Author: Drew Neisser

Behind Fusion-io’s Crappy Code Games

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Interview with Trip Hunter & Mat Young, Co-Marketing Directors for Fusion-io in Europe about a new promotion called the Crappy Code Games which I will be writing about on FastCompany.com.

When do the games begin?
TH: The Crappy Code Games will launch in the UK, and take place over three events in March and April. The first event is at Revolution, a modern nightclub/bar in Manchester on the 17th of March. The second event is at Revolution in London, on March 31st, and the third event, which doubles as the Grand Finale, will take place in Brighton on April 7th, on the first night of SQL8, which is the largest SQL community event held in the UK, and be hosted by Apple co-founder and Fusion-io Chief Scientist Steve Wozniak.

What is the idea behind the Crappy Code Games?
TH: The Crappy Code Games highlight the problem that most SQL programmers are constantly experiencing in the workplace, and demonstrates the performance and efficiency gains of Fusion-io Memory.  Badly written SQL code can really stink up an enterprise database, resulting in poor performance, increased resource allocation and ultimately system breakdown. But cleaning up crappy code hasn’t always been easy. It can mean hundreds if not thousands of man hours spent rewriting inefficient code to conform to best practices. Until now. Fusion ioMemory is so powerful, that it actually flushes away crappy code.

Where did this idea come from?
TH: Crappy Code is not a term that Fusion-io made up. If you do a Google search on Crappy SQL code, you will see that this is language that the community understands and uses to quantify this problem. We are just using this insight to engage our audience in a more entertaining way. Crappy code is the problem. Fusion is the solution, but if we talk about how great our solution is it is just marketing, and no one will pay attention. By engaging our audience through the problem, we can show people how our solution works, which is much more fun, engaging and effective.

How are you measuring success?
TH: On a number of different levels; PR impressions is certainly one, as is event attendance, which we are hoping will be around 125 SQL coders for each event, and 300 for our final event at SQL8 in Brighton. We will also be conducting pre and post interviews at each event which should gauge how well Fusion is telling their story, and how compelling it is to our audience. We also have a robust social media program, so success will also be judged by the number of followers and level of engagement we can drive through social media efforts.

Why do you think your target will respond to this promo?
TH: Because the Crappy Code Games, despite its name, actually celebrates great coding. In order to win these challenges, you have to be really good at what you do. This is a very competitive community. Every SQL coder in the UK will want to prove to their peers that they are the best. The Crappy Code Games is the perfect platform to do this. Not to mention that there are some really great prizes that you can win, like developer laptops, win-mo phones, X-box 360’s, and more.

How are American tech companies perceived in Europe?
MY: In general American tech companies and their products are very well received over here in both the UK and wider EMEA. From my personal history there is quite a good amount of UK folks that go and work for US tech companies at their HQ in product development and that can further reinforce that bridge.

Why are you starting this promo in the UK?
MY: What I find interesting is that in general the UK and Germany tend to be early adopters of new technology, especially if it makes a radical change to the value the business derives from it. That’s not to say there aren’t innovators in every European country but the others in general terms tend to wait until there are a number of good cases studies, at that point they move quickly to adopt.

Why do you think the Crappy Code Games will cut through in the UK?
MY: In the UK market there a number of major players with large budgets that dominate pretty much all traditional marketing approaches but to my mind with limited real engagement. What we are trying to do is engage in a slightly humorous way, educate and then let the prospects decide (we know how good our products are and believe in them).  Also, the technical heart of Crappy Code Games is based around some very real performance issues.

What does the fact that you are running a Crappy Code promo say about Fusion-io?
TH: It says that Fusion understands the day-to-day challenges and issues facing our customers. It also says that while our solutions are completely serious, we as a company like to have a little bit of fun.

Do you see a risk in this approach?
TH: I’d be foolish if I said no, but if we weren’t taking calculated risks, we just be one more boring,  invisible marketing program. As we see it, risk is proportional to reward. So obviously, we believe that the potential reward is greater than the potential risk.

