Pure Play

Freemium - startup metrics

I set up a google alert a week ago for this term and am getting some great results back. A conference I came across is Startonomics (link to upcoming one day'er in LA) and I have just watched the video and accompanying slideshow from a presentation by Dave McClure in October 2008.

For any of you in early startup mode with an eye on your business model and visitor conversions this is a great one to give 20 minutes to.

Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! (Startonomics SF 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: dealmaker media revenue)

Welcome feedback on the LA conference - any readers with experience of their events? Would you go to it? Will you go to it? :-)

keith

As the New Year approaches

I have a lot to be thankful for. We sold and bought a house at the beginning of the year and are happy to have moved to our new home. We have exchanged one set of good neighbours for another but the kids now have loads of friends around them to play with and they are much happier as a result.

The consultancy went well but suffered from a 3 month blip when I broke my ankle in June and then got focused on the Angel Round for dbTwang which we closed on 19th December. There is a lot inbetween the beginning and the end of that and hopefully I will get a chance to share that with some of you at upcoming barcamps (the one planned for the end of January has yet to be announced but bizcamp.ie should be up shortly and will be held on Saturday 7th March in Dublin)

dbTwang in it's current and future forms would not be possible without the help and inspiration we have received from a number of people:
Conor O'Neill (who indirectly hooked us up with...)
Gerry McQuaid

Robin Blandford
James Corbett
Damien Mulley
Joe Drumgoole
Marcus MacInnes
and the elder statesmen (in terms of stage of development at least) Pat Phelan, Fergus Burns and Brian Kelly.

Each of these has shared their time and advice with me over the year and that helped a lot when I needed a friendly and experienced person to turn to. Each of us has highs and lows and it is good to share both.
[It occurs to me that there are no women on that list, need to do something about that.]

Personally I am also very grateful to my co-founder Fintan Blake Kelly (the guitar-head who inspires this) and my wife and kids. Who see less of me than then would if I worked 9 to 5 and have to put up with a lack of foreign holidays and a car heading towards being a classic because of my focus on dbTwang.

Thank you to every one of you and I hope your businesses achieve everything you hope for in the coming year

keith

Great deep niche presentation from TC50

Birdpost, for birdwatchers everywhere

keith

Go win a phone or a TV, free, no catches. Pat Phelan, he's the Man

From Pat Phelan came my Nokia Carbon Arte (build quality to die for, thank you Pat) and you too can drop over, leave a comment and await the courier. Nokia N79 and a 37 inch HDTV LCD up for grabs.

Good luck,

keith

Spanish Business Directory Scam

If you haven't seen one of these and are curious then feel free to click and read!

A great offer to update/include your details in a business directory. With the following small print:

I HEREBY ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION WITH SERVICE PROVIDER INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORIES LTD “WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE”. I WILL HAVE AN INSERTION INTO ITS DATA BASE FOR THREE YEARS.

THE PRICE PER YEAR IS EURO 995.

THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED EVERY YEAR FOR ANOTHER YEAR, UNLESS SPECIFIC WRITTEN NOTICE IS RECEIVED BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER OR THE SUBSCRIBER TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THE SUBSCRIPTION.

Nice one, a rolling 3 year contract for 1,000 euros per annum per person sending these back.

These are picked up regularly in the media as being scams - see this post in TheRegister.

keith

[please note, I take no responsibility for the validity of any transaction you may enter into as a result of taking advantage of the offer SCAM above]

Wishing all of my readers a Happy and Peaceful Christmas, keith

Robin offers assistance to Irish startups

Decisions For Heros is a cool online service aimed initially at Rescue Teams around the world. Robin Blandford is the founder behind it and he was the first Irish participant (along with a colleague of his) at Seedcamp in 2008. Seedcamp is an intensive week long event held in September in London targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA - for more info on Seedcamp click here.

