We can’t resist the opportunity to give another shout out to the twelve companies who presented at our third First Look Forum event yesterday, and the whole community of folks who made it possible! Both John Cook of TechFlash and Greg Huang of xconomy did some incredibly thorough write-ups of the afternoon showcase, so we’ll just chime in with some context around the program itself.

What is this event anyway? The forum itself is the end of a two-month application, screening and coaching program, but we hope just the beginning of a new path for these diverse companies!  Our twelve participants receive mentoring from a pair of coaches (primarily investors, with a sprinkling of serial entrepreneurs), a presentation workshop, and a personal coaching session from Pivotal Presentations.  The “piano recital” at the end is a great place to meet potential investors and advisors, but past participants have raved equally about the coaching and the big day.

What do these companies have in common? Our theme is innovation. It’s not all IT or Web 2.0 all the time. Remember this event is brought to you by the organization that featured the founders of Bacon Salt as keynoters in our signature Entrepreneur University!  Every company selected to present in First Look Forum had a unique value proposition and was at an inflection point in their business:

1. a local business, profitable going concern for 8 years, changing the game and going national
2. a travel-oriented company re-emerging from hibernation and hoping to take the industry by storm
3. a graduate of the Founder’s Institute embarking on the fund-raising adventure
4. a grant recipient and perennial UW business plan competition participant who met their first investor at FLF!   (scroll down for their identities!)

What else? None of these companies had done the dog-and-pony show to the membership of an organized angel group, nor received venture funding, so First Look Forum was their coming-out party.  Are these companies ready for investment?  Many will be in the next 6-12 months. This may explain how we can attract investors from some 20 investment groups, including: Alliance of Angels, OVP, Seraph, The Tacoma Angel Network, Founders Co-op, Divergent Ventures, Ignition Partners, WRF Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Voyager Capital, Integra Ventures, Puget Sound Venture Club, Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society and more.  In addition to serving entrepreneurs with coaching and connections, we provide a service to the investment community in sourcing early deals for their organizations.

The flip side of the coin of having ’something for everyone’ is that not every pitch will resonate with every investor.  We support innovative entrepreneurs of every ilk and are happy to showcase the many local flavors!  The home of Microsoft, Amazon, Real Networks and Expedia has also enjoyed decades of innovation from Boeing and Starbucks… NWEN members reflect this unique potpourri.

What did we take away from the big day?

• Always be closing: We believe every one of these companies had “steak” (one, literally ground into dogfood and frozen)….but the audience voted with their coins for some of the pitches that really “sizzled.”
• Investors will vote with their feet. From my time with the Alliance of Angels, whether a company is in materials science or software, deals get done when they have that needle-in-the-haystack advocate who steps up to lead.  Being genetically pre-disposed towards match-making (yes, I’m a yenta), it was incredibly fulfilling to see investors huddling with presenters in corners of the room during our reception.   Successful entrepreneurs create their own luck, but we can help them get lucky by bringing together a diverse set of investors and deals, adding a healthy dash of showmanship and a soupcon of alcohol.

Answer key below. Congratulations to all the presenters, finalists, runner-up and grand-prize winner, and thanks to the entire community of volunteers, coaches, and investors for supporting the area’s innovators!

1. Darwin’s Natural Pet Products
2. Inside Trip
   
3. Zendorse
4. Empowering Engineering Technologies
   

A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck — the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it’s an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I’m only going to mention the most important one — investors expect it.

To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I’ll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn’t an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I’d made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different — your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you’re asked for:

• One line pitch
• Summarize your business
• What specifically makes your management team most qualified to build this business?
• Define customer problem
• Describe the solution you sell
• Define your market
• List your current or potential customers
• Sales and marketing strategy
• Describe your business model
• Describe the competitive landscape and list your competitors
• Define your competitive advantage and list barriers to entry

Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you’re filling out the form. For example, the explanation for “Define customer problem” reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you’re done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:

At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the’ll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don’t answer those questions, it’s over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!

In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn’t exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that’s not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:

• Combined the one line pitch, business summary, and customer problem into a new opening section which read better than the three individual sections.
• Combined target market and customers sections.
• Combined competitors and competitive advantage sections.
• Added a little bit of additional detail in a few places where I’d been constrained by Angelsoft’s character limits.
• Added a (small) illustration to help explain the product.

