Building Momentum from a Standstill

The last couple of weeks, I shared some discussions with a CEO of a services start-up here in Phoenix. She and her team of three were having a disconnect about how quickly or slowly they were progressing. It was obvious that there was a communication break-down, but the underlying theme is that each person's perspective was very different regarding how fast the company was progressing. It didn't help that one of her team-mates thought she wasn't doing enough... Why is it that she was unable to make significant strides on a weekly, bi-weekly basis? I don't have all of the details for her company, but I venture to say that her company and mine are in similar boats.

Momentum is something we all wish to have as entrepreneurs, because this type of self-powered energy that gets a lot accomplished in a short amount of time. But to get to momentum requires that a lot of sweat equity is used in a small amount of time, and time, as usual is something we all have less and less of. Whether it's services or software, her start-up and mine share the same obstacles:

1. full-time day jobs with part-time start-up
2. zero compensation during early start-up phase
3. other ideas??

So the key is to ask ourselves, how do we get momentum for free? That's really the question. I can't speak for her services business (hopefully she'll comment to this blog), but from a software engineering perspective, the current wisdom of the crowd is to get a product out quickly so that the customers can start to provide feedback.

The following post at The Ideal Startup (Engineering) Team blog, speaks to the importance of designing for usability because valuable feedback can be gathered early on. Of course, this begs the question about how we can keep our idea under wraps so competitors don't feed off of it, but that may be a risk we'll have to do. They don't speak about how to acheive momentum for free, but I suspect that if we keep the customer in mind we'll be able to make ourselves design for them. Makes me wonder whether the customer survey that we created months ago should be revisited and actually sent out??

So does anyone have ideas as to how to get past square one? How did you achieve momentum for your start-up?

-john

Lukewarm Response to Presentation

Well, I don't know what happened but the lack of response in the areas which I thought would receive attention is a concern to me. I gave a 7 minute presentation of the business plan with financials and the panelists did not seem very interested in the opportunity.

I could understand if the market growth potential to be a concern, but there were zero questions about the business model. This annoyed me because I spent the most time on the financials and justifying costs and market growth and making what I felt were realistic growth projections.

Did I do such a good job at explaining how we'll be generating revenue that questions didn't need to be asked? Were the revenue models understood when I introduced them? What about how I intended to spend the funding for the seed round? The only question that touched on financials dealt with how my financial projections would be impacted if the initial market focus was made more narrow.

I did receive a question about barriers to entry and how I intended to keep this going. My honest answer was there was zero barrier to entry and I was depending on being first to market.

The other two questions were on the selection of the company name. Two of the panelist thought that the name would a) segregate half of the population because they wouldn't understand it, and b) branding of such a name would be costly because of the consumer would have to be educated.

So what did I learn from this presentation? I learned that as a team, we didn't prepare enough for the presentation. I don't think we understood our audience well enought to anticipate where they'd focus their attention. We didn't practice questions and answers. We didn't do ourselves justice.

Also, I don't think I have the stage presence to connect with the audience. Sure I can do presentations, but I can't sell the message effectively -- perhaps the 7 minute limit is harsh, but a good salesman could have done it in 30 seconds.

No rest for the weary, we're pushing forward,

-john

The 3rd Amigo

Good news, we've added a third person to our team of founders. I've been so busy working on the presentation for next week's pitch that I wasn't even involved personally to recruit this candidate, but my partner did all of the schmoozing to great success.

Now, we've got two strong technical founders and then there's me :-) What I like most about this combination is the strong working history that this new candidate has had with my other founder. The two of them have worked together for about a decade now, and that includes, stints at two different companies too.

I'm looking forward to having all of us wear many different hats of the next year. The most important item on the agenda is next week's pitch at ASU.

-john

Recruiting Advisors

One of the many tasks on my ever growing list of things to do is to find candidates to be advisors for the company. What does this entail? Hehe, this is going to sound like a classifieds ad for date, but here goes.

I would like someone who is honest in their feedback and can take a minute or two to engage me on the ups and downs of doing this business. This person does not have to have business, technology, or entrepreneurial experiences, but should be able to think critically about the business model and other issues. Location doesn't matter, as cell phones and emails work enough, but I do like face to face interaction, so a Phoenix native would be a plus. Age? Well, age doesn't matter at all.

The ideal candidate will be a former consumer ecommerce entrepreneur. She will have had experience raising capital. Finding "A-list" executives. She would have experience dealing with board of directors and investors, the growing pains of growing from zero revenue to $10M, and she would have sold the company for a nice exit.

What can I give in return? My friendship and time, and lots of startup talks for now :-)

Man, that really did come across as a dating ad, haha, but thats the way it goes. Entrepreneurs are match-makers, too, you know?

I've started to keep a list of people and contacts that we know and how we could approach them. So far, the list is mostly family and friends, with a few acquaintances, should be interesting to see how this all works out.

-john

Google: 5th largest company by market cap

You gotta love what the Google brothers are doing in their labs. Techcrunch recently wrote about how the company passed the $700 per share mark on Halloween and has positioned themselves within site of four heavy-weights, Exxon-Mobile, GE, Microsoft, and AT&T.


Just imagine all the brand name companies that are in their rear-view mirror... Walmart and Citigroup, to name a couple.

Financial Model Needs Work

I got some very blunt feedback from a business coach yesterday. He liked my executive summary, said it was well-written, but he thought my growth curve and expenses were unrealistic.

I've been having a hard time making the right assumptions about the business. The number of technical heads, the length of time to produce a widget, the number of business heads for marketing and sales, the number of widgets sold per month, the number of alliances/partners, etc...

This was my first attempt at financial projections and I was trying to fit the business into the hockey-stick curve. Wrong idea. So my next go around in the coming days will be purely bottom-up with less focus on achieving the 10x return on investment after 5 years. We'll see what happens.

-john

Recap of Presentation

Yesterday's 7 Minute Pitch at ASU went well. I'm going to stop short of saying it was excellent, but it was good enough for us to get some hard-nosed questions and feedback. This was a dry-run to make sure that our value proposition and business model can be effectively expressed.

Of all the comments and questions we received, the following sums it up quite well. Paul Rasjski, former VP of marketing at BAAN (which was sold in 2000 to Invensys for $700M), said we piqued his interest and left him with questions as to how we do it, but he also offered a strategic issue that we need to address and that is of IP, and how we may or may not infringe upon a main competitors patent.

Other questions:
- how do you intend to spend the funding upon receiving it?
- what is our value proposition for the alliance partners?

The rest of the comments feedback were about the presentation itself:
- no need to emphasize the demographic and statistics that we stressed as the "problem statement"
- cadence and tone were good, pace as well
- the product feature comparison chart was well received b/c it compared how our offering is different from the main competitors
- introduction needs to be worked to tell a story

There is still work to be done to get the pitch right. I could tell in certain portions of the presentation that the audience was less interested than others... We've got until Nov 5th to refine the message -- that's the full-up presentation in front of a panel, including an angel investor.

-john

Milestone Event

So much has happened lately, it's hard to keep up with the writing.

One: The biggest thing that has happened to us recently is the validation of a test/demonstration. I know, I've kept mum about the idea for awhile, and I will still remain so, but the validation came about 10 days after the test was done, so it was unexpected and awesome at the same time.

Two: We've finished our application to YC's winter funding round and it is submitted. Now we wait for word on whether we get to continue our journey in Boston/San Fran or we just do it here in Phoenix. We'll see which dance we get invited to.

Tapping ASU for Marketing Help

It seems that the more time I spend on looking at the marketing plan, the bigger the task grows. Sure, marketing is only a piece of the business plan, but if there isn't a market or if one doesn't know how to engage this market, the business will go nowhere. With that in mind, I've decided to be a little unorthodox and have made the following decisions.

a) Focus on the marketing plan/strategy, before getting the business entity done.
b)Engage ASU's student population to help with the marketing plan.

