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Tips from Cofounder of Omniture and Observepoint, John Pestana

John Pestana is a familiar name in Utah, he cofounded Omniture which sold for over 1.8 billion dollars. And he more recently cofounded observe point 6 or 7 years ago, he is the cofounder and chairman of the board. He plays more of a business development and product role.  He helps with long term vision of the product by creating connections and networking. 

They help a company have quality data, data that they can trust.  The platform looks at their data implementations, all of their marketing techniques, and make sure that they are all functioning properly. Whether its on their website, video or mobile platform they just make sure their data is being collected properly.  It is a business to business market.

What is a big difficulty you have faced in this business,  and how did you overcome this difficulty?

“One of the hardest things is finding the qualified people into the company and finding skilled developers.  Building a good product has come pretty natural to us because we are already very familiar to the market that we are in.”

How did you find the top developers or team members?    

“Basically reaching out to my network and the people that I already knew.  Although none of these people I had actually personally met before.  Many of them were references that I received from people that I knew.  I always tried to reach out to my network and look for leads.”

What tip would you give an entrepreneur? 

“Just start, I think everyone waits for the perfect scenario.  And I think if you want to be an entre you just need to start and the opportunities will come. You will start seeing clearer and know what you need to do, and what you shouldn’t do.  Like with Omniture we just started making websites for people and then we tired X, Y, and Z and created different products and then actually a friend of mine came and said Hey have you guys thought about making this tracking app.  And that’s how we started into it.  But if we hadn’t gotten out that and started making those basic websites none of that would have happened.”

If there is anything that you would have changed in your entrepreneurial journey what would that be?

“I haven’t second guessed that many things.. Nothing ever goes perfect right?  I don’t know even the bad decisions guide you into better decisions. And if you were to take away those experiences I don’t know if I would have learned as fast.  There’s no real big thing that sticks out in my mind that I wish I wouldn’t have done.  There were a lot of tough times but I think we were able to make good decisions in the moment.”

Story of Piper & Scoot

Piper & Scoot was started by Nate and Kylee Middleton.  They started off by selling used clothes on Instagram and then they used that money to bootstrap their way to where they are today! Piper and Scoot sells exclusively online and ships worldwide. 

Like many start ups they have had their share of difficulties, unfortunately one of the major difficulties they have had is untruthful competitors who have stolen their clothing lines, blogger contacts, and some have gone after them personally, etc.. This has taught them a lot of patience. All you can do is hope that eventually they will stop or that somehow people will see that they are not being genuine. Kylee has learned that more than striving for sales, she should strive for customer loyalty. "Since there isn't much that is proprietary about what we do as a company, that doesn't mean I can't set my company apart by the way I market and use my voice to capture customers."

Kylee and Nate Middleton

 Another difficulty they have had to overcome is keeping enough inventory in stock. They have learned how to better estimate how much stock they can handle as they have been in the business longer. It has come down to a lot of trial and error, but going into their second year of business, "I would say we have really worked hard to improve upon this." 

"If I could give one tip for entrepreneurs, I would say to set a goal and stick to it. I didn't originally start Piper & Scoot thinking it would be a big deal one day--a big deal meaning it can employ both me and my husband (that's a big deal to me!)--so I didn't have a solid goal in mind. But as my husband and I have set goals, I have seen our company really start to take off. It takes a lot of perseverance and there were tons of times that I thought about just liquidating all my inventory and hitting the road, but I am glad I didn't. I couldn't see the potential that Piper & Scoot had at the beginning and I hope it continues to grow, but its not without a lot of hard work, which can sometimes be super annoying when you feel like its all you ever do."

"If there was anything I could have changed in my journey thus far as an entrepreneur, I wouldn't have let the copycats get to me. They were just wasting my time and setting my company back. I had a hard time separating my emotions from my work, but now I feel like I've learned to channel my passion into something that actually helps me achieve my goals."

Jeff Pedersen (Del Sol & Cariloha)

Taylor Brasher

Del Sol started up as a very small family business.  In 2000 Jeff and his wife got into the business by moving to St. Marks and working on the front lines.  Jeff started as an intern (increasing sales by 30%) and moved his way up the ladder from store manager, to VP of sales, to partner and eventually CEO of the company.

Jeff bought out his partners in 2003 and 2006 and then in 2007 started up the sister company Cariloha.  Cariloha’s introduction was rough, they had a hard time getting traction with their product.  That is when Jeff asked his team if they could create a fabric out of bamboo.  They were creating their own marketplace and saw that this idea was incredible.  They started with 5000 shirts and they all sold out in less than 3 weeks, since that time they have had incredible success.

Del Sol has an interesting way of finding its employees.  70% of 

the employees that make up the employee base of Del Sol and Cariloha started working there as interns.  With this method of finding people, their interns work all the way up the ladder and already know how to deal with customers and are familiar with the company.

Some of Jeff’s entrepreneurial tips focused on a very important point: Hiring people to help your dream take off.  You need to love working with them, they should be smarter than you are, and they need to share the same fire/ passion that you have. 

Jeff is a great example of someone who works hard, doesn’t let anything hold him back from reaching his goals, and someone who keeps true to their values.

Entrepreneurial tips from Time-tracker application CEO Jared Armstrong

Taylor Brasher

BUS M 490

Jon Bradshaw

           

Jared Armstrong is the founder of MinuteDock and handles the CEO & CTO roles at MinuteDock. He keeps the business moving forward and his code runs a huge number of MinuteDock's complex backend systems.  Jared Armstrong founded MinuteDock (which will be explained later in the interview) with two fellow colleagues while looking for a solution to one of their time tracking problems. 

Q.  What Demographic do

 you target with your product?

--MinuteDock; CEO Jared Armstrong (center)

A. “Initially we really focused on freelancers, and small 1-3 people businesses.  Over the years we have came to realize that from a business perspective that isn’t such a great demographic because they aren’t willing to pay much more than the minimum amount of money for the product.  At the moment the main demographic is still in the small business space but we are trying to get companies that employ around 10-20 people.  Usually the industries are professional service businesses, such as design agencies, accounting

firms, and developers.

Q. What gave you the desire to start this business?

A.  “MinuteDock was started in mid-2009, and there were originally three of us who made it. What we were at the time was we were software consultants and we were selling our souls for an hourly rate and tracking our time, adding all the details of what we worked on, and being Kiwis we also were on to this new great thing called Xero for our accounting.   Xero doesn’t have time tracking in their product so we thought, “Okay, we just need a basic tool to track our time and get it into Xero.” It sort of grew from there really. We added a whole bunch of other features and worked for around that time-tracking problem to really make tracking time and keeping track of your targets and budgets for clients and customers. It’s really easy and really seamless.”

Q.  How did finance your business, or find investors?

A.  “We are fully bootstrapped, we basically funded it through our contacting work.  For a long time we were working on it part time.  Then once our part time wages weren’t covering expenses we started to contract our clients.  For now we plan to continue private, and in the long run we can go public, but we have not planned for that yet.”

Q.  If you had one tip for new

entrepreneurs what would it be?

A.  “Make sure you choose your fellow founders wisely.  Establish goals and make sure you are all on the same page before you start up the business.  For us in MinuteDock we worked extremely well together for the first few years, and then we started to have a few problems and that’s when I ended up buying out the other founders.  Also to get the best outcome on any business you need to invest everything you have in that particular business and focus on that.” 

  “MinuteDock is an online time tracking software. Essentially it’s built for any small business that has a time component as a key part of their business.  It allows the business to track and bill their time and gives them an easy way to get invoices into their accounting system and send off to their customers.