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Beautiful Evidence
The Art of the Start
The Bootstrapper's Bible (eBook)
The Business of Software
Guerrilla Marketing
Sudok! (It’s Kudos backwards)
I had the pleasure of meeting the future founders of Xobni at a Webinno event last year. Smart kids with a neat idea around data mining Outlook. I pointed them toward Dmitri Streblenko’s Redemption, which is a great utility (and near as I can tell the industry standard for getting around the OMG, though there are alternatives).
They were about to get their Y-Combinator funding at the time, and since then, they moved west and raised institutional money. Their space looks sweet too. (But did they have to pose all those pics?)
I like this business because I think data-focused businesses are more resilient than the lighter-weight “digital media” trend that so many people are glomming onto. It also creates value for user one, but by analyzing communications data, value can increase on a higher exponent as they look at the data of additional people, and the cost can go down as well (because an inbound from one person is the outbound for another, and could be analyzed as a single record). Both of these are even more true when working within a network, such that customer reference marketing (or, more likely, same-firm expansion) leads to the highest value for the customer, in addition to the reduction in COCA such a strategy usually implies.
And wow, it’s nice to see someone in the software business instead of the media business. There’s definitely value in the latter, but the former is where I get excited, and I wish all the best for Adam and Matt.