Eliminating Single Points of Failure in Start Ups by Kevin Dwinnell

Back when I worked for an ISO 9000 certified company and was feeling overwhelmed at the extensive documentation and process, I learned that writing the requirements avoided “bus-terminated projects.” If all the requirements are in the head of a product manager, there’s a huge amount of risk. Putting it all down on paper ensured the continuity of the project.

There’s a lot to be learned from that message for a start up. If you’re like us, money is tight and staff is lean. With little or no depth on the team for any given position, however, risk is considerably high with all those single points of failure.

That same ISO 9000 company was in the uninterruptible power supply business helping network administrators maintain uptime, and from that I also learned how redundancy exponentially reduces your risk.

Now, we’re not in the position to hire a second head count for every position. We have, however, used this as motivation to be purposeful about using contractors. We seek additional help, and line up contractors, in key areas so we’re able to weather a catastrophic event.

The additional bonus to this strategy is we have trained resources to help us load balance when our client list grows suddenly (and we see our fair share of that). With major brands using our Booms (custom browsers) as a means to stay connected to their consumers and fans, we’re often trying to meet deadlines whether it’s the season opener for a sports team or a new tour for a music artist. Having this small level of redundancy built into our team is ensuring we’re meeting immediate demands in addition to protecting our future.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Branded Browser, business, custom browser, Redundancy, start-up, Uptime | No Comments »

Can Attendance = Presence at a Trade Show? BT Heading SXSW by Kevin Dwinnell

Like any start up, we need to be cash conscious but sometimes separating the “wants” from the “needs” is not easy. We really want to be at SXSW. But in terms of it reaching the audience who buys our service (the brand marketer needing a branded browser), we don’t know if it’s the right show so we don’t know if it’s a need.

Outlined here is our strategy and thoughts for the show.

1. We’re not buying ads at the show.

This is a marketing spend that may help with awareness but, most likely, won’t drive a sale on its own.

2. We didn’t get a booth at the show.

This is a calculated risk. It’s a big cost driver, but gives the personal connection with a prospect that can deepen the interest and really get close to a deal.

3. We’re sending one of the team to attend.

Here’s the big leap of faith and why we’re doing it.

• We have talent in Austin. Michael Kaply, our lead developer, lives in Austin. But proximity isn’t the real value. Mike is one of those rare talents who is not only an amazing and accomplished coder, but he’s aware and articulate about the needs of the business person – and he’s an extrovert. If you’re going to put this task on the shoulders of one person, he’s the guy. (No, I did not give Mike a chance to edit this blog before publishing.)
• Much of the pre-show preparation is the same. Regardless of how we’re attending (booth or just a body), we want to go into the show with a set of pre-scheduled meetings. We’re contacting our partners and prospects, finding out who will be attending and arranging times to meet.
• The networking in the off hours is half the value of the show. It’s amazing how beneficial talking to the person next to you in a line can be, and if you actually get quality time at an after-hours event, even more so. We’ll find out how high our “half-the-value” estimate is.
• The high-quality leads of people seeking us out at the booth will be partially offset by the value of extended interactions at the networking events.

We’ll naturally discuss the results here. But, we’d really like you to meet Mike there and learn how Brand Thunder can help you engage your audience. So, if your headed to SXSW, drop us a line at our Contact page and we’ll arrange a time to meet.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand, brand thunder, Branded Browser, custom browser, Marketing and Advertising, South by Southwest, start-up, sxsw, trade show | No Comments »

Why Start-ups Should Show Product Flexibility – Obama Inauguration Honored by Kevin Dwinnell

Or, maybe the title of this post should be: Is it an opportunity or a diversion?

If an opportunity for your start-up is:

1. An extension of your current work
2. Improves product or process
3. Boosts your cash flow

Go for it.

For us, the launch of a browser theme focused on Barack Obama’s inauguration (see it here) was a yes to all of those points.

Here’s the back-story.

Our product focus has always been to deliver custom browser themes for leading brands. NASCAR, Huffington Post, you name it. After all, we create a persistent presence with online consumers, which is a great value proposition. What we didn’t focus on was event-driven versions — until recently.

