Mobile Madness

How one local ex-tech exec is making waves in wireless

by Drew Ermenc

August 25, 2008

T here's a rumble growing in Atlanta entrepreneurship, and it's coming from local high-tech start-ups. With incubators like Georgia Tech's ATDC (Advanced Technology Development Center) and a hotbed of top companies such as UPS and Georgia-Pacific relying on technology to stay ahead, the sector is gaining steam in post-dot-com-bust Atlanta. For up-and-coming entrepreneurs like Marci Troutman, an ex-tech exec with The Home Depot, ideas like her latest venture, SiteMinis, a mobile marketing solutions company, are helping facilitate the growing wealth of tech start-ups trying to make it locally. Drew Ermenc, editor and associate publisher of Catalystmag.com ( Atlanta Woman 's sister site about local small business and entrepreneurship), spoke with Troutman about her latest mobile endeavor, how to land the big client, and why she wasn't interested in bringing in venture capital.

Give me your 30-second elevator pitch about SiteMinis.
SiteMinis is a brainchild coming out of Home Depot. I'm one of the originals at homedepot.com and tried to discover how we could bring more of our audience from the contractor field into the site to actually order. The contractors out there with a Palm everyday looking at their schedules, we just thought that it would be best if we could put together a module that they could carry around on their job site, punch in all their products for the next day to order, bring it back to their computers, log in and place the order at homedepot.com.

Of course, Home Depot comes a little bit behind the times with IT and stuff like that. That never came to fruition. That was, I would say, 2001 to 2002 timeframe.

So I built a prototype out, and I built it out for the flip phone when the flip phone came out. Of course, the Internet wasn't even accessible for mobiles yet.

In 2006, I launched it alongside an eCommerce company that I owned and went to market with it through VCs (venture capital). [I] walked through the VC realm and ended up walking away from VC money and deciding to just do it on my own, and launched it on its own in 2007 as its own incorporation. Started down the pavement into all of the big box retailers because my initial product was mobile commerce.

So mobile commerce being something that is up and coming and everyone's going to need to do it at some point, the United States being a little bit behind everyone else in the world. Well, not everyone else, I would say Europe and Asia anyway. So everyone is interested and along the way of walking into all of the entertainment industries and a lot of the big boxes, having been in Home Depot, I had developed relationships already, so it was easier for me. So walking into all these companies, they all wanted something a little bit different in the mobile marketing realm.

So we built a suite of mobile marketing products that we could offer, like conduits into a mobile shop that will eventually become a mobile shop, the text message scenario or the coupons on the mobile or the landing pages.

We just launched a site called GasRunner.com which has a database-driven portal system behind it that allows gas stations to come in and put in their own real-time live data and updated themselves, and then all the users can come and view it for free.
  
Who was your first big client?
Bloomingdales.

Wow. How did you manage that?
Perseverance, I would say. We're not even done yet. We have a contract there, and Bloomingdales is such a big box. It's similar to but not bigger than Home Depot. So we haven't really even designed where we start but I have a contract to start a project in, so we're just kind of doing small little pieces here and there.

That's great. Tell me about that first big sale and, 1) what it meant for the company, and 2) how did you achieve that?  You mentioned perseverance, but dig a little deeper if you don't mind.
Bloomingdales was my first target, and from there, I went over to the Liz [Claiborne] brands ... We actually did do a launch on DKNY, and that was a small viral campaign for the mobile. The Bloomingdales piece was very difficult because I walked into the IT side of things. My thinking comes out of the IT side a little bit just because I started out right in code. In writing code, I understand all the bits and pieces that are behind building what we need to be done on the mobile.

So sitting down with the IT team, it's not necessarily the way to go. Really, you need to start with the merchandising side or the marketing side and let them say, 'Yes, this is what we need to do for promotions because here is where the ROI comes in and here's where you're going to need money, and then here are the specs for the IT side. And you guys build it.'

I kind of went the back way into it. In that respect, I met quite a few people from the IT side which is extremely valuable for me. It took a lot longer for me to get to the endgame where I have a contract and yes, they're going to start their mobile marketing with us. It was difficult. It was lots of meetings and lots of trips to New York.

But, in the end, it's perseverance. Perseverance. It pays off, just keep going, and you build relationships. Building relationships is extremely important.

That's great. Essentially, you are a start-up, and that's a lot of faith for a big company.
Yes, it helps that there's not that many other companies in the marketplace that everyone in the mobile space is a start-up. So that does help. Coming out of the dot-com craze in '95, I started in '95, so coming out of all of that and going through in '99 when they had the big dot-com craze, you saw how many start-up companies became just huge, right?  Because everybody was small and everybody was starting out. So that makes a big difference.

You mentioned that you walked away from VC money: 1) tell me why, and 2) are you bootstrapping right now?
No longer. We have investments from friends and family, and we have a small investor. We're actually launching projects now, and it's fine, but yes I did bootstrap. Yes, I did. It was well worth it to me though because I didn't have to give away 60 percent of my company. The VCs wanted to take a bigger chunk of the company just because it's a very new entity, and mobile marketing and mobile commerce was not something that has been proven in the United States yet. So there weren't numbers behind it.

Seeing what happened in the dot-com craze with all of the little one-off companies and the garages and whatever, not that I was in that, because I already had a company that we had a base. But seeing all the companies in the dot-com craze in their basement, mom and pop shops, taking all the VC money, I'm sure they've probably gotten a little leery about that kind of a thing anyway.

