1. To see & hear this deck presented in 4min:
http://vimeo.com/ownlocal/ownlocal
• In January 2010, Jason Novek and Lloyd Armbrust started Seeing Interactive
as a Y Combinator-backed company.
• In June 2010, we received seed funding from Baseline Ventures (Steve
Anderson), Lerer Ventures (Ken Lerer), Paul Buchheit (Gmail & FriendFeed),
Joshua Schatcher (Delicious), Alex Moore (Palantir), and Trevor Blackwell
(Anybots).
• In January of 2011, we started using the name OwnLocal.
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2. • In 2010, we traveled to different markets to discover what small businesses need to be
successful online.
• We learned that SMBs just want someone they trust to make the internet work for
them.
• The result was a consultative sales process and product development strategy that takes
the pain out of getting online and winning new business there.
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3. Small businesses outside of the top Urban areas are stuck. They need to participate in an
ever increasing number of areas online, but they haven't figured out how to master the
basics. It's confusing.
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4. Conclusions:
Most SMB's can't dedicate the time and resources to do all the work
themselves.
Self-service solutions are too time-consuming and confusing. Options abound
and no clear steps of what to do next.
Local Contractors and national direct sales groups like ReachLocal are too
expensive.
Companies like Yelp and Groupon are point solutions that can solve certain
pieces of the puzzle but still leave many essential services to the SMB to figure
out.
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5. We know it’s not sexy. We know it’s not exciting. But we leverage local
newspapers because it gives us four things that cost our competitors too
much time and money to succeed:
1. We have access to small businesses
2. We have immediate relationships
3. We have immediate trust
4. We have a large existing sales force that can bring us leads.
Everyone else stands outside these communities ramming the door. We
partner with local groups, share the revenue and are welcomed in to the
community with open arms.
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6. The sales machine
1. We launch our white-label directory with the publisher’s brand
2. The publisher markets our directory for free with Print, Web, Radio, and TV Ads. We
organize multiple e-mail blasts and each publisher sales rep calls their top 20 SMB
accounts. The goal of this marketing is to get SMBs to claim or add their business listing
to the directory. This gives them control of the listing and access to analytics.
3. Our reps in Austin, TX then call to verify the listing. We use this process to convince
these SMBs to come to a future online consultation located at the publisher’s office.
4. We train the publisher’s sales agents to close sales based on a highly consultative sales
process by presenting an 80-point inspection of the SMBs online presence. 53% of
SMBs who attend this meeting sign up for paid services.
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7. • It’s almost impossible to pursue local markets nationally.
• The blue area is worth almost half the total advertising dollars spent in the United
States.
• Our team understands small towns having lived there. The needs are different. The
business owners are looking for different things.
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8. • Our average publisher generates $120,000 in annual revenue the first year
• We have identified over 4,300 daily and weekly newspapers in the US who could execute
on this level
• This network should generate $516,000,000 per year.
• We can also work with Chambers of Commerce, Radio and TV stations.
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9. • Lloyd Armbrust is a problem solver who is half sales and half technical with 10
years experience in the newspaper industry. Lloyd believes that OwnLocal has the
right recipe to do what no one else has done: break into local markets, dominate
them, and expand.
• Jason Novek is a hardcore technologist, data geek, and Rails hacker. He is one of
our two founders and runs our technical team.
• Lamar Romero is our VP of Sales and comes to us from 10 years of enterprise
sales experience at Dell where he ran their Fedex & International Paper account
teams with $30m annual sales quotas. In 8 weeks at OwnLocal, Lamar took our 4-
person enterprise sales team and developed a sophisticated sales pipeline with
$2.22m in added annual revenue so far.
• Jeremy Mims is an entrepreneur and former Y Combinator founder from
Frogmetrics. He has acquired large sales accounts and handles marketing.
Our original hypothesis was that we could save local publications by helping them
bolt on our suite of products. What we discovered was that we were looking at the
problem backwards. By helping local businesses first, a byproduct would be to help
local publications survive.
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11. We make a suite tools that make small businesses succeed on the web.
Long-term we're the one stop shop for small business everywhere to be successful (even
major markets). We’re like a Heroku AppStore for media or an iPhone AppStore
for SMBs.
For more information request an intro on AngelList: http://angel.co/ownlocal
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