with Tom Allason, 10th November 2011

Tom is founder and CEO of Shutl, a web service that connects retailers with local same-day courier companies, meaning that you can purchase items online and have them delivered in as little as 90 minutes. Before Shutl, Tom was also founder and CEO of eCourier, the online courier company whose purple vans are instantly recognisable around London. Tom served as eCourier’s CEO from 2004 until 2008, overseeing the company’s growth to £7.5m turnover with over 250 staff (including couriers) and raising $16m investment.

Tom is very aware of the trials and tribulations that can befall a start-up and is therefore particularly keen to share his experience with others and offer advice on how best to approach the task. To begin with he took the participants through a brief history of eCourier and then Shutl, outlining their progress through the various stages of development and providing a rationale behind his decision to exit eCourier and begin again with Shutl.

During the second half of his presentation Tom laid out his lesson in fundraising:

Raising investment is all about risk and reward. The investors naturally want to insure themselves against unnecessary risk and therefore will consider a few key factors when you come to pitch your idea:

1. Is the problem your start-up is attempting to solve big enough and serving a large enough audience to be viable?
2. Are you able to determine this opportunity or gap accurately? Can you calculate the risk involved in realising that opportunity eg: business costs including cashflow (particularly appropriate to service sectors where payment terms are longer than creditor invoicing terms, meaning there is a distinct gap or lag in your cashflow)?
3. Do you have the core elements/capacity in place to successfully execute your business plan? That is, do you have a quality team behind you with relevant credibility and experience?
4. Can you create a product that works in your proposed environment? You don’t have to have a product ready to launch when you go to raise capital but it helps. Investors want to see signs that your idea has the potential to become a profit making business and that people are willing to pay enough for it.

There are various ways and means to raise capital for your idea and they fall under the categories of either equity or debt. Tom’s primary view on raising equity is that it is an option for later, the further you can take a business on and the further you can reduce risk in key areas, the better, as it means less overall risk in the business. This will enable a better valuation and therefore will increase the chances of raising equity. If you can make your business run without raising any external investment then do it!

There as various types of equity investors:

1. The 3 Fs; Friends, Family and Fools! (£100-100K). They may be able to benefit from EIS (only available for ordinary shares, tax efficient for high net worths to invest in start-ups, they can write up a proportion of income tax for their investment, also get preferential treatment for capital gains tax)

2. Angel investors (£10K-500K). They are different from the 3Fs in that they want a business that is a little more established. They are interested in making a return. From Tom’s experience they are successful people who are looking to give something back. As a result they are the sorts of people you want to give fair/good terms to so that they will come in line with your goals and help you attain the best possible deal in the future. They will also want a board seat which again is in your favour as they have the necessary experience and advice.

3. VCs (£1m-10m). VCs will want to get involved in a business that has been taken further along, meaning that they will want to have proof that the fundamental economics of the business are viable. They are capable of investing significant sums of money via an investment fund and it is successful functioning of this which ultimately motivates their decisions. They need to protect and make a return for their own investors.

The VCs prefer to play big to win big, giving large sums of money in the knowledge that it will provide an absolute return. Naturally they will also seek to minimise the negatives and will secure a termsheet that includes a strict exit strategy in their favour and restrictions on what you can do with their capital. They can take a hands on approach, sitting on the board to make sure that if the business isn’t preforming they can act.

4. Seed Funders (£50K-500K). Essentially these are VCs with smaller funds who are willing to invest in earlier stages of development. They also don’t instill as much complexity in the terms of business as it requires a significant amount of time to manage and their smaller funds do not reflect a need for this.

5. Corporate/Strategic Investors (£100K+). They don’t have the same criteria as VCs, not as strict. Come form a perspective of their sector, they will look to see how your

Resources

Blogs

• Both Sides of the table: Mark Suster
• Chris Dixon
• Equity Kicker: Nick Brisbourne 

Other

• Angel.list: Angel Investors
• CrunchBase
• Crowdfunding: Kickstarter
• Accelerators: Seedcamp, The Difference Engine, Y Combinators

We have a total of seven clinics this series and so if you would like to find out more or to attend please see our programme overview. For any questions relating to this event or the series in general please contact caroline AT metamute.org.

