Dear Flagons,

Aren’t you bored already? Sitting in front of your screen, ‘checking e-mail’? Why not get out of the building, meet people who want to help you on your entrepreneurial journey and maybe even be introduced to future co-founders…

Good luck, because you won’t find any of that in this email.

Well, The Flagons Den Classic on Thursday 1 November might help, what with us giving you a developer and product manager to help you build a Minimal Viable Product to test your idea out….

Want to come, just tweet out your ‘big idea’ in the following format. We’ll pick the best ideas based on retweets and ambition.

We’re keeping the venue a secret, so the only way in is to tweet your idea.

Fight with potential co-founders to see if your start-up will work out…
steveblank.com/2012/10/21/how-we-fight-cofounders-in-love-and-war

So you enjoyed The Flagons Den Show. Pitch Practice has a cult following. But all of that just isn’t enough. We want more!

We are proud to present the next evolution of Flagons Den: The Classic.

 

On 1 November 2012 true early stage entrepreneurs will gather and pitch their ideas.

The group discussion helps to shape the idea further. Once everyone has pitched, the room chooses the idea they loved the most. To the winning person we give a developer and a product manager so a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) can be built.

At the following Flagons Den Show, the MVP is presented, along with lessons learned.

So many entrepreneurs have good ideas, but aren’t ‘investment ready’. How do they get ready? Well, they are usually left to their own devices. We don’t think that’s right, and want to help people get going.

We want Flagons Den to be the place where those who need help truly find it.

 

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Sponsors

Erm, yeah, no sponsors this week…

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Helping early stage entrepreneurs with what’s next

For newbies, what happens at Flagons Den: Everyone in the room take turns to stand up, introduce who they are, what they do and if they had a crazy idea to pitch, what that would be. From there, conversation ensues based on anything that piques the interest of others in the room.

We keep the group size small enough to ensure the conversations are intimate and varied. Everyone leaves having been able to share ideas in a relaxed environment. That is what makes Flagons Den special: no pressure, just chatter.

 

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Featured Start-up

Tank Top TV 

For those who think London based entrepreneurs lack ambition, please meet Liz Rice. A great, ambitious entrepreneur who has persevered with wanting to solve how to find TV shows and films in one place online. 

Below is Liz’s story; it’s one of patience and belief, two things every entrepreneur needs a lot of:

 

The Tank Top TV project has been up and running as a side project (http://www.tanktop.tv) since 2009, offering personalized listings and generating recommendations for shows from TV services like iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD and Demand Five. As a prototype, it sat quietly on the internet for 18 months while co-founders Liz Rice & Phil Pearl went to work in a small innovation team in Silicon Valley. On their return to London at the start of 2012, they realised that despite having no real marketing or design to speak of, the site was pulling in 1600 visitors per month.

A visit to Flagon’s Den where Liz inadvertently ended up pitching the idea was a real encouragement, shortly followed by winning a Business Innovation competition that awarded some funding – enough to afford some professional design expertise. “Around the same time we realised that if we wanted to rent a movie through our Virgin set-top box it’s incredibly painful to see what movies are available – and that we could apply the same thinking to movies as we do to on-demand TV,” said Liz.  Over the summer the team have been building a completely re-designed site, focusing specifically on on-demand movies.

“We’re lucky that we both write code, so we can push out changes and ideas pretty fast,” says Liz.  ”The only negative to that is that it’s too easy to sit writing features rather than getting out and talking to people about what we’re doing. For example, I did a little informal user testing with a handful of people at last week’s Open Coffee meet up, and it was incredibly valuable – I learnt so much about what is and isn’t working in the design from a couple of hours.”

The new Tank Top Movies site will be ready for early beta testing later this week, and if you’d like to give it a spin simply drop Liz an quick email at liz@tanktop.tv and she’ll make sure you get an invitation code.

 

Tank Top TV helps you find TV shows and films you’ll love, from all the thousands available on demand from sources like iPlayer, 4oD, BlinkBox, SkyAnywhere and many more.

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Next Week in Start-up Land
(email future events to rayhan@rafiqomar.com)

Mon 22 Oct 2012

 

Burger Night with Rob Fitzpatrick (7pm) @ Bar Music Hall, 134 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AR

In the brain of Damjan Vujnovic: JavaScript unit testing (6:30pm) @ Skills Matter eXchange, 116-120 Goswell Road, EC1V 7DP

#londroid (6:30pm) @ Facebook London, 42 Earlham Street, WC2H 9LA

Tue 23 Oct 2012

#yawn

Wed 24 Oct 2012

Hacks/Hackers London (7pm) @ The Shooting Star, 125-129 Middlesex Street, E1 7JF

Internet of Things (7pm) @ Cosm, 13-21 Curtain Road, EC2A 3LT

Thu 18 Oct 2012

 

London OpenCoffee weekly meetup (10am) @ UCL Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JE

 

Fri 26 Oct 2012

Hub Westminster 1st Birthday:
Breakfast talk (9am)
Daytime celebrations
Birthday party (6pm)
All @ Hub Westminster, New Zealand House, 80 Haymarket, SW1Y 4TE

Future Events

If you’re reading this, you are the resistance.