Startable

Wow, there is an incredible amount of customer feedback that can be collected through a customer support number. I’ve learned some interesting stuff by listening on conversations the Pixily team has had with users of their service. This got me thinking - why don’t more internet-based businesses have phone numbers?

I guess it’s pretty simple to understand why Google doesn’t have a help desk. Think of the calls they would get: “Hey, I can’t find the address of the restaurant I’m going to on Google Maps,” or even more likely, “Why isn’t my company at the top of your search results?” (Or me a few weeks ago: “what the hell just happened to gmail?” This afternoon at TechStars I attended a talk by Nitzan Shaer, who was at Skype for a few years, and he mentioned that Skype consciously did not have a customer service number available because there was no way the service could handle the number of calls they would receive. I can buy that.

But what about smaller/startup internet companies? Can they have a help desk and actually not get overwhelmed helping customers? Should they? I’m starting to think that maybe… I’m pretty sure that for each customer who cares enough to contact a startup there are many, many other users who don’t bother. When you are trying to get something totally novel accepted by an as-of-yet undefined market, any customer feedback that you can get sounds pretty good, even if it is negative feedback. Early product decisions should probably be based on more than just the founders’/programmers’ gut instinct. Most startup internet companies have such a short runway to develop a product that will actually be accepted by the market that minor tweaks to the UI, content, etc. can have a huge impact on customer acquisition and retention.

I realize that actually talking to people is sometimes scary. And constantly picking up the phone can be very distracting. But you may be able to carefully expose a customer support phone number and not only help your business but also help some customers.

I’d imagine that the right way to have a customer service number starts with an easy way to REMOVE the customer service number. After all, if you end up having a Skype level of user adoption you just can’t support a support line very easily. So I’d go with one of those easy to throw away 800 services for the original number. I mean, you don’t want mooches like Mark MacLeod constantly bugging you… On the other hand, if you are an accounting software company and a well known startup CFO is constantly raving about how great your service is, maybe you do.

I’d also think that you will want your developers/product managers to answer a lot of these calls. I know this will slow them down, but on the other hand get the customer info into their hands asap. Also, if they build something that sucks shouldn’t they be the first to hear?

The feedback you get should also be taken in the context of customer segmentation. Maybe the particular user group that you are targeting just can’t “get” your product. Or maybe you want a help line specifically for bigger or corporate customers, or as a way to differentiate your free vs. premium app.

I obviously don’t have most of the answers on this topic. I’d love to learn from others who have or have not had a successful experience with their customer support line.

Has your startup failed before? I don’t mean the exact company that you just founded, but the business idea that you are attacking. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to try to take on a problem that has already gotten the best of other entrepreneurs. Difficult problems can be the most rewarding and can offer great opportunities. But when I was a venture capitalist hearing one of these pitches, it was very frustrating when the founders didn’t realize that there have been other, failed companies in the same space.

If you are pitching something to VCs that has failed before, you need to be able to talk intelligently about what caused the previous failures and how your startup is different. Venture capitalists will want to know that you are aware of the risks in your space and that you are taking intelligent steps to overcome them. Not knowing about other startups that have failed is fine if you are starting a company on your own (I guess), but if you are approaching funding sources you better know if there have been big-time venture funded failures with a business plan similar to yours.

I was always a bit surprised when I knew more about companies that had failed in a space than an entrepreneur trying to pitch me. That really shouldn’t happen. You’d be surprised at how many entrepreneurs present business plans to venture capitalists that have flamed out spectacularly and don’t know it. A little internet research can go a long way, as can some networking in a space before putting together a business plan and starting the fund raising process.

A venture capitalist’s natural response, when hearing about a startup in a space where a number of other venture backed businesses have met an early demise, is to assume that there is something wrong with the particular industry. “It must be a bad market,” goes the typical thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Broadstuff (a blog that I follow) has a good summary of a recent McKinsey article on the differences between how technology winners and losers navigate a recession. The key take away, besides the fact that technology spending falls really fast during a recession, is that successful technology companies are smart about how they cut SG&A and thoughtful on core vs. non-core investments. I’ve listed the McKinsey findings below (as quoted in Broadstuff); see Broadstuff’s site, linked above, for a more detailed explanation of each.

Successful technology company tactics during a recession

1. Manage working capital aggressively
2. Rationalize SG&A expenses and overall headcount
3. Make frequent, significant acquisitions (later)
4. Divest non-core assets early in the cycle
5. Maintain a stable level of leverage relative to equity

An important point to note is that for #2, the rationalization of headcount, successful companies actually slightly increased their headcount expenses (relative to their loser technology company competitors) during the recession.

This speaks to the need to focus on what works, get the right team on board and focused on the goal and get rid of non-core/distractions. This is very similar to what I am hearing board members say to portfolio company executives right now - figure out what the market needs now/what will be needed and cut out any other projects that are not aligned with this core task. Focus is a good thing.