We figured the long-term relationship a fan has with their favorite sports team or music artist, and our ability to reinforce that, was the real business opportunity. It’s good, but it’s not the only opportunity. There’s also a big demand for event-driven browser themes as well.

We started the non-branded work with sports (baseball, football, basketball and so on), but when we launched Christmas, we saw a real nice spike in users. That was quickly followed by an “Oh, shoot!” moment (word choice edited to maintain our PG rating). The Christmas user base would evaporate after the holiday.

So, we scrambled to get a special “Make Merry or Make History” offering in place, which presented a product for New Year’s and one for the inauguration.

The entire effort was beneficial on several fronts. The non-branded and event-based browsers allow us to maintain our build cycles in between client builds (point #1 above). The need to keep these more transient users inspired our BOOM product platform (see related post here) allowing users to seamlessly move between our themes rather than work to get from one to another (point #2). These products have the same business model as our branded versions, so we continue to build a user base that generates revenue (point #3).

By looking beyond our original product focus, we’ve given our business a lift and hopefully more runway – a plus for any startup. And by delivering an Inauguration theme, we’ve given ourselves until the end of January to build our next event-based BOOM.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Barack Obama, Branded Browser, brower theme, custom browser, Huffington Post, New Year, start-up | No Comments »

Building a Game Plan by Ryan D Miller

For starters, I love basketball.  It is hard to swallow the end of the college football season, but its good to know that college basketball is always right there to catch my fall.  Although that sounds like random gab, you’ll get the picture when you’ve finished reading this blog.  Business development and basketball, how could you not read on?

When a company has a great product or service to offer the first step to sales is getting deals as easy as possible.  The typical approach is tapping into the contacts that you have and taking the shot gun approach to get in front of anyone and everyone.  No doubt this will provide some immediate success and help build some case studies that will be the foundation of your company.  This will also get your name out there and start developing chatter in the industry giving you a presence within the market.

Leveraging existing contacts and going after easy wins can jump start any company, creating a base of clients and generating necessary revenue to move forward.  Thanks to the immediate tactics you have seen the early success you were anticipating and it’s evident that there is a demand for your offering, so what’s next?

This is where my addiction to analogies comes in.  I think it is safe to say that the overall objective in basketball is to score, and score as much as you possibly can.  As a start-up company our objective is pretty similar, land quality deals, and land as many as we possibly can.  Knowing the objective is to score, basketball coaches spend days, weeks, and sometimes even months coming up with a game plan that will maximize the teams potential.  At a competitive level you won’t see any team take the court without a game plan.  Shooting at will from all over the court won’t lead to success.  Although some shots may fall, ultimately maximum scoring potential won’t be reached.

At Brand Thunder we have a talented team and great scoring ability, but what will make us successful is our strategic approach to expand our presence in the market.  We continue to put together a strong game plan internally and expect it to pay off in the end.  The next step is execution, which is fairly self-explanatory.  A coach can put together a book with the greatest plays, but if you don’t execute correctly, you won’t see the desired results.  And not unlike basketball, you have to be flexible and willing to change the selling game plan when necessary.  Go into half time and make adjustments where necessary and take what the market gives you.

Not having a thought out strategy can be detrimental to the success of business development.  The sales approach and strategic direction at Brand Thunder is ever evolving but a game plan is in place.  We believe we have the team, the scoring power, and now the game plan to come out on top at the end of the fourth quarter.  Fortunately for me, all I have to worry about is offense.   ☺

Posted in Commentary | Tags: basketball, brand thunder, business development, Ryan D Miller, ryan miller, sales, sales approach, sales strategy, selling, start-up, strategic, strategy, success | No Comments »

Holiday Weekend and Start Up Fears by Patrick Murphy

We’re hoping to clear the long holiday weekend without incident. We’ve had a good run of luck with a growing client list, awards and industry recognition. Good momentum for our branded browsers. And our blog posts, while we hope are substantive and useful, tend to be rosy.

