I recently did a presentation on our new business to an EI Mentor Panel. It was a very valuable exercise and I recommend that anyone in a start-up in Ireland do one as early as possible. Not only do you get excellent feedback from the panel but it is a great way of clarifying your own thoughts and tightening up your presentation skills.

The panel consisted of three people, one from a marketing background and two from a business background. None of them were familiar with the subject matter apart from the usual “is related to Bebo?”. The format is that they had already received a business outline document, you then give a presentation for 10 minutes and they feedback for about 50 minutes.

As it is Enterprise Ireland, the feedback in done in a very constructive and positive way but that doesn’t mean that they do not criticise. Some important things became very apparent very quickly.

For a start, I was emphasising the wrong things. The USP and key differentiators which I felt were completely obvious had actually passed them by and they ended up focusing on some of the standard features which are common across competitor sites. The revenue model also caused some explanation problems but was cleared up quickly during the Q&A.;

The biggest issue they saw was in the marketing plan. And in this, I realised they really did have a point. Most of the other issues they brought up were failures in communication and explanation by me but in the area of marketing and growth, there was a large hole after the initial launch.

They also identified a problem that I have been reading more and more about recently. We were making the classic mistake of trying to be all things to all people. Whilst our site will be built in a totally generic way, it is imperative that we identify initial market niches and go after them with all of our efforts. Tara has done some great posts on this recently and I’ve already mentioned Seth Godin’s book which brings up similar ideas.

What I found so interesting about this feedback is that once they said it, it was totally obvious and we were able to pick the initial niches without much difficulty at all. Of course, identifying niches and successfully attracting customers from those niches are two totally different things. The panel’s comments were echoed again much more forcefully two days later at another investor panel which I will describe in a later post.

We all tend to focus on the grants and funding aspects of what EI does, but sessions like the Mentor Panel, the upcoming BES & Seed Capital session and the “Sales Process Coaching Programme” are possibly even more important. Getting a grant to help you build your dream is crucial but if your dream only has a target market of 1, then all of those training and advice sessions may save you a lot of pain and wasted time.

p.s. EI need to fix their web-site fast. Not only is it totally broken in Firefox, it is also bunched in Internet Explorer 7. I gave up trying to find info on the Mentor Panel on their site so I could link to it.

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