To help meet this objective, I went to ASU last week and met with a business planning coach about on-campus contacts who could help us in marketing. The POC he gave me works in the Dean's Office of the Business School; she never replied to my email, even with me name-dropping the business coach :-) I'll try again in a couple of weeks.

Today, I met with a person in ASU's Community & Entrepreneurial Liaison's office -- match students interested in entrepreneurialism with local ventures. My objective to meeting with them is to find students to help us with our marketing section. I think it behooves us to tap into the 18-30 year old demographic and why not use the collective intelligence of these students to solidify our marketing plan.

So, we talked about our venture's needs and what/how these ASU students may be able to help. The school has had a huge response to their solicitation for businesses in the community that want to tap into this group of interested students -- some 600+ businesses responded for 25 or so interested students. He mentioned that if it wasn't for my connection to the LPEC class then he wouldn't set aside time to help a non-ASU affiliated ventures. We talked some more and it was apparent that he understood the opportunity that we could offer his students; he will be pitching Marketing 300-level students in a couple of weeks to find more candidates. So we'll see where this leads us, perhaps with a good team of energetic students to work alongside us to meet a big goal.

As for next week, I have another meeting planned with the director of career services. Which may well allow us some recruiting ops for a different set of students, my guess are students not necessarily in business school. I'm not going to leave any stone unturned while at ASU's campus, this is one of the biggest student populations in the nation, so there is bound to be some interested students.

Actually, I did see a flyer posted in the engineering building's men's room -- ASU Facebook Application Club, join and learn how to make money with Facebook apps. Hmmm, I may have to pay them a visit because it would be foolish to ignore Facebook's built-in user base. Think, engaging Facebook's users as a part of a larger marketing strategy.

Alright, about to start my business class tonight. I need to get a Ning site setup in 30 minutes so that I can hand out the url to partipants -- in case the class doesn't have a good way to communicate with the group.

-john

Internet Platforms, which one to do?

I read a great posting written by Marc Andreessen on what defines an internet platform and what differentiates one platform type from another. You can find his write-up here.

I appreciate the time he took to write this because it helps me and my team to answer a fundamental question, "Why are we building this product?" It is easy to look at the near-term and focus on solving the "low hanging fruit" problem -- we're doing this to solve problem A. But what happens after A? Perhaps we need to architect our solution, such that we won't have to solve problem B, but allow other people the opportunities to solve B and subsequent problems.

You'll find in Marc's writing that he shamelessly promotes Ning, which is one of his companies. I normally find that type of promotion a little too self-serving, but in this case, it isn't so bad. The reason is that Ning is growing and has not reached critical mass such that mainstream America and Madison Avenue will pay attention. Marc is explaining how Ning is different from other platforms because it is cutting-edge in the way that it will host and run other people's applications. Sure it's a social network, but it allows for 3rd parties to do more than any other type of network will allow. We won't have to host, process, and manage our apps locally because if we deploy on Ning and tap their user base, we'll be using their infrastructure. Kinda neat, huh?

Confused yet? Well, go read his write-up and let me know if it makes you rethink your vision for your ideas.

Internal Communication & External Marketing

Open communication was one of the main topics discussed by the team this past weekend. The main issue was our individual intentions and how we wanted to see our venture proceed. Each of us has a different way to get to the end-game, and this topic will have to be revisited again. In addition, we decided we need a way for us to resolve disagreements; go carting, first-person gaming, and inflatable sumo wrestling were suggested.

Then, we discussed in length how our business planning has been coming along, and to be honest, we're barely getting anywhere important. The reason we believe this to be is that the most important part to a business plan, at least to us, is the marketing strategy. We've focused on the other parts and have largely ignored the marketing plan. Studies have been conducted and many articles have been written about software companies with very promising technologies that ended up going bust because the market was not sufficiently tapped. If we can't get to our customers, we'll never generate revenue. So my task for the coming weeks, months, will be to focus on how to get to our target market, the steps we'll have to take, the money that will need to be spent, and the trade-offs to be done.

-john

Condor: Recap Business Counseling Mtg

Yesterday was our scheduled meeting with SCORE. The purpose for meeting with them was to help us answer three questions:

1) which business structure is most favorable for investors?
2) how do we request seed-capital?
3) how do we determine the valuation of our venture?

So here is how the meeting went...

The meeting was at noon, but I stopped by on the way to work to drop off the draft Condor executive summary for Jim Batz to read prior to the meeting; his expertise is in business planning and manufacturing.

Our Background
His first question for me was about my background, particularly education and current job. Fine.

Then he wanted to know about why I was there? I laid out the three questions that we wanted answered and then we started talking about the business model.

Business Model
A half hour discussion about the business model with him trying to understand how he would make use of it. He asked, "so after this occurs, then what?" Good point, I had never made it clear in the executive summary, and had always assumed that readers would understand what would happen next. Jim's uncertainty meant that we need to include this critical step; good.

Commitment Level
He looked at the executive summary and mentioned, "You're asking for this much money." I explained that it was an early guess at a need and that it was a placeholder value in order to complete the draft executive summary. He then asked, "will you be quiting your job?" Of course I said yes and that was what he wanted to hear.

Purpose of a business?
Uhmmm, I replied, "to make money". He remarked that making money is the result of doing business, not the purpose. My second response was the right one, "to meet the needs of the consumer." He emphasized that we need to always keep the customer's needs understood and met. Fine.

Then we spent the rest of the session focused on what to do for a business plan. He gave us some forms to review and to do -- homework for the next meeting with him.

Who makes the decisions?
He remarked that we have three cofounders... he wanted us to know that someone has to be able to make the final decision. Okay.

Corporate Structure
He referred us to some online sources to understand the different structures, but remarked that we may want to consider an LLC umbrella company with sub-companies under it.

Financials to Valuation
He explained briefly what we need to do to get our financial projections started. This exercise will feed directly in doing our valuation, question 3. This value is also driven by our business model, How do you add value to the market by using your business model?

What is the ideal business going to be 3-5 years from now? What are the things that need to be in place at that 3 year timeframe? Looking out and working backwards, we'll be able to know what internal and external pieces have to be in place to achieve the ideal system. This vision core + ideal will allow us to cost the core capacity and capability. Capacity + Capability = Cost

We'll have to calculate different capacity levels to help us crunch our numbers for different financial scenarios. 100%, 80%, Reasonable Guess, and Break-Even. If we can't succeed at 80% capacity, we shouldn't be in business. This being said, Jim has a manufacturing background and I am not sure how well running a server at maximum capacity will fit into this capacity calculation. Especially since we're thinking of scaling our infrastructure using a hosted model. When we get to this part of the business plan, I'll be sure to work with Jim to iron this out.

So once we understand a maximum capacity, we will also know the maximum capability. This will then allow us to figure out what the cost will be to have a system running full-bore at 100%. We'll be able to cost bandwidth, hosting, rent, salaries, etc... Add up the numbers and that is the cost of running the system. I'm a little unclear though, how to go from this point to the valuation, but we'll get there.

What is your hamburger?
McDonald's sells all sorts of food, but they are identified with hambugers. That being said, what is our core offering, such that Condor will be identified by that service?

Homework/Research
There is a lot for us to review and work on individually/together so that we can all be on the same page. Business entity, corporate structure, licensing, insurance, getting a lawyer, etc...

Next Meeting
I scheduled the next meeting for Oct. 24th at 11am.

To Do List
There is a lot to do yet; this never changes. We should try and meet this Sunday to review our personal expectations for the business, our roles, etc... Setting aside the project for now, what is it that we want from this business and how each of us thinks we can get there.

