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.

This evenings event was held at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi and was catered by them as well. A big thanks goes to them for providing something different than pizza. (I like pizza too)

The agenda has expanded to include more content, so I am going to “flip” the order to give the pitching companies first billing. The rest of the information is below the company pitches.

Company Pitches

• Ryan Elkins from iActionable was the first to present. I have been meeting up with these guys for months and watching their pitch move from “well we were just thinking” to “wow.” The concept is to bring “achievements” out of the gaming world and in to the market place. Achievements or awards are a part of most addicting games and are a way to Reward, Incent and Guide users to do what you want. During the Q&A Ryan tried a new innovation and reversed the paradigm to be a Q&A from the audience. The most compelling question that the audience answered for them was what market they should target. I bought off on this idea months ago and it was great to see a large group get excited and engaged with this concept. I look forward to seeing what iActionable can deliver in the coming months. NEED: Answers to questions. And I believe they got a fair number answered or confirmed at this evenings gathering.
• Steve Fulling from Kynetx presented next and kept his presentation very brief. Steve and Phil Windley have done a venture together in the past in the eCommerce space and are now creating a platform to change the way we view the Internet. Right now your browsing data is owned, mined and exploited by … you don’t know who. With this technology you may give specific permission to your favorite trusted websites (ie. merrillhansen.com) to help guide your browsing experience. This includes the ability for merrillhansen.com to remove ads from facebook.com pages for you OR add book deals from amazon.com to the the book reviews at goodreads.com. This is a very exciting technology that I personally am experimenting with right now and will continue to follow closely! NEED: Get ready to use the applications that the developers roll out soon. If you are a developer, sign up for an account and use it.
• And finally Ryan Goodwin talked about simler. He presented a video that explained the idea quite well and then he continued with further elaboration on how simler will help people make new connections with communities that they might enjoy. The idea is to have users select their interests using “tags” and connect with other people who have the same individual tags. You can also connect with people with whom you share a lot of tags in common. It sounded like a great idea. I am intrigued with how it may play out in the competitive market of social opportunities right now, but I look forward to seeing where Ryan is able to take this company. NEED: Sign up, tag yourself and share your ideas. He is also looking for Funding. No specifics were given.

Amp Session was given by Jeremy Hanks. With the continuing growth of the LaunchUp community he wanted to share some history, thoughts and a call to action. The history he provided was that LaunchUp grew out of his desire to give back to the entrepreneur community. In trying to help the community grow he compares it to working together to raise a barn, like in the old days. Rolling up our sleeves together to accomplish a common goal brings rewards to everyone. The concerns that he shared were that:

1. We have a unique community that does not put the “business” in first priority
2. We have a demographic/geographic divide that appears to exist at the “Point of the Mountain”

The call to action was to recognize and get over these two concerns. The meetings are only once a month and planned well in advance. Schedule your time and Join Us. If the meeting is north of the point Join Us and if the meeting is south of the point, Join Us. Your attendance makes a difference, so Join Us. Period. Opportunities will be coming for a group of “Friends of LaunchUp.” Jeremy is also looking into establishing formal “Mentors area” and hopefully “Funding” as well.

In The Weeds was presented by Ken Kaufmann from CFOWise. If you were late to the event, then you missed out on a great financial presentation for entrepreneurs. Ken’s opening slide was about “Make the Promise”, “Keep the Promise”, and finally “Track the Promise.” I would love to elaborate and may do so in the comments if someone else doesn’t. Ken then gave us the top 10 secrets for startups. For details you will have to follow up with him and I would encourage you to do so. They were: 10-Entity (legal structure), 9-Record Keeping (compliance/business), 8-Banking (separate account), 7-Billing (make it easy to pay you), 6-Payroll (don’t Guess 1099, Know), 5-Taxes (IRS is the worst lender), 4-Staff, 3-Professionals (10-15yrs exp.), 2-Financing (bootstrap is best), and 1-Benchmarking (MEASURE!). This was an excellent presentation about the things that will make us successful. Ken loves entrepreneurs so contact him if you want more information.

Finally the Artist Spotlight was on “Wesly”

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