dotone » Business

SMB’s dragged Online with GoNabit

Saleh Esmaeili — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:58:26 +0000

Years and years digital agencies have been crying n’ whining about how hard it is to sell digital media & products in the Middle East. Ten years later, most of the brands are online, most of the governments have woken up but SMB’s are still out of the picture, having said that, SMB’s form the bigger number of the companies n’ businesses in the Middle East, specially in Dubai.

A month ago a new service floated on the MidEast Internet gulf–GoNabit. I really got interested about the project prior to its launch when @danstuart from Bayt.com announced that he’s goin’ to be workin’ on it full-time, ever since I’ve been registered with their Newsletter. So they launched, and I keep on receiving these interesting Nabit 50+% offers on goods/services that I might like.

The Value & Problems Solved

Looking at the big picture, GoNabit is one of the most creative approaches in filling the gap in the e-commerce & online media markets for the SMB’s. Now check this out.

E-commerce is nearly impossible to implement with little budgets in the ME if we don’t consider the very low quality payment gateways given and managed by banks & ISPs. Yea, brands and chain shops with huge marketing/sales budgets can go e-commerce but what about the little boys, for those with no big budgets? for those that do not work with ad-agencies? SMB’s are all those in Dubai. So what does GoNabit do? Sells the coupons! In a transparent way it’s not just informing you about the offer, but letting you Nabing it so it assures business & visits, but the value lies within the buzz and the awareness that comes with such sales–sales of coupons & special offers.

GoNabit buzzes around everywhere in the Online social space, starting from Twitter(@GoNabit) all the way to Facebook(GoNabit Page). With every Nabit there’s a good chance for the business behind the offer to be acknowledged and marketed with viral & user generated word of mouth. And that is a start to keep a good taste in SMB’s mouths to come back to online & the digital space again and again.

The idea is not coupons or the group buying as noted, the idea is Marketing + Leads packaged in coupons business. What businesses get from working with GoNabit is direct-mail-gone-social. Direct as in solicited direct, no spam. The only people who hear about or receive the e-mails about Nabits are those registered. So take a look at the media and digital channels used, only the best, the solicited ones. E-Mail & Social Meida. So no sperm-like-unsolicited-1-go-die-the-rest kindda’ approach to reach and buzz. Lovely!

Maktoob Yahoo! bandwagon effect?

Saleh Esmaeili — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:40:04 +0000

First things first, it was a great piece of News to receive after such a long time of flop n’ demeaning News on ME’s tech/Internet scene. Congratulation to Maktoob on the pay off for the 12 years of keeping things running. Is this deal gonna’ get the wheel rolling?

Having Google enrooting in the ME, Microsoft already there although the Live team hasn’t been of an active team here. And now, Yahoo! So what does that mean for the startups in the ME and the Arabia in particular? What would be the Formula for the Content value?

Investors confidence

The best effect of the buy out is the fact that now at least one example is out there to show. One story to showcase the value of Content and online innovation.

Developers motivation

I’ve heard this line countless times before “man it’s hard to sell the idea out here, I’m off to US man”. And those who had no hope for leaving the country they just end up doing their projects for fun and the sense of being a geek/nerd. And if it was very ambitious it’s about selling some ads n’ banners, that’s it.

Now? This has to change. Your side project can become your life if you were a developer. Yes, you can put Google/MS/Yahoo! between your eyes when thinking and polishing your ideas, of course after the solution and identifying the needs.

It’s about patience

Jus’ like any other business n’ investment, patience and lots o’ luck n’ some more innovation. Yes. It pays of in the Internet business, this is highly the way it is going to be received.

Lot’s of mini-examples have been there in the market. Jeeran being one of the earliest mini porjects that were funded twice, other projects that had the same path there too. But! this one is the News that will buzz for a while, indicating the region’s readiness for being the next best thing.

It’s DOABLE

That quite said.

Match no more, get relevant people

Saleh Esmaeili — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:48:51 +0000

One day out of the blue I visited Bayt.com n’ got me an account, uploaded my resume n’ kept waiting for interviews, wait, when was that? Sometime between 2002-2003. Then I remember being hired using my own networking and contacts n’ in the first month of my job I started getting calls from Bayt.com offering me jobs.

