Startable - Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

We’ve had some cool developments at my startup, OfficeDrop - mail-in scanning service + document management - and I figured, why not brag about it on my blog.

First of all, we have really had some aggressive integrations with Google Aps. These basically allow people to get paper into Google Docs, either by our self-scan scanning software download or by linking an OfficeDrop account directly with Google Docs, which pushes the mail-in scans directly into Google Docs accounts as text-searchable PDFs. For us, this is a pretty big deal. A blogger lead a piece on this integration with the title:

OfficeDrop Puts Pressure On Microsoft

Very awesome! (Scroll to the middle of the article) I’m not sure Microsoft feels pressure from us, but we think our integration is a big deal…

You may have noticed that Prasad Thammineni, my occasional co-blogger here at Startable, is becoming very occasional. Well, this is partly because he’s been writing some good stuff on other sites like Small Business Trends. His two most recent articles were published this month and are getting some good traction:

20 Tips Small Businesses Can Use to Build Web Credibility

and

Finding the Application Marketplace That’s Right for Your Small Business

Check them out!

A while ago my company changed its name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. While we briefly talked about this on our blog, two recent posts have talked about this change. Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups has a piece on coming up with a company name written by me (and OfficeDrop’s fearless marketing intern Matt Fellows). Matt and I detailed the name change brainstorming and customer validation/involvement process. I’m glad Dharmesh published this piece - he and I have had some pretty involved/heated discussions on the importance of choosing your startup’s name and the ramifications of actually getting a particular name.

Ivana Taylor, a small business technology and marketing professional, posted an interview she did with me on the QuestionPro blog on how we changed our name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. It was nice of her to do such and extensive writeup on our process.

Startup naming is a very difficult thing to do. It’s hard to find a name that customers will remember, that is somehow descriptive or evokes what it is that you do - and finally one that you can get the domain name of. Domain name hording isn’t too bad of an idea - OfficeDrop owns over 200 domains, and I’ve been collecting a ton recently too around the concept of the smart grid and smart grid applications.

Using the power of Google Analytics, it’s easy for me to see which Startable blog posts were the most read in 2009. Keep in mind that I’m merely looking at the number of views, so stuff posted earlier in the year has a distinct advantage of making it to the top.

10. The hidden cost of down rounds - the antidilution provision. When venture backed companies’ values drop, the pain is not felt evenly amongst the shareholders. With venture backed companies’ valuations falling like rocks due to the financial turmoil and bad-economy-induced-missed projections, I’m not surprised that this post got a lot of traction.

9. 4 Ways to generate business ideas. Prasad’s post on idea generation and ways to come up with innovative businesses and solutions still attracts good traffic to Startable.

8. The Entrepreneur in Residence. The first in a three part series explaining what an entrepreneur in residence does at a venture capital firm. The follow up posts talk about how to deal with an EIR and how to meet with one. I think this post will continue to get good traffic; it is actually the number one search term driving traffic to Startable.

7. MBAs and Startups.  Right when I was fresh from leaving venture capital and starting actually doing the entrepreneurial thing, I responded to a Dharmesh Shah post on 10 things MBA school won’t teach you. Now that I’ve been a “real” entrepreneur for the past 6 months, I agree with what I wrote. This post also had a bit of a TechCrunch boost.

6. Early stage venture capital valuations. Right after I left venture capital I felt that I could reveal the truth (as I saw it) on how VCs value startups. VCs have a target ownership, and the more you raise the higher valuation you startup will get. I continue to stand by this.

5. So you want to be a junior VC. My advice to someone who emailed me asking for tips on interviewing for a non-partner position at a venture capital fund.

4. Angel groups are professionalizing and I’m not sure VCs realize it. I was pretty impressed after attending a meeting of the Northeast ACA (Angel Capital Association.) This isn’t a meeting most venture capitalists get to attend, and I was pretty shocked at the level of sophistication. Angel groups are really getting good. Somehow this post got a lot of stumbleupon love.

3. The venture capital investment memo. Since I worked at a few funds, I thought it would be fun to compile the “average” investment memo put together during the investment process at a venture firm. I get good monthly search traffic to this post.

2. Leaving venture capital. Well, this is when I officially announced I was leaving Atlas Venture. I guess people wanted to read about it!

1. It’s not me it’s you, the real reason many startups can’t raise venture capital. Many, many startups are rejected by venture capitalists for the simple reason that the VC doesn’t have confidence in the founder. However, this is rarely communicated. I list some tips that the founder can use to tell if they are the problem.

Wow, so I’ve written a lot this year. Hopefully I’ll continue to have some good content going forward. I am always available over email or twitter, so don’t feel bad reaching out.

Happy New Years!!

I was lucky enough to attend a PopSignal event a couple of weeks ago, and was surrounded by a few entrepreneurs who I really respect like the guys over at YouCastr and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot. We got into a pretty heated discussion on naming your startup. In fact, it was so heated that one of us knocked over his drink (that individual will remain anonymous.) We agreed on pretty much two points: naming your company is really hard and you’ve got to be able to purchase the domain name.

But a bigger question that we batted around was how does branding impact your web business? The opinions ranged from branding is just as important as it is for offline businesses to branding doesn’t really matter in the era of google juice. I’ve been thinking about some of the data that I’ve seen on branding, search volume and traffic. It’s pretty hard to find really tangible information on this subject, but there was a study done by MSFT and Comscore that showed a serious positive impact when branded advertising (display) was combined with search advertising.

