Apr 09

The unattainable is unknown at Zaarly.com!

Kudos, Nerd 5 Comments »

There’s a little startup I have a special affinity for having been in the room for its inception at the LA Startup Weekend event, standing feet away when now investor Ashton Kutcher was first pitched. I had a chance run-in with the guys weeks later in a cigar smoking circle outside their RV at SXSW right after they landed $1M in seed funding. And I then got private beta access to their app at SXSW to try and solve a last-minute challenge we had in running our launch party for Scratch Audio.

The best way to understand what Zaarly does is to go to Zombocom and substitute “Zaarlycom!” They’re basically a hyper-local, real-time want ads site with no limitation on what you can ask for. Here’s why this is so cool:

There is no limit on the potential market cap for this company. Like eBay and Craig’s List, Zaarly stands to create an enormous ecosystem that will enable countless people to earn a living (and a few smart ones to become extraordinarily wealthy) by finding ways to expand the market and make it more efficient.

eBay and Paypal are so entrenched because they became core pillars in enabling others to make money. Zaarly will do the same only it will sit at meta level above each of these specialized devices essentially being this master clearinghouse of desire. In the process of making a ton of people rich, they are also going to provide a powerful secret weapon for those who understand how to wield it. Basically it’s like having your own personal “genie in a bottle” that you can pay to solve any issue for a price you name. Provided you know the value of solving the issue, you can at all times troll for a solution at a pricepoint which is profitable to you.

  • Need to get 300 mimes in El Paso by Friday? There’s a price for that.
  • Need to create and distribute 100,000 wristbands with your company logo to every fraternity member in the US? There’s a price for that.
  • Need midget geologists to sneak into a cave in mexico and perform ground-penetrating radar analysis, have it interpreted and translated into Swahili and display the results in skywriting over Chicago? There’s a… you get the point.

Sharp college kids are going to find ways to make money on the spread between asks on Zaarly and the infinite fountain of ways they can fulfill the requests. CS students will invent scrapers that check eBay, Oodle, Craigslist, etc in realtime for items sought by Zaarly’rs and they’ll broker the transactions and capitalize on the arbitrage. Entire businesses that were heretofore not feasible will be enabled by the existence of this tool. Zaarly is one of those simple business ideas like Groupon that people a few years from now in hindsight are going to kick themselves for not having thought of.

One of their other investors Naval Ravikant is a guy whose writing and speaking I’ve followed for awhile now. Knowing how he thinks and his affinity for econ, game theory and market efficiencies, he has to be giddy over the possibilities on this one. I was admittedly lukewarm on this at Startup Weekend but now that I’ve had the chance to ruminate on the implications for all the side businesses this is going to spawn, it’s genius. Every pawn shop, scrappy college kid and CL/eBay lifer is going to be all over this app. I can’t wait to see how things unfold.

The icing that actually tipped me to write this post was hustle they’ve shown in organically generating buzz the way Noah Kagan would advocate. A guy on their team (having no idea that I knew them already) reached out to me having found me via a tech-focused meetup I run in Phoenix. This is how you create a “root system” of buzz: focus on the pressure points and have one conversation at a time.

The UI for their app is gorgeous. The business potential is limited by imagination only. The team is legit guys. Their marketing plan is enlightened. And if/when this works its success will be a shining trophy and an amazing advert for the Startup Weekend event itself. I am long on both Zaarly and Startup Weekend.

Sign up for their beta – I understand they’re targeting a launch for early-mid May. This is definitely going to be something to investigate when it comes out.
Full Disclosure: I have zero financial ties w/ these guys. I just think they rule.

Apr 06

Blueprint for disrupting the banking industry

Entrepreneur No Comments »

I almost titled this post Mint.com: grow a pair already. If Patzer were still running things independently he’d probably be down for the bold play of disrupting the banking industry but sadly under conservative Intuit management I doubt we’ll see this play from them anytime soon.

