Jambo

As a tester working on the Jambo team, I’m the advocate for the customer. I stand in as the customer’s representative when we talk about design decisions and fixing bugs. But it’s far better when I don’t have to pretend, so I’m very thankful that I also get to help with the customer support side of things.

It’s so much better to represent a real customer than to talk about what-if’s, to write a bug report that says “a customer encountered this problem.” If I do my job well, customers won’t find many problems. But for the few that slip out, I’m grateful when our users alert us as soon as they see a problem, because then we can fix it before it affects too many others.

So I thank Wayne M. for encouraging us to improve our error handling in email invitations. And Matthew H. for helping us understand some new angles on firewalls and other real-world situations. And Jermaine J. for reporting discrepancies on our web site. And thanks to everyone else who reminds us that Jambo isn’t an experiment in a petri dish, but something that real people are using. When I know that a customer cares about a certain feature, it motivates me to explore that area further, so often we make additional improvements beyond the original scope of the issue.

Keep the comments coming! If you’re having any kind of problem using the Jambo application or web site, please contact support@jambo.net. And for other feedback, contact feedback@jambo.net.

If you don’t yet have the opportunity to use Jambo, are you planning to attend a conference? Do you attend a school or professional organization that could use it? A coffee shop you spend time at that wants to use it? Let us know where you could put Jambo to good use.

“Listerine did not make mouthwash, as much as it made halitosis.” –James Twitchell

I’m currently reading Freakonomics a very good, random book. “A Rougue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” (If that’s any indication of just how random.) One discussion in the book is on mouthwash.

Jambo can learn a lot from Listerine - the first mouthwash. Listerine was invented in the 19th century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn’t until the 1920’s, when it was pitched as a solution for “chronic halitosis” - a then extremely obscure medical term for bad breath, that it achieved blowout success. Ads showed women and men, eager for marriage, but turned off by their mate’s rotten breath. “Can I be happy with him in spite of that?” the ad showed. Listerine had created a need.

The market for mouthwash exploded in just seven years, rising from $115,000 to over $8 million before 1930. This growth, in a market that did not even exist prior to the Listerine campaign. Something to think about when introducing a brand new product.

Ogilvy’s Law. - The founder of Ogilvy & Mather (now part of WPP) left a rich legacy of ideas in his books. Ogilvy wrote that whenever someone was appointed to head an office of O&M, he would give the manager a Russian nesting doll. These dolls open in the middle to reveal a smaller doll, which opens in the middle to reveal a yet smaller doll.. and so on. Inside the smallest doll would be a handwritten note from Ogilvy. It read: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

Saw this on Forbes and I thought it was both very cool, and a great hiring strategy for Jambo. (It’s been working for us so far!) Ogilvy knew in the 1950s that people make or break businesses. It was true then; it’s truer today.

As many folks know, Jambo is swahili for hello. Charles and I took swahili classes in Africa, and this is one of the first words we learned. The name Jambo carries a lot of meaning for us, and the concept of hello (and of greeting in general) is our foundation.

It’s interesting though, to look into the origin of the english word “hello”. It is a very young, new word (the first written record of “hello” was August 15, 1877!) and its rise into common use is deeply rooted in technology.

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in the 1870s. As the invention became popular, its users found that they needed a signal for starting a conversation — especially since some early phone lines were left permanently connected and open. People experimented with lots of different telephone salutations like: “What is wanted?” “Are you there?” “Are you ready to talk?”

The word “hello” was invented by Thomas Edison as a gift for Alexander Graham Bell. Before hello, there was no polite way to start a phone conversation (proper people were introduced, they didn’t just greet each other). Edison took an exclamation and gave it a whole new meaning. With Edison’s endorsement, the word “hello” soon became the accepted telephone greeting — and eventually a normal greeting for meetings in person, too.

What is interesting is that people generally didn’t greet each other directly, pre-telephone. They were introduced. In so many ways, the telephone created a fundamental cultural shift. The behavior change it caused allowed for individuals to greet each other directly, first remotely, and then face-to-face.

So now we’ve come full-circle. Jambo is all about the introduction before the greeting. We’re about establishing a context in the moments before you meet. What information is useful before you say “hello”? Just some food for thought.

We made a batch of t-shirts for our launch at Washington University. First lesson learned - the tighter the better. All the girls wanted Youth Large - evidently the Small just wasn’t small enough. A lot of guys preferred Medium over Large, and few requested X-Large. This is a trend I like to see, because Youth Large is a lot cheaper!

Another lesson is to see what the shirt looks like before printing a large batch of them. We found out later that “Jambo” was hard to read from far away - so next time we will be making sure the colors stand out better. Luckily, we only made 150 of them, so our sunk costs were relatively low.

Let us know if you all have any suggestions for a cool t-shirt or a great tagline.

