Marketing Articles About Business Plans

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Results for: 'business plan'

15 items found:

Writing a Business Plan. When it comes to writing a business plan you need to remember that it should focus on four separate elements of your business: description, marketing, finances and management. These will be the ma... (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

I Hate Business Plans. Okay, anyone who knows me at all knows that I don’t really hate anything, and I don’t really hate business plans, what I dislike is the way people think about, and then consequently use, business and marketing plans. To me, a plan for anything is an action plan. If fact, the first step in creating a [...]
(07/15/08 09:01 AM)

I've Been Gnipped.

Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip. Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service - a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg). I've written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect). Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I'm going to tell you how this investment came about.

It started in 2004. I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find - AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.) bpm140 asked me if I'd be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had. I IM'ed back that he should email it to me - I got it 30 seconds later.

I took a look and scheduled a call. It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn't really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it. I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback. After talking for a little while I told him it wasn't my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.

Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric. We'd have quick interactions - usually around a specific question - and he shared with me a new idea he was working on. He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric's references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets). You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link. I'm a stats junky so I loved it. Eric said it would cost $3 / month. I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I'd prepay for a year for $25. He took my money.

Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog. The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo - FeedBurner's CEO. More feedback ensued.

One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network." All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog. I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget - with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog. For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn't ever remember living without. Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying. MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.

Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn't raised any money. I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006. Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO. They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months. I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn't want investments of less than $50k.

MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read. Fred Wilson - one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog - and I started talking about doing a VC round. We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006. I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn't be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck. I also told him that I'd love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.

I didn't expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.) True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.

I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund. By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments. It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007. Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business. He was hedging a little - struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few. I strongly encouraged him to focus on one. I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn't for me, but one was awesome. It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.

During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more. Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward). Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we'd be game to go after it with him.

I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he'd decided to go all in with Gnip. We'd recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga. I think Mark's single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.

Part of Eric's success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd. I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip. Todd wasn't available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski. We'd known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder. Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig. Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.

A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip. It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it. We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot - either by ourselves or with another VC firm. A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW - Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)

Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year. They've totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team. They've managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).

It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners. As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."

(07/03/08 09:00 AM)

Site Update and New Feature.

This weekend I spent some time adding some great new resources to my site. Check out my What's New Page to see what I've added.

I've also instituted a new feature for these and subsequent new resources. Recently, I discovered Clipmarks, a tool you can use to clip and stash snippets from Web pages. I've been trying to come up with a way to incorporate Clipmarks on my site and decided to begin using it to highlight the new additions. A possible other use might be to incoporate it in this blog, maybe for a "Site of the Week" or "Site of the Day" feature. I'm still thinking about this, so stay tuned.

Now what you will see when you go to a page on my site where I've added a new resource is something like what is shown at the bottom of this post -- a clip from the Foundation Center website.

To see the clips for the new resources, go to any of these pages:

Business Plans
Grant Writing
Small Business
Grant Subjects
Grant Samples
Legal, Financial & Contracts

What do you think?

clipped from foundationcenter.org

"The subject of this short course is proposal writing. But the proposal does not stand alone. It must be part of a process of planning and of research on, outreach to, and cultivation of potential foundation and corporate donors."

(03/24/08 09:01 AM)

Why a startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/why-a-startups-.html (08/01/07 09:01 PM)

How to Write a Business Plan: Ten Questions with Tim Berry. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/07/how-to-write-a-.html (07/24/07 09:01 AM)

[Sandhill] Bootstrapping: The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success. http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=16 How do you launch a successful high-tech business? If you ask the typical MBA, they'll give the same answer. Write a comprehensive in-depth business plan, take it to investors to secure a healthy initial round of funding, recruit... (12/12/06 08:04 AM)

Five Questions to Ask About Your Business Plan. It never hurts to step back every once in a while and take stock of where you stand. With that in mind, here are a few questions to mull over before you show your business plan to the world.1. Are you ...

