As their words (and pictures) washed over me I had several thoughts. The first is how much I hate bad PowerPoint presentations. More on that later. The second is that from the beginning, I wasn’t looking at the business model as much as I was the individual, and looking to see if they had the “right stuff.” So what is the “right” stuff for a high tech entrepreneur in a startup environment?

Business startup success vibe

Not to be too woo-woo (I am from California) but it’s their overall vibe. It isn’t their business savvy or their business relationships, although those are always good and helpful. It isn’t how well developed their business plan is, although it’s nice to see a well-thought-out and well-researched business plan.

The vibe comes out of their enthusiasm, passion and commitment. Are they excited? Are they having fun? Do they enjoy their work? It shows.

The vibe comes out of their eagerness and openness to hear feedback because they care about making their business model better, not making it their way. It comes out when they are being honest and humble, not trying to hide or cover up weaknesses. After all, they are applying to come into a high tech incubator — if they didn’t need help, why apply?

The ones that didn’t have that vibe didn’t have a chance.

The humble problem solvers

What clearly set the winners apart were the real problem solvers. It was exciting to be there when the problem solvers came in. One of the worst parts about the high tech business (besides bad PowerPoint presentations), and I’ve spent 30 years in it, is listening to people who have developed a solution for a business problem that doesn’t exist.

I remember a meeting way back in the day with a software developer (who got funding by the way, largely because he had been on the original Lotus 1-2-3 development team). He had developed a product that he wanted to engage my firm in selling, and as I interviewed him, I asked him what motivated him to build this particular product. “Oh,” he replied, “It was a really interesting algorithm.”

“But,” I argued, “no one has the problem you’re solving. I get why you would build it. I just can’t figure out why anyone would buy it.” I passed.

You could argue he had a neat problem and he went about solving it. Nope. Not the problem solving I’m talking about. I’m talking about solving for real, everyday problems. This is where startups succeed and grow to scale, when they tackle a real business problem, research how people are solving it today, and come up with a technology solution that solves it faster, easier, more completely and better.

I use “headaches” as an example in my free 11-slides Guide to a Successful Presentation. Everyone gets them. When you have one, it hurts, and you want to make it go away. When someone offers you a solution to your headache problem, you buy it. When it works, you buy more and tell your friends.

The real problem solvers are people who either have a problem themselves or they listen to other people who have a problem, and then they use technology to solve that problem. It was so refreshing in the interview process when these folks come in.

US: “What motivated you to develop this?”
THEM: “I tried to do something, I couldn’t, so I sat down and developed a way to make it happen.”

US: “What motivated you to develop this?”
THEM: “Someone asked me if I could solve their problem, and I did. And then I found other people who had the same problem.”

Don’t be defensive

If we’re asking a lot of questions, it’s either because we’re interested and want to know more, or you’re doing a crap job of explaining and we can’t figure it out on our own. Questions are good. Be excited when you get them. Challenges are good. Take a minute to think about it.

At the end of the day, for most of the winners, we said “we’d back that guy / that team regardless of the business plan.” It just underscored how important the right spirit is for entrepreneurial success.

Power Point Presentation Tips

I promised I’d get back to this. here’s my best advice for making a decent presentation, whether it’s to an investor group, a potential customer, or a panel deciding on whether or not you get the opportunity to participate in a high tech business incubator.

• Don’t read your slides. I get very cranky. I can read faster than you can talk.
• Don’t write a book. It’s a slide presentation.
• Make one point in each slide and just get that one idea across.
• Use simple language.
• Don’t embellish. You’re not developing an “e-commerce portal”, you’re building a website.
• Have a point. And get to it. Quickly.

Brian Somers, Co-founder, Standard Microgrid

Navigation sprawl

Over the years the site had grown, and grown, and grown. There were over 100 pages. While there was a lot of content, most of it was terribly out of date, and good luck finding anything. The existing site navigation scheme included five different (and conflicting) navigation elements (two horizontal navigation bars across the top with cascading menus; a left-side navigation bar with yet another tier of cascading menus, and the menus just cascaded and cascaded, several levels down) Getting to a page with the information you were looking for often required a half a dozen clicks or more.

Users complained that they could never remember where important content — like the monthly events calendar — were hiding month after month.

In short, it had become frustrating for users, frustrating for managers, and an all-out pain. Managing content was a pain, but that’s easily remedied with a content management system, and our all-around favorite, no question, is WordPress. WordPress makes it easy to democratize content, which is just a fancy way of saying we can let everyone in on the content creation game, and not be limited to funneling everything through one person. It also provides a framework for organizing and sorting content easily. I’m going to write about content management, cool technology we used, and other elements of this site in a future post — stay tuned.

