Adii Pienaar

Something really cool has happened recently with regards to the contributors for Aboard Entrepreneurship: it has gone somewhat viral. :)

A couple of the new contributors that has joined up in the last week, has taken the individual initiative to introduce us to some more awesome entrepreneurs and had recommended that they get involved with the project. As you can imagine it is pretty hard getting the attention of well-known people (like all of our contributors) as e-mail overload is a real issue for most of us, which is why these viral introductions & recommendations have been amazing!

Here's the 4 new contributors:

• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Roy Rodenstein, Going.com
• Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Hacker
• Gabe Weinberg, DuckDuckGo

We're very close to having 1000 people signed up to the mailing list at this stage. Head on over to the site and sign up to be notified of the next phase of the project which will be launching soon.

I just watched this video and I quite enjoyed some of the insight that went into the creation of Tumblr and kudo's to David for not doing the cliche thing which is to knock other tools; instead he believes in a "horses for courses" mentality whereby Tumblr is used for certain reasons, whilst other people still prefer WP (or others) for other reasons.

Having myself been through various ups & downs in terms of blogging and content-creation over the last 4 years, I can attest to everything David said in the little interview. Heck, this even saw me move to Tumblr, which was quite a significant thing considering I'm co-founder of one of the biggest WordPress companies on the web.

Since then I have however been able to move back to WordPress (powered by Woo of course) and I now have 90% of the functionality I had with Tumblr, plus the added benefit of not battling Tumbeasts and owning my own data.

Hopefully within the next day or two, WooThemes will be able to release a little something that too will give you Tumblr-like functionality on your own, hosted WordPress-powered platform.

My natural instinct is to blog about "how life is a rollercoaster" or something silly like that (purely because the photo would compliment content like that), but that kinda content probably doesn't justify the photo much...

Instead I'd say that I've been experiencing a kind of rollercoaster effect in my working days. Work will be going well and my productivity would be right up there and then - at random - the drive to finish something or to move onto the next to do just vanishes completely in a very "bleh" moment.

Anybody else experience that kinda, sudden drop in motivation / productivity?

Since 500 Startups - headed up by Dave McClure - announced its new Accelerator program, I've been following their blog where they've gotten the founders of their startups blogging about loads of different things. In one short summary, I think this strategy is absolutely brilliant.

It goes without saying that Dave McClure obviously has a lot of pull in the startup world, which is why 500 Startups have been successful in getting the kind of funding they have. Taking that a step further, as a result of Dave's reputation the media has been all over the launch of their Accelerator program and the 500 Startups blog is thus a perfect place for these startups to be getting some traffic (which is what they are getting by blogging on their).

But there's a flipside to this: this is also working out really well for 500 Startups. Content is still king and there's always a marketing strategy involved when you can create quality content, which is what the founders are doing. So in a very similar way in which we are using the audiences of the individual entrepreneurs contributing to Aboard Entrepreneurship (to generate traffic), 500 Startups is leveraging the experience and knowledge from their founders not only to build new businesses, but also to generate hype & traffic for the company. Brilliant!

WooThemes is a predominately B2B business. We sell products to people that use them in their own businesses or for their personal projects; most of which has a direct or indirect focus on generating a financial return of some kind.

So whilst we have a pretty diverse customer base, they share one characteristic that has been hugely profitable to us: they do not mind spending money on our products.

I guess this is sounding really simple and obvious right about now, but I've got a point here. :) To do so, we just need to back up a bit and look at a very basic example of how a business / entrepreneur operates...

Entrepreneur A invests $100 in his new trading business. He buys $100 worth of goods, sets up a little stall somewhere and proceeds to sell all of his goods with a nifty profit mark-up for $150. To re-stock he again purchases $100 worth of goods and re-invests his profit of $50 in making spiffy new (premium) packaging for his goods. Due to the new packaging, he manages to sell his goods at an increased mark-up and generates $200 in revenue.

Simple take-away from this story: Entrepreneur reinvested the $50 profits (from his first round of sales) in packaging, because he knew that it'd contribute positively to his revenues (and ultimately his ROI). He didn't spend the money on a new office (which may not have contributed to his ROI), but reinvested directly in something that would enhance his business.

Back to B2B

Back to what I said about WooThemes' users... I believe that WooThemes' users are happy spending money on our products, because it enhances their businesses and / or personal projects. Because this is directly or indirectly linked to generating a financial return, the expenditure of buying a WooThemes product could potentially turn into a simple reinvestment in enhancing those businesses.

The fact that the majority of our sales are thus B2B-esque, has meant that even though economies worldwide has suffered from economic recession we've been able to grow our business. Recession doesn't mean that people stop spending money; they're just thinking twice about every dollar that leaves their bank account, which means they're more than happy to spend money on something that will enhance their businesses / potentially generate more revenue.

VC Focus

I spoke with a prominent, US-based VC a couple of weeks ago about WooThemes and asked him point-blank why they were interested in our company, considering that we'd never rack up the kind of user numbers that the "platforms" like Facebook, Twitter & Tumblr can boast. He remarked that they believed there to be a shift in the marketplace where companies - like WooThemes - could profitably provide value-added, B2B-type products to users within those platform ecosystems.

Whether that has influenced their firm's investments, I don't know, but - to me anyway - it made a lot of sense.

B2B products and services just seem to be less sensitive in tough times and I certainly don't think that we have to fight as hard for every single sale on WooThemes when compared to general consumer expenditure.

So if you're thinking about starting a startup, I don't think it's a bad idea to create something that will enable other people to make more money. Even VC's seem to be liking that model.