ViTrue CEO

ViTrue CEO says entrepreneurs need perseverance and timing
February 15, 2008
By Allan Maurer

ATLANTA—Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue, which helps companies create video-centric social networks around brands, says that working with startups from WebMD to N2 Broadband and ViTrue, he’s learned that perseverance and timing are key virtues.

Bradford is one of many leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business gurus participating in the Second Annual Southeast Venture Conference Feb. 27-28 at Tysons Corner, VA.

Bradford’s professional experience spans 16 years in the Internet, television and packaged goods industries. He was president and on the board at Tandberg Television, a 400-employee, $100 million revenue organization he led to a 40 percent annual growth rate. He also integrated two acquisitions there and led global repositioning of the brand.

He also served as president and CEO of N2 Broadband, which sells open-platform, on-demand entertainment solutions. The company grew from annual revenues of under $1 million to more than $35 million under his tenure. Television Week named him one of the “10 to Watch,” in 2005.

From 1998 to 2000, Bradford served as chief marketing officer at the legendary WebMD, which grew from 40 to 4,000 employees and raised $2 million in funding.

Much of his experience involved branding in one form or another and that remains a key element of what his current company, ViTrue does. Bradford founded the company in 2006 and it raised about $8 million in venture backing so far from General Catalyst, Comcast, Turner Broadcasting, and Ron Conway, an early investor in Google, Facebook and other successful tech startups.

Bradford, 40, now on his third startup, says, “I used to be the kid, but I’ve become a veteran.”

He’s learned more than a few useful lessons through the years, Bradford tells TechJournal South. “I learned the hard way not to get too excited about the wins or too down about the losses,” he says. “You’re going to have peaks and valleys in startups. I had many near-death experiences in others. You focus on the problem and typically things work out.”

Also, he says, “I try to have a nose for the football—what are the right opportunities over the next several years. You have to trust your instincts and go in the right direction even if you face a headwind from time to time.

“When you’re a pioneer, you get a lot of arrows in your back. So perseverance is helpful.”

Timing is also crucial, he notes. “You don’t want to get too aggressive, but you also don’t want underinvestment when you are ready to go. Timing is everything.”

Finally, he says, “One benefit of experience is the ability to pick the right team and the right talent and give them plenty of runway to do what they do best without micromanaging.”

ViTrue gives Bradford the opportunity to bring his specific skills to bear on the Web 2.0 world. “My background was mainly customer focused. I was a brand manager and chief marketing officer, and I have a passion for working with brands,” he says.

ViTrue creates online promotions for companies such as Pringles, Vicks and Chick-fil-a that get customers involved with their brands by having them do things such as create their own jingles. Chick fil a, in its first foray to celebrate its 40th anniversary, successfully sought their most rapid fan. “Some phenomenal videos were created,” says Bradford.

ViTrue tracks any use of the videos across the Web and makes sure uploaded videos are safe, don’t contain nudity or other aspects that would damage the brand. The contests generally include generous prizes to the winner—40 months of free Chick-fil-a for instance.

“What we’re finding,” says Bradford, “is an almost unlimited number of companies and brands are interested in having a consumer base participating with a brand. Everyone wants feedback and to build their brands through word of mouth. It’s a great way to find your most loyal advocates and let them talk about the brand’s impact on them.”

The next step in developing brands that way, Bradford says, is to keep things in front of consumers constantly, keep giving them reasons to come back to a company Web site.

The content might also be distributed through widgets and integrated through numerous social networking sites such as My Space and Facebook and so on, “building an audience virally.”

On the Web: www.vitrue.com

Tips for Entrepreneurs

Zero to One Million: Ryan Allis book outlines path to success
January 21, 2008
By Allan Maurer

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC—Ryan Allis, founder and CEO of email technology company iContact, say the primary purpose of his book, “Zero to One Million, How I built a company to $1 million in sales and how you can too,” is to help other entrepreneurs.

Allis started his own entrepreneurial career at age 11 when his parents declined to buy him some brand name t-shirts he wanted when he was in the 7th grade. He asked himself, “What am I good at?”

The answer: computers. Therefore, Allis started offering computer help for $5 an hour via printed cards he distributed to local businesses and soon had a growing business.

At 14, he added Web design, and at 16, Web marketing and search engine optimization services through his company, Virante. While a senior in high school he helped a man market a nutraceutical product for arthritis to nearly $1 million in sales via his Web marketing efforts.

Tips for entrepreneurs
His book, first self-published in 2003, the same year he founded iContact (then Broadwick), tells the story of his entrepreneurial adventures to date, while the second half is a ten-step process to help other entrepreneurs mirror his success.

It includes tips on how to evaluate a business idea, write a business plan, raise capital, get a product to market, hire great people, become a manager, scale operations of a company and build systems and processes.

