The first report I read noted some slowness in the ad popping up which likely is more related to what carrier you are on given the limitations of speed on a cell phone.

Brian Cowley which if you read below about Intelius and their current leader you should also know that Brian came from Infospace as well. Brian can also be given credit as a co-founder of Looksmart.

They are early into the market which I like since the first in often gets the biggest slice of the pie. And although they may not be exactly the first or the only I hope to see big things from them in the future so we will keep you posted on any new happenings.

 Naveen Jain is back in the saddle again. You would know this name as the leader of the high flyer Infospace back in the day. They will become listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker INTL.

You have a proven leader in the market place but then you end up with a foot fault when it comes to his background which if you Google around a bit you will find out some of Naveens past that may become an issue at one point. I do like this company but I will say to any investor his past may cause some turmoil.

The company has been profitable and with a quarter left to go in 2007 they have already put up revenue numbers that exceed $60 Million. One thing I like about this service based company is the low cost to startup and low running capital to keep it moving. All Intelius is an interface to places or many places at once that you do not care to go dig up. They also have links into some places you may not get but in the end it is a portal that snags information and publishes it to you.

Mix the non-complicated aspects of this business along with the fact that consumers are very willing to pay to get access to information along with businesses that need to do background checks amongst other things and you can clearly see why on paper the idea is a success.

Given they have no back end issues, keep the interface clean and deliver what they promised I do not see how this company could lose money. I guess with poor management any company could go south but with the amount of revenue they can generate with a low overhead day to day operations center this could be a winner all the way around.

Intelius is in the 2 month quiet period right now so you will not be hearing to much about the IPO from them.

Personally I do not want my cell in a directory anywhere if it can be avoid. I am all for a product like Cequint that is offering since it is use but not invasive. I still wonder how they had access to such a list to begin with? If you know post up a comment I am curious to hear.

As of right now I do not see anyone pulling off a cell phone directory without half of the country going after them so it is a lost cause. Maybe in a few years some other feature will satisfy the need on all cell phones.

An article on the Intelius IPO will be up shortly so stay tuned.

And no we are not talking about your wife knowing that your standing on the corner Broadway and Boston by the donut shop eating a chocolate double dipped after you promised you would cut some weight before the Cancun trip.

We are talking about a service that provides basic city\state registration information of the caller. Now one of my primary businesses is a recruiting company that works around the world. If your are a hustler then you have people calling you from every area code around the clock. I do not know how many times in the past I hopped on Google to see where an area code was trying to figure out if I want to take this call of if it is the same guy that I told no to 45 times in the last week.

They have raised some venture capital in a first and maybe second round and have seem to caught some peoples eye on their product so I would keep an eye on this up and comer as I believe the market they are trying to attack is wide open for a front runner. I always say if I would use their service then it is in the majority so we wish Cequint luck in their continued business efforts.

Well that is the first thing every non-business-owner will tell you. Everyone working a 40 for someone else will tell you exactly what and how you need to do to start a business because they already built an empire right?

 If you have or tried to start a business do you remember that awkward time of sitting in front of Microsoft Word thinking where do I start? Or maybe you bought a software at staples for $49 that was going to walk you through it.

I remember those days and I don’t plan on ever seeing them again. My most successful business, an Recruiting and Research company was built on free thinking and my word combo of the decade “business hacking”.

We had ideas on paper, in email and everywhere in between but we never locked it into a “plan”. Anytime things in our original plan didn’t work what should we have done if we had a business plan? Chances are it wouldn’t have a solution.

By not having a formal plan we were able to hack on the fly, if something doesn’t work then you don’t sink with the ship (the ship being the business plan).  Many people will follow this right down the drain and I am saying you don’t have to. Put your ideas on paper but never let down your guard and when you start to see things that don’t work you need to attack them and find something that does work.

To many failed business rely on a plan that traps their minds from free thinking. The modern day business plan will not have a solution to everything and often the plan you wrote on paper doesn’t work so well in the real world. Adapt quickly and you won’t become part of the statistic that says most businesses will fail within the first 5 years.

Here is another one to make your business life a little easier. You always read about how and why businesses fail but over and over it is the same old thing you read. I would like to add a few posts over time of very pointed reasons on why certain businesses fail.

Location 

I can think of 3 or 4 locations on top of my head where a business has never made it for any extended period of time. It could be a restaurant or retail for example.

You may notice the building itself may be ugly.

Or it could be in a bad location such as right on the corner of a busy intersection where no one wants to mess with getting out of the parking lot once they enter or a location that sits way off the road or the frontage is blocked.

Over and over at those same 3-4 spots someone will try to open a business and I can already call it before it starts, you will fail. I guess business owners see a place like that and think about how much they will save in rent but what I see is them having to spend 3 times what they saved and spend it on marketing because the location is horrible. If your in a bad intersection, nothing is going to save you. And another thing you will find out after interviewing business owners, at the time of the startup they always thought their idea was so grand that it didn’t matter where the location was. Well the post failed business interview always tells the story.

One coffee house my best friend and I always joked about as “the coffee shop that is going out of business”, well it finally went out of business. It is often really easy to see whom won’t make it and with more research and planning many failed businesses could have a better shot at succeeding. If you have a question post it up on the site and get a second view point!

The lesson learned is also easy, don’t chose a location based on price and don’t start dreaming about how much money you will save. Do your research and if you see a location that has had multiple businesses fail over the years then maybe you need to look for another place.

During one startup, we had a national audience whom we wanted to sell our service to. With the founding partners still working their full time jobs at the time we found ourselves making calls on the way to work, on lunch breaks and on the way home. Living in EST, often when we were calling was when people were out to lunch, not in yet and luckily the best part of the day was at the end since people were usually at their desk.

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Instead of focusing on our local area, we realized that we can market nationally so why not use the time zones to our advantage. If we took lunch at 11am, we cold called Chicago and would catch people before lunch since it was 10am. We were able to call into western time zones and catch the early crowd before their day got busy and at the end of our day at 5pm it still left us up to 4 hours of calling time on the west coast since many decision makers still camp out until 6pm.

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This is the kind of creativity that helps a startup survive. This is the kind of business hacking I am talking about. You’re sitting around, lying in bed, driving or soaking in the shower trying to find a hack to give your self and your company a boost. Always keep looking at ALL the angles so you can squeeze as many ideas as you can for your business.