Product Development

30/07/12

Smart Connections – Networking with Shhmooze

Shhmooze is a smartphone app that makes networking at events and conferences fast, smart and effective. Michelle Gallen, founder and CEO at Shhmooze, explains how every event junkie out there can benefit from Shhmooze and why she admires founders.

Could you start by explaining what Shhmooze is about?

It comes from the fact that we felt that networking really sucks, it’s hard work, it’s painful, it’s time consuming, and most of us are actually pretty rubbish at it. However, networking is really important when you are in business and even more so when you are in the startup world. I have been in this space for quite some time now, and I felt that there has been a need for a service like Shhmooze.

Shhmooze is a smart phone app that allows you to make smart connections by helping you to check-in to events, both massive conferences like Le Web as well as smaller meet-ups like Tech Club.

When you check-in with Shhmooze, it will show you who is at the event. This is done by analysing a lot of publicly available social media and network data, and as a result we don’t only tell you who is at the event, but also who you already know there, and more importantly, we provide you with smart recommendations of who you should talk to. In conclusion, Shhmooze helps you make smart connections so that you can have fantastic conversations at any event you go to.

How did you come up with this idea? Was it because you went to so many events and got frustrated that you couldn’t connect with people in a better way?

I am definitely an events junkie but it’s a little bit more interesting than that. In my early 20’s I had a brain injury and I basically went from having a fantastic job, working on Regent St, being super happy and active – to being sent home to my parents in a wheelchair. I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do a lot of basic skills again, such as learning how to walk, and how to read and write. I spent a lot of time working with technology to support my learning process. I had memory problems and I needed to often look things up when I was out, so when the first smart phone came on to the market I jumped on it. This made me realise very early on that mobiles could help my brain.

I love to go to events and to meet new people. However, as a result of my brain injury I have prosopagnosia, which means that I really struggle to recognise names and faces. So when I was looking at my mobile one day, I thought about how my phone actually has information about where I have been, as well as information on where all these other people have been via Twitter etc. Therefore the phone can basically scan the room for me, and let me know who I know. It is something which can really help me on a personal level but actually, it also helps a lot of other people since many of us struggle with networking.

How long have you been working on this idea?

The company was formed in April 2010. The technology was built over two years in order to be really solid. We wanted to make it right, and not turn it into a service that is about shouting out that you are in a room and that there are 50 other people there too. We wanted it to be about creating an understanding to why someone would be at a particular event, understanding to what level they want to be connected and to understand what they might want to talk about. We want to make things happen in the real world.

What is the market like for an app like Shhmooze?

I am going to be generalist about this. I think maybe 95% of the competition consists of generic conference apps that are based around the conference organisers’ needs. Sometimes these apps only work at one event since the conference organiser pays for them. There is also another section of apps, which are more about discoverability and work to inform you that this friend of a friend is having pizza at the same restaurant as you are.

I think the difference is that when I go to a conference, I am switched on and I am there with a purpose, that’s when I want to know whom to talk to. I don’t think that there are a lot of apps in this space, and I don’t feel like a lot of people have done the same deep thinking as we have.

What is your strategy for monetisation?

We have a freemium service that anyone can use, but if you are a power networker, then you can purchase additional features. We also work with conference organisers. We offer to upload schedules and speaker profiles for free, but for a certain fee, give them to possibility to have their own brand on the app.

Considering the fact that you seem to be a very avid conference-goer it would be interesting to get your point of view on the startup community in London. Is there a community, especially in regards to Tech City, and if so does it provide any support?

I think it is kind of like the music scene, at first you have an underground scene and for a while, everyone thinks it is cool and then it goes mainstream. I think what Tech City has done is that they have identified a scene, and they are now trying to find a way to consolidate it.

To have the government behind you is very powerful, even if it’s not the only solution to sustain London’s tech community. I think we need a more solid support and slower voices – and you also need the renegades and the anarchists, the people that are out there pushing it. I think Tech City is just part of an interesting support system that is happening. The one thing that I am little bit concerned about when it comes to Tech City is that it seems to be such a focus on geography. I think it we would be great if we get over spatting over geographical boundaries and instead focused on the amount of amazing tech startups that we actually have here.