This workshop series will be free to attend thanks to the generous support of our sponsor the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network.

GET THE MONEY

INVESTMENT DAY

————————————–

brought to you by

Gatway2Investment (g2i)  and Mother

produced by MiniBar

^25th of November at Mother

Why?

For Start-Ups and small companies growth capital is what is often hard to come by. Venture and angel capital is often the right option, though many entrepreneurs find it hard to access.

This is why Gateway to Investment (g2i), Mother and MiniBar have teamed up to create a one day series of workshops covering topics such as, ‘how to pitch your idea’, ‘an insight into the investment landscape’ and ‘the role creative branding plays in growing companies’.

What?

We are offering 20 companies the chance to attend a day of workshops and trial pitches at Mother HQ in Shoreditch. Over the course of the day you will meet a series of experienced VC’s, angels and successful entrepreneurs taking the workshops, then later during our trial pitches you can present your own idea in front of a group of judges comprising of investors and experienced entrepreneurs.

If you want to attend please email Matthew Stafford – matthew.stafford@pembridge.net – a one page exec

summary. He will then inform you, if you have been selected to attend.

The five best companies will get to pitch again at a MiniBar Meetup that evening in front of 250 techies and digerati. These 2 minute pitches will be filmed and professionally edited to be distributed online. The top three will also win: individual business plan review by g2i plus individual
branding sessions with Mother

Program:

09.00                 Welcome & Introduction

09.15                 The Investment Landscape:

- Mike Bowman, Investment Director, E-Synergy

 09.30                   Inside track from an established business angel and VC:

- Mike Bowman, Investment Director, E-Synergy

10.30            The Numbers: The Market, Business Model and Projections:

 - Mike Bowman, Investment Director, E-Synergy

11.30            Management Team and Pitching to Investors:

- Rose Lewis, Partner, Pembridge Partnership

12.30            Lunch

13: 30  Branding and its Importance

- Dylan Williams, Partner, Mother; Samuel Payne, Strategist, Mother

14:30 Coffee

15:00 A Conversation with Entrepreneurs and Investors

- Mitch Pender, Antrak Capital
- Scott Sage – DFJ Esprit
- Oli Ashness – DFJ Esprit
- Damien Tanner – Angel
- Luke Hakes – Octopus Ventures
- Jack Gavigan, Angel/Entrepreneur
- Mark Adams, Angel
- Sitar Teli, Doughty Hanson
- Rose Lewis, Pembridge Partner

16:00 Pitching

Participants get 2 minutes to pitch to the panel of judges comprising of:

Dylan Williams (Mother), Mike Bowman (E-Synergy), Scott Sage from DFJ Esprit, other Angels/VC’s TBC

18:00 MiniBar Starts

19:00 Pitches at MiniBar

 21:00 MiniBar Ends

presented by Margaret Gold, 20th October 2011

Margaret is an innovation and business launch specialist at Gold Mobile Innovation Ltd, she works with entrepreneurs, start-ups, institutes and corporate ventures to move their ideas into businesses and launching them to market. She is also the founder of The Mobile Collective, an idea-to-launch community platform for the collaborative development of mobile apps, products and services.

Margaret provided a huge amount of information in her presentation so below is an attempt at a summary. If you would like to find out more about Margaret’s presentation the slides have been uploaded here. They are purposefully very detailed and contain several important statistical diagrams, planning aids, case study lists and bibliographies for you to keep as a resource.

The producer / consumer feedback loop

Understand that social media is reliant on word of mouth. It cannot be used in a traditional broadcast manner. The ‘social’ makes it explicit that it is about how you connect to networks of people and encourage them to spread your information for you.

Your audience

Take the time to learn to build a profile of your target audience, understand what it is they like about your product on offer. Explore the relationships they have to it and find out what emotional responses it triggers so that you may develop a way to hook into that.

A customer journey

Think about how someone is making use of your service or product. Follow the diagram in slide 5 and expand upon the moments when they are in contact with you before, during and after the point of transaction. At these touch points trace how are they interface with you, is it via a retweet, a comment, a telephone conversation, an online checkout or are they simply reading information on a static webpage?

