We have begun to continuously monitor traffic, as part of providing real-time chat support through Woopra on edocr.com. Woopra is an invaluable service to our operations, and we recommend it highly for any tech startup.

Today, we came across a new edocr.com account which was continuously pinged, in fact 556 times today. As a general rule of thumb, we investigate any account that is pinged more than 100 times a day with the same behaviour, which indicates existence of a script created for whatever the reason. In this instance, each time edocr.com was pinged, it goes through the same 3 steps; login to account and visit the account page twice. And then restart the same sequence again and again.

Whilst above behaviour is not new, when we investigated the account and the associated email address, we discovered a service, which creates email address that automatically expire after 10 minutes.

The creator of this service says:

Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don’t want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it’s free. Enjoy!

But, in our case, the opposite is happening. Further analysis showed that 10 accounts out of 30,632 were created with this service. As expected we took immediate action against these accounts. Looks like we need to build functionality that prevent signups with email addresses created by this service.

I have kept the name of the service out of this blog post to not encourage others to use it. If your business suffers from similar issues, do share them with us.

There are many ways to plan the growth of your tech company. One way is to split start to exit period in to 5 stages, these being: product development, product/market fit, launch, growth and dominance. And each of these stages can be further split into five key components, these being: milestones, team, product, funding and metrics.

Product Development

This stage runs all the way from the initial idea to setting up of the company, coding of your product, moving the product from alpha to beta and launch, building your initial team and raising the funding to sustain the operations, either through savings, credit card debt or through angel or venture funding.

In terms of milestones, the product should function as intended and achieve early traction before you can move to the 2nd stage. Whether this is 100 users or 30,000 users, is really your call. No one other than you will know what the right number is.

During this stage, your initial product team needs to be in place. Depending on the capital invested, this could well be from sole founder to 5 to 10 staff. In most cases, you may find this stage is filled with 2 to 3 co-founders. Vital skills at this stage are product development and ability to engage with users to refine the product.

In terms of the product, it should not stop at simply providing the functionality, but should extend to applications, i.e. how the product is applied for specific use cases.

How much funding you needs or how to obtain this is anyone’s guess. This stage is generally treated as seed funding, and its a good idea to start speaking to suitable investors at very early stage, even if they may not be interested until you move through this stage. You may well decide to fund yourself rather than giving up lot of equity – there is no right or wrong universal solution to this – what works for you at the time based on your circumstances is the best way to decide whether to raise external capital or not. Once decided stick to it – if you are going to raise funding, you need to allocate significant time to it, and do not approach this half-hearted! Stick with the gut feel!

Metrics could well be number of users signup, level of engagement, etc measured on monthly basis. There are plenty of books written on lean startup methodologies and cohort analytics. Its also a great idea to engage with local techstartup groups to learn from your peers.

Just few thoughts that came to my mind whilst reviewing our 5 stage planning. Hope you find above of some use.

Here is a simple template you can use.

The intersection between marketing and sales is a fascinating area, which touches almost all organisations, whether they are small or large. At a very simplistic level, marketing is about promotion. It is about letting the world know that you exists, and your products and services can be trusted to solve a problem. Of course there is lot more to marketing than product and service promotion, but that is for discussion on another day.

(image from digitalnpo.com)

On the other hand, sales is a process you adopt to convert identified targets into revenue paying customers. Without sales, you have no business. Of course, there are exceptions. One example being, where venture capital is used to sustain operations until the organisation can generate sufficient revenues to pay its bills and reinvest into the growth of the business.

(image from http://gavrielshaw.com)

Large complex sales have many layers, where small transactions have few layers. Above sales funnel shows a simplified process.

Having established simplified definitions for marketing and sales, is there a gap between the two?

Marketing uses a plethora of means to reach out to a very large audience, this may be through donations and sponorships, exhibitions and conferences, TV and radio, newspapers and press, and the Internet. At the end of a marketing campaign, you should end up with a potential list of organisations and contacts to target. Of course, this is not always possible or may not even be required. Airing a gorilla playing drums by Cadbury will increase sales of chocolate without ever producing a list of those who might be interested in buying.

On the other hand, running a marketing campaign by uploading a white paper to edocr.com will produce a list of contacts who read online, downloaded it and forwarded to colleagues (disclaimer: some documents are interacted more than others).

The viral marketing campaign starts when some of the 15,000 strong edocr community start to bookmark the document to their social profiles on social networks from Facebook to Twitter. This is a campaign that produces contacts, which may or may not be worthy of adding to your sales funnel.

