Lessons from the Ground Floor

When I was in the videogame business, particularly at Electronic Arts, I spent a lot of time thinking about how (and even if) a consumer product could be engineered to be a hit. As business leaders, we could very closely predict the sales of a successful sequel but original titles were quite difficult. Having said that, there were a few creative executives who could envision a product design or play a vertical slice demo and very accurately estimate market acceptance. In the end, it was an intuited response and these executives were held, not surprisingly, in very high regard.

I believe the same scenario plays out in the Consumer Internet space with the difference being that it is actually easier to predict whether or not a specific product will be a hit. Having said that, the common thinking among most venture capitalists is that one cannot predict a hit. The perception is that consumers are fickle and that one never knows what they’ll actually adopt until you launch a product. Once your product is launched, the thinking goes, it will inevitably miss the mark, but the development environment enables a unique nimbleness to react and adapt quickly. This is why VCs in the Web 2.0 space almost universally have adopted the ‘throw anything out there then rewrite it as fast as you can approach’ to design. Sadly, this results in somewhat interesting product ideas wrapped in indistinguishable and undifferentiated packages having the ultimate consequence of thwarting consumer adoption and acceptance.

I believe this market reality stems from a few key market realities. First, very few people who actually understand consumer behavior, and why specific demographic subsets buy particular products, are involved in designing web-based products. Secondly, most products are developed with an engineering bias- by engineers, ultimately, for engineers. Lastly, VCs reinforce this design approach because they themselves usually have absolutely no idea why consumers buy a particular product. They lack that ‘intuited instinct’ to which I referenced earlier. Not all VCs mind you, but at least 90% of the one’s I’ve met.

In the design of FNO, we’re setting out to prove these naysayers wrong. That is, that hits CAN be anticipated from the outset and generated by design. If nothing else, smart design and marketing principles can be imbedded into Consumer Internet products to give them the best chance of success at launch.

While still being committed to flexibility, I believe there are several fundamental attributes that are important to imbed into your business approach and product design to best ensure a hit in the Consumer Internet space. Though naturally the ‘proof is in the pudding’ and only customers (not entrepreneurs) can create a ‘hit,’ blueprints of successful products will benefit from the following original design objectives:

1. Find A Big Tailwind

A rising tide raises all boats. In deploying our brand we wanted to do so in a market that was exploding. Fast growing markets are more forgiving from an execution standpoint and social networking is growing the fastest—particularly those targeted at more mature audiences. One doesn’t have to be perfect to be successful and there’s usually time to adopt tactics, even strategy, without suffering large setbacks.

2. Build a Business with Good Financial Mechanics

Build a product in an environment with favorable economics. Consumer Internet companies have capital requirement to valuation return ratios that are the highest in any industry. One can create a very simple application like Hot or Not, built originally for less than $50,000, and see a valuation several years down the road in excess of $50,000,000. There aren’t many other businesses sporting that return profile. Facebook, for example, has had less than $25 million invested over the past 3 years with a current consensus valuation north of $3 billion.

3. Hire a Great Team

It’s important to hire the right type of talent for any particular product vision. In our case, experience with consumer entertainment products and advanced graphics systems were prerequisites. So while our CEO had spearheaded the marketing launch of over a billion dollars in retail gaming products, our CTO had built both software and hardware graphics systems (including a chief architect role on the Nintendo 64 product line for SGI). Additionally, FNO art directors, interface designers and programmers ALL have experience either designing or building videogames.

4. Build an Experience that is Unique from the Outset

In order to create consumer conversations about our product we wanted to ensure that users saw and felt how we were different from other competitive products, let alone all web 2.0 products, from the outset. This is why we used next generation web and wireless technologies to build a 3D-interactive interface. It takes a consumer no longer than one second to FEEL the difference. This focus on unique attributes is what stimulates the first viral transmissions between consumers.

5. Make Sure Your Product is Naturally Viral (not Hopefully Viral)

It’s one thing to hope that your product becomes viral due to some potentially sticky attribute. It’s an entirely other thing to design-in multiple viral components at every turn. In FNO, for example, users gain status, access and features by inviting friends and building their network. In other words, there is a positive consequence/reward system for participation driving usage, adoption and growth. If a Basic member wants to become a VIP, and be afforded all the benefits therein, they MUST recruit their friends to accumulate enough points. This is what is meant by ‘designed-in virality.’

