Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund

February 28th, 2011

Calom was very fortunate recently in being selected by Enterprise Ireland to secure a €50k for 10% investment as part of their Internet & Games Competition Fund. The  investment itself closed last week and this blog entry is here to tell you about the process and to encourage start ups to enter the replacement competition, the Competitive Start Fund.

The Application

This was simplicity itself. If you have been maintaining some form of business plan, the information that is required is very straight forward to put in. The whole thing is done on line. The only thing I’ll say regarding the site is make sure to save your work frequently, I lost some of my application when internet connection went a bit funny. You’ll be given guidance on how many words to use in each section and you should try to stick to that. Remember that the panel who are judging your entry will have a whole bunch of other plans to read, so make sure you can get your points across quickly so you make it to the top of the pile. Our application was in on Dec 16th, and they announced the 10 winners on the 21st of Jan, not bad given Christmas got in the way. That was fast, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the speed of the next phase!

Make sure your house is in order

Should you be offered investment (it looks like you have another step with this competition having to do an investment pitch) you face the same requirements as any other company taking on investment. You’ll get a draft Ordinary Shareholder agreement from EI which is non-negotiable. Before you can do anything with this, make sure you’ll be able to:

  • Furnish a Tax Clearance Certificate
  • Have your most recent management accounts completed
  • Have copies of your Memorandum and Articles of Association ready
  • Have some idea of who will be your solicitor (we’ll talk about that in a bit)
  • And of course €5k ready for investment into your company.

Even if you don’t win anything, it’s always good to have the first 4 items in order. If you are successful, EI will invest €25k immediately upon you investing your €5k for 5% equity, and the subsequent 5% is invested after you hit the objectives and milestones you identified in your application. You need to furnish a report to EI to release the second round.

At this point in the process the speed at which you move is down to you, but EI were exceptionally well organised here. If our own startups were as efficient as this we’d be laughing!

Getting a solicitor

You need to get a legal firm to do basic due diligence on your business and to certify this to EI. This includes CRO lookups, judgement look ups etc. Quotes varied for this work from €3k downwards. The 10 companies who were selected clubbed together to see if it was possible to do a good price on this. We went with a firm based in Naas, Breda Cullivan & Co, who did a great job for us. As it’s a legal thing, you should make up your own mind on who to use to represent you. You should be able to drive a good deal and not pay any where near the top figure I gave earlier.

Your solicitor will guide you on what needs to be done, so obviously, the more organised you are, the better for this one.

Closing the deal

The main points to this are:

  • Lodge €5k to your company bank account for the purpose of buying shares
  • When you go to execute the documents, you’ll issue yourself these shares first, then EI will be issued a number of shares which will bring their ownership in the company to 5% of the issued shared capital. Make sure you have enough authorised share capital to be able to do this ortherwise there will be some additional paper work to do.
  • Send in your management accounts & tax clearance cert (this can take up to 5 days to issue, more if there’s anything out of date with Revenue) to EI.
  • EI will also review your Memo’s and Art’s so you will need to send them in as well.

Once you execute the paper work, the first cheque is issued. The whole process took about 2 weeks to do for Calom

Should you apply?

Yes! You will learn alot about the investment process from this. Some of the questions to ask yourself include:

  • Is a €500k valuation on your business reasonable?
  • Are you demonstrating some traction in your market and  would investment this size  help that further?
  • Could you benefit from the extra credibility from having EI take an actual investment in your company versus grant aid can be beneficial.

I’m sure there’s more reasons, but it’s getting late. You will have to part with up to 10% of your company in ordinary shares so does need some considering.

Well done to EI for this competition, and for the speed and efficiency that whole process was executed.  Further information on the process is available from the Enterprise Ireland Best Connected Blog.

Questions on anything welcome in the comments section.

Posted in Hothouse | 7 Comments »

Welcome to wordpress

September 27th, 2009

Just got this blog moved over to wordpress, should make it easier to get content up soon!

Posted in Hothouse | 2 Comments »

DIT’s Hothouse

June 15th, 2009

If you’ve ever been thinking of starting a business, DIT’s Hothouse have started recruiting for the next intake onto the program in September. These kind of programs are a great benefit to you in so many ways. But getting to network with other like minded entrepreneurs, plenty of training and access into Enterprise Ireland would be the main ones. And of course a new qualification at the end of it!

Check out the site at http://www.hothouse.ie and you can get the application details from there.

Posted in Hothouse | No Comments »

Over at Calom

June 7th, 2009

Day to day in Calom we come across things we think are cool and worth sharing, Well at least we think they are, you can judge for yourself!

