eBay Live 2007, the biggest trade show in the eBay ecosystem, started on Thursday morning. 1ofthese, an ab|inventio company that can convert every bidder into a winner/buyer by finding equivalent items for losing bidders, had a booth to introduce its services to big eBay sellers. It was the night before the show, and our booth sign had not been delivered. Our software still had a critical bug. Our impact movie had not been received. Our company T-shirts had not been received, and the girl who was supposed to wear one of them had not confirmed her presence. And the FEDEX package with the mind-reading headsets that we would use for our contest, prizing the contestant who got the highest attention score when concentrating on “I want more sales” was late.
But we did not give up, and thanks to diligent work by Susanne Sandsberg, Umesh Lalwani, Kartik Sehgal, Harender Kumar and team (and the fact that the Sun never sets on the ab|inventio empire), by the following morning, every one of those had been solved. With Mike Yudin (whose assistance was invaluable) and I manning our booth, we went on to collect hundreds of leads from eBay sellers interested in using our services, with many of them signing up right there on the spot. Prospective customers told us such things as “It’s a no-brainer to sign up for this!”, “This is a great idea!” (repeatedly) and “This is much better than eBay’s method”. We received visits by print and radio journalists, by an analyst intent on writing about us, and repeated visits by eBay executives, including Rob Cross, Sr. Manager of the Developers Program, and the top gun at Prostores, an eBay company which, in his words, has little to do with 1ofthese (eBay wouldn’t be spying on us via their companies, would they now?), . The keynote speech by eBay’s President North-America focused on eBay’s intent to increase “windorphins”, a term they recently coined for the feeling of winning an auction on eBay, which was practically an ad for us, given that 1ofthese is designed to help convert every bidder into a winner. We had a visit by a big potential bus dev partner, and by people intent on distributing our software in Europe. We had several visits by eBay educators who teach and train other eBay sellers. We had visits by Titanium sellers (the top of eBay’s tiers of sellers). And we had lots of useful feedback for future product development. I even got a chance to briefly meet Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO. In sum, it was a thoroughly successful debut show. All with an investment in the smallest booth size available.
In the meantime, the Whozat team made several exciting improvements: a new UI, improved relevance, new interfaces to allow for comparisons of search quality, and two new internal UIs to test relevance improvements.
The SEM Experts grew its client base again.
And we came up with several new inventions for times to come.
All this in just a few days. Which brings me to how you can help. We are looking for a sales person and/or a biz dev. guru for QLess’s several verticals (restaurants, theme parks, hotel/casinos, supermarkets and retail, clinics and pharmacies) as well as one for Whozat HR and another to sell our Community-powered Corporate News Site to Fortune 500 companies who like to stay abreast of what their employees are reading and talking about. And if we find the right person, we may hire a Chief Revenue Officer as well for ab|inventio –someone with the experience to strike strategic partnerships and drive revenue across all our daughter companies. Referrals of exceptional people appreciated. And as always, we are always thankful for customer referrals, or for a word of advice.
We have also received investments by Assigncorp and Tom Mitchell, of Heidrick and Struggles fame and the co-founder of True Data Partners and several other successful ventures.
Thanks for your ongoing support. Thanks for helping us invent a better future.
Alex
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on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Hiring, The SEM Experts, Whozat, 1ofthese.
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