“3. Prove the concept on your own nickel. The best way to gain the upper hand in an investor negotiation is to show that your company has traction – a pilot deal with a Fortune 1000 customer, a hockey-stick-like ramp of users to your site or a contract with a major retailer or distributor to roll out your product nationwide. That’s why I’ve been advising my start-up clients to generate revenue – even a small amount of revenue – to show prospective investors that they’ve got more than just a business plan and a dream. If you spend as much time pitching customers as you do courting investors, you’ll make more money, give up less equity and end up with a far more valuable company at the end of the day.” – The Wall Street Journal Online
Why wouldn’t you spend all your time ‘Pitching Customers’ and ‘Making Money’….Then you won’t need to ‘Pitch Investors’ and ‘Accept Money’ while losing control and future revenue.
4. Less is more, and I really believe this, particularly early on when you launch something. Over time, you can grow the utility of your service, and Facebook today probably offers 20 or 30 different features of significance in their service. But, when they launched, it was really quite simplistic. I think that’s true of most great services.
One of my favorite investments that our firm made is in Delicious. The thing I loved about Delicious was its simplicity. There wasn’t much you could do, but what you could do was really quite powerful. People used it every single day, maybe 5 or 10 times a day. These services where you do one little thing, but you do it all the time, and it’s very reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it, and it’s quick, easy, and fast, I think tend to do very well and give you the platform to ultimately grow from there.
“Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps”
Interesting how things come full circle…If you remember (and we are sure you do) the 3.5″ Floppy Disk (1.44 MB) looks like Sony is ending an era by shutting down Production (TechCrunch.com). Don’t know what is more amazing, the fact that they were still being produced or sold or purchased or used? But think of how much this piece of technology dominated the market and the length of time at which it did that. Kind of mind boggling that it did eventually find a niche market in technology emerging markets….
For those who work at large agencies or carriers…bring tim to your next meeting…www.bringtim.com. Just goes to show you that for the most part meetings are a waste of time and money. But if it was their time and their money, would they waste it?
Over the weekend we finally made the decision to NOT build the Email Marketing feature into Radius, and we are Happy about it. All along we had planned to offer agents the ability to manage email marketing campaigns within Radius as we originally felt it was a great tie into the entire management of a book of business. What we came to learn was that this original thought was just a bad fit to our overall objective with Radius. We got as far as mocking it up in HTML on our development servers, walking through the thought process while examining the pros and cons:
Pros:
Great Feature to Market to Leads and Up Sale Clients
Ties into the No Touch concept nicely
Good way to stay in touch with your book of business
Cons:
Spammers and Black listing our domain (radiusbob.com)
This is a ‘Marketing Feature’ not a Book of Business Management Feature.
So many services do it right and that is their sole focus (CampaignMonitor.com, ConstantContact.com or VerticleResponse.com) and if we built this feature in, we would have to add in limits and restrictions to each account level while having to increase the price of each plan.
In the end it just didn’t feel right. So we dumped it and are taking a different approach. We now realize that while email marketing is a great way to Generate Leads, it is not what Radius is meant to do, which is to Manage Leads. And taking a step back, when one communicates with a lead via email, that is how you are managing leads. So where do all those emails go and how do you quickly access them to know the various conversations you have had with a lead or client? Well if you can answer that then you understand where our heads are at, we don’t want you to look to your email client as to how you manage your book of business…More to come!
GEICO’s managers, it should be emphasized, were never enthusiastic about my idea. They warned me that instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream. I subtly indicated that I was older and wiser. I was just older………Read Entire Article
Bill Lumbergh (Office Space) asked for them, so we built them…Actually the Radius Reports are now Live and helping agents better understand their Book of Business. There are four main categories of reports; Commissions, Renewals, No Touch and Lead Conversion. Within those four, each has a sub-category by Lead Temperature, Product, Coverage and Agent. Now Radius provides Agents 11 Reports that give powerful insight into the Leads, Clients and Products to focus on. Log into your account at Radiusbob.com…Read the Rest Here