As a startup, we need to get creative about how we market Jambo. We don’t have unlimited funds to spend on marketing, so the way we get noticed needs to be more creative or unique than the other guys. A few weeks ago, we launched Jambo on Washington University’s campus. We had a booth on campus to show students a demo of how they could use Jambo. The question was how do you get students to stop by? Students love t-shirts, but sometimes t-shirts aren’t enough. We needed another hook - particularly since no one had ever heard of Jambo or anything like it.

Since I grew up in St. Louis, I was staying at my parents house, which is right down the road from Washington University’s campus. That morning as I came into the kitchen, I was welcomed by Pumpkin - our four year old Golden Retriever. She was excited to see me and as I was petting her, it came to me - why not take Pumpkin with me?

Goldens are known to be friendly dogs, and Pumpkin is one of the friendliest dogs I have ever seen (I may be biased) and she craves to be petted all of the time. While Pumpkin has never appeared to be particularly ambitious, it may have been because she hasn’t found her calling yet. Well, I think we may have found it, because she was a natural. We gave her a Jambo T-shirt and trotted off to campus. She was a perfect lure. Students would see her and walk out of their way to pet her. Once they started, she wouldn’t let them stop - because she would continue to move towards them to keep them petting her. That made my job easier, because I pitched Jambo while they were a captive audience. She was a huge hit that enabled us to sign up a ton of users. I am thinking of going on tour with her, because I think we could replicate this around the country at all of the other universities we deploy to.

Sorry for another “________ is flat.” post, but the more I read this book, the more I think about level playing fields and about enablement. In terms of technology enablement, our startup would be much more cost-prohibitive if it weren’t for technologies like MySQL, linux, apache, CVS, cheap intel servers and other ways of enabling the little guys. These are all fascinating subjects in their own right, but rarely is an event an enabler - a leveler.

What is unique about the DEMO conference vs. other events, is that it is truly flat - by its very design, a level playing field. Whether you are a tiny garage startup like Jambo, or a giant powerhouse like Microsoft, at DEMO, all companies are on an equal plane. Everyone gets a desk, a network drop, a chair, a sign, a plant, and six minutes on stage to pitch their wares. No extra marketing material is allowed, no fancy 1000 square foot booth to take on a larger presence at the conference - everyone is equal going in. DEMO rewards those that capture the interest of the attendees, not those with the most marketing muscle. Being the little guy, thank you to DEMO!

Even though our install base of Jambo software is still (relatively) small, the larger Jambo concept is hard at work making interesting connections for us all over the world. I’m fascinated with how it has brought me back in touch with people that I had wanted to find, but never expected to see again.

A long lost friend from college contacted me through info@jambo.net when he saw our Forbes article. Another lost friend I’m meeting with later this morning and I haven’t seen in 20 years! (I’m not that old…) The last time I saw him, we were little kids on the tennis court, and he found us via our network of angel investors. Charles and I each have 10 or so stories like this of connecting and re-connecting through Jambo.

Even the story of Jambo itself has many amazing connections in it. Charles and I would have missed the opportunity to start this company if I had not had the same name as my dad. In a chance meeting, Charles met a “Jim Young” from Dallas and saw enough of a connection to ask him if he had a son that was in Africa over 10 years ago. Charles and I were able to reconnect from our NOLS program, and now we have signed a partnership with them!

The world works in very strange ways, and I’m looking forward to Jambo continuing to accellerate the oddity and the connections!

We’ve been podcasted! One bleeding edge technology touching another. If you don’t know what podcasting is - basically, its a web-based audio broadcast that can be downloaded and heard at your convenience. Most podcast sites have RSS feeds so that you can see what has been updated recently. Our Jambo podcast was an interview by none-other than Cameron Reilly, the godfather of podcasting - I guess that makes him the Podfather (and a really great bloke!) You can hear us here!

As a former VC, I have sat through many investor presentations, wishing I was elsewhere. But, last night, we had an investor pitch that I am sure most investors would enjoy. Of course I am biased about the content of that pitch, but what I really want to talk about is the environment in which we gave it. We have found the cure to the conference room blues. One of our angel investors - Russell, hosted a party for us at this private club in Dallas called Moosh. What’s not to like about a place called Moosh! The place even has its own vision statement - “Chief Bartender, Yosuke Fukuda will offer the same quality of cocktails that our elite members have come to expect from us in Tokyo, Japan. Our goal is to provide an intimate space for our members to unwind coupled with the finest service in Dallas.” Most vision statements are something you strive for, but this place actually acheived its vision. By far the best service and drinks in Dallas.

We had this little room to ourselves, sitting in cushiony chairs, eating sushi from Teppo (Moosh’s sister restaurant next door), walking through our presentation projected on the corner wall. This was a meeting not to miss. While it probably isn’t appropriate for most investor meetings, when you have a group of younger, successful angels that you are pitching to, a place like this is hard to beat. If at least one of them ends up investing, then we will be batting 1.000 at Moosh, and maybe this idea can catch on. So, for those that were there last night, the ball is in your court! :) Thanks again Russell for hosting this for us! It was a lot of fun!