Here’s a great video I found showing the trade-off of value vs. complexity when deciding which features to add to a product. Often times folks building a product become fixated on building the most complex features because they’re cool, not because they can generate a lot of value. This is a product management trap to be avoided.

The video uses a 2×2 matrix to show the relationship between value vs. complexity. If you want to explore your own product features on a 2×2 matrix, here’s a nice
2×2 matrix stencil for OmniGraffle.

Ed Dale, of 30 Day Challenge fame, was in town a few weeks back for MacWorld. He gave a great talk during an Internet marketing meetup at my office. Checkout my awesome name tag!

I’m back! Almost a year off from blogging.

Here’s a gem from the video vault. Kenneth Yu discusses his “Pareto Filter” principle. The idea is to “delight” your customers into buying more. Nothing particularly earth shattering about that, but I like the way Kenneth says it!

After spending over a month in Kuala Lumpur, I feel I’ve distilled down some of the key ingredients needed to build a portfolio of profitable Internet businesses. This is essentially a blueprint of how to create a mini business incubator.

Here’s the recipe:

1) a few really smart people (including at least one excellent programmer)

2) develop simple ideas

• product ideas are more likely to succeed than Web 2.0 social media/community
• information products and software are best
• work on a few projects
• share learning and assets across projects

3) agile software development

• build projects which can be built within one weekend to 3 months max – the planning stage might be longer, new products are always in the pipeline

4) understand the market

• find a need and fill it, rather than building a product and trying to generate a need – appeal to a specific customer avatar with each product

5) use the psychology of sales

• scarcity, social proof, commitment and consistency, etc. – all from Robert Cialdini (see attached), done properly no salesforce is needed, all sales occur through the Web

6) engineer a strong product launch

• use the techniques outline in the product launch formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker – the root of which comes from Cialdini

7) implement business automation

• automate customer service – for example see the snippets feature of fogbuz

Here are a few more tips:

Repurpose technologies

• Build technologies that can be used across your businesses. For example, a custom shopping cart platform might be useful for all your businesses. Build it once and repurpose it. Often times you’ll find synergies between your existing technologies and the new products you develop.

Focus on niches

• Pick a few niches and focus on developing a basket of products for each niche, this makes it easy to upsell products to existing customers. This strategy will allow you to monetize visitors better than the competition

I spent this past weekend in Singapore. It was awesome! Many people seem to think the place is boring, but I disagree. Saturday was full of adventures. By early Sunday morning I was finally losing steam.

It must have been around 4:30am when I found a 24 hour PC gaming center. I tried some games, but I’m not a gamer, so I was just getting kicked from the games by other users. I snapped a few pics of the place before I was told by the management to stop. Notice the guys passed out in front of their machines.

There’s nothing like a Sunday with Formula One and some Durian ice cream

We travelled 1 1/2 hours outside of Kuala Lumpur for the 2008 F1 Petronas Malaysian Grand Prix. My Polish friends were very pleased with Robert Kubica’s 2nd place finish.

See a quick video of the race!

Brilliant programmers are working 24/7 on the planet. If you have a real business you can pay a pittance to get yourself out of almost any technology backlog, jam-up, or snafu, without your existing tech team in the office. Of course this doesn’t work in all cases, but increasingly it’s becoming true for most programming work.

There are a few factors at play here which have lowered the bar to make it possible for you to get your project done for less money and time while still maintaining a high standard of quality.

1. Agile Software Development

This covers a bunch of practices which make software development a lot faster. Say goodbye to the 100 page product spec.

Do you realize that programmers are now able to write stories instead of actual code when programming in Ruby on Rails? If there’s a problem in the story they can change course immediately.

2. Open Source Goodness

So many applications can be installed with just a little knowledge. Take this blog for example. It runs on WordPress which requires a database. Now I’m not a programmer, but I installed WordPress, setup the database, and tweaked out the blog.

There are a lot more more open source applications which can be installed just as easily. If an open source solution exists for what you want to build, don’t reinvent the wheel and give the open source solution a shot. I’m launching a Digg style site for online marketing news which is based on an open source content management system. It will cost me $0 to see if I can gain traction.

3. Cost of Programming

A good programmer in San Francisco might make at least $10,000 a month.

A really good programmer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia makes $1,000 a month or less.

See the difference?

It’s not just India anymore. You can find good programmers in China, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.

There are no more excuses!

So I met another tech company in the Internet marketing space operating out of Kuala Lumpur. As I mentioned before there are only a few companies working in the Internet marketing category over here. This is a European based company that was drawn to open a development office because of the supposed benefits the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) would provide.

From speaking with this company and others, I get the sense that they feel the MSC benefits are a bit of a sham or not worth the trouble of jumping through the required hoops. It seems the official designated MSC zones conveniently correspond to the properties of certain landowners. Other places in the city just don’t qualify for the program.

I’ve only been working in an office for three days, but I’m not sure how “Super” the MSC is when the Internet data transfer speeds are painfully slow in central Kuala Lumpur. It’s amazing that I can even make calls on Skype.

Overall, even with the bureaucracy quirks and the slow Internet, I do get the sense that Kuala Lumpur is a great place for a startup of a shoestring.

Update 3/10/2008:

After further conversations, I’ve been told by business owners in the tech business here in Kuala Lumpur that they like the MSC program because makes it easy to hire foreign workers and they pay no taxes. Makes sense.

The Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is a collection of areas in and around Kuala Lumpur which offer attractive incentives to draw in multi-national tech businesses and encourage local entrepreneurship in tech. The initiative has been modeled after Silicon Valley. It is intended to provide first-world knowledge and infrastructure but at developing-nation costs. Malaysia plans to have a knowledge work based society by 2020 when multimedia corridors will crisscross the country.

Companies operating inside the designated MSC zones enjoy the following bill of guarantees from the Malaysian government:

1. Provide a world-class physical and information infrastructure.

2. Allow unrestricted employment of local and foreign knowledge workers.

3. Ensure freedom of ownership by exempting companies with MSC Malaysia Status from local ownership requirements.

4. Give the freedom to source capital globally for MSC Malaysia infrastructure, and the right to borrow funds globally.

5. Provide competitive financial incentives, including no income tax for up to 10 years or an investment tax allowance, and no duties on import of multimedia equipment.

6. Become a regional leader in intellectual property protection and cyberlaws.

7. Ensure no Internet censorship.

8. Provide globally competitive telecommunications tariffs.

9. Tender key MSC Malaysia infrastructure contracts to leading companies willing to use the MSC Malaysia as their regional hub.

10. Provide an effective one-stop agency – the Multimedia Development.

New office buildings are going up all over Kuala Lumpur. If these buildings lie outside the MSC areas of the city, their space might rent at a discount of up to 60% because MSC benefits would technically not be available. I am told this is the case with the building being constructed in the picture below. However, even without the MSC benefits, this building will offer premium, brand-new, office space for cheap when compared to Silicon Valley prices. Plus, it’s right next to a train station.

For more information about the Multimedia Super Corridor visit http://www.msc.com.my/.