Dear all,

A couple of weeks ago (June 4th 2009), Myngle was invited as guest speaker to a PricewaterhouseCoopers event “Growing with ambition’’ to present to a large public of entrepreneurs as example of successful Dutch start-up.

PricewaterhouseCoopers organized this event together  with Rabobank, NextStage, New Venture en Syntens. The objective was to present business cases of successful entrepreneurs with 3 to 5 years of life of the Company and high Revenues and growth.
Myngle is still very young, and much smaller than the other companies that presented that day, but was invited because of the early successes it already booked, the many awards won and the fact that it was able to ensure healthy funding even in this moment of economic downturn.

I presented Myngle as business case, from idea to implementation, with particular attention on how to get the right funding to finance growth:

1. First decide: how fast do you want to grow? The decision on which type of funding and the amount very much depends on the stage of development of the company:
• Angels, VCs, Bank loans best fit different stages of growth. In the case of Myngle, the bank loan was the right choice for that moment of development of the company.

2.The official ‘Tips & tricks’ are all well known, and can be found also online in different articles on how to get VC funding, but they are important:
• The business must be well understood and explained in each of its critical aspects: opportunity, problem, target market, competitive advantage
• In a very early stage of execution, you do not have results yet to support the case, so most important ingredients to predict future success are the team, the product and some initial validation done with real users

3. Myngle additional ‘Tips & Tricks’: these are things we learned along the way, and probably one of those examples that as first time entrepreneur you just  ‘discover’ but will gladly apply it in any new venture in the future
• Awards, PR and high profile partnerships are important for a startup to gain visibility as well as credibility, and help set one start-up aside from the many others.
• Plan well your cash needs as the funding process normally takes longer than expected. Even once the price and value is set and agreed, it is the discussion and agreement of the small clauses in the contract that takes the most time. Plan to have sufficient money to be able to conduct all discussions with peace of mind, without cash constraints.

After the workshop, I had the chance to exchange some ideas with some of the other speakers – owners of more mature successful companies – and a lot of other entrepreneurs.
This was the most fun part of the day!  🙂

Marina

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Myngle News, The Company. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.