Bob Browning's blog

I recently went back to one of my old projects to see how it is working out. And it is looking great. It started as a quick demonstration site and now it is an important resource for the FinTech industry.

Around 1995 I finished a consulting contract, and needed a new job. Around the same time I was reading about something called the World Wide Web running on the Internet. It sounded interesting so I bought myself a state-of-the-art modem (9600 bits per second) and got myself an account with a service provider.

The only web browsers then were Mosaic (which eventually turned into Internet Explorer), and a beta version of a new browser called Netscape. Yahoo wasn’t a search engine, but was a hierarchic database of web sites. Most web sites were academic or a web version of existing brochures – just static HTML pages.

I put this advert in Marketing Week: “I understand the Web, you understand marketing. Let’s talk.” People were interested and from that I started a small business, and the first site I developed was for Dulux Paint. That site had a database of paint types, and had a calculator so you could work out how much paint to buy for a given room and a given paint. These days that is distinctly Meh, but at the time was leading edge.

But I wanted to build a business servicing the finance industry – one I knew well. So I started a demonstration site which was a catalogue of financial technology for the Treasury area of a bank. I had just completed a project for a bank reviewing Treasury systems and I had the brochures and reportes sitting in a box, so I had the data to get started. I called it bobsguide, because that was the trend those days – e.g. Norton utilities.

After a while people started sending me sales material and eventually I developed a user area for vendors to add information themselves. We started a newsletter which included press releases from vendors. Initially it was weekly but one the vendors got the idea we had to send it out daily. We ran the site like the yellow pages. A basic entry was free but there were various ways you could enhance the entry for a small fee. We ran banner ads as well, but they were never a big revenue stream.

We started getting advice, particularly from people in the publishing industry. Business magazines have a model where they publish journalistic articles every month, and once a year they have a product guide. The whole thing is based on users paying for the magazine plus advertising. So people came along saying:

• You need a paywall
• You need more journalism to attract people to the site so you can sell advertising
• News content is really important and needs journalistic added value
• You should charge vendors for any entry – even the basic one

We did everything differently.

• The site was always free
• Entry level was free
• Our newsletter just quoted press releases verbatim
• The news section was just verbatum press releases as well – we never did any journalistic editing

One of the things we learned early on was that it didn’t matter if you were asking $10 or $10,000. Once money was involved you flicked a switch in you customer’s minds. A free service didn’t need authorisation, it didn’t need accountants to be involved, and as a result didn’t have any barriers to taking up the service. Once they we had a relationship then we could start asking for money.

Early on, we went to see a major hardware manufacturer who did a lot of business in the finance sector. We asked for a really modest fee to sponsor the site and were turned down flat. They wouldn’t spend peanuts on publicising themselves to their core buyers while at the same time spent an order of magnitude more sponsoring motor sport. I guess the corporate hospitality was better.

A few more people got involved to help with finance and business planning. We had a fabulous American manager who ran the business and built up a great team. We negotiated a presence at trade shows in exchange for advertising. It wasn’t always a great stand – at major events it was basically a table, but we became pretty well known. The demographics of the site were fabulous. If you are selling something , there we were with an audience that were mainly buyers.

In due course, I was retiring and everyone wanted to cash in our investment. We sold it to a large professional association. It should have fitted their business model well because they ran huge trade shows in the US, but somehow it didn’t work out and the site went up for sale again – and because profits were down the price was lower. We put in a bid, but it was a cheeky one and they didn’t bite. It was bought by Contentive who rewrote the technology, which was getting pretty tired at this stage, and reworked the design. It is now Infinite Intelligence and I really like what they have done. The design is great and the content is as valuable as ever.

They have more editorial now and everything is well organised. If you are interested in Fintech please check it out: https://infinite-intelligence.net