Articles Entrepreneur Interviews Colly Myers - AQA 63336
Colly Myers - AQA 63336 |
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His was the generation that got into its stride as computers were becoming embedded in everyone’s lives. Myers became a managing director of Psion before taking the role as head of Symbian, which was set up in the late 1990s to develop a standard operating system for mobile phones. It was conceived when Psion persuaded Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola to put up around $50m each in exchange for equity. Myers left Symbian in 2002 and says: “Being CEO of a joint venture was a tough job because you have to have everyone hating you. That is wearing. By 2002 I had had enough. I had achieved my goals.” So he left, took six months off and trained hard for the London Marathon, which he completed in an impressive time – less than 4 hours.After searching around for a new business idea, Myers hit on AQA 63336, a text service that delivers answers to any question for 98p. The initial concept was simple: customers text their question and it is answered by a human, rather than a machine. “It was a terrific opportunity to enter a growing market,” he says. “Even if you are a small success in a big market that is good.” Myers, together with Bill Batchelor and Paul Cockerton, researched the market. “We looked at the net and what the successes were,” says Myers. “You want an area with a lot of success and all to play for. That was search.” At the time there was no dominant player - AltaVista, Google, Excite and Ask Jeeves were all jostling for position. “It was clear consolidation was coming,” explains Myers. AQA 63336 does not rely on search engines to answer questions – rather it is educated people, who have endless reference books, as well as phone numbers to institutions that might be able to help, and search engines are a back up. It is an important distinguishing characteristic. “To be effective you have to enchant the customers,” explains Myers. “It became obvious we should use people to answer the questions. We go straight to the source – not Google, it adds to the wow factor.” With the help of some carefully placed press articles and advertising, as well as word of mouth, AQA grew steadily from zero questions to 600 a day, peaking at 4000 a day after a newspaper article. “We always planned to grow slowly,” says Myers.
“We get four marriage proposals a day,” says Myers. “Talking to us is a good way of getting through angst.” Once the network operators, the government, and the researchers have been paid there is a thin margin to be made by AQA. The recession inevitably put AQA back but Myers says the customer base is stable and there is everything to play for in terms of capturing the lucrative market of 18-30 year olds. In April AQA launched a commercial SMS text based micro-blogging service, AQA2U, similar to Twitter, in which AQA and third parties can set up their own publishing topics, and send text updates to subscribers via AQA, receiving a share of the text message charge to subscribers. Myers calls it a ‘terrific opportunity’ to answer those questions people are passionate about. Myers has always been motivated by computers, and more specifically by operating systems. Before Psion he was a mainframe programmer and always wanted to see a mainframe-class operating system on a handheld, which led to the creation of Symbian. But his big break came when David Potter, his half-brother, recruited him to export Sinclair Spectrums and Acorn Atoms to South Africa. He moved to the UK as Psion’s technical director and began developing software titles, developing many himself. The market was moving and customer needs were changing. So Psion reinvented itself when it became clear that people wanted data with them wherever they were. “It was a fashionable company – things go in fashions,” says Potter. “It is very clear that you have your moment in the sun and then move on. Fashion will desert you.” It is a sentiment he clearly applies to all his business ventures. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
  
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Colly Myers considers himself to have been born lucky. The Zimbabwe-born technology entrepreneur shares a birth year – 1954 – with Microsoft’s Bill Gates. “There is a lot of being in the right place at the right time and then taking advantage of that,” he says. “Entrepreneurs born in 1954 became a big deal in the computer industry.”
There are now 1000 researchers who answer questions round the clock – with peak times of 9-11pm. They get more than 90 per cent of questions right; some are repeat questions, others are more specialist, and many are from people who face real issues they don’t know how to handle. Questions are as diverse as ‘when am I going to get married?’ and ‘what are the winning lottery numbers today?', to ‘who should get the next round in?’.