Banking sucks. It has all but become entirely commoditized and yet I don’t know a single person who actually is satisfied with his/her bank. The features and rates are nearly identical along with the frustrations across providers. The model with banking seems to be: get you in as a customer & sign you up for extra services so switching is a PITA. Pleasing the customer? Umm no… Convenience charges, statement fees, courtesy tax, ding-you-for-withdrawing-your-own-money fees… yep, that’s the norm.

You will remain with a bank you hate because there’s always just enough inertia to keep you from changing. The more surface area you have via extra services, the harder it is to leave. And besides, if you do leave the same dynamics are still at play so it’s not like you have anywhere better to go.

Here are some obstacles that keep the average person from changing banks:

  • the tedious process of applying for a new account and closing out the old one
  • the idea having to relearn a new UI for your banking interface
  • switching where your direct deposit goes
  • reconfiguring your personal money management software
  • reconfiguring auto ACH payments hanging off your account
  • reconfiguring auto debits on your credit cards
  • figuring out how to send and accept wires under the new system
  • learning new ATM habits and locations
  • recreating bill pay profiles

There are probably a bunch more but those are the main friction points that immediately come to mind. The banking scene is ripe for a startup to come along and disrupt it by taking these issues off the table and making it easy to switch. Of everyone that exists today Mint.com is in the best position of anyone to pull it off (but they also have the most bridges to burn and are no longer the rogue player to attempt daring feats). Here’s what a theoretical startup we’ll call AnyBank should do:

a) Abstract the major banking functions for the top 10 banks to a generic UI you work with
b) Store your info and automate the process of switching banks so it’s trivial to change.

This is a bold proposition. Banks, like any incumbent spoiled with the luxury of traditional lock-in aspects, will fight this initially because you’re killing the barrier to leaving. But the answer is: start with the smaller progressive banks who are willing to play ball to gain the new marketshare, grow a critical mass there and then move upstack and gradually sign up larger and larger players. Give me the Mint interface only instead of being limited to reporting functions, add the actionable banking functions into the UI and so I have a central banking app that works consistently agnostic of the underlying provider. This will force banks to compete for our business, re-introduce the concept of customer service and make them think twice next time instead of f&^%’ing us at every opportunity.

I think of banks as being almost like databases- I have no emotional attachment and could care less which one I use as long as it performs well. There are factors that make it advantageous to use a specific one given circumstances, but if a startup can move all the “logic” up to the application layer ala AnyBank.com, then the db can be swapped out at will and I’ll do so when it makes sense.

Mint if you’re listening: please grow a pair and go disrupt the banking industry. I already spend more time in your UI than all my banks combined. If you give me the ability to execute my banking tasks from your interface I’ll have zero reason to ever visit my bank’s site. Go the extra mile of making it trivial to switch and you will single-handedly coerce an entire industry to behave properly again.

Mar 31

Espionage via war dialing open conference lines

Security No Comments »

“War dialing” is the practice of automated sequential dialing of a block of numbers – it’s like portscanning for phones. Possibly the most classic example of this was from the movie War Games where Matthew Broderick’s character uses his computer (and an acoustic modem) to dial into the NORAD defense computer and play video games against “Joshua.”

I was on a call with a major vendor last week discussing some fairly sensitive roadmap stuff and realized that about 70% of all the dial-in conf calls we do with large companies don’t have any authentication to ensure we’re actually allowed to be there. They rely upon “security through obscurity” – basically it’s like reserving a conference room in a public place but not placing a lock on the door to control who can get in. I’m not advocating this shadiness but I can’t help but think about ways to exploit insecure systems. There’s unfortunately a significant opportunity for someone to take advantage of these open conference call lines. Here’s how:

  1. Create a list of the dial-in blocks for the top companies that use these open lines with no authentication.
  2. Write an app using something like Twilio that walks the # block on the hour (when most conf calls begin).
  3. When it finds one in progress, start capturing the audio. Obviously it shouldn’t announce a name when prompted or, if required, play back something non-descript like “Bob from corporate.” How many times have you been on a big call and thought nothing when new people ding’d in without announcing themselves?
  4. Index the resultant audio captures, add meta-data on where & when they were captured and sell the uber-sensitive ones on the black market in an IRC room.

