The Optimeneur

[optimeneur-blog]

Good enough for now is a critical tool I've employed for years. I find with more time, data and customer feedback, you can iterate at a slightly better vantage point a few weeks or months later

[enhatch]

Mary Meeker, Internet Trends 2014 at the Code Conference

The same that is happening for enterprise tech.  The old, clunky, non-intuitive, and plain old ugly interfaces are slowly getting replaced.  Partly this is due to the growing influence of consumer tech into the enterprise which has changed employees attitude and expectations around software.  The more important influence however is mobile, which has forced the hand of enterprises that wish to mobile enable their workforce, but cannot simply plug in the existing interfaces used for prior versions of client/server and web software.  The medium simply does not work given the smaller screen space and vastly different navigational constructs.  So 2014 is also when we will see a renaissance in enterprise technology and new vendors emerging that specifically target the needs of companies migrating to mobile applications.

[marksbirch]

R.I.P. 2014 to all that bad UX across the software world…next up is the enterprise tech world.

[optimeneur-blog]

This is a big reason we don't experience long enterprise sales cycles, like many others.

[optimeneur-blog]

Moneyball for Startup Sales

I just got done reading my cofounder Mark Birch’s piece on hiring for sales teams.  If you don’t follow his blog and you are in a startup, you really should.  I did for two years before we met

Strong Opinions

His latest post got me thinking about the movie Moneyball.  I’m not a big baseball fan, it never felt like a team sport to me and I enjoyed playing soccer in high school and college, which is much more collaborative.

Mark’s post got me thinking to the part of the movie where Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are preparing for the draft with the recruiters.  A couple of the old timers start talking about how a player looks vs. how they play:

Grady Fuson: Artie, who do you like? Scout Artie: I like Perez. He's got a classy swing, it's a real clean stroke. Scout Barry: He can't hit the curve ball. Scout Artie: Yeah, there's some work to be done, I'll admit that. Scout Barry: Yeah, there is. Scout Artie: But he's noticeable. Matt Keough: And an ugly girlfriend. Scout Barry: What does that mean? Matt Keough: Ugly girl friend means no confidence. Scout Barry: Okay. John Poloni: Oh, now, you guys are full of it, Artie's right. This guy's got an attitude and an attitude is good. I mean it's the kind of guy who walks into a room his dick has already been there for two minutes. Scout Pote: He passes the eye candy test. He's got the looks, he's great at playing the part. He just needs to get some playing time. Matt Keough: I'm just saying his girlfriend is a six at best.

Basing decisions on looks just doesn’t make sense, does it?

Then I started thinking about the first team I ever built.  It was a ragtag team of students, consultants and a employees.  As we were scaling our group at Stryker, we didn’t have headcount but had tons of projects.  I recruited based on whether they were good engineers, not if they were outgoing.  I even had them take the Gallup Strengths Finder and matched their traits and personalities to my own and another manager.

The team I assembled was incredible, but most of the guys/gals wouldn’t have passed the eye candy test.  I remember one VP saying “You can’t put that guy in front of a customer” and a few years later that engineer was converting surgeons and launching products across the world (he's also one of my current cofounders).

In startups, you often don’t have the budget for “seasoned” employees.  In my career, I’ve hired people who are young, smart and hungry.  Mark reminded me of that recently and we are really excited about the team we are building at Enhatch.  Shoot us an email if you are interested [email protected]

"If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there."

[enhatch]

Enterprise software sucks. We don’t talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don’t see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater. And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It’s so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is. What banks were in the 1930’s, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.

via Hacker News

In our ongoing theme around the challenges of enterprise tech (to put it mildly), we found this classic thread from Hacker News from a few years back.  Guess what?  Nothing much as changed.

At Enhatch, we are doing our very best to rethink the way business apps get created and deployed to users.  For one, we believe most needs in the enterprise could easily be handled by elegantly crafted apps that are available on mobile devices.  That is where employees are spending more and more of their day doing work and the device they are most comfortable with.  But more importantly, why are we not giving business users the ability to create their own apps and their own processes that conform to the way they work?  Maybe users, and not IT department or outside consultants, know best as to what they want and when they need it and how to get it done.

It is time we rob the enterprise IT vendors and raid the armies of the systems integrators, and like Robin Hood bring joy, riches, and freedom to the users from the tyranny of bad technology.

