WOW, up to part 5! Who knew it would take so long to write about the events of one day. I’ve been trying to keep the posts at 300-500 words to keep it from being so long, but I never thought I’d go out to 5 posts and beyond.
The last 3 sessions were discussions and conversations, so these posts are much more involved to enable me to give you the basis of the conversations and my take on them. From this post forward I will title the posts as the root conversation to assist you (and me) in keeping up with them.
After the session of FriendFeed that turned into a good conversation, I moved to a session on eCommerce and Entrepreneurialism in Memphis. I was interested in this topic as ALWAYS have ideas, I just don’t know what to do with them. I was hoping to get some answers on starting up in Memphis but as you would see, I didn’t get my exact answer.
This session was facilitated by a person who is living the topic, Dale Berryhill, “Chief Spotter” of a very interesting concept, a site known as Onthisveryspot.com. Onthisveryspot.com is a travel guide with a twist where you can research sites of a historical nature, or other interest and book events and travel based on that selection. In their own words from their about page:
Welcome to the world’s first Reverse Travel Guide!TM
Look up famous people, things, or events, and we’ll show you places around the world related to them.
Our goal is to pinpoint every spot on the globe where interesting things have happened!
Dale began to describe the problems gathering capital from VCs in this region as well as the trouble Memphis seems to have gathering good talent to assist in the building and growth of eCommerce sites in Memphis. Several benefits to eCommerce were detailed, such as low overhead and smaller long term costs, especially if you do not manage an inventory.
Dale also did a great job outlining the growth of the eBusiness model with a fact that I found very interesting. Dale stated Google had twice the market value of GM after 2 years on the market. It now makes sense why everyone seems to be scrambling to get a piece of this huge pie. I also had a thought while listening to the conversation. The old adage, “If you build it, they will come.” is dead and buried. With the saturation and shear depth of the products and services available on the web these days, if you do not find a niche and fill it, you will not survive. You also have to work at it, as hard, if not harder, as you would in a traditional business model. It takes extreme effort to pull together the idea and the site for eCommerce to work.
Another point of discussion was the lack of a community of programmers/developers in the Memphis area. The economic and educational support in this city does not seem to be conducive to supporting a high-tech business model. My main question down this line of thinking however, is have we started concentrating on the tools and back-end over the idea itself? Frankly, in today’s global society, do we really need a huge base of talent here in Memphis to do a solid high tech business in Memphis? I know, as members of the community, we want to hire and spend our capital in the city in which we reside, but can we allow that to be a barrier to our ability to “get the job done” and act on the ideas we have? There is a huge base of coders and developers around the world who can invest time and energy in development if we seed them our ideas and give them the funds and tools needed to build them for us. You may push this idea aside as “outsourcing” but it is not outsourcing if it was never “insourced.”
Another barrier we may raise would be the inability to make the person that is over 1000 miles away understand our idea well enough to build it. This idea has merits but if we cannot adequately communicate our idea to a technically minded person in a manner sufficient for him to understand and build out our idea, how can you expect your customer to understand your idea and spend money with you? Are we making it tougher on ourselves needlessly?
While the session didn’t really answer my root questions, it did one very successful thing; It made me rethink my questions. I believe we may be stuck in a regional mode of thinking for the development of our sites and ideas. While our concept may be pointedly directed at a region or certain niche, we cannot allow ourselves to think this way on the back-end development of the idea itself. To do so limits us unnecessarily and can be a hinderance to our success. If the region has the talent to support us in development and maintenance, then great, if it doesn’t, why wait for the area to catch up to us? Do what you must and then when you are earning, reinvest in the area for the future.
I’d like to know your thoughts, especially if you are in the Mid-South region. Do we have what it takes to become another tech hub or are we now past that paradigm and moving into a globally sourced model of development and resources?
3 Comments
November 16, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Andy, I’m sorry your questions weren’t answered. I would say that entrepreneurs can put up artificial hurdles to keep them from moving forward. The most common one is money. Great entrepreneurs conquer hurdles and go for it. If that means getting outsourced work done, then you got to do it. If you or anyone wants to meet up to discuss starting up (get your questions possibly answered), then reach out to me eric {at} launchmemphis {dot} org and we can meet up. I don’t have all the answers but it is a starting place.
November 17, 2008 at 12:34 am
Not answering my questions actually has had the result of allowing me to refine my questions and look in a different direction.
Not getting an answer can sometimes be a better answer.
December 1, 2008 at 12:56 am
[...] manager and social media enthusiast Andy Glover thinks there’s no reason a business idea should be restrained by the (lack of) availablity of IT talent in the surrounding area. Using AdaptiveBlue as our model, we can see that Andy is probably [...]