After chatting with my fellow sprinter Kirsty Thom today about her startup, Sojurn, I was about to email her some thoughts and suggestions. But in the spirit of sharing (and hopefully of continuing my luck of getting onto Idealog!) I thought I'd blog it instead. Sorry Kirsty!

Firstly, a bit of background. Sojurn is an upside down CRM, where you control which companies get access to your address, email and other personal details. A great idea I'm sure you'd agree!

But Kirsty faces the same problems all startups face. Going from not much to something isn't easy. Advertisers like having your data, and they wouldnt give it up easily. So here's my suggestions:

But before we talk about you, Kirsty, lets talk about me. Since our expert entrenpeneurs session a couple of weeks back where we were told to act on what we can control, not what we predict, that's become my guiding principle. Thats why I'm looking into expanding our E-Learning division (!) and at the same time looking into taking Shmego to the open source world. I've got solid, tangible assets in each of those areas where we can, and are, organising deals.

Of course I'd prefer to get a great big dollop of angel investor cash, head up to the San Fran Kiwi Launch Pad and party with the TechCrunch guys, but I can't control that. Instead I'll work with what I've got.

OK, enough of me, lets talk about Kirsty. Sojurn needs people to sign up, but noone will do that for no reason. It has to be part of something that people are signing up for anyway. Sports events, council websites, etc. Big organisations probably won't help. They just don't need Sojurn, at least not until Sojurn is big enough to reduce their customer management costs or improve their data quality.

But little organisations, like events organisers, are technology consumers. They would use something like this simply for the sake of being a free technology service which helps them run their events - if it actually did.

So I think that if you can do a deal, even just get an in principle agreement, then act on that. Whether thats with events organisers, local government, big corporates, whoever, do it. That's your immediate goal, anything beyond that is just speculation. So what would it take to get a deal or agreement? It seems that a good proposition video is better then a work-in-progress website, because the video communicates your vision, and evokes the watcher's imagination. But a partially completed website just takes away that imaginative element. It only shows what is, not what could be.

So, my suggestion, do whatever it takes to get that first deal. Then you won't need to guess what to do next, you'll know.

Cheers,

Brad