So Robin, in the true spirit of a Irish entrepreneur, has made the following offer:

Offering myself and my inside knowledge to help prepare any Irish start-ups for next year.

1. We’ll get a winner from last year to speak in Ireland.
2. We’ll get one of the organisers over to speak.
3. We’ll prepare for Mini-Seedcamp London April 20th ‘09.
4. We’ll work on your 100 million dollar exit.
5. We’ll work on your Seedcamp Application Form.
6. We’ll work on your pitch.

I have signed up - I love the idea of learning from Robin and his inside track. Join me over on his blog.

Thanks Robin

keith

HPSU Mentor recommendations?

As part of the package from Enterprise Ireland dbTwang can avail of a mentor from their panel. Anyone reading this got someone they can recommend based on direct personal experience with their own HPSU startup?

No going to bother specifying what we are after - those of you with good mentors know exactly what one feels like and the opposite also holds true :-)

keith

dbTwang Angel Round closed today

Our documentation and share certs for the dbTwang Angel round will be dated 19th December. It took longer than we had hoped; this round commenced over the summer when the business plan hit the streets and started to filter through to investors. Nicely coinciding of course with the financial poop hitting the fan.

We got through it - thanks to the efforts of a good team who had put a lot of work into the detail of the proposition and a strong influence from our new director Gerry McQuaid who was responsible for sourcing a couple of the investors who joined us. It's a great Christmas present for all of us involved.

In the short term we are starting 3 weeks of usability design with Contrast on the 12th January. That will be followed by 2 weeks of graphic design and then we move to the build with Lunar Logic in Krakow. They use the Agile approach to development so we will have 2 week iterations of the service allowing us to launch the early closed beta (most likely closed, we have not made a final decision) around the 3rd week of February.

While that is happening I will be working to achieve key milestones which will build the case for a Seed Round Q2/3 next year enabled by our proof of concept and strong engagement with external partners.

Thanks to Fintan Blake Kelly (my co-founder), Gerry as mentioned above, Dylan in Mason Hayes and Curran (expensive but very professional and responsive) and to all of the entrepreneurs who are part of the strongly supportive eco-system in Ireland for technology startups. Kilkenny CEB chipped in with a e25k capital grant - much appreciated.

Finally thank you and welcome on board to our investors - the Share Cert is in the post :-)

Looking forward to 2009.

keith

Email management - an ongoing experiment

My time allocation and priorities are constantly jigglying between the consultancy and dbTwang and my use of the iPhone to monitor and respond to email is increasing. For those reasons I have found myself changing my email management and logistics again.

• I now have a main bohanna dotcom email which I use for friends, family and consultancy clients.
• A dbtwang dotcom one which is the primary one for the startup.
• 2 gmail accounts - one for general signups and the majority of public facing stuff for me and a second which is for dbTwang signups, google alerts etc
• A me dotcom one which goes with the iPhone and the mobileme service
• A new yahoo dotie one which I will use to collect the activity on the EI ebusiness discussion - and which I will not monitor on the iPhone as the volume and immediate irrelevance do not merit clogging up a small device on the go. I will also start to use that for other stuff that I just do not need day to day access to or awareness of.

I am aware that this is not what a lot of bleedin edge techies/bloggers do - they appear to funnel everything through a single gmail account. Would be interested in what you do to stay sane and help you track priority comms - especially when out and about?

keith

Fancy working with startup businesses?

And living in a small rural town? :-)

Kilkenny CEB have a vacancy for a Business Advisor - someone who will work to help new entrepreneurs. More details can be found here.

Excerpt: The successful candidate will help the Board deliver upon its strategy, in particular provide information and advice to start-up businesses; evaluate start-up business projects for financial and other supports; organise the Boards schedule of entrepreneurial and capability development programmes; and develop and deliver a broad range of programmes aimed at developing a culture of entrepreneurship in the County. See ‘Duties and Responsibilities’ below for detailed job specification.

