Wow!  The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to setup, and get started.  It demonstrated great utility. Utility means useful or beneficial: it’s easy to get started and use, you’re sharing your experience through photos rather than just via text updates, photo effects can be applied easily (it’s effectively commoditising photo manipulation), and all your photos are stored onlne and are accessible easily. Great utility.

Next, it asked me about my other web presences – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and more.   Immediately it connected me to other users I know through other connected media.  It demonstrated a great community so you’re excited to find that others you know are sharing content using the application. This leaves you with the expectation that the content and experience you will have will be valuable and memorable. This expectation came true within moments of sharing my first photos as others immediately “Liked” and commented. You can view my photos here.

At Saasu these ideas of utility and community are ones we strongly believe in. We want our users to enjoy using Saasu, discover and realise the benefits for their business. They become our community and tell their own communities about us. We’ve seen this grow our business dramatically over the years and it’s allowed us to maintain fanatical pricing as we don’t advertise in the traditional sense.

Think about your own business in terms of utility and community. Are these areas you could improve on or learn on from the Instagram experience?

Recently at the annual “LeWeb” conference in Paris conference, the CEO of Instragram spoke about his vision for their company. I hope you draw us much inspiration from this as I did.

In addition to raising awareness I am fundraising for the cause with all funds raised going to the Black Dog Institute to help expand their Community Education Programs.  The mission of the Institute is to advance the understanding, diagnosis and management of the mood disorders by continuously raising clinical, research, education and training standards.  In so doing, the Institute aims to improve the lives of those affected – and in turn – the lives of their families and friends.

I encourage all of you in our Saasu community to share my adventure and donate generously to the cause.

DONATE: bit.ly/TonyBDRDonate

BLOG: bit.ly/TonyBlackDogRide

This week is “Micro Business Week“, an initiative of the NSW state government who are providing a week of dedicated workshops and events for solo operators, home-based entrepreneurs and micro business people. I’m attending events today in Sydney to meet current and future Saasu customers, and help raise awareness about the event.

You can follow the tweets this week using the #MicroBizWeek hashtag.

If you’re attending any of the events this week, what did you think?  I’d be interested in any examples you heard about of businesses doing things a certain way, their web presence, how they are managing their business.

What does this mean? It means we often sponsor events for startups or gift them a Saasu subscription. We also involve ourselves in events for startups and early commercialisation companies, notably ventures like Pushstart. We are a bit picky though, we need to believe in the organisers of these events.

Pushstart is a new set of community-focused, mentor-driven activities to help grow Australian tech (Web and Mobile) startups, and the Australian tech startup community more generally. By combining top Aussie tech startup people, seed funding and community events it gives local tech entrepreneurs help to start, grow & succeed. There’s an accelerator underlying the structure and it’s run by a bunch of people I have a lot of respect for Kim Heras, John Haining and Roger Kermode.

This week I had my first Mentor session and I have to say that the ideas and talent at this event were incredible. We have amazing talent out there. Notably, ideas have often progressed much further than you would expect. The nature of development tools, ease of company setup and the quality of online apps that you just switch on is facilitating this. The start-up business framework is now a quick beast to create. So if you’re thinking about starting a venture, finish the dreaming and start the doing!

Update: 24th May 2011  Noticed this tweet today linking to a video interview with some of the entrepreneurs:

PushStart on Twitter
Founders: PushStart – Kim Heras – John Haining – Roger Kermode.
Saasu Mentors: Marc Lehmann – Tony Hollingsworth – Peter J Cooper

I thought i’d share some of the things that help me get motivated. Most days I just wake up motivated but occasionally I get some bad news which can suck the energy from you. The way to handle it is to act on the problem and re-motivate yourself. I press a few of these bounce back buttons:

