Comfy Socks: Echelon Demo Experience
So that's out first deadline hit. Our demo day at echelon is now over. My wisest decision was definitely to wear my comfiest socks - a must when you're standing for over eight hours. My voice is also basically gone and I'll be hearing my own demo in my sleep.
As a point of personal pride it was great to see the echelon 2010 logo all over the place, it actually looked better the bigger it was. Plus most digital design types will tell you its always nice to see to see your work in print. Plus I'd also fulfilled my stated goal from last year, to make it back as a startup.
Our pitch was pretty simple; the current state of running an amateur or school football/rugby/hockey/basketball league is horrible spreadsheets. Then we demoed the league creation part of the interface.
We gave out red and yellow (business) cards by the handful and also got some founders and developers interested in learning Ruby on Rails with us.
Highlights
- Webvision's coffee machine
- The look on people's faces during our demo when they 'got it', even if they weren't potential customers
- The individuals in the room who'd had the same pain and wanted Gameplan right now
- The respect we got for what we've built in only two months.
- There was some laughter at my gags, always nice
- A few lovely people who said they're avidly following along our weekly progress on this here blog - nice to know some people find it useful
- And someone who said that we've got a better chance of making money than most.
Disappointments
- The tables are small and wobbly.
- The Bubble Ideas guys nearly lost their laptop as people tripped over their power cables, a little more duct tape wouldn't have gone amiss!
- Who serves prawns in their shells with plastic cutlery at a walk up buffet? Someone from the catering team had a prawn-fest for supper.
- I didn't see the invited 'names' walking the demopit, but it's possible they just didn't make it to us. Shame. They missed out. :-)
Amusements
Two excellent typos in the programme. The first led to Jouko from Grow VC constantly referring to Dave as "Steve" during the first live panel. The second meant a potentially fascinating study of the caste system was actually only about startup marketing.The Conference
Sadly I won't be able to comment much on the conference itself, I caught the Dave McClure keynote, which was full of sensible advice although, I'm pretty sure, his standard (deliberately ugly) deck. Nice to see him 'playing live' though.The most important message that I took away was something that we believe in: "small companies" (in VC terms) are beautiful. That and LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS before you build what you think they might want.
I was, according to Twitter, wise to drop out of the following (too big) panel in which the only highlight was Joi Ito and Dave McClure's spirited discussion on VCs, angel investors and incubators.
I totally missed the other talks and then the launchpad as we were busily showing off Gameplan, but from what I understand only the foound guys kicked ass with their professional and humourous presentation and their 'more useful than foursquare' product.
The Exhibition
The quality of startups this year in the level 4 'pit' seemed better than last, and I'm not just saying that because we were one of them. Standouts for me being insync, dropbox with added Google Apps sexiness (and possibly the loveliest website in the 'pit') and Creately a great product (despite the Flash) whose founders are also providing some great Hacker-news-worthy blogposts.Tomorrow
I'm disappointed Daniel Raffel isn't making it as I was hoping his talk might be my day two highlight... but it'll be interesting to see the Product Management panel and I'm looking forward to seeing what the audience make of Carl Coryell-Martin's "this is how to do development" bit.For those of you who missed our demo yesterday, we're going to busk, setting up shop wherever we can. Have Gameplan poster and laptop... will demo. Just grab us - even if you don't want a demo, we're nice people.
