Mike88

Mike Nicholls Australian Inventor + Entrepreneur working with a small team of engineers building prototypes from Inventions including two medical devices. Publishes Startup88.com and has assessed/reviewed +500 inventions and +200 startups in the last 3 years. Mentors Sydney Startups via Incubate and other incubators and helps members of the Australian Startup Community via the Startup88.com website with free publicity and advertising. Experience in numerous industries including Digital Publishing, Cloud Computing, Apps, Hardware, Aviation, Real Estate & Finance and Health/Medical Devices.

Droners.io – Connecting Drone Pilots with Users

Pitch your Startup
Startup Name Droners.io
What problem are you solving? The drone/UAV industry is exploding. Everyday you see headlines covering the great uses for them, and unfortunately also a lot of negative things from them due to their irresponsible use. Our mission is to make drone services easily accessible and affordable to the everyday consumer, safely, and legally. We make it super easy for anyone to post any kind of job, whether it be a wedding, real estate, or a surf session, and get connected with 100’s of professional, legal drone pilots.
What is your solution? Droners.io connects you with local, professional drone pilots to film your wedding, real estate, surf session, anything. Read reviews, compare prices and hire the pilot that best fits your needs and budget.
Target Market Consumers
How will you make money? The site is free to use for clients. Pilots pay 10% for each job, with a $1k cap.
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Dave Brown, the founder, is a senior software engineer and entrepreneur. He has been building web applications for over 10 years. Over the last two years he has built several two-sided marketplaces including the Google funded CustomMade.com, a similar type of marketplace for makers of custom furniture, jewelry, leather, and anything else you can imagine. Armed with the experience of what it takes to build and scale a two-sided marketplace, Dave knew exactly what he needed to do to get Droners.io off the ground. Two months later, he launched Droners.io with a slew of features, including platform messaging so that clients and pilots could easily communicate togther, a secure online payment platform to allow clients to easily pay their pilot and reviews to help pilots build their brand and reputation.
Founders Names Dave Brown
Website https://droners.io
Twitter Handle @dronersio
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Hardcore Sales Prospecting

Daily Startup Tip,

Had a mentoring discussion with some fellow mentors today and when asked how many sales calls a new startup selling into the enterprise should be making a day I suggested 20 minimum.

The mentors all laughed at me, suggesting that this was way too high.

I was actually being conservative, I actually though it should be more like 40-50 but I know they definitely would have fallen over laughing.

I spent about 8 years in Corporate IT sales, 8 years cold calling for my own business and also when I took a sabbatical from tech I spent a few years selling ~$15 million of real estate (not actually a big deal in Sydney).

I am not the worlds best cold caller, I hate it, give me a warm lead any day however sometimes there is only one way to reach your prospects and that is by cold calling.

This is especially the case if you want to secure meetings and try to win business this year, not next year (or never).

Other methods are too slow or can easily be ignored. Cold calling doesn’t scale but it can get you those first 10-20 customers that will keep you alive while you work out how to create a lead generation marketing system that will scale.

I know phone usage is reducing but its still a thing in corporate land and while it is, if you are in enterprise or business sales you should be calling a minimum of 20 prospects a day. It does actually work for consumer too but its painful.

Don’t over think it, write down a script 2-3 paragraphs and pick 20 prospect names and start calling.

Linkedin is fertile ground for finding names and titles of people and often even their mobile number.

Do a search with the key attributes you need, i.e. title, city, skills et

Cut and paste 50 names into a spreadsheet,

Start calling, rinse and repeat.

You might laugh but 20 calls before 10.00 puts you in fantastic shape for the day and makes you the top 5% of sales reps for prospecting (most don’t).

If you were wondering my best ever call record for a day was 160 calls.

Thats what you call hardcore.

Image Credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle

Nominate Now For The Deloitte Technology Fast 50

Events/Seminars
Event Name Deloitte Technology Fast 50
Event Details The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 now in its fifteenth year, is a program that recognises and profiles Australian technology companies, both public and private, who have achieved the fastest rates of annual revenue growth (based on percentage revenue growth over the last three years).

