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We’re pleased to announce all Silktide customers now have immediate access to Silktide’s new AI capabilities.

Our Ask AI feature saves you time by explaining how to fix any specific problem Silktide discovers. It understands your code, your design, and even your CMS.

Here’s how it works.

Ask AI how to solve problems

When viewing a page inside Silktide, every issue now has an “Ask AI” button next to it:

Simply click this button to open a sidebar, where AI will explain the specific issue you’re seeing and how to fix it:

The explanation is not just static help text. Silktide uses cutting-edge AI to consider your specific code, text, and images, and to explain the specific problem you are experiencing.

Silktide knows about your CMS and related technologies. So for example, if your website uses WordPress and the Yoast plugin, our AI can tell you how to fix problems with those:

You can reply to the AI to ask follow-up questions:

Follow-up questions can help you resolve unusually tricky problems. Say Silktide gives you code to fix an accessibility issue, but that change impacts your design in a way you don’t like. You could ask Silktide to make changes to better suit your design tastes.

You can also customize the level of technical knowledge that Silktide assumes when it talks to you. Choose between very non-technical (but longer) explanations, or developer-friendly (shorter) dialogue:

How to enable Silktide’s AI features

Silktide’s AI has to be enabled by one of your account administrators before you can use it.

This is completely free of charge, but you should understand how our AI works before accepting. In particular, bear in mind:

• Silktide records conversations to enhance your experience and improve the AI’s performance
• Some of your website’s code will be sent to OpenAI (an approved 3rd party) for processing
• Our agreement with OpenAI ensures that your data will not be used to train their model

The first time an administrator chooses to use Silktide’s AI, they will be given the option to enable it for the whole account. Once this is done, everyone within the account has access.

Understanding AI credits

Silktide’s AI works on a credit model. We have given every customer exactly 1,000 AI credits for free now.

Every click of the Ask AI button (i.e. asking AI to solve a problem) uses up one credit. Asking follow-up questions also uses one credit.

This is an early access model, intended to give customers a taste of this exciting new feature. We may revise our credit model in the future, once we’ve learned from real-world use by our customers. Silktide are not currently offering more credits for sale, but we expect to do so shortly.

How clever is Silktide’s AI, really?

It’s not perfect, but you might be surprised how far AI has come.

For example, when Silktide considers the grammar of a confusing sentence like “all your base are belong to us”, it understands the joke:

And when asked to help write alternative text for a meme, it correctly suggests “Meme featuring a man with shoulder-length hair and beard, gesturing with his hand, with the caption ‘ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY IGNORE ACCESSIBILITY’”:

We continue to be amazed at the capabilities of modern Generative AI, and expect you will be too.

What’s next for AI?

Silktide will be announcing many more game-changing AI features throughout 2024.

Watch our recent “How AI will revolutionize web governance” webinar for a guided tour through the latest advances in Generative AI. And join our webinar mailing list to be notified about future AI webinars.

We expect to announce our next major AI feature in early January.

Need more help? Visit the Silktide AI support documentation.

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Summary

• There are over 61 million adults with disabilities in the US and over 14.1 million disabled people in the UK and this number is increasing. 
• The spending power of UK families with at least one disabled person is estimated at £274 billion / year.
• 71% of disabled people abandon websites that present access barriers.
• Almost everyone experiences temporary or situational impairments (e.g. noise, poor lighting, distractions); these people benefit from web accessibility.
• 97.4% of the top 1 million websites have clear accessibility issues.
• 93% of disabled users don’t report inaccessible websites to their owners.

Defining accessibility

Web accessibility means making your website as usable as possible to the greatest number of people.

This is often seen as “people with disabilities”, but actually includes people who experience any impairment to their use of the web, including temporary impairments (e.g. a broken arm) and situational impairments (e.g. holding a baby).

The technologies which help people with traditional disabilities are equally effective on impairments – for example, captions are a solution for deaf users that also help people watching a video silently in public.

As a result, accessibility affects everyone.

Prevalence 

In the United States, 61 million people live with disabilities up from 56.7 million people in 2010.

• 6.9% of children are disabled
• 49% of working-age adults are disabled
• 43% of adults over 65 are disabled

In 2020, there were 14.1 million disabled people in the UK (source: GOV.UK). 

• 8% of children are disabled
• 19% of working-age adults are disabled
• 46% of pension-age adults are disabled

However, these figures drastically understate the number of people with a temporary or situational impairment. 

Consider that in the United States, about 26,000 people a year suffer from loss of upper extremities. But the number of people with similar temporary and situational impairments exceeds 20 million (source: Microsoft). 

Other examples:

• Distracted users, say watching TV, who benefit from websites that impose a lower cognitive burden on them
• Users with mobility impairments, say riding a train, who benefit from decently sized buttons, and forgiving controls
• Users unable to experience sound, due to their environment: at work, or at a bar

Most users are now on mobile devices, and the idea of a user sitting down to experience your website on a computer, in a quiet room is now the exception, not the rule.

Business case

Legal risk

Legal risk varies enormously by country and between private and public sector organizations. Most countries have adopted legislation build around the WCAG standard.

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) are widely used, and present a substantial risk of high compensation. In 2020, 10,982 ADA Title III lawsuits were filed in federal court, a number that was barely slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

These trends are accelerating drastically. During January 2021, 1,108 cases were filed – the most ever in a single month.

