three things to consider when pitching. impressions from the ESTC business idea contest

the winners of this year's ESTC business idea contest 2008 are: innoraise (3.), D.O.O.M (2) & sindice (1.). congratulations! three things to take away from this year's contest: 1) prepare for your audience, 2) choose your name carefully & 3) show a demo.

innoraise' focused presentation made people following their lines. they explained the problem, market size, business model and the like. the audience feelt respected and taken serious. that always arrives well, regardless if it is a jury, a vc, a customer or a new employee. some competitors tried to reuse presentations that they had produced for other events. That did not work.

D.O.O.M. gave a good presentation. they made it on the 2nd place by a focused business idea and through actually showing screenshots of their software. not insisting on taking the world over instantly helps. but simply showing what they did, made the point instantly. the name however, should be worth a reconsidertion.

sindice made their point - and to sell a kind of semantic meta api is not an easy job from the beginning - by showing a live demo. that's risky however briought involvement of the audience. showing what they did or can do with their project, simply transported the message.


standing up, presenting your ideas in front of colleauges, scientists, potential consumers & competitors and venture capitalists clearly payed off well.



pictures courtesy of wolfram anderle.

and the seedcamp winner is: SOUP.IO!

congratulations to the soup.io team!

they are one of the seven winners of the recent seedcamp 2008 round. seeing the recent develpments of former seedcamp finalist zemanta, this can be a worthy boost of soup.io's development.
just to give an idea how, look at zemanta. they just secured another investmet from union square ventures, also involved in twitter, del.icio.us, feedburner, and the like.
this supports the thesis, that pitching can help progressing a start.up a lot, as already discussed here.
Update: And even if not all agree, winners are winners!

leweb´08 startUp registration opened

too late for the ongoing seedcamp competition this time? the next possiblity to pitch on an european level is coming up.

leweb´08 startUp competition is now open for application. the competition is organzided by seedcamp. leweb was added as a link in the blogroll.

for all those who need some more presentation preparation and which went through all the demo videos already, there just starting ignite/web2.0expo new york will film the presentations, so keep watching for them.

linkroll: multible angel rounds, ff shares, plan b

what are "series ff preferred shares"? they can bring early money to the founders of start.up companies, like powerset. details are described in the post "putting founders first". also found on the updated start.up linkroll.

how to deal with multiple angel investment rounds is the the 2nd add to the linkroll. if you can not decide whether to take convertible debt or make an equity round, this blogpost is a good read.

finally a common history of a venture based start.up called "plan b for fund raising", written by guy kawasaki. a bitter-sweet history. as entertaining as we expect from guy, he indirectly referes to the bootstrapping idea in his book "the art of the start".

two austrian seedcamp finalists: congratulations!

the recent announcement of the seedcamp finalists contains two austrian start.ups: soup and tripwolf. congratulations! 

challenging your start.up idea before pitching investors is a great way to get exposure, train presentation skills and to get rapid market feedback. 

besides seedcamp, there are plenty of other platforms out there to compete. the start.up mindmap lists alone nine international competitions, and several of the listed platforms are interesting hubs as well. venture lounge and estc business idea contest got recently covered and have running applications.

new start.up blog topic (mind) map

to easily access all the topics covered in the start.up blog, the new "start.up blog topic map" has been created.
the new mind.map shows all the areas covered by the start.up blog until now. it allows easy discovery of topics around starting.up a successful high-tech start.up. the mind.map allows fast drilling down into the different topics and direct access to the relevant blog posts through links.
enclosed a fist glimps, to fully enjoy it is recommended to open the map in a full browser windows.

new blobroll category: incubators/competitions

staying up to date with all the business competitions around the world can be tricky.

those which have their own rss feeds can now be found in the blogroll of this blog under the category incubators/competitions. so it is simple to follow them for everyone interested. those which are still without rss feeds can be found in the start.up financing mindmap. anyone is invited to post infos about additional ones existing which are not on the map yet.