A guide to winning the Seedcorn competition – Part 4

Posted by Ronan on Aug 26, 2010 in Seedcorn, cauwill, comment, innovation, ireland, startup | 0 comments

This post concludes the series.  Grab the Business Plan template [here] (word document) which has all three previous posts plus extra comments from the IntertradeIreland Cube document.

To summarize:

• Make every statement count – be clear, be precise
• Don’t be technical (after all it’s a business plan)
• Make the job of reading the plan easier,  visually alert the investor to things they want to see
• (Early Stage/Startup Companies) If you have paying customers this is a big deal..
• Really make the executive summary stand out. Give the investor the motivation to read on.It really should be a self contained document that you can extract and it makes sense by itself.

Checklist:

• Business Overview (what you do and why)
• Size up the market opportunity
• Industry Analysis
• Describe the team
• Explain the business model
• Show Financial projections
• Show Funding sources (and usage)
• Exit
• Appendices/Schedules

Personally, I want to wish all entrants for the InterTradeIreland Seedcorn competition the best of luck and cannot wait to see who gets selected this year both as regional finalists and overall finalists. Winning the investment really has helped Cauwill. Financially it helped out but the PR and confidence it gave was worth than the money – as a result we’ve had a great year, signed more customers and are now looking to take our 1 year old company to the next level!

Finally, if any one entering the competition wants to get in touch please feel to do so.

Regards,
Ronan.

A guide to winning the Seedcorn competition – Part 1

Posted by Ronan on Aug 23, 2010 in Seedcorn, comment, innovation, ireland, startup | 0 comments

In a series of blog posts I’m going to share what Cauwill put into the Seedcorn Business Plan.  I (there is no I in team!!) didn’t write the business plan alone nor have I  put this guide together without a great deal of help from Ian. As ever Ian – a big thanks goes your way.

Don’t worry about cutting and pasting from the blog – with the last blog of the guide (Thursday)  I’ll be attaching a complete word document version of the guide with extra comments from InterTradeIreland. Feel free to ask & post questions – I’ll be happy to respond to them.

At a later stage I’m going to do the same for the regional and final presentations for fortunate companies that make past the business plan evaluation section of the competition. Let’s hope it’s you!

DISCLAIMER TIME: There is no guarantee that if you follow the guide exactly that you will win the competition.. quite the contrary this business plan worked for us because it is OUR business plan. Your company business will be different to ours so your business plan will be different also. Things we left out, you may need to include. With that, we wish the best of luck.

Voddler: Like spotify but for movies..

Posted by Ronan on Jan 17, 2010 in comment, innovation, movies, software, startup, technology | 1 comment

The blurb : With Voddler you can watch movies and TV shows the way you want, anytime. Voddler is easy, legal and available around the clock ..

Before I could it to work I had to configure the firewall correctly to allow inbound/outbound permissions but still it didn’t pass the startup test completely. It worked fine though.  The UI is a bit clunky but once you get the hang of it ..it’s fine. Enter and ESC with the nav keys pretty much do everything. You can see the UI designers have TVs in mind.. everything is BIG ! I kinda like it!

Because Voddler originates from Sweden  subtitles are on by default. You can turn them off in the settings.

The video quality of the movies is excellent as is the sound quality however the movie selection is s a bit limited at the moment but still I’d happily watch most of the movies currently listed.  Voddler also has TV series listed, I haven’t investigated them too much right now but from the first glance they looked to be a good mix of stuff.

The moves are listed as FREE and then there is a Premium section… as you would expect.

Before the movie starts you get to watch some advertisements, which is fine and understandable.  I haven’t watched a movie in it’s entirety to see if advertisements occur in the middle of it. If you exit a movie and come back in – it picks up where you left off (again with a few advertisements prior to it).

Overall – I like it! 8/10

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Seedcorn Best Emerging Company 2009 – Cauwill

Posted by Ronan on Nov 28, 2009 in cauwill, innovation, ireland, startup, technology | 0 comments

So Ian and I went to Dublin on Thursday to give a pitch for the final of InterTradeIrelands Seedcorn competition. It went well but it took until 11pm that night to find out how well it went.

Since spinning out from the University (July this year) and running solo with Cauwill we’ve worked hard on fine tuning the technology, focusing on a vertical market and generating sales – on Thursday night at 11.05pm our effort and thought process was recognised. To use a cliche – we are over the moon – it was fantastic to stand up and pitch our business idea to VC’s and serial entrepreneurs and win the Best Emerging company of 2009.

A lot of people to thank – but Ian is top of the list, fantastic business partner and friend  (I wonder could we have ever imagined being in this position today when we met over 10years ago in the ‘that’ office?). Family and friends (& soccer) have been a massive support – without I would have gone a little crazy a long time ago. Enterprise Ireland have played there part too – they were there to seed the idea in the Proof of Concept project while in UL. In particular, Mark and Gearoid have been tremendous.  To all the people in the EAC – many thanks for the advice, coffee and outlet to talk about everything and anything. A big thanks to InterTradeIreland and all the judges (at the final and regional level).

Congratulations to Sophia Search who is winner from  the High Growth category. Congrats to all the regional winners too – they walked away with €25,000.  A very special mention to coClarity who won the Special award for best spin out  or platform.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Serious Validation & Goals

Posted by Ronan on Nov 7, 2009 in LEAP, cauwill, innovation, technology | 0 comments

We got some serious validation of our business model this week when we got the phone call from InterTradeIreland Friday.

Cauwill, (Founded by Ian Rice and myself) won the Best Emerging Company in Munster 2009.

Getting customers and validating our business is an important goal for us and it just happened that Fergal was in again to talk to us on Goals.

Thankfully those two goals have now been achieved and we delighted!

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay his entire session (we had a few meetings and prep work to do for Seedcorn) but I really enjoyed the half day.

We did an exercise where we had to fill out our goals. There was 3 categories. Personal(life) goals.. Things (I’d like to have) and Financial Goals. Each of these then had to assigned a time scale (1, 3,5 ,10 and 20 years), then we had to take our top 3 one year goals and assign a first task in achieving it.

To be honest, I was so surprise to find myself pouring out personal goals, finding it difficult to ‘want stuff’ and the financial goals were short. I was expecting myself to ‘Want’ more stuff.. after all I do like gadgets but I just didn’t really feel I really really wanted them.. whereas the personal stuff I really really wanted.

Very interesting exercise. Really makes you think of whats important to YOU and your business..

The other exercise was to write up your business purpose in 3 sentences.  Then, other people got to review it and leave comments on it.  Because it was psuedo anonymous I felt I should leave fair and constructive comments and not be afraid of putting someones nose out of joint. In return, I wanted the same. I got it too from others that attended and you know it really helped in getting my thoughts together for the Seedcorn presentation. Thanks guys!

Exciting Times

Posted by Ronan on Oct 23, 2009 in LEAP, cauwill, innovation, startup | 0 comments

An exciting week this week for Ian and I.. collectively known as Cauwill.

We got a phone call Wednesday morning from those nice people in Intertrade Ireland letting us know Cauwill had made the Regional Finals for the Seedcorn competition. We are listed along side really great companies and we are really honoured and chuffed!
In the Munster final all three companies (Mobanode, coClarity and Cauwill)  are from the Enterprise Acceleration Centre here in Limerick! There must be something in the water

A big thanks to the Donncha and Graham for their help and guidance.

Here is the Regional Final List - The very best of luck to all!