Tuesday, June 24, 2008 by Lincoln Murphy
One last post today and then back to work. Alexander Muse has announced the creation of the Dallas Startup Happy Hour with the inaugural event taking place on July 7, 2008, with subsequent events every other week thereafter). Here is what he sent me and a link to his original blog post.I am hosting a regular 'startup happy hour' every other week (starting July 7th) and would love for you to attend. The idea is fairly simple, get entrepreneurial people together on a regular basis to facilitate the creation of a vibrant 'startup community' here in Dallas.
The event is completely free (i.e. no one is going to make money, EVER) and is being sponsored by SpringStage (the startup blog network that owns the Texas Startup Blog). If you can't attend, please help me get the word out.
We held the first event at the Ritz last week (between 16-25 people attended), but we have decided to move the happy hour to The High Tech Bar in the INFOMART (I35 and Oaklawn). Here are the details:
Event: Startup Happy Hour
Place: High Tech Bar at the INFOMART (I-35 and Oaklawn)
Date: Monday, July 7, 2008
Time: 5PM - 8PM (drinks are free from 5PM-6PM)
Host: Alexander Muse, Scott Ryan and Brad Merritt
For more information or to RSVP:
http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2008/06/23/announcing-springstage-startup-happy-hour-dallas/
Make sure you check out his entire thread on the Dallas Startup scene and how we can improve it. Note the "we"... this isn't all on Alex, its on all of us. Either help or stop complaining!Labels: dallas, entrepreneurship, networking, startup, technology, venture capital
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 by Lincoln Murphy
I'm always trying to learn about real life, in-the-field objections that sales people are having when it comes to selling SaaS products, especially to enterprise clients. There was an article published today on Silicon.com that features an objection to a SaaS product that I have not yet heard of... limited feature set. Wait, yes I have, and this is not a SaaS problem just because the product in question was a SaaS product.If you aren't interested in reading the article, or the synopsis of the article, here is my take on it. Basically, the vendor showed the client some pre-release features that they couldn't deliver in a timely manner so the client looked for a product that could deliver. Unfortunately to get the features they needed, the client had to take a best-of-breed (do we still say this?) approach rather than an integrated one. This new approach caused problems since sharing data with the systems chosen proved to be a challenge.This scenario could have occurred regardless of the software delivery method. First, integrating products that are not built to share data is not easy. Whether deployed or SaaS, products that are built without data sharing in mind often cause problems when forced to integrate. I think the mentality with a deployed solution, where you generally have access to the underlying database, is that if push comes to shove, you can drop down and query the data manually. Queries are one thing, but often people think they can import and export data this way. What they often miss is that business rules are enforced within at the application level and by writing directly to the database they could be causing data integrity problems.Since SaaS products are hosted, a mechanism to directly work with the underlying database is generally not available, nor should it be. The SaaS vendor should know their market, know where they fit in the market, and know what products they might have to integrate with. They should learn this early in the process and create the tools necessary to allow for integration with those third-party systems. This should not come up as a concern to the client if the SaaS vendor has done their homework.Second, in the case of the scenario referenced in the Silicon.com article, the vendor made the error of showcasing features they were not ready to deliver. Again, this is not a SaaS problem but an age-old problem in the Software business itself. Selling features that do not exist yet, or even products that don't exist yet, is not new, and not limited to SaaS. Software vendors of every kind must be cognizant that over promising and under delivering is not the way to build a sustainable business.Labels: marketing, product management, SaaS, sales, start-up, technology
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008 by Lincoln Murphy
Why doesn't Google provide its own URL shortening service? Can you imagine the potential for a Google-owned version of this type of product. Think of the intelligence they could gain on the popularity of URLs.No longer does a link have to be on a published web page to count against their Page Rank, but now the sharing of those URLs could be taken into account. In fact, this seems to me to be a better way (potential system-gaming aside) of determining the popularity of a URL. A big question is, how many people publish links to their favorite content vs. share URLs with friends. I'm guessing the former out-weights the latter by a huge margin.If Google provided an easy-to-use tool (bookmarklet, addition to its toolbar, integration with gMail and Reader, etc.) and encouraged its use, this could be a serious blow to the 90+ URL Shortening Services out there, and a major gain in actionable intelligence for them.Labels: google, marketing, random thoughts, technology
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Monday, December 31, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
I'm not going to attempt to predict the future, but I believe 2008 will be the year of the Small Vertical (intra-vertical focused) and Niche Horizontal (spanning only a few, related verticals) SaaS ISV. The headline producing SaaS ventures in 2007 were the big players, with horizontal offerings. These were Salesforce.com (CRM), Business Objects (BI), and NetSuite (Office Productivity). Just as in the deployed world, "big" horizontal applications are the same ones that have traditionally received the press. And 2008 will not be much different. Small ISVs that until now have remained in the "deployed" software and traditional licensing game will begin to break out. I predict that 2008 will see the largest influx of vertically focused and niche horizontal SaaS offerings to the market to date. The future of SaaS (the long tail, if you will) is the Small Vertical and Niche Horizontal products and tools. These will be new tools, tools ported from "deployed" solutions, and internal tools utilized by technology services organizations they would like to productize.The problems I wrote about in my articles in early 2007 regarding selling SaaS solutions to the Enterprise for the most part still hold true. Sure, the climate is changing, but many of the objections are still being faced. These challenges are actually a good thing for well-prepared ISVs as they provide barriers to entry for those SaaS vendors that are not ready to overcome them. In 2008, these barriers will become an even larger part of the story as more and more small ISVs attempt to sell SaaS products to F1000 companies. Large, well-funded, and well-connected, SaaS vendors had to overcome these same hurdles to get to where they are, but had the resources to wait out the market; small ISVs do not have that luxury.Since I work with companies to bring their vertically-focused and niche horizontal on-demand software and technology service products to market, 2008 will present some interesting challenges and opportunities.Happy New Year!Labels: business, marketing, SaaS, software, technology
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Thursday, October 18, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
 You probably capture a lot of data in your web or SaaS app, but how often do you mine that data for Actionable Business Intelligence; information you can use to solve business problems, such as slumping revenue, high client turnover, etc? It might be time to stop everything else you’re doing and go write some queries. Below are some scenarios that I helped a start-up solve recently with information right at their fingertips.
If you have paying customers who aren’t using your system, find out why they aren’t actively using the system and fix it.
Ask them what you can do to make their experience better, what problems they are having, etc. If you do not, when their contract is up, or they get their next bill, there is a high probability they will no longer be paying customers. It is much easier and cheaper to keep these customers than it is to go find new ones.
If the majority of your system’s usage is from non-premium users, maybe you are giving away too much.
Contact those free users who are actively using the system and find out why they haven’t upgraded. If the answer is “I don’t need those premium features” then you are giving away too much. You can either reduce the feature set on the free version or introduce advertising within the free product.
The former might cause some problems with your users, but the reality is it has to be done. Tell them you are scaling back on the feature set in the free version but you would be happy to upgrade them to the premium version at a discount.The latter can be implemented without making existing users too upset and would be one of the reasons someone would upgrade to the premium version; to get rid of those pesky ads. Remember, however, that if your user base is small, ads might not make up for the lost premium revenue.If you have multiple people from the same company using your service, perhaps you could leverage that into a corporate account.
Those users may not even know the others in their office are using it. If you don’t feel you have enough users at that company for them to consider a corporate account, leverage the few users you do have to spread the word internally… give them an incentive to spread the word (free month for every new user, etc.). This will quickly get you to that magical number you’ve conjured up that would give you confidence to sell to corporate. Alternatively, you might find that you have a large, un-related user base in certain cities, and that might be a great place to go for an early-adopter round table (with free pizza!) to get their feedback and to get them to spread the word for you.If the usage of your system is very small or the majority of the users are not paying, perhaps you can use that data to justify reducing your overhead.
Do you need all that hardware at the co-lo if you are only getting 70 hits per day or do you really care if the freeloaders have to wait a second longer for processing to occur? This is difficult for tech-founders who might have a geek crush on their servers but could be enough to save a company with low revenues.Finally, whether you are mining data or not, make sure to constantly solicit feedback from your early-adopter customers. It reminds them, and you, who exactly you are building your web service for.Image via. Labels: actionable, application, business, data, ideas, intelligence, marketing, mining, SaaS, technology, web
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
 John Ludwig posted a link to a presentation by Amy Jo Kim at ShuffleBrain titled "Putting the Fun in Functional – Applying game mechanics to functional software". I'm not even sure why I clicked on it, I'm not a gamer, but I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.While the entire presentation is great, the best lesson of all, IMHO, comes on slides 46 & 47: "Customization creates investment and creates barriers to exit". This is huge and it was nice to see someone lay it out like that. We are always talking about lowering barriers to entry, but it is rare to see someone write about barriers to exit. When building a product, it is difficult to constantly play "let's out-feature the competition". While you must always have new or updated features in the pipeline (ideally developed and ready to launch in a competitive response), the reality is a better product will always come along and people will want to switch (its human nature). Your user, I'm sorry to say, will sign-up for an account (if it's free), look around, go back to the service they currently use, and, if you've done your job, determine that it would simply be too much work to switch.As much as I have issues with the current crop of social networks, the reality is, they have this down pat. The nature of a "social network" implies that I am actively connecting with other people, and therefore am making an implicit investment. The problem for non-social networks is that you have to work at building this type of user investment. Take the image hosting service Flickr. They have built in a number of features that, to take full advantage of the system, require investment. The user can look at other photo-sharing sites that come online, and probably will, but as soon as they look at the work it will take to move their images and the associated meta-data, this becomes quite daunting and they will stick with Flickr, thank you very much.Image viaLabels: business, design, experience, functional, networking, product, social, software, technology, user
