Goowy: From Idea, To Pivot, To Sale – with Alex Bard

Alex Bard, Assistly, Mental Game, SaaS (software as a service), Scaling, Sell Your Business, Social Media

What do you do when giants in your industry make your original business idea obsolete?

In 2004, Alex Bard and his co-founders launched Goowy a web-based desktop replacement that gave users a more vibrant email interface than existed at the time. Then Google launched Gmail, which offered features Goowy couldn’t compete with. This is the story of how Goowy discovered an alternative vision for its business and sold it to AOL in 2008.

Today, Alex and his same group of co-founders are building Assistly, which offers web-based, socially-networked customer service. You’ll hear how he’s using what he learned at Goowy to grow his new business.

Alex Bard

Assistly

Alex Bard is the co-founder and CEO of Assistly, which offers web-based, socially-networked customer service.

 

Three messages before we get started. First, do you know someone who wants to build an online store? Would you tell them that I said Shopify is the easiest way to build a robust store? When electric car pioneers, Tesla Motors, wanted to build their online store, they chose Shopify and so should you. What will you sell online after you discover Shopify?

Next, are you still coordinating projects by e-mail and wondering why you’re not productive? Check out TeamworkPM.net. TeamworkPM.net is trusted by big organizations like Universal Studios, right down to small two-man operations. How will your team benefit from a productivity boost by using TeamworkPM.net?

Finally, do you want to build a web app that interacts with phones? Twilio makes it easy. The founders of PagerDuty created a web app that tells site administrators when their systems are down. By using Twilio, they could send alerts via phone and SMS to their users. They didn’t have to build it...

Continue reading the transcript...