Why we’re building a boring business (and you should too)
meetingburner.com
meetingburner.com
1) People pay serious money for solutions.
2) Your competition is often clueless companies or, even better, clearly subpar manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. (Every Excel spreadsheet which has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.) Nobody in the Valley will realize you exist, since they'll be too busy with mobisocialfotogames and other businesses attempting to separate jaded twenty-something's from money that they don't have and wouldn't spend if they did.
3) Most boring problems have a fascinating underbelly, if you're inclined to look for it. I knew a guy who did paper sales once. He was brimming with enthusiasm for it: he was an absolute magician who spoke the secret language of Paper. Every sheet had a character and a story, and he knew them all.
1) There are over a dozen perceptually different shades of white, grouped mostly into blue whites and yellow whites. There is a difference in use cases but I can't remember it and don't want to just make up one.
2) There are over a dozen common weights for papers. This chiefly becomes an issue for "resume" paper, which is the king of papers. It's the stuff you reserve for wedding invitations and, well, resumes. It's for when writing the document on actual money would still be a totally valid use of funds if the document got a positive response as a result.
3) Some types of papers have a front and a back.
4) The microstructure of paper determines how it interacts with ink and office equipment. Don't put inkjet paper in a laser printer or vice versa: you're asking for jams, and the color won't stick the right way. (Inkjet paper is designed to have lots of surface area at the microstructure level, the better to trap ink. Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to burn quickly and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser.)
5) How much money paper costs is exquisitely sensitive to how much of it you buy at a time. Major American school districts, who quite literally buy it by the truckload (one truck carries approximately 8 pallets, 50 cartons to a pallot, 5 reams to a carton, 500 sheets to a ream), pay about a fifth what you would if you went over to Staples and picked up a ream.
Not that it affects your point at all, but laser printers don't work that way (by burning paper). It's still ink-on-paper, the laser beam just tells the ink where to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer
The laser removes the static charge in a pattern on a charged rotating drum. The charged drum then picks up the toner particles - essentially styrene and carbon black - the paper is pressed against the drum transferring the toner particles.
Finally, a pair of heated rollers melt toner and fuse it to the paper.
It is correct that laser paper is smooth but that's so the toner not scattered by the rough paper and can be fused fully.
One minor nit on point 4 though. The laser changes charge on a small area of the drum so the toner adheres there. The flatness of the paper probably ensures good adhesion to the ink and heat transfer during fusing.
"Textiles and Paper were two of the original departments when the Mechanics Institution was created in 1824 ..."
There's a huge psychological impact to be had, and most people don't pay enough attention to realize that they're missing out; pay 20% more and get a business card or resume that triggers just the right response, and people pay more attention to what you've put on the paper.
Pharma companies will lose $50B in revenue this year due to expiring patents. To put that in perspective imagine if every game and music company in the world went out of business simultaneously. Then double it. That is the scale of revenue loss in pharma and the industry will still be worth $720B. It is a "boring" industry from a software perspective, but its magnitude is amazing.
Also, "Boring" is as much a perspective as a category.
MailChimp has built a massive business in email marketing and are one of the cheekiest companies around.
AirBNB helps people book hotel rooms.
37 Signals makes a close cousin of meeting software.
At least that's what their SW does. I'm sure if you asked the owners of those co's they'd say they help organizations communicate with their members, people form real social networks, and entrepreneurs build their businesses.
There is a Disney saying "Magic doesn't make it work, the way we work makes it Magic" Having the right perspective can add 80 IQ points!
(In general:) Consumer orientated startups have the potential to become ridiculously valuable companies - lets just define that as a valuation of $1bn+. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare (soon), etc. But your chances of getting there are 0.001%.
Business orientated apps that real solve a genuine problem are more likely to be 'successful' (say, valued at $100m+) but unlikely to become $1Bn businesses (on it's own - you might get acquired, or you could become a software behemoth like Atlassian with 100's of products - but these are not really 'startups' anymore) .
As someone about to turn 30 and been in this business a few years, I see this as simply an example of someone with a matured aspiration for what they want to achieve.
