LaunchMemphis and Butler Snow Present: Business Plan BootCamp August 15th & 22nd
“Great job!!! Thanks for this fantastic opportunity; it came at a time when i really needed some direction and advice on how to proceed.” -past BootCamp participant
LaunchMemphis Business Plan Boot Camp
Sponsored by Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens and Cannada, PLLC
August 15th and 22nd, 2009
At EmergeMemphis
Tickets here: http://bootcamp2009.eventbrite.com/
For a new startup, the journey from an idea to a working, successful business is a confusing and dangerous one. Real, practical advice from objective outsiders can make all the difference in helping a fledgling venture reach its goal.
LaunchMemphis is hosting the Business Plan Boot Camp: a two session experience where entrepreneurs will be given the tools they need for success. Experts from several fields will be on hand with hard-earned, practical advice, while attendees can get tailored feedback on their business plans in several break-out sessions.
Topics will include:
- Business plan development
- Legal issues for entrepreneurs
- Marketing
- Financial considerations for entrepreneurs
- Gaining funding
- Finding investors
- Perfecting your pitch
LaunchMemphis’ goal is to foster entrepreneurial growth within the Memphis community. The group is non-profit and the cost of the BootCamp is $60 for two days filled with insight (and lunch and materials!).
The two sessions will take place on Saturday, August 15th and 22nd from 8:30 a.m. – 2:15 p.m. at the Mercury Launchpad located at:
EmergeMemphis, Suite 133
516 Tennessee Street
Memphis, TN 38103
For more information email Chris@LaunchMemphis.com or call (901) 628-4657.
Be sure to grab your ticket here: http://bootcamp2009.eventbrite.com/
SUW MEM 2.0 Update
Hi All,
I just wanted to give an update on the projects that came out of SUW Memphis 2. Again we had a great weekend with a lot of strong ideas coming out of the 48 hour event. Marks Menus pitched at the LaunchMemphis Investment forum and the roll play is really taking off. As a recap, we had 70 participants and we ended up with 5 projects. All projects are still progressing. Below is a summary of each idea and a recent update. Please get involved and join one or a few of these ideas. We are going to have our reunion on August 27th.
The Roll Play (www.therollplay.com) is a new web system to allow students, writers, and others to build stories collectively with other members by assuming the role of a character of their own making. The members in effect make a “rolling” play or even a debate. The site is up and running with new differentiating functionality coming out weekly.
The Roll Play is still progressing well. We have been live for 45 days and are up to 59 users. To date, 20 roll plays have been created, with the most active consisting of more than 200 posts.
59 Users
20 Stories
–
Marks Menus
Mister Menus changed to Marks Menus (www.marksmenus.com) is a site that allows a user to upload menus of their favorite restaurants and to rate menu items. This enables other users to search where to eat using criteria like dish ingredients and menu items. This way if you need to find the best vegan dishes in the city you can easily locate them and know where to go.
At this time, Mark’s Menus has 30 registered users and, this week, we got our first restaurant manager to enter their OWN menu on the site!
CheezyWeezy (www.CheezyWeezy.com), another project that built a beta launch product and business plan in 48 hours, encourages the world to “Take a Smile Break” by heading to their site to view and rate photos of cute kids. Grandparents unite and rate your grandchildren to the top!
We’ve completed our alpha testing and starting a private beta last week. Expect to see a public beta by the end of the week. After that, my team will be meeting on how best to market and get the word out.
Rezzie focused on designing an innovative business model for the real estate and print news industry. By providing previously unavailable data to consumers on agents and brokers on print news web sites, all parties can benefit with revenue and savings. This idea easily could provide large returns to investors and the team is moving forward with technical specs.
Interest declined after SUW and a few parties trotted the idea out to potential customers and there was interest but they wanted to see something. We’ve got a meeting scheduled Thursday evening at the Launchpad to discuss technical requirements and team members roles and responsibilities.
GameWavMedia focused on providing a new cross functional gaming platform to change the way games are designed, distributed and played. At the center of the idea is object oriented gaming independent of game functionality. Sound complicated — it is — but the idea has some merit, especially since the average age of a gamer is over 35.
Another Successful Investment Forum
The 2nd Annual LaunchMemphis Investment Forum was held June 19th at the FedEx Institute and attracted an impressively wide range of companies. We are proud to be able to refer to it now as an annual event, and we continue to be excited about the long-term viability of this event. Entrepreneurs brought their ideas and pitches to investors with companies ranging from concepts that were still in the early development stage to companies that have been in operation for several years. The event included representation from the retail, real estate, medical device and software industries.
Based on the feedback we have received to date, the event has once again exceeded the expectation of those that participated. Meetings are occurring with investors and the dialog that started at the event continues today. For some participants, the practice of pitching 7 times in 1.5 hours was challenging, educational, and life-changing. For others, it was a way to discover the areas that need work and to try out different pitches on an audience that asked challenging questions and pushed them to consider some interesting alternatives to their business models.
This year’s event was a more compact event, with a smaller seed track. We felt that most participants last year were just too exhausted at the end of the day to provide the feedback that the entrepreneurs deserved, and the changes we made were received well by those who participated. Whereas last year the number of companies in the seed track outnumbered venture companies 3 to 1, this year it was evenly split, with 7 companies in each track. While these numbers reflect the types of applications we received, they are also reflective of what we see as some maturation of some participants. We couldn’t be happier with the quality of the ideas we are seeing in the area.
Like any event, there are always lessons learned and things that we can do better. Our two top priorities as we look to next year’s event are engaging a broader base of investors to help grow the event and improving the pitches of those companies that participate. We recognize that in some cases, the presenters had great ideas but still had some work to do to turn the great idea into a great business. We will continue working with entrepreneurs and investors to help these great ideas become great businesses that can help take our great city to new levels. We were once again reminded by all those that presented that no city has a monopoly on innovation, and Memphis is a place that has the talent to compete with any city in the country.
If you are an investor (angel or institutional), we want to hear from you — we need to work together to ensure that this event can become a showcase for the talent that is in Memphis and that is all too often unrecognized by the media and the investment community.
For those that participated or plan to participate next year, look for updates on upcoming events to really try to help anyone interested get better at pitching their company to investors, partners, and prospects. We realize this is an area of critical need for our budding entrepreneurial community, and we want to provide events and means to help everyone improve.
We also want to thank our sponsors for the event, Tennessee Technology Development Council, TECworks, and the FedEx Institute at the University of Memphis. We could not continue this event without their support and greatly appreciate all their efforts in making this event a success.
