The modern online newsroom is a 24/7 operation. It needs power tools to work efficiently, like modern carpenters need electric drills to build houses. The problem is that most content management systems, including web-native ones like WordPress, Tumblr, etc, are intended for smaller organizations or slower-paced writing. Which is why I’m so interested in Vox Media‘s Chorus.

The rest of us have been stuck turning screwdrivers. Features from last decade like admin interfaces full of buttons that need to be clicked, as well as heavy metadata entry requirements, static site designs, and weak distribution options. Chorus has evolved to solve these problems, and much more.

Christened with the new name last month, the four year-old platform is now much more than a CMS. It comes with nearly every tool that’s needed for publishing, all tightly connected. And it’s already powering hundreds of SB Nation sports fan sites around the country, plus our gadget-oriented pseudo-competitors over at The Verge, forthcoming gaming site Polygon, and whatever else Vox decides to launch (I’ve heard there’s one coming about cars, for example).

Chorus’ core is actually based on nearly a decade of experiences. SB Nation started in 2003 with many of the same features as any other CMSs, like posts, user profiles, comments, photos, and basic stats, but the company had to adapt to its user-driven network. The solution, one that I believe we’ll see more often at top online publications, was to create a tight development loop between developers and writers.

“We don’t throw things over the fence,” explains Trei Brundrett, the company’s vice president of product and technology. “We map our development plan around the tools that our editorial and advertising teams tell us they need, and then rapidly evolve the product based on data and feedback.”

He recently gave me a guided tour of the product, which I’ll sketch out below. Among many stand-out features, there’s full-fledged forums, an editorial workflow system, a streamlined article page that automatically includes some links and other metadata, a variety of options for laying out posts and advanced stats tracking features.

Really, the biggest question in my mind around the company is revenue — and my doubts may very well be proven wrong.

Community and Identity

Because it was quickly launching new sites for unique communities — a college football team at a big state school, for example — it needed federated yet open access for community members.

The identity system lets anyone create a user ID, then for any of its sites, administrators can convert commenters into authors, and comments into posts. Beyond the usual set of commenting features — threads, upvotes, etc. — it also auto-updates with new comments, flags possibly offensive ones, and comes with a big set of hotkeys for power users.

Administrators of a given property can also carefully gate users. So, the fan-writers running the Yankees site could prevent Red Sox fans from coming in and trolling posts about Derek Jeter.

Admins, who are themselves designated by senior Vox editors, also get a full back-end system for moderating comments, including the ability to see and block IDs based on IP addresses, or promote users based on recommendations from other readers.

Today, any new site that launches on Vox comes with these hardy, field-tested community features, whether it’s about MMA fighting or video games.

Editorial Workflow

Another early problem faced by SB Nation was planning coverage across sports seasons and big events. The solution visible today is a sophisticated tool for assigning and scheduling stories, that syncs with the user ID system and the publishing tool. For those of you who don’t manage publications, this problem might not be obvious. But the way most of us who do are handling assignments these days are through whiteboards, spreadsheets, general-purpose management software like Basecamp or Asana (in my case), or through clunky legacy programs (in the case of many newspaper editors).

Vox makes it possible to assign even a commenter a story, then write it, have it edited and then published to the site within a single interface. There are no issues with integrating between software programs. Having cofounded a startup that was trying to solve this problem with our own editing and workflow tools back in 2005, I’m very aware of how much more efficient it is to have a single system like this.

Content Creation and Publishing

One of the most maddening parts of publishing online today is all the data entry related to a story — adding links to previous articles, tags, categories, images, and any other  non-writing elements within the text editor. This process often takes up more time than writing the story itself, and the only solutions I’ve seen have been half-functional plugins.

Chorus appears to crush the competition here. It automatically checks words, including a semantic comparison for related types of terms. “If you mention ‘Derek Jeter’ and say that he’s very good, and is going to be the MVP, the software will analyze related text and tag the post with his name,” Brundrett explained as he showed me this feature in action during the demo.

That’s not the only way it saves writers time. A bookmarklet lets them save links to articles, photos and videos from around the web, then see a panel next to a story that lets them drag the content into the post.

On the topic of photos and videos, Chorus also has some careful solutions in place. The text editor includes a section that shows writers relevant licensed photos to use, whether from the AP, Getty or other services. It also comes with a streamlined photo editor to help writers crop images to their needs, and a tool for quickly uploading videos and photos that they’ve taken at events.

