Failed Startup Profile: What Went Wrong and How to Avoid the Same Mistakes: A lesson from FreePrint

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What Went Wrong: How one entrepreneurial great idea couldn’t quite get off the  ground. . .

The Story of FreePrint, the Startup that ALMOST could.

Today, CareerMee is speaking with FreePrint founder Gus Murray. Whoa, that’s a lot of links for the first sentence. Anyway, we’re here to tell Gus’ story, about his great startup idea FreePrint – the challenges he faced, the good choices and the bad, and what led, in the end, to pulling the plug on a great idea.

Not all ideas that make it to the market are good (please see link about KFC introducing a sandwich that had no bread and instead two pieces of fried chicken holding it together) and not all ideas that falter are bad. Gus speaks from his experience, and hopefully startup entrepreneurs can learn something from his journey. Be sure to leave any additional questions or thoughts for Gus in our Comment Section below so he can get back to you.

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CareerMee: Pitch Freeprint in 100 words or less:

Gus: Freeprint is a new print media, where targeted messages are printed ‘on demand’ on the rear side of student prints. Companies can segment the student body based on their online profile, gender, education, degree, interests and location, and in ‘sponsoring’ the rear side, students can then print for free. A win-win!

CareerMee: How far into development were you before pulling the plug?

Gus: After completing a trial at one of the business schools, we had the software developed for the backend of the system, raised $250,000 USD, and installed our printers in two schools.

After running the system, and bug fixing, over a 8 month period we redeveloped the concept to be a web based system that would be allow for students and individuals (non-students) to print over the web and at various print kiosks i.e. Starbucks, 7-eleven, airport lounges, etc.

CareerMee: What were some of the things that went wrong?

Gus: The new system would essentially allow anyone to print for free, with sponsored messages, over the internet, at any of our print kiosks. This posed several challenges. First, we required additional funding to redevelop the software and create a web based printing solution and an API that allowed people to print from heavily printed web pages –  i.e. Google maps, Gmail etc. Second, it would be encouraging people to print more and therefore increasing the volume of pages printed – not so environmentally friendly. Third, to attract advertising dollars we would need to build a large users base – i.e. students, business people, individuals etc. Finally, the advertising and recruiting market is, as most people know, at the moment quite depressed.

All-in-all, one of the greatest challenges we faced was managing the different stakeholders and in the end, this proved to be our undoing. For Freeprint, our stakeholders included: Customers (paying advertisers), Users (university students), Software Partner (product), Investors (cash), and Distribution Points (business schools). One of our misjudgments was the time it would take to form, engage and develop each of these different stakeholders with their various interest and incentive points. However, it was the software company that ultimately led to our undoing.

CareerMee: What are some things that you might have done differently?

Gus: If I had a magic wand or a time-capsule and could change things again, I would have made sure that we did all the development internally and had better control and input into the project. The project management, cost structure and general inflexibility of our software partner caused massive problems for us, so if we had recruited some developers and had them in-house, I believe we would have been on much better grounds for success. Additionally, we would have better prepared for the amount of time taken to deal with all stakeholders mentioned above.

CareerMee: Any other advice or wisdom that you learned from the venture?

Gus: As business students playing with an IT related product, one of the things you can’t know when you start out, and go down a path like the one we did, is how little you actually do know. So make sure you surround yourself with good people. What I mean by this is people that have good energy and burn for your idea –  i.e. they’ll give you unsolicited advice, help and constructive criticism.

Lastly, I believe that one of the things that we did really well was tell other people our idea. What we realized, as we told more people, is that the more people we told the better the idea became through feedback, input, contacts and referrals / recommendations. This helped us immeasurably – free access to conventions, cash from business angels, publicity, an auditor, a huge amount of fans and many other costly items for nothing.

So for everyone thinking of becoming an entrepreneur or in the process or saving the world and becoming the next Facebook or Google, tell others what you are doing, what your product is, what model you think you should use and ask people for their thoughts and advice. Nine times out of ten people will offer their advice and services for free and you in return will at best receive validation of your idea and at worst practice pitching and communicating your product / service or technology. Good luck!

Thanks for speaking with CareerMee, Gus. We look forward to hearing more from you soon, about any future business ideas! MBAs, looking to work for a startup? Think you have what it takes to make a company run? Then head over to CareerMee.com and get you resume online in front of our over 125 recruiters, many looking to hire for small businesses and startups.

An MBA grad works free for startup: Carrotmob Part (2)

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MBA grad speaks out about the decision to work for free after business school and what compeled her do it.

. . . AND, we’re back with Susanna Schick from Carrotmob, an innovative startup CareerMee profiled last week. Find the story here.

