Top 5 Most Hated Bloggers

Posted by Tom Blue on June 22, 2009 under Technology | Be the First to Comment

Loud, opinionated, egotistical. These are common characteristics of successful bloggers and typical descriptors of the Top 5 Most Hated Bloggers…

#5 Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is primarily known for his company, Weblogs Inc which was sold to AOL for $25M.  He is extremely outspoken and people really seem to dislike him even if they can’t figure out why.  Maybe it is his “conference spam” blowup he had with Dave Winer at the TechCrunch20. Or maybe it was his sensational “retirement” from blogging yet he still continues to blog. Whatever it is people seem to have a strong opinion about him.

#4 Mark Cuban
It is easy to hate a multi-billionare that owns a nba team, isn’t it?  Before calling out refs in defense of his Dallas Mavericks, Mark sold his profitless Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7B in Yahoo stock.  What frustrates most Cuban haters is that they feel he got lucky while he gives the impression he is a business guru.  On top of that, he is an outspoken owner of a professional sports team.  My personal opinion is that he is hated because most people want to be him.



#3. Arianna Huffington
Even if you agree with her politics, you probably still find Arianna Huffington’s voice slightly annoying.  Speaking against any side politically is a sure fire way to collect detractors.  Arianna is a Greek born writer who was previously married to Michael Huffington, an oil millionaire and Republican politician.  She was a staunch “right winger” while married to Michael, but has recently switched to the left.  Switching teams will definitely anger a few.  

#2. Michael Arrington
The more power you have the more likely people are going to hate you.  Michael Arrington is the Founder of TechCrunch, the most popular tech news blog.  Every startup is dying to get a mention from his blog, but with only 20-25 posts a day a lot of founders are going to be unhappy.  Apparently this craze has hit unprecedented levels over the past 2 years.  Not only did he get spit on at a conference in Europe, but received death threats for he and his family.  Success definitely has its drawbacks.

#1 Perez Hilton
Is it surprising that the most hated blogger is a hater himself.  Celebrity bashing and gossip has entered new levels in the past 10 years and Mario Armando Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) has put his face on the movement. Not only does he tear people apart, he wears outlandish clothes and his hair is usually pink. That doesn’t sit well with mainstream America. What also doesn’t sit well are discussions and disagreements about gay marriage… especially during a Miss America pageant.  And Perez Hilton was in the middle of all of that.

Bootstrappers are the Real Entrepreneurs

Posted by Tom Blue on June 15, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing | Be the First to Comment

I have gone to a lot of conferences and seminars over the years that were focused on startups, business plans, venture capital, etc. Not only that, but I graduated from USC with a degree in Entrepreneurship. Every single day we would have an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist present to the class.

Many times these speakers talked about how an entrepreneur is a unique breed, self reliant risk taker that goes through an enormous struggle when starting a company. This message almost always seemed to come from a VC and/or a so called chronic entrepreneur that received venture funding. I find this sort of ironic considering I believe the real entrepreneurs are the bootstrappers.

An entrepreneur is someone that assumes the risk of a company and owns all aspects of a business. First of all, almost all founders of vc funded companies get a 6 figure salary. You call yourself a risk taker? When I started my company I had nothing. If I didn’t make a profit that month I was seriously hurting. In my late twenties I was couch surfing to save money and when I did have enough for an apartment it was a literally a box with no kitchen. My car got repossessed! I am not trying to say my life has been tough(it hasn’t), but I am bit tired of the violin playing CEO of a company that got $5M in funding…

Second, once you get financing you are not in control of a company regardless of what you might think. Bootstrappers completely control their destiny… Even if you try to blame your failure on an employee you have to look at yourself. You are the one that hired them. If you fail it is because of you. You make the final decisions.

No offense to anyone that has received venture capital… I am sure I will raise money for other ventures in the future. I am just asking if we could make the struggle a little less sensational…

My Interview with Craig Rosenberg

Posted by Tom Blue on June 10, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Craig Rosenberg of Funnelholic did an interview with me last week and it was just posted on their blog. Thanks! I like their site because it gives insight in to what people are thinking about the future of sales, marketing, and lead generation. I also noticed the company Craig works for, Tippit, has a number of bloggers that focus on different subjects in and around marketing. I think this is a solid strategy as it gives the Tippit brand name more reach.

