Here is this week’s event update from Calagator.org:
Monday, Feb 23, 2009
5:30 pm, BarCampPortland Volunteer Meeting
6:00 pm, Social Media Club PDX Meeting
6:00 pm, Mobile Portland: Mobile Tagging — Paul Doktor
7:00 pm, PDX Critique
Tuesday, Feb 24, 2009
7:00 am, Oregon Health Forum: Health vs. Health Care
8:00 am, “Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills” Workshop
12:00 pm, OTBC Legal Series: Term Sheets
4:00 pm, PMI Chapter Meeting
5:00 pm, PSU Multimedia Professional Development Center Info Session
5:30 pm, Tech MeetUp: Diagnose Your Website’s Issues
6:00 pm, Portland Data Plumbing User Group (pdpug)
7:00 pm, IEEE RAS: Industrial Vision Applications
Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009
8:00 am, Business Leader NW 2009
4:00 pm, MIT Enterprise Forum: Avoiding the Financial Beast of Burden
5:30 pm, SAOpdx: Poker Night
6:00 pm, IEEE PACE: Recession Proof Yourself
6:00 pm, Starve Ups: Setting Valuation \u2013 What Is Your Business Worth
6:30 pm, PDX Open Source GIS User Group
7:00 pm, Portland JavaScript Admirers’ monthly meeting
Thursday, Feb 26, 2009
4:30 pm, AMA MAX Awards
5:00 pm, OEN: Swap Meet
5:00 pm, Smart-ups Pub-Talk: Business Plan Competition
5:30 pm, Shizzow Developers Meetup
6:30 pm, Refresh Portland February: Hajime Kobayashi on Inside The Web In Japan
6:30 pm, Exploring Photoshop CS4 with Mark Fitzgerald
7:00 pm, Westside Proggers
7:00 pm, PDX Flickr Meetup
7:00 pm, Relay For Life of Portland kick-off party
Friday, Feb 27, 2009
12:00 am, Oregon Tech Awards — Nominations Due
6:00 pm, Puppet PDX Meetup: Config Management, Cloud Computing, and Beer!
10:00 pm, John Nastos
Saturday, Feb 28, 2009
1:00 pm, OTBC: Speed Dating for Startups
From Calagator.org, here are this weeks tech and entrepreneur events:
Monday, Feb 16, 2009
7:00 pm, DorkbotPDX Meeting
Tuesday, Feb 17, 2009
7:30 am, ShopTalk Showcase
8:00 am, Career Tools Breakfast Series – Portland AIGA
9:00 am, UIE: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences
4:00 pm, StartUp Exchange Meetup
5:00 pm, Bash scripting class
5:30 pm, AeA: Tech Strategies when Preparing for Acquisition
6:00 pm, SAO HealthCare Information Session
6:30 pm, IxDA Portland: Interaction’09 Conference Recap
6:30 pm, Portland Java User Group
7:00 pm, Portland State Aerospace Society Meeting
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009
7:00 am, IMC: The Business of Consulting
8:00 am, Open Source Test Workshop
12:00 pm, SAO Health Care Information Session at OTBC
6:00 pm, The Entrepreneurial Journey- A conversation with Vijay Vashee
6:00 pm, Trust the Vote! Open Source Digital Voting Foundation Intro
6:30 pm, DevGroup NW: Small Groups, Tightly Joined
6:30 pm, XPDX February: Acceptance Test Driven Development
Thursday, Feb 19, 2009
10:00 am, OEN: Capturing Market Share in a Recession
11:30 am, PMI: Global Initiatives, Jim Wasko (IBM)
11:30 am, SBA Loan Briefing
3:00 pm, Professional Technology Career Fair
6:00 pm, Financial Executives Internat. – Winter Social
7:00 pm, PDXPUG: PostgreSQL Data Visualization
7:00 pm, SECP’s – What you need to know about SEO
7:00 pm, Ignite Portland 5
Friday, Feb 20, 2009
8:00 am, SCORE: Are You Positioned for Success in a Down Market?
9:00 am, Southern California Linux Expo 7x
9:30 am, RecentChangesCamp 2009
12:00 pm, OTBC – HR discussion with Iris Sasaki
12:45 pm, OEN: Off the Record with a CEO
1:00 pm, XPDX Pub Lunch
10:00 pm, Raven Zachary
Saturday, Feb 21, 2009
5:00 pm, NW China Council – Year of the Ox Dinner
Sunday, Feb 22, 2009
1:00 pm, DorkbotPDX Focused Workshop: Breadboard a Sanguino
In an earlier post, I argued that you really do need an elevator pitch – if for no other reason than to be sure you have a clear concept of what your business is. But how do you create a concise, compelling elevator pitch?
At OTBC, I’ve often used the following fill-in-the-blanks template. I’m not sure who to attribute this to – I’ve seen variations on it in multiple places. It does make creating an elevator pitch easier by providing some structure. So here’s the template:
- For: (describe your target customer)
- Who: (describe the compelling, unmet need your target customer has)
- Our: (give a one-line description of your product or service)
- Meets this need by: (describe very briefly what your solution does and what value it delivers)
- Unlike alternate solutions: (describe how your solution is different/better)
- We make money by: (describe who pays you and how)
Fill in the parentheses-enclosed phrases with the appropriate declarations about your product and business, and you’ll have an excellent start to an elevator pitch. Of course, if you’re pitching an investor, you’ll want to mention the market size, state the “ask” (how much investment you’re seeking) and say something about the “exit strategy”.
