Startable - Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Prasad has a new piece on Small Business Trends on Turning email newsletters into customer insights. I’m a little partial to this newsletter since I helped OfficeDrop create these testing tactics (I’m not claiming that these tactics are unique, just that I was the person to bring them to our marketing efforts.)

I really like the point about allowing replies to the marketing emails. I send a lot of emails our to our new subscribers, and let customers reply to me directly. This helps cut off customer service issues early in the process, and also can get a good dialog going with individual customers.

One point that that did not make Prasad’s piece is that we also let customers know about upcoming new releases/products via the newsletter. It is a great way to get early-bird signups to new products.

AT&T recently announced new pricing plans for smart phones that limit monthly bandwidth usage, in theory to reduce the strain on their mobile networks caused by Apple’s products. The reaction in the mobile development community has been to become pretty depressed, as everyone now believes that new apps will have to be more efficient in how they use their subscribers’ data plans.

But what if this could actually be good for mobile app startups’ ability to monetize their apps?

Let me explain!

A large number of smaller ecommerce companies make money from 1) selling products and 2) marking up the shipping of their products. In fact, when I was a VC, I saw a surprisingly high percentage of actual cash flow coming from shipping at a large number of the online retailers I evaluated. In some cases, over half the margin was coming from shipping. This is because, as a bulk shipper, the retailer got a substantial discount off of standard shipping rates. The retailer charged the consumer something similar to what the consumer would expect from walking into a UPS store and captured the difference.

If mobile apps could bundle a certain amount of bandwidth with the purchase/subscription to their app then they might be able to capture a similar margin from marking up bandwidth. In other words, if AT&T is willing to act like UPS and sell bandwidth to the mobile startups in bulk, these startups could then mark up the bandwidth and sell it to consumers bundled along with their app.

If the pricing of data plans really starts to bug consumers, AND if AT&T is willing and able to provide bulk bandwidth purchases to startups - including the ability to meter/assign bandwidth to an individual consumer at the moment they are using a particular mobile app - then this could be a way for data-hungry applications to monetize. While a consumer may never be willing to pay for, say online content/video, they may be very willing to pay for the data plan needed to actually consume the content. This could be an entirely new way for startups to actually sell something to consumers who typically expect everything to be free.

What do you think? Am I crazy? Is there anyway AT&T would ever do this sort of a thing? I’d think that the billing would have to be done by the startup or Apple, which is something that AT&T may not like. I also think there is a bit of technical work that would need to be done since the ability to  meter additional purchased bandwidth would have to created.

One of the co-founders of my company recently posted his thoughts after attending the Startup Lessons Learned conference, from the perspective of a startup product manager. It’s worth a read!

Today I use a ton of applications on my iPhone to get the full experience of online services/sites like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and others. But the beauty of the web (at least on the PC) is that you don’t need to download software in most cases to get a full, awesome experience. I can just log into eBay and start trading stuff; I don’t have to wait for a download to get going.

But on the mobile phone it’s different. To get the best experience I need to hit the app store and download something. It’s a like a weird step backwards from the point where anyone could easily use any site with a browser (from your PC) without downloading software to a place where each site has its own special software that requires a download and install.

According to MediaPost:

Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.

I totally buy this argument. While one can quibble around the exact number of mobile devices vs. PCs, there is a clear and obvious trend that mobile devices are becoming an important secondary, and to a lot of people, the primary web access device.

So I wonder - will web sites just automatically be optimized for mobile viewing, or will the “app” become even more important? Is this whole app thing for using online services a real of “de-evolution” of the web - or a mere blip before mobile browsers and bandwidth become powerful enough to support the real web experience? What do people think, are mobile web apps here to say or just a strange passing fancy?

Vivek Wadhwa had an interesting post today on selling in TechCrunch. I’m learning some serious lessons on selling now that I’m the head of marketing at Pixily - although I am very much still a novice sales manager! I reserve the right to be completely wrong/change my mind on any or all of these points

