The second Keynote of the day comes from Nick Holzherr who was in the final of the BBC Apprentice in 2012.
Nick over-complicated his pitch of his business plan to launch ‘Whisk’ so he knows the meaning behind simplifying things to make them better. His new business has now launched and he is talking us through how they convert people just looking at recipes into people actually buying the ingredients and cooking the recipe.
Stephen Pavlovich, the Director of Conversion Factory is moderating the session.
Nick started off the talk by showing us a clip of the Apprentice from earlier this year which shows him explaining his business model to investors, of which none of them thought the pitch was going to be a success. Since leaving the Apprentice, Nick has realised that he over complicated his pitch and has since refined it and now has a business running online.
If you are interested in Nicks business, Whisk, check it out here – www.whisk.co.uk
Let’s start with a couple of quotes which help bring us back to thinking ‘simplicity’:
If you are unable to explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough – “Albert Einstein”
Simplicity if the ultimate sophistication “Leonardo Di Vinci”
When you are launching a new business or refining an existing one, you need to focus on user experience. The user needs to want the product or service you are selling or you won’t have a business! So many people don’t think about the user when they are building a website or business and are setting themselves up to fail.
Looking at some of the most successful online businesses, their website and landing pages are so simple. When you land on the page you immediately know exactly what they want you to do. They do this by analysing the data for all the visitors to their site. Making it simple = more conversions.
Some examples:
Google – Have a huge data set and they use this brilliantly to show their customers the most relevant websites based on their search. They have added in personalised results so that websites displayed may have also been viewed by your friends. Google are learning and adapting their algorithms everyday to ensure their customers see what they want to see. They make it easy!
Facebook – If you spend more time looking at certain peoples profiles than others, Facebook will begin to populate your news feed with more updates from those people. They know that you are interested in certain profiles and they make it easy for you by returning results that you are interested in most.
Nick has taken a lot of the experiences from other businesses and tried to utilise them in his own company, Whisk, where he is attempting to make it very easy for customers to add ingredients for a recipe into a shopping basket and buy online. There is a lot that has gone into this and Nick has been analysing the data continuously to make the website simple to use.
Machine Learning is important, you need to gather as much data as possible and mine that data to learn as much about each user as possible when they are on your site.
Quote of the Session from Nick
“Embrace Complexity but show your users Simplicity.”
Speaker Bios
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