iGAP (internet growth acceleration program)

I have been a participant on the Enterprise Ireland iGAP program and it has been fascinating so far. Some of my iGAP colleagues have blogged about iGAP previously, Ronan Skehill wrote a particularly succinct account last month.

I know that Enterprise Ireland sometime get a lot of criticism but the work of the iGAP team deserves praise. Brian Caulfield and the EI team devised a very practical program, bringing the best of Ireland and Silicon Valley together to inform, challenge and prepare us fledgling Irish companies in executing on our passion and vision for a scaleable internet business.

On Wednesday we had our penultimate session, preparing for fundraising. I have done some fundraising before and it is always daunting. I wish I had access to this program when I was starting out. One of the many upsides of a program like iGAP is the networking, not just with the tutors and mentors but also with the participating companies.

The program started with Paul O’Dea who introduced us to the Business Battlecard, a practical set of tools to get you focused on what you are offering, who your customer is and how to reach them. This was followed by a highly motivational session with Eric Reis who introduced us to the magic of the lean startup model. I suppose the opposite of this would be the fat startup model i.e. spending lots of time and money making the product perfect before you engage with your customer. With the lean startup model, you release a minimum viable product and learn from your customers what you need to do to make it a product that is worthy of a cash transaction.

Scott Rafer gave an amazing session on revenue models. This was thought provoking, making a clear distinction between the business to business revenue model and the business to consumer model. Scott brought a lot of practical experience to the session, he is currently CEO at Omniar and was co-founder of Mashery, to name but a few of his successes.

We then got insight from Sean Ellis who brought a depth of experience to the business of startup and customer acquisition. I found this module really practical, lots of tips on how to engage with your customers, learn and iterate.

Stepping in with my absolute favourite topic was Justin Knecht who focused on brand and customer touchpoints. This was really useful for Tunepresto , we charted out the customer journey and identified all the points of contact, which was really useful for us to work on our messaging. Justin also gave great feedback on our assignment.

In February we had a session with Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of Mashery amongst a lot of previous startup history. Oren focused on business development and gave us a really good explanation about what business development is really about and what we need to focus on to scale our businesses. I am currently working through his assignment and find it very interesting, making me focus on what I need to do to move the needle.

The penultimate session with Brian Caulfield focused on funding. It was really interesting to get his perspective both as a VC and as an entrepreneur. We got a good insight into the current landscape in Ireland from Liz Fleming of angel network HBAN, Shay Garvey of Delta who have a new seed fund, John O’Sullivan of ACT who also have a new seed fund and Nic Brisbourne of DFC Esprit who are now active in Ireland. It appears that there is plenty of seed funding available at the moment.