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (1995)  and Equality Act (2010) make it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide the service or providing a worse service because of their disability.

At the time of writing, although the UK public sector organizations have clearly enforced standards, the legal risk for private organizations is relatively low. A customer would need to demonstrate a breach of the Equality Act in a County or High court, which is difficult and expensive; although several cases have been initiated, all of these were settled out of court.

Globally, more legislation is being introduced over time, and although laws rarely change, the trend is clearly pointing towards more regulation with stricter enforcement.

Commercial opportunity

Modern organizations are seeing a transition similar to what happened with diversity and inclusion: what was initially seen as a frustrating new challenge, is increasingly being recognized as an incredible opportunity.

In the US, 26% of adults are reported to have a disability as of 2020, up from 18.7% in 2010.

Graph source: CDC

In the UK, 22% of all people report a disability (source: National Statistics); for people of state pension age, this is 46%. These numbers are increasing over time:

The total spending power of families with at least one disabled person in the UK is estimated at £274 billion a year. 71% of people with a disability people will abandon a website that presents them with access barriers.

Add to this the much higher number of people who have a temporary or situational disability, who benefit from the improved user experience of an accessible website.

Considered as a facet of website usability, the commercial opportunity of improving accessibility is enormous. On average, e-commerce websites that redesign for better usability double their sales; accessibility is a component of these gains.

Many components of accessibility are closely aligned with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), including the use of alternative text, headings, landmarks, semantics, captions, page titles, languages, code quality, and link size.

Improving accessibility can therefore improve search engine placement and traffic (source: W3C).

An accessible mobile experience is both a key ranking factor (source: Google) and a requirement of modern accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 and later). Websites rank differently in Google on mobile and desktop devices, depending on how accessible they are on mobile:

Brand and reputation

Organizations who embrace accessibility can benefit from the positive press that accessibility attracts, such as BBC’s coverage of Ticketmaster.

The reputational damage from being inaccessible is hard to quantify but is clearly present. Inaccessible websites are by definition, delivering an inferior user experience, which means lower customer retention, and fewer recommendations. 

Consider that the largest two companies in the world, as measured by market capitalization at the time of writing, are Microsoft and Apple. Both invest heavily into world-leading accessibility, which is prevalent throughout their products, services, training, brands, and marketing. Apple had public accessibility guidelines for their operating system back in 1987. 

Costs and solutions

The cost of making a website accessible is generally a small fraction of the overall cost of the website as a whole. This fixed cost is almost always a negligible fraction of the expected returns.

Once the correct processes, tools, and training are in place, the overhead for keeping a website accessible drops significantly, so long as it’s done properly.

A further concern can be how accessibility can reduce the responsiveness of your team. By introducing additional processes, accessibility can slow down the rate at which websites can be developed or updated.

Silktide is designed to help organizations identify and remediate accessibility issues quickly, and at scale. Wherever possible, issues are identified automatically, and Silktide helps teams share, triage, and understand how to fix them in the most efficient way.

By providing clear and transparent scoring of the different areas of your web estate, Silktide helps to align your teams. They can view their progress easily, on a regular basis, and across business departments. Together, scores help incentivize team members to care about and excel at accessibility.

Further reading

• The Business Case for Digital Accessibility (W3C)
• Accessibility of top 1 million websites (WebAIM)
• Assessing the online shopping experience of customers with disabilities, and the costs to business of ignoring them (Enterprise rent-a-car)
• We analyzed 6,554 websites for accessibility issues and here are the results (Silktide)

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Not that long ago some well-meaning-but-dumb laws required that websites ask for permission to set cookies.

Since then we have all grown used to a crappier Internet, where users routinely dismiss popups without reading them. The result has been wasted time, smaller screens, and precisely zero improvements to privacy.

Now the UK body responsible for policing these laws has published new guidelines on how we must comply. In short: we’ve been doing it all wrong.

What’s new?

It’s all about things that you can’t do:

1. No non-essential cookies until you ask first

This means no Google Analytics, no Facebook buttons, no comment boxes, no social plugins, and no tracking pixels unless the user has explicitly chosen to enable them first. To give you a compliant example, the ICO uses this cookie sidebar:

Note how their option for analytics is turned off by default, which is also a requirement:

In practical terms, this makes analytics worthless in the UK, as almost no-one is going to opt in, and you won’t know what percentage of your visitors did.

2. No emphasizing “Accept” over “Reject”

Nearly every cookie solution ever emphasizes accepting over denying cookies. The ICO explicitly says this is not allowed: “A consent mechanism that emphasizes ‘agree’ or ‘allow’ over ‘reject’ or ‘block’ represents a non-compliant approach”.

3. No denying access just because you don’t accept cookies

Many websites block access until a user accepts their cookies. Under the new guidance, this is expressly forbidden. You must provide access to your service without cookies, unless the cookies are technically required for it to function (e.g. for login, or a checkout).

Together these changes should help privacy, but they’re going to be an absolute nightmare for website owners, and we’re sceptical how they’ll work in real life.

The way that you make websites, and the way you ask for cookies will have to change completely. Let’s break it down.

How everyone used to comply and why that won’t work

The big change here is you absolutely cannot set non-essential cookies when a user loads a page. This is pretty much what everyone on the Internet does now, and changing this is a serious challenge.

