Class 2: Introduction to web technology entrepreneurship

Allan ChaoStartup ConsultantStartup V8allan@startupv8.comUC Berkeley Extension, Summer 2012

Question of the day:If you were an investor, what kindsof companies would you invest in? Humor of the day: (we’ll have humor all day long today)

The Agenda Quiz Quick review of last session Pitches  Real Pitches (2 minutes)  Form Teams Business Planning  Pitch deck Website Introduction  Process

Quiz Time Good luck!10 minutes max

Quick review of prior material Web startups  Hockey stick curve  (in contrast to) high tech startups  Trough of sorrow / valley of death  (in contrast to) small businesses  Angel Investors Disruptive innovation Dotcom bubble  Lean Startup  Pets.com sock puppet  (in contrast to) Business plan Venture Capital  Agile Software Development Silicon Valley  Minimum Viable Product (MVP)  Entrepreneurial spirit  Iteration Exit  Customer Development  IPO = Initial public offering  Customer Discovery  Acquisition  Customer Validation  Lifestyle business  Customer Creation Startup Lottery  Company Building Execution

Pitches Agenda Discussion Practices  (1 minute) Real Pitches  (2 minutes)  Investments Form Teams Funny pitches

What is a pitch? Pitch  Any short summary of the product and company to someone who has never heard of it before. “Elevator Pitch”  30 second pitch, summarize your idea  Let a listener figure out if he’s interested Contents  Who you are  How you came up with the idea  The idea  Where you’re going with it

Why is pitching important? Entrepreneur is always selling…  The product  The vision  The company … to everyone  Customers  Key hires  Potential investors  Board of directors  Strategic Partners You never know when you’ll need to pitch. It’ll just happen.

What makes a great pitch? Keep it fast, short, and sweet  Don’t babble on and on. FOCUS!!  Your goal is to (1) tell the audience enough, and (2) get the audience to want to learn more. Know who your audience is.  Specifically mention things that they are interested in.  With customers, sell the benefits  With investors, talk about revenue and name drop  With potential partners, sell the passion and the vision Tell a story, or do something memorable  A magic trick (related to your company)

Practice Pitches Ideas from:  http://itsthisforthat.com/  http://www.halfbakery.com  http://www.kickstarter.com/ 1 minute each Just practice speaking in front of an audience, keep it fast, short, and sweet.

Real pitches, 2 minutes each 2 minutes. At 2:30, I will cut you off. When you’re not pitching, you are an angel investor  You have a $150,000 fund. Each $1 bill is $1,000  You must split your fund among 3-5 companies.  Splitting it up reduces your risk  Splitting too much will reduce the value of your investments, and it’s a pain to manage too many companies, too.  You must deliver your investment immediately after the pitch. You must decide on the spot. No “comparing later” allowed.  Top 3 Winners Also, keep in mind who you might want to work with for the rest of the class.

Rules for Forming Teams 2 people is best. No more than 3 people  No working with people you already know.  Word of caution – only work on something where you feel comfortable. No NDA’s today, please. If you want to work alone, that is OK, but you’ll get a better learning experience by working in a team of 2.

Funny Pitches Third, videos about funny pitches  Ali G – Ice cream gloves  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs  Share the Air – Venture Capital Fundraising Club  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyrFWbGiGOc  Hardly working startup guys  http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6507690/hardly- working-start-up-guys

Pitch Decks

What is a pitch deck? Same as a pitch, but in powerpoint form  Any short summary of the product and company to someone who has never heard of it before.  Primary use is for investors. Compared to the verbal pitches we just did, pitch decks need more focus on business and product, less focus on your story.  Marketing strategy  Revenue models and financial projections

Example pitch decks TaskLy  http://www.slideshare.net/flamingdeth/taskly-pitch- deck Gamexplain  http://www.slideshare.net/Micahseff/game-xplain- pitch-deck-81610 ZapMeals  http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/zapmealscom -closing-the-gap-between-your-mouse-your-tummy- for-supernova-2007

Pitch deck outline Many different ways to do the  Cover same thing: describe what the  Mission / Vision company is and where it’s  Summary going  Team  Problem We’re going to use a template that’s been put together by  Solution / Demo some investors.  Technology  Marketing Walk through the outline  Business Model template  Competition  Milestones / Financial Forecast  Conclusion

Work on your pitch deck for your project (in teams)Pitch decks take a lot of time to put together. Weeks, sometimes even months. You really need to think through and research the business opportunity.

