Blogs

I spent some time with some new business entrepreneurs this morning at a seminar on Raising Revenues by Prevista. I went there in the hope of learning some new ideas for my own start-up, but found out that I was several chapters ahead of the group and left early (it was really setup for beginners). I offloaded a few good ideas on the group from what I'd learnt and came out realising that the past year, I've really learnt a lot and should start sharing this stuff! It was this same epiphany that led me into Drupal consulting after attending a similar seminar last summer and ending up teaching the class about website marketing!

Firstly, I couldn't help but notice so many people there today still think of advertising as marketing. Get a product or service up, and then start advertising to find customers. Not only is this wrong, its costly and IT CAN KILL YOUR START-UP!

No start-up should be advertising. Advertising is a one way conversation from you to your market (if you're lucky enough to know exactly who they are!). If you haven't tested your message face to face with actual customers, how do you know your message works? How do you know the market you actually think is your market is actually your market? Until you've spoken directly to customers, and sold a few times, you simply don't know anything, its only assumptions, and assumptions are dangerous!

Advertising should only be used for two things:

1. Growing Your Business - Once you know exactly who your market is, and what messages they respond to (from selling to a few of them already), then advertising could make sense. That way you aren't wasting money advertising to the wrong people with the wrong message and you can be confident that your messages are effective.
2. Brand Building - Advertising won't make a sale, it will however re-enforce your message and brand in your market. Once you have a solid and growing business, then you can afford to spend some money building your brand to ensure it stays in peoples minds.

Both of these are for later stages of your business, not the first stages. I don't expect any business to advertise in the first 2-3 years (if ever) of life. During that time you should be directly talking to customers through the web, cold calling, trade shows and most importantly networking. All your customers should be people you found or were referred to. Once you start hitting a home run, and you find the same people respond to the same message for repeated sales, then you know that you can broadcast that message successfully and get a positive response.

My only caveat to advertising is web advertising such as Google Adwords. The difference for this form of advertising is that done properly, you can actually monitor accurately the response to several adverts relatively cheaply. Not only are people searching for your product (so you pretty much have solved finding your market) you can also tailor your advert messages over time to see what works and what doesn't. Its another way of "speaking" directly to your customers, and done properly can start paying very handsomely. However, even then, I would suggest this is done later on in the business once you've spoken to a few customers and made some sales, as when you're paying up to £15 per click for some popular key words, you'd like to be sure that you're messages are strong and you are pulling in paying customers!

In future blogs, I'll share some of the techniques I've tried and loved that can hopefully kickstart your business.

Sad news today, as the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died today from a cardiac arrest. To say MJ had an impact on my life is an understatement. When I was a kid, my next door neighbour, Ann, introduced us to Michael Jackson after we saw Moonwalker in the cinema and were amazed! (In fact we actually went to see Roger Rabbit, but after the film ended my Dad told us to stay low in our seats to see what the next film was, turned out it was Moonwalker. Good parenting!) After that I became a hard-core fan, buying all his albums and learning his dance moves, from which I won a lot of dance competitions at the school discos and still has influenced the way I dance today (without the kicking and ball grabbing of course...)

However, as I grew out of my Michael Jackson phase around the age of 11, my younger sister grew into him, and never grew out of him since! I ended up having to chaperone her to all the UK Michael Jackson fan club parties, which all seemed very political (I've never seen so many club members argue so much), and full of what I can only describe as Michael Jackson FREEKS! The funny thing was when I later saw a documentary about Michael Jackson fans, and I realised I'd met all the main characters from the parties with my sister, some of whom were pretty much stalking MJ at the time!

But one day a few years back, Michael Jackson came to the UK and the club actually invited him to come to a party they had organised in his honour. My sister HAD to go, so I HAD to go with her. I ended up standing about a meter from Michael Jackson hanging off the side of an open-top double decker bus going through Soho, as I tried to get a good picture of him for my sister, while being pushed and shoved by loads of screaming Michael Jackson fans! We later ended up in Equinox, in Leicester Square, where everyone bitched about the club managers only meeting Michael and how unfair it was, and Michael sat and watch a show of many of the people in the documentary, doing imitation dances of him to his music. At the end he came on stage and my first thought was "Wow, his balls have finally dropped!". Turns out his profile high-pitched voice isn't really like that in real life...

Unfortunately by that time, for me, his music had become crap, nothing compared to his Thriller, Bad and Dangerous albums, and I started to look at him differently, as a bit of a wierdo, or "Wacko-Jacko" as the papers called him, especially with all the child molesting allegations. Surrounded by the MJ fan club fans, made me think the whole MJ scene wasn't for me, and so until my sister bought me a ticket to go see him in July for the O2 concerts, he was really a relic from my childhood. Sure, every now and again my friends would get me to do my Michael Jackson dance party-trick, I'd listen to his older music, but for me he definitely wasn't the Michael Jackson I'd been a fan of back in the eighties.

