Ryan MacMillan

On Tuesday night Iain and I went along to catch Clem Chambers, CEO of ADVFN plc, “Europe’s leading private investor website” speak at the Mandrake Club, a monthly group that gets together at the Adam Street club.

Chambers has a long history in the dot com world and was covering the stock market for Wired during the “correction” of 2002 as well as starting and running his own dot com and games buisnesses. Clem’s talk at the Mandrake Club was a quick guide to the things that matter to dot coms using his current business ADVFN as the case study. ADVFN has over 700,000 registered users who generate more than 38 million page impressions a month. The site is the number one UK stocks and shares website and winner of several awards, including the Investors Chronicle ‘Best Investment Website’ Award in 2003, 2004 and 2005. So he knows more than just a little of what he speaks;

Clem’s Things That Matter (Caveat; I was taking pretty rough notes on my phone so I have paraphrased slightly);

1. Care about your customers. Even the most difficult ones. In fact, care about them the most. The best customer is the one you hate because he puts you under the most pressure. By pleasing him you are certain to be taking care of everyone else. So don’t bitch and moan about the tough customers - just look after them. Clem’s advice was that if this is too annoying you’re probably in the wrong business and someone who loves taking care of these pains in the arse will happily do so instead of you.
2. Don’t hire programmers who play World of Wacraft. Because they will always be exhausted from being up all night playing WoW. Do hire programmers with bolts through their noses and peirecings that can only be detected by x-ray. Because they are the ones whose lives are their work. Clem did point out that an advantage of having WoW playing staff is that if the system goes down at 3AM its easy to get a hold of them - they’re already up. Playing WoW.
3. The CEO needs to be User Number One. The person in charge has to passionately care about what is happening on the site; speed, accurracy, depth and quality all need to be matters of visceral importance to the CEO. Clem gave an example from his own experience of making second by second buy / sell decisions on a German stock based on information from his own site. Which he discovered was being posted 20 minutes after the fact. He’d assumed it was being supplied in real time. Having soiled his shorts and narrowly missed losing them, the servcie was soon updated so that the data was available in real time.
4. You need to be able to raise cash. Online you’re only as good as the last thing you served. The ability to take an idea, explain it to investors and get hem to hand over money is vital to the growth of an online business. Clem’s view was that this is a particularly neat trick ot pull off in the UK where this kind of capital is hard to find and British entrepenuers are under served. As evidence he pointed to the significant lack of pure play dot com business currently flourishing in the UK.
5. Think globally. The UK market is not even slightly enough, Europe won’t cut it - you need to be able to do it globally. And this loops back to the last point; investors need to be able to see the global potential to back a dot com becauser they aren’t going to believe that a UK business can beat a US one. Clem’s closing illustration of this point was that ADVFN actually gets more traffic than Cramer’s The Street, a much hyped New York based tipster site. But ask anyone which one they think is the larger, The Street is always going to be favored due to an assumption that a US site is just naturally going to be bigger than a UK based one.