Ed: These guys just raised a $2m seed round (seed rounds ain’t what they used to be).

Very easy tool to produce great looking graphs and infographics.

Ed: I like this app, few organisations or sales people have this problem solved or consistently record their communications into their CRM.

Longer term I see a future where traditional outbound and inbound sales reps are increasingly automated or replaced with self service.

The truth is most people don’t want to deal with sales people if unless they have a requirement which needs a customised solution.

I can say this with conviction after spending 20+ years selling various tech related products and services.

There is now enough evidence to say people just want to hit a button on an app and have a problem solved, service provided or a product delivered. We want software to replicate the relationship we used to build with the great sales reps.

Having sold tens of millions of $ of computer and networking equipment customer will usually make a decision to buy based on the relationship and trust with the sales person.

But increasingly this is being replaced by online ordering systems and products which are easy to configure or even self installing.

The software, online processes and products are now building the customer relationships.

However wholesale replacement of sales reps is not going to happen overnight, it took +50 years to build the enterprise sales models it’s going to take +20 years to wind it down and for some industries and processes it will never be replaced.

In the meantime there is $ billions of business still to be closed and most companies, sales people and CRM systems do a terrible job of the sales process and tracking all interactions with the client.

I would go so far as to say except in call centers where they run dedicated apps, the majority of email comms between sales people and customers are unrecorded and lost to the business when sales people move on (which they do a lot).

Scheduling meetings is an unsolved problem (especially across time zones), getting emails transferred into CRM, too often the systems that generate leads (webforms, email enquiries) are not integrated to the CRM resulting in loss of data and incomplete data between systems.

This looks like a good solution to the problem and the founders certainly have a great track record in the enterprise sales space to back this up.

Ed: Adsy.me wants to be the 2015 version of Geocities. The reference to Geocities in the pitch is an interesting one, for those that were still at school or not born during the dotcom boom Geocities was one of the first major consumer sites, pre Myspace, essentially just a big personal home page hosting site that you could customise.

Started in 1995, they built the site to become the 3rd highest traffic site in the world in the space of a few years, listed on NASDAQ in 1998 and were acquired by Yahoo in 1999 in a stock swap valuing the business at $3.57 billion (an outstanding outcome, even by todays standards). There is a great story by well known Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson about the original Geocities funding and exit.

Turns out Geocities may never have really made much money, according to financial reports it ran at a loss for some of the time up until Yahoo acquired it, but it was one of the first really supercharged Rocketships of the Internet.

When Yahoo took over they made a bunch of changes and restrictions that caused mass user revolts.

Some of these were stupid ideas including forcing users to agree that all content they posted became the property of Yahoo, no doubt the idea of some lawyer who had no idea about users, nor any concept that forcibly reducing peoples intellectual property rights was a bad idea.

Other changes like throttling bandwidth were probably dictated by the sheer cost of providing the services.

Yahoo shut Geocities down in 2009, although the Yahoo Japan version is still running.

Way Back When

To give you an idea, when I first started selling DSL services in the early 2000s it cost per $6000 per 1Mbps of bandwidth with no contention or rate limiting (ie you could hammer it and it would deliver constant bit rate).

So even though Yahoo was buying in bulk and no doubt building their own data centres the Telco’s still largely controlled the access into the data centres and transits to the users so the cost of serving 10s of millions of pages would have been huge.

Not many newcomers to the industry really understand what a massive head start you have compared to the early 2000s.

Back in the dotcom boom days you could easily spend $10-100k on a single HP or Compaq server, fit out a data centre $50-500k, big Cisco router and Pix firewall $10-200k plus all the staff to run it before you even deployed a line of code.

Dozens of companies burned through 10s of $millions without ever getting their online businesses actually taking orders.

When hosted servers became a thing I remember paying about $500 a month for a dedicated server and it took about 3 weeks to order and deploy and needed someone to hit the reset switch if I did something stupid and crashed it (usually next day and a $100 charge).

You often had to write all the supporting code we take for granted now, load balancing, authentication, web servers, payment gateways, billing, the list goes on.

Only last week I launched an instance on Google Cloud which had significantly more processing power, RAM and about 10x as much disk, took about 1 minute to boot including selecting a fully loaded MEAN stack (MongoDB, NodeJS, ExpresssJS, PHP, AngularJS) with access to virtually unlimited SSD persistent storage at a grand cost of $0.03 per hour.

And I can keep launching these at will and shut them down when I don’t need them.

I didn’t have to think about IP address, routers, firewall rules, configuring the server, remote access, trying to load software remotely, filling out forms and faxing them off and arranging payment details.

Oh did I mention the 1 year contract on the old hosted server?

So what’s changed between Geocities and now?

Back to the pitch. Essentially Adsy.me is trying to replicate Geocities by providing free hosting for fast little microsites that are easy to setup and launch.

I gave it a try and it took me about 30 seconds to create an account, pick an image and launch.

