From Flickr user Yoshimai

In a guest blog post for Entrepreneurs Unpluggd, I talked about how one way of keeping startup momentum flowing is to practice explaining the idea of your startup to others. That piece focused on the how of explaining (switching up the language you use, going to friends outside of the entrepreneurial world for a different POV).

As we’ve been working on Edit Huddle these last few months, I’ve also found that the where of explaining is an important component to think about too. I’ve talked about Edit Huddle at a concert, at a crowded tech meetup, and at a job interview. By this point, I’d feel remiss if any of my friends and close family members didn’t know what I was working on.

At first I felt uncomfortable having to explain Edit Huddle in such suboptimal situations–it’s loud, the person is probably only half listening anyway, and do I really want to explain our revenue model for the millionth time?

But then I realized: this is the real world. You’re rarely going to be in an optimal situation when you’re talking about your startup to other people. We shouldn’t expect the real world to adjust to meet our expectations–we’re the ones that have to move.

The more I started to talk about Edit Huddle, the more I realized I was comfortable when people threw questions and challenges at me. What’s the market like for the tool? Easy. How do we prevent people from abusing the tool? Got it. What’s the value-added benefit? No problem.

You just have to know how to tailor your pitch–and I do often think about it as a pitch, because you always want to spark interest in your startup, and who knows who your interlocutor could connect you to? It helps to tell a story. Instead of just talking about “blogs and websites,” I pick a big-name blog that the other person is likely to have heard of. And I give an example of a real typo or factual error that they’ve probably seen. If I sense that the person is distracted, I’ll give the short version.

So give it a shot. The next time you’re at a bar or a party, meeting new people, engage with them. Talk about your startup. You’ll get more practice explaining it, build confidence in yourself, and–who knows? Maybe even meet your next customer.

Originally posted on tincmag.com.

Edit Huddle allows bloggers to receive reader feedback on issues like spelling, grammar and factual mistakes via a private dashboard system.

TINC: What growth phase is your company in currently?

Pre-A Series (no external funding);

TINC: Give us your Elevator Pitch.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a blog reader. And you probably notice errors a fair amount: spelling, grammar, factual misstatements, and things that just plain don’t make sense. Errors like this suck. They’re distracting, they lower the quality of the blog, and they cause commenters to swarm the comments section pointing out mistakes, which detracts from real discussion. That’s where Edit Huddle comes in. Edit Huddle is a tool for bloggers to harness the power of the crowd to quickly fix errors. An unobtrusive “Corrections” button at the bottom of blog posts allows readers to select the type of mistake–spelling/grammar, factual, clarity–and attach an optional suggestion. That submission goes straight to the blogger, who has access to a dashboard that features useful analytics. The dashboard seamlessly integrates with blog sites, allowing bloggers to correct their posts right from our system. The tool promotes more reader interaction and makes for improved SEO, because Google uses spelling and grammar as an SEO determinant. Edit Huddle is a way for bloggers to more effectively target and fix mistakes, raising the quality and professionalism of their blogs.

TINC: Can you explain to our readers the service that you provide, in detail?

Edit Huddle is a tool that allows bloggers to receive private, specific feedback on their posts. Right now the only place to point out errors–some trivial, like spelling, some more serious, like factual errors–is the comments section. There are a number of problems with this: it’s public, it reflects poorly on the blogger, and it takes away from more substantial discourse. Edit Huddle is an unobtrusive button that appears on the bottom of every post. It’s very simple for blog readers to submit an error: they simply click the button, highlight the problematic text, and select the type of error. They can also optionally suggest a correction, which they may want to do upon finding a factual error. This feedback is private, anonymous, and sent directly to the blogger in the form of a dashboard. The dashboard features analytics on the most commonly flagged errors, and seamlessly integrates with the blog: the blogger can fix the error and update their blog directly through the dashboard. Errors manage to slip past even the most diligent pair of eyes, and Edit Huddle serves as an editing safety net to catch those errors and rectify them.