What are you really selling?
TH: Fusion-io sells a family of NAND flash-based ioMemory technologies that offers an entirely new building block for data center applications. Containing 100 times the density of RAM, ioMemory overcomes the physical and thermal limitations of the medium and provides near limitless amounts of fully scalable memory for accelerating throughput, driving higher performance density and efficiency in applications server platforms.

What problem(s) does your product solve for your target?
TH: Fusion ioMemory reduces latency so markedly that CPU’s can be used more efficiently, enabling our customers to do far more with far less than they could with other storage technology solutions.  In a recent survey of 274 Fusion customers, 95% said they bought us for performance gains, and 75% of them experienced performance improvement of 3-10x over what they had prior to deploying Fusion.

8 Tips on Loving Your Start-Up

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Job satisfaction need not be fleeting for entrepreneurs especially if they follow these 8 tips gleaned from an interview with ZogSports founder, Robert Herzog.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Robert Herzog founded ZogSports a few months after watching an airplane crash into what was his office on the 96th floor of the World Trade Center tower.  Eight years later, after growing his company from one sport to a dozen, from five hundred participants on 29 teams to sixty thousand on 4,000 teams in three markets, Herzog happily admits that, “I love what I do everyday.”  How Herzog has been able to sustain his initial enthusiasm is both instructive and inspiring, revealing 8 tips for just about any entrepreneur who actually wants to enjoy the journey.

1. Pursue your Passions

Duh, right?  After all, why would you go to the trouble of starting a business if you didn’t love the idea?  [Pause here if you’re in it for the money.]   With passion comes insight and hopefully an unmet need.  In Herzog’s case, the insight came after meeting his wife playing co-ed softball.  “I played in all these other recreational sports leagues and while I had fun with the sports aspect of it, they provided terrible customer service,” explained Herzog.  Knowing he could do better, he added “I wanted to create what I wished had existed when I was single.”

2. Make sure its Meaningful

This is one of the lofty notions that sounds good at the beginning but can be tough to sustain once an organization matures.  Recognizing a growing interest in altruism, Herzog made charity the third pillar of ZogSports along with the sports and social aspects of the service.  Herzog is understandably proud that the organization has helped raise one million for charity thus far but takes just as much joy from the sports and social aspects.  “I organize other people’s fun for a living,” explained Herzog, offering a broader perspective on what can make a job meaningful.

3. Hire the Happy

While most entrepreneurs will tell you the importance of building a team of different personalities and skill sets, few will call serious attention to the attitudes of these hires.  “When I hire people, I ask a whole series of questions about how much fun they are,” explained Herzog.  “We don’t hire people who are really uptight,” added Herzog, who considers himself the most uptight of the bunch.   “When I started Zog, I wanted to create a workplace that was fun, open and collaborative,” noted Herzog, who I witnessed greet a random team captain with outright exuberance.

4. Prepare yourself Properly

The serial entrepreneur is often content to get his/her idea off the ground and then move on, requiring a modest amount of prior experience.  Herzog, on the other hand, brought a wide range of experience to his new company, enabling him to adapt to the changing nature of his job.  “I feel like having a whole bunch of different jobs before this was incredibly helpful,” insisted Herzog.  Having been both a management and operations consultant and executive at several start-ups, Herzog “was about making things better,” which also ensured he was unlikely to get bored as the company grew.

5. Forget about Funding

Spend time with entrepreneurs and inevitably the conversation drifts back to finding VC funding.  And while not every entrepreneur is in a position to bootstrap his or her idea, don’t assume that outside funding equates to job satisfaction.  Self-funded from the start, Herzog has not sought outside investors.  Explained Herzog, “I have found that my job is so much easier because I don’t have anybody else’s money in here telling me how fast we should grow.”  Also relating this independence to his high job satisfaction, Herzog offered emphatically, “I don’t ever want to work for anybody else again!”