So now that he's died, while its sad, especially as I was saying it would be cool to go to the O2 arena just to see him live once before he died (I said the same about James Brown a month before he died too - maybe I should stop saying such things!) I don't feel like this will affect me the way it definitely will affect my sister. Hopefully I'll restrain from telling her all the jokes I've just heard (already) since he died (its like Princess Diana all over again) but probably not...and while I may joke, and not feel that much after all these years for someone who was really just a poster on a wall and an album in my CD collection, I do think he was a legend, and his influence on my childhood and my sister will always stay with me

By the way...I just found out Elton John sang "Don't Let The Sun Go Down on Me" at a party when they heard the news. This guy seems to have a song for every tragic celebrity death, can't wait to see what he brings out for the next one!

Every now and again, a book comes along and you think "WOW! I wish I'd read this before!". This is one of those books. "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Gary Blank. While I've read a lot of books about start-ups and entrepreneurship, all of them tell you pretty much the same thing, but nothing specific enough to act upon. This book is a roadmap for anyone launching a product based company, but particularly for online-services such as ours. It fits in so nicely with what we learnt from our trip to the US, what successful companies must do and why so many start-ups fail.

For starters, it focuses on the customer development model. The traditional way a lot of companies start is this: build a product, launch it, get a sales team to sell it, and hopefully you'll get some customers and become successful. In fact in all honesty, it was the way we were going about things (even though we knew better!) until we got a reminder from all the guys in the US to sell it then build it! I think on our side, it was much easier with our technical backgrounds to just build what we thought would be useful, based on our experiences with working for large clients in Accenture, than actually go around talking to lots of potential customers, and I think it took us seeing it to believe it (as we did in the US) that you could actually sell something to someone before it actually existed. But I know we're not the only ones to do this, in fact loads of start-ups do it, and thats why they fail. 

This book essentially states the obvious - why would you build anything until you know you have a market for it? Lots of books talk about market research, business plans and the such, but none of them give you a clear process of how to reach potential customers, validate your idea and assumptions, build your sales material and positioning while you're talking to your market, and effectively modifying your product (if needed) as you go along, so that by the time you launch, you have a product people want AND some initial customers. I think if we'd read this book at the beginning we could have shaved 6 months off our sales cycle while we try to find our initial customers. What hit me is it pretty much validated everything everyone in the US was telling us, to the point I was thinking "they must have read this book too!". 

So if you're about to launch a start-up around any product, you HAVE to read this book. Unfortunately its only available in the US right now, so you'll have to buy it and ship it from Amazon.com in the US, it took a couple of weeks and cost around £33, but is well worth the wait and money! From now on this book has become our bible and roadmap to launching SambaStream!

I've been away for the past 2 weeks to the states, and I've been away from this blog since January, too busy with my start-up SambaStream to concentrate on it properly! In case you were wondering you can read some blogs I've been doing for SambaStream here: http://www.sambastream.com/blog.

The trip to the states was excellent! I've heard it before, but I had to see it for myself to believe it, the attitude to business and entrepreneurship in the states is amazing! I've been networking the past year in London, and to date, I haven't met many start-ups or entrepreneurs that are as impressive, and more importantly, as approachable, as the people I met in only 2 weeks in the US!

To give you an example, our first stop was in Seattle, for the NetHope summit in Microsoft's headquarters. 2 days before we flew out, Clarence my colleague, showed me a video demonstration of a cool start-up called Gist. I'd never heard of them, but when we saw they were in Seattle, we thought what the hell and decided to email them to see if we could come around their offices. Within 10 minutes, we had a reply from the CEO T.A. McCann, who had never heard of us but was happy to meet, so we met up on the Monday morning. Through my friend Sri, who lives in Seattle, we also met some other great people like Kabir Shahani, CEO of another SaaS start-up called Appature and a very cool fund manager and VC called Ken Kamada. All of them took the time to meet with us and talk about our business, and more importantly give us genuinely useful advice.

We then went on to San Francisco where we met up with Demian Entrekin, CTO of another SaaS company, Innotas, and Luis Sala, Product Manager at Alfresco. Demian had never heard of us either, but was happy to meet for us even though we got lost in San Francisco and turned up 30 minutes late!

