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.