As a quick summary of how some of Pollenizer’s portfolio fits in here;

• Social – 99Dresses, Posse, Linqia (exited)
• Real time – TanglerLive
• Location based services – none yet – contact us.
• Mobile – mogeneration, OzPDA
• Urban entrepreneurs – that’s Pollenizer isn’t it?
• Flash sales – Spreets, TravelCandy, Dealised
• Behaviour and transactions – 99Dresses, Posse

The idea came to Posse CEO, Rebekah Campbell, when she was struggling to sell Evermore tickets in Perth. Recruiting the fans to work for the band quickly fixed that problem and planted the seed for a new web business.

Here is the first lesson for new web businesses: this idea was tested before the technology was envisioned, before the architecture was laid down, before the team was hired. There was simply a question: “If we gave fans the tools to sell tickets for the band, can they do so?”

If you can find a way to test your hypothesis simply and manually before you start, like Posse did, you can soon discover if there is a business behind it.

Now Evermore are touring again and we chose to gently launch Posse around the band that started it all. Now you can buy tickets for Evermore from me! I am going to the Sydney gig with some mates so let me know if you are coming and buy your ticket from me. :-)

Now begins the hard part – building a web business.

Our approach to this is highly iterative. We have defined a series of tests, each of which must be passed before we move on to the next. For example, 80% of users that start to register to be an agent must be successful. Or, average agent sales must be 5 or more tickets. With these objectives, we watch the stats closely, hypothesise about certain behavior and make changes to the site quickly before starting the cycle again. This is the core mechanical heart of the business and if it works poorly, the business will work poorly, no matter how large it grows.

As Rob Antulov (3eep’s CEO) says, “We want to make great burgers before we try to open McDonalds”

It is common for start-ups to have a feature based approach in which the blind hypothesis is that the next feature will bring the users. Rarely it does and usually the same teams are not noticing that registration is not working well, or invite emails fail to reach their destination.

We hope you will give Posse a try. Become an agent and try to flog some tickets to your mates. Help us learn how to make it a better service that is truly useful.