Startup | Matt Merriam

New York Tech Meetup – September 8, 2010

The NY Tech Meetup has become the venue for presenting new start up ideas in NYC. Here is a distillation of a my learning moments at last nights event (September 8, 2010).

Apture – Simple elegant always wins

Apture may be the next generation of search. It allows webpage visitors to search on terms in the text [...]

NY Tech Meetup Review – Aug 3, 2010

The NY Tech Meetup has become the venue for presenting new start up ideas in NYC. Here is a distillation of a few learning moments at last nights event (August 3, 2010).

Market Publique: Long Tail Application’s Win

www.marketpublique.com
Market Publique is an excellent example of a “long tail” strategy, coupled with a passionate entrepreneur. It’s a winner. It [...]

Financial Models for Pre-revenue Investors

The VC model requires spending a lot of time on building models, creating phantom variables to adjust your assumptions, and managing finance people when you could stay lean, and run hard at revenue so you can adjust when you KNOW what business model works! [...]

What's the Big Idea?

It’s possible for everything to be buttoned up and look like you can’t fail — strong intellectual property, great ideas marketing ideas and an amazing team — and the idea is truly “too big to NOT fail.” But if it’s really a good long range vision, then there’s probably a way to engage the ideal corporate buyer to assure you hit your exit. [...]

Public Relations meets the Blog

PR is the most effective way to build mind share, marketing pull and general awareness. You must learn to craft the finer more focused little blog blasts and leverage them. Long copy still sells; you just have to build that long copy in discreet chunks and sew them together on the web. [...]

Marketing Assets

Once you get all of these pieces in place you are ready to push on to creating a marketing program. [...]

How do VCs Manage Investments?

If you take your business to a VC you have a 75% chance of handing over majority ownership to someone who will unload it. [...]

Managing Expectations in the VC Process

Capital can always wait for you. A key measure for building up value is whether can you can actually build excitement. Most VC deals go down, in a well orchestrated feeding frenzy with a bunch of VCs all validating each other and trying to pile on their money at once. [...]

When is VC Necessary?

VC’s stick to investments limited to the markets they understand. At the same time, they exist to venture the risk of new markets. They will do their homework, so you better do yours and present them with a real opportunity. [...]

How does VC work?

A venture capitalist’s main problem is that they have few methods to understand the future performance of an investment. Therefore they rely exclusively on the resumes of the management. It’s not realistic think you can join this same club; and more important to understand you won’t get a good deal as an outsider — so go find an insider [...]