Going back to the eHarmony way of doing things.  There’s a ton of spade work already done over many years before they even got to doing any software.  Remember the founder of eHarmony, Neil Clarke Warren, was a marriage counsellor many years previous.

I keep going back to eHarmony as it’s the one system I’ve read about time and time again when it came to analytics and data mining.  It uses 261 bits of information and refines that in to its 29 core criteria working on a like for like match basically.

So I’m looking for 5000 business partners/CEO’s/entrepreneurs who are will to answer a lot of questions at the start.  Good research if nothing else.

5000 * 261 = 1,305,000 bits of information.

Meyers Briggs profiles… data, it’s all there. Just need to do something with it.

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?

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.

It’s been a funny old week.  Too much pen to paper, not enough on the early morning juice (I missed every 5am alarm apart from today, which shouldn’t be a problem but it seems that some of my Twitter followers set their alarms by my wake up call) and a lot going on elsewhere.

One thing that kept coming up in conversation was a Groupon type site for Datasentiment as part of the product offering.  A nice idea and actually very easy to copy and inititally an easy instant revenue generator. Then this morning I stopped because of two reasons.

1. I’ve already got four products that need my attention.

2. I’d pee off retailers in the long run.

First things first Datasentiment exists to promote customer loyalty to the retailer.  Groupon doesn’t do that in reality. It promotes new customer generation and at the cost to the retailer.  I appreciate at this present time you need sweetners to get customers through the door but for some the economics just don’t work out.

Okay, here’s a real example (I did some sums).

The dance studio in New York has a deal on for 5 classes for for $39, reduced from $150. A saving of $111. Not bad at all. So far (at time of writing) 375 people have signed up for the offer which is great.  I’m sure it would have taken some doing to generate $56,250 of revenue.  The offer is on though so that’s now slashed down to $14,625 that’s been generated.

For the customer it’s all well and good.  Pay the money, print the voucher and boogie x 5 can ensue.

For the retailer…. time to count the cost.

Firstly the fee to Groupon.  Depending on where you read it’s 30% or 50%.  For this exercise let’s go for the former.  So 30% is $4387.50 leaving the retailer $10237.50, or $27.30 per customer. For the pedants in the audience (me mainly) you could go as far as saying that it costs $5.46 per customer per session.

With this sort of deal there’s actually a good chance of retaining the customer, I think it’s a good fit.  But these are few and far between.  There are variables we don’t know, the cost of acquring the customer and then the cost of the product to the customer I’m sure would come to more than $5.46 per session.

I would also wager that the retailer is making no real profit, nor really gaining a new customer.  The majority of users to Groupon aren’t brand loyal, they’re coupon loyal constantly on the hunt for a good deal.  Fair enough, can’t complain with that.  This level of deep discount creates a dangerous starting point for a relationship with a customer though.

There’s a ton of competitors now and I wondered about a more local version but I’d suffer the same problem.  So I’m more bothered about maintaining long term value for customer and retailer, that’s what I’m about.

So the question remains, what about Groupon.  Aggressive mapping out of territories, acquisitions and the like. A huge valuation and an awful lot of staff.  Is it a case of a very bright shining star that will burn out brightly?  Keeping in mind other high profile sites like Yelp are now planning the same.

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?

So, 12 months later, what can I say.

1. It takes longer that you want it to.

Annoyingly so, I’m an impatient type at the best of times but this was difficult. Looking back though it’s happened at the right time.

2. The plan WILL change

DS then and DS are two totally different things.  The USP is a killer but it took about sixty phone calls and three mock ups to get there.  Only after Barcamp Derry did things really take shape and every line of code up until that point was scrapped.

It was the best thing that could have happened.

3. You will get answers but only IF YOU ASK!

The world will not come to you, you have to go to it.  Six months of the year was network, network and network.  Lots of good came from it, I met an awful amount of really nice, helpful good people.  You know who you are.  Yeah I met some arses too but you’ll always get that.  The skill is figuring out who the tyre kickers are.

4. Brand “you” counts.

How you project yourself, your passion (an overused word in startup land) and your conduct will either work for you or kill you off.  Ultimately it’s your choice.

Hibernia Atlantic were promising a 40 millisecond performance increase, citing video as a beneficiary.  Thinking about it a lot more, high frequency trading is really the potential startup to do in Northern Ireland.

Some HFT networks can do 10,000 trades a second (that’s 10 every millisecond). A 40 millisecond gain would create 400 trades (one company moved their entire network for such gains so they are important).

Now with 365 * 86400 second you get 31,536,000 seconds with an increase of 400 trades a second gives 12,614,400,000 trades.  If each were to make 10p each that’s £1.2 Billion in the back pocket for shandy’s all round.

Yeah the numbers are up the spout a bit – but it does make you wonder.

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

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.

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.