Product Demo V1.0

At long last, we have a product demo uploaded.  No, it is not fully interactive, that is still on the way.  Regardless, I am so proud of our team for thier hard work and determination.  It outlines 6 of our 12 basic tools that will be available in the alpha release.  This demo is basically intended to help clear up some of the questions that we recieve as to the mechanics and logistics of the workspace.  Again, this is a fairly simple walkthru, but it accomplishes it’s task.  The UI seems to evolve on an hourly basis, so don’t hold us to this. Keep on the lookout for a fully interactive demo in the next couple of weeks.

Special thanks to Lee Graham, founder of trimagination for his hard work, design skill and positve attitude.

A day late but still worth mentioning.

While this is old news in the age of instant information, I feel that it warrants mentioning.  On Thursday I came across a forum post by David Lago on the Vencorps site.  The thread was in reference to books that entrepreneurs should read.  It was started by Lee Graham founder of TRImagination and produced a large number of exceptional materials including:

1. Books- everything from  “Art of the Start” to  “Getting Real” to “The Third Wave”.

2. Presentations on blue ocean strategy and various other business practices

3. Lectures- The most critical of which was “The Last lecture” by Professor Randy Pausch now available in book form through Hyperion Publishing and available here.

This was the first time that I was ever exposed to Professor Pausch in any real way, and I felt like a fool for never experiencing his work before.  I watched the entire lecture in one sitting that Thursday afternoon.  After the lecture was finished, I did some additional reasearch and attempted to extract every ounce of knowledge that I could in a short time frame.

Yesterday afternoon I was speaking to Michael Nelson about business materials when I nearly hit the floor.  Just one day after having “met” this amazing man, I was informed that he had passed.  I was shocked.  Yesterday the entire net was ablaze eulogizing and proclaiming the greatness of Professor Pausch and I crawled literally hundreds of blogs and news sites and learned of the far reaching impact of Professor Pausches work and legacy.  He was truly amazing.

Donations can be made to the Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.

Alpha Invite

We have just added a form on our homepage with the intention of building a core group of individuals to participate in our alpha which has been tentatively set for the end of August.    Head on over to ideabreaker.com and check it out.  We are planning on limiting this alpha to 1200-1500 users, and we fully expect to get there pretty quickly, so any interested parties are encouraged to sign up as soon as possible.  Of course we promise not to sell, distribute, spam or otherwise abuse your personal information.

Thanks!

ideabreaker executive slidecast

As one of the last in a long series of hoops that we have had to jump through in the VenCorps showdown, we were charged with uploading a 10-20-30 powerpoint presentation.  A couple of things jumped out at me right away:  We are to use slideshare, so 10 slides with no animation would equal roughly 3 minutes worth of viewing hence negating the 20.  A twenty minute slideshow would require around 90 slides in this context hence negating the 10.  It seemed that the only thing that would be a constant was the 30 pt font.  In lieu of this, I made a 43 slide presentation that mimicked animation using 10 master slides.  I then walked through the presentation and recoreded the “pitch”, converted it to mp3 and stored it on archive.org.  I had the makings of my first slide cast.  4 hours later the results are in.  I feel as though this is the happiest medium and a worthy compromise.  Just ignore the number 43 in the lower lefthand corner and it really does look and feel like 10.  Mr Kawasaki would be proud.

Michael R. Nelson named VP of Strategic Operations

Last night in the wee hours of the morning, ideabreaker.com inked a deal with Michael R. Nelson in a noteworty acquisition of human capital.  Mr. Nelson has been appointed VP of Strategic Operations at ideabreaker effective immediately.   We came into contact with Mr. Nelson through the VenCorps Community and after a period of introduction, conversation, and collaboration, the decision was made to offer Michael a position within our emerging company.  Mr. Nelson was gracious enough to accept our offer.

Michael R. Nelson – VP Strategic Operations

Professional Summary – Through a long and varied career in several industries and with 10 years as an I.T. Management & Strategy consultant; customer service, innovation, and bottom-line reality have been my areas of focus. Successful consulting engagements internationally with manufacturing, retail, finance and service industry experience help to provide the broad base of understanding that enhances communication between executives, users and developers. With Ideabreaker I will be bringing my years of experience across many industries and market segments to bear in helping to make the end product a realistically useful tool for the widest user base possible.

Core Competencies – Project Management, Product Management, I.T. Management & Strategy, Strategic Planning, Operations, New Business Development, Business Process Re-engineering, Team Building, Procurement & Contract Management, Economics, Business Philosophy, Cynic

Education – B.B.A. Business Administration 1993
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

An Attempt at the Guy Kawasaki Model

Let me start off by saying I am a powerpoint junkie.  Well, impress junkie to be exact.  Aside from so mostly minor formatting issues, the open office equivalent to powerpoint is capable.  And it is free   I am a huge fan of telling stories through images and pointed dialogue and if I am not careful, I can get seriously sidetracked from work while thinking that I am working.  The majority of the presentations that I have made for ideabreaker are now obsolete, as the business has evolved regularly and with force.  Not to mention all of them but one were well over 60 slides.  So, as a preemptive experiment  David and I set out to do what for me has been completely impossible in the past:  A Kawasaki inspired presentation on ideabreaker.com.  I must admit that I suck at distilling information as I am a verbal pugilist who is much more comfortable conversing in paragraphs than sentences.  Thankfully David’s style is the exact opposite, swift and to the point.  Take a quick look at our 10-20-30 on ideabreaker and share your thoughts.

Please bear in mind that this slideshow is animated in its native form, and it would have required over 40 slides to achieve the same effect in slideshare, hereby negating the 10 slide model.

