This year’s IDEA IDOL promo video starring David Langer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu1DHCyG8xE

IDEA IDOL is Oxford Entrepreneurs annual business ideas competition. Like Dragon’s Den, but for students, this is definitely an event worth checking out if you are interested in student enterprise and can make the trip down to Oxford on Tuesday 19th February.

Official Press Release:

The young entrepreneurs behind the six shortlisted ideas will have just two minutes to deliver an ‘elevator pitch’ and impress a formidable panel of judges, including Deborah Meaden from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, at the final of the Idea Idol competition to be held on Tuesday 19th February at Said Business School, University of Oxford. The shortlisted ideas:

Altitude Medical - a path-breaking invention to counter the spread of hospital acquired infections such as the MRSA superbug

Heat is Energy - an Einstein-patented process to use heat that is currently treated as waste in data centres thereby saving money, carbon and energy

Zoombu - the ultimate way to plan a trip between any two destinations, incorporating all available options of cost and speed

CivSpark - on open source philanthropy platform enabling everyone to fundraise for the causes that appeal to them most

NowIknow - a one-stop source of career information to help individuals find a path through the bewildering array of options

Open Source University - a website providing university level education free of charge and without the accompanying bureaucracy for those who just want to learn

Now in its 4th year, and open to all Oxford students, Idea Idol is a competition to identify the brightest entrepreneurial ideas and uncover the successful entrepreneurs of the future. So whether it was a Eureka! moment, scribbles on the back of an envelope or the result of long, hard planning, the competition may put budding entrepreneurs on the road to realising their dreams.

The final judges include:
- Deborah Meaden of Dragon’s Den fame
- Reshma Sohoni, CEO Seedcamp;
- Katherine Mathieson - Head of Future Innovators at NESTA
- Sebastian Grigg - MD of Investment banking at Credit Suisse

The total prize money is £10,000 with three prizes to be awarded at the judges’ discretion.

This year, the audience - made up of around 300 fellow students, local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business angels, as well as representatives of the sponsoring organizations - will have the opportunity to participate in the action. £1000 in cash will be given away to those willing to stand up and give a one minute pitch. The four lucky enough to be selected by the audience will pitch side by side for the judges’ interest and face a group inquisition. With no judging criteria, he who dares wins in the ‘melee pitch’.

Last year £5,000 was given away in a dramatic final featuring Theo Paphitis, Shaa Wasmund and Dan Wagner. 2007 finalists Design the Time sidestepped the prize fund and received direct funding from Dan Wagner and Shaa Wasmund’s own venture capital boutique ‘Bright Station Ventures‘.

Idea Idol is the flagship event of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Oxford University’s student society for entrepreneurs which now has over 3000 student members within the University.

You can find out more info at www.ideaidol.com.

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Over the past couple of weeks, we have been busying ourselves, attending event after event, looking for a lead developer to join Face Your Cause and after hours of networking, we have finally made a breakthrough!

Since beginning this new venture, Tom, Vish and I have been networking our balls off in order to get feedback on what we’re doing and more importantly, recruit a lead developer. During this ongoing process, I have met dozens of entrepreneurs and developers and despite wanting to initially avoid giving ourselves official positions, we realised that in order to network more effectively we had to bite the bullet and adopt some roles.

Coming from a technical background and having had some experience with starting an Internet company, I have comfortably fallen into the role of Chief Technology Officer. This means that when Tom and Vish get probed about the mechanics of how Face Your Cause will work, they can utter the magic words, “Let me introduce you to our CTO”, and with a puff of white smoke and a small bang I appear at their side, ready to indulge in some geek speak. However, my role as CTO is not just limited to spewing out technical jargon!

As a CTO, it helps if you actually know what you are talking about, and in my case, when trying to recruit developers I really needed to be on the ball when it came to talking about what we had planned from a technical point of view. I have to admit, to begin with, I didn’t have a clue about the technical side of Face Your Cause, because it hadn’t really been defined. To solve this problem, I took the opportunity during the networking events to discuss what we wanted to achieve with wiser entrepreneurs and techies, in order to pick up some hints and tips. My plan was to piece these little pearls of wisdom together and regurgitate them as convincingly as possible when confronted with a technical interrogation from a potential developer!

One thing I knew for sure was that you can’t blag when you are talking to a developer. Tom could probably blag his way into the Women’s Institute (though I’m not sure why) but his “powers of exaggeration” were no match for the experienced techies we talked to. So for my plan to work, I had to make sure I looked up any jargon I didn’t understand and took lots of notes. This method worked out pretty well and after a few networking events, I actually managed to piece together a pretty decent technical plan, but there was still one questions that I had difficulty answering: “If you have a technical background and you’re the CTO, why don’t you build the website?”

Having come up with a string of hopeless answers to excuse why I wasn’t going to build the website, this question really started playing on my mind. My main reason for not building the website was that I hadn’t had any web development experience. A secondary reason is that I didn’t want to get pigeon holed as just a developer on the team. Upon further consideration, these two excuses actually seemed pretty weak. Being a computer geek, I should be able to pick up at least the basics of building a website in Ruby on Rails pretty quickly, especially because Ruby is an Object Oriented Programming language and OOP was my favourite CompSci course. Also, as many people have pointed out, Ruby on Rails is pretty easy to get to grips with and there’s a great online and offline community to rely on. As for being pigeon holed, this is an absurd argument because as CTO, I have full control over the product design and both Tom and Vish value my experience in start ups. As the developer, I can actually put my ideas straight into action and I don’t have to rely on other peoples’ interpretations.

As you may have guessed then, the breakthrough is that for the time being at least, while we are in need of a prototype for Face Your Cause, I have decided to take on the development myself. This way we can actually start making some solid progress with our idea! The long term plan is that while I put together a prototype, Tom and Vish will develop the offline part of the business and keep hunting for some expert coders. With a working prototype and a development team, including myself, we can then pitch to angel investors in order to raise enough cash to launch Face Your Cause version 1.

As Richard Branson says: “Screw it, let’s do it!”

Side Note on getting developers:

These are the most frequently asked questions which I had to answer and if like us you are on the hunt for a developer; I strongly suggest that you prepare some responses:

1. What programming language do you plan to work in and why? We are working in Ruby on Rails because its quick produce working apps and the learning curve isn’t too steep for me!

2. Are you going to pay the developer(s) a salary or offer equity or both? With no cash at the moment, equity is our only option. I am a strong believer that having at least the lead developer on equity is essential because they then have a vested interest in the long term success of the company and therefore the product they are building will not just be a short term solution.

3. Would you consider outsourcing? For example, I met a lot of contractors who were offering cheap labour in Eastern Europe for development projects. One guy even said that he could get me a team of four developers, all for just £5 per hour!!!

4. How are you hosting the website? Amazon Web Services is becoming increasing popular and a number of people I have spoken to are testing it out or have already moved to AWS. I looked at EngineYard, as it was highly recommended for Rails hosting, but the prices they were quoting were way too expensive for us! Slicehost looks like a very attractive option for us at the moment.

Finally the most important question of all:

5. How is this going to make any money? Having some idea of an exit strategy is also essential if you are offering equity.

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