As organisations run many campaigns of this nature on-line and off-line, all producing lists of organisations and contacts, how do you select which of these to be taken into your CRM to start the sales process? What tools do you use to make the selection? Would you simply add all the contacts to CRM and then sort them within your CRM application? Do you have rigid procedures in place to help you address this problem?

I believe here lies a problem that is worth solving.

Clarification 1:

This discussion is not about building a list of contacts by identifying the target market segment, then identifying the companies in that market segment to target based on the product or service fit with their needs. This discussion is about contacts collected through engagement, and any validation is yet to be carried out on these contacts. Would you add them straight into your CRM or run first level of validation before adding to your CRM?

Extended Discussion

• Leadformix User Group

Idea Stage

Having made the decision to build our product development centre in Sri Lanka starting with employing the first senior PHP and Drupal Developer, I thought it might be useful in capturing my experience so far, at least for my own reference. In my previous post, I spoke about the challenges we face at edocr.com due to lack of development resources. By March 2011, I decided to park my attempts to bring on board a technical co-founder on equity and concentrate on recruiting a developer from Sri Lanka.

Friendly Recommendations

The process started by inquiring from few Sri Lankan friends whether I could hire a senior developer for the monthly budget I had in mine. Whilst the budget was not high enough to attract the very best, the feedback was, it was sufficient to attract good developers. In April 2011, a Sri Lankan friend highly recommended an ex-employee, and I entered into the interviewing process previously discussed. The interview came to an end, when the applicant refused to work during rain due to the fear of possible lightning strikes.

Unexpected Threat

Now, who would have thought “rain” would be a critical factor in recruitment. At this point, I consulted Guy Fraser, CEO of Techcelerate Member, Adaptavist.com, who has been recruiting staff from across the world successfully to learn few more peculiarities of hiring from abroad. In Sri Lanka, it rains none stop during the monsoon season. I simply cannot have staff not completing their work load every time it rains. Whilst the applicant promised to work extra time on sunny days to cover for lost time due to rain, I knew this would lead to poor employer-employee relationships, and therefore not something I was prepared to go ahead with. At this point, I started to enquire from my Sri Lankan friends to understand whether this is the norm in Sri Lanka. And it seems, quite a number of people who worked from their homes would simply stop working during heavy rains. However, this is not a problem for those who work from offices due to surge protectors installed in high-rise buildings. Those who are brave to work during rain from their homes, already had access to a laptop, a UPS and surge protector. 

Advertising

On 2nd May 2011, I advertised on the most popular job board in Sri Lanka, topjobs.lk for 14-day period. At the mid way point, I have received 30 CVs. All have been rejected due to lack of sufficient experience, except for 2. Most of those rejected were from those with less than 1 year experience or those who will graduate in this Summer. They have also adopted a shotgun approach, i.e. just sending the CV without a single word in the covering email. Not the best way to attract a job. Instead of ignoring, I replied to each one of the CVs I received, in some cases with feedback.

Opportunists

At this point, I realised that I cannot simply rely on topjobs.lk to produce the candidates I require. I started to look for talent through Linkedin with the support of Twitter and Facebook. Soon I realised that Sri Lankan developers are becoming business owners whilst been employed, i.e. most of them work for the local branch of an overseas company, in most cases headed by a Sri Lankan, and then during non working hours, they are either freelancing or running their own web development agency.

The problem this creates for me is that they are contend with their current predicament. The day job gives the security they require whilst the evening projects generate enough revenues to give them a better lifestyle. Of course, not everyone falls into this category. The large recruiters such as Virtusa pays higher salaries and attract the best in the market. They as well as other leading firms recruit direct from the universities, targeting the best raw talent and then mold them into the type of employee that is suited for large Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) contracts. Who wouldn’t want to have their CV littered with names of blue chips, such as BT, etc? Having sucked up the top talent, then the smaller companies compete for the second best.

Building brand awareness

In these circumstances, we almost have no chance of attracting the right talent for us without building brand awareness in the local market. With this in mind, we signed for 12 months co-sponsorship of Refresh Colombo, an initiative similar to early days of GeekUp in the North West of UK.

Tech Startups in Sri Lanka

Whilst we are competing with BPO companies and traditional software houses in Sri Lanka, there is a small number of tech startups that seek similar talent to us. At this end, I have discovered Curdbee.com, Creatly.com and WSO2. Both Curdbee and Creatly CEOs have helped me understand the market bit better.

