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About 4584 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Around the World in 80 Seconds

Techniques: Microcases Messaging Problem: Customers and staff are out of sync with the home office Solution: A unified messaging service that keeps everyone in touch Payoff: Faster response times help the company beat the competition When 1st 2nd Mortgage Co. of NJ Inc. saw a drop in its Hawaii revenues, earlier this year, Andy Pada Jr. wasn’t sure if the problem was a weak real estate market or strong competitors. But as the vice-president and COO of a small mortgage-banking firm whose home office was five time zones away in Cresskill, N.J., Pada realized that the recipe for keeping his share of the Hawaiian market was the same either way: react faster and offer better service than his bigger competitors did. What Pada feared most was that his staff would miss a closing because internal communications were too slow. And that brought him face-to-face with the time-zone issue. On any given day, Honolulu branch manager Ella Taong might need to wait until after lunch to set the preliminary details for a closing. But by that time the home office would be closed. Taong needed to know the bank’s exact mortgage rate for the following day, which was determined in the late afternoon on the East Coast. If she waited for the New Jersey office to reopen the next day, it would be after midnight in Honolulu. Most of a day went by waiting for clocks to catch up — a problem her local Hawaiian competitors didn’t face. Of course, Taong could call or E-mail Pada after hours, but she was never sure where he’d be. To allow his far-flung brokers to reach him wherever he was, Pada ordered a unified messaging service to consolidate all of his messages. In addition, the 29-year-old banker gave each of his 75 employees (in 10 states) an account with New York City-based MessageClick, which lets users receive E-mail, faxes, and voice messages at a single phone number or E-mail address. In addition, users can program the service to forward calls to several different phones using a Follow Me feature. For calls from Taong, for example, the service might try Pada’s car phone first, then his cell phone, and finally his home phone. Each employee at 1st 2nd Mortgage received a personalized toll-free number from MessageClick. The mortgage-banking firm pays $8 per user per month. Like the rest of his employees, Pada checks one mailbox and gets all his voice and E-mail messages — including an alert if a fax is waiting. (A text-to-speech E-mail translator “reads” him the E-mail out loud.) When checking his messages online, Pada can print E-mail and faxes, and listen to voice messages, which are stored as RealAudio files. In addition to bringing 1st 2nd Mortgage’s 16 field offices into the communication fold, unified messaging has also paid off for the company closer to home. A recent south Jersey refinancing nearly derailed when the homeowner balked at a monthly payment that was higher than the one she had expected. Settlement agent Carol Anne Newman called Pada from the closing table to get more details for the client, and the Follow Me service routed the call to Pada on his cell phone down the hall from his office. Pada checked the title documents and discovered that a previous owner had failed to pay a $1,200 water-tax bill, thus increasing the overall amount due. Pada called back with the explanation, and the refinancing went forward. “In a fast-moving, inflated market, this kind of mom-and-pop service is only possible with technology,” says Pada. Pada gives MessageClick about “75% credit” for the expansion of his firm’s business since May. “We have opened two new branches in New York, one in Ohio, and we are opening another in the state of Washington,” he says. “We also did some business in Guam — a 12-hour time wing — but that has died down in the last year. Unified messaging may allow us to pick it up again.” Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4645 days ago E-Commerce

Mortar Combat

Despite the daunting advantages of their Net-based rivals, conventional retailers have something in store to compete: new technology With high-powered 3-D glasses covering his boyish face and his right hand gripping a joystick, Raymond R. Burke looks as if he’s set to pilot a virtual jet fighter. Actually, he’s about to go toy shopping. The glasses enable Burke to step inside a dazzling virtual toy store in which he can view model cars and toy trains without having to fuss with any child-resistant packaging. If he wants to access reams of information–to find out, say, if a product is in stock–he can press a button and the answer flashes in an electronic box beside the item. And since the virtual showroom offers unlimited space, he can walk around (or feel as though he is) a fully assembled swing set that stands behind a giant slinky. Burke is just doing his job: mock-shopping in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a $500-million machine that works only with the help of a couple of ponytailed Ph.D.’s. As director of the Customer Interface Lab at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, the 42-year-old devotes much of his time to developing and testing new ways for brick-and-mortar retailers to steal a few tricks from anxiety-inducing Internet-based newbies. “There are some things that are just better and easier to do on-line,” says Burke, “but there are ways to bring those characteristics into the physical store.” That sounds