Recently we got to catch up with Andrea Lo, Ceo/cofounder of Piggybackr. During our interview she introduces us to Piggybackr and shares with us some lessons from the early stages of starting her company. Piggybackr is and Angelpad Spring 2012 company from San Francisco.

Tell us what  your company is all about.

Piggybackr is the “kickstarter for kids.”  We teach young people how to bring their offline fundraisers online so they can raise more money for their teams, schools, and communities in a more effective, educational, and fun way!

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

I was inspired by my then 11-year-old sister who wanted to raise money by selling bracelets for $1. I thought…”why isn’t she doing this online?”

Can you walk us through some of the early stages of starting Piggybackr?

I initially started the company without a technical co-founder so I had to do everything I could to validate my idea without building the product.  The first version of Piggybackr, was a sketch on construction paper.  I went around talking to strangers and asking them for feedback.  Only after a couple iterations, did it evolve to prototypes on the computer.  It was only after I had gotten the user experience flow down and positive feedback that we really started building out the entire website.

How’d you gain traction initially?  

We pounded the pavement to get our first customers. Once we had a few initial successes, people started telling each other about us.  We also signed on some large organizations that reached a lot of youth.

You’re part of Angelpad, how have they helped you? Why Angelpad?  

Angelpad was an amazing experience.  It brought my company to whole other level and has helped me build a lasting network of down to earth mentors and founders who have willingly helped me every step of the way.  I chose Angelpad because I liked the people who started it and because it was small and focused (they only accepts only 10-12 companies per batch).  The mentors are accessible, hands-on, and genuinely care about every company in the portfolio.

Any do’s or don’ts you’d recommend for those trying to get funding? 

Introductions really matter.  Start out by getting other entrepreneurs to introduce you to their investors or mentors who know you well enough to introduce you to their contacts. Always be pitching your company – you never know who you’ll meet or who you’ll be introduced to. Don’t talk to investors until you’re ready to pitch them – you oftentimes only get one chance to present your company.  Don’t take “no’s” personally.  Investors are trained to find reasons to say “no.”  Be confident, passionate, and don’t give up!

Did you beta test? How so and how do you feel it affected your relationship with those who were testing it?  

Beta testing is a critical part of building a product.  No matter what stage you are in the company, there are going to be people who love your product, and people who will find fault with it.  You have to get over that, and be ready to put an incomplete product out there, get feedback, and act on that feedback quickly.  We made sure to always communicate with our earliest users, and be quick to recognize and own up to any mistakes and errors that were made.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneur looking to get their company into Angelpad?  

All the regular stuff: validate your idea as much as possible.  Have unique insights about how you’re going to solve the problem and know your industry and competitors in and out.  Line up customers before you build out your product too much. Make sure you have a strong team, big market, and good idea.  And network as best you can to get their attention.

What advice would you like to give to an entrepreneur thinking about writing their first business plan?  

Don’t write one. What you should be doing instead is going out there and talking to customers, testing your assumptions, and validating that you’re actually doing something would pay for.  Try to line up your first couple customers before you even build anything.

What progress do you hope to make in the next year?  

We want to reach every young person in the nation, continue to grow quickly, and help youth successfully raise money and realize they can do things to help themselves and their communities.

A massive thank you to Andrea Lo for taking the time out of her busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Piggybackr next year to see how things are going. You can also follow them on twitter! 

What is Weavly all about?

Weavly is an incredibly easy to use online video editor with a twist. You can use it for creating mashups and video remixes with all the media that is already online – clips from YouTube, tracks from SoundCloud and even animated GIFs from Tumblr, Imgur and Loopcam. And you don’t have to worry about uploads, downloads or legal issues.

How did you come up with the idea for Weavly?

The foundation for Weavly was laid while working on a project for university. I wanted to create an interactive movie and give people the possibility to influence how the narration should progress. For example, they should be able to decide if the main character goes through a door or passes it by. Based on their decision, a different chain of video clips was triggered. As I wanted the project to be as accessible as possible, I hosted the different parts of the story on YouTube and build a simple JavaScript application to interactively connect them.

