brand management
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Heirlume raises $1.38M to remove the barriers of trademark registration for small businesses
Platforms like Shopify, Stripe and WordPress have done a lot to make essential business-building tools — like running storefronts, accepting payments and building websites — accessible to businesses with even the most modest budgets. But some very key aspects of setting up a company remain expensive, time-consuming affairs that can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses — but that, if ignored, can result in the failure of a business before it even really gets started.
Trademark registration is one such concern, and Toronto-based startup Heirlume just raised $1.7 million CAD (~$1.38 million) to address the problem with a machine-powered trademark registration platform that turns the process into a self-serve affair that won’t break the budget. Its AI-based trademark search will flag if terms might run afoul of existing trademarks in the U.S. and Canada, even when official government trademark search tools, and even top-tier legal firms, might not.
Heirlume’s core focus is on leveling the playing field for small business owners, who have typically been significantly out-matched when it comes to any trademark conflicts.
“I’m a senior-level IP lawyer focused in trademarks, and had practiced in a traditional model, boutique firm of my own for over a decade serving big clients, and small clients,” explained Heirlume co-founder Julie MacDonell in an interview. “So providing big multinationals with a lot of brand strategy, and in-house legal, and then mainly serving small business clients when they were dealing with a cease-and-desist, or an infringement issue. It’s really those clients that have my heart: It’s incredibly difficult to have a small business owner literally crying tears on the phone with you, because they just lost their brand or their business overnight. And there was nothing I could do to help because the law just simply wasn’t on their side, because they had neglected to register their trademarks to own them.”
In part, there’s a lack of awareness around what it takes to actually register and own a trademark, MacDonell says. Many entrepreneurs just starting out seek out a domain name as a first step, for instance, and some will fork over significant sums to register these domains. What they don’t realize, however, is that this is essentially a rental, and if you don’t have the trademark to protect that domain, the actual trademark owner can potentially take it away down the road. But even if business owners do realize that a trademark should be their first stop, the barriers to actually securing one are steep.
“There was an an enormous, insurmountable barrier, when it came to brand protection for those business owners,” she said. “And it just isn’t fair. Every other business service, generally a small business owner can access. Incorporating a company or even insurance, for example, owning and buying insurance for your business is somewhat affordable and accessible. But brand ownership is not.”
Heirlume brings the cost of trademark registration down from many thousands of dollars to just under $600 for the first, and only $200 for each additional after that. The startup is also offering a very small business-friendly “buy now, pay later” option supported by Clearbanc, which means that even businesses starting on a shoestring can take the step of protecting their brand at the outset.
In its early days, Heirlume is also offering its core trademark search feature for free. That provides a trademark search engine that works across both U.S. and Canadian government databases, which can not only tell you if your desired trademark is available or already held, but also reveal whether it’s likely to be able to be successfully obtained, given other conflicts that might arise that are totally ignored by native trademark database search portals.
Image Credits: Heirlume
Heirlume uses machine learning to identify these potential conflicts, which not only helps users searching for their trademarks, but also greatly decreases the workload behind the scenes, helping them lower costs and pass on the benefits of those improved margins to its clients. That’s how it can achieve better results than even hand-tailored applications from traditional firms, while doing so at scale and at reduced costs.
Another advantage of using machine-powered data processing and filing is that on the government trademark office side, the systems are looking for highly organized, curated data sets that are difficult for even trained people to get consistently right. Human error in just data entry can cause massive backlogs, MacDonell notes, even resulting in entire applications having to be tossed and started over from scratch.
“There are all sorts of data sets for those [trademark requirement] parameters,” she said. “Essentially, we synthesize all of that, and the goal through machine learning is to make sure that applications are utterly compliant with government rules. We actually have a senior-level trademark examiner that came to work for us, very excited that we were solving the problems causing backlogs within the government. She said that if Heirlume can get to a point where the applications submitted are perfect, there will be no backlog with the government.”
Improving efficiency within the trademark registration bodies means one less point of friction for small business owners when they set out to establish their company, which means more economic activity and upside overall. MacDonell ultimately hopes that Heirlume can help reduce friction to the point where trademark ownership is at the forefront of the business process, even before domain registration. Heirlume has a partnership with Google Domains to that end, which will eventually see indication of whether a domain name is likely to be trademarkable included in Google Domain search results.
