Pallian Creative

Wow - talk about slack! Last time I updated this blog was on a plane ride back from TC50… tons have happened since then that I don’t know where to begin. Things have been happening so fast that before I could finish up a blog post, something new pops up. Today, I got an email from Doug Williams, Biz Dev for Twitter, and he casually noted “…I’ve read and enjoyed your blog for a while…”. Something about that made me want to blog again and here we are! To really catch up on what I’m up to now, we’ve got to travel back in time to where we left off, so here goes:

Oct 2009 - I decide to open up an office and hire some talent. Like all things that happen with me, this decision came over lunch with a friend at an obscure Chinese restaurant eating some dim sums. I knew I could not go on forever working in my apartment, and felt it was the right time to get a bigger space and hire. As many of you know - I design websites for a living. As much as I’m passionate about startups and the sub-culture that goes with it, I enjoy designing websites and getting paid for it. Over the years I’ve built a pretty large network of financial clients who seems to always want a new blog or website, and it always pays the startup bills. I figured if I opened up an office and hired some designers and developers to do all the contract work, I could sit back and really focus on my social shopping startup JustBought.it. Unfortunately, that didn’t really pan out as anticipated. What ended up happening was we secured a nice open space, hired 4 new designers but instead of me taking a back seat and focussing on my startup, I ended up having to manage and coach my new team and do quality control for my clients. And to make things more complicated, with all this new found confidence to design and develop websites faster, I took in as many as 8 new clients in a span of 4 weeks. The money was great… but.. well lets move on to November.

November 2009 - Office is running smoothly - team is happy - money is great, BUT, instead of working on my startup, I ended up being my own project-manager for clients. It reached a point where I knew I had to hire someone just to run Pallian Creative. And as luck would have it, a casual chat with my old college mate, the very smart and talented Rasheed Akhtar, solved that problem. I flew in Rasheed from Winnipeg to Vancouver (twice!) in November to first and foremost make him love the city (that was easy!) and to convince him that we have a growing and profitable business here that needs a good COO. I think it was the right combination of the few sunny days we had in November when he was visiting and the office coffee maker that sold him - he took on the position! Which brings us to December.

December 2009 - With Rasheed on board and running the day to day operations, I spent all my time on JustBought.it knowing that the holiday season was critical to it’s success. We re-launched the site, got a great press mention on techcrunch and got some really good momentum going. Around the same time, I came up with the very awesome idea of launching a blog called ThisIsAwesome.com to showcase some of the awesome things getting shared on justbought.it along with the awesome finds we find on twitter. Luckily got a great deal to buy the domain for cheap and will be launching this awesome blog this week. The blog is so damn awesome that I think it deserves an entire post on its own, which I will publish when we go live on friday.

January 2010 - This bring us to the past 30 days and what an amazing 30 days it has been! We have so many updates and features coming up on JustBought.it that it’s making me giddy. Shopping as we know it now is going to change, and being on the forefront of technology that changes it is very very exciting. I’m going to write an entire post on what we’ve been cooking up in the next week, so look out for that. We are also looking for Angel investors to help take social shopping to the next level. If you can think of a VC or a private investor who would be the right fit in this space, please get in touch.

And finally, here we are on the 2nd day of February and I want to update you on a couple of quick things:

1. Pallian.com is getting a major facelift by the end of this month. This blog will still be active, it will just go through a branding and re-design phase to showcase some of the amazing work my team at Pallian Creative have been doing. This current theme is for sale for a low price of $99. You can just paypal me and I’ll send you the theme via email. The theme comes as-is with no support - but if you’re a wordpress junkie, you should have no issues installing the theme and have your site running within minutes.

2. The Winter Olympics are here in 10 days and since this city is going to be in a security/traffic lockdown - we decided to have a little fun with it. I invited a very special french journalist to stay with us during the Olympics and today, I’m proud to introduce THE GASTON REPORT. He arrives on the 12th of February and all I can say is if you’re going to watch the Olympics, bookmark his website, friend him on twitter and fan him on facebook - because he’s going to show you winter olympics like you’ve never seen before!