6. Emphasize the Experience

A lot of start-ups narrowly define their offering to the product or service at hand and in doing so miss the larger opportunity.  In the case of ZogSports, Herzog is quick to note that their business transcends sports.  “Our goal is to be the highlight of a ‘zoggers’ week,” and to do that explained Herzog means that every customer interaction from registration to the games to the post-game happy hours needs “to be overwhelmingly positive and fun.”  The end of result of this emphasis on experience is that 80-85% of the new zoggers come from positive referrals, keeping marketing costs down and CEO smiles up.

7. Live your Life

While working long hours is hard to avoid at the start-up stage, entrepreneurs who continue at this pace year after year are unlikely to say, “I love my job.”  Although Herzog admits to having worked 80-90 hours a week initially, he has avoided over-extending himself and the business since then.  “I never wanted to work that much and completely sacrifice every other aspect of my life,” explained Herzog.  A father of two, Herzog also derives helpful instruction from his family time.  Admiring his son’s

ability to be happy 24/7, Herzog explained, “I look at him and say, wow that’s just amazing, why should I dwell on this thing that’s bothering me?”

8. Grow your Goals

Like sharks, entrepreneurs have to keep moving, challenging themselves and their employees to do better.  The gleeful Herzog is no different here.  “I see my enjoyment in my job being tied to being able to grow the business and provide my staff new and exciting opportunities,” he added.  As such, Herzog is investing in new systems that will make it easier to offer a standardized experience from game to game, sport to sport and market to market.  With these systems in place, Herzog hopes to be able to expand to 15-20 markets in the next five years, a growth pace that will be hard not to love.

Final Note:

Given that he is in the business of providing “an escape from people’s daily lives,” it is little wonder that Herzog puts a premium on having a well-balanced life himself.  He also is well aware that his situation is not the norm nor easy to maintain, “I couldn’t think of a better job for me but if I didn’t have to work hard at it, I might not appreciate it.”

[Robert Herzog, Founder of ZogSports]

4 Questions 4 Every Entrepreneur

Posted on by Drew Neisser

After three years of refining BookDirectTM, a hotel reservation search engine used by DMO’s (Destination Marketing Organizations), Andrew Van Luchene knew his little company, JackRabbit Systems, had reached the moment of truth. In early 2010, The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the largest and most visible DMOs in the country, was suddenly interested in BookDirect.  If JackRabbit could land this business, success was virtually assured. In this case, what happens in Vegas would be heard not just around the country, but also around the world.

Van Luchene did win the Las Vegas DMO and went on to double sales in 2010.  He also expects to triple to quadruple sales in 2011 given the company’s current momentum.  Born during one of the worst travel slumps in decades and self-funded, JackRabbit is by no means an overnight success story.  Its success is the story of perseverance and experience, yielding in the process five questions every entrepreneur should ask themselves before they land their make or break account.

Have you worked out the product kinks?

While every small company dreams of winning the marquee client early on, the truth is that winning it too early can overwhelm a product or service that has not been sufficiently tested from multiple aspects.  In the case of Book Direct, Van Luchene and his team had first created the reservation service as a project for the Santa Fe Convention and Visitors Bureau, where his company is based.  Noted Van Luchene, “We were just solving it for Santa Fe with the hopes that if we could do it in one tourist-based market that it would work in others.”

But the initial solution according to Van Luchene was not quite right, “I initially put up a Travelocity white label service. We had 30,000 people use it in a month and we only sold $12,000 worth of rooms so I knew something was wrong.”  Eighteen months later, “we figured out consumers were going to the city site because they didn’t want to book with a middle man but rather directly with the hotel,” an insight that led to critical changes to the service itself.  Noted a delighted Van Luchene, “the problem that we solved for Santa Fe just happened to be a problem that resonates pretty much everywhere in the world.”

Is your revenue model right?

When starting a new company in an existing industry, the temptation is to seek revenue in the conventional fashion.  This was certainly the case with JackRabbit’s BookDirect system.  Aggregating availability and pricing data from local hotels, BookDirect initially charged on a cost-per-click basis for leads passed to participating hotels.  This approach initially seemed acceptable to the DMO’s since it limited it their upfront investment and distributed the costs to the hotels that received the most benefit.  But when tourism dropped off with the economic downturn, that approach left JackRabbit quite vulnerable.