The Right Direction?

I recently had a real graphic artist:) take a look at our logo to see what he thought about it and what he could come up with.  His name is; get ready for this, its a long one: Vladislav Sergeivich Sitnikov.  Vlad is a great friend of mine and a very talented designer and D.J.   The problem with really talented people is that they are usually as busy as they are talented!  Thankfully after a few weeks of hustling, Vlad was able to give us a proof on a “new:” logo.  This is only a draft, but I really like the direction that he is heading with it artistically.  I like it so much that I have begun to attach it to every thing that has our name on it.  (The banner at the top of this page is on the way)  There is no doubt that this image is of a far greater quality and posesses much more visual depth than what we had.  The only question is: Should we stick with this theme, or scrap it all and start from scratch?  Suggestions anyone?

20 questions: The Conclusion

16. How do you scale?

As a hosted application available to anyone, scale will be managed through precise capacity planning and an intensely scalable architecture.

17. What is your sustainable competitive advantage?

Our initial competitive advantage will be our architecture and user interface. Our long term competitive advantages are enterprise adoption, highly extensible application framework, and barriers to entry for existing players.

18. What key hires do you need to make next?

The two positions currently on the radar are VP of Marketing and CEO.

19. In addition to capital, what else do you need to be successful?

As it is our intention to stay lean through first revenue, identifying and maintaining close vendor relationships is paramount.

20. Assuming you hit all your targets, who do you think would want to acquire you?

While there are a number of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, HP, and IBM that would stand to benefit from acquiring us; we feel that this may not in fact be our best exit strategy.

Now.  Onto more entertaining things

20 questions continued. . .

6. Who is your ideal target customer?

Our primary target is medium to large enterprise that understands the value of embracing innovation at all levels of the organization.

7. How do you plan on reaching them?

Our initial plan is to focus on departmental use to gain entry. Our hope is that user evangelism and tangible returns will help expand our reach within the enterprise.

8. How do you make money?

Our revenue model is based on a subscription platform and augmented by industry specific consulting on innovation management.

9. What prerequisites do you need before you can start generating revenue?

To generate revenue we need a fully functional and thoroughly tested public beta

10. How much capital has already been invested?

$10,500

11. What’s your “skin in the game”?

To date we have committed capital and over 2200 hrs between 3 individuals over 4 months. We have quit jobs, liquidated assets, and passed on additional income and opportunities to facilitate the success of this venture.

12. How much capital do you need to get to first revenues? To get to breakeven?

We estimate $125k to first revenue with $350k taking us to breakeven and beyond.

13. What are you going to do with the $50,000?

We will continue to build our advanced User Interface around the basic application framework using an iterative task-centered design process.

14. What are you going to do with the 50,000 points?

We intend to leverage community talent for development/marketing efforts as well as invest points in emerging startups, as others have invested in us.

15. What are your goals?

Our #1 goal is to make a useful product that produces quality business results and that people love to use.

20 Questions:

As part of the public due dilligence process at VenCorps we were required to answer 20 questions relating to our business.  We have answered many of these 20 questions intriplicate at various junctures so the overriding feeling was that this would be easy.  However, like most of the other instances where we have had to broadcast information regarding our business, this would be an exercise in distillation.  Compressing pages and pages worth of text and extracting the essence thereof is no small feat.  Then to take that distilled information and remove all posible emmisions of jargon and buzz can prove to be an exercise in emmense frustration.  This is definately one of those situations where a projected hours worth of work, can quickly become 4 or more.

David and I deployed a writeboard with comparative versioning and went to town.  2 hours later we had our answers.  What makes this little story even better is that they are clear, concise, and effective.   While my techniques have always been effective in the eyes of myself and others; concise and clear have tended to elude me for the most part.  In my opinion it is always much more difficult to explain something in 3 paragraphs than in 3 sentences.  Thankfully I am slowly beginning to think differently.

Here are the first 5:

1. Why did you found this startup?

We have seen dramatic improvements in innovative efforts from the implementation of freeform idea management tools, but they fall well short when it comes to information management and execution. In almost every case, ideas that are fleshed out are either left in limbo or transferred only in part to more robust project based applications. We feel that this is not only inefficient, but unnecessary. Our vision for ideabreaker is a full lifecycle product for innovation management that supports both ideas and execution.

2. What problem does your startup solve?

Our product addresses both the inadequacies of idea management tools and the inflexibility and formalities of project management applications.

3. Who else agrees that this problem exists?

Based on an in depth review of user forums from our indirect competitors, we have ascertained that these products are not meeting the user’s needs. What is even more surprising is that the vendors have no intention of addressing these concerns. The feedback from the VenCorps community seems to validate this perception.

4. Who else is trying to solve this problem?

Firms that offer Project Management applications are not interested in adding ideation functionality to their products as this is not their focus. In fact, it is not even on their radar. These firms have recently begun to promote the collaborative possibilities of hosted applications but with limited purpose and strictly as an afterthought.

Idea Management companies are starting to add some limited features, such as task assignment and scheduling, but they do not seem to see the big picture. In addition, the core architecture of their toolsets does not lend itself to competing in this space.

5. How big is this market? How big can you get?

The business technology optimization market (BTO) surpassed 6 billion dollars in 2007 and has been increasing at a 21% compound annual growth rate. An in depth competitive analysis has revealed that best of breed players in both idea management and project management are gaining significant traction within corporate enterprise and emerging business alike. In fact, 72% of executives rank innovation as one of the top three strategic priorities according to the Boston Consulting Group. R&D Magazine found that 62% of respondents indicated collaboration as an important driver of innovation.