TINC: How is your product different from the other guys? What makes your company unique to the scene?

We are unique in our focus on the blogosphere and our use of an already-existing, attentive audience: blog readers. We benefit both bloggers and blog readers: the former can more accurately target and quickly fix errors based on private feedback, and the latter now have a venue through which to submit that feedback and help cut down on mistakes. Other editing services aren’t focused on blogs and don’t allow for edits targeted to specific lines of text.

TINC: How many employees do you have on board right now?

We are a tiny company! Our core team is made up of 5 members.

TINC: Who are the founders and CEO’s of your company?

Imran Ahmad, Adam Bain, Mark Roberts, Charles Scobee, and Rachel Hyman.

TINC: When was your company established? What is the official founding date?

TINC: Tell us about development platforms you may be using, or what you’re coding this in.

Our front end is Javascript and our back end is Django.

TINC: What is your technical approach that makes your software better? How are you getting the details right or working in a more optimized way?

We are using smart algorithms to make inferences from user data. For instance, we infer where the most problematic parts of a blog post are based on user submissions.

Photo: Courtesy of racoles on Flickr

Also posted on Built in Chicago

As much practice as I’ve gotten these last few months explaining Edit Huddle to people (short description: a crowdsourced editing tool that allows bloggers to more effectively target and fix errors), there’s one challenge that’s persisted.

That’s the fact that Edit Huddle–both in the marketing of the tool and the tool itself–is essentially breaking bad news to people. We’re telling people that their blog posts, carefully (or not so carefully) crafted for hours, have glaring errors in them. And that this is a problem. Even if a blogger is well aware of the problem, and even if we’re providing a solution to that problem: people don’t like to be told bad things about their work, as an extension of themselves.

It can be insulting, particularly if you’re a blogger that carefully edits all content, or has a dedicated editor. But we’re all aware that even under the most careful eye, errors slip through.

One of the ideas we’ve tossed around at Edit Huddle is publishing a blog of all the blog errors we’ve found. I tend to screenshot these errors (and the ridiculous comment threads they spur). But I wonder if calling bloggers out publicly on their mistakes won’t earn us some ill will, and turn people away from the product. While writing this post, I spotted an error in a Chicago-based website for startups. I’m especially reticent to alienate our fellow entrepreneurs in the Chicago community, whether they’re aware of their errors or not.

Then again–does a huge media conglomerate like the Chicago Tribune really care if someone posts a picture of one of their errors? But the little guys are just as likely, if not more, to make mistakes as the big ones are. They need the tool too.

From the Chicago Tribune

Something I’ve found effective is appealing to bloggers’ pain point. Instead of telling them so directly that “you make errors and that’s a problem,” I explain how the mistakes are a problem. I point out that many people highlight these errors in the comment section, which (1) makes the blog looks bad and (2) distracts from real, substantial conversation. I emphasize that Edit Huddle is a safety net, to catch those errors that do slip through. And I explain that, as a blogger, I understand the pressure to quickly generate new content.

Marketing Edit Huddle feels like walking a tightrope sometimes. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I also want to make an appeal to bloggers that the tool is useful, maybe even necessary to them.

Originally published on Technori.

On November 29th, a day with gale-force winds, Technori held its fourth-ever Pitch event at the Chase Auditorium. With a sold-out crowd of over 500 and a diverse array of startups pitching, the event was an emphatic success featuring a great lineup of Chicago startups.

I was struck by the casualness of the entire evening. Revenue models were scarcely mentioned in any of the presentations or questions. Instead, the focus was on demoing the products, with more than one startup officially launching that day.

Even so, there seemed to be a wide spread in the audience members—”suits,” tech people, and young entrepreneurs in a community training program were all in attendance. The average age, maybe late 20s, was older than I had expected.

The Keynote

The event began right on time with Technori Co-Founder Seth Kravitz introducing keynote speaker Niko Drakoulis, Founder and CEO of Akoo. Akoo is an out-of-home television network, predominately in shopping malls across the country.