• Get up early, not because you have to but because it’s great to be alive and healthy. I want to give this day it’s best chance of being big and successful. I call it getting up early with gratitude and attitude.
• Listening to music that revs you up (with headphones as the volume can be louder).
• Remind yourself that life is a lot like a game with ups and downs and that is actually what makes it fun. The ups are fun because of the average or down days.
• Read some inspirational blogs about a topic you love.
• Improve or automate something with just a small amount of time. Quick wins motivate.
• Take your morning coffee and walk to the nearest park. Sit down, breath in, breath out, look at nature, daydream or workdream a little and then write a fresh action list and head back to work.
• Catchup with a mentor, friend or work collegue who oozes enthusiasm. Hire these type of people!
• Go to an event in your industry ecosystem. There’s lot’s of coffee meetups, almost daily. The people you meet at these events are usually going to trigger ideas or opportunities for you which in itself is motivational.
• Do something of service to someone without looking for any payoff. Service or support of others in a selfless way is a sure thing for a motivated and happy life.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
The Power of Less, Leo Babauta
Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
Black Swan, Nassim Talib

I’ll be talking at the Auscloud Forum tomorrow on the topic of getting Saas-y. What is it and how do you build a business SaasBot for yourself or your clients. Come listen and find out.

The speech will discuss the stages of adoption and also the practical side of this. I’ll also give insights into actions people can take that don’t cost much or chew up much time that aren’t that well known. I’ll talk about tricks we use inside our own company to maintain a low cost of sale using SaaS and also some tricks you can use to truely test out SaaS vendor claims on their Saas-y products. I’ll share the podium with our good friends at Salesforce.com

Date: Friday 8th April, 2011
Time: Starting at 2pm and will go until around 5pm.
Location: NICTA Seminar Room – Australian Technology Park, 13 Garden Street, Eveleigh NSW 2015, Australia

I was captivated by this presentation today (thanks to this tweet by Jen Corbett) and immediately thought of Saasu.  I’ve been using Saasu for a few months now, and continually find features and use cases for it that I didn’t know existed.  It makes it “sticky” for me – I know the basics now, like viewing my data, looking at sales and contacts and most recently adding my automated bank feeds.  I keep coming back into it knowing I will be learning more every time (there’s a lot under the bonnet I am realising)  I see long-term users coming through our service desk with interesting feedback and things they are trying to do all the time – they don’t know what they don’t know a lot of the time – and when we help them find a way, they’re chuffed.  That’s the “stickiness”.

Have a read through these slides: great products are fun to use – can accounting be fun for you?  The ideas explored in this presentation are ones we’re thinking about at Saasu.

Are you fighting gravity on a daily basis? Many businesses have components which require labour and thus labour must scale to grow the business. Other businesses scale without labour or very little labour.

Nothing new here. A simple analysis would say this is classic services, versus productised business but it goes deeper than that. Essentially services can be commoditised through automation. As humans we just haven’t figured out how to do that in many situations.

So this post is really about growing large and avoiding tracking sideways in your business. We know this stuff works. We have seen businesses go from 100k to 1million turnover in a year by employing techniques we have taught business owners. These are nearly always operational problems we solve rather than traditional accounting ones.

Another way to look at this labour gravity issue is to discern the difference between hourly labour versus commoditised labour. If your business does hourly-based tasks you are subject to labour gravity. You would be much better off breaking your tasks down into commoditised components and then from there cost them and review them for automation candidates. Even changing your billing model to have fixed pricing or tiered pricing that relates more to the task you perform and less to the hours worked.

In product-based businesses the gravity is technical and centred around supply-based issues which scale much better. These limitations can be engineered out.

So when I speak to business owners who are data entering transactions from their eBay or Trademe system into their accounting system I can see the labour gravity taking effect. More recently I heard about a business that was merging reports from their payroll, inventory and invoicing systems to produce a report they needed. It’s easy to see the same thing happening at the management level in business.