Working on this project gave me a lot of insights into the YouTube API and led me to the idea that it should be possible to create a whole video editor based on the APIs of portals like YouTube, SoundCloud and Vimeo. As I’ve created mashups and video remixes before and knew that finding good footage was as complicated as the tools you had for editing, I immediately felt that this might be a problem worth solving.

What were some of the challenges that you faced starting a company?

Weavly is a very consumer oriented product. There are a lot of possible revenue streams but they are not as obvious at you might expect from a B2B product, you have to think yourself into the project to see them. Therefore, convincing people that we’re onto something was quite a task, especially in Europe.

However, most of the conversations with other people – friends, mentors and investors – radically changed once we had our first beta out. People saw that we’ve built a fun and easy to use product and that we’ve given them a solution for something they’ve always wanted to do.

Apart from that, building the right team was quite a challenge. Everybody loves the idea of working on a startup but just a few people have the guts, the ability and the focus to pull it through. Finding them is one of the hardest tasks and although we’re still a young company, we already had our share of bad experiences in this direction. We hope we’ve learned from them.

You took part in the Startupbootcamp accelerator program, what difference do you feel being part of an accelerator made to your company?

There is the obvious part – we gained a lot of know-how and got the chance to be part of a great network. All the conversations and discussions we had with the Startupbootcamp mentors and members of the other teams helped us focus, got us out of the building and shaped our product in many different ways.

However, the recognition and exposure you get is equally as important. You’re no longer a team of nobodies working on a crazy project. You’ve got the name of trustworthy entity behind you and more importantly, it was the accelerator who chose you and not the other way round. Although it’s all about metrics and numbers in the end, and being part of an accelerator program opens a lot of doors, especially doors in the minds of people.

What 3 pieces of advice would you give to an entrepreneur looking to get their company into an accelerator program and why?

#1: Have some sort of prototype or MVP ready. Show that you’re not only able to think of good stuff but that there is a huge need out there and you are able to satisfy it. And be creative – a prototype or MVP can have many different forms, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a working demo or piece of hardware.

#2: Be honest. If you’re already an expert in the space you’re trying to get in, use the knowledge and brag with it. If not, than say openly that there are still some questions you need answers. Either way, keep the level of bullshit as low as possible.

#3: Have a great and balanced team. Easier said than done as there is no golden recipe for building one.

What advice would you like to give to an entrepreneur thinking about writing their first business plan?

Writing a x-paged business plan should be one of the last steps for setting up your business. Your first steps should be to identify a problem, validate that it really exists, think about a great solution and talk to other people about the things you’ve come up with. Ignore people who say you should be as secretive with your business idea as possible because it’s all about execution in the end.

Only when you know that you’re onto something real, you can start drafting a business model canvas and think about how your stream of revenue might look like and how you’d like to set up your company. Sometimes – and to be honest, I haven’t come across a startup the following statement doesn’t apply to – a business model canvas is more than enough. As your plans definitely will change while you’re working on your project, planing it in detail before you’ve even started working on it may be a waste of your time.

A massive thank you to Oliver for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Weavly. You can also follow Weavly on twitter!

Upon the successful completion of our project on KickStarter, a friend of mine and brilliant designer Daniel Bailey, founder of the luxury lifestyle brand MrBailey and creator of ConceptKicks launched a great project on Indiegogo. He opted for Indiegogo becasue he was having to make changes to his KickStarter application that would change his project in a way that he didn’t feel comfortable with, before it would be approved. Indiegogo has no real vetting procedure so a project can instantly go live which was perfect for Daniel, but what was interesting to me was that Indiegogo offers a feature that KickStarter doesn’t, called Flexible Funding. This allows you, the project owner, to still benefit from the funding that you raise, even if you do not hit your funding goal. This is designed for projects where any amount of funding will allow the project owner to provide the incentives to the backers without needing to hit their funding target. This is perfect for taking pre-orders of an already successful project, between the time it is successful and when it goes into production, exactly what we are doing with our book Accelerate. We have decided to use the Flexible Funding feature on Indiegogo to provide an opportunity for those that didn’t manage to pick up a copy of the special first edition on KS for a limited time on Indiegogo before we go to print in July.

