Photo courtesy of Official U.S. Navy Imagery (Creative Commons)
By Michael Girdley
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
Pitch your idea. Pitch some more. Then keep pitching. Do it perhaps hundreds of times.
That’s the only way for entrepreneurs to get their product and technology pitch up to a level that will impress potential investors, according to Cole Wollak. He gave a presentation at Geekdom in San Antonio on Wednesday night.
Cole helped run the most recent Techstars Cloud program held at Geekdom earlier this year. TechStars Cloud had the members of the program repeat their pitches dozens, if not hundreds of times. The results showed.
Here, the CEO of TechStars Cloud program member Keen.io shows that even engineers can pitch:
Why do we care, anyway? Investors care about the idea and technology, right? Well, the initial pitch is the most important interaction an entrepreneur will have with an investor. It’s where a first impression is made. Ultimately, an investor knows that an entrepreneur unable to organize him or herself to present a coherent, persuasive, concise pitch will also be highly unlikely to create a good, profitable business.
Some tips from Cole:
Minimize the use of gimmicks or jokes. One per pitch if at all.
Keep it short and high-level. Notice Techstars pitches are 5-7 minutes in length.
Don’t presume anything about your audience.
Stories are a great way to personalize a talk and get people’s attention.
Resources are available at Geekdom for budding entrepreneurs and technologists honing their pitch.
The new office hours of the staff members are one example. As demonstrated by the discussion amongst the attendees at the talk, the other members of Geekdom can be a great resource as well.
Dan Graham, CEO of BuildASign.com, photo courtesy of WeAreAustinTech.com
This morning, I spoke with Dan Graham, co-founder and CEO of BuildASign.com, about the Austin-based company’s expansion into the consumer market.
BuildASign.com, launched in 2005, makes signs, bumper stickers, magnets, banners and more for the business market. Realtors are chief among its customers. The privately held company expects to do $40 million in revenue this year, up from $30 million in 2011.
This week, BuildASign.com launched Printcopia using its internal resources to produce a home décor site focused on the consumer market.
“We really noticed a growing market in the home and consumer space,” Graham said.
Printcopia allows consumers to upload photos from their computer or other site like Facebook or Instagram and to convert those snapshots into artwork to put on a wall. That means it can be as easy as a few clicks of the mouse to create unique wall décor featuring pets, family, vacations and more.
Printcopia started “almost by accident” because BuildASign began to get requests for home décor products, Graham said.
“We looked at the market online,” and saw opportunity, he said. The core competencies of its BuildASign.com business complement the consumer space as well, he said. That means BuildASign.com can print all of the Printcopia products at its headquarters and warehouse in North Austin. It doesn’t need to hire additional staff or buy new equipment, he said.
As the site grows, Graham might add a team more focused exclusively on the consumer market but right now, they can handle the expansion with the existing staff of 230 employees.
“It’s an exciting time for the home décor space,” Graham said.
The home décor market is a multi-billion dollar market but consumers haven’t been able to print their own wall art and create other unique photo décor products online until recently.
“We are seeing a general market awareness grow rapidly,” Graham said. “This kind of website didn’t make any sense until a few years ago. It’s only recently that it has become mainstream.”
That’s because new technology has made printing and ordering the products less expensive online.
“The machines we print our home décor products on didn’t exist a year and a half ago” Graham said. “The ability to produce these products affordably didn’t’ exist.” Printcopia competes with some other online competitors but by and large its biggest competition comes from local photographers and photography shops that charge four to six times what it would cost to purchase items from Printcopia, Graham said.
“The challenge that is facing the market right now is one of awareness,” Graham said. About 90 percent of the market still doesn’t know they can purchase photo home décor products online, he said.
Printcopia follows a similar path in educating consumers as BuildASign.com did in educating businesses about the ability to order print products online cheaper and faster than traditional brick and mortar outlets, Graham said.
So far, consumers have reacted positively to the Printcopia products, Graham said.
“Customers light up when they see the finished product,” he said. “Repeat business is a big part of the business.”
Just in time to decorate dorm rooms and renovate empty nest homes, BuildASign.com has launched Printcopia, a new home decor site.
Austin-based BuildASign.com, has grown quickly since its launch in 2005. But mainly, it’s growth has been organic with a few acquisitions along the way.
The company now has more than 230 employees and $40 million in revenue projected this year.
