Society and business in the 21st Century
This is an interesting project – Google have pulled together all their entrepreneurial resources into one page at Google For Entrepreneurs.
As well as being a handy resource for anyone building a business, it’s a great overview of the various programs Google and their partners are running around the world.
If you are looking at setting up a business or have a fast growing enterprise it might be worthwhile having a look at the resources Google have pulled together.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur which means I failed with one company at a time” says Steve Blank in a terrific interview with Mark Suster.
Both Steve and Mark are experienced entrepreneurs conversation is one of these raps between two experienced and intelligent individuals where the questions are as smart as the answers.
One of the key take aways from the interview is that our customers are smarter than us. If they aren’t buying from us, they know something we don’t.
Whether we’re talking about startups or big business, listening to the customer is the core thing we have to be doing and everything else is noise.
“It changed everything. It changed the game for a lot of us and you know it made a lot of people feel very anxious and sort of compare their own success.”
Lisa Bettany, the founder of Camera Plus lamented how Facebook’s billion dollar purchase of photo app Instagram purchase changed the start up community on Australian current affairs program Foreign Correspondent.
In the program Foreign Correspondent also spoke to Australian and Italian startup founders looking to make it in Silicon Valley. On being asked what they hoped their business was worth they all had the same answer – a billion dollars.
There’s no doubt Jindou Lee’s Happy Inspector home inspection app or the Timbuktu kids’ story website are great products and should be successful business. But is business success only measured by a billion dollar exit?
In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon every child is above average, it seems in Silicon Valley every successful business is worth a billion dollars.
Every founder in the current app or web 2.0 craze says “it’s not about the money, it’s about changing the world” yet scratch them and they are all on the lookout for the greater fool buying them out for an improbable sum.
One could say that a billion dollar cheque does change the world of the person cashing the thing although exactly how a iPhone photo app changes the world may escape some of us.
At the same time the Foreign Correspondent story was being aired the founder of Y Combinator – Silicon Valley’s most successful accelerator ‘s founder – warned the heat is now out of the market after Facebook’s market flop.
Paul Graham was elaborating on a letter he wrote three months earlier where he said, “If you haven’t raised money yet, lower your expectations for fundraising.”
If the billion dollar valuations are going out of the startup mentality then it might be better for all of us. It might mean our youngest, best and brightest really are focused more on building things that will change the world rather than buying mega-yachts for themselves and their VC investors.
Outsourcing company freelancer.com regularly releases the fifty fastest moving job descriptions requested by their customers.
This year’s list shows how the online industry is changing – content creation, social media and SEO job requests are all down substantially as users and gatekeepers like Google adapt to the information flood we all have to deal with.
Keeping in mind the market that Freelancer.com caters to small businesses and many of the jobs posted are for fairly small – some would say laughingly tiny and insulting – amounts, it’s probably safe to say we’re looking at the low value end of the market.
Article writing (down 15%), proofreading (5%), blogging (13%) and submission (4%) jobs are probably the cheap and nasty “Demand Media” style of low quality content designed for SEO purposes.
SEO itself is in trouble with jobs in that sector down 7% indicating Google’s Panda and Penguin search engine changes have achieved their objectives of improving search results and knocking out those gaming the system with low quality content.
A similar thing has happened with social media. Facebook is too hard for many businesses and they’re not seeing a return on their substantial time investment.
“Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Freelancer quotes Nate Elliott, an analyst at market research firm Forrester.
A bright part in Freelancer’s list is the rise is in open standards as HTML5 starts moving up the list with 20% growth.
“The Internet is becoming more interactive, and the technologies that are winning and will continue to win are open standards like HTML5 and jQuery- to the detriment of the incumbents proprietary technology providers like Adobe and Microsoft,” says Freelancer’s CEO Matt Barrie.
Open standards aren’t winning everywhere though as Apple’s iOS is clearly winning the developer war as iPhone grows by 30% and iPad by 26% compared to Android’s 20%.
Freelancer’s list is an interesting snapshot at where industry demand is right now, what’s we’re starting to see are some of the transition effects working their way through the system. The rise and fall of the social media and SEO specialists being one of those.
The full Freelancer list is below;
Listening to your customers is a business truism, it’s so obvious that it really shouldn’t have to be said. Unfortunately all of us have to be reminded of this sometimes.
The amazing thing is today’s business has the tools not just to listen to our customers, but also to react quickly.
At Microsoft’s Asia Pacific Entrepreneur summit this week, we had the opportunity to hear from some of leading voices of the Australian startup and investment community.
One of the things that really leapt out from the array of founders, investors and entrepreneurs is how successful businesses thrive from listening to their customers.
