Yesterday something clicked and the customers started rolling in. It’s VERY early for us right now, and the customer counts probably sound infinitesimal to you, but for us it’s a great start and an indication that people care about what we’re doing. Awesome.

We’re launching Profitably v1.0 this week, which means we are open to accepting our first paying customers. Quite a big step, but with it comes some major league jitters around the “Minimum Viable Product” and sending our baby out into the real world!

There’s a lot of excitement around the office coming off a big win up in Boston!  The North Bridge Venture Partners venture competition featured a $75k prize but it also came with a hearty vote of confidence.

]]> http://adamrneary.com/2010/06/confessions-of-a-startup-ceo-we-won/feed/ 3 Confessions of a Startup CEO,north bridge,Profitably,Startup,venture competition There's a lot of excitement around the office coming off a big win up in Boston!  The North Bridge Venture Partners venture competition featured a $75k prize but it also came with a hearty vote of confidence. There's a lot of excitement around the office coming off a big win up in Boston!  The North Bridge Venture Partners venture competition featured a $75k prize but it also came with a hearty vote of confidence. adam r neary no http://adamrneary.com/2010/04/start-up-lessons-learned-from-led-zeppelin/ http://adamrneary.com/2010/04/start-up-lessons-learned-from-led-zeppelin/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:10:15 +0000 Adam Neary http://adamrneary.com/?p=237

“We’re hope that we are Led Zeppelin’s first album…for small business analytics.”

What else can I say about that?  Watch the video and pass along the link!

Transcription:
Hi! I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” Today’s episode is called “Startup lessons learned from Led Zeppelin,” and the episode is prompted by all the great blog posts out there called start up lessons learned, and most of the bloggers are writing great articles about things that entrepreneurs have done that we should all learn from. I realizes one of the best learned lessons that I have learned, that was actually from the early days of Led Zeppelin. So if you haven’t read Hammer of the Gods you should because it is a seminal piece of literature in rock journalism. It is a great lesson…separate from that from my experience listening to American blues that I think it is relevant.

The analogue that I am going to draw is that we can run around telling customers about Profitably and we first to try and find the groove and how we talk about this thing is business intelligence. We want to help customers you know grow their businesses and you know we work on the charts and graphs and analytics and you know how my background relates to what we are doing. It has been a choppy experience quite honestly learning how to describe what we are trying to do and what occurred to me was Led Zeppelin didn’t bother.

So both Jimmy Paige and Robert Plant, both huge American blues fans before they even met….they had stacks and stacks of Willy Dickson and Howlin Wolf and all the classics and when they met that was one of the first things that both had in common. Few people know this…so, you know, when they decided to bring the American blues to the British mindset they didn’t run around and ask everyone, “Hey do you listen to Albert King. Do you like Howlin Wolf? Do you like Mississippi River Delta Blues or Chicago Blues? These are the questions that people would not know how to answer, and I think there is a good lesson in there for what we are doing…

You know, when I started to ask small businesses about business intelligence often times they have a negative opinion because they know it is not something that they can usually get a lot of value out of nor are there any offerings for them. So a lot of time they don’t know any of the solutions that are available in the marketplace for large organizations. So I have started to do what Led Zeppelin did which is just show them what I know is business intelligence and say “look is this awesome or what?” and the answer is as it is.

If you look at Led Zeppelin’s first album you know “I cannot quit you baby” and “you shook me,” both Willy Dickson’s songs. They just played them. No problem. “How many more times?” they managed to merge Howlin Wolf’s “How many more years” with Albert King’s “The Hunter” to create one song, and it is awesome. “The Lemon Song” in the second album is Howlin Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and a couple of lyrics are from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” They just took these songs and just started playing them and they played them in a way they knew that British or London contemporaries would enjoy and they played them in a way which was just awesome. They were very successful.

So I think the startup lesson learned there is do what Led Zeppelin does and what we are trying to do is we are going to take concepts from operations consulting, data mining you know heavy data analytics. We are going to take concepts from business intelligence but rather than tell people what they are doing here is what we are going to do, we are going to do what makes sense and we are going to do it for small businesses and we hope that the result is awesome.

