confessions of a start-up ceo

Confessions of a Startup CEO: We Won!

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:58:12 +0000

There’s a lot of excitement around the office coming off a big win up in Boston! The North Bridge Venture Partners venture competition featured a $75k prize but it also came with a hearty vote of confidence.

Confessions of a Startup CEO: Kick-off party tonight!

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:04:23 +0000

We’re kicking this project off right tonight at Profitably World HQ! Team, advisors, significant others, and random passers by will be drinking a little champagne to celebrate the achievements to date and gear up for the road ahead.

The launch party will be a bit more elaborate…when an actual launch comes together! But for tonight, the team gets to put their feet up a little and enjoy. What an exciting time!

Confessions of a Startup CEO: True confessions

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:20:21 +0000

Today we launch a new format for Confessions. The glossier “Disney” style is out, and I am speaking a bit more from the heart about our challenges as well as our successes. It might take a few episodes to really get it right, but I think a more frank format will provide a much more honest and open window into the company. Enjoy!

(And we want to hear your thoughts–comment below!)

Transcription:
Hi, I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” This is sort of a different format this week. Looking back at the last 6-7 videos I am starting to feel that they have started to feel they got a bit “Disney” on us, and they are looking more like sales pitches than the natural confessions of what is going on here, you know, windows into the company, and I think that is a shame. I feel that this is a great forum to be actually being able to open up to you guys and talk about what is actually going on. You know, really step through some of the insecurities that we have and some of the fears that we have got and some of the challenges that we have got as well as all the great things.

So we are doing a bit of a more informal concept but I still want to keep it energetic and engaging but want to let you know what the challenges are. You know, I think it is a mirror of what is going on, on the sales side of the work where there are actually a lot of great things going on sales side. We have got target right now that we have set of 10 customers this morning and we have got 15. So 50% further along where we should be on this stage and you know that is great. The down side and the flip side of that is I feel like as we go through this process and I have been talking to customers, I feel I sound too salesy, and people sometimes gloss over and they kind of say what is that you are selling and that is very difficult for me because I haven’t spent a lot of time on the sales role. I am a data guy not a sales guy. I am an outcome guy and a problem solver. I kind of just want to have a heart to heart with customers sometimes and just say, “Listen, I know that you have got struggles because we all have struggles and I think some of the struggles that you face are the kind of things that I am well suited to fix and help with. We are going to do that by pulling through your quick books data and running our analytics on it. We think our analytics are pretty best in class. You know these are the kind of things that we would charge $350,000 for Procter & Gamble or Unilever to have as diagnostics for their business, and I think we are able to do this in a scalable way that allows us to deliver you for free and I think it is going to add some more value there,” but sometimes it is tough to get that sort of message across and you have got very limited windows to catch people’s attention.

I get that but I think that what I am going to do over the next month or so and in so far as I am having the sales conversations I want to open a little but more and take some of the gloss off and take some of the sheen off it and say hey listen…we think it is going to add a lot of value to you and I want to talk to you about whether or not this makes sense for your business and so we want to follow the same pattern here.

What else is going on? We have a brand new office behind me. I would walk around and show you the office but that seems…if you want to see the office you should come in and visit us. We are down at Broadway and Prince, and we are enjoying the space. Team is really working out well. We have got Francis really doing a nice job. We have got Chad Pugh who has been working with us from the design standpoint and that has been going very well. I think right now the biggest challenge that we face and this is something you know confessions of the startup is that right now we have started engaging with these customers and we need to show them the value. I think everyone that we talk to is like wow great idea, fantastic, or sounds good to be true, show me that it is actually working and I will meet you at the work site. That is an understandable position. So the challenge for us and the goal I think for the next you know for the next couple of weeks is to put couple of chalk marks on the board that will say hey listen we talked to the company that was making $50,000 of profit every year and we were able to identify another $10,000 in profit that we think they can go after and get that will be really exciting. If we do that 10 times then I think a lot of people would say wow this sounds like this is really good…and gets the attraction that it needs. To say for the fact that those 10 businesses we you know 10% better off than they were before we were talking to them. So that is where our attention is and we are hope you stay around for this as we go through it. We hope you like the new format. We hope that a bit more casual of a video blog format will be appealing and we want you to forward this along and we want you to tell everyone you know and let them know what is going on and leave some comments. We really love to hear the feedbacks. Love to hear what you think about all this. So get engaged and type in some comments right now and tell about this to all your friends. We will talk soon. Bye.

