Danielle Morrill

I don’t know why, but I rarely write about my “past lives” professionally, even though I think about my experiences all the time and draw on them to help me make decisions. I remember, for example, hearing the term “SaaS” for the first time over four years ago when I was working for Expeditors International. Expeditors is an amazingly successful non-asset based common carrier – in layman’s terms: a shipping company that doesn’t own any planes, trains, ships, trucks, etc. Sound familiar? Like a software company that doesn’t own any computers. They created multi-tenancy for shippers, and I decided to work there because the model is brilliant. How funny that now I find myself in the cloud computing space.

SaaS came up because I was sitting in a meeting with 50 other people in this Fortune 500 company, listening to the newly appointed CTO speak about the changes we would be making to our technical infrastructure over the next five years. We would transition away from Cobal, SmallTalk, and all the other languages and technologies we were using to Java. There wouldn’t be any more layoffs (half of the 2,000 IT employees had already been let go), the remaining staff would have 1 year to learn Java. The company would be moving to the cloud, because it was just too expense to run an international company the way we were doing it. We were still using the same systems which, though revolutionary when created, were becoming outdated.

In my day-to-day, I wrote scripts in PASCAL to automate business processes. I wish I could go back to Expeditors now with the Twilio API – oh my god, we’d have saved even more time. I created elaborate scripting within the windows OS that worked with our electronic filing system, home grown CRM / accounting tool, and Excel to automate entire jobs. It was like crack, saving time and money and freeing people from mundane tasks. I didn’t know anyone else in the Business Process Management world, I thought I was entirely alone – and it was fun!

Of course I didn’t get hired into this job, instead I started out as an intern and then customer service rep on a team that was losing money each month. Due to the nature of the particular product this team supported margins were small but each customer generated at least twice the work as they would on other products. We were doing all sorts of painfully manual things, and it was a waste. Morale on the team sucked, and at first I thought I was doomed to become sad and jaded with work at just 19 years old. Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way at all. With the help of better processes, a new manager (and then another even better one), and pulling together as a team we got profitable and I got promoted.

So… you’re probably wondering why I left? When I joined the company, I just wanted to work – but after being there almost three years and seeing what kind of impact I could have, I wanted to build new things, not just fix broken processes and eliminate inefficiency. The company’s migration to Java was on a 5 year plan, so a lot of the projects I was planning with the VP of Business Processes were going to be sitting on hold for quite awhile. I was becoming frustrated with the pace, and since I was 22 and about to get married I decided it was as good a time as any to take a leap and join a company that would build things, or start one.

In hindsight, I gave up a sweet job – although it didn’t pay well at all, it was really rewarding to help people. But MAKING things, instead of fixing broken things that are inherently wrong in their design, is its own drug. I admit I was starstruck by “startups” and joined one without taking a deep enough look at whether or not it solved a really impactful problem, but I never forgot how I felt about Expeditors and so when Twilio presented itself 2 years late I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to change the way people do business.

There, a little piece of my past life out there – it feels good to capture memories, and I’m so glad I worked for Expeditors. Better investment than any startup I’ve worked for (so far) – 20% of my income went to purchasing stock, woo!

Ask anyone, I love to pitch.  It’s exciting, you get immediate feedback, and an adrenaline rush – what’s not to love?

Last night at NWEN‘s Entrepreneur Idol, I pitched an idea which my husband and I have been discussing over the past couple weeks: live streaming adult content, like Ustream — but for porn (which is against Ustream’s TOS).  It all started when I complained on Twitter that Lovers Package is like going to WalMart to purchase erotic toys and video.

First of all, I should probably point out that this product is in the concept stage and no development work has gone into it at this point.  I could easily cobble together existing software to create a prototype site with a couple models, but I’m enjoying marketing the idea and talking to a lot of people right now – particularly women.

What About Zivity? They’re Featured on TechCrunch A Lot

I checked out Zivity (link is NSFW), hadn’t heard of them until last night (might be a failure of their marketing since I think I am their target market – or at least my husband is), and the site has black background… which sent warning bells ringing immediately for me… bleagh, but I digress. More disappointing that some of the aesthtics (although they are devoid of ads, which is nice) according to Compete.com the site’s traffic is pretty flat, and not doing that much better than Seattle 2.0:

I hear they are founded by a woman, it would be great to figure out what is (or isn’t) working for them.  Compare this to forthegirls.com (NSFW) which is targeted directly at women