About raising money, Allis tells TechJournal South, “You have to make sure you have a true business opportunity.” He provides what he calls the MRA evaluation method: market, advantages, and potential return. Once an entrepreneur goes through that process, he or she needs to decide whether to raise debt capital or equity financing and the book outlines the pros and cons of each through each stage of a company’s development.

Allis bootstrapped iContact for its first three years, then raised about $5.5 million over two rounds. The book explains, “How we were able to get started with $5,000 in debt capital.”

Like pushing a big wheel
Allis says he learned business “through trial and error.” One of the biggest lessons he’s learned has to do with management. “When we started hiring in 2003,” he says, “it was the first time I’d ever managed someone. My style was ‘tell me what you did and I’ll try to make it better.’ We had casual relationships with employees working right next to me.”

Now, managing his 82-person company, Allis says, “I had to learn not to micro-manage and how to structure criticism so that it’s seen as constructive. I had to train people then trust them to do their job.”

His company has had steady growth. “But in the beginning, it was difficult to get sales. The first year we had $12,000 in sales and $17,000 in expenses. It was hard for Aaron (his partner Aaron Houghton) and I to work a year and lose $5,000. I learned it’s hard to get going. It’s like pushing a big wheel. It’s tough to get momentum, but once you have it, it moves faster and faster by itself with each push.”

Another thing Allis concentrates on these days, he says, “Is speed of implementation. Getting things done. We continue to look at how we can create efficient processes and systems.”

Allis says his job has altered from the earliest days in the company when his it was essentially Web marketing and raising money. “Now we have a lot more people and my job is interacting with team members. We’ve built a big family-like culture here. I look forward to coming in to work in the morning because of the type of people who work here.”


On the Web: www.icontact.com

Amazon link to the book: http://tiny.cc/7MKFB

Forex Money Management

Forex money management is one of the most important things you can learn before you actually begin making live trades.

The money management principles discussed here will teach you how to avoid the costly mistakes many new traders make, often to the degree that they lose their entire investment on the first handful of trades.

Psychology is really the most important factor to money management in forex. You have to be able to separate yourself from any emotional attachment you may have to your money. This is not very easy to do, but it works and it can be done.

If you allow yourself to become emotional on a trade, you will not exit the trade properly, and this could mean holding on to a trade when you should have let it go, or letting go before the trade had a chance to turn profitable.

First and foremost, you should consider leverage and risk. It is advisable that you never risk more than two percent of your account balance on any trade. However, some go further and allow for as much as ten percent, but never more than that. This gives you the ability to withstand market fluctuations, and if the trade goes bad, you still have money to try again. You should never operate under the assumption that you will profit from every trade. You should also plan for losses. Therefore, most traders will tell you that the best thing to do is to keep your gains large and your losses small. Develop your trading strategy around this idea.

Keep track of your gains and losses. Keeping accurate and detailed records of your account activity will allow you to see whether or not the strategy is working, or if it needs to be re-built.

Never go blindly into trading without a way to keep track of results. You will lose all of your funds and never understand why it happened.

Finally, it is highly advisable that you first practice a strategy on a demo account. Nearly all brokers offer a virtual account whereupon you make trades in real-time, but with imaginary money, so nothing is risked. This is the best way to test a strategy before you put your real money on the line.

However, be careful, once again, of the psychology of trading. When you play with fake money, nothing is risked. When real money is on the line, you must not get emotional. If you do, you will find yourself with very different results, most likely losses, than you had with the demo account.

Forex - What is it?

The international currency market Forex is a special kind of the world financial market. Trader’s purpose on the Forex to get profit as the result of foreign currencies purchase and sale. The exchange rates of all currencies being in the market turnover are permanently changing under the action of the demand and supply alteration. The latter is a strong subject to the influence of any important for the human society event in the sphere of economy, politics and nature. Consequently current prices of foreign currencies evaluated for instance in the US dollars fluctuate towards its higher and lower meanings. Using these fluctuations in accordance with a known principle “buy cheaper – sell higher” traders obtain gains. Forex is different in compare to all other sectors of the world financial system thanks to his heightened sensibility to a large and continuously changing number of factors, accessibility to all individual and corporative traders, exclusively high trade turnover which creates an ensured liquidity of traded currencies and the round - the clock business hours which enable traders to deal after normal hours or during national holidays in their country finding markets abroad open.

Just as on any other market the trading on Forex, along with an exclusively high potential profitability, is essentially risk - bearing one. It is possible to gain a success on it only after a certain training including a familiarization with the structure and kinds of Forex, the principles of currencies price formation, the factors affecting prices alterations and trading risks levels, sources of the information necessary to account all those factors, techniques of the analysis and prediction of the market movements as well as with the trading tools and rules. An important role in the process of the preparation for the trading on Forex belongs to the demotrading (that is to trade using a demo-account with some virtual money), which allows to testify all the theoretical knowledge and to obtain a required minimum of the trade experience not being subjected to a material damage.