Alan Smith, CEO of Oprius, and his team spent a year researching, planning and designing before launching their sales and contact management software for people doing network sales. (Network salespeople are the folks selling things like Tupperware, Avon, etc.) Since all sales people will pretend business is great, they used “the swimming pool test” to…
Having spent time in New York, Joanna Track was frustrated when she came back to Canada and couldn’t buy many of the fashion items she wanted online. So she combined her experience in the magazine industry with her love of fashion and created eLuxe.com. The website is a high quality fashion magazine that sells the…
My interview with SendToNews CEO, Greg Bobolo, almost didn’t happen because fog kept him stuck in Vancouver for two days. Not exactly a hardship, I know! This fast-growing Canadian company has massively disrupted how video from sports events is made and distributed. Their radical business model makes everyone a winner … except for sports reporters, whose…
If you are a retailer, reading Doug Stephens’ new book, Retail Revival: Reimagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism, is a bit like skydiving: terrifying yet thrilling. If you figure out how to open the parachute in time, you’ll have a wonderful journey. If not … Average Won’t Work Anymore There is hope for…
Speaker after speaker at this week’s Dx3 conference stressed that to succeed in marketing today you have to “think like a publisher”. The key, they all believe, is to put out a lot of good, relevant content and your prospects will come to you rather than you having to chase them. One company that is…
FunctionFox got into the software-as-a-service (SAAS) marketplace early, developing a simple time tracking sheet for ad agencies, design firms and other small, creative teams. Starting early meant that they didn’t have any web-based competition when they started, but it also meant they had to overcome some initial resistance to the idea of web-based time tracking. Combining a…
When I recorded this interview with Dave Phillips, founder of Ubervideo in Victoria, Canada, I was still stalling on recording my first video. As you know, I’ve now done so (you can watch it here) and I’m preparing several others. Why is Video Important for Online Marketing? People like watching video. We are getting lazier…
Internet Jargon The first article I sold as a freelance writer was an article demystifying marketing jargon for businesspeople. I had just finished an MBA, and it bothered me that smart entrepreneurs were being intimidated by MBAs and their jargon. (I’ll have to see if I can find a copy of that article!) The Internet…
One of the fun things about interviewing entrepreneurs is seeing how many different ways people can approach the same topic. Take gift cards. Frances Ho, of CardSwap, (click to hear my interview with CardSwap), and Leif Baradoy, of Kiind (today’s interviewee) both noticed that a lot of gift cards go unused. CardSwap looked at the problem from…
Scott Pielsticker, CEO of Toronto start-up, Contact Monkey, helped solve a mystery for me in this interview. I’ve always wondered why it is so tough to sell usability testing services. There is a ton of research proving that the money you spend on usability testing is paid back many times over, because improved usability (i.e.…