This move into home decor with Printcopia is taking the business into the next level, according to Molly Wilson, its spokeswoman.
Printcopia lets customers create artwork from their photos. The printing options range from “basic and framed prints to stretched canvases, panoramic and acrylic prints.”
“Printcopia is all about bringing high quality, personalized home decor to consumers at a really accessible price,” Matt Hawkins, brand manager for Printcopia, said in a news release. “What’s more, we’re focused on making the design process fast and easy, so that anybody with a photo and a few minutes can create something really special.”
The site allows people to upload from files, Facebook or Instagram. The site also has built-in editing tools allowing shoppers to size, crop and alter the image such as converting images to black and white or sepia.
For more on BuildASign.com, read the profile Silicon Hills News did on Dan Graham, its founder, last month.
Also, the creative people at We Are Austin Tech, posted this interview with Graham recently.
It’s the doldrums days of August and lots of people are getting ready to go back to school.
So we figured we should get into the learning mode too.
And who better to school us in the ways of startups than Austin’s Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and multiple other startups. Thanks to the great folks at We Are Austin Tech, we’re going to share Cohen’s words of wisdom on the startup scene in Austin. The biggest mistake he sees startup founders make is not surveying their customers before creating their product. It’s so important to talk to customers about what they are interested in and to meet their needs. While creating a cool technology product might impress your friends and family, you’ve got to find out if the market wants or needs that new technology application.
Have you dreamed of having a private cloud?
San Antonio-based Rackspace seeks to make that dream a reality.
Today, the company released its private cloud software, code named “Alamo” and available on the OpenStack platform. It is available as a free download from the Rackspace website.
The software can be used in Rackspace’s data centers or in other data centers. Rackspace is also offering support services. The software provides companies with greater controls in a public cloud environment. “We believe that the majority of our customers and cloud users will be running hybrid cloud environments for a long time,” Jim Curry, general manager of Private Cloud business at Rackspace, said in a news release. “Today’s announcement allows businesses to utilize their existing investment in their own datacenter resources to run an open cloud solution for additional control and customization and also take advantage of Rackspace’s datacenter options.”
Tonight, Rackspace is having a launch part at Capital Factory in Austin to celebrate its new software. The party features product demonstrations, giveaways, food and beverages as well as music provided by DJ Sean Anderson of Rackspace and Andrei Matei of AppFog. The party starts at 7 p.m. and runs until 9 p.m. To find out more, check out Rackspace’s invitation.
Every week, We Are Austin Tech, a group of entrepreneurs, technologists and other volunteers release a video highlighting someone who has contributed to the local technology industry.
Last week’s video put the spotlight on Jason Cohen, founder of WPEngine and other startups including co-founding Capital Factory.
We Are Austin Tech seeks to tell the story of the city’s vibrant technology community blending the stories of veteran entrepreneurs with others involved in the industry such as public relations experts, journalists and more.
This week, the video features Bijoy Goswami, the founder of Bootstrap Austin. Susan Lahey, a reporter with Silicon Hills News, did this profile on him earlier this year.
It’s that time of the year again when your social media news feeds get clogged with people asking you to vote for their panel. South by Southwest PanelPicker, in which votes and comments count for 30 percent of the decision making on whether a panel makes it, went live this morning. SXSW uses a crowd-source method to winnow the not so great ideas from the great ideas. Voting runs through Aug. 31.
And if you’re looking for something to vote for you could cast a vote for Silicon Hills News’ presentation “The Myths and Reality of a New Media Entrepreneur.” It’s one of those tell it like it is talks. I’ll let it all hang out and talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of being a new media entrepreneur.
Here’s my pitch: “On the Internet, anyone can publish a blog, become a video star or take amazing photos. But running a business is another story. Making a buck from online publishing takes a lot of time and work. It’s possible to earn a living as a new media site, but it takes a lot of skills and connections and time to make it work. In this session, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned during the past year and a half creating SiliconHillsNews.com, a regional technology publication covering technology entrepreneurs and companies in the Austin and San Antonio region known as Silicon Hills.”
But enough about me, let’s talk about you. If you’re in Austin or San Antonio or parts in between (heck we’re in Wimberley – that’s Texas Hill Country living at its finest folks) and you’ve submitted a panel for 2013 SXSW Interactive then leave a comment or send me an e-mail and I’ll plug your panel. Right here. We reach thousands of Central Texas’ most plugged in people so let us know and we’ll spread the word. It’s SXSW panel picking time right here in the Silicon Hills of Texas.