If you would like to follow the books progress, check us out on Twitter.

Before being acquired by Facebook for $85mill in order to help developers build apps that span mobile platforms and devices, we had the chance to catch up with Parse cofounder Ilya Sukhar about their early stages and how it all got started. Ilya shares with us where the idea came from, how they prototyped, and what their MVP process looked like. Those who embrace the lean startup methodology might want to read on…. Parse is a 2011 Y Combinator company and is also funded by Google Ventures.

Where Parse came from:

The idea came from my own experience building mobile apps. I was part of a very small startup called Etacts that got acquired by Salesforce in late 2010. I joined Salesforce but I was really itching to start something of my own. So I spent a lot of my free time in early 2011 learning the mobile landscape and building experimental apps. I eventually left Salesforce because I had been accepted into Y Combinator. While I was building these apps, I realized that I wasn’t very passionate about building apps but that there was a huge opportunity in making it much easier for others to do so. As a backend engineer, I had expected to struggle with the UI layer and spend most of my time there. However, in addition to the UI, I found myself rebuilding very common functionality like data storage and user authentication over and over again all the while dealing with the problems that come from developing for different platforms, different devices, different run times.

Ycombinator, Prototypes, and MVPs:

I had been accepted to Y Combinator as a solo founder so the first step of validation was finding a cofounder. Luckily, I met Kevin right around the same time that I started considering this idea. We clicked instantly, entered YC together, and began working on a prototype in my apartment.

A few weeks later, we met Tikhon & James. They had been working on a payments company but were looking to switch it up. Kevin & I pitched them on this idea, we felt each other out for a bit, and then combined forces to form an amazing powerhouse team. We had to switch to Tikhon’s larger apartment to accommodate everyone.

While we were coding the prototype, we also put together a landing page that advertised about a dozen features we were considering. It looked completely real but, when you went to sign up, you were asked to fill out a survey to join the private beta. In fact, we had no product ready but we were able to gather requests from hundreds upon hundreds of people. This served as both validation and a roadmap for what to build first.

The four of us were able to put together an MVP in less than a month. I believe it only had basic data storage and retrieval capabilities for iOS. We seeded it to the YC network and our friends and continued to iterate and expand from there based on their feedback.

Beta:

We did but it was a pretty liberal beta. It was open to anyone and we didn’t charge anything. We just wanted to gather as much feedback as we possibly could so we could iterate towards the right product as fast as possible. Some of our highest paying customers are folks that started toying around with Parse during the beta.

Some Advice to Founders:

Build something first. Validate that people want it. Then worry about the long term game plan. There’s no use in planning if you don’t have a shred of evidence that people want what you’re making.

Lessons Learned:

Generally they all boil down to not trusting my gut. I’ve learned to do that more and more.

A massive thank you to Ilya for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Parse next year to see how things are going. You can also follow them on twitter!

Recently we caught up with Ben Lerner, Co-founder and CEO at DataNitro. During our interview, Ben introduces us to DataNitro while sharing advice abut the business plan process and applying to an accelerator program. DataNitro is a graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator program.

What is DataNitro all about?

We’re making Excel more powerful. Millions of people work with Excel every day, more and more of whom are reaching its limits. It’s common to see businesses rely on massive spreadsheets, and these spreadsheets frequently require functionality that Excel can’t provide. There are two options for extending Excel beyond its built-in limitations. You can use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), or dive into Windows programming with .NET. VBA is a bad choice for anything beyond simple user macros, while .NET requires substantial engineering investment. DataNitro is better. We integrate Excel with Python, decreasing development time by a factor of 10. Python, and its open-source libraries, also opens up a wealth of new functionality. Our users have built statistical models, web scrapers, and analytics engines in Excel, and integrated spreadsheets with chemical formula databases, REST API’s, and even electrical meters.

How did you come up with the idea for DataNitro?