Michelle Deaker spoke of her experience in founding giftcards.com in 1997. At that time there was no experience in running an online gift card business and the only way to figure out what worked was to listen to customers. Eventually Michelle sold out of the business and today talks from the investment side of building enterprises as the CEO of OneVentures.
Viocorp founder Ian Gardiner described how their video streaming business not only has to adapt to customers’ needs but also to a market that has dramatically changed over the last decade.
Moving quickly to respond to those market changes is something Sebastien Eskersley-Maslin of Blue Chilli touched upon in his presentation where startups in their Venture Technology program are encouraged to get a built product out of the door in three months.
“You can’t build quickly enough” says Sebastien.
Sebastian also has a three customer view – there’s the customer that you build the product for, the bulk customer such as a corporation and the “strategic customer” who is the potential buyer for your business.
Considering the business buyer as being the ultimate customer fits into the Silicon Valley model of “flipping” business which isn’t applicable for many ventures although it illustrates that we need to consider customers through the prism of our own business objectives.
That we often don’t listen to customers is unforgivable in an always on, connected world. We have the communications tools like social media and the business intelligence tools to monitor visits to our websites and sales through our stores.
In a world where we’re lionizing technology startups on the basis of the number of users – note “users” are not the same as “customers” – or the amount of money a large corporate will pay for a small development team, it’s important we don’t lose touch with the basis of all businesses.
Ultimately it’s the customers who matter – if we don’t solve a problem, fill a need or provide value then our businesses are ultimately worthless.
While Silicon Valley grabs most of the headlines about cool new businesses Singapore has been quietly building its own position in the global venture capital industry.
SingTel, the city state’s main telco operator, setup their own venture capital fund in 2010 with Singtel Innovate investing between S$100,000 and thirty million in various ventures.
The strategy from SingTel, which is closely aligned with Singapore’s government, is a very canny one – it allows the telco to move beyond being a “dumb pipe” just providing the phone network and fits into the nation state’s aim to be one of the centres in an increasingly Asian centred global finance system.
Yesterday SingTel launched a new Australian startup venture, the Optus Innov8 Seed fund which offers investments of up to A$250,000 in new start up businesses in return for equity or other stakes.
To identify the right investments SingTel are partnering with various start up groups and incubators in Sydney and Melbourne which is an interesting way to filter out unsuitable businesses.
Being funded by a telco, the Optus Innov8 program is naturally focused on the technologies that are going to help their business in an evolving market, the areas they are currently looking at are mobility solutions and digital convergence.
For Singtel and Optus this is a long term investment as equity stakes in new technologies will position the business well as their industry evolves and margins come under pressure in their core telco market.
To businesses looking for investments, the Innov8 program is a welcome addition to the funding landscape but Singtel also offer access to Asian markets with operations in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Edgar Hardless, the CEO of SingTel Innov8 says “if you’re looking at going into the Indian market, we can help with introductions. Same with any of our other markets”.
Those introductions are useful but probably more important is the market intelligence that a partner like SingTel can bring on board. Understanding foreign business conditions is a great advantage for a foreign venture.
Asian markets can be tough, particularly for Australians who have been bought up with a US centric view of the world, but there are plenty of success stories. There is a successful group of entrepreneurs catering to the massive Indonesian market while companies like Dealize have moved their head office to Hong Kong.
Dealize was part of the Pollenizer incubator which is one of Innov8’s partners. At the launch, Phil Morle of Pollenizer pointed out that his business has set up a Singapore office to take advantage of the favorable investment conditions there.
While Innov8’s program is relatively small, it’s a much needed addition to Australia’s start up and venture capital scene and will help some new businesses in the app and mobile space.
Hopefully a few other corporations are looking at SingTel’s lead and thinking how they can tap into these new industries that may disrupt their own.
For Singapore, the city state has always had a number of advantages for the finance industry. By expending into new financing new sectors they are securing their own future in the 21st Century.
“Those guys are successful, they’ve raised half a million from investors,” one startup commentator recently said about a business.
Is raising money the benchmark of business success? Surely getting investors on board is part of the journey, not the destination.
Having some investors coming on board means others share the founders’ belief their idea is a viable business and it’s a great ego boost for those working hard to bring the product to market.
That cash also exponentially improves the survival chances of the business – too many promising ventures fail because the founders haven’t enough capital.
While it’s an important milestone in the growth of a business, raising capital is not the end game. Only minds addled by the Silicon Valley kool-aide believe that.
In fact, if you’ve set up a business because you hated working for a boss, you might find your new investors are the toughest task masters you’ve ever worked for.
Good luck.