TechEndeavor Profile and Founder Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on June 9, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Technology | Be the First to Comment

TechEndeavor provides Enterprise Mobile Consulting.  They are headquartered in Austin and one of their co-founders is Rahul Aggarwal.  Below is an interview with him…

Planvisage Company Profile and Founder Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on June 3, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Pari Annamalai is an American that is now living in Singapore. His company, Planvisage, provides supply chain solutions… Here is our interview below.

1. What do you do?

Planvisage is a Supply Chain Solutions Company. We provide both software and services to companies including outsourced planning services for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses all over the world.

2. Who are your competitors?

Not to sound funny but our biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel or manual processes. We compete with other companies that do Production Planning, Production Scheduling, Demand Planning and Replenishment Planning for SMEs. This market is highly fragmented with no real global player. There are big players like SAP with APO, Oracle with APS, i2 and JDA Manugistics but they focus on larger manufacturing companies so we really do not consider them our competition.

3. What makes you different than your competitors?

Our product is very graphical things like our BOM Diagram and our Gnatt Based Planning board are all very unique to our solution. We also offer functionality that is important to SMEs that are only found in the larger systems but the cost of these systems can be many times higher. Our total cost of ownership is very low because of the following reasons:
a. Our products are based on a proprietary heuristic algorithm rather than optimization algorithms which increases the need for hardware.
b. The products are build on standard proven MS .net framework and standard databases like SQL, DB2 and Oracle. This insures availability of long term support and reduced costs.
c. Implementation times are 25% of the time of larger systems which insures up front investments are low. Typically we can implement our modules in less than one month.
d. No special administrators or support staff required to maintain the system. The users are able to maintain the system and make the needed changes as required.

4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?

Our biggest challenge is the overall economy has affected most of our customers worldwide but the companies that have used this time to invest in such solutions have seen paybacks of as little as one quarter on their investment. They have seen tremendous cash savings from inventory reductions, utilization of capacity more efficiently, better alignment of supply and demand which has meant lower obsolescence and inventory carrying costs and overall reduction in planning and production cycle times. In one of customers they saw a payback at one of their four factories of less than six weeks. Planvisage has also received in the past year four awards from customers and independent institutions. So getting the word out that this is truly an investment has been one of our biggest challenges.

5. How long have you been in business?

We have been in business since Jan 2004.

6. How many employees do you have?

We have about 21 employees and three partners. Our employees are equally disbursed in development and consulting. We also have a half dozen distribution partners throughout the world. We are also Microsoft, IBM and Intel ISV partners.

7. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?

We expect this year to be similar revenues to last year which is about $1,000,000.

8. Are you profitable?

We expect in 2009 to be breakeven but we have been profitable from 2004 to 2007 and have substantial cash reserves from these years. These cash reserves are in excess of one years working capital requirements.

Top 15 Sales Bloggers and Twitter Users

Posted by Tom Blue on May 28, 2009 under Sales, Technology | 7 Comments to Read

Here is our latest top bloggers / twitter users list. Since we sometimes focus on sales here we figured it would be nice to focus on the top bloggers that get the most traffic… The list is different than our original top bloggers list, in which the criteria is different. We are ranking on number of twitter followers, their Retweek rank courtesy of Retweetrank, number of unique visitors a month on their blog, and Google PageRank.

FunAdvice Company Profile & President Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on May 27, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Marketing, Technology | Be the First to Comment

I am always trying to profile bootstrapped startups so I was very happy we got in contact with FunAdvice and Jeremy Goodrich. He is extremely open about FunAdvice and I assume that really helps his PR. Of course, more bloggers, etc are going to be more likely to do a story on you if you can give them some dirt. FunAdvice has been growing 300% year over year and that is without the help of venture capital. Very impressive. Please the profile interview below…

1. What do you do?

FunAdvice is a question & answer service that allows anybody to register, ask questions, give advice and make friends. Our fundamental belief is that advice / answers is far more interesting when it’s truly social so over the years, we’ve added customizable profiles, friend lists, photo sharing & tagging, photo rating, groups, private messaging and more to improve retention and member interaction. Generally speaking, it’s worked very well, as our retention has been going up along with overall traffic.