Educational Institutions

I also discovered during this process that one of the leading education institutions is founded by a business contact I have known for a while. And most of the rookies who applied with a shotgun approach came from this Institution. A quick email resulted in a long conversation with his son who runs their operations from the UK. He was kind enough to further explain how the recruitment process works in Sri Lanka.

Way forward

Based on various advice received, the way forward for us in Sri Lanka might be to recruit a senior developer on part-time basis in addition to recruiting a young graduate on full time basis. Ideally, I am still looking for the right candidate on full time basis. But whilst I look for the ideal, the clock is ticking, which is not something we can take a risk on. I will report back in couple of weeks to share my experiences.

Of course, as usual, love to hear your experience of recruiting overseas labour, and especially from Sri Lanka.

Image taken from http://www.therethink-group.com

At edocr.com, we never had it easy! I have changed teams many times over the last 4 yrs. At the beginning, I had a great team, but due to various issues, the team under performed. Then there was a period of about 15 months where no real development took place. In 2008, I outsourced complete development to an Indian company. This relationship also came to an end in 2010. Since then I courted with two individuals. These relationships ended well before they got going.

Not ready to give up, once again, outsourcing looked promising. But having to work through project managers and detailed specifications continued to put me off. So I have decided to try a new tact, employment, but with a twist!

So what is the twist? I want to make sure this falls inline with our long term strategy, which is to build a strong in-house team. I also want to ensure this strategy does not result in hire and fire if our finances dry up. With this in mind, I have started to seek a developer from abroad, starting from Sri Lanka.

image from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Having thought about this in great depth, I cannot wonder why it took me this long to try this out. So how do you proceed with recruiting an overseas developer as your first employee? I was planning to try a job board recommended by a friend, which would have been a long drawn out process. In the meantime, another friend suggested an ex-employee, whom he put me in touch with. But how do you make sure s/he is the right fit for your startup?

This is the process I have devised:

1. Email interview – questions and answers
2. Skye interview – strengthen the email discussions
3. In person interview with a friend who happens to lead a software development company
4. Develop a mini module and test it for quality of coding and speed of delivery

Then a three months probation period on full salary. What I am not sure at this stage is about the international labour laws. I was not going to blog about this, but my friend, Joel Gascoigne of Buffer twisted my arm, so here I am sharing my current challenges, once again!

I love to hear your experience of hiring overseas developers as employees, to work from their country of residence.

I have been exploring various search boxes of our competitors to understand the ultimate size and shape for our own search box.

Here are few references:

1. Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices
2. 25 Creative Search Bar Designs

I have been wanting to replace my iphone3 with an iphone4 for sometime since my 18 months contract ran out in October 2010. Today, I walked in to Tesco and bought an iPhone4. Before you switch, its worth thinking about the process, and hopefully my experience will help someone.

1. Eventhough my O2 contract has run out months ago, they still need 1 month notice.
2. To issue a PAC code it could take up to 14 days
3. To unlock the phone (as I want to pass my old iphone3 to my daughter), it could take up to 14 days.
4. You should not use the PAC code until the iphone is unlocked
5. Irrespective of what O2 might say before, they will match Tesco’s offer when you try to cancel. When I rang few months back, they refused to match. Perhaps, they guessed I was not serious at the time.

I will write the rest of the post, once I get to (3) and (4).

Just like many of us, I am in the planning mode right now. I believe in creating my own luck, i.e. been at the right place at the right time with the right proposition. I am putting considerable demand on 2011 – This is the year I must deliver, balancing growth of two micro companies whilst ensuring I give enough attention to family and my own life, i.e must enjoy living and not postpone living.
I am keen to hear from you how you plan to deliver your objectives, what checklists you are putting in place to achieve the objectives, etc,… against a back drop of an economic recovery.

Also check out Quora for answers?

Many investors will bet on the team than the product or the market opportunity. So what is the ideal startup team? According to Mark Suster, its 5 software engineers and a CEO.

But edocr.com is now 3 years old, yet it has no full-time employees. What it has is a team, made up of freelancers and contractors. This arrangement has helped us to bootstrap, but we now need a major rethink on how we can grow as a business, in terms of market share, revenues, product and people.

In terms of writing the business plan for edocr.com, I have chosen the team as the starting point. Why you may ask?

My belief is that we have traction, we have market knowledge, we have a commercial application/product and we have sales. What we lack is a solid full-time dedicated team. Therefore, in my mind, this is the most vital aspect we need to fix, and fix quickly.