1. Aspiring to a touchless sales model is great, but small business customers like to know they can reach you on the phone. Many great SaaS companies have a great sales funnel that terminates when a customer signs up online without speaking to a sales rep. I think most small business SaaS startups hope to create this type of sales cycle. After all, how can you have a profitable company if you need to have a sales person on the phone closing $15 per month sales? But, at Pixily, we’ve found that phone calls result in sales and great free to paid user conversions. We offer a free trial, and a decent number of our paying customers choose to sign up for the free trial and eventually convert to paying customers. The highest converting (free to paid) lead source is the customers who call us and who we sign up for the free trial over the phone. The convert to paying customers by over 3x vs. the next best source. (Note: “source” is probably not the right word to use, but it’s Saturday and my coffee isn’t kicking in quite yet…) Is this sustainable in the long term? I’m not experienced enough to know at this point.
2. Customer service reps make great sales people too! Vivek mentions how developers make great sales people. I’d very much agree, since our developers often drive closed leads from networking events they attend and from conferences they speak at. But we are having success with our customer service reps doubling as sales people. First of all, they know the product. Secondly, they understand how live customers are using the product. Third, when a free user calls in to ask a question it’s the time to try to sell them on an upgrade!
3. Customers do the darnedest things with the product - asking them “why are you interested in my product” is really helpful in selling. For example, one of Pixily’s products is a simple document scanning service. We happen to be pretty good at scanning documents, and can offer it profitably as a stand alone service. We had a bulk scanning customer who was a magazine publisher. He wanted to get his old magazine issues (from the 80’s and beyond) online, but only had them stored in print. Once we actually really understood how he wanted to use our product we were able to sell him - even though we were more expensive than a couple of local scanning providers in his area. We’ve sold this particular product a few more times, mainly because we “get” what the customer’s end goal is.
4. Managing a sales pipeline is harder than it looks. When you are the VC, you get to see all these pretty sales funnels at board meetings. When you are the person trying to grow the business, keeping the different campaigns and leads all moving along in the funnels is much more challenging! I guess it’s just in my nature to enjoy playing/measuring our sales channels by output, but I have to fight the instinct to not spend too much time in analytics and not enough time in selling/content creation.
5. When selling online, content is king. I’ve had a ton of luck getting great content out of a marketing intern we recently hired. Not only has he built an entirely new site dedicated to document scanning, he’s also put out some very helpful blog posts and made content upgrades to our web site. All this content is producing - both in terms of us moving up on Google, getting more traffic and improving our conversion rate.

Nielsen has a great blog post on smartphones, Droid and mobile applications. Some of the most interesting points they make are:

• Over the next several months at least six new smartphone devices (like Droid) will be released - these devices are going to have large screens, keyboards and a wide array of applications.
• More smart phones are accessing web pages vs. “dumb” phones as of Q3 2009.
• 24% of cell phone sales in Q3 2009 were smartphones; Nielson expects this to jump to 40% in Q4.
• In 2011 50% of all phone sales will be smartphones
• In 2011 120 million mobile users will be on the internet, and 90 million will be watching video on their phone.

It is clear that we are finally reaching that critical tipping point in terms of mobile internet usage. (I guess we were already there, but now even a slow person like me can see it clearly.) But I believe that phones ARE the internet/computer for many people these days, and that there continues to be opportunity developing services, apps and sites specifically designed for these users. The evidence I’ve seen recently speaks to this point; in particular several of the Techstars mobile companies have really had amazing adoption.

Is Droid, for that matter any of these other new smartphones, going to really take on the iPhone and emerge as a real alternative smartphone platform? I understand that iPhone has a real lead in apps, but I don’t think the market is won yet (although I am a pretty happy iPhone user.) Blackberry shouldn’t be forgotten about either, since their market share is surprisingly large and I think grew to 19% of smartphones recently due to their new phones positive receptions. My gut is that at least BB and iPhone are going to continue to gain share real market share. I have no idea how Droid will do, but if it got 10+% market share over the next year or so I wouldn’t be shocked. And I think it might be good for the overall market if 3 competing smartphone platforms all had real volume.

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!

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the generic advertising based web 2.0 business models are struggling, and I am wondering if lead gen business models are a much more effective model for the current downturn. Some of my partners are saying that 100 million in the new 10 million, as in a startup now needs 100 million monthly views to generate venture style revenue returns based off of a pure advertising based business model. While this is a bit of a cynical joke, there does seem to be statistically valid slipping in online CPMs, particularly around untargeted display advertisements. Targeting definitely helps, and some startups that I interact with are earning $25 to $60 CPMs… however, these are for highly desirable user groups. If you really think your startup has better targeting but doesn’t have huge users maybe you should consider using lead generation to do the monetization yourself.*

My general thought process is as follows:

1. Targeting requires work and advertisers can be lazy. Read the rest of this entry »
   

Prasad and I have been blogging about cloud computing and how it has sparked a massive round of new web services innovation. The advantages of using cloud computing for a startup’s backend are obvious; Prasad has touched on them before: low capital outlays; no long term contracts; Scale up and down on a whim; high availability, security and reliability, etc. However, if it is easier for your startup to enter a market due to cloud computing, then it is also easier for others. One way I’ve seen startups attempt to build barriers to entry/competitive differentiation is by using the data created by customers as a weapon.

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As a venture capitalist, I get a somewhat high level view of the economic landscape affecting startups. While I’m sure it’s not news to anyone, from my vantage point it does appear that the enterprise technology slowdown is now real. Startups that I met with several months ago have been returning with lowered plans. More sadly, several startups that were not able to raise funding from us or other venture firms have thrown in the towel based on slow revenue traction. Forrester research’s just released CIO study confirms that overall IT spending is down. My perspective is that Q2 enterprise IT spend was not healthy and Q3 will be worse.

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