Narciso Cerezo

I already knew about focus, and I always try to keep focused. Sometimes it's hard, and you need to stop, breath and tell yourself: "keep focus".
But Peter Rip's post How to Double your Valuation has made me think seriously about what we are doing to reach VCs.
The fact is that we started with a very concrete product for a very concrete market: A sales management software for distribution companies that will run on a simple Java-enabled phone, instead of the expensive and difficult PDAs or industrial terminals. The name for this product was BaseMovil.
After all, we ended up with a technology that can be used for almost anything: a database and synchronization engine for Java-enabled phones. So we took the name for the technology, and renamed the product to bmSales.
We're receiving new ideas from customers and prospects every day, and we have developed some interesting solutions (fine emission with integrated photos, generic forms, defect management, etc.).
When we address a concrete forum, we use either a product-based approach or a technology-based one. We choose the one that we think fits best.
But I must admit that the executive summary that we've written for VCs talks a lot more about technology than about the product and it's market, and that's probably an error.
We've not fallen into the trap that Peter says of developing a technology instead of a finished product, but we're surely falling into "selling" the technology to the VC instead of the product.
We know the market that our product addresses, and the VC has a lot more of "wide market wisdom" to imagine where our technology can be applied.
So thank you Peter, we'll rewrite our executive summary focusing on the product but showing the technology behind it. This comes in a very good moment for us, as we're starting the search for VC now.

I'm not going into deep details, as this matters require a lot of privacy, but the truth is that I have had a meeting with a VC that makes global investments.
It's too soon to know if the outcome of the meeting is a positive one, I mean, if we will continue speaking about working together. And there's a cultural difference that makes it hard for me to know if the other part was interested or just polite.
I think that I did it reasonably well, but I must admit that my spoken English was not as fluent as it should. In my daily life I read, write and hear a lot of English, but I don't actually speak English, so it takes me two days or so of only-English to get my brain used to it :-)
The meeting was not a presentation, it was something more relaxed, with no power point and just my cellular phones to show what we do. My interlocutor was very polite and professional, and I felt very comfortable.
She made a lot of questions, very well aimed to know if we have a clear view of our own business and what opportunities lay ahead for us. I know that I failed to mention a couple of things and that some of my explanations were not as clear as I would like. I have to improve that!
But she said a couple of times that she found our work very interesting, and she spoke about a possible big customer using "our" instead of "your".
I usually pay a lot of attention to that kind of details, as well as to the non-verbal communication, but sometimes I feel I'm a bit paranoid about it, and that I find information where there are only words.
I'm also a very optimistic person, so I try to keep my feet close to the ground until things actually materialize. I prefer to think by now that she was just polite.
If that is the case, I feel grateful for the time and interest.
But we have invested a lot of money, time and effort; we're absolutely commited to the project, and we're pretty confident that we will success: we have a great product that is starting to sell with great projections.
I really hope that we find a way to work with this guys I met, because we think they're the best VCs for our company, and because I need to keep focused on the company.