Certainly some conf lines require that you enter the meeting number & passcode. But for the ones that don’t, be aware you’re leaving the door open literally for anyone to sit quietly in the corner on your conf calls and capitalize on the absence of security.

Mar 22

How to attend large conferences without getting completely frazzled

Events, Lifehacks, Nerd 3 Comments »

Let me explain. I just returned from spending the last ten days at SXSW Interactive and Music. The attendance for Interactive was just shy of 20,000 people and Music this year was apparently about 10x that number. Having attended SXSW three years back the best analogy I can give is that this star of an event has super-nova’d into a Red Giant that’s borderline overwhelming. With such an intense amount of condensed human interaction it’s like trying to drink off of a fire hydrant: you better have a formalized system for taking baby sips or you risk getting your head blown off by the stream. So here’s the three-part “GTD-like” system I used to extract meaning from this event:

The goal is to wind up with meaningful connections and relationships. If you end up with a stack of business cards and a blurred recollection of faceless conversations, you failed.

Capture

At SXSW you’ll meet no less than 20 interesting people each day. These will be folks from all over the world with shared interests and with whom (if you had hours to sit and chat) you would almost certainly find incredible commonalities and opportunities to help each other via sharing contacts/advice/experiences. Sadly you have only limited surface area at an event like this though so you have a tiny window of interaction to make a meaningful connection.

Given the choice of breadth or depth of interaction, you should err on the side of connecting more deeply with fewer people. Stay in the moment, tune out distractions and engage. At this point you’re operating on two different levels though: 1) you’re 90% in it connecting 2) you’re 10% above it indexing. When you part ways, jot a three word trigger phrase on the back of the business card you received to make a mental note of the conversation.

Curate

At the end of the day (or even better, periodically throughout the day) stop and make notes that distill the anchor points and context of conversation with each person. The half-life of a conversation is less than a day so this distillation process is essential and should occur before the sun goes down. If you wait until after you return home, you’ve likely missed the opportunity to capture and process the meaning.

I use Evernote as a general purpose note taking app and I made a single note for SXSW that I just extended each day jotting down tidbits from interesting conversations. The key here to processing is to actively brainstorm about the interaction you just had and think hard about how you can help the other person. Curate the discussion mentally and jot down a concrete follow-up action you will make to advance that cause. I added an empty checkbox by the people I definitely wanted to follow-up with (Evernote makes this easy).

BTW I hate paper- it’s something extra that takes up space and inevitably you end up losing it. And yet in spite of all our ability to put a man on the moon we still rely upon paper as the lowest common denominator for exchanging contact info at conferences. Go figure.

I use a free iPhone app called “CardMunch” that allows me to quickly convert physical business cards into digital format. It lets you retain the associative value of the business card (the visual image you link with the person and recall) while giving you the more useful OCR’d data in a format that can be exported into your contact manager.

Contact

Lastly, all is largely for nought if you don’t ping the people you met after the conference to cement the connection and open the door for continued conversation. You should ideally offer something of value – an intro, a thoughtful insight based on a previous conversation. Even if it’s just a “hey it was great meeting you” compliment, do something that allows you to stake out a tiny piece of mental real estate in that person’s mind.

If you’re a true baller you’ll use a CRM system to develop relationships. Having used a handful (SugarCRM, Highrise, Salesforce, vTiger, Goldmine, Act) over the years I’ve become a huge proponent of Ming.ly just in the past month. In my opinion it strikes the golden balance of light-weight, frictionless and useful enough to where you’ll actually want to use it religiously. If you use Gmail as your email client this extension to Gmail unifies context across all your contact mediums and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even your phone). I recommend tagging new contacts with an identifier of the event like “SXSW2011” so it’s possible to search against the pool of people you met at a specific event. Ultimately the mental index you make is king and you’re just tagging interactions with keywords and notes that can be used to retrieve context later.

