Tag Archives: Portal

How Do You Finance an Early Stage Company? Three Considerations

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Situation: The CEO of an early stage web company is looking at steep ramp-up expenses. Many companies have bootstrapped their way to success. However outside investment may speed the process. How have others evaluated these options? How do you finance an early stage company?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Raising money takes time and is a major distraction to the development process. The two big variables will be investor interest and the timing of investment. Talk to Angels and venture capitalists now. Start by presenting a broad outline of your technology and business model. Ask what they will want to see to offer you funding at different levels. This will give you a reality check as to investor interest in funding the company. It also creates a roadmap to funding if the response is positive.
• What is the company seeking – money or accountability? One CEO bootstrapped her company during the early stages, then looked for outside investment to gain accountability and advice – a whip to help move things along. This CEO found that investors brought few of the anticipated assets, and added a new level of distraction and pain.
• If you are looking for funding to purchase content to serve through your Internet portal, consider a more creative way to gain content. Can you use a Web portal through which your target audience provides both the content and the consumer audience in a marketplace exchange? Establish the audience and then add premium services to monetize the model. This can minimize your upfront cash investment requirements, and may create a faster track to positive cash flow.

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How Do You Assure Consist Reliable Service? Six Solutions

Situation:  A company has remote employees who are on a wide variety of schedules. Retaining great employees is a challenge, and with this consistent service due to turn-over. How do they improve the relationships that they have with remote employees? How do you assure consistent reliable service?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Guarantee employee income for a period after they lose a client and as you seek another assignment for them. Limit your exposure by setting hurdles – an employee must have served the company for X time to qualify for this benefit.
  • Create your own “down time” bank. Say you pay an employee $10. Give them $9 and put $1 into a bank so that you can pay them once they lose their current client. The fact that their bank is limited to the amount of these contributions creates an incentive not to draw down the bank.
  • Offer a paid day off per month of service.
  • How do you shift your business from commodity to specialty, as a value add business?
    • What Peace of Mind features could you provide to your clients to create added value and stickiness? For example, can you provide a portal into your system so that clients can access information on the services that you’ve provided, or enhance their ability to communicate with their own clients? What about access to time schedules, account notes, etc.
    • Look for a solution that will shift the industry.
    • Look at menu driven packaging and pricing options. Examples include discount pricing for purchase volume commitments or iPads for a significant level of investment.

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How Do You Simplify Access to Knowledge? Five Factors

Interview with John Kogan, CEO, Proformative

Situation: An organization that provides an online network for senior financial executives has an immense amount of content on its web portal. To improve the user experience of their target audience, they want to simplify access to this knowledge. How do you simplify access to knowledge?

Advice from John Kogan:

  • We have a rich portal with an immense amount of content potentially valuable to senior corporate finance[K1]  executives. We have many ways to access this content – perhaps too many. Our objective is to get the highest quality answers in front of the user with the least effort on their part. Google has done a very good job of pulling the best content to the top given a million possibilities to each query. If we can do this, we become the Google of finance and accounting!
  • Most people know what they want when they come to a site. We have started by creating a clean user experience to allow them that good “line of sight” to what they want.
  • Our objective is to help the user identify the right content with the smallest number of queries. From the user perspective, exposing the wrong content is a waste of time. We want to show them high quality, compelling content which directly addresses their need.
  • To develop quality content, you must have an open mind. It’s not about what we want to say, but understanding the user’s needs and addressing these. You have to be guided by the data to tell you what’s happening on the site and what the user wants to see, and then provide them relevant information.
  • Achieving this means that we must find people who are smarter than us in these areas and gain their input. In the end, your company is no better than the ideas that you can either dream up or gather from others. We constantly seek fresh perspectives from investors, advisors, users and potential users.
  • Finally, you must take action on the data you gather. Too many companies suffer from information paralysis. The solution is Vision plus Will plus Doing it!

You can contact John Kogan at [email protected]

Category: Strategy, Technology

Key Words: Strategy, Technology, Content, Portal, Access, Simplify, Knowledge, Google, User, Experience, Triage, Sticky, Relevant, Ideas, Execute

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