That's it for now!
-john

"Competitor" raises $9 Million

One of the companies that competed with my Angus idea just raised $9 million in funding...wow. Back in mid-July, I was still working on Angus, which was advertising at the point of sale. I was attempting to solve a common ecommerce problem called, shopping cart abandonment. This is the problem where shoppers add items to their cart and then decide to checkout, but for different reasons, they decide to leave the retailer's site. While investigating the advertising market and the different business models being used, I came across BazaarVoice, whose business it is to compile consumer product reviews.

I did a SWOT analysis for Angus back then and wrote that BazaarVoice was one of Angus' competitors in the mature market for influencing consumer purchases. I'm not sure whether I'm happy that we set aside the Angus idea, because of this company's recent funding acheivements, but it's kindof neat to see that the analysis was purposeful.

YC Application and beyond

I've been working on filling out the YC application for this Wintor 2008 funding round. It's taken me a lot longer than I thought. The reason for this is the nagging question of whether my "idea has legs?" It's come down to two ideas on our plate, Condor and Elephant. Condor is consumer related while Elephant is very much a b2b. While I figure out which of the two has a greater upside, I'll try to get the Condor survey out soon.

Regardless of the YC deadline, I have to realistic about it and position myself for local funding opportunities. There are some preparations that I still need to do, especially on the recruiting front for rapid prototyping developers.

1. I have a Sept 12th meeting with a SCORE counselor, I hope to get some Condor questions answered, as well as recruiting strategies.
2. I visited Glendale Community College recently and spoke with one of their guidance counselors for how to tap the student population about recruiting for the team.
3. I will be doing the same recruiting at ASU and it may be easier to do this now that they have an office that handles the liaison between entrepreneur and student-intern.

We'll see what happens.

-john

Survey Feedback & Planning

I've got a three-pronged attack for this survey. Feedback loop, administering survey, getting the word out.

The feedback I've received about the survey questions have varied greatly. Most people thought the questions were good, but that sort of feedback doesn't provide much info to me. I did receive two useful emails which pointed out a wording flaw in the survey.

The wording at issue is similar to the following example survey about ballroom dancing experiences,

Question #1 Have you ever done ballroom dancing? [Yes, No]

Question #2 How would you describe the first time you doing ballroom dancing? [text box]

Question #3 Would you be interested in lessons? [Yes, No, Maybe]

This may seem well and good to you, but it isn't ideal. If the respondent selects No for the first quesiton, then the following questions wouldn't make sense and would be awkward to answer. That's the issue I have to fix with my questioning.

I downloaded an open-source survey script, called Ask People, to administer this survey. I also added a Google Analytics script to this survey so that I can capture traffic details (location, new or returning visitor, etc...) while the survey is being taken. I intend to use the results of the survey and the traffic information to help paint a good picture showing the opportunity at hand. This may help me with recruiting :-)

The survey wouldn't be any good if I don't get the word out and pull favors. Part one is to email my friends and family to ask them to take the survey. Two, I will also ask them to forward the survey to their contacts. Three, I will be asking friends who use social networks (myspace, facebook, friendster) to post the message out to their network. Ideally, I'll get several hundred results from around the country. We'll see.

-john

Differing Goals

It's been another learning experience this week on how to manage people's expectations and personal interests. After the team meeting on Sunday morning, we left with differing views on what/which idea would be the main objective for the team.

We had two differing camps: Condor or Doberman. Though the Condor idea continued to evolve, this time to remove a critical differentiator for the idea, my gut was still telling me that Condor has a real market opportunity. Doberman was being favored by RG because it was more byte-sized and the expectations for a high-tech solution are lower. I don't think we agree on the size of Condor's market or the problem-space that it may solve. For you readers, I haven't explained Condor and Doberman on this blog, yet. Remember, I only reveal the details after I've set the idea on a shelf and have moved on; see ideas Angus and Bison.

We talked it over again and we came up with a gameplan. We will focus on getting Condor's concept and perhaps a demo ready for the Y Combinator Winter Funding Deadline of Oct 11th. The sooner we get this application into them, the sooner we can apply our energy towards launching Doberman.

The reason for two separate approaches is to appeal to the investment/networking opportunity at YC. Condor may have a greater upside, though it would require more time to implement, so unless we're funded by an angel for a few months, allowing us to quit our day jobs and bang out the product, Condor will have to take a back-seat to Doberman come October. Doberman on the other hand is almost too easy. The upside and potential isn't as great, and since the concept is very low tech, I can't imagine YC would be interested in the venture... Imagine, the solution requires a person to be involved with operations, too!

- I sent out the Condor survey for comments yesterday, so we'll see what feedback we get.
- I borrowed DE's PHP and MySQL Web Dev book, looks like I'll be coding this weekend.

The fun continues!

-john

Retool Condor; introducing Doberman

Here's a recap of what happened over the weekend:

Survey
I completed a draft of a customer survey and posted it in our google group. There were three sections to it: set the stage for the customer, ask about experiences, offer a solution.

We want the customer to be in the right mindset prior to filling out the questionnaire, so by giving them a short story/description, we are able to get them to focus correctly. We'll then ask them about their experiences and how they liked or disliked them, finally we'll offer the possible Condor solution and inquire whether they would use a service such as Condor. And ofcourse we'll gather demographic info and gather their level of interest on being an early adopter of the service.

Meeting
The team got together on Sunday morning to discuss the deal-breaker issue for Condor. This being the need to establish 3rd party partnerships to make the service even work... Research was conducted and we found some information which states that this sort of arrangement is unlikely to happen because it places undue risk and liability for the 3rd parties. This being said, the survey draft was not that important anymore and our focus changed to how we could retool the idea to reduce the liability for the 3rd parties.

Doberman
While thinking about how to change Condor, Doberman was born; I've written an initial concept in the google group. Doberman plays in the same arena as Condor, but is sufficiently different enough to be treated seperately. It may be the case that we'll combine these two ideas as a single plan with phased implementation; I think investors may like it better that way :-)

That's all for now, lots to ponder still. I need to get more comments on the survey though.

-john

Condor: Status

Here's a quick recap of what we've accomplished since my post on Aug. 17th:

Technology
- I did two installations of the same open-source script on my LAMP server at home, calling them site A and site B, respectively.
- DE and I met last night to see how we can forward data from site A to site B; he had a copy of Apache2Triad running, btw
- We soon realized that our attempts to capture transaction data from the session token was not the way to go because it was too cumbersome. Instead, we'll have the data stored on a local database. We can then query for the information when we need it and then repackage it prior to sending it out to a partner site.
- There is still a lot more to figure out, including coming to agreement on the concept of operations.

Business
- I emailed various organizations with whom I have affiliation about their business resources
- my engineering adviser/professor at George Washington University
- the entrepreneurship club at GWU
- the alumni association at University of Maryland University College, for alumni living in Phoenix

Additional Task
- Address investor risk, specifically market risk. To do this, I am going to produce a survey of potential customers. More details on this in a later posting.

-john

How does VC behavior change when interest rates are cut?

I posted the following question, How does VC behavior change when interest rates are cut?, on Y Combinator News because I am trying to understand the relationship between interest rates and the likelihood for angels and VCs to actively be investing in start-ups; my post with people's replies can be found at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771.

I remember a few years back when timing would have made all the difference. I was spending my evenings working with a start-up in Washington, DC to get their business off the ground. They were trying to partner with either Erickson or Nortel to exchange equity for equipment, but the bubble burst and the wining and dining went up in smoke. Ideally, I would like to try and time the launch of a company when angels and VCs are more likely to be handing out money.

Do you have no life because you work in a startup or...

