Posts

Showing posts from 2007

A Startup in the Cloud

Image
This post was the source of a BusinessWeek article by Rachael King . There is a remarkable difference in the method and cost of startup infrastructure between when I started ActiveGrid in 2003 and wdgtbldr in 2007. Back in 2003, we still had to buy our own servers and hire IT people to get some basic services. This mindset prevailed into 2007, where to upgrade our Wiki into something much more functional, I learned that IT had physically installed two iterations of wikis on our servers. It was beyond me what features we would get from our own installation vs. a hosted one, so I suggested a policy of only using hosted infrastructure moving forwards. This led to a suggestion of having some meetings to discuss the concept, which in my experience means "not going to happen." :) Starting with a clean slate at wdgtbldr, there is definitely an "everything must be hosted" policy, and I am amazed at how cheaply and easily all of the functions of a small business can be se

Make the web come to you with feeds and widgets

Image
Lately I have noticed that an entire day can go by without "surfing" the web. Instead, the web comes to me. I scroll through all of the news and information that I am interested in using Google Reader, and sometime dig into the things that people are linking. My iGoogle home page tracks stocks, weather, top newsfeeds, and other just-in-time information. About the only actual website I go to nowadays is Facebook, mainly because there isn't a widget that shows me the friend updates, especially about what apps they are checking out (which is of particular interest to me nowadays). When I want to find out about something, I use vertical search in the Firefox toolbar to select Wikipedia, IMDB, LinkedIn, Dictionary.com, etc. I very rarely use Google search unless I am looking for something obscure. Net net, I never see any advertising, especially with Adblock Plus. Nielson is cluing in to this, they just came out and said that pageviews don't matter . For exampl

Startup 101: Staying funded

Image
The number one job of a startup CEO is to secure funding for his or her company. Most early stage startups need external investment to cover costs, so without funding, there is no company. The number one question a startup CEO needs to be able to answer is "how are you going to get to the next round of funding?" If there is no credible answer to that question, there is going to be a very unpleasant road ahead. I ran out of money at JRad, and didn't run out of money at ActiveGrid, and believe me, there's a big difference! Following are the three variables at the disposal of a CEO in order to secure the next round of funding: timing, traction, and positioning. Timing - Startups generally have 12-18 months of cash between funding rounds. You have to raise money while you still have 6 months of cash in the bank or you are going to get tooled as potential investors wait you out in order to increase their leverage. The math is simple: if there is 12 months of mone

Startup 101: Getting funded

Image
Raising venture capital for a new business is not easy, but fortunately the process is very predictable. First time entrepreneurs often do not understand the process, or think that they are above it, which leads to a lot of frustration, and in the end, no venture financing. If your business doesn't meet these criteria, it doesn't mean it is a bad business, just that it probably isn't going to be venture backed. If you want to raise venture capital, get out of your own way and navigate the following process. Domain Expert - The most important thing for a startup to have is a domain expert. When people start a company in a business that they know nothing about, you end up with disasters like Pets.com. So it is critical that a startup has an expert in the market it is trying to penetrate. There is no such thing as a "visionary," just people who know a market very well and can therefore make a much more educated guess as to where it is going to go next than

Startup 101: Customer "pull"

Image
In my blog post "Startup 101: Sell to Users" I emphasized the need to focus on the product before scaling up a company. Marc Andreeson has recently started a new blog and he has a great term for this concept, "Product/Market Fit". Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful. Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board -- heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding p

Startup 101: Sell to users

Image
In the last few years, there has been a remarkable shift in how software is sold to businesses: by the time a salesperson is talking with a prospect, they are already a user! Numerous successful businesses do not have a single salesperson until there are a groundswell of customers that want to purchase their software at a relatively high pricepoint. Successful companies concentrate on getting users to use fully functional software for download or browser use and then upselling those users. This is a sharp contrast with the time consuming and expensive style of effectively selling incomplete software door to door to the Global 2000 and then fixing the software after the customer has bitten. Following are the characteristics of a successful 21st century software business: Self-Service Product - Software must be easy to install and a service must be easy to run from a browser. Anything that these products do that is already well known (ie, add a customer in CRM) must be brain-dead

Startup 101: The platform game

Image
I have been advising a few startups over the past few months and thought it might be useful to share some startup advice in a series I will call "Startup 101". The ability to identify a new trend early, turn on a dime, and capitalize on a market shift is what distinguishes a startup from a large company. A lot of what startups do is not actually new, but rather something old for a new platform. For example, NetDynamics/WebLogic/Kiva were appdev/deployment for Java/Internet, ActiveGrid was appdev/deployment for LAMP, MySpace is BBS for the web, Skype is phone for the Internet, Salesforce is CRM for SaaS, etc. The latest in vogue platform is Facebook's F8 platform, which is a supercool way for startups to deliver social features without having to build a social network. Kudos to iLike, which as one of the early adopters of the Facebook F8 platform has massively increased their number of users (850K new users in less than a week). iLike retained the ability to respond