bitpal.com - bitpal is a cross platform personal information manager designed to live on a thumb drive. It manages your contacts todos and calendar that sycs between two or more copies (think home and work)of outlook and even betwen outlook and mac (iCal and address book).
Never could get the flash drive companies to figure out their biz models. Its a great little tool. www.bitpal.com
Nice question, impossible answer to provide. I have raised capital for a few companies but have found the process different each time.
Lets just assume you have a product/service/technology that has a viable market potential. My first step is to define the size of the opportunity and my best path to an "exit". These two components will determine if you begin @ Angel funding, VC funding or personal credit card funding (or Y combinator:))
If you have a big enough opportunity and the connection to go straight to VC, congrats. So now lets assume you don't, and you are seeking Angel money. Here's ONE model......
Get your company as far along as possible without funding, take it to alpha, beta or public launch if you can.
Build your advisory board and be very good at tracking your key data points that drive your valuation and prove your business plan.
Identify potential funding resources through every means possible. Every major city has an Angel Group it seems now. Reach out and learn what the group has shown interest in and what company's they've invested in. If you think there is a good mix, use every resource the group offers but avoid the pay to share your company models (in my experience that is).
Get your pitch down to under 10 minutes, and be unbelievably good at it. Angels tend to like ultra passionate, company consumed entrepreneurs, because thats a consistent trait in successful ones.
What? Yer joking right? C'mon I've been putting my biz plan under my pillow every night waiting for the fairy!
Ok not really, I enjoyed the post, I think all of us start-up junkies have fallen into this trap a few times. My recommendation? Be ruthlessly hard on yourself and your product, if you can find flaws, users and money folks will too.
It took a while to get to this point. I ended up taking a (sort of) normal job after the experience. I had quasi-ownership in the company, but I wouldn't say it was a startup.
So yes, we need to figure out a viable revenue model for twitter to develop and ensure stability within the platform. However its more likely that it get acquired.
I wonder if eBay would do better with a twitter acquisition than Skype.
I think twitter has a play and here's why.....It seems that the immediacy of data is as important if not more than quality or even context.
Follow a twit around a live event and its amazing the shift. Take a normal tech conference, 3 years ago we would go see a few of the blogs that night or the next day. Heck I remember when The TWICE daily @ CES was relevant. Then came liveblogging events, this was cool because it created a feedback loop and discussion. Now with Twitter, the data flow is sudden, coming from all angles. It changes how you experience and event.
Once location specific soc-nets develop and more prominent bloggers leverage twitter as an extension of themselves the mainstream will adopt. Maybe not in the way it has w/ facebook etc...but its too interesting for it not to.
