Although Vizify wouldn’t be paid
for its work, the offer was still
enticing. After all, the project
would give Vizify a stamp of
approval from the Internet giant
and the chance to be seen by 140
million Twitter users—who could
become new Vizify users.
But it was also a big risk. Vizify
had no paying customers and was
surviving on what was left from the
$1.4 million from investors, who
had been promised that Vizify
would hit key milestones in the
coming months. The company was
set to build a series of add-ons
and upgrades that would let users
share even more biographical
content. The goal was to boost
activity among users to the point
at which they would be willing to
pay for the service. Partnering
with Twitter would put those projects on the back burner.
A deal would mean building
software for Twitter and spending
upward of $30,000 on servers and
extra freelancers to help prepare
Vizify’s website for what could be
an onslaught of traffic—perhaps
10 times its biggest volume yet.
And the work would have to be
done fast, in just seven weeks.
Further, if Vizify’s website
crashed, it would hurt the company’s reputation and turn off would-be users. At that point, Silverstein
would have only enough cash to
survive another five or six months
and would be in a difficult position
to get more money from investors.
THE DECISION
Silverstein had even more misgiv-
ings after learning that Twitter’s
2011 year-end campaign produced
meager traffic—a little more than
1,400 tweets in total. Twitter prom-
ised it would put more firepower
behind its PR efforts in 2012, but
there was no guarantee. “We had
no way of knowing,” says Silver-
stein. “We fretted that we could
possibly be relegated to a tiny text
link on the bottom of the website.”
For four days, Silverstein
engaged in heated and emotional
debates with his partners and
investors over which way to go.
more-conservative investors
argued that the company was too
young and not ready. They thought
Silverstein should stay the course
and deliver key objectives by sum-
mertime. “I learned from past
investments and start-ups that
going from zero to 100 could be
a disastrous opening night,” says
Jordan Weisman, one of the com-
pany’s investors.
Other investors argued this
deal could offer credibility in the
marketplace and lead to more
partnerships or even buyout offers
from big tech companies. “It’s like
getting knighted,” says Jonathan
Sposato, Vizify’s lead investor. “It’s
a major brand saying, ‘We trust
these guys.’”
“It was a bet-the-company
decision,” says Silverstein. “We
said, ‘If this doesn’t work, we are
pretty hosed.’ ”
MAT T TURCK MANAGING DIRECTOR AT FIRS TMARK CAPITAL Be willing to walk away In general, I’d strongly recommend against betting the company on a single partnership opportunity. Relationships with large companies can often leave a start-up vulnerable to just about anything: your champion leaving the company, the boss not liking
your product, or budgets and priorities changing.
Working with a big, prestigious brand will often
appear as a make-or-break opportunity, but
sometimes it takes real courage to walk away.
THE AFTERMATH
Two weeks before the December
12 launch, Vizify’s website failed
a stress test that simulated 100
sign-ups per minute. The company
expected it would need to hold up
to at least five times that volume.
To get the site up to speed, Vizify’s
employees worked virtually around
the clock. many of them wound up
sick. “I remember not sleeping for
60 hours at one point,” says Silver-
stein. “It was a brutal time for us.”
It is still hard to say if the part-
nership was worthwhile. Vizify’s
participation in the campaign got
just a few mentions in the press,
and only about 10 percent of the
roughly one million visitors from
Twitter became active Vizify users.
Still, the boost was enough to
double Vizify’s user numbers to
200,000, and by early February,
Vizify had signed partnerships with
two other large tech companies.
(Silverstein couldn’t reveal which
companies because of a nondis-
closure agreement.)
“There’s always the weight of,
‘Have I made the right decision or
not?’” says Silverstein. “We are still
a start-up that is fighting for its life
and its legitimacy, so we have a lot
of work to do.”
JADE VAN DOREN CEO OF TECHFORWARD Stand up for your team As a founder, the most valuable thing you have is the time of your team, and so the hardest decisions come when there would clearly be a benefit to a partnership, but it would also take
the core team away from building key features
of the product. That said, I think Vizify’s CEO
made the right call, because it didn’t require
too much unique customization and allowed
them to showcase their core value proposition.