After getting her MBA  from North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler business school, Susanna decided to move out to California and work, free, for a company she really believed in.

What’s more is that this isn’t an isolated incident. A study by by David Montgomery and Catherine Ramus of UC Santa Barbara examines the tradeoffs candidates are willing to make when selecting a potential employer.

It found, to the surprise of all involved, that a reputation for ethical conduct and caring policies towards employees ranked 95 percent as important as the financial package and were willing to give up about $15,000 of their paycheck to get it. Read about it here and check back later this week for a more in-depth review.

And if you think MBAs were just bending the truth a bit on a survey to make themselves look good, we’ve got Susanna, who has given up more than the average $15,000 to work for her ideals. Let hear from her. . .

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CareerMee: Has having an MBA helped you in your role at Carrotmob? AND: Why did you choose to work for an internet start-up, and why Carrotmob?

Susanna: I chose to work as an unpaid intern at Carrotmob because it totally fits with my values, and my passion for saving the planet through conscious consumerism. I get to use what I’ve learned about entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing, and also tap my large network from b-school. It’s great being with a small and dynamic company where I can be myself. People, including my school’s career management services office, tell me I’d never fit in at a large company, and I think they’re right. I applied to some Fortune 500’s, and wouldn’t turn down the right offer, (I am just an intern here, after all) but I’d think more seriously about the culture shock.

CareerMee: Have you had to make any sacrifices to work for a start-up after business school instead of an established business?

Susanna: Yes, the biggest one is that I am living with my parents. But I made that choice before the Carrotmob internship came up, because I knew I’d rather live with them and be close to San Francisco, where there are so very many companies dedicated to sustainability, than live in a city I’m not excited about and working for a company I don’t believe in.

CareerMee: Do you know if many MBAs are taking similar routes?

Susanna: Because Kenan Flagler provides such an excellent education in entrepreneurship, many of my classmates have chosen to work for startups or even start their own businesses, some of which are focused on social and/or environmental responsibility. It takes tremendous courage of conviction and a willingness to earn less than one did before b-school. I would much rather do something like this that contributes to the greater good and utilizes what I learned in school, than go back to my old job.

CareerMee: Have you found the things you learned in business school to be useful in a practical sense?

Susanna: Absolutely. The one problem I had was that some of the classes felt like I was being fed information through a firehose, to quote our awesome Managerial Accounting professor, Joey Bylinski. So that made it harder to retain what I’d learned, but that’s why I never throw anything away, and also one reason why I stay close with the friends who excel in the areas where I’m weak.

CARROTMOB IN ACTION

CareerMee: Overall impressions of working for a start-up after business schoool – advantages/disadvantages?

Susanna: The positives: It’s exciting and there’s a tremendous sense of potential. I work in a great office culture and in a fantastic neighborhood (South Park in San Francisco has launched a bazillion startups). I work every day with smart, interesting people and I’m learning a ton about early phase business development.

I’m lucky, because it’s a great startup that’s well known, with a founder (Steve Newcomb) who has a history of successful launches under his belt, so I feel like I’m learning more than I would at any other startup solely because of Steve’s strong management talent and transparency.

The only downside: The pay.

Thanks for talking with CareerMee, Susanna, and sharing your story. MBA grads, if you’re looking for work or maybe even want to change careers, check out our site, CareerMee, to put your profile out in front of our over 125 recruiters. Nonprofit, green energy and socially responsible businesses are recruitinng on CareerMee now.

Photo courtesy of Flikr user emdot.

Introducing. . . Carrotmob

Online Company Startup Profile

I’ve got to admit – this startup profile was pure fun for me. A favorite company I’ve been watching for the last 9 months, I’m excited to introduce you to online startup, Carrotmob.

Today, we’re talking with Susanna Schick, a recent MBA grad and member of the Carrotmob team. While Carrotmobs idea – a ‘reverse mob’ –  may sound both silly and slightly dangerous, it’s neither of the two.  In fact, CarrotMob and the team there have built a serious organizing model that really changes the way business is done – for the better.

To hear more, we speak with Susanna.

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CareerMee: Pitch your company in 100 words or less

Susanna: Carrotmob is a method of activism that leverages consumer power to make the most socially-responsible business practices also the most profitable choices. Businesses compete with one another to see who can do the most good, and then a big mob of consumers buys products in order to reward whichever business made the strongest commitment to improve the world. It’s the opposite of a boycott.

NOTE from CareerMee: Definitely check out the About page, where you can see the video that inspired over 20 Carrotmob events worldwide and the FAQ page as well, which answers the serious questions of the company with a nice witty sense of humor. These guys are pretty funny.

