Monthly Archives: December 2009

Goodbye Insightory.com – Opportunity for a management consultancy?

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Insightory.com was soft launched two months after edocr.com through TechCrunch. As TechCrunch put it, they wanted to be the Wikipedia for Management Knowledge. I was drawn to Insightory.com as they offered a document publishing, distribution and interactivity platform, albeit focusing on a niche market. Their plan was to approve every publication before displaying on the site. Not the best approach unless you crowd source the approval process similar to wikipedia.

See the email below this post in which Avneet Jolly explains the reasons for the pending shut-down. Instead of arguing about the rights and wrongs of their strategy, I am happy to share my conversation with Avneet and Joao from yesterday.

Lack of strong upside

I reached out to Insightory with two thoughts in mind; explore the possibility of user acquisition, and explore the technology stack. They have adopted a different strategy to edocr.com in terms of displaying documents. They convert each document page to an image before wrapping all the pages in flash. Not something we see value in as an replacement to Flash Paper we use. In terms of user acquisition, it was felt that there were not sufficiently high number of users to make a difference to edocr.com. In addition, it is highly unlikely these users will ever become revenue paying customers.

Opportunity

So what to come out of Insightory.com? Avneet has already received number of offers for the Insightory assets. If you are a management consultancy, Insightory.com might present a nice addition to your website. You would need to think carefully whether you are interested in just the site, or the site and its current user base. If it involves users, what would your strategy be for retaining them and then growing the user base? Do you see it as a permanent financial loss maker, revenue booster for your existing services, or actually making revenues from the user activity? Leave “advertising” out of this as a potential revenue generator. What resources would you allocate to continue maintaining and improving the site? Acquiring and then leaving the site to grow naturally will not work, as there is choice! You need to think this through carefully. If you do decide to bid, it would be great to see Insightory.com continuing, perhaps under a different brand. It’s sad day to see a competitor having to shut down, but I sincerely hope there would be a buyer!

Below is the original email from Avneet, CEO of Insightory.com:

Hi all,
I wanted to let you all know that we have decided to shut down Insightory.com.

Insightory was an experiment in aggregating management-focused content that soon became more-than-a-hobby-but-less-than-a-business. The site itself has grown a lot since we started 2 years ago. We regularly featured content from the best-known business authors, professors, firms and even senior corporate executives. It gave me a huge thrill to host the insights of people whose books I used to read in b-school – Tom Peters, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, Graef Crystal etc. It was also gratifying to help leading global firms like Booz & Co, Watson Wyatt, Nielsen etc – as well as hundreds of smaller firms – promote their thought leadership through Insightory. The range of topics also kept growing – we covered everything from business strategy to generational issues, and from social media to business statistics! This probably sounds immodest, but there aren’t that many sites that give access to such a wide range of quality management content for free.

We logged well over 1,000 page views per day last month. Since the traffic kept growing and the content kept coming in without too much effort from us – we let the site coast for almost a year. Unfortunately, we could never settle on a business model that would let us invest in the technology or content partnerships that could take us to the next level. Every model we looked at seemed to require exponentially more traffic and users than we had – or could reasonably expect in the next few years. The sharp decline in online ad rates didn’t help either.

For a while, we even believed that we could let the site run without any revenue generation at all. But the cost and time required to run such a site with any level of quality & professionalism is not insignificant. At the same time, my other work (I also run a consulting firm) kept growing and taking up an every-increasing % of my time. It has now reached a point where I need to (gasp!) make a significant investment in office space and staff! The writing was on the wall for several months, but I guess it took the end-of-year clarity of vision (should that be hindsight??) to really see it.

We will terminate our hosting contract shortly. The site will no longer be hosted after Jan 31, 2010. That should give you enough time to review your account and migrate your documents to another document/ presentation sharing site. If you need support with your documents after that date, please let me know and I will try to help you as best as I can. Rest assured – your documents, profile and contact information will NEVER be shared with anyone else.

THANK YOU for helping us build the site to this point. You contributed by sharing your documents (even if in response to repeated entreaties from Laurie Smith, Selene Cong, Donna Sacks or me!), commenting on others’ documents and sharing ideas for features and functions that the site should have. I sincerely hope you got something positive out of that experience, and will continue to share your insights on other platforms as well.

