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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.

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.
• 7.15am:  We drive to our allocated patrol area.  Seat-belts are eschewed in case we need to jump out and rugby tackle someone in a hurry.  I abandonded mine just to fit in.  I wasn’t going to tackle anybody.
• 8.30am:  Time for a trip to McD’s.  Much to my disappointment, we didn’t have donuts for breakfast.  Instead it was some kind of egg/hash-brown thing.  I wasn’t sure what the protocal was regarding the bullet proof jackets.  I left mine behind in the car.  For some reason we had to bring the massive R5 5.65mm assault rifles with us.  Aside from that, we tried to fit in.
• 8.45am:  As people started to wake up, the radio chatter increased.  People were waking up to find their houses had been burgled over night.  For the most part we just cruised around nosing into the back of other people’s gardens.
• 9.10am:  A report comes in of someone having being shot in the district next to us. The lights go on and we start haring around the backstreets and motor-ways of Pretoria.  I remain calm, although I’m starting to think about swapping my bullet proof jacket for a nappy.  Dion, the driver, is however very impressive.  Although at high speed, breaking red lights and overtaking a go go, you can’t help but appreciate the skill involved.
• 9.12am:  On our way to the shooting incident, we get a call to a “murder in progress”.  This trumps a plain old shooting, so we alter course and start driving even faster.  We head for one of the poorer areas of town.  I’m not sure if you’d call it a Township, but it was something along those lines.  Most of the houses were make of plain, un-plastered breeze blocks or corrugated iron sheets.  We pull up beside one house, and the guys jump out, M5’s in hand.  I’m not sure what to do at this stage, but decide to take up the rear, guarding the car, from the back seat, across the street.
• 9:15am:  A crowd had gathered, and after a while, it became apparent, that whatever had happened, was now over.  In fact the incident had occurred a few hours ago, and it wasn’t a murder at all, it was almost worse.  A kid of 19 had had a bowl of boiling water poured over him by his mother.  He was stealing form neighbours to feed his drugs habit.  Each time he did so, his mother would end up having to pay the neighbours back.  Because she was busy paying everyone back, she didn’t have money to treat him for his addiction.  Pouring boiling water over him to teach him a lesson was all she could afford.
• 10.00am:  An ambulance arrive and the kid is inspected by a medic.  He had 2nd degree burns on 20% of his body.  He’ll be shipped off to hospital.  He is 18, and he could press charges, but it doesn’t happen.  Instead the mother is given some informal advice –  ”Next time just use a sjambok”.  A sjambok is a kind of whip, about an inch across used as a weapon traditionally.
• 10.40am:  We’re back on the streets, patrolling around.  Both of my newfound colleagues are volunteers.  They do their job for no pay and not inconsiderable risk.  Twice a month, they carry out a 12 hour shift.  They buy much of their own equipment but have all the training and powers of a regular policeman.
• 11.30am:  The radio comes alive with chatter about an armed robbery in a house.  We set off at break-neck speed one more time.  The suspects have been spotted fleeing the scene, and shots have been fired at the scene.  There is a trail of blood away from the house, so we suspect that one of the robbers shot an accomplice.
• 11.40am:  The police helicopter is mobilised, and we start to hear the pilot over the radio.  He directs us to the area.  We pull up along side some veld and the guys jump out.  I follow, a few hundred meters behind.  A veld is basically a large piece of scrub land, and it seems hopeless to find anyone.  We scan the horizon and get back in the car to skirt around the outskirts of the veld.  We come across another car that has a suspect in custody.  There are still 4 other suspects on the run.
• 13.00am:  We get back in the car and start heading back to base.  The shooting we had originally been called to, had subsequently proven fatal, but they guys were keen to get on with the rest of their day without a pasty white Irish guy to slow them down.

So that was it.  1 murder, 1 murder in progress and one armed robbery, all on a quiet Wednesday morning.

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)*.

There are of course a bunch of things I don’t like about them

• Capital intensive (although  my opinion on this might change if I had more capital)
• Requires staff
• Turnover is high, but so is the potential for downside.

Thankfully, I’m getting the chance to learn a little more about retail without having to put anything on the line.  For the next two months, we’ll be living in London, helping to promote The Flying Burrito.  It is a burrito bar opened by my soon-to-be brother-in-law.  Located in East London, they have been operating for three months.  Thus far, my main contribution has been to put together a website ordering system for them (not yet released).

