My CV on Linkedin

Launching Zifiz

Guys,

I and a fellow classmate from HEC are launching our startup Zifiz.

What we do: We develop a product locator service based on a web app.

Why? Because shopping stresses us out and we want a solution to help us save time and money!

Where we are: In Paris, in the Palais Brongniart as we got selected by Silicon Sentier to enter their startup accelerator Le Camping.

If you want to follow our progress, please do not hesitate to register on our landing page. As soon as we are launching the beta, we can let you know.

How to organize a focus group (in french)?

This post is one I did when I was working in my startup to explain how we organized focus groups. It is in french only, nevertheless if three people ask me for an english version, i'll translate it!

Dans la vie trépidante d'une start-up, il y a souvent des moments où on part bille en tête sur une idée de service tout en bidouillant un business model qu'on imagine viable.

Mais arrive un moment où le doute vous assaille et que "Sérieusement, est-ce-qu'il y a vraiment des gens que ça intéresse ou bien suis-je le seul?"

C'est là qu'il devient urgent de faire un focus group (en fait il aurait fallu le faire dès le début pendant l'élaboration du business plan ;) )

Pourquoi?
Au début on s'enflamme pour un concept sans vraiment savoir s'il y a une demande potentielle. On se base sur l'intuition mais on oublie souvent qu'on n'est pas forcément le client final.

Quand les premiers doutes arrivent, on a souvent tendance à élargir le périmètre des fonctionnalités pour pouvoir palier toute éventualité.

Résultat, on se retrouve avec une roadmap de fou, un produit couteau suisse qui fait tout, même le café, sans au final vraiment savoir à quoi ça va servir.

Ensuite la question primordiale est de savoir comment vous allez vendre votre service/produit et acquérir des utilisateurs. On pourrait croire que tout le monde raffolera de ce service qui fait tout mais au final, le message va se brouiller et les utilisateurs seront perdus, à la fois concernant l'utilisation de votre produit et parce que vous ne les reverrez pas de sitôt.

Ainsi l'objectif d'un focus group est essentiellement de prendre du recul et de mieux identifier les points clés de votre service ainsi que les potentiels utilisateurs.
Ceci afin d'éviter de partir bille tête sur un développement qui se révélerait inapproprié.

Les objectifs sont donc:
-evaluer le concept auprès d'une cible d'utilisateurs potentiels
-définir un positionnement stratégique fort et attractif
-identifier le périmètre de l'offre le plus pertinent

Comment?
En général, un focus group vous permet de récolter des informations qualitatives sur vos utilisateurs et votre service. Cela suppose d'avoir fait au préalable une étude quantitative afin d'avoir identifié un minimum votre cible.

Pour cela:
-constituer un groupe de 5 à 10 personnes maximum
-entretien d'1h30
-un déroulé en entonnoir: habitudes, description du concept, fonctionnalités associées, cas d'usage envisagés

Qui doit participer?
Afin que le focus group soit gérable, il est vraiment recommandé de ne pas avoir plus de 10 personnes dans le groupe avec un minimum de 5 afin qu'il y ait un minimum d'interaction.

Les personnes doivent avoir été sélectionnées comme rentrant dans la cible.

Les personnes ne doivent idéalement pas être vos amis directs car ils seront moins objectifs et seront tentés de trouver les "bonnes" réponses pour vous faire plaisir.

Comment les faire venir?
Pour se faire, nous avons diffusé notre annonce de focus group sur Facebook et avons demandé à nos amis de diffuser dans l'idée de toucher des amis d'amis.
Pour les motiver à venir, nous leur avons proposé une carte cadeau et un petit-dèj à 11h un samedi matin. En seulement une journée, nous avions constitué notre focus group!

Qui doit animer?
Idéalement quelqu'un d'extérieur à la société afin de ne pas influencer l'audience. En effet, si c'est l'un des fondateurs et que l'audience le sait, cela pose deux problèmes majeurs.
Tout d'abord,le fondateur va avoir tendance (inconsciemment) à orienter les questions et réponses dans le sens de son idée et se fermer à d'éventuelles alternatives.
Ensuite, l'audience peut vouloir "faire" plaisir au fondateur ce qui n'est pas du tout le but recherché.

Comment exploiter tout ce contenu?
Pendant la session, nous avions décidé de tout filmer afin de ne pas perdre une miette des interventions ainsi que pour en être en mesure d'étudier les réactions des participants à froid.
Ainsi après la session, nous avons retranscrit l'ensemble de la session et rédigé un document de synthèse dont nous servons maintenant pour adapter notre offre.

Et après?
Suite à ce focus group, nous avons réorienté légèrement notre offre et avons lancé une alpha afin d'avoir des premiers retours d'ergonomie.

