Running a “Why Now” Session

If you’re finding this post now, I actually wrote a book about all this… It’s called Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products. You’ll get a fuller perspective there.

This is a format I developed and have run with startups in incubators and accelerators, grad students, and other groups. The goal is to understand how timing may benefit a specific business or product and then how to express that. I use something that I call a Timing Map to help organize the information and understand its impact.

This entire exercise can be done in a few ways. Regardless of how much time you take for the steps, I recommend each step in the following order. I also included suggested time allotments and team member involvement. This is based on what has worked for me and the groups I’ve guided.

For background, see earlier posts on Timing and Product Success, Timing Drivers Visualized, and Avoid the Analysis of Others.

Why Now Session Steps

Form the team for the Why Now Session. That’s the founders for early-stage startups, CXOs for later-stage, and the product team for larger entities.
Form the team for the “Challenge Session.” These are the people who will pick apart your reasoning. The team could be made up of colleagues and friends for early-stage startups, colleagues across the organization and outside the organization for later-stage startups, and product leaders for larger entities. (I’ll cover the Challenge Session in a later post.)
Run the Why Now Session (advance preparation plus 1 – 2 hours of live meeting time).
Share findings with the Challenge Team. This can be either live (15 minutes) or sent in advance for individual review.
Challenge Team session. Present and take questions (1 hour total, with only 15 minutes needed for presenting and the rest of the time spent on questions).

Run the Why Now Session

1. Go through the list of drivers from the earlier posts. Which drivers are most important to your business now? Make a list of them.

If you end up with a long list, narrow down to the most important ones. Start to list the information relevant to your Why Now, including dates.

What relevant history should you know about? What earlier attempts were there at similar products?

What future expectations do you have? What will change because of the drivers you identified?

Most Relevant Drivers	Relevant History (Make a list of earlier attempts that didn’t work and why. Or earlier attempts that did work, but in a limited or different way. Include dates.)	Future expectations (Depends on driver type and expected speed of change. Include expected dates.)
“Driver 1”
“Driver 2”
“Driver 3”

2. Draw your own rough diagrams based on the drivers, using the ones below as examples. Since your situation probably includes multiple drivers, draw these however it’s most helpful to tell the story of what is changing. To keep your work readable, create a separate diagram for each driver.

For example, if your Why Now depends on a new technology becoming faster and cheaper, what’s the expected timeline for that?
For example, if your Why Now depends on a new social/behavioral norm, when did it become a noticeable niche? When might that norm become mainstream, if it hasn’t already?

3. Build the Timing Maps. Put each driver on its own timeline and show examples of the changes. You might show some distinct changes like this. Choose to put “today” at a spot that gives you enough room for the earlier examples. It’s OK if different charts have different total years of past history shown.

4. Related to the above, if you have a continuous change, rather than individual examples, you might show that change like this.

5. If you have examples of earlier companies that tried similar ideas, place them on a timeline. What happened to them? Did they fail because of bad timing?

6. If there are current companies building similar solutions, place them on another timeline. Again, choose where to put “today” so that you have enough room for the examples.

7. Now that you have done the above, mark these next points on your timelines:

The latest point at which you believe you would still be so early that your business would fail mainly because of timing. When were the drivers too weak to matter?
You can also draw a second line where you feel the market window will close based on how fast things are changing. This is where you expect other companies will dominate the industry if you don’t act. Being too late may be less of a problem than being too early.

Drivers may operate on different timelines. You’ll see below that I break them out separately and then stack them up to show the overall picture.

Also, some of these diagrams are loosely defined. When you do this exercise, it’s going to show your perspective, not a single true or false answer. You do however need to back up your perspective with data.

After this exercise, you can present all of this detail in a single slide when you pitch for investment or present your company. But the result of this exercise is that when you do speak about your business and its timing benefits, you’ll be able to have a much deeper discussion about your perspective.

Here’s an example with a large, successful company to gain more familiarity with the process.

Case Study: YouTube’s Why Now

Whenever I read about a process, I wish there were examples to help take me through them. I feel like I only really understand what to do once I see it in action. So if you’re like me in that respect, this next section is for you.

Let’s take YouTube, which was launched as a startup in 2005, to demonstrate the above technique.

Why was YouTube’s timing great? It might be hard to think back to why.

We take for granted that we can find and stream a video of just about anything today. That wasn’t always the case. What drivers impacted YouTube’s launch?

The following info is from both the Viacom Vs Google (YouTube) lawsuit that exposed Sequoia’s investment memo and other research on the companies and technologies mentioned.