6. Solve Big Problems

Most successful products solve big market problems. The exceptions to this are exclusively entertainment-based products. As a product rooted in real utility, we are focused on solving huge problems in social networking, the most prominent of which is that it is very difficult to meet cool, talented people online. A chief reason why this is the case is because cool, talented people want to hang out with each other not with the less desirable types that flood open networks like MySpace. Among many others another key problem is the stigma associated with ‘relationship’ networking on sites like Match.com, Yahoo! Personals, etc. At Fuego Nation, no one knows why you’re ‘hooking up’ because it could be for any number of reasons (including trying to find a climbing partner for your trip to Tanzania).

7. Make it a PR magnet

There are often ways to build a product that is naturally attractive to national press outlets. Very few Consumer Internet products are designed with this in mind. At Fuego Nation, our lightning rods for press are exclusivity and look-and-feel. The twin towers of publicity magnetism are controversy and newness and we feed off of both by design.

8. Build off of an Aspirational Brand Concept

A big problem with current Consumer Internet sites is that they’re wrapped in weak, non-emotive brands. Fuego Nation is a brand, in contrast, with meaning. It represents ‘the elevation of the human soul to greater levels of accomplishment.’ If you can succeed at creating an attachment to the brand itself, over the utility of the site, you will be much more likely to retain your customer and thwart competitive advances. The reason why Facebook and MySpace churn so many customers is because neither actually ‘stands for anything.’

9. Target Behavior that Leverages Innate Human Needs

If you can build a motivation system for participation that leverages innate human interests and desire, then you could be on to something big. In Maslow’s seminal Hierarch of Needs, the need for recognition and acceptance (e.g. status) flows immediately after our need for physical sustenance. In Fuego Nation, we designed-in ‘status’ intentionally knowing that it is one of the greatest motivators of human behavior everywhere in the world.

10. Make it Sustainable

Deploying a unique user experience to get consumers talking is one thing but getting them to come back to the site time and again requires a powerful feature set. Included in ours is the convenience of managing all of your profiles at one site, enabling multiple groupings of friends and contacts, group text messaging, custom fuegonation.com email addresses, etc. We intend to innovate on ‘both sides of the ball.’

11. Time the Market Right

It really doesn’t matter if you have a great product if consumers aren’t ready to use or adopt it. While social networking is now a known commodity amongst the younger, early adopter set, the demand for this type of service is surging in the 25-35 year old demographic the most. Testament to this pent up demand was seen recently when Facebook added 10 million new registrations in one month after opening up its service to everyone. Additionally, the time is ripe, with the general maturation of the social networking craze to introduce a product focused on quality (over quantity) a characteristic that receives a much higher premium from more mature, time-starved, consumers.

12. Focus the Launch Product on Most Unique Aspects of Offering

One of the most challenging aspects of product design for web-based products is narrowing down your product focus to only those elements that will stimulate demand. The product we are currently in development with has about 35% of the features implied in our original design. Focus is important because you inevitably have a more limited resource base and, more often than not, the things that aren’t unique will go unnoticed anyway. Finally, in web-based products the opportunity to revise and iterate quickly lends itself to this design approach. So, as an example, we are less focused on launching with our fully built facet management system and more so with our Passion profile approach, which is unique (from a data input standpoint) to Fuego Nation.

13. Leverage the Growth in Mobile Data Usage

The growth in mobile data usage is exploding. With the advent of unlimited picture-messaging programs around the nation, usage for photo-based applications is expected to go through the roof. The Fuego Nation Wireless product is being designed to take advantage of this sea change in the way people use their mobile devices, which is why our simple interface design was chosen from the outset. That way, unlike any of our competitors, we’re able to offer the same experience in both web and mobile environments. Finally, usage of the mobile product is like having ‘recruiting agents’ in the field, at clubs and in bars driving new users to our web-based product.

- BMK

While the concept of building a powerful brand concept from the outset is foreign to most consumer internet companies, this goal was of paramount importance to us. We knew that building a power brand would not only allow us to stake the high ground against competition in the online social networking space but, if successful, would pave the way for product extensions into mobile, published media, apparel and assorted licensing.

