Launch48
Wraply featured in TechFluff TV Launch48 roundup
On the Sunday of Launch48, Hermione Way from TechFluff TV went round interviewing the team leaders again - and edited into this little video.
Starting Work on Wraply - Launch48 Day 1, Morning
This is part of a series of posts about the Launch48 weekend at the Paypal HQ in London, in which six web businesses developed a prototype of their idea in one weekend.
On the Friday evening we had selected which six projects would be developed, and my idea for Wraply was chosen (hurray!).
On Saturday morning we all gathered back at Paypal's offices for our first team meetings. I'd put together a plan the night before for how I wanted to organise the team, and started putting it into action.
Organising the Team
I believe that 15 people, particularly strangers, can't work effectively in one big group - as things would descend into endless debate. We only had two days, so we needed to focus on execution rather than discussion.
So the first thing I did was create small sub-teams, with someone clearly in charge of each. Those team leaders would then meet regularly to share information and make key decisions before going back to their teams to 'trickle-down' key info. I also tasked one team member with enabling communications between groups. He would float around all groups learning what they were up to, and then sharing what the other teams were up to. He would also monitor our overall progress against plan.
Setting the Vision, then Letting Go
I started by setting out the vision for Wraply, what we would achieve by Sunday afternoon, and how we would work to get there. Then we split into our four sub-teams and began work.
I then had to make sure I wasn't tempted to get too involved in the work of each team (because I love getting stuck in to design, coding etc), enabling the team leaders to take charge and make the decisions.
Here's what the teams began work on:
- The product team started designing the site in terms of the featureset, and the journey the users would take through the site.
- The development team started with a discussion about available resource (see below), and then key decisions about the language and framework we would develop on. They then started working out the data model based on an initial feed of info from the Product team.
- The marketing team began by setting up a blog, twitter, flickr and all sorts of accounts at other social sites, ready to start building buzz.
- The business team did some competitor research, set up relationships with one or two key partners (thanks to Reshma from Seedcamp for helping that to happen via her contacts on a Saturday morning!), and made decisions on the business model.
Finding Resources
On Saturday morning our lead developer, Ram, was worried that we didn't have enough people on the team with PHP experience. So one of my first tasks was to try to bring extra people onto the team to help.
I began asking around, and was pointed towards Iman Samizadeh, who had arrived on that Saturday and was looking to join a team.
When it comes to getting what the team needs, I have no shame - so I ended up actually begging on my knees for Iman to join our team. Thankfully he did, and turned out to be a fantastic developer - really smart, with a lot of experience of the Paypal APIs that we really needed.
Lunch
The teams made great progress, and as we were all so deep in work one of the team members (Brij) and I popped out to get pizzas for everyone from Strada. Brij used his negotiation skills to get a 50% discount and we marched back triumphant with 10 pizzas, and other snacks.
Startups are all about begging and blagging!
Interviewed on TechFluff TV
On the Saturday of the Launch48 weekend I was interviewed by Hermione Way of Techfluff TV about Wraply.
Launch48 - the Wraply Pitch
In my previous post I wrote about the first part of the Launch48 weekend - the conference giving advice and training to web entrepreneurs.
To recap, the idea of Launch48 was for 150 entrepreneurs, developers, designers and others to gather in the Paypal HQ in London to develop 6 web businesses over a weeekend.
At 7pm on Friday the 16th October, the time came for everyone to pitch their business ideas.
I'd been trying to decide between four different ideas I had that I thought would be suitable for developing on a weekend like this - but before all the presentations started we had to register the idea we were going to pitch. I'd been blogging on the Launch48 site all afternoon to get other delegates feedback on the ideas to help me pick one, and as I stood in the registration queue I chose Wraply.
The Idea
The concept of Wraply is that the gifts we really want are out of the budgets of our friends, family and colleagues as individuals - but if they all grouped together to give a gift you'd get the perfect present. Wraply enables you to create a gift page for your present, and then promote it to anyone you know - who can then contribute towards it. It saves them time and effort, and prevents you from getting unwanted presents.
I would have two minutes to explain the idea, the customer need and the business model! This would be tough.
The Pitch
Altogether I think somewhere near 30 people pitched ideas - and the evening demonstrated lesson number 1 from the weekend: Presentation skills are vital in business. There were some good ideas that the audience didn't really understand because they weren't communicated well enough - and there were some ideas the audience couldn't even hear!
Fortunately presentations are something I'm well versed at - I do public speaking professionally - so being heard and being clear wouldn't be a problem. What was difficult was communicating a whole business idea, along with revenue model etc, in just two minutes.
It's part of the reason why I chose to pitch Wraply, because it's such a simple idea which many people can identify with.
