Application Deadlines

Okay, for those of you interested in going beyond brain-storming, here
is the first line-in-the-sand -- a deadline to meet for getting
funding!

What I'm going to do is to keep an ongoing list of conferences for
funding opportunities in the investment community. It is likely that
these events will be all over the country, so we'll have to decide how
we target them.

In addition to the list of conferences and dates, I'm going to specify
which idea to be pitched at that conference. Initially the idea will
just be the "idea of the month", but as we get to know the investors,
locations, etc... we'll have a better idea for where the investment
dollars are going in that city and we will target the opportunity
better.

2007 Aug 7
- Application deadline for http://www.InvestSouthwest.org, located in
Scottsdale, AZ; event is Dec 12-13, 2007.
- Conference with Angels and VCs

2007 Oct 11
- App deadline for http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html, located in
Cambridge, MA; event is Nov 3-4, 2007
- Investors that provide seed money for startups; seed money is the
earliest stage of funding

More to come...

John

Cape Cod for Vacation

I'll be in Cape Code for the week at a place called Bourne. Yeah, kinda coincidental that the new movie is coming out soon. I don't know if I'll have access to the email/web while living in a 100+ year old farm house. I'll try to find time to work on Bison.

-john

TechCrunch 20

I thought I'd take a moment to introduce a topic to discuss money, how
to get it, where to get, what to do with it, etc...

To kick things off, check out the list of VCs and Corporations
attending the first TechCrunch financing event -- this is an
impressive list. http://techcrunch20.com/look-whos-coming/

Well, maybe we'll attend next year as presenters.

-john

Bison: Patent and Security

Alright guys, I talked with a couple of you last night to understand
whether you're keeping up with my writings -- thankfully you have
been, really.

Three focuses this morning for me were:
1) finish Bison Slides explaining how a user would use Bison.
2) investigate patent possibilities for ILP, yeah I'm serious
3) security thoughts

---Bison Slides---
Diagrams take forever to put together, so the slides I worked on this
morning are high-level views that do not show how Amy would add
contacts and do relationship tagging, and then tag/mark-up her
writings with the tags. I may just want to draw it out again on my
whiteboard and take a photo of it for uploading.

What I did upload is a consumer's viewpoint on Email and Blogging and
how Bison ILP provides a simpler solution to redundant writing/
managing of communications. Please take a look and provide feedback on the content; the graphics and text were quickly thrown together this morning. The filename is Bison v1a.ppt.

---Investigate Patenting---
I didn't get around to it because time flies when you're thinking
about stuff. As a reminder, I believe that this sort of information
level security/sharing/protection has yet to be seen. Let's think
about how security is done currently...

---Security Thoughts---
@Operating system level
Solaris and does file level sharing. Does a user/group have permission to Read, Write, Execute. Windows does pretty much the same. The container is the file, and permissions on set on the file, there is no seperating of the CONTENT of the file into seperate views or levels of permissions.

@Application layer
Hmm, I'm not a software engineer, so I'm going to have to investigate this some more, perhaps you can chime in??

@Presentation layer
Permissions are established about whether a user can view/interact
with a portlet (the application). Once again permissions deals with
whether the portlet can be accessed, there doesn't seem to be any
logic regarding the content of the portlet. I'm really stretching
here.

Anyway, I'll have to research security at these different layers, but
once again, if you have experience/knowledge on it, please share your thoughts.

-john

Bison: Prelim Slides

Alright, my focus this morning was to do diagram a scenario of how a
user would make use of ILP. I did the diagram on my whiteboard and it has taken too long to put into PowerPoint, so here is the gist of it.

Amy is a Bison user.
She adds people to her contact list.
At the same time, she assigns her own tags to these people: friend,
family, band, etc...
She writes a blog entry and before she publishes she marks-up the
sentences with the tags from her list of people/relationship tags.
She publishes the blog entry and the people, according to their tags,
get to read her separate stories.

Here is an first run at a Bison powerpoint slide:

Bison believes that
- There is a story behind every event in our lives.
- Each story has lots of details and nuances

Bison wants you to share your story, but control your message, because
- Not everyone should know the details
- Bison allows individuals (organizations)

Bison: Publish your public parts, not your private parts.

okay, more tomorrow.
-john

Bison: Prelim SWOT Threats

My objective this morning is to get through the Threat (T) portion of a SWOT for Bison.