(via enhatch)

Enterprise apps suck* * except ours ;) enhatch

[marksbirch]

Changing the world is not so obvious at the beginning

As Airbnb’s valuation grows to north of $10 Billion, it is hard to imagine the company as anything other than the “global hospitality brand" it aspires to become. For someone that was a former road warrior, to realize that my default...

[dfjvc-deactivated20150122]

Savvy entrepreneurs and venture investors tend to “think big”, meaning that they build companies that go after big markets and especially those with incumbents that are ripe for disruption. As a venture capital investor, on the top of my list for 2014? Enterprise software, a $120 billion...

[optimeneur-blog]

What the hell do I do for a living? Being an entrepreneur for most of my career, I have always had a lot of friends and family ask me "what does your /startup do." It used to be easy with my previous company. "I make shoulder implants, like hip implants, but in your humerus, errr, arm" For the past two years, my answer has been different. "My company builds software that makes it easy for the enterprise to build apps for sales and marketing teams" I usually get a few different responses... "I've got a great idea for an app" Or "Do you know what the best app is... Or "My cousin has a restaurant, can you build them an app" Or "Is there any money in that" But now, I can just point to this article and say "read this" this is exactly what we are doing... And yes, he said $750 Billion, with a B.

[optimeneur-blog]

Only you can build the Perfect Enterprise Application

After reading Todd McKinnon's article on Techcrunch, I started dreaming about the perfect enterprise app.  There were fishbowls and gumdrops, lions and tigers and bears... Yes, I have some weird dreams.

I am unsure that an IT department can create the perfect enterprise app because they probably don't suffer from the same pain that the "business" people suffer from.  All the customer development and wireframes in the world does not replace the pure understanding of the pain.  Why was Travis Kalanick/crew able to create uber?  Because he suffered from the problem of not being able to get a taxi in San Francisco and had the initiative, creativity and resources to do something about it.

My proposal is in the spirit of the Lean Startup.  Build, Measure, Learn, Repeat. 

Building the perfect enterprise app requires a constant innovation and iteration on the needs of an organization.  For this to happen quickly and efficiently, I believe it needs to be designed, built, tested and iterated upon by the people who live and breathe the pain every day.  For this reason, there is no perfect enterprise app across any vertical because not only is every company different, but even within a company, the needs of different product groups will likely require different applications. 

The one thing that can be common is the branding and functionality.  These apps also need to feel much like consumer experiences that people are used to.  Common conventions are important, don't try to reinvent the wheel or be too flashy.

Show me someone working with antiquated software in the Enterprise, and I will show you someone who experiences pain.  Give that person the tools they need to solve their own pain, and you may get close to the perfect enterprise app for themselves or for their group. 

Can you imagine what would happen if enterprise employees were able to solve their own problems by building their own enterprise applications without any code?  Isn't that a cool idea that a team with years of experience on the "business" side of the Enterprise should really tackle?

Don't worry, we are on it.  I'm sending the Wolf!

http://youtu.be/ojTKkfgvwvU?t=12s

[marksbirch]

You may have noticed that the blogging has been rather light the past few weeks. It is not that I am ignoring you, but it has been a whirlwind since I first announced my big news. I took the leap and landed at a startup. However, I have been less vocal about what I am doing exactly and where I...

[optimeneur-blog]

We cheated at the Salesforce Hackathon #df13 #sfw

It’s true, but I was told it was okay in the Dreamforce forums and that we would be judged on what “new” thing we implemented. So I was aware and we didn't win so no one really cares.

Did we win, no.  Did we lose, no.  I had a great time with my buddy marksbirch , we learned a lot about how our software works and a lot about how we work together.  We built a demo that we can use for companies like Philips Healthcare and integrated Salesforce.com.  Philips was showcased in the Salesforce keynote as was ADP.  I think our app kicks both of those apps asses, if an app has an ass to kick.

And we did it in just over 24 hours - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLHUQGH6yAc

I am a true believer that business people understand how to run their business and not fancy implementation consultants.  If software is eating the world, then why can’t it eat programmers too?  Yum, yum.

For the past few months we’ve been building a platform that builds sales/marketing/CRM apps without code.  It does what python or ruby does, but without programming.  Think about it, are any of you programming in binary or machine language these days.  There is a reason for that.