I know you have been involved in the entrepreneurial scene for quite some time now and I was just wondering what it is that you personally find to be the most appealing factor with this choice of career?

Well, my father warned me to never gamble, as we have had gamblers in the family that had bet their entire savings on a horse. So I didn’t go into gambling, I got involved in startups – which is obviously completely different…

I left a career at the BBC to do my own thing [TalkIrish.com] and after that I just kept on going. I think you have to be somewhat of a risk taker. Personally, I had no guarantees when I left my job, I just walked. You will need a great deal of confidence in the fact that everything will work out.

I think founders are different from people that join startups. I have a massive amount of respect for individuals that have actually founded companies, the people that grind away and do a lot of deep thinking. Founders are an incredible, interesting species.

Do you think you are born a founder or do you think it involves a certain set of skills that you can learn over time? Do you think anyone can become a founder?

I think anyone could do a startup but I think that you wouldn’t be really interested if you are not a certain type of person. I think founders are usually people who are risk-takers, and people who can see potential and not resist the opportunity to do something they believe is right or try something new because they believe they can make a positive difference. There are plenty of people out there doing startups because they know that what they build will generate money, and that’s great too, but for me it has always been about creating something which will make things better, and then I try to come up with a revenue model.

Interview by Philip Gasslander

Posted by RIG Admin on July 30, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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27/07/12

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done”

Matthew Painter is co-founder and CTO of import.io, a startup currently in private beta that aims to revolutionize the way that we access, collect and analyse so called ‘big data’. We caught up with him over lunch to find out about his background and how he became an entrepreneur.

Import.io is rooted in some serious programming, how did you become interested in computers in the first place?

I had my first computer when I was 5 or 6, a Commodore VIC-20, and I started programming soon after that really. I started off using Commodore Basic, and soon enough was spending time trying to program role playing games and similar sorts of programs. When I started at Cambridge I was studying Maths but in my 3rd year I switched to Computer Science. This was a fairly easy decision to make given that I’d always loved programming and that I’d had previous experience with it.

And how did you first become involved in startups?

On graduating I left to a startup called headporter.com. This operated on a simple premise: it supplied student unions with IT services (e.g. websites, membership card schemes, email lists etc.) in return for access to all of their databases and the ability to resell data to companies doing target recruitment and similar things. We had signed up all of the Russell Group universities when some unfortunate circumstances meant that we had our finance pulled. This was a blow as we had to walk away from what we had spent quite some time building, but I enjoyed myself while there and I took a wealth of experience with me. Following that I did some consulting before joining Yahoo to build a Yelp competitor. Surprisingly this had an atmosphere much like a startup because it was a small team working on their own project within the company. This was going very well until poor annual results caused Yahoo to shut down the project in order to focus on their core business areas and cut costs.

After this a friend approached me saying he was working on some tech within a large organization that had a lot of opportunities. He found it constrained working within that environment though and thought for a chance of real innovation they would need to start their own company up. Having enjoyed my first start up experience and liking the idea I didn’t hesitate to get involved and it’s been a great decision – this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

As CTO what sort of challenges do you face most often?

As CTO you’re not just a technological person you’re also a businessman, and one of the challenges we face is balancing risk and reward and making trade-offs accordingly. With startups the challenge is always about balancing efficiency with quality, and this manifests itself at many different levels. One of these might be human resources, for example the Google founders personally interviewed their new employees until the company grew so much that this was no longer possible – a clear trade-off of their time that they thought was worth it. The right workforce in a startup is crucial to deliver results under very tight time constraints, particularly when bootstrapping. I have to make these judgements regularly as we are currently going through an angel round, but we have to keep focusing on the business itself and not compromising the quality of it while we raise funds.

What processes have you gone through in terms of funding?