While I’ll be keeping content here non-techie and talking about my experiences in running a startup business in Ireland, Calom’s blog will focus on the technical stuff we work at. Which is anything as divers as build system, video acceleration, the hardware we work on etc.

See you over there – http://blog.calomtech.com

Posted in Calom, Technical | No Comments »

Bing

June 5th, 2009

You’d think with their resources, the fact that they have their European HQ in Ireland, maybe even their data centres located here, that when you go to “bing” they’d at least offer you the choice to just search pages from Ireland! Nope, we’re part of the UK!

Oh well, no major incentive to migrate over from google just yet.

Posted in Microsoft | No Comments »

Financial Projections

May 26th, 2009

Wow, can’t believe its so long since I’ve blogged here! Oh well, time to set that straight.

We’ve been really busy over in Calom over the last few months so sorry for the lack of content here.

As somebody who’s just started to hit the investment trail, I thought this blog entry was very much spot on the mark:

http://www.askthevc.com/blog/archives/2009/05/startup-cost-pr.php

And even though it’s early, what’s most frustrating is that I have a clear idea in my head where I want Calom to be in 9 – 12 months time. It’s clear, I know what risks the company faces and I know what work needs to be done. My first milestone is to get our product to market, and that it’s one people will buy. As regards what volume we will have in 3 years, wow, that’s a little bit of pie in the sky. When we get to that stage, projecting for the 18 – 24 months is going to be a hell of a lot more accurate.

Posted in Projections, Startup | No Comments »

Infrastructure on a budget (part 2)

March 1st, 2009

Continuing on from my previous post there’s lots more useful tools to get you up and running as cheap as possible.

Accountancy Software
This took a while to find. The usual suspects of Sage, Tas books etc were briefly looked at. But I felt they were quite expensive and you had to install software onto your PC. How quaint! So I looked around at online alternatives. In this space there is Freshbooks who some on the Hothouse use and it’s great if you need to bill out your time to clients. I went with xero however. This gives you a clean web based interface and works at approx €23 a month for the service. In here you can keep you bank and credit cards reconciled. Issue invoices, keep track of your expenses and accounts payable. All the basic stuff. You can also give your accountant a login to see how things are looking.

And it would be really neat if some of the Irish banks made their statements available in an electronic format. xero can automatically do the reconciliation for you once it can get bank data in csv format.

With the world converging into cyberspace, taking your accounts online gives you a lot of possibilities that could be useful. One of the more interesting aspect of xero is that they have an API and are encouraging partners to partner with them. This includes Banks (in NZ and the UK), payroll providers, CRM companies. So you can track your customers from the accountancy system directly into your CRM system. Neat!

email and calendars
Here go for Google Apps. While Google have received some bad press about downtime recently, for the price you pay ($0 for basic access) it’s terrific. They include full details about how to get your domain fully set up so all mail looks like it has come from your domain. The google calendar is great and integrates into most mail clients. You can create your own site page for employees, and the control panel makes it a snip to add new users. I’ve seen some startups install outlook and set up some sort of exchange system. But using google has 2 major advantages, one it’s very inexpensive, and 2, you don’t need to be worrying about having to back up your email. If your laptop goes bank in the morning, you haven’t lost 3 years worth of email.

Customer Relationship Management
Being a techie, you can start off for free here using Sugar. Sugar is huge, there’s lot of options in there and you’ll be a while learning it. You can track your customers well, run campaigns etc. You can integrate your crm system with your Google Apps so mail to your clients that are present in the CRM is picked up automatically. I’ve put a CRM in place, even though I don’t have customers yet. But start as you mean to go on, and all my potential leads are being put in there.

Project Management
Calom uses Agile techniques to develop its software, and we use Trac to put coordinate developer activities. With trac you can set milestones, define tasks and activities and show how the overall progress of your application is looking. You can also tell trac where your svn repository is so it can track the commits coming in. In your commit message you can mark tasks with something like “Fixes #10″ and trac will close task 10 automatically for you in its database. So after setting up your milestone with the activities you plan to do, as you complete them, you will be able to see all the commits that affected each task being rolled in. You can also even see the code that was changed. Your Hudson build can also integrate here so that as a build completes, it puts an event into trac. Now you can see the commit with all the details and the status of the build that immediately followed it.

Web Site
I took time to learn how to install and use drupal. This blog is based on drupal as are the main Calom websites. It’s a pretty powerful system and will take some time to get over the learning curve. But there’s a few new books out for the latest version that will help you out. And once you’ve cracked the basics of how its structured, you can become very productive with it.

For around €60 a month, you can end up with a pretty strong architecture that doesn’t require a huge amount of ongoing maintenance. Plus you’re ready to scale should you find new staff coming on board.

