The First Boston-Area Startup Marketing Meetup

Last night we held the first Boston-Area Startup Marketing Meetup here at Aprigo’s world headquarters in Waltham. I gave a presentation entitled “Getting Your Startup Noticed Online”. It was mostly tactical and focused on execution and content promotion, with a little bit of strategy sprinkled in.

About one minute in, I noticed a few attendees feverishly taking notes. That’s when I realized I didn’t mention that I’d make the slides from the presentation available. Here they are (PDF Format).

This was the opening night of Aprigo’s worldwide multimedia production division (as in, we had a camcorder and a laptop with a webcam), so we tried something a little new. First, we were broadcasting the session live via stickam. Additionally, we took some digitial video footage and they’re available below.

It was a great event, and we really look forward to future Boston-Area Startup Marketing Meetups in the future. If you’re interested in checking them out, please join us on our Meetup Group page where you’ll meet over 100 other area startup marketers.

June 2009 Amazon Web Services Meetup

On June 11th, we hosted the Boston Amazon Web Services Meetup right here at Aprigo World Headquarters. It was an excellent, interactive conversation with a room full of people with varying experience in deploying web apps in the cloud. A brief summary video is below:


Since we’ve been enjoying these AWS meetups so much, we’re doing more of them:

Tuesday, June 16- The Boston-area startup marketing meetup
Tuesday, June 30- Boston Cloud Services- All things Cloud, SaaS, PaaS,XaaS etc

So if you’re in the area, we encourage you to stop by. These are really great events, and we’re learning a lot from them.

Collective Intelligence And SaaS- Learning From The Community While Keeping Your Data Anonymous

I just read an excellent article on Cloud Ave entitled “The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS” which covers one of the truly unique (yet almost never talked about) benefits of SaaS: the ability to benchmark against aggregate community data.

While the article talks about community data in the context of companies that are going to sell anonymous aggregate community data, it does a good job at pointing out the benefits of benchmarking against live data:

Benchmarking has long been a lucrative business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as specialized shops like the Hackett group – none of which were affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. Now that SaaS providers have access to the most authentic data ever, they can aggregate and process it, producing the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.

and

Now clearly there’s a whole world of difference between selling aggregate customer data to advertisers, benchmarking, or sharing transactional data within your supply chain, but let’s now focus on what’s common in all these cases: new business models emerge, not simply representing additional revenue sources for the SaaS vendors, but also enabling them to deliver enhanced services to their customers, services that were simply not possible in the previous, behind-the-firewall fragmented data model.

Yes, this raises a number of serious questions: How far can SaaS vendors go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data, or services based on data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate? And just what is “aggregate enough” and “anonym enough”? The industry needs to address these issues as a first step towards a paradigm-shift: while current concerns about SaaS mostly focus on the security, privacy, and consequently isolation of business data, eventually a culture of controlled sharing for business benefits should develop.

Those couple of paragraphs make some great points about using community data for benchmarking purposes:

  1. Before now, small and mid-sized businesses simply couldn’t afford to pay for expensive research firms to give them “benchmarking”
  2. Even if they could, the quality of source data is questionable
  3. SaaS providers now have access to real, live data. The article uses the word “authentic” and I think that’s right on

The last paragraph brings up the point of data ownership and privacy/confidentiality, which is incredibly important. It calls into question notions of trust and security, both issues that absolutely have to be addressed by any SaaS vendor that features benchmarking based on live data. And when a SaaS company can ensure that the data displayed in benchmarking contains nothing that can identify any customer or company….well…..just imagine how awesome that will be.

Weathering the IT Budget Storm of 2009

I believe this may be the understatement of the century, but hey, I’ll go for it anyway: IT Budgets are not increasing this year. Yup, I know. Really stepped out on a limb there and took a chance, now didn’t I? With budgets in nearly every business unit being cut, it is no surprise that companies are trying to cut back on any new spending – even when it comes to mission-critical IT expenditures. And with mid-market IT managers expected to perfiorm miracles daily in order to keep everything running smoothly, how are they expected to maintain the same level of awesomeness with a smaller budget? Well, here are a few ways for IT pros to maximize their current environment.