We started off bootstrapping for as long as possible. We were lucky in that Kusiri (import.io’s predecessor) was self-funded and cashflow positive very quickly so this was not as painful a process as it can be for some startups. It was pretty clear though that to really get a world class company off the ground you do need investment – you need cash to burn through. If you don’t put money into it, you’re not going to get anything out of it.

Finally, as someone who studied computer science, why do you think more American computer scientists enter into entrepreneurship than their British counterparts?

I’d say there is an element of truth to that, American society is a lot more entrepreneurial in general with people more motivated to start businesses. The UK has entrepreneurial people but our culture is more risk averse and we don’t have the same background motivation pushing us forward. Take Silicon Valley for example, people there have been brought up in an environment that will surely breed more entrepreneurs. If we get a few big successes in the UK people will become more motivated to get involved. More encouragement for young people to do computer science and coding would also have this effect. I’m very keen on this, so we were involved in SVC2UK last year, and this year we’re hosting a team for Young Rewired State. YRS fosters the sort of growth we need to see more of in young people.

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on July 27, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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27/04/12

“Building a product that people want” – An Interview with Dragos Ilinca, CMO and Cofounder of UberVU

Dragos Ilinca is the CMO and cofounder of UberVU, a social media intelligence company with bases in London, Bucharest, and the USA. Dragos began our interview by describing the genesis of UberVU as it evolved out of a web-marketing consultancy into a social media posting platform, into a social media monitoring tool, into its current form as a social media dashboard with social media intelligence.

In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of getting a startup off the ground? Is it getting funding, working together as a team, is it actually developing the product, or something else? Or is it everything in combination?

I think it’s everything in combination. It all comes down to building a product that people want because I think everything falls into place from that. Of course in order to build that product, you need a team. We were lucky because we had known each other for a lot of years, we had started other businesses together, but I look around and a lot of people are looking for co-founders and I think that’s really, really hard, finding someone to start a business with. And once you do that, its about just building something that people want—even if it’s a minimal sort of version—because if you do that, raising money shouldn’t be difficult. If you manage to build that product, that kind of means you’ve got a team, and if you’ve got that team and product, raising money should come pretty easily. So in our case, I think it was definitely figuring out what product to build, but I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are starting with building a team, especially in places like London where developers have so many options to choose from. They could work for, you know, the finance industry, or an already-established startup, and if you’re just starting out it’s difficult to get talented people to join you.

Perhaps it’s too early to ask this question, but in terms of your experience working with social media, how do you adapt? How do you know when to stay your course with your vision for developing a product, and how do you know when to pivot? The social media world is constantly changing, so how do you adjust for that?

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to it, but it kind of comes down to traction. If nobody likes your product or buys it, you need to do something about it. If you have a few people who really, really love it, then you need to understand who those people are and why they love it, and if there’s an easy way to reach more of them, that’s your whole market. And if you’re happy with that that’s fine, but if you need a way larger market, you can potentially work with them and figure out what a dumbed-down version of that product is. I think the most difficult thing is actually making the decision. I think deep down you kind of know when things aren’t really going well, and you can stick around for three months, maybe another six months and see: make a plan, and just say we’ve got this deadline and if things don’t pick up we need to do something about it. But I think people deep down kind of know, but they’re just afraid to make a decision. You need to be able to say, “What we’ve done so far, yeah, it’s a lot of effort, but in the end, people aren’t really paying attention to us and aren’t buying the product, so tough luck. We need to start all over again.”

UberVU strikes me as a pretty advanced mechanism, integrating social media and media monitoring. Do you think the days of simplicity in application development are over? In other words, do you think the skill-level required to produce groundbreaking apps will only become higher as times goes on?