This initial seed funding includes participation from Backbone Angels, as well as the Future Capital collective, Angels of Many and MaRS IAF, along with angel investors including Daniel Debow, Sid Lee’s Bertrand Cesvet and more. MacDonell notes that just as their goal was to bring more access and equity to small business owners when it comes to trademark protection, the startup was also very intentional in building its team and its cap table. MacDonell, along with co-founders CTO Sarah Ruest and Dave McDonell, aim to build the largest tech company with a majority female-identifying technology team. Its investor make-up includes 65% female-identifying or underrepresented investors, and MacDonnell says that was a very intentional choice that extended the time of the raise, and even led to turning down interest from some leading Silicon Valley firms.
“We want underrepresented founders to be to be funded, and the best way to ensure that change is to empower underrepresented investors,” she said. “I think that we all have a responsibility to actually do something. We’re all using hashtags right now, and hashtags are not enough […] Our CTO is female, and she’s often been the only female person in the room. We’ve committed to ensuring that women in tech are no longer the only woman in the room.”
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Adobe launches a new, simplified digital asset manager
Adobe today announced the launch of a new asset management tool, Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials. That’s a mouthful, but while the company didn’t necessarily simplify the name, the idea here is to give teams that work with lots of digital assets an easier-to-use management experience in the Adobe Experience Cloud than Adobe’s current enterprise-centric asset management tool can offer.
In addition, Adobe is also launching the first tool to integrate this new experience: the Adobe Journey Optimizer. This new tool is meant to help users leverage their customer data to build out customer journeys and figure out the best ways to deliver messages and content along that journey.
“The push towards digital content and building these richer, engaging experiences — customers expect it,” Elliot Sedegah, director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Adobe, told me. “Almost every interaction that you go along, you expect a rich experience. And not only at that point of just having richer material, like images or video, etc., but you expect it at every point of interaction with that customer. So that customer, if you think of it, isn’t just interacting with a brand, but our customers, they think of it as a customer journey. So using the same content, from awareness to conversion to post-sale and loyalty — they expect that same story to maintain. And it’s getting increasingly hard to get to all the different touchpoints.”
Image Credits: Adobe
Like with similar products, the idea here is to create a centralized, collaborative space for content creators and the teams that use their work. In that respect, this new tool isn’t necessarily all that different from other shared online file management services. But Adobe is also leveraging some of its unique capabilities. It’s using its AI smarts and Adobe Sensei platform to help users organize and tag their assets, for example, to make them more easily searchable. And the new tool is integrated with Adobe Asset Link, so creative professionals can search, browse and edit these assets directly from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and XD without having to switch context.
As Sedegah noted, not too long ago, it was mostly the creative teams and marketing that were involved in the content creation and management process. But today, this group also includes sales teams and customer support, for example, and the pandemic only accelerated this process.
Image Credits: Adobe
“[Our customers] have been forced to rethink their business models, rethink the way that they engage with customers — and it essentially accelerated this digital-everywhere process of the experiences customers get, the agility that customers expect from businesses, and then the number of people — and how they work — leveraging that content.”
So while Adobe’s enterprise asset management tools worked just fine before, the company’s users were telling it that it needed to do a better job at creating tools that made its asset management technology easier to use by more teams.
The first tool to integrate this new asset management experience directly is the Journey Optimizer. “That was a great opportunity for us to rethink that user experience that our customers wanted to deliver — and then make it easier for that person to do,” Sedegah said. “So as you’re building out a content journey — or maybe you’re designing a piece of content that’s going to get sent to maybe a customer as they engage with a brand — the digital assets appear right there for that author to use.”
Next up for integration is Workfront, the work management platform Adobe acquired last year. There’s an obvious synergy here between Workfront’s abilities to manage the planning, review and approval stages of a project and an asset management system like this.
The long-term strategy, though, is to integrate this experience across all Experience Cloud applications.
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Brands that hyper-personalize will win the next decade
A digital marketing and customer experience leader, Evan Kohn is chief business officer at Pypestream, where he created PypePro, an AI onboarding methodology used by Fortune 500 firms.
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When people reach out to customer service, they’re seeking more than a solution to their immediate problem. They want empathy and understanding. What they’re often met with is a queue.
Nothing frustrates people more than calling customer support and getting stuck in a loop. According to a study by Vonage, 61% of consumers feel interactive voice response (IVR) actively poisons the customer experience — and only 13% found it more helpful than calling a human directly.
