Netflix whiplash stirs angry mobs — again. FAIL

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Angry Netflix mobs aren’t putting away the pitchforks yet.

The company said Monday that it would kill its spinoff, Qwikster, only a month after it was announced.

That did little to placate consumers who are still fuming about price increases the company announced in July and who are starting to see Netflix as a once-innovative service that’s lost its way.

“Netflix does more flip-flopping than a fish on a hot dock,” a Twitter user named Steve Harrison wrote.

“Netflix’s approval rating is so low right now it could run for president,” another said.

“I don’t think this fixes anything,” said Ann Marie Blodgett, a 37-year-old in Utah. “This will make people realize how right they were to leave them. Now they’re just back-pedaling.”

“I don’t feel the need to go back when they’ve already made too many changes too fast,” said Adam Britten, a 21-year-old in London.

The company’s public relations nightmare began in July, when Netflix announced that it would stop offering free streaming video services to households that paid for its DVD-by-mail service. That raised monthly prices by 60% for some customers, without any improvement in the service.

Then Netflix said in September that it was spitting its DVD and streaming services into two companies: Qwikster and Netflix. That incensed some already-angry customers, since they now would have to deal with two corporations instead of one.

And, finally, on Monday the company pulled a 180-degree-turn.

“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a blog post. “This means no change: one website, one account, one password … in other words, no Qwikster.”

Actually, that puts Netflix back at square two — before the Qwikster fiasco, but with price hikes.

Since all of the whiplash changes started, Netflix has lost an estimated 1 million customers — possibly more. An earnings call on October 24 is expected to reveal details about how Monday’s changes affected the company’s customer base.

It’s clear investors don’t like all this back-and-forth.

The company’s stock closed down nearly 5% by the end of Monday. Since mid-July, it’s fallen about 60%.

Not all consumer reaction to Netflix’s decision to kill Qwikster was negative, however.

Kyle Wegner, a 26-year-old in Fayetteville, Arkansas, said he was going to quit the service until he heard about Monday’s announcement.

“It’s the right move, not only because of the silly name of Qwikster, but it was just going to be such a huge pain to manage two separate companies that were doing the same thing,” he said. “Nobody wants to have to manage two different queues and pay two different bills for something that we’re doing all together now.”

The company does seem to have lost its way, he said.

“They’re being really reactionary at this point, and that’s not very comforting.”

Others cut the company a bit more slack.

“As long as Netflix continues to function for a reasonable price I don’t have reason 2 abandon it,” a Twitter user named@Nitesh_Arora wrote. “Wish they’d focus though.”

FRIDA – the robot…

Manufacturers and factory owners needn’t worry about pesky human workers for too much longer.

ABB has introduced FRIDA, a half-humanoid robot designed for the industrial life.

Although FRIDA could easily replace a horde of human workers, it’s actually designed to work side-by-side with its mortal counterparts. The robot features a human-like torso with padded arms that are capable of a wide range of motion, a flexible gripper for handling small components, and cameras for identifying and locating parts.

FRIDA’s humanoid build makes it easy to be interchanged or inserted between human workers. It has a convenient handle placed where a head would normally go, which makes the worker bot easy to carry while eliminating that nasty uncanny valley problem.

FRIDA, a “harmless robotic coworker”, has already left the research stage, with prototypes currently being tested in pilot applications.

Perhaps FRIDA will be the one putting together the components of your next smartphone or tablet.

What a Startup Company Founder’s Priority List Looks Like

Leading a startup company is nothing like leading a big, established company. Startups are focused foremost on survival, while big companies direct their efforts toward growth or in the worst case, slowing decline.

It’s natural that many entrepreneurs start companies with a task list that looks a lot like it did at their old job. After all, they’re likely coming from an established career in a big company. Big companies (usually) have the critical infrastructure in place and as inefficient as they may be, workers are free to look much farther down the road.

Startup Founders don’t get the luxury of looking too far down the road. They don’t get to spend inordinate amounts of time on product development or internal policy making. For this reason, a startup Founder’s priority list looks a whole lot different.

Job #1: Get Money in the Door

A Founder’s most important question is “do we have enough money to make it past our next milestone?” If the Founder can’t answer “yes,” then solving customer problems, addressing HR issues, and planning for the long term just won’t matter.

An underfunded company doesn’t have to worry about these issues. That’s because without additional capital, they will soon be out of business altogether! Therefore a startup needs to focus on keeping the lights on before it can even worry about solving day-to-day issues.

It’s not uncommon for a startup to spend far more time selling to investors than it does to customers. While this may feel like a distraction (which it is) it’s a necessary evil that supersedes all other activities.

