- What is your programming cost per hour?
- Programming, what language? PHP, ASP, Java, C++, …?
- It does not matter. Give us a price per hour. And it must be legal binding for the next 3 years!
- I cannot give you such thing. The price differences are very big. Tell me more details.
- We can’t. Give us a price or you will not be included in the pitch!
- Tell me at least the size of the project. If you give us a lot of work is one price, if you bother us with shitty projects, another price.
- No, we cannot give you this information
- OK then… xxx eur/hour for PHP for big projects.
- No, no,  it should be in RON.
- RON? And for 3 years? Legally binding???
- Yes.
- And what if the forex goes wild?
- Your problem.
and so on…

Of course, we lost the pitch. Who won it? Somebody that asked 10 eur + VAT/h and they will inflate the hours X6 to actually be profitable.

Some clients deserves their fate.

Then, the clients said: “Why didn’t you implement what you just said?“. So, we become a full e-marketing agencies, with focus on web/apps development.

An then 2 more things happened: A. all clients came from recommendations.  B. Being well behaved, we could not say no to anybody. How can we say “No” to somebody that came via a friend? We could not.

The good thing was we stretched our heads and learned a lot of new things. This made us more valuable as consultants, but less valuable as a scalable business. The fact that the scalability of our business was low was killing us and generated a lot of frustrations. We considered ourselves an intellectually challenging addicted team. We loved that we could not get bored day after day, because each day we faced a new challenge. And we still do. But there is a slight difference.

We started to have the power to say NO to some projects. The selection criteria for the projects we are doing are now much more clear. Is it good for us on middle and long term? We take it. It’s good only on short term? Reject.

It’s difficult. We reject good money. But we know that CARPE DIEM is not a good long term strategy. I  think all the small companies have the same problem. Focus. And more focus.

We are still in the process to have the complete power on the saying NO. But we have come a long way. We do have a clear purpose and we intend to stick to it. Wish us luck!

It’s a nice portfolio and we are proud of it.

A lot of memories re-appeared. And a sense of satisfaction. We have 4 years now, a nice organic growth, clients that love us and recommend us further. The team is getting bigger (this summer, during peak season we were 22 souls involved in Ferseta e-Consulting Cabinet).

We have new ideas about how to reinvent ourselves, to become more efficient, so future is something that we just can’t wait

Next step (when we will have the energy and time to do it): a complete re-branding Coming up!

You can see the top here: http://startevo.com/topul-romanilor-inspirationali-startevo

Actually, this is a Facebook Application, available here: http://www.facebook.com/startevo/app_453410094674665.

After you install it, you see the list of your facebook friends, you check the names you consider inspirational, and that’s it.

Until now, in 4 days since the soft beta launch, we got 1400+ Romanians nominated as INSPIRATIONALS, which is not bad at all…

• without integration of understanding, intuition, sensibility, a digital social media is in vain
• they use “Antena” software, to listen the web
• total media = owned media + earned media + paid media
• push (persuasion) pull (motivation)
• be social means Social + local + mobile (SOLOMO)
• ? what is their average cost per fan attracted?

Hungary guy, carnation group

• 80% of Italian population spend 4h in average at TV
• branded gadgets for facebook fans for barrila
• i need to build DESIRE. it’s the only way to make consumer to purchase
• lego did a table, where u can take a picture of the think u did.
• content becomes more important that creativity

Avon lady

• 1/3 of avon clients are rural

Now, I see that in Alexa, for the past months, twitter is going down. So, if you were not an early adopter, now you are in the trend if you are not using it

The decrease is not major, but is significant in time. Click to enlarge.

Marius Ghenea

• all actual studies shows that small entrepreneurial companies are generating jobs, not the big ones
• the progress came from debt, loans in the past years. is not ok. increase productivity should be the motor.
• celebrate entrepreneur.
• entrepreneurs are not born, are made
• theory of 10,000 hours necessary to become an entrepreneur
• Steve Jobs, Mozart, successful entrepreneurs
• school for start-ups – Marius Ghenea tries to promote it in whole region
• NGOs still entrepreneurs, even if they are non-profit
• in Romania we don’t have an entrepreneurial education
• we need models, because the models generates new entrepreneurs
• in top 100 entrepreneurs in Europe, Romanians have 3 positions: ubervu, brainient, erepublik
• http://www.postprivatizare.ro – supporter for projects

Dragos Manac

• 4 years ago, at NETCAMP, erepublik was the most lame presentation. Now, they are the best in the domain
• from services, we moved to products
• personal accomplishment is better than money
• everybody has a business idea (at least)
• ideas are like mental spermatozoids. there are zillions, one is a winner
• entrepreneurship is not the same with money
• purpose, work, determination
• i will change the world=> i will change MY world
• Art of money making (PT Barnum); Economics in one lessons (Henry Hazlitt), Flow: The Psychology of optimal Experience (Mihaly Csikszent Mihaly), The essential Drucker (Peter Drucker)
• I like fucked up entrepreneurs, because i know statistically they will fail. And they will appreciate more what i offer them
• What i do must constant improve what i already did!

