Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

My occasional co-blogger Prasad Thammineni was recently featured on Amex’s OPEN Forum.com, sharing four intuitive ways that he promotes innovation around the OfficeDrop office. (OPEN Forum is a pretty interesting strategy by American Express to offer their small business card owners a place to share best practices on running their companies.)

Prasad lists a few of the things we try to do at OfficeDrop to be more innovative… As with the OfficeDrop name change process, Prasad makes sure to employ all of the clever minds around the office, not just the over paid ones like mine…

June is Innovation month in New England and in the spirit of fostering innovation, I have been reading up some books and sharing those ideas.  Vikram Kumar, CTO of  at Pixily, shared a video interview of Scott Anthony, the author of Silver Lining. There are some simple and yet powerful ideas  recommended in the book. Take a look at the video:

In how to choose the right business idea, I introduced the concept of the Idea Funnel.  Like me, you could use the idea funnel to narrow down a bunch of startup business ideas into few viable ones. I talked about stage 1 of the due diligence process, namely, “Is the idea viable?”. In this post, I will present the second and final stage, namely, “Can I execute on it?”. 

Stage 2: Can I execute on the business idea?

In stage 2, you are focused on things that you need to successfully take your business idea to the market. Here are the few things you need to have:

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Last week, I gave a talk on “Starting a Business upon Graduation”  to a group of Harvard Business School students. In addition to sharing my experiences in starting Pixily right after graduating from Wharton, I shared my approach on how one should zero in on a viable business idea. 

I approach the idea development process similar to how one approaches sales leads within a sales funnel (see below). I start of with a number of rough business ideas and put each idea through the due diligence funnel. Some make it through the funnel and some don’t. Ideas that make it through the funnel are more viable and have a higher chance of being successful.

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You probably read quite a few articles on how to answer this question. You have heard extreme things like, “your idea is not worth anything unless you implement it” and “this is how you calculate the true value of your idea”. Well, I am not going to spend anytime addressing this question from that perspective. Instead, I want to share my thoughts on what I think an idea is worth during a firm’s lifetime. I believe the value of an idea diminishes as time passes and instead, is replaced by the value of its execution.

Day 1: Firm’s value = The idea’s value

On day one, all of you have is the idea. You do not have a product, customers, revenues and of course profits. Most likely, you don’t have a team either. The firm’s value is same as the value of your idea. It could be $0, $1000, or a $1,000,000. Whatever that number is, your firm’s entire value is the number.

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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.

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This is the quote Anand Rajaram, one of the co-founders of Pixily, used when being interviewed by Mass High Tech for their weekly journal. Christopher Calnan, the staff writer at Mass High Tech wanted to know how Cloud Computing was impacting hardware infrastructure for his article Cloud computing bursting on the corporate scene.

I think this quote captures the essence of what cloud computing is doing to hardware costs. I strongly believe cloud computing should be part of every entrepreneur’s technology strategy. Let me start by summarizing how open source has become part of a startup’s strategy before making a case for cloud computing.

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If you were wondering where the “E” or the co-host of this blog is, here I am. No, I have not been vacationing, even though I wish I was. I have been super-busy preparing to launch my new startup Pixily and only now I have had a chance to get some time to do my part towards Startable.

I am a serial entrepreneur and spent majority of my adult life in the Boston area. Pixily is my fifth startup which I co-founded with Anand Rajaram and Vikram Kumar in August 2007 shortly after graduating from Wharton. Prior to Pixily, I founded and ran jPeople from 2000 to 2007. jPeople is a high-end technology consulting firm providing technology leadership across all stages of a project for clients like Fidelity and IBM. Some of the projects we provided leadership include Fidelity NetBenefits and Fidelity.com. We were considered experts in a number of technologies that powered the web and that experience is proving very useful with Pixily.

I got my start with entrepreneurship accidentally in 1995. I was playing with a beta version of Windows 95 and realized that it lacked a Launch bar – yes, the launch bar we have come to depend on in windows XP was conspicuously absent.  Sensing a need, I started developed a launch bar and released it for free on the web under the name Launchpad 95. Soon people started downloading and giving great feedback. They wanted to know how much it cost. After doing some research on the web, I started charging anywhere from $9.95 to $29.95. By the time I stopped maintaining the product, I had sold over 10,000 copies all over the world.

This entrepreneurial experience taught me some great lessons in market segmentation, pricing, packaging, product development and more importantly customer service. I still use these lessons today.

I met Healy while at Wharton and got to know him quite well while working on the stage as a Stage Manager. A lot of people volunteered to work on the stage but he was one of the few who showed up when he said he would and worked hard. I strongly believe in “do what you say” and not “say what you would like to do”. Commitment and delivery are must have qualities for entrepreneurs since meeting milestones is so integral to the success of a startup. I am happy that he moved to Boston and I am co-hosting this blog with him. 

I live in Boston now with my wife Shivani Grover, who is a big support in my endeavors and without whom I would not have gone to Wharton nor would I have this much progress with Pixily.