Deloitte Technology Fast 50 winners receive exposure and recognition from media and industry, and join an exclusive network of high performing technology companies. Available to entrants meeting the eligibility criteria, the program is supported by forums, events, newsletters and seminars, which will help to grow your business and boost your company’s profile.

For more information and to view the eligibility criteria please visit our website.
Date Nominations close on 25 September, 2015.
Organiser (person, company, org) Deloitte Australia
Link to Tickets Nominate your company now http://goo.gl/TaCMGI
Your Website http://www.tech50.com.au
Twitter Handle or Hashtag @TechFast50au
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Enterprise Sales For SAAS Startups

Daily Startup Tip,

Had a discussion with an freshly hatched enterprise startup the other day, a self acknowledged newbie we got to discussing the process of selling into the enterprise.

Another thing I am grateful to Hewlett-Packard for is their insistence all sales reps undertake training with Strategic Sales Training with Miller Heiman who are arguably the long established experts in the methods of selling into the Enterprise.

Might be a bit old school for the many new age growth hacked, A/B split tested, recurring billing payment gateway SAAS companies but I promise you if you are selling a product used by enterprises, no amount of growth hacking is going to help you unless you understand these concepts.

You may work out a way to bypass some of the players as Atlassian has, but to do this you need to understand the basic concepts.

So here is an outline of the key issues. If Enterprise is your thing go buy Miller Heimans books or do one of their courses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISHuR20G330

You can buy their updated books on Amazon here.

When you are selling into the enterprise it’s important to select your prospects carefully, the reality is to do this properly you can only have a handful of active sales prospects at once.

It’s important to understand that an enterprise sale is actually 3-10 separate sales processes, they just happen to be in the one company and affect different parts of the decision making process.

The biggest single objective of the key influencers in the prospect company is to keep their very highly paid jobs and maintain their power in the organisation. Anything that poses a threat to this has some work to do.

I can’t do justice to the entire process here, for that you will need to do one of their courses but here is a summary of the key points and issues of the Enterprise Sales process.

Essentially a sales rep needs to complete a separate Blue Sheet for a sales opportunity in a prospect or customer. The bluesheet (pictured above) helps you quantify the account and requires you to;

  • Start with a single quantifiable objective for that account (separate objectives=separate bluesheets)
  • Makes you decide whether this is a good customer for you
  • Recognize your position against the competitors in the account.
  • Recognise the prospect organisation has multiple people or “Influencers” with multiple agendas and objectives, few of which will be the same and may not be entirely rational from the outside looking in.
  • In order to secure a sale you may need to sell across and up and down the organisation to convince multiple Influencers.
  • An example. You wish to sell a new Enterprise ERP software to an enterprise.
  • You are going to have to convince the CEO, possibly the board, CTO, CFO and COO, Director of IT and probably a few managers in each function.
  • This is a complex sale, it could take years.
  • In order to map out the influencers you have know which influencers are responsible for what part of the decision making process.
  • The guy who signs the cheque usually isn’t the only one who makes the decision.
  • The key types of Influencers are Economic (they sign the cheque), Technical (they make decisions based on the specifications of the products) and User (who actually use the product or manage the team who uses the product)
  • There is usually only one Economic Influencer
  • There can be many different Technical and User Influencers (consider our ERP example, could be a Technical influencer regarding accounting, cloud computing, IT Support).
  • You may need to address the sales process with each of them
  • The blue sheet forces you to review and rate each of these and your position with them
  • It forces you to work out what a Win looks like for each person who is an influencer
  • This allows you to formulate a plan to address any weaknesses or capitalise on any strengths in those relationships
  • Finally this leads to an action plan specifically to address your position in the organisation and the sales process.

All of this explains why you need to take them on Rugby and Soccer World Cup trips and get them into the box at the Swans for at least 12 months before you close a deal.

You may think that in this day and age of online sign ups you don’t have to do this anymore.

