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I write about what happens in our startup week by week...
I was tempted today to write about our Bumblehood portal news
- start of our new community project, professional, inexpensive (or even free
of charge for our community members) travel guides for everybody, but I couldn't
take it from Vedran (the "father" of this project) who will write
about that topic soon, probably right about the time our Kindle eBook sales
start (if "the Kindle team" holds the deadline, that should be
sometime mid February).
So, for this blog I am going to cover one thing which
bothers me most of my entrepreneurial life. Still does at the moment.
Predictions!
Let's assume you are a young "entrepreneur-to-be" and you have "one great idea" (who does not?) which you want to push to the market (and get sooo rich that you can buy Google!). You start thinking about it (the idea, not Google), put first brainstorming ideas to paper, sleep less, think more, figure out you are not-so-good in Excel as you thought you were (yeah, right, you DO need to learn what the "goal seek" function does!) and finally you finish up with, (*insert dramatic music here*) - the first business model, usually called "the beast" or "when-you-read-me-again-you-will-not-understand-me".
No panic, that's normal. People tend to overcomplicate
everything when they think about the model of the idea for the first time. Now,
what is important for the young entrepreneur-to-be is to be consistent and
patient with iterations of the model. Iterate, make it simpler, iterate, make
it more simple, iterate, make it even more simple and at the end, when you have
the final model which is so simple that you can understand it "no problemo".
Then (not before!) you ask several people to read it and give his/her first
opinion. And then, guess what? "Sorry, I didn't get this", "Can
you explain how do you plan to do this".
So - back to the "make me more simple" table.
Already bored? Well, if you are, entrepreneurship is not for you. If you still
stand, welcome to the club.
And then, somewhere on your way of progress with your new
ideas and the business plan, you will come to the point when you start asking
yourself: "How will I make money with this thing?" Again no panic,
every entrepreneur-to-be (also called '"the founder” among the VCs or
"the fool" among friends) comes to that point, because, guess what -
your business model must earn something, right? If it doesn't you have two
options, either drop it or continue sleeping and eating at your favorite hostel
"Chez Mama".
And when you come to the point of asking yourself how your
business will earn money, then you come to the point of predictions!
And here, my friend, nobody can help you. This is the Mordor
of every single entrepreneur-to-be, this is "the final divine truth"
you have to seek and be sure not to mistake (at least not to mistake too much).
Trust me, if you want to do something new, something worth spending your time
and efforts, something you will put all your energy into, there is this one
topic of predictions NOBODY can help you with.
Every single business model idea will have variables which
form the magic formula "How to earn money?" Let's write a simple
example for a small family restaurant which sells exotic soups to vegetarians
in Soho (New York):
Money earned = "number of vegetarians who will come to my restaurant that live or work in Soho" *
"number of times they will come per month" *
("number of those who stay loyal during more months" + "newcomers") *
"average number of soups they will eat per meal" *
"how many meals per day" (maybe both lunch and dinner, maybe not?) *
"do I offer new soups every day/ week/month so they don't get bored" *
"how much does one average meal cost" *
"what are my costs to run the business" *
...
You get the picture, right? And this is just about a small family restaurant, not about hardware machines paired with hi-tech software which will navigate a laser beam in eye surgery. (BTW, it is rather good that small family restaurant owners usually do not ask themselves these questions, or we would have nobody opening restaurants. Many owners close their businesses during the first year simply because they do not ask themselves those questions.)
All the variables have to be predicted and put in place for
your business model to work. This is it, this is why starting a business is so
fun to do. You get one good idea and all of a sudden you find yourself in deep
... well, you know where.
Maybe this whole mess with variables and predictions would
not be so bad if you just have to deal with those parts of the problem. But
there is something you have to know in advance - and it ain't pretty. Most of
you already know this, many of you will find out soon if you are following the
path of entrepreneurship - EVERY single investor (if it is not from the class
of 3F - family, fools, friends) will ask you to EXACTLY specify to him the
revenue formula and exact numbers for each and every variable you can think of.
