By Allan Maurer   
 
When people need a product or service, they often start their search online. At that moment there is an opportunity to grab a consumer’s attention. 

Benjamin Rudolph
President & CEO, Relevance Advisors

Your goal is to be present when potential customers search, and once they arrive at your website, you want them to take an action – whether that is an online purchase, filling out a lead form, or viewing a video.

“You can send a million visitors to a client’s site and still be fired if they don’t take action,” says Benjamin Rudolph, president, founder and CEO of Relevance Advisors in Atlanta. Relevance offers pay per click, SEO, and Web analytics services.

Rudolph is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, a Yahoo! Search Ambassador, a Microsoft AdExcellence member, a Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) individual member, and a member of the Web Analytics Association. He is also president and co-founder of the SEMPO Atlanta Working Group.

Prior to founding Relevance Advisors in 2010, he spent four years at Comcast, where he managed the search partnership with Google for Comcast Interactive Media.
 
Rudolph is one of 50 top Internet mavens, digital media experts, executives and entrepreneurs slated to participate in the Atlanta Digital Summit May 16-17 at Cobb Galleria. He’ll be focusing on developing landing pages to direct post-click activity.

Figuring out post-click behavior
 
One of the main challenges in search engine marketing, Rudolph says, is too get visitors to Web sites to take a desired action. At Relevance Advisors, he notes, “We help companies figure out that post-click (on the site url) behavior.”
 
“A company has a lot of control over a destination page,” Rudolph says. “It’s easier to make a change on a Web page than in a retail store, and it lends itself well to testing, such as trying different shopping cart paths.”
 
That sounds easy enough. But, Rudolph adds, “Navigation can be a big problem for Web sites.” He says that having worked at a large company such as Comcast, he knows that “a lot of constituents” can have a voice, but a lot of voices may mean the site ends up not being consistent with the goals of the visitors it attracts.
 
He offers the following advice for those who want to increase post-click activity:

“Content should match keyword search terms as closely as possible.” Content that suits the company’s needs may not suit the users, he points out. “Most people decide to stay or leave a site in two seconds. If they don’t see something quickly, they’re gone. We have some clients who spend $20 a keyword, so it can be an expensive departure.”

Scene from TechMedia’s previous event Internet Summit 2010. Benjamin Rudolph of Relevance Advisors is a participant in the upcoming Digital Summit in Atlanta May 16-17.

“Test. Show your landing page to someone who never saw it before.” Let them look for two seconds and ask them what they should do next. If they don’t know, try something new, he suggests.

“Check out friction.” Don’t lead with a form of 50 lines. “Forms should be simple and ask for as little information as possible. Include a progress bar.”

“Explain top benefits in a bulleted format. People put too much on a landing page. You can always include links to more information.”
 
Minimize external links. “People think landing pages are like home pages. They’re not. People arrive because they searched for a specific term. Make the specific intent of the page clear: to buy, to get a lead, click on a link. Don’t try to be all things to all people. That’s a high bounce rate situation.”

Don’t get hung-up on the wrong metrics

Sometimes, he says, a high bounce rate is not the metric you should pay attention to. “If you’re a dentist and your goal is for someone to read, get your number and pick up the phone, de-emphasize the bounce rate.”

He adds, “People can get hung up on the wrong metrics. I had a client who focused on time on the site. If you’re Macy’s, too much time on the site might mean people can’t find what they’re looking for. You have to think about what your goals are first, then how to tie the metrics to the goals.”

His basic, overall advice, however, is to “Build relevant content based on how users interact with your site and come up with a strategy relevant to your audience.”  
 
Join hundreds of Internet executives, interactive marketers, web entrepreneurs and other new media professionals at the Digital Summit scheduled for Atlanta, May 16-17. Get the latest trends and best practices in topic areas such as Social Media, Cloud, Mobile, Internet Entrepreneurship, Search Marketing, Email, Venture Outlook and more while checking out hot new Internet startups in the Demo Showcase. Use VIP code TECHVIEW50 to save $50 off your registration http://www.digitalsummit.com/

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Allison Fabella

So says Allison Fabella, who joined the Southeast’s largest daily newspaper about three and half years ago as SEO manager.

At that time, many of the paper’s large staff of reporters and editors had “never heard of SEO, let along about writing for it,” says Fabella.

Participating in May Digital Summit

Fabella is one of dozens of Internet mavens, digital media thought leaders, industry executives, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs participating in the upcoming Digital Summit at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta May 16-17.

At the AJC, Fabella oversaw development of a content management system that was SEO friendly and worked with graphics people to design pages for SEO, then began training the reporters and editors on how to take advantage of SEO.

 A real cultural shift

“It was a real cultural shift for some people who were doing it for a long time to change the way they wrote headlines and leads.” Fabella says she works closely with the AJC staff in the newsroom “on a daily basis. Some are still getting used to it.”