Fortunately these businesses end up finding us and we can fix that but you can see they are subject to massive amounts of labour gravity. Sometimes these people resist in fear of making their role less relevant. This is where people divide into two types. Those that embrace it and reinvent themselves and those that fight it in an attempt to maintain the status quo to serve a self interest gain they get out of doing the work that machines can do. This is so wrong because the reinvention of oneself to do higher end tasks generates more income for society, higher billing rates, more interesting work. It’s the difference between evolution and maintenance. Evolve or die.

Hidden treasures exist in this approach. If you think about what the world looks like fully automated all you will see is art, passion, self expression, family time, love etc. The list goes on, it’s all those things that are at the essence of happiness and not in the realm of the mundane. Automation is a pursuit dedicated to causing happiness that liberates people from automaton existences.

You may be wondering why I am being firm on this, it’s because I’m passionate about this and I want you to “get sum”. You’ll love automation, the more you engage it the more you will be liberated by it and and the sooner you will realise the truth… You are what you haven’t automated.

But, today I was reading an email and wanted a few more options. No, I didnt need to view it in my browser. I wanted to unsubscribe.

I wasn’t interested by it at all.

The only issue – it was a personal message, and as far as I’m aware, there are no regulations around individual emails and one-click unsubscribe links…

But it got me thinking.

Ad men, designers, marketers and the rest of us spend countless hours ensuring our public campaigns are the right length, our mailing list is up to date, the call to action is clear, and the desired outcome after hitting the send button is known…

But, do we apply the same principle to our personal correspondence?

Why use 400 words, when 120 will do? Why schedule a meeting request, when you can let the recipient come back in their own time?

Anyone who has read REWORK knows the hugely successful 37signals team focus on sharing information when it needs to shared, on a need to know basis. Thus eliminating disruptions to the rest of their team. This is something we strive to do here at Saasu.

They also view meetings as toxic and ‘ASAP’ as poison – but of course not everyone is ready to take this stand, and you do still need to get together, occasionally.

But, how many of the messages we send just sit there unread? Do you need to /cc: those 8 other staff into your next email? And of course, what’s the reason for emailing in the first place?

That’s my fleeting thought for the day. And a heads up – if we’re already communicating this way, and my next message is no more than a few lines… You now know it’s nothing personal.

If you’re curious about shaking up the way you work, I highly recommend a flick through REWORK. It’s not the be all and end all of running a business, but with heavyweights like Seth Godin giving it the thumbs up it certainly offers a fresh perspective on the status quo.

Disclaimer: I think email is a great tool. But it’s not the only tool.

Yes, I’ve unashamedly borrowed the Litmos tag line for the title of this post. But can you blame me? The Saasu Training Team love the flexibility the system affords.

When we launched the Saasu Accounting Partner Programme we realised the most crucial part of the process (training) was going to be the hardest.

Cue: Litmos LMS

To set the scene: We have staff spread across Australia and New Zealand, each of whom required upskilling, as well as an international customer base. They work on Macs, PCs and an assortment of mobile devices. They operate in different time zones, and maintain their own office hours. There’s no consistency.

Each of these individuals needed to be taught about the latest developments in our product, and have their progress assessed. Handing out awards for online accounting competency is a serious business, and so we needed a platform that let us control everything.

We quickly identified that an online, on-demand LMS (learning management system) was essential.

eLearning is a rapidly expanding industry, and it’s no surprise as it offers incredible flexibility. It’s a concept adopted by businesses of all sizes. From local franchises, to large multi-nationals.

We looked at several options, but nothing we came across seemed up to the job. Then we found Litmos.

Their claim ‘easy to use’ had to stand up to two tests… Easy for the training team to set up, and easy for customers anywhere to use.

As it turns out, it is – and we’ve been impressed with the system for a number of reasons:

- Custom branding (we wanted it to fit our identity)
- Excellent support from the Litmos team themselves
- Adding and assigning courses to users is now a 2 second job
- Notifications on assessments are automatic

But the best thing about Litmos, is that it isn’t a one-off resource. Clients can sign in to review presentations as many times as they like.