Finally, when posts are ready to go, writers get an advanced set of options for promoting through social media. There’s a promotion section for deciding whether to share with Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other sites.

The Web Site

The main elements of the user-facing web site, from the overall design to individual posts, come with a set of templates to quickly create an original look and feel. Writers quickly create spacious, image-filled articles (like this Verge spread on jet packs). And editors can easily pull in widgets including polls and photo galleries to add more engaging content.

There are also specific iterations available for sites with special needs. StoryStreams, for example, is a template that Brundrett’s team built at the request of sports editors, that provides real-time updates to the home pages of sites (see our coverage from last fall). Readers can just keep a page open and watch for updates instead of having to constantly refresh the page.

The commenting system is another example. Readers were using the section so much that they demanded shortcut keys for faster navigation. That’s what every Vox site comes with today.

Statistics

In addition to hooks in with Google Analytics, there’s a simplified dashboard that lets editorial staffers see how each story is doing. But there’s also a special part of the site, where Vox shows editors how stories might do in relation to a big news cycle. For the NBA draft, for example, it analyzes its own data from past years, public sources like Google search trends, and other sources that Brundrett wouldn’t reveal, and suggests dates and times for certain types of stories to be published.

A lot of this may be intuitive to experienced editors, or deducible via careful analysis of other analytics tools. But the fact that it’s immediately available within the same system as everything else means teams can make quick, smart decisions related to traffic goals without having to go data mining.

Revenue

Now, for the business model(s).

The main way that Vox is making money is ads. But, the company is able to offer something many others aren’t, which is increasingly large volumes of users who organize themselves by very specific interests. When the dozens of SB Nation football blogs cover game days in detail for each team, it’s a no-brainer for a beer company — Guinness, in the example above — to wrap itself around that branding. Literally, as you can see. There’s a background takeover, a top banner, a main ad to the right, and then the “presented by” branding around NFL Game Day. And, a contest for fans to engage with as they’re reading and commenting.

Another example, with a more direct editorial tie-in, is a “Core Of Sports” themed set of posts that goes along with a recruiting campaign by the U.S. Marines. The series covers professional athletes who have also served in the corps.

The internal slogan, chief executive Jim Bankoff tells me, is “substance is viral.” If you create the right kind of content for users, and wrap appropriate advertising around it, they’ll spread it themselves.

“We have had a lot of success scaling our advertising model (5x growth in two years) in large part due to our tech platform,” he goes on to explain. “Our platform enables us to create, manage and track these high impact, customized ad campaigns at scale. The same back-end that powers the edit content also allows us to create ad campaigns, run them in our network, track and monitor and report against them in valuable ways.”

The business model is a big indicator of Vox’s ambitions as a company. Even if it is still able to charge relatively high ad rates around its targeted content, it still needs huge scale to be able to compete against traditional media and the rest of the web (including TechCrunch’s parent company, AOL). It will need to continue to grow traffic to become one of the larger media companies out there in order to attract ad dollars — which, again, is why having such a high-tech editorial software platform is so crucial.

That said, there are also some interesting opportunities for Vox as it expands into other revenue streams. Reviews of products, like gadgets or cars, are natural sources for attaching affiliate links to. And, there’s always the potentially lucrative but time-consuming conference business that many blogs (like this one) do to help make money.

Software In The News

Just as a carpenter needs to apply a power drill with skill in order to build a great house, an editorial operation needs top-quality writing and organization to be successful. Software is just one of many crucial elements.

And there are plenty of other great tools out there. Tech companies large and small specialize in products that can meet the needs of big newsrooms. Some examples of what I’m using are Chartbeat, which provides real-time data on site traffic, and Asana, an especially streamlined task management tool. Newsrooms without the resources or time to build their own tools have the added challenge of stitching third-party services together, but get the benefits of each company specializing in making its product best-in-class.

For example, WordPress VIP, which we use at TechCrunch, requires a good amount of customization on the part of the publications that use it. But it also serves as a platform for all sorts of plugins to add new functionality. And we can build our own tools on top.

Still, having gotten my behind the scenes tour of Chorus, I am very impressed. This is a next-generation platform, and many publications live on publishing platforms from past decades.