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by Lincoln Murphy
 Obviously the main value proposition of social networks is to show everyone else who we know. It's not about keeping in touch or keeping a record of our contacts, it's about proving to everyone else how popular we are. If we don't have many connections or friends, we simply say that we don't really participate; "I'm not an active user". It's pointless.What we really need is a way to keep track of those people who are actually a part of our "social network" (can we get a new name, please), and a way to keep up with them and their changing profiles. Then Xobni Insight appears on the scene and seems to be heading in this direction. Read more about it if you are unfamiliar with the way it works here, here, and here.I was lucky enough to get an early invitation to the Xobni beta was immediately blown away at how it exposes the social network that you already have and updates the "network" as you organically add people. Its not about meeting people, it's about getting to know the people that you know better, and staying in touch. If Xobni can figure out a way to build a network around the exposure of this data, they will instantly create the most useful "social network" around, at least for business.Here is an example of how a Xobni-powered social network would have changed the dynamics of a recent Connection Request exchange on LinkedIn. A guy contacted me in an effort to make contact with one of my connections. I forwarded his info to my connection and never got a response. I tried again because I really wanted to hook them up (it was a potentially lucrative gig for my connection), to no avail. I eventually called and left a message telling my connection to contact this guy, but no dice. Oh well, time to move along.Why did this happen and how could it have been avoided with network intelligence powered by Xobni? First, if LinkedIn had Xobni metrics embedded for my connections, or if Xobni had its own web-based visibility into my network (as I choose to expose it), the guy trying to contact my connection would have noticed that I haven't communicated via email with my connection in a few months. In fact, given the ability to drill down, they could have seen that the last time we had an email conversation was over three months ago and that I had, in fact, emailed my connection two times in that time period with no responses to those messages. Perhaps my connection is just that, a "connection", and not a "relationship". Given that, perhaps this guy would have avoided contacting me.For someone doing prospecting who doesn't want to waste time, this type of network intelligence would be very beneficial (and valuable). I think it is safe to assume that only a handful of everyone's connections are their true friends or close colleagues. Of my connections, probably 10% are people I deal with even once a month. The rest are people I want to maintain a connection with "just in case", but rarely go to them for any thing of substance. I don't have any substantive metrics, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many (if not most) LinkedIn networks are like that. Most of the people I know really well are not on LinkedIn and, frankly, have no interest.A Xobni-powered social network would completely change the dynamics of social networking; in fact, it could turn the entire model on its head. Create a way to feed the Xobni engine with multiple email accounts, IM, Skype, mobile phone and SMS data (via on-device software), and you can create visibility into who is really connected and who did a glorified reciprocal link bit. As long as the Xobni powered network is opt-in with the ability to expose my data to only certain groups of people and the network effect data is anonymous, the possibilities are incredible. So far, I am very impressed with the Xobni Outlook plugin and can see some incredible things on the horizon for this company.Labels: ideas, marketing, networking, social, technology
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by Lincoln Murphy
 To keep bots from scraping our email addresses from our web sites for SPAM purposes, but still provide a way for humans to contact us, we have come up with many ways to obfuscate our email addresses. From using contact forms with no publicly visible email address, which isn't a good choice, to "user [at] domain [dot] com" notation (or a variant), the options have always been limited and not user-friendly. This hasn't changed.However, while the non-user-friendly nature of email address hiding must remain (if its easy, the bots will get it), the usefulness of the process has just taken a leap forward. We are all familiar with CAPTCHAs, the squiggly letters in an image we must type in to gain access to a website or sign up for a service. CAPTCHAs are used to fend off automated scripts that might otherwise gain access to the system it protects, since only humans can read the letters and type them in. A new service called reCAPTCHA has been launched to combine the anti-bot power of CAPTCHAs with the reading power of humans, to digitize books. Some great explanations of this service and its benefits are here, here, and here. While reCAPTCHA has been around for a few months, they recently added a feature that caught my eye; the reCAPTCHA Mailhide service. You simply submit your email address on their form and a URL comes out the other end. Instead of publishing your email address, you publish the link to the Mailhide service. When the person who wants to email you clicks the link, they are presented with a CAPTCHA containing words from a book. Upon successful entry in the text box, your email address (clickable, even) is exposed. When you click on the "Contact me via email" link in the "About" box on this site, you will see this in action.
While it adds a step or two for the person who wants your email address, it is definitely worth it. It helps out a great cause, keeps the bots out, and within two steps fully exposes your email address to the intended party. Hiding from bots will never be easy, so it might as well be useful.Labels: technology
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I help companies bring their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web applications to market by leveraging the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces, the first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Ruby on Rails.
I am located in Dallas, Texas. Contact me via email.
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