We now have a series of courses set up in our LMS, each one consisting of an informative presentation followed by an assessment. The training team can quickly modify, assign, and assess each of these, and our users can see their progress at a glance. Having a system that not only simplifies the learning process, but also makes keeping track of user activity easier is a real bonus.

Our team are only just scratching the surface of the product’s capabilities, and we can’t wait to modify our processes to make use of the advanced features. Check out the Litmos product tour to find out more.

Have you completed one of the Saasu training courses? We’d love to know your thoughts.

Want to sign up for the courses? Lost your sign in details? Get in touch with Support and we’ll set you up.

Or are you a business looking to improve your training experience? We highly recommend getting in touch with Nicole and the Litmos Team.

In this post we’ll look at GoToMeeting, which as those of you who have attended our webinars know is a great way to give sales presentations and run training sessions.

For any business looking to broaden its reach, or increase the efficiency of its sales, support and training staff, online webinars are the best way to quickly and easily run interactive sessions that add so much more value than a standard phone call.

We now have a sales team across Australia and New Zealand who can schedule upwards of 8 meetings a day, where traditional traveling around would allow only 3 or 4. Not only that, but each session they present can have multiple attendees (up to 1000!).

However, our training team use the platform the most out of anyone in the organisation, running courses from both sides of the Tasman. They can even collaborate, presenting together and creating interactive sessions for our users.

The easy planning system makes setting up sessions weeks in advance a breeze, and provides greater flexibility for those attending the courses. Instead of making them schedule their day around us, we are able to offer a range of dates and times so they can progress at their leisure.

Another bonus is that upon registering, the automated email system we’ve set up takes charge, and sends notifications to all attendees of any changes to the session date and time, and well as a convenient reminder so they don’t miss their webinar. It also lets those that missed the presentation know about viewing the recorded version, or switching to another date.

You can see a full list of features here, but the winning points for us in choosing GoToMeeting were:

- Huge savings (financially, and in time spent visiting clients in remote locations)
- International reach, to potential clients around the world
- Portable (anyone can join, from anywhere. Even on their iPad!)
- VOIP and Conference Call options
- Multiple presenters in sessions, and interactive Chat and Q&A options
- Optional session recording for those that missed the webinar

If you want to read more about these benefits, a couple of months ago an article surfaced in The Australian, in which Marc discussed how GoToMeeting has been saving our team time and enhancing our sales and training processes.

What many of us didn’t realise was that a few weeks earlier he’d been pulled aside by the GoToMeeting team themselves, and asked to give his thoughts on their product. He mentioned this in passing, but it was quickly forgotten… As it turns out, they had the cameras rolling.

After trawling the web we’ve managed to unearth the video, and so thought we’d share it with you.

Are you already using GoToMeeting, or an alternative? If so, let us know. We’re always keen to pick up tips from other users to improve the experience Saasu offers!

In our next post we’ll look at the Litmos LMS, which as well as being produced by an enthusiastic team, has been our solution to training and assessing users from all over the globe. But, for now jump over to our webinar info page and sign up for one of the sessions if you haven’t already done so.

It’s not new in itself being basic flow diagrams but it’s really nice how they have represented the value of things like micro credit, experience and free services into the modelling approach. Not just representing the value of money which is a mistake people often make. They could actually go a step further and represent social and environmental value in a business and produce model that allows for social capitalism.

Business Model Kit – by Board of Innovation from Nick De Mey on Vimeo.

Interestingly the question is sometimes a disguise for a discomfort they feel around why they charge so much for their own product or in the case for accountants, why they are paying such a high price elsewhere versus what they pay for our online accounting application licences.

I might be crazy to have this dream but back in the early nineties when I was part of a team building one of Australia’s first online banking websites I was of the belief that the web was designed to save people and businesses money. We wanted to remove banking costs through a self service website.