SEO is a challenge, she says. “There are so many moving parts. There are a lot of ways one can be diverted. We have 250 reporters here and they’re all writing content. There are a lot of places where things may not go as you hoped.”

On the other hand, she adds, “Some have really adapted to it, They recognize they get more people reading their stories.”

As a journalist, I get that. I’ve only begun really paying attention to SEO since TechMedia shifted from a proprietary content management system to WordPress last year, where filling out the SEO package is part of doing every post. It does add another layer of work and thinking, particularly in shaping heads and leads. But when you see ten times more people reading your reporting, it is motivating.

 Social media lift-off

Lately, Fabella has been busy getting the newspaper’s social media strategies off the ground, which means both more training and evangelizing, she says.

But, she notes, “When you think about it, news and social media work nicely together. There is value in being able to move the information into the community in ways you haven’t before, tweets, Facebook.”

Not only that, social media is a “Two-way avenue” that lets the paper’s reporters and editors crowd-source stories, get tips on breaking news, and let readers know the paper’s staff is listening to them.

One thing the paper is not doing, she says, is allowing comments on the story level. The newspaper just does not have the staff to monitor anonymous comments, which any publisher who allows them knows can get nasty, vulgar and way off track if not monitored.

It does allow comments on its Facebook page, where the usual lack of anonymity results in fewer negative comments. “We try to keep things fairly broad on Facebook,” she says. “We don’t want to police it too much. We only pulled something down once, an image some people found objectionable. But we haven’t had to intervene in the comments yet.
 
Most negative comments are between those making them and work themselves out.”
 
The paper has been using social media actively for about a year. Prior to that, a number of individual staffers had opened various accounts, but the paper did not have a cohesive strategy or anyone managing the efforts strategically.

Then, Fabella and the paper developed strategic goals and the rationale for engaging in social media. “Once that shaped up, we saw a rapid increase in pageviews on Facebook and Twitter,” she says.

“We broke up the newsroom into smaller groups by beat (the subject area covered) and talked about the benefits of using social media,” she explains. That got faster buy-in from the staff than her SEO efforts. “It fits in well with a reporter’s toolkit,” she says. “Any way you can reach out to the community for crowd-sourceing or tips is an easy sell.”

At the upcoming Digital Summit, Fabella will be talking about “The five biggest mistakes you can make in SEO.”
Those include such things as building a site in Flash, which, while agencies love it and it’s very, well, flashy, search engines can’t read it. Another: site maps that direct search engines to the wrong place. For the rest, catch her presentation at the Digital Summit.

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Twitpay’s John Beisner sees green in social game space

Originally founded by Michael Ivey and Don Brown as a way to use microblogging service Twitter as a peer-to-peer payment service, last year it sold its assets to a group of investors led by payments industry exec Ashish Bahl and Morgan Keegan banker Keith Myers, who said they would invest up to $1 million more as the company relaunched  to help non-profits do fund raising over Twitter. While it acquired 44 non-profit clients, it is expanding now to process commercial transactions, initially for social gaming companies and the gift card market.
 
John Beisner, executive vice president for client services, who joined the firm last year, tells us, “The key here is the social side of the purchase – the value derived from users sharing their purchases with friends.” The idea is that seeing friends buy social gaming currency might inspire them to buy as well.
 
The company has partnered with Atlanta-based inComm, a prepaid and gift card payments processor to power its new direction.
 
Considering the expanded services, the company discussed changing its name – and may yet rebrand under its parent-company name of Social Media Pay, says Beisner. But it decided to stick with Twitpay for the time being, since the company has good name recognition.

Twitter itself could benefit from seeing its popular service with 200 million users turned to new uses, Beisner says. “If they continue to add features – something Facebook has done well – they give people more reasons to sign up and use the service.”
 
Twitter has advantages as a way to facilitate payments: it is already available on any mobile device, and there is a lot of buzz around the evolving mobile payments sector. Many Twitter users already access it on a mobile phone, he notes, so Beisner says the company sees potential there.

Twitpay is one of 50 innovative companies that presented at TechMedia‘s fifth annual Southeast Venture Conference March 2-3 at the Buckhead Ritz Carlton in Atlanta. TechMedia’s next Atlanta event is the Digital Summit, May 16 and 17 at the Cobb Galleria.
 
Beisner says the company’s model is “Continually innovate.” So, he adds, “As we talk to customers and figure out what their problems are, we try to create innovative solutions to add to the basic product.”
 
The company’s offices are nothing fancy, Beisner says, but its layout allows the firm’s five people to communicate with each other easily. “You stand up and say something and start exchanging ideas,” he says. “To innovate, you need a direct line to someone. If I’m talking to a client on the phone and mouth something (to those in the office), they may have an idea before I’m off the phone.”
 
