Ari Klinger, entrepreneur and investor based in Sydney, Australia, spoke to startups at Hackerspace.sg last weekend. It was the first of a series of public talks given by JFDI mentors to local startups, including those involved in the JFDI–Innov8 2012 Bootcamp.
The session covered the basics of building a scalable and sellable business, which Ari learned from his experience building and selling two companies in Australia: the online media network iMega in 2006 and the Online Marketing Group (OMG) which grew to become Australia’s largest network of websites and owner of premium domain names.
Ari advised startups to think about where they wanted their company to be in 2-3 years. He suggested writing this down in a 2 year plan, something that he has done with the companies he’s built and invested in. He also recommended that startups build their company “so that you can sell it at the right time [if you want to]…its about [giving yourself] options.”
He also shared a lesson that he learned the hard way, in hopes that it might save the startups in the room from making the same mistakes. He urged the startups to focus on their core product, but suggested switching the focus to diversifying once they had developed their core product. He explained:
“In 2006, we were generating a lot of traffic from Google…Our network of websites had diversification across geographies and across categories, but we were heavily reliant on Google for our traffic. When Google changed their algorithms, our traffic dropped from a run rate of 30 million people to 3 million people a month overnight, and it took us a couple of months to get back to our previous levels.”
You can find the link to Ari’s slides at http://bit.ly/JFDIAri.
