The Idea

In April 2009 I left Corporate America and started on a new entrepreneur adventure in small business. I had an idea on combining a user’s social media data to deliver real-time personalized advertising to online customers. The idea had great interest and secured some generous investors.

The Results

Office in Pacific Beach, #210

In May 2009 I started Ideablue Networks LLC, a small business dedicated to support the development of SocialSimple, the product. I was fortunate enough to hire some TOP TALENT people that I knew well and we opened up our office in Pacific Beach, just two blocks from the ocean. Our conference room was a trendy coffee shop right below us.

After several months worth of hard work we had a finished backend product that thoroughly analyzed a user’s social media data from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, Flicker, TwitPic, Meetup, LinkedIn and many other social networking websites. SocialSimple collected a user’s profile data, history, media, and trends to generate 30+ personalized tags that helped define that user an an individuals.

Mary showcasing SocialSimple at Twiistup 5

When we showcased SocialSimple to advertisers, we were overwhelmed with positive feedback, interests of partnerships, and licensing. In August 2009, the SocialSimple technology was acquired by a California based marketing company which will be used in some exciting new user profiling applications, including iPhone applications. Due to the acquisition being recent, specific details are currently undisclosed. We’ll keep everyone updated.

Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

The members of the SocialSimple team that I will FOREVER be deeply grateful to and could not say Thank You enough are Lee Waterman, Ori Guttin, Jimmy Lozowsky, Erica Negretti, Tanya Milhaud, Mary Salvatera, and Colleen McPhillips. Everyone had an equal and important role in the development and planning of SocialSimple.

The SocialSimple Team

Johnny Negretti (me) – Engineering, Business Development

Lee Waterman – Engineering

Ori Guttin – Product Development

Jimmy Lozowsky – Product Development

Erica Negretti – Operations

Mary Salvatera – Creative, Business Development

Tanya Milhaud – Marketing

Colleen McPhillips – Project Management

Johnny, Tanya, and Lee at a Mixergy Lunch 2.0 in Hollywood, CA (August 2008)

Also, Thank You to those who I bounced many ideas off of including Johan Viberg, Marzena Kmiecik, Andrew Warner, Greg Wasmuth, Scott Berg, Tyler Stample, Gavenraj Sodhi, Alex Carrillo, and the CEO & Founders Lunch group.

Being a Founder (and CEO) of a small business technology startup was such a growth experience in my professional career and in my personal life which I will be blogging much about.

Please check back or subscribe to my blog for more insightful postings yet to come.

Johnny hard at work

Many THANK YOUs to everyone who supported SocialSimple with their encouragement, advice, and most importantly, their belief in our product. We could not have done it with you!

Sincerely,

Johnny Negretti
CEO, Ideablue Networks

Here is the presentation (w/ too much text) I pitched to TechCrunch 50.

Here is a little tour video of our office in Pacific Beach

Related

• SocialSimple.com Sponsors Twiistup 5 (blog post)
• Ideablue Pacific Beach Office photos (on Facebook)
• Ideablue North County Office photos (on Facebook)
• SocialSimple Sponsors Twiistup 5 photos (on Flickr)
• Lunch 2.0 in Hollywood photos (on Flickr)

NOTE: This is an archived post from ideablue.com

Tickets, Tickets, Tickets

Last week we sponsored the Twiistup 5 event in Los Angeles, CA. Twiistup is a social media gathering event where internet start ups show off their product for bloggers, investors, and other technology driven companies/individuals.

We started off just being one of 300+ people on the waiting list for tickets of this sold out event. The chances of getting tickets were slim though one can hope. The day before the event, the organizers sent out an email saying tickets are still sold out, though there is one sponsorship spot left (includes 4 tickets). Luckily for us, we were one of the first to call and get the last sponsorship spot. The event organizers Mike and Steph were amazingly helpful with getting us on board at the last minute. I was intending to setup a booth about Ideablue Network (our services/solutions) though since we are at a good spot with SocialSimple I figured showing off SocialSimple would be the better route. In the end, it was!

Majority of everyone already had set plans for Thursday night, though I was able to get Mary Salvatera to come along (she had to cancel other plans). She rocked it out! So, now I had 2 tickets left. I figured it would be easy to give these tickets away. Well, I’ll just say it was not. The problem was I was offering them to people in San Diego, duh, should have offered them to some LA peeps. We were able to give the tickets to Alex Carrillo and Rick Rodriguez of XOL Marketing.

Last Minute…

Now that we are a sponsor of the event, we’ll have a table to pimp out our product. Since this all was last minute we had NOTHING for our booth, no signs, no flyers, nothing. I threw together a quick diagram explaining SocialSimple and rushed on over to Kinkos. Going into Kinkos I was certain they would say “Sorry, No can do” though someone was looking out for us. Kinkos was able to get all of our signs printed, laminated, and boarded in less than 2 hours. I’m not sure if they know how much they helped us out – here’s a big THANK YOU to Ken at the Kinkos in Rancho Bernardo, CA. Now it was time to head to Target to get a big screen monitor (TV) and an iPod (giveaway). The iPod was $150, then noticed an Xbox 360 was $200 so decided to give away an Xbox 360 instead. Of course, they were out of the $199 model, they only had the $299 model, me being a guy, I went for the Xbox.