And it is not even the worst thing - they will pretend to be very clever and
they will ask you trick questions about each variable. Of course, usually they
know less than you do, so they just pretend and use their common sense and a
bit of experience.
So how to work out this problem? Think about it and come
back in 10 days, I will write my point of view about this topic.
And don't forget, new projects and companies fail because
founders usually stop working on them. Don't be one of them. Work out your
"profit formula" well.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on January 28th, 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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We write about what happens in our startup week by week...
I read an interesting article recently about one famous company and its history. The story goes like this:
In 1833, Marcus Samuel founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the son of the founder realized there was potential in exporting oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex. By 1907 the company had a fleet.
The name of the company is Shell, and the brand is one of the most famous symbols in the world. The yellow and red colours used in the brand logo are thought to relate to the colours of the flag of Spain, as Shell built early service stations in the state of California which had strong connections with Spain.
Wow, that's a lot of information! First the guy starts a business to collect shells. Then his son, some 60 years later, finds out that the shells are not enough and switches to oil, propelling the business into unseen heights. The company is from London, UK, their logo is red and white because of the Spanish flag and everything is connected through the State of California in the USA. Sounds like 21st century, although it happened 150 years ago.
Starting up any business is hard, making money out of it is even harder. One of the first lessons every manager learns while trying to push the company through the break-even point is that business models change. In the times you're starting up, you thought you will earn money with the "best business idea" ever. Yes, of course it is the best business idea in the world - nobody thought about it, nobody knows it, you are in the position to change the world. The dream lasts until the time you have to earn the first dollar from your "great business idea".
Then you start tweaking, turning, changing, refactoring! You do everything and anything for your company with only one goal in your mind - survival!
This is exactly what we did in Bumblehood. I saw that the investment "situation" is far from being perfect and that it is going to be hard to raise new capital for the project in the near future. So we started to tweak, turn and change; 6 months later we have BumbleMap, the product which feeds us in these stormy days.
The times are hard, especially for startups. Last week I got an E-mail from the founding member of The Funded, a web site dedicated to research, rating, and reviewing funding sources worldwide. In that E-mail, the first couple of sentences were not so inspiring to the young entrepreneur which is searching for a new round of investment. The E-mail said: "The venture capital bubble has burst, and change is coming. Investments into venture funds are at a fifteen year low. There is increasing risk that innovative businesses will be unable to raise capital within 18 months."
Wow again! 18 months - that's a long, cold winter. Maybe even two long, cold winters. Young entrepreneurs, prepare for the ride.
I have been talking to some of the venture capitalists in the last 10 months. Most of them silenced at some moment and I thought I did something wrong. The project is crap, ideas we created are useless, my team is not known enough, I suck, something is wrong! You know all those thoughts person has when not everything goes as planned.
Then I asked a couple of my friends, who happen to be in the same process of raising capital, how were they doing. And this is where I figured out that we all suck, all our ideas are crap and none of the teams is known enough. But it was not us being wrong. It was just the lack of new investments happening in the world. And they still don't.
New entrepreneurs, prepare yourself for the ride. And two cold winters!
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on November 2nd, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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As some of you may have noticed, we're officially no longer in beta status. The software team has been working around the clock to make BumbleMap as stable as possible and removing bugs encountered so far, in order to make using the software a pleasureable experience. We're determined to keep all features easy to use and only a click or two away, and the list of features & feature requests grows daily :).
Besides the software platform, we're also preparing to launch an innovative customer loyalty platform - a complete package for both customers and business owners. The idea is to provide local business throughout the world with an integrated solution for attracting new customers & rewarding existing ones, as well as a method to effectively promote the business and available special offers. It's a win-win situation for all involved parties, since the cardholders will be able to discover great new places at the Bumblehood portal, collect points for every transaction made at an establishment which is a part of the program and earn special coupons offered by different local businesses.
