OTBC provides coaching, networking events, entrepreneurship programs, and shared office space to help tech, biotech, cleantech and opentech start-up ventures succeed.
Set up your company. Validate your market. Develop your business plan. Get your company investor-ready. OTBC can help.
To hear about our upcoming lunch events, join our Meetup.com group.
If your company is a pre-revenue tech startup and you'd like to get it off to a strong start, check out our FastTrac® TechVenture™ program.
If your company has revenue, but it's time to revisit the strategy and the business plan, check out our FastTrac® GrowthVenture™ program
OTBC Partners with Clean Tech Open
OTBC is partnering with the Northwest Region of the Clean Tech Open , the business competition for clean tech companies, to spread the word to entrepreneurs in Oregon. Clean Tech Open has both regional and national competitions for clean tech companies, with winners taking away significant prizes in the form of both cash and services. Find out more at the Clean Tech Open website.
Validating Your Market
On Monday, we had session #2 of our latest FastTrac® TechVenture™ sequence at OTBC. The topic was how to validate your market - or, in other words, finding out “if you build it will they buy it”. OTBC coach Mark Paul reviewed the critical questions that need to be answered in the market validation process, including:
- What do your target customers buy?
- Why do they buy?
- How do they buy?
What do they buy? You may think you know what capabilities are important to your target customers — but those that end up buying may be focused on a completely different set of capabilities than you expect. Do your best to find out early (in the validation stage) what the customers want to buy!
Why do they buy? What is the customer payoff? What problem or pain do you think will motivate your customers to buy? Is that pain severe enough that they actually will buy? How will you verify all of the above (before building the product) so you know you’re building the right thing?
How do customers buy? Find out how customers in your target market find out about and buy products similar to yours. If they almost always buy based on referrals, then maybe you can avoid spending money on trade shows (and other expensive merchandising approaches) and focus on creating and leveraging referrals! If they usually buy based on advice they get from peers at technical conferences, that tells you a lot about where your marketing dollars should be spent. In general “never assume” what marketing investments are the right investments for your market. Go ask your customers how they buy!
Mark shared numerous stories of clients who assumed they knew the answers to the above questions, when in fact they didn’t. Too many entrepreneurs assuming they know the customer, and build a product based on that belief. If you take some time to validate those beliefs up front, your odds of success are much higher!
Video: Top 10 Legal Pitfalls
In a recent lunch program at OTBC, Jon Summers with law firm White and Lee reviewed the 10 most common mistakes startups make from a legal point of view. Those mistakes include missing the 83(b) election deadline (#10) and waiting too long to form an entity (#6). You can hear all 10 points, while getting lots of great additional information from Jon, by downloading his slides and viewing the video of the program. It’s all available on the OTBC Video and Slides page. Under the Legal topics section, Jon’s presentation is “Avoiding Legal Pitfalls”.
Infinity Softworks Launches iPhone™ App
Shortly after announcing a funding round, OTBC member Infinity Softworks, a leading provider of calculation software for smartphones, has announced availability of FastFigures™ for the iPhone™ and iPod® Touch. FastFigures is available to purchase now at the iTunes store.
FastFigures Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch comes with 30 unique calculator templates covering areas from real estate, finance and investing, math and science, construction, medical and more. Shipping with both standard and RPN calculators, FastFigures Mobile is available today for US$5.99 from Apple’s AppStore.
Infinity Softworks has more than 15 million customers in real estate, finance, education, medical and other fields. Its powerOne® software calculators are available for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Windows computers and the company’s products have been bundled with Palm, Sony, Garmin and ViewSonic devices.
End Joblessness Event a Big Hit
The Beer and Blog End Joblessness mini job fair at OTBC on Saturday, Jan. 24 was a big hit, with about 70 people in attendance.After an hour of networking, event organizer Justin Kistner (shown to the right in the photo) invited representatives of companies that had jobs to spend 2 or 3 minutes describing their companies and what opportunities they had. Seven or eight companies took advantage of the opportunity, and then we went back to networking for another hour.
Everyone I talked to made useful connections at the event. I think we’ll have to do this again!