Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (8/8)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.



Buy, Sell, Hold? - Yes, You Have Mo' to Think About
You've grown your company. You're making money. What's next? IPO, acquisition, or just keep walking. In this session, hear about the exit strategies that momentum companies have to think about, and plan for, today.

TSX - Ungad Chadda, Vice-President and COO
Thumbplay - Are Traasdahl, CEO & Founder
Microsoft - Marc Brown, Director of Corporate Development
IMVU - Eric Ries, CTO

(no links, sorry, Blogger really needs to improve linking and adding image capabilities...)

The panel agreed the focus should be on building a real business.
They disagree on what does it mean...

Nice quote: "companies do not fail due to lack of technology - they fail due to lack of customers..."

Building a dream-team is the key step in building a real business.

First hires for technical or product driven companies - should be in the marketing area - as you need to generate lead and to make the market ready for your branding and product.
(???)

Executive team of a start up changes with the phases of the company.
The role of the executives changes as well.

The transition from 'traffic' or # of users to monetization is not trivial (duh...).
Partnership with a market leader or a company the complete your value offering is a logic step.

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Done.

It was a long & good fun day...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (7/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.




Ones to Watch


Adify - Larry Braitman, Co-founder and Chairman


Tumri - Hari Menon, CEO


Turn - Jim Barnett


Again - 6 minutes per presenter - too fast for me to Blog about at real time...However -

Turn has an interesting model (as well as a good presentation) to enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell online advertising in an advanced market that automates targeting. Turn eliminates the need for manual targeting and provides bidded CPA, CPC and CPM pricing for graphical and text ads. Through its revolutionary targeting and innovative pricing models, Turn simultaneously delivers amazing simplicity, dramatically better relevance, and maximum revenue for advertisers and publishers.

From Turn site:

• Demo and introduction to the concept
  

• Automatic targeting. Traditional manual targeting is time consuming, frequently ineffective, and not scalable. Turn eliminates the complexity of manual targeting and managing keywords with technology that automatically selects the best graphical or text ads for any placement. By automating the process, Turn can find subtle patterns of performance that manual targeting would otherwise miss and respond much more quickly to changes in performance.
• Blended targeting. Turn uses sophisticated algorithms to blend more than 60 relevance variables rather than just one or two, the common practice of most networks. This is critical because relevance and advertiser performance require targeting beyond just text on the page. Targeting must combine elements of category targeting, audience and user behaviors, and innovative new targeting methods in order to optimize performance.
• Bidded CPA pricing model. Turn has revolutionized the traditional CPA model by utilizing a bidded market. By offering CPA, CPC, and CPM to the advertiser and using effective CPM (eCPM) ranking on behalf of the publisher, Turn aligns the business goals of the advertiser, publisher, and ad network.

Automatic targeting is an interesting approach.
I think it is powerful model, however as it is 'automated', it is based on parameters and assumptions. It would be interesting to learn how flexible and 'self learning' this system really is.


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To be continued...Maybe...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (6/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

What Advertisers Want, What Businesses Need
The online advertising game as we know it is changing. Established players are scrambling to determine methods and metrics - how do widgets and time spents stack up against pageviews and eyeballs? Innovators are moving quickly and land-grabbing on their own. Since many consumer-facing companies depend on advertising for their revenues, and big-budget brand advertisers employ media buyers, the lack of agreed-upon standards could be a big problem. Are shortcomings leaving ad money on the table?


Google - Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics


VideoEgg - Adam Klein, President


Aggregate Knowledge - Paul Martino, CEO


Real Branding - Mark Silva, Principal & Founder


ComScore - Nick Tabbal, Senior Vice President

Still there are too many different definitions and ways to measure activities, effectiveness and other subjective parameters.

One of the logical comment that was (finally) made was that business owners (the ad publishers) are interested to understand how the online activity (and their investment) actually effect their business.
How to provide them with this data and contect (or at least make them comfortable with the data) is still debatable...

"Actional-analytics": the concept of modify the site/service on-the-fly based on activities of the users. Example such as Amazon's "People who bought this also bought these items...", may be the next generation - shorting the time from feedback/data/analysis to action.


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To be continued...Maybe...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (5/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

Thinking Outside the "Bubble"
So you have the Big Mo' - now what? A good company can rest on it's laurels, but the truly great companies are those who strategize to grow, expand, adapt and reach that next level. Momentum companies have to think beyond the bubble of Silicon Valley to Main Street USA and even out to the roads of Ulan Bator. Hear from experts about what it takes be great outside the Silicon Valley bubble.


Hi5 - Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO



Bebo - Xochi Birch, CO-founder & President



Best Buy - Martin Nyman


ThinkLondon - David Riches, Director, North America


Topix - Chris Tolles, CEO


During a long discussion about success and Tipping Points, the following parameters mentioned:

1. Luck
2. Mix of available capabilities allow the company to leverage luck.
3. Industry readiness
4. Market readiness
5. Luck
6. More luck (and then some...)
   

If you know what your user do and need, you can understand what will they need in the future (maybe...) and build something they will want and need in the future. If you are a head of the curve - you may be able to create a tipping point in customer engagement - driving success.

Statistics are very important to be able to measure health of the communities as well as status versus the competition. (It seems every company has a internal numbers and KPI as well as external numbers to through at the PR team...)

