See What’s Out There

Some final thoughts from my trip to the Convio Summit this week:

1. Some commentators misread notwithstanding, the Convio Open initiative is significant, and the Facebook application builder, while not nearly perfect or complete, represents a great short-cut to building a custom application for Facebook for most Convio customers. Having content go directly from your CMS to your Facebook application pages makes having a Facebook app much more manageable to most and keeps the interactions with Facebook users within your primary CRM tool.

2. I am not sure going public will be a good thing for Convio. On the plus side, raising $80+ million can go a long way toward building out a more robust product, buying competitors, beefing up marketing, etc. On the downside, there will be new pressures for short-term performance that might not always be in the customers’ best interest.

3. The founder of GetActive, the software company that merged with Convio earlier this year, is leaving. Sheeraz Haji became the President of Convio when the merger was announced, but at the summit in Austin, through a video message, Sheeraz said he was leaving. (He just had a kid, so he couldn’t make the trip.) My guess, the whole merger was a way for Sheeraz to exit and find the liquidity in an IPO they could never have achieved alone. Lets hope Sheeraz decides to do something innovative in the nonprofit space. And lets hope that enough of the great spirit of GetActive survives in Convio.

4. I have heard that many GetActive customers have received a lot of hand-holding and positive experience with the whole migration issue to the Convio platform. What I heard at the summit was that this is not the universal experience. To have a successful IPO, Convio must be successful in the migration of GetActive customers. If enough of them bolt, the public market will have issues with this offering.

5. Convio is growing annually at more than 50%. Given how small they are relative to Blackbaud (which has over $200 million in annual revenue and a billion dollar market cap), it’s not enough for them to be a successful public company. I don’t see how Convio can get enough top-line revenue with their existing product in their existing market, without taking every Kintera customer — and that’s not going to happen. Threats are everywhere — for example… Salesforce + third-party applications being one, and an increasingly robust Drupal + CiviCRM being another, plus all kinds of low-end players. So, expect to see Convio adding some new products or reaching out to some new markets to get the growth they will need.

6. Quentin Tarantino is the man. He came into the Tex Mex place I was in on Wednesday night in Austin. (Guero’s Taco Bar, for you Austin people.)

7. The team at Care2 are great. I enjoy hanging out with them. While lots of people run in lots of Web 2.0 directions, the folks at Care2 are focused on giving nonprofits clear ROI for their fundraising and advocacy dollar. If you are a progressive organization, an environmental organization, an animal organization or a medical organization, you should talk to the folks at Care2 and see how they can help you grow your list.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under nptech, convio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.