How does one go about deciding what your team composition should be? This is when you need to think about breaking the next five years into manageable chunks of time. My typical approach is:

1. Establish
2. Grow
3. Dominate

Establish can further be split into:

1. Proof of concept
2. Launch
3. Early traction

Product Development Team

If we are to move away from outsourced product development, what size of team do we need for product development and maintenance? Strangely, I have come up with a figure of 6 as well. And my ideal team for first 12 months would be:

• 1 x CTO
• 1 x Lead Developer
• 2 x Developers
• 1 x Designer
• 1 x QA/QC

Now think about what effort will you need to hire these individuals, when do they need to be hired (not all at the same time) and how would you manage your time during the hiring and induction process. Don’t forget, you still have to run the business, whilst all this is still on-going. Would you hire the CTO first or the Lead Developer? Do you want problems fixed first or getting the strategy right first? End of the day, whilst you take others suggestions, you alone will have to make the decision.  Having recently interviewed potential CTOs, I am more inclined to think our first hire ought to be the Lead Developer, unless I am lucky to find a startup hands-on CTO who would not mind getting his/her hands dirty.

Sales and the rest of Team

Next, start thinking about what resources you need for sales? Would 2 sales executives and 1 sales manager suffice for the first year? Or is this an overkill? In our case, we have a commercial application which require sales input. If you are starting up, you would unlikely to focus on sales from day 1

What about marketing? What about conversions? This is the role for the community manager, yes, the chap that help your users and customers get the best out of your product. They should be able to convert users to customers, whilst the field sales team does the customer visits

You may also want to add 1 admin to help you with book-keeping and other mundane activities. If you do take VC or Angel funding, you would have the luxury of having a Non Executive Director.

Now you have an initial team of 14. Then work out what the cost of this team would be. Make sure you stagger their recruitment, say 3 to start with and then slowly build the team to be 14 by the end of month 12.

Validation

How do you know this is the right team size for your tech startup? You could ask others with experience to start with. I would suggest you speak to tech CEOs rather than consultants, especially avoid those without any real startup experience. Quora is a great resource for this type of research. Also check relevant blogs.

Check the profiles of your competitors on their own websites and Linkedin. See how they have built their teams. Speak to as many as possible.

In our case, our biggest competitor has raised over $13 million and seems to be employing about 55 staff. Think about your game plan if you have a bigger competitor. Is the game plan to reduce competitive gap or to go in a complete different direction?

The Past

Its worth revisiting the history of your startup and take stock of how you have evolved. In our case, we had the right team when we started, a great CTO, a great Drupal developer and a network specialist. Unfortunately, this team did not survive beyond the first version, which was launched in Oct 2007, due to number of key reasons:

1. They were running their own businesses, which demanded their time
2. Whilst they came on board and helped edocr.com soft launched, they did not whole heartily buy into my vision
3. They had nothing to loose

The real killer was the dreadful communication skills one team member exhibited which basically resulted in pissing off the others. The eventual result was, no product innovation and eventual slow departure by all three. But all three let me progress without any conditions. The mistake I made then was to try to build the business without taking external capital – basically trying to prove to myself that I can build this business with freelancers and contractors.

Watch out for the time

The biggest problem is, the time can slip whilst you try to keep the business continue as a going-concern. With hindsight, I should have given my best shot at securing external capital at an early stage. If we did not run into performance issues, we had a slim chance of generating sufficient revenues to build our own team. Its never too late until the fat lady sing.

Getting back to team composition

You would need to re-adjust the team taking into consideration of level of revenues your sales staff can generate.

Would be interesting to hear your experiences on what your initial team composition was and how you build the team over the years.

There are many ways to write a business plan. But how do you start the process? You could start by thinking of:

1. Product – Where would you like to see the product in 18 months?
2. Sales – How much revenues would you like to generate in 5 years time?
3. Market – How much market share can you grab in 5 years?
4. Capital – How much capital would you need to get to traction and subsequent break-even?

All of the above, will get you start thinking. The overall plan will cover all of above, as you start developing a detailed plan for each of the major components.

As you no doubt worked out by now, I have finally bit the bullet and decided to write a business plan for edocr.com (RobertW, I know you will be happy!), having lost confidence on business plans during my second startup experience, ebdex. By the way, I raised £250k on the 7th major revision of the ebdex business plan, which you can get a copy here.

Would be interesting to hear how you started your business planning process, and how your mindset changed whilst writing the plan.