Within this journey consider; moments of truth – when you either stand out or you don’t; how you are monitoring and measuring this journey, experience design etc. The journey can become increasingly complex so perhaps, build up resources when conducting your market research that you can then work from to start simple and expand in stages.

User personalities

In slide 7 you can see a diagram of the different user personalities and the types of tools they use. Understanding what tools people are using and why is key when planning a successful strategy.

Social Object

The term was coined by Hugh MacLeod from the gapingvoid blog. It’s the idea that people congregate around things they have in common eg: an interest in micro breweries, a love of motor sport, a desire to start a business! Map out the vista of the social object(s) your service or product sits within. A tip to begin with is to consider what your idea is proposing to solve and see how this can be put forward as a social object.

Find the key talkers

In order to engage with your audience you need to be listening to what people are saying and making yourself available as much as being a self-promoting broadcaster. Find the connecting people who talk to and influence others and can also push out your information. Find out what platforms they work through.

Planning your strategy

Now that the research is over, it’s time to plan! Sit down and consider the following:

• What social media tools fit your audience?
• What is the problem your proposing to solve?
• What kinds of tools will serve your purposes? slide 12

What do you want to achieve through using social media tools? Examples are perhaps:

• How do people first hear of me?
• How do they begin to interface with my service or product?
• How do they feedback?
• How can I keep them in the user cycle?

Designing your campaign

There are four rules to remember when coming to design your campaign:

• Give the customer what they want (competitions, discounts, previews etc)
• Make your activity bite-sized
• Engage little and often
• Choose lots of little campaigns over big ones as they are more effective at building relationships

Building relationships

When it boils down to it, our new modes of consuming via social media are based upon a desire to create relationships with others be that your friends, family or colleagues. Individual profiles are built up through in an alignment with the people, activities or ways of thinking that represent held beliefs. For these links to exist you, as an product or service, must create a pathway into your organisation. This creates the necessary feedback loop between you and your audience that enables your information to spread effectively.

We have a total of seven clinics this series and so if you would like to find out more or to attend please see our programme overview. For any questions relating to this event or the series in general please contact caroline AT metamute.org.

This workshop series will be free to attend thanks to the generous support of our sponsor the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network.

with Malcolm Coles, 15th September 2011

The ICT KTN Online Business Essential Clinics series began anew on 15th September 2011 at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green. The topic for the evening was Search Engine Optimisation with Malcolm Coles presenting.

Malcolm is a content strategist and SEO consultant. He is currently the Digital Product Director at Trinity Mirror and maintains a humorous and engaging blog that focuses on SEO, Twitter, social media and newspapers. Previously Malcolm was the editor of which.co.uk, the product-testing website and consumer association. It is also the UK’s most successful pay-walled website.

Over the course of the session Malcolm showed the group that there are many ways and means to influence how people find you on the web. Malcolm provides more than just a step by step guide to improving your Google ranking, he finds a way to into the process that is fun and develops a sense of empowerment in those previously baffled. He instills an attitude that SEO is not a massive wall of tedium but is something that effects our viewpoint and therefore understanding of the world.

Throughout the session Malcolm showed how we can reverse engineer Google searches and analytics reports, to unearth patterns in your audience’s behaviour and use them to adapt your site in order to influence future searches.

Malcolm showed how rather dry stats reports become illuminated when you begin to think about the reasons for the behaviours that compel people to search as they do. A great example of this is an instance where Dr. Who fans would search for the lead actress – ‘Karen Gillan’ + ‘Underwear’ whilst sitting with their laptops in front of the telly. This would always happen over the weekend when the show is aired. However, one week the searches spiked on Tuesday instead, the explanation for this was deduced to be the fact that during this particular weekend England were playing a football match. When the repeat was aired on the Tuesday all those who were occupied watching the football match tuned in and promptly began to search for their favourite starlet in her underwear and hence creating a new spike!

If you would like to find out more about Malcolm’s presentation the slides have been uploaded here(please note these slides are from a previous presentation in 2010 and so differ slightly from what you may have seen in this session). They are quite detailed and provide many helpful tips to get you started with website an SEO overhaul as well as a few laughs too.

We have a total of seven clinics this series and so if you would like to find out more or to attend please see our programme overview. For any questions relating to this event or the series in general please contact caroline AT metamute.org.

