IdaApps

Back from 2.5 hours angel investor meeting! Learned many many things. Will share in 140 characters, twitter style! Let’s call it angel investor wings!

Spicy wings: I should forget about my passion for building complex biz apps for startups, no investor trusts professional services model.

Golden wings: having live products is like gold! I have 2 live apps + 2 ready for release = Quadruple gold if my story is appealing…

Practical wings: I must find a sales partner for my apps. No more “my apps are so good, they sell themselves” story for investor …

Angel wings: sell ‘I don’t need your money’ and investors will come! reverse psychology i guess..

Strange looking wings: Never ever use the word ’startup’ in your biz plan, it cause allergic reaction! Use SME …

Flying wings: my story has potential for $$$$. I just need to work on Holes. BTW, do all angels use the word Hole so often?

Broken wings: forgot to include Total-Cost-Of-Ownership TCO in biz plan

BBQ wings: I’m good for Product co, just need to scale up my sale or find re-seller, or get my damn math right!…then we can all party!

Turkey wings: to sell your own products/expertise/story to investors, but not the awesome force.com or platform story. Easy to mix up.

Boxed wings: give investors the box/chart in you biz plan, before they get a chance to box you in!

Wing Story: King had 2 daughters, sevice-ios & product-ios. Nobody wanted to marry sevice-ios. But all knights were in love with product-ios

Being a female Iranian-American techie running a software startup company who is married to a Dutch guy puts me in a unique position when I meet people.

Here is how a typical conversation with a stranger goes:

Hi, my name is Mina.
Hello, my name is John. You have a slight accent, where are you from originally?
I’m originally from Iran.
[Long pause.] How about the latest remarks from Ahmadinejad?
Hmm, well, I think it is very unfortunate that he . . .
Is your husband Iranian too?
No, he is Dutch.
[Sigh of relief.] Oh! Holland is very beautiful . . .

Here is how a typical conversation at a business event goes:

Hi, my name is Mina.
Hello, my name is Joe. You have a slight accent; where are you from originally?
I’m originally from Iran.
[Pause.] Oh! When I was in college I had a roommate from Iran. Nice guy. His father was a general in the Shah’s army. They all immigrated to the U.S. to escape ayatollahs.
Oh. Well, I come from a modest family. My father was a typical engineer at a steel plant. He was forced into retirement at the age of 45 during Iran’s revolution. He could never get another job.
So who do you work for?
I have a software startup company.
[Pause.] What kind of software?
Software-as-a-service . . .

Here is how a typical conversation with the neighbor down the street goes:

Hi, my name is Mina.
Hello, my name is Jane. You have a slight accent, where are you from originally?
I’m originally from Iran.
[VERY long pause.]
And my husband is from Holland.
[Pause] Oh! I went to Amsterdam once. It is very beautiful.
Oh yes, I love Amsterdam . . .
Where did you meet?
We met in Los Angeles. We like to think if an Iranian girl and a Dutch guy can survive the test of marriage, then there is hope for the United Nations!
[Big smile.]

So in case we meet soon, how would you keep the conversation going?

It was late December 2007. I was a busy executive at a software company, and I was trying to find the right balance between corporate life and motherhood. My job was demanding and stressful. I was coordinating developers, designers, and outsourced teams to transform an aging client-server application to a state-of-the-art, rule-based SOA system.

So it was not surprising to see my husband’s disbelief when I mentioned that I wanted to attend a local event to support Barack Obama during the presidential primaries. After all, neither of us had ever been involved in U.S. politics before. And why would we?

To give you some background, I immigrated to the U.S. many years ago. I worked hard to rise and shine in corporate America. I postponed motherhood, and I traveled for weeks at a time on business trips for as long as I can remember, leaving no time to get involved with social and local groups or events. But in December 2007 I felt I should move beyond the business world and become part of society by helping to build the future.

Attending the second event, I found the person in charge and offered my time as a volunteer to help with IT matters during our Delaware state primaries. To my surprise I received a follow-up e-mail and a phone call. I was in!

Being part of the Obama movement offered me the most fulfilling experience for a proud first-time voter and an immigrant. It was a second chance to achieve what I could not have accomplished in my country of birth. As a young adult in the Middle East, I learned to stay as far away as possible from politics. Being political meant trouble. It was a no-win situation. So I let go of my eagerness to change my homeland’s pressing social issues in favor of becoming an engineer.

Back in January 2008 in Delaware, the energy and the excitement was building. We were getting closer to Super Tuesday, and we had a team of official campaign staffers leading our movement. I was doing many things, from delivering pizza to connecting computers and troubleshooting printers to creating fairly sophisticated initiatives such as targeted canvassing lists and calling lists in VoteBuilder and BuildTheHope systems.

My life could not be any more fulfilling. I was now a tiny part of “the most successful political movement in the history.” I was doing my tiny share.

To be continued . . .

Growing up in the Middle East has its own charm. You get used to buying fresh bread from the bakery every day. You get used to seeing big families and having many cousins, third cousins, and so on.

You also get used to the idea of no matter what you do and who you are, people are going to judge you by what car you drive! The typical sign of success is driving a Mercedes-Benz. So if you are totally into impressing family, friends, and business partners, you buy a Mercedes—not a BMW or a Hyundai.

Another sign of success is the way people address each other. No matter what college degree people have, you address them as “Mr. Dr. XYZ” or “Mr. Engineer XYZ.” The tone of conversation in the Middle East is much more formal than in the U.S. or Europe.

I grow up in the Middle East during the 1970s, which coincided with the revolution in Iran. The short version of the story is that the Shah, the King of Iran, was forced out and the country became an Islamic Republic.

No matter who ruled the country, my life as a child was totally the same: fresh bread, cousins, etc.

Until, of course, Iran and Iraq broke into war. The war lasted all my childhood and all the way through my college years. As the result of the war there were indeed new dimensions to my childhood. I learned about evacuation sirens. I learned how to make duct tape crosses on the windows so they don’t crack while bombs are falling. I learned how to sew curtains so we could have the lights on at night, even while the city was all blacked out to avoid being spotted by enemy planes.

Believe it or not, I didn’t mind. All my friends at school had to do the same, so it was almost a transparent part of our lives.

What I did mind, however, was the way the curriculum at school started to change over time. Year after year the geography books got thinner and thinner. The thinking was perhaps that there was no need for the curious minds in my class to learn about the rest of the world. The same thing happened with history books. There was no need for kids to learn about Persian dynasties, Greek mythology, the Dark Ages, and the Industrial Revolution. There were no art classes that I remember. Did I mention that all forms of female singing were considered illegal?

So I found my precious freedom in math books. After all, no matter what happens in any given country, differential equations should be the same. The same goes with algebra, statistics, and geometry.

Amazingly enough I started to get better and better at math. It was all about training my brain and the amount of practice I put into it. The next step was to work on my visualization skills. Since I had to memorize religious curriculum as part of school, I started developing an algorithm in my mind to associate the important words in any page with the pictures on that page and memorize the entire text. It works like this: the exam asks about “potato”. I remember potato as a word that appears on pages 23 and 35. Next, I remember the pictures on those pages, which leads me to remember the entire text on pages 23 and 35. So I would repeat the text like a parrot and then write it down. Problem solved!

I also discovered that predictive models are fascinating. As some of you know, Iran is one of the youngest countries in the world, which made sense because of the number of cousins, second cousins, and third cousins I have. The majority of the population is in their twenties.

So I started thinking about the ironic consequences of all these kids growing up, having universities to educate them all, the number of jobs that has to be exponentially higher every year to employ them all, and the number of new homes needed if all of these people wanted to start a new family.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d had the opportunity to get the same education as kids in the U.S., including the variety of classes and topics, would I have practiced as hard as I did on my math and visualization skills? Sometimes I get sad when I realize I spent my entire childhood learning math and logic without any exposure to art and social sciences. I wonder how different my life would be if I could learn to draw beautiful scenery, sing, or play piano.

As I write this blog, I conclude that no matter what kind of childhood each one of us had, we should try to remember the good parts and tell stories to our kids. After all, many of us growing up in the 70s are considered historic by our kids . . .

It all started when we decided to move to a single-family home in a Delaware suburb. We did a proper inspection like any other responsible buyer. But we forgot one minor detail, which was to put our offer contingent upon having cell phone signal at the house!

The reality kicked in the first day after we moved in; there was no signal for my Sprint cell phone. No signal inside the house, no signal in the backyard, and only a weak signal down the driveway.

I’ve carried cell phones since the mid 1990s. I’ve had my love-hate relationship with cell phones. I’ve loved my phone because I could be on a call anywhere. I was in many places at once, having my mom on hold, trying to finish up a conference call, and avoiding unwanted calls from work. I hated my phone because the number of new daily voicemails could exceed the number of my unread e-mails. Perhaps the worst part was my husband’s complaints after I stopped picking up the cell phone while grocery shopping: “If you don’t answer your cell, why do you carry it anyway?”

Having no signal at my new house made me realize the depth of my cell phone addiction. Since I could not change the house, I tried to change the phone, get a local number, and find out from neighbors about their cell phone carriers. After spending hours at the Sprint store we discovered that my house is located in the Dead Zone. Dead signal zone that is. I decided to cancel out of my contract and pay the whopping $300 cancellation fee. I bought a pay-as-you-go phone and managed to keep it a secret from family, friends, and work.

Ironically, and to my own surprise, I became more disciplined and organized. I didn’t have to worry about receiving calls from family and friends while meeting with prospects and clients. I did not have to worry about a low battery anymore. I tried not to worry about my son while thousands of miles away on a business trip. My employees started finding clever ways to deal with work-related issues, knowing that if I wasn’t online I wasn’t reachable.

The crazy world around me started to calm down. I was winning the gift of being at one place at a time. It has been like that for the last three years and I just love it!

Where did it all begin?

You can decide whether it is a personal mission or a need to discover uncharted territory. It all began with a quest to make sense of the dynamic and competitive business world we live in.

Background

A couple of years ago I was the chief technology officer (CTO) at a document preparation company. You might be familiar with the document preparation business. When you apply for a mortgage to purchase or refinance a house, you are given a stack of documents to sign. Let’s call these closing documents. These 20+ pages of closing documents are put together based on federal, state, and county laws, as well as the mortgage lender’s loan criteria and the loan characteristics.

The intelligence and automation behind choosing a subset of 20+ pages from a repository of tens of thousands of documents is what a document preparation company does. Another core part of this business is keeping the entire repository of documents in compliance as laws change.

From the technical point of view the process of updating this document repository can be explained as follows. First, the document preparation company receives an XML file that includes borrower information and loan characteristics from the lender. Using rule engines, a subset of documents pertinent to this borrower and this loan is determined automatically. Using math engine numbers such as the monthly payment, the monthly interest amount and other numbers are calculated. Using dynamic PDF, foreground text is merged with background documents, and the final package of closing documents are produced as a PDF file. Finally, the PDF is sent to the lender and the attorney for their review.

Some lenders produce the closing documents in-house, while other lenders outsource this operation to document preparation companies.

The document preparation business is indeed competitive. Many software companies compete for the same market. Occasionally lenders discontinue using document preparation services and opt to manage their operations in-house.

As the CTO of this company, I was tasked with turning the aging client-server system into an automated online application using expert systems and dynamic PDFs. This was a dream project for me and perhaps a dream project for any system architect and project manager.

What Is Next?

I follow everything and anything about online visualization tools. I truly believe as part of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 we will see a huge leap forward in the near future in the way we analyze the massive amount of online data.

I am also very much interested in finding an economical way to create an AppExchange that automatically feeds data from Salesforce to an expert system, then displays the result in Salesforce. This might add new possibilities to analyze both structured and unstructured data in Salesforce.

As the final point I would like to say that although the financial benefits of running an AppExchange start-up are nowhere near that of being the CTO of an established company, I indeed enjoy this adventure every single day. I hope to be able to help you make sense of the dynamic and the competitive business world using our AppExchanges.

Competactix

We managed to continue as an AppExchange partner, adding Google visualization tools to Ida Apps for Google Alerts. By using visualization tools as part of our AppExchange we could now provide variety to the interactive dashboard to spot keyword trends and compare keywords side by side.

At last I achieved the first part of my journey. I am delighted to say that e-mails, calls, test drives, and installations are picking up again. Clients recognize that we build a better app with more powerful features.

Before I knew it, I was busy finalizing the architecture of our second AppExchange, Ida Apps Competactix. Conceptually this would become Phase Two of my adventure: building an app to monitor competition, competing products, and services. This app helps clients understand and follow the dynamic nature of competitive spectrum. I came across a paragraph in Wikipedia, “With the right amount of information, your organization can avoid surprises by anticipating competitors’ moves and by reducing response time . . .”. We are doing exactly that! Ida Apps Competactix enables early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious.

As part of Competactix we added the capability to tag competitors in Salesforce Account and maintain a list of competing products and services in the Account level. We also enhanced Salesforce Opportunity to capture competing products and services for each opportunity. After all, in the real world we always compete with similar products and services. Honestly, I could not understand why this approach was not already built into Salesforce. The final step was to add an interactive Google Motion Chart to Competactix. I debated for a while about adding the native Salesforce dashboard vs. interactive Google charts, but I thought, “Let’s go live with the interactive dashboard and upon client requests we will add native dashboards in the next release.”

I am glad to announce that we recently received Salesforce’s approval to list Competactix on AppExchange. So I am about to conclude Phase Two of my journey: going live soon.

When Disaster Happens

Then disaster happened.

The day after Google Chrome launched, our AppExchange with Google Alerts broke. I was on vacation in Mexico at the time, without reliable Internet access. Clients kept e-mailing and calling me, but I had no solution to offer. Finally Aaron detected the problem; Google had altered the Alerts’ schema. It took us some time to fix the app, test it, go through Salesforce security check again, and relaunch our app. The relaunch timeline coincided with one of the Salesforce quarterly upgrades. Although the upgrade was seamless to Salesforce clients, it was problematic for partners and developers trying to upload new managed packages. We lost more time until the problem was fixed. This gap was disastrous for our business. Clients stopped using our app. They would not return calls. It was a very difficult time for me, and it was hard to stay committed.