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Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #10: Trip to Alcatraz

No text, just pictures :-)

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #9: Pitch training session

In Silicon Valley everyone pitches everyone about their ideas almost everytime. Although we trained a lot before coming here, Piotr decided to arrange a meeting with Angelika Blendstrup, an international communication couch. Here's some notes from over 4 hours session:

Get to the point and be pragmatic! Angelika came from Europe just like us and pointed out that because of the heritage our european culture put too much stress on theory & big words (blablabla) like if we were ashamed of our idea being too simple. Be pragmatic - it's about solving problems, not philosophy!

Be positive and optimistic. The reason why Silicon Valley bears some many idea is because everyone is nice and polite and nobody will tell you "What a stupid idea, get a real job!". People in here try to focus on the positive aspect of every idea and that's why they dare to innovate. Just take a look at those curves of emotions ;-)

and that one applies to Startup communities so beware of vague "Oh, that's interesting":

Don't pitch idea to everyone. People won't tell you it's a stupid idea but you won't get a valuable feedback.

Don't use word "try". Don't use phrase like "The problem we're trying to solve...". You're the expert and you know what you are doing so say "We're solving the problem".

Silicon Valley is not a one night stand. Don't make an impression that you're here only for a while as entrepreneur tourist - if you want to build a relationship you have to act like if you are about to stay in SV.

TELL STORIES. Everyone loves stories because they're engaging and more human. That's the difference between US and Europe: in Europe with our philosophical heritage we tend to grasp the whole idea in an encyclopedia-like terms "My company X is a highly sophisticated and automated system for server providers that provides cost-effective solutions blablabla" thinking that it sounds cool. Bullshit. Tell a story:

"It was a Friday evening 2 years ago when I received a call from my office that all servers got burned. I was supposed to go on a trip with my familly but instead of that I spend whole weekend trying to fix it. And then I realized: I know what's wrong with those servers so why not make a company that do it far better and cheaper?"

Cow, big data & e-commerce - focus on take away! Investors listen to hundreds of pitches everyday, so how are they going to remember you? One of the participants during Blackbox Connect pitch session was presenting Big Data analytics for e-commerce. He didn't get into more midetails but said that it's a common believe that cows produce more milk when you talk to them and use their name. And that's what they do for e-commerce: they analyze Facebook logs and give users a more personal treatment. He ended his pitch with showing a cow on his t-shirt and saying "we help you milk your cash cows better". The take away: "it's this funny guy with cow who specializes in big data for e-commerce, you should talk to him!"

2-3-2 liner. The session finished with a funny excerices "2-3-2 liner". We're supposed to invent a 3-liner that consists of 2, 3 and 2 words. So it went like this for Nearbox:

Local communication.

Does is exist?

Use Nearbox.

Local communication.

In real time.

With strangers.

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #8: Blackbox

Yesterday ACCELERATE teams took part in Blackbox Connect demo day in Blackbox residence. But what is Blackbox? Blackbox residence let international entrepreneurs visiting Silicon Valley make their very first connections here by providing their house to live and work among the community of like-mided founders, get feedback about their product or vision. Apart from that, non-us startups might take part in Blackbox Connect - a two-week immersion program for top 12 international entrepreneurs who want to learn the DNA of Silicon Valley and prepare to bring their company to the next, global level.

One of the 12 startups was Innovation Nest's backed UXPin that pitched a tool that "will turn everyone into a UX hero" :-) After the pitches we had a garden party combined with networking. Couple of startups definitely worth checking out: Klash, Ding Dong (pretty funny), Fido Intelligence

Here's some Instagram photos:

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #7: Day off :)

Yeah, we had a day off and have gone for shopping with Cloud Your Car team :-) Lots of weird stuff...

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #6: Get laid, get paid, get made

Well, I tried to start with some cool and creative begining in this post but maybe I'll just skip it and get to the point that we've met those two great and experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: Johnny Hwin and Peter Berger :-)

We've met Johnny in a Stable Cafe in San Francisco. Johnny used to work in hi5 (acquired in 2011 by Tagged), sold the company Damntheradio, consult Asana and now run his own projects and helps other startups. Although the meeting lasted about half an hour, Johnny provided some insightful idea about Nearbox (and few advice every startup can benefit from):

The main hypothesis we're testing is: SHARED PLACE - STRANGERS - COMMUNICATION and see if there's a chemistry in that.

