Pitching to a panel of sceptical VCs is just like a first date. The point is to get a second date and maybe a long-term relationship out of it and many of the same rules apply.

At least that’s according to Katy Turner and Andy Chung from Eden Ventures who told GeeknRolla delegates just where some inexperienced pitchers are getting it wrong.

Preparation: “It’s like a first date – you need to find out what they (VCs) like and don’t like,” says Chung – stressing the need to find this in advance of the pitch meeting. “Preparation is so important: what do they invest in, what’s in their portfolio, what are they looking for in their investments?”

There might be lots of things on the VC company’s website, but Chung recommends “speaking to someone in their network, someone who may have pitched to them before” to find out what really makes them tick.

Looking for love: Continuing the dating theme, Turner says VCs are “definitely not interested in the one night stand or the early exit: we’re looking for a relationship that will last between three to five years, if not longer.” She says the whole “point of a pitch is to get a second date so leave us wanting more.”

Size matters: “Contrary to what most women will tell you, size really is important,” says Turner. “We’re looking for market opportunities of around £1 billion… If you’re setting up a social network for Norwegian goatherds in the Outer Hebrides it’s probably not for us.”

It helps to address the global opportunity that’s out there in a particular market and think about how much of that you can grab, she says. But Turner warns that 80 percent of the M&A market happens below the $200 million mark and Eden is looking to make deals of a higher value than that – so she prescribes some realism in what a company is worth.

Don’t pitch technology: Don’t bore the VCs, both Turner and Chung warn. That means not talking through your entire CV and – more importantly – don’t drone on about technology, however interesting you think it is. Chung says: “We’re not against technology, but it shouldn’t be the focus of your pitch.

“What you really need to focus on is, 1. who’s your customer and how isn’t? 2. What problem are you solving? We don’t want to hear that the target market is the ‘the whole internet’ 3. Can you pitch this to your friends and familiy? and 4. Passion – if you’re not passionate about it, how can you expect us to be?

No competition?: While it might be tempting to say a start-up is so unique it has no peers, Turner cautions against it: “Don’t tell us there’s no competition. If there’s no competition, then we ask ourselves ‘what’s the size of this market?’ We’re really looking for differentiation.”

We’ll call you… The pair were agreed that if you’ve gone past the pitch stage and nothing comes of it, VCs do want you to stay in touch. “Just because we can’t get together now doesn’t mean we can’t get together in future,” according to Turner.

SongHi is an entertainment-based online community aimed at the “Guitar Hero generation” across the world. It lets users create and personalise their own musical identity and form bands in customisable virtual spaces.

Launching to the world at GeeknRolla 2010 on Tuesday, the company’s Carl Costa said: “We’re creating a social network or environment around music creation so people can go on be the stars of the future.”

How does it work? Users can use SongHI to create an online rock star persona, customising their alter ego’s identity, instruments and even room decor options – all via a system of micropayments and subscriptions services. Parent company SongHI Entertainment is planning an online viral game to tie-in with the site. The main site itself has a scheduled private beta launch date of around June 1 this year.

Here’s a video showing what it’s all about…

StrippedFinance is a social media platform for personal finance that allows consumers, finance professionals and companies to come together in a secure place tailored for regulatory and financial business processes. The company describes itself as “a social network for the personal finance vertical”.

Founder and CEO Eddie George told the last GeeknRolla start-up pitch slot of the day that the problem StrippedFinance wants to solve is that personal finance professionals spend too much on admin – this site could free them to offer “a much more tailored approach” and give consumers a better offer. George says the business model is largely based on sponsorship and advertising.

“If you reduce the cost of the advice, you reduce the cost of the service,” he says, meaning that consumers in theory can get a better deal on their financial advice.

But it’s not just about financial advisors, George says 50 or 60 different types of finance professionals could sell their services using StrippedFinance. Consumers could use the site to find advisors and interact with them via text and video messaging.

When consumers have issues with companies, like their broadband provider or an airline, they rarely know how to complain. But that’s where pownum comes in: the site acts as a “social platform to air opinions about companies”. The name is an amalgamation of “power” and “numbers”.

Co-founder Marty Carroll, launching Pownum at our second GeeknRolla start-up panel of the day, says: “Everyday we’re both dismayed and delighted by the actions of companies. Yes we have social networking and Twitter, but what if we could work together to rate companies?”

How does it work? Users can rate companies and write reviews using Pownum’s mobile apps and widgets, sharing their experiences and hoping the companies take notice. Pownum says it has 20,000 organisations already pre-loaded onto its system. There’s a Foursquare-style gaming element too, where users are encouraged to add their ratings and move up the Pownum rankings, with the aim of advancing from “trooper” to “general”.

Each company rated will have its own Pownum web page (e.g. www.pownum.com/bt) which displays a company’s rating, rating trends over time, reviews, a tag cloud of sentiment and the facility to compare ratings against other companies. Pownum says it wants to bring “unprecedented transparency to the marketplace”.

It’s free to use for users so what’s the business plan? Selling usage data and selling a “right of reply feature” which allows companies to respond to users’ reviews and sentiments – that costs £5,000 and half of the payment will go to charity. The company wants to give away £10 million to charity in the next five years.

musiio.com wants to be the source of the freshest music and is proposing a new model for music distribution. Fans can listen for free, buy tracks to download or see what their friends are listening to while artists get to choose the number of free listens, price and receive 100 percent of the revenue.

Co-founder Matt McCallum told a GeeknRolla start-up panel that the still-to-launch Musiio is a service that allows users to “search, share and discover” music. The service mixes music streaming with a kind of social networking where artists keep in touch with fans.

But whereas Spotify is often derided by artists and music labels for not properly remunerating artists for ad-supported streaming – Musiio wants to offer the service to users for free.

So how will the company make any money? In short, the artists pay. “Artists and labels will be charged a fee to host their music on Musiio; we’ll charge them every time they send a message to their fans, because there’s a value to that,” says McCallum. On top of that, the site plans to implement a pay per click model too.

The site isn’t launching today and is still working on the site so it will be interesting to see where it goes from here…

Linkcloud’s vision is to evolve links to turn links into to a visual medium rather than just a text-based reading one. Linkcloud will turn your favorite links into images. It’s like visual social bookmarking, but more interesting that…

Linkcloud’s Toni Wagner, speaking during the second GeeknRolla start-up panel, said: “It’s a simple Java-script based website – every link is interactive, it can be a search box, an RSS feed, a movie player… We believe there is a very strong trend that soon companies will define themselves by what they link to.”

Wagner says the site – which launches in beta on Saturday – “is absolutely free for the user, you don’t even have to see our logo”. But he was confident that the site can make money through “a lot of different sources” including referrals and partnerships. “We also have a very unique user database – we’ll know what people search for,” he said.

The company is hoping to capitalise on the more than 100 million social network users around the world, for whom sharing links is one of the main activities.

Other Linkcloud features include: arranging and personalising links, without any ads, menus or borders; no “click and wait”, just a direct connection to the link location; real-time synchronised service, without any load times or intrusive messages.

iGlue is a knowledge organisation service which creates an additional information layer over web pages. In other words it can understand a web page’s content and start building a database of knowledge. No, it’s not another Google, but when applied to a web page, iGlue recognizes names of relevant entities, such as people, geographical locations, institutions etc. and on the spot displays related data, images, videos, events in a timeline.

iGlue analyses page content in real time, utilising “various natural language processing and machine learning techniques”. The user community can also add their own entries and data, potentially turning any website into a Wiki-like, multimedia-rich resource.

CEO Péter Vaskó told the second GeeknRolla start-up panel of the day that he wants to “wikify the web”, meaning to analyse the web and give semantic, language-based filtering of online content. The iGlue algorithm – which can be embedded into browsers via a widget – can give users more detailed information on individual people, places or just about anything.

