Quoderat

Whether you’re writing a business plan for your personal startup (the tech equivalent of the Great American Novel that every hack journalist plans to write), a report for your customers, or a proposal for your managers, sooner or later you’re going to have to describe a customer problem — the justification for creating a product or launching a project.

Frankly, the majority of customer problem descriptions I’ve seen and heard — including those I’ve been involved in — have been either poorly thought out or complete B.S. I know I won’t always be allowed to use this, but as a consultant and as a poor fool who still dreams of his own startup, I’ve written a checklist of six criteria that a real customer problem must meet:

1. It uses the customer’s language, not yours — if any words or ideas need to be defined or explained, then it’s probably not really a customer problem.

2. It describes a business need — it should not mention the proposed technical solution (such as a social network, CMS, etc.).

3. It is recognizable — the customer is already familiar with the problem or with a very similar one, and doesn’t need to be convinced that the problem exists (thought she might not be aware of its severity).

4. It is quantifiable — even if you can’t assign a number yet, it is the kind of problem that has a cost expressed in concrete units such as money, time, subscriptions, support calls, page views, etc.

5. It is compelling — you can demonstrate potential benefits, savings, etc. that justify the time, cost, and effort for the customer to try to solve it.

6. It is succinct — you can describe summarize the problem meaningfully in a single, short sentence (of course, you’re always free to elaborate it somewhere else).

The passing grade on this checklist is 100%. If only one checklist item is missing, the problem is likely just wishful thinking — if your product or project succeeds, it will be despite your idea of the problem, not because of it.

Note: It’s actually easy to come up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria; what’s hard is coming up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria and have credible technical solutions.

Update: Bell quickly backed down — Tweets will be billed just like any other text messages. Interesting that a little web company was able to beat a huge telco on this one.

Facebook and other US sites have no problem sending SMS messages to my Canadian cell phone, but Twitter hasn’t had as much luck — maybe they’ve been looking for ways to avoid paying bulk SMS charges. However, they recently announced that customers of Bell Mobility (one of Canada’s big two wireless providers) can now send and receive tweets again, with “no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).”

Not so, says Bell. According to this story, Bell Mobility is treating Twitter as a “premium service”, and will charge CAD 0.15 for every tweet sent or received, no matter what text plan you have.

That’s actually worse than the status quo. On my Canadian Rogers cell phone, I can’t receive tweets right now, but I don’t pay anything extra to send them with my current text plan.

I guess I’ll stick with Facebook status updates instead. They work fine with Canadian phones, and Rogers hasn’t (yet) decided that they’re a premium service.

Last week, international media outlets reported that American Jennifer Figge had become (or claimed to have become) the first woman to “swim the Atlantic” — the BBC story is pretty typical.

According to the initial stories, Figge swam from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad (3,380 km direct distance) in 24 days, spending up to 8 hours/day in the water. Since this is a tech blog, I know that you’ve all already started to do the arithmetic, and you’re right. Even in the ideal case (no course deviations, 8 hours/day swimming), she would have had to maintain an average pace of 17.6 km/hr to pull that off. She did have the benefit of swimming with the North Equatorial Current at her back — it’s a weak current, but let’s allow her 0.6 km/hr for it, leaving an average required pace of 17.0 km/hr.

The men’s world record for 50m freestyle (front crawl) swimming is currently 21.8 seconds, or 8.3 km/hr. That includes a huge initial speed-up from the leap off the podium, and even then, the pace the brings the world’s top elite swimmers to absolute exhaustion in only 0.05 km. It also takes place in a calm swimming pool with a swimmer wearing a speedo, rather than against huge ocean swells with the swimmer wearing a wetsuit. Even in the pool, no one could keep up that pace for minutes, much less hours or days.

In fact, it was soon confirmed that Figge swam only about 400 kilometers over those 24 days: an impressive distance for an amateur athlete at any age, much less in her 50s, but not the distance across the Atlantic Ocean.

So I guess that “swimming the Atlantic” does not mean the same as “swimming across the Atlantic.” I’m curious about what it does mean, because there are two other people who became famous for “swimming the Atlantic”:

• Guy Delage claimed to have swum the Atlantic with the assistance of a kickboard, covering 2,100 nautical miles (3,889 kilometers) in 51 days. Even assuming 8 hours/day, that works out to an average pace of 9.5 km/hr.
• Benoît Lecomte claimed to have swum the Atlantic unassisted, covering 3,716 miles (5,980 km) in 72 days, swimming 6–8 hours/day. Even assuming 8 hours every day, that works out to an average pace of 10.4 km/hr.

By contrast, in swimming across Lake Ontario in 1959, Marilyn Bell took 21 hours to cover 52 kilometers direct distance, for an average pace of 2.5 km/hr. People have called even that into question, since with currents and primitive navigation equipment in the support boat, she may have actually had to cover a much greater distance, but at least it doesn’t strain credibility.

(The original title of this posting was “Swimming the Atlantic” vs. grade-four arithmetic, but that seemed to be tempting fate, since I’ve likely made at least one arithmetic error in this posting.)