Last week I posted a presentation that I had been working on for awhile and asked for your feedback on how it might be improved. Thanks to my partner Steve, friends, family and the vibrant NextNY Community, I got that feedback. This presentation is still kicking around among a few friends and colleagues and I look forward to integrating their feedback, but in the meantime I wanted to show you the improved presentation. I am thinking of adding my notes into the comments section for each slide, but I am not too keen on adding an audio track. If you have any opinion on either the notes or the audio track, please let me know.

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I look forward to your comments.

Back in August a guy named Charlie O’Donnell tested an interesting tactic for garnering attention and feedback on a business that he was starting called Path101. At the time I wrote a quick blog entry admiring the tactic. The tactic, defined as Anti-Stealth, has been an unqualified success for Charlie as he generated significant interest in his business, found a technical partner, refined his presentation and successfully raised an angel round of funding. A consequence of this tactic has been an ongoing discussion within the NYC entrepreneur community about the business effect of this tactic.

Steve and I have always maintained an anti-stealth bias due to our shared belief in the effectiveness of agile development. Our first act of anti-stealth was launching PlansForUs as soon as we had a working set of tools, exposing ourselves as quickly as possible to feedback. Given that our target market, K12 teachers, has a reputation for a lack of tech awareness this was a risk…but it has paid dividends as we embark on our second iteration with a much better understanding of how teachers might interact and use a tool like PlansForUs. With our second iteration underway, a growing user base and a need to increase our development cycles we need to find our seed-stage financing. This leads us to our second act of Anti-Stealth; revealing our investor presentation to readers of this blog…I know the anticipation is building.

By revealing our investor presentation, we also want to better understand a fundamental question of the anti-stealth tactic, if you do not have 1,000+ readers on your blog would it still work as well?

I have 13 subscribers to my blog, went to Colgate, New Trier HS (Winnetka, IL) and play hoops at Stuy Town. Those are a few of my primary networks, so lets find out if this blog can spread the word on PlansForUs beyond these networks. I promise to give full disclosure on how this plays out. So with the lead of Charlie’s anti-stealth movement and our own agile leanings we offer you our investor presentation (slightly modified).

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As for anti-stealth, we will continue to play around with this concept as an outgrowth of our convictions that agile development is the most efficient path towards success.

I apologize my relative quiet on the blogging front. Your regular dose of Tyler was most likely a highlight of your day, but I have been consumed with fundraising for PlansForUs. Next week I will share our fundraising deck, so that you can have a better sense of what we are thinking from a long term perspective.

Having grown up amidst relative affluence I had actually, silly me, thought that the fundraising would be a piece of cake…not the case. Needless to say, I am learning a ton and reaching deeply into my network which has been really great, as I have been able to reconnect with some folks that I had not spoken to in some time.

As for the first part of my title…Do you ever watch No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain? It is on the National Geographic channel and it is absolutely brilliant. I did not know who Anthony Bourdain was until I saw him as a judge on Top Chef. When I saw that he had a show, I figured it would be worth putting on the DVR. A couple shows came and went and then I sat down and watched one. Woah, it’s awesome.

In the show, Tony travels to locales foreign and domestic eating the local food with a heavy focus on street food. The characters that he meets and the food that he eats by adopting this very local style of travel is inspiring. I remember when my wife and I were in Vienna, Austria for a friend’s wedding and yearned to break out from the tourist district and get into the real, local style of Vienna. It is that same yearning that is realized every week on No Reservations.

If you like food and travel then I think you’ll love this show…if you don’t, well then maybe this show is not for you.

Anita Roddick the founder of The Body Shop passed away on September 10th and while I can’t say that I was a heavy user of Body Shop products, I was very aware of the Body Shop’s brand positioning. Body Shop was the first that I can remember, I am 28, practitioner and marketer of environmentally and socially conscious corporate practices. What I was not aware of till this morning, was that the Body Shop’s conscious was founded on 5 points that guided Anita Roddick’s development of the Body Shop into a billion dollar brand.

