More good advice

Some hours after the meeting with the lady involved in funding startups I met another lady who runs a PR company in Munich (with global reach).

She had some great feedback and advice about our solution and also said she would introduce me to an investor.

Progress

Despite my bloke interrupted post actually I have been making progress:

The app more looks like an app now. Although it did involve a tour around stack overload and github.

At the end of yesterday's pitch night one of the organisers mentioned that they would holding a "clinic" today to see if their startup-assisting-business could help startups with financing. They have an interesting business model for this.

I hope I didn't kill too many people in the room as I rushed to the front to put my name down.

Met the organiser this morning and will send them a pitch deck and have a conference call with them soon.

She too stressed that we need to show some traction. We will.

Take-aways from yesterday's pitch event

Last night I went to another Entrepreneurs Night - pitch event at werk1.

Here are my takeaways:

• European investors are funding European companies which have gone to the US to find funding.
• US valuations are significantly higher than Europeans ones
• Valuations cannot but be disproved - if someone says your company is not worth €8m or whatever ask them why not, how much is it worth and why.
• Better valuations are needed because by series E funding of €50m is not really enough for a company.
• No European angel has been outstandingly successful with a European startup. On average they are losing money.

And Axel's advice:

• 8x20 on forward looking revenues (I really must get the slides for his presentation)
• get revenue as soon as you can
• ideally grow by 1% per day
• have a disruptive business model

For the pitches they were judging on:

• Team
• Idea
• Growth Strategy
• the pitch itself.

At the end he reminded us that entrepreneurs are, at most, 0.1% of society.

Bloke interrupted

Been busy but:

• my Surface Pro died. It was only 11 months old. I went to the shop from where I bought it and they told me that if they sent it back to Microsoft it could take six weeks to replace. When they realised there were no armed police nearby they then calmed me down by telling me that I could also use a special Microsoft service to expedite this. As a result no one died and the shop wasn't horribly destroyed. Microsoft were awesome and a few days I had delivered by courier a brand spanking new Surface. I did, however, have to configure it for my needs.
• On the day of the Venture Wiesn in Munich (an event I had been advised to attend by a VC) I developed my third ever migraine. I took a pill my doctor had prescribed for this eventuality. Instead of feeling "foggy" I now felt "woozy" but not better. I checked the details of the medicine on line and worked out from its half-life that I would be ok to have a beer later on that evening. I ended up having four beers at the Venture Wiesn and felt much better. Made good contacts there.
• A few evenings ago my modem suddenly died. In the morning I had to go to a local DT shop, buy a new one straight away and then set it up. Turns out the modem included a firewall with an email service whitelist which is, apparently, updated by DT on a regular basis. But my email service provider is in the US and so wasn't on the whitelist. After a bit of investigation I manually added it.
• And yesterday I went into town with the alertness of a zombie. I had forgotten to renew my transit ticket and, for the first time ever, was unlucky enough to suddenly be ticket inspected. Not a cheap experience.

Better news:

• A week or just over ago I had a Skype call with an interim manager who knows some angels. Although what we are doing isn't in their space, he reckoned we had a good idea. He also added that we need some traction, at least a couple of customers, even for angels.
• We have a young IT guy volunteering to help us in his spare time. It will take a little while to bring him up to speed on how we do things but once he understands this he will probably be more productive than me - even though he had limited time due to work reasons.
• We're pursuing a third co-founder who has been a bit unlucky recently but hopefully will be able to join us.