The city of Munich will be the first to try out the Bumblehood BonusCard, as the program starts there in December. We've prepared a local portal just for Munich (we will be following this model for all future cities which will be a part of the BonusCard program), available in both German and English languages, including interesting local information and a list of local businesses in the city.You can also get all information about the BonusCard there.
We'd love to hear what you think about this program, especially if you're a resident of Munich! Send us your opinions & ideas how to improve at bumblehood (at) bumblehood.com.
Oh and while you're at it, give as u tip or two about how you like our weekly comic!
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on October 19th 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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News flash: we’ve recently set up a website for the BumbleMap platform, the “engine” behind Bumblehood. A German version is also available. As certain deadlines had to be met, only the most important parts of the site were implemented – it will be fine tuned, properly branded and optimized in the following weeks.
BumbleMap software will also have a strong SEO-friendly aspect, doing most of the work in that regard for the customer. Of course, this is not especially important for use on company intranets, but is invaluable when used for powering web sites of any kind. It is our goal to provide a complete solution which will meet all user requirements and keep up with the latest trends.
As far as Bumblehood is concerned, we have a major SEO update coming up, which should drastically improve organic traffic over time. One big issue we’re currently researching is duplicate content. Since we’re relying on the Topic Maps paradigm, it is logical to have the same entry in multiple instances within our tree structure. Let’s take Café de Paris in London for example, which you can access through the following paths:
United Kingdom – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
United Kingdom – Cities – London – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
United Kingdom – Cities – London – Areas – City of Westminster – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
All of these paths make semantic sense, but technically this is duplicate content in the eyes of search engines. One possible solution we’re considering is the introduction of canonical links, which will hopefully resolve any duplicate content worries.
Another thing we’re considering is introducing more “reader-friendly” links. Currently, links to all articles on Bumblehood have the /article/ID_hash format. Such flat structure has its advantages, but it’s really not convenient for showing in search engine result pages. Naturally, changes of this scope require tight cooperation with the development team, careful research and testing.
With the implementation of user registration and PDF printing option, Bumblehood’s beta days are numbered. There is still a long way to go, many improvements to be made and numerous features to be added, but we’ve made good progress thus far. Teamwork is everything, and my personal opinion is that’s one of our strongest points.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on July 15th 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
Some time ago I read one article from Joel Spolsky about the nature of new businesses. He says: "A new business is like a shortwave radio. You have to fiddle patiently with all the dials until you get the reception you want."
There is a lot of truth in those two sentences and everybody who runs any kind of business can confirm and agree to that. The business you start probably won't look like that in several years. Changing and tweaking every step is a constant task for a young company, and if you are not ready to do that, you shouldn't even enter the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship.
So, is it easy to constantly self-motivate yourself and change your business model every second, all the way until success? If you look at the fail rate of new businesses, the answer is "no". When asked about all the different ways a start-up can fail, Jessica Livingston from a small angel investment group called Y Combinator said that they all fail for the same reason: people just stop working on their businesses.
Paul Graham, also from Y Combinator, says: "The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck)."
It seems that every founder and young entrepreneur has the same problems, and it is up to them to self-motivate. I personally manage to self-generate my morale. How about you?
Back to reality, what happened in Bumblehood during the last several months? Did we stop working? Is our morale low? Check out our portal, we are finally fully functional and the air of web 2.0 is all around us. We change constantly and tweak our progress every day - we are far from slacking. Our BumbleMap platform is in the spotlight at the moment, but that is a topic for another blog post. Stay tuned.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on July 7th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
In the last couple of weeks my colleague Matko wrote about technical side of our project. At first I thought we can do it in parallel, one blog about technical side, one about business aspects, but after his first blog post we got so much attention from the community that we decided to keep the buzz in the air for three weeks in a row. So here I am, after one month of technical idiosyncrasies I will write, as I promised a while ago, about Yelp and differences between our project and what those guys at the West Coast are doing.
