Rich Martell – founder of digital media group Floxx waxes lyrical on three themes of online business.
Social, mobile and local
Social is becoming even more important. We’ve got to the stage where you start to see things pop up.
Things that you used to do are now becoming social.
For example, listening to music, running. You used to just listen to music and you’d just put it on, but now if you go on Facebook you can see what your friends are listening to and you can see if you are listening to the same music at the same time.
Now when you run you can put your Nike+ app on the iPhone and connect it with Facebook and as you are running along people can cheer you.
Going Mobile
There is the aspect that things are now going mobile because people have smartphones – we’re in that business as we build apps for that.
50% of phones in the UK are now smart phones
But also business social media is going more local. Facebook Places shows people are using apps about locations so we build apps giving people offers that are nearby, e.g. telling people where the best restaurants are.
Technology is so fast-moving but we’ve yet to see its full potential.
I have no doubt that in the future things will go to TV. You’ll flick on the TV and see the BBC and you’ll see what your friends are watching. The whole aspect of the social graph will become ingrained in everything that we do.
Find a sounding board
It’s always important to have a mentor or a group of advisors to sound out ideas. Even if it is somebody who is not formally involved, just someone that you can ask ‘Can I just bounce an idea off you?’
A lot of entrepreneurs are worried that they don’t want to give away their idea. But I say the idea is 5% and execution is 95%, even if you really give somebody your idea. If I have an idea I am not afraid to tell the people I trust. I want to sound it out, as a good idea to me might not be to other people. And I’ve come up with a lot of bad ideas!
A word on brand naming
In my experience it is always a lot easier and a lot cheaper to come up with a name so that people will know what your product does from you just saying the name. We had FitFinder as our first website, which was about finding ‘fit’ [attractive] people. It was a name that I came up with in two minutes and it wasn’t supposed to be spread to more than just my close friends, but it worked really well.
When we came to doing Floxx, the iteration of FitFinder, we were thinking about how people would look at it from a worldwide perspective. We were trying to build up a worldwide brand. In this day and age to build up a brand name on its own like Google, Spotify or Skype you’ve got to have a huge marketing budget to get any traction on that.
There are cases where it does work, but from my experience it’s a lot easier having a name that is somewhat related. When it comes to doing an ‘elevator pitch’ if your name sounds like what it does it works a lot better.