Previously most websites ‘solved’ the cookie law by adding some standard JavaScript that displays a banner or popup when a page is first loaded. Typically they say something like “By continuing to use our website you accept our use of cookies”.

Secretly though the website itself was never changed. It still used cookies. Adding a banner or popup is relatively cheap and easy, but modifying your website to not use non-essential cookies without consent is much harder.

The problem is down to the way webpages work. There’s no copy-and-paste plugin someone can add to their website which blocks cookies. In most cases, you’ll need code on your server, which means your website and your CMS will need to be modified by a programmer.

Programmers cost a lot more than copying-and-pasting a plugin.

Say your website uses Google Analytics and Facebook Share buttons. Because they are non-essential, these plugins will need to be removed until the user has chosen to enable them. This means parts of your pages will need to work with and without these features, and will need new interfaces to enable those features.

Because Google Analytics and Facebook exist for separate reasons, the user is now required to choose to enable one and not the other. This means users will need to see a list of these providers and approve them individually. Options can’t be pre-checked, and must be freely given, so your current “Accept recommended cookies” splash screen won’t cut it.

Asking your users to check a lot of separate, optional settings upfront is never going to work. We can see a better way, although it probably won’t happen.

How this could work, in an unlikely but delightful utopia

Websites could copy how our phones work.

If you use a mobile app, and it needs permission to do something, it asks you once, like this:

Your choice is remembered and you can review it later if you like. You’re given total control and crucially this request is made only when consent is needed, not up front.

Of course an app could ask you for permission up front, but most apps aren’t that stupid: they know if they harass users without good reason, the user will say no.

Websites could do the same. If I want to leave a comment on a blog post, it could ask me for permission to use cookies to do just this. I understand my choice, and the website creates a clear rationale for why I should consent based on my action.

In time, if this approach became commonplace, we could see browsers implement it as a standard, and give users controls to accept and review their privacy across all of their websites. This would save web developers time and enforce privacy for everyone on a technical level.

Yeah, we probably won’t be this lucky.

How cruel, cold reality will probably work

At first, nothing happens. This is a nerdy clarification of an existing law, how many people will even notice? It’ll likely take heavy fines before people will care to go through the whole process of “cookie-lawing” and “GDPR-ing” their websites again.

However detecting people who don’t comply will be very easy. Do you use Google Analytics when we load your page? You’re breaking the law. Expect a whole tonne of automatic spam email along these lines.

When the fines do arrive, organizations will scramble to patch technology that doesn’t currently allow them to comply. You think your website is old? Your bank’s website is running on Windows 1892 Coal-Powered-Edition.

The quickest, dirtiest solution will be to direct users to a static splash page where they must accept all cookies to continue. This isn’t really compliant, but it will pass automated checks and is technically feasible for mass distribution, which in reality is what usually wins.

The result will be anyone requesting a webpage will likely get a splash screen. They’ll be asked to either leave or accept all cookies because “It is not technically feasible for us to offer more granular controls at this time”. These screens will be slow, expensive, inhibit sales, and make many technical actions more complex (e.g. crawling, SEO, sharing links). Cookie banners apparently cost the EU €2 billion a year; these will cost many times more.

Facebook, Google are so essential to so many people that they’ll be able to persuade their users to accept anything. New companies, looking to compete with them, will not.

Meanwhile the average user still doesn’t know what a cookie is, and blindly clicks on the Accept button.

Conclusion

The ICO has just handed out two fines for £99m and £183m. Those are stand-up-and-take-notice figures which show they’re prepared to enforce GDPR seriously. Their head of technology policy just said “Cookie compliance will be an increasing regulatory priority for the ICO in the future”.

The intent of the law was to protect privacy, which is a Good Thing. In an era where Mark’s Zuckerberg’s nanobots are hiding in your bathroom mirror [citation needed] we could all use more control over our privacy.

Let’s just hope they figure out a practical solution that works this time. So far we fear the only people benefitting from this law are those being paid to implement it.

Footnote

Silktide is helping large organizations build a better, more accessible, web. Click here to see how it works in our online demo.

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Apple is the highest valued company in the world, and love them or hate them, everyone can learn from what got them there.

1. Consistency

The reason Apple announcements are so widely anticipated is because they’ve consistently done things in the past that got people excited. In one decade they introduced the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad:

That’s the equivalent of releasing four of the most successful films of all time, back to back. When someone does that, people pay attention to your next movie.

In life and in business, your brand is what you do consistently. Apple have made a point of consistently delivering high end, quality, desirable products. When you’re not consistent, you must work much harder to win people’s attention each time. Most companies have to beg and plead with us to buy their stuff. Apple could write iPhone 6 on a shoebox and get 10m pre-orders.

You are exactly the same. If you deliver consistently, your work will be prized in advance. Your reputation will accelerate your successes. But to obtain this level of consistency, you’ll need:

2. Focus

The highest valued company in the world only makes a handful of products:

Sony had more varieties of Walkman than Apple has products in total. The first thing Steve Jobs did on his return to Apple was reduce their computing line to just four models (2 desktops, 2 laptops), aiming to make each ‘best in class’.

To be consistently great, you need to focus. Thinning yourself out is a sure route to mediocrity, even for a billion dollar business. Jobs said this to Nike’s CEO:

“Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

Unfortunately, as we become successful, we all tend to diversify. Companies and people are constantly beset by demands to do more. Most succumb to these demands, and are weakened, one distraction at a time.