I love Yelp. All people that I know like Yelp. It helped me find a good restaurant last time when I was in the States, not to mention the bad bars I managed to avoid. OK, I admit, I do check CitySearch and TripAdvisor, but Yelp's GUI is clean, without tons of ads, and I feel cozy enough to spend a lot of time on their pages. I guess I made my point, and I reckon that Yelp is going to stay on the Internet scene for some time.
So, if Bumblehood has local businesses, if we have slick and almost ads-free GUI, if we are a community oriented web portal for global and local travelers, what makes us think we are so much different than the Yelp guys?
Yelp has acquired data for millions of local businesses; huge base of followers and community members updates its content on daily basis. They got 40 times bigger investment than Bumblehood and they have been “live” for years. Does all that make them different? I wouldn't say so.
Small companies grow, outsiders gain popularity on the Internet quickly. In months and years to come our community will also pick up and we are determined to stay on the same track of what we have been doing so far. And what we have been doing is not what Yelp has been doing, and I will now tell you why.
First, and maybe the most important of all, Bumblehood is not trying to be the yellow pages of the United States of America (with Canada and UK as a side-kick) only. Yes, the USA is the biggest economy in the world, but Europe, Japan, China and Russia, just to mention a few, are the new markets where local businesses emerge faster than in the USA.
Yelp is focused on the USA and on yellow pages only, and no matter how good they are doing their job, our opinion is that it is just not enough. Focusing on local businesses and not providing additional information about geo-location itself (being it a town, region or country) seems a bit boring.
Bumblehood aims to be "Yelp for the whole world", but also wants to provide the "full experience" for locals or the global travelers. Our wiki approach, semantic structure and carefully designed domain should help us in this non-trivial task we want to accomplish in the years to come.
Some will say the most important difference is that Yelp and Bumblehood have completely different business models. Yelp has sponsored ads, all sorts of them actually. Many say that Yelp's marketing blurs with user generated content and that companies are stacking the reviews. Recently I have also read that some businesses have gamed (or tried to game) the system by reviewing on each other's business pages.
Bumblehood still hasn’t revealed publicly its business model and I am sorry but I cannot talk about it at the moment, although I feel the need :). Please stay tuned, we are launching at the end of the year.
But one thing I can promise already, we will not charge or sell anything to the local businesses and there will be no promotional ads on our local business pages. We think that community information should stay unbiased and that businesses should do their job the best they can without conflict of interests. This is and it will stay the holy grail of our business strategy.
Yelp is also doing elite squads and "the Elite thing", encouraging some people to pour thousands of reviews and fight their way up the ladder of the Elite group. I wonder if someone writes a lot of reviews just to become a bit "more elite" than the others, does this system goes into the direction of the community and the freedom which has been lately emerging on Web 2.0 Internet led by Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and the others?
I also wonder how unbiased and relevant those reviews are.
Bumblehood will not encourage this type of activities and no matter how popular or "elite" somebody is, his or her opinion should not influence the view on the local business more than somebody else’s. If we want to keep unbiased results we should think about this factor too.
Stay tuned for our big portal update this month.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on June 12th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
Starting the startup is all about fun, working hard and being really excited about everything what is going on, right? Wrong!
It's much more than that. It's about having 14-hour working day, sleeping in the office, walking home like a zombie at 11 PM when all teenagers go to the clubs, being with the team at 04 AM when a major release is scheduled, not seeing your girlfriend for days, telling your mom you cannot be on that Sunday lunch (No, Mom, I really can't, I have to be in the office. Yes, Mom, I will be there next time, I promise)...