But unless your product can be purchased on a department credit card without any approvals from the division head or the product is insignificant in the company then you will absolutely need to work through this process or work out a sales method and pricing strategy where a single manager can make a decision without the approvals.

Thanks to Miller Heiman for the fantastic training some 20 years ago (it’s stuck with me) and for the use of your Blue Sheet

The Tools & Stacks We Use To Run Startup88.com, Day Job & Side Projects

Daily Startup Tip

Thought it might be useful for you to know what tools we use to run Startup88.com and also a lot of projects we work both in the day job and my side projects.

Startup88.com

Startup88 is hosted by Flywheel who I highly recommend

  • For small projects we use Trello.com to allow us to capture ideas and then prioritize them.
  • Everyone runs on Slack and Github and Trello are both configured to push any changes made into the Slack Channel.
  • Startup88.com runs on a self hosted WordPress installation powered byFlywheel. The key plugins we use on WordPress are
  • Sumome.com (this has increased my email sign ups from 2-3 to 50-60 a month)
  • Yoast SEO & Analytics Plugin
  • Optimizely for A/B testing signup copy
  • Google Analytics for tracking traffic
  • Google Adsense for Advertising
  • Mailpoet (warning do not use this, trying to find a good replacement)
  • Leadin by Hubspot (captures all available social network data about a person who signs up as well as what pages they visited and how many times)
  • Custom plugin that we developed which takes a form entry and turns it into a WordPress Post
  • Livefyre for handling comments
  • Askimet for catching spam in comments, forms and forums
  • Wangard for catching Sploggers (Spam Bloggers who register as fake users)
  • Buffer App for cross promoting all our posts to multiple social networks at the same time, saves an enormous amount of time.
  • Tweet Jukebox for scheduling large quantities of Tweets long into the future
  • Mandrill for Transactional Email, I like their visual guides and reputation metrics so you know how you are going. If you don’t get your email list right, configurations correct and strip out all the bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints and rejections then your email newsletter ends up getting rejected. Mandrills tools and reports are great for managing this and they can handle 10000s of emails a day.
  • PicMonkey.com for fast editing of images, resizing, cropping.
  • Canva for more detailed layouts or banner ads.
  • Atom for the odd bit of incompetent coding
  • Tweetdeck for managing multiple twitter accounts
  • Spotify for making my 3 hrs of train commute bearable

Day Job & Side Projects

  • Google Docs for managing shared documents, checklists and presentations
  • Firebase for real time database supporting updates to 10,000s clients simultaneously and client authentication
  • Google Cloud for hosting code
  • We use Github.com to allow us to version our software and manage multiple users working on the one code base.
  • Bitnami great for launching preconfigured instances of just about every software stack you might want to run either locally or on your cloud server.
  • NodeJS for non blocking crawling
  • AngularJS for 3 way binding front end.
  • NLTK (Natural Language Tool Kit) for Natural Language processing, tokenising, stemming
  • Word2Vec for Clustering results
  • Skitch to occasionally get a point across visually
  • Python for running the Clustering and Machine Learning code
  • MongoDB as a backend database working with NodeJS
  • For larger projects we use Atlassian’s Jira for project management and Confluence for documentation
  • I get all my contractors from Freelancer

Drip – Email Marketing Automation Software

Pitch your Startup

Ed: I like this one, not sure about the pricing but I guess if you are earning income from a large portion of subscribers you can probably justify it.

Startup Name Drip – Email Marketing Automation Software
What problem are you solving? Easily automate email marketing.
What is your solution? Drip is the 80/20 lightweight alternative of the clunky old marketing automation platforms, at around 10% of the cost. Drip’s sole purpose is to make it ridiculously easy to get started with email marketing and marketing automation.
Target Market Marketing, Email, Software, Automation
How will you make money? Subscriptions/Advertisement
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? Rob Walling is a serial founder, author, angel investor and advisor. He’s been quoted in Inc. Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and dozens of other national publications.Derrick Reimer is a full-stack developer from Reedley, CA. He’s been working with Rails for half a decade and is proficient in every application layer from SQL to Photoshop.
Founders Names Rob Walling
What type of funding has the company received? Bootstrap
Website https://www.getdrip.com/
Twitter Handle @getdrip
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When You First Start Out

Daily Startup Tip

When you first launch you maybe concerned about what people will think about your actions, your startup, your marketing, your ideas.

