“We originally had visions of building a little bit of a client base, selling to AOL, and retiring in the Caribbean. Well, we were a little late for that, so we had to opt for Plan B which was to buckle down and build the business.“  Dale Coyner, Serial Entrepreneur, Founder of Communicast and Open Road Outfitters

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs and product managers about the steps they took to grow their businesses/products and how they were able to create, penetrate, and/or dominate their niche.  This week we interview Dale Coyner, the founder of Communicast (which was sold to PrecisionIR Group), Open Road Outfitters and a noted author of several motorcycle touring books and a motorcycle touring blog

Interviewee:  Dale Coyner, serial entrepreneur. 

Why Selected:  Dale is a two-time entrepreneur and one of the pioneers in the use of interactivity and streaming technologies within the web conferencing and webcasting industries.  Dale is also a motorcycle touring enthusiast and author of several books and a blog on the topic. Dale is also a member of the Virginia Governor’s Motorcycle Advisory Council.

I had the pleasure of first consulting to and then partnering with Dale (and David Paul, co-founder of Communicast) as we grew the company and eventually sold it to PrecisionIR Group and their Vcall division.  Under Dale’s guidance, Communicast became known as the leading interactive webinar platform and was one of if not the first to integrate streaming audio and video.  Dale’s foresight and unique ability to understand problems and break them down to their smallest and easiest to solve position enabled Communicast to continue growing while delivering its famed “white glove” service.  Dale also understands himself, his strengths, and the strengths of those around him and he has the ability to bring those strengths together to make the team more productive. 

In the following interview, Dales takes us through how he was able to keep Communicast growing without ever taking any venture capital and how the start-up of Open Road Outfitters differed from Communicast.  During the interview, Dales makes several points about what it takes to grow a company, the key points you’ll take away include:

1.  Know your buyers.  Possessing a solid understanding of your buyers will enable to you understand their problems and build products they understand.

2.  Take advantage of the numerous open source and low-cost solutions are now available to help small businesses. 

3.  “It’s the rare opportunity that can stand up to the scrutiny you’ll put it through if you write even a simple business plan.”

4.  The biggest threat to losing your position as a market leader is to become complacent to the changes in your niche/industry.

You are now on your 2nd start-up, how has the start-up Open Road Outfitters differed from starting Communicast?

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“Most services have little impact – if you can push the client to use the results you go beyond the standard company that moves onto the next customer and seldom looks back.“

 John Goodman, Co-Founder & Vice Chairman of TARP Worldwide and Author

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs, product managers, venture capitalists and others about the steps they took to grow their businesses/products and how they were able to create, penetrate, and/or dominate their niche.  This week we interview John Goodman.

Interviewee:  John Goodman, Vice Chairman and co-founder of TARP World­wide. 

Why Selected: As a pioneer in the science of quantifying, managing, and optimizing the customer experience, John (and his company TARP Worldwide) gives us the opportunity to glean a little bit of his knowledge on how a start-up, small business or any business can perfect their customer’s experience.  It is not often we have the chance to hear from someone running a company referred to by renowned author and consultant Tom Peters as “(TARP is) perhaps America’s premier customer service research firm.”  John is also an author, and in his new book Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty and Maximize Profits, he shows how successful companies use customer service as a “catalyst,…making the organization more proactive, accelerating responsiveness, and boosting its effectiveness.”  John also points out the financial impact good and/or bad/no customer service can have on an organization.

In the following interview, John takes us through how TARP got started and how the importance of moving customer service from a complaint department to one that can have a positive financial impact on your organization.  The key points you’ll take away include:

1.  The impact of great service on your financials is ten to twenty times the cost. 

2.  Many companies that hire a market research firm to conduct a study read their final reports then put them up on a shelf.  Find ways to make sure your clients use information and the advantages you bring to them.  This will lead to repeat business.

3.  When clients and prospects want to negotiate on price make sure you take out work/services/product accordingly.  Just reducing prices can lessen the perceived value of your offering. 

4.  In order to gain traction in a market dominated by one or few companies , look for ways you can out innovate them and find the one or two people at some of their clients who are the most unhappy and then deliver outstanding service to them.

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“One of the common mistakes that marketers make is to believe that their customers are different than they are.  They’re not.  Just like us, our prospects hate cold calls, throw away junk mail, and ignore most advertising.“ 

Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO of HubSpot, Serial Software Entrepreneur and Startup Blogger 

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs, product managers, venture capitalists and others about the steps they took to grow their businesses/products and how they were able to create, penetrate, and/or dominate their niche.  This week we interview Dharmesh Shah.

Interviewee:  Dharmesh Shah, serial entrepreneur, author and startup blogger. 

Why Selected:  Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of HubSpot.  HubSpot provides marketing software for small businesses.  The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has raised over $30 million in venture capital, and has over 1,700 customers. 

He developed grader.com – a free suite of online tools for marketing measurement.  These tools, including WebsiteGrader.com and TwitterGrader.com have won numerous awards and have been used by millions.

Dharmesh is the co-author of the new book “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs,” published by Wiley in October, 2009.  The book has been consistently ranked in the top 100 business books on Amazon.

He also authors OnStartups.com, a top-ranking startup blog with over 15,000 subscribers and 100,000 members in its online community.  He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and internet marketing.

Dharmesh has a B.S. in Computer Science from UAB and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT.

In the following interview, Dharmesh discusses how he used inbound marketing techniques to help his company’s grow and how any business regardless of the sector it is in can use these same techniques to reach its customer base.  During the interview, Dharmesh provided some great insights on what it takes to launch, grow and sustain a company in today’s market.  The key points you’ll take away include:

1. It is critical for entrepreneurs to figure out a way to efficiently gain access to customers and to really reach people, you need to give them something that is valuable and compelling. 
2. As your company grows, one of the challenges you needed to be prepared for is how to stay on top of rapid growth and ensure that the organization shares a common vision and maintains the culture that has made it successful thus far.
3. Successful companies that enter a niche have a good understanding of how the existing players are failing to deliver sufficient customer value.
4. Companies that dominate a niche find some sort of “network effect” whereby each additional customer adds value to the remaining ones.

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