Meet Bizily Founder - Ketan Kotak

So what brought you to Bizily?

Bizily is a collection of insight from my experience as an entrepreneur. Whenever you try to do something alone you are faced with multitude issues. Work areas, legal issues, business development, operational challenges... Being an entrepreneur is hard. I am using my experience to create something that addresses the problems faced by people trying to grow a small business.

What has been your most persistent frustration as an entrepreneur?

Basically, everything outside of the core business. The things that you don’t naturally excel at are the hardest to get to. They become chores. The risk then, is that they don’t get done at all and you quickly realize that your talent and the great work you do for clients is only a part of the picture. What doesn't get done for most is sales and business development. My guess is that this comes naturally to less than 10% of entrepreneurs and it is a real obstacle to the other 90% of us. The relationships around the business that drive sales and are there but people need help turning them into a pipeline.

Bizily is a creative business solution for creative entrepreneurs. How have you applied your own creativity to Bizily?

Everybody is creative in one way or another. We often think of creative business as being associated with things like design, but creativity is how you come up with solutions. Creativity, for me, means maximizing what you have to get what you want. That is what Bizily does for small business. It recognizes and organizes your relationships and builds in tools that let you get the most out of them in a seamless way.

So it sounds like relationships are at the heart of the Bizily method?

Everything about a small service business comes down to people. Your ability to get things done rests on having the right relationship in place because there is so much interaction between the provider and the customer. Clients want a mutually beneficial and productive relationship with you so the connections that you form with clients and other vendors in your industry, as well as with friends and associates are likely to be the key to success in your business. Building and strengthening ties is the definition of business development for small service companies.

Biz looks completely different to any other small business application – what is it all about?

I think that is the difference between offering a tool and offering an experience. We are not interested in patching together bits and pieces of a solution but want to create a holistic experience based on the assumption that you are already doing a great job serving your clients and simply need to gather the benefits associated with that. We have created a map that allows you to quickly understand the proximity to your relationships to your business. That helps you identify existing connections that could deliver business if nurtured as well as helping you define good prospects for new relationships to grow. The whole thing is visually very different to anything else out there because we are looking at the situation from a unique perspective. We believe you are already have what you need to grow and we want to help you use it.

You give a lot of credit to your team. What were you looking for when you hired them?

Primarily what I look for are people who are different to me. Entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their own ideas and hire people who mirror them. I think this is a mistake. Direction comes from the core beliefs of a founder but a lot of voices are needed for good decision making around that. My role is to bring the smartest people together and get them thinking about my vision. Then I need to choose from amongst the ideas that emerge and define the evolution of the company. This is more interesting than simply plugging my own idea and it gets better results.

Who stands out for you in terms of mentors? Why are you an entrepreneur?

The person who comes to mind is my uncle. He was a businessman when I was growing up so I saw him build his company and was inspired by that. He was a role model, not perfect by any means but a 30 something guy who was traveling around the world building a global business. Seeing that made me realize that your horizons can stretch beyond your immediate environment. It gave me an extension to my perspective. At this point, being an entrepreneur comes so naturally to me that I cant think about doing anything else.

So tell us a bit about your launch and what to expect in February.

Well, the first 3 or 4 months of the beta launch is going to be about learning from our users. How do we take the product to a place where it really reflects the needs that are out there? Ultimately, what matters is how many people benefit from what we have built. Of course we will go out through the traditional channels but our success will depend on how well we listen to our customers and how well we respond to them. It is never black and white; if something doesn’t work you don’t scrap it. You try to figure out what will work and keep changing until it does.

Interview by Sara Batterby

Identity Crisis

“Pro Se” they call it in court, and the proverb goes, “the man who represents himself has a fool for a client.” The same goes for graphic design in a small business. Graphic Design is basically problem solving in 2 dimensions. The reason you can’t do a good job of it yourself is that there is no problem for you to solve. At the point at which you conceived of the business, you absolutely get it. You may well be the only one who gets it. You need no graphic solution to interpret it to yourself. It exists so strongly in fact that you can functionality articulating it in a product. The message resonates with you because it originates with you. To make that brand conception relevant to the rest of the world, you need an adversary: A reality check and a provocateur who can prod you to push beyond the personal boundaries of your idea, rein in your more extravagant excesses and create engagement around the core concept. Without an adversarial process one cannot arrive at the boldest possible solution necessary for the greatest, most compelling and best differentiated expression.

When collaborating with creative design experts, I like it best when they are the voice of reason and we, as the client, are the raving lunatics. I think good graphic designers might prefer it that way too. Having worked as a designer for a number of years and having seen my best and brightest children slain on the altar of the status quo, I am nostalgic about those clients who said they wanted something that discomfited them, and meant it. Even better when they rejected most of my first round of concepts as too docile and unchallenging.

That’s where we are now. We gave crowd-sourcing a try and wound up with something that solved the problem, but didn’t engage. What the crowd-sourcing process lacks is the conflict and interplay between the designer and the client. A hundred monkeys sitting at a hundred drafting tables may never come up with the graphic identity one is looking for. Two monkeys chained at the wrist and armed with clubs just might. What may be missing in that process is the adversarial relationship that tempers the steel and forges something new out of dreams and dross. Perhaps we didn’t conceive the problem largely enough, or position ourselves extremely enough. Let’s give lunacy a try. We have a novel way of looking at social networks; we need a novel way of expressing it.

Sabin
--

What's In a Name

So our venture has found a name. Naming is hard! I have memories of reeling in shock at the amount of money top flight naming shops, like our very own Lexicon here in the bay area charge for the process and that's before you even get to securing the url or dealing with trademark issues and the like. Over the course of my experience with these projects I have learned never to take on a naming project with anything but the most serious consideration and to charge about 10 times what I think I should for the work which always ends up being monumental.

Our own process was akin to a well executed boomerang toss. We started with something in our hand and then we poured our all into launching it into the air. It makes a perfect (think hours of meetings, late nights spend with Gdaddy, lists and lists of unlikely possibilities and a couple of real gems that belong irrevocably to another) arc. Ultimately we found ourselves right back where we started with exactly what we had to begin with. I have no problem with that outcome because it validates the initial impulse and reminds you to appreciate what you have. A broader lesson in life but that is for another time.....

Highlights along the way were plu.me - we loved the hydrodynamic fluid motion of that word but couldn't seem to get away from it's feathery friends. Funniest by far was Lead Balloon..... Lead Balloon.... get it? Chuckles! Aireal was good but lost it's appeal in direct proportion to its owners willingness to negotiate the price from many thousands of dollars to not very many dollars at all. Just took the shine off. Our name is BIZILY. Make of it what you will. We are pretty psyched and one step closer to our pending launch.

Sara