Bonnie Griffin Kaake has 30 years of marketing and marketing management experience. She is President/CEO of Innovative Consulting Group (ICG), founded in 1996. Her experience encompasses work with national and multi-national corporations, including the General Electric Company as well as new product innovators. She has won many awards for her work and she is a nationally published author on the topic of marketing. In addition, she guest lectures at the University of Colorado and speaks on the topic of innovative marketing nationwide.
Bonnie has one patent and two patents pending. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration and is a graduate of General Electric Company’s Technical Marketing Program. She speaks both English and Spanish. Bonnie has been actively involved in the Rocky Mountain Inventors Association (www.RMinventor.org), is the current executive director and past president of the internationally known and prestigious United Inventors Association (www.uiausa.org). In addition, she is on the advisory board for Inventors Digest Magazine.
ICG offers marketing services to businesses and to new product developers who want more successful products and better results from their marketing efforts. Bonnie and her staff have been responsible for the successful marketing of many new products and businesses as well as working with angel investors and producing business and marketing plans. The company specializes in consulting in the area of innovative product marketing and works as a turnkey, out-sourced marketing department for many of its clients.
Simon Slade learned a lot about startup marketing as he grew his company from a small, part time auction selling business into an international brand with over 50,000 paid subscribers in less than three years. Slade is a New Zealand-born entrepreneur and a founder of SaleHoo - an international wholesale product sourcing directory that caters to online auction sellers.
Slade began his entrepreneurial adventure in 2003 when he began supplementing his income by selling goods in online auctions. As he got more successful, his hobby quickly turned into a 30-to-40 hour weekly marathon on top of his day job. Because he invested a lot of time in finding and developing relationships with reliable suppliers, and other sellers started seeking his advice on who to buy from. Slade began to compile all his notes and information into a list that would eventually evolve into SaleHoo.com.
Slade partnered with online business veteran Mark Ling, hired a part-time software developer, and then spent 5 months developing his list of quality suppliers into a user-friendly online directory. After recieving postive feedback from friends on the new interface, Slade decided to launch it in August 2005. He was especially eager to be the first product on the market, because of the “law of leadership” - where the first product that comes to the market becomes the dominant one — and even can become a verb, in cases like “Coca Cola” or “Xerox.”
Within eight months, the site had grown to 10,000 members. As the business scaled quickly, there was the question of how much the users should be allowed to influence the site. Slade acted on the best suggestions: the site soon opened a member’s forum and allowed several senior members and eBay powersellers to anwser questions and implement many of the user suggestions. “Listening to all the member feedback paid off,” says Slade, “and it allowed a more fluid process of development.”
As Slade is busy with launching his second startup due for release later this year, he recalls some of the lessons he learned while building SaleHoo up to an active community of 50,000 subscribers:
Launch Soon, if Possible: Launching soon is better than launching too late, because there is an incredible advantage at being the first to the market - if you capitalize it. This doesn’t mean to launch something that is incomplete - but rather, to focus on getting the working product done as quickly as possible.
Monetize Quickly: A big problem with many startups is that they focus too much on development and then rely too much on VCs and other investors for support. If you can make your product profitable sooner, rather than later, then a lot of the strain of funding and development can be reduced.
Listen to Users, and Trust Them: You users are, by far, the most important people in the whole “big picture” of the startup. Since they actually use your product, they have some of the most valid ideas about how to improve it. “Be flexible, but don’t be flaky,’ says Simon, “Trying to meet every single request is impossible, and it will leave you stumbling without direction”
Thoroughly Understand Your Industry: Having a rock-solid knowledge of your industry is essential. If you’re going to develop blog software, you better know the blogosphere inside and out. If you’re doing fashion, you better know every designer and all the trends. If you haven’t done enough research and you don’t know your niche inside and out from a practical standpoint - it might be wise to look into another line of business.
Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin: You can’t be everything for everyone, so don’t even try. As new ideas came pouring in, we acted on them on a time scale that was realistic - and we used member feedback to gauge which features and changes were most important.
Rob McNealy interviews Todd Vernon of Lijit Networks about Lijit’s online tools and widgets for website owners.
Todd Vernon’s Bio
Todd Vernon is the CEO of Lijit Networks which he helped found in 2006. Lijit’s mission is to provide super cool services to online publishers of all sizes that help them understand their readers better and create a business around their passion. Prior to Lijit, Todd was the CTO, Co-founder, and Chief System Architect of Raindance Communications which built and operated web conferencing services to businesses and consumers. Todd designed and built a global multimedia architecture for web conferencing that helped grow the company from startup to publicly traded company with annual revenues in excess of $80M. Todd enjoys everything about the startup process and is an avid blogger about life, multimedia, and his startup experiences.
Simon Slade
Todd Vernon is the CEO of Lijit Networks which he helped found in 2006. Lijit’s mission is to provide super cool services to online publishers of all sizes that help them understand their readers better and create a business around their passion. Prior to Lijit, Todd was the CTO, Co-founder, and Chief System Architect of Raindance Communications which built and operated web conferencing services to businesses and consumers. Todd designed and built a global multimedia architecture for web conferencing that helped grow the company from startup to publicly traded company with annual revenues in excess of $80M. Todd enjoys everything about the startup process and is an avid blogger about life, multimedia, and his startup experiences.
