As an entrepreneur I have realized that every moment you will have to choose between the easy and the difficult task. For e.g.

Easy : Call up a friend/ family and talk and talk and talk about how you have a great idea.

Difficult : Walk to a customer, introduce your idea, convince him that your product is a game changer and how he should totally start paying you $$$. You know what you get, right?

I don’t think any start-up person should take pride in saying the following stuff.

•  I have an idea
•  My friends think this is the next Facebook
•  I already have figured out it’s a billion dollar industry
•  I know the technology to build and I can finish the coding in a month
• I have spoken to tons of Venture Capitalists and they all like it

Instead whatever looks easy to do, and you think there is no ‘customer touch-points’ – think again if you want to do it.

I was talking to a fellow entrepreneur and he told me he is very comfortable sitting with his laptop and adding more features to his B2B service. STOP! – Is what told him.

Since your computer doesn’t

• Shout at you,
• Says come back tomorrow,
• Refuses to listen to you for 5 min

you are quite comfortable spending time with the machine.

One quality as an entrepreneur you have to build is the ability to sell.

• Team members : to build a great team
• Pilot customer : For Market Validation
• Investors : To raise money
• More customers : For IPO

It’s like public speaking without having a great sppech writer for you. So don’t waste your time with easy stuff. Instead build easy solutions to be adopted for real world problems and do the most difficult task : sell, sell and sell.

After all, selling is what generate jobs, isn’t it?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulamarttila/5592059984/

There is no comparison to what these guys are doing. Simple awesome!

Last week I met Sandeep Ayyappan, editor of You and Your Energy. It’s this awesome, neat looking, well organized content (edited / aggregated) around Energy sector.

I thought of putting up few thoughts of what more can be done. Really don’t know the complete business model and roadmap what Sandeep wants to take up for YAYE, but here is what I feel can be done.

# 1. Get a mobile app

This is like the simplest task. There are tons of DIY solutions which you can use and get a branded YAYE Iphone/ Android application. I have listed few below (Disclaimer : I am not affiliated with any of them)

AppMakr

Swebapps

Seattleclouds

#2. Community, Community, Community

You need to involve people. Getsatisfaction, Quora or as simple as putting up your own user driven community portal may help.

#3. Have a dedicated video section

Video section would make a lot of sense where instead of reading, I can also see stuff.

#4. Personalization using Facebook/ Twitter

There is a lot of news one can get. YAYE also offers a lot of news in Energy sector. Do you think you can ask users to login using their Facebook so that they can “subscribe” to specific topics and follow them – less clutter, no?

#5. Company database (Think Crunchbase)

Big fan of Crunch base. Or think of Angel.co. If you can create and maintain an exhaustive Company database around energy sector, that will be so valuable. All the financial updates, new announcements, gossip, investments, diversification news, board changes can be done on this platform.

#6. Follow Companies/ Exclusive Research material

A small extension of #4 and #5. You can also start letting people follow companies, bookmark particular activities around companies.

#7. Stock Track

I don’t think you need any explanation on this. Can you run Ticker of Energy related companies, their financial news, a particular news affecting all these companies, past trends etc.

#8. Infographics, Timeline story

So I noticed there is a special story. However, you can build some cool, useful Infographics around several such news.

#9. Bit.ly and Twitter Integration

Get Twitter feeds of all these famous companies or people who write on Energy related topics.

#10. Give it back to society

Tie up with services like Change.org. When I say tie up, it can really be a mashup. There are several such niche community driven sites as change.org

#11. Pitch more and harder

Promote your blog and site on

http://alltop.com

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-promote-my-new-blog

Several other news promotional platforms

#12. Education

Tie up with TED. Or environmentalist. Let them blog, talk, refer you. May be you can have sections talking about saving energy. Invite guest writers to come and write on YAYE

#13. Misc

A. Special feature : http://youandyourenergy.com/~youandyo/gulfoilspillfeature/

I see this. It’s quite good but can I get a PDF of it? Out of 15 pages, give 5 and ask to sign up/ pay/ tweet for the rest of 10 pages. (or you may as well just give it)

B. Use platforms like Storify to write about events which are going around Energy or atleast controversies going on. They will at least bring you more readers!

Hope this is helpful.

Well, there are tons of advice given on what you should do while pitching to investors. Sure! There are loads of articles available on what not to do. I thought of putting up my learnings as well.

Thanks to Young Startup Ventures and NY VC Summit, I got to learn these things mentioned below. It was a great event and got to talk to several great entrepreneurs, VCs, Angels, Corporate Investors. It was amazing!

# Do not educate VC’s about the “Market”

It’s really stupid to tell a VC that “Mobile” is BBBIIIGGG. Don’t do that. Or saying that SaaS is HOT, or Social is the IN thing. They know it. They may not know what you are doing in this hot market, so that is the reason you are presenting.

Please stay away from Market numbers, graphs. That is actually very offensive.

# Stay away using the word “Revolutionary”

A colleague of mine calls even a minor code bug as “disaster”. Oh common! A disaster is much more. Tsumani, a terrorist attack, bird flu, these are disasters.

