Tag Archives: Andy Raskin

About 4799 days ago Setting Up a Website

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Launch

E-Diaries How I introduced my company to the world at the cost of my personal dignity A ship has a christening. A debutante has a ball. A Silicon Valley start-up has a launch. Technically, a launch means a company is rolling out of beta. Symbolically, it’s a cry to the world: I’m loud, I’m proud, and I’m ready to be bookmarked! You can consider a dot-com company launched when it discards its stealth name and strips the word preview from its site. If you come across the VP of mar- keting parked by the side of Highway 101 staring dreamily up at billboard ad space, that’s a sure sign, too. The minimum requirement for launching a dot-com business is to issue a press release on PR Newswire that says, “Hey, I’m launching a dot-com business.” But a press release is to a launch what a marriage license is to a wedding. Yeah, it’s official. But Mom’s been dreaming of a big blowout all her life, and you’d be a lout not to indulge her. When we launched Gazooba, the role of Mom was played by our PR guy, Shel Israel of Sipr. Sitting me down in our conference room last September, Shel set forth our options. ” Some companies,” he explained, his voice portentous, “launch with a press tour.” A press tour, Shel went on, meant cold-calling editors on both coasts. Many would not return our calls. Others would agree to see us for half an hour, during which they would sit cleaning their fingernails with our business card. I began to suspect Shel had a bias. The other option, Shel explained, looking suddenly like sunshine made flesh, was to launch at a conference. Launching at a conference had two advantages. First, it would allow us to tie our launch to an event. For example, “Attendees at Billionaire 2000 thronged to Booth #321, where Andy Raskin, the smokin’ young CEO of smokin’ young company Gazooba, was showing off a software product that’s low in fat and promises to revolutionize E-business as we know it!” Second, a conference would let us trot down the runway in front of A-list venture capitalists, who might be persuaded to make good on their wolf whistles during our next round of funding. According to Shel, only four or five industry powwows — such as Technologic Partners’ Internet Outlook, IDG’s Demo, and Red Herring Communications’ NDA – were worthy of us. Of those, only NDA remained on the 1999 calendar. But more than 500 companies had applied for 20 slots, and the submission deadline was history. Still, Shel thought NDA was worth a try. He E-mailed a short note about Gazooba to Red Herring Events’ staff. The news was good. The Herring staff had not made its final decisions yet. And John Mecklenburg, Red Herring Events’ managing editor, wanted to meet us. Mecklenburg is Red Herring’s Saint Peter. Hopeful dot-com entrepreneurs show up at the company’s pearly gates, and Mecklenburg determines who will be admitted to the presence of such venture deities as Ann Winblad, Vinod Khosla, and Steve Jurvetson. On a sunny day last September my new vice-president of business development, Jennifer Kaplan, and I offered up to this keeper of the keys a demo of our service, which allows Web companies to reward visitors who refer friends to their sites. Meck (as his friends, among whom we desperately hoped to number, know him) was intrigued. “This friend-to-friend thing,” he said. “It seems sort of … Japanese. Does that have anything to do with the fact that you lived in Japan?” I had never connected my time in Tokyo with Gazooba’s business model, but in the interest of kissing some Herring butt I assumed my best “You know us better than we know ourselves” look. “Let’s just say,” I replied, my voice heavy with implication, “it’s no coincidence that Zen, one of our cofounders, is Japanese.” Meck nodded knowingly. Soon the E-mail arrived. “Congratulations! The editors at Red Herring have selected your company to present at NDA 99. … NDA 99 gives 20 CEOs six minutes each to discuss their business strategies in front of an audience that includes only the best and brightest minds in the technology