Earlier this week I was invited on the panel by one of the sponsors Bill at AngelsDen, for the MashupEvent about good things to invest in going forward. I’m not entirely sure the evening focussed on this actual topic for long, but there were a few good snippets there.

There’s some fun video interviews done with myself and the rest of the panel:Video Interviews (2 mins each)

Yesterday I got kicked out of seedcamp 2009!

Aside from the embarrassment caused by the mismanagement of the situation, and the degrading scene created by being asked to leave in front of a room full of investors I consider friends & colleagues, I now find myself thinking about the entire Seedcamp concept.

Why was I asked to leave? Well apparently, I wasn’t an investor in the seedcamp main fund and thus not allowed to participate. What I hadn’t seemed to realise (and I’m sure I’m not the only one), is that this fourth day is where angel funds and VC’s pay upwards of £50,000 to attend (no kidding!), to get exclusive access to the company pitches and detailed business models and plans. Not only that, but these start-ups have at this point benefited from lots of mentoring advice from kind souls who attended the previous days to help. Now of course if I’d paid for an event and someone got in for free, I’d be annoyed to. It’s not that I’m objecting too, but rather a lot of confusion over what Seedcamp claims to be. The real question is how it can be trying to be both an open eco-system and a closed investment fund at the same time.

Firstly, don’t get me wrong, seedcamp gets some great investors and Saul and team have done more than most to promote the startup scene, and I have a lot of time and respect for them. It’s just that in this particular instance, I’m not sure the Seedcamp format is right or that it really knows what it wants to be. It pitches itself as “providing access to seed funding but also, more importantly, will expose startups to the collective experience of people who can help inspire Europe’s next generation of technology entrepreneurs.”. I believe healthy debate should be invited to see how things can be improved.

• The first day of Seedcamp sees 20 companies presenting their concepts / business in raw unedited format to anyone who wants to see it.


• What follows over the next two days is a series of sessions and help from mentors gathered from the great and good across the EU tech scene. The mentors give their valuable time (completely free) to provide advice, insight and every now and then a little bit of inspiration.


• The last day is the final presentations from the Seedcamp businesses where they pitch their full plan (hopefully having been significantly improved by the advice given) apparently only to Seedcamp fund investors, meaning the mentors and indeed all other attendees are prohibited from attending.


• The winners are then chosen and small amounts of cash invested.

This second to last point is where I believe the concept is flawed, and why there is a lack of transparency about the aims of the project. Why?

• Firstly, I don’t see why mentors are invited at all. They certainly don’t get thanked afterwards by the organisers (I wasn’t last year), and there is definitely an ungracious feeling of being shipped in and out like cattle to advise and help. If the argument is that seedcamp is doing the mentors a favour by giving them access to the startups- then I don’t buy it. I can achieve that quite easily myself with a phone call and a meeting at my office – thanks very much.


• Secondly, what’s with the closed investor day where VC’s pay large 5 figure sums to attend – is this also an investment in the main fund? Arguably, all the mentors have done is directly helped these investors by giving the start-ups valuable advice that then benefits their investment fund. If seedcamp is getting large sums of money for this then you could say that the mentors should be compensated too or not invited at all.


• Thirdly, if it really is purely an investment fund, then there is potential for large conflicts of interest. I did hear a few people say that GigLocator should have won one year but didn’t because one of the investors had a stake in Songkick. Whether this is true or not, it is a valid possibility.


• Having a closed investor day also deprives the companies of an opportunity to present to the widest possible audience and hear the thoughts of other investors and entrepreneurs. Perhaps most significantly deprives Seedcamp the opportunity to broaden their impact. How? Simply put – if any if the businesses were good and didn’t win a small group of external / angel investors could step in with financing, advice or indeed both.

To to really dig deep into the core of this issue, we need to understand who Seedcamp aims to benefit. That is, if its aim is to help the companies – it should be completely open and everyone has a chance to help out, invest, and have full access in a competitive way (perhaps with a first right of refusal given to Seedcamp). If on the other hand its primary purpose is to help Seedcamp investors refine the propositions and get some investment opportunities – then they should remain a completely closed event and Seedcamp should pay any advisors or let them invest at the same time. In either case, it should be much more transparent about what it is trying to do.

At the moment it appears to be firmly stuck in the middle!

You’ve got to love these surveys that get published that demonstrate, with stats, that your initial hypothesis all those years ago is now starting to manifest. The trick is all about the timing and riding the wave, launching to market at exactly the right point. Imagine you’re a surfer – catch the wave (trend) and go for it!

The spot in question came via InternetRetailing.net who spotted the survey from LinkShare (no they’re not getting a link as I can’t see where they published the survey!), whose findings indicated that 81% of people are now doing research online before buying a product!. That’s a phenomenal amount of individuals who want validation before making any purchase.

92% of people said they have more confidence in the information online than they do in high-street store assistants. Not unexpected considering the average person giving advice has always had to read the brochure in front of me when I asked about anything more than what was on the label. It also mentions that more people expect to shop online generally as they tighten their purse strings and seek out the best deal for that heavily researched products.

So how are people currently doing this online? Good question damn it!

• 75% price comparison engines
• 69% user review sites
• 66% professional review sites
• 55% loyalty / voucher sites

Of course, most people probably start with Google in the first place.

People like Bazaarvoice are leading the way in implementing user reviews on merchants’ own websites, which adds to the massive pile of general user review and expert review sites out there on the web. Add the wealth of conversation taking place in twitter, facebook, and friendfeed around what products to buy – and you’ve got an immensely fragmented marketplace for this behaviour.