Like many solutions, IVR falls short in personalizing the customer experience (CX). A customer calls in for a specific task like paying a bill and instead cycles through a one-size-fits-all menu that in reality fits nobody. Experiences like this clearly indicate to customers a brand doesn’t care about them as a person, only as a case number.
Personalizing the experience is a start, but this isn’t the end. Customers will expect a one-on-one interaction the moment they enter your customer service channel. To make that happen, AI and analytics are creating scalable opportunities to show your customers how much they matter to you. Brands taking advantage of that opportunity can create unrivaled CX that sets them far ahead of their competition.
The personalization buzzword
Personalization has become a popular buzzword in recent years, but true personalization is much harder to attain than many companies realize. That was the case in 2016 when companies first hopped on the chat bandwagon. The potential for a new communication method was there, but the one-size-fits-all approach companies took in developing their interaction platforms created more problems for customers than it solved.
What they missed is how to create digital experiences in which customers converse with automation that adapts based on user context. Information like their product or service history and preferences should be pulled up the moment a customer engages. Data on disposition, tone, sentiment and stated intent should influence how the customer moves through the system and reaches their desired end goal. That navigation should be effortless and go well beyond text-based communications, including immersive UX options like maps, surveys, carousel selections and more — all in a spirit of lowering the cognitive weight for the customer.
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Frame AI raises $6.3M Series A to help understand customers across channels
Frame AI, a New York City startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies understand their customers better across multiple channels, announced a $6.3 million Series A investment today.
G20 Ventures and Greycroft led the round together. Bill Wiberg, co-founder and partner at G20, will join Frame’s board under the terms of the deal. The total raised with an earlier seed round is over $10 million, according to the company.
“Frame is basically an early warning system and continuous monitoring tool for your customer voice,” Frame CEO and co-founder George Davis told TechCrunch . What that means, in practice, is the tool plugs into help desk software, call center tooling, CRM systems and anywhere else in a company that communicates with a customer.
“We then use natural language understanding to pull out emerging themes and basically aggregate them to account and segment levels so that customer experience leaders can prioritize taking actions to improve their relationships,” Davis explained.
He believes that customer experience leaders are being asked to do more and more in terms of talking to customers on ever more channels and digesting that into useful information for the rest of their company to be responsive to customer needs, and he says that there isn’t a lot of tooling to help with this particular part of the customer experience problem.
“We don’t think they have the right tools to do either the listening in the first place or the analysis. We’re trying to make it possible for them to hear their customers everywhere they’re already talking to them, and then act on that information,” he said.
He says they work alongside customer data platforms (CDPs) like Segment, Salesforce Customer 360 and Adobe Real-time CDP. “We can take the customer voice information from all of these unstructured sources, all these natural language sources and turn it into moments that can be contributed back to one of these structured data platforms.”
Davis certainly recognizes that his company is getting this money in the middle of a health and economic crisis, and he hopes that a tool like his that can help take the pulse of the customer across multiple channels can help companies succeed at a time when a data-driven approach to customer experience is more important than ever.
He says that by continuing to hire through this and building his company, he can contribute to restarting the economic engine, even if in some small way.
“It’s a bleak time, but I have a lot of confidence in New York and in the country, in the customer experience community and in the world’s ability to bounce back strong from this. I think it’s actually created a lot of solidarity that we’re all going to find a lot of new opportunities, and we’re going to just keep building Frame as fast as we can.”
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Customer feedback is a development opportunity
Kyle Lomeli is the CTO and a founding engineer at CarGurus.com.
Online commerce accounted for nearly $518 billion in revenue in the United States alone last year. The growing number of online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay will command 40% of the global retail market in 2020. As the number of digital offerings — not only marketplaces but also online storefronts and company websites — available to consumers continues to grow, the primary challenge for any online platform lies in setting itself apart.
The central question for how to accomplish this: Where does differentiation matter most?
A customer’s ability to easily (and accurately) find a specific product or service with minimal barriers helps ensure they feel satisfied and confident with their choice of purchase. This ultimately becomes the differentiator that sets an online platform apart. It’s about coupling a stellar product with an exceptional experience. Often, that takes the form of simple, searchable access to a wide variety of products and services. Sometimes, it’s about surfacing a brand that meets an individual consumer’s needs or price point. In both cases, platforms are in a position to help customers avoid having to chase down a product or service through multiple clicks while offering a better way of comparing apples to apples.