backwards. After all, since on-line shopping started to click earlier in this decade, many critics have ranted about the Net’s disadvantage as a shopping environment. According to the once-prevailing argument, Internet retailers were doomed because customers couldn’t touch what they were buying–nor could they try it on or take it home. And besides, who on earth would be trusting enough to transmit sacred credit-card data into the unknown atmosphere of cyberspace? Bargain hunters, that’s who, and plenty of them. Last year consumers transacted nearly $8 billion worth of retail business over the Internet, according to Forrester Research. Granted, that’s less than 1% of last year’s $2.7-trillion total retail bill. But it’s growing fast; this year cybershoppers are expected to spend more than $18 billion. But more than the raw numbers, what’s truly shaking up the retail establishment–in segments ranging from toys to health supplies to used cars–is the inescapable awareness that ventures like eToys Inc. and E*Trade Securities Inc. represent the speedy emergence of a threatening business model. “An Internet business is a very scary competitor, because it doesn’t need to make money right now and it has an extraordinary amount of cash,” says Ananth Raman, an associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School. “Sure, category killers and membership clubs were bad and you knew they could hit you, but you didn’t think it would happen in six months.” Indeed, although Net-based retailers have yet to perfect their business models, they’ve demonstrated some core efficiencies that look downright unbeatable. And yet even with the power of Amazon.com and its $20-billion market valuation, only 1.9% of all adult books were sold over the Internet in 1998, according to the Book Industry Study Group in New York City. Most uppity “dot coms” are still out to “Amazon” their sluggish brick-and-mortar rivals with such potent weapons as price and selection. “The Internet has struck the fear of God into the typical retailer,” notes Raman. For bigger retailers, egged on by Wall Street, that translates into feverish deal making with new Web partners (Rite Aid recently announced that it will buy about 25% of on-line company Drugstore.com) or spending megasums to orbit their rivals in cyberspace (Toys R Us has invested more than $80 million in its on-line operations). In the panic the behemoths have apparently overlooked an option that some smart small retailers are already exploring: conventional stores–as expensive to build and maintain as they can be–are not exactly evaporating. By employing a clear strategy, traditional merchants may even convert their earthbound structures into highly effective weapons as they battle against the “dot com” upstarts. In fact, according to Burke’s research, the characteristics that on-line consumers most appreciate about Internet shopping aren’t out of reach of the Net’s brick-and-mortar counterparts. What consumers crave, reports Burke, is lightning speed at the checkout line, convenient locations, and access to reliable information about the products they want. In March and April of 1998, Burke surveyed a nationally representative sampling of about 2,400 retail customers. Only about 12% had shopped on-line in the previous three months, but those consumers tended to be more affluent and better educated than their noncyber-savvy counterparts. And, in many instances, the customers who had browsed the Web for bargains tended to shop slightly more frequently than the typical consumer. Of those who shopped in real-world discount stores, only 57% were satisfied with the speed of the shopping experience. And even more demoralizing was the fact that only 44% were content with the amount of product information found in real stores. Moreover, many typical retail-store customers weren’t waiting in line because they feared being on-line. In fact, more than 70% said they believed they would benefit from in-store technologies, such as kiosks or self-scanning machines. For Burke, whose research is bankrolled in part by retailers like Sears, Roebuck and Target, the numbers suggest that retailers can deploy new technologies to serve up the benefits of on-line shopping right from the shopping floor. But a major part of Burke’s expertise is in developing and researching shopping innovations, not studying companies. There are, however, retailers–and yes, they do take up actual space in a physical dimension–that have arrived at similar conclusions simply by watching their customers. They’ve even begun to act. “There’s no sense trying to hide information from people, because there is nothing they can’t find on-line,” reasons retailer Renny Coe. “So why not show them that we have nothing to hide?” PRODUCT INFORMATION Too much is about right Coe’s comment may seem ho-hum until you consider that the business he’s in is not exactly renowned for its openness with customers. But even the car business–Coe serves as general manager for MotorQuest Dodge in Dearborn, Mich.