After our meeting at Burrell last Thursday we setup a conference call with an old colleague from college.  He had been asking us about the business and has been interested in investing, but we weren’t quite ready to bring private equity into the picture until recently.  I believe that you always want to have all your ducks in a row before starting to consume money from private parties.  Motown’s ducks are lined up and walking single file, so we finally made the call.

One tip for those who plan to do investor business over the phone, make sure you have a good phone in hand.  I love my phone, but had it not been for the fact that my partner and I were conference calling right across from each other, we may have lost the call.  After the call began, things were going great but my phone battery died in the middle of a sentence.  This happened to take place while I was explaining the basis of the Motown Initiative.  I quickly reached across for my partner’s phone and politically informed the party on the other end that my partner had to step out for a moment.  After about 3 minutes of talking, the potential investor simply said “you know, my decision was made before we spoke today, but I wanted to hear more about the project from you guys, you have confirmed my intuition, how can I transfer money”.   My mouth kinda dropped, I can’t lie.  I always heard that investors making their decisions off the bat, but I had never experienced it first hand.  All the work on the pitch deck and executive summary had paid off.  Someone gets it!

Yes folks, we have our first private investor and from the sounds of it, there may be a couple more on the way.  This was just the confidence booster I needed to get back on my feet to find more private funding while we await final decision from large VCs.

The Presentation Room

In an effort to generate some working cash flow for Motown Initiative, the team set off to Chicago to meet with a couple marketing agencies for production work.  Using 4^th Deck, our production arm, along with the knowledge of online video we have developed over the past year, we compiled a compelling presentation for potential clients.  We saw this as the only logical route to generate additional revenue in meantime.  Our main meeting was with Burrell, a well known agency that has an expertise in minority market strategy.

Early Thursday morning, the team met up in the basement of Burrell’s building on Michigan Ave.  It was an ideal location, with its plethora of restaurants.  At this point, just a couple hours before the meeting, we had not had time to actually do a group run-through.  This was the first time we’d coordinate who is speaking on what slide and how to manage transition between speakers.  To add to the challenge of preparing for our 10:30am meeting, our laptop batteries starting running out and the coffee shop we were at had no plug. Can you imagine?!? Its no wonder we were the only people in this place…should have got a clue I guess J.  Either way, we were able to complete our slides and vaguely plan out our presentation strategy.   Our next stop was Dunkin Donuts, because we didn’t want a hungry audience.  Not to mention, I miss Dunkin Donuts after being on the west coast for four years.  After spending an unbelievable amount of money on pastries and coffee we were off to the 29^th floor (we spent $75 btw…dang coffee is expensive).

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At a recent event in San Diego, I was wandering through a mixer in search of food (and a drink ) when I bumped into my good buddy Miles from Tremor Media.  He had been our main contact there for some months now but just recently he switched to a new company, Double Verify.   We still have a good relationship with Tremor regardless of his prescense, but Miles wasnt there to talk about the past, he was thinking about our future.  He kindly introduced Double Verify’s key investor,  Dave Blumberg.

Not sure what an investor was doing in Coronodo Bay with a bunch of marketing managers at a brand summit, but then again, what was I doing there haha.  Ah, I remember, a free stay in a five star hotel with great food, not to mention the opportunity to learn and teach in an environment of my peers.   In any case, we got to talking and it turned out that Dave is in the market to invest in digital media.  What a coincidence, I have a digital media start up.  This was an exciting conversation as it was the first time I actually got to use my elevator pitch in a real life conversation.  All the practice had paid off.

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June  11th, 2009….Earlier on last week one of my partners brought a pitch opportunity to my attention, but it wasn’t the ordinary gig.  Not to my surprise, America is adopting another rip off of a British reality show.  This time it’s the Dragon’s Den, but the show here will be called “The Shark Tank”.   Its funny I had so much trouble coming up with a pitch line for MI, cause for this I can easily describe it as “American idol of Entrepreneurs”.   While I didn’t know who I would be pitching to, I did know casting call was June 6th and I only had a few days to get myself together. (follow the jump)

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June 10th, 2009….Got my ticket to NYC today from Virgin Air, my favorite airlines hands down. If you haven’t been on one of those planes yet, you’re really missing out. Even when you’re not in first class, the ambiance and accommodations are second to none.  Now that they have wifi on all their planes too, I’m quite sure this going to be the best cross country flight ever.

