Eske: Coming up in front of the audience with fruit in your hands was awesome. It was an absolutely perfect way to (1) get everyone’s attention in a memorable way; and (2) give a clear visual demonstration of what the product is all about. I thought it was great. And I think your slides did a terrific job of capturing the whole story, from product, to market size, to who owns the IP, to competitive landscape, to funding requirements including royalties. You really captured the entire essence of the business, from benefits through economics, in one 3-minute presentation. Plus you were brave enough to be the very first presenter, so thank you very much for that! The only piece of input I have is that you used the European format for numbers (periods where Americans expect to see commas, as in 100.000 dollars in funding and a price point of 19,76) and for an American audience you probably want to use the format they are familiar with. Similarly, your slides use the European term “turnover” instead of the American term “revenue”, which would confuse some people (Americans are dumb). Other than that, great job, Eske!

James: Nice job on Asset Army. My main input for you is the clarity of the message. It would be great to get that opening line of “We store photos & details of your assets, allowing you to sell, alert and donate” down to something like “Easily store everything about your valuables, all in one place.” Boom. “Access anytime, from anywhere, from any device”. Boom.

I was also confused by “It’s free for 90% of all users” – my initial reaction was “who are the other 10%, and why?”. Reading back through your slides I get it now. You might simplify that down to “We are using using the well-established freemium model, where users choose between an ad-supported free edition, or a paid subscription version.”. Everyone gets that model.

My opinion (and I could be wrong, of course) is that the donation thing confuses the initial message, and should be treated as an “added benefit” later in the presentation. Later in the presentation you could say “But wait, there’s more! Asset Army helps donating to your favorite causes, too!”

So, my overall input is that you are making the story more complicated than it needs to be. It’s a powerful dashboard to keep track of all your valuables. Easy to use, easy to afford. That’s the user story. The economic story is equally simple: once we have information about people’s valuable property, we can provide highly-targeted, high-value advertising, lead-gen, and promotional offers. That’s a solid economic proposition.

Bud: I love Photozini, and love the simplicity of “You give us up to 150 of your digital photos, and we’ll turn your photos into a beautiful, high quality magazine”. Says it all. I also really like your idea of starting with the corporate gift market – much better market to start with than trying to go directly after the high-headwind consumer market. My gut says that travel agencies selling cruises could be a good channel for you, but travel agencies are a quickly-disappearing business so you don’t to be dependent on them! The world is moving away from USB-based local drives as everything moves to the cloud, so you’re swimming against the stream on that one, but there’s still a demographic that is more comfortable copying files to a drive and dropping them in the mail (plus you’ve go that branding value of physical drives for the corporate market). Nonetheless, I suspect you’ll need a direct-to-the-cloud option in the future. Re-orders are going to be a high-margin opportunity, so you want to make sure you have a mechanism in place to reach out to existing customers enticing them to order additional copies, etc. To get off the ground you’ll probably need some direct sales (very expensive), but once you’ve got momentum hopefully you can move to less expensive customer acquisition channels. Overall, I love your business. Everyone is going to say “Yeah, but Shutterfly and Snapfish do that”. To which you need to say “I know, once I get some traction they are going to pay a fortune to acquire me!”

Laurie: I happen to know, from talking to you, that you are a real expert in this field, and so the best thing about this business idea is that you already have a tremendous amount of valuable content and best practices around the topic. So I think you’d want to make sure you said that in your presentation. LinkedIn says you have “30 years of experience in emergency management and all-hazards response planning”. That’s a huge competitive differentiator, so sell it!! Put that in your slides! I also think you buried the other headlines, which are “The U.S. has sustained 114 weather/climate disasters since 1980 with losses of 1 billion or more and total standardized losses for the 114 events exceed $800 billion” and “25% of small businesses do not even re-open following a major disaster”. Those are very salient facts, but you don’t get to them until slide #9. To me, the story is simple and compelling – Businesses in this country are woefully underprepared for disaster. You have 30 years of experience in solving that problem. And you’ve developed a powerful subscription-based web service that delivers a highly-efficient, cost-effective solution to organizations everywhere. Boom! Best of all, you have a go-to-market plan that starts with the 120,000 faith-based organizations in the US, and then scales-up to reach over 3 million businesses. That’s your story in two lines, and it’s a compelling one!!! You go, girl!

Trevor and Kevin: OK, you two definitely win the prize for the well-rehearsed presentation. Very nicely done. You totally nailed the essential proposition, and did a great job with the presentation. Your presentation was filled with “benefit statements”, which I love (as you know). What was missing, obviously, was anything about the economics. I know that was intentional, since this was a 3-minute pitch to get to the 10-minute pitch, but I still would have wanted something about the economics of the deal. “We believe that we can have 3 million active, engaged consumers, and we have a unique and powerful revenue model to deliver targeted promotional offers to them”. Or some sort of teaser like that that would be given me a sense of how you are going to monetize this. That’s my input – nice job with the overall delivery of the presentation! I loved it.

Giorgio: You looked great up there in a suit jacket! Nice job with the presentation. You’ve got a business which is really easy to understand, which is a huge advantage over many people. And for me the historical financials were great – they showed that this is a well-established company, generating 25%+ in net profit every month. Not many businesses can say that. I also like the fact that you have a staged-expansion plan (first the second bay, then additional locations). That makes total sense to me. At heart this is a professional services business, which means that revenue scales pretty much in linear association with headcount (doubling the revenue means doubling the headcount). This is true of any professional services company. So that’s what made me suggest that finding an investor who wanted to join the team would double the impact – capital for equipment investment plus added-throughput for the shop. I could be wrong, but that was my initial reaction. This is also a business where loyalty and referrals mean everything. I’m not sure whether you are currently doing things like nurturing your Yelp reviews, but this is the kind of business that tends to really benefit from anything that amplifies loyalty referrals. The great thing about building loyalty and referrals is that it drives both ends of the economics: referrals drive revenue, and loyalty drives margins (I totally trust my car mechanic, and so I never question his bills. This makes me a high-margin customer). Anyway, I love your family business, and am really glad you are in the class, so please let us all know what we can do to help. Great job with the presentation.

Shushanik: I love your slides. The best part of your business is that your target market is really easy to understand: fashionable women who love tennis. That’s a nice, easy-to-understand target market. The other great thing is that I suspect that people who fit that demographic are very passionate and loyal (and probably affluent) which always makes a great group of consumers to target. Yours is a business where the CPA < LTV equation is really really crucial, so I’d want to see some exploration of that in any presentation (even an initial 3-minute one like this). If you rely just on SEO, the laws of economics say that usually the cost of traffic will end up being about equal to the monitization. Everyone wants to magically be getting traffic that somehow is naturally of higher value than its cost, but that almost never happens. So, I’d probably want to see at slide or two that talks about how you’re going to get traffic at a cost of X (SEO, great content, linkshare agreements, etc) and you are going to monetize it at Y (ads, affiliate marketing, ecommerce, etc). Great job with the slides, and great job at picking a business you are clearly passionate about!

Kat: Awesome presentation. You get the award for the best-prepared heart-tugging presentation, and a self-running movie with music definitely made it stand out from the crowd. I think we were all sold on the fundamental proposition. The two things missing were (1) differentiation; and (2) economics. Greeting cards are such a crowded space that you’ve got to convince your audience that you have a unique approach, with a defensible revenue model. I realize that your intention with this was for it to be a teaser which made us want to know more (which it did!), but I’d probably want to add something about secret sauce and economics. To put it a different way, you sold us on something we didn’t need to be sold on (thank you cards) but didn’t sell us on what we needed to be sold on (that this is a legitimate standalone business). The good news is that, like Bud’s Photozini business, there are lots of big players in the space who would be happy to buy you if you get traction. So, you don’t need to own the space, you only need to own a little corner of it and one of the big players will pay a fortune to buy you! Hope that’s helpful – I loved your presentation, and all of your contributions to the class.

Jignesh: I love how your title slide sums-up the whole proposition: Window into Online Marketing. Any audience will intuitively understand that offering a dashboard with insights into online marketing spend and results has value to any business. You then followed that up with slide 2, that told the whole story: “Both advertising agencies and companies gain deep insights into how their marketing dollars are being spent, and how to optimize the returns. D-Media provides a web-based dashboard showing all of an organization’s online marketing activities in one centralized place”. Very nice. I also liked your phased-in approach for going-to-market, and also your slide about the deep experience of the team. That’s hugely important, especially for an enterprise business like this. And your market landscape slide does a really nice job of painting the picture of what a huge opportunity this is. The one thing missing, I think, is the economics of your particular offering. Something like “for just $10,000/year we can save the average business $50,000 in non-optimized marketing spend”, or something like that. Anybody selling to businesses just has two value propositions: either you save them money or you drive their revenue. Those are the only two value propositions when you are selling to businesses. And the GREAT thing about your business is that you do both: you save them marketing dollars AND you make their marketing more effective. That’s huge. Sell it!!