Twitpay has learned a number of important lessons, Beisner says. “First, you can stay lightweight in a business and get a lot done without needing a lot of infrastructure or people.”
 
On the technology side, he says, “The cloud environment enabled us to develop a product quickly at low cost.”

The essence of these lessons, he says, is that “You can run a business with a lighter footprint and innovate quickly.”

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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By Allan Maurer
 
Atlanta has totally changed several times over in the 41 years Sig Mosley, Jr. of Imlay Investments has been doing business in the city.

Sig Mosley, Jr.: “[Startups] underestimate what they need and what it will take to get to the marketplace”

Mosley, one of Atlanta’s best known investors, is among a number of top speakers and panelists at the upcoming Southeast Venture Conference in Atlanta March 2-3.
 
While Imlay is focused on supporting its 37 portfolio companies rather than making new investments now, Mosley says the ecosystem supporting Georgia entrepreneurs is developing steadily.
 
“We have a number of organizations that have begun to help the entrepreneur in various ways,” he says. “New ones continue to pop up.”
 
The groups include Startup Chicks, Startup Lounge, the Angel Lounge, Atlanta Tech Angels, Start Atlanta, Georgia Tech’s ATDC, and groups focused on biotech and medical devices, among others.
 
“I think we’re making progress,” Mosley says. He does see one area that needs improvement though.

Sig will be leading a panel on early stage fundraising strategies at the upcoming SEVC in Atlanta

Better coordination needed

“Eventually, I think we’ll do a much better job of coordinating between the groups. We need to do a better job of figuring that out.” One group recently circulated its suggested calendar of events to other groups to make sure they didn’t conflict with other events, he says. But generally, he notes, “They have a tendency not to coordinate them well.”
 
Atlanta has a number of strong tech clusters, which Mosley expects will remain so. “Internet security has been here for many years and will continue to have a strong presence here,” he says, adding that the same is true for the mobile space.
 
He also notes that biotechnology is doing well. “I don’t look at bio, but everyone I talk with says it is doing well and medical devices are on the uptick.”
 
Green energy companies are evolving in Atlanta and he believes they could evolve into a “center here.”
 
If he were to start investing tomorrow, he says, “I’d still look at mobile and Internet security. But I would definitely look at medical devices. That’s a real opportunity coming along.”

Advice for entrepreneurs headed to SEVC

We asked him if he had advice for entrepreneurs coming to the Southeast Venture Conference.
 
“Do your homework before you come,” he suggests. “Figure out who you want to meet before you get there. People who show up without doing their homework waste a lot of time.”
 
He adds, “If I were an entrepreneur at an early stage company, I would want to know who does early stage investments and what they like. I’d try to meet the right people in that regard.”
 
Having a good attorney or advisors who can help find the right people to talk with and make introductions is a plus, he says. “People may be at a slight disadvantage if they don’t have good advisors.”

Sig feels the social and local deals market that Groupon is in highly over-crowded

Understand your market
 
One area where entrepreneurs often need to do more homework before presenting to investors, he says, “Is that they need to know their market. I’ve told people for years, you can have the best team and the best product, but if you don’t have a market, it doesn’t matter.”
 
Questions entrepreneurs should ask? What do people want to buy? Are people ready to buy? What are their competitors doing and who might become a competitor?

That’s particularly important. “In this day and age, you don’t know when a Google or a Facebook or Microsoft might become a competitor. But you can find out if they are interested in your area and take that into account,” Mosley says.
 
Or, he says, a product may face a dozen competitors – in some cases many more. “Investors will want to know what makes you different.”
 
For instance, the whole social and local deals area that Groupon is in seems over-crowded. “There are one or two local ones here. Why would an investor want to fund a new one?” That, he says, is about the business model and how the company delivers it.
 
Part of understanding a market includes “Understanding the community you are in,” Mosley says. “Atlanta has been more likely to do B2B companies than B2C,” for instance.

Another common mistake many entrepreneurs make, he notes, is “They underestimate what they need and what it will take to get to the marketplace.” So, worried about their equity, they shortchange themselves and raise only $500,000 when they really need $1 million.
 
He warns, however, that people on the East Coast and in Atlanta should keep in mind that valuations tend to be lower on this side of the country than in Silicon Valley. “We’re not the Valley and we’re not going to have the same valuations as the Valley. People need to recognize that,” he says.

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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By Allan Maurer
 
Dan McDade thinks lead management processes are broken in most companies and it frustrates him to the point that he wrote a book, published this week, called “The Truth About Leads.”

 Dan McDade

“It’s a map to fixing some of the most significant problems,” he says. “They’re not easy to fix.”