The lesson you should learn here is to do the opposite. Use your successes to narrow your focus. Say no to almost everything, and concentrate upon:

3. Choosing the right things

Many of Apple’s best choices were widely criticized at the time, but later proved to be insightful.

For example, the iPhone launched with a seemingly primitive ‘one app at a time’ model. Apple decided that the benefits (better battery life, simplicity of use) outweighed the cons (less control for power users). Likewise for not supporting Flash, having non-removable batteries, a single locked-down App store and dropping floppy drives.

The fact that most of the industry argued these decisions were wrong (before ultimately copying them) shows you how powerful these decisions were – Apple had an unusual connection with what customers really wanted, not what the industry thought they did.

This is a hard skill to copy, and one reason why Jobs was considered a genius. But to distill part of that genius: be your own customer, and take a fresh look at things. Don’t succumb to social pressures at the expense of your own judgment. This will lead you to:

4. Distinction

Apple’s official slogan used to be Think Different, and not without reason. Their products stand out amongst a sea of rivals. In 1998, compare the first iMac:

with a traditional PC of the time:

Or the first iPhone:

with the other “hottest phones of 2007”:

The best kind of distinction is the kind that makes your customer feel distinctive. Apple have managed the trick of making themselves the Porsche of the mobile and computing world, without having to limit themselves to the top 1% of earners. Apple’s distinction was in making the right decisions (as judged by the buying public, not industry experts) and thereby inciting:

5. Desirability

Apple is a master of creating things that people want. It’s an oft overlooked business maxim that:

Product Desirability = Profitability

Through a remarkable fusion of consistency, focus, saying no, choosing the right things and distinctive products, Apple has built a brand cachet that any company would kill for. But ultimately, it’s really simple: people want their stuff.

This sounds obvious, but the majority of businesses, writers, musicians, poets and playwrights could attribute their failures to simply never creating things that people want.

One more thing

Jobs said he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

Most tech companies focus, understandably, on tech. Apple have built their success on artistic values.

To make great art, you focus on what you’re passionate about. Your work gets people excited. You make decisions that piss some people off because the otherwise your art is a slurry of mediocrity. No good artist surrenders to groupthink or is led by committee. I believe this artistic ethos is at the core of Apple’s DNA, and it’s the absolute antithesis of almost every corporation elsewhere in the world.

And it may just be the ultimate secret to their success.

What next?

All this points the way for Apple’s potential downfall. If they succumb to pressure they might start diversifying, saying yes to more, losing focus. As rivals get better at copying, they risk losing their distinction.

The biggest threat to Apple comes from within. They have built themselves upon the highest of expectations, and if they should fail them, they have a long way to fall.

Right now, Apple is the most valued company in the world. Fifteen years ago they were almost bankrupt. Whatever success they have, they earned it. All it took was a consistent, focused philosophy of saying no, focusing on the right things and building distinctive products that people want. What’s your excuse?

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Like millions of people, I was carried to work today in a comfortable metal box by the controlled explosion of 60-million-year-old dinosaur juice. (You call that petrol).

I avoided unexpected traffic on my way thanks to flying machines orbiting the earth, which talked to a metal and glass supercomputer in my pocket smaller than a bar of soap. (You call that a phone).

My pocket supercomputer is – of course – wirelessly connected to the entirety of humanity’s knowledge. The entirety of humanity’s knowledge is – of course – free. And I can search all of it as fast as I can type.

None of this is even interesting to anyone anymore.

At work, I help make software, which is to say I am able to benefit the lives of people mostly by thinking and occasionally pressing some buttons on a surface. Somehow, I am paid for this.

At the supermarket I look for bananas, which have been transported five thousand miles for my convenience, yet remain fresh, tasty, and so cheap I don’t even notice their price (12 pence). I enjoy food without even considering the possibility that it might be diseased, or toxic, or fatal. I buy a plump, delicious chicken – the byproduct of a thousand years of careful breeding – and let machines scan my choices with beams of light and pay them with a thin piece of plastic. If I run out of money, there are whole industries competing to loan me some, for a price.

Best of all, I realize, I have my place amongst all of this wonder, and so do most people around me. My trip to the supermarket likely helped employ a hundred thousand people or more; from chefs to engineers, shelf stackers to logo designers. A few of those people are in their dream jobs, most less so, but together we’re all a lot more prosperous and opportune than when we built our own shacks and dug dry vegetables out of our gardens.

Is this world perfect? No. Many are exploited, and most are denied it entirely. I’ve walked through slums in Africa, India, and South America. I know I’m amongst the luckiest alive.

But once upon a time, I wouldn’t have been lucky either. If you look at the whole of human history, a trend becomes clear. Draw a graph of the rights of women, or income per person, or human lifespan over the past thousand years. Compare the life of a child today with one fifty years ago. Consider how likely it is, today, that a person living in a developed nation will be drafted into war, or die in childbirth.

There are blips in that graph, to be sure, but the world is getting better constantly, and it’s not about to stop anytime soon.

If you’re able to read this, you live in the most amazing time imaginable. And the funniest thing is, most of us never even notice.

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When I first started a business, I was 21, bald, and had the social confidence of an asthmatic field mouse.

