Booktagger - Sunday Surprise-II

Vishal Sharma Saturday, March 15, 2008 , , , , , , , 0 comments

Continuing in our coverage of bringing more surprise entries, today’s surprise entry is Booktagger

Co-Founded by Jeremy and Rebecca LeBard, Booktagger is a niche web 2 social community for book lovers. Each Booktagger profile is a graphical representation of your physical bookshelf on the internet. The bookshelf can then be shared with friends, family and others searching for the next good read. Booktagger.com is the first offering, trading under the entity name Amity Agency, which specializes in the creation of niche web communities.
Jeremy describes:

We hope you'll congregate into book clubs and share reading experiences. Or maybe you'll catalogue all your books and track to whom they've been lent. We are a stand-alone site with a Myspace application due for release shortly.
Jeremy gives us more insights about their startup:
• How it started?
Booktagger started off like any good journey, with a woman. Rebecca, an avid reader and fellow internet addict, could not find a free and appealing service on the internet where she could store
memories of books and share them easily with family and friends.

Jeremy took it as a personal challenge to implement what she was looking for. With Rebecca's continued creative input Jeremy designed a unique way of sharing books that functions more like an application and less like the traditional internet experience. An idea turned into a business entity, Amity Agency. Like any good saga the Booktagger story is just getting started.

Rebecca is an academic at UNSW in the field of molecular biology where she has been working since completing her PhD at Sydney University. Jeremy is an IT professional who has consulted for Microsoft, Avanade and a number of other large Australian institutions.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
18 Months of planning, fundraising and coding

• What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
Beta

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
Provide a niche social network for book lovers that leverages into established social communities.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Booktagger is a free book cataloguing and recommendation application available online.

• What is unique about your venture?
We are the first Australian based Web 2 niche community for book lovers. Booktagger bookshelves are interactive and allow for the easy movement and propagation of books throughout the community.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Niche social networks for book readers and social book widgets/applications for mature social networks.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
We are targeting internet savvy bibliophiles and casual book readers.

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
All ages of literate internet users.

• How many users are using your services?
We currently have 1,200 registered members and 9,000 catalogued books.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
We have grown our community base with no media spend. All growth has been viral.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
We measure Booktagger's success based on population interaction and uptake.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
This is a labor of love. ;)

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are none based in the Australian market. However overseas there are several large players that have their own reading communities such as Shelfari, LibraryThing, GoodReads and the Facebook specific Visual Bookshelf. We fill a gap as Australian authored books are often not found in their communities.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
Php and Mysql.

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
We haven't used an out of the box technology our community is custom built. However our blog is hosted by WordPress.

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
We couldn't have made it as far as we have without open source tool sets.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
We are using a Linux based platform and Mysql for the database.

• How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
On occasion I run into others starting niche social networks at entrepreneur meetups like Open Coffee in Sydney.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
How long is a piece of string?

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
I believe the main barrier for new ventures is finding early stage investors.

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
AC Nielsen released a report in February 2008 outlining online shopping trends. The most sought after items on the internet were books. They also indicated that online product recommendations were the highest growth area for influencing buying decisions. We believe we've captured the right product, books, and mechanism, a social network, for promoting it. Online shopping growth world wide is a high growth sector.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Be passionate, listen carefully and evolve.

Thanks Jeremy for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of Booktagger. All the best for Booktagger.

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GoodBarry

Vishal Sharma Friday, March 07, 2008 , , , , , , , , 1 comments

The 11th participant is GoodBarry

GoodBarry has created GoodBusiness, the first system born to run online businesses. It's one central console that powers your website and email marketing, your online shop and your customer database. It has re-defined "web hosting" for small business with an all-in-one product that replaces up to 10 separate, expensive systems with one. With GoodBusiness, you can have a fully fledged online business up and running in a matter of minutes - including your website, online shop, email marketing and an integrated customer database.
GoodBarry is the brain child of Bardia Housman and Brett Welch from Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst(BC) was founded by Bardia and Adam Broadway in 2003, when the duo saw an increasing need for CRM integration into websites and online businesses. With that in mind, BC created the first integrated Content Management/Contact Management system. This system grew to become a fully fledged online business platform built around that central contact database, including online shopping, email marketing and analytics

In late 2006, Brett and Bardia started to work on bringing BC's technology direct to the small business market. After re-architecting much of the system and a huge user interface overhaul, they relaunched under the GoodBarry brand in mid 2007.
This is Bardia's third venture since he founded Australia's first free email service Start, which was acquired by LookSmart in 1999.