“What is SocialSimple?”

Now that we had our booth setup we were ready to rock-and-roll. The night started off with a mellow pace of people stopping by as they did their rounds of stopping by each booth. Since this was our first time publicly telling people about SocialSimple outside of our private beta group, were started the night with a lose of formulated words to answer the question – “What is SocialSimple?.” We came up with…”Your Social Life, Simplified”

SocialSimple aggregates your social networking life. With your permission, we connect and gather your social networking activity, crunch and analysis the data to generate personalized tags about your personality. Similar to a blog tag cloud. Participating advertisers and ecommerce companies would use these SocialSimple tags to better market to you and to offer a personlaized shopping experience. In return, you will receive exclusive discounts and promotions.

So, in a nutshell we have a tagline “Your Social Life, Simplified”! What do you think?

Once the night got started we were swamped with a steady flow of intrigued people. Each person we talked to had a unique and interesting perspective and viewpoint on social media and social networking. Majority of the conversions regarding SocialSimple were more like brainstorming on what the person can do with such technology. Pleasantly we received many comments about it’s “simplicity” (a good thing). We were also glad to see other companies like Scour and Music World interested in collaborating. We are BIG fans of collaboration!

Our goal was to get new beta users for SocialSimple. With the incentive of winning an Xbox 360 we signed up 80+ new users that night. Of the new users, Regina O was the lucky winner of the Xbox 360.

Thanks again to Mary, our Interactive Strategy Director, who was an amazing help! She was rockin it out, helping everyone have a good and inspiring understanding of SocialSimple.

Overall

The night was a success for getting SocialSimple into the public ear and we were delighted to have made some excited fans. I’ll be looking forward to sponsoring Twiistup again!

For those who are curious of where us web gurus gather to brainstorm on our plans to conquer the world. Here’s an inside view of our humble internet startup office in Pacific Beach (San Diego, CA), just two blocks from the beach.

You can find this video on:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn-t5ssO_HU (watch in HD)
• http://www.viddler.com/explore/jnegretti/videos/2/
• http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=43365339286

Today’s economy is keeping us business owners on our toes. The financial recession has reached the web industry, which has resulted in a rise in many internet startups folding and venture capital firms drastically pulling back on investments. Within the last three days (including today) there have been 15,600+ layoffs in the technology industry alone. According to TechCrunch, in the tech industry, since August 27, 2008 there has been a reported 131,000+ layoffs, that’s 963 a day or 10 every 15 minutes.

TechCrunch Layoff Tracker

Fortunately in 2008 I was lucky enough to start an investor funded internet startup here in San Diego (http://www.socialsimple.com/). We are all very excited to be developing an innovative social networking platform that utilizes social analytics and user permission data to deliver a more personalized user experience throughout the web.

To stay ahead of the curve and adapt to today’s market, we are shifting our business model and committing to new priorities. We are moving from an investor-based startup to a client services company and taking on our investor as our first client. Yes, that’s right ditching the guaranteed paychecks for a “Project” based revenue. This may seem a little off to some, especially those who are bootstrapping their business and are struggling to find investments.

Our decisions to do this came after a Lunch 2.0 event hosted at a local startup just like us. The event was at their nice spacious office a block from the beach (just like us, excluding the “spacious” part). The following week, we learned the entire company was laid off the same day due to investors pulling out. Well, we are in a similar situation, if our investors pull out, well, its time to bust out the resume again! Where did I put those shinny shoes and fancy ties?

We have built such a great top talent team who has an unmatched commitment to helping change our modern web to a more personalized web experience. Although, I am a new entrepreneur, business is business, corporate or startup, it’s about ensuring growth and long-term stability. This gives us the ability to try to survive independently if the roof falls in. I am not a serial entrepreneur, from the start it was a risky to leave a stable executive job at a large successful Fortune 40 corporation.

It’s a game of chess and to protect your king, strategically moving your pieces, and planning out all the next possible moves.

To adapt, we are now offering tailored web services and already have clients who are eager to embrace the new and emerging trends and technologies in web. We are not going to take on the world and be a “full-services” agency. To keep to our core competencies we are specializing in eBusiness and Social Media. We’ve taken down our old ideablue.com website and now our website is a network of Ideablue employees and blog contributors.

One of the biggest changes which will have a big benefit to the development community is we are working to make our existing social media application platform into an Open Source project. Our investors and myself have been highly impressed with what our team has developed, a platform for rapid application development with a robust modular/API architecture. I’m starting to sound like a sales guy, in truth, I’m just excited to get the community involved.

We are firm believers in success through collaboration.

Subscribe to our blog for more updates as we have some great ideas planned to write and collaborate on. I’ll also keep you guys posted on what it’s like turning your investor into a client (not an easy task).

Johnny Negretti
CEO, Ideablue Networks