Moon Kim Seminar (with IP Attorney Ron D'Alessandro)

I hosted my first independent seminar last month on May 21st:

The seminar featured Dr. Moon Kim of Harbor Pacific Capital and Ron D'Alessandro, a New York based patent attorney.

It was designed to help Korean startups learn more about the nitty gritty details of an overseas investment and give the later stage tech-centric companies some advice about the importance of holding a high quality patent portfolio.





All in all, the seminar was a huge success: we had about 30 people in attendance, representing over a dozen companies.

I would like to give a special thanks to Hyung-ah Kim and Jong-woo Kim of the Seoul Business Agency for letting my hold this seminar at the DMC Center.

Patent Attorney Ron D'Alessandro
infront of the seminar banner

Fromt left to right: Ryan Huddleston, Ron D'Alessandro,
Hyung Ah Kim, Dr. Moon Kim 

Dr. Moon Kim's presentation

Some of the seminar attendees

The beginning of Ron's patent portfolio presentation

Closeup of Ron D'Alessandro

Meeting with Andy Soh, CEO of Luxen Technologies,
at Mr. Soh's office after the seminar

Designing a Startup Teaser Page

Recently, I have been working with Add2Paper on creating a teaser page prior to the Add2Paper U.S. launch.

Add2Paper's Website

Our purpose is to discover the level of interest in the American student market and, in particular, the level of interest by individual university.

To accomplish this goal, we need to explain to students exactly what we do in a clear and interesting fashion.

To that end, I have been scouring the web, learning everything I can about startup teaser/landing pages.
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One of the first stops I made was a Smashing Magazine article titled "Building an Effective 'Coming Soon' Page For Your Product" (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/05/24/building-an-effective-coming-soon-page-for-your-product/)

This article walks through the steps of establishing an effective teaser page, focusing on four aspects of the page in particular:

• Memorability
• Virality
• Desirability
• Data Collection-Ability

I won't go through the specifics, but this excellent article goes over each topic in depth, offering a large number of examples in the process.

Another Smashing Magazine article, titled "Elements of a Viral Launch Page" (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/01/elements-of-a-viral-launch-page/) was also extremely helpful. 

This article intimates that all launch pages should have three basic elements:

1. A clear value proposition that interests people.
2. If your strategy is stealth, then why should people care?
3. A notification form, with a bright call-to-action button

Using these two articles and several other resources as a springboard (Quora is also extremely good, so start from here if you're interested: http://www.quora.com/Which-are-the-best-startup-prelaunch-pages), I then went to work on organizing a list of the best startup teaser pages on the web.

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I first went through as many teaser pages as I could find, filling out everything I could, and clicking on all the social media links.

Here's Wooplr, a social discovery and shopping site

Bottom portion of the landing/teaser page

After inputting my email: many teaser pages are
utilizing these 'sign up your friends
and receive something' reward systems

Default tweet that Wooplr offers to
send out after clicking on the twitter link

I organized the pages, taking pictures during each step of the process, and saved them to my hard drive:

I included some folders for services that allow
you to create your own teaser pages, like
KickOffLabs, Launch Effect, and Launch Rock

Services that can be useful for teaser page designers:
MailChimp (email marketing and list manager),
 Olark (live chat and monitoring of your website
visitors), etc...

After going through dozens of these sites, I came to a certain realization: I prefer the simple, uncluttered ones the best.

Enter Cloudring, a service for managing your personal
online information: note the simple, elegant teaser page
UI design

After inputting my email, a small, unobtrusive message
pops up informing me that the beta is currently full

Cloudring log-in page

Another thing to consider are the stealth mode teaser pages, so named because they don't actually tell you about the startup's service/product.

TechCrunch has a great article about a stealth mode teaser page for the startup Hipster, titled "How a Startup Named Hipster Got 10k Signups in Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does" (http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/hipster-2/)

Hipster's hit stealth page, with the mysterious "Something
Cool is Coming to San Francisco" in the title

Another stealth teaser page made by the startup Lifepath was actually charging users $10 to create an account, without revealing what it was about:

Eventually, I decided to choose the best teaser pages, and place them in their own folder.

But how do you define best where teaser pages are concerned?

I came to the conclusion that there were three different ways: 

• Design (well designed teasers, all the way from the front page to social media interaction, emails, log-in pages, etc...)
• Function/Innovation (teasers that offer unique experiences or offerings, such as early access, sign-up discounts, interesting user forms, discounts, etc...)
• Mixture of Both

My best teaser folders, organized
by Design, Function, and Both

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Best by Design

Stripe is in my list of Best by Design because of its
easy, simple lay out. The one stripe across the page
really emphasizes the name and draws viewers to
the short one sentence description and email form.