To be successful, a company should adopt a consumer-first philosophy that informs its product ideation and development process. A successful consumer-first development resides in a company’s ability to expediently deliver fresh features that customers actually respond to, rather than prioritize the update that seems most profitable. The best way to inform both elements is to consistently collect and learn from customer feedback in a timely way — and sometimes, this will mean making decisions for the benefit of consumers versus what is in the best interest of companies.
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Virtual product placement is coming for TV and movies and Ryff has raised cash to put it there
In a world where ad rates are declining for traditional broadcast media, the corporations responsible for making the fictions that millions devour daily need to find a new business model.
Subscription services are on the rise — with every major broadcaster launching an on-demand service — and so are ad-supported video streaming services to replace the traditional networks.
But there’s another Holy Grail of the advertising industry, long thought to be too technologically difficult to achieve, that may finally be within reach. It’s the on-demand product placement of branded goods in a video, and it’s the technology that Ryff has been developing since it was founded in early 2018.
Product placement is an increasingly big business in the U.S., raking in some $11.44 billion in 2019, according to data collected by Statista. That figure is up from $4.75 billion in 2012. The same report indicated that roughly 49% of Americans took action after seeing product placement in media.
The effectiveness of product placement has even been proven by researchers from Indiana University and Emory University. They found that “prominent product placement embedded in television programming does have a net positive impact on online conversations and web traffic for the brand.”
And while streaming services enjoy the dollars their subscribers are throwing at them, they’re also looking at ways to diversify their revenue streams. Netflix and Hulu are both expanding their product marketing divisions and analysts like those from Forrester Research predict that product placement will be a huge moneymaker for the company as traditional ad rates decline.
There are companies that handle product placement already. Startups like Branded Entertainment Network, which works with brands and producers to place real brands into contextually relevant scenes in movies and television, and Mirriad, which adds branded billboards to scenes, are working to bring more money to platforms and producers.
Ryff takes the technology to the next level, using computer vision, machine learning and rendering technologies to identify objects in a scene and replace them with branded products that can be tailored based on customer data.
“The infusion of SVOD/streaming platforms into the market, combined with platforms like Netflix that are unsuccessfully trying to grow their subscriber base will force those same platforms to explore and embrace alternative revenue streams,” said Marlon Nichols, managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, and a new director on the Ryff board. “In addition, consumers on paid platforms do not want their content consumption interrupted by ads. As such, product placement will be an important growth channel and Ryff’s new marketplace and unique technology set it up to be the unequivocal growth market leader.”
To continue its technology development and ramp up sales and marketing, the company has raised $5 million in financing. According to Crunchbase, Ryff had previously raised $3.6 million from investors, including a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group and undisclosed investors. The new financing came from Valor Siren Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Moneta Ventures and Vulcan Capital.
“Ryff’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that extend the reach of a brand’s content and drive business results,” said Uday Ghare, vice president for media and entertainment at Tech Mahindra, in a statement at the time of the company’s investment. “We believe the market will continue to see a shift of brand dollars to both content marketing and programmatic advertising as brands increase their reliance on content-centric programs and look to scale those efforts.”
Ryff’s ads can be tailored to the viewer’s taste, the platform on which video is being distributed, the geography of the broadcast, the date and time of the broadcast and a broader demographic profile, according to the company. Basically it’s like AdWords for videos.
In a blog post writing about the rationale behind his investment firm’s capital commitment to the company, Marlon Nichols of MaC Ventures wrote:
Imagine a future where an IP owner can maximize the value of its content by putting it on the Ryff marketplace, where that content will be mapped for dozens if not hundreds of product placement opportunities and be layered with restrictions that comply with creative needs. Those opportunities will be ranked and priced by their effectiveness to drive marketing goals for brands. Brands can bid on in-video placement opportunities that fit their marketing strategies and budgets. 3D brand assets can be uploaded and inserted dynamically into content right before the moment of video delivery.
Ryff’s first disclosed partnership is with the “reality” television producer Endemol Shine.
“Ryff successfully takes the concept of product placement, the only advertising format that can’t be skipped by the viewer, and delivers a scalable and adaptable advertising solution that can be applied to any content, at any time and in any market,” said Roy Taylor, founder and CEO of Ryff, in a statement. “The result benefits all — content free from annoying distractions, audience-specific brand placement and delivering a new means towards monetizing video assets.”