industry.” That night I lay in bed trying to imagine what possible configuration of PowerPoint slides could captivate so many of the best and brightest minds in a mere six minutes. I could just picture the best and brightest fingers scratching the best and brightest heads — or worse, those heads lolling on the best and brightest necks — as a succession of CEOs took the stage to jabber on about eyeballs, bandwidth, and the underserved b-to-b marketplace. Despair laid its head on my pillow. But then some part of my subconscious spoke up. I had the solution! The next morning I met with Shel at my office. “I want to do a mime,” I told him.” “Fine,” he said. Assuming correctly that I wasn’t the kind of guy who had spent his formative years trying to get on Star Search, Shel arranged for some help. It arrived in the form of Chris Melching and Chuck Eudy of Got Moxie Presents Inc., a presentation-coaching company in San Francisco. Chris asked me to tell her about Gazooba. I obliged, with an energy and eloquence that left her barely sentient. “Remember, Andy,” Chris exhorted, “as an Internet-company CEO, you are always onstage. Life’s a pitch!” Chuck, who hails from Texas, found my hand movements equally uninspiring. “Why don’t we begin by practicing some jay-a-stures,” he drawled. During the next two weeks, Jennifer and I learned to sit, shake hands, walk, and talk: invaluable skills we navely thought we already possessed. We rehearsed the mime next to the man-made duck pond behind our office building. Maggie Essman, the account rep Shel had assigned us, doubled as a member of the troupe. I also wrote a brilliant spoken epilogue guaranteed to bring the audience to its feet. At Chris and Chuck’s urging, Jennifer and I growled the epilogue like bears, purred it like cats, and screamed it at the top of our lungs. “Must be another dot-com launch,” passersby muttered to one another. On November 1 the grand ballroom of the Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad, Calif., was crammed with 800 of the best and brightest minds in the technology industry. Meck began announcing the presenters. Company number one took the stage. PowerPoint presentation. Company number two followed. PowerPoint presentation. Company number three. PowerPoint. We were number six. The lights came up. I walked onto the stage like some cyberage Norma Rae, holding a big sign that read “New Web Site.” Jennifer and Maggie walked by. Maggie immediately came over to me. Jennifer kept walking. Like the sites that would become our customers, I tried everything to attract her. I flashed a giant “Click Here” sign. I put a target on her back (suggesting that I was, you know, targeting my message to her). I offered her money. No response. Then I pleaded with Maggie — silently of course — to ask her friend to come over. She did, and lo and behold, Jennifer responded! I rewarded Maggie with a box tied with a bow. There you had it: the power of personal recommendation. A business model we’d labored over for six months clocked in at under six minutes. Now, depending on whom you talk to, that skit was either the greatest presentation in the history of presentations or the worst idea since the PCjr. Dot-com CEOs swarmed us afterward, and most of them eventually became customers. About a dozen VCs invited me to send along our business plan. Others merely looked confused. Some were clearly cheesed at being denied that 20th PowerPoint presentation. After the conference we packed our props and flew back to Northern California. As we drove along Highway 101 from the airport, Jennifer leaned out of the car window. “How about that one?” she asked, pointing to a billboard that loomed at the side of the road. “Let’s go for it,” I mimed. Andrew Raskin is the cofounder and CEO of Gazooba Corp., based in Redwood City, Calif. E-Diaries: Episode 1: A New Beginning The Game of the Name Take My Job Offer, Please. Pretty Please There’s No Such Thing as a Free Launch Gimme Shelter Bridge Financing over the River Scared Let the Good Times Roll There’s a New Man in Town I Really Must Be Going Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