In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it’s a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft. You don’t have to do your one pager like I did and your executive summary might be longer. Garage.com recommends two to three pages in this excellent article. But, whatever you do, keep these things in mind:

• The purpose is to sell your company to investors, not tell them everything about it
• You want to convey the excitement and the energy behind your business
• To the extent that you can, answer the questions potential investors will have before they ask them

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First Look Forum competition. So much advice, in fact, that I followed it too well.

The first versions of my business plan and my pitch deck were so focused on the product, the technology, and all the cool things that we’re doing for customers, that I neglected to talk enough about the business. I talked about how the technology scaled, but not how the business scaled. As one of my advisors said, investors will assume your technology will scale — they want to know how the company can grow to be a billion dollar business. And I’d made the same mistake in other areas. The pitch deck (and the pitch that goes with it), initially had a lot less about the business side of the business than the business plan, so, off I went, removing technical stuff, and fleshing out the business side. It was looking pretty good.

Then, I went to my first coaching session with my NWEN advisors. We went through the whole deck and they gave me a lot of great feedback. When we were done, they asked a few questions, including a key one — what’s exciting about this? When I explained what I thought was exciting, they both responded, practically in unison, why isn’t that in the pitch? It turns out that I had over-corrected, by a long shot. I had spent so much time working on my weaknesses that I had given my strengths short shrift. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew the business was solid, that I had basically left out what was exciting about the business in the first place.

In the final deck, I lead with the big vision and the long-term plan that is a key part of the excitement, then I segue to the first product and the customer pain that it’s all about. The pain is a bit less exciting, but it’s compelling. Elsewhere in the deck, I make sure to revisit the things about the business that I think make it really exciting. And, I try to talk about technology only where it directly relates to customer pain, solutions, or growth. The result is a significantly better pitch.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

When someone asks me which team I was most impressed with at Seattle Startup Weekend 2, I’ll say ALL of them. Wow!

Thirteen teams demoed at the end of Sunday night, winnowed down from 47 ideas presented on Friday and 17 teams starting on Saturday. The most amazing spectacle to me was the Scrampede team, led by John Clifford, which was super organized, had giant project management charts on the wall (courtesy of Paul Osborn), and had a full pitch at the wrapup about how the business could make money and grow. The Scrampede idea came out of an idea John brought up at the brainstorming session I led at StartPad last Thursday — after the brainstorming, when we split up, almost half the people joined his group to discuss the idea a little further. So, I’m a little extra proud of them, but, to be clear, I can’t take any credit beyond providing a venue for initial discussions. But it does show the benefit of starting with brainstorming. Scrampede is one of a number of teams that has plans to continue beyond the weekend.

Another team with a hopeful future was 1nvite, which was the only team that was actually incorporated by the end of the weekend, courtesy of team member Adam Philipp of Axios Law. 1nvite’s mission is to make it easy to invite your friends to multiple social networking services at the same time, particularly useful after an event like Seattle Startup Weekend 2.

There were two Twitter apps, TweetSum, which gives you information about your followers to help you determine if you want to follow them back (and a great interface for organizing followers), and TweetReporters, a souped-up Twitter widget (and infrastructure behind it) for newspapers and other news sites.

I think FavorWish was the best looking site at the end of the weekend. You can’t tell the home page from a company that’s been in business for years. And KnarlyVote, despite its rather, uh, knarly name, solves an interesting voting problem in a very nice way. As they said, it’s not a new technique (I’m blanking on the name for the mathematical underpinnings of what they’re doing), but I’m not aware of a site that does this. If they can clean it up and solve a few fundamental usability problems, I think they could have a winner. This is a good time to mention that the UX Office Hours that I have at StartPad are open to everyone — startup entrepreneur, laid-off tech worker, or Startup Weekend warrior. If you want to take a step forward in your UX, feel free to drop by (the next one is this Thursday, February 12th).

As for me … I didn’t do much. I pitched an idea that didn’t get enough votes, so I looked to join another team, but the couple I tried to join ended up disbanding. By then, other teams were in full swing and I realized that I still had a lot to do on the second rewrite of my plan for the First Look Forum (more on that later). When I wasn’t writing, I walked around, encouraged people, and offered a few suggestions (and at least one got taken, that a team switch to Google App Engine as their platform).

