BaseKit

We were invited down by the guys at Swede, a top brand and marketing strategy agency, to thrash out some ideas about BaseKit and see what help they could provide us. Slap bang in the center of London, we arrived at the offices at 8.30 in the morning at the SEP offices and greeted with a warm cup of tea and awesome mentors!

We did this awesome road mapping exercise which helped up to get all our ideas out our heads and on the table (literally!) Check out the Swede website for their take on the exercise.

Awesome guys who helped us really define BaseKit.

As part of the FOWA experience, we were asked by Ryan Carson to join a discussion panel organized by Adobe to talk about the future of web apps and how Adobe Air fits in to the current market. We rocked up early to ExCel in East London and after walking into the wrong room, straight into the middle of a Carsonifed Workshop (the arrangements definitely said Room 7!!!), we eventually found our place.

The room was lightly flickered with industry illuminates that have gathered to chat. Simon Willison from Django, Stefan Magdalinski from Moo and the (brilliant!) Francisco of 280 Slides / ObjectiveJ fame. We talked about the internet and its current state. We explored browser technology and looked deeply at what role the desktop plays in the current industry and what role it will play in the future. We also looked at the mobile web and how things how mobile technology will progress internet platform technologies forward.

We also looked how the guys Howard Baines created Alert Thingy. They used Air to develop their app and disclosed how it stands up as a development environment and what advantages / disadvantages it gave them. Really interestingly, a lot of the discussion was geared towards the Installation Process of Air and the pitfalls it runs into.

Other Air Demos were also shown. The one that sparked everyones imagination was the The Sun’s Desktop Keeley.

Some really interesting quotes that I picked up were:

“I’m more towards View Source rather than Open Source”

“There’s a view that info that we have on the desktop is more important than on the net”

Future developments of BaseKit may well include desktop resources. How far we take that we don’t know yet. But it was an enlighting chat anyway.

Thanks for Adobe and Ryan Carson for inviting us down.

Our final day. We’ve soaked a lot of the advice we’ve received and accumulated it all in to our final presentation. We worked through the night to perfect our pitch whilst resurrecting our original demo that we brought to the Seedcamp 10 minute interview.

Knowing from experience, we needed to show our product and produce that wow factor so that the investors would remember us. Our demo was building the Seedcamp website in BaseKit and within 3 minutes. The idea was to show a relevant use case to spark the imagination of the audience and prove that BaseKit has the capabilities to be used a professional website creation tool.

The content of the presentation was the trickiest though. We didn’t want to repeat the pitch we showed at the start of the week but we found it hard to create relevant, but different content. So we decided that we would keep the demo down to 2 minutes and then talk about our Seedcamp experience; what we have learned and what people have said about our product. On reflection, it was important that we discussed our Seedcamp journey as it showed that we are flexible enough to listen to advice. It also kept the audience engaged as it was an journey that we traveled together.

We were second to last and as always, things were running behind time but our time to pitch came around quickly! It was Simon and Richard Best that pitched the product, whilst I made sure the slides and demo ran smoothly (A lesson hard learned! Ask us about our Seedcamp Interview Demo!). We then all equally took an share at answering the questions. Thankfully, everything went exactly as expected!

The main lessons we learned in terms of our pitch:

• Show the demo! Thinking back, all the winners had demos. So a demo is a must!
• Get into the demo as soon as possible; People want to see it!
• If you have a technical product, don’t be over technical. The technical content in our first presentation was pretty in-depth. We changed this in our final presentation, we talked on a higher level rather talking about widgets, events, methods, binding etc. The last thing you want to do is confuse your audience.
• A common misconception is that you believe that you should have all the answers. Wrong! There are some things that you will never know until you launch the product / service. What you do need to know is the questions that need to be answered and a plan on how you are going about finding the answers.
• Investors want to hear about your ideas on making money, so tell them!
• Practice and have a backup plan for when things go wrong (they will – so expect it!).
• Have no more than 2 people present. Ideally you want one person, but we used two. Simon for the technical side of the presentation and Richard for the rest. If one person can do both, then just use one. Using more than two people is distracting and dilutes the message.

So we finally got to the end of Seedcamp Week! Exhausted, we made our way down to the TechCrunch Party for a well deserved drink. Phew! What a week! But worth every strand of effort.

For us Day 3 was a distracted one. We had received advice from many great people, all of which had their own idea on what we should do with BaseKit and where we should take it. Distribution models, monetization, target markets, etc. With a head full of noise, we had to refine our preposition for the final pitch.

Officially, we had some great info on Day 3 and it was one that I was personally looking forward to. It was split into two topics. Scalability (with an undertone of Technical Preparation!) and comments on / from Investors.

The first panel was litter with technical calibre in the form of Simon Willison (of Django fame) and Matt Biddulph (from Dopplr). There was a stream of awesome information that flowed from these guys. Obviously veterans in the tech world, they also had first hand experience of successful internet business. Mainly, the advice was on the scalability of applications, applications that could help you monitor infrastructure status and preempt potential service pitfalls. All great stuff!

After more mentoring, the next panel was solely given by Dave McClure (a ’salty sea dog’ who has lots of fingers in lots of pies). We, at Team BaseKit have to say, we love this guy! Funny, charismatic and knows his stuff too! Dave talk was focusing on metrics and pushed the fact that only statistics and measurements is the ONLY way of telling what your users are doing. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is conversion! The man tells it best so check it out! Also, check out his slides.

More mentoring sessions then we move swiftly moved on to the second half of the day. Investors! The session was insightful on the VC and Angel world. What really resonated was the fact that they all have different ethos and strategies on how they make their investment decisions. There was talk about the market, strategies on getting investment and discuss about how that how investment is not all about the money; you need to work with people that you can get along with and have common goals.

That was it. We had gained as much knowledge and advice as we could physically and mentally take in 3 Days. Only one thing mattered from this point on; getting our message across as to why BaseKit is a serious business to invest in. We entrenched ourselves in to sort out the presentation and demo… all this whilst fighting excitement and exhaustion.