As a result, we spent the first few months of our development cycle creating the brand meaning, its visual representation, the corporate logo and most importantly the non-verbal mark that represented all of these items. From the outset we set out to build our ‘Nike swoosh.’

The Brand Meaning

Fuego Nation is an aspirational, all-inclusive and positive brand. At first glance, this seems somewhat paradoxically set against a community of the elite. At it’s core though, just the opposite is true. Fuego Nation represents ‘the best that is inside all of us.’ Our charter is to help bring that out in people, both members and guests. If, in being aspirational, we can help enhance people’s lives by giving them a reason to strive to be better, on a mass scale, than perhaps we can truly change the world.

An example of this paradox is in membership application. An applicant gets ‘points’ toward membership based on other applicants rating of their ‘passion card’ which is like a baseball trading card as well as on their participation in the community. They can change out the photo on their card at any time without incurring a penalty. The point is that they are ‘never out of the game.’ You actually can’t lose in the ‘Game of Life’ and this is an important example of how we’ve structured the brand meaning.

The Design Objective

While the details of our creative brief are too extensive to chronicle in this format our key objectives are not. Below is a list of the top three goals we conveyed to our design team in building out our identity.

1. The logo, mark and look-and-feel of the product must all provide a sense of utmost quality and richness
2. They must be somewhat aggressive in tone as the brand has a sense of ‘tacit elitism to it’– how could a place where talent resides not?
3. While not a game, it should have the intense interactivity and engaging interface of an addictive videogame experience

The Mark

We actually developed the mark before constructing the logo around it. This was because we wanted to be able to use the mark in lieu of the full logo in various environments (e.g. apparel) creating a more powerful allure.

We also required the following:

1. The mark had to be so interesting, cool and timeless as to warrant a ‘tattoo on the small of a woman’s back’
2. It should represent the passionate, ambitious nature at the heart of our membership base
3. It should signify ‘connectivity’
4. It should symbolize the earth (global nature of the product)
5. It should be representative of the way we assess our environment around us (e.g. looking through a triangular placement of our hands to focus in on far-away objects)

This is what we designed:

And this was proof of how it might look as a tattoo:

The Logo

The full logos were designed next and required about a tenth of the amount of time to go final on than the actual mark itself. Here is the horizontal final:

The Product

The product depicts the same aspirants as seen in each of the fundamental cores of our identity. Interestingly, though the design team did not have Under Armour as a reference, the completed look-and-feel is quite similar as depicted below. Under Armour is one of our favorite brand success stories in the offline world because it defied all critics by coming late to the sports apparel party and still immediately began gobbling up market share from the leaders. It proved, once again, the overwhelming power of an aspirational brand in creating revenue opportunities via extensions that have absolutely nothing to do with the original product positioning (baseball hats for example). Whereas most sites literally have no ‘brand voice’ Fuego Nation will have a powerful, aspirational one with plenty of attitude.

Fuego Nation Online v1.0

Under Armour Site Front Page

Regarding Fuego Nation Online, one of the most common questions we get is ‘What will make the site sticky?” That is, while it’s nice to have visitors, what will keep them coming back for more time and again? Well, because we designed the site from the outset to be first and foremost an addictive user experience (and less a simple utility as was the intent at Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for example) we believe that ours will be the most sticky social networking product to date. Listed below are our ’sticky’ traits:

1. User Experience

By deploying with the latest Rich Internet Application framework, the graphical acuity, look-and-feel and dynamic nature of ‘gameplay’ are unique to the FNO experience. We believe this, in and of itself, because it is so unique and impactful will have our demographic target, as well as the press, talking. So, within one second on FNO, every user will be able to articulate how we are different from other sites. Now, who else can say that? How deep do you have to get into the myriad travel or, for that matter, social networking sites, before you can figure out what is unique about them?

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2. Pictures

People love to look at pictures of other talented, successful people. In many respects aspirational beauty speaks to all of us. Billions of dollars in revenue are generated each year by media companies based on this simple fact. If FNO were only a composite photo-rating site, and not a media and communications company, it would still achieve great success.

3. You’re Never Out of the Game

Fuego Nation is a celebration of the talents and excellence that are in each one of us. There is no way to lose in FNO’s ‘Game of Life.’ If an applicant’s Passion Card (mini-profile) isn’t working they can simply modify the photo and re-start their admissions meter. Additionally, they accrue points toward membership by participating in site activities like voting and recruiting friends. This ‘added benefits’ approach to viral transmissions will increase the overall virality of our site, relative to other similar products, by a large margin, because there is a personal benefit to doing so.

