The Birth of a Start Up – Built In Chicago! (Part 10) - Break Throughs

by Jeff Weber
December 29, 2011

It has been a very busy time since my last entry. 

 

1. We decided on a law firm.

We chose Perkins Coie to do our incorporation and founder’s agreement.  They have a focus on start ups and have west coast roots.  They have helped us to create a legal path with investors in mind and have experience and relationships in the VC world.  Further they have a customer base that we may be able to be introduced to that could serve strategic partners or customers for our solution. 

 

2. We decided on a new logo.

Our company was founded by “piggy backing” off of our founders existing consulting company.  We somehow integrated a blend of logos and ended up with a confusing brand strategy – if you’d call it a strategy.  So it was immediately evident that we needed to solidify our brand, logo, tag lines and general use of branding images.  We used LogoDesignGuru to come up with a new logo.  I was very happy with the experience and results.  In five days we had over 100 design submissions and we will officially select our winner on Friday.  I think it’s pretty cool.

 

3. We completed our “pitch” deck

Wow, what a process!  This was probably two months or more in the making.  Initial iterations of the deck were drastically changed based on where we are at today.  Our business model and business concept has grown into sophistication and after seeing our latest screen designs I am really excited.  We’ve really come up with a great and timely solution that potentially disrupts an industry – or at least attacks it from a completely new angle.  We are able to say we are the only ones doing or providing certain aspects to solve some deep emerging problems in the employment vertical.  I will share more when it is appropriate to do so.  I do want to thank those at Mint.com and SCVNGR who shared some of their start up experience, which helped us formulate our solution.

 

The pitch deck is under 20 pages and has all of the major buckets investors should be looking for.  The challenge is in conveying the depth of our solution in the allotted time.  To do so, I need to practice, practice, practice the pitch.  Not fun – but very anxious to get out and do it.   We are ready to go full steam ahead as the market opportunity for our solution is now!

 

4. We determined the progression of our business model and revenue streams

So the pitch deck helps condense the business plan down to a very concise document.  Part of the challenge in the deck was explaining our business model and how we make money.  Since a big portion of our solution and secret sauce is dependent upon scaling users, some of our revenue streams will not activate until the user base grows to a certain level.  However, we have other revenue streams which we can go after immediately.  Therefore, our business model slide needed to show the various streams and when they would activate based on the launch, growth and maturity phase of our company.  I got it down finally.  A spreadsheet helps to run scenarios on projected revenue based on plugging in various selling prices and market acquisition percentages.  Don’t ever tell investors your numbers are conservative!  I will have to resist doing so myself.  We have some really big potential, simply by hitting a few lead customer targets.  Again, very exciting now that we have working models and plans that pull everything together.

 

5. We completed forecasts for sales and expenses and ideal amount to seek for funding

As I mentioned the sales forecast were completed once we identified our revenue streams and when they would activate.  I also spent some time figuring out what resources were needed to make this all happen.  That became our expense projections.  Now that I had the revenue and the expense side, I could start to ascertain what amount of funding we need.  This is tricky, as I am typically very conservative and would ask for as low amount of funds as possible.  However, we have a unique business start up.  I would say one of the few that has very large scalability and potential.  I’ve reviewed and advised dozens of entrepreneurs and I have seen all sorts of businesses in all sorts of industries.  Very few, had the high growth potential that investors struggle to discover.  I can tell you, we have it.   We have the social layer, the gamification layer (to direct behavior modification), training, unique process, mobility, large addressable market, API’s, community creation, CRM and more.  All addressing unique market opportunities being driven by legislation, extreme environmental ramifications and technology advancements.  A perfect storm.    All of this necessitates that we get in the market now!  To do so, we need funding.  Further, our solution is involved and some may say complicated.  We’re no iPad app – although that is on the roadmapJ  We’re solving a big problem in a big way and we want to be the global leaders.   So we are seeking $1.5mm in funding to make it happen.

 

6. We completed page designs for our v.2 of our site

I’ve put in the initial seed money to keep moving things forward; prior to $1.5mm we are seeking.   This will sustain our development and other plans for some time, but we really can’t explode.  We have two developers in India and we are seeking a US based user experience intern.  One of the co-founders and me (there are three of us) architected the v.2 design and we’ve passed it to the graphic designer.  The graphic designer will provide the screen designs and look and feel.  We’ve gotten some of those pages back and all will be done by the end of December.  Then the developer will rip into it.  It’s really cool to see what the pages look like and once again, it is exciting. 

 

So our solution has really come together over the past two weeks, but we still have a lot to do.  Starting next week we go out selling our training and enterprise edition to get some customer and revenue traction.  Further, we are working on two very strategic (big name) partnerships and hope to close those within a month.   Our goal is to secure funding by the end of February.

 

That’s all for now!

(As always, forgive typos, etc.  Just pounding out thoughts and moving on to the next to-do)

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