni companies in 154 countries.

How can you keep working on a product when it feels that the very industry you are here to help is out to get you? Simple. You can do two things:

1. Focus intently on product, and work slowly on your story as you build, build and build

2. Engage with your critics to turn skepticism into a helpful collaboration

You Know Something Is Cooking When A Bunch of People Come Up To Smell The Dish -- Add Salt

Take the conversation on a Facebook page run by Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at the Altimeter Group. In the post, Owyang points out that recently launched AirPR is angling to give the top 1% of the PR professionals in the world a place for leveraging new client relationships, a model that is played out on a social commerce platform that is a little like Angie's List. Unlike Angie's List, the reviews are not public. FYI: AirPr is a BizSpark member.

Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, founder and CEO of this PR marketplace, weighed in during the weekend conversation, addressing questions about the vision and tension about whether the platform was selling "snake oil" to the profession. What immediately became clear was that anything new -- and disruptively new -- not only creates tension. It also seems to create a lopsided conversation, where people who don't understand the market play lump observations into a collective sense of dissatisfaction with anything new. This shows any careful observer that something is actually wrong in the market place. All the startup is doing is addressing it.  In addressing it, the company will take the barbs.

Fouladgar-Mercer tackled this by listing out the steps his company was taking to help (rather than destroy) the industry./ He knows a little about what he is talking about, he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Shasta Ventures, and worked at Sierra Ventures for a time:

Our vision is to (first) solve the latent -- and overt -- issues in the PR industry using technology as the driver. The goal was and is to build an amazing team, which includes the best and brightest minds in both technology and communications so that we can have a 360 degree understanding of what those problems are. Not based on a hunch, or speculation, but on actual data - both anecdotal and quantitative. I'm proud to say that we've been successful in doing that thus far. With regard to any PR engagement, the key is not necessarily how many years of experience (I mentioned it only to answer a specific comment), but the quality of the talent. Just like everything that is evolving, the story - our story - isn't nearly finished. In fact, it is evident that all marcom functions will continue to change and evolve, hence this discourse - and we welcome it. It's been great to see, and I appreciate the thoughts. Additionally, we have several success stories from customers on our site in terms of Marketplace, and I am confident that there will be more! Last point: we are having a blast and learning a ton along the way

This offers a really cogent lesson for other BizSpark teams who are doing the same kind of thing in their spaces. Your focus on product is your PR. When you embody the problem and focus on the product's addressability to that problem in the marketplace, you are well-armed to be your own PR machine. It gives you a reason to keep working, even when there are a lot of questions. It's the ammunition you are going to need to make the product better and make the conversation more meaningful for skeptics and supporters alike. 

Jerry Reynolds, founder of social travel calendar Plandree said that he discovered early on that he had to be just as focused on the product, because he knew it was set to disrupt notions of what travel apps do in the space. He didn't want to push something out there and see what happened. He wanted to spend a lot of time on the problem.

"The challenge in creating a company in today's startup environment is the notion "to be viable you have to launch early and iterate quickly."  On some level that is indeed true.  But when you are attacking a problem that really wants to change how an industry works, you have to focus on the foundation," he says.  The foundation is how the current market doesn't serve something stuck in the customer's mind -- a something that is missing."Plandree has set our official launch day a couple of times and missed because certain things just were not right." And that's okay.

When The Industry is Up In Arms, Engage

Josef Dunne, a founder at Babelverse, a new platform for interpreter services, started his company with co-founder Mayel del Borniol, because he was so frustrated with not being able to hire an interpreter quickly enough in Greece, he knew something had to be made to fix it.

Nobody is going to like what you do when you disrupt old markets, or entrenched positions, but most people in the industry will benefit from the result of your work, and especially if you do the second thing in the list: Engage. You will find that when you engage and really ask questions about what makes them so upset, they become in some cases your secret allies. However, most people are on the fence about change. 

The issue here gets really rocky. How do you engage when you have apathy, at best, and dislike, at the worst? One answer: you need to understand their struggle, because at the end of the day, you are really there to help them. Again, it's so not about you. It's about making something in service to other people.

IAnd here's why it's hard for an incumbent.

Incumbents know that any proof of success they see in others using the new technology is also proof that something is erasing the gains they hold, which leads to a tension, and often paralysis. Incumbents then feel threatened by their own lack of progress, which they will continue to blame outwardly on the market disruptors. Which means, you have to serve a rather unexpected need. More than anything, you have to help those incumbents move on from the paralysis.

