“The narrower you focus your initial market, really really narrow, the larger your market actually is!!“ Barry James Folsom, CEO, Twirl TV
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 Barry James Folsom and we’ll come to understand how he has “focused” his companies in order to grow more quickly:
Interviewee: Barry James Folsom, serial entrepreneur.
Why Selected: Barry James has over 37 years of executive management and strategic marketing experience with a successful track record of growing divisions and companies rapidly into category leaders. He has played pivotal roles in the creation of 4 major market categories: PCs, Workstations, Internet Data Centers and Web Conferencing.
As a respected company leader, Barry James was Frost & Sullivan’s 2002 CEO of the Year. He is also a frequent speaker, e.g. Ad:Tech, Media Summit, Digital Hollywood, & Digital Connections.
Barry James is CEO of Twirl TV. Twirl TV is a Social TV gateway experience to online TV for the 30M 16-to-24 year old YouTube on-demand Generation whose PC is their TV. Twirl TV viewers have choice – from over 400 shows/6000 episodes – as well as camaraderie with their Twirl TV friends, including chatting and watching together on their respective PCs.
I had the pleasure of partnering and working with Barry James when he was the CEO of PlaceWare (now known as Microsoft Live Meeting) which he sold to Microsoft for $200M.
In the following interview, Barry James provides you with some insights on how he was able to come into PlaceWare and implement some changes and processes that enabled them to grow faster. In addition, he gives us a look inside his new company, Twirl TV, and how it is changing the way young adults access, watch and interact with their favorite TV shows. During the interview, Barry James brought up several points and ideas about what it takes to solidly grow your company. The key points you’ll take away include:
1. Look for the pain points of your target market and how your solution can solve them.
2. If your target market is already in the customer base of an established business, leverage that business to reach and gain customer acceptance.
3. Know what your adoption cycle is and look for ways to decrease the time it takes to get a “sold” client using your service/product. This will have an impact on everything from customer satisfaction to cash flow!
4. Focus, focus, focus…by being narrowly focused you can get to know your prospect’s and client’s needs better and deliver a product/service they highly value.
