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.

Good morning. So this week PlansForUs is experimenting with MySpace. While we are well aware that MySpace lacks the tech street cred of Facebook, it has a lot of members. In fact, today I joined a group of 2,000 some educators on MySpace.

I will be watching how this MySpace networking experiment goes very closely.

So we are heading into the weekend with a lot of exciting things to come for next week. Principally, Steve has been working hard on a redesign of the site that we hope to launch on Monday. This redesign will be a nice step forward, I’ll blog about the new stuff next week.

To complete the marketing series here are the final three

7. How-To Stories and Advice

Terry was perplexed. How to teach her first graders units of measurement. Lucky for Terry, PlansForUs has a plan from gretchen that worked great for teaching this concept. By reading the plan, checking the rating and reputation and reading the comments, Terry felt this plan would be a slam dunk. With a few changes to fit her classrooms context Terry was on her way to a great teaching moment.

PlansForUs is simple. Find inspiration, create and share. These three stages take a teacher from a problem to a solution, quick.

8. Glitz and Glam

Paris, Britney and Lindsay are not teachers and are not members of PlansForUs.

I know, PlansForUs struggles a little bit when it comes to the glitz and glam factors. That said, we can’t wait to have Golden Apple winners as members of PlansForUs.

9. Seasonal/event-related

The school year is started and there is one place where teachers are collaborating to build new and engaging learning experiences. PlansForUs, see you there.

Join us teachers. PlansForUs is launching in time for the 2007-2008 school year, join up and be a part of the community that understands that teachers working together are the most powerful force for change and success that we know. Creation through collaboration comes alive at PlansForUs.

As indicated in the last post there are 9 interesting marketing pitches. At this point we have only gotten through 3 pitches. I happen to think they are among the strongest, despite that perception, I will soldier on.

4. Contrarian/Counterintuitve/Challenging Assumptions

Relying upon yourself does not produce the most engaging lesson plans. Relying upon what has only been done before does not produce the most engaging lesson plans. Using Microsoft Word limits your ability to seamlessly integrate new ideas into your plans. Change to PlansForUs, there is strength in numbers.

While that statement is not radically contrarian it does challenge that one can rely solely upon what has come before. It also challenges the conceit of being intellectually self-sufficient.

5. Anxieties

-Without collaboration can I possibly be teaching my students the full story.

-Is this plan any good, I mean I just found it on a website.

-I am running out of time and still have no idea how to teach this concept

These are fears that teachers have expressed to me and are at the source of the problem that we are trying to solve. I “like” these because they are real and not just stuff to sow FUD.

6. Personalities and Personal Stories

PlansForUs started on a saturday morning walk through the West Village with my wife. We talked about the difficulty of working in schools where collaboration was not an essential part of teacher interaction. Over breakfast we talked about this problems and outlined some solutions on a napkin. That single conversation lead to a platform where millions of collaborative conversations are happening everyday. Creation through collaboration on PlansForUs is changing the lives of children every single day.

One of the aspects of PlansForUs that we value most highly is our close relationship to teachers. Exemplified most directly by the fact that our wives, mothers and fathers are teachers. Telling this story about the founding of PlansForUs speaks both to our connection to teaching as well as our dedication to finding a solution.

The final installment of this riveting series is coming tomorrow. All I am saying is Paris, Britney and Lindsay.

Let’s be clear-a great product makes the marketing of that product a whole lot easier and we are working our butts off to evolve PlansForUs into a great product-or as we like to think of it-a great platform for idea exchange and use.

However, I should recognize that the story that we use to describe what PlansForUs is doing will be essential to the successful expansion of our business. Thanks to Lois Kelly, the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing I have a framework to explore how to market PlansForUs. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Joshua Porter for bringing this to my attention.

Without further ado, here’s how I might position PlansForUs. I would of course love to hear your opinion on the relative success of each of these positions.

1. Aspirations and Beliefs

PlansForUs is a platform for improving education by empowering teachers with engaging teaching ideas and methods from their peers.

We aspire to have an impact on the education of our future generations, not just on the lives of teachers. The world is getting more competitive and great education is the key to the success of students, workers and countries around the world. The PlansForUs platform is the means for teachers to exchange the ideas that create powerful, engaging learning experiences. You can see that we are definitely exploring this theme with the content on our homepage.

2. David vs Goliath

PlansForUs does not impose artificial, bureaucratic limits on ideas. We believe that it is the teachers, not the administrators that should define and lead the educational experience. PlansForUs is an exchange for ideas and is totally focused on aiding teachers.

In this case, teachers are the David’s in a world of administrative Goliath’s (NCLB, state testing, rankings, static administrations, etc). PlansForUs is the teacher’s slingshot. As a company, we are certainly David’s in the face of the Google’s, Yahoo’s and Blackboard’s of the world, but this positioning is nascent till we gain additional traction.

3. Avalanche about to roll

The rapid development of technology and the fact that 40% of teachers are retiring in the next 7 years has created an enormous challenge for teachers educating our future generations. A challenge, that if not met properly could cause enormous hardship for our teachers and their students. PlansForUs is the tool for capturing the knowledge that we are losing, as well as the rapidly accumulating information that is constantly entering learning networks.

This position ties different generations of teachers together to a common cause, that being to maintain what we know while simultaneously growing the knowledge base in the face of profound technological and global change. I like this theme a lot, except for the fact that there is not quite as much immediacy as I would like. This theme underpins a lot of what we do, but may not resonate to those who are making a decision of whether or not to sign up for PlansForUs.

More to come in future posts. I am of course interested in how to make these statements stronger and look forward to your comments.