David Cummings on Startups

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  • Thoughts on the Content Sourcing Marketplace Space

    Almost two years ago I wrote a post on a Content Marketing as a Service idea where I talked about the need in the market for high quality custom content on a regular basis for companies. It’s been two years and I still haven’t seen anything breakthrough as a clear leader in the space.

    Here are three content marketing companies that are related to the idea but not the exact thing:

    • Contently – marketplace that facilitates high quality freelancers for companies
    • Compendium – content marketing platform that provides a set of tools for content planning, managing, and publishing
    • Kapost – content marketing platform with a marketing calendar, workflow, analytics, etc

    After thinking more about the idea and market for content marketing marketplaces, I believe there are some challenges in the space to build a $100 million business:

    • Content is too personal and custom to a business such that business owners and marketers are very reluctant to outsource it to a third party (this is anecdotal after asking several business owners about it)
    • Crowd sourcing areas in the creative space have been most successful with simple, visual items like logos where there are people that design logos for fun and it’s easy to decide which ones you do and don’t like. It’s exponentially more difficult on both sides of the equation to facilitate 1,000 word blog posts as the product.
    • Even if you outsourced the content development to a third party, it still takes a significant amount of effort to come up with content ideas and the subsequent editing of it to maintain a consistent voice and message aligned with your brand

    Content marketing continues to grow in importance but I think there’s too much friction relative to the return on investment for a content marketing production as a service company to emerge as a large vendor. As it is now, it will continue being serviced by agencies, PR firms, and more involved freelancers.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the content sourcing marketplace space?

  • Notes from T.A. McCann’s Startup Riot Keynote

    The first keynote at Startup Riot was by T.A. McCann, founder of Gist and head of social product strategy at Blackberry. T.A. did a great job going through his background, lessons learned, and the Gist experience from starting to selling a pre-revenue business in 2.5 years for a large sum of money to RIM/Blackberry.

    Here are notes from his keynote:

    • On 7th company currently
    • Gist was 6th startup
    • Professional sailor for 10 years
    • Gotta keep practicing
    • Practicing by helping others and paying it forward
    • On Vizify – TechStars co similar to Gist or About.me
    • On board of Startup Weekend
    • Involved in TechStars Seattle
    • Collegiate swimmer
    • In charge of everything social for BlackBerry
    • Been at BlackBerry for two years
    • Core message: How are you making people’s live better?
    • Find the confluence — people, investors, trends, customers
    • Why me and why now?
    • Sell the first version of the product with a PowerPoint before you’ve built it
    • Seemingly unachievable vision
    • Discover like-minded people
    • Gist acquired without monetization (pre-revenue)
    • Create moments of delight and amplify
    • 80% of success is about showing up
    • Make peoples lives better: Connect and solve; Listen, learn, share; Experiment; Iterate and persist
    • Look for work/life harmony instead of work/life balance

    T.A. did a great job and I’m glad he came to Atlanta.

  • Thrillist Co-Founder Adam Rich Keynote Notes at Startup Riot

    Yesterday, Startup Riot had two keynote speakers, one of which was Adam Rich. Adam is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Thrillist. I had heard of Thillist before but didn’t realize it was a city-specific daily email site with something new of note in one of four categories: eat, drink, travel, own.

    Here are some notes from Adam Rich’s keynote at Startup Riot:

    • Original idea came from being in Philly trying to find the coolest stuff to do
    • Built a bar in dorm room for prohibition cocktails
    • National men’s magazines good for an airport layover but not tactical
    • Local city guides had relevance but weren’t focused on the young professional male
    • Built Thrillist to have filtered, targeted city information for his guy demographic
    • Idea is 10% and execution is 90%
    • Daily Candy was good but light on tech and guy stuff
    • Went to funders of Daily Candy and pitched it was that for guys
    • Don’t reinvent the wheel, use a successful plan when you can
    • Hire former athletes as they are coachable and roll up their sleeves
    • Tough to transition from doing to delegating
    • Manages remote teams because he has a local native for each market covered
    • Still views his 200 person company as a startup

    It’s always fun hearing the back story and lessons learned from a successful entrepreneur. Adam did a great job and I’m glad he came to the event.

  • Atlanta Startup Riot 2013 Presenting Company Notes

    Today we had another great Startup Riot in Atlanta. The way it works is that 450+ people get together to hear 40 startups give a three minute pitch followed by two minutes of Q&A from two judges. At the end of the event three winners are selected for prizes and glory.

    Fireplug

    • Turn information into knowledge
    • Get credit for what you read
    • Humans crave feedback
    • Keeps track of what you’re read
    • Can push recommended content you haven’t read

    deductmor

    • 10+ million people with 1099 income
    • Able to capture more receipts
    • Take a picture of a receipt on your phone
    • Less cost for tax prep and get more deductions
    • iPhone app

    Spensa Technologies

    • Agribusiness
    • Problem: $20B/yr crop loss
    • $4.5B/yr on insecticide
    • Insect populations drive decisions
    • Sticky trap catches insects and then they’re counted to make insecticide decision
    • Product: automated insect monitoring using z-traps
    • Web-connected software
    • Visualizaion and management tool for insect monitoring activities

    Campus Bubble

    • One community for student, faculty, and administrators
    • Facebook fails as a closed university community
    • emorybubble.com/preview
    • Relevant discussion, events students actually like, deals, etc

    TuneWolf

    • Bars usually have a juke box or the bartender/employee controls it
    • Music app controls a web service that interfaces with a computer in the bar that interfaces with the local speakers
    • Pay to play and more interactive

    College Canvas

    • Student debt topped $1 trillion
    • An online market for students to sell handmade items
    • facebook.com/collegecanvas
    • Like Etsy for college student made stuff

    Abeo

    • Like moneyball for talent management
    • Improved profit through reduced turnover
    • Battle between fast growing tech companies
    • Psychological characteristics help determine effectiveness in a role
    • Social application with personality tests
    • Behavioral model and motivations model

    Agency Spotter

    • Quick, painless, and easy to find the right creative agency
    • $760B is spent annually on agencies
    • 560k agencies across the globe
    • Better way to find an agency
    • Ratings and reviews
    • Charge money to the agencies to be listed

    IS3D

    • Interactive technology for science education
    • Real world problem-solving skills
    • 3d game engines to learn skills
    • Real-time assessment of skills
    • $3/student/year

    Pipefish

    • You are greater than the sum of your social graph
    • Social media assumes you are defined by your friends
    • Detect taste preferences from people
    • Help e-commerce companies make personally relevant product recommendations
    • Looking for B2C companies that need an analytics partner
    • Travel, restaurants, and fashion are the first three

    Mr. Arlo

    • New way to plan and book travel online
    • 80% of travel is booked by women
    • Uses social networks to see what travel options friends like
    • Travel taste graph

    Banyan

    • Github for science
    • Make it easy for scientists to share
    • Easy to publish and share in under 5 minutes
    • Assigns an individual ID to each change a researcher makes
    • $6 billion market for software for scientific collaboration

    Guardian Watch

    • 911 is broken
    • Enable first responders and citizens to save lives
    • Mobile app to live stream video from the scene of an emergency
    • Sell to emergency responders

    SafeImageMD

    • Solve inefficiency in managing medical imaging data
    • Images from CT scans and MRIs
    • CDs and DVDs are currently used
    • Cloud-based storage solution
    • Browser-based DICOM data viewer (comes from CT scans)
    • Web-based image uploader
    • Software that sits on network or desktop to sync files
    • 1/3 of worldwide image storage is for medical data

    Shindig

    • Facebook’s events page wasn’t cutting
    • Social network for social people
    • Keep track of social life by instantly sharing plans with friends
    • Combines Facebook’s API and Foursquare’s API

    WorkReadyGrad

    • Connect students with mentors, alumni, and employers
    • Students document career goals and what they’ve accomplished
    • Digital portfolios
    • Addressing the skills gap

    Wagglez

    • Local. Mobile. Deals.
    • Local discovery and deals
    • Raising $350k

    Ten Eight

    • Commercial real estate mobile app
    • Tour books are standard issue print outs of the buildings to be toured
    • Buildings are judged on feel and complicated spreadsheets
    • It’s a tour book app plus rating system
    • Data analytics on tours
    • Ability to tell building owners about competitive set, ratings, and notes

    Excelegrade

    • 80% of schools use mobile devices in the classroom
    • 46 of 50 states teach against common standards
    • End-to-end digital assessment solution
    • Assessments and assignments administered on mobile devices
    • Paperless and personalized learning
    • $3 billion market
    • Freemium subscription business model
    • Per student per subject per year fees

    Persint

    • Most people don’t where they stand to improve their financial profile
    • Financial uncertainty leads to fear and stress and then to budgeting
    • App that makes it easy to compare your financial metrics against peers and provide insight
    • Generates a score about your financial health
    • Gives recommendations like cheaper credit cards, get a cheaper car, etc
    • Pre financial manner app

