Archive for October, 2005

$1500 referral reward for Utah software engineering job

paulballen — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:10:41 -0700

Robert Merrill, a Utah technical recruiter, is offering a $1500 reward
for the person who helps one of his clients hire the right SQL
engineer. He is using H3.com, a site that is getting a ton of press
lately, to manage the referrals and referral fee payments.

When I signed up at H3.com the following message was generated which I
am supposed to email to friends who qualify for the SQL engineer
position:

Hi -

I recently heard from a friend who asked me to help them fill a job
vacancy, SOS Technical is looking for A Senior SQL Server
Engineer/Architect to be based in Orem, Utah County, Utah.

As part of this search, they are working with a new Internet company,
H3.com. Through H3.com a $1,500 reward is being offered which will be
shared equally among the people who help locate a successfully hired
candidate.

Can you please take a moment to think about the following questions?

1) Do you know a good candidate for this position?

2) Do you know anybody who might know of a good candidate for this
position? (This way you can still earn a share of the reward!)

3) Would you be interested in this position?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, click on the link
below to view the job description and to register with H3.com:

https://www.h3.com?r=Uru0oS6bgW-iIlj5dNqkS7zWuJQ (link from Paul Allen)

Thanks for your help! Wouldn't it be great if someone we know got their dream job and we got to share the reward money!

Regards,
Paul Allen

Josh Coates: Disruptive Entrepreneur Speaks

paulballen — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:15:52 -0700

If you are in Utah Thursday, you have to pay $10 to hear Silicon Valley transplant Josh Coates speak about how to start a company
and raise money. He is an incredible technologist with a disruptive
business model and he knows how to raise capital. He likes to challenge
the way the Utah angel and VC community fund startups. Josh likes the
Silicon Valley way. The event will be at Los Hermanos in Lindon at 3:30
pm. Don't miss this.

Google Stock Price Soars

paulballen — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 07:56:50 -0700

Google's stock price is soaring today.
Google had $1.58 billion in revenue last quarter, exceeding
expectations. The market cap is approaching $100 billion. Microsoft's
is $265 billion. The gap continues to narrow.

I just finished reading the excellent book "The Search" by John Batelle
(co-founder of Wired Magazine and founder of the Industry Standard.) He
has excellent insights on why search is so important, why Google is
winning, and what the next generation of search might entail. He cites
a leading technologist who says we are only 5% of the way there with
our present search technology. There is so much more to do in this
field.

I had an idea this past week for a post-Google search engine. I
actually think Google has an achilles heel in the long run, a weakness
that stems from the way their algorithm is based on pure online
democracy (which is not a good thing), where every page can vote with
its links for what is relevant. Everyone in the SEO industry is gaming
Google, and the results are becoming less and less relevant. For many
terms it is ridiculous. I have an idea for a more "representative
republic" type of search engine.

Netflix: subscription marketing machine

paulballen — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:29:21 -0700

A nice article by Motley
Fool talks about how Netflix lowered prices in the past year to stave
off competition from Walmart and Blockbuster. They will reach 4 million
subs by the end of this year and project more than 5.5 million by the
end of next year. Next year they will generate almost $1 billion in
revenue. Impressive.

Netflix has one of the best online marketing machines out there. They
are everywhere. Entrepreneurs and students of internet marketing would
do well to study all the ways Netflix markets their services.

The one month free trial offered on their home page is great.

They promote that offer everywhere.

Natural Search. They have almost 600,000 pages indexed by Google. Blockbuster has only 55,000.
Search Rankings. They rank #1 on Google for "dvd rental" and which gets more than 1,000,000 searches per month in the U.S. They are also #1 on Yahoo for "dvd rental". They are #2 on Google for "movie rentals" just behind Blockbuster.
Affiliate Marketing. Last year they switched from BeFree to LinkShare, a high end affiliate marketing network. They pay quite well and have many affiliates.
Pay Per Click. They are outbidding Blockbuster (as of right now)
on "movie rentals" and many other terms on both Google and Yahoo. Googspy shows them bidding on many keywords (although the Googspy list only shows a tiny fraction of what people are really bidding on.)
Social Networking. Last year they introduced Netflix Friends. Haven't heard how well it is working.
Online advertising (banners and rich media). Netflix had the 4th largest budget for online advertising in both August and July.
Email list size. I haven't found this yet, but I'm guessing that
millions have signed up for their free trial offer and that their list
is probably much, much larger than their subscriber base.

Here is the management discussion of their business from a recent 10-Q.
And here is an interesting block called Hacking Netflix that contains tons of news and info about the company.

