Shark Week and Shark Tanks

Since it is Shark Week, it is only appropriate to dedicate one blog post to my experience pitching Bimotics in a shark tank. Investment groups, entrepreneur clubs and academic programs have all jumped on this trend of hosting business shark tanks. Active entrepreneurs that seek funding from outside investors these days, most likely will find themselves preparing for our actually pitching in a shark tank.

It is especially important that an entrepreneur to have their startup story crisp and solid.  I have found that talking to individual investors will be a be more inquisitive and casual in talking about your business. But in the tank, the story needs to fact based and all the latest numbers and metrics rolling off your tongue.  Although passion for your business is important, there is less time to convey it.

The sharks in the tank may not be evaluating your business under the same criteria.  Some may be looking for early stage, others could be looking for B2Cs, others are looking for that one story that is missing from their portfolio. This makes it hard to because you cannot tailor your message just the one investor or topic of interest. If you have the luxury to know the background of each perspective shark, I’d just tell the story to the very most one you want.

It is rare that your startup will get all the investors to be frenzied over you. The businesses that do are special enough to have their story told on business insider. However, it just takes the one right investor to make it all worth it.   

Happy Shark Week!

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.

A design thinking approach: Observe extreme users 2

Continuing the learning from the Design Thinking training, figuring out who will be the extreme users of Bimotics is similar to the hypothesis of our early adopter customers. It is not a stretch to assume that those that are currently measuring and analyzing business would be the the most likely early adopter and positive extreme user.  On the other side of the spectrum, the extreme users that are least likely to use our products are those with either low data quality as poor quality adversely affects the effectiveness of analytics or hidden agendas that is not supported by the data.

The things I would like to observe from our extreme users that love our product and find value in our features include the categories of analytics that mean most to them.  Are they leveraging topics related to sales and marketing over supply chain and finance?  How are they using the customer flows we designed? To navigate to and from analytics and dashboards, are they taking necessary steps to get around? I have learned from other software entrepreneurs that small business “use copy” and paste more often than using “new” in order to avoid typing in the same information over and over. Finally, I would like to know on what devices they access our application. Our product is mobile enabled; and we have taken care to so that our infrastructure supports mobile.  I would like to know if it was worth it.

Something to observe related to the extreme users who don’t use or even dislike our product, it whether or not they go to their teams and applications and work to improve data quality.  Are there initiatives or trainings that makes their resources input better information?  For those whose agendas don’t have data to support their decisions, I would be very interested in seeing and understanding how communication is done to other team members and whether they get push back from the others with access to the same analytics.  

I’m sure there are other groups of extreme users.  And the identification of extreme users can extend past product users.  For example, those that read this blog would be not segmented by product customer.

A design thinking approach: Observe extreme users 1

I was excited for the training I attended this week called Design Thinking.  The trainer, Experience Point, based the whole session on the methodology of IDEO, one of the greatest design firms that have come up with innovative solutions that we use everyday.

A bunch of blogs and startup readings, have been about getting out of the building and talking to customers.  At Bimotics, we have constantly talked with small business owners of all types about our business idea, our tagline, our data sources we want to connect.  Sometimes we got an excited response and sometimes the person simply didn’t get it.  Getting to talk to anyone that will hear us out was always appreciated, but I can’t say the talks were always helpful. There was continued ambiguity on how to put what a business owner was saying in a context that made sense.

In the design thinking training, I learned the concept of observing the extreme users.  Extreme users are those that fall outside of the normal 80% if you are looking at a normal distribution. The extreme user is on both sides of the 80%. The first group represents the users that love and have completely adopted and live the subject you are studying. The other group represents the users that never use or care about the subject.  

Observing these groups is the key to getting real insight. You can see the difference between each extreme user. This can help provide context needed to get more quality insight. Being able to observe the right group requires a bit of profiling and a clear understanding of what you want to learn. Observing is not just having conversations with random users.  It is almost opposite, it is about consciously being objective and simply trying to understand how the user ticks.  When you have a conversation you may instill bias unintentionally.  

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.   

Delegation for startups

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending my first mentoring session with Femgineer lead by Poornima Vijayashanker.  This particular session addressed the topic of delegation for entrepreneurs with early stage startups.  The discussion could not have come at a more timely, as this week it became increasingly clear that I needed to manage my team more effectively.  

Since my startup is still developing our first sellable product by bootstrapping, the “employees” on my operational team consists of three four part-time professionals that can donate only a few hours of their expertise a week. Because at this time I can’t pay them I have not felt comfortable pushing nor aggressively enforcing deadlines.  This has sometimes set us back or otherwise burned me out as I tried to pick up the slack.  

The mentoring session started out with the fundamental question to ask every perspective person that your work with: “Are you interested in my business idea?”.  In my case, most would find the B2B software space compelling as there is a lot of potential.  The next excellent points included:

1. Always be clear on what they will be working on whether it is a project or a specific task.
2. Start by asking if they can commit to 5-10 hour a week on a non-paid basis? Because if they can’t they may not be interested enough. And, they may not have resources to give 20 hour resources on a paid basis.
3. Make the first task very basic and see if the person takes charge. Note founders  don’t have time to check in with everyone everyday.  
4. Layout the expectation that you will only be checking in only once a week- unless of course if they are stuck them more frequent dialogue is fine.
5. Always attach deadlines to tasks. Ask the person to first give you an estimate.  Let them set the deadline.  Assess whether you think they are giving you an aggressive deadline or a doable one.  Ask what part of the task will be most at risk of not meeting the deadline. Then hold the person accountable for meeting the deadline.

Overall, the discussion was helpful.  In many ways I have already known these management skills, however, hearing them from another entrepreneur brought me back to basics.  