Jeff Bezos advises startups to look to the things that never change.

If 35 million people wanted to host their own microsites in 1999, then they probably still want to do that, but now it’s probably more like 100s of millions or even billions of people.

It’s exponentially cheaper to launch a new webservice than it was to build one 15 years ago. Two guys can plug together a bunch of APIs, provide a unique service that solves a problem for their customers with a relatively small amount of engineering effort get a service running in a few months, at least enough to test a theory about a problem to see if there is any one who cares.

However it’s a crowded space, we already have Blogger, WordPress, Tumbler, Facebook, Medium, Twitter, Linkedin and dozens of other ways to publish content (and each large country has their own versions of these), each catering to a different need and audience.

Back in 1999 then we didn’t have the same online advertising sophistication, essentially it was just banner ads with no targeting.

Inventory was still relatively scarce, having said that the CPMs (cost per mille or cost per 1000 impressions,) were significantly higher as the adtech industry didn’t have the same level of tracking and ROI measurement that they do now.

So what might have been a $10 CPM for run of site advertising in the mid 1990s would now be less than 50c.

So back to Adsy.me presumably by keeping it free they plan to monetise with ads and perhaps premium plans, however its tough to make a living from Adsense and banner/text ads when you don’t own the relationship with the advertiser and you haven’t got massive scale.

Perhaps if you have a lot of traffic and you can keep your costs very low this is possible.

It got me thinking about how some of the other blogging services got started.

Looking back its not clear how WordPress funded their way to success in the early days, ok now its clear, (behind every great fortune is a crime), apparently they hosted 168,000 spammy Adwords pages designed to capture search traffic and earn pay per click revenue.

They were only hosting the pages for another party and being paid a hosting fee, however they were hidden on the WordPress.com domain (which would have given them a lot of Search Engine ranking) and they copped a lot of flack for it, however as any of you have built a business know it’s tough to make payroll in a new company and sometimes you have to do business you don’t want to do just to survive.

Matt Mullenweg posted a good story yesterday of how he founded Automattic the company behind WordPress and confessed to some of the mistakes he made, but make no mistake WordPress powers more than 50,000,000 blogs and it is a wild success in content publishing, even if it’s not as a profitable business as yet.

WordPress have now raised $160 million in VC funding, however they had a developer community to die for that provided most of the coding free of charge and they were among the first to jump into this space 10 years ago.

It’s not clear to me that its going to be that easy for Adsy.me to build another content publishing system, it feels like that wave has past, but who knows, maybe the ease of signup will capture the younger market, its also a lot less work than trying to create a proper blog which takes a lot of commitment and time.

Ed: Im sure Stitch could be interesting if their website actually spelled out what the product is. Their site mumbles something about realtime photos and story telling and has a very nice looking app on it, but is not really clear what the App does or who they built it for.

I’m not that bright and I have the attention span of a gnat, so if your product pitch and website doesn’t concisely tell me what problem you are solving, who has that problem, how you are solving it and why its better than the competition, I lose interest pretty quickly.

Oh just realised I just described most of the internet.

Sadly Stitch wastes most of the landing page talking about a VIP program and offering prizes to VIP users.

It’s not clear what benefit a user actually gets from the product, much less a VIP user. My guess is that their signup list will be full of non customers (the radio industry calls them Prize Pigs) who have no interest in the product just looking for a free prize.

But what I do I know?

Maybe the all expenses paid trip and the 12 offers of $1000 per week for the users that drive the highest referrals is cheaper promotion than any other method. Might turn out to be a decent investment to buy traffic to get some users on the app and test it out, but its sure to be misleading feedback and the users will be extremely random.

Once upon a time (actually only late last year) when you wanted to launch a product you needed to convince a journalist in Techcrunch or Mashable to take an interest in your startup and write a story and then you would have 100s of thousands of visitors crash your servers and then spend the next year wondering why this wasn’t turning into a raging success.

However it seems to me that getting your first 10,000 visitors is not the difficult job that it once was.

Since late 2014 when Producthunt launched and democratised product launches you can get 10,000-20,000 new users to your site in a few days for a half decent product, they removed the friction and gatekeepers from the product discovery process.

So Producthunt has made the initial launch a lot easier, but the biggest issue is the same as it ever was.

Getting the right users to arrive, bring their friends and continue using your product are still the biggest issues a startup faces.

Check out this data from Andrew Chen in his essay New Data Shows Losing 80% of Users is Normal.

Who is the right user? That’s up to you and why you built the product, but it shouldn’t be the whole world and I bet its not someone who is chasing a prize.

The lesson from this pitch is to focus your energies on selling the product vision and the benefit your product provides to the target user rather than focus on a random launch strategy.

PS. Even if the Stitch pitch is average, they are hinting at a real trend in the convergence/identification of real time events based on geo-located photos, video (Periscope/Meerkat) and tweets, check this cool demo out http://demo.thecitybeat.org/