Occasionally I stumble across a Kickstarter product and I slap my head and say “I wish I had thought of that.”
Of course, I wouldn’t have thought of this one because I’m a photographer who faces many challenges in life like taking a photo without the batteries dropping out of my cheapo camera.
But I do like this product and its ingenuity and it’s based right here in River City that’s San Antonio, Texas.
The team members behind Soloshot are the kinds of bright, young minds that San Antonio is working so hard to attract and cultivate. The fact that their Kickstarter campaign already exceeded its $50,000 goal with more than 200 backers and 21 days to go shows that San Antonio’s creative community is alive and well.
Soloshot is a device that connects to your camera and automatically rotates it to keep it pointed at you while you surf, skateboard, kiteboard, bike, unicycle, pogo stick hop or whatever you like to do. It’s like having a robotic camera operator.
The team behind the invention are “sports minded artists and engineer” who created Soloshot so they could capture their own footage while engaged in a variety of sports.
The team includes Chris Boyle from Queens, N.Y. who thought up the idea while surfing.
“Chris studied biomedical engineering at Boston University. At only 22 years old, Chris filed his first patent and formed his first company focused on the development of a catheter delivered heart valve,” according to their Kickstarter campaign. “Opportunity came calling from the desert, and Chris moved his company from California to San Antonio, TX where he joined a partnership of talented physicians, scientists and engineers working on bringing semiconductor manufacturing techniques to the medical field. After this revolutionary technology was licensed by a fortune 500 company, Chris packed up his boards and headed back to the beach looking for some rest and inspiration. Chasing a wave he had only seen photos of, he headed to Tortola’s Apple Bay. The wave did not disappoint, the creative juices again began to flow and the idea for SOLOSHOT was born.”
His partner, Scott Taylor is originally from California’s Bay area and has degrees from the University of Michigan in Naval Architecture, Marine Engineering, and Chemical Engineering. He is also an expert in wakeboarding and owned two wakeboard and waterski schools. The partners met in the Dominican Republic where they were surfing and kiteboarding.
“One day, over a post kiteboarding beer, Chris told Scott about the automatic camera project he’d been working on. The two have been working furiously on SOLOSHOT ever since.”
The company is based in San Antonio because of Alex Sammons, its product development and manufacturing expert who has experience attaching cameras to remote controlled helicopters. Sammons has a chemistry degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Other team members include Ryan Savage and John O’Callaghan.
At Geekdom, the focus isn’t just to create the next big tech company, but to inspire future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.
Already, the San Antonio-based coworking and collaborative center, located on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, has hosted robotics programs for kids.
That’s just the start.
On Sept. 29th, the first Geekdom SparkEd program kicks off, said Louis Pacilli, the center’s director of education. The program will run from September through June, and during the school year, Pacilli expects to serve approximately 1,500 middle school boys and girls in a total of 30 weekend camps. Each camp will have between 40 to 50 kids from numerous school districts around San Antonio, Pacilli said.
Pacilli works with San Antonio middle schools to select the kids for a weekend program focused on a entrepreneurship, website design, programming or robotics. The kids get to vote on which curriculum they want to pursue, Pacilli said.
“We want to teach kids about storytelling through entrepreneurship,” he said.
For the entrepreneurship program, the weekend activities focus on business concepts such as pitching, marketing, research and writing a business plan, Pacilli said. The programs follow the guidelines of the Texas Education Standards, he said.
Pacilli has sent information to select middle schools and he plans to work with teachers and counselors to select the first kids to participate in the program, which will be free, he said. He’s looking for kids who need inspiration.
The program will rely heavily on local mentors from companies like Boeing, Rackspace, USAA, Lockheed and others, Pacilli said. It will also use local high school and college students, he said.
“We have to get the kids that are disconnected to school and re-excite them,” Pacilli said. “We want to teach them that geek is chic.”
Earlier this year, ParkMe launched a free iPhone app that allows people to check real-time availability of garage and street parking for areas around downtown Austin and the University of Texas.
The company also made quite an impression at South by Southwest in March. It placed paper boots and fake parking tickets on hundreds of cars all around the convention center. The clever marketing stunt got the attention of the media as well as consumers.
