A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

When the existing business is to assume a major change or when planning a new venture, a three to five year business plan is required, since investors will look for their annual return in that timeframe.

Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.

Business plans are decision-making tools hence the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.

Business Plan Formats:

In most cases, start-ups would need to have the following formats of their business plan:

1. Elevator pitch – a thirty seconds (some will say three minutes)  summary of the business plan’s executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
2. Executive Summary – a short document (two or three pages) that summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports, in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all.
3. Business plan PowerPoint presentation – this post talks about this presentation
4. Financials Excel – this Excel should include your expected personnel growth, expenses and income. This should show the potential investor what will his money be used for, for how long will it last and where will it take the company.

The Business Plan presentation

There are many business plan templates available on the internet, and over the years I’ve built this template that would cover for what start-up investors would want to see. This is a template for an approximately 12-15 slide presentation that can be delivered in 30 minutes. It focuses more on the highlights and allows the investor to ask detailed questions.  This approach allows the company to touch on all the highlights before running out of time.

1. General intro of you as the speaker, including your role in the organization and a brief profile of the company (1 slide)

Who (the company, founders are, domain experience)
What (the company does in 10-12 words)
When (when founded, when First Customer Ship, when funded and by whom)
Where (markets customer you focus on)

2. Why  (1 slide)

What was the catalyst in the market or founders’ experience to spawn the company?
Why do your customers get inspired by your solution?
Why are you passionate about what you do?

3. The problem that your solution addresses (1-2 slides)

What is the problem?
Why is it a HUGE problem?
Why can’t it be solved by existing solutions?
Where does it exist?
Who has it?

4. How does your solution address it (1-2 slides)

What is it in simple terms?
Identify the IP or secret sauce?
How is it delivered and consumed?
How does it address the aforementioned problem?

5. Benefits (1 Slide)

If end-users implement your solution, what are the realistic benefits that can/will be derived from the solution? (They have to be compelling enough for people to 1) buy it and/or 2) remove/change what they are currently doing)
Is there an ROI story that drives this point home?

6. Go-to-market and business model (1-2 slides)

Who are you targeting and why?
How do you reach them?
What is your distribution strategy?

7. Business model (1-2 slides)

High level financials.
High level economics of the business.
Pricing and average transaction size.

8. Differentiation (1 Slide)

Why do you win and why do you lose  (an improvement over what is already in place and can be added to an environment) or revolutionary (requires more of a rip-and-replace deployment and radical re-thinking of how the problem can be addressed)?
What is your competitive positioning?

9. Market Traction (1 slide)

Key metrics that indicate your market penetration
How do you capture the rest of the market available to you?

10. Solution Road Map

What feature/functions are your customers demanding?
What are your plans to deliver them?

11. Goals

Where does the company want to be 3-years from now?
What are the enablers of these goals  (product, market, financing, go-to-market strategy, partnerships, etc.)?

12. Summarizing the story

What are you looking for?

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Most investors tend to favor really short presentations… and prefer having engaging conversations with founders who can tell a compelling story about what they do and how they will win in their market. Raising venture capital, like anything in this world, is all about inspiring your audience into action.

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Using multiples allows you to value a business in context. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson covers this particular topic in a recent article, taking five SaaS businesses (Salesforce, NetSuite, Constant Contact, Taleo and RightNow) and crunching the numbers to determine valuation multiples for each. Based on some rough financial estimates, Wilson’s analysis tallied the following averages for the five companies (to perform this calculation yourself, divide the enterprise price by revenue or EBITDA to get your multiple):

SaaS Price/Revenue 2011: 4.8x

SaaS Price/Revenue 2012: 3.9x

SaaS Price/EBITDA 2011: 66x

SaaS Price/EBITDA 2012: 31x

In the end, this calculation allows for an accurate assessment of a company’s true value. If you’re an SaaS company, look for a 4.8x valuation based on your revenue for this year, 3,9x for next year and so on.

For more on determining valuation multiples in various sectors, read the full article by Wilson.

The executive summary, in most cases, will create the first impression for your potential investor. You have about 30 seconds to grab an investor’s interest and you want to be clear and compelling. You do not need to explain the entire business plan, you just need to convey its essence, and its energy.

I’ve listed the key components that should be part of your executive summary. You should be able to do all this in six to eight paragraphs, possibly a few more if there is a particular point that needs emphasis and make each point in just two or three simple, clear, specific sentences. This means that your whole executive summary should be about two pages (maybe three). Most investors find that there is not enough information in one page to understand and evaluate a company.

