Posted by Tom Blue on February 26, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing, Technology | 
I want to prefice this by stating I am not a vc hater. I have thought about getting venture capital financing in the past and I realize that limiting private financing is silly…. but I just had a thought today. What would happen if venture capital did not exist?
Let’s say that startups could only spend $100K to get them off the ground and after that they would have to survive off their cash flow. You know, the old school way.
#1 Most products and services would really improve. Not only would companies have to create something that really worked well from their launch, but it would completely level the playing field. There would be a lot of competition which would drive better solutions
#2. You would immediately know if the business model was viable or not. During the last tech boom cycle, VCs just threw money at companies trying to shoot for the moon… market share was more important than profits. Then in 2001, all of the sudden, profitability was everything. Numerous companies folded. This cycle is repeating itself again right now… profitability is again, in vogue. If cash flow positive was always the goal much time and money could be saved.
Posted by Tom Blue on February 23, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Technology |
I like to put out news about b2b tech companies because they are not usually covered. TechCrunch, etc seem to focus on consumer based companies because they are more attractive to a broader audience and they have a little more flair to them.
FastDue just received $5M in funding from an Angel. FastDue seems to provide free tools, forms, agreements, and resources for businesses. I am actually very surprised they got this much funding. I wouldn’t expect there would be that much revenue to be made on these services. Maybe they are trying to grow themselves into an AllBusiness type of company which was recently sold to D&B for $55M.
Posted by Tom Blue on February 20, 2009 under Uncategorized |
I have a tough time finding a vendor/consultant that I am satisfied with. So much so that I am starting to think the problems are stemming with me instead of the consultants I am working with. Why do I expect so much from them? I think I expect a lot of myself so I expect people to be just as diligent as I am in their work. In addition, many times I will voice my dissatisfaction which I think I am entitled too because I am “the customer.” The only problem with this is that these consultants, just like a co-worker or employee, need to have positive feedback as well as the negative. If they are treated poorly or disrespected they are more likely to think they deserve more money from the customer for taking the abuse. This may lead to exaggeration of hours, etc. If people feel like they aren’t getting a fair shake they have the ability to get even without you knowing. That is a fact. In addition, people are more likely to give that extra effort for those they really like.
All this being said, I am going to start treating vendors more like co-workers…
Posted by Tom Blue on February 10, 2009 under Uncategorized |
TicketMaster and Live Nation just announced they plan to merge. Stockholders from each company will own about 50% of the whole company. It is a natural marriage because one handles ticket sales and the other live entertainment. The Board of Directors of both companies has already approved the merger…
Posted by Tom Blue on under Companies, Marketing, Sales, Technology |
John Dvorak just wrote a post about search engine optimization and how there is a lot of b.s. involved. For those of you who aren’t familiar with John Dvorak, he is the equivalent of Andy Rooney for the tech world. He is admittedly cranky and can be a bit of a curmudgeon. I actually find him humorous.
Anyhow, he mentions that many SEO pros told him to change his url format of his pages because they are more likely to get crawled by the search engines and are more likely to improve his rankings. The rumor/theory is that A) google doesn’t like parameters and ids inside web pages, and B) google also likes pages that have the keywords/titles inside of them. This backfired for Dvorak. He lost 20% of his traffic and it has taken him months to recover. I feel bad for him because I know that is frustrating, but I had the opposite experience when I switched over our page formats for Lead411. It has completely improved our results and we have grown by at least 60% since the change.
I do agree with Dvorak on one thing… seo is the new snake oil industry. I started noticing this in the nineties when everyone was starting their own SEO business. The problem is that payment is not based on results and probably never can be. SEO’s are at the mercy of google. I don’t know of any SEO professionals that guarantee certain rankings in google. If they did, they would be gambling. You never know what Google is going to do or what your competitors might do.
As for using a SEO firm… they are not all bad. I would just stick with the firms that show up at the top of the list for “SEO” in Google. I always love it when I get a marketing email from a SEO stating they can get me at the top of the results for my keywords. I immediately do a search for SEO or search engine optimization inside Google. 9,999 out of 1,000 their own URLs are not listed in the top 100. Hilarious.