Actually it's also about being happy about your life, about what you do, and what you plan to change, being proud about it and hate it at the same time. It's all about figuring out how to survive in this cruel world.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 24, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
This
week it is all about communication with the world outside. When a new
product is pushed on the market, all you want is the publicity, a lot
of publicity. Well, it sounds easy and everybody around you knows "one
good way how to do it", so you hear things like: do Twitter, do blog, do Facebook, do Youtube, do Flickr,
etc. Everybody is a kind of PR specialist, those entire information
dance in your head and you feel you are the only one not being aware of
the "perfect plan for spreading the buzz". Stupid me, stupid me!
After
you do some broadcasting and make a couple of mistakes, somehow the
buzz starts. Most probably your project needs to have a "wow, this is
cool" factor, and if it does, the buzz starts. Anonymous people start
to talk about you: bloggers blog, Facebookers network, Twitters tweet,
media guys call and schedule interviews - in one word, your CEO time is
booked and communication becomes your only daily task, at least for
some time. Of course, the night is long, so the other tasks are
scheduled for 5 p.m. tea time and after. I love tea time!
Every day
you get something new to communicate to the world outside and that
makes your life interesting and fun. I love my tea time, but I also love to talk about our startup and I enjoy every moment of it.
On Monday I read one post about our project on TechPluto,
blog about startup reviews. Mr. Sharma who wrote the article took his
time to visit our portal, played a bit with it and wrote a really
constructive article about us. I am using this opportunity to say
thanks and TechPluto will be on my RSS radar from now on.
At one point the article quotes: "if Bumblehood wants to be yet another competitor to these monstrous services (Wikipedia and Yelp)
then the chances of being the Next Big Thing are bleak". Wow, just
comparing Bumblehood to Wikipedia is something which makes me dizzy.
OK, the author does have a negative opinion when comparing David and Goliath,
but that is usual and I would probably do the same thing at the moment
(the Google guys were also outsiders in the field which was "already
invented", right?). But comparing us to Wikipedia shows where we are
heading with our goals and what we want to achieve. And I am proud of
it.
So, why Bumblehood is NOT Wikipedia?
I have to bow to the
Wikipedia project all the way to the ground, and I have been doing that
for years already. My friends know how big a fan of Wikipedia I am and
how much I have learned from that project. It is probably the best
thing that happened to the Internet lately (with all respect to the
others). But no, Bumblehood does not want to compete with Wikipedia, we
don't even dream about it. Bumblehood is simply different from
Wikipedia.
And I will tell you why:
1) Encyclopedia style (Wikipedia) vs. Local guide for places and businesses (Bumblehood)
Targeting
particular groups of users on Internet has always been the holy grail
of web visibility, buzz, and search engine optimization. Wikipedia made
it successfully and nowadays it became de facto the place where to look
for the facts and the details about any topic human can think of. But
it is NOT a guide!
Webster world dictionary defines a guide as "a book giving instructions in the
elements of some subject", while encyclopedia is defined as "a book
giving information on all branches of knowledge".
When people travel
somewhere, they will not take an encyclopedia with them, but rather
take the guide to instruct them about the topic and the neighborhood of
the topic they are interested in. The same applies for a person who
needs information about particular business or product - he/she will
not take an encyclopedia to find a fitness studio in the neighborhood.
He/she will rather take a systematically organized guide (yellow pages
or something similar).
There are many differences between
encyclopedic style of writing and writing for a guide. Anyone who
already had an opportunity to travel somewhere knows the difference
between the factual texts and guide texts written in personal,
interesting and sometimes "spicy" tone. The thing is pretty much the
same with any topic described in encyclopedia or guide.
Bumblehood is a travel guide portal and we do not plan to become an encyclopedia.
2) Flat structure (Wikipedia) vs. hierarchically organized structure (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia
is an encyclopedia, a flat structure of documents without real
hierarchy and neighborhood-connectivity. Bumblehood is a hierarchically
organized knowledge base targeting one area of the human activity at
the time. While Wikipedia targets all topics in the world, ranging from
science to religion and philosophy in a flat, one article topics,
Bumblehood tends to structurally organize geo-location knowledge base
about any point of interest in the world. So, the flat system without
the "neighborhood” component of Wikipedia cannot be the compared to the
hierarchical world of Bumblehood.