But that does bring up one disappointment — the selection process on Friday night produced some potential teams that were clearly not viable as weekend projects. For example, a team with zero developers or massive infrastructure needs can’t get very far. That’s not to say that they were bad ideas (in fact, most of the 47 original ideas were interesting ones), but they distracted. I hope this can be remedied next time out.

All in all, it was a great event. I’m looking forward to seeing which companies survive and, next time, I plan to not have a deadline on something else and dive in all the way.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

They tricked me! NWEN told me I only had to answer five questions, but I essentially wrote a business plan. Just five questions, one page each, but each question had questions inside it. For “Describe the market in terms of characteristics and size,” I ended up doing market research to get very precise data, then I analyzed the data to narrow in on exactly my target market. And the innocent looking question “What will be the funding requirements to grow?” caused me to create a cash flow spreadsheet to be able to provide an answer.

In the process, I ended up doing two complete rewrites. On Tuesday, I sent out what was basically the best business plan I’d ever written to a bunch of my advisors. The feedback came back that it needed a ton of rework. I did a complete top-to-bottom rewrite and sent out a new version on Thursday which was a lot better — the new best business plan I’d ever written. Back came feedback. Yes, it was better, but it was still way off from what it needed to be. So on Friday and over the weekend (thanks to NWEN extending the deadline), I rewrote it once again and on Monday I sent out what was now clearly the best business plan I’ve ever written. I hope it’s good enough!

I used Word to do a comparison of the first and third versions of the plan. In case it’s not clear, red indicates text which changed between the first and third versions of the plan.

Despite all the red, there’s a lot of similarity between the versions — after all, they’re describing the same business. But the way in which they say it changed completely.

Here are some of the things that I’ve learned.

Start with a hook. I decided to start every page with a hook, a sentence or two that summarizes the page. In essence, put the summary at the top, not the bottom. Your readers might not get to the bottom.

This isn’t a literature contest. I had some writing that I was really proud of. It was eloquent and had a great feeling to it. Save that for your novel. I tossed almost all of it and now I have a lot of short to-the-point paragraphs and bullet points.

Stories are OK, but keep them short. Real world stories that convey customer pain that you will be addressing is a good thing. On the first page, my hook is a story that illustrates the customer pain I aim to solve. This is the only place where I kept some of the great prose I’d written.

Answer all the questions. If they’ve asked a question, don’t make them read between the lines. Provide the answer as directly as possible. What’s the value proposition? How does your business scale? What are you actually doing?

Don’t answer all the questions. I like to be complete, but if you’re generating your own questions, there are lots that just don’t need to be answered. I removed a ton of information that was answering unasked and, probably, unimportant questions. Working through and figuring out those answers wasn’t a wasted exercise — I still know the answers if I get asked them.

Forget technology. This one was particularly hard for me. My first version had half a page on technology and more in my bio. Investors want to know that the technology is doable and that the team has the technological expertise. They don’t care about the actual technology. My final version has almost nothing about technology, even in my bio.

Scaling is about your business, not your technology. Following on to the last point, investors will assume that if your business is successful, then your technology will scale (they may want details on this during due diligence). But, at the beginning, they want to know if the business is going to grow through greater market penetration, opening up additional markets, selling more expensive versions, selling additional products, etc.

Get real numbers. I think every single talk that I’ve been to about business plans or pitches trots out the line that you can’t just say that you’ll get 1% of a billion dollar market. You’ll hear investors talk about the addressable market over and over again. It took me way too long to internalize that, but, when I did, it took me a lot less time to get real numbers than I thought it would.

Use real numbers. Investors will know if you’re hand waving when you say you need an $X million investment with no explanation. Cash flow projections aren’t that hard. Figure out your assumptions and be ready to talk about them, but get some real numbers.

