Following last weeks IGAP finale, this is a guest post from IGAP 2 participant Siún Ní Raghallaigh’s of TunePresto, which allows you to create music using video and pictures. This post originally appeared on Siún’s blog.
I have been a participant on the Enterprise Ireland iGAP program and it has been fascinating so far. Some of my iGAP colleagues have blogged about iGAP previously, Ronan Skehill wrote a particularly succinct account last month.
I know that Enterprise Ireland sometime get a lot of criticism but the work of the iGAP team deserves praise. Brian Caulfield and the EI team devised a very practical program, bringing the best of Ireland and Silicon Valley together to inform, challenge and prepare us fledgling Irish companies in executing on our passion and vision for a scaleable internet business.
On Wednesday we had our penultimate session, preparing for fundraising. I have done some fundraising before and it is always daunting. I wish I had access to this program when I was starting out. One of the many upsides of a program like iGAP is the networking, not just with the tutors and mentors but also with the participating companies.
The program started with Paul O’Dea who introduced us to the Business Battlecard, a practical set of tools to get you focused on what you are offering, who your customer is and how to reach them. This was followed by a highly motivational session with Eric Reis who introduced us to the magic of the lean startup model. I suppose the opposite of this would be the fat startup model i.e. spending lots of time and money making the product perfect before you engage with your customer. With the lean startup model, you release a minimum viable product and learn from your customers what you need to do to make it a product that is worthy of a cash transaction.
Scott Rafer gave an amazing session on revenue models. (more…)
