Financial Model Needs Work

I got some very blunt feedback from a business coach yesterday. He liked my executive summary, said it was well-written, but he thought my growth curve and expenses were unrealistic.

I've been having a hard time making the right assumptions about the business. The number of technical heads, the length of time to produce a widget, the number of business heads for marketing and sales, the number of widgets sold per month, the number of alliances/partners, etc...

This was my first attempt at financial projections and I was trying to fit the business into the hockey-stick curve. Wrong idea. So my next go around in the coming days will be purely bottom-up with less focus on achieving the 10x return on investment after 5 years. We'll see what happens.

-john

Recap of Presentation

Yesterday's 7 Minute Pitch at ASU went well. I'm going to stop short of saying it was excellent, but it was good enough for us to get some hard-nosed questions and feedback. This was a dry-run to make sure that our value proposition and business model can be effectively expressed.

Of all the comments and questions we received, the following sums it up quite well. Paul Rasjski, former VP of marketing at BAAN (which was sold in 2000 to Invensys for $700M), said we piqued his interest and left him with questions as to how we do it, but he also offered a strategic issue that we need to address and that is of IP, and how we may or may not infringe upon a main competitors patent.

Other questions:
- how do you intend to spend the funding upon receiving it?
- what is our value proposition for the alliance partners?

The rest of the comments feedback were about the presentation itself:
- no need to emphasize the demographic and statistics that we stressed as the "problem statement"
- cadence and tone were good, pace as well
- the product feature comparison chart was well received b/c it compared how our offering is different from the main competitors
- introduction needs to be worked to tell a story

There is still work to be done to get the pitch right. I could tell in certain portions of the presentation that the audience was less interested than others... We've got until Nov 5th to refine the message -- that's the full-up presentation in front of a panel, including an angel investor.

-john

Milestone Event

So much has happened lately, it's hard to keep up with the writing.

One: The biggest thing that has happened to us recently is the validation of a test/demonstration. I know, I've kept mum about the idea for awhile, and I will still remain so, but the validation came about 10 days after the test was done, so it was unexpected and awesome at the same time.

Two: We've finished our application to YC's winter funding round and it is submitted. Now we wait for word on whether we get to continue our journey in Boston/San Fran or we just do it here in Phoenix. We'll see which dance we get invited to.