Startup weekend presentation

1. STARTUP
THINGS I WISH I KNEW
THINGS I WISH I KNEW
FROM ZERO TO HERO IN 15 MINUTES
Saturday, November 17, 12

2. ACTION BEATS THEORY
EVERY TIME
“solve a real problem”
“satisfy real people’s needs”
“deliver measurable results”
“know your target market”
“differentiate from competition”
What do all these phrases REALLY mean
and what can I SPECIFICALLY do?
Saturday, November 17, 12

3. IDEA
SHARPENING EXERCISE (1 TO 10) A.K.A. EXTREME PIVOTING
How well does your idea turn... Does your idea:
• hard into easy or slow into fast (twitter.com) • have the ability to grow quickly
• doubt into trust (yelp.com) • match your skills and passion
• boring into fun (facebook.com) • make you proud
• impossible into possible (ebay.com) • make you want to use it yourself
• dispensable into indispensable (toilet paper • have so much potential it scares you
story) (amazon.com)
Saturday, November 17, 12

4. A-TEAM
ONLY THE BEST
Cover the basics first
• Skills that a startup team must have: technology, designer and business
Recruit your weaknesses
• find absolutely the BEST people for the job that are amazing in things you don’t know
anything about
Start right
• A teams will attract A players
• B team will attract C and D quality
Saturday, November 17, 12

5. SAY HI TO JANE
#1 INSIGHT TOOL TO HELP YOUR MARKETING, MESSAGING, PRODUCT
Create your customer avatar story
Their name, age, gender, relationship status, family. Where do they live, work, socialize. Secrets, dreams and desires...
• “Step into her shoes” and define pains and
JANE
problems related to your specific solution
Jane is a single 28-year-old
lawyer who lives in downtown • Now you can ask any question you need
Sarajevo. She earns 1500 KM the answer to:
per month and lives with the
Price:
help of a credit card and,
occasionally, her parents. She
How much is that worth to Jane?
enjoys going out to clubs and Market size:
concerts. She cooks for her
How many Janes are out there and will use my
friends and hosts mini-parties whenever she can. She product?
is fashion-conscious and easily spends a quarter of
her paycheck on clothing and beauty products. She is Product design:
obsessed with Facebook and Pinterest. She dreams of How would Jane react to this feature? What
a trip to ..... you get the picture. can I add or remove to keep her engaged....
Saturday, November 17, 12

6. EVERY $1000
HOW TO MAKE MONEY
WEB Mobile Apps
Ads (adsense, admeld, etc) App sales
• $ .50 eCPM = 2 million impressions • @ $.99 = 1000 sales
Selling digital goods (ebooks, access to tutorial videos) In-app purchases - similar to Facebook
• @ $5 = 200 sales Magazine subscriptions - hard to penetrate
Monthly Subscriptions (quality content = video) • @ $2.99 = 300 sales
• $25 = 40 subscribers In-app ads (a growing trend)
• e.g. https://teamtreehouse.com • $1.64 eCPM iOS
SaaS (software as a service) • $.88 eCPM Android
• $100+ = <10
• e.g. http://seomoz.org Make your ads meaningful
Lifetime access • internal mobile facebook $9.86 eCPM
• http://rouxbe.com/ (pronounced ruby) • Sponsorships (requires sales people or self-serving)
• @ $399 = 2.5 customers $1000+ - for one sale
Facebook Web Apps
Facebook game tokens
• @$5 to save 1 hour of game play - 200 players =
200,000 players (one in 1000 will pay)
Ads - similar to web
Saturday, November 17, 12

7. BRAVE NEW WORLD
TO UNDERSTAND
Kick-start site with external data - APIs Motivate using gamification
for social graph, login, geo data, etc.
use game principals on non-game
e.g. foursquare.com - launched on top of software
citysearch.com data (citysearch who?)
Crowd-source curation of content
Mix mobile and user location (GPS data) to stay up to date & unique
to give a whole new life to existing data
e.g. yelp.com, twitter, wikipedia, etc
e.g. yelp.com’s “what’s nearby” search
Deeply understand live social streams
stream is sharing, not log (Facebook vs
LinkedIn)
Saturday, November 17, 12

8. MONEY TO START
PRODUCT BEFORE COMPANY, NOT OTHER WAY AROUND
Web and Facebook Apps
• Servers AWS free tier http://aws.amazon.com/free/
• Use open source http://github.com
iPhone and iPad
• XCode: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/
• iOS Developer program: $99 https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/
Android
• One time $25 fee:
• Android SDK free: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
Saturday, November 17, 12

9. MEASURING SUCCESS
NUMBERS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
Web and Facebook Apps
• daily users on weekly basis
• Google Analytics & Facebook Insights
Mobile
• Daily downloads and in-app purchases
Cash-flow
• weekly estimates, monthly deep-check
• Paypal with Mint or Xero
Saturday, November 17, 12

10. STARTUP = GROWTH
A STARTUP IS A COMPANY DESIGNED TO GROW FAST
Three phases of growth
• Slow initial period - figuring things out
• Rapid growth - made something lots of people want and know
how to reach those people
• Big company slow growth - bumping against the limits of the
market
Example of a company making $1000/month Weekly Yearly
• 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 1% 1.7 x
2% 2.8 x
• 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a
month 5% 12.6 x
7% 33.7 x
• Do you dare to do the math for 10% weekly growth???
10% 142 x
Saturday, November 17, 12

11. INVESTMENT
BE THE ONE THAT MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN AWAY
Take investment as late as possible
• You will optimize your cash-flow early and know exactly
how to smartly invest money once you do have it
• You will have easier time finding investor and have upper
hand in negotiation
Look for mentors and advisors that can help
beyond money
Validation of your business model
• Users’ growth or Cash-flow projections
• Executive team (success track means less risk)
• Expecting 10x return on investment
When it comes to choosing between higher
valuation and keeping control always, always, always
keep as much of control of the company as possible
Don’t blow the money - it is not yours
Saturday, November 17, 12

12. SET UP A CLOUD
COMPANY
Google apps (free tier) for mail
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/
Paypal for bank
http://paypal.com/
Mailing services for virtual address
http://www.earthclassmail.com/
Support: Zendesk and Twitter
http://www.zendesk.com/
http://twitter.com/
Saturday, November 17, 12

13. LEARNING
THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE STILL FREE
Stanford Ecorner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/
Startup school: http://startupschool.org/2012/
Google Tech talks: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleTechTalks
• Gamification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O1gNVeaE4g
iTunes U: http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/
• iPhone Stanford Classes: http://itunes.stanford.edu/
Rework: http://37signals.com/rework
Virtual goods: http://www.dubitplatform.com/blog/2010/12/31/design-a-social-game-economy-how-
much-should-a-virtual-t-shi.html/
Google everything else yourself
Saturday, November 17, 12