UX/UI: make it as simple as possible, in the beginning do it like Facebook becaus people recognize the patterns and will start use it without any problems, don't try to do a lot of fancy stuff just to differentiate from other apps (there's a reason why they have so many users)

Establish partnership e.g. with events to get distribution

Don't go after coffee shops/restaurants - one startup tried it and failed (people don't want to discuss there)

I really like his devotion and honesty when he said "Guys, I can see thousands of way how you can fail so try to eliminate the risk" :-)

The next meeting with Peter Berger was held in our Airbnb house in Menlo Park. Peter is the Director of Strategic Development at Tagged and former CEO of Topicmarks, which was acquired by Tagged in 2011. We've been discussing lot of issues related to consumer apps but few things are definitely worth mentioning.

Every succesful company do +1 of this 3 things: get you paid (money), get you laid (sex), get you made (power). AirBnb helps you make money out of your flat or save them while looking for a cheap accomodation, dating apps - well, you know why they're so popular and Twitter lets you be famous by havng your own fans and followers. So where's Nearbox? Which one of this you want to tap in? And does hyperlocal environment lets you do that? BTW, the whole framework comes from Dave McClure presentation "Startup Viagra" that you can see here:

Startup Viagra: How to Pitch a VC from Dave McClure

Be careful about anonymous users. In Nearbox we introduced a simple feature that let users leave an anonymous message. Although it made them more comfortable about sharing, Peter pointed out that this a short-term thinking and once the quality of content starts to fall, users will fly away.

Lots of social networks has problems with retention so they try to keep their users by sending e-mails, push notifications etc. Peter just told us: "Put more value, don't just make patches". Hard to disagree :-)

...and that's the car I took a photo in San Francisco:

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #5: Mentoring

Coming to Silicon Valley with Innovation Nest has lot of advantages and one of them is a great network of mentors and advisors willing to help you. Today we had mentoring sessions with Vitaly Golomp (CEO at Keen Systems, mentor in 500startups), Nick Allen (Co-Founder & VP, Engineering at Ginzamarkets Y-Combinator alumnus) and Steve Adelman (Managing Director at Nexus Partners).

Although Vitaly runs a B2B company it turned out that he really understand consumer apps and was able to provide few interesting insights about Nearbox e.g. focus on sport stadiums and events. Speaking about best UX it's always worth looking for retail/commerce apps where "every money counts and that's why there's no place for error". Oh, and sometimes you have to stop thinking about MVP as the best way to start - in some cases you just can't do a basic product in a week and try if they like it (it took Keen Systems 2 years to build a product which just couldn't be a MVP..). One practical advice: if you don't have a huge traction try to tweak it by saying we had a 50% growth in one month (even if that an increase from 10 users to 15 users) :-)

Meeting with Steve Adelman was an interesting experience since he's a consultant with Customer Development background. We had a long discussion about value proposition and "Spotting" which is a trend "we should definitely grab".

The last mentor we had a chance to meet was Nick Allen who runs a Ginzamarkets - the only enterprise SEO platform on the market to help companies. It was another nice surprise that not only Nick had spend 4 months in Poland (and loves zapiekanki) but also provided great insights about generating organic traffic to apps through SEO. Apart from technical feedback he gave us a piece of advice about pitching in USA: everytime somebody ask you about your startup you have to keep telling how great it goes and try to find as many positive facts as possible.

Well, in Silicon Valley everyone is always doing fine and let's stick to that :-)

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #4: Meetings in San Francisco

On 4th day of our trip to Silicon Valley, every team had a meeting with 2 ACCELERATE mentors: Allan Grant - serial entrepreneur, Y-Combinator alumni & co-founder of Curebit, Marvin Liao - Experienced Silicon Valley Executive, 10.5 years veteran of Yahoo . It was quite exciting that both meeting took place in Runway co-working space on 1355 Market Street where Twitter HQ is situated :-)

Allan pointed out that we should be aware that some products have it's killer feature (that makes app cool) and killing feature that makes users run away. He gave us an example of Circle app: before that, they have an app which worked pretty quite okay and once they tried to change some features, users started to flying away. The problem was that neither they realized what was the killing feature, nor they knew what was the killer feature!

Pivot. And if you consider the pivot - do it as fast as possible. I thnk that pivoting is an issue that really differentiates entrepreneurs in SV: for some of them it's better to pivot as fast as possible to "reduce the damage" and for some of them it's crucial for you to endure and treat pivot as a last resort. Andrew Chen suggested to decide for a pivot only if you can learn something completely new - otherwise, you're just going in the wrong direction again.

What's great about Silicon Valley is that even people who do not specialize in your field, they try to help you as much as possible by providing a valuable feedback and advice. The next meeting with Marvin brought lots of great insights:

"Aha, moment". While making a consumer app, focus from the beginning on so called "Aha, moment" that should form in consumers head straight away ("Hey, I can use that app for that and that. So cool!")