I really believed that dream. I formulated Saasu in 1998 to continue that dream with the plan to decimate the cost structure of SME accounting software or at least change the way the big software providers operated in our country. I wanted to build a $1500 online accounting application with inventory, payroll, a light CRM and sell it for $299. That was my plan. This I thought would help empower businesses, save capital expense and put an end to tax table update racket that plagued accounting software in our country.

Many believe in the dream of the cheap web, I’m not alone. It is evident in Google Enterprise with their $50 per year plan, GotoMeeting with their $49 per month service and Last.fm with their unlimited music for $5 a month. Probably the most famous in this space for the fight against old pricing models (in the medium to larger enterprise sector) is Salesforce.com who while being a bit above some small business price tolerance levels is actually very inexpensive for it’s market.

The reality is that prices can be low, and businesses like ours are profitable and we can hand the massive savings the web brings back to customers through low prices. I must disclaim that I am a bit more of a social capitalist than your average CEO.

I refer to this as the big joke in our industry. Look around, online applications are nearly always more expensive than software. I’ve subscribed to a few products this year that while I think they are great products they are very expensive for what they offer so I can’t and won’t recommend them to customers and the reality is they are probably a competitor away from losing me. Products need to be both effective and inexpensive, not just one of these.

Sometimes the counter argument is that you should pay up and that for some magical reason this means you are getting a feature rich quality product. This isn’t always the case. In my experience expensive products often don’t have a great feature set. These companies usually have to spend a lot of money marketing to get the sales in the door because of the high price barrier. As a business owner or accountant we all should be totally committed to cost effectiveness ratio. Costs translate into the cost of goods value and thus translate into retail price our customers pay. Cost management is very important so you can make good margins BUT NOT at the expense of your customer. It’s what I call profitability with integrity.

When did the industry decide that small business has a bottomless pit of funds to pay subscription fees? They don’t! Every dollar counts, every dollar is felt, and that should be treated with respect as it directly impacts their business success and at the end of the day that means their families.

So where did it fail for many companies who don’t seem to believe in this crazy dream. I think the answer is with banks and shareholders. The dotcom bust really scared the crap out of bankers and c-level management in technology companies. Most went broke and then the rest decided that customers should pay up. Pay up for their ventures through higher prices, pay for their VC deals or equity issuance. The customer would pay for more certainty for their management and their shareholders and give them the grace of a quicker path to profitability through a higher price paid at checkout by the customers.

Saasu took 8 years to become profitable, we did that because we believed in our price structure. We dedicated ourselves to creating a low cost product. We hold prices as low as we can and we were alone in the market, we could have charged more. However, we believe in this crazy dream that web applications should cost less than software and we have stuck with it.

That’s who we are at Saasu.

SaaS contains a lot of sugar and spice. It turns CapEx into OpEx. It gives you capacity to burst workflow and users. It enables work from home for parents. Small business owners can take that holiday, do the online accounting payrun from afar and keep up to date. It’s liberating technology. If you aren’t a believer ask yourself why every major software company around the world is busily trying to reinvent themselves. They are busy getting their pilots license so they can fly into the cloud.

Choose an online accounting system based on credentials. Being a traditional software company is far from an appropriate credential to do cloud based applications well. Do you want to back an old dog trying to learn new tricks? Choose SaaS providers who are profitable, there are many. Most important of all is to look at their breed. Do they have a history of free tax updates? Do they let you export your data? Do you get stung for high support costs? Many new SaaS providers along with the old software companies fail on this. What’s their motive? Barriers to exit? What are their ethical genetics like in light of this?

Look for SaaS companies that will let you fly like you’re in an A380, that has the scale and all the mod cons and features you expect in this new age. One that you can trust.

Photo by VSZ

I wanted to push ahead a few years and get the point across that we need to think about the web in a more naturalistic way. It’s not about silicon, electrons and data. It’s now has a life unto itself and displays the traits of living things.

