Dave Concannon

The weekly retweet

A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week

• RT @jdrumgoole @breakfastnt @cjayfla: Brave words from a survivor – Something that every Irish person should see http://tinyurl.com/pmhr8y
• Marinaleda Journal – A Job and No Mortgage for All in a Spanish Town – http://bit.ly/KJx5y (Via @TomRaftery)
• New Space Avalanche comic – House of Mirrors – http://short.ie/mirrors (Via @spaceavalanche)
• Awesome Free UX Templates: http://bit.ly/XlaTy (Via @gracesmith)
• Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture http://bit.ly/10ykRS (Via @copetersen)
• Amazing 3D murals (via @Brodie_san): http://short.ie/tmb96w
• Beautiful waste of electricity: http://bit.ly/wc2XI

Image via bpdragon@flickr

At the moment I’m going through the process of trying to get a business idea up and running with a friend.  After doing some cost analysis on our prototype, getting some initial research and determining costs on the (many) IP issues, and some excellent advice and mentoring from a very smart guy,  I managed to just about cram a few words in edgeways to a rather unimpressed business advisor from Enterprise Ireland.  While we didn’t walk away with an enormous sack of Nazi gold, he did give us the benefit of the doubt and recommended us for the Enterprise Start 2 program run at the Guinness Enterprise Center by the Dublin Business Innovation Centre.

Enterprise Start 2 Program

I can wholeheartedly recommend the program as a very practical, well-grounded course. Not only is the content and presentation excellent, but the program puts you in touch with people trying to launch their own ideas. The feedback and advice from other people in a similar situation is invaluable.

The program is broken into five modules which bring you through the process of identifying and addressing the unknown quantities in your business concept. The primary aim is to determine what value you will bring to a specific customer,  how many customers are in the market, and what sort of marketing and sales channels to use to target them. We started off with a prototype product (non-software), which wowed everyone we showed it to. The vast majority of people who see it, love it.

Therein lies part of the problem. While people love the concept, those same people are unlikely to fork out some of their hard-earned cash for it. Trying to drill down into a market which would consider the product a “must have” item didn’t yield a lot of success – any markets the process discovered are areas which we have little or no experience in.  So, after re-jigging the concept somewhat we’ve found a market segment that we understand, and who will happily give us money for the idea.

Finding a product / market fit

It’s just as well we hadn’t spent a year of product development before this revelation – which leads me to Eric Ries‘ fantastic presentation on how to build a “Lean Startup”.  The basic concept that he espouses is that while Waterfall development makes the assumption that both the problem and the solution are known entities, and Agile concedes that the solution is unknown and needs to adapt – neither is actually correct for a lot of startups. It is possible to build a working, bug-free product, and fail spectacularly as a business.  Without verifying your design ideas continually against the people who are actually going to use your product, you’re setting the scene for a party that nobody’s going to come to.

Image via mikejackson@flickr

Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland lost about twenty five percent of its population through starvation, disease, and mass emigration as the potato blight destroyed Ireland’s staple food. While there were larger forces at play,  one contributing factor to the mass starvation of the population was the lack of diversity both in Ireland’s potato crop, and the diet of the population in general.  Even if there were different types of potato in the diet of the average citizen, the effects of the famine could have been reduced as differing potato crops wouldn’t have been as badly affected by one type of blight.

Property Boom and Bust

Can the lessons of the great famine be applied to our current economic situation? Most certainly. Ireland is in deep economic decline caused by singularly betting our fortunes on property.  As the property bubble inflated the government stoked the fire yet further by offering tax incentives to investors purchasing housing and commercial property, banks pushed large loans to people without the means to pay for them long-term, and home owners cashed in their equity in order to invest in second homes or to allow them to live far beyond their means. People on very average salaries released mortgage equity so that they could drive brand-new sports cars, take several expensive holidays a year, or buy apartments in Eastern Europe.

Laying the blame

While it’s clear that the government was not only asleep at the wheel but actively unscrewing the lug nuts on the wheels to the economy, the blame also has to fall squarely in the lap of the populace.  Overwhelmingly, Irish people have a high external locus of control (“it’s not my fault – it’s fate / the government / they’re all out to get me”) which I’ve heard attributed to Catholicism in that it preaches that “the flock follows the Shepard”. Many Irish people are happy to follow the flow without trying to determine whether they’ve just pushed themselves into the veritable creek without a paddle.

It’s also a common phenomenon for Irish people to complain loudly from the safe confines of the pub long after it’s too late to change anything, as is our penchant for begrudgery towards anyone who succeeds. I’m all for constructive criticism, but where other countries praise their success stories loudly the Irish belittle them, cast doubts on the origin of their good fortune, and sneer at their efforts.