Confessions of a Startup CEO: Start-up lessons learned…from Led Zeppelin

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:10:15 +0000

“We’re hope that we are Led Zeppelin’s first album…for small business analytics.”

What else can I say about that? Watch the video and pass along the link!

Transcription:
Hi! I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” Today’s episode is called “Startup lessons learned from Led Zeppelin,” and the episode is prompted by all the great blog posts out there called start up lessons learned, and most of the bloggers are writing great articles about things that entrepreneurs have done that we should all learn from. I realizes one of the best learned lessons that I have learned, that was actually from the early days of Led Zeppelin. So if you haven’t read Hammer of the Gods you should because it is a seminal piece of literature in rock journalism. It is a great lesson…separate from that from my experience listening to American blues that I think it is relevant.

The analogue that I am going to draw is that we can run around telling customers about Profitably and we first to try and find the groove and how we talk about this thing is business intelligence. We want to help customers you know grow their businesses and you know we work on the charts and graphs and analytics and you know how my background relates to what we are doing. It has been a choppy experience quite honestly learning how to describe what we are trying to do and what occurred to me was Led Zeppelin didn’t bother.

So both Jimmy Paige and Robert Plant, both huge American blues fans before they even met….they had stacks and stacks of Willy Dickson and Howlin Wolf and all the classics and when they met that was one of the first things that both had in common. Few people know this…so, you know, when they decided to bring the American blues to the British mindset they didn’t run around and ask everyone, “Hey do you listen to Albert King. Do you like Howlin Wolf? Do you like Mississippi River Delta Blues or Chicago Blues? These are the questions that people would not know how to answer, and I think there is a good lesson in there for what we are doing…

You know, when I started to ask small businesses about business intelligence often times they have a negative opinion because they know it is not something that they can usually get a lot of value out of nor are there any offerings for them. So a lot of time they don’t know any of the solutions that are available in the marketplace for large organizations. So I have started to do what Led Zeppelin did which is just show them what I know is business intelligence and say “look is this awesome or what?” and the answer is as it is.

If you look at Led Zeppelin’s first album you know “I cannot quit you baby” and “you shook me,” both Willy Dickson’s songs. They just played them. No problem. “How many more times?” they managed to merge Howlin Wolf’s “How many more years” with Albert King’s “The Hunter” to create one song, and it is awesome. “The Lemon Song” in the second album is Howlin Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and a couple of lyrics are from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” They just took these songs and just started playing them and they played them in a way they knew that British or London contemporaries would enjoy and they played them in a way which was just awesome. They were very successful.

So I think the startup lesson learned there is do what Led Zeppelin does and what we are trying to do is we are going to take concepts from operations consulting, data mining you know heavy data analytics. We are going to take concepts from business intelligence but rather than tell people what they are doing here is what we are going to do, we are going to do what makes sense and we are going to do it for small businesses and we hope that the result is awesome.

We hope that we are Led Zeppelins’ first album for small business analytics and we hope that people who use it are as excited as all of us the first time we heard Led Zeppelin do what we know that you hear the Blues is to create something that was fantastic. So that is the startup lesson learnt for today and I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you think oh my god it has been a long time since I have listened to that album and it is awesome and you will go and listen to it. If you have ever you should check out Willy Dickson as well because that is where it all came from. So I hope you are having a great night. It is a great weather out here in New York and that’s the end of the episode! Talk to you soon.

Confessions of a Startup CEO: It’s all about boat speed.

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:50:56 +0000

In this episode, we talk through the importance of momentum, and how the metaphor of boat speed is so relevant to early stage start-ups.

The post was triggered by a number of key milestones that have helped us build a ton of momentum and buzz around NYC (well, not ALL around NYC, but we’re working hard!), including:

Identification of our CTO, Francis Hwang
Incorporation
Winning “Top Pitch” at the Founder Institute NYC

Things are really looking great, and I would be excited to hear your ideas about building boat speed.

Transcription:
I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of Startup CEO.” This is episode 6 and it is all about boat speed.

Now it has been a couple of weeks since our last post. I don’t like to normally go that long between episodes so I apologize. A tremendous amount has happened between now and then, which is one of the reasons why we haven’t had time to put a new video up. We are excited to announce that we incorporated and that the business that we are launching is called Profitably, Inc. More available at profitably.com. Even as of the last post we didn’t have a lot of information about my blog about how to get more information on whom you should contact if you want to learn more about what you are up to. Now you can go to profitably.com and we have little teasers site in there in the new version of it is coming out you know in a matter of weeks.