I also wanted to focus on the way the web application and business space faces consumers. Essentially that we need to change direction and treat each individual as important, be careful with their time and relevent when we give them content and services.

Here’s my slide notes…

Burning Questions

So much technology
:: Why am I so time poor?

Photo: ToniVC

The next big thing
:: Where are we at?
:: Web 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, yada, yada.

Photo by David Prior

The Web Entity

The net is a beast
:: It has developed a life unto itself
:: Relative to natures evolution it’s a mini-beast, amoebic.

Photo by microagua

Primordial Days
:: Quality of info filters builds
:: Good levels of sharing
:: Early sensory control
:: Early utility adoption
:: Start of linked data

Life like
:: Homeostasis
:: Organization
:: Metabolism
:: Growth
:: Adaption
:: Response to stimuli
:: Reproduction

Biotic
:: Consumers
:: Employees
:: Developers
:: Investors

Abiotic
:: Applications
:: Network
:: Platforms
:: Web construct

Devices

Generation D
:: The data generation
:: The device generation

It’s about the data
:: Data surpasses the importance of the digital bodies that it lives on.
:: Data is created about data. A world of linked data.
:: Data lives on the web and Devices are windows into the web.

Data is set free.
:: User permission.
:: Socially permission.

Everything has a brand
:: People, Ideas, Services & Products. Not just companies.

Numerical Brand
:: Algorithm + vote search
:: Social bookmarking
:: Followers & friends
:: Crowd sourcing
:: Content rating
:: Like vs link

Information overload
:: We need better controllers of the data we see.

Restraint
:: We collect and regret
:: Collect = Gather and store data, experiences, apps, tools.
:: Regret = Missing something like news, ideas, experiences.

The Cost of the Habit
:: Time
:: Effectiveness
:: Self expression
:: Quality of experience

Data Addiction
The old addiction
:: Physical Consumption
The new addiction
:: Digital Consumption

Sales Automation

Educate vs Sell
:: Authenticity

Trigger vs Campaign
:: Trigger based email/mail/web

Targeted and relevant
:: Don’t waste their attention

Off balance sheet Sales
:: Community, Customers, Partners & F&F

Data Brokers

Data Brokers
:: Integrate and connect applications and data
:: Examples: WDCI, Boomi, OneSaaS

Web applications will change
:: less device dependent
:: more connected.

Application Constraints
:: Apps that don’t connect and that are feature light weights
:: Applications that are niche require hand holding

Moving data around
:: Too many pieces in the puzzle.
:: Too many connected apps to solve business problems.
:: Too many moving parts.
:: Higher risk of failure

Attention Dollar

Attention Dollar
:: The currency of the web is attention.
:: The attention police is relevance.

Attention Defined
:: 8 hours a day playing Warcraft

Photo by glenn batuyong

The Attention Economy
:: The web beast evolves based on your attention votes.
:: Your time is being absorbed by websites and apps in piecemeal
:: Systems seduce you into giving your time away.
:: Good systems will reward your time

Marketing emails
:: Like the guy at the party who talks & talks *eyes glaze over*

Attention engineered email
:: The new email regime.
:: Email that is exactly relevant to my needs in time, place and interest. e.g. Marketo

Infographics
:: Pictures trump text

by Davvi

Meta Data Driven Content
:: Wikipedia trumps Encarta
:: Twitter trumps Yellow Pages

Digital Soap Box
:: You have something you want to say
:: e.g. walls, tweets, blogs, chatter

Data and graphic rich business apps
:: Replacing numbers/words with pictures

Memetic Engineering
:: Designing business models to produce memes.
:: Capital value is based on the consumer & business Attention acquired.

