We hit a snowstorm during the trip. Glad to be back in the sunshine.

“Skate where the puck is going”

In the obnoxious sports cliche industry, everyone knows to try to target your business based on future trends, instead of past results.

Strangely, this seems to be a very rare occurence in business, especially the web business sector. Instead, there seems to be a lot of thinking along the lines of “skate to where someone else has already captured the puck and hope you can flail at him enough to release it and claim it”. The hundred Instagram clones, the fifteen million local sites which do exactly what Yelp does except without the user base, the penny auction sites which figured “well, Swoopo did well” (until they went broke).

The fact is, trying to cling to a “borrowed” business model often fails for two reasons:

You aren’t bringing new value to the table. Often, the differentiation people have to offer is trivial in value, or itself a crude outsourced mashup of existing concepts or properties. Image sharing, for example, is a solved problem. More storage space, or a cuter user interface, isn’t enough to get past the fact “imageshack.us” is hard-wired into my fingers.

The value is in the data or community, not the business model Let’s say I GAVE you the source code to Facebook, and appropriate server infrastructure. Tomorrow morning, LeftThighBook goes live. All the features people love are there, except there’s only ten users. I won’t find a friend request from the guy I was on the science team with in high school. If I play the games, they’ll say “invite other users” but there’s nobody there to get the referral bonus from. The technology didn’t make the product, and you can’t emulate what did.

I must say, that’s one of the things which has impressed me the most about working at Web-Op. By and large, we haven’t been following trends blindly. We’ve produced projects which created new market niches where there was a clear under-served client base. We didn’t have to try to reverse-engineer someone else’s special sauce, then realize it was a userbase we couldn’t acquire at any cost, or first-mover advantage.

Look at our major projects:

Auto Glass Guru — before us, it was surprisingly difficult just to get a real, buyable quote for a windshield replacement. Everyone wanted you to call in, or go through a 20-phase quoting process that ended with, unsurprisingly, “please call to find out more.” And this, in spite of the industry being dominated by a major player with an infinite bankroll. We’ve taken a collection of neighbourhood shops and given them the tools to compete on a national basis. It’s all very heart-warming stuff.

SwiftLiens — Lien documents are typically prepared with a desktop-based custom application. This, by its nature, limited the ability of a lien agency to succeed. Seperate installs and seperate data files for every user kept work from flowing smoothly, and the featureset was limited to “whatever they’ll sell you.” Not only could we custom-develop forms and processes around the client’s needs, by moving the data online, they can now do their work even on holiday overseas.

Cremation — If this isn’t “skating where the puck will be”, nothing is. We’re single-handedly upending the funeral industry by recognizing that, while constantly yammering about “dignity” and “your loved one” and “your time of need”, most people are just stuck with a mother-in-law they really didn’t like in their spare bedroom, and their primary “need” is getting rid of her before she starts to attract roaches.

All major, fresh thoughts, where you aren’t dependent on seizing territory from an entrenched competitor, or obsoleted the next time your competitor updates his app or site.

If you want this sort of innovative thinking, go on, fill out the contact form. We’ll let you know if you’ve got a viable business proposal, instead of just pointing and laughing behind your back as you toss money into a pit labelled “Local+Maps+Social Mashup #453.”

Look at these two charts comparing January 2011 to January 2012. If you make the mistake of measuring your growth from the beginning of each month till the end, it’s hard to see any increase. However, if you’re patient for a year the growth becomes quite apparent.

Nobody’s going to discount the growth of mobile. We’ve all got our collections of phones, tablets, and even the occasional netbook. However, a fortune thrown at mobile development will net you no extra revenue if it doesn’t serve a user purpose.

While users on the desktop may be willing to put up with moderately clunky architectures, and sometimes enjoy clever things which achieve more of a branding goal than a direct sale, such extravagances are lost when your hands are cramped around a tiny screen waiting for data to slowly trundle across a 3G (or semi-4G) connection. The medium, in many cases, directs the message.

Is your sales message necessarily long-form? Remember, scrolling is clumsy to the point of awkwardness even on the best smartphones, and NOBODY likes pinching and panning to read a long novel. For example, if you’re trying to show detailed illustrations of spa services and explain the staff’s experience, nobody’s going to sit through it.

A better choice may be to abandon that messaging entirely for mobile users. A quicker hit with a stronger value proposition can work instead– for example, a downloadable coupon.

It’s also important to consider that mobile users may not even be engaging you for a direct buying opportunity. If I open a brick-and-mortar retailer’s mobile site, my likely concern is less about making a purchase online, and more about finding a nearby location. Feel free to remove your shopping cart, return policy, and such, to put that location-finder front and centre.

Maybe you’re not a retailer, so that’s not the obvious answer. In that case, it’s time to reevaluate the reason someone is on your site in a mobile device.

The first likely choice: he’s trying to find your retail partners. The good old “Where to buy” link is vital. However, that can be risky. If your distribution channel isn’t “tight”– knowing not just which distributors you sell to, but even most retailers– you may not have the details on important local vendors, leading the user to give up on your product as unavailable in his neighbourhood.

The manufacturer does, however, tend to have an edge on product information. Frequently, a retailer’s displays are limited to breif summaries of products, and whatever you can read off the box itself. I can recall trying to peck out manufacturers’ websites on a BlackBerry to do feature comparisons in the store– and when I got there, ending up in large, slow-to-load pages which didn’t fit my needs at all. Honestly, if you look at a screenshot like this, you know– if the information you need is even on the page in the first place– you’re going to be pawing all over the screen to try to dig it out. A simple, appropriately scaled product photo and a table of key features, on the other hand, would close the deal your point-of-sale display already opened.

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Indeed, this may be a rare truly appropriate use for QR codes– since it clearly ties to a single product’s packaging, a customer could scan and arrive at full details which won’t fit on the back of the box. A further enhancement could even come by tying it to packaging version– using a different code (and thus a different page) for seasonal, region-specific, or bundled products.

People scream blue murder about Amazon using their mobile presence to aid customers in comparison shopping, but customers who are researching their purchases on mobile devices aren’t just doing so to find the lowest price– information matters. Providing those details on a well-thought-out informational mobile site can help your brick-and-mortar partners outcompete Amazon- if the customers can get their questions answered before even seeing the online price, it increases their chance of closing the deal in-store.

Of course, all these paths lead customers to a purchase– even if not directly through your site. There are retailers who have to consider “maybe my product is simply not purchased off a mobile device”, where the value proposition is primarily informational.

Any sort of transportation product fits there– yes, you might be able to build a clunky product to let me buy a bus pass with a credit card number or mobile wallet payment, but I’m probably just wanting to check the time-table.

Other likely “information only” mobile presences include products which could require emergency aid (i. e. treatment if you swallow cleanser) or field service (repairing a damaged automotive component). While it may be depressing to focus on the crisis aspects of your products, being timely and correct may be a great way to earn customer trust.