BlueTie Blog

Fostering the Entrepreneurial Spirit

The entrepreneurial spirit. It's something that we feel should be encouraged and supported. Not quashed. It's how BlueTie got started! And because that spirit is ingrained in our company, we thought it was time to encourage it in a more formalized fashion.

To that end, BlueTie is proud to be a sponsor of Intuit's Just Start campaign.

Here's the gist: Log on to www.iwilljuststart.com and fill out the form that declares what you will just start doing to make your own business a reality. What is your passion? What drives you? What will make you happy from a career standpoint? Declare it and you're on your way to making it a reality.

The best part? You could win $50,000 to get your business idea up and running!

Learn more and review the rules at www.iwilljuststart.com.

ps - If you're in the New York City area on November 9th make sure to stop by Vanderbilt Hall in the Grand Central Station terminal. David will be there live, supporting the Just Start campaign and answering questions about how he got started.

Small Businesses Get More Using Hosted Technology

Smartbiz recently posted on a study titled The Small Business Transition to Hosted Technology: Cost vs. Benefits. The posts summary: "The bottom line is that SMBs get more bang for their buck—a lot more—when they have someone else run their IT infrastructure." The full 13 page study summary is available for download. Here is an excerpt from the release covering the study:

"The survey consisted of more than 325 SMB senior executives, half with companies that outsource all or part of their IT infrastructure, and half managing IT internally. The vast majority of respondents – more than 97 percent – worked in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Key findings from the report include the following:

1. The majority of SMBs that outsource (54 percent) spend less than 5 percent of annual revenues on maintaining and upgrading IT infrastructure, while 64 percent of non-hosting companies spend more than 10 percent of revenues on IT
2. Companies that outsource (68 percent) are much more aggressive about using IT assets to engage in e-commerce than companies that manage technology infrastructures internally (29 percent)
3. By more than 85 percent, outsourcers report that their IT organizations play an important role in remaining competitive in their respective industries than those that do not outsource.
4. Outsourcers suffer fewer security incidents and technical failures than their non-hosting counterparts, and they are better positioned to avoid or mitigate downtime risks."

If you're a BlueTie user then you're probably already seeing the benefits of outsourcing IT infrastructure. If you aren't yet a BlueTie customer and are considering SaaS for Email and Calendaring, or any of your IT services, then this article may provide the impetus you need to make the transition or provide valuable information in presenting an effective business case.

Marketing Voices: Free Marketing Podcasts from the Experts

Marketing Voices is a site where you can listen to podcasts on marketing from some of the top experts including Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Regis McKenna and others. There's a lot of information on this site. You can put them in your iPod or MP3 player or burn them on CD and listen on your way to work or while traveling. They also offer printed transcripts.

More Business Ideas From the Web

Most start-up experts will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen- it is execution that attracts their attention. Nevertheless, a great business concept and a great plan for turning that concept into a business is the formula for success when starting your own business.

Whether you're looking for your great idea or seeking ways to make it happen now, here's some recent web articles that can help:

• The 20 smartest companies to start now. Business 2.0 went around and asked venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs what kind of companies they'd like to see. Then they went further and asked how much capital they would commit to a great team with a great plan to create those businesses. I'm guessing there are a lot of hungry entrepreneurs working on these ideas- you could be one!
• Can a cartoonist who draws his toons on the back of business cards offer value to a new business owner? He can if he's Hugh MacLeod and he's writing about How To Be Creative. Highly motivational and the real thing.
• Are you a freelancer or independent contractor? Like working from your local Starbucks or on the road? Web Worker Daily is a blog that covers all the issues you deal with daily- staying organized, procrastination, collaborating at a distance (shameless plug: BlueTie is a great collaboration tool that can really liberate an independent worker!)
• Trying to raise money? AskTheVC is just what it says- a site where venture capitalists explain the arcane aspects of their business.

The beauty of the world we're in now is that incredible tools and information sources are at your fingertips. Any new business owner owes it to themselves to get out there and take advantage of these resources. Stay tuned for more ...

Naming Your Business, Product or Service

We get asked a lot about where the BlueTie name came from. The story, as I understand it, is that our (then) 19 year old CEO was in a board meeting in 1999 during BlueTie's start-up phase. They were discussing names and one of the older board members looked at David's bright blue tie and said, 'these days you can name a company anything- you could call it BlueTie'. And so they did.