A primary problem is the poor communication between sales and marketing departments, he says. “You have people in sales conditioned to expect poor leads from marketing, and marketers think sales people don’t follow up on leads. Sales and marketing in most companies are not nearly as aligned as they should be. Poorly qualified and unfiltered leads go to sales and 90 percent of the time, sales does nothing with them.”

The result? At one point in 2010, more than half of sales organizations missed their quotas.

At the most basic level, they have to agree on what a lead is. “This isn’t getting a lot of people in a room and singing Kumbaya, it’s a CEO making a decision and enforcing it across the company.”

“The Truth About Leads” cover

McDade is president and CEO of PointClear, an Atlanta-based firm founded in 1997. It is a prospect development company that helps B2B companies drive revenue by nurturing leads, engaging contacts and developing prospects until they’re ready to close.

The Sales Lead Management Association named McDade one of the 50 most influential people in sales lead management in 2009 and 2010.  

Once a lead is defined properly, the next step is what happens when a lead goes from marketing to sales. That process involves “Control, credit and compensation. You communicate in such a way that people do not feel they are losing control and know they will get credit and it will affect their compensation.”

He adds, “If you work it right, it’s incredibly motivating and you get tremendous results. If you don’t, it’s incredibly demotivating.”

Dan McDade as principal for a day at a Pre-K special needs school

McDade, “an accountant by trade,” was president of several companies prior to founding PointClear. The 57-year-old likes leadership positions. Recently, he volunteered to be principal for a day in the Atlanta school system. He had hoped to be principal at a high school, but ended up in the role at a pre-K school for special needs children.

Even there, he had his eye on organizational efficiency. “I learned what a Principal does,” he tells us. “I greeted cars and helped pull children out of car seats. But you couldn’t tell if a child was special needs or not.”

Out of their cars the children headed to classrooms with names like Blue Frog and Purple Dinosaur. “They went happily and soaked everything up like a sponge. They were well disciplined and curious about having someone visit. I was one of the few men other than the janitor, and I’m 6’4″ and 290.”

He was impressed with the school’s organization. “They’re very structured. The way they’re scheduled and planned was impressive.”

Children were curious about Principal for a day Dan McDade, who is 6’4

For a video on Dan’s inspiration for writing The Truth About Leads, click here.
 
McDade’s book has been well received by critics and early readers. Here’s an excerpt:

 
Book Excerpt from The Truth About Leads
By Dan McDade, CEO of PointClear

FINAL WORDS:  The 7 Fundamental Truths About Leads

If competing was easier, it would probably not be as much fun. Shortcuts such as setting objectives based on the number and cost of each lead, or creating appearances for sales rather than real opportunities, are well-intentioned examples of decision-making that oversimplify a very difficult process.
 
This faulty decision-making is often fostered by an environment that is created by senior-level executives, marketing management and sales management. Here are the 7 fundamental truths: 

1)  Executive and C-level management owns responsibility for providing high level market, message and media strategic direction. If you are a C-level executive today, and have given your team the direction that “our market is the Fortune 500″ or “we sell enterprise solutions” (as examples), then you may be partially responsible for gaps between expectations and actual results.

2)  Tight, vertical and geographically defined markets are always necessary. Always. If you do not have a handle on this, from a deployment and message perspective, you are
wasting time and dollars.

3)  The strategic-level messaging most companies use does not work. If you cannot explain what you do with a simple story and/or analogy, you need to work harder on carefully crafting just what you need to say.

4)   Close to 95 percent of most marketing investment is wasted due to marketing’s focus on short-term leads and failure to value and capture the long-term leads. Also, frequently lost is information about companies that are qualified, but have no immediate opportunity – valuable information that results from the process of finding short-term leads. Gathering market intelligence and applying the learnings in the context of a thoughtfully planned nurturing program delivers significant return.

5)  If you have an inside sales group, it is likely that they are either glorified administrators, or making 35 or fewer dials per day due to other pressing issues. That means that for every person you have in inside sales, every day you are settling for 65 percent less productivity than you should. You can’t afford anything less than a dedicated group of trained professionals focused 100 percent on sales.

6)   Sales management has six jobs: Hiring, Compensation, Training, Deploying, Managing and Coaching. There are ample resources for the first three, but the secret to more successful sales management is deployment, management and coaching. The best sales rep, with an envious comp plan and great training, will fail if not pointed in the right direction (deployment, including providing true hunters with fully baked sales opportunities) and pushed (managed, including requiring compliance with the needs of the corporation regarding SFA or CRM), and coached as required when things are not going well.

7)  An advocate is someone who will, without prompting, speak well of you and your company – and in essence, help you sell. Initiatives to keep customers happy can help you make money. Since buyer’s remorse starts the moment the deal is signed, the activities, events and programs designed to create advocacy need to start then too.
 
