In continuation with Alok’s post on Investment pitches, i am posting our venture pitch for TracBac, a visual collaboration application. Here’s the presentation:
TracBac is a visual collaboration platform for designers and clients to interact over a modern browser. It succeeds in narrowing the gap between designers & clients by providing a rugged and easy to use collaboration platform. TracBac provides simple, yet powerful visual collaboration for designers, advertising agencies, creative professionals with their clients.
Development Stage: TracBac is 90% ready with few UI issues and minor feature upgrade. Comparing ourselves with other services by TechCrunch’s recent post, we believe, we bring in a better, simple yet sophisticated visual collaboration for the target audience.
The company is completely self-funded and interested to talk to angels / VCs in the advertising, animation, media, entertainment areas. We have a full working demo available. We are getting beta invite sign-ups via our website. TracBac’s first version [Free pre beta edition] launched in April 2006 created a good buzz, and we are featured in every Collaborate 2.0 lists in the world and people who saw the demo, seen the product has given positive feedbacks. Venturewoods has a posting too 😉 We have had genuine feedbacks to alter our features & functionality from our first version, which we duly changed in our new version. TracBac as of now is scheduled for a closed invite release by 20th November 2006.
In this presentation we focussed on the problem, solution, market, our advantage, competitive scenario, how our technology makes a cut, projections, founders and investment expectations.
Disclosure: TracBac is a product developed by 360 Degree Interactive. 360 Degree Interactive is a chennai based web service firm headed by 2 people including me.
- TracBac Invest pitch – Case study on What to & What not to do - November 10, 2006
- Venture Board - October 11, 2006
- Bar Camp Chennai – Come, Geek & Rock! - March 13, 2006
Narain,
Aside of contemporaries like Conceptshare and Thinkature, watchout for new versions released by veterans in your space like Problemtracker etc. Their site spells out a list of bugs they’ve fixed and the latest features they have added in. This would give you a better idea on what to build next so as to differentiate. The only problem in collaborative space is that it’s way too much crowded and to differentiate one from the other is not so easy.
Good Luck…!
Narain,
Thank you for sharing this. It is very interesting. I think that you have a great idea and it helps that the product is up & ready and I believe that the marketing steps has elements of being in the right direction.
The key issue is the Business Model. Who is your customer? Is it enterprises which seems to be the On premise hosted delivery model? Or is it individual designers? I believe that a start up can have one business model at a time. That may sound risky but in reality having several models is more risky than one. I think that you should make a choice between one or the other.
I find the partnership model intriguing and I would like that to be fleshed out. Who are your partners? What do they bring to the table? If you are using partner to reach out to specific audiences only what is the point in investing in creating domains and/or branded interfces? I would argue (without any other data of course) that you could get access to that audience by inserting a link in the portal. If your business model is reaching out to end users primarily via partners then it needs to be fleshed out. I am not saying it is wrong – in fact it is definitely an interesting option – but needs more details.
Finally the marketing which really flows from the business model you select. At this point there are several companies in this space and I really like the fact that you have made a very pointed comparison to your competitors. What is that Conceptshare and Thinkature are doing that you are not? You have a better product. Great! Now, you know that successful businesses are not necessarily the ones that have the best products. Heck who am I saying this too – you guys are from advertising 🙂 Now, what is obvious is that these guys are focussing their marketing efforts – on viral networks & better Internet presence. I think that you have got some of the steps right in terms of Internet advertising and Web based PR but it is important that a focussed marketing plan is in place.
One of the concerns for example that I have is why are you spending time in making presentations in the Ad Clubs of India? How much money do you expect to make from sales to Indian advertsing agencies?
Since Conceptshare has just raised Rs. 2.5 crore (half a million USD) what is stopping you to say that I will be the You-Tube of this space? To do that you need to focus. The benefits of focus would be a high pay off which is an interesting funding proposition.
Best of luck