This workshop series will be free to attend thanks to the generous support of our sponsor the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network.

Development Management with Jay Bregman, 5th October 2011

Jay is a successful tech entrepreneur based in London and the founder and former CTO of eCourier, the online delivery service for which he has received many notable accolades including the award for “Most Inspirational business 2007”.

He describes himself has having a passion for logistics. He likes to figure out how people are connected in the real world, how they communicate and what tools can be developed that make that process more straightforward.

In his most recent venture Jay recently founded Hailo, a mobile service that gives you a direct line to London’s infamous Hackney carriage – black taxi – network so that you need never again be stranded after a late night party or rush to the airport.

Below is a breakdown of Jay’s presentation into key points and if you would like to view his slides as a further support they are available on slideshare.

1. Solid foundations

The overall advice Jay impresses upon us is to put effort into the foundations of a project, namely the people and contracts that will determine how successful the outcome will be. It is the nature of start-ups that this process should be conducted relatively quickly but caution and a methodical approach is advised.

2. Get a good team

Through his endeavours Jay has picked up a lot of experience is software development management and the key to success in his view is always work with a good team. Projects with bad people that are badly managed will fail, projects with good people but again badly managed with however come through eventually.

3. Recruiting

The best place to start in getting a good team together is to ask around, look towards your friends and their networks, ask them for recommendations seek out those people who come with solid reputations. Also consider using recruiters – not one, several – so that you cover all bases and speed up the hiring process.

4. Developers like small, interesting companies

In the current climate the market for developers is hot and therefore competitive. It can be difficult to catch the developer of your choice, especially when you’re unable to offer the high salaries they can currently demand. Start-ups do however come with an advantage over larger corporate employment – they’re small! Developers like to be involved in companies where they can have a more hands-on experience and see the effects of their work. Providing them with freedom, flexibility, the all important equity share and the ability to build relationships with you as the founder and your network is a more exciting prospect with greater potential than perhaps a larger company environment. Also, a great idea wouldn’t hurt either!

5. Due diligence 

During the recruitment stage don’t skimp on putting your developers through their paces, it  will pay off in the long-run and quality developers shouldn’t have an issue with sitting a code test in the interview stages. If you can ask an expert to draft the test.

6. Contracts / IP

Spending the time to prepare a solid contract with a project outline, a clear set of deliverables, a non disclosure agreement and an IP assignment form or an intellectual property agreement will save you the possibility of pain in the future. Funders prefer for companies to be the owners of the code, that way the project is insured against collapse in the future should the developer leave. Don’t worry whether or not you may seem pedantic to prospective developers, it is always better to have clear agreements from the beginning.

The question was raised, is it ok for developers to work on other projects while they are with you? Jay advised that it would be fairly unreasonable to impose such restrictions on the developer. Creating a fair and flexible environment is more productive and instills a sense of trust. It is a good idea however to ask the developer at the interview stage what other project they have in the pipeline so that you can discuss any conflicts of interest.

7. OUT v’s INsourcing

The answer is relatively straightforward, if the project requires standard coding and is therefore low risk, go for an outsourced team. If the idea is one that needs some innovative problem solving and specialised skills then consider an in-house team. Building a new product can be disruptive and although it may be more expensive to have someone in-house the greater value will be in the technology you create. Jay also advises anyone who is considering using off-shore developers to do so with caution, it’s best to have previous experience working with an off-shore team as it could cost a lot more if things go wrong. A good tip from a member of the group is to consider having a member of the off-shore team work from London, it costs a bit more but it concretises communication channels.

8. Tech co-founders

Finding an appropriate tech co-founder is difficult as those are the people in short supply. Jay advises that a way to entice them would be to make them a 50/50 partner, not just an employee. Having a tech co-founder will increase the chances of obtaining funding for the project as you will appear to investors to have a more solid proposal on offer. In taking on a new founder Jay stresses that you should pay as little up front as you can, agreements should be made around key milestones to secure drive and commitment. Ask partners to take a portion in cash up front, an equity percentage and then a portion of cash on delivery.