Summary

So to summarize: capture, curate and contact. Do those three activities and you’ll be surprised how many interesting relationships emerge from events. The curation step is the one that typically gets ignored and yet it’s the lynchpin for extracting the meaning from the interactions you have that allows you to develop the relationship. Try practicing the curation step next event you attend and I guarantee you’ll more frequent and quality interactions following the event.

So what systems have you developed for getting the most value out of big conferences?

Feb 22

Startup Weekend LA rocked it

Events, Kudos 7 Comments »

I drove 800mi round-trip from Phoenix to LA this weekend to help my cousin get real about launching the food truck business he’s been talking about. While I was in LA I learned via a random tweet that my trip coincided with LA Startup Weekend so I dropped in Saturday afternoon and ended up spending most of the day there on Sunday. This was the fourth SW I’ve attended now (the others being an early one in SF and two others in Phoenix) so I have a little perspective on these events. Here’s a quick braindump of my thoughts:

Contributing factors to why it worked so well

The venue for this event was Co-Loft which is a co-work space similar to Gangplank or Co+hoots here in Phoenix. Avesta (@avestar), Cameron (@CameronKashani) & Chris (@chrisdumler) have done a great job creating a fertile environment for supporting startups. I would not at all be surprised to see them take their formula outside LA and franchise on what they’ve done.
The logistics were perfectly handled. With the exception of occasional wi-fi flakiness (which is to be expected when you have 100+ people on the same network) there really wasn’t one glitch the entire weekend. Strangers stepped up and just did whatever needed to be done whether it was cleaning up or setting up. To me seeing that level of volunteering and frictionless participation is a statement of how healthy their community is.
The music was legit. At any given point the air was filled with sounds of Glitch Mob and Darude. At one point they had the Rocky theme song pumping full blast which was hilarious and at the same time genuinely inspiring when you stepped back and looked at all the creation that was going on. You simply cannot underestimate the value of good tunes to support an event. The other thing was the art on the walls. This was one of the pieces made by Cam (words by Og Mandino) and it hugely resonates for anyone is a free-range chicken:

The energy was electric and it never hurts to have a celebrity at the party. Rather than describe it, see for yourself:

The companies that were presented Sunday evening were definitely amongst the best I’ve seen at any of these events. Two or three could very well make it. Zaarly won it but my two favorites were CorkHub and Eventify. GrubKlub is something I would probably do – I’ve always thought someone should make a “meals with likeminded strangers” site. The guy from Hottiespottr needs to be doing stand-up. Crowdstunt is actually a really interesting experiment (put their app on your iPhone and be a pixel in a big mosaic image at a football game). I really enjoyed chatting with the guys behind that one. Which brings me to the primary driver here…

The people

were top-notch and welcoming. Keep an eye on Santa Monica it’s heating up and I would say for a non-Bay Area locale it rivals the startup scene of somewhere like Boulder. Shout-outs to these people I was fortunate enough to meet:
Patrick Vlaskovits is co-author of the eBook at custdev.com and arguably one of the pillars in the whole Lean Startup / Customer Development movement. I had opportunity to have lunch with Patrick on Saturday and got to chat with him more at the event on Sunday. Paleo and Custdev are two of the most life-changing things I’ve learned in the past year and the trip was worth it for these conversations alone. Being introduced to a high-level music contact by Paul as “a custdev warrior” was pretty surreal.
Tyler Koblasa is the founder of Mingly (a company ironically whose genesis was as a former Startup Weekend project). They make a Rapportive-like add-on for gmail that gives you CRM capabilities and helps you unify contacts across different buckets and get back in touch with people to cultivate stagnant relationships. We talked in depth about project management, working with remote teams and the food industry and education. It was pretty cool to discover that Tyler had been using our stuff (JumpBox) for the past 2yrs.
Emerson Taymor was one of the guys behind Crowdstunt and we got to discussing ideas on how they could adapt their thing to make it more viral.
Chris Dumler instructed me on the finer points of Yerba Mate and Matcha teas and convinced me to buy one of these gravity-feed tea strainers for looseleaf tea. Chris also hooked me up with an invite for Namesake, which is something to watch fo. It’s essentially “Quora meets IRC” and when I saw who was in there talking it felt like discovering this secret rave where all the cool kids are hanging out.
Nick Seguin of Kauffman Foundation is one of the dudes directly responsible for getting the grants for Venture Hacks and Startup Weekend. Government would never have the foresight to fund these efforts so it’s great to see non-profits like Kauffman step up.
Imo Udom is improving the job interview process for companies and applicants with Ovia. It’s basically a way for doing aync, proctored virtual job interviews with nothing more than a webcam and a browser. If you’re trying to cut costs on your hiring processes get in touch w/ Imo – they’re onto something big with this.