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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Studio Rodrigo
Ritik Dholakia worked as a startup product manager before he co-founded Studio Rodrigo, a branding and product design agency based in NYC. Unlike traditional branding firms, Studio Rodrigo is proud of its product design chops, especially when it comes to helping early-stage startups build version one of their product. It’s not an easy balancing act since most companies eventually want to bring their product design talent in-house, but it turns out, Studio Rodrigo can help with that too. Learn more about the studio in our Q&A with founder Ritik Dholakia.
Studio Rodrigo’s unique approach:
“Studio Rodrigo listened to all of our goals and dreams, concerns and uncertainties, and created a brand identity, website, and marketing materials that were true to our vision but better than anything we could have imagined.” Tze Chun, NYC, Founder, Uprise Art
“Basically, we’re a full-stack product design team. We have people who can do brand identity from a pure graphic design and visual communications standpoint, and who can also connect the dots between design and technology, business, and customer needs. We don’t have a traditional agency model with a project and account management overhead. You work directly with our designers.”
On Studio Rodrigo’s ideal client:
“We like working with clients that are solving big, meaty, challenging problems. We’ve got a smart team that likes to wrap their heads around the kinds of technologies that are pushing industries forward. For us, that’s currently technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with Studio Rodrigo Co-founder Ritik Dholakia
Yvonne Leow: First things first, how did you get into brand design and product development?
Ritik Dholakia: I’ve been in digital design and product development for about 20 years now. I actually started my career as a product manager at a startup. I worked for two venture-backed startups as the first product manager. I was part of the Series A team, managing product development, acquiring initial customers, and building market traction.
The first startup was an enterprise software platform for customers doing triple bottom line reporting. The second one was one of the earliest social networking platforms, pre-Facebook, and around the same time as Friendster, LinkedIn, and Spoke.
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Videos lead brand creative growth with 3x increase since 2017
James Winter
Contributor
Contributor
James Winter is currently the VP of Marketing at Brandfolder, a leading digital asset management solution; prior to joining Brandfolder, James was the Director of Marketing at AspireIQ where he grew the marketing team from zero to seven.
As brands pursue audiences online, they are producing more creative content than ever — particularly around Instagram.
In the past twelve months, Brandfolder‘s Brand Index (check out the full Brand Index Report at the end of this article) tracked an 80% increase in videos and other creative material targeted for the platform.
With the Instagram community being a highly engaged group, brands rely on rich, visual content to connect to them. With the proliferation of new Instagram features, like video, Stories, multi-photo carousels, and IGTV, each subset requires its own content, further inflating the need for more brand creative.
The growth in brand creative isn’t just due to audience demands, however. The shelf life of brand assets has fallen as more brands compete with other content (and each other) for user attention.
In 2016-2017, the average asset shelf life was 395 days. From 2017-2018, it was 280 days, with varying lifespans across file type and industry. That’s a 29% decrease in lifespan. Over the next few years, we predict this number will continue to decrease.
Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.
Which means, as brands are becoming increasingly dynamic and getting serious about personalization, the need for brand creative, more frequently, will continue to skyrocket in order to stay current and relevant.
To bring this to life, think about the last professional sports game you watched. You noticed one team on the field was wearing a throwback jersey with an old school logo. At a different game, they were back to wearing their normal jerseys with the most current logo.
Later in the season, however, the team is wearing pink jerseys for Breast Cancer awareness. This is a prime example of a dynamic brand expressing their creativity while adapting to varying circumstances, events, and audiences. All of this necessitates fluid brand creative.
But what exactly is brand creative? In the broadest sense, it refers to the all-encompassing collection of online and offline creative assets that a business uses to represent its brand. When we refer to brand creative, we refer to assets of all types–like videos, social media posts, product photography, lifestyle imagery, sales materials, logos, fonts, 3d renderings, and much more.
At Brandfolder, we are focused on delivering intelligence about our customer’s brand creative. We house and manage millions of creative assets from companies of all sizes–anyone from small-scale mom-and-pop shops to large-scale Fortune 10 companies.
And within this massive creative data set, our data science team extracts actionable insights through asset scoring algorithms, prediction formulas, collections, classification tools, and uniqueness analysis, to name a few.
Through these analyses mentioned above, our data science team created the Brand Index– a collection of high-level brand creative trends that CMOs, brand managers, agency professionals, and designers should use to guide their strategic campaigns and deliverables. It was built on discoveries from tens of thousands of creative assets stored in our digital asset management platform from more than 6,000 brands between 2016-2019.
Some brands house asset counts as low as 60, while others house as many as 38,000 assets or more. Specific information analyzed within the Brand Index includes amounts of assets, file formats, asset orientation, asset shelf life, event-based interactions with assets, and more. This information was then combined with the customer’s industry and anonymized to remove any identifying and brand-specific information.