Fortunately I started my business with an ultra-confident Sales Director, who unfortunately turned out to be both hopeless and completely mental. He punched me in the face during our second board meeting.

At one of our first pitches to a prospective client he bragged how he “wasn’t much of a techie” and “didn’t know how to use email”. These were not inspiring words from a cutting edge web design company.

So in order to feed myself, I rapidly learnt how to sell. In our first year I secured government contracts and FORTUNE 500 clients, all with no money and an office the size of a refrigerator. Let me tell you how.

Credibility comes ahead of time

A new business has no reputation. So at the start, all credibility is on you, the founder.

For my part, I built websites as a student. One in particular – a social network for my university – had grown to thousands of active users, and was raising a lot of controversy on campus.

I made stuff like this simply because I wanted to, and the passion showed. When you can’t find paid work, create stuff for free. Free work is your way of bootstrapping credibility, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to earn it.

Enthusiasm + knowledge

I was not a conventional salesman, with slicked back hair and fancy suits. I was however, fiercely enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable. And it turns out that matters more.

People buy from people. You may resent this, but they’re far less moved by your brochure or your features. They evaluate you as a person, and that person had better be convincing. If you are sincerely bubbling over with excitement at all the wonderful things you could do for them, your enthusiasm will win many people over. Your credibility (above) should do the rest.

Confidence will come with time. But the best way to build confidence is to become good at something and get yourself in front of people who will appreciate it.

Get in front of everyone you know

My first sale – a £3,000 ($5,000) website – was to the residence where I had lived as a student.

These were people I knew. I blagged myself a meeting and sold them on what I could do. I already knew them and what they wanted; they were sold on the basis of my free social network and the fact that they knew me.

This is the key. People buy from who they know. You probably don’t want to hear that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Just being vaguely known by that guy who knows that guy is enough to get you in the door of most places.

I sold to the school where I’d studied at university. I pitched to the companies where my friends were working. Every single person I knew, however low-level they might seem, was a potential inroad to another opportunity. This alone got me a sale to a FORTUNE 500 company (3M) in our first year.

Later I would learn about ‘networking events’, but I didn’t use any for the first 6 years of my business. The best lead is always from someone you already know, and the biggest mistake people make is assuming that they don’t know anyone.

Get in at the ground floor on big names

My first tiny sale to a department of a university suddenly gave me the ability to say “I did a website for this university”. Nevermind that it was a small project; it could have been free. The most powerful indicator of credibility is not your work, it’s the names you can associate with.

One great side effect of big names is they tend to have lots of staff, who move on to other organizations and recommend you. Someone from that university started working for a local council, and soon I had my first government client. Someone there moved on and I had another. Big names attract big names.

Another great thing about big names – you can grow within them. Over the next 5 years that small school website let us pitch for their parent department, and ultimately the whole university – over 20,000 webpages and a lot more money. We never lost that contract in 10 years.

Crucially: deliver on service. If you don’t make your clients happy, none of this will happen.

Write and sound the part

You want to look presentable, of course, but don’t invest your hopes into this. Your appearance won’t win many sales, but a bad appearance will certainly cost you some. Don’t be the smartarse kid who doesn’t realize he needs a haircut, shower or deodorant.

Master speaking and writing clearly. The quality of your communication is one of the strongest indicators people will use when judging you; it can make a smart kid sound stupid, or an idiot sound vaguely intelligent. If you don’t know how to use apostrophes or capital letters, you’d best believe people who do will not judge you kindly. And they will never tell you.

Don’t mistake professional communication for fancy words and long sentences. If you can say a lot with a little, you’ve a much better chance of being heard and respected.

Things that work (but not for you)

If your sales strategy involves SEO or ‘Social marketing’, get a new strategy. Ask people who use those things – they work in the long term, and mostly as embellishment for established businesses. You are not Coca-Cola. Plan accordingly.

Advertising is almost always a fiery pit where your money goes to die. Look for what other companies like yourself (early stage, same industry) are doing with their advertising, and whether they appear to be successful. If you do advertise, spend lightly.

Don’t waste money on premature status symbols. Dropping cash on a fancy watch / car / office has terrible ROI – it might make you feel good, but it barely touches your odds of selling. I didn’t even have a car for my first 5 years of business and I was able to win contracts worth £100k ($160k) / year.

Summary

• If you have no reputation, work for free.
• People buy from people, so be enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
• Reach out to everyone you know.
• One tiny sale to a big name is a tentpole you can build your reputation on.
• Big organizations spread word of mouth far faster.
• Look the part, but more importantly: write and sound the part.
• Don’t expect results from SEO, advertising or status symbols.

By the way, I bought my face-punching Sales Director out after a year. Lovely fellow – but let’s just say he sold his 49% share of the company for less than it’s worth 12 years later. Ho hum.

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You don’t need qualifications, money, a planet-sized-brain or even a particularly good idea. All an entrepreneur ever does is create something that consistently makes money.

Think of a company as a machine you design and build. Here’s McDonalds:

Your ‘machine’ always has certain parts. It sells something to someone, and re-invests some of that to help make more sales in future. What’s left over is profit for the owners. Here’s Google:

If you can design, build, own and care for such a machine, you can become very rich indeed. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but most of the barriers that you think will stop you won’t. Interested?