Noted Van Luchene, “it was very painful and we had a year of reinventing our business.”  Rather than charge each hotel by reservation lead, Book Direct began leasing its reservation search engine directly to the DMO’s.  Explained Van Luchene, “now we had a great business because government tourism departments pay for the software and we list all of the hotels, who now get a huge benefit at no cost,” this in turn justifies the existence of the DMO and the membership fees they typically charge each hotel.  This new model also gave BookDirect a competitive advantage since the DMO was far more inclined to promote the service.

Are you focused more on the sizzle than the steak?

After tasting a little success, many entrepreneurs turn on the marketing hype, sometimes at the expense of their core product.  This is definitely not the case for JackRabbit Systems, whose website is a modest effort at best and marketing is a blank on the org chart.  “We’re like the shoemaker’s son who doesn’t get to wear shoes; we put all our time into making our client sites work well and look beautiful,” noted a somewhat chagrined Van Luchene.

Van Luchene went on to explain that his particular service is dependent on sales people who use their client sites, not his site to showcase the company.  “What they need from me is to put my reputation on the line by delivering a product that works,” offered Van Luchene.  He also noted that given the small size of his industry where “[the DMOs] all know and listen to each other, making my current customers happy is the best selling I can do.”

Is your organization scalable?

One of the biggest tests for entrepreneurs facing rapid growth is scalability across the organization.  After several years of preparation, Van Luchene’s team at JackRabbit was indeed ready to scale.  First, having tested the product with several DMO’s, they had already gone through the process of integrating 114 unique hotel reservation systems.  This meant that the Book Direct could be up and running for Las Vegas in under two months and add other markets with equal rapidity.

From a staffing perspective, JackRabbit relies on a virtual organizational structure with only half of the full-time employees actually working at the Santa Fe headquarters. “Everybody else is distributed all over the country since I can’t necessarily find all the programming talent in Santa Fe to do this,” explained Van Luchene.  Having learned to manage far-flung staff including a sales force that is essentially outsourced to local market media reps, JackRabbit expects to scale without the usual management and technology hiccups, growing from 6 percent to 25-30 percent share of market in the next 12-24 months.

Final Note: Not one to rest on his laurels, Van Luchene knows exactly what’s next for his company, readying a mobile solution that will allow visitors to survey their options and then complete the booking on a call directly with the hotel, a surprisingly simple solution that consumers are likely to embrace and one leaving little question about the future success of JackRabbit. This article first appeared on FastCompany.com

How To Build an Effective Social Media Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Given the rapidly changing nature of social media, it is not surprising that most marketers treated their 2010 activities like straw houses, unsophisticated structures with little hope of surviving much less gaining traction with consumers. Aghast at the resources consumed with limited impact, marketers are now seeking a more sophisticated if not durable approach. To address this challenge, here is Renegade’s Social Media Success Pyramid (see detailed illustration here), with guidance on how to build an effective and enduring program brick by brick. (Note 1: This article appeared on MediaPost early this week so you can stop here if you read that. Note 2: This is a topline overview with details on each section to be added soon enough.)

Establish your Foundation
Having a solid foundation that includes these five essential planning elements doesn’t guarantee success but it sure as heck increases the odds:

  • Audit: A comprehensive review of competitive activity, best practices, internal risk tolerance and input from all possible stakeholders. In addition to gathering critical data, the audit serves to engage management and foster cross-departmental consensus, both of which are essential to long-term success.
  • Brand voice: In all likelihood, your interns should not be the voice of your brand. Defining your brand voice takes the same strategic discipline as any other marketing effort and should result in not just identifying who can represent the brand but also establishing a clear and differentiated point-of-view.
  • Resources: Despite rumors to the contrary, social media is not free. It consumes mass quantities of time for listening, responding, creating, monitoring and reporting. Resources, whether internal and or external, need to be dedicated. Ideally these resources have experience getting things done across all the departments social can and does touch.
  • Product News: The old adage, “nothing kills a bad product faster than a great ad campaign” applies doubly to social media. If your product or service is not as good as it could be, either fix this first or make this the goal of your social activities. If your product is already highly competitive, then it will be still worth bringing something new to the party since social thrives around news.
  • Road Map: With all these other building blocks in place, you can now prepare a clear road map, defining overall social media goals, setting priorities by channel and establishing key performance indices. A good road map should also include test elements as well as potential risks along with a roll-out schedule for selected tactics.