So things are really picking up speed for us. In addition to our incorporation we are able to find our CTO hire which is the most important hire we have been thinking about recently. I am excited to announce Francis Hwang has joined our team. You know really excited to have him on board. He is one of the best known Ruby developers in New York and came with gushing and glowing recommendations from everyone I talked to in the development community. So we’re very excited and we have also got a lot of investor attention. Recently pitched at the graduation of the Founder Institute, went for the New York session. If you don’t know about the Founder Institute check them out…very interesting. We just had our graduation and final pitch sessions and was pleased to be voted top pitch. We actually tied with one other person, Eddie Kim, of Simple PR. Between the two of us you know voted the best pitch and very excited, little bit of no strings attached cash, and more importantly a lot of investor attention.

So we have been getting a lot of attention recently from people who are interested in getting involved in our seed round. So I want to let you guys know that all that’s going on and we actually got some customers to sign on as well since we have last spoken.

So what does this all have to do with boat speed?

It is a common kind of metaphor that you know boats are very difficult to get moving fast. They are heavy and they sit on water. Once you are able to get a boat up to a larger speed, it is very easy to tack and turn the boat and so I think that really is a great metaphor for the way small business are run and how they are developed. You are constantly having conversations and you are constantly interacting with customers and investors, potential employers, and hires and partners. Through those conversations the ideas involve and what you know or thought you know or knew, continues to change. The important thing is you know if you are gathering people around you and gathering enthusiasm you get a big group of people there excited about what you are up to. It is very easy to pivot and it is very easy to change directions but the most difficult thing is building that momentum and getting things off the ground.

So we are very open. We are not very secretive of what we are up to. We are trying to help small businesses operate more profitably. We have our pitch on the web right now and we are going to record a new version of it now that we have kind of grown a little bit and the ideas evolved. New versions of pitching coming out in the next two episodes but I urge if you are starting your own small business right now to be thinking about boat speed and I urge you if you are in a small business and want to help us grow our boat speed, reach out to us right now. We want to help you run more profitably and we are already getting started. We have already lot of people excited and I am sure a lot of thing is changing but I am excited that boat speed is there and I would love to hear your thoughts about the ways that we can build momentum and who we should be getting involved in the process because we are having a lot of fun.

Thanks!

Confessions of a Startup CEO: You’re not unique, and it’s a good thing.

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:12:22 +0000

In this episode, we talk through why being unique can be such a drain on a small business.

Small businesses should be unique when it comes to their core offering and they way they address the marketplace, but when it comes to the non-core activities, they should be conforming to best practices and seeking out solutions other businesses have employed with success.

Forums like startups.com and American Express Open are great places to look, and a little birdy told me there might be another solution in the works…keep your ear to the ground!

Transcription:
Hi! I’m Adam Neary, and this is Confessions of the Startup CEO. This is episode 5: “You are not unique.” Now it goes against conventional wisdom to tell a small business owner that they are not unique, but I am going to do it anyway because it is good news. It is fight club time! You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and it is a good thing. Right? Because there are a lot of vendors and consultants out there that want to tell you that the challenges that you are facing are unique. They are different from the challenges that your competitors face. Your unique culture and the way you approach the market place is so different from what everyone else is doing that you need a custom solution. You need to craft something from scratch. We need to sit down and get a blank white board and start from scratch and try to figure out how to solve all your business problems and I think that’s nonsense.

You know, 10 years in the management consulting industry working with large organizations, what I have discovered is THEY are not unique. These large multinational organizations are all solving all of the same problems on a day by day basis, and when it comes to operations there is stuff that Toyota and Proctor and Gamble have been doing for 25 years that these organizations haven’t been doing. And if you walk in there and say, “We are going to start from scratch we are going to figure this out because you are so unique.” Then those customers and those clients are missing out on opportunities just to take what is working to do it.

