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strictest of confidence by Talk2Legends, its employees, associates, agents, and assignees. This document will not be disclosed, duplicated, or used for any purpose other than the evaluation of Tallwave qualifications for the
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Build a business, not just an app

2. Agenda
Building a successful company hard
Common Approach
- Waterfall
- Agile (Capital A)
Why A Different Approach is needed
What is the different approach
- Prototyping
- Branding
- User Acquisition
Don’t reinvent the wheel

3. Hi.
Scott Williams
Lead Engineer
15 Years development experience
@swilliams
Jesus Ramirez
VP of Product, Tallwave Capital
Advisor
Product designer, entrepreneur, problem
solver
@jeezramirez

4. Building a successful app is hard.
Building a successful business
REALLY FREAKING hard

5. But it still starts with the product

6. Why so difficult?

7. More apps flood the market every day
1,874,615 apps currently in app store.

8. And it’s accelerating!

9. Quality of products keep rising

10. The culprits — today’s products are reaaally good.

11. Why are they so good?

12. Startup products, circa 2000
Sales Team
Build credibility with prospects
& close deals
Product Manager
Build relationship and
empathy with customers
Marketing Team
Build awareness, promotions, acquire
new leads
Customer Support Team
Keep customers happy &
address concerns

13. Startup products, circa 2000
must clean baby every
time he soils himself
must bathe and dress baby
you need to find food
and feed baby
you need to groom baby so
he’s presentable in public

14. Jump forward → Startup products, 2015
Build credibility
with prospects &
close leads
Build relationship
and empathy with
customers
Keep customers
happy and address
concerns
Build awareness,
promotion and
acquire new leads
Products these days have to be self-sustaining on day 1!

15. Feed myself, clean myself, dress myself….

16. So how does this affect how we build apps?

17. Process, process, process.

18. Waterfall
Good for bridges, not so much for software
Plan
Build
QA
Design

19. Waterfall!!??

20. The Church of Agile
Are you an Enterprise consultant? Go Agile
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20...
BURNDOWN!
STAND-UPBACKLOG
SCRUM
VELOCITY

21. There’s more to a Product than just
building it.

22. An Anecdote
Good idea + Good design + Good development = $
Right?

23. “Simplify your Photography Business”
An Anecdote

24. The Problem
What you think you can do
What you
actually
CAN do

25. It seems that perfection is
attained not when there is
nothing more to add, but
when there is nothing
more to remove.
—Antoine de Saint Exupery

26. Time
ChanceofFailure
*not to scale
Time is not on your side
You are here

27. Move Fast

28. Or
I BUILD. I ITERATE. I BUILD AGAIN.

29. The other problem?

30. What everyone thinks will happen: Unicorns and Rainbows

31. What actually happens: Zombies and Ghost Towns

32. How are you going to acquire first 100/1000/10,000 avid users?
VS
How are you going to be worth $1 billion one day?

33. If You Build it...uh, no.

34. So how?

35. Be deliberate about acquiring users early
and building this into product

36. Here’s how these guys did it. You may have heard of them.

37. 37
Examples
File sharing invitations, referral
codes and incentive split.
Apply with AngelList, Rapportive
integration, Editable endpoints that
allows company page owners to invite
others or others to self-assign
themselves to company page.
Craigslist hack allowed users to
immediately post on CL—despite the
fact that CL didn’t offer option.

38. Here’s how you can do it.

39. Acquire customers before product built
● Early adopter signups
● Landing pages (Unbounce.com, Launchrock)
● Newsletters (SEOmoz)
● Letters of intent (B2B / enterprise)

40. Single-Page Website Landing-Page
Solution

41. Landing-Page
Solution
● Event Pages
○ User Launches
○ Webinars
● Email Marketing Campaign
destination
● Pay-per-Click Experiments
○ Messaging Experiments
○ A/B / Multivariate Tests
● Social Media Marketing
Experiments
● Investor Landing Page
● Interest Gathering
● Lead Generation
○ Content offers
● Talent / Recruitment Pages

42. Build in hooks
● Attention & Activate
● Retention
● Facilitate Growth & Referral

43. Activation Engagement Referral
Invitation from Friends (social
integration)
I see friends on it (social login
integration)
I see a stream of interesting
things (discovery)
I see a big button just begging me
to create my first post (activation
goal).
Creating and sharing (core loop)
is drop-dead simple
I get push notifications that
bring me back to the app regularly
Word of Mouth is buzzing
app store photos, copy and
ratings are compelling
Saw an interesting photo from
someone on Social Networks
(social integration)
Growing list of followers
(investment)
Regular referrals / business from
posts (income)
Personal sense of expression
(intrinsic)
Where I communicate with my
social sphere (involvement)
Search and invite my friends to
join me (social integration)
Virality
Core Loop
Passive Engagement
Instagram’s Hooks

44. What are your product’s hooks?

45. Your product must build a relationship
with users

46. Not just about looks. It’s your personality that counts.

47. 47
Examples
Other messaging apps exist. But the the
lighthearted and endearing messages,
the giphy’s all add to the experience.
MailChimp’s voice and tone is critical to
their customer experience. The
messages and tone adapts to how a user
is feeling, such as just having
accomplished or completed a task.
Siri Easter eggs - "what's zero divided by
zero?"
“Imagine that you have zero cookies and
you split them evenly among zero friends.
See? It doesn’t make sense. And Cookie
Monster is sad that there are no cookies,
and you are sad that you have no friends.”