CareerMee: At what stage of development are you at the moment?

Susanna: Brent Schulkin, the man with the idea, held the first Carrotmob here in San Francisco on March 29, 2008, and joined forces with Steve Newcomb in May 2008 to create Virgance, a larger social activist group with Carrotmob as one of its core projects. Carrotmob has been growing rapidly with little management, but in the past few months we have been using and managing an official blog network. We’re also currently developing the how-to manual to make it easier for organizers to get up and running. We have over 25 Carrotmob chapters in 8 different countries, and we’re still expanding.

Brent Schulkin, Co-Founder of Virgance and brain child behind Carrotmob.

You can see a list of our active blogs here:  http://carrotmob.org/mobs and past Carrotmobs here: http://carrotmob.org/past-carrotmobs/

The full Virgance history is here: http://www.virgance.com/about.php

CareeMee: Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself/your team?

Susanna: On the Carrotmob project, we have three people working full time. Brent, the man behind the idea, is a 28-year-old creative dynamo who magnifies the energy and innovation at the root of Carrotmob with his ability to always connect people and ideas in new ways.

Brent is a true activist-turned-entrepreneur. He concocted and launched this method of consumer activism called Carrotmob after developing the idea over a couple years. Before that, Brent worked in the corporate team-building space for The Go Game, designing games and managing teams to create elaborate, customized events for his clients around the world. Brent has also directed a documentary film about criminal justice issues and worked for Google AdWords. He graduated from Stanford in 2003.

He is currently assisted by two summer interns, myself, Susanna Schick, and I’ve just graduated from Kenan Flagler Business School with an MBA in Sustainability. I manage the network of organizers and help develop a couple of exciting new projects for Carrotmob that will help move it into proper for-profit status. Curtis Lefrandt leads a dual life – by day, he’s an intern in Apple’s finance department. By night, he is planning the next San Francisco Carrotmob, which you and your readers can check out here.

See the full team at http://www.virgance.com/team.php.

Watch how Carrotmob works:

CareerMee: So what is the next year set to bring for/from Carrotmob?

Susuanna: We’re working to launch the two Big Projects, and certainly will see more Carrotmobs happen around the world. As part of our partnership with www.350.org we are encouraging as many of our organizers as possible to hold events on October 24th, International Day of Climate Action.

CareerMee: What impacts has the recession had on startups/the startup scene?

Susanna: We can’t speak for the whole startup scene, but it’s pretty clear that investors, just like all consumers, are spending their money more carefully, on things/companies that are clearly strong.

Thanks for speaking with us, Susanna,about Carrotmob, a great internet startup making waves in the business world. Be sure to check back this week to see Part (2) of our interview – where we here direct from Susanna about the pressure, delights and surprises of working for free after getting your MBA.

CareerMee site still on hold until later next week.

Start-up profile: Balsamiq

Speaking with Balsamiq CEO Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni about Start-ups and being an Entrepreneur

Welcome to CareeMee’s Blog! CareerMee is an online recruitment platform for MBAs from top business schools – a reverese job board that helps you find your perfect job. Check out our site here for more information and to sign up!

Now, down to business.

This week, our start-up profile focuses on Italian-based  Balsamiq, a new, inventive start-up that specializes in high-quality plugins for Web Office applications. We caught up with Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, the company founder and CEO to get some insight into what his company does, and how bright or bleak the horizon is for start-up IT companies at the moment….

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CareerMee: Thanks for talking with us today! Giacomo, can you pitch your company in 100 words or less?

Giacomo: First of all I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to be featured on your site. I have to admit I feel a bit sheepish not having gone to business school myself, but I swear I seriously considered it a few years ago.

About Balsamiq: we launched on June 19th 2008. We are a small software company focused on building high quality plugins for Web Office applications. Our first product is Balsamiq Mockups, a sketch-quality wireframing tool. Mockups has been extremely well received, netting over $750,000 in sales in its first year and gathering rave reviews. We like to compete on usability and customer service. http://www.balsamiq.com

CareerMee: That sounds great! What stage of development are you at the moment?

Giacomo: We are in the “continuous improvement based on user feedback” stage. Mockups has been on sale for over a year, and there’s still lots to do and more fun to be had! 🙂

We have over 7,000 customers at the moment and are selling about $120,000 worth of new licenses every month. We try to release a new update every week, based largely on customer feedback. We also aim to release two new product versions a year, expanding our sales channels to other Web Office platforms (wikis, CMSs, bug trackers)

CareerMee: With that kind of success, it sounds like you need good people around you. Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself/your team?