In hindsight, that was a very lucky decision. Anyone trying to create a unique and marketable name for a business or product these days knows it is extremely difficult yet extremely important to your success. The right name is unique, memorable, non-descriptive (more on that in a minute) and available both as a trademark and a web URL. If the names you're looking at don't fit these basic criteria, they won't cut it.

So why can't you use descriptive words for naming? You can and should if you're operating a local business and using your own name in the business name, i.e. Smith and Smith, Attorneys. But If you're selling business email to a global market you wouldn't want to call yourself Business Email, Inc. because you cannot protect a descriptive name via trademarks and you're extremely unlikely to get a web address even close to this name.

This conumdrum is why we see so many start-ups with funny made-up words for names like Squidoo which tell us nothing about their business (Squidoo has something to do with publicizing blogs). They pick a name and hope it's memorable and that they can market it into recognition.

So how do you pick a name? You could use a naming consultancy but that it going to cost you thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars (I kid you not). My advice is to get creative, do some word play and keep the Internet handy to see if your ideas are taken. And be patient- this is something you need to get right. Remember, once you have a web address, that's your storefront to the world and everytime you send an email via BlueTie your customers will be reminded of that address.

Here's two online resources for finding URLs:

Interactively Search for Domains

and to search for Trademarks:

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

Here's a final tip: Your trademark only has to be unique to your type of business. A company called Lure-It that sells fishing lures could file a trademark even if another company called Lure-It that did business lead generation had the same name. It's not a conflict when there is little likelihood of creating confusion among consumers. In any case, no matter what name you choose, get some legal and marketing advice before you fully commit to it.

Marketing Sherpa Wisdom Report

Marketing Sherpa, the online marketing resource, has just published their 2007 Marketing Sherpa Wisdom Report- it's a free 60 page PDF download. Over 100 marketers from companies large and small share their wisdom, learning experiences and tips for enhancing your online marketing (and if you don't knopw much about online marketing this is a great place to start- sign up for the free Marketing Sherpa newsletter). Even one of these ideas could mean serious new business for your company, so check it out!

Creating Links in Email: Don't load your email messages up with attachments and images

When you use email to send a customer newsletter, follow-up after a sales call or respond to a request for information, it's important to be considerate of the recipient when composing the message. I frequently receive emails with multiple attachments and I seldom open them. Although BlueTie supports an industry leading attachment size of 25MB, many recipient's email systems can't handle really big attachments. Also, opening an attachment adds another step to the process a customer or prospect has to go through to get your message, decreasing the likelihood they will actually see it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Put your messages on your web site as web pages or PDF documents and link to them in your email. This keeps the email simple and gives your recipients a one click way to access the info. There are two ways you can embed web links into your email:

• Simply copy and paste the URL from the target page into the email
• Even better (and more professional), use our Link tool. Choose the word or phrase in your email message that you want to link to the web page, highlight it and click the Link tool- it looks like a little chain. Paste the web page URL into the dialog box that appears. You can also add a Tooltip. This is a description of the link that appears when the user mouses over the link. So you might link to a sales doc and your tooltip might say: AntiSpam Information. Click OK in the dialog box and you're done.

Anyone who has received an email with tons of pictures and attachments will really appreciate this approach. Instead of loading the email itself with large images and attachments, link to them on the web. You'll save your customers time, your message is less likely to get blocked as spam (multiple attachments are a red flag) and you'll drive traffic to your web site.

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

How to Innovate: 1 million ideas

"Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it's ever been done before"

David Neeleman, Founder and CEO, JetBlue

Toyota implements 1 million new ideas each year. That's over 3000 per day! To achieve this astounding level of innovation they have developed a culture of creativity based on elegant solutions, those which seek to constantly improve every aspect of what they do. Change This offers a manifesto by Matthew May on how Toyota built this culture of innovation. It's fascinating reading for even the smallest business owner and entrepreneur.

Lesson: Imperfection drives innovation

CRN Review: BlueTie Takes On Exchange

Today we received a very favorable review in CRN that focuses on the fact that, unlike many of our competitors, we are a business application, designed to be straightforward to use, easily managed and reliable. One of the great aspects of the review, from our POV, is the positioning of BlueTie as an alternative to Microsoft Exhange, the costly middle market messaging solution from the 10,000 lb gorilla. We set out eight years ago to provide small and medium size businesses with a real alternative to paying for racks of servers, licenses and ongoing service fees to keep those overly complex systems running. Reviews like this validate our vision!