The Inspiration

Saul Klein has been a great inspiration for me since I came to know him in 2007, mostly through OpenCoffee, a great investment (sales) funnel to identify the hottest startups and tech entrepreneurs. Later, he introduced Seedcamp to add a second level of filtration and de-risk his investments as much as possible. Some of this learning has been applied by Imran Hakim and the team (perhaps not directly taking from Saul) in Manchester through Envestors and RAW2010, in terms of de-risking. But that’s another story for another day.

The Motivation (best to come clean upfront!)

At Techcelerate, we need to find a funnel for budding entrepreneurs, as well as find a low cost channel for Member products, where conversation will achieve sales, without selling. I have been toying with the idea of Techcelerate Coffee for a while, but I believe I managed to convince few people, which is enough for me to give it a damn good try.

What is TekCoffee (and why not TechCoffee)

Ok. TechCoffe has gone. Yes, that’s right, someone got the Twitter username, so I had to settle for TekCoffee. Personally, I dislike “k” in TekCoffee, but let’s go with it for the time being, eventhough I am big on brand identities.

TekCoffee would be very similar to OpenCoffee, except that it is not about a funnel for investment, but a funnel for sales and partnerships for our Member products and Techcelerate ecosystem.

Self-Management of TekCoffee

All events are local (initially around Stockport) and organised through private messaging on Twitter and PlanCast .

How To Join This Group: Go to http://www.twitter.com/TekCoffee and click on the “send request” button. We will approve new members before they are permitted to post or receive messages from the Group.

How To Post: At the beginning of your Tweet type “d TekCoffee”. This will send a private message to the group, which will be automatically forwarded to everyone else who is following.  If you use @ the message will be public to everyone. I need to test this out bit more to understand.

How to arrange a meeting: Some need to create the meeting on PlanCast first and then use the Twitter Group to invite others.

What is the format

1. One person from each local community create an event on PlanCast (we can create sub groups within Twitter later on) and send out an invite through twitter group and other available channels.

2. Those who wish to attend join the plancast event. Bring your laptops, so if no one turns up, you can still get two hours work done, so there is no real lost to your productivity.

3. Meet up for up to a maximum of 2 hours between 10:00 to 12:00pm or any other time slot as agreed, as long as it is restricted to 2 hours. Ideally these ought to be monthly meetings on regular intervals and arranged such that they do not clash with another TekCoffee event.

4. Organisers can change from month to month, and Techcelerate will provide as much support as possible

5. You can discuss any aspect of business, and we will try our best to expose new products to you through inviting tech CEOs from companies such as Yuuguu, edocr.com, CapsuleCRM, etc.

This is just a start and we can refine above as we go along. What’s left now is to prove the communication channels around the first event. Join the twitter group now to find out more.

Venture Capital Fundraising is up in the US

On 6th April, Dow Jones reported 41% increase in US venture capital fundraising, raising $4.1 billion across 34 funds in the first quarter of 2010. 

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers setup fund for iPad developers

The New York Times reported on 31st March 2010 (not quite last week!), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who invested in Google and Amazon.com early on, has double its $100 million iFund set up in 2008 and managed by Matt Murphy for application development to $200 million to support iPad application development. The iFund has invested in 14 iPhone applications including

All my businesses follow a model where it is split into 10 categories (opportunity, product, market, sales, operations, service, finance, legal, HR and other). The thinking comes from Michael Porters Value Chain framework. Today, I have started to look at this from a slightly different angel with respect to edocr.com.

Financial Profit and Valuation

Whilst a business should not be an accounting exercise, without a true picture of your finances, you have no business. I would argue, that the point of finances is to generate a profit and increase the valuation of your business. If we expand the profit further, its about growing your revenues, whilst improving working capital and cost efficiencies. Control of cost is vital in achieving a competitive advantage in the long run. Working capital in one sense is making sure the business has sufficient cash to operate, which is either funded by the cash flow arising from revenues or external funding in the form of debt or equity finance. Let’s not get bogged down in other exotic finances such as invoice discounting, asset financing, etc.

Product vs. Market Fit

You could design the most beautiful product in the world, but if there is no readily available market, you will struggle to achieve a meaningful traction. Creating new market is not without casualties. Entering an established market with a killer proposition with an aggressive sales and marketing plan can achieve wonders instead of focusing on the first mover advantage.