Let’s talk about you

Are you young, poor, unqualified – a student, or hating your job? Maybe a touch rebellious? Perfect. You have no bad habits, and will work until your fingernails fall out and your eyeballs roll onto the desk. The world awaits you.

Older, wiser, bit of money saved, experienced with a stable job? Maybe a mortgage and kids? Your job is much harder. It can be done, but it might feel like you’re trying to dance backwards through quicksand.

The most important qualities of a good entrepreneur are energy and determination. It doesn’t hurt to be persuasive, but this can be learned. I started as a shy uber-nerd aged 21; I soon learned how to sell when it was the only way to feed myself.

Enough preamble. Let’s make you a bajillion dollars:

The idea

Please forget all of the terrible deluded nonsense you’ve heard about the value of ideas. Ideas are cheap, fleeting things; by itself an idea is worth less than a half-eaten sandwich. At least you can eat the sandwich.

You do need an idea of course. But understand that even the most successful companies were not founded on wild or brilliant ideas. Starbucks chose the brazen path of selling coffee in Seattle. Facebook built a better MySpace. Google built a better Yahoo search. Microsoft copied Apple – who copied Xerox.

Original ideas are overrated. What isn’t overrated is timing. Google chose the perfect time to build a better search engine – good luck trying to do that now *cough* Bing *cough*. What you want, therefore, is an astute awareness of a need that is currently underrepresented in the market. You want to spot a product or service that can go places – original or not. It’s usually easier to refine an existing idea that isn’t fully realized than to create a wholly original one.

People fear setting up a business wherever there’s competition, but competition can be a good thing. The best place to set up a new restaurant is right next to another successful restaurant; they’ve kindly done the hard work for you of building an audience. Many a good business has ridden to success on the coattails of another – it is usually better to have some rivals over none. You just need to become 10% better.

I personally recommend trying to deliver something that you and your friends would buy in a heartbeat. You’ll know more about your field, you’ll understand your customers, and you’ll be passionate about what you do. If you can make your company about a why – not a what – you’ll inspire yourself and those around you. And to survive the next step, you need a fair sprinkle of inspiration:

Starting

Starting a company is a bit like parenting; everyone assumes you know what you’re doing, but babies and companies don’t come with instruction manuals. You stumble through it, learning as you go.

It’s at the start where you’re most likely to fail. Your aim is to build that magical money-making machine, but you probably don’t have all the parts and the ones that you need may cost more than you have. Your idea is probably at least half wrong too, but you won’t know which half yet. All of this is normal.

A big part of starting a company is convincing people to believe in you before they probably should. When Steve Jobs founded Apple, he had no money and no customers; what he did next is the hallmark of a great entrepreneur. First he convinced a local computer store to order his non-existent Apple computers, with payment on delivery. He then convinced a parts supplier to sell him the components he needed to build them – using the order he just obtained as proof he would be able to pay them back. Jobs and a small team worked in their garage to build the first computers, delivered them on time and made a tidy profit. Apple was born from nothing.

Most new entrepreneurs play a few gambits early on like this. If it sounds scary, that’s because it is. I once had to pay staff salaries on my heavily burdened credit cards when an early order fell through. You fake it until you make it.

While doing all this you need to juggle between making the perfect company (idealist) and paying your bills (realist) – an absence of either will eventually kill you. I believe it’s one reason why realist / idealist partnerships are so common in business.

Do not scale prematurely. Don’t try to be a big company early on – just aim to be one. Be slow to spend and to hire at first. Don’t waste time writing mission statements and policy documents. You’re small, nimble and on a mission. Make and sell things. There’ll be time for a HR department later.

Don’t be surprised if you change your company entirely. It’s a rare business that survives first contact with its customers. Try to avoid doing this more than once though, it doesn’t pay well.

Survive long enough, reinvest your meagre successes and compound them. Eventually, you can move on to:

Extracting yourself

This is the step most small businesses never accomplish.

Up until now, your magical business machine almost certainly contains one irreplaceable part: you. If your background is accounts, you’re probably the head accountant. If you’re a programmer, you’re probably the best coder. Whatever you do, chances are you’ll feel essential and somewhat overworked.

Here’s the hard part: you need to make yourself redundant. If you dropped dead tomorrow, your business should carry on working just fine. All of your time needs to be spent working on your business, not for your business. The alternative is you’re basically self-employed with assistants.

Some businesses can’t escape this trap. If you’re a brilliant copywriter – say – you’ll struggle. It’s because what makes you a great company is you, and unless you can bottle up you into a business model, you can’t grow.

McDonalds built a business that works even if they hire almost entirely minimum wage workers. Their process makes it work: every burger is efficient and nearly indistinct, and nothing is left to chance. Their brand is so strong people line up worldwide to eat there. Your business may be radically different, but it should be similarly robust.

If you accomplish this, you now own something that is self-sustaining. You should be able to pull a good salary even if you never go into work. Your time is now free to tweak your business endlessly into something better. Now to conquer the world, all you need to do is:

Scale

The final step is a bit like playing Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Each question you get right doubles your money, or you’re going home.

Do not make the naive mistake of assuming a big company is like a small one but bigger. Oh, nevermind. That’s like telling your kids to listen to you, really, drinking doesn’t make you cool. You’ll learn the hard way.

As a company grows the rules and your culture change completely. You may even find yourself disliking the company you created (many founders feel conflicted like this, eventually). If you’ve made it this far, you have many options: hire help, sell, or double-down and see where the ride takes you.