Learning from the past

For Ireland to drag itself out of the current economic mire, we need to correct these attitudes. The economy can be stimulated by innovative businesses succeeding and creating jobs. Government can be changed by motivated people who aren’t willing to accept the endemic cronyism, incompetence, and dynasty politics. Ideas to promote business like the Tuesday push, and incubator programs are essential. Ireland is a tiny country hiding at the edge of Europe, but by learning from the lessons of the past and embracing divergent thinking we can have a global presence. We need original businesses that fix a problem for paying customers not “me too” opportunism or “We’ll figure out the revenue model later” delusion. Most of all we just need to support people getting started find their path to success.

The weekly retweet

A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week

• When to quit: http://short.ie/sr3hiv (Answer: Never!)
• A web app that helps save lives. Awesome: http://decisionsforheroes.com (Via @ryancarson)
• New Space Avalanche Comic – The Truth Fairy – http://short.ie/hxyqr9 (Via @spaceavalanche)
• Lessons from a startup failure: http://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=756

The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.

Photo via asmundur@flickr

Decisions for Heroes provides an interface for rescue teams to manage their teams, and measure all the details of a rescue operation – from the time it took to get to the victim, the injuries encountered, to the wind speed at the time of rescue.  This allows for detailed logging, measurement, and metrics which can be analysed to determine the effectiveness of their teams in precarious situations and lets them determine if they need more members with particular skills or training in a specific area. As it logs all the data it builds up a detailed picture of how the team operates, and can print immediate incident reports, making it very easy for teams to keep a paper trail.

I had heard of Decisions for Heroes before FOWA Dublin and thought it was quite a nice idea – but when Robin Blandford blew away the competition at the small business pitch session, then I really took notice. Robin’s years of experience as volunteer cliff rescuer has obviously opened his eyes to the potential for a team management application.

So, in terms of a business model – how does this stack up? Decisions for Heroes has a nice niche market for whom the product is definitely a “must have”. My only question (knowing little about rescue services) would be how large the potential English-speaking market is? I would think that there is certainly enough money to be made before the need to localise the application into another language presented itself, and in the meantime the product can quite easily be adjusted to suit similar niches or customised for very specific types of rescue or medical teams. The software-as-a-service model promises to deliver a recurring revenue stream which should have little churn providing there are no serious competitors in the market. This is as far away from “me-too! (dot-zero)” as you can get.

In terms of  marketing D4H hits the nail on the head with great used of AIDA and clearly answers the customer’s potential questions of:

• What is the product and what can it do for me? – Nicely explained with a video, a tour, and clear feature set descriptions. Additionally all application features are positioned as benefits to the customer, not just a list of things that the technology does.
• Why should I care? (‘Why are you credible?’) – The main page has several credibility indicators, namely the logos of several internationally recognised rescue services who have used the service and given testimonials.
• What do I do next? – The “Get Started” and “Take a Tour” buttons are repeated throughout the page, with notes directing attention to them. All in all a very compelling page designed to convert the user.

As might be expected from a company making software to analyse data, the analytics behind the scenes on the main page are impressive. Bytesurgery are not only measuring how often people visit the page, but how often they’re playing the intro video, when exactly they’re pausing or stopping the video, and if they’re watching it through to the end. I’m sure there are a dozen other events that they’re tracking so that they can tweak their main page to optimise conversion.

My only criticism that I can think of (and it’s a stretch) would be the quality and position of the video on the front page, at full-screen it’s very grainy and hard to see the product features and I’d also expect it to centre on the screen. Minor criticisms aside, I think this product has a huge amount of potential.

The weekly retweet

A recap on any interesting links I’ve posted or  retweeted this week

• Embedding mouse gestures with jQuery (via @benhammersley) http://bit.ly/AeJxT (Via @ryancarson)
• “Amateurs monetize. Professionals build businesses.” http://tr.im/l20k (via @ClayCollins) (Via @joshkaufman)

If you have two minutes to spare, I’m running a small survey on Tech events in Ireland.

http://short.ie/tsurv

Photo via seemoo

I’ve been looking for a simple way to keep track of the interesting links I see every week, and was searching for a way to integrate it seamlessly with how I already browse the web. One of the major points I took from Matthew Ogle’s talk at FOWA Dublin was that in order to provide a service that’s really useful to the user it has to coexist with how they already use technology. So basically I don’t want to have to store the links somewhere special, and don’t want to have to add additional tags in delicious (I’d link to John Keyes‘ nice implementation, only his blog doesn’t seem to have “previous post” navigation buttons anywhere…).

Simultaneously, I wanted a little project to play about with yahoo pipes* somehow.