___________________________________________________

Best by Function/Innovation

Forkly entered my Best by Function/Innovation list
because of its popular viral invitation system

After leaving your email...

...the service mentions that you can attain early access by
inviting 3 of your friends through copying/pasting the
unique URL. Forkly was really a pioneer of this process
that has since become rather standard for many teaser pages.

___________________________________________________

Best by Both

Dabble has so much to offer: an incredibly
cool, interactive landing page....

...an interesting user name competition, whereby the
person who gets the most signups wins the right to use
their chosen name (though they weren't the first to
implement this kind of feature)...

...and an interesting stealth mode teaser video.

Some other great teaser sites that have a great mixture of both function/innovation and design include Evertale (https://evertale.com/) and Sumazi (http://beta.sumazi.com/).

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Using these teaser pages as an example, we have been hard at work creating our own.

Because we want Add2Paper's U.S. teaser page to be simple and direct, a stealth mode page is out of the question, especially because the service has already been running in Korea.

However, we now firmly believe that a proper mix of design and innovation is absolutely fundamental to the success of a teaser page.

It's all a question of finding that balance.

Ajou University Presentation: May 17th

On May 17th, 2012, I was invited to give a presentation about Korean startups at Ajou University (아주대학교) in Suwon, south of Seoul.

 My presentation was part of a special seminar series featuring Dr. Moon Kim and a New York based patent attorney, Mr. Ron D'Alessandro.

The Seminar Space

I focused my presentation on my experience with Korean startups, divided into three main areas: characteristics of Korean startups, obstacles facing Korean startups, and advantages that Korea has as a country/advantages that Korean entrepreneurs possess.

The seminar started at 5 p.m. and lasted until about 7:30 in the evening.

Beneath are some excerpts of my notes from the presentation, plus my entire presentation in SlideShare format:

_________________________________________________________________________________

My Presentation Begins

Hierarchy Confusion

-Hierarchy just means ranking system; I am talking about the way Korean business people rank their status at a company, like you have the 대표님 then 부장, etc

-But this is can be a problem at a startup company, should you address the other members of your business by their rank? What if the CEO is the youngest person?

-What language should you use at a startup (if people are younger and older, or if you’re their boss?) 높음말 or 반말?




Tied to Organizations

-The next thing I noticed is that people in Korean businesses seem to be very closely tied to the organizations they are affiliated with

-First, here’s a picture of SKY

-Being a member of one of these universities, or a another very highly rated university like Ajou, is very important in Korea, and people will rate you sometimes based on this

Early Stage Capital

-The next obstacle I want to talk about is venture finance in Korea, especially getting early stage capital

-Entrepreneurs in South Korea often struggle to raise capital

-Here are some of the top VC companies in Korea; Stonebridge, Softbank, and IDG

-Here’s a startup investment stage graph, and most of the money going to startups in Korea is going in at Round 2, Round 3, Mezzanine, even later

-These are much more conservative investments, and it’s really tough for a new startup to get capital

Path to Follow?

-The next obstacle I want to discuss is the path for startups to follow

-In the U.S., there are a number of ways to find the right path to follow if you’re a startup
.....

-All of these services help companies benchmark against other companies and track where they should be with key metrics like:

Speaking about the Path for Korean Startups to Follow

1) Customers

2) Product

3) Team (How much equity should CEO and Founders have? How about the CTO?)

4) Business Model

5) Financials (How big of an investment did this similar company get when it was at your stage? How many users did they have at the time?)

The Beginning of Dr. Moon Kim's Presentation

Advantages: Korea

-Well, I’ve been talking a lot about negative things and obstacles facing Korean companies, so for the last part, I want to talk about some of the advantages that Korea or Korean entrepreneurs have

-I think Korea is a deceptively large market,

-Many people say the market is small, but it’s not, it’s huge

-I think a lot of companies think they can solve their market problems by trying to move to a bigger market, but I think Korea is a great test bed for services, a large, very dense market with lots of purchasing power

-Now is a great time to test and scale your product/service in Korea

-The Korean government is putting a ton of money into startups, 

-Look at these government agencies like:

-Kocca, SMBA, SBA, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Kotra, NIPA, MKE

-Many of them are involved with giving money, seed money, incubating space to startups

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Ajou University-Startups in Korea

View more presentations from Ryanh856.

Startup Weekend Daejeon

From February 17th-19th, I attended and participated in an event called Startup Weekend Daejeon. From the website, Startup Weekend Daejeon is "... an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphic designers, and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them."