First, let me take a few steps away from conjecture. Rather than just taking my word for it, let’s look at some real numbers on IT Budgets. Just today, IDC put out a report that IT spending will decline by 1.8% in 2009. That’s the bad news. The good news is that:

Declining information technology (IT) spending by clients will bottom out in 2009 and will experience marginal growth in 2010, market research and advisory firm IDC has said. Global IT spending is expected to grow 2.9% in 2010 before nearly doubling to 5.7% in 2012.

Okay, so if IDC is right, 2009 will be a year of doing the most with what you’ve got, while 2010-2012 should be a lot better from an IT Budgeting perspective. So what can you do to maximize your current environment? Well, I’m glad I pretended you asked.

1. Save Money On Network Storage- All right, that’s an easy one, right? No? In theory, it should be fairly simple to figure out how to save some valuable dough on network storage. Some ideas:

  • Find Old Files- Find out which old files can be archived, moved or deleted and get them off your network
  • Find Files That Shouldn’t Be There- You’ve probably got files on your network that shouldn’t be there in the first place. We’re talking about MP3s, Movies, Family Photos and more. Your users shouldn’t be using your expensive network storage as their own personal entertainment center/ photo album.
  • Find Out What Users/Groups are taking up the most space- Understanding the owners of data can help you with chargebacks or at least it can help you find the right size for their needs.

2. Find Out What Others Are Doing- How does your IT spending compare with others in your industry? What’s your storage and management cost per GB, and how does it compare with companies of similar size with similar retention and archiving policies?

3. Take a Look At SaaS/Cloud Offerings- Sure, I’m a little bit biased here, but you owe it to yourself to see if there are SaaS-based solutions that can both save you money and alleviate some of the burden of your IT staff.

Well, that’s just a start. I’d love to hear you other suggestions on ways to keep costs low to keep within a declining budget. Here at Aprigo, we realize that those three things are easier said than done. We’re working on a suite of tools that will make it easy for IT managers to get a better understanding of storage costs, find data that can be moved, and we’re building a much better way to compare data environments against others. We’re still in hush-hush mode, but if you want to be notified as soon as we launch, click here.

Two New Meetups From Aprigo

Come join us for two excellent meetups in June.

First, we have the June 11th Amazon Web Services monthly meeting, where our own Mark True will be talking about how Aprigo utilizes AWS as part of our development process as well as Data Center operation. He will cover business objectives, processes, tools and more. Nate Aune from Jazkarta (and betahouse guy) will talk about how his company is using user-data scripts with the Alestic and official Ubuntu AMIs for their PondCMS service.

Then we have the June 16th Boston-area Startup Marketing Group meeting where some guy named Nathan Burke will be talking about getting your startup found online. If there are fewer than 25 people at the meetup, it will be held here at Aprigo world headquarters. If there are more than that, we’ve got another venue, and details will be announced as the date draws closer.

Burning the midnight oil…

It’s crunch time here at Aprigo. We’re on a roll and working hard to get the latest release, Jameson, out the door (we name our releases after whiskey brands if you haven’t guessed by Johnnie, or Glen). Our team is growing and so is the anticipation for releasing our incredible product to the wild. It’s a great feeling when you’re surrounded by passionate and talented people, all working towards a common goal. Starting from scratch and jumping leaps and bounds release after release, is to say the least fun. Stay tuned for the Jameson release, and if you’re a design partner you’ll get to test drive it next week!

Check out the atmosphere in this clip:

Trail blazing and shoe laces

I heard a great analogy from a friend I had lunch with recently, about how start

Getting great at iterations is an iterative learning process

Getting great at iterations is an iterative learning process

ups start off in a trail blazing mode, growing like crazy and building their product into uncharted territory. Then there’s a settlement effort in making sure that you put in place the infrastructure to support everything you’ve built so it doesn’t get lost. But how do you do both at the same time?

