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

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

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

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.

"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.

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

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

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

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