Bimotics' technology in a B2E scenario

As our product further develops and I get to see how it is turning out, it seems that a another and different competitive advantage is beginning to emerge. One that I was not expecting as we aimed to find solutions for just small business. Perhaps I am influenced by thoughts of pivoting to the B2E space.  Perhaps it is just the journey where you do not always end up where you thought you would.

Observing consultants and IT organizations implement large business intelligence solutions, I find often that the first project either fails entirely or never gets past the initial phases. Lessons learned from these setbacks are often rooted in the client/ business not knowing the data they really want or political battles over which information and metrics are most important. Technical architects have avoided such battles by instead providing data marts, so that managers can help themselves to any data and build metrics in a self-service manner. By giving the client or business everything, the problem is solved.

But does this approach really help the business in the end? My answer is no. Managers remain misaligned- serving their own agendas instead of those of the overall business. Internal to the organization, data proliferation occurs where meanings get blurred and maintenance is so difficult even labels lose their original purpose of a sufficient description. Data silos of big data proportions are saved per division which is wasteful and duplicative.

Generally, I am describing an enterprise problem. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) suffer less from these political problems as they cannot afford much system customization and the resources needed to maintain it. Instead the SMBs tend to stick with the standard and best practice fields and data points. Because of this, Bimotics can provide our customers a solution we call the “gallery of analytics”. This gallery hosts all the business analytics available given the operational and financial application data marts for which the customer has data.  Generally, these pre-built analytics reflect best practice operational and sales processes that is fundamental in all business looking to grow. The image below is an example of what the analytics gallery looks like.

The value to business owners is that they do not need to know what metrics they want before they bring on analytics. Instead they pick and choose the available analytics that which makes sense to answer a particular business problem. They also can prioritize these analytics based on the business strategy they laid out for now.  If the business changes direction, then the business owner can change out the analytics to reflect this new vision. Not having to go back to the drawing board saves precious time. This gallery approach to analytics puts the definition and the prioritization of metrics and at the end as well as provides breadth and flexibility to a manager.  

Can this same principle be applied to solve an enterprise problem? Although very complex to build, can an “analytics mart” based on only the standard fields and best practice processes of major enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SalesForce be built using the similar principles as our “gallery of analytics”? This “analytics mart” would cut across the different vendors so that advanced metrics are available. For example, metrics, like support center effectiveness, are shown as a blend of financials in SAP with support data from Siebel. This proposed approach, solves amongst the greatest barriers that keep enterprises from successfully implementing business intelligence in that it defines what to measure up front and avoids the interdepartmental politics in its allegiance to only standard and best practice processes.

Why companies have not implemented “analytics marts” already? The answer is twofold.  First building an analytic mart across enterprise systems houses many technical complexities especially when looking at all the software versions and system customizations that exist per enterprise. This is not to say that a solution is technically impossible however.  Second, budgets split by division and departments need to be continuously spent in full which enable data silo behavior over cross department collaboration and process analysis. In other words, large organizations have budgetary policies that encourages managers buy solutions while wearing horse blinders.  I wonder how much of a fundamental shift would need to occur in an organization to embrace data and metrics sharing.

The key to customer adoption of the “analytics mart” solution rests on a consolidated drive to improve the overall business and the willingness of  enterprise managers collaborate holistically. Will these managers be courageous enough to be measured against fundamental business process standards in addition to how well their divisions support the corporate strategy at hand?   

What is in a tagline?

When we first started Bimotics, co-founder and I continuously refined our with the story and sought to find efficient ways to describe our business. We took the approach of talking to as many people as we can. Not just the target customer, but also potential investors and professionals. In all honesty, the task was amongst the most frustrating things we have had to do for Bimotics. To my defence, you try to explain what business intelligence is to a small business owner.  

Last year, I was traveling back from visiting my parents. I stopped at the Barnes & Noble to buy a paperback for my flight. (I generally travel with one tablet reader and one paperback; so that I can continue to read during takeoff and landing.) Since I was in the prime of my frustration, I bought, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Frank I. Luntz.  It turned out to be an amazing book that i couldn’t put down until arriving back in Miami.

Lunz tells us that a good tagline should be between three and four words. For business, it should conjure a positive emotion and be associated with what one could experience using your product. A good tagline could was also something that you could hear in everyday conversation.  