Well, last week we hit our first real hiccup. In the midst of a bunch of great news, and a time when we hoped to be seeing a good influx of new traffic, our site went down. The impact potential isn’t just our site and company. Given that our product represents other brands – the problem could be more wide spread.

Our recent successes revealed a bug in the open-source code behind our site. An influx of traffic and events were triggering an infinite loop that ultimately led to server overload (hope that made sense). We diverted server resources to the more critical components of our company, and let our corporate website take the brunt of the downtime. Not necessarily the face you want to show interested prospects, but the right choice nonetheless.

We feel fortunate our server guy is a staunch believer in open-source code. While we run a lean organization, the ability to rely on the shared intelligence of the open-source community greatly expands his knowledge. In a way, it’s like a virtual team and that team offered the information he needed to resolve the issue. Naturally, we’ll share back as we continue to tweak and improve.

Now that we’re heading into a long weekend, we’ll be a little more attuned to the business than we otherwise might have been. And a stable server will certainly make us thankful.

Lessons Learned/Good Habits:
• Track your site status. We’re using Monit on the server and an external monitoring site to send alerts.
• Have a support escalation plan in place – who to call, where to reach them, both internal and external.
• Avoid a single point of failure – whether it’s the password to get support from your web host, or an on-call contractor to backfill key knowledge positions.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand, Branded Browser, open source, server, start-up | No Comments »

2 Reasons to Create Design Mock-ups for Prospects by Patrick Murphy

This feels like a basic business idea, but having seen it both practiced and not practiced – we’re weighing in. It’s worth the effort to design a mock up of our product for each prospect we present to. Here’s why we think that.

Reason 1: It avoids the wrong discussion.

While our product isn’t overly complex, when you try to talk about it too much is lost. “Well, it’s a custom browser theme which incorporates your brand’s logos, color and style into the internet browser creating a persistent presence with your online audience.” Or, we can show them a mock-up of what we’re talking about. Now, we can limit the talk about us, and focus on what it means to them – isn’t that the point of every sales effort?

Reason 2: It shapes the right discussion.

We don’t just brand the browser; we add functionality and content. For example, we can invoke the sidebar which gives us a blank slate of HTML to really create whatever the customer wants. That’s too much freedom to convey in a presentation and is paralyzing.

Since we’re the experts of our product, we look at the prospect’s site and make a recommendation as to what we think works well in the browser theme. In the eyes of the prospect, we may be right or wrong but we’ve created a jumping off point for the discussion. Now the customer has an idea of what we might do with their stuff and that becomes the topic of discussion. We better understand the needs of our client are when they ask, “can you do this?”

You can see some of the mocks we’ve created on our Media page as well as screen shots of live product. Naturally, if you’d like to see a mock for your own company, we’d love to hear from you so feel free to contact us.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: browser theme, custom browser, mock, sales presentation, screenshot, start-up | No Comments »

Getting Back to Start-up Basics – Refocus after a Rush of Work by Patrick Murphy

Playing baseball in my youth, I was told to get back to basics when my hitting was off. It meant stop all the unnecessary things I was doing when I got up to bat, and instead refocus on the stance, bat position and keeping my eye on the ball. I’m finding the same refocus necessary in this start up.

The core items we focus on at Brand Thunder are:
• Telling our story – building awareness to our prospects and clients
• Selling our product – the calls, emails and contracts to actually sign a partner
• Developing our technology – process and implementation improvements for a sustainable and scalable business

The past five weeks have seen a total rework of all prior custom browser themes for compatibility with Firefox 3, the launch of four new clients (with a fifth coming any day) and the inclusion of a key business model component. And, all are vital to our business. But now that the rush is over, rather than relax, enjoy and get distracted – we’re refocusing on the basics. Doing the fundamental things necessary to build this business and keep doing it until the next rush of work hits, and it starts with picking up the phone.

If you have business fundamentals that you find valuable, we’d love to hear them – especially if you feel their applicable to our efforts. Post the comments here, or you’re always welcome to give us a call.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: browser, firefox, start-up | 2 Comments »