This document provides guidance on starting a new social media company with limited funds. It recommends first building a demo product to prove the concept before seeking investment. The document also suggests registering for trademarks, researching competitors, contacting accelerators and investors for guidance and funding, promoting the product at events like SXSW to generate interest, and seeking press coverage and potential sponsorships from large companies. The overall goal is to get the social media product off the ground and proving itself before having to rely solely on investment.

2. Getting Started.

5. Dev Partners.
Cactuslab for iPhone dev.
ME&A for backend (Python on the Amazon EC2).

6. Getting Things Going.
Ambitious project with a lot of scope.
No Money.

7. Registering A Trademark.
Brand / Naming a key part of our concept.
Important to protect our brand from day one.

8. Class 9:
Social networking software for websites and mobile-phones or other internet enabled devices to allow location-aware uploading, manipulating,
tagging, blogging, posting, displaying, sharing, and electronic mapping of digital content, including text, documents, photographs, images, voice
and audio; software for uploading digital content to and downloading digital content from websites, sharing location of digital content and / or
persons via global positioning or other location technology to enable social networking among users, including searching, locating, messaging,
navigating to persons, events, locations, advertiser promotions or place of business, points of interest, or place at which a user’s digital content
was uploaded, in real-time or at user’s discretion; software to enable the search and viewing of user-generated digital content in real-time, or at
a specific date and time, over internet or other communication networks on any internet-enabled devices, by location, event, location-informed
advertisements, meta tags and user profile data, search and viewing of social hotspots, locations, points of interest, as determined by aggregate
users, or a group of users.
Class 38:
Telecommunications services; transmission of digital content on wireless communication devices through the internet or other communication
networks by registered users to enable location-aware photo sharing, virtual communities and social networking services; including transmission
of images, photographs, location information, text, documents, voice, audio, video and any data as determined by users.
Class 42:
Application services provider (ASP) for the delivery of social networking services including the use of global positioning or other location technology,
namely, to allow location-aware uploading, manipulating, tagging, blogging, indexing, posting, displaying, showing, sharing, searching, navigating
to persons or place, electronic mapping and map display of digital content and physical presence information on wireless communication devices
via electronic and optical communications networks; including images, photographs, text, documents, voice, audio and video. Hosting and updating
of websites that allow online access to searchable databases of user-generated digital content, user profiles, and physical presence information.

9. Trademark Territories
NZ - Not to expensive or tricky.
Australia - Red Snap-R Fencing??
UK - Cheaper to do multiple classes at once
USA - Mid price, need product in market to complete.
Eurozone - Not cheap but covers 27 countries
$3200 approx total for coverage worldwide in key classes.

10. No Money.
Hard to raise money for social media with just an idea.
Better to build something and let it prove itself first.

11. Development Partners.
Having a cool service / app out there is more valuable to
developers in its early stages than it is to cash investors who
would have money tied up in an unprofitable company for 2-3
years.
In the early stages everyone needs to be a fully involved
partner, not easy to find social media friendly investors in NZ.

12. Approaching People
Start with your current employers.
Try not to expect the world for nothing in return.
Try to get together as much money as you can.
Its good if people take a bit of time to decide whether or not
to get on board.

13. Business Plan.
It doesn’t matter how cool you think your service is,
eventually your business will need to be a business.
At some point if you don’t get investment you will be left
behind.

14. Research.
How to build a business case?
www.crunchbase.com - Stats on other peoples funding.
www.compete.com - User numbers / traffic stats.

15. Make a Demo.
Flash demo can help explain the concept before final dev.
Having an actual product to show makes you much more
impressive.

16. Contacts.
The Icehouse - Development advice, connections to investors.
Escalator - NZ Angel Investors.
NZTE - Advice for international expansion, some grants maybe
Friends and Family -Maybe not for money, but see who they
can connect you to.

17. South by South West (SXSW).
http://sxsw.com/interactive/accelerator/
Biz-Spark Accelerator app only costs $130 USD.
2 paragraphs about your company, 2 supporting links.
Get on the US stage (they aren’t looking to NZ for ideas).

18. Press.
Being only NZ company in finals has helped us a lot with
getting the press interested.
In the end you are going to need to do everything you can
to promote your service so may as well start early, but be
careful how you frame the story.

19. Sponsorship.
Getting press opens up more doors for relationships with
bigger companies.
Most major companies will have a social media person in
their marketing dept who will talk to you.

20. Thanks!