The application deadline for TechStars is tomorrow.
As I write this, with just about 27 hours left to submit an application, TechStars has received applications from 303 companies. Last year, TechStars received 302 in total, so it’s safe to say demand for TechStars has grown.
This should be another fun summer in Boulder.
The Facebook Developer Garage is happening now at TechStars in Boulder. Dave Morin from Facebook will be joining us via video call shortly. Several companies are presenting cool Facebook solutions, and it’s a general get together for those interested in Facebook app developers. Chat in on UStream.
Yesterday NPR interviewed Brad Feld, Kevin Rose (Digg), and Chris Anderson (Wired) in a piece called “Who Pays for Our Online Lives?”
In the interview, Brad talks about the various models for making money on the web in the age of free consumer services including lead fee models, virtual goods, selling access to consumers, and subscription-based services.
There were some good call in questions as well. It’s well worth a listen.
Yesterday Jeff Herman gave Colorado Startups a guided tour of the Fuser offices in downtown Boulder. Highlights include some special ways his team gets their creative juices flowing, an effective office workout plan and some very sweet digs. Let us know what you think!
People are gathering now at Startup Weekend Boulder 2. About 100 are expected down at CU this weekend as a new format allowing for multiple companies is tried out for the first time.
The original startup weekend has here in Boulder last year, and it was exhausting, frustrating and incredibly fun all at once. Just like a real startup.
There’s going to be tons of live video and media coverage tonight both on the official Startup Weekend Boulder II 2 site and on MediaCasters.tv, which Laura Fitton is launching tonight with this coverage and some special guests.
I’m unable to attend this weekend because I have plans to spend time with my kids up in the mountains. I plan to watch as much as I can and I’m excited to see what goes down this weekend. Good luck to everyone at Startup Weekend!
Here’s the scene right now. You can interact and chat with the folks there and be a part of it right from the comfort of your own home. Continue to watch live at MediaCasters.tv if you have nothing better to do!
Brian Pontarelli is the founder of Boulder based Inversoft. The company makes profanity filtering services which can be accessed via an web based API or installed on-site and referenced as a database. The purpose, of course, is to allow the prevention or filtering of profanity or other “bad words” in user generated content. We of course have no use for this, but you can imagine that someone like Disney or Kerpoof just might.
What a fun job this must be, sitting around the office and keeping up with the latest cuss words in order to update the database. Brian must know all the cool new words.
Inversoft has landed a few interesting customers such as Intuit, as well as some design shops that are building solutions for their own customers.
This problem space is trickier than it might sound at first. For example, you might assume that a sentence referencing an animal called an peacock (like this one) might be incorrectly filtered. It gets even trickier when malicious a$$holes use every f*cking s h i t t y trick in the book to break the rules. Inversoft products have sophisticated regular expression handlers for cases like these.
I think the market for the Inversoft profanity services is very niche, but very real. This could be a nice business for Brian, but I’m not sure how this goes turbo-big. I suspect we’ll see Inversoft branch out a bit if this first commercial product is a success. But congrats to Brian on making the jump with both feet!
Maybe Inversoft should sell one to Feld and one to Micah. Does it work as a blog plug in?
Inversoft is also involved in an open source web application framework project called J-Catapult which we first covered last month.
Manual automation is one of my favorite little tricks. The fact that it’s an oxymoron makes it even better.
Some of the smartest startups I know use the trick of manual automation on a regular basis. So what is it?
In our context, manual automation is something which is automated from the customers point of view, but not from the entrepreneurs point of view.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
One of the companies I work with had a service that people were willing to pay for. But they hadn’t yet built out the billing infrastructure. It was on the priority list, but it was going to take about 4 months to get to it, given all the other stuff they had to do. The fear was that they were losing not just revenue, but the opportunity to sign up a paying customer for monthly recurring revenue at the time that customer wanted to and was willing to pay. So they built a quick secure web form which wrote the credit card information to a database, and simply pretended that the whole back end was done. Meanwhile, once a month, they manually billed each customer by hand using an internet terminal, and manually typed out an email receipt that appeared to be automated. Five months later (software is never on time), they automated the back end completely. The customers never knew the difference.
A second example is a company I’m working with that wants to do something cool with video. They don’t have the complex code in place that would be needed to do some manipulations of the video. But they also don’t have very many customers to deal with yet, and the most important thing is really to try the feature out and get feedback. Here again, they are thinking of the manual automation trick. They’ll actually manipulate the video by hand on the desktop, store the result manually in the database, and have the system send it out “when it’s ready.” To the customer, the whole process appears to be automated. In fact, it is automated from their perspective, as long as the oompa loompas get to it relatively quickly.
