Northern StartUp 2.0 has come a long way since our humble start in November 2006. Whilst I enjoy running it, it has strained my resources heavily. Unless something is done, it’s sustainability is questionable in the medium to long run.

So here are my reasons for repositioning:
1. It must generate income to compensate effort.
2. Lacks the collaboration between new and established technology companies:
- Customers of early technology products are technology companies
- Opportunities in joint ventures
- Opportunities in acquisitions
3. It does not provide a mechanism for southern and overseas tech companies to break into the north west
4. No attention given to key segments such as mobile or SaaS through out the year
5. Insufficient knowledge transfer from established to new
6. No staff

Above will be addressed through:
1. Membership based on revenues.
2. Two strands, below £5m revenues and above. More opportunities for collaboration, setup joint ventures and help with acquisitions
3. Bespoke events and initiatives for southern and overseas companies to break in to the region
4. Focus groups with activities through out the year for technology segments
5. Active programs of match making for knowledge transfer
6. Membership income will eventually support number of full time employees.

The rebranded and repositioned organisation (techcelerate) will be focusing on both small and large technology companies. At the bottom end, the focus will remain on the needs of tech entrepreneurs. At the top end, the focus would be on accelerating the growth.

Lot to work out, but the future looks exciting. Come and join the ride!

It is no surprise to my regular readers that Northern StartUp 2.0 is currently going through a rebranding and repositioning exercise. Whilst there is a lot to talk about why this is taking place, I thought of highlighting few discussions I had on Twitter about rebranding and repositioning with an international software house which has also gone through a rebranding exercise recently.

Here is my situation: no budget but total freedom.
Here is the situation of the software house: large budget (assumption) but constraints due to history and stakeholders.

With my total freedom, and given I am lazy (or clever, depending on your viewpoint), I sought the answer from Twittersphere. What should our brand be, both in terms of name, logo and strap line.

After some deliberations, Katrina Delargy (tech entrepreneur) came up with the winner which was then refined by Tim Dempsey (investor cum service provider). A new brand was born, Techcelerate. The logo concept was forwarded by Ed French (venture capitalist), which is now going through few changes to make it look liked it has been designed by WPP. Strapline will almost be “Tech Business: Accelerated”. Final change for strapline came through email via James Crawford (service provider). All those who were involved in this process were our customers. Techcelerate is a brand that could be easily understood by a first timer without knowing what services we actually delivered. A real winner, in my humble opinion!

In the case of the software house with euro 394 million revenues and 3500 employees, it was not straight forward as tapping into the wisdom of Twittersphere. They have adopted a similar line to most large brands, that is, the name does not mean anything unless the brand is built. Take Apple for example, who would know it is about a computer unless you have come across the product before. Part of the large budget can be spent on communicating and establishing the new brand and its values.

It is important that whether you intend to enable people to buy gold, computers, phones, houses or food, that your brand sits well with your target demographic. Eventually the ability of a company to have people recognise the brand without even having to think is going to benefit them in the long run, but this is crucially based on ensuring that the brand itself is accessible, memorable and geared towards the sort of people who will attach themselves to it in an act of brand loyalty. “Microsoft” is quite a straightforward, no-nonsense name, but “Apple” says casual, cool and fun-loving, and this style is reflected in their product range, a better fit than Microsoft’s overly serious branding which Apple themselves have riffed on in adverts in recent years.

This article is not about showing who is clever, but it is to show that above scenario is a fact of life. It is usual for big companies to spend significant resources in rebranding, but tools like Twitter makes the smaller companies come up with winners with no budget! Just like large companies test the brand with its customers (again at cost), Twitter allows us to do it whilst the brand is being designed.

The power of social media is immense, if you learn how to tame it…

Since I restarted blogging few months back, I have been looking for the ultimate wordpress theme. I must have changed themes more than I have blogged during this short period. To my surprise, I came across a theme today titled “Smells like Facebook” by Ainun Nazieb. Strangely, I find it intriguing and satisfying. Perhaps its the familiarity. But it sure will confuse few people when they come across it for the first time!

Let’s hope this theme will last longer than the last dozen or so I experimented with.

As edocr.com continues to grow, it has become essential for us to adopt the right tools that will make our lives operationally little bit easier. Now is the time for us to leave spreadsheets and move on to products that will bring structure to a very chaotic environment. Two tools will be key to this strategy of operational simplification.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We have adopted Contact Manager from Salesforce.com, which is affordable and versatile enough for our needs. And we know that as edocr.com grows, we have a path for increasing the CRM functionality to match with our future needs. In addition, we see salesforce.com as a strategic partner, so it makes sense for us to also be using their products, vice versa.

Accounts

Having used Winweb for a brief period, we are now trialling Xero, a SaaS product from one of our growing customer base. I love the simplicity and the design and yet to fully test it. My gut feel says this is the right product for us. And these days, I put lot of trust in to my gut feel.

Alignment

Ideally, we love our own database of users and customers to be in sync with CRM and accounts products we have adopted. So integration and free availability of APIs are fundamental to achieve this. I have been a keen advocate to see Xero and Salesforce.com establish the ability to data exchange.

It was good to hear from Tony Rule of Xero yesterday that they have infact gone live with the integration

Pricing Dilemma

Let’s take a brief look at the costs involved for one seat license across both products for one year.

• Salesforce.com contact manager = £36 (we have subscribed for 2 seats)
• Xero = £144 to £228 – the more expensive option is suitable for edocr.com

Here is the problem. For me to benefit from having synchronisation of customer data across saleforce.com and Xero, I would need to upgrade my account to either:

• Salesforce.com enterprise (£1,020) or unlimited edition (£2,040) (where API is part of the licence) or
• Salesforce.com professional edition (£540 plus more) (where API is not part of the licence but you can add it at extra cost).

Conclusion

The combine cost of subscribing to Xero and Salesforce.com now needs to go up from an affordable £264 to over £1000 to achieve integration. This is clearly not an acceptable situation for us. I love to comment more on this aspect, but as I have a half written post on pricing strategies, I think I should better leave it till then, other than to say, at this stage, we would have to operate without synchronisation. Just to add salt to the wound, products like JavelinCRM and Xero can achieve true synchronisation without any additional spend!