Be positive. Every business plan is, in some sense, a guess. You don’t have to say “We plan to…” or “We hope to…” or “We don’t know ….” Everytime you do this, your readers view you as less positive, less certain, less able to be successful. They know it’s all a plan and that there are many things that you don’t know yet, so don’t hit them over the head with it. Personally, I tend to be a bit too honest about my deficiences (for example, many people have heard me say “I suck at marketing”). The business plan isn’t the place for that.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you don’t ask, nobody will help you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am very appreciative of my advisors.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

Brad Feld is coming to town and there are a number of folks organizing an entrepreneur party.  If you don’t know of Brad, he writes the popular blog Feld Thoughts (www.feld.com) and is a managing director at Foundry Group (www.foundrygroup.com).  He’s been an investor in a number of Seattle-based companies over the years including AdReady, Smith & Tinker, Shelfari, and Judy’s Book, and is currently on the board of Impinj.  Brad’s is also a co-founder of TechStars (www.techstars.org), a great startup program based in Boulder that has helped create a number of interesting companies, including SocialThing (acquired by AOL), Intense Debate (acquired by Automattic/WordPress), and Brightkite.

Brad’s going to spend the evening talking about his views on entrepreneurship, especially around early stage companies in today’s environment.  He’ll give us a detailed view of TechStars and why it’s been working, along with an explanation about how he thinks about early stage VC investing.  The evening with be heavily Q&A oriented – Brad’s open to any questions about anything.

Register for Beers with Brad Feld now! I just registered so I’ll see you there! Note there is a $5 fee, but it will be donated to Seattle-based Vittana (www.vittana.org), an early-stage non-profit building the next step in microfinance — education microfinance.

Jordan Mitchell, the author of this post, blogs regularly and is the CEO/Founder of Others Online (his 4th Internet startup), which provides ad networks with behavioral profiling and targeting solutions.

After a fun-filled, beer-fueled, internet-disabled afternoon topped off with thai food and a test-drive of Danielle’s techkaraoke concept, I put together the following Stephen Colbert-style takeaways from Seattle Startup Weekend part Deux. Hats off to the event organizers for gathering such a committed and talented group of people for a marathon of a weekend.  Noting my own personal disappointment that Raising John Stamos was 86′ed, that I don’t have an iPhone, and that evidently twitter is the ringtone of 2009 when it comes to spawning startups, I enjoyed my 6-hour drive-by of the 54-hour event.

• Tip of the hat: Eating your own dogfood. When it comes to creating value in the marketplace, you have to ask yourself if “the dog will eat the dogfood.”  The most compelling elevator pitches I heard Saturday afternoon were delivered by passionate team members who represented their own target market– or who could clearly articulate the company’s benefits from the perspective of their customers. Internal consistency is also a good thing– walking the walk of your value proposition. If you’re starting a green company and drive away in a Humvee, or represent a branding company with a lackluster presentation, your street cred is shot.

• Tip: Show vs. tell. If you can capture your audience’s attention and imagination with an engaging before-and-after scenario, that tends to be much more effective than delivering a lecture on features and benefits.  Slight cautionary tale (not a wag-worthy offense):  one brand marketing company put together a text-heavy presentation explaining their value proposition, but what was truly compelling was the imagery of a client’s website before they engaged the firm, and the subsequent reimagining of the site afterwards (also see: dogfood discussion above).

• Tip: Be flexible. One common element of a nonprofit organization and a startup is that the vision and mission gets you out of bed every morning and keeps you up at night. It is absolutely critical to your success that you passionately believe in your mission, but you cannot become so obsessed by your own vision that you ignore what the market wants.  One of the greatest attributes of a startup is the ability to be nimble and turn on a dime; some of the best commentary I heard from the Startup marathoners was how much their ideas evolved over the course of the weekend. The 150+ participants were the microcosm of the marketplace, and the savvy companies listened to this proxy for the market.

• Wag of the finger: The chicken-egg dilemma. I spoke with more than a handful of Startuppers whose companies were predicated on user-generated content. One of the challenges they face is that to get content, they need users, but to keep users, they need content (no site visitor in their right mind would likely return should they seek content and find nothing).  This need not be the death-knell of the startup; founders need to think creatively about how to seed their site with content before they’re ready for prime time user acquisition.  Some combination of partnerships and licensing data can help create customer stickiness.  Check out CultureMob for just one example– this site is designed to to help users “discover, share and promote events.”  As the CultureMob team goes to market in each new geography, they launch with pre-populated data from publications and venues, and the experience is further enriched with user-generated content.