The Importance of Writing Ideas Down

paulballen — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:10:11 -0700

I like the story of Johnny Appleseed. Sometimes I feel a bit like him,
planting seeds (starting companies) and watching them grow.

As I told a good and wealthy friend yesterday, I think I will be
tempted in the future, if my harvest ever comes, to stop doing startup
companies myself, but instead, to just teach and write and blog about
all the ideas that I think should happen.

I currently have a list of about 50 ideas that I believe could turn
into viable companies. I often wake up in the middle of the night (Brock Blake calls this "The Curse") with a new idea, or first thing in the morning a new thought will strike me.

There is no way that I'll ever be able to do them all. It might be best
to just scatter the seeds for these ideas as widely as possible in
hopes that they will find good soil somewhere and grow. We'll see.

I used to carry 3x5 index cards around with me so that I could capture
new ideas whenever they struck. Now I use my Blackberry memo feature. I
have several memos marked "Ideas" that each contain many of my best
ideas. I always write down the date and the idea.

The amazing thing to me is how short my memory is. When I occasionally
review my idea memos, I often come across great ideas that I have already forgotten about. I think, "Wow, that is a great idea!", as if it were a completely new thought!

Writing down great ideas makes them permanent ("the faintest pencil is
keener than the sharpest mind") and if you think good ideas come from a
Higher Intelligence than your own and you value them enough to write
them down and act on them, from my experience, you'll find that it
leads to having more of them.

Joseph Smith, Jr., born 200 years ago this December, said this about inspiration:

"A person may profit by noticing the
first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you
feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes
of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same
day or soon;

FundingUtah: Speed pitching for Entrepreneurs

paulballen — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:54:17 -0700

Under the leadership of new CEO Brock Blake, FundingUtah.com is hosting its first ever speed pitching event
for angel investors and entrepreneurs. The event will be held in Provo
at the Marriott hotel. It will be limited to 50 angel investors and 10
entrepreneurs.

This event shows how FundingUniverse.com will become more than just an online matching service for angel investors and entrepreneurs. The company will roll out all kinds of services to help entrepreneurs succeed, including events like this one.

I keep telling my partners that Florida (with 26 investors and 176
entrepreneurs) is looking like a nice place to hold our next event. And
we definitely need more people signing up in Hawaii (only 2 investors
and 8 entrepreneurs), so I can start arguing for that location as well.

Executive Assistant with HR Experience Needed

paulballen — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 07:05:24 -0700

A few months ago I wrote a very nice help wanted ad for the local
university paper and got 15 resumes from highly qualified people.

On Monday I wrote another ad, which has already run for 3 days, and I haven't received a single inquiry.

I have called to revise it, but there is no excuse for a poorly written
ad. I should have kept the earlier version rather than starting over.
The earlier version emphasized the position and pay and "super-flexible
hours"; the later one focused on what the company does. Not smart.

What I'm looking for is a part-time HR manager/Executive Assistant for
Infobase Ventures, my business incubator. I'll pay $12-15 per hour,
depending on experience. The hours are flexible, although it could lead
to full-time work, and the pay could increase significantly based on
performance. (If I need to pay twice as much to find the unique person
to fill this position, let me know and I'll see what I can do. :) )

The applicant must be amazing: a highly networked people person who is
also tech savvy. He/she will help me recruit and manage the personnel
in more than a dozen incubated startups / early stage investments over
the next year or two.

There are more details at
http://www.infobaseventures.com/jobs.html.

A Billion Audio Players in 2009!

paulballen — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:53:15 -0700

Sometimes you see market forecasts that blow your mind. I remember
attending Jupiter conferences starting in 1995 where forecasts were
made showing hundreds of millions of internet users worldwide in the
coming years, and it was mind-boggling then. Now, estimates say we're
over a billion internet users worldwide.

Any time I see a billion of anything, I'm pretty impressed. So I was
suprised and impressed today to see analysts forecasting that nearly 1 billion mp3 players (including audio-enabled cell phones and audio playing portable gaming devices) will ship in 2009--just four years from now.

I always love seeing forecasts that reinforce business decisions that I have previously made.

In 2003, seeing the uptake in mp3 players (mainly iPods), I co-founded a niche digital audio company (LDSAudio.com) which is growing every month and is now moving into the mass audio book market with mp3books.com (great site redesign coming soon!).

It makes me wonder what other megatrends exist that might reach "a
billion" someday. Will there ever be a billion bloggers, for example,
or even a billion people reading blogs? Or a billion GPS-enabled
devices? Or a billion digital wallets?

I've seen the forecast for 3 billion cell phones by 2010, but are there
any other consumer electronics devices on the horizon that will see
rapid worldwide adoption and ever reach "a billion?"