Let us explore bit further how Brett and Bardia are progressing with GoodBarry:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. The first version took about 6 months, but we haven't stopped improving and growing the system (or shrinking in some cases) since it was first being sold.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Fully Functional!

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Business owners are struggling to get online and make it work for them. Current solutions don't do enough, aren't business-oriented or are too expensive for most businesses.
We wanted to create a single, affordably priced solution that would serve most businesses perfectly - now and into the future.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. GoodBusiness replaces web hosting with an all-in-one platform for online business. Beyond powering your website, GoodBusiness allows business owners without technical knowledge to easily manage their site, run email marketing campaigns, build an online shop and grow a customer database. All from a central, easy to use console.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. Our customer-centric approach allows us to produce amazing analytics that focus on customer actions and behaviour. Many have declared the death of the pageview, but GoodBusiness is the first affordable solution that places the focus on actions and behavior to better understand and optimize your website and marketing campaigns.

Our architecture allows us to do this easily - every part of the system is built on top of a central customer database. This means that every interaction is tracked and logged against a customer record - from blog comments to contact forms, online shopping to email marketing campaigns.
That means you can track the true effectiveness of your website, your online shop and your email marketing campaigns. You'll also build a complete picture of your customer's behaviour, which allows you to make better business decisions.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. We're targeting small businesses across all verticals, focusing on those with 1 to 10 employees. We're also targeting web designers who build sites for small businesses with our partner programs at BC.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. Tech savvy small business owners who quickly realize they need more than a website to be successful.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. Our technology benefits any one who is running a business and wants to go online - regardless of age.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. We're currently running around 2000 sites through the system.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. We've used a combination of PR and some targeted advertising

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. We're monitoring our success by the number of signups we get per week. We run our entire business on GoodBusiness, so that's the tool we use to monitor our progress!

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. We're using a paid subscription model, so our customers pay a low monthly fee to use our product.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. There are very few competitors who compete with us directly. Since we are an all-in-one platform, we compete on subsets of our features with a few players like Shopify for eCommerce and Constant Contact for email marketing, and a range of web hosting companies. Probably our closest competitor in terms of breadth of functionality is NetSuite, although their price is much higher.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. We're built on Microsoft's .NET platform.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. We're using windows server edition, running MS SQL Server for our database.

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. We try to keep in touch with the entrepreneur community in Sydney through events like Beer 2.0, Dinner 2.0 and a great OpenCoffee meetup that anyone can attend. Things have been busy lately but we try and go to something at least once a month.
And let's not forget Barcamp - BarCamp 3 is in Sydney in March!

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. A billion dollars is nice, but it really depends on what you're out to do and your business model. If you're planning on offering something free, you'll probably need some decent funding.
We've bootstrapped to here without external funding and little initial seed funding from the founders.

I think it's a simple equation really - how much do you need to pay people? Technology doesn't cost much. You can work out of your home for a fair while until your team outgrows it - which won't happen until you can afford the people. So really you just need to be able to feed yourself and your initial team for as long as you think you'll need to build a working prototype.
Once you've got a working protoype, go get funding or go get customers. Or do both =)

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. Many people say that getting funding is hard, because Australian VCs tend to be more conservative in their investments. This is slowly turning around though as more VCs become interested in early stage investments and as more people realise how far a focused, dedicated tech startup can go on $250,000 - i.e you don't need millions anymore.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Right now, taking your business online is a nightmare of choice and complexity. You've got to work out a web host, choose your eCommerce software, find an email marketing provider and some sort of customer database. Then you find someone to integrate them all (which is expensive) or you constantly shovel data back and forth (which is a waste of time).

GoodBusiness already fixes that, and I think that our market segment will see more and more integration work to address this issue in different ways.

But the next step - and the exciting bit - is the data you get from a truly integrated system. Because GoodBusiness runs your website, your shop and your email marketing, we can do some really interesting data mining. For example, we can tell you exactly how much money was spent in your online shop due to your email newsletter - without any extra reporting code added to newsletters or pages.