Notre objectif est maintenant de prendre à la fois les retours de l'alpha et du focus group et les intégrer à notre prochaine beta!


http://tomfishburne.com/2010/10/all-knowing-focus-group.html
http://www.slideshare.net/karinaelise8/why-focus-groups-are-broken?from=ss_embed

Market Study on Live Streaming services in the Music Industry

The HEC MBA is soon coming to an end :( Before that, I still have to finish one of the major assignments for my class "Business Plan Workshop" in the Entrepreneurship track.

As a subject, I have chosen to study the potential of Live Streaming service applied to Music.

The reason why, I have chosen that topic is that I am passionated about music and technology and after the MBA, I really would like to work in a startup (or create one :D) dealing with that subjects.

Working on that study has been a great way to learn more on the Music industry where I have no past experience. Thanks to the HEC's network, I have been able to meet Universal Music and EMI executives and great discussions have followed. It's really cool being able to meet anyone in an industry for an academic project :D

Right now, there are several services offering live music streaming such as Grandcrew.com, Justin.tv, BigLive.com... What is still not clear is how these companies make money out of it if they make any. Indeed, even though many companies have launched such service, music fans do not really seem ready to pay for watching a live concert on the internet.

Therefore, many studies and bloggers argue that it can be an indirect sales channel to help music bands develop their marketing strategies (Direct-to-Fan and give Reason-to-Buy). By the way, I have come across a great study by Virginie Berger (a french blogger specialized in the music industry) called "What is a good digital music strategy?" and it provides great tips on our bands should build their marketing offer to reach and maintain their fan base.

Coming back to my market study, the general trend seems now to be to have a better knowledge on your fan base and propose them customized offers depending on their willingness-to-pay. Several music startups are working on that: Topspin in the US, Noomiz in France.

But this is for recorded music as it has been a decreasing market for the last few years. On the live music market, the picture is a bit brighter in the sense that this is a growing one and that the industry is restructuring around that. Indeed, music labels are now buying music venues and tour management companies in order to find new revenues. And vice-versa when LiveNation (tour management company) offers 360-deal with artists managing their whole career from the recordings, tours, merchandising,...

So what is to be done in the live music market? Are there still market imperfections where a startup could work on and make a profit out of it?

These questions are still open for me and I will work on that for the remaining months of my MBA. If you have opinion on the subject, please do not hesitate to contact me.

HEC MBA Personalized Phase 2

Now I am back at HEC until December. I am still wondering whether to go back to my previous company, start my own business, join a startup or a medium-size company.

For these last 4 months, I am very much dedicated to follow all classes and projects dealing with Entrepreneurship.

Regarding areas, I am now more focused into the Web and Music industry and I am currently working on a business plan for startup-to-be.

These 4 months are going to be intense and exciting!

Facebook case: Winner-Take-All or place for a new player?

Working today on an interesting Harvard case about Facebook for our class on Business Strategy in the Networked Economy by Prof Planbeck.

It is interesting to see how the network externalities (same-side and cross-side) and their bundling strategy (to increase the switching costs to another Social Network) advocate for a Winner-Take-All path but we could have thought the same of MySpace and that did not happen. For a new player to disloge Facebook, it would need to make a major technological/service breakthrough.

What do you think it could be?

Small Giants: you should read this book

I have just finished reading the book "Small Giants" by Bo Burlingham and every entrepreneur-to-be should read it!

The author explains how some companies choose to be great instead of big. By focusing on their passion and vision, CEOs manage to create companies with Mojo that have a huge power of attraction to customers, suppliers and employees.

The way to go for your start-up?

What do you want to do after the MBA?

This is the typical question you are asked to answer when writing your essays.

6 months after the start of the HEC MBA, I am still not sure what to do:

• Should I try to set up my own business?
• Should I do the easy way and find a job?
• Should I go back to my previous job in January 2011?

I have some ideas for setting my business up but I need to find people that work with me on that.

More to come soon...

1 month of MBA @ HEC

I could not believe that doing an MBA was so time-consuming! The workload is really big and the pace quite intense.
Anyway, I'll take some time to share with you my first month @ HEC and try to give you update on a more regular basis.

First week: Orientation week

A lot of introduction speeches during this week about the cursus, business concepts, Communication in Action, Stereotypes @ work, Personal effectiveness by Mark Fritz (inspiring!) and parties!!
My room on the Campus is great, have installed a wifi router, bought a microwave,... ready to rock!