But if you cover the above bullet points in a compelling way, you’re well on your way to giving your audience, whoever it is, a clear, compelling idea of just what your business is all about.
From Ask The VC Model Seed Documents – Direct From Techstars
Techstars has published a number of the documents they use to serve as examples for others. There are five primary documents in the set:
From Twitter Blog: Opportunity Knocks Twitter announced Friday that it has raised money, even though it still has plenty of cash in the bank from the funds they raised last year. As the saying goes – it’s best to raise money when you don’t need it. With a 900% increase in active users in a year, it’s no surprise that VCs are interested.
OTBC member company Infinity Softworks announced the closing of a funding round today. There’s more info in this OTBC blog post .
The most important reason for having a good elevator pitch doesn’t have anything to do with investors. Yes, having a concise, compelling elevator pitch can help get an investor’s attention. Or get prospective team members excited about your company. And it’s useful to have that well-rehearsed answer on the tip of your tongue when you get asked the “so what do you do?” question at the next cocktail party.
But none of those are the most important reason for having one. My experience in working with a lot of startups over the past three years at OTBC is that entrepreneurs who can’t give a concise, compelling and clear answer to the question “what do you do” don’t understand their business as well as they should.
A fuzzy elevator pitch reflects the fuzziness of the entrepreneur’s thought process about the business. It usually means they don’t have a clear idea of one or more of the central aspects of the business, like who the customer is, what the compelling unmet need is, how their solution is unique, or how they’ll make money.
Some lack of clarity at the beginning is understandable. When you’re in the “idea” stage, thoughts are still coalescing. But if you’re ready to build a team and start designing a product or delivering a service, you really need to have an effective elevator pitch. Otherwise, you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re building and why. And with that kind of a start, you probably will not be happy with the results.
So spend the time to develop a concise and compelling elevator pitch. And if you’re having trouble doing it, ask yourself: what part of your business do you not understand well enough?
In my next post: how to structure your elevator pitch in five steps.
From Calagator, here are this weeks entrepreneur/tech events:
Monday, Feb 09, 2009
8:00 am, Agile Estimation and Planning
6:00 pm, Mobile Love, Android Style #9
7:00 pm, Portland Functional Programmers Study Group: Bertrand
Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009
7:30 am, Strategies & Success Stories for Growing your Business Internationally
7:30 am, Business Leads Exchange
8:30 am, Agile Open Northwest Conference 2009 “Agile for Real”
10:00 am, SAO HealthCare Informational Webinar
12:00 pm, OTBC Legal Series: Top 10 Legal Mistakes to Avoid
5:00 pm, OurPDX February author/reader meetup
6:00 pm, iPhone Developer Meetup
6:00 pm, LPC 2009 Planning Committee MTG
6:00 pm, LWV: John Kaufmann on Peak Oil
7:00 pm, Portland Code Camp v4.0 Kickoff
Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009
12:00 pm, Lunch 2.0 at AboutUs
5:00 pm, Business After Hours at Wilf’s Restaurant and Bar
5:15 pm, OEN PubTalk – Seed Oregon Tournament, Round 4
6:00 pm, Portland Werewolf – February Gathering
6:53 pm, Portland Perl Mongers: Perl in the 21st Century — Eric Wilhelm
7:00 pm, CocoaHeads: Cocoa Programmers’ Group
7:00 pm, CHIFOO: How Communities Straddle, Leap, and Land on Technology Choices
Thursday, Feb 12, 2009
12:00 am, Portland Twestival
7:30 am, AeA: Raising Venture Capital in Difficult Economic Times
4:00 pm, MIT Enterprise Forum: The Future of Enterprise Software
5:00 pm, concrete5 local meeting
5:30 pm, SAO Corvallis – Introduction to Social Media for B2B companies
6:00 pm, Portland WordPress User Group
7:00 pm, Open Source Bridge Content Meeting
7:00 pm, PostgreSQL Portland Performance Practice Project (P5)
7:00 pm, Symbolism in Design
7:00 pm, Ignite Bend
Friday, Feb 13, 2009
7:30 am, Keiretsu Forum
10:00 pm, The Sexesode 2
Saturday, Feb 14, 2009
8:00 am, Invention to Venture
According to a FreeRange website post today, Portland based FreeRange Communications has been acquired by Handmark
“This is an exciting turning point for our company and we are proud to become part of the Handmark organization,” said Jon Maroney, FreeRange CEO. “Handmark has built a large network of happy customers across a wide range of mobile devices. This offers a great opportunity for FreeRange partners to expand their reach, adding tremendous value to content delivered via our publishing platform.”
Congratulations to the FreeRange team – although it’s unfortunate to see another local startup become part of a not-so-local larger company.
I was asked this morning for a list of open source (related) groups in Portland (this has to do with a friend’s visit to the Shimane Prefecture in Japan to meet with an open source group there. She’d like to show the breadth of open source activity in Portland). I’m sure my list is way incomplete, but here are some groups/projects:
Calagator
Portland Drupal Group
Portland Java Users Group
Portland Linux/UNIX Group
Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs
Portland Perl Mongers
Portland PHP User Group
Portland Plone Users Group
Portland Python Users Group
Portland Ruby Brigade
Portland Web Innovators
So what other open source programming/networking/business groups are there in the Portland area?