If you are the right person when you will enjoy working with the team there - apart from the normal Enterprise Board stuff they are also the spawning ground for initiatives like the Centre for Creativity and they are capable of taking the decision to give capital grants/repayable loans to fund the development of complex backends for web businesses.
And the CEO blogs regularly enough which puts him in a minority amongst his peers in Ireland.

If anyone is interested and wants to contact me to get my take on it feel free. I worked there for a couple of years so know the lay of the land. Or used to!

keith

2 new things to watch and play with

Via Pat Phelan MrTweet - a service which is wonderfully simple to start with which apparently will address a need I never knew I had - helping to make recommendations on whom I should follow in TwitterLand. It is so popular at the moment that even in this age of computing power on tap it is going to take "roughly 5.3 days" to be ready to serve me.

And equally disposable is the recommendation from Martin Wallace in Dovetail - Melodis Dialer. A free iPhone app for voice activated dialling. My first 3 attempts left it saying that it was not sure enough to initiate the call. It did shortlist the options though which makes it considerably faster than search or scrolling :-)

keith

Whale watching was brilliant

We had a brilliant time yesterday. After the disappointment in summer 2006 of watching dolphins for 3 hours we saw loads of fin whales (the world's second largest mammal after the blue whale) and a couple of humpbacks (pretty much the only one which does the tail in the air dive - the tail lob). 

We went out with Nic Slocum of WhaleWatchWestCork - he is courteous, knowledgeable and respectful of the animals we went out to see. I cannot recommend his trips enough.

It was a mild and calm morning - so despite the heavy frost when we got up the journey was quieter than our last outing.

This is what we were looking out for - the blows which a whale does when it surfaces to breath and which are followed by the sight of the majority of the whales length coming to the surface. There are three in this photo and the ususual thing about this group is that there are 2 fin whales and a humpback - something which Nic Slocum (the skipper) said he has never seen as it is rare for different species to "hang out" together!

The tail of a humpback - we saw this a couple of times with two different animals and it was wonderful to see - reminiscent of the poster shots of whales which are so popular. It signifies a terminal drive by the whale - one which brings them down deep for 5 to 10 minutes and so they can end up anywhere when they blow again.

The best bit of the trip was this - when a female fin which is 50 ft approx (smaller than the max) blew and surfaced about 30 to 40 feet away from the boat. It caught all of us by surprise.

Here is a slideshow sequence showing a humpback blowing and then going into a terminal dive with a tail lob at the end.

keith

A whaling we will go..

unless we hear otherwise from Nic Slocum of WhaleWatch West Cork myself and a friend, together with our 2 sons, will be heading down to Union Quay in Cork tonight for Nic's 9am sailing tomorrow.

Current sightings are strong - Minke, Fin and even Humpback whales are being seen around the coast down there. There has been one report of a breech (where they launch out of the water) and tail waving and lobs. Fin Whales are the second largest animal in the world - only outdone by the Blue Whale.

I have always loved to watch TV footage of these magnificent creatures and to actually see them in the flesh would be amazing.

Bringing my camera (and 6 layers of clothing) and will post up any shots and a whaling report here :-).

Out now to the Business Innovation Network meeting which starts at 8am

keith

In the midst of the noise and chatter - Email 1, Web2 0

I went looking for a recommendation for source of directors and officers liability insurance this week. Tweeted it on Monday, blogged it on Tuesday, emailed a query to Joe Drumgoole Tuesday evening.

Guess what the response rate was and the related conversion rate?

• I have 149 people reading what I post on my Twitter account. Zero responses. 0% conversion
• I have 81 people reading the RSS feed from my blog and more who randomly visit. Zero responses. 0% conversion
• I had one person reading the email. 1 response. 100% conversion. A call back from Joe within 24 hours with the information I required. Thanks :-)

Why is that? Possibly less engagement in the Web2.0 world as more and more stuff comes at people, probably less reading of each piece of stuff. So of the 149 plus 81 people who are following my output I suspect a fraction actually read my postings.

