Interesting thoughts from my meeting with Reshma Sohoni and Scott Rafer (1st April 08)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Sorry to have been so long.But here it finally is. It is just a summary of interesting thoughts that came up from this meeting and which might be interesting for anyone who is in the process of bootstrapping a startup. We talked about many things and describing everything would be a bit too long so let’s focus on the essential.
First there is that funny quote about French people saying that because of our French culture we feel like we have to release fully polished products (and therefore we wait too much).
About the concept of commentag he highlighted the fact that our real contribution (ie. our killer feature) was our concept of “Nested Tags”. The fact that when you click on one tag, you get directly the other related tags allowing you to narrow down your selection. This is our real innovation and we should more communicate about that.
Concerning my slides, he said that we should more highlight the market.The number of potential users, converted users.How many users will we be able to reach?That’s the very question. It is first all about how to grab the market, then in second how to turn this market of users into a revenue model.
Funny enough, this is almost contradictory with what we are used to in Europe. We just met Patrick Crasson, responsible of the Startup Essentials program of SUN in Belgium. His very first question was “What is your business model?”. “How will you make money” comes here first and not “how will you gain users”. So in Europe, you first have to focus on your revenues, then on the user experience. While VC in the States would allow you to first focus on the user experience (as long as there is a real market).
Both approaches can be good or bad depending on the business. The very question is in which game should we play? Should we see big and focus on user experience, or should we play safe and focus on a smaller market but on which we will be able to make money quite quickly?
Talking about the future applications of commentag he said “it’s not about a piece of software that could be applied to many different situations. It is all about a distribution channel”. “If you start targeting public content like comments, then you can’t apply your product to manage emails or contacts. Because the distribution is not the same. The former is public whereas the latter is private.
However, you could apply it to different type of public content.So the idea here is to focus on developping a distribution on which a piece of software will be applied. Not the contrary.”
This is a very interesting thought.Because at a first glance we would all think in terms of software (or product) and in its capabilities.At best, we will think in terms of market pain and try to address the issue (what we did), but never we would have thought in terms of distribution.So it is very important to focus on one distribution and then leverage it.
About the current downturn he said that it only gonna hurt companies selling advertises in the range $4 to 20$ cpm (cost per mille). ie. all companis playnig the role of useless intermediaries.However, in the funding stage the situation will probably be more difficult as investors would invest in less projects (which is already the case in Silicon Valley, see doom and gloom hits Silicon Valley).
Thanks again Reshma and Scott. Your advises are like always very helpful and much appreciated.
