November 2007

Quote of the Week

Nov 30, 2007 in Quotes

"Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait."

YnR Entrepreneur Social

Nov 28, 2007 in Entrepreneurship

YnR is an informal forum and semi-regular meeting of Atlanta area entrepreneurs. The group is led by David Ratajczak, who from time to time sends out an email to the 250 or so people that he has amassed on a mailing list to come out for some good conversation and fun. David welcomes anyone with an entrepreneurial passion into the group, though he does screen people to avoid business service providers.

There is an event this evening over at Everybody's Pizza in Emory University village starting at 5:30 and running to about 8:30. If you are an entrepreneur looking to get engaged with other like minded folks this is a great place to start.

If you can't make it tonight seek out David and get on his mailing list.

I am personally not going to be able to make it myself. Heading to an event at The Carter Center. The Center for Ethics and Corporate Responsibility is giving Charles Brewer the Ethics Advocate Award for the his advocacy for the values-based management he introduced at MindSpring.

Startup Weekend Lessons

Nov 27, 2007 in Entrepreneurship, Startups

After Atlanta Startup Weekend I needed some time to recharge. A nice break from the Internet in general and blogging in particular over a Thanksgiving holiday that I turned into a week's vacation offered me a little time to reflect on the lessons from the undertaking. As a facilitator more than a task participant I have a unique view of what transpired and the takeaways. Some of them are new, many just reinforced previous experiences with startups. Here they are.

1. The Atlanta technology community is strong. We had over 120 people sign up for the weekend. We also ended up with several firsts. Jeff Haynie walked in with a prototype on 8:00am Saturday morning. Sanjay Parekh and Michael Mealing put a provisional patent together. On top of those a Google search for the brand name of the service we created returns more results than any other Startup Weekend product. And, most importantly, we launched.

2. Good ideas are immediately apparent. When Paul Stamatiou first suggested the idea that became Skribit on the idea wiki, you knew it was a winner. It made it to the final four (but was rated lowest of the four.) Once it get that far it took a little lobbying. : )

3. Quick decisions are needed. Andrew Hyde has some amazing facilitation skills. While I was pretty involved in the planning of Atlanta Startup Weekend, one of my biggest worries was how we were going to go from over 20 ideas, down to 1 in less then five hours. Andrew led us through this process masterfully.

4. Make something that people want and can grow organically. We ended up selecting the Skribit concept for a lot of different reasons. One of the bigger considerations was that the group felt the application had the highest viral element to it when compared to the other candidates. Skribit has the ability to grow by itself without a sustained business development or marketing effort. The early traffic and use numbers support this belief.

5. Somebody has to be in charge of product. When Andrew first broke us into groups Erika Brookes mentioned that it seemed odd that there was no product group. Did that one ever come back to bite us. Business development, marketing, and user experience were all telling dev what to build. Of course dev had their own ideas as well.

6. Leaders step up and lead. Alan Pinstein was the second person that brought up the product lead issue. Which led to a product development intervention on late Saturday afternoon. During this meeting, while many of the said groups denied setting product requirements, Jason White stepped up for the first time with a solution on the dev side. During a user experience meeting about an hour later a marketing person was introducing a new feature. Lots of folks were indeed setting requirements. Shortly thereafter Alan became the point person on product requirements and Jason took charge of the development effort. A bit later in the evening I was accused of being leaderish.

7. Get the product out. Late on Saturday evening it became pretty obvious that we were not going to launch if we continued down the same path that we had been following. The Appcelerator team was confident that their platform could pull us out of the weeds. The decision was made to let them have a go at it. They delivered. It was amazing to look over Jeff Haynie's shoulder while Alan P was diagramming the product requirements on the white board and then have Jeff bring quickly bring the product to life on his platform. By the time they left that evening most of the application modules were working independently of each other.

8. All startups need milestones. Driving back to ATDC early Sunday morning it dawned on me what we had been missing thus far in the weekend. Milestones. All startups need them. We had none. Quick early huddles with Alan and Jason led to setting milestones of noon for an alpha and 7:00 pm for the first beta. Not sure we made either, but having the goals made us focus and we reached our ultimate launch goal.

9. Development has to be in sync with compartmentalized tasks. To get in a position to win we had to take a short cut. The development team was not in sync Sunday on the product requirements. With the rate of code commits this created a situation where the devs were stomping on each others code. This caused hours upon hours of rework, some raised voices (including mine) and nearly led to us not getting the product out.

10. Marketing needs to follow product. Unfortunately the marketing team was not in communication with product development as well as they could have been. Around 9:00 pm on Sunday they contacted TechCrunch and Guy Kawasaki. They did an amazing job. Both of them covered us. Which led to a good deal of traffic. To a site that had nothing but a logo on it. No app. No way to capture email addresses. A mad scramble ensured to correct the latter. We had 6,000 unique visitors within one day of launching. If you Google 'skribit' you will find over 72,000 results on a term that did not exist two weeks ago. No pr is bad pr.

11. You have to believe in yourself and your team. At 11:45 pm Andrew asked if we were going to try and launch by midnight. After about seven minutes of intense discussion the team decided yes. Nate Clark frantically scrambled to move the code from the dev to the live server. We were a launch. We stayed for about three more hours fixing things as they broke, but we were a launch.

