antonybrydon

Why Roger Federer should run your start-up

I had dinner list week with Sean Ellis. I wanted to talk to him about an advisory role at ShopWell, and we spent most of the dinner talking about metrics-driven marketing. It was interesting enough to prompt the first post here in a few months.

I've spent a fair bit time recently thinking about the point where a start-up can and should stop focusing exclusively on the product and spread its energy across marketing and other efforts. My analogy is tennis - there's a strong natural impulse to look past the ball and across the court (towards the opponent, and the spot you want to hit) before you make impact, but its critical to look at the ball all the way through impact to truly crush it. Federer is a great example. In the photo below, you can see he's left looking at where the ball used to be well after the stroke.

 
Similarly, I think its critical to follow-through in a start up, focusing manically on the product until the company finds product market fit.

ShopWell

I've made a small investment in ShopWell, joined the board, and will be working with the team to help launch the company over the next several months. The company is a spin-off of IDEO, backed by New Venture Partners, and is developing a new service around food and nutrition.

The company is in quiet mode right now, but without describing too much, there were a few things that intrigued me...

Privacy is still a Problem (we're not over it)

Back in 1999, Scott McNealy of Sun famously told a group of reporters and analysts "You have zero privacy. Get over it."

At the same time Josh Harris launched his human fishbowl experiment "We Live in Public," which eerily anticipated today's era of Twitter and Facebook. The story has recently been made into a movie I'm hoping to see.

When Jeff Patterson and I started Visible Path (now Hoovers Connect) in 2003, privacy concerns often dominated in personal and professional circles, and we built more and more features in the software to safeguard privacy.

Today, as folks broadcast more and more of their lives publicly, I've wondered if attitudes and concerns about privacy had markedly shifted. To check, I ran a quick market survey and was surprised by some of the results:

People are still very concerned about privacy
Across the board - gender, marital status, geographic location, and occupation, people were very concerned about privacy. The bullets below refer to the percentage of folks that ranked themselves as "very concerned" about a topic, the highest level on a 5 point scale:

• 34.9% of all parents were “very concerned” (top box) about “inappropriate info about my child appearing online”

• 31.7% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “Inappropriate info about me appearing online”

• 42.6% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “My personal information being collected and sold”

• 33.7% of all respondents were “very concerned” about “Undesirable info about me appearing in search results”

Younger people are as concerned as older people
prevailing wisdom seems to be that younger generations are not only more comfortable with new technologies, but less concerned about privacy, but this wasn't supported by the data. Although concern did increase modestly in older demographics, concern in the 17-24 year old group was still high:

Due diligence on demand

There's a very good post on venture hacks today on how to close a term sheet quickly. I agree with two-and-a-half of the three hacks¹ and want to add a fourth that I think deserves a spot on the summary list:

      4. Have all due diligence ready to go on demand

Due diligence on demand means that the company's due diligence is always current, up-to-date, and ready to be delivered to a potential partner, investor or acquiror at a moment's notice.

Given that financing and acquisitions are rare (once a year), this may seem like overkill. But it actually demands that the company keep its books current and in perfect order, which has a number of other associated and equally important benefits.

At Visible Path, we documented our business operations from day one around a typical due diligence checklist that a public company might use when acquiring another public company. The index has 14 sections and 100+ subsections that include corporate governance, stockholder information, securities agreements, material contracts, product and mfg information, government regulations, litigation and audit information, employee information, employee benefit information, financial information, marketing information, property, employee benefit plan matters, facilities. With thanks to Peter Astiz of DLA Piper (who helped me create the original document) and Neal Williams of Carr & Ferrell (who used it to manage our financings and transactions), I've appended the actual document below:

 

The week we incorporated, we only had a handful of documents in these binders: our Certificate of Incorporation, our Bylaws, our founders Employment Agreements, and a cap table describing the ownership of the company. A few documents and about 100 empty tabs. These empty binders seemed a bit silly when we started but as we ran the business - hired employees, filed trademarks, signed up partners, each relevant document was filed in the appropriate section as it occurred, and the binders quickly filled out.

Goodbye Vizu Answers, Hello _______?

Vizu recently unplugged their Vizu Answers product, depriving me of the single best tool in the market to quickly and inexpensively test new product concepts with consumers. The service was simple and self-service. In a few clicks, you could describe a product concept and create a set of check boxes where consumers could indicate how likely they were to sign up for the service. Vizu would distribute the survey via widgets on a broad set of highly-trafficked sites, and allow you to target certain sites (i.e., tech or political). In a few hours, you could collect several hundred responses, complete with geographical information on the respondent. All for the bargain price of $1 per response.

I've looked at a lot of potential replacements (see below) but haven't found one that meets these four criteria:

• Self-service
• Question length of several sentences, up to a paragraph
• Broad distribution to consumers (panel)
• Inexpensive (single digit dollars per response)

In general, while most of the full-service panels offer good targeting and qualification of respondents, most are designed for more in-depth surveys, none are self-service and all are expensive $10-$100 per response.

And while most of the survey tools are self-service, inexpensive, and customizable to questions of any length, most are designed to feature on your own site and blog and none have a built-in panel of consumers or way to distribute your survey and collect response quickly.

The only one that comes close is LinkedIn answers, but questions are limited to 75 characters, which is barely enough to ask about the weather.

If anyone knows a service that fits all 4 of the criteria above, please let me know.