Steve Jobs has denied for months that iPods would be video-enabled, but
yesterday's video iPod announcement was really no surprise. And now it's just a
matter of time before everyone else jumps into the portable video game,
following Apple's lead, and there are a billion portable video devices
on earth. Maybe by 2012 or 2013.

I'm guessing a billion digital cameras (mostly on phones) is not too
far away. Maybe Tivo and other DVRs (or is it PVRs) are on track as
well. And I bet Skype, Google Talk and other free voip apps will collectively reach a billion users within a few more years.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Quotes from Business Leaders

paulballen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:10:39 -0700

I just noticed that a fairly large selection of quotes from business leaders has been added to the StrategyTree.com wiki. The beauty of a Wiki project is that any individual can add content and make the Wiki grow and become a useful resource.

I want to thank the person(s) who created this section and encourage
others who have collected inspiring quotes from business leaders and
entrepreneurs to add them to this growing collection.

You Go Google!

paulballen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:19:41 -0700

Google wants to change the world, and in keeping with that desire, they have now funded a philanthropic foundation with 1% of Google's equity (over the next 20 years) and 1% of Google's profits. Check out Google.org.

A Myriad of Decisions for Internet Startups

paulballen — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 08:19:36 -0700

I continually get questions from students and startups such as: Which
email solution provider should I use? What is the best affiliate
program to launch? What about payment processing? What is the best
low-cost or free web analytics software?

These are tough questions for anyone to answer because most of us, even
internet veterans, have tried only a handful of solutions in each
category (email, affiliate, analytics, payment processing, etc.) and
often have deep experience with only one.

And today there are literally hundreds of available solutions, from
high-end enterprise solutions to entry-level solutions, including some
free services, and many, many open source solutions that are evolving
quickly.

In the 90s I used to rely heavily on Dr. Ralph Wilson of WilsonWeb.com.
Since 1995 he has been reviewing solutions continually and he has
helped hundreds of thousands of people find possible answers to these
questions.

Another resource that was first published in 2005 is a *must have* for
any serious internet entrepreneur, particularly one in the ecommerce
space. It's the 2005 Guide to E-Retailing Resources published by Internet Retailer.

This guide book lists 378 retailing solutions in the following
categories: affiliate marketing, content management,
consulting/research, customer service, delivery services, e-commerce
systems, email marketing, fulfillment services, order management,
payments processing, search marketing, site search solutions, supply
chain solutions, returns processing, web analytics, web design/hosting,
and web monitoring.

It still won't be easy to decide which solutions to try, but the Guide
often indicates how many employees or customers a particular company
has, and who some of their key customers are.

It is still hard to integrate some of these solutions, but at least you know what many of your best options are.

Angel Investors

paulballen — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 09:15:30 -0700

There are now 421 angel investors on FundingUniverse.com and several more are joining every day. When I spoke at the NASVF
conference last week in Philadelphia I told the audience that I think
about 10% of our registered angels are members of organized angel
investor groups, but 90% are independent. I based my estimate on what I
know about the angel investors on the Utah site.

But this week we started asking every new angel investor which
organized angel group(s) they belong to, if any. So my 10% guess will
turn into a pretty good estimate soon.

Last time I checked we were signing up more than 4 angel investors each
day, about 40 entrepreneurs, and getting about 17 new business plans
submitted every day. If you annualize those numbers, you get more than
1,300 new investors, 14,000 entrepreneurs and 6,205 new business plans
per year. But our momentum is actually increasing, so I think we'll
have substantially better numbers than that in the next twelve months.
I think we'll get 20,000 to 30,000 new entrepreneurs and more than
10,000 business plans in the next year.

Our company key goal and metric is the national unemployment rate.
Since small businesses account for most job creation in the country,
and angel-backed ventures are often high-growth companies, we think
FundingUniverse.com will help create new jobs all over the country. We
are going to reduce it to 4% over the next five years.

Just kidding!

But wouldn't it be nice if a web site could help change the economy in
a fundamental way. We really do hope to have a positive impact on local
economies, but that "key goal and metric" stuff is just silly--but hey,
I'm in a great mood this morning. I ran 5 miles this morning and get to
watch BYU beat New Mexico on TV tonight. (Admittedly, I'm an optimist.)

But here is a serious statistic:

One excellent presentation at the Philadelphia conference reported that
about 500,000 new businesses are formed each year in the U.S. About 1
in 10 of these new companies is funded by an angel investor (including
friends and family), but only 1 in 1000 is funded by venture capital.

Here is a link to an article that says 26,000 startups got angel funding in the first half of 2006.