• Wag: The fumpany. A term coined by my former colleague Kevin Kirn, this describes the age-old “it’s a feature not a company” concern.  You just may be a fumpany if you’re constantly getting asked “why doesn’t facebook/ twitter/ sharepoint/ insert-company-name-here just add that enhancement themselves?”

Thanks again to John Smilgin, Nathan Kaiser and the gang for inviting me to crash the party.  Already looking forward to Seattle Startup the Third.

Full disclosure: Rebecca Lovell, Executive Director of NWEN, has a deep and abiding love for John Stamos.  For those nonbelievers, check out the actor’s star turn on General Hospital as Blackie Parrish.  No one puts Blackie in the corner.

It’s 4AM and I just sent out copies of my 5-page business plan for the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum to a bunch of advisors, plus a few extra people who I haven’t previously solicited advice from. It’s so easy to wait to finish something until right before the deadline, so I deliberately set my own deadline three days early so I’d be able to get some feedback before I have to submit it.

If you’re still working on your own plan, here are some thoughts from my process:

• I’ve been pitching my business concept and long-term vision to people for months now, but where does that go? Strictly speaking, it’s not an answer to any of the five questions they’re asking. I ended up putting parts of it in each of the first three sections (Market/Opportunity, Novelty/Concept, and Scalability of the Business Model).
• Similarly, in discussions with people, a decent amount of technology has been discussed — what I’m using, why, what’s good about it, what were the alternatives, etc. Almost none of that made it into the document. Investors want confidence that you’ll make the right technical decisions. They don’t need details on those decisions.
• The addressable market, funding needs, sales projections — if I was a business person, these probably would have been trivial. I think I did a reasonable job and, in this document, a lot of detail isn’t required.
• Competitors — there’s an often discussed trap of saying you have no competitors. It’s like a catch-22, though. If you have exact competitors, you probably don’t have a viable business. I pointed out competitors and how none of them are doing exactly what Groupthink is. I did not have room for one of those market charts, but, when I do one, I’m thinking of putting Groupthink in the middle — Papa Bear’s on one side, Mama Bear’s on the other side, and Groupthink is in the middle, just right.
• Scalability — don’t confuse scalable technology with a scalable business. I wrote about both.
• The Team — gee, it’s just me right now. I wrote about both my own skills and experience as well as my search for a CEO.
• Even if you’re not applying to the First Look Forum, this is a great exercise. I put a lot of stuff down on paper that I’ve been saying over and over again. Now I have the opportunity to really refine it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the version I sent out, but I also fully expect that I’ll be making major surgery on it once I get some feedback. And, of course, when I wake up, I’ll have at least half a dozen things I’ve realized on my own while I slept. I predict I’ll be busy until Friday.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

Happy groundhog day, all!  Stopping short of Bill Murray’s deja-vu-all-over-again nightmare, I thought I’d re-run some advice from the early-aughts that still has legs.  By way of introduction, as of today, I am posting as the new Executive Director of NWEN.  You may remember me from such favorites as the Alliance of Angels, and as a weekly contributor to Seattle 2.0.  As I’m diving into this new role, I’ll be drinking a lot of lattes as I sit down with community stakeholders and learn from each of you, but in the meantime, wanted to bring you some news you could use, drawing on past experience.

With the plethora of community organizations and organic groups springing up around entrepreneurship, my calendar runneth over with happy hours on an almost daily basis.  Good problem to have—I live for this kind of thing, and there are some terrific people out there (from Lunch 2.0 to Girl Power Hour) hosting great industry events.  Cheers to Danielle Morrill for recognizing the need to make these meaningful and fun, but for those of you who would rather watch paint dry than go to a “networking event,” here are a few tips.  (In my past life, I’ve led workshops on this topic for such otherwise hesitant participants as recruiters, attorneys, and non-profit board members—and I’m here to tell you there’s an art and a science to it).