1. Take your business personally: Business has, traditionally, addressed the world with profits in mind, which is to say: impersonally. We can no longer afford this. More than any other generation – [today’s] business people are in a position to lead in making the world a better place. We must take more responsibility, which is to say, take it personally.

2. Be daring. Be first. Be different: Or no one will notice.

3. Be good.: Because you can.

4. Business is not beyond morality. Business is no longer a cold-hearted, objective, pseudo-scientific project to manipulate customers…it can’t be that anymore. The future of the world depends on us doing business with heart. Without ‘heart’ the creativitiy of the human spirit dwindles, too.

5. Business is like activism: It is a way of saying what kind of world you want to live in. Protest is not enough. You need a vision.

If you had come up to me on the street yesterday and asked me the maxims that drive PlansForUs, I probably would have given you a long winded answer that eventually would have described how these 5 points describe our business goals and vision. But now here they are, encapsulated in 5 neatly numbered sections that can serve to elucidate the goals ahead for PlansForUs. I will work on building out how PlansForUs achieves each of these points in blog entries to come. For now, enjoy the visionary genius of Anita Roddick,

Just a quick update on the PlansForUs business. We have been really excited about our growth so far. In fact the internal target that we set for number of users going into September was surpassed by nearly 3 times. However, we still have our issues and we continue to receive and prioritize the feedback of our users. For those who have provided feedback, thank you. While you may not necessarily see your feedback on the site yet, rest assured that it is in our development queue and Steve is hammering on it.

This discussion of growth and incorporating user feedback brings us to a post from On-Startup’s which I just reread depicting two go-to-market strategies. Take a look below and take a wild guess as to which one PlansForUs has adopted.

The “Big Bang” Strategy

1. Have idea
2. Raise Capital
3. Code like crazy in “super stealth mode”
4. Hire VP of Marketing to plan big launch
5. Hire PR agency to launch
6. Launch!
7. Success!(?)

Sony, Microsoft and many others seem to use this strategy to marginal effect.

The “We’re Only as Smart as our Users” Strategy

1. Have idea
2. Bootstrap / Beg / Borrow
3. Tell the World
4. Release product to the unsuspecting
5. Get feedback
6. Iterate, iterate, iterate!
7. Success!

PlansForUs would add the following caveats. The 3 B’s in Step 2 endure for awhile. We’re hoping that we can curtail step 2 after the first “iterate” in Step 6 (investors we’ll be talking soon) and we actually flip flopped steps 3 and 4. We released the product to the unsuspecting and are using the product and some elegant 8 sentence pitches to tell the world.

Well I guess I answered my own question, sorry to ruin the fun. We of course are working hard to get to that step 7. As always let us know about how we can improve.

In our ongoing effort to put the best foot forward and think deeply about our business, we have decided to rewrite our business plan. We recognize that we will have to improve the organization of our plan if we are to be successful in raising future rounds of funding. Additionally, since our first meeting with a group of test teachers, our plan has evolved.

In order to organize properly we have turned to Brad Feld. Brad writes an amazing blog about venture capital, that is both an interesting read and an invaluable resource to entrepreneurs. There is one particular post that we have gone back to in an effort to address the important questions that a company should seek to answer in their business plan.

Using this post as a guide, we have begun to recompose our original business plan and during this process we (or at this point, I) have been challenged by the question of customer acquisition costs. Because we are building a tool that relies upon word of mouth, PR, product advocacy to grow the PlansForUs user base we figure that customer acquisition costs will be determined by the human resources expended marketing through word of mouth, PR, and product development. The problem is, we are unclear as to what the formula looks like for computing valid customer acquistion cost assumptions. If you happen to have any thoughts on how we might put a value on our customer acquisition efforts or have read something, please leave a comment or send me a link in del.icio.us (username: tylerfonda).

Anyway, thought I would share some of the thinking from the business formation end. We are working hard to launch PlansForUs and hope to have something for our teachers to work with near the end of April. Till then, we will continue to write and share this process with you.

Speak to you soon.