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4. Designed-in Virality

This is a product built around grouping. In order to become a VIP member and enjoy the benefits therein, one MUST recruit their friends to the site. In addition, as friends in your ‘posse’ move up in status, this impacts your own score positively thus reinforcing a ‘group play’ dynamic which is especially important for women who tend to socialize and compete in groups more so than men. Finally, every step of participation in Fuego Nation has a viral compliment designed-in. For example, on the start page, applicants can request votes from friends not yet in the community by emailing them via a simple pop-up (in-game) window and receive admission points for doing so.

5. Exclusivity of the Brand

Whether a family, an elite college or a country club, it has been proven out over the centuries that people create stronger attachments, affiliations and loyalties to exclusive entities. This incites the further promotion of the affiliation to outsiders to reinforce one’s own status. Furthermore, as members develop an affiliation and status in the community they will have a natural desire to protect that status by community moderation further intensifying stickiness and psychological attachment while decreasing our cost of operating the site.

The simple fact that users of Google’s Gmail service originally had to be invited by another user created an enormous amount of word-of-mouth from consumers who ‘assumed’ that the product had some special cache associated with it. In contrast, open networks like Facebook and MySpace are vulnerable to exclusive competitors like Fuego Nation because they have virtually no switching costs associated with their brands/products and very low emotional adhesive.

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6. Interactive, game-like design

Unlike every other social networking system, your status is not static in FNO. Like the addictive and successful Neopets online gaming phenomenon, the FNO experience requires the ‘care and feeding’ of one’s community status to maintain elite standing. This drives people back to the site on a consistent, if not rabid, basis.

Additionally, similar to World of Warcraft, applicants and members have persistent ‘health meters’ that indicate how close they are to attaining a higher level of status. This will encourage them to continue to ‘work’ at attaining that status by participating in the community. And if they’re only a few percentage points from becoming a VIP or Elite member, you can bet they’ll stay up till 3AM to get there before retiring.

Finally, in order to meet the coolest, most talented people, one has to attain the same level of status. This will encourage people to participate actively in the community. So, if I’m an applicant, I can’t essentially ‘hang out’ with Members because I’m not at their level. Likewise, VIPs can choose to interact only with people at their level. This is in contrast to sites like LinkedIn which group all contacts into one simple directory. In the real world, all contacts are not created equal.

So, as an example, if there happens to be a VIP woman whom a BASIC male member wants to meet, you can bet that 9 out of 10 times, the Basic member will do whatever it takes to elevate their level.

7. Facet Management

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The ability to have multiple profiles and control access to those profiles with multiple degrees of restriction is unique to the FNO experience. If you can meet ambitious, talented people in one location who can help play out your passions, get you a great job or introduce you to a future mate, why use other sites with lower quality talent pools?

FNO employs a sectional profile system where each profile has a ‘trading card’ abstract associated with it. So, unlike every other network, if I only feel comfortable showing you a subset of information (called a facet) I can do that. Other systems are binary in nature. That is, you either have your profile turned off or on. In the real world, we show various facets of our personality to various people depending on comfort level, expected match, emotions, etc. FNO more closely resembles how we interact in the real world and we do this through our advanced facet management system.

8. Communication Functionality

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In the end, the functionality we are building for ‘group’ contact management (e.g. limitless groups, group messaging, VoIP conference calling, etc.) will create a utility value, coupled with the FN Brand Experience, that will have people using the product for a lifetime.

This component of ’sustainability’ was important to us because we wanted to avoid the ‘prove out the value of your service then lose a customer’ phenomenon common on all online dating sites. Unlike those sites, if you decide you no longer want to meet other members for dating purposes, all you do is turn off that profile preference. Your passion for mountain climbing, golf, etc. doesn’t change. This is why refer to our membership as ‘customers for life.’

