Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

Most of startups are relying on online advertising with the very same principle: create a service, get a massive audience and try to monetize it.

Everything seems to be ok as long as online advertising is growing fast.
But the future of online adverising is elsewhere.

The online advertising 1.0 (today) is a copycat of the traditional advertising: Get me a massive audience, interupt what they are doing to expose my brand or at most click on my ads.
I’m talking about any kind of display advertising ( banners, over the page, etc..)

The online advertising 2.0 (what I’ve called Advertising on demand in a recent post) will be totally different by moving from a “look at my fantastic product” attitude to a “what can I do for you” one.
I mean by that propose to customers services they care about in your aera.
Nike made that move sometimes ago with product like Nike Ballers network, a facebook application where basketballers can: find a court, add your home court, find a game and schedule your own game and invite other players

Startups will have to review their copy if they want their share of the online advertising manna.

They will have to propose customizable version of their product in order to move their ad based business model to a b2b services businness model.
And from the success and the leadership will depend their revenues on the B2B side. Big brands don’t work will losers.

A couple of months ago, I have created an account on Kiva.org. Kiva enables you to loan to small businesses in developing countries.

You can see my lender page here.

I’ve helped among others 2 projects, one Internet cafe (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Ayacucho, Peru and one bookstore (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Agoe, Togo.

Small Amount of money to be honest ($100 + $10 donation to Kiva). It was a trial to verify by myself if the social business concept is really effective.

The answer seems to be yes because i just received the first repayment from both projects.

It’s a great feeling to see these projects becoming a reality and more important repaying their debt to give others the opportunity to been also helped.

I’m working on a project in the mobile area. I love this moment when you just keep thinking / discussing about it.

but here is the big question? what will make the difference ?

Of course, I start to have some experience but frankly it sometimes really hard to figure out what will make that vital difference.

Here is what I’ll try to always have in mind

Insights: my marketing background has taught me that a new service has to be based on a real need or solve something. We all are lazy, we don’t use something because it’s really smart or high end technology, but only because it’s fun or it helps. Never compromise on this.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): as soon as, we have this good idea, our first temptation is to sophisticate it more and more, adding options, etc…
You should do the opposite by trying to squeeze everything that is not vital to serve your idea. that way, you will make a easy service/product to use. If I need to read the manual, you are done. To read more on this: an article of Jacob Nielsen on BBC.co.uk: Web users getting more ruthless.

User Experience: you can the best idea ever if the user experience is weak, you will fail.
that’s where the alpha and beta version is useful, getting feedback not only for the marketing trick.
A good way to illustrate this is the following: In the Internet and Mobile, the User Interface is like a windows between the consumer and your service. The clearer is your window the more you consumer is seeing your service.

Timing: I’m actually reading “the singularity is near” by Ray Kurzweil and I will quote him on this:

Most of the inventions fail not because the R&D department can get them to work but because the timing is wrong

Inventing is like surfing: you gave to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right time hope that helps.

Please, don’t hesitate to comment and share your finding