Jul
8
Customer Feedback is King
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Just a heads up for those of you who have been posting in the forums and playing with our Alpha test - we’ll be moving to a more robust customer satisfaction platform shortly. It should facilitate better communication between you and us.
Why the change? Simple, you shouldn’t have to keep checking the forums to see if we’ve responded to your comments. So our new solution will automatically reply to you when we’re responding to your thoughts. This means that you can easily find out when we’re working on your issue.
In addition you’ll be able to see what other users have asked and how we answered their questions. Should make it easy to figure out if we already know about a bug.
Love the thoughts, keep them coming.
Jun
25
Event Seek was selected as a featured company for the most recent issue of Southeast Innovations! This a e-magazine delivered to a angels, VCs, and institutional investors throughout the Southeast.
It’s certainly not an article in the WSJ, the Economist, or the New Yorker, but it is press nonetheless. It is a brief review of our company, idea, management team, and market focus. It is always nice to be approached by someone who wants to talk about your company.
For those of you following the link, I apologize as it will only show you the header for our article - it is a subscription only publication.
As they say, any news is good news and we’ll continue to leverage any bit of PR we get to our advantage.
Alpha notes coming shortly…
May
14
Silver linings
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The great Event Seek run at the final prize for the Georgia Business Launch competition has come to and end. Sadly, we were not selected as one of the four finalists. While I’m disappointed that we were not selected, I’m proud of our accomplishments thus far. Just being selected as one of the 15 semi-finalists is quite an honor (and one you can bet I’ll be shamelessly promoting).
I had the pleasure of talking yesterday with Sid Elliot, Director of Business Strategy for the Georgia Research Alliance (one of the groups putting on the competition). He was kind enough to sit through all of the judging sessions, compile feedback, and provide this to us struggling entrepreneurs.
Overall our feedback was exactly what we expected, nothing new and nothing we can’t continue to work on. For those of you interested, here were a few key points:
- Tighten up your financial projects and assumptions (know every last detail of the model)
- Articulate the market pain in a way that individuals not in our target demographic can understand the gravity of it (help non-twenty something judges get why people want to find events)
- Strengthen your barriers to entry (figure out why no one can do this better than us)
“So, where is this silver lining?”
Late in the discussions, one of the judges was leaned back scratching his shin when he said to the group: “I’m not yet convinced I’d invest in this idea…but I would invest in these guys.” At which point almost everyone the room agreed. Never been said about any group in the three years of the competition…
WHOA! Seriously, wow! Did I mention we were the youngest group in the semi-finals? Not sure what this group saw in us, but awesome for Event Seek! Now all we have to do is leverage that and tweak our business plan and pitch until they love the idea. [Insert me]
So, while it was sad not to win, there clearly was a silver lining for us at Event Seek. And, we’ve got a fair amount of upcoming opportunities to do some self-promotion. I’ll be attending a variety of startup related activities in the next coming weeks like StartupRiot, Capital Lounge, the Entrepreneur’s Showcase, and Run it by the pros. If you see me, stop by and say hi.
Ok so that’s actually something that serious bloggers (who have real audiences) say. But it felt cool to act like people might seek me out.
May
9
The siren’s song of the air-mattress is calling my name
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Things have been pretty exciting around the office lately with development picking up speed, preparing for the business launch semi-finals, and the general mood that comes with hitting milestones. The thing that I’m most excited about right now however, is the addition of the air-mattress.
I brought it in a week or two ago because it was just taking up space in my house and we’re certainly not hurting for storage in the office (tends to happen when you work in a Uhaul). I’ve taken a few cat naps on it thus far, usually about 10-15 minutes in length, but generally just enough to close my eyes and get back to work. As I’m writing this post, I’m basically counting the words until I can go crash on that plush gray pillow and sleep for the next hour.
As many of you know we’ve been preparing for the semi-final round of the Georgia Business Launch Competition. This week has been hectic as I’ve worked to make sure we were bringing the right set of materials, knew what we wanted to say, and were going to be showing off our A game. As a result, I haven’t spent much time outside of the office or slept any normal person’s sleeping patterns.
At 8:00AM this morning we presented to a panel of distinguished judges. Seriously, this group was full of powerful, thoughtful, entrepreneurial, I-eat-pieces-of-shit-like-you-for-breakfast investors. Tristan and I were bright-eyed and busy-tailed and put together what I thought was actually a solid presentation. The judges asked excellent and difficult questions and we tacked each one to the best of our ability. I’m thrilled to say that the presentation and Q&A went off without a hitch and I think we have a real shot at making the final 4 groups.
Are the odds against us? Sure. Is our idea better than everyone elses? Of course. will the judges agree with me? Who knows. I can say this for sure though: I’m off to take what I believe is a well deserved nap.
Somebody set an alarm…
May
1
Picking up a little street cred
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Today, we received our first award. Well its not like a real award, and its not a huge deal, but hey we’ll take whatever we can get right?
This afternoon Event Seek was selected as a semi-finalist for the Georgia Business Launch Competition. Of the 90 or so companies that applied to the competition, we were chosen as one of the top 15. To those of you who voted for our video, my most sincere thanks! Amazingly, we weren’t one of the top two videos receiving votes for the competition, so as it turns out, our application stood on its own *ahem* merits.
We’ll be presenting our plan to a team of distinguished Atlanta judges next Friday at 7:45 am. Many of you know that I’m not a morning person so I have a feeling I’ll have to get up early and drink a red bull or two, but you can bet I’ll be there pretty psyched to present. Neither Tristan or I are veterans at this, so just being invited to present is pretty exciting. Did I mention that the judges are definitely connected to money and influence around Atlanta? I guess I’ll have to get my suit pressed and wear my power tie…
We’ve slimmed the presentation down to just a few slides that really hit our critical points, so hopefully our passion and excitement can shine through. If anyone wants to see the slides, feel free to shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to share.
Keep your eyes open for future updates on our progress. I’d love nothing more than for Event Seek to make it to the finals, but really I just want to put together a good showing for our small company, investors, and all the friends supporting us along the way.
Oh and if today wasn’t good enough already, we’ve managed to bring in another investor to the team. You know who you are (I don’t think its good to name drop in a blog), and I couldn’t be happier that you’re with us.
Back to making pretty slides…