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Method Act

How the founders of Jangl go about the tricky process of innovation.

By Carleen Hawn and Michael Cerda, May 24, 2007  —  0 Comments

Jangl founder “Michael Cerda”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/about.html recently posted “this terrific piece”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/cerdafied_voip_mobile_web/2007/05/gamechanging_pr_1.html on his site “Cerdafied”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/ about the process he and co-founder Ben Dean employed to develop a “game changing” new feature for their popular phone service “Jangl”:http://jangl.com/JanglWeb/Default.aspx. (It includes tequilla shots in the board room.) Cerda’s essay has the beginnings of a great case study on the methods of innovation, and ought to be useful to the Found|READ community.

We republish the May 21st piece below. Pay special attention to the list of product prerequisites Cerda and Dean devised to help guide them in their hunt for the next, best “game changer.” Very instructive. Cerda followed-up yesterday with “this post”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/cerdafied_voip_mobile_web/2007/05/blowing_a_horn_.html on Jangl’s new beta service. Read it next to see what all that tequilla has wrought! (Then check out what “Om has to say about it”:http://gigaom.com/2007/05/24/jangls-new-social-voice-service-first-step-to-white-pages-of-voice-20/.)

MAY 21
Game-changing premises, millions of people and Patron shots.
It’s been crunch time for the past few weeks at my startup – Jangl. We’ve been working on something that I truly believe is game-changing. Here’s the deal… when Ben and I started Jangl, we had some big ideas in mind. There would be an organic progression for how and when those ideas mature as services people adopt. We started with a focus on privacy, because we believed privacy was the first inflection of bridging people’s web relationships to their phones. So we did private, disposable phone numbers, provisioned by Jangl IDs and widgets. Next stop was to move from IDs to other ‘already-in-use’ people identifiers. Here’s a diagram we put together in December 2005, just after we had closed our first funding:

We were still using our stealth name at the time “Buzzage”. Notice the license plate as a potential means for provisioning a Jangl number. We were only half kidding.

The working premise is that you cannot truly make phone numbers behave like email and IM addresses, until the privacy thing is solved. So now that we’ve got this web-to-phone privacy thing figured out, it’s time to migrate to the next inflection of our vision. There were lots of ways to skin the cat. We could have gone a route that says ‘give people private numbers to use whenever/however, and then build personalization based services to apply to those contextual phone number personas. We could have found ourselves looking more like GrandCentral and RingCentral had we gone that route. It’s all good, but not what we’re here for.

Ben and I needed to put our heads back together and hone in on a theme for our next several releases. The prerequisites:

1. The theme must be an enabler for something yet even bigger.
2. It must take what we’ve built, incorporate it into something new that is more universal.
3. It must be simple and free (with great, logical placements of revenue generating extensions).
4. It must have legs to huge adoption.
5. It must give people what they want today, but also give them new wow functions.
6. It must spread virally (duh).
7. It must be game-changing. (something nobody has seen, that everybody could use)

You might be thinking about now… “ok, right, yeah, uh huh.” Stay with me a sec.

So Ben and I went to lunch, and we also grabbed Aaron our VP of marketing (who by the way joined us from Podshow a few months back). We talked about product as-is, things we need to improve, etc. I was itching to spark a bigger discussion though. In my car driving back from lunch, I said “Ok guys, take all your predispositions, thoughts, inclinations and throw them out the window right now. Think game-changing. Don’t stop at any hurdles. Then we got back to my office, hat shots of patron and got going.

What is it? I can’t say because I’m under our own press embargo;). The first step in our next theme will show its face tomorrow. I hope you and millions of others like it.

Carleen Hawn About Carleen Hawn
Carleen Hawn is a business journalist based in San Francisco. Prior to editing Found|READ, she was an Associate Editor with Forbes, and the West Coast Bureau Chief and a Senior Writer for Fast Company magazine. Today you can find Carleen's articles in the pages of Financial Week, Business2.0, and Outside magazines, among others.

Michael Cerda About Michael Cerda
I am the CEO and co-founder of Jangl. Here’s my story. While going to college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo I held jobs at KFC, Mobil Oil, and played in a band. I learned quickly that fast food and oil weren’t for me, and playing in a band for a living could be a long road to hoe. With a B.S. in Industrial Technology in hand and a family, I moved North to the center of the technology universe. I grew up professionally in the broadband access and services space. At Netopia, I built a sales distribution channel among ISPs for some of the early ISDN routers. At Livingston/Lucent I sold remote access servers to the same ISPs. At Redback I sold broadband remote access servers to the same ISPs as well as the phone companies. At Procket I did the same with high density routers, although more on the business development end. At Trapeze I built partnerships with other Internet plumbing companies for wi-fi systems. Starved for doing something cultural and community oriented, I started The Yoga Company, a brick and click lifestyle services and goods company. The Yoga Company became the de facto yoga destination in the San Ramon Valley, attracting the rock stars of the yoga world. I began to really thrive on starting new ventures at this point, and so started a company that would leverage the years of technology exposure, yet apply it at the consumer level. I co-founded Ooma, a voice over IP product and service company. In that process I learned that for something to take hold with consumers, it needed to be without barriers. I also recognized the convergence opportunity that had been so long talked about, finally reaching the market. With that, I partnered with Ben Dean to start Buzzage (now Jangl). Here we are. I still play in a band actually, and now Ben plays with me. I don’t eat fast food, and I drive a hybrid. Some things never change;)).


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