Shamelessly grabbing the “post to wordpress” function from this blog post on how to post to wordpress using python and XMLRPC, I’m filtering my tweets from the last week for any retweets that contain links and bundling them into a post. At the moment I’m leaving them as drafts to be published manually while I iron out any unforeseen bugs, and future implementations might include a nicer template or to add an automated flickr image for every post.

* Admittedly, pipes aren’t a necessary component in this setup as all. All the pipe is doing is taking my twitter stream, and plucking out any that have links in them and start with “RT @”. Optimisation sometimes makes for less interesting implementation, I just wanted to tinker.

The weekly retweet – A recap on any interesting links I retweeted this week

• Fascinating article about how Twitter is making http://bit.ly its default URL shortener: http://bit.ly/fqcHY #thinkvitamin (Via @ryancarson)
• *Never* microwave a cellphone. http://bit.ly/Ki17s (Via @TomRaftery)
• My poetic tribute to Declan Ganley http://url.ie/1jh1 (blog post) (Via @duggan)
• Envision building an onion as you are building your startup http://bit.ly/Oza6d (Via @copetersen)
• “When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win… ” http://tr.im/kwAR // Great article by Malcolm Gladwell (Via @joshkaufman)
• “I’m not answerable to you.” http://ff.im/-2B3DR. Conor Lenihan highlights systemic incompetence? (Via @patphelan)
• The art of building a successful social site. http://adjix.com/avud (Via @guykawasaki)

Two weeks ago I wrote a Tuesday push about loopthing.com. Despite having a nicely designed site,  Loopthing isn’t something that resonates with me in terms of a business model. Until the service matures I believe that they’re sitting in the category of web business which I describe as “Me too! (dot zero)”. The Me2.0 businesses are missing one or more of these essential ingredients:

• At least ten percent innovation on their competitors to make them stand out (Satisfying the criteria of “value to customer” versus “uniqueness”).
• A niche that’s small enough that they can dominate without significant competition before branching out into new markets or niches.
• A superstar web or entrepreneur personality who can drive traffic immediately just by having their name attached to the project (E.g. Jason Calacanis, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose, et al) – It’s possible to succeed as a “Me too!” if you have a “celebrity” name attached.

Revahealth

This week’s Tuesday Push is for yet another business listings portal, in the guise of Revahealth.com. So what’s different here? For a start, Revahealth have been around for a few years, giving them time to solidify their business model and  giving them a head-start on any recent competitors. Secondly, and most importantly by far, they’ve picked a small but extremely profitable niche that isn’t going to go away any time soon – Healthcare.

Business Model

The business model is straightforward. Business for healthcare services like Dentistry, Cosmetic surgery, and Laser eye surgery  practices are competitive. Your average small-to-medium sized clinic isn’t likely to have a web page, and even if they did it’s probably unlikely that they have much time to update it regularly. Revahealth fill this gap by funnelling clients to grateful clinics who reward them with a referral fee. In addition, Revahealth offer the “freemium” model where clinics can list their business for free, but there’s a much nicer upgraded profile available for a fee. The model is proven – Internet marketing “superstars” such as Jeremy Schoemaker have commented on it before. The difference between Revahealth and the countless other “business portal / connect users to business” sites is in the niche.

The healthcare niche is by no means small, but certainly not as big as “a list of all businesses”. This means that it’s possible for one player in the field to make a name as the go-to place for healthcare information and dominate, with the added benefit that there’s revenue immediately. Once they are a recognised brand in the  healthcare sector, there’s nothing stopping them from moving into another area using the same basic technology and business model.

Management Team

In Micheal Cusumano’s eight-point lens for business evaluation, the management team is the primary criteria. Revahealth benefits from Caelan King’s experience in marketing and as a product manager, and the experience of Ray Nolan as a board member, who has built Web Reservations International into the (very profitable) market leader in hostel bookings. Tapping into Ray’s experience of the problems faced in building a niche service like hostel bookings is a very useful skill to have on board when moving into another area.

Social Marketing

Calelan puts a lot of effort into the Revahealth blog (well worth a read), is active on twitter, and regularly presents at conferences such as Bizcamp. While this isn’t marketing to the specific audience of their product, it ensures brand awareness of revahealth within the technical and entrepreneurial community, and at the very least indicates that there’s no plan to let their technology stagnate.

Summary

From a business perspective, Revahealth ticks a lot of boxes – a solid management team with a compelling offering in an attractive market. The site itself has lots of content, the design is clean, spacious and easy to use, and the layout seems entirely geared towards the company’s organic SEO efforts. I can see Revahealth doing very well – Healthcare services are an necessity, and they have a great targetted service which I think will continue to grow profitably.

Here’s a presentation that Caelan King gave on monetising web applications at Barcamp Belfast, which goes into more details about Revahealth’s revenue model. (Via Ken McGuire’s excellent Tuesday Push for RevaHealth).