While some people will say that Wikipedia has categories,
organization and hierarchy, I claim (and open discussion about that
topic on this blog) that Wikipedia's structural organization is
inefficiently set up in later phases of the project and it does not
have structural and semantic rules which can guarantee good systematic
organization.
Let's take an example: City of Barcelona, the
capital of Catalonia (an autonomous community in northeastern Spain)
and the second largest city in Spain can be found in English Wikipedia.
If we take a look at the categories in which this city is placed we
will NOT find category "Cities in Catalonia" nor "Capitals of Spanish
Autonomous Communities". Although, if we take Munich, the capital of
Bavaria (a state in southern Germany) we WILL find categories "Cities
in Bavaria" and "German state capitals".
This example shows
ambiguity and incompleteness of the Wikipedia’s categorization system
and justifies semantic topic approach used in BumbleMap knowledge base platform. It is just much more powerful and provides better systematical data organization.
3) No local businesses (Encyclopedia) vs. Local business directories (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia
does not allow business promotion and most of the businesses are not
present on Wikipedia. It is just not something what Wikipedia does.
Full stop.
Bumblehood on the other hand takes into account any geo-location in the world, including local businesses. But those businesses are not scattered around, they are systematically and hierarchically organized together with the local guides, providing the full picture about one geo-location (neighborhood, town, region, country).
4) Plain text editor (Wikipedia) vs. full WYSIWYG editor (Bumblehood)
Jimbo
Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, decided to run a simple study and
found out that "the most active 2% of Wikipedia editors, which is 1400
people, have done 73.4% of all the edits". Let's face it - to edit
Wikipedia you have to have the extensive knowledge of a complicated and
user-unfriendly markup language which is used to contribute the
content. It is not a secret, and although Wikipedia's markup is a very
powerful tool, it is just too complicated for a non-experienced user
who is used to WYSIWYG environments of modern text editors. Wikipedia's editor seems to be coming from the age of "terminal WordPerfect".
On the other hand, Bumblehood WYSIWYG editor is easy to use - open the document, edit it, see what you are doing and close it when you are done.
Not
only that guide content is editable using WYSIWYG editor, but also
information about the local businesses, which makes Bumblehood a unique
place on Internet. Hopefully our contributing community will appreciate
this part. You can check it yourself on Bumblebee testing environment.
5) Non-profit (Wikipedia) vs. for-profit (Bumblehood)
While
Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation not allowing any promotional
activities and business placements, Bumblehood is a joint stock
company. Wikipedia's way has many advantages and I personally love what
those guys are doing - who wouldn't support free knowledge
distribution. But many obstacles and growth problems which Wikipedia is facing right now (and most probably there will be even more in the future) start to worry many of us.
On
the other hand, for-profit companies like Bumblehood, have more
possible sources of income which can provide a long term stability and
development. I wonder what would have happened to Google, Facebook or
YouTube being non-profitable organizations? Their costs are just too
high for that model. Let's hope Wikipedia stays for a long, long time.
Although Bumblehood is a for-profit company, we have already put all our content under the Creative Commons license and as long as I am leading this company, the knowledge base we
gather will always be free for everyone. This is the dream I strongly
believe in.
Do you have anything to say about this topic? Our
Forum is open for the discussion from 0 to 24, and you can reach me
privately on boro-AT-bumblehood-DOT-com
And why Bumblehood is not Yelp? Stay tuned for my next post.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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If a tree falls down in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, would it make a sound? How about if a web portal goes live and nobody knows about it, is it really there? I'm not entirely sure about the first question, but in the second case the answer is clear – yes, but not for long. My name is Vedran, and my team's job is to make sure that Bumblehood takes the place it deserves among the Internet community and steps out of its current anonymity.