Recently, ParkMe’s Kevin Blomberg took time to answer a few questions about how the company, based in Santa Monica, Calif. has been doing since its launch.
Q. Can you explain what ParkMe does?
ParkMe is the leading provider of static and real-time parking data in the US, Canada and Europe. We provide robust data (parking rates, hours of operation, entry points, occupancy levels etc) to navigation systems and cars, as well as through our free iPhone app. Ultimately, our goal is to change the paradigm of navigation by including parking, the last and oftentimes most important leg of the journey. We take the thinking out of this annoying process by empowering drivers with intelligent parking information.
Q. Where did you come up with the idea for ParkMe?
ParkMe (formerly Parking In Motion) began in 2009 as a backlash to the daily nuisance of trying to find parking in downtown Santa Monica. We realized that the navigation experience was incomplete without including parking, and that drivers needed in addition to being directed to the front door of a destination. There was a serious lack of this type information out there, so we began to work with cities and private operators to aggregate many different types of data. And as we went forward, it became clear to us that the industry was mostly still in analog mode and lacked the key component of technology. Much like real-time traffic reports, we think people deserve up-to-the-minute parking info.
Q. Who makes up the team behind ParkMe?
Two local boys, Sam Friedman (CEO) and Alex Israel (COO), initially formed the company in 2009 as a response to the daily frustration of parking in Los Angeles. These two humbly started the operation out of Sam’s garage, and now ParkMe maintains 15 full time employees in our beautiful downtown Santa Monica offices.
Q. What is your market?
There is indeed a very large market for our service. We’re not only marketing our app to transient consumers, drivers and tourists, but also to navigation and car companies. Additionally, any local business or events site can embed our free web map widget onto their websites to allow their customers to reach them faster and more efficiently. Everybody needs to park, so the opportunities are vast.
Q. How does ParkMe make money?
Good question. Our app is completely free, but we make money by licensing our data to navigation systems, third party app developers, and eventually directly to automobiles. We also work with reservation and payment platforms, and derive profit from those transactions. However, ParkMe’s future is certainly in car navigation systems, and we’ve already been approached by major manufacturers about including our data in their vehicles.
Q. Who are some of your customers? How many people are using the ParkMe app?
Because our app is free, we don’t make money off our transient users. We’re heavily focused on the “car-sumer,” as we like to call it and I’d say we have somewhere between 40k – 70k downloads.
Q. What differentiates your company from the competition?
We don’t really have any direct competitors, but the closest ones are just focusing on the US, whereas our database reached Europe, Australia, and eventually into parking nightmare places like India. Also, our so-called competitors aren’t giving their customers “real-time” data. Not only can we tap into existing infrastructure to provide valuable data such as a garage’s occupancy, we also have a patent pending algorithm that shows the availability of on-street meters.
Q. How is your company financed?
We have been funded by two very well respected firms with tremendous experience in the startup and transportation technology realm. The first is Fontinalis Ventures, which is based out of Detroit and co-founded by Bill Ford. IDG Ventures is our other sponsor, and they are based out of Silicon Valley with a history of backing many prominent startups and larger tech companies.
Q. What’s the biggest mistake so far?
Well, our company is mostly comprised of people in their 20s and 30s, so there have certainly been times where we’ll try a tactic, or an app design idea that won’t work. Learning from mistakes is something that is emphasized office-wide. A lot of us are establishing a company for the first time, and to say it’s been a flawless experience would be untruthful. That being said, we’ve been deftly able to learn and grow alongside the company.
Q. What’s the company’s biggest achievement?
I’d say it’s hands down our launch of real-time parking with the city of Austin, which was preceded by our SXSW guerrilla marketing stunt. If you haven’t seen it, please check out the video of us “booting” all the cars in the downtown core. People loved the stunt, and were very good sports about it. But clearly, that was a great setup for our subsequent launch with the city. Austin now has fully operational, up-to-the-minute parking information in its downtown core.
Q. Why did you choose to expand into Austin?
Several reasons, but mainly because of its population and economic boom. Forbes recently called Austin the fastest growing US city, and of course it has also become a hotbed for innovations in media and technology. Another reason was the willingness of Austin’s civic leaders to work with a startup like ParkMe to help residents and tourists have better access to this valuable transit information.