Probably. That’s probably true. Because we’re a business tool, so from that point of view, we need a lot of technology to do what we do. But look at something like Instagram, for example: there’s not a lot of technology in there. If you think of technology just in terms of code, you know, other people can build that kind of stuff in a weekend. If you think of technology as also the mechanism by which they’ve been able to build viral coefficients in it so that it spreads and that kind of stuff, then that’s very difficult to replicate by other people. So I think if you’re building consumer apps—if you know what you’re doing—you can still get away with not having a highly technical solution. But even so, if you look at Colour, they’ve got pretty hardcore technology in there, and it’s just a photo app, more or less. So even these things are becoming more and more complex, and I think the reason is that you can do so much more now with the technology and the stuff that would have been impossible to do in real time is now possible, so you can build a lot better experiences for the user; and the second thing is there are so many people looking at the tech space, that if you build something that can be replicated within a week, and you’ve got absolutely nothing else that can make you succeed, then it’s just not worth it, because other people will copy you ASAP. Just look at Groupon as an example. A lot of people think it’s the technology and they built that in a weekend and there are hundreds of clones; but actually the difficult part is the sales behind it, selling to small businesses and being able to scale and that kind of stuff. So if you think about that as sales, not really technology, but technique and strategy, then it’s very difficult to replicate it. In terms of actual code, some people can probably build that in a day. But it’s not that that makes it work.

Since you’re the CMO, I wanted to ask a marketing related question. Since uberVU and so many applications are so heavily grounded in the online world, how important is actual person-to-person interaction in marketing?

I think it’s still important to have the in-person interaction. Not all the time; we started selling online with credit card, so it wasn’t necessary to meet anyone at that point. You could, you know, make the product and the company look more human by having photos of the members of the team on the website, having a video where you present certain stuff, having a blog that’s very human, but now that we’re moving more into the enterprise space and we’re starting to get customers like NBC or the World Bank, for these sort of things it looks like it’s pretty important to meet face to face, and if you cannot do that, at least have a few phone calls. I think the higher price you charge for what you do, the more you need that sort of relationship. And it’s not just because of the person-to-person interaction; usually if you’re charging a lot of money, the solution that you’re selling, you need to really understand the customer’s use case and be able to show them how the product is really going to make an impact. And these solutions are usually pretty complex, so it’s not like a photo sharing app: you take a picture, you share it with your friends, pretty easy to understand. It can be pretty hard to articulate just from a website and understand exactly how that could be used in your organization, and understand how easy it is to use even though it’s got this breadth of features. It’s hard to make the jump from, ok I see this demo video, how could I use it for my specific use case? It’s very difficult to understand that. And people just don’t have the time and don’t want to take the effort, so instead of researching that tool for 30 minutes and not understanding, it’s sometimes more useful to say, ok let’s just have a 30 minute phone call, you’ll tell me about it and I can explain really easily how we can help or how we won’t be able to help and you’ll probably need some other tools.

 

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm in Demand Generation, Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Product Development, Real World Lessons, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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06/04/12

Growing a business during a rough patch in the market

You do not need to look far to notice that the Eurozone recession is dooming on us. During the last global recession, entrepreneurs were some of the worst hit across all businesses.

So we got in touch with one of few entrepreneurs who managed to continue hiring and growing his business during the recession, Tony O’Shaughnessy, to describe how he managed to build Fourth Hospitality to a point where it was strong enough to break the storm and plough through by hiring 5 to 10 people a week, and to give us and other entrepreneurs advice on how to survive rough patches…

“The key point here is business planning. I’ve written and seen so many business plans that have unachievable financial targets. This is because entrepreneurs are stereotypically very opportunistic, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you consider the worst-case scenario. You need to consider how you can ride the storm in the middle of the Atlantic, i.e. how can I operate my business with limited resources and demand.

Additionally, you must always think of the basics: what is it that your product does and how is it unique. A lot of people promote products/services that are ‘good to have’, but not many people sell ‘essentials’. If your product is an essential in the market with no better substitutes, the effects of external pressures will be minimal. Once you have identified why the market demands this product, you must drive this through with consistency.

We offered complete back office solutions, which met market requirements that would aid them to overcome the effects of recession. Very importantly, our offering was affordable. Major industry players felt the pressure of the recession and wanted to become more organised to succeed. Consequently, they recognised us as a way in helping them through the recession and coming out on top. In particular, the idea of visibility and sales analysis became very important to them in understanding how they can outperform. Our ability to provide this solution became a great asset for them to control performance of outlets.”

