At the age of 20, Rob Stokes was sitting in his room at university, thinking of how he was going make pocket money. Then it came to him—why not follow in Mark Shuttleworth’s footsteps and start a business? Thirteen years later that company, called Quirk, has a $10 million turnover and an unusual name.
“I was literally lying on the couch, thinking I need to start a business… I looked over at my cat and her name was Quirk and I thought ‘That’s an unusual word, it’s short and I’ll probably get the domain name’ and off I went. So Quirk is actually named after my cat. I’d like to have something more fancy to tell you but that’s the reality,” says Stokes.
Stokes is an easy going roller. His backpack contains nectarines, apples and pumpkin seeds along with documents and magazines. He says it has nothing to do with being a health enthusiast; he just likes to eat on-the-go. A decade ago, when Quirk was still in its infancy, Stokes was so broke that all he had to eat were carrots.
“I once had nothing but carrots for two weeks, true story. I actually went yellow around my mouth, and I’m already orange so it was really weird… But hell if you’ve got no money, what choice do you have?”
For the first five to six years, he was so broke his parents paid his rent. The fact that his friends were earning fat salaries in the corporate world frustrated Stokes, at times, but his entrepreneurial spirit kept Quirk alive. He was inspired by a lecture given by South African entrepreneur and millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who was also the country’s first space tourist.
“…I didn’t get to meet him but he was massively inspiring… And I remember watching that lecture and I thought, ‘I can do that. I can be that guy’. I’m definitely not as smart as him, I definitely know that, but I’m entrepreneurial.
“I’d [also] been reading about a guy called Michael Dell, from Dell Computers. He started in his dorm room, he cut the door in half so he could sell computers over the counter, and I just thought, ‘That’s an awesome story’. So I was kind of inspired by those guys,” says Stokes.
Stokes is described as inspiring by one of South Africa’s respected journalists and ICT commentators, Arthur Goldstuck.
“Initially [Quirk] struck me as just another SEO, then I saw the book he wrote and realised he’d become one of the thought leaders in the online marketing environment and not just an SEO,” says Goldstuck.
The term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process that companies, such as Quirk, use to get a company’s name read more often by those searching on search engines such as Google and YouTube. The aim is to increase a website’s popularity by gaining more hits.
Quirk has branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and employs 200 but in the early days things were different.
“I remember the first client who came to our offices; he was just blown away because it was the filthiest office in the world. Our ‘boardroom’ was about five chairs, none of which were the same, around a beer crate, with a tray on it… I think he appreciated that we were doing our best, so he gave us a piece of business…”
“There are many times when, if we hadn’t landed a piece of business within a week or two, we would have gone bankrupt,” says Stokes.
Stokes is also the chairman of the Silicon Cape Initiative, a private sector community movement founded by two South African hi-tech entrepreneurs, Vinny Lingham and Justin Stanford. The initiative wants a community of entrepreneurs, the best tech talent and foreign investment.
The Western Cape Province has produced some of the country’s brightest tech entrepreneurs including Stokes; Lingham—who lives in Silicon Valley in California; Herman Heunis—founder of MXit and Ludwick Marishane, who was recently named one of the 12 brightest young minds in the world in 2011, by Google.
Stokes thinks that more could be done.
“My biggest frustrations at Silicon Cape is actually how few university students start businesses… it creates an opportunity cost to become an entrepreneur because a [graduate] leaves UCT and suddenly Old Mutual pay him R40,000 ($5,000) a month. So now becoming an entrepreneur is not only about risking what you have, it’s about risking what you could have.”
It irritates Stokes that the tech business is not yielding more. An unreliable internet connection and bureaucracy are just a couple of problems that Stokes sees in the way.
“Internet connectivity [is a] huge issue. I mean, business would be much bigger and more successful now, on a global level, if there was better internet. So the more customers there are online, the more [our] kind of marketing is going to be of value.”
As for bureaucracy, when he registered his business in South Africa he filled his form out with a blue pen. The form stated black pen only, so what would’ve have taken him three months, took six.
“When I first registered the Quirk cc, it took me six months. When I first registered the limited company in London it took me 24 hours… Is it worth holding back a small business for three months because they used the wrong color of pen?”
What is his tip for upcoming tech entrepreneurs?
“Hitting the road and selling the stuff, that the best thing you can do when you’re young. Don’t wait.”
The thirty three-year-old’s next dream is not to be a space astronaut; in the next ten years he wants to open a cricket academy in the Transkei in the Eastern Cape.
“I want to be remembered for my cricket school, it’s going to be the greatest cricket school in the world”.
It seems like a quirky plan

Name The Business After Your Cat And Paws For Success

In an increasingly on-demand world, how do you get people to tune in and stay tuned? Take a cue from Ian Sander and Kim Moses. Six years ago the husband-and-wife duo produced a television show called Ghost Whisperer, about a 25-year-old girl (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) who can talk to ghosts. CBS picked it up and scheduled it to run on Fridays at 8 p.m., a ratings dead zone. Survival meant generating some serious buzz—and not waiting for the network’s help.
The pair organized a conference where paranormal-fanatic bloggers could meet the stars of the show before it aired. They also created a crystal ball game for ghost-fan forums online. Expenses ran short of $100,000, cheap by TV standards. Result: Ghost Whisperer averaged 10 million viewers during its first season—the highest-rated Friday night show that year. Over the next few years (it ran for five) Sander and Moses made a Web series from a ghost’s point of view, called The Other Side. When Comic-Con, a film and TV convention, came around they produced a Ghost Whisperer graphic novel. In some cases sponsors like General Motors covered most of the costs.
Sander and Moses got so good at building buzz they decided to make a business out of it. Today the couple runs two outfits headquartered in the old Animation Building on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif.: Sander Moses, their production arm, and Slam, a marketing agency that helps TV and movie producers use the Web to snare viewers. According to SNL Kagan, a media research firm, even if a show makes it through its first season, it has only a 30% chance of being renewed the next year. “We have to create an interactive playground,” says Moses, 50.
Sander, 56, and Moses started flirting with online marketing in 1996 while working on the show Profiler. Their lead character, FBI agent Samantha Waters, was tracking down a serial killer who called himself “Jack of All Trades.” One episode took place in Jack’s lair, where the killer typed on his computer. The camera peeked over his shoulder to reveal the URL he was looking at—JackOTrades.com. Viewers who went to that website could chat with the creep and tour his loft. The site was such a hit that NBC executives, worried about the message they were sending, asked to have it taken down.
These days Sander and Moses never make a show without a marketing plan. Last year they pitched a reality show, Psychic in Suburbia (about psychic Maureen Hancock and her family), to the Style Network. The attack included a mobile application that allows users to shake their phones like a magic eight ball and get Hancock’s answer to any question. The show premiered as a onehour documentary in July; Style will decide whether to pick it up as a series in October.
In another project, meant to highlight the show Ugly Betty as it went into syndication earlier this year, Slam created an app that lets viewers “Be Bettyer” by decorating a photo of themselves with Betty traits like thick eyebrows and braces. For Regis and Kelly they created an app allowing fans to run a virtual race in high heels, winning coupons along the way.
“We love what they’re doing,” says Eric Berger, head of Sony Pictures’ Crackle, which hired the couple to create a Web series called Monster Heist, about monsters planning to steal jewels. “They think about the 360-degree experience.”
<div id="attachment_65" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-65" class="wp-image-65 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_021-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Husban and wife Ian Sander and Kim Moses</div>

Tag: Marketing

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Name The Business After Your Cat And Paws For Success

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