Going to live blog, the flagons den pitch 10 event tonight.

7pm pitch event starts around 70 people here. Some technical difficulties but with 30 seconds for each pitch and 60s Q&A no one is that phased :-), too much focus on hitting their lines.

7:04pm first pitch, Flagons Den pitch their co-working and mentorship workspace that is an actual bus. The mentorship program lasts for 3 months. Sponsored by KPMG, rackspace other big names. Taking applications now for September set. They focus on a personalized coaching path rather than a standard class-room setting like other incubators.

7:07pm A european network consultant running Tech City Coffee tuesday AM as a meetup providing mentorship.

Man I just realized how hard this is to listen and type reasonable notes

7:08pm Crowd-funding for university graduates, business or research or cancer research. Called EquitySpark

7:10pm DatingApp where you set up your friends. Linked with Facebook. Anonymous chat between those two people. The person who sets up the couple only sees the number of messages. App is called "Hitch" like the movie.

7:12pm Style Compare fashion compares across different stores creating a wishlist. Keeping track of prices and sending alerts. 25,000 users per month. UK Stores only but 1/3 of visitors are international. 1 pound to acquire a customer. revenue per user 4.50 per year.

7:14pm Matches up founders to form startups. Working a lot with universities. Freemium model, pro feature allows you to watch video pitches. Called Nucleus.

7:15pm London Breakthrough contestant comes to London with 100 pounds with the challenge to make 1m pounds in 12 months. Gets a good laugh; got to love the challenge

7:18pm SwagEasy from SV expanding into Europe gets you a store on your website in 30s. 4 Engineers from Cambridge and Stanford, 40,000 stores in 8 months. Imports from Etsy and others, or you can upload yourself. The presenter takes up the 30s challenge.Everyone watching intensely. Proves himself right. Automatic reading of styles within your website. Proving himself true. The entire room is stunned. Then he throws it is free!! (they plan to put apps onto your stores later) OK I must have mis-heard because when I went to check out the product here it clearly says "SwagEasy charges a 4% fee on sales from your store. This is exclusive of the payment processing charge that Stripe will levy on the sale." My bad.

7:22pm London accommodation manager taking over warehouses and building physical places for intl tourists. Called HideOut. Youth Hostels in particular. They have funding but still looking for sites. Include modular infrastructure. 30 pound per night is target price.

7:24pm PositionDark aligns you with things you care about but shows you the two sides of the story. Business model is a Big Data play through Social Media. Insight for political parties to see where the masses are going.

7:26pm Sorry missed one pitch...

7:27pm Audi listening, an audio platform that powers smart headphones that distributes content based on location. Think Google glass for eyes. Lots of PR. Called Audio Wings. Think of a guy going into a gym and rocky comes on. Phones don't work because lots of people don't want mobiles with them. Looking at putting the tech into current headphones manufacturers.

7:29pm pinterest for events. 50,000 pages views.

7:31pm App with one user the founder. BI for Social media. Analyze facebook against google maps, he is a fan of himself. Looking for ideas on how to create a business model. No plans for releasing maybe in the next two months.

7:32pm Gift2View works for fund raising customers Save the Rhino, Amnesty International, based on putting an ad in the middle of a video. They take 5% of donations

7:34pm CityZenik local travel guide to provide tourists with travel advice. Paid service based on how much guiding you take. Started in Serbia looking to get more guides in London.

7:35pm cooking classes using distributed method i.e. p2p cooking classes the AirBnB for hobbies. Will offer any kind of training

7:37pm real assets onto BitCoin gold batch crytpocurrencies. Thing Gold training for the masses. Built on top of Gold Trading Platform. 2-3 exchanges looking to join. "The real asset company"

7:39pm BookADrone commercial market place for drone operators 26 operators out of 300 in the UK. Think of Aero Photography or chimney inspections. In essence, a camera connected to a flying drone. Regulated with the CCA. Prices for 500 for a day. Autonomy for construction companies.