Again, we've started down this path but there's a way to go. In the future we'll see more and more complex analysis of online customer actions, more behaviour profiling and and it'll become more and more affordable too. This will be fantastic for businesses everywhere, since it'll really help hone your business performance.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Have a dream, back yourself, and never say die.

Oh, and learn to be a marketer! You don't want to get beaten by someone with an inferior product but better marketing.

Thanks Brett for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of GoodBarry. All the best for GoodBarry and the competition in this carnival.

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Plugger

Vishal Sharma Tuesday, March 04, 2008 , , , , , , 0 comments

The 5th participant is Plugger.

Cofounded by Stephen Phillips, Richard Slatter, Plugger, is a search engine that focuses on Australian business news. Plugger monitors, indexes, organises and analyses business news - Australian business news. Since its inception last year has already become one of the best source of Australian business news on the web.
Plugger enables you to:

  • Read the latest and most reported Australian business stories as they break.
  • Monitor the biggest news makers - which companies are most mentioned? Which business leaders and politicians are dominating the media?
  • Stay on top of the big issues in your industry.
  • Monitor news about your own company or investments - your customers, clients, prospects, competitors and so on.
The service is totally free. You don't even have to sign in or register although if users want they can. In addition, users can register (still free) for an extended service. We call this extended service PluggerPlus.

Plugger was created over the course of 2007 by a team with many years of experience in market research, advertising, marketing, journalism, web technology, and cutting edge programming. .
In Richards words :
Having worked in consulting capacity with hundreds of clients on their Internet strategies and developing lots of websites, the core of the team has used the web for years for secondary market research - to understand a market, work on positioning, find leads etc. While generic search engines are great for background and depth, nothing beats business news sites and blogs for the best source of what is happening in the market right now. So we decided to build our own business news site that does a lot of the work for us. A site that automatically organises news by company, people and themes to make it a lot easier to discover who is working with who, who are the market leaders, where is the market going, what are the important themes, and ultimately where potential sales might come from.
So we decided to build our own business news site that does a lot of the work for us. A site that automatically organises news by company, people and themes to make it a lot easier to discover who is working with who, who are the market leaders, where is the market going, what are the important themes, and ultimately where potential sales might come from.
Let us now learn more about Plugger from Richard, one of the founders, on various facets of their startup:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. The site has been in development for about a year, with the first version released in February 2007.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Plugger has not been actively promoted at all to date so I suppose you could say we are in 'stealth' mode at present. We are listening intently to all feedback and input from our user base and refining the application and experience accordingly. In effect the site is being beta tested by our current user community.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To build the best personalised Australian business news aggregation service monitoring the broadest range of quality content available to Australian business people. To provide deep analytical tools to allow our users to extract meaning from a huge amount of content that they would otherwise have to manually sift through.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. Plugger sources Australian business news across a vast set and variety of sources because what you read in the traditional media is only one perspective. At Plugger our team of human news fanatics and our even more fanatical automated news bots are dedicated to finding and organising the whole story across every perspective, wherever it appears on the web, and making it available to you in one place.
Plugger users and subscribers can:
  • Read the latest and most reported stories as they break.
  • Monitor the biggest news makers - which companies are most mentioned? Which business leaders and politicians are dominating the media?
  • Stay on top of the big issues in your industry.
  • Monitor news about your own company or investments - your customers, clients, prospects, competitors and so on.