So you know your business. You and your team know your business better than I would. So I want to say so that we are clear. This is not supposed to be an arrogant post. You should know what is unique about the way you engage in the market place. You should know what is unique about what you are offering your customers and THAT’S an opportunity to be unique. That is an opportunity to be different. When it comes to everything else, the non-core stuff, what you spend on office supplies. Many of you think about a million different things that are not core to your business…that is not an opportunity to be unique. Don’t be unique with accounting or legal, don’t be…

So we have decided that you are not unique and have a conversation. So what is the next step? I think you treat a non-core business problem like a technical error that comes up on your computer. You have some kind of error code and your noise goes off and you take it to Google and you see what the Google has to say. You figure somebody else has already solved this problem. I want to take some non-core business problem that you have got something that has been nagging you and you have been thinking all along that I think maybe I know people have solved this problem and there got to be an answer out there like you. Use this post as an excuse to believe that it is true and just go Google it. Go to American Express Open. Go to startups.com where they are asking a lot of questions. Very soon we are going to have a forum where you can go too and hopefully that helps answer some of these problems. Take this confidence, take this encouragement and go solve the business problem that is not core to your business and see how it goes. I love…people have started to comment more and more on the blog and is picking it up on iTunes now. If you solve some of these problems throw us some comments and let us know how it is going on out there and we would love to have a dialog and hopefully this has been helpful.

Thanks!

Confessions of a Startup CEO: Customer development

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:21:36 +0000

In this episode, we talk about the importance of thorough customer development in the form of research, surveys, and as much actual customer interaction as possible.

We want to make sure we really understand the pain points and what we can do to help solve them. If you’re a small business owner, please click here to take the survey if you have a moment.

Or forward the link: http://profitably.customerdiscovery.sgizmo.com.

Thanks!

Transcription:

Hi. I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” This Episode 4: Customer Development. So, as you know, we have been spending a lot of time on recruiting last couple of weeks as we recruit for two key roles. We have been spending a lot of time on product development as we built our prototype, and we have been spending a lot of time on legal and finance and those sorts of logistical issues, but the number one priority for the next couple of weeks is going to be around customer development. Really taking the time to make sure that we understand what the key customer pain points are and then within that one or two or three pain points that we have identified, we want to find out those customers who are feeling most immediately. So we are going to do a lot of primary market research and we will be doing a lot of interactions with customers.

So a couple of different dimensions that we are looking at…industry vertical. I have received feedbacks from a lot of very smart folks who are trying to find sort of that vertical that we can target right out of those gates. Whether that is retail or manufacturing, warehousing or distribution, or professional services. Even within professional services you have accountants design shops, web shops, attorneys. We really want to have a good concept of which is that vertical who respond to these pain points and which ones are feeling them even most.

In addition to industry we are looking at the business side. So whether it is head count or revenue, is it the 50 to 60 FTE business size or whether it is $1M or $2-$2.5M, $5 to $10M, you know, what are the revenue levels and the head count levels and this problem really exists? You know at certain level of small organizations there is no data. They don’t even use QuickBooks for you know the majority of the business that they are in and that is okay. It is appropriate. You don’t want to take on tools before you need them. That is a consideration at the floor. At the ceiling, you know once you get through certain size there are a lot of other opportunities out there in the market. The savings that you are going to get running cleanly if it is going to save your $100,000 a year you can afford to spend a lot of money on those tools and we don’t necessarily want to be in that space. We are going to be doing this research.

There are a couple of different channels that we are going to need this information from. So I continue to call you know 10 phone calls a day and 20 phone calls a day trying to reach out to customers and have interactions with small businesses that I know. We have put together a survey that I think is great and hopefully we are going to reach thousands with this survey. If you are a small business you are watching this, we will send a link in with the post. Definitely take the survey and it is not just for my benefit but also the more we learn about very small businesses that are out there, the more targeted our solutions can be and it can reflect your needs. So you know it is a great opportunity to get you knows in an early stage of a product.

So survey is out there and then we are also going to be contracting (it sounds like) a outsourced lead generation firm that can do some primary research and make some phone calls on our behalf because they have a volume and start to ask small businesses you know hey you really feel those pain points are…it is not this are we missing it…what else is it can you give us a feedback so that we can continue to hone this solution and make it useful.

So in this primary market research is going to be the major point of focus for March. If we have spoken to 5000 companies by the end of March and say listen this is really where we need to target our initial products just build the product around this room and I think it has been a great space.

If we finalize a team by then and have a working prototype and we are incorporated to have all those legal logistical issues all sorted out by April 1^st, I think we will be in a great position. So in the best we are going to go and keep track on this thing and leave your comments. I love to hear your opinion on customer discovery and customer validation. If you have any great ideas on how to get more of that feedback we would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

Confessions of a Startup CEO: The pitch!