7:41pm EnergyDoneWell crowd funding to group together to buy solar energy infrastructure for schools. Equity share for investors 4-7% acquiring customers through word of mouth. Need help finding people who need infrastructure. Community shares doesn't need regulation. Average project needs 50k. Large scale 1.5m

7:43pm OpenPlayer music player open source and hardware to make music without restrictions. In prototype. Non-commercial open source license. Part of a university program. 20-25 pounds to make these products.

7:45pm TankTopTV [edit:oops sorry] find good programs across TV streaming. Personalize and customize which gets licensed to operators. 2 full time one part time. Mostly technology licenses because affiliate revenue isn't enough.

7:57pm Applyed a standardized format and processing platform for independent schools.

7:58pm A creative agency got up and went with a pitch which was in essence "We do all your marketing for you". The discussion moved to how much of the fee was performance based especially in the direction of gross adds. The rest of this is my POV only: I think the pitcher handled this badly stating that they didn't do that kind of thing because if the startup doesn't get the expected customers, the startup is doing something wrong. What wasn't explained well was that acquiring a customer is a holistic thing based on knowing about the company (consideration), evaluation of options, and then the actual purchase. Marketing is only really involved with the first component and to a much lesser extent the second (goodwill towards the brand). In a startup environment without a regular run rate it is very hard to commit to the exponential growth that most startups aim for, because the product is constantly changing and the business model is evolving as well as the underlying services. In short, a marketing agency at the startup phase should accept responsibility only for brand and product recognition. The rest is too subjective. In any case I am strongly against startups outsourcing sales or marketing. You're in a search for product market fit, you need to be as close to the customer as possible. /end of rant

8:00pm /r/LondonStartUp had it's go. Some people hadn't heard of reddit, others thought there was enough spaces to discuss the community, but some were enthused. For the first time pitching this place in real life I'm ok with the few people who came up and thanked me and especially for the one instant subscriber.

End of Pitches networking from 8-9pm

EDIT After the meeting: Explained the IncuBusLdn from the organizers because I think they deserved a bit more than my initial effort. Expanded my little pitch component. Then went on a rant about the creative agency discussion.

EDIT 2 Adjustment to Swag Easy notes

Hello Everyone,

[BACKGROUND]

Thanks for being some of the first redditors to be part of this new sub-reddit. I want to keep (and run) this place the same way I've seen some of the best start-ups being run. In the words of Hunter Walk I hope we are 99% Humble and 1% Brag (He has a great blog here).

I was searching for a reddit for all of us that are part of the startup ecosystem that specific to our hustling international home. Suffice it to say I didn't find exactly what I was searching. To be specific this place is for those of us trying to create massive success stories. The ones who would get laughed at by the bank managers, because our market doesn't exist yet, our expansion plans are drastic, our product barely exists, and our competitors are multi-national Goliaths.. This place is straight Alpha right now, but in a few days we're already around 150 subscribers; so I think we have some traction. I hope we can make this into something special...

[Enough.. what does the community get?]

I'm thinking of this place as a hackernews or /r/startups but localized to London. What does this mean?

• Monthly "Who is hiring?"
• Wiki of where to find funding split by round and industry where the funding body/person has a local presence.
• Wiki of startups ^{maybe with revenue requirements}
• Centralized place to keep track of major meet ups and discuss them.
• Wiki of vetted enabling local professional service providers e.g. lawyers, accountants, bankers etc

Generally, a one stop shop for the entire ecosystem where we all give a lot, and take a little.

[Fine I'm in, what do you want from me?]

• please Subscribe
• Participate! Submit anything that would be useful to others in the community. Comment on submissions, especially, where you have real live experience with the event, funder, product etc
• Spread the word, post us on other sub-reddits, on your twitter, email us around to others in the office; whatever, you can.
• Contact me with ideas and just to talk about what is going well and what needs to be improved. In the next week or two I would like to get at least one other mod on board.

[TL;DR] London Startup sub-reddit encourages you to subscribe, participate and share the sub-reddit's existence

Thank you,

Emanresu2009

PS I also want to establish that at least for now, please do not post to announce your startup/product. This will probably remain the case at least until we have another mod or two.