1. Scanning the list of timing drivers, these look like the most important for YouTube.

Most Relevant Drivers	Relevant History (Make a list of earlier attempts that didn’t work and why. Or earlier attempts that did work, but in a limited or different way. Include dates.)	Future expectations (Depends on driver type and expected speed of change. Include expected dates.)
Technology: Moore’s Law	Falling cost of data storage needed for video files. Cost of storage for typical short videos (only 7 Megs at the time) was much less than $0.01 in 2005.	Expected to continue to decline. Data storage cost projections are available.
Technology: Edholm’s Law	Increasing data speeds for streaming large video files. By 2005 it’s already common for people to have broadband in the home. Broadband to the home grew at over 30% per year in the lead up to 2005, with approximately 30% of US households having broadband by 2005. Cost of bandwidth for typical short video files was much less than $0.01 in 2005.	Expected to continue to decline. Projected along Edholm’s Law curve.
Social/Behavioral	More people comfortable with sharing images and videos and videoing themselves. Relevant acquisitions: Picasa (digital photo organizing service launched in 2002) was acquired by Google in 2004, Snapfish (online photo sharing and printing) was acquired by HP in 2005, and Flickr (photo sharing site launched in early 2004) was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.	Expected to continue. People will not stop sharing online as it becomes easier to do so. People already sharing images will start to share video.
Social/Behavioral	Social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Facebook launched in 2003 and 2004 and are growing in popularity.	Expected to continue. These social networking sites will drive both supply and demand of online video.
Installed Base	Webcams connected to a computer became common with sales in the tens of millions of units sold by 2005.	Expected to become more popular as they become cheaper and better.
Installed Base	Digital camera (can be carried around and then connected to a computer to upload files) unit shipments were approximately 60M in 2004 and 65M in 2005, globally.	Expected to become more popular as they become cheaper and better.
Regulatory/Legal	Problems distributing copyrighted content. Avoid the issues in the beginning, with the understanding that a solution will be needed eventually. YouTube did have to deal with pirated copyrighted content later, but since the company focused on user generated content, this area is unimportant for the Why Now analysis.	Not a top driver of timing.

2. Draw diagrams for the above list.

If any of these stopped growing, which would have the biggest impact on YouTube?
Draw projections (dashed lines) based on industry reports and the likelihood that the trend would continue.
Input your own perspective as well.

3. Now let’s look at why earlier attempts partially succeeded or failed. What has changed since then?

Earlier attempts at video streaming include:

The band Severe Tire Damage played the first Internet concert in 1993. This was broadcast live at Xerox PARC with video and audio carried over the highspeed MBONE (IP Multicast Backbone) and using a significant amount of all Internet bandwidth available. The band then opened for The Rolling Stones in another online show in 1994. Sound and video quality was poor.
Real Networks RealVideo Player (1997) could stream video and vary the number of frames per second depending on connection and computer processing power.
Blockbuster / Enron Broadband Services (2000, not launched) focused on the distribution of existing copyrighted content. Required a TV and a device.
Hong Kong Telecom iTV (1998 to 2002) required TV, a set top box, and high-speed Internet. Users experienced long delays when trying to load videos and little content to choose from.
Shareyourworld.com (1998 – 2001) enabled users to upload and share their own videos. The company was without a revenue model and had bandwidth problems, but benefitted from cameras becoming cheaper.

4. Competitors. Now add the recent companies (in 2005) delivering similar services.

PutFile launched early 2004. Provided video hosting, with ratings.
Vimeo launched in late 2004. Some problems with the technology, owned by CollegeHumor, which helped with distribution.
Google Video launched early 2005. Targeted existing content, rather than user generated content.
24 Hour Laundry (24HL) launched in 2005. Focused on video hosting and blogging.
Dailymotion launched in 2005.
Other video companies focused on adult content and were unlikely to move to the mainstream market. I’m not counting them in the list.

5. Build the Timing Maps. Make diagrams of the main drivers. For each chart I marked Too Early (dotted vertical line). In the competitor chart I marked the opportunity bracket (the space between Too Early and estimates for when the market window will close, shown by the other dotted line at the right). Today (the year 2005) is shown in bold.

YouTube also made good decisions. Helping with distribution, YouTube transcoded different video file formats to compressed Flash video, the most common format at the time. Other video companies of YouTube’s era made tactical errors, had poor management, or didn’t improve their slow video load time. Those examples are important, but aren’t included in the Why Now Session, except as additional context.

Depending on who you present to, you might not want to share all the details that came out of your Why Now Session. As a summary, put your findings in a readable single slide when you pitch for investment or present your company. The result of this exercise is that when you do speak about your business and its timing benefits, you’ll be able to have a much deeper discussion about your perspective. If desirable, you can also share the extra content in a more detailed presentation.

Now that we’ve done YouTube’s Why Now Session, what would a summary slide look like? Here’s my version.

When you compare this slide with all the detail in the above sections you can see that I chose not to include every detail. After all, when you present your Why Now slide you’re getting into a discussion, not putting every piece of supporting detail on one page. But with the more detailed work above, you will be able to discuss each of the slide’s bullet points in detail. Skip the above steps and you’ll risk a superficial understanding of your timing advantage. By going through the above process you’ll also have the content for a more detailed version that you might want to share with some audiences, such as your Challengers.

Feel free to say hello here or at @porlando on Twitter. I hold “Why Now” workshops periodically. Contact me to learn about the next one.

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