(08/27/06 09:03 AM)

Sharing Your Business Plan. Business plans have a variety of uses: You can show your business plan to banks, private investors, and venture capitalists to obtain funding. You may share it with potential employees to attract to ...

(08/25/06 09:02 AM)

Why Business Plans Matter. Jerome EngelFounder and Executive DirectorUniversity of California, Berkeley, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and InnovationProblem: You don't know w ...

(08/24/06 09:00 PM)

Ten Reasons Why You Need a Strong Business Plan. A business plan is the cornerstone of starting a business as well as a significant tool for monitoring the progress and growth of your company. Below are ten key reasons why you should have a business ...

(08/22/06 09:00 AM)

Use Software Programs to Write Your Business Plan. There are several software programs available that can help guide you through the process of organizing and writing your business plan. However, before purchasing any software, you should answer the f ...

(08/21/06 09:00 AM)

Why It's Pouring VC Cash. Why It's Pouring VC Cash

By Michael V. Copeland

"The forecast for entrepreneurs during the next few months? It'll be raining -- cash. Consider Flickr, a popular photo-sharing-meets-social-networking site based in Vancouver, British Columbia. When it went live a year ago, it attracted plenty of notice and even pulled in a few angel investors, such as Excite co-founder Joe Kraus. But that's nothing compared with the torrent of offers it's entertaining now. Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) want to buy it outright, while venture capital firms are flooding it with all kinds of creative proposals. 'We get four or five calls a week from VCs,' says Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr with his wife, Caterina Fake. 'We even had a health-care fund call recently. I guess they wanted in on the excitement.'"

- I've noticed a lot of VC activity lately involving web based companies such as Flickr and Technorati. This article explains what is going on. It seems like there is a lot of money out there with a time constraint on it. Dust off those business plans everyone! -ed. (07/29/06 02:29 PM)

Strategies for Creating A Catchy Business Name. Strategies for Creating A Catchy Business Name

By PAULETTE THOMAS

"Question: I would love to start a small business selling the beaded jewelry I make. I'm thinking of calling it 'Dress Me Up with Beaded Jewelry.' How does that sound? What would a good business plan look like for someone starting out small?"

- Well I guess The Small Business Blog (TM) is not the fanciest name. Recognizing that people might hate typing in http://www.thesmallbusinessblog.com I shortened it to http://www.sbblog.com and it worked! Almost everyone that links to me links with sbblog.com. In fact thesmallbusinessblog.com has an abysmal Google Pagerank while sbblog.com has a great one. Naming The Small Business Blog (TM) as I did also turned out to be a great idea since the search engines love those keywords and people love typing them in. I guess my point is that, as the article points out, there are specific rules you should follow to create a catchy name, but don't be afraid to play around with the rules a little bit. -ed. (07/29/06 02:29 PM)

Guy Kawasaki's Thoughts on Blogging. I’ve been blogging for over 3 years. My friend Guy Kawasaki passed my traffic count in three months. His blog, Signum sine tinnitu, was recently listed as #2 marketing blog (Decker Marketing was #21, but who’s counting :-) In an effort to help him get to #1, and share with you his thoughts on blogs and marketing, I posed the following questions to Guy: You are an early leader (father) of customer evangelism, which is accelerated with today's user generated content and social networking movements. What took you so long to join in, and why do you have a blog now?For years I've considering blogging too arrogant. That is, that a blogger is saying, People care that I was in Norway today at a conference, and I had a hangover from last night's dinner part, and this is what I think of innovation and the RIAA. I have a blog now because some friends just hounded me into it. I still think many blogs are arrogant--perhaps even mine! But I view my blog as a way to help make the world a better place by helping people with issues surrounding entrepreneurship, innovation, evangelism, and fonts. One year from now, or a few years from now (take your pick), how do you think your Blog will have impacted your work, wealth, and life?My blog will be, if it isn't already, my primary outward facing broadcast mechanism. People will read my books, hire me to speak, and send me business plans because... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)