Last week Tshirts4Hire.com was 1 of 5 teams to be invited to participate in Funding Universe’s CrowdPitch. You have 4 minutes (exactly-they cut you off mid-sentence) to pitch followed by 3 minutes of Q & A before the “judges” give you a American Idolesque critique. While we didn’t take home 1st place it was a good experience with great feedback from entrepreneurs, angels, and VC’s. Our pitch went well enough and though I could have done better with the Q & A it helped to validate what questions we still needed to answer or at least find better ways of communicating the answers.
Speaking of answers, for all those who are budding entrepreneurs or thinking of becoming one there are a series of short videos that walkthroughdefinitions, terms, and practices common to the industry on the following YouTube channel. It is put on by the incubator program I’ve “finagled” my way into. The cover things like the type of business you should file, different sources of financing and how the work, even diving into different components of operating agreements in common in deals. Take a look see. It is at UsparkFoundryTV
This incubator has been a great way to stay focused, learn or perfect new skills, tap into a shared network of resources, and meet some great people. I left the state to go pitch and a funny thing happened while I was gone. Another local Angel investor groupwas visiting our incubator hub and upon hearing where we were (one other team, CupAd, was also at the CrowdPitch and won it btw) have expressed an interest in talking with us.
Oh I guess that is another change I should have mentioned. We are seeking a single angel investor to invest between $50-75K in order to help get our site development moving faster and finish testing our market assumptions. For example, this next week or so we’re having a bunch of our iMarketers (t-shirt wearers) wear shirts with text message codes (thanks O-codes) on them to get some baseline data of how effective t-shirt advertising is. So if you see a tshirt with a text message code please text it in-they’ll be in CA, OR, WA, AZ, UT, ID, NE, DE, GA, and a few other states. So keep your eyes peeled the last week of July. We’re also going to be having others count the number of people they pass in a day so we have comparable numbers to other forms of advertising. If anyone wants to do their own tally feel free to leave a comment on this blog with the result of your experiment. We’ll gladly share the results with others.