Remember no business can grow indefinitely. Most industries are more efficient at different sizes – it’s easy to be a two-man plumbing company, but near impossible to build a 1,000 man plumbing corporation. Know the limits of yours well in advance. Software is an example of an industry that scales exceedingly well, which is why it creates so many young billionaires.

And finally

It’s never been easier to start a company. You can create a killer product in your student dorm without even registering any paperwork – that was enough for Facebook.

I think entrepreneurship is a form of enlightened gambling. Skill and tenacity are big factors, but luck plays a big part. However, as long as you can keep picking yourself up when you get knocked down, try different things and keep learning, the odds are in your favour. You just have to dare to chance them.

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11 years ago I was an impoverished student about to graduate with £14k in debt. I did what any sensible person would do in this situation, and started my own business.

I co-founded with someone who proved to be less than ideal when he punched me in the face during our second board meeting. He owned 49% of my company. Our first annual profit – £200 – was barely enough to buy one iPod touch.

A decade later I’m almost embarrassingly happy and successful, but the road there was long and winding. Here’s some of what I learned:

On you as a founder

Firstly, do it.

Every single person – from my family to my closest friends – ultimately doubted that this was a good idea. (Many started being supportive, and changed their minds when times got harder). If you feel compelled to do it, don’t let anyone stop you, and don’t expect anyone to support you either.

Start with total brutal honesty.

I’d say this is Rule #1 in life. Everybody deludes themselves in some way – and in groups it can often be easiest to delude each other. But the more honestly you can see the world, the better your decisions will be. Doubt yourself. Question everything. If someone put a gun to your head, could you tear holes in your ideas? When your plans can withstand that, they’re probably pretty good.

Practice saying no. A lot.

You will almost certainly want to do a hundred different things. Almost all business founders are like this by nature – they see opportunity everywhere and change the world (I’m certainly no exception). But this is a terrible way to run a business. You need to focus on doing a very small number of things really well, and that means saying no to 1,000 other things. This is harder than you think, and far more powerful than you can imagine.

Growing past 2-3 people will cripple most founders.

Most small businesses are started by a person who’s good at what their business does: accountants start accountancy companies, bakers start bakeries; I was a geek who – at first – started a web design company. These people will find it extremely hard to grow past 2-3 people; most often they struggle to hire someone ‘as good as themselves’, and end up tired and frustrated trying to do everything. If you only read one business book, get the E-Myth Revisited and learn what to do about it, or at least skim these free notes.

On your business idea

Don’t be afraid to change tacks.

There is a saying that no business plan survives first contact with the customer. Nintendo started by making playing cards. Facebook was designed for university students. My own company built websites for 10 years before changing to software. Changing direction doesn’t have to make you weak or indecisive – you may have to adjust to find your perfect niche. Just try to do it early and avoid doing it too often.

Just one. Powerful. Idea.

You can blend complementary ideas (e.g. a restaurant with comedy shows) but not totally disparate ones (a restaurant that sells management consulting services). When you start pick out just a few key features of your idea, and focus on making those amazing. Say no to everything else.

A successful business is either loved or needed.

It’s exceeding rare to be both, although as owners we always like to think our companies are loved! (see Rule #1: be honest with yourself). Ensure you’re essential or utterly irresistible. Most often if you sell to businesses you have to be needed – like accountants, lawyers, web designers; if you sell to consumers you need to be loved – like iPhones, movie theaters, cosmetics.

Imagine being an outside investor.

Pretend to be someone with a lot of self-made money but not much time. Meet yourself right now, and listen to your own explanation of your business. What do you think? Does it sound like a good investment? Once again – be honest. (Sidenote: it’s ok to have a business which isn’t planning to be a big financial success. But very few entrepreneurs believe they’re starting one of those).

Align with your passions.

True passion is infectious. It will win over doubting prospects. It can make staff loyal to you. Passion will give you boundless energy and keep you going when others would throw in the towel. Ultimately if you build a business around something you’re not passionate about – and I made this mistake – you’ll wake up one day and think “what have I gotten myself into?”

On marketing

Marketing isn’t about changing people’s minds.

Your job isn’t to convince people to want what you’re offering. It’s to help your prospects convince themselves that what you’re offering will help them get what they really want.

A few things not to skimp upon.

Your logo, tagline and website are utterly essential; they’re the first impression you’ll make to most people, and your only message while you’re not there. If you need professional help, get it. Don’t be tempted to hire your teenage nephew, or do it yourself. This is akin to being your own lawyer, and equally disastrous. You don’t have to pay a fortune – just keep your requirements simple and emphasize quality over quantity. Don’t worry about letterheads or compliment slips or custom email footers or any of that crap until you’re making money.

Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.

A good idea is easy to sell; a great one will sell and spread itself. The harder you have to work to explain and sell what you do, the more your idea needs work. There are two solutions: simplify what you do, or change tacks entirely. You won’t sell more of a bad idea by making it more complicated.

Everyone has to find their own path, but you can save yourself a lot of time and stress by learning from the best and brightest who have come before you. I highly recommend reading just three brilliant books: The E-Myth Revisited, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and the Personal MBA; they’re worth at least a year’s head start by themselves.

Everyone I know who has ever tried had a single common refrain: they wish they did it sooner. If you think it’s your calling, what’s your excuse?