It requires a lot of time and effort to draw attention to a website in the vastness we like to call cyberspace,
especially one that is quite new – Bumblehood has been around a little
over a month, since February 15th (what Sasa likes to call „one night of horror“).
Since I used to be a content writer for Bumblehood during the
non-public beta days, I had good insight about what the portal was
really about, as well as the general “feel” of it. That knowledge
proved invaluable in the current mission of my team, because I could
focus my outgoing communication on the portal’s innovations and cool
aspects.
Needles to say, we were all quite excited during the
first week of our mission, which consisted primarily of brainstorming
about different means of creating buzz. Numerous ideas arose, some of
them good, some excellent and some bad, and a plan was slowly beginning
to form. We all knew that months of intensive correspondence and other
forms of communication were ahead of us, all the way hoping that people
would recognise the potential of our web. It was up to us to spread the
news, but we couldn't control the feedback, so we were quite anxious to
see Bumblehood through the eyes of others.
Since
Bumblehood is a community-driven project, it was only natural to
approach fellow bloggers first. The team sent several e-mails with
general information about the portal and BumbleMap, the engine behind
the whole thing, to several blogs which covered web 2.0 news, start-up
companies and technology. And they didn’t disappoint. I would
personally like to take this opportunity to thank Killer Startups, Startup Meme and Sociable Blog for providing that crucial first coverage, informing their readers
about the rapidly-growing toddler, that is Bumblehood. You certainly
made our job a little bit easier.
It is not just outgoing
communication that matters, however. In order to make it easier for our
users to spread the word about us, my team decided to include quick
links for every article to the most popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (also known as the colorful
little buttons in the upper right corner). After a brief meeting and
arrangement of all details, the development team included those buttons
overnight, all without any sort of bribery. Now that’s teamwork!
Another
important aspect of our job is search engine optimization – a little
science in itself, and a very inexact one at that. After reading many
articles and different opinions on SEO tactics, numerous ideas about improving visibility and better keyword
targeting popped into my head. I will not go into details here since it
is just technical stuff, and we're still considering the positive and
negative aspects of all those ideas. Since the primary goal of the
communications team at the moment is to generate more traffic and
spread the word about Bumblehood, we don’t really have time to go into
much detail regarding this activity for now. It is, however, very
important, and we intend to begin tackling this giant very
soon.
That’s
it from me for now; I will keep in touch with updates as soon they are
available. And don’t forget to spread the buzz about Bumblehood if you
like the site; there’s nothing quite as reliable as a recommendation
from a friend.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on March 25, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's Up --- Comments on Forum
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Being the CEO of a startup company is never easy. Knowing the old rule of thumb that from ten companies only ONE succeeds in becoming profitable makes you sweat most of the time. Maybe worse than anything is waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about some tasks which have to be done tomorrow, or this week... or this month... Since this is my fourth software company in the last eight years, from which two were profitable and one a failure, I am doing better than many, but every startup is different and each one brings both sweet and bitter tastes in different ratios.
How does the developing of the company look like from the perspective of the person in charge?
What problems do you face and how hard is it to run the start-up?
How do you choose right from wrong, good from bad, important from waste of time?
Which personal and team challenges are involved in the process?
How do you deal with the tough times and rough rides?
Do you still have time for your friends, family, yourself?
Are you getting fat?
Many times I have searched web portals and blogs for the answers which would reveal to me "the pearls of wisdom". And I have to tell you something - not many people write about this! They are either busy running their companies and do not have time to describe what is happening around them, or they are just scared of bad luck they might cause by writing about their new startup while it is happening.
So I’ve decided to write my blog precisely about this topic: what happens in our startup, week after week.
Actually, I plan to keep biweekly blogs, and my colleagues will fill in the gaps.
So, what's the title about?
I have a friend, Sunny, who works for a big IT company, and mostly does VoIP integration stuff for governments and big multinational corporations. They just finished a project in Budapest, Hungary, and he is now in charge of an internal task: to set up a better organized knowledge base of 35 projects that his 50-head-department made in the last years.
