Mark Curphey - SecurityBuddha.com

Every week I start to write the next episode in this series I want to start with a few comments about how I wish days had 40 hours and weeks had 20 days. I think by now it’s well understood (by me and this blogs readers) that there will never be enough hour’s in a day or days in a week to do everything a budding entrepreneur wants to achieve. No amount of clever time management techniques or GTD tips can shift mountains. I will refrain from mentioning it again.

Last week we made significant progress upgrading the ISM-Community site and we will be releasing our own corporate web site and the free community application called Security FaceTime™ for the ISM Community this Friday.

This week I cover;

- Eating Our Own Dog Food and Focusing on What’s Important

- The Art of Positioning

- Corporate Culture and Responsible Business

Eating Our Own Dog Food and Focusing on What’s Important

I have always believed that first impressions count . One of our corporate mantras is;

Design Driven – We believe that using our technology should be a pleasure. All of our users should consider that it makes their jobs easier and not that their job is to use our technology. Usability, look and feel and fundamentally good design is deeply rooted in our culture.

When it came to designing and developing the corporate web site we knew we needed to spend the appropriate amount of time and effort on “eating our own dog food”. It never seizes to amaze me how much detail is needed to get a web site to look and feel ”just right” and ensure it will scale as you add to it. Some ASP.NET controls don’t quite work as advertised making CSS properties act erratically; ensuring that password controls help users choose appropriate passwords is not as easy as it should be; privacy policies need to be accurate…….the list goes on. ..NET has some great things (like Sitemaps and the Sitemap API) that mean you put the effort in up-front and reap the rewards as you grow.

Could we have thrown something together in a day or two? Could we have built a 90% solution was that wasn’t perfect? Of course we could but if we are to stand in front of people and extend the virtues that we are better at understanding requirements and better at building software than any competitors we needed to have  a showcase of what’s to come. And as Ronald Reagan said “you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

On Friday we will enable Security FaceTime™ , the first of our free community applications to manage face to face meetings of security groups.

I spoke to one of our advisors this week, a former exec at ISS and now Chairman of his own and interim CEO of another security company. He told me that one of the common mistakes he sees startups making is focusing on their backend operations. They forget they need to build product and they need to sell and market to customers.

We feel good about the corporate web site and hope you like it when it goes live at the end of this week.

Art of Positioning

It’s human nature to pigeon-hole people and companies. If I had a dollar for everyone in the last month who said to me “…so you are like Archer, Agiliance or ControlPath” or “so you are a GRC platform” I would already be able to retire and not have to think about the Art of Positioning.  Positioning is currently very topical as next quarter we are about to embark on our first round of funding and I will be pitching to potential investors. They need to get it and get it fast.

As always Guy Kawasaki’s the Art of Pitching is a brilliant reference .

Question: How can I tell if an entrepreneur is pitching?

Answer: His lips are moving

Maybe these days this should read his lips are moving or his fingers are tapping!

His tips for pitching include;

- Explain Yourself in the First Minute

- Answer the Little Man

- Know Your Audience

I have found all to be spot on and that you can hit a few points with the same phrase but (and its a big but) knowing your audience is extremely important.  For instance if I describe SourceClear as “SAP for security departments” to a potential investor they instantly perkup calculating returns based on thoughts of capturing a few percent of the SAP market. If I use the same phrase to potential buyers they usually instantly get it but usually follow up with a question about wether we will expect people to re-engineer their business around our software (the classic SAP approach) or if we will mould around them. We offer both by the way.

For the record an archer is a medieval character and if you want to think of us in parallel I encourage you to consider these images

 vs.

Corporate Culture and Responsible Business

For a while I have been working on  set of corporate ethics we will adopt and we will publish the corporate web site. Responsible business has demonstrated time and time again that it benefits both the company and the various stakeholders. Think of examples like the Body Shop and Starbucks.

Our company is different from many traditional companies and somewhat unique among technology companies. We are first and foremost a commercial software company and the principles and ethics we have created for ourselves define what we do and who we are.

Innovative – We strive to be different. We don’t want to be the best at what we do but the only ones that do what we do. We are unique. Innovation is key to our success.

Design Driven – We believe that using our technology should be a pleasure. All of our users should consider that it makes their jobs easier and not that their job is to use our technology. Usability, look and feel and fundamentally good design is deeply rooted in our culture.

Embrace technology – We embrace modern technology though we don’t adopt technology for the sake of it.

Transparency – We want our customers and potential customers to know what we are doing and the direction we are taking. It is for that reason for instance that these corporate principles / ethics are published here on our public web site. Ultimately we want our products and services to continually be the best in the market (actually we intend to be the only ones really doing what we are doing) and so are we are not afraid of people trying to imitate us. We expect to be imitated but never copied.

Honesty – Trust is built on honestly and we want to earn your trust. We are currently a very small self-funded company but intend to grow rapidly after 2007. You will not find us issuing press releases making out that we are a multi-national leader in the field with 100% market share and millions of dollars of venture capital in the bank. You will also not find us making false claims about product readiness or capabilities unless it’s true. If our products don’t do what they say on the packet you can have your money back, period. We don’t want unhappy customers.

Responsible Business – We will donate a portion of our company profits to support worthy causes including environmental and social issues (especially poverty and disease).

Ethical Business – We believe in ethical business and as such we will not outsource work unless we are able to ensure a policy of fair trade is in place.

Creative People Business – It is people that design, build and support our technology. As such we are creating an environment where people can excel and produce their best work.

OK back to the grindstone. Next time I write we will have passed a major milestone of our corporate site and our first free community application.