First things first – get the navigation right

Before we can get into the content to make sure it’s reasonably relevant, we have to make sure it can be easily found, and that’s the job of good design. A primary objective of the design refresh, therefore, was to make the content readily available in a click or two. In fact, that was a design rule we imposed on ourselves — the navigation had to allow users to get to any requested content with a maximum of two clicks.

Utilizing a platform like WordPress makes it easy to begin to organize the content by categories, and since all the content can be tagged and categorized it is therefore easily searched and easily found. But in my opinion, if your visitor needs to use a search box, your navigation has failed. The other rule was no cascading menus.

The content could be easily organized within the existing structure of about 5 or 6 categories; and using Catalyst we could easily create custom layouts for each section, so, while the entire site has the same main navigation element on top, each section has its own unique navigation element on a sidebar to the left.

Watch this short video to get an idea of how we solved the navigation problem:

Making full use of technology

Building the site on WordPress allowed us to let the technology do most of the heavy lifting. Content is easily organized, archived, and found, and WordPress is doing all the work behind the scenes. As usual, we used our favorite platform of Catalyst to generate the theme. Catalyst is an innovative and easy to use, unbelievably flexible framework, and it allowed us to build a truly unique site with dozens of custom layouts and separate elements. We used online forms tools (Wufoo) to integrate registration directly within events and payment goes in via PayPal. Fundraising is convenient and always open. School registration can be completed without leaving the site.

Every month, staff and committee heads would send their upcoming calendar items to the webmistress and she would desperately try to get it all online. As a result, there was never more than one month’s information at any time, with no categorization, no search.

More on this site

I’m going to say more about this site, and the technology we used and the decisions we made, in future posts.

Paul Klebahn, Director of Sales, s.p.a. inc.

Jonathan Schreiber, CEO, Xingtone

Alan Annis, Owner, Magical Moments Media

Douglas Schiller, COO/CFO, Xingtone

I find the work of drilling down on the positioning statement and delivering it in simple language is a helpful practice in focusing a business on its core mission and core strengths. In this article I’m just going to focus on one of these simple steps.

It’s really simple and only 4 steps:

1. What do you do / offer / provide / are developing…
2. For what group of customers or audience…
3. To solve what business problem?
4. With what unique differentiating factor.

Usually the key question that hangs people up is “what problem do you solve?” Most companies I work with want to quickly get into a discussion of what they do, not what problem they solve. Typical.

But in one case, the tough question was “what customers do you serve?” The person in the hot seat was a dynamic young woman with a terrific business. She was delivering quality results to a group of customers already and had impressive statistics and testimonials. But her positioning statement was too general, and it said her customers were “businesses.”

What kind of businesses? Where? What size? Any particular industry?

Classic dilemma for people starting out

The reason I say this is “the classic startup dilemma” is that her answer was universal. Am I limiting myself and our opportunity by focusing on a specific customer class? If I say I am providing these services to “businesses in the auto industry” does that mean I can’t ever take on a customer in the insurance industry? No, it doesn’t. But it does add to your credibility if you can say you have a particular industry focus and highlights you as an expert with industry knowledge and understanding of business needs.

If you further hone it down, is it large enterprise customers or mid-size companies or small-to-medium enterprises? Again, the startup dilemma is fear of limiting yourself. But in fact, what you are doing is clarifying your business model and making it easy for someone (an investor or prospect, for instance) to quickly get what you’re all about. Far better to come across as focused, expert and dedicated than vague and diffuse.

What other clarifying statements can you make about your prospects or people you wish to serve? Are they companies who wish to increase traffic and lead generation on their website? Or maybe they are companies who need help managing payables.

Which of these do you think is more memorable?

“My company provides services to businesses.”
“My company provides services to small-to-medium enterprises in the insurance industry who need help managing payables.”?

And the upshot of this all is that this young entrepreneur has a particular affinity for the fashion industry, as well as some early customers in this field. She really enjoys the industry, she likes the clients, and she’s interested in the whole ecosystem. But she worried that her other clients in the insurance industry might be more lucrative, even though she doesn’t enjoy the work there as much. What do you think she should do?

I know what my answer is:

Do what you love and the money will follow.

 

]]> http://www.kickstartgrowth.com/classic-startup-dilemma/feed 0 http://www.kickstartgrowth.com/sarah-padlog http://www.kickstartgrowth.com/sarah-padlog#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:03:25 +0000 RichardM http://kickstartgrowth.com/?p=1369 “Richard is an innovator and someone who can find a solution for the “unsolvable” situations. His drive is only matched by his dedication.”

Sarah e Padlog, Manager, Special Projects, Xingtone

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