Probably the coolest study I’ve seen on branding and online businesses is the chocolate covered grasshopper campaign that Grasshopper did when they changed their name/branding from GotVmail to Grasshopper. I don’t know if you remember this campaign, but they FedExed something like 25,000 chocolate covered grasshoppers to technology and entrepreneurial thought leaders earlier this year. I was in Pixily’s office when Prasad got his… it certainly got everyone’s attention! But did it work?

Thanks to the case study published by Grasshopper we can actually see if it did! The company spent approximately $68k on the marketing event, including the price of grasshoppers and shipping. In two months they got over 150 blog mentions, 8 TV mentions and 51.7k unique page views. More importantly, the Alexa visitors to Grasshopper.com eclipsed GotVmail.com and the new brand’s site seems to continue to outperform the old brands since the campaign - and in aggregate traffic to the two brands is much higher than to the single GotVmail brand pre-branding campaign.

online branding campaign results

My conclusion would be that there is still space for really creative branding campaigns in the online world. In fact, given that it is now easier than ever to track this sort of a campaign it is almost surprising that more companies don’t experiment with these sorts of attention getting branding campaigns.

Anand Rajaram of Pixily recently posted a piece on approaching industry competitions/award programs if you are a startup. I thought that you may find it interesting.

While nothing says success like an increasing customer count, sometimes a startup can appear bigger, more established and get great free marketing from success in a prestigious industry award. The right award or two can help get a customer over the “should I trust this startup” hump!

Prasad and I had an interesting discussion with Siamak Taghaddos, co-founder of Grasshopper (formerly GotVMail.com), a provider of phone number and voicemail services to entrepreneurial companies. Siamak and his team have done a very impressive job bootstrapping Grasshopper into a successful company. He is known in the area as a very savvy marketer, which is why Prasad and I wanted to meet with him - he’s the guy who sent out thousands of chocolate covered grasshoppers recently. We were looking for any advice he might have on how to continue to increase sales at Pixily since he was able to grow his own sales so effectively without a big ad budget in the early days of his company.

His advice was pretty interesting, and is something that I think maybe needs to be reiterated in today’s go-go world of internet based marketing. I was expecting him to mention some sort of a viral online campaign or SEO tactic that really helped get things going back when his company was just a tiny startup. I was wrong. Instead, he said:

1. Figure out the right pricing
2. Get the positioning correct

Then worry about promoting/advertising the service. No one will sign up for your service if you can’t convince them they will get value for what they pay. He even went so far as to say that RAISING the price can be a good thing, if you can simplify your pricing structure. Customers don’t like to worry about overage charges or special fees, even if that means they pay a bit more - a predictable/stable bit more. And a higher price, in the funny world of the internet, can be a signal of quality. If it’s too cheap businesses owners may be afraid that the service is not up to par.

Of course, Siamak is totally right. And of course, his advice is totally obvious. But it was so refreshing to hear from someone who is walking the walk everyday that I thought I’d share it.

My (occasional) co-blogger, Prasad Thammineni, had his company featured in a great BusinessWeek article. BusinessWeek’s well known technology reviewer, Arik Hesseldahl, wrote a solid review of Pixily. 

First of all, this is a really cool acknowledgement of Pixily’s growing success. The article has a very realistic description of Pixily’s service. As a happy user of Pixily, I agree with Arik’s positions around how easy it is to use and search within formerly dumb paper documents. I also agree with his opinion that it would be great if users could merge documents and delete pages from within a document. 

Secondly, this is an example of  great PR for a startup. I’m sure we can all learn a bit about developing solid PR from Prasad… like, how did he get BusinessWeek to review his product, how did he get in touch with Arik, what did it take to convince him that the service was worth reviewing, etc. 

Finally, I’d love to hear from Prasad what this review has done to his site’s traffic and new customer sign ups. Is it creating buzz that is translating into sales??

Thankfully I’ll be getting lunch with Prasad today so maybe I can learn a bit about this stuff… and not to steal any thunder, but I think Twitter might have been involved…

In an earlier post Prasad Thammineni makes a thesis for why startups should blog. He also asks the question, “Do VCs care if startups have a blog?” As a venture capitalist, I would say, “yes, a startup blog is not a bad idea.”

I will ignore the obvious reasons to blog, such as search engine goodness, brand building, etc. Instead, I’ll focus on why your startup blog matters to a VC.

If you are trying to raise venture capital, a blog isn’t a bad idea because:

1. A VC might find YOU via your blog. This is true - VCs just don’t sit on their butts and wait for new investments to walk in the door. In fact, some VCs actually know how to use Google… and during our research into your space might we just might stumble across your thoughts and then contact you.  
2. Thought leadership/PR. If you are a really well known blogger in your space then you will potentially get quoted in press articles and/or asked to speak at events. Since most VCs can read (and a few can even listen) there is a chance that they will be so intrigued by what you’ve said that they reach out to you. Read the rest of this entry »
   

Should a startup blog even before they are ready to tell the world about their idea? By blogging will you be giving away your idea? Is there a real benefit to creating a blog and updating it on a regular basis? These are questions I asked myself when we founded Pixily and in the ensuing months when we were in stealth mode.

Reflecting back on these questions, we at Pixily wish we started blogging within the first couple of months of founding Pixily. It would have helped us in a number of ways including acquiring customers, being perceived as an authority in the market and in recruiting employees. In this post, I will cover the benefits and in a following post I will talk about blogging strategies that a stealth mode startup can employ.

Read the rest of this entry »