Jason Caplan put together a brief but effective list of your todo’s before you pitch to a VC. This is more a nuts-and-bolts collection you should follow that pertain to the mechanics of the pitch and includes:
Definitely a good read.
If you’re a geek, and you have a dream to start up a Startup, “How to Fund a Startup” is a must-read. Paul Graham gives an awesome, down-to-earth review of what it’s going to take including:
…and that’s “Word of Mouth”.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and this post from Brad Feld, “Are Customers Your Best Marketing?”, drove me to finally jot down some bullet points on how I feel about Word-of-Mouth marketing.
Here’s Kay’s law #21: “The amount of marketing dollars required to generate sales is inversely proportional to the product’s buzzability”.
Buzzability = ability to generate activity via word of mouth discussions.
Whenever I think about spending marketing dollars, I think about how much money Google spent to market their search engine: Zero.
I’ll bet you can remember exactly how you found out about Google and of course it was through a friend.
So what simple rules can we take away from the Google lesson that can help you figure out how to increase your product’s buzzability?
Leighton Chong once made a point that many new inventions are really superior, but they take too much effort on the part of the customer and so they fail. One of the biggest problems I had with one of my previous companies was that our product rocked but was difficult to explain, hence customer’s couldn’t explain it to their friends, and so we had a big challenge in getting the word out.
You want success? Make sure your product hits those three points and watch your word-of-mouth marketing take care of the rest.
First-time entrepreneurs are so enamored w/ the idea of getting outside investment that they overlook all the non-money issues that need to be considered to make the partnership a successful one.
Scott Maxwell wrote up a nice post here in “Choosing a VC- You need to squeeze the avocado!” that’s a good read, filled with common sense stuff that one typically forgets about in the rush to get a check.
(BTW, you might notice our designs are identical. I liked his page and found the designer that did it, then (legally) downloaded her “design theme” and installed it on my blog. Thanks Scott!)
During the heydays in Titan Key, we were getting quite a few calls from people that were “interested” in acquiring us. I even flew out to the West Coast once for a company that was pretty confident they would be buying us for $5M.
I wish I had Ed Sim’s post, “Beware of fishing expeditions” about some prudent, cautious things you should do if/when you get “the magic phone call”.
Here’s an article, “Who Owns XML?” talking about Scientigo, a company that has patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426), which it believes cover the “Namespace” features of XML.
Just about any significant usage of XML uses Namespaces. If this patent is “solid”, and of course that’s yet to be determined, it will be worth many, many millions.
Looks like they’re already in discussion…
According to Bryant, the company so far has held talks with more than 40 companies about its patent claims, including Microsoft and Oracle, and this week Bryant says he’s finalizing an agreement with an IP licensing firm.
and this is not the first time that patents on XML have been valued:
…South Carolina-based e-business software developer Commerce One auctioned off a collection of their own XML-related patents last December for $15.5 million…
I know that most programmers (who have never filed or received a patent) really hate patents, but those of us that have painstakenly went through the process of innovating and protecting our intellectual property understand the power of the patent system and really appreciate how it gives the little guy a chance to make it big.
In today’s world of giant tech companies and easily-duplicatable intellectual property, a patent is one of the most powerful ways to protect a truly great idea. I love ’em!