And because direct one to one communications are still the most appropriate for some questions.

It must also be said that my outward engagement has diminished recently as I get more and more wrapped up in cracking the dbTwang angel round and laying the foundation for the Seed round in 2009. You get out of this what you put into it.

keith

3 win National Broadband Scheme

Their press release:

National Broadband Scheme – 3, a Hutchinson Whampoa company, appointed Preferred Tenderer
 
Communications Minister, Eamon Ryan today announced that “3”, a Hutchinson Whampoa company, has been selected as the Preferred Tenderer for the National Broadband Scheme. This follows the conclusion of a competitive tendering process.
 
The National Broadband Scheme will deliver broadband to those areas of the country currently unserved. Following 3’s appointment as Preferred Tenderer today, work will be finalised on the contract in the coming weeks, with a final announcement expected upon completion of the contract matters next month.
 
Commenting on the appointment, Minister Ryan said: “I am delighted to announce that I have appointed 3 as the Preferred Tenderer for the National Broadband Scheme (NBS).  It is imperative that we have universal broadband coverage in Ireland, for foreign investment, for competitiveness and for our own businesses and householders.
 
Broadband availability will be central to our economic recovery.

This scheme is over a year behind and will use satellite in some areas to deliver the service. If this is the answer then the question was wrong. And having 2 of the 4 interested businesses/consortium's pull out was unfortunate, what was it about the conditions or the process that provoked that?

Mulley has more - click here.

keith

CEB's to introduce Micro Finance Fund?

This is taken from the newsletter sent out by Kilkenny County Enterprise Board today:

Credit Crunch

Small businesses tend to be under-capitalised, resulting in cash flow difficulties. While access to finance in recent years has improved, many small businesses cannot raise adequate capital to start and run their business. Low levels of profitability leave little scope for reinvestment in growth. Owner-managers therefore find themselves in a spiral of constraints from which it is difficult to escape. There is a growing concern that mainstream banking is failing the small business sector. 

To address this issue, the County & City Enterprise Board (CEB) Network are investigating the introduction of an Enterprise Loan Fund (i.e. a microfinance loan scheme) specifically fro micro-enterprises (i.e. those employing less than 10 people). In this regard, we would very much appreciate if you could take a few minutes of your time to take part in our survey.

This comprises of a small number of inter-related questions in relation to your credit needs and current banking services. The responses to the survey will remain anonymous and will be used to substantiate the CEB case for micro-finance for our clients. To take the survey click on the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=s2zTzXBAJxf8AP6Yxdc8Xw_3d_3d

This is a great initiative and deserves support - the more of these coordinated initiatives that come from the 35 CEB's as a whole the better

keith

2009 Barcamp - for Open Source lovers everywhere

Just seen this via John Handellar on Twitter - OSSBarCamp in Dublin on 28th March 2009.

keith

Directors Insurance for startup

Welcome recommendations for sourcing Directors Insurance for dbTwang - the UK based brokers I have been dealing with have come back to say that the underwriters they usually use have pulled away from covering Eire.

thanks, keith

6 tips for hard times - from GigaOm

Raghav Gupta went through tough times in dotbust and he shared some lessons from that:

1. Be as transparent with your employees and other stakeholders as you can be

2. Cultivate a trusted adviser or mentor outside of the workplace

3. Remember whom you work for and where your fiduciary duties lie

4. Accelerate non-advertising revenue models

5. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger

6. Pray! Seriously, luck plays a big role. Do whatever you can to make your own luck.

There is more on each of the above over at his post - linked here.

keith

2 Lessons learned in the last couple of weeks

1. When you send documents to a solicitor for review and they come back with comments on one do not assume they had nothing to say on the other. Because 3 weeks later when they get around to reading it and then send their issues your assumption is stripped bare.

