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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