6. What Idea?
• Solve problems you’ve experienced
• Observe and looking for niches/problems
• Help people make money
• Not all businesses are equal

7. A Problem I Have …
• It’s hard to sell advertising for RSS and Email
• The market leader in RSS doesn’t provide
Email Digests
• There is no one-stop RSS/Email/Twitter service
for publishers

8. My Idea: A Service That …
• Helps people follow blogs with RSS, RSS
Digest, Email, Email
Digest, Twitter, Facebook, all automated for
the publisher
• Helps bloggers make money with self serve
advertising on RSS, Email and Twitter

9. BlogFollower
• Disclaimer: I’m not saying this is actually a
great idea, but it’s a good example idea. And
executed well, probably could work.
• Lots of ideas could be good if executed well.
• It’s not very glamorous or trendy, but it does
fulfill a real need for a growing target market

10. Research
• Do other people think this is a problem?
• Is the problem solved already?
– Look fordirectcompetitors
– Look for similar competitors
– Ask around
• BlogFollower Competitiors:
Aweber, Feedburner, Feedblitz, TwitterFeed, Hey
Amigo (Defunct)

11. Identify the Audience
• Primary Audience: Bloggers
• Secondary Audiences: Readers, Advertisers
• Are these audiences growing or declining?
• How will you reach and capture these audiences?
Do you know them well? Do you really know
what their problems are?
• Survey them. They may tell you some surprising
things!

12. Is There Money in This?
• How will you make money?
• How are competitors making money?
• Be pessimistic. To generate $1,000 p/m:
– $10-20CPM is possible … but $.5 - $1 is more likely. At $1 CPM,
you’d need 1,000,000 impressions a month
– For example < 1% conversion for subscriptions. At $10 p/m
subscription, you’d need 10,000 free subscribers to convert 100
• Of course you can do better than these numbers,
but you should be assuming the worst!

13. Mission and Vision
• What are you actually trying to do?
• A mission should be something that inspires you
to work, and should be the reason you are
tackling the business.
• I am a blogger, I like blogging, I believe in
individuals working for themselves. Therefore for
me the reason I’d get into this business would be:
To Make Independent Publishers More Effective

14. Start Planning!
• Carry a notebook
• Get excited
• Get obsessive
• Try out competitors
• Learn more about the niche
• Start networking

15. Personal Preparation
• You need to be ready to work hard
• You need to be prepared to carry it alone even
if you are planning on having cofounders
• You need to have some money to start off
and/or an income to subsidize you

17. Cofounders
• Find people you trust
• Find people who have different strengths
• Find people who work as hard as you
• Find people who you like and get on with
• You need to either:
– lead people
– join someone else’s team
– find cofounders who are happy to lead in different capacities
(technical vsbusiness vs product)

18. Who is Going to Do What
• Money? Hours? Skills?
• How will shares be split?
• It's important that you don't look back and
feel hard done by and that it wasn't fair
• It's like a marriage - you have to work at it, you
have to be prepared to compromise

19. My Core Team
• My Wife: Project Manager, Branding, Organized
• My Best Friend: Detail Work, Money
• My Brother: Capable, Analytical, Business Minded
• My Father: Experienced, Risk-averse, Wise
• Me: Ideas, Instinct, Execution, Confident

20. Money
• Founder investment
– Keeps you focused
– 100% ownership
• Outside investment
– Time and attention consuming
– Less control
– Pressure to deliver ROI
• Debt
– Repayments and Interest
– You own it, but the bank is watching you carefully

21. Accountant and a Lawyer
• Essential in the long run and helpful with initial setup
• Get recommendations
• Meet a bunch of them
• Build a relationship
• Initially:
– Lawyer should advise on company setup and shareholder agreement
– Accountant should advise on company setup and creating your
accounts

22. Business Plan
• Think through assumptions and details
• Don’t get bogged down with them, but don’t
skip them either
• More necessary if you need investment or
debt

24. What is Essential?
• Focus first on the essential, core of the product
• Nice-to-haves can be added later
• You should have a vague idea of how you think
the product will grow, but don’t over-plan or
over-spec
• How you can break the product into iterations?