From now on - "Thanks for the feedback on doc XX, I will respond to those points shortly. Can I take it that you are happy with Doc YY?"

(this was not dbTwang solicitors - just to be clear!)

2. When you are working your way through a list of to-do's and you come to an important call - STOP.
Clear your head.
Write your key message(s) down on paper.
Get FOCUSED.
And then make the call.

That will avoid the danger of leaving an under impressive voice-mail as I did last Friday.

keith

On the hop - 4 mins, 3 seconds on dbTwang

Fintan is my co-founder and he is the key custodian of our core services. Watch this impromptu video clip, shot by Thomas Crampton (a former correspondent of the International Herald Tribune) where Fintan explains a little about the longer term ambitions we have for the business.

keith

 

User Experience Conference - see you next week?

Update - I won't be at this, I have a chunk of paperwork which needs me to be desk bound for the day :-(

 I will be attending this next week - this area of usability is a core one to dbTwang and we hope to work with Des Traynor to build out the wireframes before we go to design and build.

keith

IIA USER EXPERIENCE CONFERENCE: Brand Building, Profitability and Customer Loyalty through Better User Experience
25 November - Burlington Hotel, Dublin

AGENDA
9.30: Registrations and Coffee
10.00: Welcome Address - Matthew Ovington, Open Interface
10.10: KEYNOTE ADDRESS "More Than Just a Pretty Face: The Business Value of User Experience" - Martha Rotter, Microsoft
10.50: Build and Protect Your Brand Online - Fiachra O'Marcaigh, Amas
11.10: Universal Design Process: Maximising Design Potential - Donal Rice, Centre for Excellence in Universal Design, NDA

11.30: BREAK
The conference will split into two concurrent working groups following the break. A 10 minute Q&A session will take place in each group before lunch.

STREAM A: Understanding Your Audience
12.00: Understanding Your Users: Building a 360 degree view of user experience - John Wood, iQ Content
12.25: UX Design for Results: From users to customers - Sorcha Moore, Pocket Kings

STREAM B: Techniques and People
12.00: To 2.0 or Not 2.0? - Future proofing usability - Josh O'Connor, NCBI CFIT
12.25: User Centric Design: Stories from the front line - Fiona Murphy, Frontend

13.00: LUNCH

14.00: Case Study by Odran Ginnity, COO, Daft.ie
14.30: Usability Round Table: Answering People's Questions

15.30: CONFERENCE CLOSE

View the full details and speaker biographies here

EI CEO Forum Part Two

** Patrick Coveney, Greencore **

He has background in Management Consultancy. He started by saying clever and brave businesses can seize opportunity now and the gains that come in difficult times will be magnified at the upturn.

Turnover 1.3b. He spoke about the constant change for them over the last 17 years. Less than 1% of their turnover now derives from a business in existence in their privatisation 17 years ago.

They have 10 year deal with Weightwatchers in US to do branded chilled foods. He also spoke about their property portfolio (accidental) and about the environmental obligations that went with that.

He said that biggest driver of performance is people, not strategy. (I am guessing that capability execution is close to this )

( general comment here, each of the speakers have used text dense slides which are bad at the best of times and almost unreadable in a large conference room. Presentations should be available Friday 14th on Deloitte and EI websites)

Their strategy is a bet on the continuous growth in demand for convenience foods. They supply private label products.

They are No1 or No2 in each of their product categories and this is fundamental to them, this is similiar to what Paul Kerley said.

He said that their US strategy (to become category leader) is a 10 year play.

He said the era of cheap food is gone, raw material price increases have slowed down but are with us for good. He spoke about the changes in currencies and the loss of profits (Paul also referred to this).

He referred to the Irish Stock Market being wiped and the consequences - pissed off shareholders, management incentives under water and inability to access capital (he reckons the credit market will ease quickly enough, but on substantially different terms - 2% higher cost of finance so a shift of funds from shareholders to banks etc).

