TWiST, Peter Pham of Billshrink
Date: August 10, 2009
Guest: Peter Pham, CEO of Billshrink, Co-founder of Beta South
BillShrink is a free, personalized savings tool that helps you
save money on your everyday bills. We put the power in your
hands by presenting comprehensive, unbiased choices so
you can select options best for you.
The concept behind the company was born when co-founder Schwark and his wife tried to compare rates when changing their family cell phone plan. Overloaded with data on coverage, features and pricing, Schwark (who conveniently is a data analysis wizard) realized that this was a problem best solved by technology. Two years and many fancy algorithms later, BillShrink saves the average user $1500 and continually provides money-saving recommendations through timely email alerts to keep people saving even more.
Ask Jason: (06 min.)
- Lisa Kant
- How do you get good effective press around your launch, when you don’t have a PR firm or access to bloggers? Jason is not a fan of PR companies, to get press be amazing and be everywhere. Try engaging bloggers before you need the press, create a relationship by posting (in comments section) something insightful with a link to your company blog. The product is everything and creating real relationships, Peter is a big believer in Dale Carnegie and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Obsess about your market and whatever space you are in when you pitch them they are going to understand what you do. INSIGHTS FROM TYLER!!! – Shorter is better, when people reach out to bloggers they write something big and professional, he feels the shorter and more casual the better.
- Michael Rubin
- Called in on TWiST Episode #7 for advice about a slacker partner, after taking Jason’s advice things worked out in the end and equity of the project was readjusted.
Discussion: (30 min.)
- Peter came in as CEO, the idea was done before (Lower My Bills by Matt Coffin) Matt moves on, has success and invests in Billshrink.
- Billshrink analyzes cell phone, credit cards, and gas bills giving you a recommendation on what plan works best.
- T-Mobile is a big backer of Billshrink, they are focused on making customers first and want you to go to an independent site in order to prove their worth.
- Billshrink also looks at coverage maps when considering a recommendation.
- Raised 8 million in B-round
- About 10 years to become CEO.
- Jason feels you either need to make the product or sell the product to become CEO.
- The experience of startup to hyper growth to exit at Photobucket has proved invaluable.
- He focuses on culture as CEO.
- Netflix internal 128 page company culture document is amazing.
- Tyler feels the worst thing about working for Jason is he is always “on” and expects you to be “on”, relentless in business. Lon feels the worst part of working for Jason is that he is too passionate about the business and sometimes his decisions feel like snap decisions and the 90 degree turns in direction are hard to follow. Mark feels the worst things are his temper and the second keeping up with the 90 degree turns as much as possible. Jason feels the worst thing about working with him is he is unreasonable.
- Billshrink will move into more verticals, building brand and trust
The News: (1:13) with Lon Harris
- Twitter down for most the day, Georgian attacks the reason – not a big deal, Twitter is working on scaling issues and things will improve.
- Digg, testing Digg ads, users vote on ads the more people like the ads the cheaper it is for sponsors – Jason loves the idea, Advertisers will create better ads.
- Listia like Craigslist but you get virtual currency for free stuff
- Microsoft held contest for Bing jingle – Is Microsoft trying to do bad marketing, INSIGHTS FROM TYLER!!! Very low budget and trying to be not what they are, trying to brand it around a scrappy company.
- Rackspace still doing well, not unexpected
- Urban Spoon taking on Opentable – probably not a good idea, if I am close why use it.
- Thank you for the plug.
Dead Pool: (1:30)
- Bix
- American Idol online, was a good idea, probably no passionate founder
Notable Quotes:
- (13 min.) Jason, PR people are friction and what you want to do is develop a direct relationship with the CEO and the journalist blogger.
- (41 min.) Peter, I find that build a great product that has its own virality but if you leverage really big partners and other people where it is a win win situation right typically where you provide something they provide something typically they are bigger and have more users we went from zero users to 60 million users in 2 years.
- (49 min) Jason, Leaderships and the best leaders, realize they are flawed.
- (1:56) Lon, I’m giving you gold here
Homework: (1:35)
- Robert Johnson, How the Mighty Fall, What did you learn from the book? The prideful sense that we deserve success, success is because you earn it not because we have the smartest guy running the show. You must remain hungry and disciplined.
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