What a flwowp the shwowp pitch was
I may not be an angel and I’m certainly no VC. However, I am almost an MBA and as such have spent many evenings asking tough questions to presenters from all walks of life. That said, last week I took a walk down to the SAT for StartupCamp and had the chance to rub shoulders with some interesting people in Montreal’s bubbling startup scene. Of particular note was Shwowp, an effort headed up by three social media starlets from Montreal.
The web app provides a way for shoppers to track the purchases they make online and offline. The goal here seems to be that a shopper will send Shwowp receipts from their purchases by forwarding an email or snapping a shot of it with their phone’s camera. Once Shwowp gets the receipt, it’ll be able to crunch the data and track purchase histories, budgeting, and consumer behaviour while allowing shoppers to keep up to date on what the Jones’ are buying in order to spot trends and great deals.
I can definitely see the value that Shwowp would receive from such a platform. Hard data on purchasing activity is a valuable pot of gold that some players in our financial system get to dip their feet into. This is the sort of information that would have market research firms knocking down your door with a battering ram and briefcases full of cash.
The hope is that the benefits of this service will take it viral and that soon everyone will be Shwowp’ing their purchases as happily as they post their crappy vacation photos on Facebook. Unfortunately, Hunt and the Shwowp team spent so much time talking about how awesomely amazing the company they were pitching was that they forgot to tell us why they suck. This is important because:
Everyone sucks.
The presentation had great visuals, BIG BLOCK TEXT, and was reasonably engaging (Tara Hunt, did a decent job as a passionate presenter). However, if you’re trying to pitch your idea to men and women who are intelligent, articulate and selective, you need to be real.
Being real isn’t just having a blog or raising whuffie, if you want to be real you need to air your dirty laundry. Tell us that your business model is based on assumptions from half-baked market studies. Tell us that going viral has a x% (where x is less than 10) chance of actually happening and that you’re relying on hitting it off with a great and persuasive user base right off the bat. Tell us that Zukerberg might very well integrate your features into Facebook and leave your site to rot.
Give us the risks, tell us what keeps you up at night and you’ll come off as genuinely interested in starting a successful business and demonstrating a fiduciary responsibility to your fucking investors.
Once you’ve done that, tell us how you plan to mitigate those risks using clear and realistic tactics. Prove to us that you’ve thought this through, that it’s not just your opinion. Or better yet, appeal to your audience for help. Enlist a community that loves and respects your work to help you start off on the right foot.
ADDENDUM:
If anyone has Silverlight installed and wants to view the pitch online, you can do so at replayedu
Phooff! That pitch was awful. Just a painful video to watch. Tara Hunt is “old friends” with Jimmy Wales, another Internet startup low-light (Bomis.com, Openserving.com, and Wikia Search, to name a few shuttered flops).
Wales is a co-founder of Wikipedia. That’s hardly a shuttered flop.
I’m not sure what you’re implying by “old friends”, I didn’t intend to allude to Shwowp being destined for the bitbucket or at the incompetence of its team. I’m merely commenting on the mechanics of this investor deck.
It seems to me as if more time is spent marketing ideas and not businesses. More often than not these ideas are spun with an arrogant (or a sickeningly forced humble) tone that exposes the ignorance and “knee jerk” behaviour of some entrepreneurs.
To be credible, we need to see the good and the bad. We need to understand the the entrepreneurs really understand their industry (even if it’s a nascent niche) and that they know where the risks are, how to measure them and are at least thinking about mitigating them. I want to see a pitch that’s fair, balanced and credible.