Following Startups & Tech Trends

Vishal Sharma Saturday, March 15, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , SAAS , Software Development , Startup , Technology , Time Tracking Tool 0 comments

The 28th participant is 88 Miles

Founded by Myles Eftos, 88 Miles - is a simple time tracking application, aimed at the SME market.
Let us explore more about on various facets of 88 Miles from Myles. This is what he has to say:

• How it started?
88 Miles was founded and developed by Myles Eftos. I developed this for my freelance and consulting business because I realised that I couldn't accurately account for his time when working for clients.

• How long it took before it was up and running?
A beta was out with in 2 months - the final version was launched after about 6 months.

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

• What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
To provide an sustainable, un-obtrusive time tracking system that will be useful to other small companies.

• What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
Punch-in and Punch out facilities, time sheets, reporting, full REST API and integration with Saasu.com a popular Australian-based Invoicing system

• What is unique about your venture?
It is time tracking that I would want to use. As a consultant, I don't need all the flashy Gantt charts or reports - I need to be able to track my time quickly and efficiently and generate a timesheet for my clients. This is all88 Miles does and it does it well.

• What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
Small to medium design and development firms. I'm also looking at the recruitment industry.

• What type of customers you are targeting?
Basically anyone that has to deal with per-hour billing. This includes owner operators and organisations that take on consultants or contractors

• What age group of people will be benefited most?
Anyone that is working I guess :)

• How many users are using your services?
I'm currently up to 24 paid account totalling 45 users which is breaking even on expenses. I am in the process of ramping up the marketing to get the name out.

• What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
Mainly word of mouth and Google adwords at the moment. I have started a snail mail campaign - but this is in it's early days. Marketing the system is the next big step I need to take to make the venture viable.

• How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special
mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
Retention rate of users. Although the current numbers are small, those that have paid are loyal users, and the system has become a essential part of their workflow.

• What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
Revenue is subscription based.

• Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
There are a number of players in this market, the biggest is Harvest. There are some other small sites, such as Togglr, Clicktime and Punchytime, although they all use slightly different ways of tracking. 88 Miles is relatively unique in that is focuses on time clocks, rather than updating time sheets after the fact.

• What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
88 Miles is built on Ruby on Rails, relying heavily on AJAX, and REST web services

• What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
Ruby on Rails

• Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
Yes - all of the tools are Open Source.

• What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of
database you are using?
Currently the production system runs of Solaris

• 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?
Many of the Perth based users are Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) members, so I will see them at AWIA meet ups. If I am interstate, I will try to catch-up with other users if possible.

• How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
I've managed to get 88 Miles going from my own pocket, with little money. I obviously have a way to go, but it has cost me less than $5000 so far (not including my time)

• What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
Cost of hosting and bandwidth locally. You basically have to host in the US to save money. Other than that, there is no reason why an Australian company can't make a financially successful product

• What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
I consider 88 Miles in the SaaS space, which is going to get huge. I think a lot of companies are realising the benefits of hosted services. This is especially relevant to small business owners how need reliable systems but can't afford the upfront capital hit, and to road warriors how don't want the hassle of syncing data between users.

• Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
Build your system for yourself - that way you will get a feel for what does and doesn't work. You can't expect to build an awesome system if you are a heavy user.

Thanks Myles for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you in future on the progress of 88 Miles. All the best for 88Miles and the competition in this carnival.

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Vishal Sharma Thursday, March 06, 2008 2008 , Australia , Carnival , Product , SAAS , Software Development , Startup , Technology 1 comments

The 9th participant is Plutext.

Plutext enables collaborative editing around docx documents wher, docx is the default file format in Word 2007. In simple terms it's a wordprocessor like Openoffice writer and Google docs.
Based out of Melbourne, it is created by Jason Harrop in 2007 and this is the second venture he has started, previously he was involved with SpeedLegal (now Exari).

Let us explore bit further about Plutext from Jason, on various facets of his startup:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. A couple of months to build a proof of concept, whilst also doing
other things, before giving it 100% focus in September 2007.

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

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. Enable people to work on a word document at the same time. Provide an environment for doing this irrespective of whether you have Word 2007.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. People can collaborate from within Microsoft Office (ie retain their familiar working environment), and use all the formatting of a docx document.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. General corporate/government/academia.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. People who need to collaborate together to complete a document, often with a deadline approaching. People who get frustrated when they need to work on a document, but find it is locked by someone else. Existing users of Alfresco - plutext-server is delivered as an Alfresco module.
Potentially, 3rd party document management system vendors who wish to
incorporate our technology.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. 25 to 60

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. Not many yet. Ultimately we expect people to use our yet-to-be-made-public SAAS offering

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Blogs, mailing lists, the power of open source. At present, we are mainly looking for developer momentum. End user awareness will hopefully follow in due course via the well known technology blogs.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. Measuring success currently using Google Analytics and community engagement. Later, we will also include financial measures.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. Avoid dependence on enterprise software sales! Instead.

• 1. SAAS - Subscription model for end users
• 2. Services/support for companies using our Alfresco module
• 3. Potentially, licensing our software to third party document management system vendors.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. Just Microsoft and Google :)
Google Docs; presumably Microsoft will offer something sooner or later.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. Java, Java Content Repository (JCR), Alfresco, Swing, SOAP, WebDAV

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. Eclipse, JCR, VMware, Ubuntu.

Q Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes, exclusively, except for our Word 2007 add-in, which is itself open source, but relies on Microsoft technologies at development and run-time.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Anything which runs Java. We're using JCR (and Hibernate in Alfresco) to isolate from the underlying database (but its MySQL).