Six years after that, I still get e-mails for saved searches. But the odd thing is I receive jobs that are completely irrelevant to my outdated resume, but perfectly matching my new roles & skills. Weird & Spooky. Then I calmed down, n’ figured the market for talent is really down in the low that the word “Match” ain’t the target anymore, the new match is “Relevant”. Another look at this n’ I was feeling my own pain seeking fit candidates for positions to fill in my team.

You could easily find Web Design positions filled by Graphic Designers, or Web UI designer filled by DB/Software-Programmers. Now this could indicate two very important facts about the UAE’s talent market. First, who’s screening? screeners are failing to understand Web and related jobs positions. Second, employers are hiring, desperate. But hey, the region doens’t lack talent, seek the right ones, n’ you shall get’em. But! can you compensate them? The reason you wouldn’t be able to attract the right talent is the fact that most of the employers had no idea of the right budget for the right candidates, led by wrong data you get wrong candidates. Fact.

The bigger the client the cheaper the process

Saleh Esmaeili — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:31:08 +0000

At d&l we’ve had 91% of business coming from references and the rest from only networking, directories, n’ search engines. So what I hear most of the time is hey bro, we ain’t as big as company X that referred you, so be gentle with invoices “you know what I mean”. It is not shocking anymore to me, but I keep on getting this assumption from prospects n’ clients that Agencies n’ Design Boutiques quote/invoice based on the size of their clients’ pockets n’ not the size of the job. But the Irony lies in the fact that it is cheaper to work with bigger clients.

You usually do less “unbilled” work for Bigger clients.

Bigger clients mean bigger personnel count and departments which also means lots o’ hands that could brief you and get you most of your needs and answers on a timely manner, thus saving your schedules from tangling up.

Department, not a one-man marketer. You get lots o’ input and more questions and the more you interact the clearer the goal and creative needs are.

Bigger clients usually have their branding done professionally.

That means you come to receive a proper Branding guidelines that help you understand the visual/feel of the brand. Print marketing collateral to give you insight of what has been working for the client offline. And, that could be a good platform to start understanding what the client has been approving and liking from the work done for them on traditional medium.

While with smaller ones, you gotta’ first find where the source of that Logo is or you might end up scanning and redrawing the logo not understanding a damn thing about the concept behind it, nor how it’s supposed to be used. And then comes content, smaller companies usually expect to receive copy writing for free, imagery, and the whole thing for free. While at bigger clients you have these mostly ready with little adjustments and tweaking to fit with the concept of the website, need you some more copy, they’re ready to pay.

Big sharks know how to take care of smaller fishes, they grow’em

Yes, irony, but that’s true. Bigger clients tend to be a little more with moralities regarding treating a bunch of young kids doing some artwork for their brand online. Because they usually know how important their opinions are and how effective they could be. While at smaller companies the stress is on squeezing the budget-spent and crunching those kids for some extra saving.

Sure at bigger organizations the amount of work might be a lot more and the expectations are higher as they hold a bigger stake in the market. And yes, the work is usually required faster and with really sharper presentations and prompt feedback, which translate in more resources to allocate to their projects, which means more cost. But from bottom up, it is cheaper to work with bigger clients thus more profiting than working with smaller ones, because:

Smaller clients expect you to do it all from A-Z as in even their part
Usually have no offline collateral and branding guidelines
Unbilled work means collaboration for them
Consultancy? You can’t bill that!
You keep on hearing can you let my daughter give you a design idea? She’s graduating this year
Website is a one time thing

The point, I don’t know how accounting goes right when pricing is different for bigger & smaller companies, I mean how would the product pricing be on the books? Crazy! You just don’t bill some stuff to smaller clients because they won’t understand it nor pay it but you do it just for the ethics of the business? Is that it?

Nakheel’s Spam

dotblack — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:59:20 +0000

How often does a company get e-mails on info@domain.com? When a prospect has no hold of a contact in a company that he/she is contacting. To inquire about more information, the kind of information that wouldn’t be there online.

When we first offered e-mail campaigns at dots & lines, the first question we were asked was, where do you get your database from. We’d often use other portals’ databases with demography details. Not the ones compiled by a bot from websites. Human managed database of people who won’t receive e-mails from us, nor from our clients, but from the portal that registered its users, and that’s the users who’ve agreed on receiving ads, and sponsored messages.

There’s no one day that we don’t get offered to buy a collection of 100,000 potential databases sent to our “info” e-mail. Now think about it, if a database seller is spamming, and calling that e-mail marketing, then what’s left for the rest of the spammers? Unfortunately that market has falsely grown. It’s very obvious, analyze your “info” e-mail list and you’ll be shocked with how many local spams we have daily.

