Naked Startup

So What Now?

It's been a while.

I think we can safely say that in its current incarnation Gameplan will not make us millionaires. Or frankly pay our salaries. However, this does not mean we are giving up.

Today's News seems to be a fantastic product and we have a hard core of several thousand readers using our app every day. Plus we have an iPhone version in the works, which should increase our users count several-fold. Arun even thinks it might be his preferred version.

But our (meagre) salaries have to be paid. So in an effort to do some interesting work and make some cash we met with several people over the last month or so to attempt to secure some paid work so we can fund ourselves as an entity for the forthcoming year.

After meeting with several potential clients we finally agreed to work with ViiKii on an extended consulting job that'll see us well into 2011.

What made us take the assignment? We're working on something that's an interesting project, with a decent shot at success, working with a talented team of staff and Pivots. Hardly a bad way to spend your life for a couple of months.

What should be noted at this stage is that we're not giving up on our 'startup', we're just going about it another way. We're both talented developers and don't need to spend other people's money on a workforce to build our ideas. We can help other people with their ideas, get involved, learn and at the same time fund ourselves for another run at Gameplan (or maybe something else) next year.

As is often said, investors are often backing a team rather than an idea, per se. We're doing the same. Investing in a team, but we're just funding it a different way; through our own skills. We back ourselves to do something amazing but by taking on interesting consulting work, for a little while, we don't need it to be right this minute.

Also the benefits of working with other people on interesting projects can only help us to avoid pitfalls and spark interesting new directions for us as a team. Plus it's nice to get out and about in a coding sense once in a while!

Seedcamp Singapore 2010 Retrospective and Distilling Reality

So Andy and I were accepted into a mini-Seedcamp in Singapore last week. We were apprehensive that it might turn out to be an echo chamber of familiar faces and generic advice, but Seedcamp turned out to be an excellent exercise in questioning our assumptions and challenging the direction of our product as well as our business model.

The Pitch The day began with all companies pitching their ideas to a roomful of fellow Seedcampers as well as mentors. Andy gave a very good pitch and many of the mentors later commented that the Gameplan pitch was quite memorable and that they were intrigued by the idea and wanted to speak to us about the product as well as our business model.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

The Mentorship Sessions The pitching session was then followed by mentorship sessions which can be best described as 'speed-dating-meets-advisors'. We were paired with BitDin and shared 15-20 minutes of time with multiple sets of mentors over the course of the day. Reshma and Philipp explained that this is to maximize the number of ideas that you can absorb, the number of introductions or connections that you can get, and most of all - exercise your brain and think outside the box. Here are a few highlights:

Daniel Heaf (BBC Worldwide) and Yeo Yaw Shin (Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd) Our first session set the tone for the rest of the day. Both Dan and Yaw asked pointed questions about Gameplan - what it does, what our target market is, how do we plan to market it, etc. and it gave us the chance to clarify our pitch and our message and ensure that we made sense while speaking to veterans of the Internet industry.

There was discussion about engaging schools as users of Gameplan but Dan pointed out that schools are tough to involve as early adopters (he was speaking from experience). Dan also sowed the first seeds of the Gameplan pivot, when he said that for a consumer Internet company, it is easier to go with a bottom-up approach rather than our top-down approach.

In other words, if we are targeting leagues, then the initial set of users that we need to get on board are not the league managers but the players. Given our struggles with marketing and early adoption we also asked Dan about how we figure out when to 'pivot'. Moral of the story: give it a bash, get critical mass, but if you don't have measurable traction - think of changing course.

We also got to demo Today's News and if we weren't mistaken, there was some definite excitement over what we're about to launch.

Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang (Nusantara Ventures) Our next session was with Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang from Nusantara Ventures - an early stage venture capital firm focusing on investments in Indonesia. Adrian also used to be the program manager for FIFA Online, and as enthusiastic FIFA players, it was a mini-thrill for both of us to meet him.

They both recommended various avenues to persue for exposure - from advertising on sports/news sites or blogs, to running our own leagues to spread awareness (we came pretty close to the second suggestion with our sponsorship of The Startup Cup).

Philippe Cazaubon (Data Robotics, Inc. - makers of the incredible Drobo) My favourite takeaway from this session was how Philippe, as soon as he sat down, asked us this question: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?" I personally think it's a brilliant question and one every startup should attempt to answer before it sets out to do business. This led to another engaging session about getting traction, speaking to various kinds of people who would generate leads for us as well as more introductions in the bag.

Remember: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?"

Christian Geissendoerfer (Yoose.com) and Edvarcl Heng (Mediacom and SocialHero.me) This was by far the most eye-opening session for us. We've never really spoken to a 'pure' marketing person regarding Gameplan prior to this, so Edvarcl really had us thinking when his first words were: "Make it free". He went on to provide us with a fairly convincing alternative course, focussing on the players and then our business model primarily becomes lead-generation for major sports brands such as Adidas, Nike, Puma et al. He cited examples of DailyMile, Endomondo and Runkeeper of how they kept their primary app free but became a vast resource for huge sports brands to tap into.

In the six months we've started, we'd become somewhat wedded to the idea of a pay business focused on revenues and profits - so to listen to this perspective was fascinating (as well as a little scary).