I responded to the following Y Combinator News posting by vuknje, "Do you have no life because you work in a startup or..."

My response was:
"Oftentimes, working/thinking about my startup consumes my attention, such that my wife thinks I don't care about anything else... I find it hard to understand why other people just don't "get it" when it comes to entrepreneurship."

I used to spend my evenings working on my projects, but have now had to change to early mornings. It's tough on the family (wife and two kids) for me to work on stuff in the evening, so now I wake up at 5am and work till 6:30, at which time the morning routine of getting the kids ready for school kicks in. The weekends afford even less time for me to work on my start-ups...

-john

Condor: Near-Term Planning

So here is a preliminary game plan looking forward a couple of months. There will be many more things to investigate, but here is a quick list:

This week
- setup two sites for testing out a proof of concept

1 Month
- complete a proof of concept; the team members have agreed to help at various levels.
- begin looking at which retailers would be most willing to work with us
- discuss with advisers about how we can get retailers to cooperate; I already scheduled an appointment with SCORE for Sept 12th.

2 Month
- apply to YC with demo sites
- attend Launch Prep course at ASU Technopolis; I already signed up for it, starts mid-September
- see if thru ASU Technopolis, we can get an introduction to demo our idea for an angel; I'd like to get enough money to be able to work on the project full-time

I'll work on the two sites this weekend and hopefully beginning of next week we can start to do some mods and tests.

-john

Can a Start-Up Succeed w/o Developers as Founders?

I posted the following question, Can software start-ups succeed with non-programmer founder(s)? on the YC news forum; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42508.

The reason I'm asking is that my quest for launching a start-up(s) will mostly be done by me, until I can find a developer/partner who is willing to share the same sacrifices and risks. I hope to get some feedback on this question from someone in the investment community. We'll see.

-john

Condor: Prelim SWOT; Plan Proof of Concept

I just got back from a weekend camping at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. 'twas a fun time, but now back to business... {the full version of this posting is in the google groups page}

Direct Competitors?
I did an initial search for companies that do the same thing as Condor -- none found so far. Not even those {cut} have this kind of feature.

Alternative Competitors?
These are the alternatives that might take away a customer. For example, if we were in the automotive business, an alternative competitor may well be public transportation and cycling. As for Condor, the alternative for consumers is to do things the old-fashioned way -- {cut} (If you haven't read what Condor is all about, please do so in the Pages section) That answers two of the hardest parts for a SWOT.

The Opportunity is to fulfill a consumer need and to provide convenience.

As for the Threat? There is no direct competitor and there is no alternative. There will always be copy-cats (so no biggie). There is always the risk of a slow rate of adoption. These last two points are pretty much a part of any Threat analysis, so overall, I'd say that Condor is a high opportunity and a low threat.

Proof of Concept
I think with Condor, I will actually spend some time looking at how a proof of concept can be thrown together. Why focus on this now? Since Condor's business model is so easy to understand and the opportunity is more apparent, I think it would serve us well if a proof of concept were put together. At the very least, I will document my train of thought, and if you ever want to comment, please do.

The 10,000 Feet View
{cut}

Condor at 10,000 feet will need to do the following:
{cut}

3rd party {cute} site will need to do the following:
{cut}

More thinking to come, got to leave for the cubicle farm.

-john

Investors at YC Demo Day

Today was Demo day for the summer Y Combinator teams in Boston, MA; the winter one let me remind you is in San Fran :-)

Here is just a quick snippet of those investors who attended the demos, a little info about what happened, but the bulk of the event is kept under-wraps. Still I like reading the list of investors,
http://www.innoeco.com/2007/08/demo-day-at-y-combinator.html

-john

Condor: v1

Alrighty, concept Condor is available for reading. I'm testing out this versioning option for the Group Pages. So you'll have to read about Condor from the Pages section of our Google group. We'll see how well this works, if it is cumbersome, I'll just go back to the way I've been doing it and put the content in the discussion pages.

Condor is so straightforward, it's short and sweet.

-john

Bison: Prelim SWOT; Put on Hold

The following is what I worked on while flying from Rhode Island to Atlanta(lay-over) last week. What I found was a narrow market for customers, which can be a bad thing.

Who are the customers again?

• bloggers, people who like to write, people who review things, etc...

Unfortunately, most of the people who get online do not create content.

A prelim-SWOT had me stuck on the externals: Opportunity and Threats.

BCNN Opportunity:

• create first blogging news service
• monetize user generated content

BCNN Threats:

• rate of adoption by customers (bloggers, etc...)
• copy cats

When I got home, I started to search for competitors who have already monetized blogs:

• About.com, though not a blog, pays all their "guides" rather handsomely to keep the content flowing; http://beaguide.about.com/compensation.htm
• a number of other pure-play blog who haven't hit the mainstream yet;
  
• http://payperpost.com/
• http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/05/08/gawker-blog-network-a-ni...
  

So it made me wonder -- does monetizing blogs make people more ready to leave their current blog service (blogger.com, wordpress.com) and sign up with the PayPerPosts of the world? It hasn't happened yet,
though these services were started in 2005, which means the Threat of a slow rate of adoption is real.

Now, that I've recorded my thoughts from last week, I can fast-forward to this week's thoughts.

I've been reading a bunch of Paul Graham's writings/lectures/info, both from Y Combinator's site, and his own website, http://paulgraham.com/, and the one thing that he stresses is to make something that people
want... http://paulgraham.com/start.html

I asked myself, do people really want to use a blogging news service? [unsure]

Do people really want to earn money from writing their blogs? Well, I have a blog and I never wanted to put Google's adsense on it... I've always thought advertising was rather annoying because it changes the aesthetics of a web page.

So I spent the past couple of days documenting my thoughts from last week, only to have my thoughts from this week slow my momentum for Bison; I'm shelving it for now based on the question of whether people would really want this service.

Next in line is Condor!

-john

Zenter Interview

Interviews with the founders of the latest Google acquired company, Zenter. The company was only started in January and was bought just recently. Here is a link to two separate interviews, one that is audio and the other is a transcript -- both have great content and provide inspiration. Did I mention that these guys are from Arizona?

http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of-zenter.html

-john

Bison: v3

If you didn't read the wrap-up to Bison v2, you might want to do so first, so that you can understand how Bison v3 came to exist. While on vacation, this is how Bison evolved...

What exactly is BCNN?

• BCNN stands for Blogging Community News Network
• it is a blogging service and social network

What is the purpose of BCNN?

• to promote blogging content as an alternative and legitimate form of
• daily news and opinion
• to be the source for "the news about the news"
• to compete against other online news sites for advertising dollars

Who are the customers?

• the blogging community, each individual blogger
• writers
• anyone creating user-generated content

What does BCNN provide the customers to compel them to switch from other blog services?

a) more opportunities b/c of

• shared revenue based on traffic to their blog/entries
• as part of the social network they can expand their readership base (audience)
• become part of a larger purpose "to build a news network" and "create a brand"

b) a better blogging experience

• full web server statistics for their blog/entries so the blogger knows more about thier audience
• more reader traffic because the social network allows for tagging of content (creation of a tag cloud), this allows for associations
• between blogs/entries which generates more readership traffic among BCNN blogs. The tagging of content lets BCNN offer readers the
• following scenario, "If you like this blog, we recommend the following other blogs..." Hence more traffic for bloggers.
• a blog book binding service to allow bloggers the option to offer their content in bound, book formats. Yes, this is possible and it
• will be an additional revenue source for the blogger
• ILP (maybe we keep, maybe not), if yes, it will allow for paid readership opportunities and more revenue.