SWOT refresher
In the not-so-near future, I need to do a SWOT analysis on Bison. As a reminder, the reason that this NoMoreSnow Ventures group will be doing SWOT analysis is to decide whether a venture is compelling enough to start a business. In case you need a refresher on SWOTs, here are two links I'll be using this morning:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis
- http://www.bplans.com/dp/article.cfm/148

Core Reminder:
As usual, we need to remind ourselves, what are Bison's offerings:
Communication and Networking. Please read the previous posting for the details of these objectives.

Communication Objectives
1. Be an Open Network, allowing information out and in
2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP)
3. Allow Anonymous Communications

Social Networking Objectives
1. Allow Relationship Tagging
2. Provide Visual Relationship Network (VRN)

What are external threats that Bison will face upon launching? I'm
just going to list external factors that may influence the success of a Bison launch. These are not in any particular order and I'm going to
throw everything into this list, including the kitchen sink. Later, when the SWOT is performed, I'll pair the list down to the major issues.

Threats:
- competitors begin offering ILP-type services for email, blogging,
forums, calendars, webpages, etc... Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Google
Groups, and Blogger to name a few.
- People's attitudes about security and privacy change, such that
these topics are no longer important
- People are satisfied with using their current tools (email,
calendars, blogs, etc...) and don't see the compelling need to switch.
- Social networks are "old news" and people no longer care about
networking because they've done it so much lately.
- Advertisers no longer see the value of paying social networking
sites.
- Technology is not yet mature for us to implement ILP or VRN.
- No more angel or VC money available. It is possible that VCs have spent all the money they wanted to spend this year. Timing of when we launch may be bad in that the amount of VC money that has already been invested this year have almost reached $1B.
- Others???

This type of objective look at our offerings compared with what we
think are Threats makes me consider that Bison does not want to
"pigeon-hole" itself into being called a "social network".

I'll have to revisit this later, off to work now.

-john

Bison: v2

Alright Guys,

There's been a lot of thinking done this past week about what are
Bisons' core offerings and resulting from this is a more focused list
of consumer features. Yes, we may have all of the default features
that other social networks have, but the following list will set Bison
apart from the rest.

Mission
Bison is a next generation social networking site with a mission to
improve how people communicate with their personal networks(s).

Communication Objectives
1. Open Network
Be an open network that freely allows registered users(members) to
communicate with people outside of Bison. This includes, but is not
limited to
- blogs on Bison being read by non-members
- email is just considered email, there will not be a members-only,
internal email system.

2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP) {copyright}
Information-Level Permissions are member-defined allowing for finer grain control over how much information is exposed and to whom. Whether it is their personal profile, blog postings, emails, visual network of contacts, anything that they write or expose can have information-level permissions. This is beyond just taking file and folder permissions at the operating system layer and moving it into the application layer. Bison may be the first to define a ILP model.

For example, a Bison member will be able to do the following:
- create a blog posting about a recent date
- publish the blog posting with the following relationship tags
'public', 'friends', 'guys' (more on relationship tags later)
- here is an example using html-style tags to explain to whom the
content is exposed

2007 July 22

Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

Alright, in case you had a hard time reading the example, here is what each level of permissions will be allowed to read.

@ Public-level (includes outside Bison and members who are not part of that user's defined relationship tags)
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Friend-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Guys-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

3. Anonymous Communications
Though members can already set ILP, Bison allows a member to be as anonymous as they would like on the network. This means that a
person's name, address, or other identifying information can be
completely hidden from relationships tagged, for example, 'public' and 'friends', whereas the 'guys' are able to see the person's real name and other private information. Though this may be just an extension of information-level permissions, it is important to point it out because Bison takes privacy seriously.

Social Network Objectives
1. Relationship Tagging
Bison allows for members to define their relationship to a person in
their own personal network. So it is possible to label your brother
with the following tags, 'family', 'high school football team', 'guys', 'single' I think this type of tagging, though may complicate the ILP model, may provide members with a powerful search and relationship mapping possibilities.

2. Visual Relationship Network
In coordination with the relationship tagging feature, Bison provides
members with a visual relationship network(VRN) which displays
graphically how people in your network are related to you. It will
show degrees of separation because you will be able to see the number of "nodes" that lead out from you. In addition, it will represent in a graphical way the type of relationship tag that you have with that person. On top of that, as you move to the second-degree of seperation, you will see both your relationship tags and that of your first degree contact.

Here is an example about you, your brother, and his girlfriend.

You----------------1st Degree ---------- 2nd Degree
You --------------- Brother -------------- Girlfriend
Your tags--------- family, guys --------- girls, taken, church
Brothers tags:
family ------------- Brother -------------- girlfriend, hot

Anyway, it all depends on how your brother set his ILP for the tags...
as to whether or not you can see his tags, but the idea for this VRN
feature is to allow a member to learn so much more about another
member based on the tags and network of people. As we browse through our friend's network, we learn more about them through the information exposed in their friend's profiles, tags, VRN, etc...

Dating?
How does dating fit into all of this? Regardless of the purpose for a
communication, whether for business contact reasons, or keeping up with friends, or to meet a potential date, Bison allows people to
communicate as they see fit. We will implement browsing and searching of members. Not sure if we will take the time initially to have relationship matching.

Well, that's all I can think of now, I've been up since 5am and now
its time for me to get ready for work. I'll try to post some powerpoint slides to better explain these features. Please comment on them if you have the time. Thanks.

-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis: Engage.com, part 2

I signed up to their free service, free for 6 months while they are in beta mode, to see what the customer experiences. My first impression is the site has potential, in that it has the "match-making" idea, but it doesn't fully meet all of the things I have been envisioning for Bison.

1) Quality of people - it let me sign up as a single dude with no kids -- that's too easy for anyone to sign up and scam people. In addition they did not ask for a mailing address or telephone number, which makes me want to believe that it is way too easy to just sign up.

2) Weak Social Network implementation - the "network" is a list of people you want to track... these people are just profiles and the options for communicating with you network are the same as if you were trying to talk to a prospect; this is okay, but it is kinda hokey. It feels to me like a MySpace "add me as a friend" option where the list grows and grows. For Bison, I am envisioning a robust social network where the user can define the strength of the relationship/friendship, perhaps tag the relationship as: work, football buddy, church friend, etc... Then on top of this, the users are able to see how people are connected, not just the flat list of "friends". I'm thinking of a node with radiating lines out to other nodes, which in turn continue to have radiating lines. The network really grows. In addition, with the tagging of the type of relationship, this allows for a user to quickly see a prospects "social network", the activities and interests they have, the type of people they know, etc...

3) Communication mechanisms are basic - they only allow "anonymous emails" to be sent. Bison will include anonymous emails, anonymous text messaging, anonymous voice mail, and anonymous video. Users on he receiving end of these communications can choose to accept these forms of communication and are able to block certain users from reaching them.

4) No mechanism to make the suitor different from others - There is no way to be creative in the way they communicate with a prospect. Emails and that is it. It's a sad implementation. Bison will allow users to send creative gifts such as flowers, cards, photos, etc... I can send flowers to a prospect's work address, without me knowing her address. It's too easy to implement, perhaps they will do that
later...

Overall, I think Engage's intent is a good one, in that they try to get our friends to work with us in finding a mate, but the implementation is outdated already. I think they could have emphasized the personal network more, because if people don't use it, this site is just like any other dating site -- a bunch of photos. I've looked at a lot profiles and almost all of them had empty networks.

A quick search for all the women in the US between ages 18 and 99 gave me 51 pages of 10 photos each = 510 total women in the US. Hmmm, not very impressive numbers, but I don't know when they launched.

Long story short, Bison is still very different.

-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis: Engage.com

Engage.com may be the closest thing to Bison, yet. How?

"Engage, for example, allows members to bring friends and family with them online, all of whom can prowl the profiles, checking people out and matching them up. Members can also rate the politeness of their dates, as well as the accuracy of the profiles. This is the new"community" approach to online matching — a naturalistic, social corrective for the deception that plagues cyberspace," a quote from "The Truth about Dating Online" of the journal Scientific American Mind (you can read the entire study, which I did, found in our google group's files section.

I just checked out their site and not only do they have friends help
friends find love, but they even have a service called "matchmaker",
where anyone can try their hand at matching people up.

Here is what they have to say about themselves...

Unique Engage.com features include:
* Play Matchmaker™ - Singles can ask friends to introduce them to other singles, while anyone (single or married) can become a matchmaker and help set up singles they know.

* Cast Your Vote™ - Better than unproven, scientific personality-testing methods, singles can garner the collective intelligence of the Engage community to meet matches the community “senses” would be right for them.

* Living Profiles™ - Much more than the typical dating profile offering only self-disclosed information, Living Profiles™ present singles in a rich, community-determined social context, helping bustthe bogus barrier plaguing other sites.

· References - Read what friends and family have to say about a member.

· Member Reputation - Feedback regarding the member’s interactions with others in the community—including responsiveness, truthfulness and politeness—speaks to a member’s character.

· Tags – Singles (and their friends) use descriptive tags to help connect them with other Engage members who share similar interests.

· Advice - Decide if a member is insightful by reading the dating advice she or he has provided to others, or give the member advice yourself.

· People I’m Helping Introduce – See (or contact) other singles a member is helping.

· My Community of Matchmakers - Contact matchmakers who are helping a member to find out more about the member, or ask for an introduction.

· Matchmaker Rating – View the number of introductions a member has made for others and feedback regarding the quality of those introductions.

Sounds like a good competitor to emulate and exceed.

-john

Bison: Some Questions to Answer

One of my main todo items is to seek legal counsel on the legality of receiving transcripts; I’ll try to get answer by the end of the week. In the meantime, here is how I will address it.

Consumer needs and privacy issues

I don’t think it will be a problem, but it will raise a lot of eyebrows. My defense will be the fact that almost all employers
require that we send to them official transcripts from all of the schools we’ve attended. These documents help the employer to verify that what we said to them and what we wrote to them on our resumes is true. The other times when transcripts are so important are for enrollment into graduate school; these programs require that applicants are degreed from undergraduate programs. Bison hopes to maintain this high standard as well for the benefit of the Bison community. The people you will meet on our network are a “verified” a bit before they can participate fully.

Addressing revenue opportunities

From a money generating standpoint, the fact that people definitely have college degrees and at what level of degree or the type of field they studied would help Bison to provide targeted advertising. We will have criteria to use such as: average income per level of degree, average income based on type of degree, and other education related statistics to go along with all of the other demographic info we will collect.

Good point about the education level of users at competing dating sites. We will have to dig for this stuff, hopefully one of the competitors will be publicly traded and this info may be in their SEC filings. This type of information is critical for “selling” the idea if we need investment dollars.

Keep the feedback coming!
-john

Bison: Competitor Analysis, PlentyOfFish.com

The intent of this thread is for us to analyze what makes this free online dating service so successful. My definition of successful in this case is this: earn a $800K+ check from advertising using Google’s Adsense. See the following blog entry from the founder, complete with a photo. In case you are motivated by money, I believe that was only two months of Adsense usage too.

There is some truth behind the money this guy is making. The following Wall Street Journal article says that that Google confirmed that he did get this check. He runs a very simple site, really basic, no
bells and whistles, and according to this WSJ article, the secret to his success is making online dating free. Remember the site, HotOrNot.com? They’re following his lead and have turned their site free.

In addition, here is an interview with the founder. One of the best pieces of info from him is how he “stayed under the radar” — by blocking certain sites from keeping track of his daily traffic, which
meant his business could grow without anyone noticing. Read the interview and you’ll see which services he blocked from his site. That’s just a robots.txt entry, right? I think we can do a lot better and still offer it for free.

-john

Bison: Market Research

I found a ton of consumer reviews about these dating services! The following site has some pretty long and insightful thoughts about the major dating services, the nice thing is these are recent reviews too.
http://www.edatereview.com/101category.aspx

-john

Bison: Gripes with Online Dating Svcs

From reading the reviews, I have come up with a few major issues gripes that people have voiced about these online services. I will list these issues and then offer the Bison solution for them. Please comment on the issues and solutions!

1. The quality of people on the service is poor.
Bison will require that a member of the dating portion of the site, must have a college degree. To validate this, we will require that a college transcript be sent from the university to our address. There may be certain universities with whom we have agreements and those universities will work electronically with Bison to expedite the account approval process. Yes, this is a hard sell, but college graduates are used to sending transcripts to jobs, graduate programs, etc… Besides, if the service is free, this is a small fee to pay. The upside is we are sure of a demographic that is educated, which is great for advertising.

2. Other match-making sites promise matches.
Bison doesn’t promise matches. Bison allows your network of friends/family to help you find the right match. It is the social network doing what it typically does in the real world — find matches for you and others, all on-the-fly.

3. People are fed up with subscription fees and poor results.
When people pay, they expect a level of service, and for a match-making service that equates to dates and connections in the real world. With that said, we can see all of the flames that people have left for these competitors sites. I think we should still be free and focus on marketing to an educated group of members. Less expectations with a free service, if it happens to be good, it gets lots of publicity via word of mouth.

4. Guys say that a lot of the girls on these other sites are fake.
They were saying that these girls were asking them to send money… with our college transcript requirement, we weed out people who create many fake accounts and fake their gender, perhaps to trick guys into sending money. We can really clean up the act, maybe not entirely, but we make it harder for people to deceive.

-john

Bison: General Thoughts

Here is some feedback that I got from my sister-in-law, who is a current eHarmony user:

- eHarmony is complicated and has received complaints about this.
- she doesn’t like the fact that social network/credibility idea, she wants her privacy…
- she doesn’t want to be rated/reviewed…
- she said, if anything, just make it simple to have matches done for you, most sites don’t match people like eHarmony does.

To me, that’s just a little code to figure out compatibility, so it shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

In addition, how do we prevent ppl from forming fake networks with the intent to harm/steal/take advantage of the nice ppl?

-john

Bison: What is it?

We had an impromptu meeting tonight to discuss what Bison is all about. I’m not going to take much time to do some marketing speak about Bison. The following is a recap of the major points (subject to change as we understand the trade space):

1. Bison is a match-making service based on user ratings, for lack of a better term. Bison answers some important questions. What is the person really like? What is the fabric of their being?

2. Bison is a REAL network of friends and family. The answers to the questions from #1 present themselves as each person’s network of friends/family contribute to the information/background that supports the individual. It may include people with whom they have just shared a day — a post-date review. The network provides the credibility for the person. Think eBay user/seller rating system put into the context of a Human Quotient. The idea behind Bison is based on a traditional, old world match-making foundation — people who know you can speak volumes of you.

3. Bison is self-regulating.

4. Bison is free for consumers.

5. Bison generates revenue based on local advertising from businesses that serve as dating activities, locales, events, etc… Restaurants, Balloon rides, Concerts, etc… will be served as recommendations for activities, with perks for consumers if they make use of the business offerings; perhaps a discount or credit mechanism.

6. Bison serves the working professional… this is very unclear.

That’s it for now.

-john

Angus: SWOT

Here is the SWOT analysis that I did for our Angus idea. I won’t go into the details of the idea in this posting, since we’ve hashed that out in our yahoo group page already. Yes we have both a yahoo and google groups page; we like the google one better and transferred most of our info over to there.

Based on this SWOT, we canned this idea because there was not a compelling upside compared with the hurdles.

SWOT: Angus

Angus is a software venture with a vision on how to influence online consumer purchase decisions at the online point of sale. The venture is currently assessing which products will have the most impact on a mature market.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Business Model	Business Model Products
Opportunities	Threats
Products Increase Market Share	Mature Market Competition

Strengths

Business Model

Angus works on a business model which unites consumers with the information they need to make a purchase decision at the online point of sale. This business model overcomes the inadequacies that consumers are presented when visiting online retailers and auctions – lack of supporting product information, limited perspectives, and product excitement. This business model saves the shopper time by not having to search the Internet for product reviews, consumer perspectives, and marketing buzz, ultimately this means the shopper does not leave and will spend more time at the online point of sale. Not only will this model help online retailers and auctions sell new and current year items, it will also help influence the purchase of end-of-life and used items because the information doesn’t age and will continue to influence the shopper to make the purchase. The simplicity of this model will allow Angus to remain focused on influencing the shopper.

Weaknesses

Business Model

This business model is not unique, as it is already in use by many competitors in the online retail space. The competition is currently providing information to the shopper by means of consumer and expert reviews.

Products

Angus product offerings are not unique, they are as follows:

• Consumer review
  • Angus would need to catch up with all competitors
• Expert review
  • Angus would need to catch up with all competitors
• Video review – n/a
• Commercials videos – n/a

Opportunities

Products

Angus product offerings may be unique in the following ways:

• Consumer review
  • Angus intends to provided filterable reviews.
• Expert review
  • Angus is proposing to sign up a large list of 3^rd party, expert, reviews and will allow the retailer to select which from the list to be displayed, perhaps based on the demographic of the shopper at that time.
• Video review
  • Angus is proposing to allow all consumer reviews to be in any video format and source (web-cam, cell phone)
• Commercials videos
  • Angus is proposing to sign up a large list of manufacturers and to provide their television commercials at the point of sale.

Increase Market Share

As broadband acceptance in the consumer market continues to rise, this will allow companies to offer richer content, including video. Angus’ video reviews and commercial videos will be able to leverage the greater bandwidth.

Threats

Mature Market

There may not be many opportunities for Angus to capture the business of retailers that are household names because these retailers already offer shoppers additional information at the point of sale. The most commonly used mechanisms listed in descending prevalence, based on an eye-ball survey:

1. consumer review
2. consumer review w/reviewer history
3. consumer review w/user history plus expert review
4. consumer review w/user history, expert review, and 3^rd party video

Competition

There are many different types of competitors that serve this online retail market. The following types pose a threat:

1. in-house solutions
2. specialized software companies, like a Bazaar Voice
3. open-source solutions
4. social shopping networks, PriceGrabber.com, Epinions.com

Angus: SCORE mtg

Meeting 2
So I spent late Thursday night planning for my meeting with SCORE. I trimmed the presentation slides (attached) and practiced working the new message. You'll notice in the slides the Angus name was removed and replaced with my old company's name, Netaloft; my in-laws only had jokes for the "Angus" name, despite it being a codename.

My meeting with Paul Gasser was valuable, but different from the meeting with the in-laws. The in-laws helped with refining the message and doing the sales pitch. Whereas Paul gave more specific working advice regarding marketing strategy and how to cost the marketing plan and insights on how to lower investor risk; when I scheduled the meeting I asked specifically for help with marketing strategy and planning. Here are the major points coming out of this meeting.

1) Consider ways to lower investor risk. He mentioned, "jumping in with both feet" to show how serious you are with doing this business. The investors don't want to see you working for another company while running your own. Show that you already have customer feedback regarding your product or services. If a big-box company like BestBuy says that using your services will help them increase their sales by 10% and that they would likely use it, this will lower investor risk.

2) Actually work on the marketing plan because it is an action plan. You should be able to take it and start marketing. This being said, he helped narrow our customer market. Keeping in mind our limited resources, $, and people, we have to target very specific, niche customers. He discussed segmenting the market and picking an industry. Then figure out the pricepoint of the products which might have video commercials already produced, this pricepoint will allow us to know which customers can afford the service. Other topics where targeting strategies for individual decision makers within an organization, joining trade associations.

3) Think about a phased approach to getting capital. Phase 1 proof of concept sounds good, but it doesn't lower risk enough. He recommended actually having a PRODUCT, not just a service or module. Phase 1 will be better if we actually had a product completed and ready for the next round of investing. This leads to point 4...

4) Maybe customers want to host their own videos? We should not assume that our solution is the best one, that being we host the videos as part of our service and our software module residing on the online retailer's page will be all that the retailer wants.

In addition, Paul was not wowed, he only said "interesting". And he did mention in a gentle way that VCs are looking for more than just a business plan in which to invest, he recommended thinking about angel investments up to $1M. In addition, he liked the idea of setting deadlines, so the line in the sand is still Aug. 7th to submit for InvestSouthwest.

My own thoughts now include:
- reconsider who the primary customer really is, perhaps the manufacturer is the key, and the retailers are second.
- think about a different solution that will allow us to sell software or licenses, sell more!
- write a marketing plan, which fits into the business plan
- consider how we can start doing customer surveys
- schedule another SCORE meeting for Friday
- keep writing a business plan and make and executive summary from it; Paul appeared to have been expecting one...

That's all from me, we need to meet to finalize the picture, otherwise we won't meet the Aug 7th deadline. DE, are you getting back in the morning Sunday or evening? RG, do you have any time too? Thanks guys.

-john

Angus: Practice Pitch

Now that I've had a night to sleep/rest on the results of two meetings, I can now brief you on what was learned.

Meeting 1 was Thursday night and this was with my in-laws and their close friend from high school. I spent the night at their house in Central Phoenix, so my morning drive to Meeting 2 would be effortless.

Here are some major points :
1) Tell a story and move away from the data flow and concept diagrams. I did my business pitch to them and they were lost, and they started to argue between themselves about what my product/message really was. The problem they told me was when I diagramed the supply chain, they didn't see how that fit into the business; this being said one of the in-laws does supply chain mgmt for Intel. Finally, their friend started to give me sales advice; he having done sales in the magazine publishing business. The result was the following 30-second pitch,

- 59% of online shoppers with the intent to buy, do not make the purchase.
- We have a solution that will close the deal.
- We're offering a module and process that will allow manufacturers to control the message, maintain their brand, and bring excitement to the point of sale to infuence an impulse buy.

In addition, they said that I was giving too much information that just clouds the picture, like, "John, you already sold the product, but then you keep going and give more and more info that isn't needed, unless requested."

2) Deemphasize, but not throw-out, the user generated video reviews. The reason is this feature/option is a business opportunity in itself and it presents a complex picture to the simplifed sales pitch.

Well, there is a lot of rework to be done prior to the meeting tomorrow morning.

-john