If you are a first-time entrepreneur, you should really meet as many
angel investors as you can, because the chances of getting venture
capital for your first company are very, very, very slim.

One way to find organized angel groups in the United States is on the Angel Wiki, a collaborative site that is sponsored by FundingUniverse.com.

Seth Godin Live

paulballen — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:51:56 -0700

Last Thursday in New York I heard Seth Godin
in person for the first time. I've been learning from him for many
years, ever since I read "Permission Marketing," which is still my
favorite Seth Godin book -- a must read for anyone doing business in
the age of web sites and email.

I like a lot of things about Seth. For one, he is a family man. A
friend of mine tried to get him to speak at a Utah convention, but he
rarely travels west of the Mississippi -- it takes him away from his
family for too long. I really enjoyed his presentation.

He told a story about playing with a bathtub toy to entertain his kids.
It was one of those suction toys you stick on the sides of the bathtub.
But he decided to stick it to his bald head and wiggle his head around
to entertain his kids. They loved it, but when he took it off his wife
noticed a big red circle on his head, and he realized that the suction
from the toy burst all the blood vessels in his head. He said the mark
took months before it went away.

Then he warned the advertising industry that they will all leave a
permanent ugly red mark on their careers if they don't stop spamming
and interrupting potential customers -- they need to enter the era of
permission marketing and grassroots spreading of ideas.

So his talk was basically about how to spread ideas in this century. In
the past, buying TV was the key to success for many brands. For
example, Charles Revlon bought TV ads starting in 1946 -- the first
cosmetics company to do so -- and it led to distribution and to
billions in revenue.

But he says the TV-Industrial complex is ending. The era of
interruption advertising is coming to a close. Seth wants the
advertising industry to change before it dies.

Today, 83% of people with a Tivo skip *every* commercial. Anyone who wants to ignore you (an advertiser or marketer) can.

He says advertisers are spammers, poking people over and over and over
again, trying to get our attention in a world increasingly full of
clutter.

He said every major brand that has launched in the past five years has not relied on television
to build their brand. Instead, they have done something remarkable,
something to get customers to make remarks about them, something
noteworthy and different and better.

He mentioned JetBlue. Their customer satisfaction and word of mouth
advertising is unprecedented in the airline industry. They keep adding
more planes and filling them up (with a greater than 77% load factor)
while the bankrupt airline companies just keep doing TV ads.

Why? TV in every seat helps. So does their snack policy. Other airlines
cut the freebies to save money, but JetBlue invests more in snacks. [I
can vouch for this: I took my first JetBlue flight to NYC last week and
I jokingly asked the stewardess for "one of each" -- they had about 7-8
different kinds of snacks -- and she said "sure." Of course I really
only took one, but the fact that they were willing to be generous
impressed me.]
Seth said humans hunted for thousands of years but would have gone
extinct if it weren't for farming. Today advertisers need to stop
"targeting" users, which is a hunting term, and instead, "work the
grapevine", by getting everyone talking about their products.

He gave lots of examples of companies that are built by word of mouth,
and by getting their ideas to spread. The Atkins diet got people
talking. OFoto (photo sharing) got people sharing with each other. He
said the iPod won because everyone saw the white headphones and it
marketed itself.

Today, marketing tools are more powerful than ever before, but what
marketers have to do is tell a story, an authentic story, that gets
everyone talking about and sharing their ideas with others.

He calls this the Fashion-Permission Complex (which will replace the
TV-Industrial Complex). He said tell your story to your best sneezers
(people who love your products or services) and make it easy for them
to share you story with everyone else.

Here's a great example.

In 1990 a man named Don ran Hallmark card and gift stores. Heavy card
users would buy about 50 cards a year. Don came up with an idea to sell
"collectible Christmas ornaments in July" -- their slowest month. They
priced them at $10 each.

Hallmark got permission from customers who bought ornaments the first
year to notify them next year when the ornaments were available. Year
after year the permission base grew.

In 1999, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about this Hallmark
success story. That year Hallmark made $100 million in Christmas
ornament revenue without spending any money on advertising. All they
did was send an anticipated, relevant, personalized postcard to all the collectors.

After Seth's speech he took some questions from the audience.

During Q&A I learned that he personally answers every email that he receives. Very cool.

Also, he said he gets tons of email from Turkey. A woman in the
audience who was from Turkey wants him to go there to speak. Clearly,
his ideaviruses are spreading all over the world.

He also told advertisers to work with engineering and not just to take
a finished product and try to advertise it. He said, "go upstream,"
talk to the chemists, help them create a product that is worth talking
about. Engineering is marketing.

He said the role of agencies will become consulting with R&D so
they can give you a remarkable product that will be easy to market.