Second week: NEGOSIM
NEGOSIM is a business simulation tool where you manage a company in group of 5. You are competing with other companies from different countries. Different countries have different labor costs and quality of work. The interesting part is that to play you really have to negotiate with other companies to set up a joint venture in a low cost country or buy raw material at a discount.
As I have no accounting background beforehand, I was struggling a bit at first with the different financial statements. But it got better and everyone got very excited to get the best "market to book" value!
We have been playing this game the whole week and it has been really interesting for me as a newbie to identify what is important in the financial statements, how to implement different strategies and how to negotiate with others and a good dose of leadership training to channel the team work.

Third week:
Now the show begins with real classes. Marketing, Financial Accounting, Financial Markets, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources Management, Statistics.
A lot to read and many cases to deal with.
My study group is great and after a slow start, we are now quite well organized but one question remains: are we all supposed to work on cases or can we just dispatch the workload within the study group?

Fourth week:
Getting up to speed with cases and different classes.(and parties!)
+ different conferences with Yann Arthus Bertrand (remember HOME?) and Alain Juppé (former France Prime Minister, currently mayor of Bordeaux)

Fifth week:
Now are the exciting things coming up! Every year, HEC organizes the MBAT (MBA Tournament), which is a sport tournament between the best european business schools. This year is the 20th anniversary and there's a lot of pressure to make this one unforgettable.
This year, 2 teams have competed to organize the event: "GAME ON" and "DREAM TEAM". This week has been so exhausting by preparing videos, newsletters and advertisings combined with the usual workload.

At the end, "GAME ON" won by 1 vote difference! Crazy!
Here are the promotional videos of both teams:
Enjoy!

• HEC Dream Team
• HEC Game On!

I'll keep you posted!

How (not) to handle the waitlisted status!

After running my 2 interviews for the INSEAD MBA starting in Sept 09, I finally received the answer on the 19th of December 08 from the INSEAD Adcom: you're waitlisted!! Damned, what an horrible situation!!!

First it is a very mixed feeling because some kind of hope still exists but at the end of the day it is so small that you just want to forget it and move it. Easier said than done!

My Christmas holidays have been horrible because I was stuck in some kind of limbo and unable to think forward :(

INSEAD is such a great school and being that close is very difficult to bear. At the time, even though I didn't have any response from HEC, UCLA and Berkeley, I knew I was 100% sure getting one of those.

Second, you just wonder what made them make this decision, apparently too many french people with a better profile than me (they are very strict with their <10% french :(), bad interview? You just don't know...

So what can you do? After browsing some business week and MBA forums, several options appeared:

• you wait until the end, pay the deposits to your other admits and if accepted, you just go
• you wait until the end, reject your other admits and cross your fingers!
• you try to speed up the decision process before having to pay any deposit to other schools

Well, well, well...

Not easy to decide but actually HEC made me decide because you have to pay a 6000€ deposit to secure your seat while it was something around 1000$ for Berkeley.

If I had been rich, I would have chosen the first option but as it is still not the case I had to choose between second ans third one. (well it is not really about being rich or not but 6000€ sounds so big!!)

The second one was a bit like suicidal mission so I sticked to the third option.

Before having to pay the deposits, I contacted INSEAD to know whether there was some way to speed up the process. Actually, their answer was quite clear: No!
They only suggested to inform them about any "major" update of your file in the meantime.

Well, what can you do if you don't have any update to add? Answer: Just don't do any!

That's not what I did...I registered to attend an INSEAD in house event, and after that prepared a big mail stating all the major updates I had made since the application. But in retrospect, I am not sure there were worth mentioning.
During the in-house event I met the adcoms and they told me GMAT, essays... are OK and to emphasize what I could bring to the class...
Plus I mentioned the deposits I had to pay in order to kind of push them to tell me what to expect from INSEAD.

Answer was quite fast, 2 days after my update mail: "We are sorry....blabla" Snifff!

Here we are, so I won't go to INSEAD, too bad!! but hey, now I know that and can move forward! So this is great news! :D

In conclusion, I don't know if I can advise you anything on how to handle the waitlisted status but here are some suggestions about stuff I did that broke the deal:

• don't be too pushy saying you have other deposits to pay (especially for lesser-rank schools I think)
• don't be needy like "Pleeeease let me in, INSEAD is such a great school, blabla". It does not work with the girls so why would it work with INSEAD? :D (Keep in mind: "you are the prize"; Neil Strauss inside :D)
  
• If you have nothing to say, just don't say anything. Don't waste the Adcom time!

So here are the main ideas, sound obvious and during the process I kept telling myself, don't do anything stupid, but you run under such stress that your reactions might change (some will say that your true self is revealed under stressed, so now it's official, I'm stupid! :D) because you just want to stop the pain.

So my best advice if you are waitlisted: drink some green tea, go and work out, take holidays, cut the internet and don't go on all these crazy MBA forums :D, party, read novels, meet new people and don't do any thing stupid!

That's it!