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Mark Fowler
on Mon Apr 30 2007 14:33:00 GMT+0100 (GMT)
During Web 2.0 Expo I had the 'chore' of running one of the demo machines on the booth. Of course, people say it's a chore, but it's not really. It's a chance to talk to some real people, face to face, about what Zimki is. It's a chance to talk to people about the great things you've been doing? How terrible is that? Oh, woe is me, I have to spend the next three hours talking about how insanely cool the stuff I'm doing is. It's a hard life, eh?
The trouble is, telling people everything about Zimki in about five minutes is really hard - So, the first thing I normally tell 'em is that. Zimki is many different things to many different people. It's a bunch of ideas bunched together running under one central idea, which was handly blazened across our chests. "Pre-shaved Yaks".
Do you like the new black T-Shirts opposed to the white? If Spiderman has a whole new cool evil black look this summer, why can't the Zimki Crew? Everyone at Web 2.0 Expo seemed to agree, as we gave away about 700 of these in just under two days.
Anyway, back to that idea. "Pre-Shaved Yaks." Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Makes an intriguing conversation starter, in a geek slogan kinda way. But what does it really stand for? It stands for making it darn easy for people to make web sites, to get down and create competitive advantage straight away (or as I like to think of it, get straight to the good stuff.)
The trouble with explaining Zimki in five minutes is everyone else has different yaks they have to shave before they can do some work. For the biz people it's sometimes that they need to invest money hardware, and we pre-shave that yak with our utility billing model. For developers it's often Zimki's persistency store rather than relying on a database, or the convenience of our user system, XML APIs, XML by Example, templating systems, or countless other cool shortcuts. For the infrastructure worriers it's that we can easily provide a development, staging and live environment that can take seconds to switch around giving near instant deployment.
The hard thing about the five minute demos on a stand is finding which of those things (or the countless other pre-shaved-yak things I didn't list above) is going to be the one thing that makes that attendee click instantly with what you're doing. Because when that happens - when they get it - it's a wonderful thing for a developer to see.
So maybe we should have a new slogan for our next batch of t-shirts. Zimki: It's more than one thing. But that's not cryptic enough for a t-shirt slogan now, is it? Maybe something like Zimki: Whatever your yak is, we've already shaved it.
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