Finding business partners the eHarmony way.

So much for the quiet long weekend.  I got into a fairly long Twitter conversation with Nichola Bates (@growsalesonline), Chris McCabe (@maxer08), Jackie McGonigle (@whatsonni), Lyra McKee (@LyraMcKee) and Mary McKenna (@MMaryMcKenna) about something that really makes me tick… data!

Well I was looking at the data angle of it I’m pretty sure the rest were looking from another angle.  It was triggered by a blog post that Mary did a few days ago about having two pros of having two heads at the helm of the business (you can read it here).  The question then was raised, how do you find the perfect match of a business partner?

There are some sites out there like LinkedIn and Collab.ie which do provide a start but nothing that could actually predict anything.  The key to all of this are two simple things: rules and knowledge.

eHarmony works in the same way.  The questionnaire when you sign up is the key bit, it’s the data gathering that figures who you are and what you are prepared to put up with.  The next key is figuring out what you are actually looking for.

The following is an actual advert (why they listed on Gumtree I’ll never know but there you are, each to their own and all that).

We are an angling retailer based in manchester. We are a new breed of retailer, with a great USP. We have a vision for future growth and are now looking to grow the business.
We are looking for a partner/Investor/Mentor. Preferably someone who has an interest in angling. The ideal person is someone who would like to take an hands on approach. Experience in the retail trade and IT.
We have been trading since June 2009, much work has already been done.
We have a website already up and running, ecommerce site, 200+ Customers.
Business name, brand name and trademarks have already been registered with IPO.
This is a great opportunity for the right person.
Ingoing is 10K.
Quick return is predicted and all targets are seen as highly achievable.

So the jump out points:

• Hands on investor in sales/IT
• Min invest of 10K
• Likes angling (call it active interest in the investment)
• Based in North West of England
• Early stage startup
• Retail experience

You could network your brains out for six months getting to every event you could, shaking loads of hands, doing lots of meetings and it could all come to nothing.  Or you could go the eHarmony way plough all your wants and needs into the system and let the site whittle the list of eligible partners down for you.  That filters the wheat from the chaff.  Then it’s a case of meeting them all (pink carnation and a newspaper job) and doing the rest from there.

Obviously a system like this is only as good as the data it has from potential plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea business partners.

Weekends off, who needs them?

The JFDI Chronicles – My little black book.

I suppose everyone has “a book”, it might be a journal or a word document.  It’s the place where everything goes into.  For me I have an A4 sketch book, it’s coffee stained and a bit bashed around the edges, not great to look at it but it contains every note about Datasentiment’s development from day 1 (and the previous four months from that).  I started this book during unemployment, it was a horrible time as well.  On the positive side this was the time I started meeting likeminded people in the startup arena, ones who I will keep in contact with wherever I am on the planet.

It’s got screen shots, market research, quotes, everything that got planned and binned, everything that got planned and implemented.

Rough business plans, projections, customer segmentation, buying patterns, phone numbers, interested customers.  It’s got SQL statements, recency/frequency/value calculations….

I’m sure you get the idea.

Most things I’ve been involved with never start at the computer, it starts with pen and paper.  It forces me to start with a bunch of notes and ideas and refine them into something usable that I can produce.

Every month I revisit the black book (today is my scheduled day) and I’ll go over notes from 12 months ago and see if there’s anything I’ve missed.  Oddly enough things that I’ve put on the back burner (but are in the book) are now starting to emerge into something usable again.  It didn’t go in the direction I’d originally planned but it’s good to see it’s not wasted.

This book makes sure I don’t forget.

To boost retail commercial landlords will have to think different.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the weekend (a dangerous move according to some near and dear to me). Though I’ve been thinking beyond anything online and more into the retail realm.

Now I walk through Derry everyday and look at the amount of commercial property that lies empty. I’m not the only one either, Mark Nagurski did an excellent post on the very same subject. I’m looking from another angle.

Commercial landlords desperately and urgently need to rethink their strategies on how they lease out their property.  The idea right now is not to give big long leases but attractive short ones.  Micro shops and pop up shops are the perfect way to occupy empty space.  The idea of pop up shops aren’t new but if you want to have a go at starting up in retail now is a good time to start planning for the Christmas, ahem, rush.

If I were a landlord I’d rather have a place occupied for a shorter period of time than lying empty.  So how about shorter lease times.

6 months?

3 months?

2 months?

4 weeks?

1 week?

2 days?

1 day?

All doable in my eyes.

