Michael Carr
Business: Swoop
I’ve been working with a business partner to create a fusion of Gumtree and a daily deals site.
Well, it will work as a live marketplace where businesses set offers there and then. The offers are more live and in the hands of businesses at any time of the day.
We wanted to have somewhere with time-limited deals, rather than having money off for weeks at a time. We wanted a shorter timeframe. The theory is more “there are 30 doughnuts left – first in, best dressed”.
We’ve kicked off development on the website back-end and an iPhone app. We’ve got a few stages to launch – we’ll be kicking of merchant acquisition in January. Hopefully it’ll all be up by March or April.
I had the idea maybe two years ago and I just sat on it. I felt that I’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a go. I use Gumtree a lot and I wondered why you couldn’t combine it with a daily deals model.
We were talking to friends who had businesses and their advice was to get in front of a mentor as soon as possible.
I actually saw something on StartupSmart about PushStart and I jumped on it. I thought the idea was brilliant.
The speed dating element itself was fantastic. It went on after the actual sessions too – I spoke to Kim Heras who almost became another, unofficial, mentor.
The night went so quickly, but we came away with three or four nuggets of really useful advice.
For example, we thought a bit more about the payments system. We’d thought of just one side of it, but there’s actually a two-sided market that you have to provide payment services for.
When we first sat down with Zac Jacobs from Tigerspike, we didn’t know where to start. We realised that we needed to structure the pitch around what the idea is and what need it fulfils.
Then we went to Tom from Adioso who said that he didn’t want to see the idea, he just wanted to hear a 30-second elevator pitch. That really put us on the spot, but it really gave us a clear idea of how we needed to pitch the business.
Have a 30-second pitch ready and prepared with no “uhms” and “ahhs”. I work in sales where you go into every negotiation with a pre-prepared pitch, which is exactly the same when pitching a start-up.
Keep it concise and have some questions pre-prepared too. I came away thinking, “I wish I’d asked that”.
At the moment, it’s not very easy to get investment, especially in the Australian market. You need to get every advantage you can get, which means getting out there and getting good advice.
You need to build your idea, prove that it has some worth and then start looking for funding. We’ve got some money from family and friends, so we’ll see where we’ll go with it.
At the end, I got the contact details from some of the mentors and asked if we could keep in touch. We really want to maintain those contacts so we can get a footing before going into an incubator.
