Here's an interesting post from Rick Segal. Even if you don't want VC money, it's an intruiging exercise to see how you look from that point of view. Let's see how gregcons does:
- Our website, www.gregcons.com. "Does the web site's home page tell you what the company does?" Yes: "We program in Visual Basic.NET, C#, Visual C++ (Managed and Classic,) Java, ASP, ASP.NET, XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, HTML, Javascript, Perl, and CGI. We mentor, provide architectural vision and inspiration, write, edit, train, develop courses, design web sites and act as general internet consultants. "
- Google "Gregory Consulting" and "gregcons". Our site, some sites of other Gregory Consultings in the world (note to self - if I want VC funding, create a sub with a weirdo name with extra vowels or not enough vowels), and some folks linking to blog postings of mine. Not a soul who's actually discussing us as a company. Fine by me but probably an issue if I wanted investors.
- Google "Kate Gregory" and "Brian Gregory". You can see who the public face of this company is - not one of the Brian hits is the right Brian, and all the Kate hits are me speaking, writing, and general experting. Interestingly Google (which I never use for my own searches but am using in the spirit of Rick's blog) doesn't find the "other" Kate Gregorys that Live tends to return. I'm not actually the only one on the planet.
- The mission statement. Um. Well, we have a tag line on the website "Leading your developers forward" so I'll give that a try. Interesting way to discover who is mirroring your old content chrome and all, but you don't learn much about us from it.
I think we pass the test of being discoverable on the internet, but it's clear people don't talk about us as a company much (they do talk about me from time to time). Fun exercise. Try it yourself!
Kate