Peter Harrington's Blog

Dec 1, 2008

Today we handed in our application for stic.ca, a business plan competition. We of course wrote about Heddge.com and its overall greatness :P. For the first stage of the competition business plans are restricted to 3 pages, so they are more like executive summaries + brief parts about market/competition, technology and competitive advantages.

Writing the initial plan was actually very difficult at all, we wrote the 3 pages in a couple hours. Our next step was to show it to people, especially ones who did not know anything about finance, to get their thoughts. They had no idea what the idea was, uh oh. And they said they didn’t feel it was a great idea (ie. we didn’t explain the problem well enough), so back to the editing board we went. 

Heddge.com is a fairly complex idea for those who do not have experience/knowledge in the tech and/or finance industries. So to write something that explains our idea in a such a simple way that anyone could understand it was difficult. Your idea has to be explained in the first hundred words, which was very hard to do. We eventually managed to not only educate the reader about industry basics but also highlight the problem and how were solving it (to be fair we went over 100 words, but we kept it as short as we could). 

I recall reading that writing a business plan is good because it makes sure all team members are on the same page and understand the vision, blah blah blah etc. I did not not get this experience at all, but what we did get was well worth it. Instead I learned how to explain the idea in the simplest terms so that it could be explained to anyone and could be explained quickly and easily. I had always feared doing an elevator pitch before with Heddge, because I had no idea how to fit everything into 30 seconds. The business plan forced us to think in absolute simplest terms and then project our idea with those terms. I think we ended up doing a good job and I personally cannot wait to get started on the next phase of the competition. 

P.S. I also remembered how helpful it is to have other people help you out and edit things. More eyes make catching errors a lot easier. So thanks to everyone who help out, you rock!

Nov 24, 2008

On the weekend I participated in a business pitch competition. First place got $3,000 for their business or tuition. I was competing with Heddge.com and I had an opportunity to learn quite a few things. First place went to my good friend Mark (I had guaranteed the organizers that one of us would win), and I’m happy for him but disappointed in myself.  Although I’m confident I would have taken 2nd place, an organizer reassured me of this, I was unsatisfied as I absolutely hate losing. The constellation prize was some good networking and having the MC telling me that we could probably get funding.

Things I did right:

1. It is very important to educate the audience on the basic knowledge of the industry your operating in. I knew going in I would have to educate them on Technical Financial Analysis, but I think that they didn’t quite get it in the end. Without any educational aspect I would have been drowning for the 5 minuets I was up there.
2. Show your passion. This was very easy to do as I am very passionate about: web based technology, startups and financial analysis. I was probably one of the most enthusiastic people on stage, which I knew helped a lot. When your excited about your idea it gets other people excited too.
3. No powerpoint or keynote. It was only me up on that stage speaking about Heddge. A slideshow would have distracted people from my enthusiasm and passion, plus there isn’t a whole lot I could have put up that would have made things easier to understand.
4. Be confident, going into the competition I knew I stood a strong chance. Knowing you will win is the first step towards winning. 

Things I would change:

1. Show how you discovered the need for this product. Somehow I managed to skip over how we found a problem and are solving it. Going by the judges comments afterwards, this is one area that I lost ground in.
2. I would showcase the need for the money/prize more. Student competitions don’t want to give the money to somebody who has $100,000 in the bank, they want to give it to the person to whom it make the most difference.
3. Talk slower, it all my excitement I may have talked a bit too fast.
4. Tailor the talk to the audience more. After seeing that non of the judges had any technological or financial experience I should have talked more about the concept then implementation. 

All in all it was a helpful event and I’m glad I could take away some valuable lessons and networking connections. This time I guaranteed that my friend or myself would win, next time I guarantee I will win. 

Nov 19, 2008

We’ve all heard the saying “all publicity is good publicity” or something very similar. And although most of like to agree, in theory, it is very hard to feel that way when you see a bad review or someone bashing your idea. I know from personal experience that seeing a hateful or poor review of my blog hurt, and at that point there is no way in hell I was happy to see that posting. You may have found yourself in a similar situation, seeing a bad comment on a forum or a blog posting, I doubt writing a thank you note to the poster was the first you did.