Both competing publications and the software companies who build products for them will need to think about how they too can create tightly-synced software suites to optimize the publication and distribution of top-quality content.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Even though Facebook’s IPO roadshow video was a mostly touchy-feely affair with videos of friends have coffee and babies blowing out candles, there were some new stats tucked away in it.

For the first time, the company gave a look at how it monetizes on a per user basis in different parts the world. There was one chart of most interest.

It shows that Facebook made about $9.51 in advertising revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada. Europe was about half that much with $4.86 in ad revenue per user. Asia and the rest of the world follow that at $1.79 and $1.42 per user. What this shows is the revenue trajectory that other more economically developed markets like Western Europe and Japan could get to if Facebook successfully grows there or convinces more regional brand advertisers to come on board.

But these revenues are also affected by seasonal and macroeconomic trends. The average price per ad in Europe actually declined in the first quarter from the holiday season because the weak economy there, according to Facebook’s most recent IPO filing.

Plus, Asia and the rest of the world will be a challenge for awhile. These economies can’t support the kind of spending per user that the U.S. or Europe can. Also keep in mind that Facebook is still blocked off from China, where competitors like Sina, Tencent and Renren are thriving.

There are six main factors that affect how much Facebook’s advertising revenues can grow over the next several years. They’re listed below and they have to do with raw growth (or how many users Facebook has) to engagement (or how sticky and addictive the product is) to targeting (how well Facebook can route the right ads to the right users).

Facebook is at 901 million monthly active users, so it’s running out of room to grow given the sheer limit of world Internet usage. More importantly, it’s gotten a lot of the low-hanging fruit, or users in developed countries. It’s also continuously changing the product, which can affect short-term revenues. Facebook has bumped up the numbers of ads per page to seven units from four over the past year.

In terms of Facebook’s overall ad pitch, the company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that the company’s long-term goal is to be the place where 70 million businesses worldwide go to offer personalized, relevant advertising.

She said, “Every day on Facebook is like the season finale of American Idol times two,” in a reference to the home page.

She also added that advertising budgets are not moving online fast enough to match user behavior. Of the roughly $600 billion spent on advertising every year, only 11 percent of it is devoted toward online ads. Another $1.5 billion in advertising is spent on mobile devices.

Overall, as we’ve reported before. Facebook’s revenues have two components: advertising and payments. Both are up on a year-over-year basis, but advertising revenue actually declined going into the first quarter, which Facebook says happened because of seasonal spending habits. Plus payments revenue is virtually flat from the fourth quarter into the first one.

If we look closer at payments revenue, it’s up by quite a bit year-over-year. Facebook earns a 30 percent revenue share from apps and games on its platform. But this isn’t a fair comparison since Facebook only made the revenue share mandatory in July. Payments revenue is pretty much flat on a sequential quarter-over-quarter basis, at $186 million from $188 million in the fourth quarter.

The concerning thing is that if you look at games on the platform, Zynga’s quarter-over-quarter bookings for the Facebook canvas aren’t really growing anymore. Most of their bookings growth is coming from mobile. So unless Facebook turns on other kinds of payments revenue soon, this figure is going to stagnate.

Facebook’s chief financial officer David Ebersman stressed that the company may cut its 30 percent revenue share if it expands payments beyond gaming, which we reported on a few weeks ago.

He also pointed out that Facebook’s operating margins are declining. A measure of how profitably the company can run, operating margins fell to 36 percent  in the first quarter from 53 percent in the same time a year earlier. Ebersman said this has a lot to do with share-based compensation expenses.

He also added that the company is still in growth mode and will make decisions that will hurt its short-term profitability from time to time. For example, even though Facebook has only started to bring in revenue from its mobile apps, it will still continue to spend aggressively on them.

“We believe mobile usage of Facebook is critical to our future,” he said. “Expect us to invest in it even if mobile monetization is uncertain.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video chat is still something many people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Apple’s iChat and startups like Tinychat to video chat with each other.

There are significant differences between how many boys and girls use video chat, though. Only a third of boys use video chat while 42% of girls said they have video chatted. Maybe unsurprisingly, those teens who use the Internet more frequently also use video chats more often than their peers who only go online a few times per week. The same is true for teens who text and use social media more often than their peers.

The Pew study also looked at how often kids upload video to the web. A quarter of the U.S. teens who were interviewed for this study also said that they record and upload video to the web. This represents a 100% increase since 2006. Just 14% of adults, by the way, upload video to YouTube and similar services.