Create the Blueprint
With the foundation in place, we move closer to execution by creating a strong blueprint including these four critical steps:

  • Design: Whether you are a billion dollar brand or an ambitious start-up, design never stops mattering. Even if it’s “just a Facebook page,” look for an aesthetic that is consistent, engaging and clearly your own.
  • Keyword Research: With the search engines now tracking Facebook and Twitter, the link between SEO performance and social activity is growing stronger by the day. Make sure you know the keywords that matter.
  • Editorial Calendar: Based on your keyword research, map out an “editorial calendar” that defines what content needs to be created, who will create it, where it will run first and how it will be amplified via social channels.
  • Disaster Plan: Since the fit just might hit the shan when you least expect it, do yourself a favor and outline a few what if scenarios and potential responses. Even if nothing bad ever happens, you’ll sleep a lot better.

Gather your Materials

Moving up the pyramid, its time to gather all your materials and execute with earnest.  In the process, you’ll want to focus on these three areas:

  • Analytics: With so many free and paid measurement tools available, measuring what matters is easier said than done.  You’ll need to work with pros to figure out what’s right for your situation.
  • Content: The center building block of a strong social program, content is indeed king.  Make sure your content is engaging, enlightening and or entertaining, representing your brand in all its glory.
  • Channels & Hub: Since context goes hand in hand with content, choose your channels carefully based on your target and the quality of your content.  Also, to optimize the SEO potential, archive your social content, especially Facebook and Twitter feeds on a “hub” within your website.

Measure your Progress

Since the goal of any business is to acquire and retain customers, to be taken seriously, social media must play a role in both of these areas.  Thus the penultimate building blocks of a successful social program are the following:

  • SEO Improvements: With the right content in the right places being shared by the right people, a comprehensive social program will yield improved SEO results over time as long as you remember to set benchmarks at the start.
  • Leads & Referrals:  While listening can yield leads and referrals can occur naturally, integrating social content into your CRM program will significantly enhance overall impact.  

Reap the Rewards

Ascending the social media pyramid is not an easy affair but it is certainly worth the trip.  Hard-earned consumer trust will be rewarded with increased loyalty, stronger word-of-mouth, higher value per customer, lower cost per acquisition and even lower churn rates.  You may even start measuring CPE or cost per engagement, given the relatively low cost of engaging fans once acquired on Facebook and Twitter.   Knowing that the original pyramids weren’t built in a day but have lasted 4,000 years, think about your social program as a permanent part of your go to market strategy and enjoy the view from the top.

Social Media Success Pyramid

View more presentations from Renegade.

Are You Sure You Want to be an Entrepreneur?

Posted on by Drew Neisser

On the orders of Spain’s Queen Isabella to bring back riches, Christopher Columbus set out for uncharted waters in 1492. While discovering vast new lands assured his place in posterity, Columbus’s real triumph was uncovering vast beds of oyster pearls off the coast of Venezuela, a rare natural gem that the queen coveted beyond all else. The “pearl rush” that Columbus started way back when is not unlike the rush to entrepreneurship underway today, a surprising outcome in a challenging time.

And more to the point, the beloved pearl provides a lustrous metaphor for the joys and pressures of entrepreneurship, something I’ve discovered personally and as a result of recent interviews with the founders of four start-ups. Though each of the entrepreneurs I interviewed offered pearls of wisdom worthy of an entire article, this provides a deeper dive into the collective mindset of entrepreneurs, especially the type of founder that is prepared to bootstrap their company from inception to market introduction.

