BaseKit

BaseKit’s recent Seedcamp adventures have brought us to Silicon Valley through mid November. Finally recovered, we are happy to report that it was a rip roaring success!

Our first time in the Valley was always going to be a good experience but with all the events that Seedcamp had organized for us, it was the ultimate trip. Visiting Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo we were able to interact with the best of the best.

Our first trip was to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Submit where we hung out (or in other words, too tight to by a ticket!), speaking to advisers and mentors as they passed through. We met up with Ben Godfrey, a San Fran Veteran (well, he’s been there more times than we have) who showed us the sites. Great to get in the mix of it so quickly and experience the networking possibility of being at such an event and being in the Web Tech hub of the world.

Next was visiting Google at their HQ which is beyond belief! Free food and a great working environment. Great to see the more relaxed way of building a Super Business; Employ the best people and give them a inspiring place to work! Google took us through their current offerings; Android, OpenSocial and GWT. Even though it was great to hear about all these technologies, the most relevant chat was with a Lead Product Manager at Youtube. Google have an interesting feedback loop; they release the product into the Google ecosystem first and get feedback. I think this truely awesome! Like a incubation stage before they release products into the wild.

Next was a great talk with Twitter. This was really the most interesting and relevant chat. The problems Twitter have had are well reported but ultimately, they have product that people want. There were some great questions asked; mine was about how did they get people (and investors) to believe in such a crazy idea (it is crazy… I don’t care what you say!). I didn’t realize (I should do my homework!) the guy behind Twitter was also behind Blogger (sold to Google) which obviously gave them the validation. Twitter started out as a side project and once it started gaining traction they jumped on it full time. The combination of Founder experience and the user traction got them the investment they needed. Very interesting!

Separately, we went to Palo Alto to visit Facebook in one of their many buildings (8 apparently!), we talked about the Facebook experience and Connect (which is awesome by the way – really looking forward to connecting this up into BaseKit). More free food and great company! I love how Facebook is built in PHP… so many haters but it is a great testimony to my favorite language (joint 1st with javascript).

So the weekend descended on us so we got busy building our presentations for Seedcamp in the Valley. Our pitch went great at Microsoft and at SocialMedia, we kept it short and snappy showing for some of the developments we’ve made in the past 2 months since Seedcamp (still a bit hush hush – sorry!).

Our next visit was to Techcrunch then Yahoo! The TC Ranch was not what I expecting… no horses or cowboys (generalization? probably!) but inside (even though it was very early) there was a lingering buzz of the start of another day of hot-off-the-press journalism. We met the team who ran Crunchbase and the Techcrunch core products. As Heather Harde was speaking, I sensed a presence behind us. Peering over my left shoulder, there stood the Man Giant himself, Mike Arrington! He gave us advice on how to deal with blogs and getting PR coverage, but kept it brief because he knew that we were there to pitch to him. Great guy! Great advice! Some of the Seedcamp teams got some great coverage.

After finally finding Yahoo! (by that I mean, turning up to the correct building!) we received some awesome information on Yahoo! products. We met with members from BOSS, Pipes and YUI teams and even got ourselves on the YDN! Awesome!

The whole Silicon Valley experience was truly great. Some good mentoring and particular from the companies that we went to visit. Business wise was interesting. definitely opened some doors for the future. Thumbs up Seedcamp and a special thanks to Dave McClure

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.

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!