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A decade ago I started a web design company. We grew and grew, and after ten years of hard work, I’ve finally been able to get rid of it.

Don’t get me wrong – we were successful, had fun and did good work. At our peak we had over 200 clients and 15 fulltime staff, making us the largest such company in our city. We’ve worked on great projects for some big name clients and we even made some money too.

Little by little however, the years ate away at my soul. This year we finally left it all behind and moved onto our own products, and I’ve never been happier.

So this is why.

Web design isn’t all bad

Web design is not without its benefits. Client work is endlessly varied, and you’re always learning new things.

It’s a ludicrously easy industry to enter too – all you need is a computer, Internet access and time. There’s plenty of demand for cheap work to get you started, and fair rates for good work if you can do it.

I started Silktide fresh out of University with no computer and £14,000 (about $22,000) of debt. And though it was hard from the start, we were able to double in size every year, and all our work led to better work. Our efforts were continually rewarded as we grew.

Unfortunately, not forever.

Your fate is sealed

When you take on creative work for a client, they own a share of your time.

I used to think I was an entrepreneur running a web design company, but the reality was far from entrepreneurial. Clients were my bosses, and we were at the mercy of their whim.

We worked with some amazing and wonderful clients, but we had our share of the misguided, tyrannical and flat-out bonkers too. It’s not like you can always see them coming.

Most web designers work constantly just to keep their clients happy, because unhappy clients don’t pay their bills. Regardless of how good their legal contracts are, a web design company that pisses off their clients won’t stay in business for long, and to keep clients happy sometimes means compromising your work to do what you’re told.

I fired a number of clients in our time, but you can’t fire everyone you disagree with. At times, to pay the bills, you’ll probably take on work you suspect you shouldn’t, and deal with people you wish you wouldn’t. Bit by bit, you sacrifice your ideals for expediency, because the alternative is worse.

But eventually, your conscience grows thin.

Not a great business

It’s not easy to make a lot of money in web design. It’s decent sustenance, but a poor investment.

You can’t really differentiate yourself for starters – I mean, you’ll think you can – but in reality you’ll always be one of a gazillion companies in a global marketplace. It’s not like software, where one company can literally own a market; no one web design company owns 0.01% of their market.

Like everyone else, we charged clients fixed rates. If our projects were a storming success, our reward remained the same. At best, you’ll earn yourself more work. Well done! You just won yourself more work.

Understand how this is different from many other businesses. If you make a best-selling solar powered torch your reward is your own, and so is your destiny. You can choose to change your product, your brand, your strategy as you see fit. If you’re the best, the rewards are immense. But with web design, you essentially earned yourself more, slightly better work.

There’s a reason most web designers never have time to work on their own websites, nevermind their own businesses.

The limits of size and location

Companies in all industries have natural sizes that have evolved to be stable and successful. For example, there aren’t that many car companies worldwide, and they typically have to make billions of dollars just to exist. Yet most plumbers and electricians are one-man bands.

Web design companies tend to range from 1 to 10 people, with the vast majority having a couple of staff and a handful exceeding 100 or more. Like plumbers, they tend to focus on one geographic area: as far out as they can comfortably meet people face to face.

The most successful companies tend to be in the biggest cities. If you’re a magnificent designer but you’re based in a remote mountain cabin, you’ll have a harder time than a mediocre designer in NYC.

After about 7 years our location began to limit us – although we had customers from Cornwall to Cumbria, it became progressively harder to service them all. More distant customers are more expensive to tend to, so your returns diminish. You’re paying a premium to compete against the local companies who already work there.

We could have moved or expanded, but this didn’t make economic sense for us. We’d spend a fortune to lose all the advantages we’d worked to earn: our staff, our network of referrers, our name. It can be done, but like plumbers there are few web design companies that can scale and prosper.

Sacrifice your own destiny

For me, the greatest cost was what we could be doing instead. The opportunity cost.

The thing I love most about businesses is their ability to transform the world for the better. We live in a world where two guys can found Google in a garage, creating an incalculable benefit to the world, and profit for their efforts. That – to me – is one of the greatest wonders of civilization.

I’ve always wanted to make the biggest difference I can with my life, and I couldn’t see me achieving this with a web design company. For no matter how much great work you do, it’s not the work you choose to do. You’re always working for someone else.

And if you feel like I do, that’s the kind of passion you can’t surrender quietly.

So what did we do?

For at least 5 years I knew I’d need to leave web design behind eventually. 4 years ago we started to split Silktide into a web design division and a software division – and gave them separate brands. We had our first product – originally called SiteScore – and our first clients.

The mistake I made was continuing to feed the web design monster, whilst trying to get our product side up and running in my spare time. In reality, despite ultimately delegating command of the agency to others, the web design business always consumed 90% of my attention.

When the 2008 recession came our web design sales were severely hit, and it took all our efforts just to dig ourselves out of the financial hole that put us in. Ironically our products were keeping us afloat, but our web design was consuming all of our time.

A year ago I set a 12 month deadline to get us out of web design; in the end it took us 9 months. It cost us a fair slice of income, but we gained a monstrous amount of our time. And finally our products are starting to get the attention they deserve.

It’s too early yet to know if this decision will pay off – right now, we feel like a startup all over again. But whatever happens, we only have ourselves to answer for. And that feels pretty damn great.