The implementation plan for BCNN is pretty straightforward,

1. build the software
2. persuade bloggers to use our service with hopes of revenue opportunities. We'll target the more popular bloggers to become beta
3. testers by invitation...
4. As the network grows with content, we can turn on the news feature, such that we'll have a news page, akin to Google News, but all of the links and sections are user-generated, BCNN blogging content. We'll have algorithms to figure out which entries to post in which sections, Sports, Entertainment, Misc, etc... and we'll even have to figure out the order of listing, etc...
5. we hope to generate enough buzz such that regular news services will come to our bloggers for their "news about the news"

So, what do you guys think? Not only about v3, but if you think we should revisit a previous version also. Thanks.

-john

Bison: SWOT

Continuing where I left off for Bison v2...

I then did a preliminary SWOT of a combined scenario of A and C -- use a free blogging service to allow people to experience ILP and to
create buzz for it, then sell the ILP servers to companies for
integration within their own networks.

Strengths:
- unique security feature (ILP)
- ?

Weakness:
- ?

Opportunity:
- gain advertising revenue from aggregation of similar blogs
- sale of ILP servers

Threats:
- infosec firms
- copy cat firms

As you can see, there was nothing compelling in the SWOT that made Bison v2 (scenarios A & C) very appealing. The question kept coming to my mind about how we could sufficiently create buzz if bloggers have a low adoption rate for our free blog. What can we do to make our blogging service unique and useful enough for bloggers to try it, then like it, then create buzz, which we hope will sell ILP servers? Then it dawned on me.

Monetize the blog such that revenue sharing options can be
implemented. So now, the people who create the content can be paid for their work based on traffic to their blog entries. As I continued to
think about how this revenue sharing would work, Bison continued to evolve and scenario C was removed and what was left was a scenario A on steroids, the Blogging Community News Network (BCNN).

This is Bison v3 and I'll write about it in my next post.

Assessing Your Situation

Today is Aug 7th, and the deadline for InvestSouthwest is upon us. Thankfully we're not submitting anything ridiculously thrown together.

But the one that I'm quite interested about has a deadline of October 11 and I'd like to know which one of you (or if you know of any friends) would seriously consider doing this with me.

Visit http://www.ycombinator.com/ and read the Newseek and USA Today links on their page, and then read the "winter 2008 funding" link.

My wife is resigned to let me go because this is all I think about and she has not rejected my suggestion that we may have to sell our house if any idea is really good enough to require my full-time focus.

You may be saying that we haven't solidified an idea yet -- I agree, but once we do get one rock solid -- I'm going to submit it and I want to know who can ride this bus with me. Again, if you know of anyone who would be interested, please let me know. If you want, just email me directly.

Oh yeah, the main thing to remember is this: being in Silicon Valley and working with the ycombinator team (which have founded a lot of businesses we know, even slashdot.org) is the value of who they know and the introductions we can get.

Yes, I am trying to get the same introductions in Phoenix, having signed up for an entrepreneurial program that is jointly funded and run by a VC and ASU. But we're talking Phoenix here, which for start-up investments is not even in the top 5 cities.

Okay, please read and think about your options, your future, and your family. We're all not getting any younger, so the window of opportunity for this kind of stuff gets narrower as the months go by.

Thanks,
john

Bison: Marketing and Generating Money

While on vacation last week, I worked on trying to understand how we could get ILP as a software business to work. I looked at it from
these standpoints: marketing, scenarios on how Bison will generate
money, SWOT. This is the first of a few postings which will show how
Bison will continue to evolve into a version 3, called BCNN; I just
want you to understand how I got to version 3.

Here is an overview of some of my thoughts of Bison v2.

Marketing

What market needs does Bison meet?
- multi-level information sharing with stakeholders

What market condition will Bison exploit?
- Convergence of information makes it hard to control the message that stakeholders receive; the combinations of information sources,
distribution channels, and different stakeholders makes for
information distribution to be inefficient.

What market segment will Bison target?
- Bison will start with bloggers.

What makes Bison unique?
- Bison's ILP is the first engine to allow each person to control
their own message.

What advantage does Bison have?
- Bison's ILP can be integrated into many different communication
workflows: email, blogs, office documents, web documents.

Who are Bison's direct competitors?
- none found so far

Who are Bison's indirect competitors?
- software firms that
-- develop security related software for different classification
levels
-- develop versioning systems, ie) source code and documents
-- develop requirements management systems

How will Bison reach the market?
- We intend to "get the word out" by offering a free blogging service
with ILP. This will allow consumers to get a feel for ILP and create
buzz for the blog service, which will lead to more interest in ILP.

What future circumstances can "create" the market for Bison?
- More consumer security breaches and scares will make ILP more
inviting.
- More accidental information leaks, whether thru press releases,
blogs, etc...

What is the purpose of the business?
- (Then, as I continued, I got stuck on what exactly is Bison's
purpose.) To be the leader in information partitioning. Our focus is
to control the message behind the news. We are not an information
security company.

What business are you in?
- Software development for ??? (got stuck on this)

Scenarios on how to generate money
A) Bison as a web site destination for blogging
- user creates free blog at Bison
- Bison sells advertising
- as more ppl read the blogs, Bison generates more money

B) Bison as a web service providing ILP to other websites
- I started to step through this scenario using three entities: the
user, their website, and Bison
- I had difficulty understanding how the ILP service will be able to
provide the user with the list of groups tagged for sharing the
content. Where will this database of groups reside -- at their website
or on Bison?

C) Bison as a software server to be purchased and installed by other
companies.
- Bison will be a "commercial off the shelf" offering with licensing.

D) Bison as a monetized, social blogging network
- aggregate blogging content
- sell advertising
- share revenue with bloggers
- allow tagging of their own content and other people's content

(to be continued later, got to get ready for work)

-john

Application Deadlines

Okay, for those of you interested in going beyond brain-storming, here
is the first line-in-the-sand -- a deadline to meet for getting
funding!

What I'm going to do is to keep an ongoing list of conferences for
funding opportunities in the investment community. It is likely that
these events will be all over the country, so we'll have to decide how
we target them.

In addition to the list of conferences and dates, I'm going to specify
which idea to be pitched at that conference. Initially the idea will
just be the "idea of the month", but as we get to know the investors,
locations, etc... we'll have a better idea for where the investment
dollars are going in that city and we will target the opportunity
better.

2007 Aug 7
- Application deadline for http://www.InvestSouthwest.org, located in
Scottsdale, AZ; event is Dec 12-13, 2007.
- Conference with Angels and VCs

2007 Oct 11
- App deadline for http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html, located in
Cambridge, MA; event is Nov 3-4, 2007
- Investors that provide seed money for startups; seed money is the
earliest stage of funding

More to come...

John

Cape Cod for Vacation

I'll be in Cape Code for the week at a place called Bourne. Yeah, kinda coincidental that the new movie is coming out soon. I don't know if I'll have access to the email/web while living in a 100+ year old farm house. I'll try to find time to work on Bison.

-john

TechCrunch 20

I thought I'd take a moment to introduce a topic to discuss money, how
to get it, where to get, what to do with it, etc...

To kick things off, check out the list of VCs and Corporations
attending the first TechCrunch financing event -- this is an
impressive list. http://techcrunch20.com/look-whos-coming/

Well, maybe we'll attend next year as presenters.

-john

Bison: Patent and Security

Alright guys, I talked with a couple of you last night to understand
whether you're keeping up with my writings -- thankfully you have
been, really.

Three focuses this morning for me were:
1) finish Bison Slides explaining how a user would use Bison.
2) investigate patent possibilities for ILP, yeah I'm serious
3) security thoughts

---Bison Slides---
Diagrams take forever to put together, so the slides I worked on this
morning are high-level views that do not show how Amy would add
contacts and do relationship tagging, and then tag/mark-up her
writings with the tags. I may just want to draw it out again on my
whiteboard and take a photo of it for uploading.