#2: Sell More Stuff

Aside from raising capital to get started, sales are by far the most important activity any company can spend its time on. A simple way to consider this priority is – if you have sales and a crappy product, you can afford to improve your product. If you have a great product and no sales, you’re dead.

It’s a widely held belief that a great product will sell itself. Sure, great products sell better, but perfection can’t be pursued at the expense of a massive sales effort. Very few products are just so great that they sell themselves and become profitable.

What drives a company forward is its ability to focus its time on actually selling the product in the market, not refining the product in the lab.

#3: Hire Brilliant Staff

Staffing brilliant people sounds like an obvious thing to do, but in practice few people make it a true priority. It consumes more time and energy to hire brilliant people which is why most settle for “good enough.”

A startup’s ability to succeed in the market has everything to do with the key staff members it finds early on. If you’re rushing through your staffing process, pulling the trigger on the first resumes that float through your inbox, you’re doing the company a huge disservice.

Instead, make hiring brilliant staff a priority even if it takes substantial time away from other activities (that don’t involve sales or capital raising!) The time spent finding a better-qualified candidate will be repaid by their more competent execution of important startup tasks.

#4: Everything Else

After raising capital, increasing sales, and hiring brilliant people comes everything else. The trouble is that most entrepreneurs start with everything else and only plan to address the more critical items.

At some point you need to buy post-it notes, answer customer calls, address product problems, and take a shower. But if you put those activities first, you won’t be in business long enough to continue doing them.

The Priority Filter

A good way to help manage your activities is to create a “priority filter”. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you manage you work through a daily task list that changes all the time. More often than not, you get easily swept into the mundane activities that are calling your attention.

Simply putting your top three tasks – raising capital, driving sales, and finding brilliant people, to the top of the stack can serve as a constant reminder of your priorities.

Unlike simple tasks like “buying office supplies” that have a defined start and end period, your ongoing priorities may seem hard to handle if you just lump them under one big “to do”. The best way to handle this is to create smaller sub-tasks under each, like “call three new customers today” or “create a draft of the pitch deck” that can be accomplished definitively.

When you’re still a startup, every moment you devote to your priorities comes at the cost of getting other stuff done. It’s a zero sum game. Yet the benefit of putting your time and effort into your priorities will provide a much greater return on your time investment than running errands and getting distracted.

You’ve got 80 hours per week to work on stuff – stick to the big items and you’ll be in great shape!

Sell the Potential, not the Present

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So there you are on day one of your new venture. You’ve thought long and hard about your new idea and you’re ready to build a great company that is going to change the world. Now it’s time to attract customers, employees, and investors. No problem, right?

Except for the fact that you have absolutely nothing to offer anyone because your company does not have an office, a product, or a single employee! So how do you get started with this world-changing vision if you have few assets to leverage?

The simple answer – sell the dream, baby, sell the dream!

The Vision is the Asset

A startup company has only one asset – the vision of what the company might be someday. Today it’s just some poor guy burning through his life savings hoping all his hard work will pay off. No one wants to quit their job to go work for that vision!

Yet employees will jump out of bed to work for a vision they believe in, even if the paycheck isn’t there just yet. Investors get excited about the idea of making an enormous return on a single investment. And customers are always interested in the next best product from the next best company. You need to become all of these.

While you cannot completely ignore where you are today, you should not let that define the prospective opportunity your company offers. From a practical perspective, most startup companies evolve so quickly that they’re not even worth describing in current terms. Your focus should be on getting the company to where it will be, not dwelling on its position today.

What you are is what you Intend to be

Apple Computer has been long honored for having one of the most cult-like followings among employees, investors and customers. Apple founder Steve Jobs created a vision that the company would develop “insanely great” products and the people surrounding him believed it as much as he did. As a consequence, they do create these amazing products (we love you, iPod, iPhone, iPad) because they believe so passionately in the vision of what they intend to become.

Think of yourself as an author telling the story of what your company will become. The author is the visionary and the messenger — seeing the vision and sharing it with others. You can envision what your office will look like, what your product will sell for, and how happy customers will be when they purchase the product. Give that vision color and detail. Have fun with it. The more those around you can see the vision as clearly as you, the more likely they will be to accept it as their own.

Keep in mind who you are selling the dream to and how your dream affects their well being, not yours. Don’t try to impress potential investors by telling them how rich this new idea is going to make you, tell them how rich you are going to make them! Paint the picture in a prospective employees mind by telling them how great their job is going to be day-to-day, not just how great the company will be in the future. You’re asking these people to take on a considerable risk so you need to make the prospect of a big return as tangible and visible as possible.

