Dave, Jonny and I had been working on our semantic, tag-based, emergent, faceted, search and listing technology for almost a year before we seriously contemplated actually showing it to anybody.
Like most people who have poured their time, money and souls into a venture of their own, we were as petrified of someone stealing our idea as we were that someone would say our idea was not even worth stealing.
During the Business Plan writing process, which is an ongoing, continually self-reflective process, we realised that the one thing we didn’t have (excluding a live site, customers and weighty funding) was validation; seeing whether someone with no vested interest would see what we see in our idea.
It was also around this time that we found out about Seedcamp – essentially a sort of European Y Combinator; a competition for EU web start-ups. And what first drew us to it was the application form.
The word ‘comprehensive’ just about covers it and the prospect of having to answer the questions posed, was itself appealing.
- Let us say you have 15 seconds to pitch your business. Can you describe your business?
- How will you make money? What’s your business model?
- Planning for the worst is a key to great success. Think hard: what might go wrong?
- What is your favourite movie of all time?
Sure they seem obvious questions but when you’re in the process of turning a complex concept into technical reality, dealing with design, usability, programming issues, APIs, branding, content acquisition and a slew of other considerations that actually constitute the process of creation, such questions are easily neglected.
Yet we actually had answers to each. Over beer, GTA4 or strange YouTube videos, Jonny and I had developed a sort of intuitive understanding of how we would make money, the current and future team we would need, what we would be in 6, 12, 24, 100+ months time and how we might get there. It became clear though that actually putting this down on paper and having the prospect of other people challenging these assumptions was as necessary as it was disconcerting.
So we read the rules, read the Seedcamp blog, looked at previous finalists and set about an application that at one point swelled to some 8,000 words.
Our key learnings were:
- Never sell yourself short – talk up your experience, your networks and your team;
- Make sure the passion for your concept shows through in every paragraph;
- Think about the core message you are trying to convey. Is it your team’s strength, is it your research behind the concept, is it that your idea has already been validated by paying customers – then make sure that is reinforced in any relevant answer;
- Think about other great things you would want anyone interested in your concept to know. Write it all down separately and then see if any of those messages fit into a question. This is a great way of ensuring you don’t leave anything important out.
- Go through multiple drafts; if you truly care about your idea and the Seedcamp opportunity, your attention to the questions will shine through when your application is read by someone else.
Having deliberated long and hard over what our favourite film was (an Aliens/Hudsucker Proxy double-bill) and detailed how we planned to crush Craigslist (in the nicest possible way), we sent the Advertag application a day before applications closed.
Seconds later it was forgotten and we were back playing with an emergent, tag-based search technology.
Coming soon: Part 2 – The Preparation
Did you submit a Seedcamp application? How was your experience? The comments await your spam links opinions!
