After 2 weeks in sunny California, Dilan and I are back in the UK and are looking forward to the next 6 months of intense product development. As we’re going to be coding lots and I don’t want to neglect this blog I’m going to be posting highlights of our trip to SF (including random videos). Here’s the first video from the trip including our take on Start Up School. Enjoy!
To see all of Garry’s Start Up School photos check out his Posterous Blog.
The more I use Twitter, the more I wish that Scoopler already existed! As the list of people I follow grows, I seem to increasingly turn a blind eye to the high profile twitterers, who seem to post the most frequently. This is ironic, considering the reason I am following these guys is so that I can keep track of the latest tech news, and the freshest memes. The problem is that only about 1 in 10 of these posts is interesting to me. In contrast I read my (actual) friend’s tweets religiously.
Speaking to a few twitter users, I know that this problem isn’t unique to me. There’s also been some recent talk in the blogosphere of twitter spam increasing and developers have been quick to realise that there is a need to organise the Twitter information better. Quotably, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, AlphaTwitter and more recently Twitlinks are all websites which aim to make sense of the tweetosphere. But, what does this all have to do with Scoopler? Well, we are currently working on a prototype of Scoopler which will begin to tackle this problem.
We had been trying to work out what the essence of Scoopler is over the last few weeks, the feature that made it really unique, which we can demonstrate easily as a prototype running on top of the Twitter API. Two features really stood out:
1) A location focused service which shows a user a events in their location and the tweets about those events. The service would connect people who are sharing the same experience of an event, so that they can discuss it via microblogging as it happens.
2) A Digg like website for the microblogosphere where users can highlight posts about interesting events in real time. As Mike Arrington points out, Twitter is already a great source of breaking news, because the real time nature of microblogging means information is dispersed faster than via blogging and mainstream media.
Option (1) is a bottom up approach to Scoopler, and is actually the path Buzzspotr, a service created by London based startup i-Together, is taking. Buzzpotr was featured on TechCrunch UK last month, when the service was mothballed, but I have been in touch with Jof recently, who has assured me that they’re working on resuscitating it. Given that we have just under a week to put together a prototype to demo, when we’re in the valley, building a location based service seemed a little too ambitious! So, we decided to go for Option 2, with the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. Building a Digg for the microblogsphere was actually our original idea, so after a month of Biz Dev it’s good to know that we haven’t lost sight of our vision. The prototype will run on top of the Twitter API, as well as plugging in to Twitter’s public stream via Jabber.
How will it work?
When you are twittering and you want to share a piece of news like a product launch, you “scoop” your post and it appears on Scoopler’s front page. Scoopler users can rate scoops and comment on them. We forward those comments back to you on Twitter and if you like someone else’s post you can scoop it too. If your post is rated highly and there’s a lot of discussion about it, it will stay on the front page. The aim is to create a source for breaking news, especially experiences of events as they happen. We’re working out the mechanics of how scooping a post will work but its going to be dead easy, I promise! To make sure we don’t lose sight of what we want to achieve, we actually put together some mock-ups of what Scoopler might look like. Check out the homepage and the page for an individual scoop and tell me what you think.
On Thursday, I received the email I had been eagerly anticipating over the last couple of weeks: Dilan and I have been invited to interview for Y Combinator’s Summer Funding round. We’re pretty excited about the opportunity to pitch Scoopler to Paul Graham, and more importantly as is the case with YC, pitch ourselves!
The interviews take place in Mountain View, CA, so we thought, while we’re in the area we might as well make the make the most of it and expand our network, bounce our ideas off potential Scoopler users (e.g. event going microbloggers) and perhaps event meet some investors. Our tickets are booked and we’re flying out on Friday, 18th April to San Francisco, and we’ll be staying until 2nd May. We’ve managed to blag somewhere to stay, thanks to Sumon from Snaptalent and some of Dilan’s friends from his days at Oracle. On the agenda so far, other than the YC interview is Start Up School (also run by YC) and the Web 2.0 Expo.
We also happen to be in town at the same time as Web Mission, the government backed project to take 20 UK tech startups out to network in Silicon Valley, including Groupspaces.com, the startup I worked on at Uni. As more and more of us Brits invade the Valley, in search of greener pastures, you have to wonder who’s going to be left? If we’re lucky enough to make it on the YC Summer round, we’ll have to relocate to Boston from June to August, and like many of the British YC teams, once we get comfy, we probably won’t want to come back! However, it isn’t all doom and gloom because the startup scene in Europe is improving, as my good friend David Langer (CEO of Groupspaces.com) points out in his recent post. While I do agree with Dave, that the Silicon Valley is more of a state of mind, perhaps our short trip to San Franciso will give us a chance to see if you really have to be in California to achieve it!
I was going to post this last week but we hadn’t secured the domain name yet and then I forgot! Here it is nonetheless:
Dilan and I have been doing lots of brainstorming over the last couple of weeks and among the ideas we have looked at, one really stood out: The vision we have is to provide a microblogging platform for discovering, sharing and discussing events and news.
Ok, so that sounds like pretty blue sky thinking. What we want to do is provide an events aggregation website with the added feature of being able to microblog about a specific event you are attending. This idea spawned from all the Twittering that has been going on during SXSW. Our line of thought was that maybe there’s a better way to collect all the twitters about an event like the infamous key note by Zuckerberg, so everyone can join the discussion on a single thread. You can kind of do this on twitter, by using hashtags and tracking them, or setting up a user account for the event and @replying to that user, but twitter isn’t events focused, which is beauty of it - you can twitter about anything.