It was wonderful getting to know many of you – even if only by email or phone. I hope you will stay in touch.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Wishing you a great holiday, and a happy & healthy 2010.
Best regards,
Avneet Jolly

avneet.jolly@insightory.com
www.insightory.com

Key Objectives for 2010

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2009 is fast becoming history. The two week period I wanted to use for thinking seem to be evaporating fast. Blogging is a great way to put you mark on the calendar. Twitter is fine, but you do not control it. I can see more and more people coming back to blog in 2010 whilst using twitter as a mechanism to drive traffic.

So here are my key objectives for 2010 (business and not personal – bit of a blur there!).

1. Grow my ego whilst learning to be humble – Ok! should have said, personal brand.
2. Grow edocr.com – we may be looking for our first round of external capital in 2010 to speed up growth – this would be to finance number of key positions plus spend on product development
3. Grow Northern StartUp 2.0 to be the organisation that binds all other regional tech, investment and entrepreneurship activities, whilst fostering more tech startups to be establised and helping those committed to achieve growth

Then there are peripheral activities such as:

4. Foresight North – time to deliver or shutup. I am not the driver here, just the facilitator
5. Next Gen – UKIBC – Board Member for NW

2010 year is the year we all need to prove ourselves as the markets start recovering! A great opportunity if we position ourselves to tap into the hungry corporates, ready to do business and exercise spend.

MB1 – Play 8 – Work only on What is Important

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Marc adopted similar principles to me in getting the product to market as quickly as possible. As he says in his book, “do it fast, simple, and right the first time”. Based on my discussions with another tech startup from the north, they have rewritten code number of times to get it right. I do not see this as a problem, as you evolve and your goals change, so should the code, unless you can read the future.

At edocr.com, we had another consideration, how to build without spending money! We achieved this through using open source products as much as possible. In addition, we inherited a technology stack, that each of the team was familiar with, which ensured, low cost and speed to market.

Unfortunately, the “right for the first time”, requires mammoth resource base. I am not talking about 100s! But it require more than one or two developers. In my opinion, your initial customer facing product, should not require the effort of more than couple of developers. Remember, at this stage you are gambling, unless you have a customer who has already paid for your product. Don’t be embarrased to release a product with few known glitches. It’s OK as long as you disclose you are working on them and do have a plan to clear the bugs quickly. By getting a product out to market quickly, you can start validation quickly and your users/customers will not just help you to test and identify bugs, but will also help you validate the product map. But be careful not to build every functionality your userbase asks for. You may end up with a product users like but may not have any chance of ever commercialising it.

Marc speaks about keeping things simple, no fluff as he elegantly put it. He also speaks about their early focus on developing the best possible and easiest to use product; focus on the 20 percent that makes 80 percent of the difference. Whilst I whole heartly agree with this and wish we could have adhered to similar principles, we were constrained in many ways.

Few of the key questions I ask myself before we venture into any further development on edocr.com are:

1. what is the expected return – this is not about putting a scientific figure against an expected ROI, its all about your gut feel. By now you should know your market inside out and know well what could make money and what couldn’t
2. who requested it – if its a customer (better if its more than one) request, and you believe it ought to be provided, yes! but if it was requested by a user that is unlikely to ever pay for you services, think twice before you commit your scarce resources.
3. do you have to do it – perhaps for legislative or any other purpose, including the future failure of your product or its infrastructure. This is no brainer, you got to bite the bullet and commit resources.
4. what about the competition – this should not be a good enough reason. Does it achieve differentiation that will increase value. Be careful in copying your competitors.  The one with the biggest market share and capital will ultimately win. So look for differentiation and try to carve a niche, which may help you discover a short cut that will eventually put you in the no. 1 seat. It does not matter, if the rest of the world does not get this, but make sure you test it over and over.

Couple of areas we are working on at edocr.com right now with comparison to above 4 points:

1. Lead capture – there is a significant revenue opportunity, so this meets the “expected return” test
2. Ability to update documents – requested by customer. Even I within edocr has this need to update our brochures, etc. We have the same requirement from Northern StartUp 2.0, who is edocr.com’s first customer.
3. Limiting “email this” facility – at present, edocr.com allows ability to promote documents by emailing document link to unlimited number of email addresses. Unfortunately, this functionality has been misused, resulting in two hosting companies giving us a warning. All our development time is now diverted this week to fix this problem. Fortunately, this has created another (1) and (4) opportunity for us.
4. We cannot compete with the likes of Scribd ($13 million investment) and Docstoc ($4 million investment), but can carve our own niche. Hence focusing on the enterprise and the benefits we can bring instead of focusing on consumer markets, such as taking Amazon.com head on with book sales.