These were the main people, we met many others on our trip, but all of them displayed the same level of openness and approachability, and were full of great advice for our company. In all my time networking in London, I haven't met many people as impressive as the ones I met on the trip, who really understand our space and are willing to share good advice. It really goes to show why a lot of companies are moving to the US, and doing successfully out there, and the UK has much to learn from them.

While one day I may very well move out there, for now I'm happy to stay in London and see what we can do here, its not all bad in the UK for high-tech start-ups like ours, but it definitely isn't as easy as it is in the states. Hopefully one day we'll catch up, and there are a few start-ups like ours that are making moves to take the UK to the next level!

Today I found out about a very interesting competition on YouTube, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Tan Dun, the Chinese composer who wrote the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, has composed a piece which you can download as PDF sheet music for each instrument and then follow him online while he conducts you in a video. I originally thought you had to learn his peice and then record it to submit online, but fortunately (as a 2nd violin part would be very boring by itself!) you can choose from a range of famous pieces to play to show off your talent for each instrument. All you have to do is practice your chosen piece, record it and upload it to YouTube, and then submit it using the competition page for entry into the competition. The cool part is the best performers get flown to New York to perform his composition at Carnegie Hall in April.

The competition closes on  January 28^th, 2009, which unfortunately for me is not enough time for me to pick up my violin properly again for the first time in 11 years and try to get good enough again to play in this event. Too bad, I would have loved to. However if you are good enough to play, make sure you submit an entry, it looks like an excellent event to get involved in!

So much has happened in the world recently, and unfortunately the best part when George Bush got shoes thrown at him today in Iraq (see the YouTube video below) didn't work out so well and missed his head. Bush was his usual smug self pleased to have dodged the shoes and make a joke of it, as anyone would be who had managed to get away with all the mess he's cause for the past 8 years without having to pay for it.

But back to the rest of the world, who will hopefully be able to forget Bush once Obama comes into power this January, it seems when the economy tumbles, as it has quite dramatically since September and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, all the other worlds problems begin to surface. Since September we've seen mass protests in Thailand for a Government that's been in power since before I was living there last year in 2006 (and saw very little complaint), closer to home, especially for me because of my close Greek connections and friends living in Athens, Greece is now having some of the most violent riots in years, and today Russia was having protests against the Kremlin in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I have close friends in all these countries so I've been speaking with all my friends from each to make sure they're OK and find out exactly what’s going on out there.

Where have all the problems with the Governments suddenly come from? I was in Athens in September and I didn’t hear anyone, even my very opinionated friend Dimitris, complaining about the government then, I lived in Bangkok for 7 months last year and again apart from one reporter I met who wasn’t even Thai, I never heard a complaint about the government, and Russia, while not as big as the other protests it appears, I have constantly asked very critical questions about the Kremlin to my Russian friends, and usually the Kremlin is defended very passionately by them.

The fact is these problems didn’t just appear now, they’ve been around for years, the only difference is now the economy is tumbling and people are feeling the pain of a global recession, they stop being complacent and speaking out. I can now really understand why politicians place so much priority on the economy, keep everyone content financially, and you’ll have an easy ride. It’s like the governments have been paying us off to keep us quiet while they proceed with their own agenda, knowing full well someone in a good job, with money to buy the luxuries and support their family is very unlikely to complain outside the confines of their local pub or living room.

But the flip side to this is can we blame our Governments for all the current problems? Protesting to get rid of them? Why didn’t anyone protest before the recession? I don’t think we can blame the Governments for getting us here, its our complacency that got us here. Sure, making change late is better than never, but until we play an active part in our democracies all the time, we should receive no sympathy.

I too am a culprit of complacency. Other than this blog, I’ve never got political, the most I ever have was for the Shisha ban in the UK. So why don’t we all make a new years resolution for 2009 together, to complain in both the good times and the bad so that we don’t just let everything build up and require a global event (such as the credit crunch) to bring us together.

As a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology I applied this year to become a Chartered Engineer (which allows me to put CEng at the end of my name). To pass I had to do a huge application form, followed by an interview, in which we spent considerable time discussing my new start-up SambaStream and other parts of my career.

For those of you who've never heard about Chartered Engineers before, basically its a qualification to recognise that I have gained the essential skills and experience needed to be a competent engineer. From the IET's own website this is how they describe it:

Chartered engineers are characterised by their ability to develop appropriate solutions to engineering problems, using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change.

They may develop and apply new technologies, promote advanced designs and design methods, introduce new and more efficient production techniques and marketing and construction concepts, and pioneer new engineering services and management methods.

Chartered engineers are variously engaged in technical and commercial leadership and possess effective interpersonal skills.

So you may now call me David Gildeh, MEng CEng and respect my authoritayyy