He laid out his three top pieces of advice for nascent startups—encouraging entrepreneurs to build their competitive advantage, find mentors early on, and seek out opportunities for capital. He interwove these tips with his own story of Akoo.

If I recall correctly, he said some 78 out of 85 investors he met with committed funds to his startup. That’s an astronomically high return rate, something that younger entrepreneurs with little to no business experience might find hard to relate to. I’ll look forward to seeing what other Chicago area entrepreneurs Technori brings in at future pitches, and I’d love to hear more talk about the growing entrepreneurship scene in the city.

Restaurant Bucket List

Ben Reid of Restaurant Bucket List kicked off the pitch portion of the event. Restaurant Bucket List is a Facebook app that allows you to track the places you’ve been to and those you want to visit. The thinking goes: if you and some of your friends have a place in common on your bucket lists, you’ll be impelled to round up a group and head out.

They illustrated with a little skit why the existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare) aren’t good for planning a restaurant outing. The brilliance of RBL is that it’s already integrated with a social infrastructure that people are accustomed to using, and it’s not a stretch to imagine users sharing their restaurant lists, given what many people already put up on Facebook.

The flipside is the potential for awkwardness if a Facebook friend who’s not really a friend invites you and your buddies to go out—a

Our initial demo of the Corrections button included 4 options for type of error: spelling, grammar, factual, broken link:

In all my communications with bloggers, I continually cited 3 or 4 of these categories to explain the corrective purpose of Edit Huddle. Last week, we sat down and gave some serious thought to our 4 categories—and by extension, seriously considered the purpose of Edit Huddle.

Our first step was to combine the spelling and grammar categories into a single option on the bottom. Some people might flag a “their/they’re/there” error as spelling, and some as grammar. Figuring out what to classify such an error as requires extra thought on the part of the blog reader, and it’s better to have less ambiguity in the data provided to the blogger—e.g. 20 submissions of one spelling/grammar error versus 10 marked as spelling and 10 marked as grammar. We’re in the business of making it as easy and nonintrusive as possible for blog readers to submit corrections: that’s why, for instance, we decided not to go with a floating design where the Corrections button follows you down the page as you read the post. So spelling and grammar got paired as one error type, which should make the error submission process easier.

Next, we re-examined the “broken link” category. We decided that the option wasn’t extremely useful, and would probably get marked the least often. There’s also a difference between a broken link, an incorrect link, and an outdated link. Because there are already tools to detect broken links, we decided to scrap the category altogether.

While I’ve been predominately involved in marketing and social media for Edit Huddle, there’s been furious activity on the part of our talented developers, Mark and Adam, and our designer, Charles. They’ve carried the spirit of Startup Weekend through to our weekly work sessions and beyond, buckling down in order to crank out a working product.

One of the first blogs we tested the tool on is Sports Medicine Research, a blog that updates frequently on clinical research in sports medicine. We set the tool up on their blog via a Friday phone call. Eventually we hope to make it simple for customers to add the tool to the blogs themselves (the WordPress plugin we’re working on is one step in that direction). The positive flip side is that, by having close contact with every beta tester, we’re building up experience in providing quality customer service. When you’re sending a bunch of emails, it can be easy to forget that there are human beings on both ends. We discovered that the Edit Huddle button wasn’t collecting data on the SportsMed Research page the way we wanted, due to bugs in the CSS. We weren’t comfortable with leaving the button up there when it wasn’t functioning properly, so we made the decision that it’d be better to pull it off. Mark and Adam isolated the specific issues and have been working to resolve them.

Another snag we ran into is browser compatibility. The tool is working well on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but Internet Explorer was presenting some issues. Incredibly, Internet Explorer still has a 23% market share. If a good quarter of are users are on that one browser, that means we need to get that bug fixed.

