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”

Announcements

To help you to get to know the companies presenting at LaunchUp #6 we asked each to respond to a few questions…

The following Q&A segment is from Jason Barnes of iActionable.

Q: What does your company do?
A: We help sites and services attract new users and increase interactions by providing a personalized Achievement System. Sites can define and automatically award public badges to their users when specific actions are performed.

Q: Why does that matter and how do you make the world a better place?
A: We believe that a good way to encourage good behavior or use of a site/service is to provide a few goals for users and offer a public rewards for those who achieve them.
With Achievements you can make things fun to use, promote exploration, encourage return visits and sometimes create a little friendly competition between users.
By offering a centralized achievement system and badge repository service we hope to push this new trend forward and help sites create better user experiences and increase usage of a product or service in an desired and beneficial way.

Q: Why is your company cool?
A: The Badge/Achievement trend is very new and we believe it is going to grow rapidly. A few major companies or sites have successfully implemented Achievement Systems on the web and more and more people are going to want to implement one. We want to make it easy for anyone to create one!
We are the first to offer a service based achievement system powered by a customizable event based rule engine. Very little is required to initially hook in our API to track events. We also make it easy to modify the criteria by which achievement/badges are awarded without additional dev work.

Q: What 3 lessons/observations would you tell other entrepreneurs?
A: Start Ups are like a roller coaster. One minute you’re excited and swear your idea will take over the world, the next you’re starting to wonder if you’ve done the right thing. New ideas and projects can be bad temptations!
Find a good co-founder. It will ensure that things keep moving when either of you gets busy or starts to burn out. Keeping each-other in check but also motivated is important.
Release early and get feedback as soon as possible. We waited too long to really get our idea out there and discovered there was a whole different need that wasn’t being met and we quickly changed directions.

Q: Pick 5 people for your entrepreneur dream team (assuming you and your team were riding the bench)
A:Phil Haack (Microsoft), Scott Guthrie (Microsoft), Fred Wilson (avc.com), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)

Q: Which one pursuit? Golf, Basketball, Skiing/Snowboarding, Knitting, Mountaineering/Climbing, Bowling, Watching Grass Grow
A: Bowling, definitely bowling.

Q: Why are you an entrepreneur in Utah?
A: Ryan and I met while attending Neumont University in Sandy. We both landed our first software development jobs here in Utah and have been working together on startup ideas ever since.

We look forward to LaunchUp #6 and hearing more from iActionable!