What I did upload is a consumer's viewpoint on Email and Blogging and
how Bison ILP provides a simpler solution to redundant writing/
managing of communications. Please take a look and provide feedback on the content; the graphics and text were quickly thrown together this morning. The filename is Bison v1a.ppt.

---Investigate Patenting---
I didn't get around to it because time flies when you're thinking
about stuff. As a reminder, I believe that this sort of information
level security/sharing/protection has yet to be seen. Let's think
about how security is done currently...

---Security Thoughts---
@Operating system level
Solaris and does file level sharing. Does a user/group have permission to Read, Write, Execute. Windows does pretty much the same. The container is the file, and permissions on set on the file, there is no seperating of the CONTENT of the file into seperate views or levels of permissions.

@Application layer
Hmm, I'm not a software engineer, so I'm going to have to investigate this some more, perhaps you can chime in??

@Presentation layer
Permissions are established about whether a user can view/interact
with a portlet (the application). Once again permissions deals with
whether the portlet can be accessed, there doesn't seem to be any
logic regarding the content of the portlet. I'm really stretching
here.

Anyway, I'll have to research security at these different layers, but
once again, if you have experience/knowledge on it, please share your thoughts.

-john

Bison: Prelim Slides

Alright, my focus this morning was to do diagram a scenario of how a
user would make use of ILP. I did the diagram on my whiteboard and it has taken too long to put into PowerPoint, so here is the gist of it.

Amy is a Bison user.
She adds people to her contact list.
At the same time, she assigns her own tags to these people: friend,
family, band, etc...
She writes a blog entry and before she publishes she marks-up the
sentences with the tags from her list of people/relationship tags.
She publishes the blog entry and the people, according to their tags,
get to read her separate stories.

Here is an first run at a Bison powerpoint slide:

Bison believes that
- There is a story behind every event in our lives.
- Each story has lots of details and nuances

Bison wants you to share your story, but control your message, because
- Not everyone should know the details
- Bison allows individuals (organizations)

Bison: Publish your public parts, not your private parts.

okay, more tomorrow.
-john

Bison: Prelim SWOT Threats

My objective this morning is to get through the Threat (T) portion of a SWOT for Bison.

SWOT refresher
In the not-so-near future, I need to do a SWOT analysis on Bison. As a reminder, the reason that this NoMoreSnow Ventures group will be doing SWOT analysis is to decide whether a venture is compelling enough to start a business. In case you need a refresher on SWOTs, here are two links I'll be using this morning:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis
- http://www.bplans.com/dp/article.cfm/148

Core Reminder:
As usual, we need to remind ourselves, what are Bison's offerings:
Communication and Networking. Please read the previous posting for the details of these objectives.

Communication Objectives
1. Be an Open Network, allowing information out and in
2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP)
3. Allow Anonymous Communications

Social Networking Objectives
1. Allow Relationship Tagging
2. Provide Visual Relationship Network (VRN)

What are external threats that Bison will face upon launching? I'm
just going to list external factors that may influence the success of a Bison launch. These are not in any particular order and I'm going to
throw everything into this list, including the kitchen sink. Later, when the SWOT is performed, I'll pair the list down to the major issues.

Threats:
- competitors begin offering ILP-type services for email, blogging,
forums, calendars, webpages, etc... Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Google
Groups, and Blogger to name a few.
- People's attitudes about security and privacy change, such that
these topics are no longer important
- People are satisfied with using their current tools (email,
calendars, blogs, etc...) and don't see the compelling need to switch.
- Social networks are "old news" and people no longer care about
networking because they've done it so much lately.
- Advertisers no longer see the value of paying social networking
sites.
- Technology is not yet mature for us to implement ILP or VRN.
- No more angel or VC money available. It is possible that VCs have spent all the money they wanted to spend this year. Timing of when we launch may be bad in that the amount of VC money that has already been invested this year have almost reached $1B.
- Others???

This type of objective look at our offerings compared with what we
think are Threats makes me consider that Bison does not want to
"pigeon-hole" itself into being called a "social network".

I'll have to revisit this later, off to work now.

-john

Bison: v2

Alright Guys,

There's been a lot of thinking done this past week about what are
Bisons' core offerings and resulting from this is a more focused list
of consumer features. Yes, we may have all of the default features
that other social networks have, but the following list will set Bison
apart from the rest.

Mission
Bison is a next generation social networking site with a mission to
improve how people communicate with their personal networks(s).

Communication Objectives
1. Open Network
Be an open network that freely allows registered users(members) to
communicate with people outside of Bison. This includes, but is not
limited to
- blogs on Bison being read by non-members
- email is just considered email, there will not be a members-only,
internal email system.

2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP) {copyright}
Information-Level Permissions are member-defined allowing for finer grain control over how much information is exposed and to whom. Whether it is their personal profile, blog postings, emails, visual network of contacts, anything that they write or expose can have information-level permissions. This is beyond just taking file and folder permissions at the operating system layer and moving it into the application layer. Bison may be the first to define a ILP model.

For example, a Bison member will be able to do the following:
- create a blog posting about a recent date
- publish the blog posting with the following relationship tags
'public', 'friends', 'guys' (more on relationship tags later)
- here is an example using html-style tags to explain to whom the
content is exposed

2007 July 22

Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

Alright, in case you had a hard time reading the example, here is what each level of permissions will be allowed to read.

@ Public-level (includes outside Bison and members who are not part of that user's defined relationship tags)
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Friend-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Guys-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

3. Anonymous Communications
Though members can already set ILP, Bison allows a member to be as anonymous as they would like on the network. This means that a
person's name, address, or other identifying information can be
completely hidden from relationships tagged, for example, 'public' and 'friends', whereas the 'guys' are able to see the person's real name and other private information. Though this may be just an extension of information-level permissions, it is important to point it out because Bison takes privacy seriously.

Social Network Objectives
1. Relationship Tagging
Bison allows for members to define their relationship to a person in
their own personal network. So it is possible to label your brother
with the following tags, 'family', 'high school football team', 'guys', 'single' I think this type of tagging, though may complicate the ILP model, may provide members with a powerful search and relationship mapping possibilities.

2. Visual Relationship Network
In coordination with the relationship tagging feature, Bison provides
members with a visual relationship network(VRN) which displays
graphically how people in your network are related to you. It will
show degrees of separation because you will be able to see the number of "nodes" that lead out from you. In addition, it will represent in a graphical way the type of relationship tag that you have with that person. On top of that, as you move to the second-degree of seperation, you will see both your relationship tags and that of your first degree contact.

Here is an example about you, your brother, and his girlfriend.

You----------------1st Degree ---------- 2nd Degree
You --------------- Brother -------------- Girlfriend
Your tags--------- family, guys --------- girls, taken, church
Brothers tags:
family ------------- Brother -------------- girlfriend, hot

Anyway, it all depends on how your brother set his ILP for the tags...
as to whether or not you can see his tags, but the idea for this VRN
feature is to allow a member to learn so much more about another
member based on the tags and network of people. As we browse through our friend's network, we learn more about them through the information exposed in their friend's profiles, tags, VRN, etc...

Dating?
How does dating fit into all of this? Regardless of the purpose for a
communication, whether for business contact reasons, or keeping up with friends, or to meet a potential date, Bison allows people to
communicate as they see fit. We will implement browsing and searching of members. Not sure if we will take the time initially to have relationship matching.

Well, that's all I can think of now, I've been up since 5am and now
its time for me to get ready for work. I'll try to post some powerpoint slides to better explain these features. Please comment on them if you have the time. Thanks.