One of our largest tasks for the last 2-3 weeks has been contacting bloggers to get the word out about Edit Huddle and compel them to sign up for beta testing. We’ve currently segmented our audience into 3 sectors: Republican blogs, health research blogs, and female blogs. We decided upon these sectors based on the response we got from our initial probes of the market. There are hundreds and hundreds of blogger niches, and Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere was helpful in giving us an idea of growing blogger demographics. At the outset, we reached out to a diverse mix of bloggers: college admissions blogs, foreign bloggers, mommy bloggers, tech bloggers, politics bloggers. For each of our 3 sectors, we had an early adaptor agree to beta test: Guns.com (Republican), Sportsmedresearch.blogspot.com (health research), and various “mommy bloggers” (female). Guns.com is a particularly significant tester to have on board, with 200,000 monthly unique visitors. Once we got these testers on board, we spun out along 3 axes, contacting similar bloggers: gun owner interest blogs, medicine and health blogs, and female bloggers with a large female audience.

One of the tactics I’ve found most helpful in reaching out is going to the blogroll of beta testers to find new blogs. This gives me a good way to begin my email—explaining that I came to their blog via a peer blog linking to them that they’re likely to know. Similarly, I mention a recent post of the blogger’s that I liked or found useful. The idea is to make the email seem more personalized and less like a blast or spam email. Additionally, if they know that a peer blog is testing the tool, they’re more likely to sign up for the beta as well. This is social proof in action. It’s also advantageous to us because 2 blogs that link to one another are likely to share some readers, and the more we saturate similar blogs with our tool, the more likely we are to gain active users of the Edit Huddle tool. If I saw a new utility like Edit Huddle on one blog I read, I might not pay much attention to it, but when it’s on three of them, I’m more apt to check it out.

Originally posted on Entrepreneurs Unpluggd.

My name is Rachel Hyman, and I’m with a startup called Edit Huddle. We recently competed in Chicago Startup Weekend. I entered the competition on Friday night with essentially zero experience, not entirely sure of what I was getting myself into. I had mentioned my weekend plans to a few friends, and the common response was “How’d you get involved with that?”

I was still trying to answer that question as I walked up to Excelerate Labs in the early evening on Friday. My best answer is that I’d been having a creeping fear of ending up in a dead-end job post-graduation, miserable and stagnant in order to pay the rent. I was feeling like my ambition outpaced what I was doing in my life, and I wanted to get involved in creative, challenging, self-motivated work with other young people. I had gotten some secondhand exposure to the world of entrepreneurship and startups, and figured Startup Weekend was a good place to get a real taste of this world.

Day 1: Friday

Before the event officially started, people mingled over pizza and bounced their ideas off one another, a pre-pitch of sorts. After a brief introduction, the real pitches began, with each person given 60 seconds. We heard 64 ideas, according to my notes from that weekend. The pitch time was great for getting everyone psyched up, because all the pitch-ers came out full of enthusiasm to convince us of their ideas’ greatness.

As I kept circling the room with my tickets, I ran into some guys with an idea for a blog-editing tool called Edit Huddle. Essentially, blog readers highlight a selection of text, pick the type of error (spelling, grammar, factual, etc.), and the information gets sent directly to the blogger, who can rectify the mistake. I raised some criticism of their idea at first. Then their developer Mark drew an analogy to SoundCloud, which lets users comment on specific points in a song, to show me the potential power of their tool—it could be used for collaborative essay editing or commenting on a specific blog paragraph. I was sold. And that’s how I ended up working with Edit Huddle. The top 13 ideas that were given the most tickets made the first cut. Teams were quickly formed, and then the real work began.

