Alrightly then… TC50 2009 is over. I watched nearly ever presentation. Being a “start-up stalker” I wanted to see what companies followed in principal @victor_cheng ‘s book: Extreme Growth: A guide for Silicon Valley CEO’s. In this incredible short read Victor discusses the that “extreme growth” is the result of a business being built on a foundation of 5 main principles:
1) Competitive Advantage
2) Product / Service
3) Distribution Channel
4) The Promise
5) Target Customer
Target customer of course being the base. No customer = No sale. The “promise” as he describes it is actually the “promise” that your product or service actually solves a problem you’re target customer is having. Simple, but brilliant. Yet as I viewed the last 2 days of demos, it was amazing how many companies had a product or a service that actually made the cut to TC50 that didn’t have either: A target customer that had a problem:
Example:
iMo : Cool iPhone app, gaming market is big but really, does is solve a problem ?
cocodot : a more elegant evite: Where’s the problem solving ? E-vite’s successful for a reason: people use it! This guy said it would “Help guys get lucy with their wife’s or girlfriend’s”…. ?
Theswop.com: professional bartering : As Roelof Botha put it “I don’t like it. Money was invented for a reason, we’ve seen people try to use beans etc. and it doesn’t work. I wouldn’t invest”
None of these companies solved a problem nor were their target markets large enough to scale…. Many companies however did solve a problem like:
CitySourced: Allows users to report city vandalism, repairs via iPhone app
Threadsy: web app that allows you to consolidate all webmail accounts + twitter + facebook in one very nice UI
Mota Motors: web service that takes out the “guess work” and “distrust” of the used car market.
All in all a great event with great ideas, but an even greater education on what VC’s look for in a start-up!
Check it all out here : www.techcrunch.com
No comments:
Post a Comment