My cofounder, Victor Jakubiuk, and I were working at a trading firm, and we were asked to build an options model in Excel with VBA. I’d never worked with VBA before, and I was looking forward to trying something new. By the time we were done, we were both stunned at how bad the language was. VBA has few built-in functions, and doesn’t support the concept of libraries. As a result, anything you need must be written from scratch (or copied from some forum) and stuck into your codebase. Because of this, we wasted a lot of time building basic functions. For example, things, we needed to write a version of Newton’s method, not to mention a max function. On top of that, you spend a lot of time fighting with the language for performance. The project ended up taking over two weeks to finish. If we could’ve used Python, it would’ve been done in two days. Despite its shortcomings, VBA is widely used in finance and engineering. Victor and I decided to work on DataNitro because we knew we could build something better.

What were some of the challenges that you faced starting a company?

It took us a long time to pin down an idea. We initially worked on a social travel site. This seemed like a great idea at the time, but we didn’t have a business model and we were missing key skills for the project. After a lackluster start, we went back to the drawing board and decided to work on something that matched our skillset and had a clear business need. DataNitro doesn’t sound as sexy as a travel site, but it solves a real problem for an entire class of professionals.

You took part in the Y Combinator accelerator program, what difference do you feel being part of an accelerator made to your company?

We entered Y Combinator right after starting DataNitro, and it helped us get off to the right start. The partners’ advice made sure we focused on what was important. When you’re starting a company there are a million different things you can spend your time on; it’s surprisingly easy to work 16 hours a day but not accomplish anything. And seeing how hard our batchmates worked and how much progress they made really helped us build up momentum.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneur looking to get their company into an accelerator program? 

Convince them that your company is going to be a success. An accelerator is an investor. Unlike most investors, their main contribution is time and support, not money, but they’re still investors. How do you do that? The best way is to clearly articulate why you think you’re going to be successful. After all, you and your cofounders are the company’s biggest investors: you’ll be spending years and tens of thousands of hours building it. Why do you think that’s a good idea? On a practical level, take the time to carefully write your application. Make sure it’s clear, succinct, and doesn’t leave anything out. Your writing needs to compel the partners to give you an interview over thousands of other applicants.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned so far?

Listen to your users. Victor and I are both engineers, and when we’re faced with a problem we immediately want to sit down and code. Most of the time, though, you need to go out talk to the people using your product before you start programming. Without their feedback, you don’t know if you’re building the right thing.

What advice would you like to give to an entrepreneur thinking about writing their first business plan?

First, keep in mind that a business plan for a startup is very different from a business plan for an established company. You won’t have detailed revenue and cost projections for 3+ years. Instead, focus on the next 12 months. Figure out some basic facts (how much money do we need, at a bare minimum?; what’s the soonest we can release something?; where does our product need to be to start making money?), and outline a few scenarios (what will we do if we don’t raise money?; what if we raise a seed round?; how would hiring one employee affect our costs?; how would it affect our development time?). Above all, remember that your business plan is just a starting point. It’s going to change, some times dramatically. The process of thinking through the business plan is much more valuable than the plan itself. If someone’s asked to see your business plan, they’ll understand this. They’re expecting it to just be a guess; you should make sure it’s a thoroughly educated one. If this is a potential employee or investor, they want to know that you’ve thought through things as much as possible with the limited information you have.


A massive thank you to Ben for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with DataNitro next year to see how things have come along.

Tell us what your company is all about.

Ordr.in is an open platform for restaurant ecommerce. Our APIs and other tools make it easy for anyone to build a food ordering app or integrate food ordering in any existing site, app or device. Our mission is to power generations upon generations of new restaurant commerce solutions.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

I used to run the restaurant business development team at American Express. My job was to get tens of millions of people to spend more with restaurants. Ecommerce was part of that but my only options were to promote a bunch of local online food ordering site or chain restaurants. The amount of opportunity in the space is crazy but there are very few tools that would help me take advantage.  So I recruited my co-founder/CTO Felix Sheng to this amazing mission to build Ordr.in. He handles the crazy technical challenges and I focus on the business.

