Alexia Blogs

Last Thursday night, I went to the FOWA Road-Trip/DemoBar event at ElyHQ. It was melting pot of tech people - academics, engineers, business-heads and geeks. A nice mix of people. Downstairs of Ely HQ heaved under the strain of sustaining the crowd. I met lots of interesting people, all eager to engage and was impressed with quality of the attendees.

Mixing with the startups made me think of the challenges that startups face when going to market. Having come from a household where the main bread-winner was a small businessman himself, the biggest issue that I see most startups face, is understanding their business.

First off, I am very happy in my job and I am not thinking about moving on, but suppose for a minute I want to set a up business that searches banks of data. Perhaps it’s a search engine. It doesn?t matter what kind of data I’m compiling, I just want to offer a meaningful discovery service to the user. I might also want to add an advertising stream to my cash-flow.

The biggest issues facing my imaginery startup is trust and relevance.

Trust in that user privacy is being protected, and isn’t being compromised for profiling to my advertisers.

• How can my business play both sides of the equation and stay honest to the end user?

As user trust is the bedrock of my imaginery business, the relevance of search results is key to its success. Users trust my business to give them a reliable, consistent and meaningful service.

• So, how do I ensure that they get delivery of these expectations?
• How do I stop nefarious manipulation of my service to warp search results?

Also, a much bigger question is, how do I distinguish myself from the big players who produce something similar to what my business does? They have much deeper pockets than I do, and it would be easy for them to divert a small percentage of their investments to blow my imaginery startup into oblivion.

By looking at these issues, I’m not only protecting the business IP of my imaginery startup but also instituting branding. I’m distinguishing my service as one that keeps the user in mind and can respond to moves by the big players.

If startups can successfully swim the shark-infested waters of business, keeping these principles in mind then they are certainly on the road to success.

Thanks to the all of the folks involved in organising the FOWA Road Trip and DemoBar. I hope this is the beginning of a new era of events like this being held in the Ireland. Thanks to all of the sponsors, including Microsoft for supporting the event.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Blogging, Geekery, Irish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.