Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

The Word is out, DabbleDB has gotten funding. Ventures West was the firm savvy enough to snap this deal up. I had the chance to see these guys demo their stuff at DemoCamp a few months back and what they’re doing is some spectacular bits of technology. Imagine all of those non-math things you bastardized Excel to do like keep lists of schedules, contacts or semi-organized action logs and so forth. Dabbledb takes all your data and you can play with it through just-like and Excel interface while in the background it magically sorts, cross-links and organizes everything into a database without you the user having to know how the hell it’s doing it. And then, like google spreadsheets, it’s web-based so you can access and collaborate on the data without the hell of version tracking and e-mailing around document versions and who’s got the latest version and so forth.

Om broke the story and Paul Kedrosky of ventures West adds a few clarifying points here.

Toronto, the “City that always wins the world cup.” Alex Manu

For those interested in a brief interlude into marketing science….

Earlier this week professor Dillip Soman gave a lecture on the topic of his research “overchoice”. His findings, briefly: too much consumer choice can often be a bad thing. Too much product selection can result in purchasing behaviour that is suboptimal (from both the perspective of buyer and seller).

Here’s some quick notes from the evening’s presentation…

For the customer, too much selection can result in increased cognitive load, reduced buying confidence and greater purchase regret. These effects have been shown to both reduce the chance of purchase and damage brand perception.

Furthermore, In response to overchoice customers often fall back to default behaviour. Data shows that every time snapple introduces a new set of flavours, sales of *regular* snapple go up and many other examples. Like cholesterol though, some types of choice are healthier for you than others.

What turns out to be an important distinction are “alinged” vs “non-aligned” choices.

good choice: like size, quantity, speed vs price. Customers are okay with trading off attributes that are directly comparable eg. “aligned”

bad choices: Things that are difficult to compare “non-aligned” such as choosing between models with tradeoffs of many differing attributes. Understandably, when you make it hard for customers to choose, they become stressed.

In almost every category 3-5 is found to be near the optimal maximum number of non-aligned choices. If you need to offer more selection than this better to offer cascading options rather than “chinese menu” style 150 choices at once which will overwhelm your customers only ever ordering the same 4 things hot and sour soup, kung pow chicken etc.

Implications: In packaged goods for instance, competition can lead to “selection wars” as competing brands try to crowd out shelf space by offering more varieties – to their mutual detriment. This is a prisoner’s dilemma type game -or like a price war- where value is fought and lost through overchoice rather than pricing.

Read more, abstract (free) and full copy (not free) of the paper available here