25. Blog Follower Features
• Essentials:
– Takes an RSS Feed and pushes out RSS Digests, Emails, Email
Digests, Twitter Notifications and Facebook Notifications
– Facilitate Banner Ad Sales on RSS and Email
• Nice-to-haves:
– Self Serve Ad Marketplace
– Analytics
– Advanced Theming and Styling for Emails
– Multiple Payment Methods

26. Concrete Monetization Plan
• What exactly are you selling?
• Who are the buyers? Who are the users?
• How much will it cost?
• Are there fixed costs you need to account for?
• How much would you need to be selling to
break even? To reach your ideal profit?

27. BlogFollower Monetization
• Option 1: Subscriptions – charge the publishers
– Lots of small increments
– Easy to estimate and plan around, lots of conversion information out there
– Easy to develop and account for
• Option 2: Advertising cut – take a portion of ad sales
– Potentially very lucrative
– Hard to develop and account for
– Only really works if your publishers are all selling lots of ads … hard to estimate and plan
• Option 3: Charge per email sent, per RSS feed published etc
– May be necessary for emails
– Easy to develop and account for
– Could be lucrative
• Option 4: Mixture

28. Iterations
• Iteration 1:
– Publisher Account System
– RSS -> Twitter and Facebook
– RSS -> Email
– RSS -> RSS Digest
• Iteration 2:
– Digest Settings
– RSS -> Email Digest
– Email Subscriber Management
• Iteration 3:
– Fine Tune and Testing
– Publisher Subscription Billing
– Launch Iteration 1 & 2
• Iteration 4:
– Banner Ad System
– Basic publisher directory
• … and so on

29. UI & Development
• Wireframe out the application
• Assume that UI and Development will be
harder and more expensive than you’d
planned 
• Contractors? Founders? Staff?

31. DON’T underestimate marketing
• Lots of little startups build decent products
• … but go nowhere
• A mediocre product can go far with good
marketing (and you can improve it as you go)
• A great product may market itself … to some
extent (but often is teamed with great
marketers – e.g. 37Signals)

32. Branding
• A brand should:
– Be memorable
– Have personality
– Is more than just a logo
– A good brand has a story
• The easiest brand path is to tie it to yourself – be
the voice of your site/app/service. Be the
spokesperson, the evangelist, the story…

33. BlogFollower
• Personal brand through
– Blogging
– Personal emails to users about new features and personally
responding to support requests
– Evangelizing and networking with the target audience
• Get interviewed on sites and talk about my
experience with blogging to create the back-story
for the brand
• Position as the anti-Feedburner (be the little guy)

34. How Will You Find Users?
• Advertising (how much will you spend?)
• Blogging (what will the blog be about?)
• PR (what is the story?)
• Networking (how will you reach out to
people?)
• Social Media (e.g. 0atmeal)

35. BlogFollower Marketing
• Networking with bloggers, particularly bloggers whose
audience is other bloggers and internet marketers
• Try to get reviewed, interviewed, run giveaways, send
T-shirts, …
• Start a blog aimed at helping bloggers promote
themselves
• Try some social media promotion with linkbait articles
and giveaways (e.g. free icons for bloggers)

37. There’s No Finish Line
• Launching is not the end … it’s only the
beginning.Now you have to build a business!
• “If you leave and everything stops, you don’t
have a business, you have a job.”
• You need to be systematic in replacing
yourself while still ensuring that everything
keeps moving.

38. Stay Focused
• Focus on your users
– Marketing to new users
– Improving the product for current users
– Providing great support for current users
• Focus on revenue and numbers
– Accounting should be solid, watch out for cash flow!
– Make sure you have an instinctive feel for what actions correlate
with what numerical results

39. Continuously Improve
• If you stand still, your competitors will pass
you by
• There is a never ending list of improvements
and fixes and upgrades you can make. Be
prepared for this
• Improving isn’t always ‘adding’, sometimes it’s
removing stuff or streamlining