If you are planning for your first tech startup this festive reason, think about how quickly you can get to market, and the four points I raised in here. If you a startup veteran, please share your experience.

For first timers: I am comparing my experience against Marc Benioff who founded Salesforce.com and grew it to be the first $1 billion revenue SaaS company.

Previous posts:
- Forthcoming knowledge share blog posts against Marc Benioff

Forthcoming knowledge share blog posts against Marc Benioff

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Having met Marc Benioff on 8th Dec 09 in London and having finished reading his book, “Behind the Cloud” recently, I will be sharing my experience against Marc’s through a series of blog posts. In his book, there are 111 plays. I will be picking plays randomly and would like to invite you to do the same by leaving you experience as comments against my posts.

But before I can start, here is a reality check:

Marc was well connected, influential, secure and financially stable before he setup salesforce.com. In addition, he lived in the epic centre of technology, San Francisco and invested $6 million of his own capital before raising $60 million over the next 3 years. Very few in the technology sector has the resources Marc had in bringing a SaaS product to the market. He had a vision to change the industry and he did, but one cannot ignore the fact that he had the best possible start irrespective of the difficulties he has disclosed through his book.

Now I am not going to compare myself against Marc in this respect, but will compare my journey with edocr.com against ebdex (my first startup that I shut down in 2006). When I started ebdex, I had significant startup capital (nothing compared to Marc’s $6 million), years of corporate life and a brand new MBA. I knew nothing about technology, the sector I ventured into and had zero startup experience. I saw the opportunity and did my research to understand the size of it. I also had confidence (self belief) and an ego the size of Paul Walsh.

When I started edocr, I had very little startup capital, plenty of scars from ebdex, a network of tech entrepreneurs and friends, and bunch of others who wanted to be part of edocr. Things have changed, but here are few areas that mattered to me at the time

- Built the product without spending anything – The actual cost when soft launched in Oct 2007 was under £500
- Speed to market – should have taken weeks, but at the end, it took 6 months. We launched a product with bugs under Alpha
- Not to put all my eggs in one basket – now VCs hate this, they believe that if you invest cash, you should just be concentrating on one business, and only they know how to share risk and you do not.

Of course, since 2007, we have spend significant amount of capital, still fully embracing the low cost model. I continue to be a strong believer in sharing risk, so 2010 will see my continuing efforts in driving both edocr and Northern StartUp 2.0 forward.

Now to get to the first post….

Planning tools – removing duplication – plan for 2010

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As I am in the thinking mode, one thing I am not good at is sticking to one tool for planning instead of using multiple tools. Just to get my head straighten, I thought it would be better to write it down, so here goes.

1. iGTD (1.4.5.6) from fasticon/James Wondrack – great little GTD tool for Mac. It synchronises with iPhone app Todo (1.6.1) through Appigo Sync (0.9.6 Beta) and Mac’s own to do items displayed through iCal and also on iMail. iGTD2, the replacement to iGTD caused problems in the past with synchronising. With my intention of keeping all things simple, I took the decision to stay with iGTD as it met all my needs at the time, and continue to do so.

2. Mindjet MindManager for Mac is not as extensive as the version for PCs. But nevertheless a great tool that I have been using since 2005 (Mac version since 2008). I have a template for monthly, weekly and daily planning that I built. But I do not use this on regular basis, which is not excusable.

3. Salesforce.com – this is my latest tool, which also provides a calendar with tasks.

As they say, three is a crowd. Here is how I plan to use these tools in 2010.

a. All tasks except sales related will go on iGTD.

b. Monthly and weekly planning with daily monitoring will be through Mindjet. The relevant tasks need to be manually added from iGTD to Mindjet, duplication of effort nevertheless. I am at ease with how Mindjet display information, which I find easy to absorb than typical to do list reports, which iGTD produces.

c. All sales related tasks will be on salesforce.com for edocr.com. Need to make a decision about how I will manage Northern Startup 2.0 commercial activities. On one hand, salesforce.com may provide the solution (low cost contact manager and familiarity from edocr.com use case). On the other hand, supporting local startups such as Manchester based JavelinCRM (more expensive but with mailchimp integration) is vital for my conscious. But it would have to be a commercial decision at the end.

