Consumer Products Blog

Workshop for tech-based startups

By Ruth Thomson - Last updated: Friday, April 16, 2010

Have you noticed how the product development process maps really well onto the stages of the investment ladder?

On Tuesday we held an event for early stage technology companies to explore how they could use this to their advantage. In practice this means using demonstrators and good engineering practice to address credibly the tough questions their investors will ask. In other words reducing the risks that are the barriers to further investment.

We hadn’t held an event quite like this before, so it was something of a pilot, but we’ve had good feedback so we thought it was worth blogging about!

At Cambridge Consultants we meet and work with lots of startups (almost half of our business in the consumer sector, for example). We’d noticed that, in early discussions when we are working out whether we can work together, we end up having very similar conversations. The startups are facing similar issues and are asked similar questions by their investors, no matter what market sector they are in.

The event was organised for us by Angel News who were terrifically supportive and invited along a really interesting group of companies, from many different industries and a different stages of development. We held the event at Wallacespace in London.

Krishna Visvanathan of Encore Ventures gave an excellent insight into what VCs are looking for at each stage of investment. Duncan Smith from Cambridge Consultants talked about different sorts of demonstrator and how they can be used effectively at each stage. Larry Klimczyk of Blackbay explained how demonstrators had worked to help him build a successful business, and gave some very welcome general advice from his experience.

The feedback on all the speakers was very positive and there was lively debate and the networking must have been good as Duncan was complaining that he didn’t get any nibbles! The event was certainly successful enough for us to repeat it sometime soon.

We’ll be posting some of the slides from the session soon, and the accompanying booklet “Bathtub to warehouse – turning product ideas into reality” will be available.