Despite the gender gap in video chatting, though, boys and girls are equally likely to upload video these days. That’s quite a change from 2006, when Pew last asked this question. At that time, boys were twice as likely to say that they regularly uploaded video they had taken.

Streaming video over the web, however, still remains a bit of a niche activity among teens. Only 13% of respondents said they stream video live online. Interestingly, 3% of teens with dial-up connections manage to stream video to the web – one postage stamp-sized picture at a time.

The Pew study also noted that 95% of the 799 teens it interviewed said that they use the Internet. This number has not changed over the last few years. It’s worth noting – and somewhat odd – that this data is based on interviews that were conducted between April 19 and July 14, 2011. Given how quickly these trends change, chances are these numbers are actually a bit higher today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook strategy software company Zuum today releases a new dashboard interface designed to give marketers an understanding of metrics and trends on a number of Facebook pages at once, regardless of whether they have admin rights to the pages.

With Zuum’s subscription service, companies can monitor between five and 10 pages to follow the competition or see how other industries are using Facebook. Zuum collects and organizes all the pages’ publicly available data, such as People Talking About This, the number of posts per day and engagement per post. Zuum then creates leaderboards, word clouds and and other views of what’s being shared on a page and how it’s performing.

The updated dashboard section of the tool is more visual than the text- and data-heavy dashboard Zuum had previously. The dashboard now includes the following features:

• Leaderboard – A breakdown of how various pages perform across industry benchmarks, including People Talking About This, fan growth rate, engagement rate and community involvement.
• Brand Voice – Subject analysis, media type analysis, People Talking About This and a keyword cloud of the most engaging terms for all brands in the report.
• Most Engaging Posts – A list of the most engaging posts for client page as well as competitor pages.
• Community Health – Includes the most common subjects posted about for both client brand and their competitors, images of the most popular fan posts for all pages and a list of the most engaging fan posts.

Zuum emails a daily, weekly or monthly PDF of the dashboard to subscribers and anyone they work with. Company co-founder and social content strategist Doug Schumacher says some subscribers have been sending the PDF to their whole team or printing it out for brainstorming sessions.

Zuum is commonly used to track competitors but businesses can also monitor pages in order to see what works in different industries and get inspiration. The tool could be useful for marketers working on regular campaigns or preparing for pitches. Zuum offers some historical data going back to January 2010.

As marketers begin to focus more on content and engagement than building large fan bases, features like Zuum provides are increasingly valuable. Unmetric Inc., which offers a similar tool with the objective of letting brands benchmark their success against competitors, raised $3 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners earlier this month. As it happens, Inside Network has its own PageData service that we use for tracking growth and engagement across pages. With Facebook making more insights and demographic data public, these tools can aggregate information in ways that would be very time-consuming and less meaningful if viewed individually on the social network.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Here comes money for media startups: former MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade and VC Michael Yang are announcing the launch of a new NYC-based firm called DEV (Digital Entertainment Ventures) whose early stage capital fund which will invest in next-gen digital media companies. To kick off its launch, DEV is today revealing its first two investments, a live music platform called StageIt and mobile gaming company Mad Humans.

According to the fund’s directors, DEV’s plan is to build up a portfolio with startups focused on new ideas in the music, TV, film, games, publishing and social media space, and they’re especially interested in investing in companies building for Internet-connected TVs, smartphones and tablets. (My kind of startups, actually).

McGlade, in addition to his long stint as the chief exec of music and digital content distribution network MediaNet, was also CEO of Video Jukebox Network (The Box) for six years, which sold to MTV back in 2001. Following the sale, he stayed on at MTV Networks for another year. Yang, meanwhile, is a senior venture funds attorney and was previously a VC for Divine Interventures and Sandbox Industries, as well as a co-founder and CTO of the enterprise software company, Redmind, Inc.

In an essay on the firm’s new site, McGlade delves deeper into his thoughts as to why these industries are ripe for innovation. “Music, film, TV, video games, newspapers and magazines have all been profoundly affected by the explosion of new devices that enable the consumption of digital media,” McGlade explains, before recapping many of the trends shaping our present-day media consumption behaviors. E.g, Nielsen last year reported the first decline in TV homes in 20 years, video games are one of the highest growth segments in entertainment, DVD sales are on a downward slide, handsets and tablets are reshaping the publishing biz, and social media has changed how we discover and enjoy entertainment.