48. Why?

49. Differentiate Yourself

51. Win Hearts & Minds with
purpose & position

52. 52
Purpose Pay Dirt Position

53. 53
32+ A/B Testing products…
...but only 1 clear winner.
5,000
4,500
4,000
3,500
3,000
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
Optimizely Adobe
Target
Monetate
Unique Page Views
Maxymiser Qubit VWO SiteSpect Unbounce Hp Optimost Webtrends
Optimize
Top 10 Most Evaluated AB Testing Products Q3 2014

54. Here’s how you can do it.

55. Strong Positioning Statement

56. 56
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).

57. 57
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).
Customers:
What do you do?
Investors:
What do you do, what market
are you in?

58. 58
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).
Customers:
What’s in it for me?
Investor:
What problem are you
solving?

59. 59
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).
Customers:
Is this product for me?
Investors:
Who are your customers?

60. 60
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).
Customers:
This need is already being met.
Is there a better alternative for me?
Investors:
Who else does this?
What do customers do currently for this
need?

61. 61
Company X is the leading type of company that provides unique
benefit to target customers. Unlike competitors, Company X
does unique differentiator(s).
Customers:
Why should I care?
Why should I switch?
Investors:
How are you going to win?

62. Reasons to Believe
Tagline
Positioning Statement
Value Proposition
Differentiators
Customer Problems
Proof
Competition
Benefits
Customer Segments
Brand Story
Core Brand Values
Mission
Vision
Purpose
EXTERNALINTERNAL
PURPOSEPOSITION
Voice & tone
Why
How
What

63. Voiceandtone.com

64. Don’t reinvent the wheel

65. Use Your Tools
Sketch
bohemiancoding.com/sketch
Paper
inkwell.io
Open Source
github.com/tallwave
Watch this space!

66. Use Your Tools
Strongloop
Make an API
Heroku/AWS/AWSBox
Deploy servers
Invision
Collaborate on design
Kaleidoscope & Tower
Manage source code
Xscope
Fine-tune the visuals
Ionicons/Font Awesome/Noun Project
Icons and Assets

68. 68
A different and smarter approach to building
web and iOS applications that weaves in user
testing, branding, and user acquisition
throughout.

69. Here’s how...

70. We’re obsessive about prototyping,
testing and iterating to ensure we’re
building a product users love.

71. 71
Traditional approach is to test the market AFTER launch
Most product
concepts start
as a set of
unvalidated
features
Traditional development shops are unconcerned or
incapable of helping your refine your concept
As a result, you risk
building unnecessary
features that increase
cost, push deadlines,
create code debt and
clutter the user
experience
Launch

72. 72
Tallwave Approach: Test and refine BEFORE building
We do this through a process of rapid
prototyping, continuous user testing, refinement
and feature prioritization
We only build what users
want and need. In some
cases, users help us imagine
new features.
Launch

73. Your product is not just a product; it’s an
extension of your brand and the primary
driver of growth and user acquisition.

74. 74
Silo’d, linear approach
Development: Silo’d
approach to
developing an app
Design: If offered, always an
afterthought, on the front-end
and tossed over the wall
Branding & Positioning:
Not offered OR always
after product is built
User Acquisition: Most
think has nothing to do
with product build

75. 75
Silo’d, linear approach
Development: MVP!
MVP! MVP!
Design will surely
fix it, right?
What the hell is
Branding?
User Acquisition: Okay,
now, how do we sell?

76. 76
Honeycomb Approach
Clean and intuitive visual
and micro-interaction
Design
Clean, scalable, gorgeous web
and app Development
The Brand, tone, voice and
microcopy that resonates
with users
Product hooks that drive
Customer Acquisition, retention
and referral at launch

77. 77
End result:
● World class visual and micro-interaction design
● Well-architected, scalable technology infrastructure
● A software application that’s fast, smooth and highly
responsive
● A brand, tone and voice that resonates with users and is
woven throughout every part of your product
● An application that is setup to acquire users and drive
growth at launch

78. Thank you
www.tallwave.com
6263 N. Scottsdale Rd
Scottsdale, AZ 85250
jesus.ramirez@tallwave.com
scott.williams@tallwave.com