With a good dollop of marketing (announce the sale to your user base on Facebook, Twitter and uVoucher to increase awareness).  Nothing beats being out on the street and mixing with potential customers.

1. Pick something you can sell

The last thing you want is stock at the end of the sale so you want to pick items that you’ve got a good chance of shifting.  Sounds simple but I’ve seen this sink some companies over the years.

2. Creative thinking on the rent.

Easier with some landlords than others I’m sure (I’ve never tried).  Can you negotiate for free?  Offer a percentage of the revenue you make in your venture.  Free free free, whatever you can get for the least amount.  And only have the premises for the time you really need it.  November through to December 24th, don’t forget an online presence if you can (e-commerce would be better but only if you can really complete the orders).

3. Your brand is everything

Just because it’s a short lease shop doesn’t mean that your brand should suffer.  Without going mad with the money try and get some creative design thing going.  You can find some really cheap printing deals (or even Vistaprint for the ubercheap) to get flyers and all that stuff done.

4. Know your costs

Rent and staff are the big numbers.  The minimum wage is rising to £5.93 (£237.20 a week) in October this year. Goes without saying really but it’s so easy to end up running at a loss.  A better strategy would be not to pay anyone and run it yourself.

There’s a large amount of #JFDI in there I know and it will require some creative thinking from a few parties.  At the end of the day it’s all attainable we just need some creative minds to embrace it.  Who’s first?

Self employed or startup in Northern or Southern Ireland? smeople.com

Just a quick heads up, there’s a new website for self employed, small business and startups called Smeople.  Founded by Rob Marr it’s there to bring like minded entreprenuer type folk together to share and help each other on.  Sounds like a plan, just wish it existed twelve months ago.

Anyway, the site is www.smeople.com and it’s free to join.

Data, Data, Data: Why would Subway run out of my fave bread?

I hope my doctor isn’t reading this…..

My morning commute to work involves me passing a Subway store.  As I have the Subway card (500 points and you get a free 6 inch sub, or £50 for a sandwich) I’ll use it pretty regularly to get the points. My breakfast is pretty much like clockwork, a 6 inch white sausage bacon and egg sub.  Simple, nothing on it.

The point of sale (POS) system uses an internet connection back to a server to add the points.  The interesting fact though happened when I walked in one day and they didn’t have white bread.  Now let’s remember, I’m English and quite set in my ways (Corn Flakes, THEN THE SUGAR, then the milk) so for someone to run out of white bread I’ll not really go for anything else, I like my routine.  It gave me opportunity to ask a few questions though and the big surprise for me, the POS doesn’t take into account the bread that’s being purchased.  It knows the name of the sub, cost etc but not what type of bread is being used.

Worse case scenario is that the manager over makes on a type of bread that will not sell. This leads to wastage.  If you can track the bread then you can start reducing overheads against a period of time.

And the perception on the customer is bad, I don’t really like the taste of the other breads. So I have the option of getting second best or coming back (by which time I’m at work so it’s too late).  Subway has less that 2 minutes to get my attention and it all starts with white bread.  The can then compound to me not returning the next day under the perception that the store might not have the bread in stock again.

Ultimately, if Subway could track the bread type transactions they’d potentially save money in the long run and keep the customer happy.

Points loyalty systems are pretty useless unless there is some correlation between the requirements of the customer and the knowledge of the retailer.  It’s one of the main reasons that the Tesco Clubcard works so well and the Sainsbury Nector card doesn’t.  One can do something with the data and the other can’t.  WalMart/Asda look through transactional data from the POS to find changes and patterns based on location and date.

Getting the data is easy once you have seriously defined what data you want, then what you are wanting to gain from mining that data.  An exchage of points for fractional money value is all very well but you don’t really learn anything from your customers.

Don’t be afraid to shoot high, very high.

This isn’t just a Northern Ireland thing, it seems to be a connected Great Britain mentality. No one wants to see you succeed.  More than that no one wants you to make a comfortable fortune either.

I don’t hear very often, “well I hope you make f**king millions from it”, it’s normally, “well if you make enough to pay yourself a wage”.  Like that’s good enough.  By the way there’s nothing to stop you in the plan for making a wage from your idea first and then continuing on to the making a fortune bit.  It’s just the idea of stopping because you can scrape the bills.

Don’t be scared to dream, don’t be scared to aim high (I was like this at the start). Don’t be scared to argue and fight your corner for what YOU want, not what everyone else thinks you want.

There’s a ton of great startups in Northern Ireland but I think a lot of the problem to growth stems from the mentality of others telling people “you won’t make it”, “you’ll not make that amount of money” or “what background do you have…..”.