Plus, adds McGlade of DEV’s chosen location, “New York City, with its established media businesses, talent and burgeoning startup ecosystem, has all the right elements for these game-changing companies to emerge,” he says.

Currently, DEV’s team also includes venture partner Damian Manning, and Executive Council Members D. Walker Wainwright, Joseph Saviano, and Alan Goodstadt.

DEV will vet new companies via its team of entrepreneurs and investors, and is now open to startups wishing to submit business plans here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Want a zombie on your underwear? Good, because soon, you will have that opportunity. Today, there comes more proof that mobile gaming is the entertainment franchise opp of the future as EA-owned PopCap, makers of Plants vs. Zombies and the “Bejeweled” series of games, announced a number of new partnership deals that will see its game brands turned into merchandise – much like Rovio’s Angry Birds has already done to great success. The company has six new partnerships on tap which will see its properties featured as everything from plush toys to branded headphones. And yeah, boxers, too.

According to PopCap, the deals are the first brand licensing partnerships to emerge in the company’s 12-year history, and they’ll kick off with top game Plants vs. Zombies to start. Bejeweled will then follow, followed by other games, and the merchandise will arrive in early 2013.

The partnerships include those with Bioworld Merchandising for apparel, headwear, bags and accessories; Jazwares for plush toys, figures and electronics, like headphones, USBs, speakers and device cases; Walls360 for wall graphics; Funko! will produce Plants vs. Zombies vinyl figurines; MjC will do adult sleepwear and boxers; and Trends International will do calendars and posters.

While Rovio has seen success with its likable (and kid-friendly) Angry Birds series of games, it’s unclear how well that type of success can translate to less huggable brands…like Bejeweled. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve wasted as many brain cells on that game as everyone else has, but Bejeweled hats and bags? I mean, that Tetris bag of mine is kind of old but still…it never really went with my outfits.

PopCap also has Zuma, Peggle and Bookworm to bring into the merchandise play, but again, none are as standout-ish as Angry Birds.

EA acquired PopCap back in 2011, and now has a worldwide staff of over 600 with offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., Dublin, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo. Its games have been downloaded over 1.5 billion times, with Bejeweled alone selling over 50 million units.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pepsi is launching a big rebranding campaign today, and the company says social media is going to play a crucial role. Specifically, PepsiCo Global Head of Digital Shiv Singh tells me that the biggest online piece of the campaign is a “social media cheat sheet” called the #NOW board — it has, in fact, taken over the Pepsi website.

The board is built on top of Pulse, the social media visualization platform that Pepsi launched last fall. Looking at the RSS feeds from across the Web, as well as the firehose of wants being shared through Twitter and bit.ly (with help from startup SocialFlow), Singh says the #NOW board presents the pop culture stories that are hottest in social media at any given moment, presented in easily-digestible form.

Beyond serving as a news aggregator, Singh says the site will include other features, like the ability for celebrities to pose challenges to their fans, and exclusive deals courtesy of sites like Thrillist. And naturally, the content can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

That all sounds fun, but what does that have to do with a food and beverage company? Well, the theme of the campaign is “Live for Now,” and it tries to reconnect the Pepsi brand with, as Singh puts it, “the heart of pop culture.” He argues that “the more deeply integrated” Pepsi is with broader pop culture trends, the better the company does.

My other question: Are people actually going to return to a Pepsi-branded site as a source of news? I mean, any news website is probably going to have advertising and sponsorships, and sure, we’re not probably not talking about hard-hitting journalism here, but it still feels a little weird to treat a Pepsi-owned site as a “real” news aggregator. Singh counters:

In the last few years we’ve seen people in general care less about the source of an experience or who’s creating the content, and more about the experience itself. People care less whether it’s a TV network that’s creating a really funny piece of video or whether a brand is.

The argument carries some weight, when you think about how ads like the Old Spice guy have become popular viral content. So is this advertising? Is it content? It’s a little bit of both, and it sounds like that’s what Pepsi wants.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With so much nonsense still being bandied around about social media, particularly relating to fictitious revolutions, businesses would be forgiven for tuning out of the faddish hype and spin.

Quite rightly so.

But every once in a while, something is written on social media that cuts through the claptrap with clear, concise and compelling utility. Following up on their brilliant update to the consumer decision journey, McKinsey have written a short pithy article designed to demystify social media for businesses.  The word revolution is not mentioned once.

