Lukewarm Response to Presentation

Well, I don't know what happened but the lack of response in the areas which I thought would receive attention is a concern to me. I gave a 7 minute presentation of the business plan with financials and the panelists did not seem very interested in the opportunity.

I could understand if the market growth potential to be a concern, but there were zero questions about the business model. This annoyed me because I spent the most time on the financials and justifying costs and market growth and making what I felt were realistic growth projections.

Did I do such a good job at explaining how we'll be generating revenue that questions didn't need to be asked? Were the revenue models understood when I introduced them? What about how I intended to spend the funding for the seed round? The only question that touched on financials dealt with how my financial projections would be impacted if the initial market focus was made more narrow.

I did receive a question about barriers to entry and how I intended to keep this going. My honest answer was there was zero barrier to entry and I was depending on being first to market.

The other two questions were on the selection of the company name. Two of the panelist thought that the name would a) segregate half of the population because they wouldn't understand it, and b) branding of such a name would be costly because of the consumer would have to be educated.

So what did I learn from this presentation? I learned that as a team, we didn't prepare enough for the presentation. I don't think we understood our audience well enought to anticipate where they'd focus their attention. We didn't practice questions and answers. We didn't do ourselves justice.

Also, I don't think I have the stage presence to connect with the audience. Sure I can do presentations, but I can't sell the message effectively -- perhaps the 7 minute limit is harsh, but a good salesman could have done it in 30 seconds.

No rest for the weary, we're pushing forward,

-john

The 3rd Amigo

Good news, we've added a third person to our team of founders. I've been so busy working on the presentation for next week's pitch that I wasn't even involved personally to recruit this candidate, but my partner did all of the schmoozing to great success.

Now, we've got two strong technical founders and then there's me :-) What I like most about this combination is the strong working history that this new candidate has had with my other founder. The two of them have worked together for about a decade now, and that includes, stints at two different companies too.

I'm looking forward to having all of us wear many different hats of the next year. The most important item on the agenda is next week's pitch at ASU.

-john

Recruiting Advisors

One of the many tasks on my ever growing list of things to do is to find candidates to be advisors for the company. What does this entail? Hehe, this is going to sound like a classifieds ad for date, but here goes.

I would like someone who is honest in their feedback and can take a minute or two to engage me on the ups and downs of doing this business. This person does not have to have business, technology, or entrepreneurial experiences, but should be able to think critically about the business model and other issues. Location doesn't matter, as cell phones and emails work enough, but I do like face to face interaction, so a Phoenix native would be a plus. Age? Well, age doesn't matter at all.

The ideal candidate will be a former consumer ecommerce entrepreneur. She will have had experience raising capital. Finding "A-list" executives. She would have experience dealing with board of directors and investors, the growing pains of growing from zero revenue to $10M, and she would have sold the company for a nice exit.

What can I give in return? My friendship and time, and lots of startup talks for now :-)

Man, that really did come across as a dating ad, haha, but thats the way it goes. Entrepreneurs are match-makers, too, you know?

I've started to keep a list of people and contacts that we know and how we could approach them. So far, the list is mostly family and friends, with a few acquaintances, should be interesting to see how this all works out.

-john

Google: 5th largest company by market cap

You gotta love what the Google brothers are doing in their labs. Techcrunch recently wrote about how the company passed the $700 per share mark on Halloween and has positioned themselves within site of four heavy-weights, Exxon-Mobile, GE, Microsoft, and AT&T.


Just imagine all the brand name companies that are in their rear-view mirror... Walmart and Citigroup, to name a couple.

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.