anyways, there were a ton of people I wanted to mention so just by name only Nicole of Music Boxe, Ryan of CorkHub, Vasily of Mingly, Fernando and Sheryl of the eventify team. You guys all have a place to crash next time you’re in Phoenix.

One takeaway I had from the weekend: I would love to see us establish an “underground railroad” for startups amongst the cities. We’ve talked about this in the past and whether it’s something as unstructured as an email list amongst ambassadors who are the hub for each city or something more formal like a tag or prefix to use on airbnb listings, it would be so powerful to set up sister city relationships amongst the incubators and co-work spaces. Anyone from the LA startup scene is absolutely welcome to come out and I’ll personally chauffeur you around AZDisruptors, Co+Hoots and Gangplank and introduce you to the peeps in our tech scene.

Here’s some pics from flickr as well as some of my own:
Gallery is empty!

And lastly, for anyone who happens to be going to the tribal unification / diaspora that is SXSW, I invite you to be my guest at the launch party we’re hosting opening day of the music portion for a new music collaboration startup we’re unveiling. You’ll hear more about it if you follow the SXSW announcements. Contact me and I’ll get you on the list if you’re out there.

Tagged with: •
Feb 16

Snapple Cap jury-rigged jury system for Ignite pitchers

Kudos, Ponderings 2 Comments »

Let me explain this convoluted title. Ignite Phoenix #9 was this past Saturday and it frigging ruled. I just happened to run into the entire Ignite organizing crew at a coffee shop in Scottsdale that actually came about via a talk at the first ever Ignite. Oh and there happened to be one of the Ignite presenters here that I got to randomly chatting with so it was basically a lot of ignition going on.

Anyways the event on Saturday was flawless in every respect (mad props to the organizing committee for continuing to improve on something that was already amazing – I’ve been to 8/9 and they’ve gotten progressively better). My only ounce of negative feedback for Jeff and team was that one of the talks was clearly just a pitch for this lady’s barter business. And hey I get it: you get a captive audience of 800 people and the temptation is to pitch your biz and advance your cause. I understand, but it makes the audience roll their eyes and basically ends up being a buzzkill.

So anyways, here’s a suggestion I want to propose: we need the equivalent of a super-budget, anonymous jury system to shame people out of trying this at future events. And now here’s an even wackier proposal for what that might look like:

What if every member of the audience got a snapple cap upon coming through the door and the moderator explained the protocol that if presenters pull shenanigans and start Amwaying the crowd, the audience is to “cap their ass” with a collective gong of popping their Snapple caps to make that annoying clicking sound?

If you know you’re going to be publicly shamed on stage when you willingly violate the presentation guidelines and slang your own stuff, you’ll either a) steer clear of this practice or b) violate it and provide some serious amusement for the audience. Either way- WIN!

Anyways, I leave this suggestion in Jeff’s capable hands and will pledge to buy a few cases of Snapple to arm the audience if they decide to adopt it. Even if they just gave the front row this duty I think it would work (but it’d be way more impressive to see 800 people capping a presenter that did this). If you’re down with this idea or have feedback on how to improve it, chime in with a comment.

Tagged with: • •
Previous Entries Next Entries
preload preload preload