Value Proposition

Value proposition is as good as the paper its written on (or the web page), as long as it is understood and there are sufficient number of people willing to pay a price above your cost point. Having a product that fits the market requirements improves your chances, but you need to be able to articulate in a manner that puts you ahead of the competition. It was only this evening I was speaking to an early stage technology business with an email marketing tool. They have decided that it is not worth competing for the end client head on due to the sheer number of well established brands in a crowded market place, instead they are attempting to sell to middlemen who could dress the product in their branding and take it to the market. In this case, the product not just has to be fit for the market, but it needs to be now fit for both the end client and the middle man. So getting your value proposition right is crucial. One company that adopted this strategy successfully is BT, sell-to and sell-through strategy.

Operational Efficiency

None of above can be achieved without adequate resources in place, both in terms of numbers and level of skills, experience and competency. In addition, you need to achieve higher efficiency of resources with continuous improvements to have a chance of beating your competition.

So how does edocr.com fares with above four crucial elements? In terms of financial profit and valuation, we have bootstrapped the company so far generating modest revenues. We have a product that works, which was achieved through hard work with low investment. We have an acceptable cost efficiency, but need external capital to make a bigger impact. I am dwelling on this, especially with respect to the forthcoming sales seminar co-sponsored by Microsoft next week

In terms of product fit vs. market, we and a bunch of other early stage companies have created a new market which is now about 3 years old, but I would argue that the market is not quite there yet. In terms of value proposition, we have bet on that the customer will soon demand real tangible benefits from their social media engagements. In this respect they will be looking for hard numbers, and the best anyone can offer is sales leads, and this is exactly where our focus is right now. In terms of operational efficiency, we are not faring well suffering significantly due to resource constraints. This has created three options for us, (1) grow at current pace reinvesting revenues back into business, which is not ideal by any means, (2) take external equity investment and dilute the shareholding, which is not a problem as far as curent investors are concerned, and (3), a compromise between (1) and (2) with minimum dilution. I will be going into the weekend thinking about which direction we ought to focus on. Your thoughts on a postcard please!

Image source: Problogger.net

This article is inspired by a private tweet I received just now, which simply said “Can’t see the value…” when I queried a prospective customer “What’s stopping you use edocr.com for your group and the subsidiaries?”.

I am the first to acknowledge that not everyone will buy a product irrespective of how good it is. But I like a challenge. Let me know by the end of this short article, whether you agree or disagree with me.

Value of Social Networking

Do you see the value of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube? I assume you do. Each of these channels allow you to collaborate in slightly different ways, but with the same end point in mind, i.e. spread knowledge, improve your products and services, and ultimately generate new business.

1. Twitter – short messages for real-time collaboration.
2. Facebook – conversations through multiple objects from messages to pictures and video, almost a final destination, aggregating conversations from elsewhere.
3. Youtube – conversations around video.

Of course, there are many other channels offering conversations around a different object, e.g. Flickr around images.

edocr.com is about conversations around documents/pdfs. We do not discrimate what type of documents you upload from brochures, case studies and whitepapers to operating manuals and annual reports. As long as they are not confidential, edocr.com is the place for document related conversations.

Document Distribution

You could get a document distributed through limited number of ways, irrespective of how hard you try:

1. Printed – post or hand over at meetings, exhibitions and seminars.
2. Email to a known list of recipients.
3. Make it available through your website.

We like to be the 4th way of distributing a document. Let’s take a look at a document on your website. This is most likely to be a link on a web page.

Lets say that you tweeted the url to the web page where the document link exists. Let’s track my actions (and most likely yours):

1. I saw the link
2. Clicked and visited the web page
3. Found the document link among others and down loaded the document

This is probably where a typical visit would end. Let’s explore the same scenario on edocr.com

1. I saw your tweet and the link
2. Clicked and visited the web page which has the document displayed prominently and no other documents or non related text.
3. I can now read on line (use full screen if I wished), download, book mark to over 200 social networks, email to a list of addresses, leave a comment, rate, add my own tags to make it easier to find next time, or simply drop a private message to you (the publisher).

Item (3) makes it much easier to distribute and have a conversation, all without leaving the link I clicked from Twitter. At the same time, search engines starts indexing your document, which means the document is now found through search engines, social networks and edocr.com through tags, document directory and business pages (the document can be listed against your company profile among all your other documents, fully categorised).

If you like us even more, you could simply use us as your main hosting provider for documents, and embed them on your website (thumbnail), blog or e-newsletters.

Beyond the Value of Exposure

In addition, we could provide leads of who actually look at the document. Email addresses will only be released with user consent. You can determine how you would like to expose your documents, e.g. top documents available only to those giving consent.