Few tips for the road: Use simple English. Check your grammar and spelling. Avoid meaningless adjectives such as ‘top notch’ and ‘next generation’. State your value proposition and competitive advantage in positive terms, not negative terms. It is what you can do that is important, not what others cannot do. Lastly, Investors would rather invest in a company solving a desperate problem for a small growing market, than a company providing an incremental improvement for a large established market.

There is no template the fits all companies hence make sure you touch in each key issue, but don’t apply these points rigidly. You need to think through what points are most important in your particular case, what points are irrelevant, what points need emphasis, and what points require no elaboration.

1. Grab Attention – Start with the most compelling statement (a sentence or two) that explains of why you have a really good idea. Explain the unique solution that you have for a very big problem. Be specific, not abstract or conceptual. If you have some impressive names involved such as advisors, well known investors, companies you’re already working with etc. use it here.
2. The Problem – Explain the problem that you are solving, and make it clear why it’s a big problem (current or emerging). Your description should lay the foundation for your value proposition.
3. The Solution – What specifically are you offering and to whom? Service, software, hardware, combination? Use simple words and commonly used terms (avoid acronyms) to explain what you do to solve the problem you have identified. This is the place to briefly explain where you will integrate with the current value chain or who will you work with in your ecosystem. If you already have customers, and/or revenues, make it clear. If not, state when you will.
4. The Opportunity – Explain the basic market segmentation, size, growth and dynamics—how many people or companies, how many dollars, how fast the growth, and what is driving the segment. You will be better off targeting a meaningful percentage of a well-defined, growing market than claiming a microscopic percentage of a huge, mature market. Don’t claim you are addressing the $190 billion market of E-Commerce if you are only addressing the $5.7 billion of the mobile E-Commerce market.
5. Your Competitive Advantage – Whether it’s a direct competitor or an alternative solution – you have a competition, and you need to explain how are you better and what are your unique benefits (and no, ‘first mover advantage’ is not considered as competitive advantage).
6. The Business Model – Explain how are you going to generate revenues, from whom and how much. I’ve seen startups succeed without a clear revenue model (e.g. facebook in its early days, Twitter, etc.) however don’t rely on it when going to investors. Build a sustainable model and mention what are the critical metrics you’re going to be measured upon (e.g. number of licenses, subscriptions, page views, etc). What are your metrics showing today, and where will you be in 3 -5 years.
7. The Team – introduce your founding team, their roles and the relevant experience which made them the most suitable people for that role. If you can, state the names of brand name companies your team has worked for (don’t mention a name you aren’t happy to give the contact as a reference at a later date).
8. Summary Financial Projections – Your fundamental promise is to make your investors richer. The only way you can do that is if you can achieve a level of success that far exceeds the capital required to do that. You should show five years of revenues, expenses, losses/profits, cash and headcount. It might also make sense to show a key metric, such as number of customers or page views (e.g. in an advertising eyeball model).
9. Funding Required - This section details the amount of funding the organization requires, how those funds will be used, and the milestones the organization hopes to achieve using the funds. If you expect to be raising another round of financing later, make that clear, and state the expected amount.

And one more thing before you go – the most important sentence will not be in the executive summary, but in the email you (or your friend) will send to the investor. This email has to be short, well crafted, and to the point. It should sell your company, not describe it.

