AngelCube 2012 – The story so far.

Three weeks ago round two of AngelCube kicked off at one of Melbourne’s most successful startups SitePoint (the home of 99Designs, Flippa, Sitepoint and Learnable). It was an epic day, a startup bootcamp of sorts, hosted by AngelCube mentor Tony Mittelmark with a program overview by myself.

AngelCube mentor, Tony Mittelmark, opens the AngelCube bootcamp at the 99Designs "Sauna" pic credit: Nathan Sampimon.

The pace definitely hasn’t slowed since. There’s been late nights; countless hours of hard work; hundreds of customer interviews and a lot of time spent building MVP’s; testing assumptions; getting customer feedback and iterating on product and marketing.

There’s also been over 10 mentor sessions including; 

  1. Alan Downie from BugHerd on “Where you should be by demo-day”
  2. Steve Sammartino on “How to pimp your startup”
  3. Scott Handsaker from EventArc on “The Lean Canvas“
  4. Nathan Sampimon on “Creating personas and user stories”
  5. Adrian Stone on “The intersection of product, market and team”
  6. Melissa Shawyer from ClickPR  ”Creating PR stories, angles and content for mass media”
  7. Brownwen Clune on “Disruption and creative thinking”
  8. Jonathon Weinstock on “Pitching and capital raising”
  9. Diesel Laws on “The importance of UI & UX“
  10. Joe Ziegler on “AWS and scaling your business in the cloud”
  11. James Tuckerman – “Gattie Pitches and the four things you need to know about marketing”
  12. Andrew O’Brien on “Artscrowd’s story, MVP, Capital Raising and Pivoting” and
In addition the teams have been given prescribed reading including 

And a series of milestones that have included 

  1. Developing, testing and refining their business model using the Lean Canvas
  2. Running problem/solution interviews over 20 real customers
  3. Creating the “Board-room as bits” style presentations each week
  4. Developing and testing Non-software MVP’s and Concierge MVP’s 
  5. Pre-selling their products to interested customers
  6. Developing their investor pipeline and relationships
  7. Working out key metrics such as COA, APRU, LTV, Churn Rate etc.
    and many more.

Overall we feel this has helped their progress dramatically and you only have to read their blog posts such as; 

  1. Week two of AngelCube by David, David and Cyril of Broccol-e-games.
  2. Week two AngelCube – “Become your product” from Adam and Paul from Giftless and
  3. Week three AngelCube – Vinspi’s Milestone presentation. 
Or check-out the weekly Podcast that Jake and Phil have been recording each week. AngelCast2012. 
So, what exactly are the each of the teams working on?
Well they’re finally at a point where we can reveal their ideas, without fear of too many changes. Whilst a startup should always be learning and open to adapting and pivoting I feel we’re at a point now where each team has a clear direction and clear vision of who their customer is; the problem they’re solving and the market they’re entering.
Rather than recover existing ground I’m going to link to a recent press release that explained each business nicely from ShoeSringLaunch (which IMHO is becoming the best startup publication in the country) and talk specifically about two of the teams and the journey they’ve been on since joining AngelCube week 1.
PicksterApp 
Pickster App entered the AngelCube program as BrickTrack.co, a software as a service analytics platform for retailers. After Scott Handsaker’s brilliant Lean Canvas session; and after a lot of customer testing the founder Jake Lawton realised the most important assumption to test was “Are retailers interested in analytics?” After a series of difficult interviews, conversations and an incredibly slow reply rate – the overall conclusion was, not only are they not interested, but reaching them is incredibly tough. The testing led to the conclusion; that there wasn’t necessarily a business model here, and even if there was it wasn’t likely it would reach product market fit easily or quickly. The resulting pivot has been huge, but based on Jake’s desire to build a valuable niche marketplace and bringing amazing, hard to find products online. The response so far to PicksterApp from our targeted retailers has been incredibly positive and we’re excited about the opportunity Jake and Naveed have discovered.
KickFolio
It’s no secret that when selecting teams to participate in an accelerator the main emphasis is on teams. In KickFolio’s case it was 100% on the team. We met Chris Nolet and Ed Dowling and whilst we weren’t enamoured with their existing idea, recognised how talented and smart these to two gents are and the raw entrepreneurial energy and drive each had.  Within a week of coming into AngelCube they’d literally documented and written a Lean Cavnas for over 20 ideas. The determined search has ended up yielding in our opinion, and certainly the opinion of customer’s they’ve spoken to, a brilliantly simple and clever idea that will solve real problems for app designers around the world. We’re incredibly impressed by the work, energy and learning that Chris and Ed have show and I’m guessing their story will be an inspiring one in the not too distant future.
So, what else has been happening?
Well, if all that wasn’t enough we’ve had a few social events, including AngelCube’s launch party which wasn’t quite as large as the 2011 one, but a great night nonetheless. We’ve also jumped on the bandwagon of Inspire9′s new regular Friday night drinks. So, if you want to, come join us. There’s beer and foosball and if you’re lucky you won’t’ come up against Inan Lim (Vinspi) and Nicola Gracie (FitIntegrate) who seemed to occupy the table for most of the night last night!
Note, this isn’t them, but it’s awesome.

Some other, non-foosball related highlights of #AC12 thus far include.
  1. Brocole-e-gaming’s SpringBird cracking the top 10 in the Education section of the AppStore
  2. Vinspi’s continued growth, and the forthcoming redesign by the incredibly talented AC mentor Diesel Laws
  3. KickFolio going from an idea, to having a small group of loyal customers queuing up in less than a week
  4. PicksterApp moving away from a tough, enterprise sale, low value play to a really exciting marketplace
  5. Team Giftless relentless approach to customer-solution interviews, which has led them to some fascinating insights.
  6. FitIntegrate founder Nicola Gracie  being recognised as one of the top 10 female tech entrepreneurs to watch in StartupSmart
  7. The amazing response to AngelCube TV Episode 1 – produced by the super talented Kealey Nutt (hire her if you’re ever doing video!!)
  8. Starting the year at SitePoint HQ; and enjoying the perfect welcome to the program courtesy of AngelCube friend of the family Leni Mayo.
  9. And just generally, how well the teams are getting along, collaborating, pushing each other and creating businesses that we’re really excited to be part of.
None of this could be done without the amazing support of the AngelCube community and the following people need to be thanked for their contribution thus far (listed in no particular order!).

Alan Downie, Steve Sammartino, Tim Stanford, Scott Handsaker, Nathan Sampimon, Adrian Stone, Melissa Shawyer , Brownwen Clune, Bevan Clark, Jonathon Weinstock, Diesel Laws, Leni Mayo, Mark Harbottle, Joe Ziegler, Pieter Kemps, James Tuckerman, Ned Dwyer, Tom Howard, Fenn Bailey, Dave Slutzskin, Michael Shimmins, Ivan Vanderbyl, Glen Maddern, Anita Lloyd, Nic Hodges, Michael Van de Wiel, Bernie Tschirren, Andrew Twaits, Guy King the awesome Inspire9 community and everyone else that’s contributed via Yammer; come along to an AngelCube event or been roped into a Problem/Solution interview by team Giftless!!

It’s been an awesome start to 2012′s program; and although it’s been intense, we’re really proud of all the teams efforts thus far.

There’s a long-way to go but we’re looking forward to seeing how each of the team’s progress over the coming weeks… Stay tuned AngelCube’rs!