** Brian Long, Atlantic Bridge Ventures **

480m fund. He had a strong entrepreneurial background (Parthus founder).

Started with current economy. Bad - referred to anticipated drop in value of spend in Comms, Software and Semiconductors.
VC's pulling back and IPO's off the radar.

He then referred to areas where growth will continue - SAAS, cloud computing, security, location services.
M&A picking up again, long term investors raising funds.
He reckons that optimistically the US economy will start upturn mid next year and others will follow afterwards.

He referred to Parthus and funding cycles. Survive this period and be ready to take advantage of the bull Market when it happens.

Keys to success
Conserve capital/ cash
Keep cost base lean
Raise money when you can, not when you need to - even with dilution being more than you are comfortable with

How Government can help
Expand BES - e2m limit is too small
Improve grant aid
Improve seed capital
Improve R&D tax incentives

Big issue, supply of science and engineering grads - increase points at leaving certs for related topics.

Opportunities
Hiring great people is possible, corporate life is uncertain
Offer ways for your customers to cut costs
You maybe able to acquire assets cheaply

Ask your investors if they have kept cash aside for your next round, because if you do not have cash you have to hope that they have!

Board of directors advice
You need a professional board, majority non-execs, mix of skills, focus on long term strategic direction, ask CEO to account for stuartship, One Team & One Agenda

Finally Think Big!

Keith

EI CEO Forum notes

Frank Ryan (EI CEO) spoke positively about the success of Irish businesses abroad and also about the changing face of the world in terms of market sizes.
He acknowledged the depth of the recession and stresses the importance of looking after existing customers.

(they are videoing the proceedings, I wonder how that will be used?)

Paul Kerley, Norkom
They have 5 of the top 10 banks as their clients, great business. He spoke about leadership - this is what is required in difficult times. He also spoke about leading Norkom through 2 close to the wall experiences ( contrasting that with the video clip which introduced him!). He said that there is a very strong support network in Ireland and he has taken advantage of that.

He said that shocks to the economic system will get more frequent.

Crisis management, risk management, change management all important.

Early days of Norkom saw a failed IPO and a savage burn rate coming into dot bust. They cut their employee numbers quickly but it took 2 months to make the decision - that was too slow. And that lead into 9/11. They got through that, things had settled and June 2002 3 key contracts disappeared. That lead to a change of direction and went into financial services. ( where as he put it they would be recession proof, that got a laugh!). Burn 27m and then ask for more to change direction. They had been in CRM, now in risk monitoring. He says his plan, which was drawn up quickly, was bullshit ;)

He said here that change and trauma are constant and you need to stay fit, not get stressed and ensure your home and family are stable - invest time and emotional energy into that no matter what the investors say.

How do you prepare for instability in business? Plan for the downside as well as the upside, it is not negative, it is prudent. Boring but necessary. It helps overcome the fear and paralysis, the personal fear/cowardice of sacking 3 of your best friends ( they are still his best friends).

Assess regularly your suitability as CEO for your business.

Own your space. They are the global leader in their sector. They want to be the standard.

They have 15% of their workforce as contractors.

Build an enterprise not a speculative venture.
Separate the exit strategy from the growth strategy. He said that their IPO helped them to do that.
Spoke about spreading risk, about no one customer being more than 10% of turnover.
They are strongly focused on profitability and have profit awareness down to individual project level ( resisted by his ee's. but appreciated more in rough times with competitors letting people go)

His clients are not recession proof, 50,000 redundancies in his 100 clients. His personal belief is that the recession is not close to over so they are being very cash cautious at present.

He spoke about young fellows with big knots in their ties and spiked hair telling him to take their cash and put it into their hedge funds!!

Final questions:
When the shit hits the fan
Will you know? Do you have the metrics.
Who will tell you? (no one wants to be the first to call it)
Are you ready?
Have you the appetite / are you willing?

Keith