The Ones to Watch: Adam Baker, Blottr.com
Name: Adam Baker
Company: Blottr.com
Date established: August 2010
Website: www.blottr.com
Twitter: @BlottrTweets
1. Describe your business in one sentence
Blottr.com is a citizen journalism news service that enables anyone to capture, report, collaborate and discover news as it happens.
2. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
During 9/11 it struck me how long it took for mainstream news services to cover events, yet there were hundreds of people at the scene capturing footage without an outlet to publish it. Enabling people to capture and report incidents they are witnessing uncovers lots of news that would otherwise not gain exposure and often enables Blottr.com to break news long before mainstream news services.
3. What have been your key challenges and how have you overcome them?
Building traction and contributors. We have focused on developing a platform which is powerful for the search engines, so much of our growth and user adoption has been generated organically. We have reached the tipping point where stories and users flow into us at a good pace now, but it took some time to reach this point. We have recently launched in Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester, so the learnings we took from our initial launch in London is helping us with traction and engagement in these new cities. As an indicator of traction, our traffic has grown by approximately 70% mom since January, a percentage that continues to increase.
4. How have you funded your start-up?
In the first year, I personally funded the business through development and into Beta and then in May 2011, we raised £1m from Mark Pearson, founder of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk.
I met five investors (three angels and two venture capitalists) and had two term sheets in the space of about six weeks. I also met with a very large technology fund - that I knew we were too early for - but making the contact and putting us firmly on their radar will hopefully prove useful in future.
We raised fairly quickly to be honest, partly because we had a strong product and vision, and partly because I met the right investment partner.
Nearly all of our marketing happens through search, social media and word of mouth. Networking at every opportunity and meeting people face-to-face is also a very effective way of promoting the business.
I am religious about making sure we get ROI for every £1 we spend. We have a small, but super talented team of PR, marketing and social media people who deliver exceptional results using tools that are freely available, as well as coming up with creative ways of reaching new audience's, acquiring new users and engaging our existing, valued communities.
We have made significant traction in London and are enjoying similar success in each of our UK cities. We plan to launch Blottr into 3 European countries by the end of this year, with plans for further roll out into new countries in 2012.
We recently launched an app for iPhone and iPad, with the Android version soon to follow. Mobile is a real focus for us and we have already seen how powerful the app can be in encouraging and enabling people to capture and report events they are witnessing from mobile to web in real time. Contributions and new user acquisition continues to grow as a result.
7. If you started again, is there anything you’d do differently?
This is my third startup so much of my learning has come from failing at stuff I've tried before. I have a reasonably good sense of what works and what doesn't, which only failing at things can bring.
The three main things that I have done differently with Blottr.com that I didn't do so well with previous ventures are:
- Hire an in-house development team. This will enable you to be much more hands on, provide clear transparency and visibility of development at every stage and allow you to spot and change things in a more agile way.
- Stay lean. Find brilliantly smart people that can and are happy to multi-task. Just because we have money to spend, doesn't mean we should chuck it at the wall.
- You can't do it on your own. Thinking you know best is dangerous and often leads to failure. It is a fine line between steadfastly believing in your strategy/vision but at the same time, be open to new ideas and better/alternative ways of doing things.
8. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs based on your business experience so far?
- Don't procrastinate. Get your product to market as early as possible. Your best learning will come from your users.
- Be prepared to pivot. Your strategy and product roadmap now will almost certainly change in 12 months, be it incremental changes or complete strategic shifts.
- Don't be afraid to take calculated risks and punch above your weight
Take advice, listen to others, welcome feedback, and embrace ideas that are not your own.
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