Month: May 2006

So, you are a start-up bringing your first product to market and potentially every business on the planet is a target. How do you decide which companies to target initially? This is when customer profiling become important. Customer profiling focuses you to identify the type of company you believe you have a higher chance of converting to a revenue generating client. How do you go about accomplishing this given UK alone has more than 2.1 million registered companies? You need to apply number of criteria to reduce this number to about 50 companies to initially target. Once you got your…

I just got back from listening to Martin Beaumont, chief executive, Co-operative Group Ltd at Manchester Business School. Martin spoke passionately about the corporate turnaround that is taking place within Co-op Group under his leadership. Their vision is to be the best co-operative business in the world. How does this vision relate to typical UK business? Very differently. Because his stakeholders include co-op members and focus is not just on revenue, profitability and growth. To get your head around this, first you need to understand what a co-operative is… “a co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to…

A friend just introduced me to “the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint“. Guy Kawasaki is right! It is true. Most start-ups are poor at delivering a clear strong message to VCs. VCs are not interested in working with companies that does not have the right management structure, etc because its hard work and they have many other propositions to choose from. Many start-ups, specially those in the technology space, falls into catch 22 scenario, i.e. cannot develop product, generate revenue, let alone acquire clients without external funding. You have no chance of getting funding if there is no product, no revenue…

Everyone knows who BT is. But do you know how much influence BT had in creating entrepreneurs? I had the fortune to work with BT Retail in the past. And during my involvement, I had the opportunity to research Internet Service Provider (ISP) market. Most of the CEOs who run top ISPs today, worked for BT in their career at one point or another. Today, I was told by Vodafone that SE 990i I have been awaiting for since X’mas 2005 may not be released this month. So, I started looking for alternatives and I came across i-mate, a company…

I recently came across vyew pronounced as “view” from Zoli’s and Dennis Howlett’s blogs. In the past I have trialled both gotomeeting.com and webex, and came to the conclusion that webex is priced too high and bandwidth hungry. So, I was going to settle with gotomeeting.com. We need a on line meeting product that has following features: Web based – because we are a web based company and therefore promotes such applications. Thereare other valid reasons than this!! Can be easily set-up – if it does not require software installation on your machine, this is even better Can use to…