Ranking of documents on edocr.com is determined by the level of user interactivity. See how your document performs against your competitors. Let others know that they can track your new documents through RSS feeds.

Do you still think there is no value in our service? We are very happy to receive your constructive criticism.

Image source: biojobblog.com

Below is a list of tips to improve your document being found through search engines, third party sites such as social networks and on edocr.com

1. Document Title: Ensure document title is more than two words, descriptive enough to justify content, and without hyphens or underscores (SEO)
2. Twitter: Set your twitter details for auto-tweeting (distribution)
3. Source URL: Edit document page to add your source URL (distribution)
4. Duplicates: Remove any duplicate documents to improve indexing by search engines (SEO)
5. Tags: Add all relevant keywords as tags to improve being found on edocr.com (distribution)
6. Category: Select the most appropriate document category. Request new categories to suit your needs (distribution)
7. Bookmark: Bookmark to as many social networks as possible, and request your colleagues and friends to do the same (distribution)
8. Email this: Send document link to relevant colleagues and friends by adding their email addresses. Upgrade to edocr Essential to email to large lists (distribution)
9. Rate: Rate your own documents and request your colleagues and friends to do the same.

These are simple to implement. If you want traction for your documents, make sure you implement the above 9 points. Give us a shout if you need more information on any of the above points.

The general belief is that this year’s election will be won by TV debate, but the impact the Internet will make should not be underestimated after the successful campaign run by Barak Obama during the last US presidential election. On the forefront of Internet campaigns, you find YouTube, Twitter and Facebook used by each of the main political parties to complement their own websites. Given that these are US products, one wonders why no British technology company has emerged as a key contender for social debate during the UK elections, which started today.

We are proud to bring your attention to edocr.com, a British tech company run from one of the two key campuses for science in the country, i.e. Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, which has also emerged as a favourite drop-in location for campaigning politicians. edocr.com allows knowledge to be shared easily across the Internet through documents/pdfs. As we do not compete with YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, we would like all the contending political parties to consider us in their campaigns to spread their policies across the Internet. After all, documents/pdfs remain the main instrument in capturing details from one page to hundreds of pages, we believe strongly that we could provide a significant input to educating the UK electorate on what each party stands for during this election.

To kick start, we have setup a profile for each of the three main parties; at Labour Party, Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats, and have started a dialogue to handover these accounts. Tune to #UKElection2010 for new documents or set your reader for RSS Feed.

May you have the best information possible to make an informed voting decision!

Life was easier when you had only one calendar to deal with. If you are like me, then you have made your life difficult by having too many unconnected calendars, causing misery! Here are a list of my calendars:

1. iCal (MacBook)
2. Google
3. iPhone
4. Salesforce.com
5. Tungle.com

I have added Tungle.com today, so that others who want to schedule a meeting with me could do so by finding out my availability. My tungle account is at http://tungle.me/manojranaweera

The trick to all this is being able to sync. Tungle failed to sync with my iCal after many attempts even after Tungle crew came to my aid. My way round this is to sync with my personal Google Calendar, which syncs with my iCal. I still like to think iCal is the master calendar, as it syncs well with my iPhone.

I am yet to sync with my salesforce.com account. Here is my thought process when I am adding an event or an appointment to my calendars.

1. Add it to my personal iCal Calendar, which has three calendars splitting my interests: edocr, Techcelerate and Personal.
2. Copy all relevant ones to my Google personal calendar (not shared) on iCal which syncs with Google and then with Tungle
3. Copy relevant ones to two public Google calendars, these being, UK Tech Biz Events and NWDC Calendar

An event such as the one planned for 24th Feb will have four entries on my iCal as it shows the same (copied 3 times) against my iCal master, Google personal, NWDC calendar and UK Tech Biz Events. Irrespective of the clutter, it works.

What this shows is that life is full of mini strategies and plans. Who thought I would need a strategy for maintaining my calendars? Next is to think about integrating Salesforce.com for edocr.com. In this process I must thank Google, which provides the means for achieving synchronisation across many different platforms.

Update 1:

Just realised that I can simplify the process by changing my Google Personal Calendar to be the master. There is no longer a need for own calendar within iCal. Just wondering whether this can be further simplified.

As I just tweeted, working out the route to market is easy, working out the optimum pricing strategy is harder. As we move forward with LC&SFI (Lead Capture and Salesforce.com Integration) project, I am debating about which part of our value chain has the biggest pricing opportunity? Perhaps you could help me find the answer!

