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• Credit card processing: There’s the small resellers with spammy looking sites you aren’t sure you can trust and the giants that don’t have your best interests at heart—I see a wide open space for somebody to step in and do it right. While the article does a great job of showing you all the ways CC processors are ripping you off and hiding it, the best tip is how to find your real rate; just divide your total fees by your total monthly credit card sales. If it doesn’t match the low, low percentage you were quoted during the sales pitch, then you’ve got a problem.
• the Elevator Pitch for Personal Pediatrics: normally I love the Elevator Pitch, but this one feels off. I think it’s just the benefits the article pushes though—the doctor pays $50k and gets a portable office including a fridge for medicine plus access to a secure website for admin tasks and medical record storage, while the patient pays $1.5k/yr and gets 24-7 phone access to their doctor. Since Personal Pediatrics has little to no brand cachet ($0 revenue in ‘06, one unpaid temp employee), I’d be wondering what I’m getting for my $50k as a doctor, and as a patient, I’d be hard-pressed to believe I’ll get 24-7 phone access to a doctor since past experience has always been so poor in that regard. Since the clientele is basically buying the right to have a doctor (with the annual fee) and clearly desires the high-end experience of in-home treatment, I’d assume the doc’s hourly fees aren’t cheap and with that comes a higher-end customer base that will make it worth becoming a 24-7 phone slave to new parents. Then it’s just a question of signing up already-known pediatricians with strong reputations and riding them to the tipping point of brand recognition. Because otherwise, you’re selling parents on a specific set of doctors that they have no referrals for—and who’s taking their kid to a doctor nobody can vouch for, especially at that price?
• Speed up your sales cycle: good anecdotes on rethinking how and to whom you sell.
• Cyber insurance: I wonder how many web2.0 companies handling sensitive data have it?
• The story of eSys: taking advantage of what each country has to offer around the world to reduce costs to a bare minimum; brilliant, but it sets off “cheater!” alarms in my head. probably out of envy though. it makes the author “uncomfortable”, for reasons like standards of living and governments needing to tax the companies that operate in their bounds. if everybody followed the eSys plan of formation, it could definitely be disruptive on a large scale.
• How I Did It: great first-person account of a guy doing business in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[ April 2007 index archive ]

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