The key to success in all this is consistency. It’s not about how great the individual or combined tool set is. If you do not consistently use these, the end result will be a mess leading to less effectiveness as an individual and team player.

There is another tool that could perhaps play a role. Tiyga, a product from another local tech startup, which helps you record how you spend time. It has ability to let you plan ahead and then monitor progress with weekly analysis of your performance. Whilst it has been a great product, and I have test driven many variations of it over the last 3 years, the problem I find myself with is lack of consistent usage, which comes from poor self-discipline. And it’s also about micro-planning and monitoring, which require a mindset change. Unfortunately, I am less disciplined than when I had a 9 to 5 job. One thing is for sure, I am going to give it another shot in 2010.

The key objective of all this is to be the most effective you can be, with the fixed time available. I hope I will be more disciplined and effective in 2010 than I have been in 2009 thanks to these tools plus a strong will to make a key difference in 2010. 2009, from both Northern Startup 2.0 and edocr has been a year of commercial trials. 2010 is about making it happen! Wish me luck folks!

Do share your thoughts on what tools you use and their effectiveness.

Update

It looks like iGTD has merged with Things. For the time being, I will continue to use iGTD and consider migration later on.

edocr external tool kit

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edocr.com just like others, need a vast number of external services to function, both as a product and business. From a business perspective, below is a list of web services we rely upon to make our life and our stakeholders lives bit easier:

1. Assembla – edocr.com is my second tech startup. I operated blindly with first tech startup where daily development progress was not visible to me. Today, thanks to Assembla, I am fully aware of the current status of product development. In addition, assembla captures our specifications and knowledge share between the operational team and the development team.

2. Google App – primarily used as mail server for our business emails. Other services include Adsense (soon to be discontinued), webmaster tools, analytics and alerts.

3. Salesforce.com – we have recently started using SFDC as our CRM product. It integrates well with Google mail. We need to integrate with edocr.com database in the future to remove manual uploading of new users.

4. Support system – we have tried uservoice, get satisfaction and zendesk in the past and believe Zendesk might provide the ultimate solution. A decision needs to be taken on this in 2010.

5. Twitter – all time best collaborative platform for edocr.com. How do we use it? We crowd source input for functionality changes and introductions, and knowledge acquisition. In addition, its a great tool for customer acquisition. The built-in auto-tweeting function promotes our users and customers’ documents.

6. Mailchimp – provides monthly communications with our user and customer base. Recent issues with corporate credit card has prompt us to review use of mailchimp. The key problem arise due to the need to segment our userbase. It would be suicidal to manage this process both on salesforce.com for CRM purposes and on mailchimp. We need further thought on continuous use of mailchimp or similar email marketing tool, perhaps within the saleforce.com platform.

7. Yuuguu – screen share for demos. Exploring the possibility of using Yuuguu for webinars in 2010

8. Skype – Instant messaging and chatting both for product development, operational management and customer service and acquisition.

In the past, we used various other products for collaboration, e.g. huddle.net, basecamp, etc. The intention is to narrow down the number of brands used so as to reduce duplication of effort.

Update 1

9. Paypal and HSBC – payment collection

10. Billingboss.com – invoicing – trialling Xero for accounts including invoicing

Options for charging for leads – fixed or per lead basis

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Since the soft launch of edocr.com in Oct 2007, we have been delivering value to our users and customers. The value delivered right now can be categorised into “exposure” leading to “prospects contacting you”. We are now entering a phase where our customers will have the opportunity to access “leads”, delivering further value.

We now need to figure out the best way to commercialise the new value addition, “leads”. The two options available are:

1. Charge per lead
2. Charge a fixed fee

I am a great believer of simplicity and keeping all things as simple as possible. Charging a fixed fee is easy. You set up a particular subscription and demonstrate value whereby targeted customers subscribe to the additional new service.

Charging per lead becomes harder to manage. Software need to be able to calculate the number of leads after those leads which are considered to be “noise” (e.g. employee of edocr) are removed, use a set fixed or variable price per lead and invoice or charge paypal the due amount. If variable rate is used, then the quality of leads need to be considered. The customer may also object to the quality of the leads resulting in disputes. The whole issue of providing added value becomes complex to manage from edocr.com’ point of view.

