Take-aways from the AGBC Exchange

The Munich chapter of the American German Business Club once or twice a year has a Saturday morning event where there are various seminars held on different themes.

And this year it started with us, The Crazy Chicken and I, giving a three minute talk about our business's product.

Our approach was to start by telling (true) stories where businesses would have benefited from using our product - "if only there was an app for that".

Then The Crazy Chicken interrupted me and reminded me that I have been working on the app and carried on with a couple of more slides.

It seemed to go down well (I was congratulated by the president).

Then the seminars started. The most relevant one was also the most excellent, not least as it was run by a former professor who has worked in startup here and in Silicon Valley and has been involved in getting funding. We will be contacting him soon as he was happy to talk to us about the business and give feedback.

Here are the take-aways from the event:

• Customers should love the product and cannot do without it
• You need a revenue model, perhaps copy an existing one (as that should work) and know that a subscription model has advantages. Also the revenue stream should have low friction so it is trivial to understand and submit payments
• listen to customers and potential customers
• It's bad to not look closely enough at existing customer behaviour.
• Also bad not to be watching the competition and emerging trends
• Fund raisers should see a clear path to revenue

To summarise:

have a clear revenue model and product fit.