–has been wrenched open by the Internet’s information free-for-all. For the plugged-in car buyer, Web-based merchants like Autobytel.com offer smooth routes around the often harrowing trip to the car dealership. Consumers now routinely find sales quotes, compare different models, and scan safety records before they ever sit behind the wheel. Of course, many retailers and manufacturers trickle out only as much information as serves their ends. But on-line merchants don’t attempt the impossible task of restraining consumers from seeking out a slew of data sources. On-line consumers use the Net to scan through any information that might help them to make a product decision. In so doing, shoppers have sent a blaring message: unbiased information is often more valuable than actually having the product itself. That message reached Joe Ricci, an owner of MotorQuest Automotive Group, the parent company of the car-dealership chain. Since he founded the business, in 1996, Ricci has spent nearly $5 million to refurbish its existing locations in Dearborn, Mich., and Wellesley, Mass., and to add a third location in the Detroit suburb of Southgate. His goal: to create a homey environment where customers can access all the information they could want. Walk into one of those dealerships and you can’t help noticing that you’re suddenly swarmed by…nobody, actually. Gone are the salesmen, clad in their Members Only-brand jackets, waiting to split off from the pack and serve up a suspiciously firm handshake. Instead, there’s a carpeted area outfitted with oak desks and ceramic vases. There, in a living-room-like environment, shoppers can jump on one of three computers to access the Internet at the heightened speed of a T1 line, with MotorQuest’s own home page as a guide to the Web sites of auto manufacturers, along with other sites that provide information on pricing, loans, and leasing, as well as reviews. MotorQuest also offers NADA 2000, proprietary software that enables buyers to calculate the value of their current car directly from the National Automobile Dealership Association. NADA sends Coe monthly updates of the information. “The goal is to give the consumer everything on the Net along with all the sources of information that we have at our disposal,” he explains. To be sure, customer computers or kiosks, which shoppers can use to order products not in stock and to get additional product information, can cost tens of thousands of dollars, hog valuable floor space, and serve only one shopper at a time. But Burke and his nine interdisciplinary researchers have designed a “shopping assistant”–a handheld computer with a built-in bar-code scanner–that allows consumers to check prices and snag product descriptions from just about any spot in the store. It could work like this: Before shopping, buyers would enter a personal profile that includes information about their dietary needs, budgetary constraints, and even a list of current prescriptions. Scan a bottle of olive oil and the computer might report that the salt content is too high, for example, or suggest a less pricey brand. The computer could even be programmed to retrieve recipes from the Martha Stewart Web site, based on the foods the user has stocked up on. “This sort of device can pull information from almost anywhere, including a store’s server or a manufacturer’s Web site,” says Sonny Kirkley, a researcher from Indiana University’s School of Education who works with Burke, “so the amount of information a consumer could access in the store is really limitless.” In addition, Burke has also developed an application that would allow shoppers to harvest reviews from like-minded people about which brand really did change their social life for the better. While the device could slow shoppers down (a definite no-no in the Internet age), Burke says his research shows that shoppers are willing to take more time if they believe it will result in a better buying decision on big items. “It takes about 12 seconds for a shopper to buy toothpaste,” says Burke, “but something like a sofa is a more thoughtful purchase.” SPEED Adding ‘searchability’ to store aisles Skirt the periphery of a supermarket–where the staples like milk and eggs always seem to reside–and you can’t help wondering whether stores are as user-friendly as they could be. After all, retailers want shoppers to be exposed to as many situations as possible in which their impulse-purchase reflex might kick in, thereby boosting profits. On the Internet, by contrast, a resourceful shopper can locate and purchase products with just a few taps on a keyboard. That process, however, has one obvious limitation: it can take days or even a week to receive a book from, say, Amazon.com. But what if brick-and-mortar retailers could combine Internet-like speed with the instant gratification of real-world shopping? To that end, Burke and his colleagues have added a product-finder feature to their handheld gizmo. Having trouble locating roofing nails? Scribble the product name into the handheld device, press Enter, and–voilÃ!–a map of the store appears on the screen indicating where the product is located. The device could also save time at the checkout line. If you’ve scanned your purchases while cruising through the store, a self-serve cash register could read the total from the shopping assistant and then bill a credit-card number that you’ve stored in the device. Such technology, of course, won’t be available–never mind affordable–for another year or so. Which is why retailers like Mike Largent have sought out simpler methods to speed up the shopping experience. Largent, president and CEO of Stambaugh Hardware Co., a $30-million chain based in Boardman, Ohio, has blatantly disregarded modern merchandising rules in the name of fulfilling consumers’ cravings. Since purchasing the 153-year-old chain in 1997, Largent has built six new stores and has plans to open eight more this year. None is bigger than 13,000 square feet–as compared with the company’s existing units, which run to 28,000 square feet–and each