My advice to the rest of the hackers.  Always build products that your startup could benefit from, this makes the sting much less if you lose.  Be thankful for what you learned, for who you met, for what you accomplished.  I’ve been a part of many great “losing” teams in the past, but we always came out winners.  It’s about the experience, get the most out of the experience and be happy with that.  Yeah, a million bucks would have been awesome, but when you build a product that helps your company in any way, it was still time worth spent.

[optimeneur-blog]

The CRM of the Future (like a few weeks from now)

We've been going really deep with a handful of customers from several different verticals involved with Complex Sales.  We've been at their customer meetings, at their tradeshows and at the same time pitching our own product to prospective customers.  I call it hand to hand combat, which I think I stole from college friend and sales idol of mine, Matt Greeley of BrightIdea.  (These guys know how to sell Enterprise SaaS software).

The key thing I've seen over the past several months is that many verticals share the same complexities in the sales process.  It's not easy, it's intuitive for so many great sales reps and it's tough for so many people trying to come up the ranks.  But for all of them, it's really hard to keep track of all this activity and most of them aren't using a small fraction of their CRM systems.

What I am very excited about is that all of our learning from over a dozen of the world's best sales teams, is a simple and intuitive system that works for the sales rep, not against it.  A system that makes tracking all aspects of the sales process quick and painless and on their mobile devices.  Most importantly, it's not just about Getting Customers, but it's actually about the entire Customer Relationship!

I've been following marksbirch Strong Opinions blog about CRM lately and we've had some great conversations over beers. 

Definitely read his most recent posts about CRM, I totally agree with his strong opinions and let me tell you something... Sales Reps everywhere also agree! These interfaces were built for people who sit behind desktop computers with giant screens and there are a whole slew of people who don't and want a simpler, more powerful tool.

http://birch.co/post/62830753821/crm-interfaces-of-shame http://birch.co/post/62828684681/strong-opinions-on-crm

[optimeneur-blog]

The Sales and Marketing Professional in 2013

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the CMO getting more "IT" budget than IT in the near future.  I find it funny that this type of thing always gets a lot of hype AFTER it shows up in Harvard Business Review. 

This is an obvious trend, especially if you look at sales and marketing people on the ground in 2013.  The people who are out there slugging away every day.  They are looking for ways to simplify and enhance their current processes, and the LAST thing that they want to do is rely upon somebody else, like IT.  They just go out there and figure it out themselves.  We've seen this trend for sometime now, as early as 2011, when we met with a bunch of sales reps who were doing whatever they could to manage all the content that their companies were sending them by email. Dropbox, Box, iBooks... Just to make themselves more mobile.

During the beta release of Enhatch, we started seeing very active sales reps that create extremely detailed apps with hundreds of videos, presentations, 3D models, websites... you name it.  And we are not just talking about "Millenials" doing this, we are noticing that Gen Xers are down with technology as well as the Boomers.  

This comes back to the point that software is eating all kinds of things, even computer programmers.

[optimeneur-blog]

The Best Part of Waking Up is Folgers in your cup!

Okay, I don't drink coffee anymore.  And I only ever drink Folgers when I visit my Dad, Starbucks Venti Triple Espresso was my drug of choice.  But I gave that up over 9 months ago and I feel so much better.

Coffee has very little to do with this post.  It's actually about the part where you wake up and smell the coffee.  That's what happened yesterday.  A little while ago, I had the pleasure of going to an amazing meetup at the Standard Biergarten with the Enterprise Tech / FinTech meetup groups.  So many great people in NY Tech.  Pure gold. 

During the night I met a guy I follow on Twitter named marksbirch but didn't realize it was him.  The guy kept talking about dumplings and I said "you should really follow Mark Birch on Twitter, he loves dumplings too."  It's not really my fault, Mark wears a crazy motorcycle helmet in his avatar (which is truly a great avatar with a great story behind it).  We had an awesome conversation but both of us had a few pints and I wanted to follow up with him when I was sober and our product was a little further along.  My key takeaway was that Mark use to be heavily into CRM and after checking his LinkedIn profile, uh yeah.  He's been there, done that.

Fast Forward several weeks when our new product is nearing completion and I ping Mark.  Great thing about the NY Tech scene is that he responded rather quickly and we got together yesterday for a chat.  This is very typical here and I love how accessible everyone is.  Mark spent way too much time with me, introduced me to some amazing cookies and I really appreciate it.  He went through the ins/outs of the CRM space, gave me a bit of history and helped me understand what we are building at Enhatch. 