My trips are always for business and pleasure, so I’ll be catching up with some of the parties involved with the Motown Initiative, as well as some family and friends. Should be good times. Our production partner group, 4th Deck Productions, has setup shop and is rolling right along, so that will definitely be my first stop.  We’ll be starting some work on pre-production work and some company strategy task.  It’ll be nice to working with a team and be amongst what’s happening now. I also hope to officially confirm our first strategic alliance during this trip. If there are any good industry events or parties during my stay in NY? I’ll post them up here, so you can look out for that.

March 29, 2009…As the digital realm expands in reach and capability, there are some other businesses suffering, specifically brick-and-mortar retail stores.  Unless the store is selling a product that is exclusive or can satisfy an immediate need, online shopping is often the better alternative.  We all remember the first time we stepped into a Circuit City.  I thought it was one of the coolest stores ever just 10 years ago and now it’s gone.  Where did they go wrong? They failed to continuously refine their business model and innovate within their industry.   One company in this industry that i know is not going to suffer the same fate is Best Buy.

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May 13th 2009….I’ve been pretty busy since one of my team members pointed out that we could submit our business plan to Stanford for funding. We have a couple team members finishing up their masters at Stanford which makes us eligible for their funding cycle.  They’re not offering up much, maybe $20k or so, but that’s enough to jump start the pre-launch campaign and get a digital product demonstration together.

I’m feeling kinda apprehensive about submitting the plan, since it won’t be completely clean, but its always better to try than to pass up opportunity (unless of course you have not completely developed your vision).

I’ll keep it short today because tomorrow I have plans to hit up some Karaoke in K-Town with some broadband industry folk. So I’m gonna organize my thoughts, always want to be on my toes when I meet other people in the industry.

I think I got something here guys, please comment and let me know what you think…
Here’s the concept

“The only online video experience you can call you own”

I really still do like “The iPhone for Broadband video”, but it doesn’t instantly draw the conclusions or curiosity from people that I thought it would. Not to my surprise, I found that there are too many different opinions on what the iPhone is and represents. Oh well, I’ll keep that one in my back pocket.

May 5th, 2009… Keep an open mind about this, but I think that I have come up with my first reasonable concept phrase….

“Iphone for broadband video”

Why?  Well not for any obvious high level attributes.  Of course we believe our product will be stylish, user friendly and revolutionary.  The more important aspect to take a deeper look at though is why the product is so successful.  Can you take a guess (its funny I find that most people don’t know why iPhone is successful beyond the branding aspect)

Iphone is a mobile device that effortlessly delivers a unique experience to every user.  No other cell phone has ever done this.  You’ve always had smart phones that were essentially pocket PCs, that had customizable capability, but the fact is the approach other cell phones took to the user interface as well as product expansion was incorrect.  So the first thing we have in common is  “unique experience for every user”.

Iphone’s application store allows for the world to bring new solutions to common platform, further enhancing each user’s experience.  In the same way, our website will have original content and accept content proposals from users, thus expanding our content selection.

There are some other details that draw similiarities between our website design and iPhone but I think I’ll uncover those once we’ve done a little more development work.

Any thoughts on this concept?

One of the latest books I read is “Pitching Hacks”, and it helped to confirm a few things for me. Let me just start with a quote :

“Business plans. Nobody reads them and nobody executes them. Investors who want a long plan look bad – so do companies that generate them”

So first thing to note is,
Apparently a business plan is of no real importance to investors…
Now that just sucks don’t it? Ive been writing this damn thing for 2 months now and it turns out I don’t need it to get funding haha. I mean in all honesty, whether an investor cares or not, I know that building a business plan is key to understanding this project as a whole. It’s given me the insight to continuously evolve my vision; furthermore, it has helped us develop an appropriate strategy to market. Not needing a formal business plan is actually a relief, because I think was worried the most about the presentation of the document. Now, I can just focus on the documents substance rather than its visual. Function over form.

Second,
No one does NDAs. I kinda already knew this, but my readings helped confirm it. Not only does this appear to hold true for VCs but even some potential partners or employees. I’ve come to terms with this, and Im coming up with new ways to pitch the idea with out “letting the cat out of the bag” per say.

With all this said, expect tomorrow entry to be about my first shot at a high concept pitch.

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