Can you walk us through some of the early stages of starting Ordr.in? 

We had a vision for the company but had to educate a lot of people. There were no models in our industry to follow, no way to say we are X for Y. In the beginning I called everyone I could think of and asked “If we can do this would you participate?” Every time they said yes I sent them a contract. The more people said yes, the more confident we got in our plan. Of course one day a huge customer said yes and suddenly we really had to deliver. We thought that we were on our way but that first customer wound up being just a (super important) step on the journey. We had to keep engaging customers, listening and iterating. Only now, two years later, do I really feel like we are where we should be.

You were part of Google Ventures, how have they helped you? Why Google Ventures?

Why Google Ventures? Why not! They come with terrific prestige and teams of experts that help the portfolio with everything from design to hiring to engineering. They’ve been great supporters. Plus when we introduce ourselves as a Google Ventures portfolio company people pay attention.

What was it like going through TechStars?

TechStars was an amazing experience. Access to smart people in every field, terrific feedback and the right kind of pressure to succeed that helped us focus even more. So many doors opened for us. And the alumni experience is powerful- many engaged people to call for ideas, intros or references. I can’t say enough about it. But I also don’t recommend it for everyone. TechStars is an intensive, feedback-driven experience. If you are not the kind of team that thrives on feedback and pressure, don’t do it. Do what you think is right for your company.

What progress do you hope to make in the next year?

We are on track to having the largest online food ordering network in the country- more restaurants in more places than any other source. We are immensely proud to have done this without a sales team. Between growing our restaurant network and launching new ordering tools we expect a huge year in 2013.

Any do’s / don’ts when trying to get funding?

Don’t go into business to raise money. Raise money to stay in business. You do this by building a business you can’t stop thinking about, that you absolutely must see come to life. Don’t start by wondering what will get investment. That’s a terrible plan. Totally inauthentic. Good investors will sense that and run away.

What advice would you like to give to an entrepreneur thinking about writing their first business plan?

Start with a belief, something you really care about, and then keep making it simpler. The more complexity, the more opportunities to fail. And talk to people until you can communicate it so easily that they get as excited as you are. That’s when you know you’re on to something real. But don’t worry about an elaborate business plan. Just identify the market, the drivers of that market and why your approach will matter to customers. And then build it.

What were some mistakes that you learned from?

The biggest lesson we learned was that no one will “make” your business. New clients, nice press, a spot in an incubator…all are great but nothing will assure your success.  From the beginning we had a philosophy that we could make mistakes but not fatal ones; that things might take longer to hockey stick. We kept our burn rate low and never assumed big revenue would save us. It kept us alive through lean times so we had time to figure things out. I am so glad we did that!

A massive thank you to David for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Ordr.in next year to see how things are going. You can also follow them on twitter!

What is Zealous?

Zealous is a completely new way of looking at creativity, we’re bringing together artists from all creative fields into one space where they can showcase their work, collaborate with one another and reach their audience. All for free.

What are you doing different to anyone else?

There are platforms out there that focus on certain creative fields, such as film, design, illustration. We believe that creativity should be treated as a whole. Fine artists need pictures of their work, musicians; sleeves for their music, film makers, writers…we’re giving creatives a space where they’re able to find those skills and share the evolution of their work.

We’re completely artist-centric. Every decision we make starts with “How is this going to support the artist?” We go to great lengths to put ourselves in a position where we understand the challenges our user base is facing. We’ve commissioned art pieces, an animation, and we’ve even written, directed and produced a short film called “Tech Support” with a team of 42 people sourced partially from Zealous.

What are you plans for the future?

We want Zealous to be synonymous with creativity, on a global scale. To do that we have a long term plan which will see us challenge the way the creative industries operate.

Our new platform (That launches TODAY) is a small step towards our vision; you can expect to see the works we curate online to make an appearance in the real world, as well as new services geared to help artists reach their audience.

Recently you attended the SXSW conference, how was the experience?

SXSW is unquantifiable; going there with a set of goals would only serve to frustrate due to the chaotic nature of the event.