Yes, they just wanted too big of a chunk and wanted to come in and manage and run what I already knew how to do and wanted to build my own team around it, so I stepped away from it and decided to bootstrap it until I got to a point and I made it.

Any bootstrapping tips for small business owners and entrepreneurs waiting for their first big client?
It's not easy; hang in there. A lot of people might tell you to stop and just don't especially if you believe in it as much as you believe in it. An entrepreneur wouldn't be doing it or bootstrapping it if they didn't believe in it enough. There's enough statistics out there on mobile and where it's heading that I had enough believers. I have a very solid board behind me.

While bootstrapping, it was difficult, I still had people that I could fall back on if I absolutely had to which helped. That would be the advice I would give. I would say build a strong board.

Tell me about your board of advisors. How did you find them?  Just tell me a little bit about that process.
The board of advisors was another thing called perseverance. At Home Depot, they didn't have a mentorship program that went out of there. They did bring one in when Bob Nardelli came in, and they started that process, but there wasn't one when I was there. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew I wanted to pull out of big box and I wanted to become my own entity and I wanted to grow this mobile piece. So I actually handpicked people that I wanted to mentor me, and I would just go up and I'd bug them until they said OK.

I ended up with six board members, and they're not official board members, but they're an advisory board. But any time I need anything done or anything discussed, they'll all come in and they'll come together and we'll all sit down at a roundtable and we'll discuss it and pull the parts in. It's extremely valuable. These are leaders in the industry.

Tell me, what has been your biggest challenge so far in starting up SiteMinis?
The biggest challenge so far is just the big companies knowing that they need it, having a one-man mobile team, and the one-man mobile team not necessarily knowing how to jumpstart a mobile process within that company because he's so overwhelmed trying to do the dot-com side. I would say that's my biggest challenge.

It's trying to get that person to understand.

Is it a lack of investment in where you perceive the market is going?
Right, until a few launches, and we get a few projects going. Like GasRunner.com is going to be huge, I think, and it will produce very valuable numbers for us and along with quite a few of the others that we have the pipeline. But until you have that behind you with numbers with six months at least, it's difficult to walk into the bigger boxes and just say, "Here are the numbers. Let me show you exactly what it is going to do for you" because they don't see it. So there's just not a lot of research being done and put out there yet. It's all starting to come out now.

How many people work for you?
In total, there are probably about 150.

Wow.
That's across our IT side, and we have a team in India, and it's based on partnerships and it's based on 299s in contract and things like this.
  
We don't hire too many non-contracts. We have a small management team, and that's seven of us. But other than that, we don't bring people in per project and based on projects. Through my mentorship program, my mentors basically advise this way to do it. If you're going to bootstrap, that's another piece of advice. Don't hire a full in-house staff of people that are just going to sit around and push paper. You really need to save that money because you'll end up with quite a bit paying out, taxes and all.

Now, we have a team on Jimmy Carter Blvd, which is our IT side; a team in India, which is our IT side; a team in Buckhead, which is the admin staff; and a team on Sandy Plains; and we have a satellite office in Manhattan. There are three people that work with us in Manhattan.

You mentioned there are some competitors in the same space. What is your value-add that maybe others don't offer?
The competitors that we have in our space are just competitors of a certain element. So while we do some gaming module pieces and we do some commerce behind the gaming, there are companies that do fall on gaming, and that's just what their core is. So that would be our competitor in that respect. As far as our full breadth of products in the way that we bring our software behind the securities of a big box company's firewall in our mobile redirect, this kind of stuff, what we do is completely different than anybody else out there.

There is an upcoming company in the UK right now that is similar to what we're doing but the only thing they've launched to date is still a gaming piece.

So there is one company that is doing the database-driven thing, but they are a third party to anyone that they work with, like Delta.com for example. If you go to Delta.com, you get redirected to a URL that you're not familiar with. So it makes the customers a little bit leery about whether or not they want to put their information into it just because of what happened with some of the fraud in the dot-com side.

What we do is we actually have a mobile redirect that we've applied for a patent on. What it does is it takes your URL like bloomingdales.com and it pulls two sites underneath one roof, and it allows all of the securities and everything to live behind that, so when your mobile users come, they can feel comfortable shopping underneath bloomingdales.com versus some URL that's random that no one has ever heard of. Why would I give you my information - that kind of thing.

We actually [have] QA (quality assurance) across a lot of platforms. Right now, we have about 45 phones in our QA process. And as new phones get added, we actually add those to that process.

In terms of your specific product, what about these fully functional browsers like Safari on iPhone. Are they helping or are they hurting what you're trying to achieve?
Neither, because they kind of sit outside of what we're trying to achieve. What we're trying to achieve is to prove that you absolutely need two sites. You can't take all the information that you put up on the billboard and pair it all and bring it all down and squish it into a postcard and send that postcard out to your customers. They wouldn't understand it. It's the same thing that's happening with the phones. Even on an iPhone, you still have a small screen, and that screen is not going to be as big as your PC screen ever because that would just negate the fact that you're carrying around a mobile. It wouldn't be a mobile any longer. All of the websites that are non-configured are trying to smash a large amount of content into a small screen, and it doesn't fit. It's like putting a square peg into a round hole.