Startup Insights

http://www.shahzebsaeed.com The best start of a presentation so far. What a pitch. Nothing works like a product demo. Finest shirts in town. No retail presence. Launched at the IBA Alumni Dinner. Made 60 shirts, sold 30 of them. Great questions. Sold shirts through Facebook. Lives on referrals. Finally a winner.      

Find your destination. Not a GPS. Add fastest and easiest path with added information about traffic jams and other possible time delays. Great starting slide cover, bad background for the rest of the presentation.    

Great stage presence but blows the power point start. No eye contact. Too much sugar or too little rehearsals. Decent screen shots but too late to recover from earlier mis-steps. No eye contact throughout the presentation.    

Finally something to do with Food. Restaurant.com, KhaoPiyo.com. Starts with customer pain and goes into market sizing Karachi. Decent pitch format and presentation but still doesn’t answer the core question. How do you seed the network?  

A GSM/GPRS based personal tracking system. Jumps into technospeak much too early in the presentation Good rationale for using the technological platform. Could have done a better job using visuals. So there is an application.

60 seconds gone and we still don’t know what Reflex 360. 2 minutes gone and we still don’t know what Reflex 360 does. Finally we will get to hear what is the product about. Maybe. Nope. 5 minutes of generalized statements about how sorry a job we are doing on the research front.

The search assistant you need. A Google powered search engine. Explains what is RenSoy reasonably well as long as you are geeky Google power search user. And RenSoy is reaching. How is it different from Google Advance Search.

Electronic voting through SMS or fingerprint recognition. Pitching along the lines of a class project or a research presentation rather than a business plan pitch. Decent idea but poor pitch.

Great delivery and demo. Smart kid. Using the product to run the presentation. There is hope. Goes to market size, product features and goes off track with the video demonstration. So the key question is manufacturing scalability, distribution and profitability. Great presentation and pitch, gets the judges involved but hadn’t done the ground work on the business side, pricing and …Read the Rest

Who is the customer? What is the customers’ possible pain. Retail customer Who is the customer? What is in it for large book importers, independent book sellers. An Amazon for Pakistan? First online platform that integrates EasyPaisa – Cool? 13000 books available on the websites within 2 months Charge a fixed commission on the sale of each book. Nice, concise, …Read the Rest