We hope that we are Led Zeppelins’ first album for small business analytics and we hope that people who use it are as excited as all of us the first time we heard Led Zeppelin do what we know that you hear the Blues is to create something that was fantastic. So that is the startup lesson learnt for today and I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you think oh my god it has been a long time since I have listened to that album and it is awesome and you will go and listen to it. If you have ever you should check out Willy Dickson as well because that is where it all came from. So I hope you are having a great night. It is a great weather out here in New York and that’s the end of the episode! Talk to you soon.

In this episode, we talk through why being unique can be such a drain on a small business.

Small businesses should be unique when it comes to their core offering and they way they address the marketplace, but when it comes to the non-core activities, they should be conforming to best practices and seeking out solutions other businesses have employed with success.

Forums like startups.com and American Express Open are great places to look, and a little birdy told me there might be another solution in the works…keep your ear to the ground!

Transcription:
Hi! I’m Adam Neary, and this is Confessions of the Startup CEO. This is episode 5: “You are not unique.” Now it goes against conventional wisdom to tell a small business owner that they are not unique, but I am going to do it anyway because it is good news. It is fight club time! You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and it is a good thing. Right? Because there are a lot of vendors and consultants out there that want to tell you that the challenges that you are facing are unique. They are different from the challenges that your competitors face. Your unique culture and the way you approach the market place is so different from what everyone else is doing that you need a custom solution. You need to craft something from scratch. We need to sit down and get a blank white board and start from scratch and try to figure out how to solve all your business problems and I think that’s nonsense.

You know, 10 years in the management consulting industry working with large organizations, what I have discovered is THEY are not unique. These large multinational organizations are all solving all of the same problems on a day by day basis, and when it comes to operations there is stuff that Toyota and Proctor and Gamble have been doing for 25 years that these organizations haven’t been doing. And if you walk in there and say, “We are going to start from scratch we are going to figure this out because you are so unique.” Then those customers and those clients are missing out on opportunities just to take what is working to do it.

So you know your business. You and your team know your business better than I would. So I want to say so that we are clear. This is not supposed to be an arrogant post. You should know what is unique about the way you engage in the market place. You should know what is unique about what you are offering your customers and THAT’S an opportunity to be unique. That is an opportunity to be different. When it comes to everything else, the non-core stuff, what you spend on office supplies. Many of you think about a million different things that are not core to your business…that is not an opportunity to be unique. Don’t be unique with accounting or legal, don’t be…

So we have decided that you are not unique and have a conversation. So what is the next step? I think you treat a non-core business problem like a technical error that comes up on your computer. You have some kind of error code and your noise goes off and you take it to Google and you see what the Google has to say. You figure somebody else has already solved this problem. I want to take some non-core business problem that you have got something that has been nagging you and you have been thinking all along that I think maybe I know people have solved this problem and there got to be an answer out there like you. Use this post as an excuse to believe that it is true and just go Google it. Go to American Express Open. Go to startups.com where they are asking a lot of questions. Very soon we are going to have a forum where you can go too and hopefully that helps answer some of these problems. Take this confidence, take this encouragement and go solve the business problem that is not core to your business and see how it goes. I love…people have started to comment more and more on the blog and is picking it up on iTunes now. If you solve some of these problems throw us some comments and let us know how it is going on out there and we would love to have a dialog and hopefully this has been helpful.

Thanks!

In this episode, we unveil the concept as we emerge from stealth mode. The video is basically a trial run for a pitch to investors later this week through the Founder Institute.

Importantly, though, we aren’t raising money at this stage, just raising awareness.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Comment away!

Transcription:

I am Adam Neary and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” This is Episode 3, “The Pitch.” So I am really excited to present this today because we have been all quiet about our concept. You know, we have been slowly emerging from stealth mode as we complete the branding. We want to let everyone know what the concept is about. In addition we are pitching to some investors later this week trying to raise awareness so we thought it to be a great opportunity to talk about that on this forum.

