Event Review: SVASE Startup-U SV 24 Apr 2007
This month’s SVASE/Startup-U event in Silicon Valley had a change of agenda, and featured Ed Van Deman of Financial Navigator and Ofer Ronen of Sendori, both of whom prepared some simple slide decks.
Ed started, giving a quick overview of Financial Navigator, and talking about how it came together. Financial Navigator is a software package to help those with high value net worth (>$5M) manage their money and taxes. Some interesting facts:
- Founded in 1983, it’s a 24-year old startup
- It’s outlasted its VC funder (which folded after 5 years)
- It’s outlasted its major customer - at one point, most of Financial Navigator’s customers were the big-8 accounting firms, with Arthur Anderson accounting for 60% of revenue. Of course, the big-8 is now the final-4, and AA is no more.
Ed’s key thoughts and comments:
- Focus on who is going to be your customer; define the target market, very general, back of the envelope calculations when you’re just getting started
- Spend a lot of time building relationships with potential customers
- Understand your buyer/customer demographics and psychographics
- Find out where your market already has relationships, and then find a reason for them to work with you
- Be friends with everyone
- The sooner you can talk to your customer the better - beta or earlier
- Find other places where your customers hang out, and go there
Ofer Ronen then discussed Sendori, which is a marketplace to bring advertisers and the domain name parking market together. Currently domain name parkers rely on keyword searches to drive revenue. With Sendori, they can hook into additional revenue streams such as eBay. For instance, the owner of cellphones.com could have someone land on his page immediately see an eBay cell phone auction.
Sendori’s challenge, as he sees it, is to bring two diverse types of people together in the same marketplace, and strike a deal — the advertisers are corporate types, and the domain name folks (until very recently) are hacker types.
Ofer echoed many of Ed’s thoughts, including be friends with everyone, and view your competitors as potential partners, using co-opetition as a tactic. He also supported getting together with decision makers at conferences, and building relationships. One tactic that worked well was to span the breadth of a trade show and make sure you introduce yourself to everyone there, and start the relationships. They paid $800 for an ad in the convention map, and said it was very worthwhile in getting their brand recognized by the end of the show with all their potential customers.
On hiring, Ofer argued the opposite of Philip Kaplan regarding hiring - at least for sales, claiming that experienced, well connected people are extremely valuable.
Ofer also claimed that in reality, everyone knows that there really aren’t many barriers to entry. When asked by the VCs, he claims patents, API tie-ins, and existing customer relationships.
Overall, the information was very useful. Surprisingly, the crowd was about twice the size as I’ve come to expect from previous SVASE Startup-U events, which made the networking useful but noisy, and the post-talk question and answer sessions very busy. As I had another meeting, I bailed out pretty quickly.