Uplifting article

Well, a bit uplifting if you are in the mobile messaging app business (TechCrunch).

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.

Takeaways from the Entrepreneurs Night - Silicon Valley Style Pitch Event

It was a toss-up between going and doing more app stuff but I decided to go.

Just before leaving for the event I had, in any case, fixed a major problem I had spent several days working on (and on which a real developer would have spent an hour on).

It was worth attending. As Axel Schultz, the organiser, said, it was the best pitch event so far, even against San Francisco and Berlin.

Here are my takeaway:

• should have a significant number of businesses who have been canvassed, preferably before writing code, but in the double figures
• "obsession makes a good entrepreneur"
• consider equity-based crowd funding where you actually get a 100 or so experienced investors who can help you. This becomes part of the value added investor thinking which also includes "smart money" 
• Axel like the idea of two people developing a business to actual traction
• Munich will probably take over from Berlin in terms of startup activity in two or three years
• For startups speed beats perfection

Not fantastic

When I go to the shops on the underground, tram or whatever, I am still working by reading startup and tech blogs on my mobile (now a bit easier with the iPhone 6s Plus).

And of course TechCrunch combines startup and technology subjects so is often read by me.

Seems we are reaching a point of inflection in the startup world according to this and this

Long one

Been working on the app since 0830 this morning (more like 0805).

I made no progress before lunch. And afterwards I only made progress by working on something else (I use Trello to keep track of app issues - like I'm a little one-man-band-of-Agile-hipsters).

So, I did make some progress today but there is a lot to do.

I  also found the inspiration for a five minute summary of what the company is doing for a business event on Saturday.

Hopefully have more steam tomorrow.

(And yes I know an 11 hour day is no biggie for startups but most of what I'm doing is totally new to me and therefore rather tiring).

dun dun ... dun

An SaaS provider wanted our D-U-N-S number (yes, that is how it is written).

But we are a baby-business (no, we don't sell babies, we are just small) and it could take two weeks to get one, apparently.

Except it turns out that Dun & Bradstreet have already assigned one to us.

More business progress

Having bought a box of paperclips on Friday (and securing strong interest from one business) yesterday I purchased an iPhone.

Although we already had access to one I thought it was time to get our own and settled on an iPhone 6s Plus for two reasons:

- although appery.io will "compile" for iOS pretty easily I think that as we go operational (at least in beta) I need to always have one on hand in case there are problems
- the larger screen of the Plus will be better when we demonstrate it


Also, we gained the serious interest of a business as another beta participant.