We came up with a working title - “Scoopler.com”:
With this new idea to work with, we did some more networking and threw it out to the usual OpenCoffee crowd in order to get some feedback…
So far so good - we did a bit of tweaking and everyone we have spoken to thinks the idea has some legs, including some potential investors. We even managed to (somewhat unintentionally) land our first pitch on Thursday, with Promethyan Labs, a seed fund that “has just recently been established to work with ambitious young entrepreneurs to help them build great companies” in the words of Rupesh, one of the partners. The pitch went very smoothly considering it was our first one!
–UPDATE–
I finished the first version of our Business Plan last week but it was a bit too long so we’re trying to boil it down to 10 pages. We also just submitted our application to Y Combinator, which is a seed fund that give startups the initial capital and guidance they need to turn an idea into a company. Auctomatic and Snaptalent are two UK companies who have gone through YC already and have been given some great opportunites as a result. In fact, last week, Auctomatic announced that they have been acquired by Live Current Media for $5M in cash and shares - Congrats to Kulveer, Harjeet and Patrick. It just goes to show there’s hope for us all!
Next up: Mini-seedcamp on Friday… I really need to start blogging more regularly again.
Its been about a month since my last proper post and you may (or may not) have been wondered what has been keeping me busy. Well in short we’ve been trying to crystalize the ideas we had around Face Your Cause into a useful social application with an attractive business model. In doing this, we came to the conclusion that Face Your Cause would operate really well as a social enterprise, and I have now decided to take a back seat on the project in order to investigate new ideas and opportunities.
I feel like a big mistake I made when getting involved with Face Your Cause was jumping at the idea without considering any alternatives. Having been stuck in the application process for graduate jobs at the tail end of last year, I was raring to get involved in a project in January and as a result I jumped on board without too much consideration. Over the last few weeks it became increasingly clear to me that while Face Your Cause is very likely to be a successful venture in the social enterprise and charity domain, it wasn’t appealing enough to make a full time commitment.
It’s impossibly difficult to commit 60 hours a day to a start-up and give it 110% without being passionate about it. At the beginning of this week, before it was too late, I was faced with the difficult task of telling Tom about my concerns. After a few long discussions on Monday and Tuesday, we came to a decision: Tom is going to carry on with Face Your Cause, outsourcing the rest of the development, with my help on the technical side. This leaves me back at square one, with a new team and new ideas.
This time I am working with Dilan Jayawardane, an MIT CompSci graduate who was previously working at Oracle. We’ve just started brainstorming, and our shortlist of potential projects is growing steadily. Hopefully we can come up with a disruptive innovation rather than a pile of chindōgu.
If it all goes belly up, maybe Dilan and I could open a Sri Lankan curry house?
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.
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.
My daily activities over the last few months have largely consisted of sitting at home, watching Scrubs, playing guitar and procrastinating on the Internet in between numerous job interviews and impromptu visits to Oxford! That is until this week, which came as a bit of shock to the body and mind, because for the first time since last summer I have actually become busy again. Tom and I are now working in 5th gear to revitalise his idea and get the project off the ground - there’s a lot to do. Having been out of the start up loop for a while I decided to do a bit of research first to get clued up on what’s going on. I found e-consultancy’s 25 top resources for internet startup founders particularly useful and it’s definitely worth a read if you are considering going down the web start up route and aren’t sure where to begin.
With an idea in hand, the important thing for us now is putting together a complete team. Vishal Kapadia, a fellow Oxford graduate and marketing psychology ace, has joined us this week as the third slice in the pie that is Faceyourcause. We’re relying on Vish to use jedi marketing mind tricks to make faceyourcause viral! This leaves us with one big gaping hole in our team: we still don’t have anyone to build the website. With 3 guys on the business side and no coders we can put together a kick ass business plan but that’s no good without a product so our priority is to get a lead developer on board, which means we have a lot of networking to do.
Using my wit, Tom’s blagging skills and Vish’s powers of persuasion, we were confident we could get a developer who would be willing to work for free in our non existent office and we’ve spent the last few days searching London’s start up community for our man (or woman). Our first port of call was the Facebook Developers Garage, on Wednesday night. This is a monthly gathering of London’s Facebook application developers, consultants and religious followers. After 2 hours of presentations and a shortage of free pizza we left without many leads and a serious case of Facebook fatigue! Thursday morning’s Open Coffee wasn’t much more promising but we did meet the guys at Intruders.tv who gave us some useful tips on how and where to find these elusive developers, who aren’t already working on a project and don’t mind taking equity rather than cash.
They say you can’t beat a founder’s passion but by Thursday evening I definitely felt like it had been beaten out of me! Remaining determined, the three of us headed to PizzaOnRails, a gathering organised by Cominded for London Rails developers. With pizzas in plentiful supply this time around, our luck did finally turn around and we managed to find some developers interested in what we were doing. We also had the privilege of witnessing the launch of yabb.com, which offers users the opportunity to talk to total strangers (on skype) about topics that they share an interest in. In the words of Paul Birch, yabb’s founder, the website is about re-inventing the ‘art’ of conversation, but like Paul, most of us couldn’t work out who would want to use it. One to keep an eye on I think.
Finally on to Minibar on Friday, which I attended on my own because my partners in crime were slacking off! Held every month in Shoreditch, this event had the most buzz out of the few that I had been to. With developers, designers and entrepreneurs in attendance, this was the best event of the week for anyone new to start ups. I accumulated a few more Moo cards and enjoyed some testing conversations and after the re-run of the yabb presentation, it was definitely my cue to leave.
With a few meetings lined up for next week and some really useful feedback, the last few days of networking were productive, despite the slow start. One thing I have noticed is that unlike the nightclubs which my social life had been revolving around, at start up networking events the alcohol is usually free and there’s always a queue outside the Gents.
