Launch 48 - The Final Presentations
The Final Presentations – the final part in my War and Peace review of the Launch48 weekend. Parts 1, 2 and 3 hidden here, here and here.
I said in my first post that I am not one to sugar coat things and I’m not going to start here. Please don’t take anything too personally – I admire everyone for turning up and achieving something over the weekend, but....well I’ll cover the but in a minute.
So the final presentations started around 4.30 and went through to just after 6. Some teams just had one member stand up, some had a couple on stage, some managed four or five as they presented different parts. Considering that most of the presenters don’t exactly spend all their days doing this sort of thing the quality of the presentations was fantastic. They had microphones, but everyone spoke well, everyone seemed fairly confident, added a bit of humour and I think introduced their product satisfactorily. Andrew Dancy was the revelation of the event. When he pitched on Friday night he was a small nerdy guy who bought a sense of humour to a pretty boring product. Come Sunday night he was 10 feet tall and had everyone laughing. On Friday night all the girls wished Fabio was going to be in a team, by Sunday night they all wished they'd been in Andrew's team.
Before the next event I would suggest that everyone reads one or two articles on powerpoint presentations (or whatever tech you use). Complicated graphs and tables full of figures work for board meetings (sometimes) but not for presentations in this environment. Some of the slide decks had way too much information (our team included). There are various rules around, 7 lines of 7 words, minimum 28pt font etc – learn a few and use them next time.
There were no winners or losers, there was a write up on Techcrunch which Mike Butcher managed to push onto the main .com site which was a nice reward for all the hard work and hopefully demonstrated to the rest of the world that London and Europe can hold these sorts of events too – you don’t have to be in the Valley or Seattle.
So onto my review of the sites – don’t read this if you don’t want a big dose of honesty. I’ve done them in order of the Techcrunch article. I’m going to say this here because it applies to 4 out of the 6 – I was really disappointed with how far they had got with their product. During Launch48 everyone had a lot of energy. If you end with a somewhat marketable product then you can probably maintain that momentum, make a few tweaks and deliver a “Minimum Viable Product”(Google Eric Ries for more info). By failing to deliver anything close to a real working product I think teams have severely limited their chance of future success and probably reduced how good they feel about the whole event. Also I am quite aware that not all teams had access to designers – I’m certainly capable of looking past the design.
Wraply – Mike Butcher slated this product on Techcrunch. I feel perhaps they ignored the fact that there were new people in the room and didn’t tell the whole story – instead carrying on from what was said on Friday night. Personally I think this product has a chance of success. There are products like this in the US and I see no reason why we couldn’t have one in the UK. I don’t think Amazon etc are competitors, it is not a wishlist product in that way. I do wish they had taken on my idea of targeting parents of school kids, at my daughters school we all get in together for each kid – 20 x 5 quid = £100 quid, which results in a much better present and a whole lot less wrapping paper. But overall this was the first product where I was disappointed with the amount they had achieved. It did some basic things but looked VERY “prototypy”. I really would have thought it would be easy to get this out in a weekend. I believe Steve the ideas man does not live in London and with the state this was in I will be interested if they can make it happen without being able to get everyone together a couple more times – I see on Twitter that they are trying. I hope they do as I feel there is a market – although I doubt it will make anyone rich.
Grapeshots – I love wine (drinking a 94 Californian Cab Sauv as I type this) and this idea was similar to my beer idea, but I could never get behind it. Unfortunately I believe they ended up with a very small team which is a bit unfortunate. I think there is a market for people who want to find the wine they have just drunk, unfortunately I just don’t think the product will ever work – too many wines in the market. I was also quite surprised at the lack of development on the site, but they did have a very small team. I’m amazed that Mike Butcher liked the product, hopefully he will also like www.realalefinder.com which I will pitch at the next Launch48. The inside word is the team had a great time (maybe they spent too much time on product research..hiccup) and probably won’t be taking the product any further. I think that is probably for the best.
iRaceU-I think they had to change their name because of possible legal issues. New name is OK. If I was ranking things in a top 3 I’d say these guys came first. iPhone app that they demonstrated was a bit buggy and wasn’t as sleak as it could have been but it was still a work in progress and I’d say they were on the verge of getting far enough. People bought up legal issues with racing around M25 etc. My GPS says I’ll be home in 27 minutes and I always try and get home faster, so I don’t see this as a major issue. Yes some idiot will start recording their fastest time doing something illegal but downloading an iPhone app is hardly anonymous so you’d be foolish. Unfortunately I just don’t really see why you would want to race some random person around the place – but please see my note at the end re social media. I believe they are trying to make this work so it will be interesting how it goes.