However, lets get back to the saying; “all publicity is good publicity”. I have come to realize this statement could not be anymore true, it may as well be a law of science. The reason for my serendipity is all due to one startup, twitter. This companies success has been built around bad publicity, but I didn’t even realize it until the other day. I was on TechCrunch, fulfilling my daily startup fix, when I read the article Twitter is Down! (I forgot how much I miss typing that). Instantly I thought back to when I had first signed up for twitter, it was after I found out the site was down. 

Twitter is famous for getting blog posts about it the very instant the site stops working. I’m fairly confident if you made a graph showing the number of blog posts per minuet and the status of twitter there would be giant spikes. For a site with a rather large scaling problem at first you might think that a lot of bad publicity would further expose this fact and dampen growth. But twitter has proven to one of the most consistent startups in terms of growth, as shown by the graph below.

These numbers only reflect the traffic to the twitter website, but many (if not most) of their users access the site via applications (ie. Twitterrific). The consistent bad publicity has lead to consistent growth, not something you would expect to see. Now of course this doesn’t mean that you should seek out bad publicity, make your application bad or ignore scaling, but it does mean that when you see a bad review don’t think it won’t help you. Bad reviews are much more useful then good ones, since bad ones tell you what to fix instead of telling you what you are doing right.

Nov 16, 2008

After doing some research, reading a lot of blog posts and discussions, I have compiled 16 marketing tips for bootstrapped startups.

1) Send press releases to blogs and pitch them. Do not send the same message to bunch of different blogs. Do not just change the name and then send a message to a bunch of blogs. You need to be personal, talk about an article they wrote, say what you genuinely liked. Then be polite and introduce them to your website. If your looking for a way to make it interesting for them, give them an actual story to write about, whether you have founded many companies in the past, or never physically met your co-founder or how your 16. And do not focus on just the major blogs, there are great small blogs out there, befriend them and get them to support your site. Finally, if blogs do write about you send a thank you note, it will make getting a second article that much easier.

Note: The major blogs love exclusives and juicy stories, so give it to them.

2) Pay per click (PPC) advertising. This will not be for everyone, but PPC is a great way to attract quality traffic to your site. Costs can be as low as $0.05 per click (StumbleUpon.com) or higher with Google Adwords. Make sure you are tracking the users very carefully so you can determine your ROI and figure out if advertising is the best solution for you.

3) Ask for reviews/suggestions for your site on community sites (ie. possibly forums or niche social news sites). This makes sense for 2 reasons, number 1 you get outside advice (both good and bad) for free. You can discover that maybe that logo you made rather hasty doesn’t look as good as you thought. The second reason is that when these people are reviewing your site, they are going in deep. They don’t just judge you on the page layout, they look at features, prices, designs; you name it they will comment on it.

4) Talk about your website. This sounds simple enough, but you need to be constantly talking about your site. When people see your excitement and enthusiasm, they will in turn get excited and think about your idea that much more. Everyone you know should know what your site is, what it does and how great you are. You never know when you meet someone whether they’ll be able to take your site to the next level, that play the numbers game and make sure everyone you meet knows how they can help.

5) Do not make t-shirts, mugs or other swag. It costs money that could be better spent on other things. If you must buy a t-shirt, buy one for your team and that’s it. If people want to wear your logo, great, but make sure they buy it (shop.digg.com). This may sound a bit capitalistic, but startups need to be lean (t-shirts can wait until your funded :P )

6) Pay attention to Search Engine Optimization, but do not spend a lot of time here. It is very important to have the basics down, especially if Googe will be indexing a lot of public pages (social profiles, video pages, articles/posts ect.), but beyond that your time is best spent elsewhere. By doing many of the other things on this list you will be helping your SEO anyways (ie. building backlinks).

7) Respond to emails asap. Getting a fast reply from a company is huge indicator on how much the startup cares about its users. Be polite, respond quickly and people will love you. Love spreads, so do not be surprised when that confused early adopter ends up being one of your biggest supporters.

Note: If you seem to be getting too many emails, set up a FAQ with the ones you see the most. This is quick and easy to do, yet can cut the number of incoming emails down a lot.

