mike tatum

Category: On Entreprenuership

  • On Grinding

    On Grinding

    Judas Priest…grinding it out since 1969.

    Really enjoyed Fred Wilson‘s post “Grinding“. Everyone wants to talk about “hustle” when building a company. In reality it is usually more of a grind day in, day out until you figure it out – or die. I especially appreciated how he addressed the “magic bullet” theory to fixing company issues in this line:

    But it is rarely one thing that a business needs to succeed. It is often a little bit of everything.

    Lot of truth packed in that quote. Fred references his experience with Twitter’s early struggles with their fail whale and explosive growth and popularity. That is definitely one kind of grinding…managing a rocket ship as tries to reach escape velocity.

    What I wouldn’t give for that kind of grinding. There’s another kind of startup grind, and it’s one our company has been doing for the past 3 years. We’ve been searching for product/market fit in Voice User Interfaces (VUI) since inception. When we started, we targeted smart speakers with branded services to catch the explosive growth and popularity of smart speakers like Alexa. Having watched how web and mobile changed how consumers interfaced with content and services, it felt inevitable that voice was the next big interface change and smart speakers were the next big wave.

    But sometime it takes a while for waves of change to reach the shore. Here we are with millions of smart speakers units shipped and five years after the launch of Alexa, and we’ve had no break out VUI brands or companies. The biggest success story in smart speakers is a guy who works at Ford who bought a Tesla with cash with his Alexa skill he built on the side. That’s a nice side hustle that helps one developer and Alexa, not sure it’s a business that continue to grow.

    So we stopped focusing on smart speakers and making a transition to mobile voice. We’ve been grinding over the last year to help mobile apps develop their own VUI, including a whole company rebranding. Making this change has definitely been more of a grind than a pivot. That’s because we are refining the value we create for VUI than completely giving up on it.

    We’re excited about enabling the mobile voice movement. There are implications for better privacy, brand building and revenue streams that is available in smart speakers alone. Hopefully, our grinding will pay off and our efforts to “change a little bit of everything” about our company will help us find success.

    Please keep your fingers crossed for us! And if you app needs a voice, please shoot me an email.

  • Selling Out

    Originally published on Signal vs. Noise on January 21st, 2006

    Jason’s earlier post on “Building to Flip…” got me thinking about some of the emails and calls I get on a regular basis from people ready to flip their flop. These offers seem to be eerily familiar lately, with something like: “Since launching our site x-months ago, we have been featured on a number of blogs and we are: a. almost as big as HotorNot.com (according to Alexa); or b. growing faster than Flickr did during its first 6-months. We thought your company might be interested, as we have already fielded offers in the single-digit millions from other large companies. We would be interested in speaking with you, but need to speak this week as things are moving quickly on our end.”

    I swear that I have searched to see if there is some blog or “how-to” site somewhere where they find this repulsive language for their pitch because it is so familiar. So here’s the deal, I bet I’m a lot like other corporate development folks in the industry. We love getting contacted by entrepreneurs who are interested in combining with our company because they like what we do, and they see selling to us as the best way to grow their business and keep their users happy. They contact us because they see that the combination will enable them to have more resources and help overall, therefore the combination enables us to build something great together. But launching into a “hot pick-up line” basically kills the conversation before it starts. Seems obvious, but I guess not so much when you’re blinded by the $$. To be clear, I don’t think starting a business to increase your personal wealth is a bad thing. Whether staying independent or selling out, your going to have to make money somehow- so it had better be a motivating factor. It’s just that having a real passion for your product and users is far more attractive to a potential buyer.

    In my experience, these are the things that motivate me to take interest in young or “pre-profitable” companies:

    • Small, talented teams where each member can do “a little of everything”. Essentially entrepreneurs where the team are more “doers” than “managers”.
    • Talented engineers that are great product people. These people blow me away.
    • A feature (which is often the whole product of the company), that combined with one of our products, can immediately increase usage and revenue for both entities.
    • A product with tremendous growth potential in need of resources and a business team to increase revenue.
    • Users: You need them, and they need to LOVE your product.
    • A team who sees combining with our company as the best path to achieving their bigger company, personal or product goals.

    Trust me, it is hard to fake these traits. Eventually your flip strategy will be seen through, and it will either blow up the deal or significantly decrease the value of your company in the eyes of the acquirer.