Does your company clog the pipeline with low-level leads created by trade shows, web hits, inbound calls and junior telemarketers? Is your company spending a fortune buying “appointments” that are really “appearances”? If so, you need it to stop.

Now you know the truth about leads.

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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By Allan Maurer
 
Start Atlanta aims to pick up where the similar Atlanta Startup Weekend left off, but with a more local emphasis and a serious attempt to sustain firms created over the weekend of January 29-30, the event’s organizers say. The event launches Friday night and doesn’t end until Sunday evening, with final presentations taking place at 5 p.m., and includes sessions with mentors and professionals in addition to team working sessions.

Jason Ardell, software engineer for Neybgor and Tourbuzz

Atlanta companies created during Startup Weekends in the past include Twitpay, (which will be a presenting company at the upcoming Southeast Venture Conference at the Ritz Carlton Buckhead, March 2-3), Scribbit, and Nexpense.

The already sold-out event was organized by a team that includes Stephen Rosenberg, co-founder of Brainpik; Jason Ardell, a software engineer for Neybgor and Tourbuzz; Jeff Costa, a solution architect with Virima/S2n; Jeremy Duvall, a contract software engineer for Deloitte; Ben Cherian, and Shane Ardell, a project manager at Digital Scientists.

Just the bottom of the venture creation arc

Rosenberg, who describes himself as a web entrepreneur and a self-described beach bum, cooking enthusiast, and geopolitical junkie, says, “The vision is to stitch together a supporting organization. We want to be just the bottom of the venture creation arc. We then want to move our teams to partnering organizations such as Startup Riot, which is reserving a spot for us, and then, when they’re a little more polished, Startup Lounge. Ultimately, we want to remove as many obstacles to success as possible so we can focus on value creation.”

He adds, “The weekend is not an end in itself, but a beginning.”

Stephen Rosenberg, co-founder of Brainpik

Jason Ardell says he sees a healthy startup culture in Atlanta. He notes that changes last year to the Advanced Technology Development Center program opened it up to many more startups, for instance. “They realized that entrepreneurship is changing and some don’t need office space or big investments, so they changed their model. They’re working with a lot more bootstrapped folks. It has been really well received by the Atlanta community.”

What does it take to be investment worthy?

It may be easier to launch a startup company than ever before, but to be successful a company does have to successfully sell something – especially if it does aspire to landing seed, angel, or venture capital. “It’s imperative to sell something if you’re eventually going to look for funding,” says Rosenberg. An angel investor told Start Atlanta founders that you needed to have $100,000 in revenue or a million users to “Consider yourself investment worthy.”

Eager to create companies, entrepreneurs and tech savvy programmers, engineers and business people gathered at Atlanta Startup Weekend in 2010

“You might not need quite that much to get a seed investment,” Rosenberg says.

Ardell points out that there is a “Catch 22″ of sorts in the way technology and the Web have made it so much easier to launch a company. “It has enabled people who are not entrepreneurs in the classic sense,” he says. “It allows a tech guy like me to launch products.”

But, he says, “My core thing is not learning how to sell or to find investments. It’s a challenge that I’ve struggled with in the past. Guys like me start the company, build the technology, and have no idea how to sell it.”

Working out the details of creating new firms from scratch resulted in companies such as TwitPay and Scribbit at Atlanta Startup Weekends. Start Atlanta is a rebranding of the event intended to help keep companies started at the event going

One of the ideas behind Start Atlanta – a rebranding of Atlanta Startup Weekend – is to “Provide guidance for entrepreneurs and partner them with some mentors so they can get some training and be able to sell,” Ardell says.

Rosenberg, on the other hand comes from the business side and MBA side of the ledger. “I’m blown away by the possibility of people coming together to collaborate and create things quickly,” he says. But he also wants any startups that evolve to have a shot at actual business success.

So, Siavage Law Group is helping them put together a basic legal agreement to make things easier down the road. “I’m not saying a Facebook will come out of Start Atlanta, but an agreement like this can solve some issues so that a company is viable it can turn into a Facebook and won’t be a nonstart.”

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Marc Gorlin, chairman of Kabbage, at the 2010 Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC

“There is no faster way to raise working capital on the planet,” says Chairman Marc Gorlin. Out of Beta for a short time, Kabbage has doubled the number of clients it had previously.

It has been making advances of from $2,000 to $12,000 and is going to move up to advances of $25,000 to $40,000 over time, says Gorlin. “If they can get access to capital, they can truly grow their business.”

The alternative method of raising capital offers online sellers another option in one of the worst climates for obtaining small business credit from banks in history.

