I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mohit Srivastava, CTO and Founder of Faves.com (formerly BlueDot.us). They recently had a change in strategy as well as branding.
Starting with the change in branding, as we spoke about why and how, it became pretty clear that no matter how much traction a company is getting, that having a URL that people understand is key. Unfortunately, the .us just didn’t work for them. My analogy was that it was like the game of telephone… No matter how much they tried to explain that it is a viable URL, people weren’t sure and it was made even worse when they tried to tell their friends. In my opinion, that is the deal breaker. If people can’t quickly share the site / service with their friends verbally, then it just doesn’t work.
They decided to changes their names to faves.com, which makes a lot of sense. It meshes well with your overall services, is five characters, and has a coveted .com. It will be interesting to see how this rebranding does for the company.
A key component of our discussion is their new strategy of leveraging their current users to launch a B2B strategy. This is a relatively new phenomenon for web startups; mostly due to the fact that it is difficult to build a profitable business around online advertising. That isn’t to say it isn’t possible, it is just difficult. You have to scale your users and page views with a low cost business (video or audio anyone?).
Faves.com B2B offering works with publishers to increase content distribution and user retention. Essentially, they are targeting magazine and news paper publishers. It will be an interesting few months for Mohit and the rest of the team as they look to finalize their first B2B deals. Especially, with the goal of achieving profitability by 2008. They are a pretty lean ship, with approximately five people, so they are keeping their costs down.
Towards the end of the conversation, Mohit and I got into the discussion of how difficult it is to reposition a company and how that is compounded by having more and more employees. Small teams can shift dramatically in strategy, 180 degrees if they need to very quickly. Large company, can at best shift strategy by a fraction as much. Simply due to the ability to communicate effectively, structurally reorient whole teams, and then having teams actually implement the changes to their tactical initiatives.
This is a pretty solid argument for keeping companies small until they have proven the product / service to the degree that they have build a solid business (yes, including revenue). How many startups don’t hit the target right off the mark? All of them? Most of them? If they don’t have the ability to adapt quickly, what are their odds of success?
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