Shark Tank: Scott Annan from Network Hippo

now get on the pitch train whoever have on the call hello who's that I'm him my name's Scott Annan from Network hippo Scott have you listened to the program before of course yep you got a favorite show probably one with Brad Feld the whole discussion around contacts and how you manage your contacts is especially interesting to me yeah he's quite good at that and so you know the rules of Shark Tank then since you've been a longtime listener you have 60 seconds and we can see you there right on your skype you're looking good I've got the chapeau you know I've got the non-ironic beard looks good and you have 60 seconds to pitch your idea after which point I will ask everybody in the chatroom to score both your ability to pitch and the merit of your idea so everyone in the chatroom is ready and will give me a verbal eye aye captain yes captain something to that effect and I would like everybody to put pitch: the number and that idea: the number Tyler are you ready okay Timmy ready you understand the instructions we're good two numbers okay and here we go Scott in three two go alright now I'm guessing that's not your desk because I know how many conferences you go to when you go to conferences the one thing you get are dozens and dozens of business cards and what do you get when you get back a desk full of business cards it's a lot of work to put them into some kind of an address book or do something with them and so the solution of a POC is LinkedIn but the reality is LinkedIn is where relationships go to die you go in you can't with somebody there but you don't really follow up with them afterwards just kind of a connection that you use for the next time you looking for a job or something else so right now though with unemployment rates as high as they are and people are starting their own gigs they're looking for new jobs our networks are becoming increasingly important and social networks have helped us cap with more people all over the world but not necessarily have stronger relationships with them so network hippo is a layer a social layer that goes on top of all your social connections in your email it consolidates all of your contacts helps you understand your relationships tells you who you should be in contact when with them and that helps you engage with people in your network much better than you can on individual social relationships Wow okay well done I'll ask everybody in the chatroom give me a one to ten on the pitch and give me one sign of the idea I see six and six I see three and two I see seven and four I see six and seven six and four eight and three Tyler what did you think of the pitch I'm gonna go six five leaning towards seven I'm a pitch yes I felt it was concise clear what I did in some ways I really liked the tone and the delivery and he strike me as a smart guy but when you're talking about this kind of solution you're gonna have to really get into quickly how you're differentiating and now you're gonna get in towards the idea right and so the idea why I don't I would like to know more right so that's a successful pitch in some ways Tim so I would give it maybe a six five in that range and on the pitch I think what I would do differently is start with what it is because there was a lot of buildup of the problem explaining the problem and you lead in with exactly what it is so it kind of frames in my mind what I'm thinking about and then give me one or two quick use cases on how it could help my life right so if you have a minute you're saying maybe forty seconds of setting the stage is a little too much to leave twenty seconds to what the product is and on the product score a layer on top of all of your memory and if it if you could actually do that you know i would use it probably give it a seven or an eight on the idea right okay so i thought the pitch it's gonna be quite repetitive here took about 40 seconds to get into what exactly is your building I did like though your pace was good yeah so if this was a two-minute pitch and you right over the second minute was here's all your product things like this could be a 10 and a 10 we don't know so you left us wanting more which is good actually in some ways you had a great line in there LinkedIn is where relationships go to die when you said that everybody just sort of nodded in agreement that's a good thing to put into your pitch I think when you can when you have a universal truth that people can agree on I agree with that I go on LinkedIn I say yes to everybody who's asked for a relationship and then I don't go back until I need to hire somebody for a job but it's basically like there's no vibrance each of those relationships for whatever reason you said that networks are very important especially in a down economy people starting their own gigs again more truisms and so we're all nodding and then you say hey this is gonna be a layer on top of all of your

networks and I immediately I thought Plaxo maybe something like that so tell us now that we owe and I'll give you my squares I think the pitch yeah six seven pitch is good I mean I would say if I got 15 seconds about more specifically what the product was this can be an eight or a nine pitch so that's good news and the idea I love this idea we had a company called rapportive pitch at the open angel form which is doing sort of CRM on top of your Gmail account so you can sort of find out I think these rap leaf to go font query and find out Oh Tyler at Mahalo com emailed you here's his page on you know here's information from his other pages as CrunchBase profile this profile that profile Facebook of its public so what exactly is the product is it software is it a toolbar is it a web service how does it work yeah it's a website and so when you connect on the website then you connect your account to all of your social networks as well as your email and then we consolidate all of those contacts we understand the different relationships we find out more information with their profile and then we look at your communication trends how often you communicate with different people look at their profiles and then give them essentially a rating and then send you weekly reports on who you should be in contact with more often people you may be kept in your extended network that you weren't aware of so really help you manage your larger network I think I understand what you're doing and I guess the proof would be in the pudding so we'll have to go check it out but I see that we that you actually have the site up and running how long is the site been and so we launched we actually launched that demo I guess two months ago and so we're still in early stages you know we we've got all the scaffoldings in place we've got several thousand users that are on there giving us pretty feedback right now and you know now we're just trying to get kind of usability and the overall you know the overall system complete but the intelligence engine we've been working on now for a couple of years got it and this is a venture back startup it's not no it's a boost job so we've we built this just the small team and you know we're now at a stage where we're actually looking for angel investment we're not looking for any large investment but you know we think we've got the opportunity we see where this needs to go but we just need some funding right now so you say that you uh launched a demo did you do like the one-minute launch thing or like the full five six minute launch thing no we did the full the full thing so you paid eighteen grand eighteen thousand five hundred you present there they gave you a discount they usually do yeah we presented there they made it affordable for a bootstrap company ah so how would you get half off I'm not really allowed to say any more than that it was worthwhile for us and it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of good people next time don't pay to pitch you know I think I got an issue with that you come to a launch conference or tech runs just wrapped or something we don't have to pay to pitch any other thoughts on the idea I'm gonna try it you sold me and if I like these kind of ideas now if you go log into Facebook and take all my contacts out of there doesn't that make Facebook shut down my account so we don't actually take all your contacts we just connect with Facebook so we use the API just to be able to understand that your kind of social graph and then when you log back in then you connect with the same information so we don't store the information on our system so you mean you can't go in there and take my contact the contact information of my network out of there on Facebook because they don't allow that with their API correct exactly yeah I mean we're not Plaxo right so this is your private address-book so this is Jason's address book that is on speed right so we take all of your different contacts we do some of the things a report of we find out more information about those people but this is a private for you only this is all of your address book and then from there we enable you to do a lot of things like CRM you know all the things you get from adaptive or a Salesforce we connect with things like MailChimp Zendesk so it's perfect for the entrepreneur small business or somebody who really cares about their network awesome well I'm definitely check it out and I see Tim nodding probably gonna check it out we'll be checking it out he's gonna well done you did good job all right thank you very much Cheers