It’s tough for me to give solid advice during these times. I’ve only lived (during my working career) through the dot.com downturn, and the current recession feels more dangerous/more wide spread. I welcome any suggestions/advice from the Startable readership on how smart technology executives navigate this market.

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…

Little overwhelmed right now, but thought I would share two links I’ve recently come across that I’ve found quite interesting. One is on the freemium business model for startups and the other is data on recent Series A venture capital financings in New England.

Freemium is Not a Business Model, by Mark Evans. Mark is a Canadian writer/entrepreneur. The comments section here is really interesting; worth scrolling through. I agree that many startups underestimate the difficulties of making a real business via a freemium. However, enough startups have succeeded with this model that it has to be taken seriously. To prove that you’ve got a startup capable of really creating huge revenues via a freemium model you’ve got to have a serious marketing and conversion engine (that’s my two cents…)

Quarterly Review of Series A Financings in New England, by Foley Hoag. (download the pdf for the report) Foley Hoag is a respected corporate law firm. Their attorney’s provide the following commentary: “Series A rounds are getting done despite the general economic climate; and yes, they are getting done at a more modest level because of it.” “The first two quarters in 2008 saw a general decline nationally in Series A transactions (down 8% from the same period in 2007), with a more marked downturn felt in New England (down almost 30% from 2007).” Keep in mind they are using a small sample set for their analysis, but it’s still an interesting read.

This is just a quick post to let startups who are using Amazon’s web services know about “AWS Startup Tour.” Amazon’s web services team is on the road meeting with startup CEOs this month, and will be in Boston on September 22nd. I think, besides me, several other venture capitalists will be there as well.

Prasad has posted on the cloud computing revolution and how it is enabling a new wave of startup innovation. As the cost of launching a new business drops we are seeing some very interesting web-based companies that would not have been possible just a few short years ago. AWS seems to be dominating the startup cloud services market. Here is a great chance for startup CEOs and CTOs to interact with the team behind AWS. I’ll be there and I hope you are too!

Comcast appears to be preparing to limit residential internet users’ bandwidth, starting October 1st. Comcast’s Network Management Policy website puts this limit at 250 gigabits per month. As a user of Comcast internet, I find this a little bit of a bummer. I don’t make a habit of analyzing my monthly internet usage (anyone remember AOL when you had to stay under a certain number of minutes online per month?), but I’ll have to start paying a bit of attention. However, it’s highly unlikely that I personally exceed this limit, despite enjoying Hulu and other online video, downloading songs, tons of files for work and using a filesync program to keep my home and work computers files the same. I do worry about how this will affect startups and new internet business ideas.

Several things about Comcast’s bandwidth limit do really annoy me:

1. Working from home. What will this do to information workers who work from home on a regular basis? I imagine that self-employed computer programmers who work from their home office could be particularly hurt. What about people who edit movies and other media from their home office? Will they be unable to upload their files? Telemedicine - doctors on call use the internet to look at medical images from home before heading into the hospital. Those high resolution images are very large, and can you imagine a doctor saying to a patient, “well, I don’t want to go over my bandwidth limit this month, so you’re going to have to wait for me to get to the hospital to see the ALL the scans we took of your brain…” Sure, you are probably supposed to get a “commercial” internet subscription if you do these things, but do you really feel that someone who works from home on Fridays should have to??
2. Read the rest of this entry »
   

Pretend you are on the board of a startup. Unfortunately, this startup is not living up to its potential, and is failing to get sales traction as you and the team hoped. Why are sales not materializing? I had a brief, but insightful, conversation with one of my partners today. This partner (like most venture capitalists) is on several startup boards. Most of these startups are growing quite well; however, one of them is not.

The question is why? From a board level, it is quite difficult for a venture capitalist to determine the cause of the startup’s sales slippage. Is it the sales team? Or is it a market/product issue?

Read the rest of this entry »

What should greet me my return from vacation but yet another piece of real spam in my Facebook account. Similar to the Facebook virus/spam I wrote about earlier, this spam appeared as a message from a friend. This time I was directed to a random website that claimed to be a youtube video, although it clearly was not. This feels more like a virus (vs. traditional Facebook application “join me” spam) because the message was generated without her consent and directed the target user away from Facebook and to a site that was likely selling something or that had a malicious intent. It’s evil junk marketing generated without the user’s consent.

I’ve been excited by and met with a number of Web 2.0 startups who are planning on having an open API, and who believe that this will enable them to more nimbly develop relationships with their customers. I hope that this promise will not be destroyed by malicious developers who exploit the openness of Web 2.0.

It would really bum me out if Facebook became over run with nasty spammy messages like most of my email accounts have… I hope the folks at Facebook can find a way to keep their system open and yet avoid having virus writers and spam marketers take advantage of them.

When Facebook opened their API last year to outside developers they seriously accelerated their business and became the face and forward thinker of the real Web 2.0 movement. Supposedly in 2007 alone 12,000 applications were generated on the Facebook platform. The key to the success of the platform is that outsiders are trusted to help direct the evolution of a company’s relationship with their customers.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »