Posts filed under 'San Francisco'
March 23rd, 2012
Venue: San Francisco, CA
Date: March 27th
Time: 2pm to 6.30 pm
Details and Registration: http://p42workshop.eventbrite.com/
Description:This workshop is designed to give startups the tools and tips they need to be able to craft powerful stories that move journalists and make them write about your startup. While your startup is the product, your story is your voice.
About the trainer: Alex Barrera is Chief WOWness of Press42.com, a matchmaking platform between startups ands bloggers which aims to help startups expose and interact with the tech media worldwide. He’s also cofounder of Tetuan Valley and StartupBootcamp Europe, two of the leading startup accelerators in Europe. He’s mentor in many startup programs like Springboard (London), HackFwd (Berlin), StartupBootcamp (Madrid), GammaRebels (Warsaw), HugeThing (Poznan) or RockStart (Amsterdam). He’s also editor at The Kernel and occasionally writes for other blogs like Techcrunch Europe.
October 9th, 2011
Bootstrappers won’t like the recently enacted patent reform law. Called the America Invents Act, it was signed by President Obama on September 16. The law takes effect March 16, 2013. It provides for a “first to file” patent system. Currently a patent is awarded to the first person to invent and reduce the invention to practice, even if they file up to a year after invention. With the new law the patent will be awarded to the first person to file for the patent and the one year grace period will be gone.
While this might seem like no big deal to a bootstrapper, it is a serious handicap.
Pete Tormey will talk about ‘The New Patent Law’ and its implications on Bootstrappers.
Venue: Sandbox Suites, Union Square (567 Sutter Street)
Time: 8.30 am
Date: 21st October, 2011
Pete Tormey moderates our Walnut Creek breakfasts; he is also a patent attorney at Antero & Tormey LLP. He offered his analysis of the new patent law update, the America Invents Act (HR 1249 112th Congress), concluding that it is an unfavorable development for bootstrappers.
July 30th, 2011
On August 19th, 2011, at the Bootstrappers Breakfast in San Francisco (8 am , Sandbox Suites,567 Sutter St, SF), Tristan Kromer will discuss:
- Using personas to accelerate and improve the Customer Development process
- Deploying information radiators to facilitate company learning
Tristan Kromer has spent 16 years in marketing, product development, business development, IT security, music, real estate, and now web startups. He’s lived in the U.S., Vietnam, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and has a BA in philosophy and an MBA in international management and marketing — neither of which prepared him to work in a real startup. He blogs at http://GrasshopperHerder.com
This will be a great meeting.
Date: Friday August 19th, 2011
Time: 8-9:30am
Venue: Sandbox Suites, 567 Sutter St, SF
July 11th, 2011
I had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Mock (@steve_mock), Executive or Co-Founder of five venture backed companies. I thought the Bootstrappers Breakfast community might benefit from Steve’s lessons learned. In addition to this Q&A blog post, Steve will be joining the round table discussion as a featured guest speaker on Friday, July 15 at the San Francisco Bootstrappers Breakfast, held at Sandbox Suites. Come join us and ask Steve your own questions.
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Date/Time: July 15th, 2011, 8-9:30 am
Venue: Sandbox Suites, 567 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA |
Q: Can you share a little bit about the start ups you’ve worked for? Maybe touch on the industry each company was in, the problem each company was solving, and whether or not it returned for the investors?
A: Two of the companies were in enterprise software (IP routing software and network control solutions) and the others were in consumer web and services (mobile email, children’s adventure games, online math games). Two were sold at a profit; one is profitable and growing; one failed fabulously; and the other is TBD.
Q: What are your thoughts about having co-founders compared to going at it alone? If so, how do you find the right person?
A: If someone measured the data, I bet most successful start ups have more than one founder. You want to have people with complimentary skill sets. If you are a sales person, grabbing your buddy who is also in sales may not be the best person. Get someone who can bring a different skill set and perspective to the table. The founding team will do most of the work and have to make the tough decisions, especially early on. Ask yourself with each person you consider whether you want to be locked in a room with them if you have to make the most gut wrenching decision in your life, because that is exactly what will happen.
Q: In terms of getting started, how do you reduce the investors’ perception of risk?
A: Instead of phrasing it as reducing risk, I like to think of it as eliminating reasons for investors not to move forward with your deal. In particular, I think you should make as much progress on the non-capital intensive items as you can before you try to raise outside capital. Get all the little stuff out to the way and make the financing the only thing standing between you and moving forward. Build a non-production prototype. Know the competitive landscape like the back of your hand.
Another type of progress:if your business relies on a distribution channel, talk to people in that channel and get their feedback on your idea. Maybe even make a key person like an advisor. Talking with them isn’t capital intensive, so do it. Don’t be in an investor meeting pitching a business that relies on a distribution channel you haven’t spoken to. It gives the investor an easy out not to move forward: “Why don’t you go talk to them and come back…”
Do everything you can do before you meet the investor, so they only missing piece is the capital required to get your business to the next stage.
Q: Of your company that “failed fabulously,” did the team do a postmortem? If so, do you mind sharing what you believed were the reasons why the team did not hit their growth expectations
A: I learned an interesting lesson about partnering on this one. We started as a B2C model. The product sold for $19.95. Our customer acquisition cost ended up between $100-150. It was completely upside down. We involved many SEO, PR, SEM, and social media marketing experts, but couldn’t get the math to work. We then pivoted into a B2B model, in which we managed to do deals with over ten major media and e-commerce companies to distribute our product, thereby completely eliminating our customer acquisition costs.
It looked really good at that point. The problem is Fortune500 companies move really slow.
So, we spent another year or so waiting for the Fortune500 companies to integrate the product into their respective offerings. When they ultimately came back and said the offering didn’t work for them, I was like, wow, I just spent a year of my life waiting for that feedback. Owning your own customer base is much better than being dependent on someone else to get there.
Q: If you could’ve done things differently, what would they be?
A: I think raising much more money would’ve helped. We could’ve done a lot more awareness building for the product category which would have helped both the B2C and B2B models. The timing was really bad. I was actually able to close my financing for that company in December, 2008, right in middle of the financial crisis. I barely raised the money I did. Raising more wasn’t an option for that business at that point in time.
Q: What are the things that worked?
A: The product iteration process was quite good. We spoke to our trial users intensively, got their feedback, baked it into the product and iterated a lot at the beginning. We really built something that people enjoyed and saw value.
Q: What are you up to now?
A: I’m looking for a great team with a great idea, in which I can jump on board and add value. I’m also consulting for two start ups on their fundraising and go-to-market strategy.
July 5th, 2011
Events are sorted by day of the month they occur on.
| Embarcadero Center (1st Wednesday at 9am) |
Boudin Bakery Map
4 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA
June 22nd, 2011
At the Bootstrappers Breakfast in San Francisco, we have Steve Mock speaking on how to get someone else to pay for your marketing and how to develop a win-win value proposition to make that happen.
Date: July 15th, 2011
Time: 8 -9:30 am
Venue: Sandbox Suites, 567 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA
Steve Mock has been the founder or on the management team of 5 venture-backed start-ups and has a proven track record of effective marketing and sales strategy, business planning, and execution of successful technology ventures. He has driven over 150 distribution deals, acquisitions, corporate relationships, and venture financings ($32M) in more than 15 countries. Steve has managed dozens of product launches targeting consumers, enterprises, and OEMs in the Internet, gaming, mobile, enterprise networking, web, and consumer markets.
April 11th, 2011
On Monday, May 23, 2011 in San Francisco, CA is the sequel to last year’s inaugural event, which brought together nearly 400 entrepreneurs and executives interested in building and supporting lean startups. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.
More information www.sllconf.com
Get your early bird ticket for $250 now through April 23.
Register at http://sllconf2011.eventbrite.com/?ref=ecount
February 16th, 2011
At the Bootstrappers Breakfast in San Francisco (Sandbox Suites, 567 Sutter St) at 8am this Friday, 18th Feb, Matt Childs and Derrick Lee from DreamSimplicity will talk about “Lessons Learned Being Fearless with a Camcorder.”
Today, the convergence of social media, business culture and technology is allowing entrepreneurs to get their message out in front of their customers in ways never previously possible. Specifically the use of video to draw customers in and engage with them on a personal level has never been so easy or accessible. What used to take months and great expense can now be accomplished with items readily available on hand – all it takes is willingness to experiment.
Learn how DreamSimplicity leverages relatively inexpensive equipment, a carefully crafted social network and thick skin to become one of the leading pioneers in video in the software space.
Matt and Derrick cut their teeth in the trenches of the sales departments of various early stage VC funded Software-as-a-Service companies. Taking their knowledge of the industry, technology and relationships they nurtured, they struck off on their own in April of 2009 to start DreamSimplicity as an advocate for the SaaS and Cloud Computing community. The site is an online community for SaaS firms and customers to learn from their peers and advance their knowledge.
November 17th, 2010
Often we ask attendees to tell us one thing they learned from this morning’s bootstrapper’s breakfast. Here’s a couple … and please add your own!
“I am always surprised by how much I learn in two hours. The quality and enthusiasm of people that show up and the things I find out that I never knew about and how time flies.” – Dorai
“I was impressed with this group. People really took time to brainstorm around the issues I face in developing and marketing my local search web application. It’s one thing when people advise you to ‘focus’ – but its entirely different when they say ‘focus like this’. Great actionable advice. Great networking too” – Tom
“This was my first time to participate in a Bootstrappers Breakfast meeting and I was impressed with the quality of advice that was provided to the entrepreneurs. The challengers facing an entrepreneur were discussed and some great ideas were exchanged. What a great community for entrepreneurs.” – Herman
Want to read more — check out:
One Thing I Learned 2010 & 2009
One Thing I Learned 2008
November 1st, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 1, 2010 — Given San Francisco’s strong commitment to entrepreneurship and new business development, the Bootstrappers Breakfast promise of serious early morning discussions among bootstrappers will have many local entrepreneurs feeling right at home. The focus of the monthly meeting is on technology businesses whose next stage of growth is based on internal cash flow and organic profits. Entrepreneurs who like to “eat problems for breakfast” bring business issues and challenges to discuss with peers.
November Dates:
Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 9:00 a.m., Boudin Bakery — 4 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA
Friday, November 19, 2010, 8:00 a.m., Sandbox Suites — 567 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: $5 in advance, $10 at the door
For more information see http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com or contact events@skmurphy.com
At last month’s meeting the roundtable topics included tips on inspiring employee loyalty. To read more, see http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/blog/2010/10/19/mary-beth-deans-on-inspiring-employee-loyalty/
Members are saying great things about us:
“Its a small enough group that you can have a good quality discussion.”
“Very pleasant atmosphere. A variety of backgrounds from the participants made for insightful contributions. I particularly appreciated the informal recommendations one-on-one between participants.”
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