As for the shyness of being a good leader because I’m not able to pay for help at this time, I need to remember that we are really building a good thing that takes time and dedication.  All the pieces of my business plan make a very compelling argument for success.   And those that are there at the beginning and working because they believe in the vision and business idea need me to be a strong leader that demands delivery.  Those that stick it out also know that they will reap the reward as we grow together.

Looking at my established competitors through the Innovator's Dilemma's lense

Over the holiday weekend, I finally got to read Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.  This book has been a must read for entrepreneurs and has been on my own to-read list for months.  In trying to apply what I have learned, I was intrigued at looking at the large established industry players.  As someone who is breaking into the business intelligence space, the understanding of the fast paced disk drive industry should be interesting.  Interesting because I like the disc industry is technical and moved very quickly.   But the excavator example to me is more compelling.  

The business intelligence industry right now is dominated by the large hydraulic excavators with large bucket-size made for  big industry.  Gartner’s magic quadrant is dominated by large enterprise players such as Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.  And their products are really out of reach for smaller business that can’t pay hundreds of thousand of dollars in licenses and maintain IT organizations consisting of half a dozen technical specialists.  Finally, the expensive consultants to implement a business intelligence system in the first place.  

Although these behemoth players have moved to cloud technology and at times tried to simplify their enterprise products for the smaller company, my observation is that they are still serving their established customers- the large enterprise.  Concentrating on these large enterprises, at this time will continue to bring them the growth numbers they need to keep stock prices high.  And the larger margins for incremental technology improvements, continue to work for these big global companies.

Producing downstream to lower margins has seemed nearly impossible for these large enterprise business intelligence firms.  Perhaps this is because of their existing cost structures and investment in licensing operations does not allow them to easily change.  Another resource that would not easily accept selling down market are the extensive and skilled sales representatives, who have been paid healthy commissions on million dollar deals.

It will be interesting if their leadership will be able to address technology disruption through acquisition.

Live in the vision of your business

There is an unending sense of urgency related to getting a startup off the ground.  Lately it seems that all I ever do is work or think about working on either keeping up with investor documentation, evaluating pivot opportunities or marketing in general.  Getting the business off the ground with our first saleable product is grueling.  It isn’t just the intellectual brain power that is exhausted but also the emotional and psychological energy of keeping a thick skin to endure the sometimes unsolicited criticism and of course the word “no”.

Needless to say I am tired- really tired.  

I repeat the words from our executive advisor, Scott Creighton in my mind when I get burned out.  “Keep living in the vision of your business.”  And its true, when you get stuck with the frustration of today, you are going to give up or go crazy.  By living in the vision, you can see the progress you are making towards it and you actually feel like you are doing what you are meant to be doing.  

The next think I need to do is let loose a little.  So this 4th of July we are taking a mini vacation with the family to Key Largo.  We are staying at a dive but beat up beach cottages can be such a paradise. I’m looking forward to kayaking on the bay, snorkeling at the reefs and grilling burgers in the evening.  This is much needed as we have sacrificed quite a bit of quality time with the kids for Bimotics.  I may squeeze in a business book while I’m there, but in general I’m going to put an effort into recharging and reconnecting with the other things that matter in life.

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.

Looking for Landing Pages Providers

In order to carry out my early adopter experiment, I’m going to need to create landing pages on the cheap; and something I can set up myself.  I would like to build something that would capture at least e-mail addresses.  But I need something that looks professional and appeals to small business.  Looking around here are some landing page managers I have come across:

Unbounce appears to have fresh and modern looking page templates.  They emphasize conversions which from a marketing perspective is key.   I also think it is great that they have a reasonable subscription especially for new businesses and entrepreneurs.

Lander emphasizes getting set up in minutes.  Given the number of experiments I want to run, this is definitely a plus. The subscription price prices on the low end are amazing and perfect testing.  At the end of the day, I have not figured out which messages will resonate with my customers.  From what I can see, Lander doesn’t necessarily use templates, but claims to have a easy to use editor.  I will need to try their free trial to confirm how easy it is to use.

Hubspot has always been top of mind for a solution for lead generation. They seem to have the end to end solution for marketing automation, which I need when Bimotics is more mature.  But for purposes of my Coneierge MVP, I’m afraid that even $200 a month is too much.

Rocketstart must be a startup like Bimotics because they are about to launch their public beta.  They look promising, but unfortunately the timing is just not there.

Building my first Concierge MVP

Now that I have a healthy list of early adopter hypotheses, it is time to setup the Concierge MVP experiments.  If I understand it correctly for each hypothesized early adopter, I need to ask 3 main questions:

1. What is your initial value proposition for your customers?
2. How do you plan to convey the value proposition to them?
3. What are you looking to measure?

(from “Will it Launch” by  Poormima Vijayashanker)

Trying this for the the hypothesis, “SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability.”

1. What are your 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

I wonder if there is a way to figure out which value proposition is most important.  

2. How to convey the message?
1. Do a mini adword campaign to see if people click on add-on reporting for Quickbooks 
2. Create a video that demonstrates how we pull data on the cloud so you don’t have to sit there and load flat files
3. Create a video that shows how you create a simple query through the drag and drop metrics builder
4. Go to the next small business expo and ask people to fill out a small survey
   
   
3. What will you measure?
1. Use interaction in terms of adword results.  Additionally count e-mail addresses collected from the landing pages
2. Count video views in youtube.  I would also count e-mail addresses collected from landing pages with the videos on them
3. Process the survey results from the small business expo

One down six more experiments to think through. The survey is probably the easiest one to tackle. But it is time to learn landing pages too. Hopefully I will be able to reuse some of the content or landing pages for the others.  What are the easiest landing pages out there?

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.