But like Wikipedia, the real strength is in the audience’s contributions: “Everybody can annotate web pages, any time, anywhere in real time and everyone can see it,” as Vaskó puts it.

Graph.me is described as “social benchmarking”. You can start your own poll on graph.me and find out to which piece of the pie chart you belong – and who’s “on your side”.

Rene Karsten Kunkel, the site’s head of marketing, told the first GeeknRolla startup pane of the day that Graph.me could be used to chart…. well, just about anything. Sports and exercise workouts, spending habits, even sexual activity – all these KPIs (key performance indicators) can be tracked and monitored. The site goes into a public beta phase today, and will launch in its native Germany first.

Will people be happy giving up all this personal info? “You can choose for yourself what you want to share,” says Kunkel, who also mentions that the service can be completely anonymous. Users can start polls, get friends to answer questions on their own behaviour and see everything mapped out in charts.

And what’s the business model? “We believe we can achieve unique databases – and advertising and market research will make up the biggest piece of the piece; research for statistics, trends, as well as a white label model,” says Kunkel.

Gigaboxx allows artists and record companies to sell direct to their live audience, through their own mobile music stores. These stores can be quickly produced and managed, by using a simple online wizard. A Bluetooth box is then used to deliver the site URL to the audience’s mobile phones, allowing them to take advantage of the very moment when fans are most likely to make an emotional purchase, while within the live event itself. This will also create the opportunity for them to gain valuable insight into their fan-base through the data and analytics collected from download sales.

“Wouldn’t it be great if you coul download music from a gig using your mobile, there and then?” asks Ian Pickard of Gigaboxx, launching the start-up at the second GeeknRolla start-up panel. He says the service allows artists to “chase both the long tail and the short tail” by selling live tracks, album tracks or video.

Fans leaving gigs can be sent a Bluetooth message reading: “Hi, we’re the band, thank you for coming. To get our new single, click here,” which will have a link taking them to the artist’s mobile site on Gigaboxx where payments can be made.

As for the business model, there are four strands: downloads, subscriptions, selling data and advertising and in its first year the start-up aims to make £1.2 million in revenue. Gigboxx is looking for early stage funding of £600,000.

GameCreds is a an innovative new social network allowing gamers to create and manage their “Gamer ID” online through a set of automated tools, connecting gamers in a new way It effectively combines some of the web’s star concepts – successfully developed by Netvibes, YouTube, Linkedin, Monster and Facebook – having re-designed these to fit gamers’ specific needs and tastes.

GameCred’s Timothée Le Borgne revealed to a GeeknRolla start-up panel on Tuesday that the site has already signed a content deal with French VOD site Dailymotion and has raised €200,000 in angel investment. Gamecreds.com is scheduled to go into an open beta phase around Q2 this year and its founders have set the ambitious target of soon reaching 1.5 million unique visitors a month.

Le Borgne says: “Gaming is a lot of fun but there are problems you have to solve everday: where do you find the new content every day; how do you find other players to play with and how do you tell other people you are the best?”

The social network’s features include:

• Getting the latest gaming content, including HD videos, news, walkthrough guides and interviews.
• Allowing users to show off their gaming credentials via integrated in-game achievements.
• Facility that connects new online teammates to play with via a matchmaking module.
• Interaction with friends through walls, blogs and voice chat.

The business model? the plan is to make money through premium memberships, banner and video as and user database monetization.

Decibel supplies in-depth music data to drive the next generation of digital music, with over 30 million tracks in the database to help people discover music.

What can it do? For the music biz it could mean increased sales and for music services better listings and information for users. Decibel wants to licence its information and search technology via its API to software developers, music services, labels and hardware manufacturers. The service is now leaving its stealth mode and officially launching and says it has a number of potential clients lined up.

CEO Gregory Kris, pitching to the GeeknRolla start-up panel, said that “meta-data powers all music services” and argued that “poor metadata is holding back music sales”. “We want to enhance the public’s engagement with metadata and power the next generation of music services,” he says.