Posted by Paul Higgins on April 6, 2012 at 5:32 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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30/03/12

Counteracting threats to your business posed by offshore competition

StarBase, founded in 1992, is a London-based performance testing software consultancy with established testing expertise in a wide range of industries. We spoke to Stephen Davis, StarBase founder and MD, about the threats posed by the economic climate and off-shore competition.

What do you think will be the biggest challenge for StarBase in 2012? 

The biggest challenge is uncertainty in the current financial climate. It is uncertainty as to whether the economy is going through a slow gradual recovery or whether it’s just about to crash again. If Europe has big problems then that will obviously affect the UK and global economy and impact ‘confidence’.

There are two forces at play at the moment. The first is the recession, with the imperative to ‘do more for less’, achieve more with less money. The second driver is a return to quality; companies want to get things right where off-shoring hasn’t worked or achieved the financial savings anticipated. Some clients are motivated by both, which can cause a conflicting view: they still want quality, but at lower prices.

That is the challenge for 2012. Without the return to confidence, companies are less prepared to make long term commitments. We used to get involved in two to three year programmes; I don’t think there’s anything more than 12 months now.

How do you compete in this economic climate and faced with offshore competition?

Focusing on clients’ needs and really understanding their requirements. For StarBase, this means positioning ourselves as being people who understand what our clients need and focusing on being a knowledge-based business. This is supported by providing excellence in client management through people and communications.

Targeting higher-value niche areas that we are able to offer a better service better than off-shore providers. Testing covers a whole range of activities – functional, performance and security are the main ones, but there are approximately 20 different types of testing activity. We have decided to focus less on mainstream functional testing because it’s been picked up by off-shore providers. We decided to focus more on the more complex areas of testing such as Performance Testing and Technical Testing. These areas, require excellent technical and interpersonal skills, more domain knowledge and are also challenging.  StarBase can’t compete on day rates with off-shore providers, but by specialising in this way we are able to deliver excellent value.

Focusing on value, not price. We are not focusing on day rates, but rather on the value that we contribute to our clients. Increasingly, people are recognising that on-shore services can provide greater value without necessarily costing more than the off-shore approach. Several times we’ve found that when we’ve been in competition with off-shore providers, we cost less because we complete the project in less time and use fewer people. What we are seeing is that many organisations are beginning to bring critical functions back on-shore, and that’s the market that we’re playing in.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on March 30, 2012 at 3:52 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Management Tips, Market Views, Product Development, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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16/03/12

Customer (and Patient) Control – An Interview with Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli is founder and CEO of Patients Know Best, a personal health record system designed to put the patient first. By giving patients control of their own health records, the system allows more efficient and effective relationships between doctors and patients, as well as between doctors and specialists comprising teams of care providers. Patients Know Best is based in Cambridge, UK.

1)   Before Patients Know Best, had you ever thought of doing something entrepreneurial, or did the drive really start with the problem and solution you discovered?

I started with something entrepreneurial in a sense because I knew I was going to start my own company. I was setting myself my own syllabus, so I went through medical school having learned how to program; I was just teaching myself how to write medical software and the intention was that I’d basically solve problems for physicians. And that’s what I did during medical school. I also grew up in Cambridge, and in Cambridge… I was told in school that when you’re in Cambridge, you start your own company, so I believed them. I knew I would do that one day. The final piece for me was learning business, so I worked for a management consultancy in the States, in Washington D.C. While there, I saw the problem that I thought, “OK, this is really important I could commit to, I can see myself dedicating the rest of my life to solving this because it’s really important.”

Beyond that, there’s also a business model behind solving this problem, and I guess I just wanted to solve this for myself. I was facing the problem as a patient, trying to organise my care, trying to manage my health. I spent a year sulking that no one was doing it, and 2008 came along and I said, “You know what, I’ve literally written the book, so I have to do it. Let’s just go and do it.”

