An Entrepreneur Trapped in a Corporate Body

Late in the evening on Sunday 13^th March 2011, Social Shout! was awarded 1^st prize at the Startup Weekend Bangalore. Far from being a young ‘geek’ dreaming of making his mark on the tech scene, the founder of this startup is a 41 year old business guy with a fancy title and a comfortable corporate job. This is his story – so far.“For all of my professional life, I’ve had an interest in new business concepts. I’ve read every business magazine I could get my hands on, watched every TV show on the subject and scoured the web for all that I could devour on this topic.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become increasingly interested in what has now become known as the ‘social graph’. I think it was a video of a presentation given by Gary Vaynerchuck at SXSW 2010 that first got my attention (http://video.garyvaynerchuk.com/keynotes). It is pretty hard not to pay attention when this guy speaks!

In November 2010, I got the idea for a rewards system for the social graph – vaguely like a frequent-flyer program for your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. The idea was that you would earn points based on your level of activity across the various social networks and then, use those points to redeem for discounts, deals and offers on real world goods and services.

The basis of the idea was that in today’s hyper-socially-connected world, the people who are the most active and connected across all the social networks are really becoming key influencers in our society. If this was true, it would make sense that products, services and brands would want to reach out to them.

I knew the idea had merit. But I still had my doubts about the revenue model. Of course, I could have always gone down the track of building up user base, getting eyeballs to my site and worrying about monetising later. But to me, that didn’t sound like a solid business model.

Over the next few weeks, I tossed the idea around in my head, running through different revenue model scenarios. Eventually, I realised that if we had a mechanism where a post was automatically published on a user’s social networks whenever he/she redeemed the points gathered, it would serve as a form of word-of-mouth advertising for merchants. This, they would surely pay for. Now, deciding on a precise pricing plan is very research-intensive. But I realised that the research could come later. The point was, I now knew of a basic monetization strategy that I felt would work.

But I still had other problems to surmount. I have zero technical ability when it comes to coding, programming, designing, etc. In fact, I still have trouble configuring the settings on my new Blackberry. I realised that I needed to find someone who could build out my vision.

Through a mutual friend, I found an IT company that was willing to take on the project. I sat down with them, laid out my grand vision, came up with an initial scope of works and asked for a quote. $80,000 USD, they said! Now, if it was a matter of life or death, I could actually come up with that sort of money. However, it seemed crazy to me to spend that sort of money to build something that I really didn’t even know if people would really want to use. I decided to approach this as a ‘lean startup’, along the lines of what Eric Ries and Steve Blank have been advocating from some time (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/lean-startup.html).

So, I sat down and worked out what were the basics that I needed to be able to build a minimum viable product (MVP). I decided that the critical first step was in getting the program that would go to each of the social networks and retrieve the key activity statistics that we wanted to track and then, assign points to each of those activities. I was pretty sure this could be done. But at the end of the day, being 100% non-technical, I couldn’t be certain.

Even though this program would only be 10% of the total work that would need to be done to complete the project, I knew that without this element, the rest of the concept would fall over. So, I set my new IT friends the task of building this first element – at one tenth of the cost. After a couple of months, they had built something that, although a bit rough, was able to show me that what I wanted could actually be done.

With phase one of the ‘engine’ completed, we had to build a front end to this thing for both users and merchants. Only then would we be able to take it out to market for testing and feedback. That’s when I heard about Startup Weekend Bangalore. I was going to be in India around that time on a business trip anyway. So, I figured that I could go a few days early and try to build this thing there. After a barrage of emails with the organizer to clarify numerous issues, I eventually decided to give it a go. I am so glad I did! Ultimately, we were able to build and present a demo that caught the eye of the judging panel. We must have done something right – we WON!

What followed the demo was a flood of questions, comments and enquiries from the hundred or so people who were at the event. On a personal level, this was all very flattering and great for the ego. More importantly, however, on a business level, such a positive response went a long way to validating the idea. Now I simply had to move forward. Less than a week after the event, I have already taken a call from one VC who was interested in providing some seed funding. It looks like we have some very exciting times ahead.

The challenge now is to stay focussed on building a great product that our customers - both users and merchants- will love. The startup graveyard is littered with so many companies who had the seed of a great idea, got carried away with all the hype, failed to deliver and then, ultimately collapsed. On a personal level, the challenge for me now will be how far I can take Social Shout! before I need to leave my comfy corporate job to focus on it full time.

Life wasn’t meant to be easy. But that’s what makes it worth living!”

Trent Anthony

Regional Vice President/Wannabe Entrepreneur