Kabbage co-founder and COO Kathryn Petralia on the motorized beer cooler the company won at a PayPal X developer conference

This Internet thing is just a fad

“Take a company like Zappos,” says Gorlin. “They were doing $50 million in revenue before they got their first credit line from a bank. Many local companies doing $5 million or $6 million can’t get credit. A company in Minnesota referred to us was selling hardware and had a run rate of $4 million a year from online sales. They went to a bank for money to expand. The bank told them this whole Internet thing is just a fad – and that was this year.”

While traditional bankers want to walk wooden floors and see actual customers, Gorlin points out that “There is actually a ton more data online.”

Using that data, Kabbage qualifies sellers in a matter of minutes from about 200 data points in PayPal and eBay – how long a store has been online, it’s seller rating (which indicates how well they treat their customers), PayPal charge backs, volume of sales and much more. Kabbage has made advances to companies selling everything from American Indian jewelry to model trains, plus size men’s clothing, odd sized men’s shoes, china, and collectibles. “It’s a diverse list,” says Gorlin.

The companies agree to paying back one-sixth of the advance each month via PayPal and can pre-pay with no penalty. Kabbage makes from 6 percent to 16 percent of the advanced amount in fees depending on the firm’s credit history and volume. Down the road, Gorlin sees the possibility of giving online sellers a “Kabbage score” based on its data and increasingly sophisticated analytics. It can, for instance, tell over time which data points may be most predictive of small business success online.

Robert Frohwein, CEO of Kabbage, has been CEO of LAVA Group Inc., an intellectual property investment bank, a founder and the managing partner of Sentry Law Group, and founder of MediaWheel

Hold it while we check your Kabbage score

Banks may eventually use the Kabbage score to open up their own loan coffers, Gorlin suggests. “We could be the means by which banks get more money to small businesses by automating the process for them,” Gorlin notes.

Data analysis Kabbage has done for its own customers shows that “Margins for online businesses are stout. A lot of them won’t sell things for less than a 100 percent margin, they are not paying rent on a store, they don’t have shelf space to fill or need people to talk to customers. They do have different fees on PayPal and eBay, but by and large, the customers we see are running high margin businesses.”

Founded in late 2008 by Gorlin, CEO Rob Frohwein, and Kathryn Petralia, COO, the company attracted high profile investors who include  David Bonderman, founder of TPG Capital, Warren Stephens, CEO of Stephens Inc., and the UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, in addition to BlueRun. The company says the funding will let it expand its financing service beyond eBay merchants to marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, Overstock and so on.

Talking to Gorlin, you can tell he gets a kick out of helping small businesses while building his own. Kabbage itself still has a classic startup culture, says Gorlin, a serial entrepreneur who was a co-founder of Pretty Good Privacy (NYSE:MFE), Vertical One Corp. and the Lanta Technology Group.

Startup culture, he says, “Is something you can’t recreate in a big company. You work the number of hours you do to create something out of nothing and you have to burn off some steam.”

So, there are nerf guns. Oh yes, and there is the motorized beer cooler. Kabbage won it as the audience choice prize at a PayPal X developer conference in San Francisco. “I guess you could put something besides beer in it,” says Gorlin, “but I wouldn’t know why.”

On the heels of its funding, Kabbage has already selected larger new offices in Atlanta and will be hiring. It currently employs eight people and expects to hit 15 or so in the next 60 to 90 days. But if you’re going by, watch out for the nerf guns.

© 2011, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Startup Council “alum” Toomah went on to become “Georgia’s most promising new tech company”

1. What is Startup Council’s purpose and how well is it fulfilling that purpose?

Startup Council, a Trevelino/Keller concept, was implemented to provide entrepreneurs a support system for startups throughout the southeast. The Council holds quarterly roundtable events where entrepreneurs meet in a roundtable format with a variety of business experts for advice and insight on the company’s business development, funding, marketing, public relations, legal, accounting, outsourcing and branding. Since inception in 2006 we have hosted nearly 50 companies across a number of different industries. A number have gone on to become successful businesses. For example, Toomah, a company we met with spring of 2010 that offers software that provides automated interviewing tools that significantly reduce hiring costs, was awarded Georgia’s most promising new technology company during the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) and Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) Business Launch ’10!

TechSpartacus is an online community aimed at promoting regional established and emerging companies.

The fall Start-Up Council roundtable was held on Wednesday, November 3. Companies interested in presenting at the next event that will be scheduled for early 2011 can complete an application, found here and fax it to (404) 214-0729.
 
2. How important are connections to the broader technology community, mentors and potential funding sources to Atlanta startups?

Having connections to the broader technology community throughout Georgia and the Southeast is a very important part of business success puzzle. The technology community throughout the Southeast is booming with many opportunities to connect with other thought leaders in the space – whether through attending local events like the Southeast Venture Conference or participating in online communities like TechSpartacus or TAGthink – there are countless ways to expand your contacts.

