Dragon's Den Ep1 (or, "I was wrong")

Okay, apologies to everyone outside of the UK. Yesterday I told you that you could watch the BBC's entrepreneur show Dragon's Den online, but it turns out the online feed is only available in the UK.

As a kind of half-assed attempt to make it up to you, here's a brief summary of the first show in the series, which made for joyously painful viewing.

First pitcher up was Nick, with his multimedia coffee table. Damn this was painful... His nervousness ruined his pitch, but the best pitch in the world couldn't really have swung it for him. Basically a table-top PC with some wireless multi-media features, retailing for $6-10K dollars. The first question was "Are you serious?", and it just went downhill from there. He also completely failed to explain who might want his product and what benefits it might give them. Painful, painful... When your potential investors make faces like this:-



and this:-



and best of all:-



You might want to take the hint. This guy (2 kids) is selling his his house to invest in the product. Dude, please don't sell your house!

Takeaway: Amongst dozens of others, be able to explain the benefits of your product.

A quick failed pitch for a quirky map followed, then came James and his system for preventing overflowing baths. This one was good, nice pitch, nice product. Nothing really to criticize here, except that having ownership issues on the patent limited the investment potential. He was offered £150,000 for 40% of the company, but turned the deal down because he only wanted to give away 10%. He said in the interview afterwards that he would have taken it for 30%. Hopefully he doesn't regret holding out for that little bit extra.

Dog fashion designers, a hog style 25MPH bio diesel motorcycle, and book stands in coffee shops all failed to generate any interest.

An ex-teacher with a bit of a hygiene obsession was next. She was pitching individually wrapped toilet seat covers for women on the go, and a furry toilet seat cover for cold nights. For a bit of background, those paper disposable toilet seat covers that you find in dispensers in many US public toilets are quite rare here in the UK.

So basically, she got a little bit of interest, there's probably a market here for the disposables. It started to fall apart when she was asked what she wanted the money for. It all got very inconsistent, she didn't know her numbers, and didn't know how the investment was going to help her. The final problem was that the seat covers were elasticated and couldn't be flushed...

Takeaway: If you're going to meet investors, you must be able to explain what the money is for, and you should know the numbers.

A pitch for a west end musical from two guys who had never put on a show before, a guy trying to sell a table planning service for around £400-£500 a time (don't these people know Andy Brice has table planning all sewn up?), and a multimedia driving instructor program also all failed to get any interest.

Finally, another James was pitching his waterless egg boiler. This was cool, it cooks the eggs using a soft thermal element. It was a fine idea, nice prototypes, everything patented, and seemed like a good investment.

The only problem here was that none of the prototype demos worked. At all. First time he forgot to put in the egg. The next two just didn't cook, he couldn't explain why... and then he was out of eggs. The demo made the whole thing painful to watch, but he was still offered his investment for 40% (as usual, he was offering 10%) by two of the investors, and he took the deal.

Takeaways:-

• Test, test, and test again. And take plenty of eggs.
• It's not just software that falls apart the first time you try to demo it.
• Sometimes a failed demo isn't the end of the world.

Tags: dragon's den entrepreneurship micro isv