It takes an irritant to get started

OpenInvoWhile the proverbial “grain of sand” is a myth according to Wikipedia, it does take “an irritating microscopic object [to become] trapped within the mollusk’s mantle folds” for a pearl to get started. For entrepreneurs, the irritant can be as simple as personality type. According to Emily Lutzker, the founder of OpenInvo, an innovative resource for idea generators, “I only had one ‘real job’ once and was told I was disruptive in the workplace,” thus necessitating her entrepreneurial journey.

BennuSometimes the irritant hits the founder personally. Ashok Kamal, founder of Bennu, explained that, “like any good business, the idea behind Bennu was born out of a problem–the obscene amount of garbage being dumped into landfills.” Jeff Stier, got the idea for the voice tagging utility called Blurts after a voice message from his daughter was annoyingly and irretrievably deleted. And Jesse Middleton, founder of GetMinders, a service that reminds people when to take their medicines, got the idea when thinking about his grandfather who has Parkinson’s and the toll it was taking on him and his family.

Growth usually requires outside help

It was the rarity of natural pearls that made Columbus’s discovery so important in the 15th Century. Today, more than 99% of the pearls sold are the result of human intervention through a 20th Century process known as cultivation. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs are almost always dependent on the help of outside resources, both in terms of capital and expertise. What is surprising is how many boot-strappers find those resources close to home from friends and family. Noted a grateful Lutzker, “I didn’t ask for money, [friends and family] volunteered.”

GetMindersOutside help also comes in the form of advisers who can add layers of experience. Offered Bennu’s Kamal “You can avoid a lot of unnecessary mistakes by establishing an advisory board from the outset.” “It’s easy to neglect this task in favor of immediate concerns but once we recruited seasoned and candid advisers, Bennu become much more efficient and productive,” added Kamal. In Jesse Middleton’s case the critical advice was more home grown, as his “wife gave [him] a kick in the ass to really get the ball rolling!”

Success has its own measurement scale

As long-time leaders in the pearl trade and the first to patent a cultivation process, the Japanese also established the unique weight measurement scale for pearls known as momme. For modern day entrepreneurs, measures of success tend toward the benevolent, hoping that their products and services make the world a better place. Explained Lutzker, “I’m a bit of an idealist and I want to live in a world that fosters and rewards things that make us human and celebrates our differences.” Added Middleton, “getting our product in the hands of millions that need to remember to take their medicines would be pretty amazing for us.”

BlurtsMany entrepreneurs share the ability to see beyond the making of their first “pearl,” measuring success in terms of helping others grow their own. Offered Kamal, “I hope the business will outgrow its founders so at that point, personal success would mean being in a position to help aspiring entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.” Similarly, Middleton noted, “I’d like make it to a point where I can invest in other’s ideas that can make the world a better place.” Added Lutzker, laced with the irony that bedevils boot-strappers, “I’d like to think that success is still a starting point, not only a result.”

You still have to beat the odds

Naturally occurring pearls of a decent size are literally one in million. Columbus and Co had to harvest hundreds upon hundreds of oysters in the West Indies just to find a single pearl worthy of their faire queen. So it is with start-ups, hundreds are conceived while few achieve notable success. Beating these odds takes an indomitable spirit. Explained Stier, “if you’re not passionate and pigheaded about what you believe in even when everyone is a naysayer, you’ll never get it done.”

Kamal took this a step further, suggesting that entrepreneurs needed to be more than thick-shelled, “I’d subject the [would be entrepreneur] to a psychological exam to ensure that they are just crazy enough to start business.” Acknowledging the ups and downs, comes with the territory. Noted a cash-challenged Stier, “the depressing moments have to be outweighed by the moments of joy, like knowing we’ve birthed something from our mind that other people are talking about.” Concluded an undaunted Lutzker, “Yeah, sure I knew it would be hard–when are worthwhile things not hard?”

Final Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I became a bit of a pearl diver myself when I agreed to help Jeff Stier with the launch of Blurts.com. For you angel investors out there, I’ve recorded this Blurts for you Click on the following links for the complete interviews with Lutzker, Kamal, Middleton, and Stier.

