Social Email Graphing (SEG)

Recently, I came across this blog post about a new concept called "Social Email Graphing" and was blown away by the idea. Imagine if your email can keep track of your social network and offer you the ability to leverage your real world social network online too - that's what Sudha is proposing! Yahoo should hire this lady before someone else snatches her up! Yahoo, are you listening?

Buzka and Anza Technology Network

It's been a while since my last post and I am back with some exciting news this time, from down under. ANZA Technology Network brings companies from Australia and New Zealand to the US and helps prepare them for success in the American market. Tomorrow is the "Gateway to the US" 2007 summit in Sunnyvale, California and will see a number of start-up debuts such as social networking site "Buzka". I am very excited to hear the pitches from the different companies live tomorrow morning.

Customer Development For Start-ups

I attended a very interesting event at the TiE conference center this week. Steve Blank of UC Berkeley spoke about "Customer Development for Start-ups". He is a very engaging speaker, full of stories and interesting anecdotes, and the hours flew by. If you get a chance, you should definitely hear him speak.

His point about customer development being an iterative process, and one that needs to happen starting very early on in the process, hit home. He pointed out the flaws in the conventional model where the focus is on FCS (First Customer Ship). The current processes tend to be very inward looking with not enough attention paid to customer discovery and development. Having made quite a few of the mistakes he mentioned with my first start-up, I found myself nodding vigorously when he talked about those and making mental notes about the mistakes he mentioned which I haven't yet made!

Steve's presentation will be available in the TiE archive soon. I will post a link when it's available.

Know when to quit...

I found this interesting link to LifeHacker in my inbox:

Is it time to give up that great idea?

The readers' comments were very interesting. There were those who emphasized on the execution, others who focused on timing, and then others who zeroed in on the idea itself. Wonder how many of the comment authors are entrepreneurs themselves, and whether they're successful or not?

Time flies...

It's been a memorable couple of weeks. My biggest competitor got sued for key patent infringement. Six voice mails later, I'm yet to receive a call in return from Bill Andronico. A major grocery chain is very interested in DidaTech, but the wheels inside big companies turn incredibly slowly. Having worked for one such big company in my past life, it's deja vu. The slow pace of things means two more start-ups germinated inside my head, but one died quickly after doing market research. The second one is cooking and developing, and I'm in the process of doing detailed market research, this idea having survived the initial cursory examination. People I've bounced the idea off of love it and the potential is exciting.. stay tuned!

Grocery stores with fans

Who would have thought a grocery store would have a fan following, leave alone a dedicated website? I recently stumbled across these sites:

http://www.traderjoesfan.com/
http://www.trackingtraderjoes.com/
http://ihearttjs.blogspot.com/

Wonder if Trader Joe's management tracks these sites? If I were them, I would probably link to them from the home page. What a great way to get free publicity!

As my mentor put it, if you don't give people a place to talk about your product and your company on your site, they will go elsewhere to talk about it. Trader Joe's should take an hint.

Chris Shipley at the SVPMA meeting at Santa Clara on July 11, 2007

I attended a SVPMA meeting yesterday where Chris Shipley was hosting a panel discussion titled "Ready, Set, Launch: Taking the product to market". She is a great speaker, very witty, insightful and thoughtful. A couple of take aways from the meeting:

- If the product launch is a bright shining event analogous to a comet, never make the mistake of ignoring the tail! Have plans in place to deal with the interest that will ensue, and convert interest into customers.

- Better to overestimate the interest and make plans accordingly, unless hardware is involved and building up inventory is a concern.

- Do not make the mistake of lining up launch with funding. Launch has a causal effect in that a product launch at an event such as DEMO might raise VC interest, but funding and launching are independent events basically.