Who knows, maybe certain startup-clueless newspapers (yes I’m talking about you Irish Examiner) might even pick up on it.

If you know anyone in the Valley who you think would like to meet a bunch of Irish start-ups and techies, please contact them and let them know the details. If they bite, let us know too.

For those of you who don’t know what Moffett Field is, suffice to say when I did the tour of NASA Ames many years ago, I touched an Apollo capsule, a Harrier Jump Jet and a Black Hawk Helicopter in Moffett Field. An engineer’s nirvana.

The aim of the club is to bring together a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors, developers and marketers, plus anyone else who is interested in growing the start-up community in Cork. Organisations like it@cork and the CorkBIC are incredibly important in fostering professional networking in Cork and I hope we can make OpenCoffee complementary in many ways to them.

The aim is to make it a welcoming, well-known venue which achieves practical results rather than just being a social outlet. On the one hand we want anyone in a start-up or thinking about doing one or thinking about working for one to turn up and build links to their peers. But more importantly, we need to get the investment community and the support organisations involved too so that they can identify the upcoming opportunities and provide advice where appropriate. The idea is that it is mutually beneficial for all who attend.

If we can also get involvement from third level institutions then we could have something very special indeed.

I’m sure we’ll just be finding our feet at the first few meetings. I think once every two weeks is sufficient for the moment and I welcome any suggestions for how to make it stronger and more useful. Please do spread the word about this. Better to have too many people next Friday than a damp squib. There are no requirements other than to turn up, engage and drink beverages.

To find out more, read Saul Klein’s posts on it here.

The panel consisted of three people, one from a marketing background and two from a business background. None of them were familiar with the subject matter apart from the usual “is related to Bebo?”. The format is that they had already received a business outline document, you then give a presentation for 10 minutes and they feedback for about 50 minutes.

As it is Enterprise Ireland, the feedback in done in a very constructive and positive way but that doesn’t mean that they do not criticise. Some important things became very apparent very quickly.

For a start, I was emphasising the wrong things. The USP and key differentiators which I felt were completely obvious had actually passed them by and they ended up focusing on some of the standard features which are common across competitor sites. The revenue model also caused some explanation problems but was cleared up quickly during the Q&A.

The biggest issue they saw was in the marketing plan. And in this, I realised they really did have a point. Most of the other issues they brought up were failures in communication and explanation by me but in the area of marketing and growth, there was a large hole after the initial launch.

They also identified a problem that I have been reading more and more about recently. We were making the classic mistake of trying to be all things to all people. Whilst our site will be built in a totally generic way, it is imperative that we identify initial market niches and go after them with all of our efforts. Tara has done some great posts on this recently and I’ve already mentioned Seth Godin‘s book which brings up similar ideas.

What I found so interesting about this feedback is that once they said it, it was totally obvious and we were able to pick the initial niches without much difficulty at all. Of course, identifying niches and successfully attracting customers from those niches are two totally different things. The panel’s comments were echoed again much more forcefully two days later at another investor panel which I will describe in a later post.

We all tend to focus on the grants and funding aspects of what EI does, but sessions like the Mentor Panel, the upcoming BES & Seed Capital session and the “Sales Process Coaching Programme” are possibly even more important. Getting a grant to help you build your dream is crucial but if your dream only has a target market of 1, then all of those training and advice sessions may save you a lot of pain and wasted time.

p.s. EI need to fix their web-site fast. Not only is it totally broken in Firefox, it is also bunched in Internet Explorer 7. I gave up trying to find info on the Mentor Panel on their site so I could link to it.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise+Ireland

The timing of my reading was apt considering the sub-title is “The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World”. The recent attempt by some in the blogosphere to create a buzz around “Snakes on a Plane” (aka SOAP) was a perfect example of how to get it wrong. Many have commented that the viral marketing approach used to create a grassroots groundswell of good will about this movie was a failure considering the mediocre takings at the box-office on its opening weekend.

Those who were part of the alleged viral attempt still claim success, if by success you mean not generating much revenue. Seth himself made some good comments on the movie saying the best way to succeed is still to have a really great product.

But Seth’s book has got me in a different mind-set and the one thing I noted about the whole SOAP “campaign” was that I felt I was being played. At no point did this feel like genuine enthusiasm for a crappy B-movie. This was no bunch of teenagers hanging out in Bebo, it came across as a bunch of mature bloggers trying to prove a point. The louder they screeched, the more I avoided anything that even mentioned the movie. The failure was not just one of product quality, it was one of authenticity.

I’ve learned some simple powerful lessons from the book, particularly about framing stories to match world views and believing the story you are telling. This is a great book, worth reading even if you never intend to sell anything to anyone but want some good insights into the lies we all tell ourselves to make sense of our world.

tags: Seth+Godin, All+Marketers+are+Liars, Snakes+on+a+Plane, SOAP