Calin Fusu

• best case scenario you will fail. worst case scenario u will struggle for 10 years and after that you will fail.
• intelligence is not relevant. determination is the most important.
• not all people can resist from physical point of view.
• local market is small. international market is very competitive
• or are you based on content, or on sales force
• do you have a co-founder – you will fight eachother
• u must love chaos, otherwise you will crack
• you need to define your formula (business formula)

Zoli

• 20k views of HD streaming, 4h event = 100 usd with windows azure
• 14 july, 1 million unique visitors on several hundreds processors, Ministry of Education

Antonio Eram

• explain how your idea solves a problem, not how it works.
• explain why should by from u
• don’t put numbers. If idea is good, nobody looks at figures. They will follow later.
• focus. business and benefits. the rest will come. focus on the big picture.
• have a very simple business plan
• be open for alternative methods for produce money
• think global. be open minded. embrace global conference
• know as much as possible many people from various corners of the world
• don’t be desperate
• passionate: 150% of your time.
• Romania = vampire, hackers and good programmers – we are exotique

Ovidiu Parachivescu

• they want to be  mediator between clients and programmers

Here you can buy the app: http://itunes.apple.com/ro/app/alerta-cutremur-vrancea/id465291565?mt=8

We are proud that this iPhone application will save lives when the BIG one will hit us.

How does it work? IRSA (Romanian Istitute for Applied Seismology) installed a lot of sensors inside the Vrancea Mountains. These sensors are measuring a lot of parameters, including when the first quake waves hit the earth surface. The wave travels very fast towards Bucharest, and it takes aprox 30 seconds to reach Bucharest. Those 30 seconds are the difference between life and death. You can put the family in a safe place.

Really nice product. We are proud to working with such products and clients!

The only project that defeat us was the Robotz, who has like 0.5MM fans on facebook. So, indeed, we achieved a great result, that we are proud of it.

We are very, very happy

In brick and mortar world, mom & pops individual corner shops started to decay for like 40 years now, because the large chain stores kicked in. Both the hypermarkets ones (wall-mart, carrefour, etc), both the supermarket ones (Plus, Profi, Lidl, Wallgreens, etc), both the small groceries and kiosk chains took over market share. More and more money worldwide we are paying to chains of shops versus individual shops.

And this makes sense. They have the financial power to negotiate smaller prices, they have better marketing, they are buying nice locations, their procedures are well established, the quality standards are usually higher than individual proprietary shops… We perceive they have lower prices (which is only a perception)…

Same on the internet. In the past years it was a madness with the launch of countless websites that all look for attention. Based on the SEO guidelines, the vast majority of these were GENERIC names, with the keyword in the url, so it will have a better chance for Google, to show up higher in results. That also lead to countless spam sites, optimised with bogus content, usually just a trick to drag people on these site and then monetize them somehow (via CPC, either selling stuff directly or indirectly, using backdoors).

Google is fighting spam sites for some time, with not very clear results. Even after the Panda 2.2 launch, the spam sites with stolen content were doing pretty good, while other relative original content sites were hit. But the direction is clear: original, added value content, from TRUSTWORTHY locations will be king in the future. Will you trust your credit card data to that site? You do, if it’s a brand

Before launching a web product, it was always a decision between 2 choices:

1. select a unique, memorable domain name (and brand): google, yahoo, whatever with 2 00 in name, zulu, mulu, biku, maka, vaka, fring, bing, ping, and whatever other combinations
2. choose a generic keyword search term in url: cheap tickets, cheap hotels, and so on

Now, Google launched the +1 feature. What will happen? They’re using crowdsorcing to figure it out what sites to bring up in search results. And if you search for example “insurance” on google, countless people will give a thumbs up to BRAND sites. That will means on medium term it will be virtually impossible for no brand names to break into the top 10 results, that will be fill with brand sites.

So, my advice to all web product developers: CREATE BRANDS ONLINE, not generic sites. Generic will die. Not to mention that if you create a brand online, you can sell it later