the goose

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So after a little bit of of ducking and diving, the Jason Calacanis “This Week in Startups” global pitch event is ready to roll in London.  London has the most signups of any city so far on http://www.meetup.com/startups/.  I have spent the day testing the venue, gathering bios from the speakers and confirming the line up.  The following people will be presenting.

Dimitar Stoyanov from ovia.me.

They are currently in private alpha with the University College London.  They won mini Seedcamp Berlin last month.  Watch a brief video as ovia.me to see how it works.

Phil Woodward from HipSnip.

HipSnip connects the real world to the online world, and makes it social.  They  enable people to use their mobile phone to easily connect with a real world product or service that they want.  HipSnip then makes that content social, retrievable and up-datable.

Lieven Van Marcke from GNU trade.

A financial gaming company with a unique offering designed to make trading more accessible to a mass market; next week they’re also launching a new version of our platform wrapped up in a casual gaming Facebook application that allows people to create and enter global trading competitions with friends and back the performance of other players.

Finbar Mostyn-Williams

People take useful resources from on and offline (ingredients) and put them together into lists (recipes) to help other business owners/ practitioners improve certain skills. The collection of recipes is the cookbook. Some recipes are free, some paid. Ingredients include: events, courses, books, blogs, videos, slide-shows, interviews, articles, actions etc.

Lee Mallon from Purecause

Purecause is a service which enables students and graduates to gain useful industry work experience whiles helping charitable projects. Your a graduate you can’t get a job because you don’t have a portfolio. With purecause you spend some time over the summer completing purecause jobs, by September you have portfolio, an insight into the industry and a peer network from your involvement. Now your a more tempting employee whiles helping some good causes.

There is £5 payable at the door.  The pitches will start from 5.30 sharp.

In other news, congrats to Steve for setting up a @twistldn twitter accound and www.twistldn.com website.  Register at http://www.meetup.com/startups.

Next Tuesday, the 20th of July 2010, there is going to be a global meetup for Jason Calacanis’ This Week In Startups podcast.  I started watching the series after Jason interviewed DHH.  Jason appears to push a lot of people buttons, but I have to say, I’ve been really enjoying the podcasts.  The guy is genuinely entertaining and there are few good insights to be had as to what to do and what not to do when building an online business.

The one previous Global Meetup went down fairly well.  It seems like a good opportunity for people to pitch their business, regardless of where they are, right to the heart of silicon valley.  This month’s event has an international focus and when I saw that no-one was organising the London leg of the show, I thought I’d lend a hand.  We have a great sponsor TheFlyingBurrito.co.uk on board, and so far there are about 20 people interested in coming along.  I have about 10 people interested in pitching on the night. The format will be as follows:

5.30:  Brief introduction and thanks to our sponsor The Flying Burrito.

5.40: Pitch #1 + scoring

5.55: Pitch #2 + scoring

6.10: Pitch #3 + scoring

6.25: Pitch #4 + scoring

6.40: Pitch #5 + scoring

6.55:  Announce our winner

7.00:  Link up with live podcast + streaming of the show on u-tube

8.00:  Wrap up + drinks next door.

The scoring will consist of asking the audience to rate the presenters pitch, and concept idea. We’ll (roughly) average the results and mark each person accordingly.   The person with the highest score will go forward on to present during the show.

If you would like to come along – register here.  Drop me an email if you’d like to present.  There is a £5 attendance fee payable on the night.

Why am I doing this?  Well, to be honest, I’ll be heading state-side in a couple of weeks, and I thought it’d help raise my profile a little, so when I get there, I might get to hit the ground running in terms of meeting some interesting folk.  Lets see if it works.

It has been a roller-coaster couple of months.  Two weeks ago, I was plastered to the back seat of a Johanasburg Police car while my soon-to-be cousin in law and his automatic weapon toating partner burned considerable amounts rubber in their high powered vehicle.  I think we hit 230kph, which is 142 mph in old money.  Johan has been a police volunteer for the last 6 years and he was only too happy to scare the bejaysus out of me.  We were on a quiet Wednesday morning shift.  To summarise:

• 7am:   The lads turn up in their car where I was staying.  I serve up coffee, they serve up a bullet proof vest.  ”Like the yanks use but ours has an extra plate to withstand a higher calibre of weapons fire”.  I only had a plate at the front however, so I am instructed to try and avoid getting shot in the back.  Oh how we laughed. Read the rest of this entry »

You can tell how controversial telesales is by the euphemisms used to describe it.  ”Inside sales” sounds most respectable.  Ironically, it seems to me to be the phone companies who have done the most to dirty the bib of this sales channel.  I’m just back from South Africa where bad legislation and low wage costs allows for rampant cold calling.  In truth, we’ve also made mistakes in our thirst to figure out a way to find customers.