You may be concerned that you seem too brash, too young, too new, too different.

Not experienced enough, not smart enough, not good looking enough.

Didn’t go to the right school, University, don’t hang with the right crowd.

Truth is that no one actually notices. The majority don’t care.

If you are lucky someone might give you a second thought.

Mostly they won’t.

Most parents, schools, societies don’t want or reward someone different, radical or amazing.

They are rewarded for turning out homogenous young people.

As such most people try to blend in, act like the other girls & guys, be credible, don’t rock the boat or make a scene or a fuss or heaven forbid do something different or amazing.

Actions are often prefaced with “what will people think about us?”

Reality for most people who ask “what will people think” is that no one thinks about them at all.

Reminds me of the old real estate sales maxim, “No one is coming, no one is calling, you have to go out and get them”.

So in most cases in the early days it really doesn’t mater what you do, most people will never see it.

You have to hope that the few who do see your work think its worth remembering.

This is liberating because knowing most people are not paying attention gives you the freedom to try things that you think will be frowned upon or not right good enough etc.

If you revert to the mean in your behaviour or work at the beginning of your startup life you are in trouble before you begin.

So try something different, do a dozen experiments, be remarkable, try a different business model, pricing, be reckless.

Don’t worry too much about your brand in the early days, no one else is going to.

Thanks to NASA for the image

Given The Stock Market Slump Smart Startups Are Considering Their Funding Options

Daily Startup Tip

So there is a lot of bad news about global stock markets and lots of doomsayers about what it will do to startups and their funding plans.

But there are some positive effects. I just received an email from a Startup telling me they had decided to increased pricing on all their plans.

They indicated they decided to focus on improving their product for their customers and aiming to be revenue funded instead of chasing growth and burning capital.

I think we are going to see a lot more Startups aiming at self funding over the coming months.

The smart startups are going to look at their plans and work out how they can deal with disruptions to the funding markets.

My guess is they will bring revenue forward, slow their expenses, focus on profitable growth and perhaps delay initiatives that don’t bring in cash.

All of this is pretty sensible.

There will be the sob stories, those who didn’t see the writing on the wall, who continued to spend like drunken sailors and they will pay the price eventually.

However Im still relative optimistic about the funding market for startups.

Yesterday I noticed one of the most tweeted articles was around how the current Global Stock markets were going to hurt Startups, people are funny, they love to spread bad news, “Told You So” it was all too good to be true they said.

So my take on this is a continued rout on the stock markets will affect startups but it doesn’t seem like 2008 or 2000 to me.

Compared to the Dot Com boom, we have web/app enabled businesses making substantial changes in the way business and consumers function, massive increases in capability, significant increases in productivity, disruption to shitty old world business models that were more about the incumbents needs than their customers.

Contrast this to the crash in 2000 where the biggest focus seemed to be on different ways of buying or shipping pet food or fashion (or whatever e-commerce item you want to insert).

The hyper competition in Angel rounds will probably decrease if the Angels are feeling less rich.

Valuations may flatten, but this is ok in my view, you have to leave something for the buyer at the end, otherwise they don’t buy.

If your valuation is sky high all the way to IPO, then there won’t be much left for the public investors and you won’t get an IPO away.

VC Firms are a different situation, they still need to invest their funds, from day one of their 10 year funds they are on a timeline.

They need to get the money invested in the first few years and then exit in the later half of the fund.

They will probably get a bit pickier, in these situations there is always a flight to quality, they won’t have as much competition.

I think its fair to say that Startups need to be prepared for some disruption to their fund raising plans and the smart ones are going to do something about it now.