Funny Pitch Deck Color.xxx  http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/24/color-blind/  “Hot Keywords” everywhere  Making fun of a crazy $41 M investment in a photo- sharing startup called “color”  (still so crazy of an investment after the Instagram acquisition?)  Making fun of the VC community for “flipping” startups

Naming Tools Keep in mind that the name of a product/company can change over time. It’s not set in stone USPTO search http://www.uspto.gov Domain name search California Secretary of State business name search http://www.nameboy.com http://www.namecheck.com Slogan Generator: http://thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan

Researching the Competition Crunchbase is your best friend (example usage)Keeping Files Synchronized Dropbox is your best friend (example usage)

That’s all for Business Planning … break time …next, Section 2: Website Introduction

Components to a Website Domain Registration … $10/year  = the data record of who owns what virtual property Email … (free with google apps)  = what happens to an email to me@anything.com Web Hosting … varies greatly, $10-$2,000/month  = actual physical server cost, with hard drives, networking, and electricity Web code … depends on type.  = the HTML, PHP, or anything else that happens when the website is accessed by a visitor

Domain Registration www.________.com Getting the ownership of virtual property A lot like owning real land.  Once you own it, you can build on it, sell it, or anything. Generally very cheap, $10-20/year per domain Registrars:  Namecheap.com  Godaddy  Use a dedicated registrar, not a “secondary” reseller

DNS = Domain Name System Foundation of how the internet works  Technically, converts www.______.com  135.57.249.152  Commonly called the “internet phone book / address book” Frequently part of your registrar, you can tell it what to do with the domain for various instructions  http://_____.com  http://www._____.com  http://somethingelse._____.com  Email to ____@_____.com

Google Apps Free* and Awesome!  * free for small accounts, like startups. Lots of great collaboration tools  Email  Calendar  Documents  Chat Moderately-easy setup (requires DNS changes)

Now what for the website? Must set up DNS Point to someone else’s server  We will do this next session, pointing to other web apps Point to our own server (must buy hosting)  A CMS like Wordpress or Joomla running on our server  Or, our own custom code (web application)

Websites… before we start Building a “web startup website” is very different from building a “small business website”  Just like starting a “web startup” is very different from starting a “small business” – remember last session? By a factor of at least 100…  Much more difficult  Much more expensive  Much more time consuming You get what you put into it (money, time, effort)

Why so different? When you build a web application, you’re actually building something completely new that’s never been done before. When you build a small business website, you’re actually just using someone else’s web application All the small business website builders are web startups  Wordpress.com  Wix  Weebly  SquareSpace  Moonfruit  If you use that, you are just a customer “user” to their startup.

Software Product Development Creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)  Functional Requirements  Wireframes  Graphic Design  Code  Content (Copywriting, Social Media accounts, analytics, etc.)  Deploy (aka Release)

Functional Requirements Questions to answer  What customer problem does this product solve?  What are the customer use cases?  How will the customer use this product to solve his problem?  How will the product make money?

Sitemap

Wireframes

Graphic Design

Code HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, Node.js, Django, python, Ruby on Rails, PHP, .NET, Java, ….

Content Every single screen Instructions to the user Search-Engine-friendly content  Long tail keywords  Content Uniqueness Any emails that are sent? Blog posts? PR releases? Analytics tools

Traditional Software Development

Agile Software Development Start Small  Minimum Viable Product Iterate quickly  Track user data  Flexible software  Release frequently Cycle weekly or every two weeks

Homework Name your product.  Check the name to make sure you can use it.  Remember that you can always change the name later (e.g. after the class). Get the domain for your project  Set up google apps Work on the pitch deck as much as possible with your team.  At least put in your ideas/thoughts for each section  Get your team set up on dropbox or other file sharing Reading material  Online articles about elevator pitches, pitch decks, business plans, and financial projections.

Class 2: Introduction to web technology entrepreneurship

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