Stay tuned! Lots of exciting things coming your way… and follow me on twitter for all the latest updates. Read & Discuss

I’m sitting at SFO waiting on my delayed Air Canada flight back to Vancouver and thought I would write up a quick post on what I learned from my experience at the Techcrunch50 conference.

First off, I feel very lucky to have got the chance to be part of the 50 companies from over a thousand selected to demo. Chris Sel, the founder of Radiusly worked extremely hard the past few weeks getting ready for this conference and polishing up his presentation and his startup. He had to go through 3 rounds of selection process and 3 practice rounds in front of Calcanis and the entire Techcrunch team perfecting his presentation. I was present for one of his practice rounds at Sequoia Capital and as much fun as it was to sit back and watch Calcanis give his expert advice on every single thing Chris had to say, it was the most grueling presentation ever.

Here’s my advice for anyone who is going to submit a startup for next year’s Techcrunch50 or any other demo conference:

1. Grow a thick skin. A really really thick skin. Be prepared to hear the worst about your startup - for every 2 people who will tell you you got a great idea, 8 will completely dismiss it. Thankfully for Radiusly, Jason and Arrington saw the potential.

2. Be prepared to take criticism for your presentation and be open to ideas on what to present. For example, you may want to talk about your product and all the high hopes you have for it, but the organizers may ask you to present from a marketing point of view or showcase a section that a judge in your panel may want to hear. If you’re looking for VC money, then you may want to focus your presentation more on how your startup will change the game and how you plan to make money from it. If you’re looking for just free press, then focus your presentation on a “wow” factor and engage the audience and the judges as part of the presentation. Usually the press is seated in the first 4 rows, so try to engage them the most.

3. Perfect your presentation and your pitch. Take all the good advice the organizers have given you in the rehearsal rounds and perfect it. Work on your timing and make sure you have backup plans in case the wifi on stage is a #fail.

4. Have your product ready for launch at the end of your presentation. If you’re product is still in powerpoints or “closed beta” or “invitation only”, don’t bother coming to these conferences. With all the free press you’ll be getting, make sure the product is live and users can login right away so they can start forming opinions… encourage online chatter, either by getting bloggers to rate your app and giving feedback or by using social network channels. Get your friends to be your goodwill ambassadors to spread the word that your startup is now live. Work on building that excitement till your presentation and launch with a bang.

5. Get a press release ready. Due to the large press presence at these conferences, the organizers will most likely email you your best gift – an excel document with over a 100 contacts to all the leading journalist, bloggers, TV and media reps. Email them! Email them just before you go live on stage and send a follow up email as soon as you’re done. Send them details you may have omitted during the presentation – a good press release will almost make up for any of your fumbling on stage. Spend time on it and prefect it. Most of the time, the press will most likely use exact verbatim of what you send them. Wouldn’t you much rather have the press telling the world what YOU want them to tell?

6. And finally, depending on your budget, get creative with your business cards and schwag. For example, one of my favorite cards was of Scobleizer’s, that he got done from Snapily. Get your face on your card. It always helps. I collected over 50 business cards of which I may remember 10.

At the end of the day, remember this is your big break. Enjoy the conference, interact with as many people as you can, smile and take photos and have a good time. Your startup made it this far, so know for granted that you are already above the thousands who didn’t make it.

And finally, go to all the after-parties and try not to get drunk with all the free booze. But, instead, find a VC who is a bit tipsy and sell him your product and make sure he remembers you the next day when you follow up! :-)

And one quick final note - bookmark and watch EVERY SINGLE VIDEO from Andrew Warner’s Mixergy. Learn what others before you had to go through and learn from their ups and downs. Andrew has done a fantastic job capturing these moments on video and making it freely available for everyone.

Good luck!
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