An added benefit of manual automation is that manual stuff is really annoying, so it tends to get fixed more quickly.
Some of the most agile startups out there don’t let the lack of technology get in their way of testing their theories. For those startups, manual automation is a common weapon in their bag of tricks.
Many companies that I work with get nice warm introductions to potential investors, partners, or customers. Sometimes these come from someone who is highly respected by the target of the introduction. Often, this grants immediate and (as of yet) unearned loyalty to the company. And it makes the meeting happen.
From the entrepreneurs perspective, this can be very nerve wracking. They will of course feel an obligation (and rightly so) to be “awesome”, so they don’t let down the person who “stuck their neck out” to make the introduction.
Interestingly, it’s often the case that the referrer has virtually unlimited karma points, so even if the company totally messes up, they won’t really lose any credibility. From their perspective, it’s “worth a try.”
What I’ve learned over the last year is that unearned loyalty can and does create a weird dynamic. It’s important to quickly develop your own loyalty towards the people you meet based upon direct experience instead of continuing to interact with them based on this unearned loyalty.
This is true when it’s an investor/entrepreneur, entrepreneur/entrepreneur, or even investor/investor relationship.
If you’re going to do something, do it for yourself because it’s right and helpful and not because you were “set up” by someone you think highly of.
Social networking. It’s all the rave these days thanks to major players such as MySpace, Facebook and BeBo. Social networks have traditionally been associated with computer-savvy teens and young adults sharing photos with their friends, embedding music on their profiles and writing notes to their mini-blogs.
Now, companies are vying for more than just young, computer-savvy users: Business users are now in the cross-hairs of many social networks seeking to wring out new revenue potential, growth and services.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that Boulder-based HiveLive has created a social platform specifically designed for business use. Previously covered here on separate occasions, this is our first podcast conversation with the company’s CEO, John Kembel.
In this podcast, Kembel covers a lot of ground including HiveLive’s most recent financing round ($5.6M), how the company was founded, its competitors and much more.
When we first started ZOLL Data Systems (then called Pinpoint Technologies), we had several customers who hated us. I’m talking hated. They wanted to sue us. Burn us at the stake. Kill our dogs. I mean hate.
The reasons were of course various, and at the time we couldn’t understand how it could be true. After all, we were well intentioned. We tried hard. We were honest, hard working guys. How can you hate us that much?
Well, it turns out that if you completely screw up public safety dispatch operations, people notice. Who knew? People can even die (yep, it happened, more than once, I’m sure). We had to live with that.
Looking back, it’s interesting how those customers that hated us so much eventually became our biggest advocates. They literally went out and sold software for us. The reason: We fixed their stuff. Fast. Decisively.
It’s a funny thing, but your most pissed off customer is an incredible opportunity. Here’s one story that sticks out in my mind.
We had a huge customer who was deploying our dispatch software in Tennessee. For the entire state - something like 500 vehicles. I think at the time this was about ten times more than we had ever handled for a single customer. It sucked. Turbo sucked. It took 2 minutes to dispatch a trip via drag and drop. Stuff crashed (it was, after all, Windows). They threatened to sue.
It turned out that the customer was running their servers on the 1997 equivalent of a TRS-80. They didn’t buy that this was the problem. So our tiny little company emptied our savings account and shipped them a shiny new Dell server at the cost (to us) of $10,000, and sent a small army of people down there to help them transition to it. If we were wrong, we promised, the server was on us.
This fixed the problem. Maybe you say this customer was being unreasonable. I say we sucked because we let them deploy our software on crappy infrastructure. Our bad, not theirs. They were literally blown away at the response and we saved the account. The customer who hated us the most turned into an ally.
We thought about it, but we never went so far as to intentionally screw up. If you’re in a startup, you know it will happen to you enough that you don’t need to go so far as to try to suck. You’re gonna suck some. Maybe even alot.
Today, I work with lots of startups. We teach them to just make sure customers are thrilled no matter what. It pains me to occasionally see them suck and not take advantage of it. Some even let customers go, saying they just weren’t ready. Sorry, they say. I guess we just suck.
Next time you suck, try going to extreme measures to unsuck your mess. Jump on a plane if you have to. Recite the mantra - “we simply will not be the ones who suck.”
When you suck, take advantage of it. Fix it fast, and admit that you sucked. You’ll be amazed what happens next.
David Cohen
Gwen Bell
Ronald Lewis
