one pager | MIRKMANEA

On Being a Shark

Some sharks have to keep moving to stay alive.

Building a company, product or business means doing a thousand things (and probably close to that literally) and doing them all as quickly as possible. You need to go from idea to reality and somehow pay for it in the process. If I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a founder, a businessman, and successful at all of it… I need to keep moving also.

Ergo… I am a shark.

My Swim “Routine” This Week…

GDC Next and ADC

The last few days have been a lot of swimming. A friend tossed me a free code for ADC & GDC Next, so I spent a good deal of Tuesday and Wednesday on the expo floor and in my one free session trying to A) find a technical co-founder (TCF) and B) learn more about what I don’t know about technology and building an app. Two great highlights from this were

Dave Grijalva’s session on building and testing scalability of an app and…
Talking with another “fractionally technical” co-founder about how he had found his development talent.

The first has me terrified (but constructively so), reminded that I need to have a technical co-founder, and aware of one more selection criteria I should have for the TCF search. The second gives me hope: someone else found their engineer, maybe I can find mine as well. Pro TIp: 1) List out the things you need from your technical partner. 2) Find job postings that match those things on job aggregators. 3) Post your own job there. Good luck! *(actually, could you wait until I’ve found mine first 😉

General Assembly

I also went to General Assembly LA with my wife for their “Day in the Life of a Product Manager” free session. Tonight I’m going to their “Build a Web Application in 90 Minutes”. I am worried and excited to think that after tonight I will know if Fun Bucket could have been made in 90 minutes (worried), and how it could be made in 90 minutes (excited). Realization: I’m Fun Bucket’s Product Manager until we’re > break even. The good news for founders out there is that you already were one, you just didn’t know it.

One Pager / One Sheet

Yes. This thing will not let me leave it alone. And I am pretty sure that should be a point of concern. Today I finalized my fourth draft, sent it to a friend for one final review, and was relieved that he caught me asking for the entire value of my company in my seed series. To those of you wondering why I might still be “preparing to pitch”… This is why. One day I hope to share this one pager. Until then, I’ll just point you to my last post on it:
How To Write a One Pager or One Sheet.

.plan (huh?)

I made the change to the One Pager, now it is time to send it off to a few friends who have expressed interest in it and a translation/expansion to the pitch deck.
Today I spent about two hours chatting with my new Elance contractor about Facebook integration. I will talk about it in a later post, but login with Facebook has been broken for 6 weeks now, and after I resolved I could not fix it myself…well, we’re on the path to recovery and upgrade at the same time. It is exciting!
Fundraising is the number one priority at present.
I will work on traction and user adoption once we have the FB functionality up.
We will work on improving the feature sets once there is a “we” (read as, find a TCF or secured funding and hired a Sr. Engineer).

Do I need a One Pager or One Sheet?

If you are trying to get funding, meet people and sound somewhat organized in what you are doing, you will need a “one pager” (or “one sheet”)– a single page executive summary talking about you, your company and your success.

Why Have a One Pager or One Sheet ?

I’m looking for funding for the Fun Bucket project. We want to make Fun Bucket an awesome product that will profoundly help people. We need money for a ton of things, and a single summary sheet is great for handing to friends, prospective investors and friends of prospective investors. The one pager/one sheet must quickly and clearly address an investor’s frequently asked questions:

Who are you and what is your business?
How is this going to make money for me?
Why is your method for making money for me going to work?
Do you have any idea what you are doing?
Have you put thought into what you are doing?

How I Made A One Pager/One Sheet?

I spun my wheels a lot the last few weeks on this. When I was asked for it by a mine (also a friend of an investor), I replied that I had one close at hand. Oops. I actually had three different pitch decks that I had written while building the demo/prototype of Fun Bucket. After I looked for some solutions on the internet, I found the links in this Quora Article: http://www.quora.com/What-should-I-include-on-a-one-pager-a-potential-investor-is-asking-for Quora is a pretty great resource. And the linked template was helpful as well. But after writing, revising, re-reading and re-writing my one-pager, I still was not ready to send my one pager out to anyone with a checkbook.

So… I refrased the one pager/one sheet as a Q & A, and I forced myself to answer those questions. Here are the questions you should answer on a one-pager:

What do we do?
What problems do our customers face?
How do we solve our customers’ problems?
Who are our customers?
How do we reach our customers?
How do you get money from your customers?
Who else in the world is trying to solve these problems for your customers?
Why will you be better at solving these problems for your customers?
How are you serving or working towards serving your customers now? (This is where you would put your chart/graph/table showing your revenue, user base (traction) or plan for next steps.)

I found that answering these questions was a little more comfortable than filling in the blanks of a template. One last thing on format: after you have answered the above questions, re-lable them with the appropriate template-driven headers and make sure they are easy to find on the page. Be unique! But remember that being too outrageous can hurt your chances
and darnit, investors’ eyes are tired!