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:04:23 +0000

In this episode, we unveil the concept as we emerge from stealth mode. The video is basically a trial run for a pitch to investors later this week through the Founder Institute.

Importantly, though, we aren’t raising money at this stage, just raising awareness.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Comment away!

Transcription:

I am Adam Neary and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” This is Episode 3, “The Pitch.” So I am really excited to present this today because we have been all quiet about our concept. You know, we have been slowly emerging from stealth mode as we complete the branding. We want to let everyone know what the concept is about. In addition we are pitching to some investors later this week trying to raise awareness so we thought it to be a great opportunity to talk about that on this forum.

Don’t hold me by the way, to what we say here. As we continue to talk to customers the idea continues to evolve as we go. So by the time we hit the marketplace we probably would have pivoted quite a bit. Maybe that will be exciting, to look back at this website to see what you were thinking at this stage. So here it goes…

My name is Adam Neary and I am CEO of a new organization called Profitably. We are a web-based business solution for small businesses with a simple and specific focus, to help small businesses operate more profitably…something everyone needs. This is a huge pain point in the market place around analytics for the small businesses because they cannot do what the large organizations do. They don’t have the time, the analytical capabilities, the processes, or the tools to make informed and rigorous decisions.

BI tools cost millions of dollars and take months to roll out. Management consultants are very expensive…even the cheap reporting tools that are accessible require an incredible amount of domain expertise. You need to know what you are looking for before you can get value out of those tools. As a result of this pain, most of the small businesses are making intuitive decisions on their own. They are forced to fly by the seat of their pants and in many cases they are operating sub-optimally as a result.

Our solution does a lot to solve this problem by providing a very simple sort of like a mint.com for small business. Small businesses log in, connect to QuickBooks, we pull out their data automatically, integrate automatically and perform a proprietary battery of analytics around profitability that they can review.

More importantly, we have a recommendation engine that generates a prioritized list of winning plays, recommendations that they can take action on right now that immediately impacts their bottom line. This is not like you know while you look at this charge and just think about. No when we show you a chart, we show you exactly what you can do to move the needle and that is something that is missing in this place and small businesses they need it. They want it. So this is something that we are going after.

Let’s take a specific example. We are looking at an HR outsourcing firm, you know 20 million revenue and 60 people in their office, intuitive decision making culture and services-oriented vertical. We pull all their data down and what are the key recommendations that we make, what are the analytics…well, we can start with cost reduction probably those who mostly the low hanging fruits that you spend 10k every year on office supplies. You have got 20 different vendors. Well we have got great with Staples that we pre-negotiated. If you are going for staples then you are going to save 10% and that is $1000 right in the bank. Look at IT hardware same thing, we negotiate the rate with CBW, you are going to buy 6 computers next year. You know use our contracts and you are on your way and cash in the bank. If you want to think a little bit more strategically, just look at your price. So by merging the financial data with the time sheet data, you can start to think about the profitability of their various service offerings, and we discover that three of them are unprofitable. First thing that you can do is just raise the prices so we recommend some prices that would help resolve that problem but they don’t want to raise the prices and they just want to look at the P&L of that service offering a loan and we can show the key cost drivers are where they might be over running, what they can do about those specific you know cost drivers. These are the things that small businesses can get right now and we know when we deliver this it is going to move the needle for them.

So what does the market look like? The BI Market globally is about $7.5-8B dollars, but looking at North America small or medium sized business and BI delivered as a service, when you look at that small niche you are looking at about $250M dollars or 240M dollars between Gartner and Forrester, this seems to be the consensus. We have no dominant player in this space, so I think three years out and we would be able to catch probably a third of this market, that is 80 million in revenue that I can just go and get right now and deliver that profitably, but we are also going after a long tail of small businesses that aren’t included in that number. So that really includes the fee base and makes this opportunity very exciting. But let’s think about mint.com for a second, right, their model is totally fee stand point. They make all their revenues based on affiliate revenue. We have that as well because we have the brokers that bring small businesses to different vendors certainly for having brokered that relationship you know we will be able to get the affiliate revenue as well.

