Entries Tagged 'Entrepreneurship' ↓

Over the last 5 years, have been focusing on building Viddler out of Bethlehem, PA. One thing that has taught me, if you are going to take the remote path, you need work extra hard to stay on top of your game. Going to conferences is an option but, expensive and takes time away from your business.

Luckily, online tools make it possible to continue sharpening your skills, even from afar. Problem with long podcasts like these, is you can easily waste your time if you aren’t picky with your podcast. If used wisely they are the perfect tools for in-between time (driving, flying, doing laundry, etc).

These are my 3 must-listen to  podcast resources:

• This Week In Tech – For the essential tech news, rockstar Leo Laporte is an incredible host and always brings super intelligent guests.
• This Week In Startups - Jason Calacanus does great job of bringing in incredible entrepreneurs and providing a mix of education/entertainment.
• This Week In Venture Capital -  The venture space is changing every other month. Mark Suster does a great job bringing in the top VCs and Angel investors.

For the last few years, it has been a privilege to work with folks leveraging viddler technology such as Gary Vaynerchuk.

It’s also been a privileged to work with such a great team that’s focused at delivering the best video technology.

The latest hire, Billy Disney, is first full-time hire outside that development/support workflow, and with the Viddler Spotlight series, has begun highlighting the love affair and “privelegedness” we have with our customers:

And with this amazingness, Billy humbly bakes himself as folks to be privileged to work with.

In a recent strategic conversation someone recently said “wow, you guys should be marketing this more” when referring to # of customers, big accounts and profitability.

We do put much of this stuff on the blog and on Twitter but she was referring to the more traditional marketing techniques: Sponsoring events, parties, keynote speaking, press releases, email newsletters, etc.

This brought me to defend staying low key. Allow me to share reasons….

Benefits of Staying Low Key:
- Competition doesn’t pay attention (we have features implemented better then our competitors and they still haven’t caught up)
- You wouldn’t believe the amount of people buying into video hosting that don’t attend big shindig conferences or give two cents about press releases.
- Save time and money. What matters and what sells is usually how good your product is and how fast you are innovating. Also if your not spending a wild amount on marketing you can offer your customers with a more affordable product.
- Other companies do operate like this and succeed. For instance, has anyone seen Getclicky? Two guys building one of the best analytics toolset in the business. They are low key, no mainstream marketing strategy, and after investigating have a outrageous # of customers.

This isn’t to say we aren’t looking to improve our marketing strategy. Just a slight argument for staying under the radar.

And I will keep the company name I work for out of this, cause I know I have google alerts setup on our competition. #stayinglowkey

My desire to share information and promote tight nits companies is completely selfish. I want other companies to adopt this philosophy, therefor making marketplace more competitive, therefor delivering higher quality products and companies to work with, therefor making my job easier.

We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.

The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.

Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are

Tubemogul

These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.

When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?

Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Edgecast

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.

We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.

And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.

To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.

Google

Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.

Woopra

Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides,  is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.

In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:

1. Smart/Passionate People
2. Ability to Listen and Deliver
3. Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.

Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.

If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has launched his blog, louderback.com. Jim is an old-school internet dude, if Jim started this blog only halfway through his internet career he could have registered jim.com.

Seriously though, Jim is great to Viddler and community. If you haven’t done so already make sure and checkout Revision3Beta. If you are looking for another Gary-Vaynerchuk-like “personality” in the video space, make sure to subscribe to his feed!

Now all I gotta do is convince him to get a Viddler.com account and branded player

DEMO 2008 Reunion – Robert Sandie of VIddler

Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

It just is too difficult. My cheeks cannot go any higher. Someday, I will learn.

Two years ago I was doing the elevator pitches for Viddler in front of large audiences like this. I wonder if they sounded as crazy as PooYou.com… Don’t answer that

Watch Matthew Bare’s elevator pitch:

They send poo through the mail for people.

What do you think, would you use this service?

This was recently uploaded on Viddler by entr200.

Last year, I posted on Jeff Hawkins as a role-model to all entrepreneurs, when I was learning about Entrepreneurship.

He brings up some great points in this video. It’s all about Passion.