Stay relevant (and being paranoid really help).
Embrace change, be agile, be ready to trash things you have and love, based on what your users and future users needs and want.

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To be continued...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (4/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

Partnerships - Relying on the Kindness of Strangers
Small companies pursue big companies for partnerships -- they need credibility, access to markets and channels, and the means to scale. Whether for distribution, marketing, development, monetization strategy, or just leveraging existing APIs, teaming with a giant is the strongest route to building an empire. Learn from those who've negotiated on both sides of the table what it takes to get a deal done and how to make it work for you.


Meebo - Seth Sternberg, CEO


Kayak - Drew Patterson, VP Marketing


Photobucket - Peter Pham, Vice President, Business Development


SAP - Jens Weitzel, Sr. Director, Business Development Global Ecosystem & Partner Group


The discussion provided some (basis for) partnerships examples and points of views:

• Value swap - offer cross traffic, (missing) features, etc.
• Build together - instead of buying technology - work with the technology providers as partners to create the capability, needed by both.
• Have a mentality of "everyone is not a competitor" - build honest relationship early on with other companies - including other start ups. Find areas where others may have better value proposition (tools, experiences) to your users and work with them.
• Partner with companies that 'will be around' in the future.
• People - integrity, trust and personal connection is important - as you will work with these people closely. Do not partner with someone you do not feel comfortable closing a deal with a handshake (as a first step...).

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To be continued...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (3/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

Ones to Watch


Leverage Software - Mike Walsh, CEO and co-founder



Moola.com - Arlen Ritchie, President and CEO



mShopper - David Gould, CEO



Multiply - David Hersh, VP of Business Development

6 minutes per presenter - too fast for me to Blog about at real time...
Interesting...
I may have another look into it later on.
Especially on Multiply. As the feedback from the panel clearly showed that they miss the value proposition of Multiply, except Martin Nyman (Best Buy) - who made some comments about multi-generation challenges.

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To be continued...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (2/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

Freelancer/author Sarah Lacy chats with Tina Sharkey, Chairman, Babycenter.com

• Communities are about looking for solutions for needs (current, long term), sharing interests and about human connection.
• The audience is growing and change all the time - do not expect to have a winning formula that could last long...
• Find out where your audience live and serve them there - eMails, online, RSS, newsletter, etc... Fine tune the messages based on 1-to-1 marketing concepts.
  
• Be true to your core.
• Statistics: 8M unique users in 10 counties. Revenue from eCommerce (larger) and media business (profitable).
• The company is part of Jonson & Jonson. It was bought from eToys when eToys declared bankruptcy in 2001.

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Imeem - Steve Jang, VP, Marketing and Business Development
Sugar Publishing - Brian Sugar, Founder, Publisher and CEO
Slide - Keith Rabois, VP, Business Development
Babycenter.com - Tina Sharkey, SVP Instant Messaging & Social Media
RockYou - Ro Choy, Vice President of Business Development

• In a discussion on users loyalty - both Slide and RockYou agreed (and it did not happen a lot) that the main challenge was to get the 'first time' users, as users are not switching to much after they invested in creating content and learning a system.
• It is important to know the demographics of your service - as advertiser require depends on it.
• People are going where other people (friends) are. The features are secondary.
• The debate between reach or niche went on... It was claimed that "viral engagement" allows you to go for a wide reach, while building engagement with focusing on niche (using a dedicated application). FaceBook was mentioned many times as the platform allow you to achieve this.

Overall - after over an hour of 'buzzwords exchange' it seems everyone are still looking for ways to put some logic into their success as well as define the next steps and trends.

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To be continued...


E.T.

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Notes from Momentum Growth Conference (1/...)

Notes from Momentum Growth Conference.

How I Got Mo' - Momentum Company of the Year
Ellen McGirt / Paul English (Co-Founder & CTO of KAYAK).

• Building a service around technology and most important - customer service.
• A team of 30 engineers and 9 Biz are supporting 20M transactions per month.
• Every inquiry is answered by a person.
• The development policy is that a developer can develop a new feature only when there are no open issues with the the current features/codes this developer is responsible for.
• Spending a lot of time on usability testing - as the technology is allowing to modify the experience very rapidly and cheaply.
  
• Facebook is a great social platform which brings a lot of value and power to small companies to start with.
• Ways to create customers momentum - Google ads, affiliate programs, word of mouth.

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Business Models That Drive Momentum
Find a high-paying job. Find a telephone listing (for free). Make a coffee table quality book yourself. The internet has enabled a number of niche businesses to flourish quickly. These momentum companies have found a need and are serving it well. What were their secrets of success and how do they plan to keep the momentum?

Blurb - Robin Goldberg, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
TheLadders.com - Robert Turtledove, CMO
Gaia Online - Craig Sherman, CEO
Jingle Networks - Lyn Chitow Oakes, SVP Marketing

• Great businesses are based on passion and on personal pain...
• Business models emerge from feedbacks and conversation with the user's community. The users will let you know what they need and for what they are willing to pay for it.
  
• When a business offers a great service and provide proofs, the users are willing to use and pay part of the service - marked as 'premium'.
• Raising capital has to based the market, real needs and expectations , shared by the founder and the investors.

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To be continued...


E.T.

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