There are a few good reasons why it can’t be written off wholesale however.

• Even though your product may be provisioned online, your customers may not be.  Not wanting to cast dispersions (as my grandma might say) on actors as a group, some of them couldn’t tell the difference between and ipad and a calculator.  That doesn’t mean they can’t understand that advertising yourself online won’t drive more business for them.  Many don’t have an email address (or if they do, they don’t use it) and others just don’t like buying from an anonymous website.  This means that if we are serious about penetrating our market, we need explain it in person.
• Its non-geographic.  I’ve spent many hours on the phone to people in the UK and Canada, even though I’ve been based in Argentina for the last year.  Being stuck in Ireland is a bit frustrating when the market can be small.  Getting attention in other countries is difficult and airfares and conferences aren’t always an option in economic terms.  It is pretty magical however that you can start building relationships with people over the phone from several time zones away. Its a virtually no-cost way for companies in small markets to start breaking out.  Often times, an Irish accent on the other end of the phone can actually be an advantage.
• The communication is 2-way.  Blogs, emails and landing pages are great and telling people what you think but pretty pitiful at generating feedback.  Following Keiths mantra of find out what people want, go get it, and give it to them is hard if you don’t have an effective feedback loop.  Sure people can leave comments on your blog and respond to your emails, but in fact, we’d be missing out on 99% of feedback if we relied on that alone.  If finding out what your customers really want is truly important, than the phone has to be the most effective way of eliciting that feedback.

So there are,  in my view, solid reasons why it is hard to ignore the phone when it comes to selling.  The question then becomes, how to take this means of communication, shake off the negatives and put it to work.

1. Acquire your list of contacts directly from customer.  In order of preference
   1. They call you
   2. They send a request for a callback using something like Net2Rep
   3. Offer some incentive for them to give you their number, along with a good time to call.  (Eg:  free consultation or ebook).
2. Call them as soon as they do give you that they get in contact.  They are more likely to be interested and available to talk right now.  Calling right away gets around one of the biggest inconveniences of phone communication – the fact that you are interrupting.
3. Offer an easy out.  Some people just don’t like dealing on the phone.  In fact, I’m one of them.  Some can’t wait to talk to someone real. Figuring out which type of prospect this makes life much iease.  In our case, we call people who have received a physical copy of our guide to getting started in voice overs. My first question is just to ask if the book arrived and did they find it useful.  That is enough of a prompt for those that want to talk more to do so.  They go on a ‘hot list’ of people who are interested.  The others just default back to our email subscription.
4. The volume of leads we deal with, although not huge. still exceeds the rule of 5 plus or minus two.  As such we track notes against prospects in our own simple CRM.

Would I prefer to build a cashflow that didn’t require so much time on the phone?  Yes.  Do I have a choice?  Well, unless I don’t want to run Piehole, probably not.  As it happens, Piehole’s customers (mostly actors) are not online and prefer to deal with real people.  Zappos are doing well based on this basis. We’ve started calling existing customer, just a courtesy, over the last while to make sure everyine is happy.  The idea is that we catch someone who is considering unsubscribing and try to assuage any doubts they may have.  That process also feeds back directly into our work practices.

There are things about a retails businesses that I really like.

• You sell the same product over and over again (little or no customisation per sale)
• You have hundreds of customers paying tens of euro rather than a few paying thousands.
• People are normally pretty sure of what they are going to get, making it easy to meet expectations.
• If you can run one shop, you can probably run two and so on.
• They handle ‘real’ money (Starbucks turns over more than most of the Irish web business’ combined)*. Read the rest of this entry »

Niccolo Machiavelli

I’m writing this from the office of www.rescueargentina.com.  Rescue Argentina is run by an Irish priest who was posted to Oberá, Argentina over twenty years ago.  Although Argentina is a rich country, at one point the seventh the richest in the world, it is also huge.  There are parts which are in dire poverty and where there is poverty there are people who are left at the margins to die in filth.  Sounds emotive, but this is the language needed to divert the money from your Xtravision account, to something more worth while instead.

So here is the thing.  The first time I was here, feeding clothing and just keeping company the abandoned residents, I was way to embarrassed to admit it.   There was nothing worse than a do-gooder bigging up themselves and it seems icky to be talking about my own supposed benevolence.