Tagthink is aimed to help area tech players connect

3. What is the most common mistake a startup makes in preparation for events such as Startup Council? What can they do better? What lessons do they most often learn?
 
Startup Council offers a more relaxed environment for startup companies and entrepreneurs to learn and expand upon their business ideas through conversation with other business experts. One common mistake is a lack of succinct presentation ability. We, as other audiences, need to understand what the company does and its value proposition within 5 minutes. Longer, we lose interest.  More often than not, when presenting companies leave our sessions, they walk out with contacts, ideas to sell/tell their story. In extreme cases, companies walk out having to re-think their model.

The Southeast Venture Conference will highlight over 60 emerging companies in Atlanta next March

4. How can a Startup get savvy advice on professional services such as legal, accounting and pr on a severely limited budget? How far can they go on free advice?

Groups like Startup Council and StartUp Atlanta work hard to promote the entrepreneurs they meet with – these are free opportunities that entrepreneurs can take advantage of to get their name out there to the technology community. While both of these groups offer a valuable knowledge base, when it comes to implementation or strategy development that is when the paid relationship should be considered. There are a number of firms in Atlanta and across Georgia that will work with entrepreneurs to help them with what they need and piece together a program that best fits the company strategy.

Startup Atlanta’s vision is to make Atlanta one of the best cities for entrepreneurs in the nation

5. What do you see as Atlanta’s greatest need(s) in developing a stronger, more vibrant tech startup community and how can it be achieved?

We’ve seen the support system for Start-Ups grow during the past few years and sense it will continue to develop. Open communication and collaboration within groups can only help.

© 2010, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Jeff Pedowitz coaching soccer in Atlanta

Pedowitz, has just been nominated for the industry’s 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2010. His firm helps clients to create and execute demand generation strategies and tactics that get results. Services include strategy, program design, system selection, implementation, integration, creative services and outsourced demand generation.
 
Founded four years ago, the company already has more than 500 global clients. Pedowitz attributes much of its success to the lessons he learned early when running a Subway franchise.
 
Learning to do a lot with a little

“In a sandwich shop, you don’t have much money,” Pedowitz says. “You have to learn how to do a lot with very little. You have to make sure everyone does things consistently.” Doing that right results in viral marketing, the word-of-mouth that brings in customers, he says.

“It also taught me to think quickly on my feet to face many different situations,” he adds. Something worked. Pedowitz grew his business into a network of 35 owned and franchised Subway stores.

Pedowitz with his children

From there, Pedowitz joined Computer Associates, where he “Started at the bottom and was promoted three times in nine months”. He rose from developer to consultant to director of professional services. “Because of what I had done every day in the restaurant business, it came easily to me,” he says.
 
After his stint with Computer Associates, Pedowitz started a sales company based on Michael Bosworth’s Solution Sales, which took him to India to teach companies how to sell to the US market.
 
Hold yourself accountable
 
Just prior to starting The Pedowitz Group, he was vice president of professional services for Eloqua, which sells demand generation software. His company maintains a relationship with Eloqua, but Pedowitz says his days of working for someone else are over.
 
“I don’t see myself going back to work for anyone else,” other than his clients, that is, says Pedowitz.
 
Even before he started his first business with his father in New Jersey, his competitive nature showed. “Anyone who knows me knows I constantly push and try to be the best I can be. I’m not a sore loser, I just hold myself accountable and try to make myself better.”

Debbie Qaqish, principal partner and chief revenue officer at the Pedowitz Group, teaching MBA students at the College of William and Mary

After his parents bought a ping pong table when he was 12, he and his 8-year-old brother played every day in the basement and he still likes to wield that ping pong paddle to win. His sports interests include basketball and swimming. He played on the Penn State water polo team and plays chess.
 
Sports teach lessons
 
Sports, particularly team sports, he says, teach you how to work with others toward a common goal. “You learn how to respect people,” he notes. “We’re all driven and competitive and results oriented, we want to win, but we compete fairly and don’t feel any need to resort to trickery.”
 
But even though he was active and competitive in sports for years, business got in the road of staying in shape.
 
“Even though I played sports all those years I didn’t exercise all that much the last ten years,” he admits. By March this year he says, “I was in the worst shape of my life. I was overweight and exhausted.” He found himself drinking five or six cups of coffee every day to keep an edge on his Type A personality.
 
“I realized on a number of levels that I had an obligation to myself, my family, and my business and decided to put some of my intensity into taking care of myself.”

Qaqish, Pedowitz says, is as competitive as he is and also does cross-training workouts

Getting into shape
 
So, he says, “I went out and found the most difficult program I could, something just ridiculously difficult to challenge me.”
 