So are we abandoning Piehole?  Well, not so much.  What we’ve come to realise is that if the two of us work on Piehole full time, it doesn’t make twice as much as only one of us working on it.  In fact, it pretty much makes the exact same either way.  I guess this is the downside of not ’selling time’.  If you do have an hourly rate, all you have to do is sell more hours.  In our case, putting in more hours doesn’t tranlate into more income unless those hours are on an in-house sales effort.  Thus, while we are up there, we’ll split our time between promoting the Burrito bar and working on Piehole.

It is also the start of looking at ways that Priscilla and I can have a choice as to how much time we spend working together.  We’ve had a hoot so far, but I’m not 100% sure that working with your partner is a great idea long term.  Hopefully, by the end of the summer, either one of us will be able to take over the reins completely if necessary.

I’m looking forward to London on three counts.  The first is that we get to see how a ‘real’ business works.  Second, we get to help the guys out in a meaningful way.  Third, its the last stop before we head to San Fran for a couple of months.

Going to CA is all about exploring whether it really is the place to build a web business.  I expect to meet some interesting people out there and help to boost our own rather home-made efforts at building an online business into something more stunning.  Other than that, there is no great plan behind it.

* Turnover is however, every different to profit.

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?

Well, two reasons.  First up; I’d like to leave a legacy.  I don’t have kids, and have no current plans to have any, and I’m keen to make a mark on the world.  Twee as it might sound, growing up I was inspired by the efforts of Bob Geldof et al to make a difference in the world.  The guy has two arms, two legs, just like me and yet he’s arguably helped hundreds of thousands.  Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do something like that?  Rather selfishly, I’ve decided that before I can really get around to doing anything that great, I’ve got to free up time (ergo: have hundreds of people paying tens of euro for some service) but in the mean time, I might as well get practicing.

The second reason is that I’ve looked on with bemusement as Pat Phelan has lead the charge in taking lumps out of Evert Bopp and his Haiti Connect project.  Evert has been getting a lot of heat for his project, which basically aims to set up communications equipment in Haiti in a bid to help the humanitarian projects there.  I’m not going to go into the pros of this project.  Its up to whoever funds the project to decide whether it is worthwhile.  I have not chosen to support the it.

The attacks on him personally and his efforts seem strange as they come from what might be termed entrepreneurs.

Evert’s plans are unproven, untried, he has no experience and the outcomes are uncertain.  You might describe him as innovating.  He’s taking a chance with other people’s money and his own.  That sounds pretty much to me the definition of what an entrepreneur does.  I don’t hear anyone criticizing any of the myriad Irish tech startups in the same way, even if at least some of them seem doomed to failure.

So why is it okay to condemn an entrepreneurial charitable project and not a business one?  Are charities immune from the need for new thinking?  Do market forces not apply to them?  Are the best methods for delivering aid all discovered?

If the criticism came from anyone else I might understand but it is hard to see why Pat might decide this bone to pick.  He already has a successful blog, and business.  Maybe he has been revising his copy of the Prince.

The home in Oberá does fantastic work, and is funded in large part by the efforts of small Irish business owners.  Starting or running your own business is an inherently self-centered activity.  I think this is why many feel a need to search our projects like RescueArgentina.com and support them.  I might be self-agrandising myself here, as Evert was claimed to have been doing, but giving back is good – period.  It is dangerous to vilify Hait-Connect, if only for the fact that it puts off people sharing their experiences when it come to giving back in some way.  Worse still, it is an implicit criticism of a culture of giving. People who do make an effort to do something, while may not deserver to be lauded, certainly don’t deserve to be lampooned.

This isn’t my fight and I’m not sure why I’m getting involved.  I have met Evert once, briefly.  He may be the greatest bollox to walk the earth for all I know.  What I have read about him just doesn’t seem right.  Staying quiet didn’t either.

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.

Representativeness Bias: I used to try and avoid putting people in boxes.  It is not PC, but I do it anyway.  Most notably, a now good friend of mine, was introduced to me as a cleaner from Romania.  I watched a little condescendingly as she presented at a local business networking group.  No need to go to college for that!  It turns out of course that she actually had a engineering degree and had built the cleaning business to a stage where it supported a property portfolio in Dublin (which she exited before the crash) and Bucharest.  All as a single mother to 2 kids.  Inspiring lady.