1. It’s not a junior high dance.  It’s really ok to stand by yourself for a few minutes, collect your thoughts and some refreshments, and survey the room.  Take your time getting into conversations, and don’t be afraid to stay put and let people seek you out too.
2. When meeting people for the first time, in addition to introducing yourself, be sure to repeat their name and make eye contact while doing so.  Much better chance of remembering the name in the future. It’s like a new vocabulary word—if you can use it three times it’s yours (I’m not necessarily recommending this kind of repetition in a first meeting—when I hear my own name repeated back to me too many times I feel like I’m in an infomercial).
3. Listen.  Not rocket science here, but this is clearly the foundation of any good conversation.  I am fully convinced that one of the keys to having a good memory (see point 2 above) is actually listening the first time around. When your companion is talking, focus on what they’re saying, not what you’re going to say next.
4. Ask questions.  Even in this two-degree-of-separation town, you may need to dig beneath the surface a bit to find common connections, and that’s where conversations get interesting and fun.
5. Be succinct.  In the early stages of a dialogue, try not to speak in paragraphs (serial monologuing can be a real snoozer).  If someone asks what’s new, or wants to hear about your latest venture/business/idea, see if you can describe it in one sentence. It’s a good litmus test for the clarity of your thinking.  Michael Arrington uses the barometer of whether or not he can explain a business to his mom. Good sign: they’re asking questions (see tip #4).  Bad sign: eyes glazing over.

As all good things must come to an end, please note the following exit strategies, which should be part of the ebb and flow of any social gathering.  If you don’t have Dave Chappelle’s wrap it up box on hand, try the following:

• Make introductions.  At well-attended events this will happen organically, at any time throughout the evening, but look for opportunities to connect people to each other in a meaningful way. Getting that two-degrees of separation down to one is what these events are all about, and chances are, you know someone who could be helpful to your conversational companion.  So be it if it signals the end of your own dialogue.
• Go get a cocktail.  If you sense your conversation has drawn to a natural close, help the other person out and seek a gracious exit.

Practicing What We Preach

We’re really not kidding when we call it the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, and to that end, wanted to draw your attention to a few new items:

• NWEN has a Facebook page. Check us out, become a friend and a fan.
• And because texting is so five minutes ago, follow NWEN on twitter. (Sneak preview: This weekend we’ll be joining 150 of our closest friends for the fun and games of Startup Weekend, and twittering from Google’s Fremont offices. Word on the street this is akin to 6 Hour Startup on steroids, so stay tuned.  This event is sold out, so watch for take-aways from the trenches.)
• Blog posts from your peers.  As NWEN’s blog is kicking into high gear, you’ll notice greater community involvement and commentary; check out Roy Leban’s thoughts about our inaugural First Look Forum.
• Join the NWEN LinkedIn group.

Look forward to seeing more of all of you online and in person.

Rebecca Lovell is the new Executive Director for NWEN. If you see her at an industry event and she claims she has to re-fill her cocktail, there’s a 99% chance that she really just wants a drink.  Seriously.  Ask anyone.

A while back, when I was working on a business plan for a potential startup, I met up with someone who was also working on a business plan. He was a marketing guy, with limited technology knowledge, so it seemed that we could help each other. His business plan was gorgeous and read well, and it had all the right revenue projections and graphs. Now I’m no slouch as a writer, but mine was dreadful. My plan had accurate descriptions and diagrams of the architecture of the system that I planned to build, and I had a working prototype to go with it. And his plan? He also had some architecture diagrams, but they were basically fiction. I pointed that out to him, but he said it didn’t matter — they were just placeholders and investors wouldn’t care. Guess which company got funding?

I’m not saying that technology people like myself are dismissed entirely, but it’s certainly a much easier road for people with a business background.

So, I was really pleased to hear about the details of the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum (FLF) earlier this week. The FLF replaces the annual Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF) that NWEN used to run, with some big differences, the biggest one being that it’s not an investment forum. NWEN properly recognized that there are already plenty of investment forums in the area, but there was very little for the stage before that. And they recognized that early stage entrepreneurs need more than money — they need help. The forum is designed to:

• Recognize early stage companies that show promise and could benefit from the process.
• Help the companies to take their idea and make it presentable, through intensive, personal coaching.
• Provide presenting companies an audience of qualified angel investors that they can present to and network with.
• Provide those angel investors with interesting opportunities that they probably haven’t heard about before.

• What’s the Market and Opportunity?
• What differentiates the concept from others?
• How can the business scale?
• What traction do you have so far?
• Who are you? What’s your experience?

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.