For a few months, we've been building a streamlined way to integrate with CRM.  But I didn't fully understand what we were doing until Mark said it back to me in his own words.  Paraphrasing.. Salesforce put CRM in the cloud.  They didn't reinvent the wheel, they just eliminated the need for servers, but the databases, the forms, the fields, hasn't really changed in over 20 years.  You started with Mobile and are building from there, this is what has to happen for CRM to evolve.

And yes, we have been working on a completely new "front end for the CRM," but by doing so, we are also reinventing the CRM.  We started with the Marketer who creates content and built a product that let's them build beautiful and engaging nonlinear apps for their Sales team.  And we capture all kinds of interesting data points about the pitch and when the customer is invited, how they use the app.  What are they reading and why?  This funnels back to the marketer and helps them understand what people want to read and pitch with. In the same app, we bring together sales teams and let them compare their pitch.  How did they overcome an objection, how did they kick off the conversation?  These are questions everyone has, but not everyone can answer.  But our software does and the sales rep never has to leave the app to record anything into a silly old CRM.

But before I go, I want to thank the "crazy helmet wearing dumpling guy." Thank you @marksbirch for your time, your insight and the cookie!  Best of luck with Dumplr and if you are looking to pick up Python, we're happy to put you to work on some good ol' enterprise class code.

[optimeneur-blog]

Hoboken and Enhatch... Stronger than the Storm

Our company, Enhatch, has decided to make Hoboken, NJ our home.  In October of last year, we moved a lot of our stuff out of the @bphealth offices with the intention of setting up shop across the river.  It makes sense, this is where we all went to college and most of the guys live now and let's admit it, we're Jersey Boys (Got something to Say about that? Say it to my face, haha, just kidding).  But that weekend Sandy hit and the town was under water for a while. 

Our CTO @edpaulosky went back home during this time and was visiting  the local Starbucks that had power and internet whenever he needed to commit to Github.  My CPO uberphipps was dealing with a tree in his house and his car that floated down the street somewhere into Jersey City.  It was a crazy time, I had a piece of lattice blow off my porch.  Okay, we had it easier out in the burbs.

We tried out a few places around town, but nothing felt right, so in the meantime, we were working out of Ed's apartment until everything got cleaned up.  Unfortunately for Hoboken Radiology, they lost a very expensive MRI machine.  Fortunately for us, we found a great spot right by the Path station.

And let me tell you why Hoboken is so great.  My rent for a small office is cheaper than the price of one table at most coworking spaces in NYC.  Nuts!  When dollars need to be focused on product and customer acquisition, why would you spend thousands on a few fancy desks.  Some days we have 7 people in the office, that's like $3500 a month.  We've got our eye on a 550 SF office for $1800 if we grow faster.  That's smart.  And I can get into Manhattan in 15 minutes.  I can get uptown to see an investor and come back faster than when we were in Soho. 

The other great thing about Hoboken is the growing tech community.  Still a happy relative to the NY tech scene, Hoboken is becoming a hub for many startups in NJ and this is being led by a great guy and entrepreneur, Aaron Price @apstartup.  Expect great things out of @njtech in the coming months and years and I anticipate Hoboken and Aaron will continue to play a key role in our city/state's success

[optimeneur-blog]

What is an Optimeneur??? Me.

What the hell is an Optimeneur? It's a radically Optimistic Entrepreneur.  That's me, Peter V.  I am also the Ever Optimizing Entrepreneur.  It's in my DNA, trust me, I had it checked.

I see things that don't work right and want to figure out how to make them work.  It's fun, it's what I live for.  Like a child playing with Legos, that's how I roll with business, technology, product and companies.  How can I get the legos organized, can I get them to touch the ceiling without falling, can I get them to crash and make a really cool pattern on the floor. 

Build, Break, Rebuild.  It's the only way to make progress.

So why am I radically optimistic.  Because I'm pretty sure we are going to change how companies interact with their customers, a way for every enterprise to create Intense Customer Loyalty.  Not a widget or a feature.  I've already helped over a million patients walk better with products I designed and launched in the medical device space.  Now it's time to revolutionize the way companies connect with their customers!