In February he got my email about Bumblehood being live and kicking, and called me several days after to arrange a meeting. I thought, couple of beers with an old friend is exactly what I need, so I suggested a small local brewery where we usually meet. He said, surprising me: "no, come to my office, I would like to ask you something first, and then we can go for a beer". Ok, visiting his working place in my working hours was not exactly what I was hoping for, especially not now when we have hands full of work preparing a new version of software scheduled for May.
But it's Sunny; always smiling and kind.
So I went. And we talked. They need semantically structured wiki software, so that each team member can participate in systematically organizing the mess they have. He asked me how much it would cost if they bought our BumbleMap platform. And I didn't know what to answer. So I said: "It will cost you 20k€ and three months of waiting since we are not finished yet". And he said: "OK, but I want these 4 customizations done for us by the 1st of July". I said OK. And we went for "Dunklesweissbier" (special dark, not filtered, wheat beer made in south Bavaria and around). Only tomorrow did I realize what actually happened.
We still do not have a pricelist for our product, there is still much going on in order to finalize the first full production version and we are working 10 hours shifts every day including the weekends. But we have the startup of something new in our hands, although nobody still knows about it :(.
But Sunny knows. He actually spent 5 hours experimenting with our Bumblebee Testing Environment after I had sent him an email about our existence. He saw the potentials of our software since he already did some research on WYSIWYG wiki software. And he put his trust in me. This is what friends are for. Thanks Sunny.
Of course, he made a deal for his company. Most probably a good deal! Should I have said 40k? I don't think so. Money will come afterwards; the first priority should always be: make the software solve people’s problems, and make it stable. Everything else will come later. Sunny just proves that the exception makes the rule.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on March 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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It was not easy!
Now when I look back and try to think about the
first days of the Bumblehood project, and fast forward the story till
the present days, there is this one big thing I can shout out loud
while riding on my bike through the woods of Munich neighborhoods on a
way to work - It was not easy!
I do have a couple of already successful start-ups behind me. I have a couple of failures too. And I have read many, many books, where the "definite truth" about how to start up something big, was persued (I really liked Founders at work by Jessica Livingston). But couple of years ago, when a friend of mine and I sat down and talked for the first time about "one idea I had", there was nobody to let me know how long and painful this trip was going to be. Think about it, how many times in our lives we wanted to start something big, something we felt is right to do, something we hope will help many people and generations to come, and we didn't do it because of _________ (fill the gap yourself).
Well, this time I didn't have any excuse, at least not one good enough.
So, what's all this Bumblebuzz about?
Internet of 2005 didn't have "big, old, good" Wikipedia. No YouTube every day - all day. Facebook? Nope. Flickr? A-aa.
But
what it did have was all that noise around us in the Google results.
When we wanted to find some information on one place, systematically
organized in a good, old fashion, library style, we need to... well, we
needed to browse hundreds of web sites and do OUR OWN document (MS word
mostly), just to be able to print it.
And I tell you - we STILL have
that noise. Ever tried to find an easy to print tourist guide online?
How about your company's intranet mess? Why aren't the things better
organized?
At that moment in November 2005 I didn't know that my idea will in the next 3 years put together 8 computer scientists, 2 mathematicians, 55 content writers, a wonderful IT geek, 2 angel investors, one VC investor, 11 week-long brainstormings, many sleepless nights and one goal - go live on 15th of February 2009. We actually set up that goal in December 2007 without even noticing that 15.02.2009 is Sunday. So we went live with one day delay, 16th of February around midnight.
The job is still not done, we have the new deadline set for the end of May this year and I know that the story continues. But already now I know I will be able to tell one thing to my grandchildren: I managed to get in touch with great guys on this project and we all together pushed "that big thing" into the daylight. Don't have to tell you that the investors are pleased too, at least for now :).
And if you ask yourself what's all this Bumblebuzz about, it was all written already here.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on February 20, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