The beauty of it is to embrace serendipity. I’ve met some very interesting people, some of whom I would have never had access to. I went to some fascinating talks that expanded my understanding of creativity, and subjects completely unrelated to my field which expand my understanding of the world beyond my focus.

Of course I met new bands and saw new films, but the value of SXSW lies with its people, the talks in the long waiting lines, the random rants in front of a breakfast taco and the chats whilst awkwardly huddling the rare power sockets scattered around the conference hall.

These 2 weeks have enriched me as a person, and even though this knowledge, and these contacts are not of immediate use to me, I know they will come into their own when I next come across an unforeseen challenge.

 A massive thank you to Guy for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Zealous next year to see how things have come along.

About Recorded Future

It struck us that the internet is just a remarkable place to find predictive signals and data that can tell us things about the world. So we’re trying to index the web for analysis – allowing users to use beautiful user interfaces to answer simple questions like “What is Apple up to over the next 30 days” and more complex like “What genomics technologies will come to light over the next decade”.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

We’ve done analytics for a long time – and the idea of taking on the internet as a data source for prediction is just so compelling. Then when we started talking to some potential customers and users and quickly identified some very good potential use cases.

How’d you start?

We first had the idea that we could look at text (“Let’s meet in Tahiri Sq on Friday and be real angry”) and turn that into predictive signals. We explored lots of areas – finance, marketing, intelligence, sales, etc. – and eventually picked Intelligence as our first segment. In classic Crossing the Chasm style we took that to

Washington D.C. and started working very closely with analysts and big data technologists on how to put Recorded Future to work in their world. We created a dedicated blog – www.analysisintelligence.com - for that segment, spoke at conferences, teamed up with the key partners, etc. Deep dive!

Why Google Ventures?

Early on we thought about whether Google would be a competitor or not to what we do. In reality that probably was a bit silly… but So when a friend suggested that I get together with Rich Miner from Google Ventures I first thought hey that’s a terrible idea, but then quickly (like 20 seconds warmed up to the idea and when I met Rich and Bill Marris I realized that they were great guys and that I totally wanted to work with them.

Advice to an entrepreneur looking to be part of Google Ventures?

We started talking to them when they hardly existed (I actually don’t think the legal entity existed when our deal was done) and by now they’ve grown dramatically. But that said I think they are very much a leading VC firm – they’ll look for big ideas and great people. Perhaps the key difference is the technical/engineering staff which is incredibly good – and they also have a deep network into Google of course. Engage those parts!

Progress Recorded Future hopes to make?

We’ve started aggressively taking our products to commercial customers and have gotten great early adoption into some tremendous places. Time to take this to next level.

Advice on writing a business plan?

Don’t write too much I would do a whole series of mockups – whatever the product might be (software, hardware, consumer products, food etc.) and gain user data in many many iterations. Try to do this while measuring everything you can. Get in front of actual customers (individuals or corporations) and try to sell them. Get them to part with money. Learn from that and iterate super fast. You’ve heard it before, like 1 million times. It’s still correct.

But hey at some point writing down an actual plan is of course key – minimally for internal alignment, even if it’s a team of 1(!) or 2 people. Formulate the idea/vision, formulate what the product should be at start and what it could be 6-12-18 months out. Do your first take on the business model, both selling and cost structure. Outline what people you’ll need to start. That’s about it.

Startup Mistakes?

Hey it feels like I’ve done every mistake in the book, and keep making them haha. But that said – we’ve all waited too long to harshly cut – get out of a business segment, waiting too long to ask a person not fitting into the team to move, etc. Don’t wait.

Do’s and Don’ts of funding?

I think the key is to really just focus on building your business. Don’t focus on being funded – focus on building your business and you’ll get funded – by customers, partners, or if that’s what you want – VCs. If you lack the money, then make do with what you have. And even if you’re desperate to raise money, make it very clear that you’re not.

A massive thank you to Chris for taking the time out of his busy schedule to put down some awesome answers to our questions. We look forward to catching back up with Recorded Future next year to see how things are going. You can also follow them on twitter!

Taken from http://www.bonkersworld.net/building-software/