A blur

This evening I briefed someone who is basically an associate - he is not employed by us but wants to develop his mobile app dev skills, for which we will get some developed mobile apps.

Explaining the current set up was very tiring.

Also very tiring was everything else, before and after as we are getting prepared for a major (ish) presentation tomorrow.

Investors' seminar

Yesterday I went to an "Investment 101 Part 1 - Post Accelerator - A Three Part Series", a two hour meetup event whose guest was Kevin Czok (who totally deserves this name check, as did the organiser Jewell Sparks. As you know, when you are named checked in the ultimate startup blog you are living large).

Unlike some other startup meetings this was a tight two hours, around a conference centre in a law firm, with a slightly older, less hipster-ish, but still relaxed (the organising partner was also dressed down) attendance.

Here are my take-aways:

• a lot of VCs don't advertise, you have to seek them out and if you do, get an introduction rather than cold call.
• VCs tend to look for seven to 10 years of involvement in the business, well at least German ones do
• read Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld - I've already downloaded it to my Kindle.
• also check out Brad Feld's blog 
• if you have to incorporate in the US, it will probably be best in Delaware or California

When you approach VCs you have to:

• have a real business which has a solid, scalable model
• be respectful to everyone, some VCs are quite small and you may be lucky just to talk to a junior
• show traction and how you would use the money
• disclose anything (e.g. dormant co-founders) before you are found out
• take projections seriously - don't be glib
• don't forget to include legal costs
• have scenarios on what would you do if you raised more/less/none/exactly what you wanted
• some VCs will do convertible loans before series A round
• VCs might take 5 to 25% of equity depending on investment
• ultimately the deciding factor for VCs to invest is the team (including are they fun to work with - answer: yes we are)
• beware of liquidation preferences - better for a co-founds to have less equity 
• documents can be in English (yay!)
• business plans are less required by VCs (than by, for example, banks).
• a pitch desk can be 10 - 15 slides (with even ca 60 backup slides) and take 45 minutes of a 1.5 hour meeting with VCs - though the initial meeting may just 15 minutes. 

Foreign

With the apps all nicely working and being regularly updates I, and the Crazy Chicken, totally didn't notice that one of the apps was back to English.

I had reverted back to it a couple of weeks ago when trying to get the last bit of the code working. I'm not fluent in German (it's my third language - I don't have a second one) but I can read quite a bit of it without noticing that I am seeing actually foreign words.

We both need to keep aware of this risk.

Process

While I wait for the Crazy Chicken to find us some beta testers (she has better German than me so it makes sense for her to focus on this) I have been updating the apps on Google Play (we are still in private beta mode).

I'm now getting more into a process: I use Trello to store changes needed and track their progress (Kanban styleeee).

I am also developing a test sheet (which includes functionalities of the apps) and a release process.

Hmm, just like old days when I worked for corporates.

Progressed

So after three wasted weeks (almost four actually) because of flu both apps and the backend work.

At least sufficient for beta testing. The apps are even on Google Play albeit in beta only mode.

Now to find some more potential businesses who can test the apps - this is actually for the Crazy Chicken to do.

Less mush

Today I felt much better, though not fully recovered.

Appery.io had sent some advice to the last problem I was having and strangely everything seemed to work now.

It's like for the last three weeks I haven't been able to think with sufficient rigour and have missed obvious things.

Bit lesson learnt - sometimes when ill just accept and don't try

Mush

Three weeks ago, on the Sunday I started getting things wrong with the final bit of one of the apps I've been writing.

Around 8pm I gave up and went to a local bar which has a good selection of real ales.

I have a couple there, maybe three.

The next day I felt awful. Not from the beer but fever and sore throat etc. and generally very week. I think the problems I had with the app were crypto symptoms of the virus that was infecting me.

I worsened and worsened. The next week I was able to go to the doctor who confirmed my fever and told me there was an epidemic in Munich and that expecting it to take a week to recover was a bit optimistic.

During this time I couldn't even look at the app. In fact, getting to the sofa was an achievement.

By the end of the second week I sent a support request to Appery.io who gently advised me of the flipping obvious problem.

On Monday of this week, the third week of this malaise, I was able to go into the centre of Munich and do some shopping. There's a quite good basement supermarket in one of the department stores.

I didn't buy anything there but found myself taking the escalator up to the ground floor and exit. Whilst carrying a shopping basket. I realised just in time: it was close but I narrowly avoided shop lifting an empty shopping basket.

So even this week I haven't been switched on.

I did carefully play around with the app in the last couple of days but got quite into a tizz about it. Although Appery had solved one problem for me there is now another one.

Today has been the only day I have felt up to writing a full support ticket to them (or indeed update this blog). So that is basically three weeks wasted due to influenza.

Meanwhile my business partner has also been ill. And so has another associate who has been helping out on the business plan.

And the business who was very keen to beta test our app has closed down. No doubt we will find others.