12. Engage experts. At some point on Sunday, Andrew said something to the effect of "I could have told you this was going to happen" to which I replied "why didn't you?". "Nobody asked me" he said. Andrew was and remains the smartest guy in the world about building a startup in a weekend. We should have been more proactive in reaching out to him. As all startups should be with their expert friends.

While there were some rumblings here and there, I think in the end Atlanta Startup Weekend was a smashing success. The only question is how long should we wait before we have the second one?

Quote of the Week

Nov 16, 2007 in Quotes

"It was just incredible."

Me in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on Startup Weekend.

Update: Boo indeed. Here is an image of the full article.

Skribit Widget Live!

Nov 14, 2007 in Web/Tech

I finally had enough free time to get the Skribit widget in FoG. At the moment it is to the right about half way down the page. You can now submit ideas that you would like to see me write about.

Not real happy with the way that it is fitting into TypePad at the moment, but the team is still working on this and other items to get the application out to a wider audience. And when I say the team I mean about 20 people still banging at this hard around the clock.

So, who is going to be the first to suggest what should I write about?

Skribit Widget

Nov 12, 2007 in Web/Tech

If you want to see how the Skribit widget works mosey on over to Startup South where you can see the widget embedded in the right sidebar.

We made this widget because one of the biggest problems bloggers face is what should they write about? Often times the best topics come from readers via email or in the comments section of the blog. Skribit improves upon this by providing an easy way for bloggers to receive suggestions from their readers via a simple suggestion mechanism. Once an idea has been submitted other readers can vote on suggested topics. This way a blogger already has an idea how much inherent interest there is in a certain topic before they write an article.

FoG uses TypePad advanced templates so it is going to take some minor coding to get it on this blog, but it is coming. Let me know about your experience with Skribit.

Skribit

Nov 12, 2007 in Entrepreneurship, Startups

Skribit is the product of Atlanta Startup Weekend. We "launched" at midnight and have already been TechCrunched and on Truemors. While I wished we were a little further along from a product development point of view, any press is good press.

I led the effort to bring Startup Weekend to Atlanta and have been working on this pretty much non-stop since Friday at 6 pm. Startup Weekend is a great event to build Atlanta's entrepreneurial community and a great fun. It was amazing to watch the leadership develop over the leadership and see some stars of the Atlanta web tech scene emerge.

To top it all off Skribit is a great concept that may have some legs.

Quote of the Week

Nov 09, 2007 in Quotes

"Open platforms shouldn't be about big company political battles."

David Recordon

In a presentation at Web2Expo. Courtesy of Brian Oberkirch.

Shiny Quarter

Nov 08, 2007 in Stocks

Today Knology was the last of the stocks in my portfolio to report earnings. Here is my quarterly stock update. It's a good one.

AAPL. Blew right through the $160 target that I set in August and now sitting over $180. 50% appreciation in the past three months. Given the weight in my portfolio, this explosion continues to drive overall portfolio performance growth. Apple's CPU traction remains strong. With Leopard, the new iPods and recently announced MacBook updates I expect a very strong finish to the calendar year. My advice is to buy on any weakness.

ELNK. Rolla Huff did a fine job of cutting costs and got a good pop out of the stock. I have yet to see any potential growth strategy. I heard the word CLEC a lot on the earnings call. CLECs are boring. Most likely will sell off if it pops a little more but right now it is looking pretty flat.

JOE. Joe continues fall from $41 to $32. They swung from earnings of $6 million last year to a loss of $6.8 million this year. Home sales are down a whopping 46%. Gonna take the tax loss on this one. Purchased some VMWare (VMW) based on the recent weakness due to misplaced concerns with Dell's purchase of EqualLogic.

KNOL. Knology is up from $14 to $16 in the past three months. They just announced a solid quarter from a revenue growth perspective and entered into an agreement to buy Graceba which will fuel future growth. Holding.

NFLX. Blockbuster pulling back on marketing and Movie Gallery filing chapter 11 results in strong subscriber growth at NetFlix. So much for those competitive pressures that were dampening performance. What looked like a mistake in Q2 is a winner in Q3. Up 24% since May purchase.

SCUR. Secure Computing has been on a nice steady upward march. Until the earnings call. Management gave some misguided guidance. Regardless, the stock has returned to the $10 level it was at before the big CipherTrust sell off. I may regret this, but I intend to sell off my stake to make my first angel investment, a bit of an energy play.

Its been a great three months with the portfolio up 13.5%. And while there are some unique events driving the number, Quicken claims my 12 month return is sitting at 347%. And no, I did not miss a period in there.

Friends Don't Spam Friends

Nov 07, 2007 in Internet, Marketing, Web/Tech

Yesterday Facebook made their big announcement about their advertising platform. Facebook is selling ads that display people's profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased, voiced an opinion about, or perhaps a FB app that is itself an advertising play.

According to The New York Times Facebook is going to message me when my friends opt-in to sharing what they are doing:

"For example, going forward, a Facebook user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would have no choice but to receive that movie message, along with an ad from Blockbuster."

Mark Zuckerberg said in the announcement that “nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend." Facebook is stepping over the line of permission I have given them while hiding behind the wall (pun intended) that they are not initiating the action, my friends are.

And if you start sending boatloads of advertising related messages around Facebook you will find yourself less trusted with at least one fewer friend.

Stammy thinks Facebook apps killed Facebook. Maybe. I think social advertising is a much more dangerous move for the company.

« Previous Entries