Ubiquitous Web

Required Elements
:: Data, Utilities, Connection & Computation

The web is evolving based on what works & what doesn’t
:: Small nuances = Big differences

The web is getting judged, naturally selected
…and across many devices

Consumers are mini VC’s
:: Invest small amounts attention dollars

Consumers are natural selectors
:: May the best “web genetics” survive.
:: Facebook is genetically superior to MySpace? Or does it have a privacy cancer?

Do you have an iPhone?
:: How many apps have you tried?
:: Small numbers of apps survive your standards
:: The few that do have common traits

iPhone App Survival Traits
:: Extremely entertaining
:: Create or save time
:: Window into content

Utility Web

Low rather than No Software
:: Software burns time and CapEx from business
:: Software = Rekeying data, upgrade software, buy licenses & maintenance

Cloud applications / SaaS
:: Converts CapEx into OpEx
:: Google, Microsoft, Amazon are re-building the webs architecture

The Semantic Web is a WIP
:: Resource Description Framework
:: Ontology Language
:: Folksonomy

The AI Web
Mechanising our activity
:: Mechanical turks
:: True Artificial intelligence
:: Data collection and connection
:: Collective web intelligence
:: Knowledge coding
:: Recommendation Engines e.g. Apple Genius
:: Rules Engines: Triggers, Rules, Scheduled Events
:: Business Logic Layers that are flexible, learning, crowd sourced

Web Evolution

Darwinian
:: Natural Selection applies

The future will be strange
Strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking
Ross Lovegrove

The future will be functional
its the only vehicle which have the elegance of intelligence, because it’s not driven by marketing, it’s driven by function
Philippe Starck (on military vehicles – his favourite vehicle)

User Designed Applications
:: Behavioural design
:: Relevance design
:: Theme serving

Q: With all this technology why are we time poor?
:: Shouldn’t the evolution of the web help?

A: The web doesn’t let you triage your time very well
:: We are designed to collect, gather & hunt = Quick, while it’s there.
:: We are opportunists by design

A: We are bad at delaying gratification
:: The marshmallow experiment.
:: We are still learning how to do this with financial dollars.
:: What hope is there for us with the attention dollar. It’s too easy to spend.

Web 3.0 will
:: penalise inefficiency
:: lack of connectivity
:: poor relevance

A new kind of Capital Punishment
:: Inefficient, expensive, disconnected will lose the survival of the fittest contest
Failure to be efficient
:: The new “margin squeeze”.

All business are really two+ businesses
:: They are what they normally do and they are technology businesses.
:: Survivors will have embraced this passionately
:: Survivors will ensure tech creates time rather than consuming it.

Saasu calls this
:: Engineer the way you work

Thank You

Marc Lehmann
Email: marc@saasu.com
Twitter: @marclehmann
LinkedIn: marclehmann
Web: saasu.com
Blog: saasu.com/blog
Personal blog: marclehmann.net
Address: 1st Floor, 111 Elizabeth St Sydney, Australia 2000
Creative Commons: Attribution-NoDerivs License

As an example in the UK the construction of 5 billion dollar aircraft carrier is in doubt as quickly as it was planned. In Australia there was an insulation scheme with good environmental intentions that recently collapsed highlighting the inherent risks and subsequent systemic business failures.

The problem is that while you swim in a sea of cash a storm may be brewing. Politicians might be changing their minds, funding may be ending, new technologies might be about to make your business model irrelevant. Any business model based on a temporary market opportunities requires a agile business model. In doing this some simple strategies can be employed.

It must be a low capital structure.
Make sure the CapEx you have to make is commensurate with the risks of the opportunity ending and that you can sell that CapEx when and if it happens. The inability to shift old or redundant inventory is one of the biggest problems I see in business.

Keep your human resource needs off balance sheet
Outsourcing, sub-contracting and services (vs. self-service) can help keep headcount down in the business. Thinking more like a film producer that pulls people together for a project rather than thinking like a traditional business owner. Pull the right people together and know that filming will stop and you need a simple dismantling strategy for your business and it’s crew. Set the expectations in the staff as such, they have families and responsibilities and need to know where the risks are around longevity.