-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis: Engage.com, part 2

I signed up to their free service, free for 6 months while they are in beta mode, to see what the customer experiences. My first impression is the site has potential, in that it has the "match-making" idea, but it doesn't fully meet all of the things I have been envisioning for Bison.

1) Quality of people - it let me sign up as a single dude with no kids -- that's too easy for anyone to sign up and scam people. In addition they did not ask for a mailing address or telephone number, which makes me want to believe that it is way too easy to just sign up.

2) Weak Social Network implementation - the "network" is a list of people you want to track... these people are just profiles and the options for communicating with you network are the same as if you were trying to talk to a prospect; this is okay, but it is kinda hokey. It feels to me like a MySpace "add me as a friend" option where the list grows and grows. For Bison, I am envisioning a robust social network where the user can define the strength of the relationship/friendship, perhaps tag the relationship as: work, football buddy, church friend, etc... Then on top of this, the users are able to see how people are connected, not just the flat list of "friends". I'm thinking of a node with radiating lines out to other nodes, which in turn continue to have radiating lines. The network really grows. In addition, with the tagging of the type of relationship, this allows for a user to quickly see a prospects "social network", the activities and interests they have, the type of people they know, etc...

3) Communication mechanisms are basic - they only allow "anonymous emails" to be sent. Bison will include anonymous emails, anonymous text messaging, anonymous voice mail, and anonymous video. Users on he receiving end of these communications can choose to accept these forms of communication and are able to block certain users from reaching them.

4) No mechanism to make the suitor different from others - There is no way to be creative in the way they communicate with a prospect. Emails and that is it. It's a sad implementation. Bison will allow users to send creative gifts such as flowers, cards, photos, etc... I can send flowers to a prospect's work address, without me knowing her address. It's too easy to implement, perhaps they will do that
later...

Overall, I think Engage's intent is a good one, in that they try to get our friends to work with us in finding a mate, but the implementation is outdated already. I think they could have emphasized the personal network more, because if people don't use it, this site is just like any other dating site -- a bunch of photos. I've looked at a lot profiles and almost all of them had empty networks.

A quick search for all the women in the US between ages 18 and 99 gave me 51 pages of 10 photos each = 510 total women in the US. Hmmm, not very impressive numbers, but I don't know when they launched.

Long story short, Bison is still very different.

-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis: Engage.com

Engage.com may be the closest thing to Bison, yet. How?

"Engage, for example, allows members to bring friends and family with them online, all of whom can prowl the profiles, checking people out and matching them up. Members can also rate the politeness of their dates, as well as the accuracy of the profiles. This is the new"community" approach to online matching — a naturalistic, social corrective for the deception that plagues cyberspace," a quote from "The Truth about Dating Online" of the journal Scientific American Mind (you can read the entire study, which I did, found in our google group's files section.

I just checked out their site and not only do they have friends help
friends find love, but they even have a service called "matchmaker",
where anyone can try their hand at matching people up.

Here is what they have to say about themselves...

Unique Engage.com features include:
* Play Matchmaker™ - Singles can ask friends to introduce them to other singles, while anyone (single or married) can become a matchmaker and help set up singles they know.

* Cast Your Vote™ - Better than unproven, scientific personality-testing methods, singles can garner the collective intelligence of the Engage community to meet matches the community “senses” would be right for them.

* Living Profiles™ - Much more than the typical dating profile offering only self-disclosed information, Living Profiles™ present singles in a rich, community-determined social context, helping bustthe bogus barrier plaguing other sites.

· References - Read what friends and family have to say about a member.

· Member Reputation - Feedback regarding the member’s interactions with others in the community—including responsiveness, truthfulness and politeness—speaks to a member’s character.

· Tags – Singles (and their friends) use descriptive tags to help connect them with other Engage members who share similar interests.

· Advice - Decide if a member is insightful by reading the dating advice she or he has provided to others, or give the member advice yourself.

· People I’m Helping Introduce – See (or contact) other singles a member is helping.

· My Community of Matchmakers - Contact matchmakers who are helping a member to find out more about the member, or ask for an introduction.

· Matchmaker Rating – View the number of introductions a member has made for others and feedback regarding the quality of those introductions.

Sounds like a good competitor to emulate and exceed.

-john

Bison: Some Questions to Answer

One of my main todo items is to seek legal counsel on the legality of receiving transcripts; I’ll try to get answer by the end of the week. In the meantime, here is how I will address it.

Consumer needs and privacy issues

I don’t think it will be a problem, but it will raise a lot of eyebrows. My defense will be the fact that almost all employers
require that we send to them official transcripts from all of the schools we’ve attended. These documents help the employer to verify that what we said to them and what we wrote to them on our resumes is true. The other times when transcripts are so important are for enrollment into graduate school; these programs require that applicants are degreed from undergraduate programs. Bison hopes to maintain this high standard as well for the benefit of the Bison community. The people you will meet on our network are a “verified” a bit before they can participate fully.

Addressing revenue opportunities

From a money generating standpoint, the fact that people definitely have college degrees and at what level of degree or the type of field they studied would help Bison to provide targeted advertising. We will have criteria to use such as: average income per level of degree, average income based on type of degree, and other education related statistics to go along with all of the other demographic info we will collect.

Good point about the education level of users at competing dating sites. We will have to dig for this stuff, hopefully one of the competitors will be publicly traded and this info may be in their SEC filings. This type of information is critical for “selling” the idea if we need investment dollars.

Keep the feedback coming!
-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis, PlentyOfFish.com

The intent of this thread is for us to analyze what makes this free online dating service so successful. My definition of successful in this case is this: earn a $800K+ check from advertising using Google’s Adsense. See the following blog entry from the founder, complete with a photo. In case you are motivated by money, I believe that was only two months of Adsense usage too.

There is some truth behind the money this guy is making. The following Wall Street Journal article says that that Google confirmed that he did get this check. He runs a very simple site, really basic, no
bells and whistles, and according to this WSJ article, the secret to his success is making online dating free. Remember the site, HotOrNot.com? They’re following his lead and have turned their site free.

In addition, here is an interview with the founder. One of the best pieces of info from him is how he “stayed under the radar” — by blocking certain sites from keeping track of his daily traffic, which
meant his business could grow without anyone noticing. Read the interview and you’ll see which services he blocked from his site. That’s just a robots.txt entry, right? I think we can do a lot better and still offer it for free.

-john

Bison: Market Research

I found a ton of consumer reviews about these dating services! The following site has some pretty long and insightful thoughts about the major dating services, the nice thing is these are recent reviews too.
http://www.edatereview.com/101category.aspx

-john

Bison: Gripes with Online Dating Svcs

From reading the reviews, I have come up with a few major issues gripes that people have voiced about these online services. I will list these issues and then offer the Bison solution for them. Please comment on the issues and solutions!

1. The quality of people on the service is poor.
Bison will require that a member of the dating portion of the site, must have a college degree. To validate this, we will require that a college transcript be sent from the university to our address. There may be certain universities with whom we have agreements and those universities will work electronically with Bison to expedite the account approval process. Yes, this is a hard sell, but college graduates are used to sending transcripts to jobs, graduate programs, etc… Besides, if the service is free, this is a small fee to pay. The upside is we are sure of a demographic that is educated, which is great for advertising.

2. Other match-making sites promise matches.
Bison doesn’t promise matches. Bison allows your network of friends/family to help you find the right match. It is the social network doing what it typically does in the real world — find matches for you and others, all on-the-fly.

3. People are fed up with subscription fees and poor results.
When people pay, they expect a level of service, and for a match-making service that equates to dates and connections in the real world. With that said, we can see all of the flames that people have left for these competitors sites. I think we should still be free and focus on marketing to an educated group of members. Less expectations with a free service, if it happens to be good, it gets lots of publicity via word of mouth.