So why fess up now? Read the rest of this entry »

Ana appears to be directly connected to the intwebs, and particularly Twitter these days.  She is pumping out an unholy  amount of links and tid-bits.  This one I really liked.

I’ve also started listening to Dan Benjamin’s Pipeline podcast which features interviews with tech entrepreneurs.  Neil Patel of KissMetrics and CrazyEgg was chatting to Dan about how he had no problem blogging about his failures as much as his successes.  What a good idea.  So here we go, lets bring these two beautiful concepts together and run down my bias mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been getting a little sick of the sound of my own advice recently.  I’ve resolved to only write a blog if I’ve actually got something concrete to back up my opinions.  As a consequence, I’m pretty quiet.  I did do another survey for agtweet though using the questions recommended by Sean Ellis and survey.io.  I’d recommend it.  Super easy to set up and Sean has already worked out what to ask so you don’t have to.

Sean gave me this advice on how to interpret the results and what to do next.

For the last 9 months or so, we have been hunkered down in Argentina, focusing on building up Piehole.  Overall, it has been a success.  Away from the distractions of networking events and County Enterprise Board grants, there has been nothing much to do other than grow our subscriber base and find more work for our artists.

I do have one big fear however.  It is all too each to get used to good wine, tasty empanadas and cheap meat.  You don’t need a lot of money to live a very nice lifestyle and there is a temptation to spin down a little bit and just coast.  I’m not against coasting and it has been wonderful to be able to focus on Piehole, giving it the love it deservers .  However, after a while the question becomes, ‘what next?’.

As we live in Mendoza, 18 hours away from the bright lights of Buenos Aires, there are limited networking opportunities.  There are local tech enthusiasts but it is hard to make the sort of network of contacts that can be useful in growing a business.  I’m somewhat wistfully looking on at all the great events being held back in Dublin these days.  I’m tempted to come back for a few.

However – why move back to Dublin – when we could go straight for gold and move to the Internet epi-centre – the Bay Area, California.  There are a couple of daunting reasons NOT to go.

• It will be at least 3 times as expensive.
• We won’t be able to afford the same quality of life.
• Hiring local talent will be out of our budget.
• GMT-8 is a long way from our Irish customers.  Starting work at 1am would be a toughie.

On the plus side – here are some of the benefits I imagine will flow

• Ready access to cutting edge talks and education on building web businesses
• An opportunity to set up a Piehole in the states, working with local artists.
• Potential to build relationships which made aid the eventual sale of Piehole.

So here is my question . Is it worth it and how would we get the most out of it?

Miller’s law states that

average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2

When I was in computers science school, this was pretty much the extent of our UX training.  Don’t put more than seven items in a menu and you’ll be fine.  It would probably be better off put in our business class.  Miller was a congnitive psychologist and his book on the limits of human congnition, was based on reasearch showing that, bascially, humans have limits on their ability to process information, and numbers.

This is a problem for me.  I’m trying to grow hundreds and thousands of customers, paying tens of euro a month for some service.  I can’t possibly keep each customer in mind and individually.  Also, there are hundreds of payments to keep track of – this needs to be simplified.  Most importantly, its hard to see the wood for the trees.  Some days, we only get 1 €18 payment in.  Its easy to freak out when something like that happens.  That is why we’ve been spending more time aggregating all the hundreads of transactions, from phone calls, to emails, to payments.  We’re fighting back against Miller’s law.

We built a pretty Minimum Viable CRM to gather the basic information.  It pretty much still works as described previously.  The only addition has been the ability to add notes by forwarding emails to a dropbox and the ability to initiate payments from the contacts home screen.

Thats not really what I’d like to blog about however.

On those €18 days, I tend to get a bit freaked out.  Because my brain is average and cannot really appreciate big numbers, percentages and more than 9 digits at a time, I need some way to ’see the wood for the trees’.   One of the most motivating (and therefore profitable) things about our CRM system is we are starting to have overview figures available to us.  How many calls were made this week, how many emails went out.  How many people upgraded.  Brian has a really nice post overviewing some of the fancier dashboards available online.

Aggregating live sales data down into average sale, average number of purchases per customer, conversion rate, really helps in the dark days.  Standing back, you can see how the whole thing comes together.  It makes the non-obvious, obvious.  Even though you might have had a terrible, day or week, having the total ‘broad view’ sales picture a click a way, can help you get back up and keep plugging away.  IMHO.