The Game of the Name

E-Diaries A start-up builds an identity from a car horn, Sir Edmund Hillary, and an irate father-in-law If you’re a character in a spaghetti western or a Kafka novel, you can get by without a name. Dot-com start-ups don’t have that luxury. Not only do you need a name, but you need one powerful enough to etch itself into the gray matter of consumers hard-pressed to remember anything beyond Amazon.com and “the one that sounds like yodeling.” My partners and I spent much of last summer in search of such a name. We already had a business plan, venture money, and subleased space in Redwood Shores, that Silicon Valley community-cum-office-park-on-a-landfill dominated by the shimmering cylindrical towers of Oracle Corp. But we couldn’t go much further until we fixed on who “we” were going to be. After all, a Web-based company doesn’t have a business till it launches a site. It can’t launch a site till it determines that site’s look and feel. It can’t determine the look and feel till it creates a logo. And it can’t create a logo until it has a name. Dot-com coinage is even more of a hassle than it used to be, thanks to Bigstep.com, a company that builds and hosts E-commerce sites. Before its launch as Bigstep.com, last June, the company’s founders decided to keep the nature of their business under wraps by masquerading as “the Springfield Project,” presumably on the assumption that if they used the name “Bigstep,” everyone would instantly think, “Oh, yes, they must build and host E-commerce sites.” Of course, the less people know about something, the more they talk about it; soon, knowledge of the Springfield Project’s true identity became a Silicon Valley status symbol. The buzz reached a crescendo when Red Herring magazine included the Springfield Project on its list of 10 private companies to watch in 1999. What you would see it doing was still unclear. The Springfield Project was the first popular example of a so-called stealth name, and soon hordes of company owners were waltzing around town with the corporate-identity equivalent of bags over their heads. Our venture capitalists urged us to adopt a stealth name too, but we decided it was a trend worth bucking. Devising a brand that is wildly intriguing, wholly misleading, and ultimately disposable just seemed like a waste of time. Anyway, we were having enough trouble coming up with a real name. For the first few months of our company’s existence, we had referred to ourselves as “SendToFriend.com,” a bland summary of the business plan. (We help companies set up Web-based referral programs that reward site users for getting friends to visit, register, or make a purchase.) “SendToFriend.com” lacked pizzazz, so we were not surprised when the subject of a new name came up at the first operating meeting with our VCs. When I suggested that we name the company ourselves, the investors reacted as if a bunch of kids with plastic stethoscopes were proposing to perform real brain surgery. “I’ll give you the number of a good consultant,” one of them told me kindly. We decided to interview two consultants, one representing a high-profile corporate-identity firm, the other a tiny independent. The big-name namer showed up at our office wearing a suit and carrying a fat loose-leaf binder. His portfolio was full of appellations such as “Tecra,” “AXP,” and “Fortiva,” words that conjured up images of synthetic fabrics and microprocessors. It wasn’t us. Then we met Mya Kramer. Mya dresses like someone who works in a hip San Francisco design firm, which in fact she does. An 18-year veteran of the design business, she told us she had gotten fed up with “constantly doing design work for brands that sucked” and had turned to naming as a creative alternative. Her portfolio, sent by E-mail before she arrived, bristled with funky monikers like “Zeum,” “BabyCiao,” and “CampSix.” The high-profile guy wanted six figures. Mya would do the job for one-tenth that price. I told her to start naming names. To kick off the process, Mya asked me and my two cofounders, Zen and Shanti, to look through magazines for pictures evocative of the brand we wanted to create. We soon had a pile of 30 images, including Sir Edmund Hillary drinking tea after his 1953 ascent of Everest, a teenager getting into a new CD, and a champion female windsurfer. They were people with experiences worth sharing, people whose recommendations you’d trust. Armed with these stimulants, Mya returned to her office to brainstorm with her design team, which includes a science writer and a TV producer. In short order she sent us 500 possibilities. A few days later our naming committee, composed of the founding team plus two investors, convened in our conference room to discuss the list. Mya asked us all to pick our 10 favorite names. A few of us were hot for “BigVine,” but Zen objected because the v sound is hard to pronounce in Japanese. I voted for “Zamza,” but one investor had had a bad experience with a similarly named start-up. “Don’t go there,” advised our part-time chief financial officer. No name tickled all our fancies, but we agreed that a nonsense word was the way to go. We sent Mya back to the drawing board with a mandate to come up with something “Dr. Seuss­ish.” The next week brought another 70 names, and we repeated the exercise. This time one of our investors seized on “Gazooba,” which Mya told us was inspired by the ah-ooga sound made by an old car horn. It didn’t do much for the rest of us at first. Then Zen stood up. “If we want to be reasonable about this, we’ll pick a serious name,” he said. “But ‘Gazooba’ would really piss off my father-in-law.” Zen’s father-in-law is an elderly, conservative gentleman living just south of Tokyo; Zen figured a name that got under his skin would have the same effect on others. And if old Soma-san went into a tizzy about his daughter’s being married to a guy who worked for something called “Gazooba” — well, as far as Zen was concerned, that was pure gravy. Being amused by a name is one thing; living with it every day is another. Like a clerk in a shoe store, Mya insisted we try walking around in “Gazooba” to see how it felt. We began by introducing ourselves to one another. I extended my hand to Mya: “Hi, I’m Andy Raskin, CEO of Gazooba!” We pretended to answer our phones: “Gazooba, how can I help you?” We envisioned the ultimate sign of branding success — our company’s name transformed into a verb: “Hey, can you gazooba that site to me?” We were in love. Further confirmation that we’d made the right choice came when a customer told me that Mork, of Mork & Mindy fame, had once owned a gazooba, which he defined as “a crawling, hairless form of Orkan animal life, considered more advanced than human beings.” So if we ever need a mascot. … A few weeks after Gazooba Corp. was born, Zen’s phone rang. The caller identified himself as an employee of a nearby start-up. He offered us $4,000 for one of the names that we had considered earlier and reserved as a domain just in case. Zen brought the proposal to me, and I made him an offer that no chief technology officer could refuse: anything over $20,000 that he could negotiate would go straight to his engineering budget. Bidding for domain names usually starts around $100 when small fry are involved. I figured someone opening with a few thousand would probably agree to pay more. Zen, who loves a good haggle, got the phone guy up to $32,000. I took that figure to our VCs for approval, and they passed along an interesting tidbit: our suitor’s company was a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers­funded start-up. That meant pockets. Deep ones. The phone guy insisted that he couldn’t go higher. What a shame, we said. Good-bye and Gazooba. A few days later the company’s CEO called. Would I be willing to meet him at Jamba Juice to discuss a price? As I walked in the door of the smoothie chain, I knew we were about to make a killing. What’s in a name? As it turned out, a month’s operating cash. Andrew Raskin is cofounder and CEO of Gazooba Corp., based in Redwood City, Calif. E-Diaries: Episode 1: A New Beginning The Game of the Name Take My Job Offer, Please. Pretty Please There’s No Such Thing as a Free Launch Gimme Shelter Bridge Financing over the River Scared Let the Good Times Roll There’s a New Man in Town I Really Must Be Going