Preferably hold near zero or just-in-time inventory levels.
This is simply so you can dance near the door. If you don’t and the party ends you don’t want to get trampled in the rush for the door. If you are holding a big capital investment or high levels of stock you risk not achieving a good exit when forced to sell it back into the wholesale market.

Don’t expect the government to pick up the pieces.
They love cutting projects with the stroke of a pen. We all know this and little compensation is ever forthcoming. Even when the Government is clearly the party that has messed things up there is little sympathy from the electorate or other businesses because opportunism for high returns is understood to have higher risk. If the change in the scheme or project is due to a government change post election then the new government doesn’t need to act in your interests for at least another 3 or 4 years until the next election comes along. They know your cries will be long forgotten.

Structure a low CapEx and instead higher OpEx model
Keep leases and contracts short or flexible. Keep creditors as short as possible. Don’t run your capital structure with long term debt or intensive plant and equipment capital purchases. As an example opt for pay-as-you-go mobile phone plans instead of 2 or 3 year contracts. Buy Saasu on subscription instead paying upfront for old style accounting software!

Gap management
Make sure you OpEx matches you revenue side of the business. This gap management is critical. If considered it will ensure you don’t load expense into the business without having contracted or committed the revenue side.

Put your opportunistic hat on but make sure it’s the right hat for the job.

On the way to work I spotted a Google Maps Real Estate promo done with LJHooker. Essentially it highlights the ability to search and view houses for sale or rent using Google Maps. You can explore the area where you are looking to buy or rent with Google Street View. Even check out the neighbours houses next door to your prospective property before you even get in the car to have a look in person.

This is interesting for many reasons. It is a classic leap in customer experience we see often thanks to the web. Mashing up a relatively new tool, Google Maps with a time consuming problem of house hunting. Further monetizes Google’s investment in the Maps technology, which was developed in their Sydney, Australia office. The same team now building Google Wave.

What I also like about Google’s approach is the physical marketing device (pictured). It’s different to all the other marketing devices used in the building. The "placemark" symbol has become synonymous with Google. It was also a tangible and sculptural presence. Typically the advertising device of choice at this site is plasma screens, perspex covered billboards or freebies handed out to passers by. I noticed a lot of people stopped to check it out. I think it has a quality that can be very valuable in marketing. It’s "curious". Curious is good, curious is usually a consequence of innovative thinking.

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I like attending these events. You can get insights (and insight reminders) at most events by sitting, waiting and snipping them from the conversation as they appear. Most content at these events isn’t dramatically new but there is usually outlier comments. It’s the context that they are made in and how it my apply to your own business model that is interesting.

It’s extremely important to watch other industry’s. When you cross pollinate ideas into your own industry or business model you can create new products and even new markets where they didn’t exist before.

Getting to critical mass. What is your critical mass? Chunk it down to micro market and get intensity.
Alison Deans from Netus

If it takes you 4 minutes to sell something you have a costly customer acquisition strategy.
Sue Klose from News Digital Media

We measure the life of an iPhone App in hours, not even days.
Sue Klose from News Digital Media

The lifespan of tagging is as long as humans can do it better than code.
Alan Noble from Google

Auto-magical (Alan describing a system that does something well automatically).
Alan Noble from Google

Don’t give concrete forecast numbers. Better to talk about the tech you have.
Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian

They need to be careful and respectful of the users desktop space (In reference to desktop apps).
Phil Morle from Pollenizer

Patents stop you shaping your IP. People usually patent IP to early.
Mark Bonnar Cleantech Ventures

Patents should be used to ring fence a commercial space.
Roger Price from Innovation Capital

Young people will open up more online.
Didier from Cultureamp.

Building culture means give better feedback daily to your staff.
Didier from Cultureamp.

You can scale culture with software in your company.
Didier from Cultureamp.