It’s true if you Believe it

Even more important than selling the vision is believing that you can execute on it. Anyone you are talking to will need to be convinced that your vision will actually become a reality, and that comes with bit of planning and a whole lot of optimism. If it weren’t for the wild-eyed optimism and belief that a crazy vision could become a reality, companies like eBay, Amazon and now Google would never have succeeded.

Consider the fact that Google had a vision to become the leading search company at a time when competitors like Yahoo and Excite had already dominated the search engine space and many thought there was no room to compete. Within just over five years they went from a simple vision to an IPO reality based on selling a dream that most thought could not possibly come to fruition.

Make the Vision Huge

Don’t be shy about making your vision huge. The great thing about being a startup is that anything is possible – so let it be! It’s OK to dream a little bit. Amazon.com wasn’t built on the prospect that they might sell a few books. They dreamed of being the world’s largest on-line book store from the beginning and that’s exactly what they became.

If you’re going to dream, dream big.

You can’t protect a good idea

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If I hear one more entrepreneur say “I’ll tell you about my idea, but I need you to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement first,” I think I’m going to hurl myself out of a window! I can’t think of a bigger red flag to a new business than an entrepreneur unable to share his idea. If someone can sink your new company just because they’ve heard about your idea, it’s probably a pretty lame idea.

If you have a great idea and stash it under your pillow – the entrepreneur fairy doesn’t come along at night to exchange it for a great company. While great companies can benefit from good ideas, they require superior execution.

Execution is the best protection

There’s a simple and effective way to protect your idea from the world — focus on actually executing on the business plan. It’s rare that a company loses to its competitors because they “stole the idea” and somehow instantly created a huge company with it.

Take a company like Amazon.com for example. Do you really think the founder Jeff Bezos was worried that someone else might think about selling books online? He knew competition for his idea was inevitable and that Amazon (like most other companies) would have to be successful at execution, not protecting their idea.

If you think great ideas somehow protect you from failure, allow me to direct your attention to the dotcom graveyard, namely Netscape, Webvan and Napster. These were all fantastic ideas that failed on poor execution, not because they were able to keep the secret long enough.

If your idea is good, it will be stolen

A few years back Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab had a brilliant idea. He developed the concept of pay-per-click advertising that launched his company, Overture. Pay-per-click was a brilliant idea and like any other brilliant idea, it was stolen, in this case by Google.

Google took this idea, applied it to its wildly popular search engine, and grew faster than any other company in history. Talk about “taking the ball and running with it.”

Gross did everything you would ever want to do to protect the idea, including filing a patent. Even after Google stole his idea, lost a patent dispute, and paid off Overture (to the tune of $400 million) they were still way ahead of the game. Overture didn’t lose because they didn’t “protect the idea,” they lost because they didn’t execute as well as Google did. Now Overture is but a footnote in the very business they invented, although they did sell the company for over $1 billion, so not a bad footnote.

Keep the Secret Sauce a Secret

Some people legitimately have a secret sauce. They’ve discovered the molecules that will lead to a new drug or devised a statistical algorithm that provides more relevant results when searching the Internet.

If that’s the case, then revealing the mechanics of the product may require a non-disclosure agreement or some similar protection. But those circumstances are few and far between and in most cases I would recommend simply explaining what the product does, not how it does it.

In introductory discussions, saying, “this product speeds the recovery time for patients with xyz disease,” suffices to generate interest. Only if investors need to know more and are willing to spend more time on the idea does an NDA become relevant.

Switch to Stealth Mode

In some cases you may want to keep your intentions on the down low to allow yourself a first-mover advantage. That might make for a nice lead when entering the market, but that lead doesn’t necessarily translate into a sustainable position after you’re there.

The idea still has to be strong enough to compete effectively when the market gains more competitors which you should hope there will be. Let’s face it – if there’s no competition in your future, then perhaps the market you’re serving wasn’t that great to begin with.

Let your execution speak for itself

A good entrepreneur believes not only in themselves, but also in their ability to execute better than anyone else to turn the smart idea into a great company. Telling others that you cannot share your idea for fear of someone else stealing the idea and building a better company only suggests that you don’t have the confidence to execute.

Instead, you should welcome competitors. You should welcome anyone else that is willing to take you on because you feel confident in your abilities to beat the pants off of them if they try.

I don’t fear the entrepreneur that keeps their idea from me, I fear the entrepreneur that tells the world what she’s going to do and actually makes it happen. That’s the entrepreneur we should all want to be.