Having said that, I have learned to lean on my instincts a lot more than I used to.  My old man meets thousands of people each year in his job, and he reckons he can suss someone out with a minute of them sitting down in his office.  Looking back, I can see how in the past, I’ve had a worrying feeling about a strategy of person which came to fruition.  Maybe this bias is here to protect me a little.

Anchoring Bias:  By and large, I’m not a detail person, but sometimes I let small details distract me from the bigger picture.  With an engineering background, this most often manifests itself in wanting to tinker with a website / product rather than step back and look at the cashflow as a whole.  For years, I developed countless features into SmartNote.ie in the hope that the killer feature would solve my lack of sales.  When I say years – I mean YEARS of my life were spent in a dungeon basement in Baldoyle coding away.  It ate my way through my savings and eventually the money that was supposed to go to the tax man because I was focused on the wrong thing, unable to step back and see the bigger picture.

Availability Bias:  Working with Priscilla on Piehole, you really get to appreciate the creative mind.  She is the creative force behind everything we do and I’ve come to learn that key to this talent is the ability to step past the first best thing that comes to mind.  If we need to promote a specific feature of the site, Priscilla can come up with 10 different concepts and counting.

Thinking more generally, I find myself unduly influenced by the poster boys of the web-scene.  The same tired examples of successful businesses (basecamp, Microsoft, Google) pop into my mind when I’m trying to consider what model or tactic we can attempt next.  I guess I should dig a little deeper and try to educate myself about the other successes out there.  Mixergy.com is a fanstastic resource for this.

Confirmation Bias:  Because I’m reading blogs and listening to tech startup podcasts, I’m re-enforcing a pretty narrow view of the world.  In reality, making money online is bloody hard and not the most sensible way to try and achieve financial freedom.  For all their faults, the property investments I’ve made still make far easier money for me that the night and day effort that goes into building subscriptions.  I tend not to listen to that voice in my head however.  I seek out information that confirms my own world view.  I get bored reading books on savings and mutual funds and all that malarky.

Worse still, I find myself slightly belligerent to anyone who seems to affront my strategy.  Public servants aren’t high on my list of people to be admired.  I guess this is mainly because their safe, secure and sensible position is an implicit criticism of my insecure, month to month, country to country existence.  I think I need to make more friends in the public service.  I hear they can be nice.  The self-help books tell you to avoid them like the plague (not civil servants, just people who aren’t on the same track you are in general).

Hmm.  Maybe I should keep this bias burning for while.

Self Serving Bias:  This one most often pops up if I have some custom development work to do for someone.  There is an implicit contention between my desire to bill as many hours as the best rate possible, with my clients desire to get it done for as little as possible.  Preparing a quotation sometimes feels like playing a hand of poker.  For fixed price work, someone is going to ‘win’ either them or me.  I even find it influencing my thinking when proposing improvements to projects.  ”Yes, you should consider upgrading the hardware for x, y and z reasons” – meanwhile I know it’ll mean I have to write less efficient code and I can spend less time on those projects for the same money.

Offering advice to budding voiceovers also puts us in an awkward position.  We try to guard against giving biased advice, but at the end of the day, it is hard not to let an upcoming rent payment influence whether or not you’d recommend a product or not.  A common problem in sales.

Ideally I’d like to decouple the value I deliver from the price I charge completely.  This means delivering value that isn’t attached to the number of hours I spend.  If I could charge €1, knowing they would make €10, I’d be a happy camper.

Expectancy Bias:  These ones are easy.  I expected a torrent of sales when

• I spent thousands on adwords listing
• Was a guest on RTE’s ‘the business’
• Appeared on national TV receiving offers from the Dragons
• I set up business networking groups around Dublin

Of course, some of them do generate sales.  My problem is, that none of them generate that much.  I’m always keen to find a silver bullet when an hail of arrows seems to be required.

Self-consistency Bias:  This is hard.  I’d like to think I’ve always had a master plan to move abroad, live the good life and deliver value to hundreds of customers paying tens of euro.  Of course, I never used to even consider leaving Ireland.  I thought I had to network harder, meet more people, spend more time behind the desk.  The networking didn’t really seem to get me anywhere.  Sitting behind a desk certainly didn’t.

Now that I think of it.  Maybe some of my biases do me a favour from time to time.  I guess its worth bearing them in mind though.

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?

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.