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John Philip Green

4 Answers
Name John Philip Green
Location Canada
Website http://johnphilipgreen.com
Bio CTO at CommunityLend.
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  • How much does or should an advisor get paid?

  • When creating a startup, what is the best way to attract as many eyeballs in the first month to your website as possible?
    • John Philip Green

      Companies like Mint.com attracted a lot of eyeballs in the first month post launch, by having a strong ‘pre-launch’ campaign where they signed up people to their newsletter. (Mint famously had tens of thousands of signups before they even launched their product.)

      Launching your blog and twitter account to engage with the target market and media outlets before launch is probably among the best things you can do.

  • What's the best way to place a valuation on a new company without revenues, that has a rapidly growing user base (1000+/day) ?
    • John Philip Green

      The valuation is just one parameter in a deal with an investor. Other terms, such as liquidation preference, can have as large an effect on the deal as a few million dollars of valuation.

      The ‘rapidly growing user base’ should only be one part of determining a valuation. How sustainable is the growth? What is the user engagement post sign up? How big is the market? What is the pedigree of the founders? What are the potential revenue models? How defensible is the business from competitors? … there are so many factors that should be considered when valuing a company.

  • what is the best business model for a virtual learning environment?

    • John Philip Green

      Blackboard has far and away the most successful company in the VLE industry. Their business model is fairly traditional enterprise software sales. Last I saw one of their deals, their pricing was based primarily on the number of seats per year.

      WebCT and Angel were competitors to Blackboard, with the same business model, but were acquired by Blackboard. Desire2Learn remains independent, and again, has a similar model.

      We have not yet seen open source disrupt Blackboard significantly, despite Moodle’s broad adoption. I feel we are still waiting for an open source product to do to the VLE industry what Linux & MySQL did to the OS and Database industries.