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.

P.S. My twitter is @AJisThinking.

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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?

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I’ve been getting some great feedback from my first post which has been really encouraging so thank you very much!

I feel like I should come clean because I have a little confession to make: Despite stating in my first post that I was in the process of thinking of an idea, the truth is that I’ve already started working on a project which I am very excited about…

Last week I caught up with a friend of mine, Tom Latchford who graduated with me last year and is in a similar situation with wanting to start a company. We met at a bar in Soho which I highly recommend to anyone who is looking for cheap cocktails on a Thursday night, it’s called Zebrano and you can find it just off Regents Street. I had signed up for the free membership a couple of years ago but never claimed my card and free cocktail until last week.

We started running through the ideas that had been accumulated by us independently over the past few months. I find telling someone about my ideas who I can trust will give me honest feedback a very useful way of separating the promising ones from the downright stinkers. The more ideas you have the better and don’t miss any out, you might think some are really silly but with some fresh insight an idea can really take shape. I went through a list of my weird and wonderful ideas which included Facebook apps and plantains and then Tom told me a few of his.

One of Tom’s ideas in particular really stood out and as he explained it to me in more detail and we started talking about its potential I had one of those real hair on the back of your neck stands up moments which can only be triggered by what I call a BIG IDEA.

What is the BIG IDEA?

Well this actually leads on quite neatly to an important point I wanted to make about disclosure on this blog. I am going to try my best to make my posts as informative as possible but I won’t be able to give too much away, especially at this early stage. I’m sure you understand that it is important to protect an idea which while it is still being developed but as we move forward I will be able to reveal more and more until eventually you’ll get sick of me plugging it all the time!

So in answer to the question “What is the BIG IDEA?” - I can divulge the following:

Face Your Cause provides a revolutionary approach to fundraising for charities you support and will change the way people donate to charity.

Keep an eye on this blog for more info on this but for now that’s all I can say.

If you are interested in taking a leap of faith based on this description and would like to get involved please do email me. Tom and I are looking for a lead developer to get on board and I have my eyes set on Ruby on Rails as the preferred environment but more on that in my next post.

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