Giacomo: Sure, I love our team! Valerie Liberty is our COO, Wow! Division, and works out of her home in the heart of the Silicon Valley. She keeps the company running smoothly and takes care of a lot of our customer’s questions. She’s one of those people one cannot help to instantly fall in love with, so she’s definitely perfect for the job. My wife Mariah also does some customer support but mostly focuses on our philanthropic efforts: we donate A LOT of licenses to do-gooders, non-profits and the like. It’s something we really love doing. Email us at free@balsamiq.com if you want to know more.

Doing most of the programming these days is Marco Botton, who works with Mariah and me out of our home office in Bologna, Italy. Marco is a senior programmer, a generalist, optimist and is not afraid of any technical challenge. He’s just what you need in a small tech startup.

Lastly, I go by Peldi but my full name is Giacomo Guilizzoni. Formerly a software engineer at Macromedia/Adobe, I ran Balsamiq pretty much alone for the first 8 months in business (up to 3,000 customers). While I still have my hands in every aspect of the business, I am slowly realising that the job of a CEO is a pretty time-consuming one!

Peldi Guilizzoni, Founder and CEO of Balsamiq

CareerMee: What is the next year set to bring for/from Balsamiq?

Giacomo: I am very happy with the pace we’re going at right now. We are doing good work, are happy doing it and are making lots of customers happy by saving them time and helping them communicate their ideas better. So the plan is to continue to do much of the same.

There’s still quite a ways to go before my vision for Mockups will be completely implemented, and that vision keeps evolving based on customer feedback and external market forces.

We are about to launch a SaaS (hosted, subscription-based) version of Mockups. This channel is new to us, so there will be lots to learn there as well. I’m looking forward to it!

CareerMee: What impacts has the recession had on startups/the startup scene?

Giacomo: What recession? 🙂 Well, we were born during the recession, so we don’t know anything else. I wonder if the recession has actually helped us, as companies strapped for resources look around for low-cost, high ROI tools like ours.

CareerMee: Sounds great. So, any advice you’d like to offer someone who’s thinking of launching an online startup?

Giacomo: As a rookie entrepreneur, I don’t feel I’m in a position to give anyone advice yet. So I guess my advice would be to find some heroes and try to soak in as much advice as possible from them: read their books, subscribe to their blogs, follow them on Twitter…I know, not the most original advice but it’s the one with the highest ROI I can think of.

Thanks for talkiing with us, Giacomo! Readers, if you have any experience starting your own company, or have any questions, be sure to go to our comments section. And don’t forget to go to CareerMee.com, our exclusive MBA platform for top MBAs!

Startup Profile: Wonga

Another week, another startup profile. Today we talk to Errol Damelin, founder and CEO of Wonga.com. You may think that a website that offers instant cash loans  sounds like trouble, but Errol and his team have built up a fantastic responsible lending platform…over to him.

Pitch your company in 100 words or less…

Wonga solves people’s occasional cash flow problems by providing small, short-term cash advances online. We are an ultra fast and convenient solution because we’ve automated the entire lending process. Application is 100% online and we provide an instant answer, with successful applicants receiving cash into their bank account in minutes.

We provide a genuine alternative to traditional sources of credit and we’re committed to doing this in a responsible way. We do this by providing a completely transparent service, using our own sophisticated decision technology and giving customers complete control over the exact size, length and cost of their Wonga loan. (100 words precisely!)

At what stage of development are you at the moment?
Wonga came out of beta mode less than 12 months ago and have grown fast, both in terms of customers and staff. We have already helped tens of thousands of customers. We’ve also achieved strong customer loyalty through our technical innovation and by focusing on delivering world-class service. As a result we’re already profitable.

Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself/your team?
Wonga is definitely my most challenging project yet and my co-founder and I have needed to build a team of top class people to help us make the vision a reality. We’ve recruited smart, passionate people from lots of different backgrounds and there are several team members with MBAs.

You’ve worked on some other startups before – would you like to give us a quick overview?
This is my third major venture. Prior to Wonga I founded and sold a successful business software company and before that I helped found an advanced steel wire production company. My background is varied because I look for problems that need solving regardless of which industry, or where in the world they happen to be.

Any advice you’d like to offer someone who’s thinking of launching an online startup?
The simplest advice I can offer is to ensure you set out to solve a real problem for your potential customers and do it in a way that’s different from any existing solutions. Ideally, it should also be scalable and difficult to copy. If your idea ticks those boxes it’s a great start!

Thanks a lot Errol! Readers, head on over to Wonga.com and check it out! Wonga loans £1, interest-free, to entrepreneurs in the developing world  for every loan they process per month, via another great  service called Kiva.org (check them out!).