I sat through the flight listing different possible taglines for Bimotics. I tried lines that would be associated with being enpowered or becoming stronger and smarter. I tried clever and witty lines about digging through and using your data. Then there was an announcement on our flight saying that we were a little delayed a bit and what number our baggage carousel was going to be when we landed. The boy across the aisle me put down his iPad, took off his headset then leaned over to his mom and said, “Good to know.” IT WAS PERFECT!

Good to know is a common expression used when you learned something that will be particularly helpful to you. It is used to communicate appreciation, pleasure or relief about knowing something you previously did not. That is exactly the mission of this startup.  At Bimotics, our metrics, analytics and dashboards will point to revelations about a business’s operational health and financial performance. We want our customers to say “Good to Know!” when they use our software and learn something from their own analytics. Whether it is saving money, going after better markets or laying out a different operational strategy, our products can support these decisions.

Our tagline has been Good to know ever since.

Our marketing campaign: Essential Analytics

Today, I just finished updating our first white paper for Bimotics’ Essential Analytics campaign. From concept to fruition, this milestone took much more time and effort than I expected- nearly a year. Much time was spent understanding what my potential customers, the small and medium sized business really need to know about analytics.  

After wading through topics about why metrics do not work for small business such as not having the know-how to set up metrics let alone time to look at metrics and having low data quality with the applications.  (Problems our software also solves but makes us sound like IT folks.)  I was wanted to focus on bringing value to those that were already open to metrics and analytics, but needed more practical advice on how to apply it. The response from potential customers that stood out and fit with my goal was: There is not enough context on when it is appropriate to use one metric or KPI.

As a practicing business analyst, gaining insight from the data and measurements comes more naturally.  But observation has shown that many small and medium sized businesses do not have a seasoned business analyst to “read the tea leaves”. Even our early adopters, can struggle with making sense of the numbers. Once an organization has the ability to measure their business operations and performance. Questions immediately arise:

• Does this metric make sense for my business model?
• Does this metric make sense for my industry?
• Which of these metrics are more important?
• What does the analytics even mean to my business?
• Do these metrics even align with my current strategy?

From this research, I worked on the design for my for essential analytics marketing campaign. The white paper series will showcase one key business metric that one can get out of our first data sources: Quickbooks and Freshbooks. Then, we use business cases to describe how other managers and business owners use the metric to get solutions to everyday business problems. Our readers can get both more context around metrics and how they can be used, as well as, come up with ideas on how to use analysis to answer their own questions.

A look at startup friendly workers

I have had frequent conversations related to resources for early stage startups this year.  Recruiting for a startup that is still being bootstrapped and surviving on a shoestring budget, can be a bit precarious.  Similar to go with the right kind of angel investor, it requires finding the right kind of motivated person.  My team has helped our business for a variety of reasons, but all of them really believe in our business idea and the competency of our founders. Here are three groups of workers that have been really startup friendly.

In looking for non-salary resources for Bimotics, the first place most founders look have been for student interns.  This is a great place to start, in that college students have the time for part-time jobs.  There are also win-win conditions in that interns can get exposure and experience to real-life work.  If you are lucky enough to get real go-getter then the business impact is definitely positive.  The obvious risk, is that often young adults need a lot of supervision and detailed explanation.

In the Femgineer session this week, Poornima mentioned that the retired and semi-retired can be a demographic with both time and experience.  Often because they have been able to retire, they don’t need to financial compensation that you can’t provide anyway.  I have friends that have had much success with getting sweat equity out of their parents.  At Bimotics, we have engaged with the semi-retired mostly in for business advice.  With our location in Florida, there is plenty supply of ex-executives and small business owners that will readily give you their two cents.  Most of the advice has been helpful but keep in mind some advice may be a little dated.

The final group of individuals that has proven to be startup friendly are stay at home moms.  With more and more women in the workforce and getting advanced degrees, I have found that there is a wealth of expertise and desire to “stay relevant” while they take time out to raise their kids. I have met many women who say they miss the intellectual stimulation when they leave work to stay home. So being able to do small properly scoped projects for a startup from home, can be a good thing.  As a founder, I don’t always have time to learn everything, nor actively manage a resource.  Working moms that have a wealth of relevant skill and can run with a project with little supervision has proved to be a plus.   