Now to what’s bugged me for the last three days. Nakheel’s Spam. Nakheel is not the next door furniture shop or the next electronic shop that is trying to sell some knock-off goods to you. It’s the builder of the 8th wonder of the world, the palms.

You’d skip the spam first, you’d delete it the the second time, you might add it to your spam filter the third time, and that’s because it’s from Nakheel, otherwise it’s sent to junk from the first shot. Nakheel’s spam has been sent to us three times, the same message, the same details, to the same e-mail address. So, from my point of view, all they care about is someone actually clicking the links in the spam and/or adding the counts of loading the message splash-image. And that’s where the campaigns get into false numbers, and only numbers, because with such media plan, it’s nothing but spam shots, and the numbers could never ever ever result in any kind of true ROI.

Here’s the web version of the spam shot:
http://www.dubaimoon.com/newsletter/Dubaimoon.html

The funny part is, it is sent form an e-mail address from a company called evast.ae. But the e-mail message is hosted at Dubai Moon.

Another funny point is, the e-mail is signed by Dubai Moon. Here are some of the screenshots.

September 30^th Shot:

October 1^st Shot:

October 2^nd Shot:

We never use “info” to send any e-mails, it’s rather a list that we receive e-mails from. Thus, no one of us at dots & lines would ever use it as our e-mail address while registering anywhere! And no, we’re not registered with Dubai Moon, nor Evast, and not even Nakheel on any portal of theirs. So? That’s spam!

It’s all sync’d

dotblack — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:34:23 +0000

Gmail’s IMAP support is not a new thing today, but for the last couple of weeks it made so much buzz. What’s in it for us? IMAP means all the e-mails are sync’d, that is on all our devices. Previously with POP access, if you read an e-mail using a mobile the time you open your E-mail client you’d still see it unread so when you access your E-mail through Gmail’s web GUI. With IMAP support, it’s all sync’d, I’m doing it from now, and played around it, man, it’s all sync’d, finally, true device independence!

Not only you get the read/unread status, but deleting, drafting, and more, that’s hot! And guess what, I tried it out on Google Apps.

Windows to Mac migration, not so cool

dotblack — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:11:22 +0000

Being a designer gets you facing a Mac everyday, but that’s only when you’re squeezing your right brain. Come left brain work and I always jumped on my Thinkpads. Finally made a reasonable decision of shifting my Workspace & daily uses including personal computing to my tiny MacBook. Never thought it wouldn’t be smooth, believe it, it’s not cool at all.

While I’m very well versed with Mac computing, I could get around doing anything and everything, but data migration between my Outlook to Entourage was not cool at all, syncing with my Mobile wasn’t pleasant as well.

Missing the red cursor on my Thinkpad

While having a bluetooth mighty-mouse on the MacBook is nice, not having the nipple mouse pointing is a huge drawback–You can’t use the mouse w/o leaving the keyboard! Not so cool!

A piece of software that I still miss is my old Winamp. Itunes sounds bulky to my taste, its got everything, but not all that I need in my face.

Word isn’t so cool as it is in Windows, briefs, proposals and other documents have to go around and be accessible by PC users, a huge problem to address, and nah, PDF doesn’t solve the problem, online solutions are cool, but still, they ain’t Word.

I’ve used everything else in Macs for a long time, but never used a Mac as a personal assistant and as my productivity machine, it’s been challenging so far, facing many compatibility issues, and expecting more, did I take a practical decision or just because clients like to see a nice piece of hardware while presenting? I’ll find that out as I go, hoping for it to work out, I still miss the nipple pointer and not having to leave the keyboard to move the mouse pointer.

Beauty comes first?

No XL for me, I’m good with Medium

dotblack — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:47:50 +0000

Ladies might think of something, stop it already, I’m talkin’ about websites, not 38C, though 34A is my type. Why is it that small websites try to make’em look big, even though the amount of information is not much they tend to make it look like a directory?

Got some to offer? Well, then you got a reason, done? Made it all through and got your word out? That’s it, stop it, do not elaborate more. Keep it simple. The number of pages in your website, or the number of links on your Global Navigation is not a measure for credibility. Nor the amount of photos you buy to stick on your pages are eye catchers.

It’s really obvious, many talk about it, and most of us try do implement it, but it fails when a small business looks up to a big business’ website, and wanna’ portray the same image. Well, ah?