Dunne told me in a Facebook chat recently that "a lot of these industries also cannot understand how a small team of say 3-4 people can make such an impact nor how we can have "credibility".  Yet they LOVE what we are doing and HATE it! But [then they] don't often understand how startups work, how we're lean, we're small, and how we don't have 10 storey offices."

1731.IMG_6616.CR2

"That pattern does happen among people we have come up against yet when we meet them in person they are sometimes completely changed by our encounter and if you get an incumbent who is sooo against you to then understand what you are doing and support you and defend you," says Dunne. "Someone who is established in the industry, they change and understand us more after a F2F encounter, only to become as much of a supporter of babelverse and defending babelverse as they were against it

In the end, it could be that something just happens. Maybe it is global success for a company. Maybe it is the ruination of an industry. The point is that events in history are defined by change. Startups all over the world are set on on changing things. It's important to know what that means. 

When we started The Microsoft BizSpark Show only two short months ago (or maybe it was three months ago) it was a totally unscaleable idea, we thought. The talk around the office was that it was nice to have a TriCaster, and it was great to have a couple of video cameras and a microphone, but many of us looked around at each other and thought, "Well, if we could pull it off, maybe startup developers and founders will tune in and find out what is going on in Silicon Valley and the rest of the world."

Actually, nobody was saying that. I was saying that. I hoped that we could do that. 

And so far, that's happened. We now have over 9,000 followers, which sometimes translates into a lot of viewers, not all watching the BizSpark show at the same time. 

The show is pretty simple in its format. Each week, usually on a Thursday, we talk to a really successful startup founder -- David Sacks, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Denise Terry -- or a bootsrapped developer or founder -- the ladies at Sooligan -- and we ask them questions about how they got started, how they face and solve challenges, and what they generally think is happening in this bubble of a startup world we being entrepreneurs.

Sometimes they tell us great things. When that happens, I hope that people are learning something.

This seems true. Like after we gave an hour long conversation with two PR Pros about how to gain exposure for your startup. People loved it.

Today, we got this tweet from the folks at ExGrip, a team working on a Windows 8 app. We hope you all keep watching.  

Over 1.8K of requests hitting our tool every 24 hours. Watching the #BizSpark show already did it's magic! http://t.co/E2yiCVDhen

— ExGrip (@ExGrip) July 15, 2013

Many of the startups in our 50,000+ membership roll have asked our team for some advice on social media marketing. Many of the founders ask, "How can I get more visibility for my startup?"; "What are some tricks for rapid social media or viral marketing?"

Douglas Crets is the Community Manager for Microsoft BizSpark. He also serves as a startup marketing advisor for several companies in Silicon Valley, and Europe.

There is actually a simple process for this, but two things need to be understood when starting to use it:

1. Marketing in social is not the same as marketing anywhere else.

2. This requires work -- social media does not equal automation.

Stephen Bech, founder of Wantr (and a guy who made a great pitch) is really good at explaining what his company does, and telling a story about its growth and its beginnings.

The genesis for revealing the method that I use came from a conversation that happened today on my Facebook profile with several startup founders. I had noticed that so many startup founders practice the pitch, and they believe that the pitch is actually the most important thing in their tool kit. I don't think this is true, though it was probably true at some time. The pitch was most useful, I said, when the network that people needed to get funding and development was narrow, small, and geographically located / isolated. Investors liked it that way. Keeping things "small" meant that investors could keep the gate closed when they needed to, and then they could rely on their own intake systems to look through the business plans -- and listen to the pitches -- that would signal a future success.

But now, investment inroads are everywhere, and the route to your network is much more multi-path. Look at the rise of companies like Angel List, or any of the hundreds of new platforms where you can create crowdfunding opportunities, or network opportunities.

The signal routes have multiplied, meaning there is no signal in your signal anymore. What investors -- and investor networks -- rely on now is intimacy and storytelling. So, I asked people, what would be the most important way to create this network and storytelling?

The answer is very simple, and it involves on three real actions --- Setting a goal, listening, and telling a story. The rest happens organically on social networks, or (should you be bold and funded), on social network platforms you create yourself.

Here is the methodology. If you want to know more, leave a comment here, or tweet @BizSpark and we can keep the conversation going.

1. Have a business goal in mind, and the values and themes that align internally with those goals
2. Listen outwardly for signs of alliance with said goals
3. Approach and create conversation socially about those common goals
4. Ask questions that create new understanding or new information about areas that are aligned with common goals, to find new values or new goals
5. Include others in the creation of content that aligns with values and brings them internally
6. Distribute and spread and listen again, repeat cycle and then increase audience by doing so. Recursive relationship marketing.