TaskDoer –Initially I thought this was somewhat of interest. Unfortunately again I don’t think they got far enough. Their competitor analysis highlighted loads, but none of them were real competitors as they seemed to be aiming for an untapped market. eLance and the like do not provide people that will find an insurance quote for you, or a nice restaurant to take your wife too. I had trouble thinking how they could solve this problem. It would appear they had trouble working it out too, as did the final audience. I have not heard if they are going to continue.
Protected.cc – This was my and everyone else’s winner of the weekend. I don’t think they had anything too technically difficult to solve, but they managed to solve it. They had a pretty much fully working product (for some reason Mike Butcher missed this point – but I know he does tend to be busy whilst at conferences, and unless you say it is finished and has 5,000 users it is hard to get him to look up – he admits this openly). I also really like the way they had decided to focus on a niche. I’d always had an issue that if this was general you’d spend your entire life in court as a witness claiming your product was secure. By choosing to focus on the design community they may have reduced this problem as the two parties will know each other and this level of proof could stop things getting near court – depends how much the idea someone has ripped off is worth. I don’t know if they have any chance of ever making any money, but to me they achieved what all Launch48 teams should set out to achieve. It appears they are certainly going to try and take the idea forward (Sherene must have sent about 500 tweets about it!).
Given.org – I buy quite a few domains, and manage to sell the odd one. People often tell me that domains are dead, you don’t need a short domain to succeed etc. The reaction of people to this domain for this product tells me that those people are talking through their arse. We got a lot of extra attention purely because of the domain. Taking that out of the equation I rank our team as second in terms of delivering something of interest. All the parts didn’t quite add up, Paypal isn’t integrated yet – but we had something that gives us momentum going forward. In the whole weekend I was never 100% behind the idea itself, there were a few non-technical issues that were really nagging me, but when I got home into some peace and quiet I think I managed to come up with a solution for most of our problems. I’m not going to detail it here as I haven’t talked with our team about it, but we meet next week and I’m sure we will have something to present in December. Our pitch was helped by having Lucian and Sam present, two young guys that love being the center of attention. We had a website and a facebook app. We had a marketing plan and we had answers for questions. It is still a long path to delivery for us, but I suspect a small group will take it somewhere. Will I be in that group? I don’t know. We had a lot of strong personalities and if all those personalities want to go forward it wont work, so I’d step back. If just one or two want to go forward? Watch out world, because I think we might have something that works.
And Finally
A few last thoughts, things I probably should have mentioned earlier.
I learnt a lot about social media and how young people like it. Oddly there were times when they convinced me of something and an hour later I was trying to sell their idea back to them because they no longer agreed. We had 20 year olds who had 1,000 friends on Facebook. I’ve always been fairly social but in my 37 years I’ve not met 1,000 people I want to be friends with on Facebook. I guess they have a different definition of friend, but I don’t quite understand how Facebook can be much use when you have that many friends in your feed, I struggle keeping up with my 100 or so.
I think two things they could add to the Friday event next time are a talk on Project Management, and a very frank talk on getting the bare minimum out the door so you have a working product (ie no scaling, no unit testing etc).
Apologies again to anyone I may have insulted, especially if your team was short on developers etc (although you could have expressed that in the board meetings). I haven't proof read what I wrote and I finished at 2am so sorry if it doesn't make sense or is a bit harsh.
Now if you are asking yourself who is this opinionated arse, I’m no one. I’ve purely written this to provide an honest appraisal of what I saw, with the hope that it will make the next event even better than this one- hopefully someone will want me in their team!! However I don’t think I’ve written one thing here that at least one other person didn’t express to me as well, so hopefully I’ve managed to provide some feedback that we can all learn from. I learnt a massive amount at the event, and also from analysing my thoughts to write these posts.
See you in January /February at the next event.
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