Plugger analyses every Australian business news article it finds. It looks for the people, companies, themes, locations and products mentioned and tags and indexes everything. Using this information, Plugger can rate and graph who and what are getting the most mentions in the news at any given time and show how these rankings shift over the course of the day.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. The best source for multiple perspectives on stories in the Australian Business news arena organised in accordance with a user’s personal preferences and interests. The ability to then delve into the connections between news stories and the key actors (companies, business people, politicians, products, themes) featured.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. Generally, anyone interested in the machinations of Australian business and the stories reported in the media, both traditional and emerging. Plugger is designed for anyone who wants to search and monitor the news, analyse trends and movements over time and keep on top of events as they happen. For example:
  • PR professionals monitoring news about a particular client company and interested in the frequency, reach and volume of stories about the client as well as the variety of news sources - from traditional news networks through to alternative online media sources.
  • Share Traders tracking business news across a portfolio of investments.
  • Sales Professionals managing a long term sales process with a strategic customer.
  • Government policy professionals monitoring specific business and community issues.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. The age and gender of our user base is as broad as the demographic underpinning the Australian business world in general. Our subscribers comprise young 20-something analysts working in financial services, through to accounting firms, ad agencies and construction contractors, as well as more mature C-level executives from media corporations, telcos, banks and mining companies. If you’re interested in Australian business news then you’ll be interested in what Plugger has to offer.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. Over 4000 subscribers. The site gets about 80,000 unique visits per month.
What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
At this stage very little, although we have recently sponsored www.blogpond.com.au since we value the efforts and opinions of those working hard to create a thread of conversation, debate and commentary in the Australian blogosphere.
How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are there any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
The success of our venture will be measured by:
  • The numbers of users and subscribers
  • Positive feedback from user-base and customers
  • Ultimately, and most importantly, we’ll measure our success in terms of revenue derived from our subscription and private feed services
Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is there any new model, which is being tried?
A. Our model is to generate revenue by providing subscription services and private feed services for corporate customers.
Our goal is to deliver relevant personalised content, and intelligence derived from this content, to our users faster and more conveniently than any other news or analytics provider. We will charge an appropriate subscription fee for this service.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. A kit bag of algorithms crossing the realms of entity detection and traditional tagging, natural language processing and sentiment detection, news story ranking, clustering and personalisation, story and source aggregation.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. The website is built using the Django web framework – a framework that has allowed us to quickly deploy the site as well as introduce revisions and amendments easily over time.

Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. All the technology used behind Plugger is open source.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Apache web servers running Linux, MySQL databases. Application code is all written in Python.

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. We don’t participate in a specific ‘start-up’ community. All team members have been working in the web arena for a long time, so we routinely connect with people, businesses and communities both off and online, from web shops to ad and marketing agencies, larger IT companies, telcos and bloggers.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. The exact dollar figure depends on the number of people you need to build your offering or the number of contractors and partners you intend to engage. But broadly, you need to be able to support at least 18 months worth of design, development, marketing, promotion and sales effort before revenue generation.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. Funding.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Plugger operates in the realms Search, Aggregation and Analytics, all of which are very hot areas right now and will continue to be so over the next few years. With the search engine war well and truly over, we believe the next game is about delivering niche search engine experiences so Plugger will continue to focus on
  • Australian business news
  • Personalisation tools to allow the user to tailor their news experience
  • Analysis tools to help the user identify and understand trends and aggregate movements in the news, discern connections between people, companies, products, industries etc, identity positive and negative bias, determine volume and quality of news on given topics or people and so on.
Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. To have any chance of success you need to get all the ingredients right – a talented technical team as passionate about the user outcome as the technology itself should be at the heart of your organisation. You also need an inspired creative team mad about customer focused design and delivering optimised user experiences. Also, dedicated site admin, editorial and support staff a strong sales and marketing capability, good connections into other potential partner organisations and customers, and above all an enthusiastic, innovative board and management team prepared to try new things albeit with a responsible and balanced approach to risk management.

Thanks Richard for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you on the progress of Plugger. All the best for Plugger and the competition in this carnival.

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Evaluator

Vishal Sharma Monday, March 03, 2008 , , , , , , , , 0 comments

The second participant is Evaluator - Australian Property Reports.

Evaluator is a website that aims to make it simple and easy to arrange property valuations, building reports and pest inspections. If you are buying property anywhere in Australia, it is a one stop shop for all your property report needs.

Evaluator also offer fixed prices and guaranteed turnaround times on jobs, so you no longer have to shop around for quotes and waste time following up to get your report. All the report providers are professional, accredited and insured professionals. Their experience and professional skills are backed up by Evaluator’s commitment to quality customer experiences.

Evaluator was started by two IT consultants, Craig Brown and Justin Findlay, in Melbourne after working with some major corporations and the IT providers who service them. They saw what services the Corporates were getting and thought they could create a similar quality experience for Joe Citizen. Evaluator partnered with a web development firm in Melbourne called Get Started who did a great job of creating the face of the business via the website.