The Ups and Downs of Being an Entrepreneur

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Why did you want to be an entrepreneur in the first place?
My career started in a creative corporate environment, the advertising world.  But  the idea of someone monitoring and curating my ideas didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to run with my ideas and figure out for myself if they were good or bad; not have someone else tell me.

Where did the idea for Blurts first come from?
I was working hard at a major ad agency and not seeing my kids a lot.  They kept leaving voice mail messages for me, and I kept saving the ones I thought were really special like: “Daddy, I know you couldn’t be here but I scored my first goal today.” One day I went to play one of my favorite saved messages for my wife but it was gone, eaten by the voicemail devils.   Losing that voicemail stabbed my heart emotionally much like losing the only picture I owned of my beloved dog growing up. At the moment of that loss I realized that under the right circumstances and as told by the right person—- a voice mail or a voice memory, or a blurt— was as important a media for saving and sharing memories  as text, photo or video.

What does it really take to be an entrepreneur?
The three P’s:  passion, persistence and patience.

Did you have any major pivots?
I’ve evolved the business model at least three times in response to market direction and consumer behavioral shirts.  Because I was at JWT I was as the forefront of the convergence of brand story telling and user generated content. I thought to myself what better way for brands to encourage consumers to be part of the online conversation then by suing their voices.  By letting them literally be heard.  This was a major moment for us.  Also the concurrent rise of mobile and social media which has created an online environment in which millions of people want to share everything including their voice and opinions.

Talk to me about the challenges of raising that first round of money
The first round was the easiest in many ways. It was an emotional appeal to friends and family. They were mostly older and I said you’re at an age when you’re starting to look back and understand what your life story and history was. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily tell that story in your own voice and have it preserved for generations to listen to?  That struck a cord.

Give me a sense of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur
Not everyone has the immediate emotional connection with Blurts that I want them to because Blurts is my baby.  I hate when they give me a blank stare which means they just don’t get it.   This happens all the time in money raising to. Every high net worth individual, VC or angel has their own point of view.  Sometime I’ll have a meeting one day and the potential investor rails on the model for X reason.  The next day in a different meeting a different potential investor LOVES X.  This drives me crazy.  Can everyone please just make up their minds and get on the same page?!

Is there a moment as an entrepreneur, where you say “What am I doing?”
I have a moment like that almost every day. To keep going forward those moments have to be balanced by moments of exultation which we are lucky to have our share of.  For example, a couple of weeks ago the  #1 video news site in France ran a two minute story on Blurts.  They get 19mm unique monthly viewers in the US and over 50 mm globally. When we saw that we were like “wow!, we’ve birthed something, from scratch that people are talking about. Without those moments I think many entrepreneurs would be jumping off cliffs.

There’s a lot of angst. A lot of time, effort and thinking invested into the business.  There are people you inevitably disappoint along the way and you try to limit those. But no matter what happens you have to stubbornly stick to the vision because if you didn’t have stubborn visionaries you would never get past the naysayers and the bumps along the way.  I have to say that life during a company’s early growth is not the most pleasant or healthiest  way to live.

Did you have any epiphanies along the way?

I remember the CEO [Note to reader: that would be me] of our agency  walking into the room one day after we had been through meeting after meeting and  he said, “it’s not easy making something simple.” If you’re going to build a utility like blurts make it stupid simple.  In the end we did that.  We spent a lot of time and effort that I wouldn’t take that back for anything in the world. Because everyone talks about how easy it is to use  blurts to infuse passion and nuance into flat unemotional tweets. photos, texts, emails and more.

What’s next?
We’re at a tipping point:  great reviews, fantastic and expanding partner base, and  growing usage.  We’re looking for the next level of financial partners. Strategics who not only bring money but also experience, relationships and a passion for disruption and change.  Partners who share our vision for building a global open mike and soapbox that makes it easy for everyone to be heard in the social sphere…with the texture, tone and authenticity of their own voice.