The event took place at KAIST University in Daejeon.

I came with the original intention of writing something about the event, not participating.

The first night started out rather low key; a number of entrepreneurs presented their ideas, and the attendees were expected to join up with the team/idea they liked the best.

One of the presenters during the first day, with AppCenter's
Sally Park and Co Up's Seokwon Yang on the right

Ryan Huddleston (me) speaking to Donny Lee of Wardrobe

I quickly decided that participating would be more interesting, and joined up with one of the teams. Over the course of that night, I would go on to switch teams, and joined up with 3 other guys (one of whom I had met earlier that day). Their idea (which was called In-Home) was to create a photo sharing social networking service (much like Pinterest, pin board and all) centered around interior design. We planned some things out and decided to meet early the next morning.

Our team's first meeting!

On the next day (Saturday, February 18th), my team met in one of the classrooms and got to work. We quickly defined our roles: 1 developer, 2 pseudo-designers, and myself (planner, for lack of a better word).

In-Home: we shared our room with Reflectly, who would go
on to win 1st Prize and Best Presentation at the event 

Next, we established our team name (Glassroom). And then to the hard part; actually creating our service.

First, we wanted to look at what kind of problem we were solving. There are many photo sharing services that include pin boards. Pinterest even has a sub-category devoted to interior design. How could we go about distinguishing ourselves?

In-Home becomes Glassroom

We decided that, although there are many photo sharing sites, most of them don't have a personal feel, and very few are devoted solely to interior design. Our company's strengths would be:

• Users can modify the arrangement and size of images on the collage board, unlike Pinterest
• Limit stock design photos; we recommend that users upload pictures with themselves or friends in their pictures
• Because the service is location based, users are able to notice interior design trends in different areas of the world 
• More personalized stories about individuals (see how people live their real lives)
• Interior designers can upload their personal pictures (or their whole portfolio) to our site

From left to right: Yun-duk Nam (남윤덕), Ryan Huddleston,
Ji-Hwan Kang (강지환), Ruda Lee (이루다)

With this decided, we set out to develop our presentation: Yun-duk Nam, our developer, would create our iPhone prototype. Ruda Lee, our designer, would create our logo and other iPhone app pictures. Ji-Hwan Kang and myself would plan out the presentation and powerpoint slides.

We worked well into the night putting all the pieces together, and, after a brief rest, reconvened early the next morning.

Sunday morning was spent putting the finishing touches on our prototype, logo, and presentation. We put in a future outlook/road map and cost projections, and decided how much equity we were willing to give up for seed capital.

Glassroom logo rough design

Final logo design

After cutting our presentation down as much as possible to fit into the 7 minute time limit, we hurried to the auditorium just in time for David Lee's keynote speech.

David Lee of XG Ventures

Although we were a little nervous about presenting, Yun-duk and I did our best to convey our team's ideas to the audience.

During the presentation 

In front of the judges

Here's our presentation: it starts from about 19:25 on this video.

Afterwards, we had a chance to meet many of the other teams, mentors, and investors at the farewell dinner.

The Glassroom/Reflectly (Reflectly Glass!) crew

Looking back on things, I am very happy that I decided to participate in this event. I learned so much about a startup's early stages of creating, developing, and presenting. I also had the chance to meet so many great people, some of whom represent the future of the startup community in Korea.

Talking to some of the judges during the farewell dinner

I want to say thank you to everyone involved in the event for making it such an unforgettable experience for me.

Spectator Point of View


-Ross Geesman of Invest KOREA attended the event as a spectator

Prior to heading to Daejeon, I didn’t know what to expect. Koreans are often described as being risk averse and non-entrepreneurial, and many prefer to apply their talents at a large company like Samsung or Hyundai to risking failure by starting a business. When I arrived as an observer on the evening of the second day of the event, I was surprised to hear that not only were there 100 people participating in the event, but it had a waiting list of 150 individuals who couldn't join due to lack of space.

Entrepreneurs arriving at the event

The teams had already formed and were busy working on their businesses. However, most of them had the time to explain what they were working on. I listened while the excited young entrepreneurs, a few of them still in high school, explained ideas ranging from a customizable fashion magazine website to a mobile service for students to sell their used text books on. 


I returned on Sunday to watch the teams pitch in front of a panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who chose 1^st 2^nd and 3^rd place winners. This event showed that there is no lack of entrepreneurial spirit among Korean youth. The excitement the participants showed while explaining their ideas overflowed the next day when teams burst into spontaneous cheering for their presenters as well as those of the other teams.