If you are in your 20's, it fits your profile to probably work on something consumer oriented, taking a risk and also have a lot of run (consumer apps tend to be more fun that business apps, just saying).
If you are 30+ and not had that big win yet, it might be worth changing your expectation and working on something that has a higher chance of being moderately successful so that you are more likely to walk away from your career with something.
This may or may not be what is going on with the founders of MeetingBurner, but it's precisely where my head is at as I turn 30.
MB founders ages : 31, 40, 37, 35, 31
Definitely truth in what you've outlined, but we've also had the experience building another couple of boring businesses that haven't made us billionaires, but left us free and able to cash flow this project with years of runway.
It's hard as an entrepreneur not to jump into exciting, glad to see the response to the post today which was initially written as an email response to Noah ;)
Completely agree. The other part is that someone who is in their 30s is likely to have seen the inside of a few large companies and have a ton of ideas about nagging niche problems that can be solved.
I think you misspelled Microsoft?
Atlassian has less than 10 products (depending on how you count them).
Business orientated apps that real solve a genuine
problem are more likely to be 'successful' (say,
valued at $100m+)
First, there are still interesting problems even in less juicy domains. That's not particularly relevant, though, because the juicy domains have those too. At least we're pretty even so far...
The best part, for me, is that I get to make money solving some hard or tedious problems; clients happy to pay for that, and I'm happy to be in business. Then, I get to have actual fun with my "toy" projects rather than worry about finding some obscure way to monetize something that has very little intrinsic economic potential. I can afford to experiment, run a bunch of small operations, get other people involved, and see where they go.
In being somewhat tightly bound one side, I have almost unlimited creative freedom on the other.
I still love what we do, and the environment still feels very startupy, even after a few years.
Tell me about screen sharing, audio and recording of both. That's what I really care about.
That issue is so specific to the litany of using current solutions it's not even funny - something we definitely hated before building.
We spent a LOT of time making sure audio integration and recording worked beautifully - we even built our own phone bridge system from the ground up so that when you click "record" you get audio from dial ins and from digital users all in one session.
After post-processing the recording on server side you can one click to export to YouTube, lots more formats coming soon.
In terms of screen sharing, beta accounts let you share with up to 50 (contact us if you need more), everything is cloud based (multiple cloud solutions for redundancy) so we're harnessing massive CPU power to deliver an experience that balances / beats the big boys on speed / quality.
Give it a try - if you didn't follow the link in the post go to http://www.meetingburner.com/ and enter beta code "boring" for instant access today.
Also blog contains updates from the last two cycles that list more specific feature details.
Can anyone older and wiser give me feedback on my plan? Is there an easier way to gain a lot of domain knowledge about how different industries work? I like the idea of working as a management consultant because
(1) it pays well
(2) my vague impression is that the job consists of having people give you the lowdown on the problems their business is encountering
but I'm certainly open to trying something else if it seems like a better idea.
Maybe instead of being a consultant, I should identify a single industry that seems both corrupt and profitable and take aim at it more directly? Any tips on finding such an industry?
If you can get a job at a top tier consulting firm out of undergrad, it sounds like it would be good for you. Given your background you can certainly make it happen and leave after a short amount of time with better contacts/perspective on business. For you, it would be like getting paid for business school.
That being said, I do think it's a great way to shape up your general management skills, and an excellent post-college option.
Even in the "improve the company culture" case, it seems like you could still get a lot of behind-the-scenes information about a variety of industries just by chatting with your clients over lunch.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447428
in the infamous "How to become a millionaire in three years" post.
Charge for something- Building a consumer property dependent upon advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn't the surest path. It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build something that you can charge for.
Besides, I reject the notion that enterprise software is boring. I mean, maybe it can be boring, depending on what you're doing. But the stuff we're working on at Fogbeam Labs is largely the same technologies people are using on consumer facing web apps... And on the back end, we're doing really exciting stuff with machine learning, AI, data mining, information retrieval, semantic web technology, etc.