carries about 18,000 different products, a considerably lighter load than what is typically carried by competitors like Home Depot, which stocks between 40,000 and 50,000 products. “Part of the problem with the big stores is that you have to walk the length of a football field just to find a doorknob,” he says. In addition, each of Largent’s 21 stores is equipped with a computer, enabling customers to choose from an additional 54,000 items through the company’s Web site. He’s currently making deals with large wholesale distributors that will deliver products to either the customer’s home or the nearest store. “As a retailer today you just can’t afford to forget the Internet,” says Largent. “It’s impacting everyone’s business.” CONVENIENCE Create a habit-forming shopping experience It’s true that brick-and-mortar stores can’t produce the same rich and vibrant interactive experience as their electronic rivals. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. So believes Joshua Wesson, whose wine stores are practically walk-through Web sites. “The type of learning that the Macintosh took advantage of is precisely the sort of thing we take advantage of,” says the cofounder of Best Cellars Inc., a two-unit chain based in New York City. “Our stores have a graphical user interface.” Shoppers are expected to rely on visual cues, which is why the stores have no aisles. To speed up the shopping process, Wesson has created a color-coded icon system for his entire inventory, which is priced at under $10 a bottle. Each wine falls into one of eight categories: fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big, and sweet. For each class, Wesson posts a colored icon along with a brief description. “Fizzy,” for example, is “full of bubbles, full of fun.” Wesson goes so far as to place icon stickers on the back of each wine bottle so that customers don’t have to tote around a copy of Wine for Dummies to remember exactly what it is they’ve purchased. “We like to call it a point-and-sip environment,” he says. Wesson, who employs 75, plans to open two more stores this year–one in Seattle and another in Chicago–as well as launch his own transactional Web site. Compared with Burke’s 3-D glasses, Wesson’s real-world ideas seem quaint. Then again, the real world does have its limitations. But with the tools Burke is developing, even retailers with storefronts should be able to replicate enough of what shoppers value about cybershopping to make the trip worthwhile. “If you look at retail stores, they really haven’t changed much in 50 years,” says Burke. “The Internet is helping to force changes that were too long in coming.” Joshua Macht is a former associate editor at Inc.

About 4737 days ago E-Commerce

Upstarts: Personal-Finance Niches

Money Markets A slew of start-ups are storming the personal-finance industry by targeting populations that traditionally have been underserved What do women really want? Some start-ups think the answer is customized financial advice and business services. Those companies want to be the vehicle through which women do all their money-related tasks: paying bills, buying stocks, seeking loans, selecting insurance, and so on. They insist that women’s financial needs are different from men’s, especially because women tend to earn less than their male counterparts yet live longer lives. The thinking is that those two conditions have created a distinct marketing niche — a “niche,” mind you, that comprises 51% of the U.S. population. Do women truly need specialized financial attention? Predictably, the founders of the aforementioned start-ups believe they do. They cite the needs of the aging baby-boomer market — a megapopulation of educated women now entering their peak years of earning and spending. Those women, the first female generation to wear the proverbial pants of financial planning, will begin to look for advice on the Web and elsewhere. And the information that they’ll need will not only cover the basics but also emphasize “more relationship-oriented and life-stage topics than bottom-line transactions,” says Liz Davidson, founder and CEO of Financial Finesse, a company in San Francisco that’s dedicated to serving women’s investment needs. Such target marketing — be it to women or to any other population subgroup — dovetails nicely with the audiences that already exist on the Internet. “For some time, the Internet has been aggregating people in communities,” says Chris Musto, director of financial services and an analyst at Gomez Advisors Inc., a research firm in Lincoln, Mass., that focuses on Internet commerce. “So a start-up can work with sites that have already congregated certain groups.” Indeed, the Web — already home to such affinity sites as Women.com Networks, Gay.com, and AsianAvenue.com — lends itself to businesses hoping to attract a given demographic. Still, common sense suggests that all personal-finance customers — regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation — would want the same commodity: trustworthy advice. Yet the specialization of personal-finance businesses, both on and off the Web, is well under way. Name a target market — teens, Hispanics, newlyweds, high-tech workers — and you’ll find a financial start-up whose raison d’être is serving it. Wrapping it up Lenda Washington first had the notion of putting a female spin on traditional investment products during her days at PaineWebber. As a thirtysomething junior broker learning the art of cold calling, she was taught to ask, “Is your husband home?” if a woman