This interview is part of our Expert Advice series, where CEO's, CMO's and best selling authors share their expertise.
Bryan: A quick look at your company site reveals that you are somewhat of a serial entrepreneur. What is your business history?
Peter: In a nutshell, none. I’ve always had odd jobs growing up. My father was pretty handy so I learned how to do a lot from him. I liked my independence so started doing odd jobs and decorating around the neighborhood for cash. I wasn’t particularly good in school and I suppose that took a lot of my self confidence away. I was also interested in lots of things so ended up hopping from one college course to another (art and design to film to IT).
I never lost my obsession with ideas, questioning the status quo and looking for smarter, quicker ways to complete tasks. I’m still amazed at how one person decides the way something should be done, based on little knowledge, and no matter how wrong you can prove them, they’ll stick with it.
I then got my first real job working in Rabobank after traveling Australia I worked in the infrastructure department from tech support up to manager. At one stage I dropped into the banks GM at the time and asked him how I would go about setting up a bank. He roared laughing saying you’ll never have enough money but loved the fact he’d never been asked the question. Two years later I was working on the first online-only internet bank in Ireland called RaboDirect. Although we had Rabobank behind us, the bank was still put together with a very small team. I remember thinking back to my meeting with the GM and thinking to myself ‘see, everything is possible’. That’s when the idea of working for myself and my love for the web started.
Bryan: Your projects seem to be united, not by industry, but by making things simpler. How do you evaluate new projects before taking them on?
Peter: I suppose when I started off with SplitMyBill and SetMyCompanyUp it started by scratching an itch. SetMyCompanyUp was my first project and started after I registered my company. I, being curious, looked into what was needed to form a company. Sighting it too risky, I paid a company €400 and on receiving the products realized it was just form filling. So I hired an out of work solicitor and went about building SetMyCompanyUp. SplitMyBill would be similar; I noticed that people who organized sports teams or trips away always had hassle collecting money off people. Not so much the transaction but the social awkwardness associated with reminding people that they owed you money. Now I take a slightly different approach, I’ve just partnered with a client on a project they were looking to build called JustPlaySport.com and here are the things I looked for in this project before committing to it:
- Scalable: How hard would it be to localize to different countries, laws, or will it require expensive data storage, comm’s etc.
- On the money: Does the site enable a business to directly generate more income and is the site part of that flow or transaction.
- Community: Is there a current community out there that can be targeted to reduce marketing costs?
- Death by Feature: Could it easily be killed off by a competitor, like Facebook adding a button.
- Instant Money: Does it generate revenue from day one, or is a tipping point of people needed.
- Simple: Can I build it for under 10k with change (that includes design and build). This is probably one of the more important ones.
- Multiplicity: Can the product be sold as a white label, and it be rebranded and targeted at a different market.
Bryan: Do most of your projects deliver the service automatically? How much labor is involved once a sale is made? Cite an example.
Peter: Like the points I made in what attracts me to a product, scalability is key. Products that require a lot of labor are hard to scale. I’m not saying impossible but when you’re boot-strapping a business, the thoughts of having to hire ten sales people to spend six months building a pipeline and only then bringing in sales scares me. I set up Green Apple Media with the idea of building sites for clients, believing this was the only way I could learn everything about the web. The products were nice to have sidelines. I very soon realized that scalability in a service based business is way too difficult. The products are now my focus.
The core of all of my products are designed to be automated. Though when building the product I might delay some automation until the volume of business forces it. This keeps development costs smaller and focused. An example would be every company formed under SetMyCompanyUp we donate ten percent to charity. The entire formation process is completely automated noting most formations happen after 10pm, but we like to send a mail to the new startup attaching our charity thank you document. To create this document I edit a word template and save as pdf and email. When we hit the tipping point we’ll automate this but right now there’s better features to spend money on. Similarly we’re just launching a white label version of SetMyCompanyUp to sell into Accountants and Solicitors. The product is priced at about 80c per day, €290 per year. We’re going to sell it manually into the sector to get a feel from feedback before adding a billing engine again saving cost and keeping the focus on the core product.