I assume you are familiar with the term “catch 22″. There has been numerous occasions where our customers have asked to know the details of who viewed or downloaded their documents. Whilst this information has always been available to edocr employees, the current build will provide various tool kits for our customers to extract this data with consents where needed. I can almost smell the next catch 22, once customers have the leads, they will no doubt be seeking to understand the quality of the leads we provide.

At this stage, we can only provide details of who looked at a document or a company page (with consent). We cannot judge the quality of these leads and it should not be our role to do so. However, I am convinced that third parties might be able to play a role in here by taking our leads and dissecting them on behalf of our customers.

With that thought, our hunt for those third parties have just commenced. A clue might be in here!

All thoughts on this subject is very much appreciated.

Payment Solutions beyond paypal and others

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I have a problem, both as a buyer and seller on payments using credit cards. I am convinced this problem is not unique to me.

As a buyer – mailchimp as an example
My HSBC credit card was recently cancelled due to two fraudulent transactions in the US. While I am waiting for a replacement card, my subscription to mailchimp has been halted. This causes a number of difficulties:

1. I cannot use the service to communicate with edocr user and customer base through monthly newsletter.
2. I could use my personal credit card, but this becomes a menace from accounts points of view.
3. Gives me a chance to review the benefit of using mailchimp – I was thinking of switching to salesforce.com led solution before – but now this has become a serious option to consider.

So what is the outcome:

1. I cannot speak to my user and customer base, so I am unhappy
2. Mailchimp could loose me as a customer, even though the reason for this is not their own making. The credit card cancellation just happened to trigger this.

As a seller – edocr.com as an example
Currently, edocr.com is integrated with paypal. So the only option to subscribe to edocr Essential service is through paypal unless you contact us direct, at which point, we can invoice you.

Some of the problems we have experienced due to paypal:
1. Paypal refusing to accept customer login details
2. Customer’s paypal account need further verifications, etc to satisfy built-in paypal safety rules
3. Customer does not have a paypal account or not keen to use his/her credit card

All of the above reasons can results in:
1. Transaction delays – lost revenue opportunity for edocr
2. Transaction may never take place, as the moment is lost and the process become a problem for the customer instead of solving a problem s/he has.

In one occasion, we lost a customer as paypal has stopped his account and he is pretty much cheesed off with paypal for many reasons. Of course, we are discussing with him about alternative payment options.

Summary
When you look at both cases, the problem lies in the payment mechanism which could lead to lost revenue opportunities for businesses. So the alternative is to offer multiple payment choices, but is this the right option?

Solution
Most online solutions take credit card based payments, either paypal, google checkout etc. They are designed primarily for individuals and small businesses. However, everyone has a bank account. If you are a company, you are not likely to change your bank account, and these do not expire as credit cards do. Whilst the ultimate solution should cater for bank accounts and credit cards, there is a significant business case to introduce a bank account based service by an independent vendor.

The ideal solution – bank account base
Think about OAuth type handshake, but of course highly secure. You login to edocr.com or mailchimp or any other service, click the payment settings, and now the handshake starts to take place with your bank account. You login to the bank account to confirm, the payment is now set. Easy peasy!

Love to hear your thoughts on how you deal with collecting payment for your web based solutions, and what your ultimate solution may look like. Who knows, someone within Northern StartUp 2.0 community of tech entrepreneurs might come up with a product to solve this problem.

First UK Microsoft Innovation Academy Workshop

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Jyoti Banerjee and Manoj Ranaweera of edocr-

The first ever UK Microsoft Innovation Academy Workshop took place on the 10th Dec 09 at Daresbury Innovation Centre. It was delivered by Jyoti Banerjee. I tweeted the full workshop, a two-day event squeezed into one-day, and my tweets are captured on the following report, which you can read on-line or download.

Microsoft Innovation Academy - 10th Dec 09
Whilst I had reservations about the value of the workshop prior to participation, I was proven wrong during the afternoon session. As far as I was concerned, it was a day well spent getting a valuable insight into developing the right business model for edocr.com.

Few quotes from fellow participants:

“Interseting day, very useful, covered strategic issues that will have a big impact on our approach to the market”, Aldo de Leonibus, Director of Inventya.

“Useful and timely overview covering a variety of issues around the value chain and approaching new markets”, Katrina Delargy, Managing Director, Aventura.

I sincerely hope Microsoft will continue to offer these workshops to high growth businesses across the country.