Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Does branding still matter?

I’d like to think so. This video of a 5 year old giving her impressions of different companies’ logos is very cute, and reinforces the idea that having an identifiable brand does (probably) still make a big difference for most companies.

Ok I’ve got to brag a little here. OfficeDrop recently launched our newest mobile app, the OfficeDrop Android Paper-to-Go app, and we’ve had great success with new users and downloads. I’m working on a post about how SEO may be dying, at least for SaaS services, since the huge majority of our new users are coming from app marketplaces these days. I really think we are undergoing a significant shift in the way people find and buy software and web services… and I’m personally having a ton of fun trying to figure it out!

Anyways, here is some of the recent press OfficeDrop has gotten on our new Android app:

May 18, 2011

OfficeDrop: Scan Docs, Turn Them into PDF & Make Searchable (Android)

Using Paper-to-Go you can scan physical documents using your smartphone’s camera and store these documents … other file formats can be uploaded and processed as well. Read OfficeDrop’s Paper-to-Go Review on makeuseof…

I’ve made noise recently about how Boston needs a stronger early stage technology press/blog ecosystem.

But I’ve also been thinking about what I can do to help fix this problem. I know that there are real journalists and dedicated bloggers here working hard to put out legit pieces on the New England startup scene. How can I support them?

One of the things that I think helps set the publications in other cities apart is the large number of readers who interact with the articles – in particular, in the comment sections. There are real conversations that happen around the stories by members of the startup communities in the comments on blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable. You don’t see that as much in Boston.

So, my New Years resolution is this:

I will leave at least one comment a day on a Boston tech blog

I know this isn’t much, but if other members of the community would do this too we would not only show our support for the journalists who try to help Boston tech companies get the word out, we would also potentially help increase the dialog that goes on around the local scene. (If I miss a day I’ll make it up the following with an extra comment…)

Maybe this is putting the cart before the horse. I know that other the big tech blogs have a lot of traffic, which leads to the large number of comments. But I also know, from my own blog and from the different blog publishing I’ve done for OfficeDrop, that after there are one or more comments on a post other readers are more likely to come out of the woodwork and post comments. And a healthy number of comments helps build community around a topic.

Here are the blogs that I want to try to help promote. Please let me know if I’m missing any:

Mass High Tech Galen Moore is out there everyday trying to make noise for New England.

BostInnovation I’m hopeful these guys will evolve into our own local Mashable.

Xconomy Boston I love the national ambitions coupled with local coverage.

Scott Kirsner Boston’s best known technology promoter.

Let’s try to help these local bloggers take their message to a national level. Is anyone else up for this? You could show your support by leaving a comment

Very unrelated links, but both I found to be very interesting.

Web Design – Google and an Example

An amazing piece by Justin O’Beirne on why Google Maps is so much more readable than the competition. He must have put a massive amount of work in to this post. I love the modifications he makes to Bing’s maps to make them better based on what he sees Google doing. Awesome stuff.

Taking Money off the Table to Boost Growth

One of the venture firms I worked for, Summit Partners, used to say that letting a founder take a little money off the table often boosted the company’s growth rate. I know this may sound counter-intuitive – if the founder just got $, won’t they become a lazy fat cat? Roger Ehrenberg has a great post on letting your winners run – even if that means letting the founders take a little money off the table prior to the real exit. I think he explains how a little liquidity can give the founders the confidence to go for the big time with their company.

My ocassional co-blogger and OfficeDrop’s CEO has a good post on Small Business Trends with some tips on working with outsourced designers. Like many startups, we can not afford a full time designer, so make extensive use of outsourced designers to help us with everything from logo design to site design to button design. It is working well for us, and Prasad shares a number of good tips in his “5 tips for working with outsourced designers” article.

I’ll be speaking at a very cool event next week in Cambridge on the 5th in the evening. The event is called “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” Come out and hear some pretty interesting folks talk about startup marketing. The main speaker will be Bob Dorf, and the event is moderated by Simeon Simeonov. Other speakers include:

• David Cancel, serial entrepreneur and founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery and Performable.
• Andy Moss, founder and CEO of ESMZone.
• Andy Greenawalt, founder and CEO of Perimeter eSecurity and Continuity.net.
• Healy Jones, founder of Startable and VP Marketing at OfficeDrop.
• Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify.

The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here. The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA. Everyone should come!!

The conference is organized by General Catalyst Partners and FastIgnite. Bob Dorf will provide an exclusive peek “under the covers” at some of the many new rules and advancements that Steve Blank, Bob and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years. The event will feature a keynote by Bob, guest appearances by entrepreneurs and executives who have successfully applied customer development in their businesses and a discussion led by General Catalyst Executive in Residence and FastIgnite CEO Simeon Simeonov.

This is crazy, I just saw this advertisement in my gmail account:

Greg Shin resume link

How funny is that? The link goes here: http://www.heyitsgreg.com/

Pretty inventive. Got to give the guy points for thinking outside the box.

Good luck finding a job Gregory Shin!

I recently did a post on DIY Marketers, a site dedicated to helping CEOs with limited budgets get the most out of their marketing, called “5 Tips For A More Professional Website.”

We learned a lot at OfficeDrop when we remodeled our website, and these are 5 things I think many small businesses (and startups) should be doing on their website – things I often see overlooked. They mainly revolve around the idea of generating “social proof” that your service/product is trustworthy and worth putting money into.

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.