28th
September 2008
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We were fresh from the party from the night before. (We pointed out that if you added up the accumulated wealth of the people in the room, you’d probably be able to run a small country!). We received some great advice during our mentor sessions from the day before and this continued during the evening.
Day 2 of Seedcamp was Product Day; A day that was all about advice on how to turn your idea into a marketable product and how to get customers. We started with a panel of great people who are well qualified; Each had a hand in producing awesome products with millions of users. Team members from Skype, Last.fm and many more. Here are so of the gems I managed to record:
- Get involved with your users and get then involved early on.
- Check out Silverback for usability.
- Data and metrics – The usability data can only tells you about people who have worked out how to use your product and not the people who haven’t.
- Never try to optimise for one metric.
- Talking to your users. The most valuable thing is when customers use the wrong words. That’s where your product is miscommunicating its use.
- Have customer services early on. API is just a technical nicety.
- Keep testing – Don’t move away from the core (curtsy of Skype).
- Don’t waste money, but don’t get too proud of being frugal (curtsy of FotoLog).
- Steer a course – Don’t let other latest internet trends sideswip you (curtsy of Last.fm).
- Make it easy to give money back &;
- Think about the pain points in your product. You usually on have one moment to upgrade (curtsy of Ryan Carson).
A reoccurring theme that was branded about all through Seedcamp was to keep focused. The first time someone mentioned this was on Day 2. In relation to the product, mentors stressed that you should stay focused on the behavior that you trying achieve and stick to making sure your app achieves this in the best possible way.
The one diamond that I remember was when the Matthew Ogle from Last.fm said “Remember Function must comes before Form!” A subject that I wrote about here: Lex Parsimoniae
Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com fame and Martin Varsavsky talked about the broken market and shared their experiences. Looking back at the Twitters about this ‘Fireside Chat’ (a panel but with less people! Ha!) the most interesting post was that it was mentioned “It is very unusual to be a truly successful entrepreneur and own more that 30% of your business”.
We then headed down for lunch we jumped straight into the next panel. Which was about PR, Marketing and Product. We had some superstars on. All of which were connected to the best of the best. Google. Facebook. MySpace. Lastminute.com. Basically, all big boys! (well, nearly… no Microsoft!). They talked about bring customers to your product and how to market. Google’s Chrome comic book was brought up quite often (thinking about this now, it really did seem like a big PR stunt! But hey! It worked!). Jamie from MySpace commented that “marketing and product are no longer separate and that you can’t convince your users that your product is better than it acutally is“. Also Donna made sense when she said “If you’re an online, go with online media advertising. You’re one click away from your customers” (thanks to Dave McClure for the reminder on that one!)
After the panel, we headed for some more mentoring (The mentoring sessions are seriously intense by the way! Be warned!).
The team decided to skip the Zemanta Wine Tasting party because we wanted to get a head start on the presentation for Thursday. It was going to be a late night either way!
27th
September 2008
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Out of the frying pan and into the fire on Day 1! The official first day of Seedcamp. We get in early to mentally prepare for our presentation. All the teams accumulate into the lecture theater eagerly awaiting their pitching section. With 170 people in the room, we were all getting a bit twitchy!
Thankfully, Jakub from Adtaily stepped up to preform his pitch before us. His 5 minute presentation seemed to fly by! Our section quickly came about so we jumped on stage and went for it. We used the multi person pitching technique to introduce ourselves and get the point across that we can all speak in public. All in all, the presentation went really well (better than our Interview Pitch (you’ll have to ask us in person as words can’t explain THAT day!). We timed the Introduction Pitch well and we received some great feedback in terms of presentation skills and our demo. Thankfully we could sit back and enjoy the rest of the presentations.
Most teams gave great presentations. The Entrip presentation was highly entertaining; both funny and informative. TripWolf was also cool (but already launched). Both products in the travel environment which a crowded space.
Before we came to Seedcamp, I spotted Soup.io as the great platform for Scrap Book Blogging. It was the first one to make me say “I’d use that!”.
Ubervu and UNIKI were as equally impressive and Toska was quite good for its design and functionality. Mobclix, the platform for advertising analytics also caught our eye.
The presentations went well and everyone was relieved that they were over. t was a good exercise to get our final pitch on Thursday.
Day 1 was Founders Day at Seedcamp. This is were the real learning began. The first board that we had was with Danny Rimer of Index Ventures (hotly tipped as the Best VC in Europe at that moment) moderating the panel. On the panel we had Founder legends such as Michael Birch (formerly Bebo) and Martin Stiskel (Last.fm) giving great advice. The panel went on for an hour and so much great advice (too much to record in one post!). The best golden pieces on knowledge I picked out were:
- There is a luxury of being small company. The pressure of being VC funded can slow things down and quality could be reduced.
- Getting Venture capital is a privilege. But in the end the Venture Capital Wins.
We saw some great founders of large (and successful) companies. It was interesting to see the difference in personalities and business ethos between some of the panelists.
The video found here can you you an excellent insight in to Day 1
26th
September 2008
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BaseKit is proud to announce that we have been picked as one of the final 7 teams to receive investment from the guys at Seedcamp. The journey at Seedcamp week 2008 was a seriously intense one. Talking, Listening and evaluating our position and product on all sorts of levels. We’ve rubbed shoulders (and sometimes knocked heads) with the best in the industry and received some awesome advice.
For anyone that is considering Seedcamp in the future, then apply! The experience and knowledge you will get being surrounded by such inspirational people will help you develop your product / idea exponentially.
We have accumulated our experience from the week and go into day-by-day detail. Nothing will compare to actually being at Seedcamp, but we hope this will give you an insight into our experience and what can be gained by being part of this fantastic event. Enjoy!
Day O – Introductions
We arrived in London on the Sunday and booked straight into The Generator – our abode of the next week (by the way, if you’re visiting the UCL Campus in Russell Square, we recommend this is a good place to stay). After the initial settling in, we headed down to UCL for Day 0 and introductions at Seedcamp. On the way down, we bumped into Luke from ThoughtTrail (Great guy! Looking forward to seeing his idea blossom) and made our way into the lecture theater on the 1st Floor for Day 0 briefing.
We meet the Seedcamp Team; Reshma, Michael and Alidair, who went through the schedule for the week ahead and presented us with our mentors (we had some great mentors!).
Part of the introduction to the Seedcamp week was each team had to give a 5 minute presentation about their product. So Lizzie Blake of Essential Basics went through with some presentation skills and tips.
She talked about killing nerves by remembering that we know our businesses inside out. If anyone can talk about our cool product, it’s us! It probably didn’t help though that she added that people make a decision if they like you or not within the first minute (just so happens to be the time that you’re the most nervous as well! No pressure then!).
Lizzie went on to talk about what investors want to know when you are presenting / pitching your idea. These points are:
- What the problem you’re trying to solve?
- What is the solution?
- What is the market size?
- Who are your competitors?
- Why are you different?
- Who is in the management team? – Be specific about the skills each member has and why they are valuable.
- How much do you want to raise? – Maybe not so important for Seedcamp Week but definitely for later ventures into the VC and Angel world.
- What the Business Model is?
Other points that were discussed were remember the story / make a flight plan and rehearse all the time! That way you can’t go wrong. Also, rehearse in front of other people, not just the bathroom mirror.
The best part of Lizzie’s presentation was her E.M.O.T.I.O.N.S game. This is an exercise to help your story telling technique. You choose an emotion for each of the letters in E.M.O.T.I.O.N.S and work your way through each whilst telling a story. For example, the group choose, Excitement, Melancholy, Orgasmic (yes, we actually had to tell part of the story orgasmically!) then worked our way through a story touching on each emotion. Thomas from Yoose jumped up on stage and gave his version of meeting a girl at a house party which provided much entertainment!
Great session!
We rounded up and worked out the order of the presentations for Monday morning. We were second up. Thankfully, we’d done some preparation for Introduction Presentations and were raring to get up on stage.
We spent the next 2 hours practicing in the lecture theater (Do this! It helped us relinquish nerves and mentally plan our movements). Pretty surprised that no one else was around doing the same thing.
Day 0 was long with the traveling and presentation practice, so we caught an early night (okay! It was around Midnight! But it was early for us) to prepare for the week ahead.
All images from Flickr
10th
September 2008
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Team BaseKit have been picked by the Seedcamp to be part of the 20 (okay… 23) Start-ups to attend their program between 15th – 19th September 2008. We will be heading down for formal introductions on Sunday afternoon where we will also meet one of last years winners, Zemanta. We are pleased that Seedcamp recognizes the potential in BaseKit and we are fully intending to soak up the experience and advice from the many industries top mentors and investors. Here is the full list of start-ups that are going to the Seedcamp week.
We will be reporting from Seedcamp to share some of the advice that is offered. Stay tuned as we hope to introduce you to BaseKit in greater detail and keep you updated on our progress.