9. Protective Brand Envelope

The association with an umbrella brand that confers elite status and indicates ‘human excellence’ creates a shield from the stigma associated with online dating or resume hawking. In FNO, no one knows who or why you are ‘hooking up.’ And, if you do meet someone in FNO, the brand association will indicate to outsiders that whomever you are meeting must be ‘cool and interesting’ because that is what the brand is all about. In contrast, there’s nothing ‘cool’ about meeting someone on Yahoo! Personals or Match.com. So, in this powerful way, the ‘protective’ nature of the brand increases stickiness, loyalty and affinity.

10. Quality

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We’re committed to creating a quality experience for the user. This requires a sophisticated connection and recommendation engine (FuegoEngine) based on high quality input data (passion data) that dynamically learns preferences and tastes and allows the ability to connect people with greater degrees of accuracy and success. In the end, quality may be the stickiest aspect of all.

Are Yahoo, Google and MySpace great brand names? Well, it depends on how you define a good name. As far as we’re concerned, and considering how difficult it is to trademark a high quality name (especially when it needs to be an available URL) they are all good enough. The challenge with names like Yahoo and Google is that it costs an excessive amount of capital to give meaning to a word that has none inherently. MySpace, on the other hand, though purely descriptive, requires less branding capital to get consumers to affiliate and remember the moniker because it is what it says it is. However, since MySpace is descriptive of a single use-case, and not an aspiration or emotion, it makes extending the brand into other product areas cumbersome (e.g. what exactly does MySpace Music indicate?)

In our case, as hard as we worked to perfect our logo and mark, we worked even harder to find the right name for our company. The market opportunity to establish Fuego Nation as the brand that represented ‘human excellence in all its manifestations’ on a global basis was a huge one particularly as there is no current incumbent that occupies that psychic real estate in the collective consciousness of consumers around the globe. Furthermore, if we could stake claim to that brand meaning then we could over time extend its use to an unlimited number of categories from Fuego Nation Wireless to Fuego Nation TV. In the business word, we liken this opportunity to Virgin’s. The difference being that while few customers can actually verbalize the core value system of the Virgin brand their will be no question what claims are being made by a best of brand breed like Fuego Nation.

Objectives

With our end-goal in sight, we were determined to begin with a prism of objectives through which our brand framework would come to life. These were as follows:

1. First and foremost it had to represent ‘a body of like-minded individuals inspired by human excellence and passion’
2. It had to be naturally imbued with meaning; we didn’t want to blow our limited resources on teaching people a contrived word(s) as is often the case on the web (e.g. Doppir, Socializr, Mozes,etc.)
3. It couldn’t be entirely descriptive; there needed to be some mystery to the name; This is why our company is not ‘Passion Nation’
4. It had to be both emotional and aspirational
5. Words that comprised the name had to be familiar to a large quantity of people around the globe but still have the allure and power of being new to others in the same circle of relationships (see Dan Patrick note below)
6. We wanted the name to spark emotion (via a reaction); upon hearing our chosen moniker we wanted to see polarized reactions– “Oh my God, that is an awesome name”! to “Fuego Nation, that’s random!”; we wanted our brand name to itself insight an empassioned response, a hallmark of great names. So when you offer up a name to people and they univerally respond with, “Hmm, that’s pretty good,” we sugest you keep looking for a better name.

[Dan Patrick Note: An example of the familiar but not too much so that it would be boring objective above, while hundreds of millions of Spanish-speaking consumers around the world are quite familiar with the concept of ‘fuego’, it is often also used in our own culture to designate acts of human excellence. The concept of being ‘en fuego’ was practically coined by Dan Patrick, long-time ESPN anchor who is famous for excitedly exclaiming during his broadcasts that one player or another was ‘en fuego’ that night.]

Fuego Nation Defined

In the end, we are quite happy with the result of our branding work which we feel lays both foundation and conduit to most effectively communicate our brand message to consumers around the globe in coming years (and, most amazingly, we were able to snag the URL).

There are people who ‘get’ the Fuego Nation opportunity and those who just ‘don’t.’ There aren’t a lot of people who ‘kind of get it.’ The reason for this is that it requires a certain sophistication of mindset to understand the depth and complexity of the underlying premise AND be able to interpret that understanding into a comprehensive business opportunity that could result in literally dozens of product lines in the coming years.