We staked out a corner conference room with a great view, then talked over our preliminary plan for the weekend. There were a lot of tasks on the list: develop a working demo, prove customer validation, put together a pitch for Sunday, design a new website, and so on. One of the things I loved is that even though we all had a ton to accomplish, we didn’t immediately split off into our individual jobs. We drew a mockup of the dashboard (the mechanism for bloggers to view and fix errors) up on the whiteboard, and talked the specifics of our idea out. Especially as a nontechnical person, I found that this initial group collaboration helped me find my footing and build cohesiveness with my team. I was tasked with marketing and social media, with customer validation being the first priority. Imran, the founder of Edit Huddle, had already done some research and determined that “mommy bloggers” were an ideal market to target. They post often, have a high degree of interaction with their readers, and naturally are often too busy to correct errors. I found an index of popular mommy blogs, and set to work compiling information and contacting them, asking them to take our short survey. Even though we had to leave the building by 11 pm, I stayed up until 3 am building up a list of mommy bloggers.

TAKEWAY #1: LEARN ON YOUR FEET

I came in to Startup Weekend with very little experience and no technical prowess. I was nervous about whether I even belonged there. But already by Friday night, I was picking up a ton of knowledge. Customer validation, MVP, pivoting, hockey stick growth, pain point: I was in the thick of all these terms and getting a firsthand understanding of what they meant. I listened to everybody, asked questions when I didn’t get something, and all around just threw myself into Startup Weekend. With force. The best way to learn is by doing, and though I often felt like I was stumbling in the dark, I at least got a feel for what was around me.

Day 2: Saturday

Saturday, as the only full day of work, was the most intense. Our team felt the pressure to make measured progress. One of the things that we did well over the weekend was pivoting. As evening approached on Saturday, we looked at the response rate of the mommy bloggers and determined that it wasn’t where it needed to be. We really needed to show that the tool was a viable product that fills a gap in the market. A big boost came when Seth Kravitz, one of the founders of Technori, responded to our email with positive feedback on Edit Huddle. Pivoting is a pretty accurate analogy for what we did after that point. We switched our strategy up, reaching out to people in the Chicago startup/entrepeneurial/tech world who might have an interest in Edit Huddle and be able to provide feedback. The Seth Kravitz quote went straight into our promotional materials and any emails we were sending out. And the pivot worked, because we got a great response rate from the Chicago crowd, including Entrepreneurs Unpluggd. Pivoting helped us build momentum; it was the kick in our pants that impelled us to keep “cranking” (that’s some in-house slang at Edit Huddle) through sleep deprivation. On my end, Saturday was all about extending our reach and getting the word out to as many people as possible: connecting with people on Facebook and Twitter, racking up survey responses, and finding beta testers.

TAKEAWAY #2: COLLABORATION, NOT COMPETITION

Continuing along the lines of my first takeaway, I learned a lot from my fellow participants in Startup Weekend. One of the reasons the event was such a positive experience was the atmosphere of incredible energy, excitement, and friendliness. It didn’t feel like too much of a competition, which is not to say we weren’t motivated to buckle down, but rather there was no cutthroat feeling or ill will in the building. Whenever I walked in to the kitchen to grab coffee (a frequent occurrence), I was struck by how genuinely friendly people were. Everyone was eager to hear about how other people’s projects were progressing, and people exchanged constructive criticism over the course of the weekend. When you’re spending 54 intense hours in bed with your own idea, it can be hard to see pitfalls of the strategy you’ve labored over. The other participants, as well as mentors like Neal Sales-Griffin of Code Academy and the organizers of Startup Weekend, helped widen that tunnel vision and focus our activities. The weekend was partially a huge networking event, in the best way possible. As Imran will tell you, I had apprehensions about the idea of networking, but Startup Weekend showed me how throwing a bunch of smart, motivated young people in a room can drive positive activity. Even though we were split up into teams, the weekend felt like more of a huge collaboration than a competition.

Day 3: Sunday

Sunday was the final push: the time to put the finishing touches on our demo, send out a last batch of emails and tweets, and put our pitch together. One of Neal’s big comments when he visited the Edit Huddle room on Saturday was that we had to start working on our pitch. We had been so focused on creating our product and validating it that we hadn’t been thinking about one of the big tasks of the weekend: putting together a killer pitch for the closing on Sunday. I kept forgetting that Startup Weekend really was a competition. We went over our progress since Friday: we had gotten a 17% response rate, and 85% of survey respondents said they’d use our tool. We also drew up a great example for our presentation, riffing on a big-name tech blog that seems especially prone to errors. Imran practiced making his pitch enthusiastic, personable, and most importantly, articulate.

