Chris Crompton

Upon reading a TechCrunch article the other day, I happened upon a comment by Joshua Ledgard, one of the co-founders of KickoffLabs:

I visited the site and bookmarked it for later.

My other business venture hasn’t been gaining much traction in this off-season, so in my frustration and then burst of happiness yesterday (after finally making another sale) I came up with a new business idea to test in a related industry… (more…)

I wrote about dry testing a while back… but I’ve been thinking that even that method might take too long. At the foundation, all you really need to test the market viability of your new product/service is an ad itself. If you’ve created much more than that, you’ve probably wasted too much time. (more…)

The Start-Up Chile application period ends on Thursday August 11th for this round.  Last week I put together a blog post for those applying to startup chile.   At that point there were 629 startups associated with the YouNoodle page.  One week later there are 731.  Over 100 new businesses have begun the application process in the past week.

I expect 100 more will apply before Thursday.

Assuming there were 400 applications started for previous rounds, that means there will be about 400 for this round as well.  Also assuming that at least 20% of the applications are started and never finished, there will be about 320 applications.

They are accepting 100 startups during this round — so everything being equal, Startup Chile applicants have roughly a 30% chance of being accepted for the $40K grant.  Pretty good odds!

Of course, all things aren’t equal.  If you have significant human capital and a great project, your chances are likely closer to 70%.  Good luck!

UPDATE: 400 more applied between Sunday and Thursday… 1100+ total!  According to Start-Up Chile, there were 600+ applicants for the round ending August 11th 2011.  So that’s a 15%-20% chance for all applicants.

I found out about Startup Chile in September 2010 when a local Meetup held a Chat with Vivek Wadhwa.  Vivek is an advisor to the program and mentioned it as a model to be emulated.   The basic concept is that Chile wants to be a globally recognized hub of entrepreneurial activity.  They realized the quickest way to jumpstart this goal is to pay entrepreneurs $40,000 to come live there for 6 months to work on their startup business.

Over the next couple years they plan to fund over a thousand businesses.  They are taking applications in stages, accepting about 100 new businesses each time.  The last round acceptance rate was 33%.  This round I’m guessing it will be 15% or less due to the ever-increasing popularity and national press they’ve been getting.  The program is still relatively new, but here’s some resources I’ve found that should help you prepare for the Startup Chile application.

Primary Startup Chile Resources:

• Main Site (check out their blog, faq’s, and generally everything on this site)
• Twitter Account
• YouTube Channel
• Facebook Fan Page (check out the photos)

Good Posts from Participants:

• http://wtnnews.com/articles/8043/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2010/12/20/start-up-chile-faq/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2011/02/02/chile-at-ten-weeks/
• http://www.shaharnechmad.com/2011/02/19/building-your-dreams-in-chile/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2011/05/02/advice-to-new-startup-chile-teams/
• http://www.andrewcross.ca/2011/05/31/start-up-chile-deal-or-no-deal/
• http://hervalicio.us/so-how-about-chile
• http://blog.homeviva.com/2011/07/about-startup-chile-admission-process.html
• http://www.shaharnechmad.com/2011/02/19/building-your-dreams-in-chile/

Other:

• Brenna Loury’s Quora Profile (she’s the Communications Coordinator for Startup Chile)
• Forbes Article
• Some Sample Video Pitches Here, Here
• YouNoodle List of All Current Participants & Applicants.  (627 companies as of 7/31/11, 300 submissions in the last round, so that means they currently have 300+ for this round.)

I plan to share further information about the Startup Chile Application process through an email list.  Sign up below if you’re interested.

For the past few weeks I’ve been gathering email signups from those expressing early interest in EmberBox.  The first dozen signups came from friends.  The next few dozen came from someone promoting it to their email list.  The most recent few dozen signups came from PPC.  Pay-per-click traffic presents the biggest opportunity to grow my list — but obviously it costs.

(more…)

In the very little promotion I did for LaunchCap (basically just this blog and my Facebook friends), it wasn’t taking off.  Not to worry, the whole premise behind LaunchCap was to gauge market interest before building your product.  I hadn’t invested too much time.

Last week someone emailed me this feedback, which significantly altered my direction: (more…)

There’s a platform I’ve been thinking would be great for testing business ideas — but it doesn’t yet exist.

You can help change that.

Check out the prototype I just set up — LaunchCap!

I have 5-6 things on my list to promote this new venture… the first was publishing this blog post.  I need to get some momentum going, so I’ve made 5 of the “Early Mover” $10 offer slots available.  Take a look at the offer and let me know if there’s anything that needs changing (besides the cheesy video .

Thanks!

I love software as a service businesses.  I started one myself a few years ago.  It is a great feeling when your variable costs are near zero to service each new customer.   You can charge based on the value derived by your customers, not based on your costs…  and your customers pay you every month!

Herein lies the challenge — how do you get paid every month by your customers?  The simple answer is to ask for their credit card number.  But how will you deal with the following:

• (more…)

Do you have an idea for a new product or service you just know people are going to love?  Before you spend months (or years) of your time and thousands of dollars of capital, why not first do some dry testing.

(more…)

I’m on the email list for a business broker, so every few days I hear about a new Internet business for sale along with some overall stats such as the gross & net profit.  The biggest turn-off is when I read, “great organic rankings” when describing the main source of website traffic.

Why would you want a business that can only be profitable if you don’t have to pay for advertising.  When I hear someone boast that “all our business is word-of-mouth” or “all our sales come from great rankings on Google”, what I hear is:

(more…)