Author Archives: Vidar Andersen

Education, entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

How to Pitch Your Startup

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Yours truly live on stage at LeWeb in Paris pitching “Gauss - The People Magnet” (Image CC @francois_tancre)

How to Pitch Your Startup

I see a lot of startup pitches and pitch decks. And most of them suck. So let me share some basic knowledge to help you avoid my rookie mistakes and to help you massively improve your pitch so that when you potentially try to secure either something similar to small business loans in Orlando or before you reach out to investors, to start raising that funding round you have something more solid to present. It’s so important to clearly explain your business and its goals. You should also mention who your target market is. This will allow investors to understand the sort of demographic that you’ll be appealing to, allowing them to work out whether or not there is a gap for this business. Once a business has worked out who the target market is, they’ll be able to engage in personalized marketing. This can build customer loyalty and trust, whilst also increasing sales. Perhaps businesses should find more online about personalized marketing. It could be impressive for investors.

(If you like this post, you’ll probably love the much more in-depth Pitching Masterclass.)

There are actually three pitches you need to master. Read on to master them all.

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Education

Back teaching in Switzerland again

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Recently I was back in Switzerland. This time I was teaching Co-operation Management and Innovation Clusters at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland outside of Zürich.

Unfortunately I cannot share the slides I used this time due to 3rd party IP rights.

What I can share are the six factors that repeat in successful innovation clusters, like say Boulder, Colorado:

Luck

Infrastructure

Low costs

Supportive public offices

Quality of living

Qualified workforce

How would you rate each factor where you are situated? What could be improved? What needs to be improved? What will you start to improve? Conversely, where will you move your business if these factors aren’t satisfactory where you are today?

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Education, entrepreneurship, startup

The state of NRW and startups

Speaking truth to the crowd, why NRW is a great place to found your startup                                                                                                                       Copyright: Ralph Sondermann, http://www.ralphsondermann.com

I recently had the honor and pleasure to be invited by NRW.INVEST together with representatives from The Pirate Summit to present the advantages of founding a startup in our state at the Czech and Hungarian “Stammtisch” in Düsseldorf, to a crowd of regional officials and stakeholders, Czech and Hungarian emissaries and startups.

Posing with NRW.INVEST, IHK Dortmund and the Czech and Hungarian delegates                                                                                                       Copyright: Ralph Sondermann, http://www.ralphsondermann.com

I didn’t use any slides for this presentation, but you can find a lot of the content in the presentation I previously held for a French delegation.

 

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entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned, startup

On Location Based Services

Painted in Waterlogue

Writing on the Wall: A Business Model Canvas, complete with festively colored Post-Its, Atherton, CA June 2013.

This post has been gather digital dust in private draft form since May 2013. I thought I’d finally publish it to share with anyone interested in location based services.

Preamble

In what now seems like eons ago, I founded a location based tech startup called “Gauss - The People Magnet“. It took me on a roller-coaster ride around the world - from the front page of The New York Times to near personal bankruptcy in the course of about two years. It folded before we got somewhere significant. If you’re interested in the background for founding ‘Gauss - The People Magnet’, there are a couple of old posts for that.

Gauss was an iPhone app to help you discover who’s nearby and what you have in common; To discover the hidden connections to the people around you in real-time – and out of necessity at the time – a self-made cloud backend that did a lot of magic for that to actually work.

To its users, it was a People Magnet for their pocket.

In this post I’m completely cleaning out the closet with my thoughts and experiences related to that startup, including potential revenue sources and business models. It’s a long and winding read - a very mixed bag, assembled from scattered notes.

Caveat Emptor 2016: If any of this looks familiar or straight forward today, rest assured they weren’t when we started out back in early 2011. To wit: successful monetization of non-dating social discovery apps arguably still hasn’t happened yet. No, Zenly’s 2017 exit to Snap does not a successful monetization make, but kudos to the founders.

tl;dr

I know this is a long and bumpy read, so here’s the short version:
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Events, hustling, startup

Startup Ambassador @ SXSW 2016

Hanging with the legend Guy Kawasaki at the German Haus @ SXSW 2016

Hanging with the legend Guy Kawasaki at the German Haus @ SXSW 2016

I was honored and delighted to be invited back as an official startup ambassador to the state of NRW and join the German delegation to SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Last year, I couldn’t make it as I was teaching in Iran – but this year it fortunately fit my schedule. And what a blast we had showcasing the best our region has to offer of early stage startups!

And what does such an ambassador do, you may ask? For one, I help the delegation pick and persuade the best and most representable regional startups to go over there with us – and the kind of startups that also would have a strategic benefit other than vanity in gaining exposure in the US. Once on the ground, I help to make sure our startups connect with the people of their interest and help drag notable international startup people to the German events (kicking and screaming). I also serve as a door opener and “private events” radar, making sure our startups gets into the interesting spontaneous private events during SXSW.

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