ajit verghese

@hannibalburess has the right idea

Hannibal Buress is one of my new favorite comedians. I was first introduced to him when he performed with Aziz Ansari in Boston . He is doing something interesting with his Twitter bio that I just noticed today when researching his next show in Boston (It’s Feb 24 at Great Scott).

Buress included the first 4 dates from his 2012 tour in his bio (screenshot above) -  this is interesting because a Twitter user who either follows the comedian or sees a retweet of content that he shared is apt to click on his profile for more info. I don’t have hard numbers, but would assume that the conversion from viewing a Twitter user’s bio to clicking on the link within the profile is low. Making the bio portion of a Twitter profile dynamic and useful as opposed to some static blather is a creative use that engages THIS user. I would love to know if it ends up converting more Twitter users into going to see Hannibal Buress perform - my bet is that it probably does. This only works if the content is always kept up-to-date. I hope that it ends up generating more attendance for Buress.

Setting aside risk, more launching own companies

There’s a nice article in Sunday’s edition of the Boston Herald about entrepreneurship.

GoodEatsFor.Me and I both get a nice shout out at the tail end of the article. Full text of the article is below (original link.) Thanks Jennifer!

Typically, it’s the entrepreneurs and the small- business owners who pull an economy out of a recession. But this one has been different.

Housing values dropped. Bank loans to small companies declined. Markets around the world that might have picked up the slack stumbled. Many would-be entrepreneurs were either too scared to get started or they couldn’t find the funds.

That appears to be changing, according to a report released last week. The number of people launching or running young companies worldwide grew about 60 percent last year to nearly 400 million, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report.

Rather than being an indication of how good things are now, however, it’s a sign of how bad they’ve been. The number of new entrepreneurs in the United States hasn’t been this high since 2005, well before the economic plunge.

“It could be that people delayed starting businesses,” said Donna Kelley, a co-author of the report and Babson College professor, explaining the jump. “It could be that people don’t see their jobs coming back.”

In the United States, more people saw opportunities and planned to start businesses, even while the fear of failure climbed to 31.2 percent from 26.7 percent in the previous year.

“People may see more risk in starting a business, and this may be linked to the recession,” Kelley said.

New business owners agreed that there’s risk, but said they couldn’t wait.

Matt Chatham had been working on his plans for a SkyCrepers, a crepe franchise, for more than five years when he finally launched the company in 2010. During that time, he was going to school and developing the concept.

“I would be hesitant if I were coming to the market with something that already existed,” said Chatham, a former Patriots [team stats] linebacker. “I felt more comfortable because we’re unique and we’re filling a void.”

Michael Norwood, who has launched two companies in recent months, said he’d rather face the unpredictability of launching a business than that of the job market.

“I figured if I can succeed in an uncertain economic environment than I can survive in good times,” he said.

Norwood is building Type-U, a social movement for families of people with diabetes, and runs a mobile flip-flop store called Woodywear Mobile Merchandise.

Some have hesitated to start because they didn’t think they could raise enough money, but attitudes have changed, said James Hilton, co-founder of Jacox-Hilton Producer Consulting, which provides analysis tools for life insurance advisers.

“Folks are starting to get used to the idea that they will have to bootstrap,” he said.

GoodEatsFor.Me founder Ajit Verghese said entrepreneurs have had to get creative about financing.

“The realities of launching a startup is that regardless of how lean you can make your operations, you still require capital,” he said. “So to fund myself and the business, I became entrepreneurial, went back to my digital roots and started consulting with big and small brands.”

Verghese’s venture, which helps hospitality companies track their social media, started work on the company in 2009 and went live with the beta site in 2010.

“I’ve spent the past 32 months working, traveling and speaking with many established and budding entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and large brands,” he said. “I’m seeing a lot of innovation, new ideas launched and more risks taken from entrepreneurs in and outside the U.S.”

2011 in review: we accomplished a lot and have so much more to do in 2012!