Do I have a disruptive technology?

Innovator’s Dilemma has made it to the top of several reading lists for business, strategy, and technology management.  When we were first pitching Bimotics, there were several potential investors that swore we needed to read it as we were challenged to further simplify the definition of our minimum viable product.  Their point was that when defining a product for the mainstream, the market is so underserved that even the simplest products could be useful.  We believe that our true value will be the integrated analytics that is when you can take data from multiple applications and blend them to get more meaningful metrics.  These advisers/investors said that just being able to demonstrate ease of use from one application was sufficient.  At first I didn’t get it.  

When it comes to analytics for small business, the market is not only underserved in getting affordable solutions, but also finding intuitive and user friendly applications.  I have heard complaints from several small business owners and have observed myself that Quickbooks was not exactly easy to use and getting reports out of it is not straightforward at all.  I ended up resorted to Quickbooks for Dummies, but finally paid someone to help me.  In the end, Bimotics has an initial product at the time of market entry that does bring immediate value in that we pre-build the analytics for our customers. I’m looking forward to proving that our simple and customer centric service can be a disruptive technology.

According to the Innovator’s Dilemma, if the trend continues for workers and users to demand applications that are also easy to use, Bimotics could potentially disrupt the business intelligence industry as a whole.  At this time, our best market for this technology is the the small business- a market that the large business intelligence providers cannot address because their existing infrastructure, build process, expertise and demand for growth.  I often meet skeptics that believe that small businesses make horrible customers and thus an unviable market.  But the case studies in this book points out that startups that first address these underserved markets not only have a safe point of market entry but also develop solutions that more lucrative customers will eventually demand.  

Refining the Value Proposition

I’m trying the to create my first landing page using Lander ; and I am learning that the hard part is coming up with the content.  It makes sense that the value propositions are what you want to convey in the landing page, however, there also needs to be an element of what the customer would actually be looking for to get them to click in the first place.  

Going to my previous blog regarding the value propositions:

1. Provide additional visualized insight on-line with data pulled directly from the cloud (no need to load files)
2. Use a drag and drop metrics builder, to analyze your Quickbooks data-  don’t need to know how to run a query
3. Push button web technology that doesn’t require IT resources

Now that I’m thinking why an SMB that want more analytics for Quickbooks, I don’t like these value propositions as much.  These are good points for the poor analyst that has to put together the reports, but the real value from Bimotics comes from being able to gain more insight from the financial data they already have.  The three value propositions together can be summed up as a seamless solution.  

Maybe the real value proposition for SMBs that use Quickbooks and want more analytics, is that Bimotics enables additional insight and analysis capability of their Quickbooks data in a seamless service.

What do you think? Would the small business be searching on what they want or how to build what they need? I suppose I can A/B test that.

Hypotheses for Early Adopters

Yesterday I attended an event hosted by the new business incubator at Broward College.  Poormima Vijayashanker lectured on many lean startup concepts in her presentation “Will it launch?”. At Bimotics, we often pitched our startup as the “mint.com for small and medium sized-business”.  So I have to admit; I was a bit star struck to meet the founding engineer of the business we’ve strived to be like.  Turns out she is pretty cool and down to earth.  I’m going to ask join her Femigineer mentor group.

So the main takeaway I got  from the workshop was related to coming up with the right hypothesis for customer adoption- particularly for early adopters.  Bimotics is a cloud analytics company targeting small and medium-sized business, so here are the segments I hypothesize will be our early adopters. They are:

1. SMBs that were established in the last 5 years that already use other cloud based applications, like SalesForce and Quickbooks to run their business
2. SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability
3. Consulting companies with analysts and data scientists that need a software platform to deliver their results to their clients
4. SMBs with more than 3 resources running their operations (non-technical)
5. SMBs comfortable using online marketplaces and app stores to source applications for run their business
6. SMBs whose employees have begun to use mobile technology day-to-day, whether its a smartphone or a tablet
7. SMBs that use social media as a source for business news.

With these hunches, the next step is to confirm or deny that these are my customers in the most cost efficient way.  Since we are only in alfa, I cannot just prove usage of by these groups, I will need to try out the concept of “concierage MVP” also taught at the workshop.