This is what I’m aiming to avoid Unsurprisingly, the reason I’ve been rejigging my pitch deck of late is that this evening (17th January 2012) sees my first business presentation for a fair few months. It’ll be at the 3Cs community, by all accounts a nicely eclectic London-based group of entrepreneurs, techies and investors – it [...]
Next week will see my first proper Nanodome pitch following a fair old period developing stuff, so I’ve spent a bit of time this week revising my pitch deck, and even had a chance to run it past KRTI’s Bob Lindsey (who often attends 3Cs meetings) over coffee at the Surbiton Brasserie (very good hot chocolate [...]
Journalists & editors love centenaries and plausible-sounding round number anniversaries: it’s an easy way of making press out of something that happened ages ago, and with the logistical advantage of being a date in the (near-ish) future you can prepare for in advance. And so it goes with blog posts: only there, the longstanding tradition is to celebrate the [...]
Here’s a little story that hasn’t yet been told, hope you find it interesting! * * * * * * * * Though I wrote my first computer game waaay back in 1981, by 1999-2000 I’d grown disenchanted with the near-abusively one-sided way things worked in the industry. Given that one major games publisher tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to sue [...]
I’m disappointed to have missed out this time round, of course: but a Tech City grant was always going to be a bit of a long shot for a Surbiton-based non-social-media startup. Some of the TSB’s anonymous judges clearly liked my whole “Soft Factory” pitch: but given that the point of the competition was to fund loss-making collaborative Tech City projects [...]
When pitching to potential investors, conventional wisdom says that you should focus on clearly describing the company, the market, and the proposal’s financials while doing your best to come across as the personable, brilliant, credible marketing-and-technical-genius you are (because otherwise you probably would never have got to make the pitch), and all preferably without having to use a distractingly fancy presentation backdrop as a [...]
It’s been a strange few days here at the hub of Nanodome’s Evil Empire (I wanted to call it the “NanoPlex”, but our lawyers advised that another evil empire had got that basic meme pretty much locked down already, so best leave it alone). Firstly, out of a clear blue external sky came (mostly by coincidence) [...]
OK, let’s imagine you just happen to bump into someone on the street you know slightly, and they ask the drainingly obvious question: how’s your startup going? What should you say? Just as with newlyweds being asked how’s married life?, there’s a huge temptation to stay bang on script by giving a TechCrunch-style answer, with every notable [...]
I thought, given the bold implicit claim on this blog’s mast-head, I ought to at least mention in passing how far towards its mythical future $1bn valuation Nanodome has progressed over the last few months. The honest (i.e. startup theatre-free) answer is: it’s hard to tell – as always, there’s good news and bad news… [...]
When a startup hits a market brick wall and has enough cash and investor confidence to change direction radically, it’s a Mike Maples (high level) ‘pivot’. Essentially: a market-driven strategic shift. When a startup uses early customer feedback to drive its next product/service iteration, it’s an Eric Ries (low level) ‘pivot’. Essentially: a test-customer-driven tactical [...]
