I don’t think people talk about cleverness enough with respect to traits that founders should have. A well-placed bit of cleverness can mean the difference between someone spreading your startup or forgetting about you completely. It can mean the difference between a meaningless sign up vs. a genuinely excited one.
The following is a story in cleverness.
I’m the creepiest dribbble lurker there is. I lurk and I creep and I lurk and I creep. It’s the only site I spend everyday on for which I do not have an account. But I digress.
The other day, I was knee deep in some creep when I came across this awesome shot. I immediately checked out the website and was positively flabbergasted. I didn’t even take a second to see who designed it! I just played around with the clever interactions like a happy toddler playing with legos.
My first thought was: This site is rocks. My second thought was: I need to get this dude using utellit! After all, his Twitter profile says that he is a “veritable vocal swiss-army knife”. SOLD!
I reached out to Mr. Cummings on Twitter and his son, Keenan, who I then realized built the website, said he’d like to snag a beta account and show his dad how to use utellit. Needless to say I was pleased.
The creeper that I am, I stalked Keenan for a bit and learned that he’s the co-founder of Wander, which looks totally superb. Do yourself a favor and go check out their site, sign up and reserve your username. After you click “save your spot” be sure to relish the cleverness to follow.
Or you can just check out what I'm talking about here.
I love that they name it "The Utterly Pointless Leaderboard" and I love that clicking the cow on the bottom gives you 1 point. As you may have guessed, I clicked the cow several times.
What's more though is that I instantly shared this page. From what Keenan told me, this bit of cleverness really did work in terms of getting Wander a bunch of sign ups.
Not only is the page beautiful, but the design, interactions and wording are so clever that it begs for a share. It oozes personality which is so important in building a positive emotional connection with people. FAKEGRIMLOCK said it best with respect to Wander:
"THIS RIGHT WAY VIRAL LAUNCH PRODUCT. IT HAVE MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY ALL OVER PLACE."
The robot dinosaur wrote a great post on Fred Wilson's blog about "minimum viable personality".
At utellit, we've always prided ourselves on having a lot of personality but Wander has inspired us to be more clever in how we show it.