Let us now learn more about Evaluator from Craig, one of the founders, on various facets of their startup:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. Because the business was a part time and after hours affair it took about a year to go from concept to up and running. In the meantime Craig had a baby and finished a masters’ degree, and Justin got a job as a senior consultant to an online business in Monaco. It’s been a busy year and without the help of several friends the business still would just be a pipe dream.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Our business is fully live, but we are yet to promote it as the funds are a bit tight. In the next few months we’ll begin a pr campaign targeting our key stakeholders.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. The main objective of this venture is to provide an excellent experience to people looking for property reports such as valuations. Basically today getting a valuation organised takes at least a couple of phone calls, and even then you are not certain of the quality of service you’ll get.
Our mission is to increase the customer’s experience when getting property reports.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. Customers can get Valuations, Building inspections and pest reports. These are usually purchased when people are buying new homes, but are also sought when people are considering refinancing, for insurance estimates and preparing to sell.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. There are three aspects to our business that we see as unique;

  • We offer a simple and easy to use online ordering process
  • We tell people how much our fees are up front so you can plan your budget
  • We manage the report providers to make sure the reports are delivered on time and to the right quality

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Our primary users will be property purchasers and investors, Joe and Jane Citizen. However we plan to market ourselves to referrers such as financial planners, solicitors and mortgage brokers. These groups see many property purchasers each week. By offering good value to our clients we hope these referral groups will give us repeat business.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. The site is designed to be easy to use and as useful as possible. If you are buying property you really should be getting these reports. Our site makes it easier and quicker to arrange them.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. Anyone who buys property will find our site useful. Additionally groups like the mortgage brokers, financial planners and lawyers will find value in it as we can help them help their clients.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. At the moment our sales are a trickle, but we haven’t ramped up our sales and marketing activities yet. We have received positive feedback from some of the people who have used the site.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Well, that’s where we are at the moment. The budget is in need of some further investment right now. We are also right in the middle of building our advertising plan for 2008. Keep an eye out in the property industry and you’ll hear about us.
And if you want to invest or help, get in touch.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. Our immediate success measures are making sure all our customers receive excellent service. We hope that this will help spread the word about our business and help build the brand.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. Basically we charge a fixed fee for facilitating the order.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up ?
A. There are two areas of competition, although as far as we know, no-one is offering the same service today.

The first is from national providers of valuations, building or pest reports, however none of them really have the online sale thing worked out.

The second area of competition of from services such as RP Data and APM who provide statistical estimates on property prices. Our reports are physical inspections by experienced professionals, so this is more of an alternative service than a direct competitor, but people do spend money on these database estimates.

We see there Is a place on the market for database estimates, but think that real estimations by trained and experienced professionals is still important. If your home is an average home on an average street a statistical estimate will work for you, but if a property is at all unique or special the data models tend to show their shortcomings.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. Definitely our friends at Get Stared made the technology part of our business model painless. We have some phase 2 and 3 plans to increase the back-office automation and extend the services, but at the moment we are pretty happy with what we have.

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. We did enter our idea in the RMIT business plan competition, but didn’t make the finals. Thyat was a good place to meet like minded people. Also as Justin and I work in the IT industry we know plenty of IT professionals and tap them as we need them.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. These days more money is spent on the business side; IP, trademarks, branding, lawyers, setting up the company and our professional consulting time (which we value highly) so including our time this is a venture that costs upward of $50K, but without our time it is less than $15.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. I feel there is a real lack of connection between ventures like ours which are probably mid sized and the VC/Angel people. It feels like we are too small for them, but what we are trying to do does take a few hundred thousand to do well and quickly.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. I think we are in the right place at the right time. Like the travel industry before us the property industry is migrating online. Already Real Estate, Domain and others are delivering excellent services fro people looking to buy. Now it’s time for the ancillary services to come online; and here we are, delivering three of the key services people need.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Find others who have started their own like ventures (in other industries) and get in touch. Entrepreneurs love to help other entrepreneurs.

Thanks Craig for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you on the progress of Evaluator. All the best for Evaluator and the competition in this carnival.

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