Specifically, the metadata Decibel deals in is that artist and song details attachted to every CD and digital track – but the company’s plan is to increase that data beyond the simplest detail to include related artists and other facts.

The company projects it will make £34 million in annual revenue by 2014, but Kris says it’s about six months away from being revenue-positive at the moment.

You’ve got your idea, you’ve assembled a team and set your goals. All you need now is some funding. Easy, right? Not quite. Running a start-up is hard and attracting the right sort of funding is even harder.

One man who could help you is Jason Trost, CEO and co-founder of social betting start-up Smarkets. He pitched his company at last year’s GeeknRolla and has been running Smarkets three years. This is what he hoped someone had told him before he set out on the start-up path…

Get a lawyer: “Once you’ve got your great idea and found your co-founder – which is probably the hardest decision you’ll make as astart-up, you want to find a lawyer”. He recommends Chris Grew at Orrick as well as Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu from Winston & Strawn.

Getting noticed: “By far the most important thing when meeting VCs is the introduction,” says Trost. “Spend a lot of time meeting networking with investers and founders. If you’re new to the space you need to find who the key people are.” For a who’s who of the angel investors, he says you could do worse than look through GeeknRolla’s investment panel…

Have a tough skin “People think you hear “no” a lot but I don’t think I heard no once from VCs – they just don’t email you back. ‘Interested’ basically means ‘no’,” says Trost.

Raising money: You many have to choose between the types of funding available. Straight-forward equity financing is different to convertible note financing, which is faster but converts to equity at a later stage.

Hiring: Trost says “The first hire you make is the most important decision you make outside of choosing your co-founder – we spent six months finding somebody.” Most important attributes? “Look for people who are do-ers and closers – the most important thing in start-ups is doing, not theorising.” Salaries vary a lot, but Trost gave the ballpark figure of £20,000-£25,000 a year and equity share options range from 0.01% to 10%.

Office space: It may be over-run with students most days, but Trost says the British Library – with its free wifi – is a great place to work for early-stage start-up with no fixed abode – he worked there for three months.

Networking: There’s tons of different events in London: Seedcamp, Barcamp. open Coffee, DrinkTank… And it’s important to have nice business cards. I’d spend time on it and make sure a professional design it.”

Marketing: “Think about it a lot sooner than you think you need to”, The key is look for patnerships where you can send people traffic an they give you revenue.” Start-ups should, he says, be able to explain their business in one sentence.

VIDEO AT TIME CODE 1.04

It’s one thing getting funding for your start-up, but when’s the best time to exit?

Tommy Ahlers, founder and CEO of mobile contacts app Zyb, which was sold to Vodafone in 2008 for €31.5 million, knows a thing or two about the subject and told delegates at our GeeknRolla event on Tuesday that to sell isn’t always the best option.

Why should you listen to this guy? Simples: “I’m a millionaire,” he says in his opening gambit. Speaking from Copenhagen – his travel plans fell victim to the volcanic ash saga – he says start-ups should ask themselves: “Do you really want to exit?

If that’s all you want, then you are focused on the wrong things. If you try too hard you will not make it. It’s worth remembering that it should be one of the objectives of a company but it should not be the aim.

He says the the aim for some start-ups should be instead to build users or revenue organically, rather than looking for the big sell. “When I sold to Vodafone and they wrote a check for €31.5 million, it wasn’t about the money, it was about the success for the business.” He even admits that Vodafone have taken Zyb down a slightly different path than the one he would have, but, he says, at least it still exists and plays a role in Vodafone’s 360 content/apps strategy.

Comparing finding a VC suitor to online dating, Ahlers says VC might only see the start-up as one night stand if all they offer is packaging and there is no great product there. VCs hold the cards in funding talks, but “What are your plans for my business?” is perfectly reasonable question for founders to ask investors.