Don’t hold me by the way, to what we say here.  As we continue to talk to customers the idea continues to evolve as we go. So by the time we hit the marketplace we probably would have pivoted quite a bit. Maybe that will be exciting, to look back at this website to see what you were thinking at this stage. So here it goes…

My name is Adam Neary and I am CEO of a new organization called Profitably. We are a web-based business solution for small businesses with a simple and specific focus, to help small businesses operate more profitably…something everyone needs. This is a huge pain point in the market place around analytics for the small businesses because they cannot do what the large organizations do. They don’t have the time, the analytical capabilities, the processes, or the tools to make informed and rigorous decisions.

BI tools cost millions of dollars and take months to roll out. Management consultants are very expensive…even the cheap reporting tools that are accessible require an incredible amount of domain expertise. You need to know what you are looking for before you can get value out of those tools. As a result of this pain, most of the small businesses are making intuitive decisions on their own. They are forced to fly by the seat of their pants and in many cases they are operating sub-optimally as a result.

Our solution does a lot to solve this problem by providing a very simple sort of like a mint.com for small business. Small businesses log in, connect to QuickBooks, we pull out their data automatically, integrate automatically and perform a proprietary battery of analytics around profitability that they can review.

More importantly, we have a recommendation engine that generates a prioritized list of winning plays, recommendations that they can take action on right now that immediately impacts their bottom line. This is not like you know while you look at this charge and just think about. No when we show you a chart, we show you exactly what you can do to move the needle and that is something that is missing in this place and small businesses they need it. They want it.  So this is something that we are going after.

Let’s take a specific example. We are looking at an HR outsourcing firm, you know 20 million revenue and 60 people in their office, intuitive decision making culture and services-oriented vertical. We pull all their data down and what are the key recommendations that we make, what are the analytics…well, we can start with cost reduction probably those who mostly the low hanging fruits that you spend 10k every year on office supplies. You have got 20 different vendors. Well we have got great with Staples that we pre-negotiated. If you are going for staples then you are going to save 10% and that is $1000 right in the bank. Look at IT hardware same thing, we negotiate the rate with CBW, you are going to buy 6 computers next year. You know use our contracts and you are on your way and cash in the bank. If you want to think a little bit more strategically, just look at your price. So by merging the financial data with the time sheet data, you can start to think about the profitability of their various service offerings, and we discover that three of them are unprofitable. First thing that you can do is just raise the prices so we recommend some prices that would help resolve that problem but they don’t want to raise the prices and they just want to look at the P&L of that service offering a loan and we can show the key cost drivers are where they might be over running, what they can do about those specific you know cost drivers. These are the things that small businesses can get right now and we know when we deliver this it is going to move the needle for them.

So what does the market look like?  The BI Market  globally is about $7.5-8B dollars, but looking at North America small or medium sized business and BI delivered as a service, when you look at that small niche you are looking at about $250M dollars or 240M dollars between Gartner and Forrester, this seems to be the consensus. We have no dominant player in this space, so I think three years out and we would be able to catch probably a third of this market, that is 80 million in revenue that I can just go and get right now and deliver that profitably, but we are also going after a long tail of small businesses that aren’t included in that number. So that really includes the fee base and makes this opportunity very exciting. But let’s think about mint.com for a second, right, their model is totally fee stand point. They make all their revenues based on affiliate revenue. We have that as well because we have the brokers that bring small businesses to different vendors certainly for having brokered that relationship you know we will be able to get the affiliate revenue as well.

We are actually talking to a buying consortium where a lot of these cost reduction savings would come from.  If they negotiated a 14% discount for example for negotiating for an office supply vendor. They will take 2% and we will take 2% and pass 10% on to our customer base for having facilitated that relationship. As more and more of our customers migrate their business to our preferred vendors you will be in a position to negotiate even better savings. So that is a great opportunity and we are really excited about the revenue, but where are we in the process?

Well we have got a prototype already in development nearly done which I am very excited to share with our initial customer base. I have got some hiring going on and I have already mentioned in the previous episode that we are looking for Chief Creative Officer and talking to some handful and I think I have got some great options. I am really excited about that. Some great dialogues have been coming out. I have also been talking to some developers you know couple of CTOs and potential hires…one in particular that I am really excited about. So we are finalizing those hirings and have our initiation team and then we are doing the entire customer development work. We are talking to as many customers as possible because want to scale and we want to grow this business and make sure we don’t have the problem there. That is really what it comes down to and it leads to the big ask right. Any big pitch ends with a big ask.

