Words Heard / Our Take   Title:   Marketing in a Start-Up   What:   Venture Creation Group: A Case Study   Where:   St. Anthony's Parish Hall   Event Held On:   February 21 2006   Who:   Ellen Warren, VP Marketing ViewNyx www.viewnyx.com   What Was Said:   Ellen signed on at the very beginning of ViewNyx's journey, an engineer with an idea: application of vision system technology in the form of a driver warning system could avoid vehicle crashes and save lives. She outlined a set of questions: is there a business here based on paying customers; what are the market segments in which to find paying customers; and what is the fastest path to revenue? Cars, trucks or buses? Based upon research on the web, telephone and personal interviews the most promising market segment was identified as highway trucks. Fleets spend a portion of their revenues on safety, training and insurance that is larger than their profits. As well, there are strong social networks in this industry segment with common training and safety practices and buying behaviour. Better yet, the demand for drivers is so strong that firms will hire even marginally qualified people. After a year plus Ellen had put it together - product concept, segmentation study, competitive analysis, and technical feasibility - to produce a business plan targeted to the point of industry pain: bad drivers. The product warned drivers when they wandered in a traffic lane. ViewNyx developed a prototype, tested it with customers, then defined the product to be sold - what was the minimum feature set truckers would buy? - started the marketing effort - what price? - and the sales effort - at what stage? This work took another two years. From the idea in 2001 to starting to sell commercial product in early 2006, was a four to five year trek.   Our Take:   Viewnyx followed a rigorous staged product development process from creative insight, through assessment of its business viability, to a well defined product for sale with good margins. Because the technology permitted four choices - obstacle detection, blind spot vision, lane wandering, or all three - for a variety of vehicle types, finding out exactly who would pay to alleviate what pain led to a big gain: ViewNyx's scarce time and effort was allocated to the fastest available track to cash: sales. Worth noting is that ViewNyx accomplished everything without funds from investors. They avoided the business killing field of spending time seeking funds. Instead, their time was spent figuring out who could benefit from the insight and would pay enough for a solution to justify a business. For the founders, the happy result is that all of the future profits belong to them. They sold no portion of their future profits to investors. Should ViewNyx's journey be described as bootstrapping without boots? While you might think this uncommon, it is not. Most of Canada' s annual crop of 150,000 new firms are started this way and flourish without outside funds, particularly equity capital, let alone venture capital. When new firms accomplish what ViewNyx has in the way it has, they deserve the respect of the business community and all Canadians.   708-350 Sparks Street, Ottawa, ON K1R 7S8, t: (613) 563 4588, f: (613) 563 4689, ourtake@acornpartners.com, www.acornpartners.com If you wish to unsubscribe, reply to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject.