TagSpot Blog

When I decided to turn TagSpot into a startup project and brought Eric on board, our original plan was the following:

1. Build a prototype
2. Write a business plan
3. Seek investors with prototype and business plan
4. Build the real product

The first step was an easy one, we had it completed in about 3 months. And then we started to write the business plan, which was much harder to us than it first seemed: having to project yourself 3 years in the future when all you have is a technical expert background and a prototype is very hard. Whether we liked it or not, business is a whole world in itself and trying to understand what investors need to make a decision is a very tough job.

So after 2 months of trial-and-error, we realized that writing a business plan was the standard way, but not our way. Strategy number 2:

• Build the real product, without investment so on our spare time
• Write a business plan with information gathered around our first beta released
• Seek investors
• Keep going

The main problem with this second approach was the “spare time” part. We thought we could work after hours, we thought we would gather often during the week and at least once a week. But it didn’t work. Because we all have very busy lives and bringing money in is an important part of our lives so we managed to meet once a week and we didn’t move forward a lot inbetween. At some point it became clear that we needed an extra-boost, some time free of any day job to actually work on our product full-time. And to do that, we needed money! Back to starting point? Chicken-and-egg? Not really…

We started to look for an early investment solution. In the US, there is YCombinator. They give you a few tens of thousands of dollars based solely on a short presentation to get you from the idea to the first version. But we are not based in the US, and we don’t want to move since our best market is Europe. So we looked for a European equivalent, and we found better than that: SeedCamp.

SeedCamp is a three-step early investment program:

1. You fill in the application form, a set of interesting questions about your project, what you want to do, etc.
2. Based on this application, they select 20 teams to spend one week in London networking with all sorts of interesting and talented people and presenting your project and learning plenty of stuff.
3. At the end of this week, they select 5 teams who get 50.000€ (against 10% equity) and spend 3 months in London to build the product, write a business plan and get ready for the big jump.

This is exactly what we needed. So strategy number 3:

• Get early investment
• Build the first beta release
• Write a business plan
• Keep going

Aaaaaaaalleluiah!

Now, if we get to the final 5 (BSG fans, this is not what you think!) of SeedCamp, we should have enough money and time to build our product, and now that Fabien has joined us to help us write the business plan, virtually nothing can stop us from conquering the world! Well, nothing except ourselves…

We’ve submitted our application form yesterday, now we’re waiting for the results and in the meantime, we keep working on our product. The results of this first step should be here in 2 weeks from now. Hopefully we can get to the SeedCamp Week, and then it’s the Success Highway :oP !

Having a strategy is not difficult, accepting to change it is much harder, but it seems necessary if you want to find the right one.