Do it like Etisalat, ahm, we’d like to have a campaign like Barkley’s Bank but online.

The like xyz fever

Uneducated marketers get you rolling around yourself after their first five words, when the start is like: “We want a website that looks like Etisalat’s website” or “We want to have a website that makes people say it’s nice or make our partners happy”.

Ah c’mon, it’s about Why you need the website and how you wanna’ use it. Spend a couple of days takin her out for lunches and dinners so that you get the idea in her head and tell her this is a serious medium, you gotta have an aim for it! So you get that blond convinced, then comes the judgment and deciding on the creative.

This looks like a small website, we’re a big company, it should look big, cover the whole screen and have no empty spaces, come on use that space, they say. I let the rest for you, it’s fun going around and finally getting the message home with these kinds of clients, one day over, ten more idiots learn more about online, and we lose tens of hours that we could instead produce some deliverables. Live at startup online agencies!

The “O” factor in Online

dotblack — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:43:04 +0000

The “e” era has long gone away, the era where every tom, dick, and harry came up with an electronic solution. The “e” became a suffix to every company that opened to do IT and come up with solutions. But only one name made it out of the “e” mirage, yup, the “e-mail”. Now the “O” factor or better yet put the “Online” era, well, that’s so old to talk about, but the x-point-”O” ,even that’s so old to talk about, but apparently in the M.E and specially in the UAE where we reside, the x-point-o’h and the family is yet to grow.

Using & Abusing the Uninformed

Remember the Over the hype post when I busted an outdated and a misleading article by ACN? It was back then when we fought over the acronyms and semantics. A year after that, we’re actually taking another step behind where actual/formal business announcements include the same scenario.

Well, I promised not to point fingers, so won’t go further on this, but as I said before, “Buzzwords and Acronyms won’t lead the Online industry anywhere but to the Dictionary“!

Yet another fake Prospect

dotblack — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 03:30:45 +0000

A few months ago I posted about a number of Fake Prospect incidents where it was just new market entrants trying to Shop us at dots and lines. Shopping other businesses, well, that’s fine, but really, wasting their time is not. This time the fake prospect took the drill to another level.

The US and the UK

Man how much I hate hearing someone being proud for having served US or UK companies. It’s like a magic word for some people for them to think they’ll get the backstage pass. I would really like it if it was like well, “we helped firms in Seattle or Manchester. Okay not forgetting how the “The US” and the “The UK” are usually accompanied with eye brows up with a cool-wannabe look. Jus’ wanned to say this one more time.

Suckups

“We’ve heard so much about your Mobile Web service and heard good stuff about it, you guys rock”

And I started thinkin’ at that time, we have NDAs with the people we deploy Mobile solutions and for the agencies that we do Mobile Web consultancy, we actually work under their umbrella and private branding. Apart from that, our Mobile Web service has been given as a complementary solution to new websites that we’ve built so far. So where is all this coming from? Well, just a suckup effort.

While opening his briefcase, I noticed a folder with Mobile Web title on the cover, seemed like a research folder to me.

So he offers and talks about synergy and partnership, and straight away he’s like:

“How do you do it, I mean how do you manage the workflow? I mean we might be working together, can you tell me how you start a project and how you finish it, and could you please briefly tell me about how you charge and how much you charge?”

You know, you really know it when you can work with someone or not from the first five minutes of talk, and he/his business wasn’t our style. Now add the fact that you can actually catch the Fake Prospect in the first five minutes.

He gets fed up of me going round and round about it, so he decided to just ask his magic question: How profitable is it? How much resources does it take to get a Mobile Web department on in a company?

Some people give wrong answers in such situations, I just preferred not answering at all. Actually I did answer this one with “I’m still outlining a book I’m writing about it, when it’s done I’ll send you a copy, that’s if it was published, but wait, I don’t think I could actually include a market study in it, just technical stuff”. That’s the time he got fedup of me giving answers to unasked questions, I enjoyed that moment. The look on his face said “What a moron snob”.

It’s so easy to gather such information, if the person you meet is honest and doesn’t pretend to be a friend while shopping you. If he was honest and actually telling the truth, chances were that we’d like to really have people to work with and give some of our work to, for us to lift some overhead. It ain’t about not sharing, it’s about the way of approaching and making a business relation.

What usually happens is the fact that we at dots and lines are all young people so in most cases we’d be the youngest guys in the room, and that deceives the approachers who wanna easily shop us.