Son of a pitch

Seedcamp have come up with a neat idea to get us taking part in the whole process, submit your two minute pitch via Seesmic to the Seedcamp blog by Wednesday, August 6th.

I have done my fair share of pitching, and I have a few tips for anyone considering using this medium to get your ideas across. Remember that anyone could be watching this so make sure you don’t go too heavily into tech or financial, for example, as you are likely to lose the viewer.

Try to break your pitch into these 3 (possibly 4) parts.

1. What is your proposition / innovation? Explain the benefits that it will bring to its customers
2. Who is behind the idea? Do you have a team in place? Do they have previous experience in this area?
3. How big is the market? That can mean size in $ spent, competitors, number of customers for your Total Applicable Market
4. How much investment are you looking for? Unless you can use this in a way to show that you know what you are doing and how you will spend it Vs how you see the return, I would leave it out for the initial Seedcamp pitch.

And finally, I have always wanted to post this, how not to pitch:

Remove .svn dir from multiple dir’s

Here is a pretty useful command for those of you that use subversion for your web app’s version control. You might copy over a directory from another project that has a hidden (by default on a mac) .svn directory. You can use this to remove all .svn directories at the level you are in and levels below your current postition.

find . -name '.svn' -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

Open up your CLI app / terminal and change directory to the problem directory.

cd /Path/To/TheDirectory/YouJust/Copied

Check that you are in the right place

ls -la

or

pwd

then run the above command. WARNING, it will delete all .svn directories below your current level.

Q: Does design matter?

A: Undecided.

Plurk vs Twitter

My background is design and I would like to think that the answer is yes but there are success stories out there that make me question the importance of design as one of the ingredients in a recipe for success. I have just read Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage, but I’m not sure that the UI is an advantage. Yes Plurk is beautiful to look at but then Twitter isn’t ugly, is it? So how much has Plurk’s design impacted on its take-up?

Traffic for Plurk and Twitter

Not much. Although, another interesting question would be: how many other similar concepts have launched and made no impact at all due to being bad-to-average in the design area? Plurk’s design certainly caused some ripples of attention which have contributed to its current level of success, but I’m sure there are more successful sites in a similar micro-blogging arena to Twitter and Plurk. Take FriendFeed, it’s pretty minimal in design terms, it features a horrible bevel and stroke effect on the buttons but it’s doing slightly better than Plurk. Its recent popularity has certainly been helped by the TechCrunch coverage of Twitter’s downtime, but is has flourished in spite of its design.

I can say the same thing about Amazon, let’s face it, it’s a pretty horrible looking site, functional, but horrible. They have millions of dollars to spend on their design and that’s precisely why it looks the way it does – it’s not an accident, it’s not because they don’t have a design team, it’s not because the design was thrown together by some programmer “who designed his mum’s site once”, it’s deliberate. Equally, you only need to visit MySpace and you know you are about experience the worst bout of visual diarrhea you have ever had, but users continue to lap it up!

Based on the above examples, you would have to conclude that [graphic] design is not a solution to popularity. Neither is bad [graphic] design a barrier to entry. So for the time being A: Undecided.

Hello {online} World

What other opening could I possibly have used? Welcome to Design-Build-Review. Are you sitting on the edge of your seat, feeling like you are about to go over the summit of a roller-coaster? No? Me neither. But then a roller-coaster ride always starts off with a rather unpleasant jolt then a very slow windup, consider this post that jolt and the following couple of posts the slow windup…