We are not asking for money right now. We are comfortably boot strapped and will be able bootstrapped through all the customer discovery and customer validation work. We will need money when it comes time to scale and we will be raising cash, when it comes time to scale but that wouldn’t be it until we have the viable product. You know, a customer base and 40% of that paying customer base is saying “hey listen, if you went away tomorrow, you will be devastated”. That is how we know we got the problem solved and so hopefully we will be able to bootstrap up until that point. What I do need though is more customer contacts. We want to hear from more customers we want to hear from more people. So what I would say if you are talking to a cofounder, you know, or CFO in a small organization, you are in a board meeting and maybe you want to ask a cheeky question ask them about their profitability strategy. If they don’t have a profitability strategy then they can talk to me right away and hopefully we can help. If they want to have a profitability strategy with tools are too expensive, and they don’t know to go about it, that is even a better situation. I would love to talk to them and understand what they are doing today. What tools have they tried to put in place and how we can help. So that is the ask and then for you folks I would love to you know give as many comments as you would love to give one the feedback on the page. Things that I should be saying and not saying. We would love to hear what you think because I have been talking to some people later this week. So that is it! “Confessions of a Startup CEO,” Episode 3, signing off. Thanks!

In this episode, we introduce the new format and talk about my resignation from AlixPartners to launch a start-up.

On a personal note, I cannot tell you how nice it is to speak candidly about this process. I feel like the last 6 months have been in “ultra-stealth” mode as I continued to hold my previous job. Now like are in “stealth-light” mode as we haven’t yet finished the branding.

But just being able to talk about the venture openly is a great step, and I look forward to more engagement.

Transcription:

Hi!  I am Adam Neary and this is, “Confessions of Startup CEO.”

This is our first episode, so welcome, and I am very excited to get started. I think the pressure is off a little bit on the first episode because I don’t have any viewers yet, but as you guys start to leave comments and get involved hopefully we can grow a community out of this because I really think there is something in the experience of starting a company a lot of people get excited about, want to learn about, and want to contribute too and give opinions. So hopefully I can be as opinionated in this forum as I am in real life, and we can all learn a little bit as we go.

The topic today is “New Year’s Resignations” and that is not a typo. It is not New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are the kind of things you know you often times promise yourself, you are going to improve personally and then by January, February, or March these things are forgotten and you have fallen in your old habits. So for me the easiest way to make sure that I did what I wanted to do this year was to resign from my job. I had a fantastic job at AlixPartners. It is a turnaround restructuring firm where I used to do some great work but they were preventing me from doing what I wanted to be doing which was starting a new company. So I have offered my resignation and I am working full time in coordination with the Founder’s Institute, who you should look up to launch a company. And hopefully that is going to be very exciting. I do have a little bit of experience with a startup before. I did work for a startup in London called Concentra. We had a great time but I moved back here when I got engaged to now my wife, Deepa.

So what is the whole point of this project, to wrap up today’s episode, sort of thinking about the medium itself. I think the reason why people want to get involved and the reason people would want to watch a video or podcast about startups is that it is a challenging process. My startup, the concept we are launching is a startup for small businesses to help them with their data integration, to gather all their data from all around the organization, consolidate all the data and then run the analytics and reports on that. More importantly I think take that step further which is to provide them the recommendations on what they should do about it to make those recommendations to make them actionable. So they are not just looking at reports, they are not just running technology, consolidating data for the sake of data you know it is all about making businesses run better. So you know if you are small business owner and you want to get involved in this process, shoot me a note. If you are just interested in the arts of startups or if you are a consultant who helps small businesses this is your forum to get involved, leave some comments around, and hopefully over time we can all learn together for my business for all of my customers and, you know, for the community. Hopefully we can learn a lot. So welcome and thanks again and we will see you at the next episode. Cheers.