But for those who ‘stay with the program’ and take the time to drink in the scale of potential for this concept, when the light bulb goes on in their brain, generating that ‘Aha!’ moment, it doesn’t just flicker it explodes out of the socket like a religious revelation. Case in point. I was speaking with a potential investor from New York City last week, who upon ‘getting’ the potential of Fuego Nation remarked excitedly, “I don’t even see this as a social networking product. It is much bigger than that!’ He got it.

This got me to thinking that Fuego Nation is not any single product, it is a constellation of experiences manifested in various products. In fact, what we are building is a way of life. Consuming FN branded products says something very specific about someone’s perspective on life. It says, “I’m proud of who I am and all that I have achieved in my life so far. I want to share my achievements with other like-minded folks and, ultimately, want to be a part of a community of people who help each other achieve their dreams.” Sounds like a perspective frame from my local church. At the very least, it is a way of life.
Could we be on to something truly special here? To impress the opportunity, could we essentially be manifesting a new secular religion? If so, imagine how powerful the loyalty and evangelical nature of our customer base might end up being? We could end up having much more than a powerful, sticky and motivating brand (as we have set out to achieve from the start) we could spark a movement.

To us, Fuego Nation is a ‘tacit religion.’ It consists of a system of beliefs that, when aggregated, approximate the many principles found in the world’s great religions. Though not intentionally built by design it is certainly a by-product of our founders own value systems. Regardless, understanding how our concept is religious-like will help you understand the magnitude of what we are building.

Like a great religious experience our brand experience encompasses the following elements:

• It is Positive- Like the best religious interpretations, FN’s focus is on ‘finding the best that is inside all of us and showcasing it to the world.’ It’s really not about being VIP, elite or world-class but the process of striving to better ourselves. It is wholly positive which is why we designed the ‘Face the Nation’ game as a no-lose proposition. If you want in bad enough, you can find a way.

• It is Aspirational- All of the worlds great religions provide inspiration and aspiration. This comes from the projection of high ideals, many of which espouse a perfection all to often not human. But all of them point to a promised land, a high water mark with specific and achievable ways to get there. We do the same thing through our status-based leveling system.

• There are Consequences- One of the unique attributes of our approach to creating communities is the commitment to negative consequence. If killing someone will send you to hell (not to mention jail) in FN negatively impacting the community will get you ejected from the community. The concept of consequence is a pillar in every great religion.

• It is a Closed System- The great paradox of religion is that while they are all closed, elitist systems (e.g. our way is the only way to God) they are always open to new members and actively recruit them. In religion, you are also ‘never out of the game.’ But it is this elitist, branded environment that gives them so much power.

• They are All 2 Horse Races- Whether the horses in the race are represented by the forces of good and evil, Christian and Muslim or Jew and Gentile the power generated by the simple 2 horse race cannot be understated. Our correlate is a closed system (albeit as open as a closed system can get) versus the open systems of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Being able to manifest a 2 horse race was a critical component to our commitment to this concept in the first place because it enables us to communicate a powerful ‘us vs. them’ message indicating that ours is the ‘true way.’

• It is Accessible- The FN experience is for everyone including guests who can partake in the fruits of our labor as visitors to the site without ever having to sign up.

• It is Globally Relevant- The concepts around which the FN experience is founded, including status, are globally relevant. The design is such that minimizes text-based inputs while maximizing graphical/iconical representations thus making it easier to translate to other cultures around the world. This designed-in global consciousness will allow us to launch in other markets around the world quickly and efficiently.

• It is Motivating- Great religions motivate us to do good and live a productive life. Via scripture and commentary they provide the motivation to change human behavior. Through the showcasing of talent and the chronicling of human excellence, we motivate our member base to get the best out of themselves and those around them.

• It is Challenging- The great world religions challenge us to better our lives and ourselves. FN achieves this effect via our point rating system and status leveling.

• It is Permanent- The unassailability of great religions allow them to take up permanent residence in one’s mind and heart. They are consistent in their message and do not deviate from their course. A simple, positive premise and message allows them to do this. We follow this example.

Fuego Nation, of course, is not a religion. It is a business and a potentially very b big one at that. The point here is that our approach and brand meaning share many characteristics with the great religions of the world. This approach intensifies the power of our message. What Fuego Nation does represent is a lifestyle choice and if members commit to this choice and identify with the precepts above, the power of our brand will overwhelm our competitors because it is laden with so much meaning. In the end, it will feel like a religious experience.