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!