Strateer Blog

Launching a product and getting attention is not easy. Launching a product on a $0 budget is considerably more challenging. But as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder used to say:

“If it would be easy, somebody else could do it.”

That has been a mantra that I have used over and over again during the last 8 years building ClickandBuy. Back then we were a bunch of highly motivated and smart but inexperienced people that had no idea what we were getting ourself into. We probably would not have done it, had we seen the complexity and difficulties both internal (building a two-sides business with heavy security and privacy concerns) and external (Internet economy meltdown, fierce competition by incumbents and regulatory interference).

Coming back to launching our Alpha: It might not be easy to get attention with a small or non-existent marketing budget, but we are preparing right now some exciting marketing channels. We are thinking of starting a conversation in the financial blog sphere, using message boards (without falling into the spam trap), using marketing partnerships and good old public relations work. And of course we will try some search marketing - though probably more symbolic given our restricted budget for now.

In the end I believe the quality of our product will convince people. But can it truly excite them so they start to spread the message? Do we understand the problem of our customers correctly and do we provide the solution they have been waiting for? Do we provide the ‘faster horse’ (it seems to be quote day today - Henry Ford: “If I would have asked people, what they want, they would have told me that they want faster horses.”). Well, we will hopefully know this summer.

Right now we are trying to identify the opinion leaders that we have to convince of our product, so journalists and bloggers can pick it up. If anyone has an idea who would be an ideal opinion leader for a financial service product focused on the individual investor, leave us a comment or mail me at fabian[a t]strateer com.

This week was marked by two Strateer premiers: Our first Technology Advisory Board meeting and our first Advisory Board meeting.

The discussions at our Tech Advisory Board meeting circled around the use of JMS implementations and how extensive to rely on Java Messaging for remote communication - not only for backend data processing but even for user interaction. We are right now using EJB3 for remoting and some other things but might eventually able to move on without it. The other topic was about off shore development which we do quite a bit. All in all it was extremely helpful to have great advisers that bring a different context to the problems that we face. We are very happy with the people that are willing to spend some of their time with us and help us build this company. Of course our discussions circled not only around JMS/EJB3 and the like - culinary fringe stories from around the globe made us appreciate Petite Abeille’s mussles, steak frites and other Belgian dishes.

Yesterday’s Adivsory Board meeting focused on a pressing issue: Defining our go to market strategy for our Alpha around end of June. I realized that we spend a lot of time in the last week thinking about the Channels that we could tap into, but we did not spend enough time on clearly defining our message and defining our customer. Therefore that evening was truly mind opening. When we were finally asked to move to the bar as the check had come long time ago I felt like a lot of missing pieces falling into place.

All in all we have a lot of homework to do now - but that is exactly what I wanted to get out of our advisory boards and we are very happy to have such great people on board with us.

Currently the whole team is busy meeting our self imposed deadline on launching our alpha version (named Alerts4all) towards the end of June. It is exciting to see every team getting into place working on their components.

As our teams are locally spread out around the globe (not really an optimal scenario from my perspective but the reality when starting a company on a shoestring) we are trying to build a team sense by having regular conference call with the whole team. After some unsuccessful attempts with Skype (more than 8 people in the conference becomes quite unreliable) we tried JaJah this week. It worked OK, but the call quality was not as good as when everybody dials into a hosted conference solution. As we have team members in Belarus and Bangladesh, I do not want to require them to dial in on a US conf call number. I guess for now we stick with JaJah unless somebody has a better working solution that is for free to all the participants (I am happy to cover the cost).

Another helpful tool to collaborate is the Google Sites feature that is part of our Google Aps suite, that we use for the Strateer team. The Wiki is quite easy to administrate, has good user access management (inside the strateer.com domain as well as for outside contractors) and is hosted. Embedding Google Docs into Google Sites works like a charm.

All in all, it is great to see finally the team in place and being productive.