TestMyIdea.com — A startup for entrepreneurs — looking for early adopters
About the author
Testmyidea.com is a nice startup with potential. It is similar to an idea we had proposed at G&W a long time ago. Other similar websites are the GoBig Network.
The site aims to bring together Entrepreneurs and Investors — people can submit business ideas, from where they are voted upon by the community of general readers. The underlying thesis is that more votes on an idea could generally be a measure of the potential of that idea, and thus attract investments from investors.
a startups.
Ian, the CEO, is looking for creative thinkers who can provide content and participation. His request is below:
Hello,
I am building a business ideas research team in Pakistan…for a startup funded by myself.
Can you suggest how i may recruit the creative types ? The work is mainly thinking and research..
Most business schools seem to remove the type of thinkers we seek..odd ball ..the different
ones…..
Thank you ian amor ceo testmyidea.com
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Thanks,
August 13th, 2007 at 1:44 am
Interesting idea but their website needs a lot of work. I have used GoBig Networks and its pretty good in connecting startups with investors.
August 13th, 2007 at 1:50 am
Obaid,
Have you guys been successful in fundraising through GoBig? Any issues with the PK angle? Any tips you want to share with the community here?
August 13th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Osama,
We did get 2 VC via goBig Network. Unfortunately, the terms didn’t work out between us.
As far as PK angle is concerned, so far we have had mix reactions. Pakistanis based in US are much more open to invest in our product as compared to those based in Pakistan.
Hopefully once we completely launch our product and start approaching these investors we will get a better picture of the situation in Pakistan.
August 14th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Btw, regarding wixd how is wixd handling the IP issues? As far as I can tell any VC would be hesitant to invest in a site like wixd because of legal issues.
What do you say? Osama? Obaid?
August 14th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Another thought, do we have any successful ventured backed web 2.0 firm in Pakistan? iScrybe recently secured funding but it’s not really successful.
Success can be defined on the lines of rozee.pk (according to the site they are silicon valley VC backed) or 2btechnologies (funded by TMT ventures). Both these firms are quite profitable.
August 14th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Regarding iScrybe’s success, I meant they aren’t really profitable yet. Apparently secured 1.5 Million from Adboe and LMKR but it’s yet to see whether they’ll be able to turn the product into a profitable revenue stream or not.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Asim: With WiXD we are working towards implementing IP protection schemes. The site will transform to be a mesh of user generated and underground band media.
So far we haven’t had any reasons to go get an outside investment for WiXD and we hope to convert it into a success story without taking any large amount of funding..
I played around iscrybe beta and honestly, I wasn’t that impressed. Its a nice fancy flash app but they really need to convey their msg a bit more clearly. I can use google calendar so why should i turn to scrybe? How often do i need an offline access to my calendar when i can have my BlackBerry or SmartPhone with me 24/7?
August 15th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Obaid,
Interesting comments. I have worked on a few underground band portals and I can tell you that IP won’t be too much of a problem for these. Though, I guess you’d know better about the revenue stream.
Regarding iScrybe, finally I have someone who’s echoing my feelings about scrybe. I’ve not really played around with the beta, but from their video I had exactly the same feelings. Also I feel the major innovation in scrybe is it’s user interface (not papersync, that’s a neat idea only) and it’s not hard to replicate it. Which means that there will (and probably are already) competitors out there who will developing such apps and distributing them for free. But i do really hope that they become successful – I can imagine a lot of hard work has gone into it.
Best of luck with wixd, btw
August 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am
A minor comment – perhaps you’re not defining innovation fully accurately here.
Papersync may not feel like an innovation but for a person who doesn’t have a smartphone (the average consumer) it might be incredibly useful to have that with you.
If scrybe’s target demographic is general consumers then papersync may make more sense that blackberry sync.
The user interface is innovative — but why?
Not because its cool — if we measure the time it takes and the number of keystrokes and clicks to enter a calendar item in outlook, and compare it you’ll notice a dramatic reduction in total time of transactions. Also, the process is smoother because at no point am I stopped with an ugly modal prompt that stops me in my tracks.
These things add up to economic profit for the person using it when compared to alternatives.
Scrybe isn’t the only calendar to provide that profit througth a better UI — Zimbra has one of the best team calendars I’ve used.
The third innovation (although I agree that its not hard to replicate) is the idea of merging a task or calendar entry with the context behind that calendar entry — a birthday with ideas for birthday gifts taken from the web.
That doesn’t always make sense if you think about it that’s a huge step. Without context, a calendar is just a bunch of boxes with text scribbled on it — the human mind usually gives it the context needed.
With people getting busier every day, the requirement to keep the context in our minds is adding a subtle mental pressure on us — a calendar that lets me dump (and continue to dump) context easily, I dont have to keep it my mind and hence my economic profit increases further.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:14 am
[...] covered testmyidea.com earlier when I mentioned that it was eerily similar to an open idea I had proposed a long time ago at [...]