One thing that all accelerator programmes seem to have in common is a demo day at the. The Microsoft Ventures Accelerator is no different and we are working towards ours which takes place on 6th December.
I haven’t yet worked out quite why it is called a demo day as there isn’t going to be any time for a demo given that we have a three minute slot.
We started this week with a session with the “Pitch Doctor” who took us through our existing presentation in excruciating detail and it really felt like being back at school with a really, really enthusiastic teacher!
The first bit of good news that the doctor dispensed was that only one of us should present and given that Tim is the CEO it makes more sense for him to do it! Result! The rest of the advice seemed sound and enabled us to hone the presentation.
As I have pointed out in previous post one of the best things about the accelerator programme is the access you get to a wide variety of people – all of whom are happy to share their opinion with you. This is great until you somewhat inevitably receive conflicting advice which is exactly what has happened regarding the presentation. This is unfortunate but it is our business and we know what we want and so spent time filtering the advice to find what made most sense for us. This I think is really important as nobody knows your business like we do.
Microsoft kindly organised a UX Hackathon for us this week out at their Reading HQ which gave us an opportunity to put our two products in front of a panel of individuals. We spent two hours going through the functionality and getting some really useful feedback on how we can improve both. Having people come to your offerings blind really shows you what bits work and what doesn’t.
The office had the addition of the odd contraption you can see in the picture in the bottom right. So far I haven’t been able to establish what it is and have been told that it is a Dalek maker!
