Sophia Perl of Wisdom

A business based on anonymous confessions

I’m sure most of you have heard about PostSecret in which people send in postcards with your confession.  I came across another website called TruuConfessions.com targeted towards women.  I thought it was interesting actually in that women definitely do love their gossip.  When I read the About Us section which I always do on new startup websites, the founder talked about anonymous confessions as being therapeutic.  OK, I can maybe buy that.  Now, when someone posts a confession, she can categorize the confession into a category and then others can comment or say “me too” in response.

I like the general idea, but I don’t think the website layout makes it easy to contribute.  For instance, the confessions start halfway down the website, so I have to look down and then scroll down to see even more.  Just about all of the confessions are anonymous which they should be in my opinion, so why give the option of having a profile that can identify yourself.  What factors indicate that a confession is popular?  How do you distinguish the juicy gossip?

I’m thinking that there’s probably a twitter confessions website out there too.

Try out a VC pitch feedback event

I have a friend who decided to attend a VC pitch roundtable event for the first time.  He asked if I knew anything about that event and to be honest I did not know anyone who had attended such of an event.   BUT, I said, look it’s $60 or so, just try it once, worse case you get to network with some VCs.  So he went.

Before the event, you get the bios of the VCs so that you get an idea of what each VC’s expertise is in, possibly even cater your pitch based on this.  If you want to sign up, you can pitch for 90 seconds to a panel of 5 or so VC judges otherwise you can be a spectator.  The judging is based on whether that particular VC would fund the venture on a scale of 1-5.  Apparently, the 90 seconds was not enforced so my friend ended up feeling cheated hahahaha.  It’s OK because it takes more skills to sell in 90 seconds than it does in 5 minutes.  Eleven “companies” pitched in front of 30-40 people and my friend ended up in the middle, not bad, not good.  He really enjoyed the experience and even said that I need to do a pitch feedback event too.  I’m up for it.  Next time, you’ll see me. 

To find a VC pitch feedback event near you, try going to http://upcoming.yahoo.com and search on “startup pitch” and then your geographical location.  I did a search and came up with these bay area events:

• SVASE First Impressions Funding Pitch Feedback, with DFJ, ONSET Ventur…
• SVASE Funding Pitch Preparation Workshop
• SVASE Startup-U SFO: PPT Pitch

Make a friend who’s attending MBA school, get free work

I’ve done a posting before about free work from 5-6 MBA students.  I wanted to comment on another way to get your business some free work from MBA students.  If you have a friend who is currently attending MBA school, ask him/her to do a school project on your business.  This could be a competitive analysis, pricing strategy, marketing strategy, etc, etc.  All you have to do is convince your friend that your business is interesting enough to use as a case study.  If you don’t have a friend in MBA school yet, you should start making such friends or better yet convince  your existing friends to attend MBA school.  Hahahaha.  I’m kidding about the last one.

Good advice from a couple of entrepreneurs

I had the opportunity to ask a couple of entrepreneurs some questions and these were the takeaways that I thought were valuable.

• Funding pitch needs to have 3 things:
  1. Analysis of market (TAM) - Is it big enough?  Billion dollar?  Million dollar?
  2. Convincing management team - Can the team execute?  Do they have a track record?
  3. Technology / software / product - Can you show the tangible?  Demo / prototype?
• Focus on a market that you can dominate by 80%, it’s a mistake to start off too broad
• Figure out how to get your first customer, contact potential customers now and get some traction
• Even if you don’t have a product to show, you should still do some customer validation of your startup idea verbally