If you have an idea then #JFDI

Mary McKenna wrote in her blog recently:

In his research & interviews with 150+ notable African Americans, these are the 4 things that consistently make some people far more successful than most of us:

1.       They dream big

2.       They never listen to advice from friends & critics telling them the reasons why their idea will fail; they go with their own inner belief every time

3.       They dedicate themselves to lifelong learning (see slide on the photo above re what happens to you if you don’t!)

4.       They simply refuse to accept failure.

Food for thought indeed – I hope many of you see some of the above in yourselves.

Bootstrap Diaries: Knowledge is cheap.

Very cheap in fact.  Obviously there’s the Google/Bing/(Name your other favourite search engine here).

When it comes to knowledge for Datasentiment I had a bit of a head start from 2002 when I worked for a data mining company. I learned an awful lot about things not to do to your employees, how bad some Phd coder’s Java can be and watching reams and reams of data from a well know supermarket that couldn’t compete with the clubcard.

For those who met me last year when I was talking about free tables the like on the phone, well the next three months were an unfocused blur and the months between October and March have been the most rewarding, productive and exciting times.

Any gaps in knowledge were basically filled with the books below:

One of those books was listed on Amazon at £0.00, yup it was in their warehouse and they wanted rid of it, all I had to do was pay the postage.  The majority of these books were below five pence and all of them have domain knowledge that I couldn’t easily find on Google.  Tesco certainly don’t give their clubcard secrets away.

There’s no excuse for “I don’t know” because i) The knowledge is out there and ii) there’s probably a dozen people who’ve asked the same question.

Post-It notes came in handy for my copy of Rework when it landed.

StartVI – The incubator

Oh how I have waited for something like this.  When the huge slow to react monsters can’t deliver what’s actually needed then it gives space for smaller more nimble creatures to evolve and react.  Welcome the small, mobile and beautiful www.startvi.com

VI is:

VI (pronounced ’six’) is a Virtual Incubator for very early stage companies based in Northern Ireland which focuses heavily on mentoring and operational readiness.

And how Northern Ireland needs it. All we have to do is get the Derry branch sorted out….

You’re only as good as your network says you are.

I think it’s fair to say, in reflection, that 2009 was basically spent trying to find my centre of gravity. Towards November I was starting to sound like a bit of a personal pity party so something had to change.  Thanks to my network, finding out the technology landscape and talking to good people I could put myself in the right place at the right time.

There were a few things that happened that did help it along.

Open Coffee and other network meetings do work

You can’t beat face to face networking.  There was a time when I didn’t have to do this, the work was streaming in during the boom times.  Skills are plentiful and it’s a case of being able to sell yourself.  From Open Coffee I’ve managed to show my face once at XCake as well.  On the online side I keep up with Digital Circle and the usual stream of info on Twitter.

Speaking

I don’t think it does anyone any harm to publicly speak once in a while.  I loved doing Barcamp Derry last October.  Prospective customers, investors, employers and collaborators can instantly see what you are like and what drives you.  From the Barcamp experience I would really like to do some more speaking in 2010.

You’re friends

Considering that I moved to Northern Ireland in 2004 it’s taken a good five years to find my networking feet.  There’s a couple of factors in that, partially to do with the existence of technology like Twitter.  I always had a LinkedIn account but I did my searches by sector, not location.

Through the likes of Open Coffee I’ve met some great people.  Even better that most have them have become good friends and are on speed dial if I really need them.  The help, advice and provision that these people are willing to give is also available to you, all you have to do is to make yourself available and willing to show your face.

Write

I have an “articles” section on this site.  These aren’t articles that I just wrote for the fun of it, they are important networking tools to prove your knowledge.  The likes of Java Developer’s Journal, IBM developerWorks and the Belfast Telegraph have given me the opening to write articles on a wide range of technology subjects over the last nine years.

So, to summarise, with this mix of activities I’m just starting to shape and form what 2010 is going to look like, I’m really excited for 2010.  There’s some big things to happen.

Name Generator – The much needed tool

Chris McClelland tweeted about a wonderful tool called Fake Name Generator. When testing sites that contain user based info I always like to have real names in the fields, it just makes the site look more real that “TestUser_23423″.

The real drag is creating that data, until now…..

Fake Name Generator will create all the user data you need in a variety of output types (including sql) and then email it to you. You can create up to 50,000 names via their tool if you want to define your types of users. If you just want users you can download their 1,000,000 users dump. Perfect.