Work stopped around 5:30, and the exhausted participants gathered in the main room for pitch time. Each team had five minutes to present, and then there were five minutes of questions from the judging panel. The judges’ comments were helpful especially for startups planning to continue beyond Startup Weekend, as they didn’t hesitate to raise objections and criticize revenue models.

I felt proud of all the progress we had made over Startup Weekend. We got a remarkable amount of traction over an intense 54 hours—during a non-workweek, no less—and regardless of what happened at the judging session, I’d deem the competition a success for Edit Huddle. The judges agreed on that much, and we were one of the winners at Startup Weekend. Even more exciting is the fact that Edit Huddle wasn’t contained in that competition. Our team had a four-hour work session the following Tuesday. We’re really launching this thing. Which brings me to…

TAKEAWAY #3: PUSH YOURSELF

Logically, I shouldn’t have even been in Startup Weekend. But I felt compelled to try something new out, and I basically fell into something great. And now I’m working with Edit Huddle. I feel excited about it everyday and I’m learning so much. An experienced entrepreneurial friend told me that it never stops feeling like you’re stumbling around in the dark. But it’s about finding good people to crash around with, and acting in spite of the fear of what’s ahead in the darkness. Am I a little scared? Yes. Am I totally thrilled anyway to forge on? You bet. Bring on the darkness.

Permalink

| Leave a comment

This is what our word cloud looks like. We plugged the Edit Huddle blog into Wordle, which creates a visualization from a blog feed, weighting words based on their frequency. Notice the centrality of the words blogs, bloggers, readers, feedback, and of course the Edit Huddle name. I can’t wait to see how our cloud changes as Edit Huddle develops and we make more blog posts.

Permalink

| Leave a comment

Originally posted on www.crowdsourcing.org.

Blog Errors are a Problem

Think about your favorite blogs, whether they’re political, tech, or news blogs. If they publish frequently, chances are their posts have errors — something is misspelled, the grammar is wonky, or there’s a broken link. Even at blogs with attentive editors, mistakes slip through. Thing is, even if you’re not an out-and-out grammar Nazi, those irritating errors suck. They’re distracting. They make the blogger and the blog look bad, and they attract a flood of commenters who seem to thrive on pointing out errors, detracting from more substantial conversation.

Bloggers, rightfully, are more focused on generating and disseminating quality content than they are on catching every single trivial error. Blog readers want to read clear, error-free posts and the grand majority of them look to the comment section for something more meaningful than “You spelled ‘accidentally’ wrong. Again.” So what’s the solution?

That’s where Edit Huddle comes in. Edit Huddle is a tool that lets blog readers flag particular errors, sending that information to bloggers via a clean dashboard. The tool seamlessly integrates with blogs, allowing authors to fix their posts directly from the dashboard. The tool itself is simple and unobtrusive for blog readers to use: they simply highlight the section of text that contains the error, select the type of mistake it is, and the information is sent directly to the blogger.

Why use Edit Huddle?

Everyone on the Edit Huddle team is a huge blog reader, and we all get frustrated over errors, especially when the comment section gets inundated with people more concerned with pointing out mistakes than with having a productive discussion. Our founder, Imran Ahmad, noticed that many commenters on his favorite blogs were highlighting the same errors, but that there was no easy way to directly contact the blogger. Unsatisfied with the idea of sticking his correction in the comment section and calling it a day, Imran realized that he could harness the power of the crowd to make corrections, improving the blog experience for readers and writers alike.

We believe that there’s a large market of blog readers who would avail themselves of the Edit Huddle tool — much larger than self-proclaimed grammar Nazis who take to the comment section upon spotting errors.