In the Brand Index, companies can learn things like why and how brands’ digital footprints are growing exponentially. From 2017-2018, total asset count on a by-brand basis skyrocketed by 81%. And, it’s on track to continue climbing.
Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.
A major factor for this digital asset boom could be the increasing demand for rich and personalized media on multiple channels, putting an even greater emphasis on the need for a robust digital asset management platform.
Additionally, as CMOs and design directors are putting more time and effort into their brand creative, the need for understanding which assets perform better, when and where, will continue to rise. Brands are already taking advantage of optimizing their creative content based on rich insights.
Thus, by integrating testing data with a platform that provides asset-specific performance insights, brands will have the competitive edge they need to continue retaining and building equity in the minds of their consumers.
Our findings also show that companies should take note of the shift in file type and how brand creative needs to become increasingly dynamic in order to keep delighting their customers. Rich media files used for engaging and dynamic advertising are on the rise–with video being a key player.
Videos have become the go-to file format supporting a variety of marketing and business goals like sales, retention, upsell opportunities, customer experience, education, thought leadership, and more. JPGs still tend to be a brand favorite, however, gone are the days that these JPGs only live in one place. Asset versatility and responsiveness are critical for the increase of digital channels. Which leads me to my next point: brand identity.
Most brands now have at least four logo orientation and color variations that contribute to consistency and cohesion across their growing portfolio of channels. The brands that are succeeding in the marketplace have animated logos and other engaging asset types that they can switch out on any channel with the snap of a finger.
And as mentioned earlier, if the average shelf life of an asset differs by file type with a current average being 280 days or less, which file formats should brands continue to invest in order to maximize their ROI?
But, what does asset shelf life really mean? Asset shelf life is defined as the number of days between when an asset was created and its latest event date (the last time it was accessed, viewed, downloaded, distributed, etc.). An asset is just like a living, breathing creature. It moves from creation through purpose and finally reaches retirement or its, sometimes timely, archival.
Not all assets are created equal, however. With the creation of AI & ML technologies, brands are getting smarter about their content’s performance. High-performing brands are quicker to remove underperforming content from their arsenal and generate new brand creative to keep things fresh.
And with video on the rise, that also takes a big chunk of change out of marketing and creative budgets. Thankfully, but not ironically, we’re seeing that the asset types that take a larger investment also have longer shelf lives.
Companies should invest in a management solution for more expensive assets to ensure they are generating the maximum reach and profitability throughout their lives.
As brands look to scale their identities and creative asset production, as well as their distribution and delivery strategies, companies should take advantage of the Brandfolder Brand Index in order to ensure they aren’t left behind with the constantly evolving landscape.
Read the full Brandfolder Brand Index below:
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When to ditch that nightmare customer (before they kill your startup)
Joe is a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. Joe is currently building Spiffy, and previously sold Automated Insights, sold ExitEvent, and built Intrepid Media. Find more about Joe at joeprocopio.com or @jproco on Twitter.
Three million dollars. That’s the largest amount of money I’ve ever walked away from in terms of a customer contract that I decided we shouldn’t take.
It sucked. It was, at the time, more than half of the total amount of funds we had raised and it also represented just a shade more than the previous year’s revenue. It was a Fortune 500 company and the market leader in their industry. This was pocket money to them — which was part of the problem.
Good entrepreneurs spend a lot of time worrying about customers. We worry about the customers we have, the ones we don’t have, the ones we lost, and the ones we’re in danger of losing. We worry so much about where the next customer is going to come from that we never think twice about whether we should take on, or keep, a customer that’s more trouble than they’re worth.
The customer is king
As entrepreneurs, we need to be unflinchingly customer-first. We are the drivers, but the customers are holding the map. We should spend copious amounts of time listening, usually through data, to figure out our next move. We should know the risks when we go off-road, not only the setbacks that come with making the wrong choice, but the fact that we’ll hear about it from all sides until we right the ship.
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SentiOne raises $3.5 million to monitor social media
While it’s not exactly sentient, Sentione sure sounds like it should be. This Polish company watches social media for brands allowing you to create an instant monitor for any topic. Founded by Bartek Baziński, Michael Brzezicki, and Kamil Bargiel, the company raised $3.5 million from Venture TFI and Trigon TFI Group to build out their platform internationally. The company has been… Read More
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