BT Tradespace
A while back, one of British Telecom’s U.S.-based operatives met with me to talk about some of their initiatives regarding hosted applications for small/medium businesses. Yesterday he invited us to list Approver.com on their called BT Tradespace. This is a business directory site, similar to loads of others out there, with a few interesting exceptions: they provide the notion of businesses recommending or "friending" other businesses (similar to the idea that my pals at Merchant Circle are working on). They are also throwing in lots of publishing features like photo and video uploads, blogging, and so forth.
More importantly for us, the Tradespace site doesn’t relegate Internet businesses to some ghetto off to the side — on the site, online businesses are first-class citizens, listed right alongside brick-and-mortar businesses.
This is key because we’re cutting way back on our product evangelism to Silicon Valley-based technology businesses. It isn’t that we don’t love you crazy kids, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our sweet spot is small and medium businesses like PR firms, law firms and other professional services teams that are underserved by information technology. So instead of doing more pointless bake-off demos in front of yawning Silicon Valley audiences, we’re working on figuring out new ways to reach out to more traditional businesses that might not be located in Northern California and that are more likely to use the system regularly (and eventually convert into paying customers). Getting access to English-speaking users who do not happen to be located in the U.S. is icing on the cake.
Late last night I had an email conversation with a very nice woman in Manchester who runs a business furniture store there, lists her business on Tradespace, and signed up for Approver less than a day after our profile went live there. This is exactly the kind of customer we need to see more of.
Tradespace is a terrific idea. It needs some polish, but I hope it catches on.