We are actually talking to a buying consortium where a lot of these cost reduction savings would come from. If they negotiated a 14% discount for example for negotiating for an office supply vendor. They will take 2% and we will take 2% and pass 10% on to our customer base for having facilitated that relationship. As more and more of our customers migrate their business to our preferred vendors you will be in a position to negotiate even better savings. So that is a great opportunity and we are really excited about the revenue, but where are we in the process?

Well we have got a prototype already in development nearly done which I am very excited to share with our initial customer base. I have got some hiring going on and I have already mentioned in the previous episode that we are looking for Chief Creative Officer and talking to some handful and I think I have got some great options. I am really excited about that. Some great dialogues have been coming out. I have also been talking to some developers you know couple of CTOs and potential hires…one in particular that I am really excited about. So we are finalizing those hirings and have our initiation team and then we are doing the entire customer development work. We are talking to as many customers as possible because want to scale and we want to grow this business and make sure we don’t have the problem there. That is really what it comes down to and it leads to the big ask right. Any big pitch ends with a big ask.

We are not asking for money right now. We are comfortably boot strapped and will be able bootstrapped through all the customer discovery and customer validation work. We will need money when it comes time to scale and we will be raising cash, when it comes time to scale but that wouldn’t be it until we have the viable product. You know, a customer base and 40% of that paying customer base is saying “hey listen, if you went away tomorrow, you will be devastated”. That is how we know we got the problem solved and so hopefully we will be able to bootstrap up until that point. What I do need though is more customer contacts. We want to hear from more customers we want to hear from more people. So what I would say if you are talking to a cofounder, you know, or CFO in a small organization, you are in a board meeting and maybe you want to ask a cheeky question ask them about their profitability strategy. If they don’t have a profitability strategy then they can talk to me right away and hopefully we can help. If they want to have a profitability strategy with tools are too expensive, and they don’t know to go about it, that is even a better situation. I would love to talk to them and understand what they are doing today. What tools have they tried to put in place and how we can help. So that is the ask and then for you folks I would love to you know give as many comments as you would love to give one the feedback on the page. Things that I should be saying and not saying. We would love to hear what you think because I have been talking to some people later this week. So that is it! “Confessions of a Startup CEO,” Episode 3, signing off. Thanks!

Confessions of a Startup CEO: It’s the design, stupid!

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:32:57 +0000

In this episode, we talk about how difficult the challenge will be for the poor soul who joins up with us in the role of Chief Creative Officer. We are currently hiring for a co-founder level role to help us with design.

The hope is that if we find the right person we can give him/her the keys to the boat on everything from:

Brand identity, colors, logo, and market positioning
User experience design
Design for usability
A seat at the table discussing feature inclusion and product management
Data visualization strategy and implementation
XHTML/CSS/AJAX production
Growing the team in terms of creatives as the site grows

Bottom line, as we draw out in the episode, I think that design is key for consumer internet, but design is even more important for a project like ours, where we have complex ideas to convey to busy people, and we need to compel action.

If you know anyone, we would love to have the conversation.

Transcription

Hi. I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO. This is Episode 2, “It is the Design, Stupid!” The reason why I want to talk about design today is it is the topic that has been blowing up all around the blog sphere. It is the topic of conversation including last night at the bar. Couple of us from the founder’s Institute developers and business folks alike, we were talking about how projects right now can live or die by design. Dave McClure did an excellent blog post this morning about the importance of design to start up, particularly in consumer internet.

In my case I am in a B2B situation, but I am selling small businesses and so many of them are small and they behave more like consumers in many ways than they do traditional enterprise selling but I think more importantly than design and its role in acquiring customers, I think for me, design is essential. Good design is essential because what we are trying to do is we are trying to communicate very complex concepts to people who are very busy.

This is not something that people would come in and just check and tweet every once in a while and wait and track it over time. We are talking about communicating with busy, busy target market, concepts like customer profitability and brand equity and what it means to push payables and accelerate receivables and how it can impact the bottom line of a business, help business improve. So the content has to be there and I take ownership of that. Technology needs to be there and I need a CTO to own that along with me but we are hiring a Chief Creative Officer, Chief Design Officer, UX Hero, whatever title makes sense. We are hiring in a co-founder level, higher on the creative side because the work that needs to be done involves state of visualization and creating simple, interactive, accessible visualizations of sometimes very complex data, but it also involves the context around that and try to explain and open up these complex concepts for small business owners who is way too busy to sit down and go to Wikipedia and figure out what customer profitability really means.

