Happy Birthday to elm

This past Saturday was elm’s 1 year anniversary of incorporation. It’s been 12 months since we started elm with the belief that people struggle with online research, and that personalized advice from an expert can make the process better. Since then, although the implementation has been refined by trial and error, the concept still remains solid. For the foreseeable future, we will be improving guides by making them more interactive, more accurate and better tuned to offering personalized advice, since we think this is the essence of what makes the guides “good”.

This past year has been very exciting and we are becoming experts on the delivery of personalized advice. Here are a few examples of what we’ve learned:

• There are two very different groups of people who use the web. Some are very impatient and would like answers as soon as possible. To these people, a talking avatar is an obstacle between them and the right answer (which is why we added the “Quiet Please” button). Others enjoy the conversation and walk away from the guide with a better understanding of their needs and what’s out there.

• If you promise interactivity, the guide should feel conversational. We spent countless hours making the avatar responsive to people’s clicks. The result is that people feel like the avatar is responding to them and they become more comfortable with the guide. We think we can still make the guide more interactive and future versions will do so.

• People don’t believe that 5 minutes with a guide can replace hours of online research and trips to the local electronics store. Moreover, people are still learning to trust the advice suggested by an expert over a salesperson in the store. We believe that this will change over time, once we can gather some proof that our suggestions are as good as they really are.

• There are many “guides” available on the web, which many people think are the same as elmGuides. We spend hours explaining that other guides are pretty much informational and still leave you to apply the knowledge. With other guides, the end of the guide is typically the beginning of the buying process, but with elm the guide ends with suggestions for you.

The road this past year has also been challenging, given the economic uncertainty and the typical roller coaster life of a startup, but days like this past Saturday keep me going. This Saturday, my friend asked to see an example of what we’ve been working at elm (I explained the concept to him in 2007) and I showed him the TV guide (http://elmlife.com/guide/HDTVBuyingGuide). He was amazed, saying that so many people struggle with electronics purchases. I then showed him that we can build any type of guide (by showing the recipe and wedding gown guide), and he said “this is absolute genius”. Like many people who see a guide, he began rattling off all the potential guides that we could build (a wine guide, house finding guide, career guide, car guide), and I drank in the energy of someone understanding elm for the first time. On days when no one returns my calls or my impatience for success gets the best of me, experiences like the one on elm’s birthday can keep me going for another year.

Welcome to the elm Technologies Blog

Hello, and welcome to our blog! We plan to use this blog to inform you about activities at elm, and the interesting things we learn along the way. One of the reasons I started elm was that I thought it would be a great way to pick experts' brains on many topics, and learn something new every day. As we build more guides, I'll share some of the interesting things I learn so you can enjoy them too.

Well, here's to bringing personalized advice to the masses....

http://www.elmlife.com