About 4890 days ago E-Commerce

Showdown at Inc.com

FYI Mark McNutt, the owner of Krystal Kleen Karpet Kare, was not amused to pick up the June 15, 1999, issue of Inc. Technology and find an article by Web-marketing maven Jim Sterne roundly criticizing the home page of Krystal Kleen’s Web site. Sterne — a consultant, the president of Target Marketing of Santa Barbara, in California, and the author of World Wide Web Marketing — was writing about the basics of good Web design, a subject on which he is a leading expert. He used McNutt’s home page as a prime example of what not to do. Sterne’s piece was a good one, and his criticisms were appropriate, but McNutt must have sat there thinking, “What the hell did I do to deserve a public lambasting in a national magazine? Hey, I never asked for this attention.” McNutt went on-line to object, responding to Sterne by E-mail and creating a Web page of protest that he linked to his home page. Sterne defended himself, saying he was sorry to have hurt McNutt’s feelings, but Web pages are public — and thus fair game for criticism. Readers got involved, about half of them siding with Sterne, half with McNutt. Everyone was angry about the headline we wrote for the article: ” Even a Child Can Do It.” Then Sterne and senior editor Leigh Buchanan came up with a crazy idea: Why not sponsor a contest and see who could produce the best new home-page design for McNutt’s company? In an amazingly short time, we received 57 fully rendered designs of home pages for Krystal Kleen Karpet Kare, submitted by both professional and amateur designers. What’s so great about them? For one thing, it’s fascinating to see how many ways there are to spin a single set of facts. As Sterne observed in an E-mail message to us, “You start with the same company, the same story, the picture of the Krystal Kleen Karpet Kare van, and you get 57 different versions from 57 different artists.” You also get Sterne’s evaluations of the designs. “Nobody got everything right,” he wrote us, “thus proving three things: First of all, building Web sites is not child’s play. It takes business acumen, marketing savvy, graphic-arts talent, and a clear understanding of what the customer sees from the other side of the screen. Second, criticizing Web sites is so easy, even a child can do it. That’s why we need to be especially diligent when creating them. Finally, we now have proof that we don’t have to learn everything by making our own mistakes — we can learn from the mistakes of others.” By the way, McNutt and Sterne each gave us a list of their top 10 picks, which you can find at the aforementioned Web address. McNutt’s favorite design will become his new home page — gratis. New Blood We have two new Inc. regulars to introduce this month, both of whom will be helping us explore the burgeoning Internet economy. Andy Raskin is a former vice-president of Netyear Group, where he brokered Web deals for companies like the New York Times Co. and Sony and launched Japanese editions of Jupiter Communications’ research publications. He’s also a first-rate writer, having penned articles for publications as diverse as Inc. Technology, Coffee Journal, and Playboy. So when he decided to abandon his life as a New York salaryman for the wild world of Silicon Valley start-ups, we asked him to chronicle his odyssey. In the first installment, Raskin tells of the inspiration, and subsequent perspiration, behind Gazooba, a “recommendation network” that allows visitors to earn points for passing on the good word about Web sites to their friends and relatives. D.M. Osborne is our newest senior writer. There’s a story behind her journey to Inc. as well. Not to make her life sound like a Jim Harrison novella, but she struck out for New York City when she was 16, desperate to get out of the one-stoplight southern town where she grew up. She danced a bit (at the Joffrey Ballet School) and put herself through college (at Hunter College). After a stint as a paralegal at the law firm of Fried, Frank during the deal boom of the 1980s, she attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and eventually joined Steven Brill’s The American Lawyer. Later she followed Brill to his new magazine, Brill’s Content, from which we snagged her. She begins her new role with her first feature, about the hot Internet launch Guru.com, a company seeking to make itself the premier destination for soloists.