answered the phone. For Washington, those days of making cold calls inspired the idea for a business targeting female investors. Sure enough, Washington’s new start-up is now calling on women to buy its first product. The company, Allison Street Advisors, based in Washington, D.C., is selling an investment vehicle called a wrap account, which gives customers with $250,000 in assets access to big-name institutional money managers. (Normally, that kind of access requires $5 million. A wrap bundles smaller amounts into an aggregate that’s still worth a manager’s time.) For years, brokerages have sold wraps as an investment option. Allison Street’s wrap has a novel twist: the managing institutions are owned by women or minorities. Washington hopes her wrap fund will appeal to women, minorities, and institutional investors such as schools and pension funds — all of whom, she thinks, will appreciate the precept of investing through female- and minority-owned firms. The obvious issue is, Wouldn’t the potential return on investment matter more to an investor than conscientiousness about social causes? Washington, who’s African American, doesn’t disagree. But she stresses that study groups show that investors have an affinity for advisers of a similar gender or ethnic background — those “who ‘get them’ and share common experiences,” she says. Her concept is no different in principle from an environmentally aware mutual fund, for which performance is “the meat,” but “the social ticket is the gravy,” she says. Getting minority-owned money managers to sign on was the easy part. The hard part has been persuading the Merrill Lynches of the world to offer Allison Street’s wrap fund among their investment products. The sales challenge, besides navigating through bureaucratic straits, is convincing brokerage firms that customers will favor Allison Street’s wrap if they are deciding between it and an equally performing but less diversely managed fund. So far, the fund hasn’t been around long enough for its popularity to be compared with that of other wrap funds. At press time, the fund retailed only at five brokerages — including W.S. Griffith, in Hartford — and had less than $500,000 in assets under management after six months of active selling. But Washington believes the wrap could be a $50-million fund five years from now. Even if the fund isn’t a smash with women or minorities, she says, it’s sure to lure investors from large institutions. Which means it just might be a hit with anyone who has $250,000 to invest. “White males would also be interested in top managers,” she says. “We’re not excluding anyone.” Pride of ownership “You want two guys buying a one-bedroom condo to be comfortable,” says Brian Farley, founder of Pride Mortgage Inc., in Provincetown, Mass. “They don’t want a starchy banker asking, ‘Where’s he going to sleep?’ “ It’s hard to doubt Farley’s credentials on the subject. His $1.4-million business brokered $67 million in loans in 1999, and gay men and lesbians constitute a sizable portion of the business’s clientele. It’s a population that he classifies as very loyal to good service — and quick to bolt from bad, even when the bad service comes from a company that’s gay-and-lesbian-friendly. “If you don’t do a good job, it doesn’t matter if you’re called Rainbow Mortgage,” he says. Though he chose the name Pride in part because it connotes the gay and lesbian community, Farley says, “we don’t market solely to them,” and his efforts to target that community are no different from any other group marketing at Pride. In fact, the company’s eight other loan officers, some of whom head regional offices, have considerable leeway in how they promote Pride’s services. The Seattle office, for example, could market to that city’s large Asian population. As Farley sees it, the commission-earning officers’ motives are simple: to close as many loans as possible. If that means targeting a niche, many niches, or no niches at all, then so be it. At the same time, Farley’s pitch to the gay community is not some affinity-marketing facade. He’s well aware of how that community’s needs differ from those of conventional mortgage applicants. Besides facing the ever-lingering issue of potential discrimination, gays and lesbians face the possibility of being outed at their workplaces when a lender, seeking employment verification, sends paperwork to employers that lists the names of both applicants. There are also complications surrounding breakups of home-owning couples: an exiting partner will often neglect to notify the lender of the change in status and is still bound to a mortgage even if his or her name has been removed from the deed. Farley founded the company in 1998, and he generated $700,000 in revenues as Pride’s only loan officer for most of that year. By year’s end, he was ready to bring on more loan officers. Rather than expanding locally, Farley simply opened offices wherever prospective employees happened to live, which is why Pride’s non-New England locations are in the random states of Washington, Nevada, Florida, and California. Coordinating their efforts hasn’t been a problem, because loan officers don’t need much day-to-day management, and all loan applications are electronically sent and processed at the company’s operations center. Farley has a wait-and-see attitude about further plans to expand. “There’s no rock-solid business plan,” he says. One thing he knows for sure: niche marketing will continue. In fact, Farley is touring nationally to speak on the topic for Mortgage