2)   How much has the service evolved since you started as a result of patient and physician input? What developments do you foresee with regard to the service in the near future?

We started with an embarrassingly minimum viable product. We took all the classic startup advice, start with the minimum market product: we launched with only one feature. I came back to the UK and I began asking for interviews from my friends who were doctors and then asked them to recommend other doctors to speak to. They weren’t saying, “My problem is I don’t have a PHR.” They said, “My clinics are overrun with patients and I’m always late in helping my patients. There are budget cuts, I can’t get enough staff…” All these very clinical, very operational problems. So I just began building up clinical problems, and I thought, if you use the patient as an asset rather than a liability, we can help. What’s the minimum feature they would need, that they would pay tomorrow, to use? And the one thing they said was, “We want to send messages to patients across institutional lines, if the hospital wants to send a message to the patient and cc the GP, or GP send a message and cc the social worker, for example.” And that was the only thing we launched with.

To give you some contrast, the UK government spent tens of millions on Healthspace, which is their sort of attempt at a patient portal. And only after they went through that sort of tens of millions did they get the feedback of, “I don’t really need any of these features, but I really need to send messages.” So then they began trying to do messages, but by then they’d spent so much money, no one was going to give more money to develop the software any more. So, we started from that feature and every single other thing you see in the software is because a doctor, a nurse, a patient sat down and said, I need this, or I’m stuck on this.

The whole thing top to bottom has been built by the user saying what they need; we respond every two weeks by putting out new features. From our perspective, it’s great because we’re only building stuff that people care about, but also our users are huge evangelists. Every commissioning customer who uses us can point at a part of the screen and say, “That was mine.” And then they go and tell all their friends, “Go and use this software because that was mine. And also, whatever you tell these guys, they’ll do it in two weeks. They really respond really quickly and I’ve never had a software company do that with me.”

3)   In one of your customer videos, Gary Hotine describes looking for something that would be like “Facebook for Patients.” I’m curious to know how apt a description you feel that is for Patients Know Best.

A lot of our users describe us as the Facebook of healthcare. When we trained patients in the beginning, the docs were kind of worried that the patients wouldn’t understand how to use the software. When we sat down with them, most of the trepidation was that they did not believe the docs had actually handed over the records and given them control. But as soon as they get there, they’re like, “Oh, I see, that’s like Facebook. I’m good.”

From that point onwards they just go ahead and use it. It’s like Facebook in the sense that it’s a very easy method of communication, pulling data from everywhere and it can send lots of places. It’s not like Facebook in the sense that we’re not selling your data and we change the terms of use every week: we are not confusing our financial benefit with your privacy desires.

4)   When you started, I’m guessing it was pretty much just you. How did you then go and assemble a team? What qualities did you look for?

It started with just me having the idea and doing some of the research in the States and then deciding I needed to go back to the UK to start it. Cambridge was the place to do so, both as my home and because I’d heard that Cambridge receives 7% of all VC funding in all of Europe. It’s just a crazy number. So I came back to Cambridge and just did a bunch of things to start building the team. I emailed the CEO of Cambridge Network and said, “I’m coming back to the UK, I’ve trained as a programmer and I’m starting this company; I have no team, no product, and no customers. Who do you think I should talk to?” “Let’s have coffee.”

I think he took pity on me, but he said, “You know you should talk to Ian, he’s a CFO of VC backed companies and I think he’ll talk to you.” It turned out we shared the same pub, and we kind of just spent 2 hours the first time talking about the company and he thought it was really interesting. Over the next four months, the poor guy, Ian, taught me accounting. And then eventually he became a member of our board of directors and CFO of our company. So he was the first really heavyweight executive to commit his time to the company.

Then from the development side, I started by just getting some contract developers to build the proto-type and then some other ones to build the final software. We now have developers from the UK (obviously), but also the States, from France, from India, just a real international team. And they tended to have some experience with healthcare in the past that meant that they were as frustrated with healthcare as I was. And so they’re quite evangelical.