"What is the job people hire the app for?"

After the mentoring session Marvin took us to Nordstrom Cafe for a great lunch (steaks!). We've been discusing the SV ecosystem and dot-com bubble that happened in the beginning of 00s and as a real SV veteran he pointed out that building an Internet business was much more difficult in 90s due to lack of established tools & costs but at the same time much easier because there actually wasn't any market! I especially like 2 interesting insights he provided:

-Don't start a business based only on cold analysis because you will fail. Jeff Bezos started Amazon not because he was so passioned about books, but he saw a great potential in online retail and Internet. However, it was 1994 when the Internet stage was empty. Nowadays, the market is so crowded that you need a passion.

-66% of founders who succeeded in their first company, fail in the second one. The next one is usually a failure because founders get 1) cocky and too confident about what they're doing 2) investors spour them with too much money. It happens usually because the first success might be mostly attributed to the luck.

Oh, and here's some pics of this awesome co-working space :-)

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #3: Meeting with Andrew Chen

One of the most important and (challenging at the same time) goals of our trip to Silicon Valley is meeting people and getting a feedback. Although people in USA are really willing to help you, it's really hard to get to some of the top mentors, advisors and tech-entrepreneurs. One of them was Andrew Chen - top bloger and advisor who specializes in growth hacking.

We found that Andrew really likes Snapchat - a photo messaging app that lets you send photos with a built-in self-destruct feature. We created a website www.AndrewMeetUs.com and send Andrew a photo with us holding this URL. We implement a simple hack on the website: a share on twitter button with "Those guys from @nearbox really want to meet @andrewchen [link]" so everytime somebody tweet about it, Andrew got pinged. The whole thing went viral and even few websites wrote about us in Silicon Valley and in Poland. And yes, we arranged the meeting :-)

We met Andrew at 9:30 AM in Il Fornaio, a nice restaurant situated in Palo Alto. Andrew pointed out many interesting things we didn't think of before:

"Is there any other app people will stop using once they try Nearbox?" - it's an interesting idea to look at the product and how well it solves people problems. A good example might be Facebook Messanger. Facebook is so ubiquitous that some people stopped using SMS between friends.

Focus on something people do multiple times a day. Why Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare took off? Because everytime you see something worth taking photo of, everytime you are doing something you can tweet about, everytime you're in some kind of place. Simple but so insightful.

New market is really hard, you spend a huge amount of time trying to educate your users and maybe sometimes it's easier to create a product people are familiar with but make it x5 better. (That's why Andrew strongly insist to pitch every idea as "X for Y" e.g. "Flickr for videos", "Foursquare for dogs" etc.)

Why Snapchat become so popular among teenagers in High School? Because those teenagers usually don't have much to say about life and all they can do is express themselves with a quick funny photo. I think it might a general trend that people has less and less to say: 140-tweet, photo instead of words, simple check-in.

To sum up: GREAT MEETING! :-)

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #2: Preparation

Our second day in Silicon Valley we started with a meeting in a lovely house situated on 151 Burnell Street rented via AirBnB. Needless to say how Piotr, Marcin, Błażej (Landingi) and Cloud Your Car team are lucky to live in this house [photo by Błażej] :-)

It took us almost an hour to schedule all the meetings with mentors and advisors in the upcoming week and the logistcs behind that (some meetings are in Menlo Park, some of them in San Francisco).

After the meeting we went to Palo Alto and had an ultracaloric burgers in Workshop barbecue with Visuu team. Since the meeting with UXPin was postponed, later on we drove to Stanford Campus for a nice walk. Here's some pics:

Nearbox in Silicon Valley Day #1: Arrival

After almost 20 h flight we finally arrived to San Francisco: tired and really excited to spend 2 weeks in Mecca for tech-entrepreneurs. We’ve been passing Evernote HQ while driving to hotel - a company that launched in 2008 and reached 11 mln users after 3 years. Quite inspiring, isn’t? Okay, but why are you here guys? Our journey to Silicon Valley is part of startup acceleration program ACCELERATE by seed/VC fund Innovation Nest. The main goal of the trip is to get as many feedback as possible about Nearbox idea from SV mentors, advisors and learn how it’s beeing done in America :-) oh, and apart from Nearbox there’re 3 other great startups: - Cloud Your Car - a smart IoT device “Endomondo for Cars” - Visuu - visual text recognition - Landingi - landing page creator with A/B testing We’ll keep updating you about everything what’s going on and for now here’s a uber cheesy photo of us in front of Menlo Park Inn :-)

#nearbox #cloudyourcar #startup #silicon valley #landingi #visuu