Here’s a good roundup of what Mike and I worked on this year with our startup GoodEatsFor.Me. 2012 is going to be a huuuuge success! Stay tuned.

goodeatsforme:

                 

It is customary to spend the tail end of every year reflecting on what has transpired over the past 12 months.  Goal setting ensues once the 1st day of the new year arrives, with a focus on self improvement, elimination of vices and lofty milestones. 

I’ve been terrible in consistently documenting efforts to grow our company. I hope to do a better job in the coming months, in addition to growing our business, increasing the traction we currently have and raising some capital. We’ll write more in the coming weeks about some new developments and directions, but for now, here’s an analysis of what has taken place over the last 12 months.

 2011 was a year full of success and failure and galvanizing experiences that helped us grow GoodEatsFor.Me and better understand our business, our customers, ourselves and the challenges of startup life. 

In January of 2011 we applied to TechStars Boston for the second time. Unlike the previous year, we had a product and some customer feedback and as such were selected to attend TechStars For A Day (#TS4AD) in Boston to meet the team and discuss our candidacy. Unfortunately, i was traveling outside of the US when we found out that we were asked to attend TS4AD. Lucky for me i have an awesome cofounder in Mike who got on the Acela from NYC, came down to Boston and represented us well (despite contracting a horrible case of food poisoning the night before - a story of epic proportions ). While we thought we made a compelling case for Techstars Boston in 2011, alas it was not to be. 

We had applied to the New York University Stern School of Business New Venture competition (Mike’s alma mater) at the end of 2010 and  were in the throes of competition around the same time we received our TechStars Boston rejection.  Mike and I had applied to the competition in 2008 with our failed startup CoachAlly and progressed to the quarterfinals. Over the course of the next several months up through April 2011, Mike and I updated the competition committee on our progress and perfected our pitch deck. We steadily advanced throughout the competition to the semifinals, but after 9 months of competition, we didn’t make the finals and had to be content with being one of 30 semifinalists in competition from an original set of 230 teams.  

In February, our application to the Foursquare app gallery was approved and we were included amongst all the other apps that use the Foursquare API. We recieved a lot of signups from our inclusion in the app gallery. 

Around the same time we were negotiating our first marketing and distribution partnership with Managed Data Group, a Point-of-sale integrator who helps hospitality establishments normalize the point of sale data across multiple businesses. This partnership provided us with distribution, revenue and good customer feedback about our offering and where we needed to focus our efforts. 

As this was the first time Mike and I needed to officially sign something, we needed to incorporate. Through the wonderful introduction of our friend and fellow entrepreneur Russell Wallace (CEO of CivicSponsor)  I ended up connecting with Richard Hesp at the law firm Gunderson Dettmer. They got us incorporated, helped us negotiate the contract and supported us through the entrepreneurial process.  They’ll be helpful to us and we hope to use their services a lot more over the coming months as we grow the business and raise our first round.

Press opportunities are always good and I was approached by my friend Mike Schneider at the end of March 2011 to talk about a new book he was coauthoring with Aaron Strout - location based marketing for dummies. We ended up submitting a writeup and were included in the book as ‘one of the management tools to use’. The book was published in August of 2011 and you can get your copy on Amazon here.  

Mike and his colleague Eric Liest of Allen & Gerritsen were kind enough to interview me on their web show TechInterruption talking about the future of GoodEats and my thoughts on the industry at the end of April 2010.

In early May I also ended up representing GoodEatsFor.Me on a Tastybytes panel entitled “LBS - Not Just for Mayors” hosted by Compete.com.

We received some press mentions over the course of the year, including a mention in Xconomy in July, a mention in Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog in September and a nice piece in the Boston Business Journal in December of 2011. 

We are excited about 2012 and are hard at work launching some new things that we hope will help our customers and the industry. 

 As of January 2012, we have over 100+ beta signups and are working on some big improvements to the site that should help merchants get more value out of GoodEatsFor.Me and help us open up the beta to anyone who wants to sign up to try out our service for free! A bunch of improvements are going to make GoodEatsFor.Me the easiest system to set up and monitor the social activity around your establishment and we are experimenting with a big new idea that should help both our fellow hospitality Startups and the merchants they service. We hope to announce more at the end of the month, so stay tuned and thank you for your support.