8) Get on twitter, people love to follow companies that they are interested in, I know I do. Post updates about your industry, your features, updates. Make it interesting so they keep coming back.

9) Setup a company blog, but not just any blog. Make it special; educate your users and teach them something new, or share what you have been learning with them. Don’t expect a blog with only press releases to build much of a following. Prosper.com has a great blog system where they get other personal finance blogs to write for them, its win win! If people keep returning for your amazing blog articles, chances are they will eventually check out your site too.

Once you have a great article up, make sure it is on all the social news sites (and in the right category); digg, reddit, mix, stumbleupon.

Note: Search engines <3 blogs, never forget that

10) Go to local events, especially free ones. Conferences and seminars are pricy, not the best bang for your buck (unless you need to make specific connections and you know those people will be there). Go to things like barcamp.org, it’s a community of tech entrepreneurs who like helping each other, what more do you want?

Also focus on events that your users would attend. Did you just make some great new day trading software, well then go to meet ups of day traders. Don’t sell to them right away, they will hate you, but get to know them. Let them know what you do and what you are making, but don’t force it down their throats. Since your product is designed for them they should be interested and ask you the questions.

11) Sell yourself along with your idea. Jason Calacanis  (calacanis.com) is the absolute king of marketing himself. Go and see how many followers he has on twitter, it is no coincidence. People know what city he is in, what he thought of the restaurant he ate last night and most importantly what startup he is working on. If people follow you, they’ll follow your startup.

This can include getting interviewed on going on podcasts. The great thing about marketing yourself is it carries over from startup to startup. So if your first business doesn’t work out, those 1,000 people will follow you to your next one and they will be the best 1,000 users you ever get.

Note: Kevin Rose is also very good at this, though his approach is more passive.

12) Look at how and where you competition markets. Often time’s people will sign up for a product/service without even knowing there is a competing site out there. If you can cover the same ground all of your competitions customers can learn that they have second (and better :D ) option.

13) Contact the local press, yes they still exist. Knowing the journalist who covers new businesses or maybe tech businesses in your local newspaper can be very handy. So if you don’t know them, get to know them. Getting an article printed about your company is free advertising to a wide audience, how could you possibly say no?

14) Help the people who help you. If somebody is nice enough to take time out of their day to write about your business, you better make you sure you promote their content. It can be as simple as writing a ‘tweet’ with the url to the article.

If I knew that by reviewing a new service out there I would get promoted back, I would do it in a heartbeat.

15) Do you research before marketing to make sure everything is as effective as possible. Find the best way to write ads for Google and find the best way to write a title for digg. Putting in 30hrs a week to market your business is great, but if those 30 hours are no the most efficient then your time is being wasted. If your going to do something, make sure you do it right.

16) Try new things. Diggnation didn’t become a smash hit because it was the 1000^th startup to add a podcast with beer drinking. Experimenting will help you learn what it means to market and sell, and when you do hit gold (or maybe oil would be a better thing to hit), you’ll have more customers then you know what to do with.

Thanks for reading this and best of luck to everybody with their marketing endevours.

Nov 10, 2008

In the first tech boom a famous question was created by venture capitalists; Are you a feature a product or a business? Although I dislike the question, because features can turn into products or businesses overtime ie. Google went from a product to a business, it is very easy to classify startups into these 3 categories. 

For tech companies features are one of the first things to be cut in order to save costs (along with anything else that does not directly bring in revenue). Fancy features are generally used by a very small % of users, so when development stops on them it has very little impact on the income statement.

The idea that features don’t survive recessions isn’t very hard to accept, since features don’t bring in money (generally) and with no outside funding (due to recession) it is only logical to assume they will eventually close shop. Now if you run a site, that would be classified/app as a feature don’t think I’m saying you’ll need to shutdown, far from it. What I am saying is that you need to evolve, step out from the shadow and turn that feature into a product or business. 

Just like Google, it is time for all those great features and products (I know you are out there, I see you everyday) out there and take it to the next level. Everybody can be successful, surviving or thriving in a recession is no different.