That was the P90x BeachBody workout program, the extreme home fitness workout you may have seen advertised on TV that uses “muscle confusion” via a variety of intense, hard exercises to produce results quickly.
 
“I worked out on my own the first three weeks and it was brutal. But now I’m completely into it. I worked out more in the last six months than I ever did in my life, but I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since I was 20.”
 
Pedowitz, now 42, says he’s down to a single cup of coffee a day, “Out of habit, I guess.”

His make it happen attitude carries over into his business philosophy.

“From a technical standpoint, we’ve had challenges,” says Pedowitz. “But the challenges have brought out the best in us. And we have always found a way to solve the problem.”

© 2010, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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Ella Dyer, a former angel investor, says, “Bet on the jockey, not the horse”

Dyer, who has 20 years experience in bringing companies to market from the startup to the mezzanine level, co-founded Abundant Closet with partner Jody Fennell, another tech veteran, in late 2008.
 
“When Jody and I first started talking about this two years ago,” Dyer says, “She was saying she had nothing to wear to work. I was shocked. She’s very fashionable. Her closet in the Atlanta suburbs is bigger than her apartment was in Manhattan. We began thinking, this is just data hanging in your closet. We should be able to build an algorithm to manage it. I liked the idea so much I bought into the company.”
 
Abundant Closet has developed a product called Fashion-Ade.com, a virtual closet and e-stylist that helps women find and buy clothes that match the wardrobe they already have. They go online, setup an account and enter data about the styles, colors, and fabrics and accessories and then can shop for items they that match. Its outfit engine presents them with products that would update an outfit specific to each consumer.
 
There is also a social media component that let’s them share potential choices with friends on Facebook, say, and ask, “What do you think?”
 
“We’re a Pandora for a woman’s wardrobe,” Dyer explains. “We’re designed to help a woman get dressed and get on with her busy life.”

Jody Fennell, formerly with Weather.com, knows how to develop site traffic

Flying with Angel’s wings

Dyer tells us she started the business with Fennell because one of the lessons she learned on the investment side of the startup business is “Bet on the jockey, not on the horse.” Fennell, formerly with Weather.com, “Had experience managing massive amounts of data and driving traffic to a web site,” she says. “My confidence in her as a founding partner was very high.”
 
Fennell arrived at Weather.com in 1999, after initially working for The Weather Channel and grew its traffic from 8 million to 35 million unique users in six years. “She knew where her audience was hanging out,” says Dyer. “So she went to AOL and others and formed partnerships and alliances. She knows exactly what we’re doing with online retailers.”
 
Dyer says that the angel fund she worked with invested in companies where it could also take a managerial position, “So we had enough skin in the game to make sure the investment paid off. That’s what I’ve done personally with Abundant Closet,” she notes.
 
Abundant Closet has tapped into the Atlanta entrepreneurial ecosystem with some success. “We were introduced to the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center. Through them we met the Startup Chicks and won their pitch competition.” That in turn led to an introduction to an angel investor who they believe will work with them, contacts with entrepreneurs, bankers and lawyers who provided advice, and acceptance to showcase at this year’s Venture Atlanta.
 
The company initially raised funding from friends and family in one of the most difficult times since the Depression. Next it will likely seek an angel or venture capital round in the $2 million range. “My experience with the angel fund helped me know we want investors who have a network of contacts that can help and who can give advice,” Dyer says. “One of our early investors was able to introduce us to the powers-that-be at Saks 5th Avenue, one of our three launch partners, because of his network.”

The Fashion-Ade website helps a woman match new purchases to her existing wardrobe

The company’s other initial retail partners are Dillards and Zappos.
 
The company’s Beta site went live just several weeks ago. “We took our time in the vetting process,” Dyer says. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t a universe of two. That’s another thing I learned from working with the angel fund. It’s important to verify the market.”

Make something and sell it

Another lesson, she adds, is that “You have to make something and sell it, not necessarily in that order.” So the Abundant Closet team talked with retailers and decided how they would monetize the concept. “We’re continuing to deepen our relationships with online retailers who spends tens of millions a year to reach consumers. We are providing them with a solution to increase their reach and conversion.”
 
But that’s not all. “Our secret sauce is the data we collect in aggregate on the consumer. We know what’s in her closet, where she’s wearing it, and what she’s adding to it.” That has already stirred interest from potential retail partners.
 
And, with mobile commerce acquiring hot button status, developing a mobile app “Is on our short list,” says Dyer. “We envision a consumer taking it into her closet to add items to their virtual waredrobe, or taking it along while shopping to make sure they don’t have the same silhouette in the same color.”
 
It’s easy for men to joke about the time women take getting dressed, but study after study has shown that appearance is important in a business context, particularly for women. It affects promotions, raises, and how people are treated.

© 2010, TechView Atlanta. All rights reserved.

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