4. Guys say that a lot of the girls on these other sites are fake.
They were saying that these girls were asking them to send money… with our college transcript requirement, we weed out people who create many fake accounts and fake their gender, perhaps to trick guys into sending money. We can really clean up the act, maybe not entirely, but we make it harder for people to deceive.

-john

Bison: General Thoughts

Here is some feedback that I got from my sister-in-law, who is a current eHarmony user:

- eHarmony is complicated and has received complaints about this.
- she doesn’t like the fact that social network/credibility idea, she wants her privacy…
- she doesn’t want to be rated/reviewed…
- she said, if anything, just make it simple to have matches done for you, most sites don’t match people like eHarmony does.

To me, that’s just a little code to figure out compatibility, so it shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

In addition, how do we prevent ppl from forming fake networks with the intent to harm/steal/take advantage of the nice ppl?

-john

Bison: What is it?

We had an impromptu meeting tonight to discuss what Bison is all about. I’m not going to take much time to do some marketing speak about Bison. The following is a recap of the major points (subject to change as we understand the trade space):

1. Bison is a match-making service based on user ratings, for lack of a better term. Bison answers some important questions. What is the person really like? What is the fabric of their being?

2. Bison is a REAL network of friends and family. The answers to the questions from #1 present themselves as each person’s network of friends/family contribute to the information/background that supports the individual. It may include people with whom they have just shared a day — a post-date review. The network provides the credibility for the person. Think eBay user/seller rating system put into the context of a Human Quotient. The idea behind Bison is based on a traditional, old world match-making foundation — people who know you can speak volumes of you.

3. Bison is self-regulating.

4. Bison is free for consumers.

5. Bison generates revenue based on local advertising from businesses that serve as dating activities, locales, events, etc… Restaurants, Balloon rides, Concerts, etc… will be served as recommendations for activities, with perks for consumers if they make use of the business offerings; perhaps a discount or credit mechanism.

6. Bison serves the working professional… this is very unclear.

That’s it for now.

-john

Angus: SWOT

Here is the SWOT analysis that I did for our Angus idea. I won’t go into the details of the idea in this posting, since we’ve hashed that out in our yahoo group page already. Yes we have both a yahoo and google groups page; we like the google one better and transferred most of our info over to there.

Based on this SWOT, we canned this idea because there was not a compelling upside compared with the hurdles.

SWOT: Angus

Angus is a software venture with a vision on how to influence online consumer purchase decisions at the online point of sale. The venture is currently assessing which products will have the most impact on a mature market.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Business Model	Business Model Products
Opportunities	Threats
Products Increase Market Share	Mature Market Competition

Strengths

Business Model

Angus works on a business model which unites consumers with the information they need to make a purchase decision at the online point of sale. This business model overcomes the inadequacies that consumers are presented when visiting online retailers and auctions – lack of supporting product information, limited perspectives, and product excitement. This business model saves the shopper time by not having to search the Internet for product reviews, consumer perspectives, and marketing buzz, ultimately this means the shopper does not leave and will spend more time at the online point of sale. Not only will this model help online retailers and auctions sell new and current year items, it will also help influence the purchase of end-of-life and used items because the information doesn’t age and will continue to influence the shopper to make the purchase. The simplicity of this model will allow Angus to remain focused on influencing the shopper.

Weaknesses

Business Model

This business model is not unique, as it is already in use by many competitors in the online retail space. The competition is currently providing information to the shopper by means of consumer and expert reviews.

Products

Angus product offerings are not unique, they are as follows:

• Consumer review
  • Angus would need to catch up with all competitors
• Expert review
  • Angus would need to catch up with all competitors
• Video review – n/a
• Commercials videos – n/a

Opportunities

Products

Angus product offerings may be unique in the following ways:

• Consumer review
  • Angus intends to provided filterable reviews.
• Expert review
  • Angus is proposing to sign up a large list of 3^rd party, expert, reviews and will allow the retailer to select which from the list to be displayed, perhaps based on the demographic of the shopper at that time.
• Video review
  • Angus is proposing to allow all consumer reviews to be in any video format and source (web-cam, cell phone)
• Commercials videos
  • Angus is proposing to sign up a large list of manufacturers and to provide their television commercials at the point of sale.

Increase Market Share

As broadband acceptance in the consumer market continues to rise, this will allow companies to offer richer content, including video. Angus’ video reviews and commercial videos will be able to leverage the greater bandwidth.

Threats

Mature Market

There may not be many opportunities for Angus to capture the business of retailers that are household names because these retailers already offer shoppers additional information at the point of sale. The most commonly used mechanisms listed in descending prevalence, based on an eye-ball survey:

1. consumer review
2. consumer review w/reviewer history
3. consumer review w/user history plus expert review
4. consumer review w/user history, expert review, and 3^rd party video

Competition

There are many different types of competitors that serve this online retail market. The following types pose a threat:

1. in-house solutions
2. specialized software companies, like a Bazaar Voice
3. open-source solutions
4. social shopping networks, PriceGrabber.com, Epinions.com

Angus: SCORE mtg

Meeting 2
So I spent late Thursday night planning for my meeting with SCORE. I trimmed the presentation slides (attached) and practiced working the new message. You'll notice in the slides the Angus name was removed and replaced with my old company's name, Netaloft; my in-laws only had jokes for the "Angus" name, despite it being a codename.

My meeting with Paul Gasser was valuable, but different from the meeting with the in-laws. The in-laws helped with refining the message and doing the sales pitch. Whereas Paul gave more specific working advice regarding marketing strategy and how to cost the marketing plan and insights on how to lower investor risk; when I scheduled the meeting I asked specifically for help with marketing strategy and planning. Here are the major points coming out of this meeting.

1) Consider ways to lower investor risk. He mentioned, "jumping in with both feet" to show how serious you are with doing this business. The investors don't want to see you working for another company while running your own. Show that you already have customer feedback regarding your product or services. If a big-box company like BestBuy says that using your services will help them increase their sales by 10% and that they would likely use it, this will lower investor risk.

2) Actually work on the marketing plan because it is an action plan. You should be able to take it and start marketing. This being said, he helped narrow our customer market. Keeping in mind our limited resources, $, and people, we have to target very specific, niche customers. He discussed segmenting the market and picking an industry. Then figure out the pricepoint of the products which might have video commercials already produced, this pricepoint will allow us to know which customers can afford the service. Other topics where targeting strategies for individual decision makers within an organization, joining trade associations.

3) Think about a phased approach to getting capital. Phase 1 proof of concept sounds good, but it doesn't lower risk enough. He recommended actually having a PRODUCT, not just a service or module. Phase 1 will be better if we actually had a product completed and ready for the next round of investing. This leads to point 4...

4) Maybe customers want to host their own videos? We should not assume that our solution is the best one, that being we host the videos as part of our service and our software module residing on the online retailer's page will be all that the retailer wants.

In addition, Paul was not wowed, he only said "interesting". And he did mention in a gentle way that VCs are looking for more than just a business plan in which to invest, he recommended thinking about angel investments up to $1M. In addition, he liked the idea of setting deadlines, so the line in the sand is still Aug. 7th to submit for InvestSouthwest.

My own thoughts now include:
- reconsider who the primary customer really is, perhaps the manufacturer is the key, and the retailers are second.
- think about a different solution that will allow us to sell software or licenses, sell more!
- write a marketing plan, which fits into the business plan
- consider how we can start doing customer surveys
- schedule another SCORE meeting for Friday
- keep writing a business plan and make and executive summary from it; Paul appeared to have been expecting one...

That's all from me, we need to meet to finalize the picture, otherwise we won't meet the Aug 7th deadline. DE, are you getting back in the morning Sunday or evening? RG, do you have any time too? Thanks guys.

-john