Then, as if that is not enough, once you communicated all of that, you then need to compel them into action. I can enter a database and I can write the recommendation engine and say alright under these circumstances small business owners would be well advised to take the following actions. You know boom, boom, and boom and if they do there is bottom line impact of $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000. I can quantify that no problem and if I am there in person, I can compel a small business person to do that. I have built a career in making recommendations for large organizations in how they can improve their business. I know that concept very well and I know the content and I know how to convince people but in a website environment where people are in more of a self-serve environment, the design needs to do that. The design needs to compel a busy person who doesn’t care….who doesn’t care about our startup, who doesn’t care about charts. It needs to compel them into action.

So I think you can hear through all of this that really this is a very high priority. We don’t want to shop it out to a good UX house and let someone sort of whack it together for us and then keeps tweaking. We don’t think that getting everyone in the room and having dialogues with customers…hey what do you need is going to do it because a lot of these customers don’t know what they need. We need someone who can make you know make this content fly off the page and really compel action.

So if you are that kind of a person, or if you know that kind of person, we would love to hear from you whether you are interested in joining or not is really not the issue at this stage. I think we just want to have the dialogue so that we head to the right place you know thinking about the right thing. Are we reading the right blogs? I read Feltron, I check out New York Times. It has great data visualizations. These are the guys whom we are thinking in New York are doing a great work. Well we want to hear from you and we want to make sure that we are talking to the right people so that we can find and hire.

Anyway, that is all for today. That is my confession. My confession is we are dying to find the right designer. If you know the right designer reaches out to us. Let’s have a dialog about it because you could really bring someone on and quickly. We want to take the time to find the right person but see what happens so. Look forward to the dialogue. Cheers.

Confessions of a Startup CEO: New Year’s Resignations

adam@neary.com (Adam Neary) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:12:52 +0000

In this episode, we introduce the new format and talk about my resignation from AlixPartners to launch a start-up.

On a personal note, I cannot tell you how nice it is to speak candidly about this process. I feel like the last 6 months have been in “ultra-stealth” mode as I continued to hold my previous job. Now like are in “stealth-light” mode as we haven’t yet finished the branding.

But just being able to talk about the venture openly is a great step, and I look forward to more engagement.

Transcription:

Hi! I am Adam Neary and this is, “Confessions of Startup CEO.”

This is our first episode, so welcome, and I am very excited to get started. I think the pressure is off a little bit on the first episode because I don’t have any viewers yet, but as you guys start to leave comments and get involved hopefully we can grow a community out of this because I really think there is something in the experience of starting a company a lot of people get excited about, want to learn about, and want to contribute too and give opinions. So hopefully I can be as opinionated in this forum as I am in real life, and we can all learn a little bit as we go.

The topic today is “New Year’s Resignations” and that is not a typo. It is not New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are the kind of things you know you often times promise yourself, you are going to improve personally and then by January, February, or March these things are forgotten and you have fallen in your old habits. So for me the easiest way to make sure that I did what I wanted to do this year was to resign from my job. I had a fantastic job at AlixPartners. It is a turnaround restructuring firm where I used to do some great work but they were preventing me from doing what I wanted to be doing which was starting a new company. So I have offered my resignation and I am working full time in coordination with the Founder’s Institute, who you should look up to launch a company. And hopefully that is going to be very exciting. I do have a little bit of experience with a startup before. I did work for a startup in London called Concentra. We had a great time but I moved back here when I got engaged to now my wife, Deepa.

So what is the whole point of this project, to wrap up today’s episode, sort of thinking about the medium itself. I think the reason why people want to get involved and the reason people would want to watch a video or podcast about startups is that it is a challenging process. My startup, the concept we are launching is a startup for small businesses to help them with their data integration, to gather all their data from all around the organization, consolidate all the data and then run the analytics and reports on that. More importantly I think take that step further which is to provide them the recommendations on what they should do about it to make those recommendations to make them actionable. So they are not just looking at reports, they are not just running technology, consolidating data for the sake of data you know it is all about making businesses run better. So you know if you are small business owner and you want to get involved in this process, shoot me a note. If you are just interested in the arts of startups or if you are a consultant who helps small businesses this is your forum to get involved, leave some comments around, and hopefully over time we can all learn together for my business for all of my customers and, you know, for the community. Hopefully we can learn a lot. So welcome and thanks again and we will see you at the next episode. Cheers.