    BrainPik

    • The best deals in town
    • Offers platform with feedback
    • 10 – 50% off combined with getting feedback surveys from customers
    • Text code based to mobile phones
    • Trying to create next gen Yelp with the survey feedback component

    VacationFutures

    • Wholesale rental marketplace
    • VRBO is good but takes up more time than outsourcing to vacation rental company
    • List for free on the site
    • Property manager has access to inventory and can diversify their risk

    cMEcompete

    • Social mobile platform to make it easy to connect people in participatory sports
    • Apply the concept of meetups to participatory sports
    • Registration and sign-in app as well as social app

    CloudyDays

    • Ability to scale app is a major challenge
    • Testing the cloud from the cloud
    • Load testing application
    • Benchmarking against the competition

    TheOfferMachine.com

    • Lead gen marketer platform
    • Conversion optimized pages
    • Intelligent lead forms
    • Advanced lead hygiene
    • DIY integrations

    Iron Gaming

    • 156 million gamers in the US
    • 64 million ages 2-17
    • No centralized scorekeeping
    • Improves online gaming
    • Match.com for gamers
    • Sports Center for gamers

    Flairtab

    • Cloud-based TV service for doctor offices
    • 30 min average wait time at doctor office
    • Tools to hep engage, inform, and educate patients
    • Freemium model for doctors
    • Supported by advertising
    • USB device uses WiFi for content and plugs into TV

    Bookup

    • Text book exchange
    • Connect users directly
    • Users say what books they want and what books they have
    • Raising $150,000

    Excelegrade was the winner today and was my favorite as well.

    I’m looking forward to next year’s Startup Riot.

  • Bet on the Horse, Course, or Jockey

    Earlier today I was talking to a technology investor and I asked the question, “what types of startups and opportunities are you looking for in the area?” He stopped, looked up, and said he characterizes things in three buckets by betting on the horse, jockey, or course:

    • Horse – the specific business idea
    • Jockey – the entrepreneurs/co-founders/management team
    • Course – the market or vertical for the business idea

    Of course, I’d heard the horse and jockey concept many times before but this was the first time “course” came up and I really liked it. When evaluating a specific idea (horse), the market or vertical (course) is extremely important as most of the time the idea that becomes successful isn’t the idea that the team started out with. The horse and course need to be evaluated together as much as they are evaluated apart.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the terms horse, jockey, or course?

  • SaaS Momentum is Strong

    Recently I was talking with a friend about entrepreneurship and technology. The topic of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) came up and how it’s been a hot area for years now. After discussing it further, we agreed that SaaS is just getting started and shows no signs of slowing down.

    Here are some of the reasons SaaS is so disruptive:

    • Pace of innovation is much faster for a tech company compared to installed software due to delivering software over the web
    • Ease of on-boarding a new client and getting value is a magnitude better than the previous way
    • Removal or lack of IT involvement empowers line-of-business managers to be more autonomous and self-sufficient
    • Anytime, anywhere access changes the approach to work and frees up team members to be productive on their own schedule
    • Open APIs to share data and connect systems in an automated fashion is 10x more efficient than traditional enterprise software

    Software-as-a-Service has another decade of rapid adoption ahead and is just getting started.

    What else? What are some other reasons SaaS momentum is so strong?

  • Sound Issues in a Large Coworking Space

    In a week the Atlanta Tech Village will open an expanded coworking area with reserved desks for 30+ people and unreserved bench seating for 15+ more people in a large 4,000+ square foot area. To date, the pre-renovation coworking area has been 20+ private offices with two to six desks per office, more like a shared Regus office and less like a coworking area. Next week’s new space will be a complete, traditional coworking space with a large open area, game room, and several shared conference rooms. Enter the sound question.

    A common question people ask when touring the space is “will it get loud in here?” Of course, we don’t want it loud so we need a plan for addressing sound issues. Here are a few ideas:

    • No phone calls in the large area such that people that need to get on the phone can use one of the three phone booths, five conference rooms, game room, hallway, or go outside
    • Require companies that have a heavy cold-calling component to their business model to have a private room or suite
    • Ask people with a loud or booming voice to be cognizant of those around them
    • Incorporate some small white noise machines / active noise reduction technology

    Sound is always going to be a concern in a large, open work area. With core value number one being “be nice”, I’m confident everything will work out great.

    What else? What are some other ideas to address sound issues in a large coworking space?