In a nutshell, McKinsey suggests that getting value out of social media requires doing four things

• MONITOR – tracking what people are saying (for trends and insights to inform innovation and marketing)
• RESPOND – replying to consumers comments and queries (as part of real-time customer service and crisis management)
• AMPLIFY – taking positive commentary and spreading it or incentivising people to spread it (to build reputation)
• LEAD – guiding people towards preference and loyalty with outreach initiatives such as consumer involvement and targeted offers/deals

These activities can be mapped to the consumer journey in order to create the inevitable consultancy-style matrix;

Okay, all this will be motherhood and apple pie for seasoned business users of social media, but its a useful distillation of what social media can offer.  And combined with the consumer decision journey, including the all important loyalty-loop that social media can create, it’s a useful planning tool.

• CONSIDER – social media can help people discover new products and trigger initial consideration
• EVALUATE – social media content can help people evaluate products under consideration through shared reviews, ratings and recommendations
• BUY – social media can help consumers purchase when it is used as a channel assist or complete transactions
• EXPERIENCE – social media can help people enjoy a better product experience through shared advice on how to use the product
• ADVOCATE – social media can help people express who they are by sharing the products and brands they love
• BOND – social media can help people bond with a brand by acting as a channel for brand intimacy

Consumer Decision Journey: Loyalty Loop

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Just watching TV without also using a tablet or smartphone at the same time seems to be on its way out. Earlier this month, Nielsen launched the first part of its report on primetime TV viewers in the U.S. and today, the analytics company is taking a deeper dive into the demographics of those who simultaneously watch TV and use their tablets. According to Nielsen, 45% of tablet owners watch TV and use their tablet together at least once a day. A whopping 69% say they do so at least several times a week and only 12% say they never do this.

There are some interesting differences between how men and women use their tablets in front of their TV. Women, says Nielsen, are more likely to look up information related to an ad they see on TV than men, while men are more likely to look up general information related to a TV program they are watching than women. Men, on average, are also far more likely to check sport scores on their tablets than women (44% vs. 24%).

Unsurprisingly, younger tablet users are more likely to use their tablet in form of the TV than older ones. The only activity where older users tend to use their tablets more is checking email. Overall, checking email is also the most popular activity for tablet owners while watching TV (61%), followed by visiting social networking sites (47%) and looking up information about TV programs.

Here are a few other findings from Nielsen’s report:

• Teens used a game console for eight minutes a night, on average, during primetime – more than twice as much as the general
• Females spend 61.2% of their timeshifted viewing during primetime watching Dramas.
• Online adults aged 25-54 are 23% more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to follow a brand via social networking and 29% more likely to purchase a product online that was featured on TV.

[Image credit: Flickr user dan taylor]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In episode II of Divya Gugnani’s Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon, the two dive into M&A, a topic that both founders know well. Dixon’s company Hunch, was recently acquired by eBay and Gugnani’s company, Send The Trend was recently acquired by QVC.

On being acquired, Gugnani tells Dixon that she was approached much earlier than she had anticipated and it was a “really intimidating and scary” experience. She adds, “there were really two directions; do I go down this route and potentially distract myself from the base business that is growing … or do I just keep focusing on my business and have that kind of bravado that you know what, it is going to be worth so much more later?”

Gugnani came to the realization that the opportunity “to build a big business” within a larger organization was too much to pass up and says when “I was convinced it would work, I started putting the time and energy into that process.”

She says during the process ”we took every single meeting with every single decision maker as an opportunity to sell them on our opportunity and why they wanted to work with us and that ended up creating multiple champions at multiple levels for us – which I think had a network effect of how our transaction got done rapidly, efficiently and well.”

While Gugnani was fortunate enough to experience smooth sailing, Dixon notes he’s seen instances where lawyers get hung up on matters deep into negotiations and “people just fall apart in that process.” He adds “that’s scary because at that point you’ve probably spent months, spending almost all your time on this, you’ve disclosed everything about your business to them literally, every document.”

Gugnani agrees saying “a deal is not a deal until the wire goes though” and compares this situation to “standing naked in Times Square.”

Make sure to watch the entire video to hear more, including Gugnani’s and Dixon’s take on keeping things close to the vest during these deliberations.

Episode I of this interview is here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring leaders from Tumblr, KickStarter, BirchBox, ZocDoc, Charity: Water and many other startups are here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch