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