I was in Baltimore last week presenting at the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA) 2007 Capital Connection Conference.  I was there to introduce my company SMBLive to the local business community and to socialize with prospective capital partners to dramatically accelerate our growth.  It was an interesting and successful exercise overall.  Definitely, lots of smart people.  Not surprisingly most of the presenting companies were promoting technology products and services targeting the enterprise IT and Government IT markets.  Only a handful of companies were offering products designed for the small business market.

Why is that?  Why do most technology companies (big or small) continue to ignore the mass market for SMB solutions?  The reason, of course, is scale.  The market is not only massive -- but it is massively fragmented.  Depending on your definition, the target is approximately 15 million businesses in North America and the UK alone.

Marketing guru Seth Godin gave a fascinating talk on Wednesday during lunch.  He suggested that in general people tend to target niches in the long tail of humanity mainly because people are trained to be average and therefore are afraid to target a truly huge opportunity in the head of the curve.  This made me feel pretty good because we’re definitely targeting the fortune 15 million.  Therefore, we must be really brave (or really stupid)?  But we’re definitely not thinking small.

Instead, we’re laser focused on building SMB software solutions for purposes of targeting the massive opportunity at the head of the demand curve.  To achieve massive scale we’re building our software upon (and attaching it to) a pervasive platform element which is ubiquitous within the SMB market.  I am talking about broadband connectivity.

The ubiquitous presence of broadband is why SMBLive is partnering closely with global Telecom carriers to distribute software services to SMBs.  The telcos have the existing billing relationship.  They have truly powerful and trusted brands.  And lastly, their legacy businesses (voice and data) are under tremendous pressure -- which means they are highly motivated to partner with innovative companies such as ours.

Time will tell if our distribution model will work to massive scale?  The early results are indeed encouraging.  But one things is for sure.  We’re betting with the telcos for SMB market access – because we’re fundamentally thinking BIG!!!