Now if only Crowdstorm can do what it set out to do… is it time to ride the wave yet?

I’ve just been reading a post by Nic Brisbourne on the Future of Venture Capital who posts some interesting thoughts on what may happen with VC investments over the coming year.

Nic has a nice optimistic view on this – but I have to disagree. In this kind of market, the good businesses are those that understand how to cut their cost bases and strive for profitability as quickly as possible. They are the entrepreneurs and companies who won’t actually need to raise any VC once they are on this path and will instead seek out Angel investments and smaller amounts of cash to tide them over for any cashflow dark spots.

Any company that has raised VC all ready should have enough to see them through to profitability or the VC’s who originally invested will sink a bit more cash into it if it’s going the right way. I don’t see any VC’s making any new investments in new companies for a long time now as they hardly did this when times were good anyway!

Let’s face it – VC’s need to be become smaller, more dynamic in levels of investment, and stop being scared of risk. In fact – 2009 / 2010 are the years of the angel investors!

Jeff Pulver backs me up on this argument too, stating that the smart entrepreneurs are those that know how to bootstrap and utilise the vast range of free infrastructure resources that now currently exist to make this even easier.

Just a quick post to say the Crowdstorm team are back in action after a good 4 week break – so don’t worry, we haven’t let the blog go to waste.  In fact, the next post in a few minutes is a very detailed one about Search vs. Recommendation Sites – hurrah!

We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..

One thing which has been really interesting over the past 5-6 weeks is that having an actual site live is a very useful thing. We debated for quite a while whether we were going to put the current version live, bearing in mind the list of bugs and elements that didn’t quite seem to work correctly, going through the following points:

• You actually have deployed something which is a great morale booster
• You learn a lot from how people use (or don’t use the site) through asking them, and mainly analysing detailed statistics on usage
• It’s a chance to get out of a development environment and really see what the real world issues that are thrown at you are.
• People stop asking you when you are going to launch!!!
• Users who come to the site think that it is a finished version and may not be patient with the flaws
• You have to keep fixing the bugs in the live environment which takes up valuable development time
• Investors start asking for traffic figures on the site and to see “traction” when you’ve only just launched and know you need to put another 20 things live and perfect them before your plan really kicks in.

Well – what “have” we learnt directly in relation to Crowdstorm then?

1. Not implementing a menu bar sucks in terms of navigation!
2. Developing the site with a graphic design team and then implementing everything in one big chunk is wrong and inefficient (I’ll explain why further down in this post)
3. We shouldn’t let design get in the way of functionality and usability – it may look great but not if people can’t use the thing
4. Use some good quality analytics packages – we have a combination of our own internal tools, Google Analytics, and Clicktale
5. Make sure you get the blend right between people who want to browse and people who want to search and know what they want.
6. Some design elements and layouts on the web have evolved in a certain way for a reason – being adventurous is good but need to pick the right battles
7. Don’t try and gain traffic too quickly so that you can get feedback and improve the proposition before the masses arrive

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

The first version of Crowdstorm was a big step for us in terms of trying to build functionality and a design with no historical work to base it on. We took the concept and vision, built 75% of the functionality, then got a graphic design team in to come up with our look and feel. Once the graphical work was done and we were happy with any changes, we then tried to match the CSS / XHTML up with the technical feature set to create the finished product. There was no real way to go back and tweak things without losing time and money.

Fast forward to Jan 2008 – and Crowdstorm V3. This time we have a great team who have had me drill the words “iterate, measure, deploy” until their ears bleed. In a small team of 5, we’ve got two technical developers, one front end interface designer, a search engine specialist, and a product / commercial guy (that’ll be me then).

We build a basic wireframe of a page, write what we want from it, look through any data from the existing site to back up our ideas for change, then code a designed page up in CSS / XHTML. We look through it, play around with a few elements, then go and simplify it by reducing 20% of what we have on it. Once we’re happy with this first version we get the front-end hooked up to the technical backend and deploy it on our beta site behind the scenes, then move on to the next page.

Even then, we’re constantly going back to the older versions and trying new things with the implemented design and refactoring in the technical implementation. We run the analytics software on the pages and get people to try it out too. The main thing I’ve found is that this works very, very well, but it does rely on having all the team on-board in order to understand that nothing is set in stone and everything they do will change.

It’s what I love about the web – seeing a product as a living, breathing entity that evolves every waking minute of the day!

Predictions out on monday from the Advertising Association and World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) and published on StrategyEye – stating that UK online ad revenues could hit £21.97 billion by 2019, up from £15.98 billion in 2007. Now that is some long-term prediction from those people with the crystal ball!

It actually does make sense even in the short term as even if you believe the “predicted” downturn in the global economies, online ad spend is most likely to actually increase as advertisers look to place their money in the most cost effective and trackable channel – the internet.

Look for ongoing increases in display ads, online classifieds, search marketing, and vertical-niche channels.

Have a great holiday and we’ll be back in the new year with a whole heap of announcements. Thanks for everyone’s support this year – we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and remember you can always come to Crowdstorm UK or Crowdstorm USA when you’ve got your gifts and want to tell the world how good or bad they are!

Wow – another milestone and about time too eh About an hour ago, the US site went live at www.crowdstorm.com

Now of course we have to check for bugs, keep bringing in more of our expert review feeds, and tidying up all the loose ends for the next 48hrs. Still – it’s a great feeling to be operating fully in two countries now (UK and US) and evolving our site and platform from there.