1. Allan Chao
Startup Consultant
Startup V8
allan@startupv8.com
UC Berkeley Extension, Summer 2012

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

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

4. Quiz Time
Good luck!
10 minutes max

5. 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

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

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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)

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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

14. Pitch Decks

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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

20. 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

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

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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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)

27. 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)

28. 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)

29. 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.

30. 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)

31. 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?

32. Sitemap

33. Wireframes

34. Graphic Design

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

36. 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

37. Traditional Software Development

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

39. 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.