SEO.com hosted this evenings event. There were a lot of people that attended and gave some great feedback.
Company Pitches
Fanfare was first up. Brian Henderson did a great job of getting the audience engaged. He tapped in to the energy of those who have attended live concerts. That is the group that Fanfare is targeting. The plan is to entirely change the way that concerts are organized. Fanfare wants to move the market to be audience driven. The process was easy to follow. First an artist registers with the site and makes himself available to geographic areas. Then the local music lovers in that area request a concert and commit an upfront amount of money that is refunded if no concert comes together (similar to groupon). Once the right threshold is met, the artist commits, a promoter is secured and a venue is scheduled and booked. At this point the local music fans and promoter sell the concert to the entire local market and hopefully the venue has to be changed to accommodate the size of the audience. This is the wave of the future and Brian wants us to help Fanfare take us there. NEED: Become a fan on Facebook of fanfare. Provide feedback to them of music groups that you are interested in. Share the idea.- Bazari‘s Cody Campbell and Andrew Ray presented their idea to the LaunchUp audience.
Their focus is on creating an eCommerce platform using SMS, primarily focused in India right now due to the lack of Internet infrastructure but massive cell phone presence there. The key right now is to continue to develop the right partnerships. It was exciting to hear some of the feedback that they have already gotten from companies in India who want this now. Cody and Andrew are headed back to India in June to show off their final round of demos. NEED: I did not hear any specific request from them except for general input and thoughts. 
Inzolo is a small company that is trying to break in to the market by helping people use their money wisely. Dustin presented the idea of “envelopes” and how he has implemented them on a website in an easy way for users to keep track of their money and make the dreaded topic of “budgeting” approachable. The site looked fairly easy to use and certainly has the makings of something that can help people keep a budget. NEED: Ideas for monetizing and partnering. Thoughts on how to make it more FUN and social.
Amp Session was given by Dave Bascom of SEO.com. He spoke about getting a good domain name. He shared his experience with his company that originally owned and used the domain “webtargeted.com”. This domain didn’t really move their company forward very far or fast. However, once they purchased SEO.com their business exploded and they are continuing to grow rapidly. Dave reminded us to consider the fact that generic domains/names don’t win unless you spend a lot of time and money promoting the name. Sometimes it is simpler to just buy the right domain.
In the Weeds was presented by Jesse Harding who gave us some excellent food (or drink) for thought. 
One of the examples he used to explain what not to do when Building your Brand was Tropicana. Tropicana chose to make a brand change with their orange juice containers and Jesse showed us in a simple way how they missed the fact that their brand, in the minds of their customers, was about the orange with the straw in it, not the green leaf at the top of the letter “i”. Due to this misunderstanding, during the next 2 months Tropicana lost 20% in sales.
Some great suggestions that Jesse gave for your brand is to consider it like a friend and think about how you would describe your brand as a person. What does your brand wear? How does your brand speak? How does your brand feel when people are around it? What do people want to do or be like when they are around your brand?
For ideas on brand you can look to BrandNew or knowem.com for names.
It was a great meeting again and I look forward to seeing y’all at the next LaunchUp on June 3, 2010!
You can find more complete notes (boring transcript style) at merrillhansen.com.