In parallel with that, I got a meeting with Dr. Richard Smith, who was the former editor of the British Medical Journal. It took me six months to get a meeting with him—because everyone’s trying to get a meeting with him—but I knew when I was reading his editorials as a medical student, he was always on the patient’s side, often to the anger of his colleagues and medical professionals. But he’d always be on the patient’s side. I knew that if I could just get a meeting, he’d get it. And sure enough, he got it and he agreed to new meetings. And then one day, he agreed to be chairman of our board of directors.

As you build that core team of world class people, it’s just easy to get people. Everyone then wants to join up.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on March 16, 2012 at 5:23 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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01/09/11

"One of the biggest challenges was finding out how big could our business could be"

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Carlos Mendes, Co-founder and Product Manager of WeListen. WeListen offers an enterprise innovation management software tool, InnovationCast, which companies can use to drive innovation within their operation from the idea to the final product.

I asked to him to tell me more about the reasons for founding WeListen, developing InnovationCast and any challenges that they experienced during the start-up phase.

“Four of us co-founded WeListen several years ago. We were already colleagues so we had professional experience but we were looking for an opportunity to do something different. The basic idea was to join forces and start up a company together. We started as a project-based company and, at one point, we began working with Mota-Engil to help them organise their collaboration infrastructure.

“During that engagement, António Meireles, who was in charge of Innovation Management at Mota-Engil, came to us with the challenge to devise something better that would improve the way employees collaborated within the company and to support innovation management. The initial idea was to take a solution from the market and add some customisation to ensure that it was a good fit between the needs of the company and the existing product. In the end, we could not find any one solution available that could address all their needs such as:

• How can we support all of our innovation management process within the company?
• How can we turn our ideas into value?
• How do we engage our people to drive innovation?

“This lack of an existing solution for all these aspects drove us to produce InnovationCast. We created a solution for this from scratch. InnovationCast is not only a way to enable innovation from within a company. Our aim is to allow companies to innovate at a sustained rate. Not only does it allow a company’s internal workforce to provide innovative ideas, but it also allows external suppliers and buyers to help address any challenges.

“One of the biggest challenges for us, and this may be shared by other start-ups, was finding out how big could our business could be. Sometimes you get customers to provide solutions to but it is not always easy to keep the company going on a sustained basis. Since we started as a project-based company, we were working with clients that had different projects and problems to address.

“We had projects coming in, which was good for us, but we had difficulty focusing on a particular area. From the beginning, we always had the idea of creating a product based on social technology. We didn’t know what that product would be. On the one hand, working on different projects for different companies was good because we were finding out as a company what was possible for us to do. On the other hand, it can be difficult to choose what you want to do as a start-up that has a clear focus area.

“We had so many ideas that it was easy to want to do it all, but obviously we had to put our mast in the ground. As a startup, you need to understand what you want to do and what real assets you have to build a business.”

Posted by Guest Author on September 1, 2011 at 12:52 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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08/07/11

How do you recognise the right product/service to start a business with?

So you have decided that you want to be an entrepreneur. You have either generated a range of ideas and/or seen potential in a unique solution. Or perhaps you have searched for existing inventions to capitalise on. Whichever direction you may take, there is one question you will definitely ask yourself: How do I know that this product/service is the right one?

We asked the CEO of Permasense, an expert in the field of continuous corrosion monitoring based on wall thickness measurement in inhospitable and inaccessible environments for the oil & gas industry, how one can see potential in one product/service to capitalise on and grow a business from, and what drew him Permasense…

I became aware of Permasense as a development team at Imperial College, and chose to join as CEO because it had the ingredients to build a successful business

Good product

Firstly, I really liked and believed in the product – a good product or service should be the cornerstone of any business.

People behind the product

Secondly, the reputation of the people who created and developed the technology: technically the best, and of high integrity.

Proven need

Posted by Paul Higgins on July 8, 2011 at 11:43 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

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