The one area where we'll probably always be forced to lag a little, is client-side technologies; if we find that many of our target customers are far off the leading edge on browsers. But whatever, we can live with that.
P.S. It's a pretty great tool. Going to use this in the near future.
A boring area, where your project is a more innovative solution and you are excited about the area in which you can carve out in this area I would consider a good business but one in which the sole reason for pursuing is that its a good business prospect makes no sense to me.
I'm not saying you won't make money, but I want to do that while pursuing something which I then want to be able to explain to someone with wonder and obvious excitement.
Also regarding the iPhone mention in the article, I could be wrong but as far as I know, the opening demonstration of the iPhone was met with a frosty representation.
I believe there is a rising confidence in the corporate world about the way companies like Google and Facebook work, and that can be the key to enter markets controlled by bureaucrats.
We need to call bullshit to those spreadsheeters and power pointers and start spreading.
This isn't a function of how easy software is to use. Some of the stuff I use, I find extremely easy and intuitive. What I fail to remember, is that depending on who's in my group, they may not necessarily understand how to Google small problems they have, or how the internet works in general (yes, I had to explain that URL referred to the text input bar at the top of the browser).
In one case, I actually wrote a PDF document with screenshots, on how to get a specific software working. As the meeting started, I received a call on my cell, with a member asking for help, in connecting. After diagnosing for a little while, I realized it was my fault - I had forgotten to write down that the software needs to be installed first.
As for this: Plugins? Downloads? Port restrictions on certain computers? I haven't checked this out yet, but I appreciate the effort of making meetings easier... but I'd bet six pennies that someone will still manage to screw up.
Occasionally, under certain versions of Windows, it would complain and show a dialogue box during the installation process. We needed to hit a release date (yes, it was our own fault - we didn't have time to deal with the error message in the installer) so on the upgrade instructions, on our website, we added "you may see a box like this [screenshot] - just click the OK button, the box will close and installation will continue".
A couple of days later we had a call from an exasperated customer - "I keep clicking OK but the box won't go away".
After an hour of talking we finally figured out that he was clicking the OK button on the screenshot on the webpage and hadn't even started the upgrade process.
We'll always have a solution targeted at people holding meetings for 25 - 50 people, fully featured, and free.
Advocacy from happy users and the viral nature of the product (everybody you meet with might need their own meeting solution) will power exposure to decision makers at the enterprise clients (who currently use GTM / WebEx) that can flip over 500 accounts at a time.
More on all that in a future post - it's a very interesting market!
It's way better than the last startup I was at, where we had millions of users, but somehow couldn't make any money.
I've already contacted MB via twitter and mail, let's hope I can reach out to the right person to resolve these issues. It's been a some time since I've seen such vulnerabilities in a startup.
http://techcrunch.com/enterprise/
It's amazing to see how these M&A transactions pale in comparison to what's going on in the consumer-oriented space.
"...if you have a free account with MeetingBurner, then we will use the information gathered about you to share more information about our business in an attempt to convince you to make a purchase from us or our associated companies..."
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b) We've built patented tech around cloud which gives us a cost basis that is low and we're self funded with years of runway to build the brand and product the right way.
Boring article about boring business with a screwed-up design. Sorry, not even bothering to read it.
There aren't boring problems. There are boring solutions.
The only reason WebEx stays on top is because their sharing client is top-notch. The ability to select and share specific apps is a huge plus. The current meeting burner sharing client is simplistic, but the ease with which participants can get logged in to a meeting is a big up side. I can't tell you how many times it's taken 10 minutes to walk users through all the "allow" prompts required by WebEx or GoToMeeting.
Consumer is super hot right now... as someone earlier said, it is more likely that you can start a billion dollar consumer business than a b2b play. Some consumer businesses get funded with very little product and no customers (Zaarly, Color, etc). I don't know of any b2b plays that do.
Part of me thought I wanted to join a consumer facing company, but what I've realized is that businesses are consumers too. We get love mail from our customers all the time, from mom and pops to large public companies. It feels awesome and is so rewarding. Good luck on your journey!