Our value chain:

1. Exposure through edocr.com – edocr Essential is currently priced at £250 per annum (experience shows this is considered too low)
2. Lead Capture within edocr.com – launch planned for 1st April
3. Download sales leads from edocr.com – launch planned for 1st April
4. Make the leads available within salesforce.com – launch planned for 1st April

Given the pricing strategies adopted by salesforce.com partners, item (4) above could be the most expensive. Let’s be honest! Its not the actual cost of providing this service, but understanding how others have gone about pricing such applications, will dictate the outcome.

Here is an example. I just tried to install a free application from Appirio to synchronise calender on salesforce.com with my Google calendar. A simple application I hear you say! Yes, the version I tried to install (and failed miserably as there is something wrong with my salesforce.com account in terms of installing apps from AppExchange) is free, but the premium version starts from $2500. And that’s a hefty price to pay simply to synchronise Google calendar!

This shows that we need to seriously get some advise on how to price enterprise applications. This also raise number of further queries:

1. Could item (4) above be few times more pricey than all the items combined?
2. Should the price of all items be increased to reflect price of item 4 eventually?

Getting the pricing right is becoming more and more important!

Few weeks ago, I wrote about possible ways to integrate with Salesforce.com. The options explored included:

1. Traditional web-to-lead forms
2. API, especially as edocr.com is based on OAuth and salesforce.com now has OAuth capability
3. App Exchange

Since then, after much dialogue with salesforce.com employees, customers and partners, we have come to the conclusion, that App Exchange is the way forward for edocr.com. Having prepared edocr.com for lead capture over the last three months, we are now ready to start the integration work. Whilst the development team is busy with integration, I would like to share my thoughts on how we would price the benefits arising from new functionality.

edocr Essential

edocr Essential, our unmanaged service is priced at £250 per annum, making it viable for both small and large businesses. When we priced this basic offering, it was difficult to guess what the right price would be. As far as I know, there are no magic formulae in terms of pricing a product. Yes, certain factors can influence, but at the end of the day, you go with with your gut feel. I would be keen to hear how you have priced your SaaS application.

edocr Essential’s value proposition is based on Exposure. Sales leads are based on prospects contacting you. It provides a one-stop-shop for all your documents. Documents uploaded by employees with accounts are displayed against your company profile fully categorised with company information and employee information. And the company can be listed against all applicable categories on the business directory. Each document can be distributed through mail lists, tweeted and bookmarked to over 200 social networks by you, your team or anyone coming across your document. Documents are accessible through search engines, social networks (when bookmarked) and edocr.com.

edocr Managed is basically outsourcing above to edocr Ltd or its partners so that your account can be professionally managed.

edocr Enterprise provides tighter integration with your applications in addition to providing a white label proposition.

Sales Leads Capture

The sales leads capture is almost ready. The current development project, LC&SFI (Leads Capture and Salesforce.com Integration), started as one project, but it is increasingly felt as two. And therefore, makes sense to split as follows:

- Sales Leads: The ability to access and download who looked at your documents, giving you pre-qualified sales leads. The assumption here is that if someone viewed your document, s/he will be interested in your products and services. The quality of the lead is not part of this offering, but I can foresee us offering behavioural based sales leads in the future, perhaps in 2011. You will soon be able to download leads in CSV format
- Integration with Salesforce.com: After month’s of research, we decided today that the best way to integrate with Salesforce.com is through AppExchange. I was excited when I heard that Salesforce.com supports our chosen API standard, OAuth, but I believe it would be messy, if we had taken this approach, especially as we would have to develop an advanced version of edocr API that will only be available to paid customers.

Pricing Thoughts

Thoughts on pricing is as follows:
1. edocr Essential at £250 per annum (firmed)
2. Sales lead capture at £250 per annum (discussion stage)
3. Integration with Salesforce.com £250 per annum. (discussion stage)

So total cost to use edocr.com with full integration with salesforce.com would be £750 per annum. Seems still too low to get medium to large companies excited. Please note that there is no real basis for £250, it’s just what we came up with, and seems to be a nice figure to increment. As I said earlier, no scientific thought process has gone into pricing. And all our pricing include fair usage with no real restrictions on number of documents, hard disk space, loading, no. of employee accounts, etc.

We may also introduce a one time fee for setting up, perhaps around £100 mark. Additionally, hourly and daily consultancy/advisory fees will be available soon to get the most out of edocr.com.

Your contribution

We are very much in the dark with pricing. At the end of the day, our success depends on getting this right. Our gut feel is that the pricing is too small to attract larger companies. We believe in offering a fair price for the services rendered with a reasonable margin. We would welcome any thoughts, advice, comments you may have.