And for people waiting for their big moment to come along some time soon, Ahlers reminds us that “You only get lucky if you work really hard…”

Speaking on a panel just after Ahler’s speech, Google’s head of corporate development for EMEA Anil Hansjee, gave an insight into how he views the buyer-start-up relationship:

Getting to know one’s acquisition is critically important. I can think of several acquisitions we’ve done where we’ve got to know them over over time without buying… and then we’ve woken up and realised we can’t do the same thing they do and we press the button.

Hasnjee says Google has made 70 acquisitions in the last nine years and despite the the acrimonious split between the founders of Dodgeball (who then founded location-based mobile start-up Foursquare), said fall-outs with entrepreneurs wasn’t something that happens very often.

Serial investor Saul Klein of Index Venture – who’s played a key role in too many high-profile fundings to mention – said that: “Most entrepreneurs are not looking for an exit, they’re looking to create a great product and change the world in some way; an exit is not an end in itself.”

He added that too many people make the mistake of thinking that founding a start-up will make them rich and warned that many dismiss the public option: “An exit comes along when you create something of real value… Too often we think of exits as selling to other companies and not going public through IPOs.

DriveK says it isn’t just a new car configuration platform. The site, officially launching today at GeeknRolla, says “it’s like Kayak or MoneySuperMarket but for new cars and light commercial vehicles”.

Explaining the company’s model to the day’s first start-up panel, the company’s Marco Marlia told the conference: “We’re not only a site but a platform… we want to be the de facto platform for people choosing cars across Europe.” The company already has a white label deal in Italy and is looking for more partners. Later this year DriveK will launch country-specifc auto sites for the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

The site provides cast amounts of data on different car models and equipment, with the aim of hosting the “most up-to-date dataset in the industry, containing over 5,000 car models and trims and about five million equipment configurations.”

But what’s the business model? In short, qualified lead generation. Marlia says the automotive industry in the countries it’s targeting is collectively about €200 billion per year, with commission on car sales reaching about €10 billion a year.

The start-up is also developing also a Facebook application for UGC – called DriveKlub – and one for car trivia, DriveKuiz.

CuteFund is a “crowdscourced mutual fund”. And the big difference between this and other mutual funds is it has no fund manager – each user can vote for stocks and controls investments. Investors can start with as little as £100 and pay in two percent a year, with one percent distributed back to the top performers. $60 trillion is today managed by equity and mutual fund managers, but 80 percent fail to beat the market. CuteFund.com says it is here to make the mutual fund industry more “transparent and efficient”.

CEO Andrei Korobeinik told the first GeeknRolla start-up panel that Cutefund is “two times cheaper” than regular mutual funds for investors and “more efficient, thanks to the wisdom of crowds”. The in-beta start-up still has some way to go before it starts taking people’s money but the service is there for people to “play with”.

And the business model? Korobeinik: “The level of entry is low. It’s much cheaper.” Plus, Korobeinik is looking for business partners to take the Cutefund model to market through white label deals.

Hire early, hire often, but hire the right people.

That’s the advice from Pete Smith, co-founder of music concert alert service Songkick, who told the assembled GeeknRolla crowd that “Everyone you hire is crucial to a company’s ability to grow faster and faster.” So what’s his advice for finding the right people?

- “Always be hiring” and integrate hiring into the expansion of other parts of the business.

- Don’t compromise and take a personal approach: “You need to be really ruthless with hiring people,” says Smith “and spend as much time as possible meeting people for coffee and building your network as you do on official applicants”. When hiring a UX developer, Smith interviewed just five people he’d found through his personal/online network – boosted by researching people’s online profiles and blogs.

- Spread the net wide: Early in Songkick’s life, after researching blogs, LinkedIn and posting official ads, a Songkick shortlist of 144 was then chopped down to just seven interviewees.

- What if you don’t like coffee? asks a questioner from the crowd. “Camomile (tea) is fine,” according to Smith.

VIDEO AT TIME CODE 1.19