Christian also offered to introduce us to a German sports league he knows of - the number of introductions and leads we got from Seedcamp is outstanding.

Aarti Gumaledar (Yahoo) and Philipp Moehring (Seedcamp) Aarti and Philipp took up where we left off and further strengthened the case for a product that is free at the point of use. Aarti also brought up the angle (very Yahoo-esque I might add) of how Gameplan could become an excellent source of hyper-local sports data if we made it free and focused on a bottoms-up approach. Philipp further shook us up when he asked us "Who our target market is?" and dismissed our generic answer and poked us to come up with a much sleeker, cleaner message.

At the end of the day, though very tired, Andy and I felt very good about our decision to apply for Seedcamp. Even though some of the mentors had very little knowledge of how sport works (or sometimes even of how consumer Internet companies work!). Not to forget, our hearty congratulations to the winners and we hope you guys have a great time at Seedcamp London.

It was incredibly valuable to remain sponges for the entire day, ask questions, be questioned and most of all have a lot of fun. But as a friend of ours Dinesh mentioned later in the week, it's important not to get carried away by new ideas and thinking different. What's important for success is for us to distill our own reality from the advice and not accept or implement ideas wholesale.

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing the future path of Gameplan between us (and with anyone who'll listen!) whilst also polishing Today's News and starting a few little freelance jobs. In the next couple of weeks we'll get back into Gameplan proper with what will probably be a new direction, but we're letting the Seedcamp-sparked ideas seep through our subconscious until then.

For those on the fence about applying to Seedcamp, we wholeheartedly recommend it!

Week 26 - Accelerated?

So last week was taken up with polish on our iPad app, including a transition from WebViews to CoreText. And for those of you who are familiar with iOS programming this involved a huge boost in speed. We also met up with the talented souls at COMA, who agreed to give us a little feedback on the app during a 'lets meet and see if we can work together in the future' chat.

The middle of the week was taken up with Accelerate 2010, I've got some extensive notes that should be up later in the week.

Prior to the conference I was up late putting the finishing touches to the Neoteny Labs website, which has launched and they seem pretty happy with. They wanted crisp, clear and to focus primarily on the companies in which they've invested rather than themselves, which is bizarrely the opposite way that most other funds do it!

In terms of Gameplan, our frankly appalling Google Analytics tell us the story that we know... Gameplan is not a product for the early adopter tech crowd. And that the direct emailing is not working. We need to do a better job of marketing, so with that in mind I have been collecting phone numbers to ring actual people (gasp) and go and meet them and explain the benefits in person and get their feedback.

Given that it seems at this stage that we're not going to be an overnight success I'm also having discussions about doing some fixed-term contract Rails work and other projects (perhaps iOS-based) in order to increase our 'runway' as a products firm. It looks like we're likely to be a half products and half consulting firm for a little while.

So a week of realisation and preparation. It is amazing/terrifying how the weeks can fill up with non-programming activities.

Opening the Books

In keeping with our policy of openness I'm going to lay out our initial finances to the world. I can't promise that this is something we'll always be able to do, but hopefully it will be instructive in the early days as we venture (forge? stumble?) toward profitability.

All monetary amounts are in Singapore Dollars

Our Company Setup

Initially I was the sole director of Deepcalm Pte Ltd, set up in April 2009 through the previously cheap but now horrendously expensive EntrePass process.

Arun has now joined me as a director of the company.

Initial Seed Fund

My work last year has left $47,500 in the business. This is approximately the same (50k) as a standard grant for a web startup that you might get from one of the government agencies. A reasonable chunk of cash. It's also at least twice what Y-combinator would be offering a two person startup team.

At one stage it seemed that Arun might be able to bring a smaller but still significant amount, but that proved not to be the case. So it is, what it is.

Our Ownership Split

It was decided, before the final funding situation became clear, that we should treat any initial funding for the business as a SPRING or Y-combinator grant. Typically an investor at this stage will take between 4-10% of the business in exchange for the seed funding.

We settled on a figure of 6% of the company for whatever seed cash we had and would split the rest of the company (94%) between us.

As it's worked out this means our ownership stakes are:

Andy - 53% Arun - 47%

Salaries

I'm on a Employment Pass meaning my salary must be a minimum of $2,500 to maintain the pass which is conveniently the amount that Arun has worked out he can survive on. We've both agreed to pay ourselves as little as we can to survive until we get to profitability.

Neither of us are local, although Arun is a Permanent Resident, so we don't have any advantages as far as local family we can stay with to reduce the rental overhead of Singapore, so we're both subject to Singapore's costly rental market!

I'm in a bit of an odd situation as technically I don't have to earn that much to survive as my wife works for a big multi-national. However in order to keep things equitable and also not to fudge our actual costs we're taking the same salary.

What This Means

If we were to make no money we could pay ourselves for 9 months. We will obviously need to be getting paid much before then! From the progress we've made so far we think we should be in a situation to begin taking payment in the next couple of months.

We're also looking at doing a little consulting work if anything suitable comes up, to give us some extra 'runway'. Or you can always join us (if you're in South East Asia) for some Rails Training.

We'll keep you updated about our ongoing business finances and the thinking behind them in later posts.