Originator magazine. “We’ve found,” he says, “that niche marketing is the best way for us to get into a city and do a good job.” The young and the eager Todd Romer’s initiation into the world of personal finance began at 15, when he watched his father use a magnifying glass to scan the small numbers of the newspaper stock listings. More curious about bulls and bears than birds and bees, Romer asked for a lesson in where to invest his lawn-mowing money. Now 32, Romer has started a magazine called Young Money, based in Loveland, Ohio. He’d had the idea since college, when — despite what he’d learned from his dad — he found the personal- finance magazines of the adult world both too difficult to understand and “too targeted to the married, working adult.” And so, after six years of building his own nest egg as a salesman for Syncor International Corp., a publicly traded pharmaceuticals company, Romer launched the magazine that he’d longed for since boyhood. With nine issues on the books and a barely profitable first year based on $275,000 in sales, Romer is pleased with the project so far. In typical new-economy fashion, he isn’t just trying to sell magazine ads; he’s hoping Young Money‘s Web site can become a popular destination for preadult investors. He’s struck a deal with Stein Roe to resell that company’s mutual funds at www.youngmoney.com and is transforming his site — now just an online face for the magazine — into a transaction-oriented one that he describes as “E*Trade for kids,” where they can do online trading with very little money. So far, Young Money‘s audience has been composed, in large part, of teenage boys. Romer didn’t plan it that way, but he believes he can parlay that following into ad sales because he can tell advertisers that he has “a young male readership that can’t be seen outside of Thrasher,” a skateboarding monthly. Romer doesn’t know why his readership is mostly male, but he guesses that it’s for the same reasons that business magazines have always had larger male audiences. These days, as more teenage boys ponder forgoing college for high-tech jobs or starting their own companies, his young male audience seems larger than ever. Because Young Money‘s audience is driven to succeed, Romer thinks he can convince advertisers that his readers are more than “just boys”; they’re the boys who’ll make a difference. “We can say that our readers are savvy, they take action, they want to get ahead,” he says. It’s not lost on him that potential investors would also have an interest in a Web site that attracts teenage boys, particularly those with a high-tech or entrepreneurial bent. Romer himself is wasting no time courting angels and venture funds. “We’re doing a full-court press on the investment community,” he says. Q&A Does Niche Marketing Make Sense? Personal finance is a hot topic. These days it seems that people everywhere are more conversant about money and investing than they were just a few years ago. That’s largely because the nation’s record prosperity has brought unprecedented wealth to many different groups, including women, minorities, and other demographic subsets. Hoping to reach those prospective investors, a bevy of start-ups are specifically targeting one group or another with their finance offerings. Will target marketing work? We asked Cheryl Russell, demographer, author, and editor-in-chief of New Strategist Publications Inc., in Ithaca, N.Y., to tell us. Inc.: For personal-finance start-ups, is simply targeting a niche enough to lure customers? Russell: Only if the start-up also provides products and services that are worthy of attention. Because women live longer and are often widowed, they will have different financial situations than the general market will. But whether those differences alone will attract women to these start-ups remains to be seen. Financial advisers worth their salt will customize a plan to suit the individual customer. So does the field require a Web site just for women? I have my doubts. Inc.: But the start-ups keep coming, and they keep attracting tons of funding. Why will they have such a tough time? Russell: It’ll be difficult for them to get people’s attention. The giants have the advantage already. The start-ups will have to offer something more than the financial advice you can get anywhere, or they somehow have to be perceived as cool or hip. Otherwise, they’ll get lost in the shuffle. On the Web, the cream is already out there, and it’s hard to get people to change their Web patterns. It’s like getting people to watch new TV shows: a daunting task. You almost have to use traditional forms of advertising, like TV and radio, which can get very expensive. Inc.: So where will all those personal-finance start-ups be five years from now? Russell: That’s anybody’s guess. It’s a huge pie. In just about any business area, you end up with two or three dominant players, and business on the Internet is no different. Women might emerge as one separate area, especially if the start-ups capture a lot of the baby boomers who are now in their mid-fifties and are financially peaking. But for other targeted groups, like the superwealthy or high-tech workers, we’re dealing with more myth than reality. For most of the country, having a lot of wealth doesn’t define your twenties and thirties. That’s the type of niche that sounds like marketers’ just trying to go after the latest thing. It’s the sort of fad that’s going to change as soon as the stock market crashes. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.