My presentation went fairly well - but one surprise of the evening was that two other people pitched almost identical ideas with different brands! That showed me two things:
- It's incredible how often your 'amazingly unique' idea gets dreamed up by someone else, completely independently. That's why smart people refuse to sign NDAs before being pitched an idea. The idea matters less than the execution - you just have to get on and make your idea happen.
- It's a good idea. If 3 out of 30 people had spotted this need out of a world of business opportunities, then there's something in it.
Reshma from Seedcamp suggested we merge into one project, which we agreed to - but the organisers wanted to keep track of exactly whose ideas were the ones voted through, so asked us only to merge once the voting was complete.
Wraply and one of the other gift pitches went through to the second round - and then Wraply was voted through to the final six. So we were pleased to welcome the other two gift idea people into the Wraply team for the weekend.
Winning Teams
The business ideas selected to be developed over the weekend were:
- Wraply.com - my idea for a group gift-giving site.
- The Amazing iPhone Race - using GPS to create a game using the iPhone.
- VA finder - enabling individuals to use the services of virtual PAs.
- Jaza - allows you to use your phone to scan the barcode of a bottle of wine in restaurant and find out more info about it, or buy some bottles for home.
- Verifi - helps you protect your creative work by timestamping and encrypting it.
- Given.org - enables you to seek sponsorship for charity events from big companies via Facebook.
Selecting Teams
Now that the six teams had been chosen, the leaders had to stand in different places in the room, and all the other delegates could choose which team they wanted to work on by going to stand with that person. At wraply we ended up with a team of about 15 to start with (although 3 more gravitated to our team over the weekend).
We went for our first team meeting, to introduce ourselves, and it quickly became clear that the first problem to solve was a lack of developers. We had a PHP dev, a Java dev, and a .net dev! We decided to develop the site in PHP, and my first challenge as leader was going to be to get the resource the team needed to succeed - find out how in my next post (hint: it involved begging on my knees!).
But what was great is that we had a really strong team on frontend and user experience. We want our target customers' parents to be able to use the site, so this was important.
End of day 1
So, with the pitches over and the teams selected, we all headed home or to hotels for the night - and I sat up working out a plan of action for the weekend.
In my next post I'll set out what we did on the first day of actually building the prototype of Wraply.
Wraply is born at Launch48
Although the idea for Wraply was conceived some time ago, it was born at the Launch48 weekend on the 16th-18th October 2009. In my next few posts I'll write about what we did, and what we learned in this process.
This first post is about the conference on the Friday - which gave us training and advice to prepare for the weekend's work. During the day I also did a liveblog of the Launch48 conference on my personal blog.
Launch48 was organised by a group of web entrepreneurs, and hosted by Paypal at their UK head office in Richmond, London. Support was also provided by Amazon, Google and other big web players.
The idea of the event was to bring together around 150 entrepreneurs, developers, designers and others - with the aim of creating 6 web businesses by the end of the weekend.
On the Friday a series of speakers gave us advice on law, marketing, and other skills that would help us to create the business in the best possible way.
Some great points came out of these talks, and I'll just give the headlines here:
- PR is the best way to market a start-up.
- Keep the legals very very simple at first. It's important to make sure the company owns the IP. It's also important to have good Articles of Association that set out what happens to the shareholdings at each stage - if someone leaves etc. But don't overcomplicate things.
- Over the Launch48 weekend, teams will have 15-20 members, but they will need to slim down to fewer members after the weekend to be effective. The success of the last event, VouChaCha, is now 2 people.
- It's vital to put a lot of thought into designing the user interface, and streamlining the user experience.
- Decide on a clear business model from the start, even if it will be a while before you can implement it. Advertising is not a good business model for startups.
- The first funding comes from the founders, friends and family. The next round is likely to come from business angels, with VC money potentially being invested later. But the main thing is to keep costs minimal.
Here are some of the presentations from the Friday conference.
Fabio De Barnardi shared his experiences of taking part in the last Launch48:
Lawyer, and co-founder of the famed Bootlaw, Danvers Baillieu, shared his legal advice for Launch48 founders (Link has the full text of his speech).
Reshma Sohani from Seedcamp gave a very useful presentation on the various revenue models available to web startups, prompting founders to think about the best way to make money:
And Ryan Notz, founder of the successful web startup MyBuilder, gave a presentation on Building What Customers Need:
After the conference finished at around 6pm on the Friday, there was a short break - and then the moment came for everyone to pitch their ideas. Out of all these pitches, 6 would be selected to go into development over the weekend.
In my next post, I'll write about how I came to pitch Wraply - and how it went!