2. Who are your competitors?

The main competitor’s that we benchmark against are Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers and Answerbag, as those are the three largest Q&A sites in the US…there are about a half dozen or so that have raised VC money or been acquired, including Yedda, Answerology, Mahalo…however, I don’t worry about what they’re doing as from 3rd party stats services, we’re all pretty close in terms of userbase.

3. What makes you different than your competitors?

The social emphasis in FunAdvice is unique…eg, ‘interest’ lists you can’t find on other Q&A sites, nor customizable profiles, nor photo tagging, etc…our breadth of member features and functionalities is really what makes the service interesting as Q&A by itself is a commodity.

4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?

To be honest, building out a site and team is pretty new to me. Despite having built eight companies over the last nine years with my wife (and several with our CTO of FunAdvice, Ericson) the last year or so has been tough for me as my leadership and team building experience is very thin. As a result, I’ve been reading a lot of books, blogs and quizing companies I’ve consulted with in the past on how to build a team, how to ensure we attain the productivity I’d like and overall keep marching the numbers higher. It’s a tough juggling act, as I go back and forth on adding features to improving revenue to improving traffic…though our team is very capable and I think we get as much done as most companies with 2x the staff, full time and centrally located staff. The distributed ‘virtual company’ thing has some advantages for us, as I don’t have to deal with atypical office politics stuff…of course that doesn’t mean we’re drama free but I do believe it’s a manageable headache.

6. How long have you been in business?

FunAdvice was started in March, 2003…however, we filed to become an LLC just about two years ago, as the site grew to 700K+ visitors, we wanted to have a more formal business structure around things.

7. How many employees do you have?

Currently we have eight people in total, three are co-founders, three full time, two part time…though I only manage the two part time & one full time employee directly, as our engineering team in China is managed by our lead engineer who has been with us for over two years now and he manages the full time engineers who build out the bulk of the site there for us.

8. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?

Somewhere between six and seven figures…as we use adsense exclusively, their terms of service say we can’t share our revenue numbers publicly.

9. Are you profitable?

We have been profitable for nearly two years, however, the founders all work part time and don’t receive a salary…we should be profitable even with paying the co-founders (including myself) a regular salary in the next three to six months.

10. When were you founded?

March, 2003 the site went live and we haven’t looked back since. It’s been a wild ride, though we didn’t really work on the site proactively until August, 2006…in October, 2006, we had 70K visitors…now, on a busy day, we have nearly 200K visitors, which is quite a jump.

Top Bloggers/Twitter Users/Authors for Traffic

Posted by Tom Blue on May 19, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Marketing, Technology | 3 Comments to Read

If you are like me, you are constantly looking for ways to get more traffic to your site and more mentions of your company within the press. Below is a list of bloggers/writers/twitter users that A) Regularly discuss WEB startups & profile them, and B) have enough focused traffic to make a difference. The list is based on the type of site they write for, their number of Twitter followers, and traffic at their home sites. We used their traffic numbers from Compete.com.

Lead411: 40% Growth in 2009

Posted by Tom Blue on under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

As some of you know, I am the founder of Lead411.  Because we rarely do press releases I wanted to do a blog post on our growth so far this year.  I also figured that most people would like to know about companies that are actually growing during this downturn as I know that interests me as well.

For Q1 2009 we have grown 42% over Q1 2008 and are on track for 50% growth in Quarter 2.  What is great about this is that we are really making a dent in the market share of our competitors. The growth has to do with a number of factors, but as you can see below our traffic has increased almost 10x.  Our unique visitors are actually above 550,000 uniques a month.   Thanks to all of our customers that have been with us from the beginning including; Gartner, Corning, Administaff, etc.

 

Some companies are growing

Posted by Tom Blue on May 18, 2009 under Companies, Executives | Be the First to Comment

VentureBeat just did a post on how they are hiring. Great for them! It is nice to hear that a company that is primarily advertising based is growing in these bad times. I always love to hear that. Most tech entrepreneurs know about VentureBeat and Matt Marshall. He covered the venture capital “beat” with the Mercury News before he started VentureBeat. Techcrunch and VentureBeat are two sites that I check at least once daily.