Start as you mean to go on!

Posted in Budget, Startup | No Comments »

Grrrr, the perils of bad UI design

February 25th, 2009

I use Bank Of Ireland a lot. I have my personal and business bank with them but today after losing nearly 2 hours, in trying to log on to their business banking service frustration was showing!

For those of you who use their online banking service for your personal accounts, there is no comparison with Business Online. The process to get set up is a whole lot more complicated, and then you have a whole bunch of passwords and user id’s to keep track off.

After trying to log in today, and failing 3 times thus locking my account, I had to pick up the phone to their customer service department. They very kindly reset my Admin password and gave me the details. It’s up to you to change your password after logging in. So, after searching around I came up with my new passwords which involved a combination of Alpha Numerics and special characters as any good strong password should have. The password was 8 characters long, but the app kept telling me that passwords less than 8 were not allowed. Fair enough, this is a pain, but I appended a character to it to make it BOI’s definition of 8 characters.

Logged in, tried to log back in no joy and locked myself out again! After a phone call back to clarify things it turns out the password cannot contain any special characters (#,$ % etc.). But how does the application deal with this? It just ignores the character in your password field and just informs you the password is too short! Something like “Your password should not contains special characters” never appears. The special character is simply removed from your password, but you’re not told about it! Customer Service nicely pointed out that this information is in the support docs had I bothered to read it!

I teach UI design to my class in College, and one of the key mantras is “Put the User in Control”. This is a typical example of taking that control away from the user and costing people time and money with bad UI design.

Posted in UI, banks | 1 Comment »

Infrastructure on a budget (part 1)

February 16th, 2009

Thought I’d share the choices I made to help me manage my company and software development processes. On of the advantages of having a technical background is you really can slash the costs to pretty much nothing, particularly when it comes to developing your application and introducing automation.

Hosting
First thing you’re going to need is some form or server which will host and save all your work. I wanted to start as I meant to go on, which meant properly saving code and docs into centralised repositories.

For VPS I’m using a company in US called Slicehost who will provision a UNIX server with a distribution of you choice on it. You’ll need to be a Linux fan as they wont do you Windows, but you’ll save on Cost. I’ve been using them for a year now and its never been inaccessible. Prices start at $20 per month.

I use Blacknight for my domain names and update all entries there to point to my slicehost servers. Prices here are some of the most competitive I’ve found for domain names.

Both of these organisations have terrific customer service if you ever need to have to call them.

Backups
After you have created your repository, make sure to get automated backups sorted out straight away so you can sleep a lot easier! You can pay your VPS provider for the service, or get another company. I use a company called rsync.net who simply provide disk space, and a secure means to access it. An extra offering I avail of is multiple geopgraphic copies. So once you sync it up to their serves in one location, they copy it to another location to make extra sure your work is save. These guys charge you per GB of storage. There are plenty of other companies out there in this space, but because of the support for Linux and excellent getting started material went with rsync.net.

Version Control

I went with Subversion here. It’s pretty trivial to install, and best of all free. Once you have this up and running on your server, back up the database using rsync.net and you’ve got a solid setup. In fact if you really want cheap, host your repository directly on rsync.net.

Automation

For this you have a good deal of choice, but for me there’s one application that wins hands down here – Hudson. This will seemlessly integrate with your subversion repositories and monitor them for changes. If you use ant or maven to automate the build cycle of your code, integration with this is trivial. Then with the really neat plug-ins you can publish twitter updates about build status, look at the trends in your build and run all your tests. I’ll talk more about Hudson in another post.

Bizspark

Bizspark is Microsoft’s program for start up that gives you access to their software. It’s free to join and you can get licenses for pretty much every application they produce. It’s an amazing resource and even just using Office 2007 mean’s you’re saving a fortune. Of course if it’s just Office functionality you’re after, there’s always Open Office, but for me functionality design of Office 2007 is a no brainer.

To be Continued…

Posted in Budget, Startup, Technology | 1 Comment »

Joe’s Goals

February 10th, 2009

A little plug for this web app, one of the few that I found on the web and instantly liked. It has a really simple interface that allows you to define the goals that you need to achieve (and the ones you don’t want to be doing either).

For such a simple interface it’s really quite clever:

    You only see today’s goals and the previous 6 days worth. So your main focus is on today and it’s reinforced by looking at how you performed recently.
    Adding / Removing goals is a snap.
    Registration is simple and painless.
    If you like, you can share the high level details with everybody on your blog site of Facebook page

Worth a look.

Joe’s Goals

Posted in Motivation, Startup | No Comments »

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