Net Prophet 2010 - Building a Global Business: Lessons learnt (By Vinny Lingham)

Net Prophet 2010 – Building a Global Business: Lessons learnt (By Vinny Lingham)

Vinny Lingham is a seasoned, globally acclaimed entrepreneur who has founded a number of businesses, including the award-winning search engine marketing company, Clicks2Customers. He was recently chosen as a Young Global Leader Honoree 2009 by the World Economic Forum. He has been recognized as a high-impact entrepreneur by Endeavor Global and awarded the 2006 Top Young IT Entrepreneur.

“Going global is expensive if you don’t know how.”

“Building a product team is critical for funded companies.”

A summary of Vinny’s presentation:

Inside secrets to investment: A great team, good plan, good networking, great pitch, good demo and passion! Show potential and deliver it. Aim to build products and not simply services. Do not sell hours, but sell products, and ultimately the money will come.

Yola was established in March 2007, with only 5 employees, and our success began with a vision to create easy-to-use website building software.

Yola’s investment timeline started with a R3.5 million investment in a previous company, via R&D. We rebuilt the company from scratch, and now have a user base of 10,000.

Tips to get started: Do not keep your product a secret – share information freely and get it into the market quickly. Cold hiring is a tough strategy, rather hire via referrals – its the best!

After initial growth phase, we received $20 million investment and our target user base increased to 5-6 million users. At this stage, we did not give away too much for free, but with this said, entrepreneurs who make money tend to give back to the industry!

We moved to Silicon Valley to have more of an impact on the industry, with our main reasons being to build global business, the vast depth of talent and skills, networking, fundraising, attend conferences and to be ahead of the latest trends, business development, and acquisitions (liquidity). With this said, there were a number of reasons to not make the move to Silicon Valley, namely: It’s very expensive, not suitable for someone who is focusing on an emerging market, you are very attached to social networks and family at home, limited funding, and you think you can be successful in South Africa.

Conclusion: If you want to start building a successful company you need capital, not a product. You can have a great product, but without capital it’s not going anywhere.