We’re big on iterations here at aprigo. Do what you know, get feedback, and then repeat. (Kinda like shampoo, just without the smell). For those of you that have worked in fast paced startup’s you know that getting the product ready is like re-lacing your shoes while you’re running. Balancing the desire to do EVERYTHING you know, with doing enough to get to that feedback phase is the tricky part, and takes discipline. We’re not there yet, but we’re learning that even learning how to iterate, is an iterative process. ;-)

If Escher figured it out, so can we!

The secret is out, sorta…

It feels like it was only yesterday that our first working demo marked its debut, and already you can sense the excitement in the air.

We’re pretty stealthy about what we’re up to, which makes sense as a stealth mode startup. However, we let a few people in on some of it every now and then (strictly under NDA, CIA, MBA, ESPN, and other important acronyms of course). We’re big proponents of listening to our audience and adapting, so this week we shared our demo with a select number of advisors, and the reaction was well worth the effort of putting it together in parallel to building the real deal. 100% likability quotient so far, we just need to keep it there.

It’s amazing how simply doing something simple, can make such an impact. In the past couple of weeks we’ve had a flood of new advisors and design partners signing up to partake in our revolution and we’re still hungry for more…

Build it and they will come…or wait till they come and then build it?

Last Friday, Tsahy and I were invited as guests to attend a session at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Gil Rapaport, was the speaker and we were his guests. I’ve seen my share of Marketing experts, Sales Quarterbacks, and Finance and Number crunchers, but Gil has got it all wrapped up in a combo platter that makes it seem like those disciplines should never have been separated to begin with.

Keep it simple, and automate everything

I wanted to share Gil’s very interesting, common-sense, and pragmatic approach to building a machine that starts with the customer looking for your product, and ends with your ability to handle every aspect of the customer’s experience within your company. Gil’s view of “Sales is responsible for making the numbers, and Marketing is responsible for the growth” makes plain sense, tying it all together into one machine that generates leads, qualifies them, closes the deal, and supports the customer, makes even more sense. Especially when your market has hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of customers.

What makes it even more compelling is Gil is a serial entrepreneur and you can sense it, he’s actually done everything he’s talking about. He’s doing it again at Viewfinity now.

The question that kept coming to my mind, is why every company that is going for critical mass, isn’t employing a similar strategy. The answer for me is the build or wait paradox. The machine you build requires a critical mass of input to process (leads), and the mechanism itself is hard if not impossible to predict, your customers will dictate most of it. However, if you wait until you have critical mass and makes sense to automate and measure everything, it’s a pain in the ass to stop everything and build the machine, possible but very difficult to pull of in most cases. So where do you start, building or waiting. My bet is on both. Build a small machine, but wait to upgrade the components when you know more about your customers, and when your critical mass is building up.

Sitting in an MBA class at MIT, listening to all the students (even though they aren’t as smart as my Northeastern fellow MBA classmates are…) made me think of how powerful it is to get to meet real world executives (in and out of the classroom) that give you so many answers and experiences, but what you take away and use is really up to you.

Director’s tears

Yesterday was our 2nd Board of Directors meeting, and both Dorin and Yaron were crying throughout. I tend to err on the side of optimism and see it as tears of joy, even though they each had their excuses. Yaron’s pensive look (one eye was semi closed), was really an eye infection, and Dorin’s teary eyes where the result of living in a Claritin not-so-clear allergy haze.

Personally, I think it was the demo Ron, Jim, and Yaniv put together that blew them away and brought them to tears, they thought so too. Way to go team for pulling it together!!!

Sixo de Mayo will be a day to remember in the aprigo books, as the first demo of a working something that does something cool, and looks just as cool. Especially since it’s never been done before.