How to Make an Elevator Pitch

Interesting presentation on Slide Share showing how to make an elevator pitch for your new startup

(Start from slide 11 to skip the boring intro bit)

So much for Simultaneous Worldwide Broadcast

It really is a TV phenomenon, isn’t it?

(click through for details. SE = seeders. LE = leechers)

Disqus, WTF?

The Disqus website OpenID login has annoyed the shit outta me too many times today. Here’s the login screen

Click on Use OpenID? and you get this:

Type in your URL and click Login, and you get:

I’ve tried Chrome, Firefox and IE8 now with and without logging in to WordPress beforehand. Nothing works. What the hell am I supposed to do, coz I’m clearly not doing it right?

London Startup Weekend

I won a ticket to London Startup Weekend. Squee! :) It’s a weekend-long event where people gather to pitch ideas, then break off into groups and build them over the weekend. I’m still not a coder, and I’m still crap and graphic design, so I’ve dug out an old notebook and will be carrying it around with me for the next two weeks, writing down business ideas. I might even pitch one or two of them. Depends on the vibe in the room. Failing that, I might focus on UI design and marketing the hell out of whatever it is we build. Having been bored out of my skull on every one of the social marketing seminars I attended at Internet World, I reckon I know quite a lot about this social media stuff.

It’s the same weekend as Launch48, which is rather unfortunate for somebody. However, Startup Weekend is in Southbank, where Launch48 is in Richmond. OTOH, the Richmond office is where GameCamp was held, and I know for a fact that they have FatBoy beanbags there. Startup Weekend makes no mention of creature comforts. I shall ask them if I need to bring a pillow.

As for me, I’m getting much more comfortable with this meatspace networking malarky over the past couple of years. Not only has my day job forced me to talk to lots of people all the time, I ran a session at GameCamp 2 (London), I chatted to random strangers this year at The Stylist Network and Internet World. I can totally do this.

I hope.

There’s a competition to win your own ticket this evening and another tomorrow. Follow @startuplondon and the hashtag #swlondon

Internet World 2010

I attended Internet World 2010 the other week. It’s sort-of inspiring to be in an environment where I can completely focus on my start-up idea. OTOH, I learned exactly nothing from any of the seminars I attended.

For a start, should I really have any respect for an internet-focused conference that doesn’t appear to support permalinks on its official website? I’m sure that in 9 months’ time that deeplink I’ve included above won’t be working any more.

Besides that, I think it’s probably more targeted towards successful businesses who don’t know anything about social media/internet behaviour. Pretty much everything was well out of the range of someone (like me) languishing in seed stage. I did manage to learn that a fully-featured content management system will likely cost about £25,000. So… I’ll be sticking with WordPress for a while.

Edit: Oh, forgot to mention the most important thing that I discovered; the one thing that made it all worthwhile. I learned about BrandBank, who distribute product photos and label information. Not much use to me at the moment, but once I develop the plain fruit and veg categories on One Serving, BrandBank will make it much easier to branch out into processed or packaged food.