So similarly, DO NOT say you have come up with a revolutionary, unbelievable idea. Honestly, no one will believe you

I mean there are very few of them which will be revolutionary, so mind your assessment.

 # Do not show a Competitive Analysis slide with everything “checked” for your service/ product

What is the deal with coming up with a feature list, and showing you have got it all, and none of your competitors are doing everything which you do. Don’t bull shit with this analysis. Be serious and honest.

# Dare you say – “No competition”

If you want to use this as a joke, sure go ahead! There is nothing like “No competition”. So if you say No competition, I guess be ready to get the answer – “No investment”

# Do not keep talking for first 10 minutes on how awesome you and your team is

Sure, you are genius and you have a unconquerable team. So what? You can cover that up within 1 min (30 seconds really). Move on. I mean even Steve Jobs during his presentations get quickly to business.

Tell everyone what this awesome team has do, and has plans to do.

If you want to blow your trumpet, there are other better areas to do that (like start a blog )

# Do not have sloppy slides

The last thing you can do is have a shitty presentation. If you have put so much effort in finding a team, thinking through an idea, building it, spend sometime on your pitch. Your company deserves it. Atleast the audience deserves it.

I was at General Assembly’s course : Founder’s guide to raising capital. Great event and lots of learning. Good feedback on what we folks at Queaar.com are doing. Particularly from Charlie O’DONNELL. Below is the hashtag to the event. Few of the tweets are really awesome.

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23AssembledCapital

While I was in UK, had created the presentation below to gather my thoughts and share with some of my friends. This idea is about setting up a service,which can connect the buyers and sellers for outdoor advertisement.

Feedback is much appreciated.

Outdoor Advertisement Management Business Idea

I remember in my school there was a painting which had two horses running through the woods and had a caption “Each must find it’s own way”. However, this blog post differs in someway and here’s how.

Last week I was in Venice and explored the city a lot by walking. Apart from hundreds of eager tourists, several museums/ churches I also found abundant businesses and as a tourist sometimes you have good experience dealing with them, while sometimes leaves a sour taste in your mouth (in my previous trip to Florence I ran into a horrible restaurant ripping off 48 euro for some for some trashy food). While spending good 3 days here, I thought a day would come when every tourist would do something mentioned below.

There would be “tracker” sitting on the phones of every tourist (yes and I am hoping that international data plan would be very very cheap or may be free ). Now this service would anonymously track the path of the traveler.  This application would do a lot of data mining on Best places to see in the given time constraint, restaurants to eat, mashup events, and not to mention hotels to stay and bars to hop into. The traveler can certainly attach experiences and put reviews for the activities/ businesses they dealt with. Services like Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr can be integrated.  It would also help the local authorities to plan and increase the infrastructure to serve the tourists in a better fashion. The possibilities are endless.

Social networking is not the main purpose of this application. What people “generally” do, is what it will tell.

However, the success of this depends on two important things (out of several other roadblocks)

- The willingness of the tourist to let the real time information published (even though it can be completely anonymous)

- Free international data roaming plan

May be someone is already working on making it work for making the life of tourists an easy experience.

Recently I came across this study published by Kauffman Foundation. I was surprised to see  some of their findings as I believed/ heard/ trusted a different mantra on entrepreneurship. Here’s my top 10 favorite.

Myth 1 : A successful entrepreneur starts at an early age.

Finding : The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

Myth 2 : An entrepreneur should have a family which has business experience.

Finding : Entrepreneurs don’t always come from families of entrepreneurs; slightly more than half of the sample were the first in their families to launch businesses.

Myth 3 : After marriage or after having kids, launching a company is almost impossible.

Finding : Entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to be married and have children when they launch their first businesses

Myth 4 : Work experience eats up your time, fire, and the zeal to start a new business.

Finding: Entrepreneurs are far more likely to have worked for an employer for more than six years than to have quickly launched their own businesses.

Myth 5 : You should be very rich, to own a company.

Finding: Entrepreneurs are more likely to come from a middle-class or upperlower-class background, and very few come from backgrounds of extreme wealth or extreme poverty.

Myth 6 :  The entrepreneurs are *Super Stars* in their school/ colleges in the academics.

Finding: They performed well in high school and in college, with the vast majority ranking average or above in their respective institutions.

Myth 7 : The entrepreneur launches a company so that he has passion for new ideas, wants to generate employment, yada yada yada.

Finding : Their primary motivations for launching a business are to build wealth.

Myth 8 : An entrepreneur always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Finding: Roughly half of the entrepreneurs said they did not think about it.

Myth 9 : I became an entrepreneur because I did not get a job using traditional methods.

Finding :  Only 4.5 percent of respondents stated that inability to find traditional employment was an important motivator in starting their own businesses. In fact, 80.3 said that this was not at all a factor.

Myth 10 : You need a co-founder, or a friend’s or family support to launch a business.

Finding: Only 27% of the entrepreneurs felt that, so it means if you want to do it, do it.