  • Culture Fit Challenges Revealed in a Non-Work Setting

    Corporate culture is the only controllable competitive advantage for entrepreneurs. All the focus for corporate culture is on recruiting to bring the right people in as well as things to do internally to institutionalize whatever it is that makes the culture successful. There’s another rarely discussed item that can become an issue: when someone blatantly violates the culture’s standards in a non-work setting.

    In the sports world you see it frequently when a player gets in trouble with the law. There’s clearly been a violation of team standards but it didn’t happen on the job. In the corporate world, it isn’t usually related to the law, but more so when people treat others in a way that’s clearly against the core values, and it comes back to the entrepreneur or team member via a friend of a friend.

    The immediate response is that what someone does on their own time is their own business, and that’s true, but if they act in an egregious manner, that reflects on their employer, as people expect them to act the same whether on company time or not. I don’t have a good solution for it other than confirming to the source of the news that it’s not inline with the company’s core values. I’ve only had it happen a couple times and haven’t ever brought it up with the employee.

    Sometimes culture fit challenges are revealed in a non-work setting and there isn’t much that can be done.

    What else? What would you do if culture fit challenges were revealed to you in a non-work setting via a third-party?

  • Video Games in the Office

    One of the first comments people make when coming in our office is about the 70″ LED TV with an Xbox and Kinect hooked up to it. Laying on the sofa is four Xbox controllers with Madden 13 prominently displayed below the TV. Video games, hanging out, and enjoying each other’s company are a regular part of our startup experience.

    After seeing and commenting on the TV with video games, followed by the ping pong table down the hall and the razor scooters strewn about, a common jest is “how does any work get done around here?” The answer, of course, is that work gets done whenever and wherever each person  chooses to do it — the office is merely a cool spot to collaborate. Work isn’t defined as sitting at a desk from nine to five and putting in the hours.

    Video games in the office provide a great outlet for unwinding, building relationships with colleagues, and having fun. In fact, we have actually have two 70″ TVs with Xboxes in the office — go figure.

    What else? What are your thoughts on video games in the office?

  • Notes from the Marin Software IPO Filing

    Marin Software just filed their S-1 (SEC doc) to go public and sell $75mm worth of shares. Marin makes an advertising and pay-per-click (PPC) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management platform for online marketing, or Revenue Acquisition Management, as they put it. I remember first hearing about Marin several years ago when the PPC bid management world was heating up, so it’s great to see how far they’ve come.

    Here are a few notes from the Marin Software IPO filing:

    • Platform works with Baidu, Bing, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and more (pg. 1)
    • Revenues (pg. 2):
      2009 – $7.5mm
      2010 – $19mm
      2011 – $36.1mm
      2012 first 9 months – $42.5mm
    • Business benefits (pg. 3)
      Financial lift
      Efficiences and time savings
      Better business decision making
    • Key strengths (pg. 3)
      Robust and flexible integration
      Big data analytics
      Real-time, cross-publisher campaign management
      Predictive bid management and optimization
      Intuitive interface offering visibility and control
      Experienced team committed to customer success
      Highly-scalable and extensible cloud-based architecture
    • Losses (pg. 8)
      2009 – $9.7mm
      2010 – $11.9mm
      2011 – $17.4mm
      2012 first 9 months – $19.2mm
    • Accumulated deficit – $70.1mm (pg. 11)
    • Fees are calculated as a percentage of customers’ advertising spend managed on the platform (pg. 12)
    • Substantial majority of spend is through Google using the Google AdWords API (pg. 12)
    • Sales cycle is typically one to nine months (pg. 15)
    • Employee count (pg. 23)
      2011 – 285
      2012 – 386
    • 181 day lock-up period for shareholders (pg. 31)
    • 26% of total revenue came from advertisers outside the U.S. (pg. 44)
    • 502 active customers on September 20, 2012 (pg. 45)
    • 58% 2012 gross margin (pg. 49)
    • Total amount raised from investors: $105.7mm (pg. 56)
    • Equity ownership percentages (pg. 114)
      Benchmark Capital – 16.4%
      DAG Ventures – 16.1%
      Temasek Capital – 10.1%
      Focus Ventures – 6.5%
      Crosslink Ventures – 5.8%
      Founder – 8.8%
      Co-founder – 2.8%
      Co-founder – 3%

    Marin Software looks to have the makings of a successful IPO based on being a modern SaaS platform growing incredibly fast at scale.

    What else? What are some other thoughts on the Marin Software IPO filing?