In continuation to the post by Alok, I have posted a very initial Venture pitch for MirrorZen, a Natural Language based Search Engine. Here is the presentation:
MirrorZen had been self-funded to come to a proof-of-concept stage. And subsequently we were looking at raising some Angel Investment for MirrorZen to be able to continue further. The proof-of-concept was far from what the final MirrorZen is supposed to be, and we needed more people and better Infrastructure to be able to take MirrorZen to a public Alpha.
We had decided from our past experience that trying to meet VCs would serve no purpose and we focused on trying to meet possible angel investors who would understand our technology-intensive venture. We did a small demo as what still runs on our servers and decided to go ahead with showing the demo and a brief presentation.
In the presentation we tried to focus briefly on MirrorZen, the possibilities and why we think Natural Language based Search could still work. Infact an ask.com which works.
But, we had committed many mistakes:
1. Didn’t plan the demo well enough in advance. MirrorZen gives better results for certain keywords and bad for certain others. For a demo which ran for 30 minutes we needed to cover up our demoing skills better. There is a difference when you are demoing one-to-one/two and one-to-many. So getting down to the nitty-grity of your demo is very important and you need to show the best points of your system and try to hide the worst.
2. The presentation was quite technical and nobody bothers about how much effort you have put in coding the parsers and how many lines of code have you written. This is the cardinal sin, techies commit. Technology is important but if you are a technology player in the internet space, you should be able to commodotize the Technology.
3. The presentation emphasized on the possibilities of MirrorZen with respect to User Experience and the Financial Projections. We were simply unable to come up with a proper Financial Model and still are. Helps if you could get a much clearer Financial Model. And we could have asked somebody important to sum up the User Experience of MirrorZen.
4. No competitive Analysis as rightly pointed out by Alok: But how do we do a competitive analysis with a Google Search or a Yahoo Search. We are still looking for answers here.
5. There are many more mistakes that we had made and I would request all readers to try and suggest improvements.
While still looking for investment, we have gone ahead and realized that for young entrepreneurs like us, it is of utmost importance to get some “real technology” going or have substantial traction to get others involved. We have also got some great genuine feedback, with somebody also saying, “Guys like you are the future of India”.
-Animesh
Co-founder, MirrorZen Software
- Venture Pitches and Missing Detailing: A Case Study - November 10, 2006
On the outset let me congratulate on the scale of your ambitions. I dont know if you will get funding or not, but even if you don’t – building the next search engine is a challenge worth fighting for…and to do that in Ranchi is just out of the world.
I have done a couple of VC pitches and can claim to have some understanding on the state of the art in NLP – for whatever it is worth this is my take on your idea.
What GYM is doing is essentially a horizontal play on search. From what I understand keyword matching of the scale, speed and comprehensiveness done by GYM is the only way to do the horizontal play. NLP might give you better results for a small fraction of those searches, but as a horizontal search , NLP in itself doesnt cut it.
What you need to do is identify a niche – a way to do that is to find a small set of the searches being done on Google which are amenable to NLP driven search. Next, find the industry/domain those search’s target and then do a vertical play.
Verticalization is the next logical step for search – it is something even Google understands and is essentially what Google Co-op is all about. When you do identify such a niche you can claim a first mover advantage – which is something all VC’s like to see. Additionally, and most likely once you identify that vertical you should be able to find a much better revenue model.
Please do take these comments with a pinch of salt – I might be wrong and you might still be the team who will build the next generation horizontal search.
Best of luck
nishant
Animesh,
Thank you for sharing this. You have already received some valuable comments so I will keep myself brief and focus on one fundamental issue.
How do you plan to make money? Do you want to dislodge the major search engines of today? What is the probability that you will do so? If this is not the plan then what is the plan?
In doing so, ask yourself what you want to – build a technology or build a business?
I appreciate your candour – it takes courage to admit mistakes and I want to wish you all the best.
One good way to review your business plan is to imagine yourself in the shoes of a VC.
In that case, would you not –
a) look for two critical components viz., Investment Rationale and Exit Roadmap. These two are missing here.
b) expect the pitch to explain what must have stopped the biggies like Google, Yahoo ! and MSN from venturing into NLP what with their enormous resources to boot…?
c) visualize well that Google’s search appears to expand the query by both functional ambiguity and boolean ambiguity as well as proximity-based weightings. Further, the terms in the title tags are more important than terms in other places. In this sense, Google already appears to consider functional words, collocation/proximity, and even document context as well. So by definition of natural language search, it seems that Google is already there…!!
d) remain befuddled by the phrase “natural language search ?” If you had to imagine what is meant by natural language, would you not imagine certain things to be present that are typically absent: (1) user context modeling; (2) semantic network expansion (plug in WordNet or something like it and expand your input).
e) seek more user testimonials / feedback to dispel your misgivings given the convoluted syntax of the English language…? Worse when it gets into issues of Hinglish / Chinglish or other pidgins, NLP has to deal with queries thought in one language and expressed in English – which could easily stymie any advanced search engine. The result – if the user doesn’t get the desired results, he’ll be back with Google. Would you like that…?
I just thought you could significantly improve the quality and content of your pitch if you look at it from the other side too. Are we one…?
Best of luck.
Animesh,
I am a management consultant and usually am on the same side of the table as you are when pitching, so hopefully I can add some value. Before that, thanks for sharing this pitch with all of us..
First I would want to establish firmly the customer need : a customer centric approach to product need analysis would have structured the first part of the presentation better.
You have pointed to the growing online ad market, figures of the spend shifting to the online market is estimated – a scenario analysis with market share ( validated by second level checks) – a financial plan is a junk document the time it is closed, but then it atleasts documents your assumptions about the market, your success, investment and such – would allow some stress testing rather than guessing
I would have also loved to see a section on possible pit falls u expect as a team in the presentation and your action plan – the point of how u expect to fight google maybe
Also alongwith what you expect as funding , it would have helped to identify what other support you would like to receive from the VC – hands on VC’s would like to see , your view of where they fit into the scheme of things
thats for now, will probably have more to say once some other comment triggers some other thought. hope this was of some use…
Animesh, my two cents on your presentation (and I am sure when you are making the presentation, you are covering a lot of stuff in speech, so sorry if I am making some comments that otherwise are already covered)
1. Your fundamental claim is you have better technology than anyone else for search – why should the investor trust you? You do not talk about the team, you do not talk about validation, you do not talk about user tests. NLP is old hat, a technology that essentially failed to deliver. Can you simply outline the approach that is easily understood on intuitive basis (pagerank is easy to explain to a layman). Or can you get a couple of experts in the area to endorse it. Or can you do a quantitative test amongst users to outline preference. Or background of people who developed this technology and why they are the ones to come up with the best? The fundamental approach being logical is far more important than the engine working well on 5 searches.
2. By outlining a business model to “India SEM”, you are limiting the scope of the technology. You are telling me that you have the best search engine in the world, but the business opportunity is to do SEM in India? Something doesnt add up.
3. Market segmentation and phased plan — are there some markets that are more relevant to your superiority (beach head) than others? what can you achieve with the next $500K? what does it take to establish a discernible user experience advantage?
I am sure there are more, since this is not a full blown investor pitch. But I thought I’d focus on the key ones.
and yes, thanks for sharing your pitch for critique; at least tells me you guys are open to genuine feedback,