Geeky Peek

I have worked at three start-ups in my life.

1. Redknee – I was an early employee out of school. Redknee took no funding, just a ceo with a ton of energy and ability to bespoke sell, in front of a bunch of crazy developers who wanted to build stuff. They went public after roughly 5 years.

2. Digicel’s USA MVNO – Digicel decided to launch an mvno in the us…. more on this tmrw… there is some funny stories. For those of you who don’t know Digicel, they are the dominant teleco in the Caribbean and South Pacific with roughly 10M subs, the Verizon of the Caribbean if you will.

3. Peek – well, you all know about Peek.

Its funny, when you say you work at a tech startup, folks have this view that you have this utopian, hgh fiving, uber collaborative, hacker-ish, solve the world’s problem in 5 lines of code culture. There are just 2-3 young men in a room, sleeping on sofas with a nerf basketball hoop. I will snidely refer to this as the “romantic tech movement” where 37 signals is rembrandt, pushing the view that hacker centric businesses are the ring to rule them all. Lots also not forget the role of Y-Combinator and others in the role of the romantic hacker start-up…

Another point of view in the starup world is to build a business, not a cool dreamy technology built in erlang, scala and couch db by 2-3 geeks. So you build a business that looks and feels like a business from day 1. It has things like tps reports, structured projects and project managers, customer care, leadership models, and so on. Its not two geeky peeks in a room.

Every startup I have been involved with has been the latter.

That model fits my view on the magic ingredients to make a startup successful. Deal making and energy. Deal-making, whether its sales, biz dev or raising money… and having the energy to do it over and over and over until the company is stable and a going entity.

I have now had the privilege to work for two ceo’s who embody this.

The ceo of Redknee, Lucas, was a monster traveler. The guy used to go on epic trips to Europe raising several big deals at once. We had no core product or product strategy, just a ceo who kicked ass and made giant teleco operators believe he could build something better than ericsson and nortel. Up bright and early and always on the road, that’s my early memory of Lucas at Redknee.

Amol is similar. He has sustained a hellacious travel schedule over the past few months, sometimes in 3 cities in a week, bringing in some big exciting deals.

Basically the hacker-oriented startup model tends to believe in this axiom – ‘if I build a great product it will sell’. I just don’t think thats true. Most startups have no money to raise awareness of their market, and no money to develop channels through which to sell them. You need to do deals to find partners so you can market cheaply and sell cheaply.

So hence, I’ll take the start-up with the business savvy ceo, the deal maker, not the genius code-writers any day of the week in my start-ups.

“Cash is king”

Its supposedly the credo of all start-ups; the golden rule that must be followed.

The funny thing is that you don’t really understand the ethos until you are in a little startup trying to take on the world. And then you really start questioning every decision. Is “decision x” worth it?

We have a decent base of subs, we make a decent amount of revenue, but we are also an expensive operation to run. We both manufacture devices and operate a service (now in two countries), our money is somewhat split.

Well we have to be innovative, necessity is the mother of all invention after all, right?

So, we are progressing on some big stuff. Big stuff that will blow away folks. Not just an awesome “Peek for Life” promo.

But really, truly big stuff. So stay tuned for Project Big Stuff.

Our Peek for life, device for life promo ends in a few days. Sorry to be super, promo-y on the site, but its a good deal.

Buy it here –

Since Facebook launched email replies to comments, we have been getting slaughtered by you all for it not working on the Peek.

Well without further ado, we got it fixed last weekend. So if you get an email from Facebook about a comment, you can reply and it’ll post on your wall. Sorry about that not working!

An oft heard battle in the hallways of Peek – is customer care worth it?

We’ve been trying to watch the results from Google and their care model for the Nexus One. Google went with an email/internet only care model, which definitely will save a lot of money supporting customers… but… is it enough, are customers happy?

Ultimately it seems that most customers want at least the option to phone in. We want to offer phone support, but we want to make sure it is as economical as possible so we can put money into new features, devices, price cuts, etc. So we just made a big change in how we provide care. Previously we had used a high-end, outsourced call center based in Phoenix. They were fantastic and very easy to work with. But, in order to reduce cost we had to change things up. We decided to follow the JetBlue strategy of “home care”. So we hired care reps and set them up out of their houses. We’re now saving roughly 50-60% of our monthly care costs (and ultimately paying the call center reps more).

I’d love to hear some opinions from folks – do you think Peek could do email/internet only care ala Google? Do you think any mobile company can go email/internet only?

Not sure if some of you saw this link on our official company blog, Peek Speaks, but GoMobo has partnered with Order Panda to use Peeks to manage orders and delivery of chinese food.

Through technology cooked up by GoMobo, customers simply text the word MENU to 466626 and reply back with the number of each item they want. Order Panda then replies with confirmation and a pick up time.

Order Panda is simply using Peek’s base email functionality to manage orders and delivery, but we’re in the midst of enabling some pretty cool forms functionality using xform. Imagine snazzy looking forms on the Peek easily built for your enterprise.

I like this new promo we are running and wanted to give it a bit of airtime. Most of you know the Peek for Life package we sell, $300 you get a Peek with no monthly costs ever.

Well now we are bundling in a “device for life” with it. If you break your device at any point, we’ll replace it! Even if its not our fault. Pour a can of Coke on it, we’ll replace it!

One of the first, truly “For Life” packages available.

Buy it here –

On March 10th, Peek made its official splash into India. Partnering with Aircel, Peek is attempting to bring affordable messaging to the masses in India.

I’ve always loved the Peek story for developing markets. In India (and many other places), contracts and postpaid aren’t readily prevalent. You pay full-price for devices generally. So $400 iPhones, BlackBerries, and the likes are generally too expensive for the common person or even for the common business. When I was working with Digicel in the Caribbean, BlackBerries were generally only for the exec team (and a few high-performing sales guys).

Well, Aircel agreed with us, so over a year ago we started down the road of launching Peek nation-wide in India. Not only is Aircel launching Peek, but they are also kicking off a massive marketing campaign as well.

In the industry there are a lot of people watching this event. The idea of affordable smartphones, or smart featurephones, for the developing world is a big upcoming initiative for many of the handset makers. Peek is one of the first “big” global launches of a product aimed at this category. If things go well, I’d expect you’ll see Peek and other Peek-like products start rolling out in countries across the world.