9. Tools, tricks and management

Putting the correct infrastructure in place for record keeping, project management and bug tracking is essential and particularly pertinent to coding work. Tools are there to provide transparency, clarity, risk minimisation and workflow optimisation. NB: Developers don’t have an impeccable track record in accurately estimating the time it will take to complete a piece of work and so these tools help to construct a more realistic prediction.

You will need a software code repository to finish a project and it will help management in keeping track of a developers workload. Another good thing about the repository is that it centralises the work rather than having lots of pieces of code scattered across individual computers. It reduces risk, creates transparency and therefore aids communication

10. When it starts to go wrong

Jay’s main advice is to begin with an end in mind. Shifting from an idea into the components of a project needs a lot of back and forth amongst the team so have as much discussion as you can before starting. Poor contracts will harm outcomes especially if a key person decides to drop out midway through. You need to protect yourself against this eventuality in the contract as hiring someone new will inevitably slow things down. Be vigilant about hitting your targets, repeatedly missing them should be an instant red flag and issues should be nipped in the bud early on.

Finally, remember you don’t have to have every feature available in the first version, the emphasis should always be on quality and don’t extend past deadlines, instead restrict the amount of work for completion.

Jay would like to invite you to sign up to the beta testing of his new project Hailo.

The sessions have been really popular so far and our event on Monday proved to be equally so. We had about 35 participants in what proved to be a pretty challenging, yet fun, event. Danvers didn’t muck about as participants were set straight to work on an example termsheet and case study. He split the group into two – Investors and Founders – asking participants to work in small groups and analyse the study amongst themselves in order to prepare for the next round. Once again participants were divided, this time into teams of two with Founders pitted against Investors in a battle of wills, each one aiming to be the most profitable party in the agreement by the close of the discussion. Finally, at the end of workshop the outcomes of each negotiation were presented and those teams who had managed to get a particularly good deal were awarded special mention.

The evening was certainly a task with everyone having a go and although I think some felt thrown in at the deep end by the finish everyone had gained new insights – through means of peer learning and practice – into the many particularities involved in constructing a termsheet. Minibar would like to thank all those who came and especially Danvers for giving his time and for putting on a throughly enjoyable evening.

Seena Rejal will be joining us to talk about 3D Industries

and Sérgio Santos is presenting Bundlr

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Your MiniBar Team

The venue is much more airy than our good old home in Corbet Place and it should be less noisy (we think its actually quite cool).

The other good news is that Stella 4% will be our drinks sponsor and that we should run out of free booze much less quickly.

We are sticking to the good old format of 10 x 2min pitches, which will now also be professionally recorded, edited and then distributed online.

Our programme will be as follows:
Big Venture Challenge, presented by Dane Lehner (UnLtd)
Cooderloop.com, presented by Federico Feroldi (CEO, Coderloop).
Tom Blomfield will speak about GroupPAY.co.uk
and Joel Halbert will introduce us to webalertpro.com

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Your MiniBar Team

qMedia is now going to Sponsor MiniBar this Friday night. qMedia is a new Queen Mary research initiative, bringing under a single umbrella

• the Centre for Digital Music
• the Interaction Media and Communication group
• the Multimedia and Vision Research group
• the Doctoral Training Centre in Media and Arts Technology
• researchers in Social and Pervasive Computing

qMedia aims to be the UK’s leading integrated research centre in digital technologies for media and the arts. It undertakes world class research in digital technologies for media and the arts, solves digital media problems with multi-disciplinary teams, works in partnership with other world class organizations and institutions, in the UK and further a field and shares knowledge to the wider community.

Please check out these excellent videos featuring some of the presenters below, and come along for a similar evening in February.

Josh from Minutebox gave us a quick run down on their new website – a market for all kinds of experts.

Babara telling us about Areanow, the exciting, live-updated nightlife application and website. Perfect for all us night owls.

Snapr is a new start-up that plans to map the world through our photos. Rowan told us his plans.

John Abbott told us about how Oobafit, can make you fitter and stronger – all from the comfort of your PC.

Other speakers included

Joe Stepniewski from SkimLinks

Mahesh Guru from My Shopping Genie

Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali from BakerFramework

Nick Donnelly from JustWhatsOn

Nick Ager from getitmade

Julian Keenaghan from tastebuds.fm

MiniBar: Finance Innovation