The Inspiration
Saul Klein has been a great inspiration for me since I came to know him in 2007, mostly through OpenCoffee, a great investment (sales) funnel to identify the hottest startups and tech entrepreneurs. Later, he introduced Seedcamp to add a second level of filtration and de-risk his investments as much as possible. Some of this learning has been applied by Imran Hakim and the team (perhaps not directly taking from Saul) in Manchester through Envestors and RAW2010, in terms of de-risking. But that’s another story for another day.
The Motivation (best to come clean upfront!)
At Techcelerate, we need to find a funnel for budding entrepreneurs, as well as find a low cost channel for Member products, where conversation will achieve sales, without selling. I have been toying with the idea of Techcelerate Coffee for a while, but I believe I managed to convince few people, which is enough for me to give it a damn good try.
What is TekCoffee (and why not TechCoffee)
Ok. TechCoffe has gone. Yes, that’s right, someone got the Twitter username, so I had to settle for TekCoffee. Personally, I dislike “k” in TekCoffee, but let’s go with it for the time being, eventhough I am big on brand identities.
TekCoffee would be very similar to OpenCoffee, except that it is not about a funnel for investment, but a funnel for sales and partnerships for our Member products and Techcelerate ecosystem.
Self-Management of TekCoffee
All events are local (initially around Stockport) and organised through private messaging on Twitter and PlanCast .
How To Join This Group: Go to http://www.twitter.com/TekCoffee and click on the “send request” button. We will approve new members before they are permitted to post or receive messages from the Group.
How To Post: At the beginning of your Tweet type “d TekCoffee”. This will send a private message to the group, which will be automatically forwarded to everyone else who is following. If you use @ the message will be public to everyone. I need to test this out bit more to understand.
How to arrange a meeting: Some need to create the meeting on PlanCast first and then use the Twitter Group to invite others.
What is the format
1. One person from each local community create an event on PlanCast (we can create sub groups within Twitter later on) and send out an invite through twitter group and other available channels.
2. Those who wish to attend join the plancast event. Bring your laptops, so if no one turns up, you can still get two hours work done, so there is no real lost to your productivity.
3. Meet up for up to a maximum of 2 hours between 10:00 to 12:00pm or any other time slot as agreed, as long as it is restricted to 2 hours. Ideally these ought to be monthly meetings on regular intervals and arranged such that they do not clash with another TekCoffee event.
4. Organisers can change from month to month, and Techcelerate will provide as much support as possible
5. You can discuss any aspect of business, and we will try our best to expose new products to you through inviting tech CEOs from companies such as Yuuguu, edocr.com, CapsuleCRM, etc.
This is just a start and we can refine above as we go along. What’s left now is to prove the communication channels around the first event. Join the twitter group now to find out more.