So, you are a start-up bringing your first product to market and potentially every business on the planet is a target. How do you decide which companies to target initially? This is when customer profiling become important. Customer profiling focuses you to identify the type of company you believe you have a higher chance of converting to a revenue generating client. How do you go about accomplishing this given UK alone has more than 2.1 million registered companies?

You need to apply number of criteria to reduce this number to about 50 companies to initially target. Once you got your initial 50, then you can analyse them to identify any patterns, and then decide whether to further focus on these patterns – perhaps add further companies that fit into this pattern to the initial 50. Next step is to review the responses your receive and refine the criteria to increase 50 to 100 and beyond!

How did you identify your first 50?

Tags: customers, profiling

I just got back from listening to Martin Beaumont, chief executive, Co-operative Group Ltd at Manchester Business School. Martin spoke passionately about the corporate turnaround that is taking place within Co-op Group under his leadership. Their vision is to be the best co-operative business in the world. How does this vision relate to typical UK business? Very differently. Because his stakeholders include co-op members and focus is not just on revenue, profitability and growth. To get your head around this, first you need to understand what a co-operative is…

“a co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically controlled enterprise”

So the key objective is to:

“optimise profits from businesses where co-operative values gives a positive marketing advantage, allowing to serve members and to deliver social goals as a successful co-operative, while making a reasonable financial return to member-owners, both corporate and individual.”

This means that they cannot compete on the same grounds as Tesco. Yet, they hold No. 1 slot in the funerals sector. It is a very challenging environment. Good luck to Martin.

Press here for next Vital Topics lecture…

A friend just introduced me to “the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint“. Guy Kawasaki is right! It is true. Most start-ups are poor at delivering a clear strong message to VCs. VCs are not interested in working with companies that does not have the right management structure, etc because its hard work and they have many other propositions to choose from.

Many start-ups, specially those in the technology space, falls into catch 22 scenario, i.e. cannot develop product, generate revenue, let alone acquire clients without external funding. You have no chance of getting funding if there is no product, no revenue and no clients. So, what is the answer! Pack up and get a job! Perhaps there is another away.

You can attend many workshops that teaches you how to write a business plan, structure a business, get inside the mind of the VCs, elevator pitch, etc. You come out of the workshop thinking if I do a, b and c, then VC would come running to fund the business. Hell no chance! short dreams!! Remember, most VCs are risk aversed – most have never started a business – some comes from banking sector. So, what can you do?

How about you hire a VC to become your mentor. You work with the VC to identify the gaps. Both come up with joint solutions. Both take responsibility to deliver. Have you ever known a VC getting their hands dirty!! Perhaps not. But then again there could be few who might just do it!!! So, in a way, you hire the VC, infact paying him to do his own due diligence. You build a good relationship and once both parties deliver, you should be in a strong position to get funding. In addition, the VC gets a case study, which puts him in front of other VCs. A win win for all. Money well spent!

What do you think? Do you have more innovative ideas to share? How did you raise finance – share your story!

Tags: VC, funding, start-up

Everyone knows who BT is. But do you know how much influence BT had in creating entrepreneurs? I had the fortune to work with BT Retail in the past. And during my involvement, I had the opportunity to research Internet Service Provider (ISP) market. Most of the CEOs who run top ISPs today, worked for BT in their career at one point or another.

Today, I was told by Vodafone that SE 990i I have been awaiting for since X’mas 2005 may not be released this month. So, I started looking for alternatives and I came across i-mate, a company founded by Jim Morrison in 2001. He was one of the key members of the team that conceived and designed the product which became O2 Xda, another alternative to SE990i.

Some of these entrepreneurs continue to give headaches to BT, as BT’s market share is under pressure. These individuals have been crucial in driving the industry forward. BT still has a very large R&D capability. The market pressures has resulted in creating an innovative organisational culture in certain pockets, continually exploring new ways to generate non regulated revenue.

Tags: entrepreneurship

I recently came across vyew pronounced as “view” from Zoli’s and Dennis Howlett’s blogs. In the past I have trialled both gotomeeting.com and webex, and came to the conclusion that webex is priced too high and bandwidth hungry. So, I was going to settle with gotomeeting.com.

We need a on line meeting product that has following features:

1. Web based – because we are a web based company and therefore promotes such applications. Thereare other valid reasons than this!!
2. Can be easily set-up – if it does not require software installation on your machine, this is even better
3. Can use to demonstrate software
4. Can run powerpoint slides – not as documents flicking one page at a time. Animation intact if possible
5. Whiteboard
6. Allow attendees to take over your computer only to interact with the presentation.
7. Price – free if possible or single and group user licenses plus pay-as-you-go model.

Now I cannot remember how gotomeeting and webex featured against above, but my take on vyew with limited knowlege is as follows:

1. Yes – you can save your files permanently (or until you run out of space – 25MB free space offered)
2. Yes – web based. Therefore better than gotomeeting and webex
3. No – real disappointment
4. No – real disappointment – can flick pages without animation, etc.
5. Yes – seems very good
6. Not sure
7. Free – at least during beta testing

I tried to run a ppt with Dennis and failed. Then I commented on Zoli’s blog. To my amazement, Tim Hon from vyew got in touch on the same day and agreed to give me a demo. I am yet to agree a time. 10/10 for listening to potential clients. Now I have fixed a session with David Terrar for next Monday to run whatever I can, as part of our on-going discussions to explore possible partnership opportunities between D2C and ebdex. I will report back afterwards.

What do you expect from such a product? And what do you use right now? Do you have any advice for us in product selection?

Tags: ebdex, webex, gotomeeting.com