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. Mainly at conferences - say 5 times per year.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. Obviously it depends what you are building (development costs, time to revenue, marketing costs, and infrastructure costs). But typically you'll need $30K to $100K to quit your day job and get started. Then you'll need more when you start to scale.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia.?
A. Distance from California. Limited local technical resources and investors.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. Obviously I think Microsoft Office is going to remain the dominant product on corporate desktops for at least the next 4 years.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Understand yourself and what is important to you. Why do you get up in the morning? What are you willing to sacrifice? How long are you prepared to work at it?

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

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Vishal Sharma Wednesday, March 05, 2008 2008 , Accounting , Australia , Carnival , SAAS , Software Development , Startup 1 comments

The 8th participant is Invoiceplace.

Invoiceplace - Easy Invoicing and Quotes from Anywhere. It provides a service for businesses to save time preparing invoices and quotes, and keep track of overdue invoices and record payments received. It provides free, fully functional accounts for up to three customers, and twenty customer subscriptions start at $15 AUD a month.
Scott Carpenter created this in 2006 with the help of some very talented contractors whom he worked with.

Let us explore bit further how Scott and Invoiceplace is going:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. Invoiceplace was launched in November 2006, and was in development and testing for a year before the launch.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Invoiceplace has launched.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To provide a simple and easy to use service that enables businesses to take control and save time with quoting and billing.
What services it provides it for consumer or customers.
Essentially Invoiceplace provides an easy way to manage billing from any computer connected to the internet. Specifically it provides a means to:

• Save time preparing invoices, quotes and tracking payments;
• Create products and track available inventory/stock;
• Keep track of unpaid and overdue invoices;
• Create invoices in different currencies;
• Email invoices directly to customers as a PDF or Microsoft Word attachment (makes it easy to save a copy and print);
• Easily convert quotes/proposals to invoices;
• Include taxes and discounts on individual line items (so can have a mix of tax free items on the one invoice, and discounts applied on specific items only).
• Record postage and handling, with tax.
• Record partial payments/retainers.
  

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. The most significant factor is that Invoiceplace is a SaaS offering, and is typically a very different solution to what our customers currently use. Most customers have used desktop accounting software or used manual invoice or quote templates previously, so this a very new way of managing their business.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Small business from one to ten staff typically.

Q. Type of customers you are targeting?
A. We help small business, consultants, contractors and freelancers. Particularly those businesses engaged in export or who need to bill in different currencies.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. I haven’t found one particular age group has benefited over others.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. There are over 700 businesses using Invoiceplace from countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, India, Singapore, South Africa, and more.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. I use a combination of Google Ads, being part of online communities such as the Joel on Software forum , and commenting (but not spamming!!) on blogs.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. The most significant measures are sales, and the number of free account signups.
We also track visitors to the site using Google Analytics, and watch the results of Google Adwords campaigns carefully.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. We provide monthly and yearly subscriptions (yearly offer two months free).

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. The main competitors are the established desktop accounting and invoicing software vendors and other SaaS services. One of my largest competitors is actually Microsoft Office since there are lot of people using a manual invoice/quote template in Word or Excel.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. I have found the Eclipse IDE a very useful, stable and time-saving tool.

Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes, particularly the jUnit unit testing framework.

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using.
A. We use the Linux operating system CentOS, and MySQL 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?
Mostly by being a part of online communities such as forums. I also keep in contact with friends with start up ventures so that we can learn and encourage each other by sharing our experiences and tips.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. Assuming that you need to buy a computer the cost is anywhere from $1000 to $100,000.00. It depends on how fast you want – or in some cases need – to launch your venture.
If customers are willing to pay for a certain solution you can be sure that you won’t be the only one to recognise the opportunity. This doesn’t mean that if you can’t build and launch a commercial product in three months you will fail, but a product that takes five years to develop working nights and weekends may be ready two years too late, and a competitor has been able to step in early and earn enough market share to leave your product unsustainable.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. I think a major barrier is that Australia is a very small market. To put this in perspective in 2007 the population of Australia was just over 21 million . The City of Los Angeles had a population of almost 10 million in 2006 . That’s almost half of Australia crammed into one city.
Since Australia is a small market many ventures export – but that is expensive given the internationalisation effort of adapting software, gaining trade contacts, marketing and dealing the physical distance between Australia and major markets such as the United States (i.e. travel to conferences/trade events). Internet based ventures are able to offer their service world-wide but it’s not just a matter of building a site and waiting for the sales to pour in! Marketing is hard work and it is made more difficult when you are selling in a different country.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. I foresee growth in my market segment due to three factors:

• From the positive feedback I receive from Invoiceplace customers, and the number of new customers received from word of mouth referrals;
• By the policy decisions and action by government and the telecommunication industry to improve the availability of high speed internet access; and
• The focus and market shaping traction of major software vendors such as Google offering services such as Google Apps that provides hosted word processing, spreadsheet and other applications.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Be patient, passionate and prepared.
Be Patient – most successful ventures take time to build, gain recognition and growth in customers. There will be times that you feel that you have wasted your time and money, have received scathing negative feedback or even worse a complete lack of interest from others. Don’t give up.
Be Passionate – you need to be excited about how incredible your product is, because initially no-one else will care. Friends, colleagues and family don’t count – unless they are paying customers. It’s a big world, with start-ups launching (and closing?) by the hour and when you start out nobody will know you exist to even show a tiny glimmer of interest in your product.
Be Prepared – so that you can build your product and business. Don’t spend months writing a voluminous business plan – but know what you are building , an estimate of how much it will cost to build and promote ($1,000, $100,000 or $10,000,000?), the customers who need it, and how much they would be willing to pay.

Thanks Scott for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you on the progress of Invoiceplace. All the best.

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