I’ve Heard the Porn Industry is HUGE

Yep, you heard right.  Huge and losing money like any other media industry, due to the proliferation of free amateur content on the web.  According to an article in yesterday’s Austin Chronicle (Austin is a hotbed for sex workers, if you didn’t know), “The porn industry, according to the best estimates, makes four times what Hollywood makes”.  That’s a lot of money, I’m not even sure how much. Wikipedia says:

The sex industry earns as much as $13 billion a year in the United States and has been credited with driving technological advances in popular media , such as home video and DVD, pay-per-view, live streaming video and video on demand

For a startup, a big market is actually a big problem.  How do you approach it?  Where do you start?  How do you get enough attention to your site and cut through the noise?  I figure if I pursue this, it would be great to start with a market that is under-served, and familiar to me, women.

Imagine a site that has content similar to what you might read in Cosmo’s “70 Ways to Excite Your Man” or “10 Positions to Try Tonight”, except that you have video content, an anonymous persona, and you can see live demonstrations of the positions, preferences, or toys suggested – and you can ask questions.  Of course, experts in various niches would emerge and could become well-paid affiliates for specific products.

What Motivates Me

Personally, I’m excited about developing the business model and providing an awesome content distribution platform. I’ve spoken with several women who either run in home pleasure parties (like Tupperware for sex toys) or write online reviews (or create educational content) and they’re making good money, but have plenty of complaints about the technology and ability to re-use what they’ve created to generate as much revenue as possible.  One thing that I am learning as I talk to more women is just how many different preferences there are, and how many different needs can be served (definitely a topic for another post).  It’s not even about being wild and crazy, it’s mostly about feeling confident and sexy with their partners – or even by themselves.

I’ve been asked if I’ll be producing video of my own, or if I already have an online persona in the porn world, and the answer is no to both question.  I won’t say that I’ll never do it, but frankly I think there are so many talented and ambitious models and actresses out there looking to reach a greater audience, that I’ll leave that to them for now.  Will I watch?  Sure!

What’s Next?  When Can I Watch?

I’ve got a honey-do list for Kevin to get started on while I get back to work on what I actually do for a living, which has nothing to do with this.  If you’ve signed up for the beta list you’ll receive an email from me once and awhile about our progress and invitations to test out features as they are released.  Be patient with us, it could be awhile.

It’s been awhile since I did any writing or thinking about what I want out of location based app, but back when I worked on Whrrl as their community manager, this was on my mind all the time.  After I left the company, I kept using the product for awhile until someone asked me if I would still use it if I hadn’t been involved in its creation.  So I decided to take a break from it, and see if I actually needed Whrrl in my life… and to find out what about it would draw me back in.  Recently I downloaded Whrrl onto my iPhone (now version 2.2 I think) to try out some of the new features and here’s why:

• It organizes my pictures in a particular place/time (story) into a single album in Facebook
• It allows me to quickly share to Facebook and Twitter in realtime, and Whrrl stories tend to generate a lot of comments compared to my other content

There are also a lot of features I don’t care about, like how big my audience is or what my friends are doing.  Yeah, I said it – I don’t use Whrrl to find out what my friends are doing — just to publish what I’m doing.  That’s actually pretty weird, entirely the reverse of how consumer products are normally used (people would rather be voyeurs than contributors, except for a small % of users).

Whrrl is like many other apps in the space which fundamentally do the same things, although they’re packaged up into storytelling (Whrrl), friend-finding (Loopt), local blogging (Brightkite), games (Foursquare), and the list goes on and on.  Each ones tries to claim they’re different, but to me its about picking one of these and fully investing in it because I don’t want the experience of showing up at one location, and checking into 4 different apps.  Truly, if there was an app that would check me into all the other services I’d use that one — but all of these guys are trying to hang on tight to location information and most don’t offer open APIs that would allow for collaborative checkins.  The problem is that all the value goes to the service where you actually provide the checkin, the portal service.  Really this just seems like something Facebook will eventualy offer… and then all these guys could be eliminated.

Why?

Because Whrrl, Loopt, Brightkite, and Foursquare are products (and in some case just an amalgamation of features) — not companies.  They would make great Facebook apps for adding value to LBS checking on the Facebook iPhone app… and my guess is that the feature is coming soon.  Each of them would love to cash in on the rich “foot-streaming” data that checkins provide, creating complex recommendations algorithms for telling me what i should do, say, buy, etc. in a certain context.  But to do that you need a huge base of users and data, and if you’re not openly integrable into a larger platform then the chances of getting that big on a single unique feature (the ability to check in at a location, and then do a bunch of things you can already do on Facebook).