1. Have fun! – Armando Montelongo, the former Flip This House star who now mentors others on how to flip properties of their own, wins over his staff by simply being more fun, surprising employees with parties and outings, incentivizing them with contests, and showering them with attention.
2. Make realistic promises – Josef Gorowitz, CEO of Prodege, an online customer loyalty rewards program sais: “”What we give to our users is part of the revenue that we receive. We make sure we don’t overpromise; we pay out what we can.”
3. Stay competitive, always – Laura McMurray, CEO of Complete Landscaping Systems says “I want to win. I strive for excellence no matter what I’m doing”
4. Reward your fans – By 2001, Andy Levine, then the manager for the band Sister Hazel, had built an army of passionate fans that did everything asked of them: They put up posters, called radio stations, and even let the band sleep on their couches. Eventually, the fans approached Levine asking for a vacation, just “a weekend to grill out hot dogs and hamburgers and drink beer with the band.” Levine realized that by super-serving the fans he already had, they would be so thrilled with the experience that they would recruit more people to come join. Levine’s company Sixthman brings entire communities of fans together with their favorite bands.
5. Know your audience – David Prokupek, who treats his company Smashburger like a tech start-up, is constantly innovating and upgrading, from the overall aesthetics of the restaurant to the food itself. In just four years of operation, Smashburger has grown nationally by acting locally: Each one of its 111 locations offers a menu customized to the marketplace, which is antithetical to most other burger joints.
6. Keep your competitors close – “I knew a lot of really talented people that I met in competitive environments—we’d both be trying to get the same customer or same partner—and I took notice of them and created a relationship with them,” says Robert Wechsler, founder and CEO of Century Payments. When Wechsler launched Century Payments, he reached out to his old competitors, offering them a chance to innovate and retire early—an opportunity they couldn’t refuse.
7. Perform outside research – “We started the company to reset the mentality of how people think about videogaming,” says Brett Lovelady, CEO of Astro Gaming, which sells stylish videogame accessories for game enthusiasts. “We looked at anything that didn’t have to do with technology: sporting goods, toys, housewares—anything that was more pure design, and then we layered back in technology over the years. That change in perspective allowed us to see what people want and help us understand who we’re developing, designing, and defining products for.”
8. Address your weaknesses – President of Cadillac Stone Works Jeff Grail had said that Soon after they moved to Las Vegas, demand for fabrication-only construction businesses on the strip plummeted, and the company was in jeopardy of falling apart. “I knew I had a weakness, I found my weakness in my company, and I was able to turn that into a tremendous strength.” The result? Cadillac Stones Works went from near bankruptcy to unprecedented growth.
9. Be honest – Honesty and integrity are the cornerstones of Sundurance Energy, a company that designs, builds, operates, and maintains large-scale solar electric projects. “Being straight shooters with our customers and being very honest right from the upfront discussions is really a key part of our success,” says Allen Bucknam, CEO of Sundurance Energy. “We spend a lot of time rigorously estimating what we’re going to do, both from a cost and schedule perspective, so when we put that in front of the customer, we stick to it. No hassles.”
10. Keep your employees happy – “When I started the company, I really did it because I wanted the freedom,” says Sean Lonergan, president and CEO of PruGen Pharmaceuticals, a company that creates generic versions of prescription drugs. “I wanted to be able to go away when I pleased, so as I started adding employees on, it was really a lifestyle that I sold to the company too… I base the company on a lot of freedom.”

Read the full story

One more reason why choosing a great name is important: it’s a one-time cost and effort to get a great name, however the benefits are forever.

If dismiss it completely, you might have that small doubt about your branding. Once you have that doubt, it keeps on nagging, and it’s growing every year. The longer you wait, the more expensive this decision is, and the less chances you’ll actually do it.

These are suggestions not laws, and not all of them are weighted equally:

1. It provides a clue to what you do: Generally speaking, there are few options for a starup name: A) a name with a meaning (example: Salesforce.com, MailChimp). B) a name which has a twist to a word related to your business (example: Picasa, Quora). C) a name that means nothing or is not related to your business (example: Wufoo, Uber). The A type are usually easier to remember, the B type are smarter in a way, and as such are also easy to remember. The C type are harder to remember, however it’s easier to trademark and truly own them, then infuse them with meaning. I personally like simple names that convey a bit of what the company actually does or stands for.
2. The “.com” has to be available: The name’s .com domain has to be available for purchase from one of the domain registrators, or you should be able to purchase it from its current owner at a price you’re willing to pay. Don’t play tricks with the domain name like including hyphens, and stay away from clever domain names like del.icio.us for a simple reason; it’s difficult for people to type in domains that way. By the way, del.icio.us eventually bought and switched to delicious.com
3. The twitter @name has to be available: The same as the .com domain name. If it’s not available, don’t choose this name. It’s not as hard as finding an available .com domain, but it’s getting harder every day. No tricks with numbers and underscores and stuff.
4. The facebook page should be available: To test this, try visiting http://facebook.com/yourname and see if there’s something there.  Or, do a search on Facebook and see what you find.
5. Make it unambiguous when spoken: This one is important, because you don’t want your best marketing tool – word of mouth, to be un-functional. The best way to try it is to ask a friend what does he think of the name, and ask him to spell it. If too many of your friends get it wrong, choose a different name.
6. Buy the .com domains around your main name: if there are few options that people can spell your domain name, buy the whole set of different names and redirect them to your main domain name. For example if you choose the name: SmartTable.com, make sure you also buy SmarTable.com.
7. Make it easy to remember: There are two options to test this one: the first option is to write the name down, and after a day try to see if you still remember it. If you do, try also the second option: talk to a friend about the name, then after few minutes of conversation, ask him again, if he remembers the name. If he doesn’t, it means it’s hard to remember.
8. Keep it short: Generally, try to stay 10 characters or under. There are plenty of good reasons why it’s important to keep it short, however here two: A) The fewer the syllables, the easier it is for people to say, remember and type. B)  In the age of Twitter, the longer name you have, the less space you have to write in Twitter. The same goes for those who Retweet your tweets. Great examples of one and two-syllable names:  Dropbox, Mint, ZenDesk.
9. Try to get your main keyword into the name: It signals to potential visitors what they might find on the website and it helps with SEO. For example: SurveyMoney.
10. Don’t leave out vowels or add punctuation: If you do, you’ll need to keep on spelling your name from now on (“…the name is Flicker without the E”). Note that Yahoo eventually bought the domain name Flicker.com.
11. Make sure it’s not an offensive word in one of the popular languages: Check the name in different dictionaries such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, etc. You don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings and make a joke of yourself (and of your company).
12. Make it unambiguous in Google: Some of the ways to bring users to your site are using the search. It’ll be quite difficult for people to find your company’s website, if your name is something like “Ginger”. It’ll also be difficult for you to place yourself in a good position in Google search results. However there ARE examples where a startup started with a generic word and went on to be pretty successful (example: Mint.com).
13. Start early in the alphabet: Before the days of Google, this was one of the older tricks in the book to be listed on top of your competitors on YellowPages. In today’s world, this is done to make sure your company appears on the first page where few companies are listed in a multi-page directory.  Also, the first page of a multi-page directory usually passes more SEO authority to your website than subsequent pages.
14. Start with an uppercase letter: If it’s good for Google, Amazon, Yahoo and thousands of other really successful companies, it’s good enough for you. Don’t make yourself spend the time making sure that from now on, people will spell your name with a lower case letter. It just doesn’t worth the effort.
15. Check that it’s legal: This sounds obvious however most entrepreneurs skip this step. The good news is that if you’ve passed the steps above (.com domain, twitter name, etc) you are most likely to pass this one successfully. In the U.S., you should take a quick peek at http://uspto.gov.
16. Don’t name your company after yourself: There are few famous examples of successful companies that proudly carry the founder’s name (example: Dell), however to most customers this name will sound a bit amateurish. The other reason is that if you name the company after yourself, too many people are going to want to talk to you.  That’s ok when you’re the only person in the company to talk to, but becomes problematic as your startup grows and there are other people trying to sell/support/market.
17. Don’t Use An Acronym: It’s harder to remember, difficult to pronounce and it’s hard to get emotional about a three letter acronym. Yes, I know, there are successful companies like IBM which used the acronym quite successfully. By the way, all 3 letter domain names are taken already.
18. Pay attention to character sequences in multi-word names: If you have a name that is two words stuck together, then be mindful of what character ends the first word, and what starts the second.  I’d stay away from names where both of those letters are the same.  Example: BetterReading is sub-optimal (because Better ends with “R” and reading starts with “R”.  There’s also that popular example of unfortunate character sequences:  expertsexchange.com.  When capitalized properly, this name is just fine (ExpertsExchange) which is what the site owners intended.  But, it turns out, this can be confused as “ExpertSexChange” (which is not what was intended).
19. Have a story:  When someone asks (and they will), so why did you pick X for your name, it’s nice to have something relatively interesting to say.  Names are a part of your personality, and the absence of a personality is rarely a good thing.
20. Seek timeless instead of trendy: It seems that every generation of startups has their own “trendy” approach to names.  Examples are the dropping-vowels thing (like Flickr), the breaking up of words (like del.icio.us) or the newly fashionable “.ly” names.  I’d suggest that names that don’t necessarily indicate when you started are a good. Pick a name that is timeliness, not one that people will see 10 years from now and not think “Hey, they’re one of those companies…”.

Save yourself some of that future pain, and invest early in picking a decent name.  You may still get it wrong, but at least you’ll know you tried.

SmartBird is an ultralight but powerful flight model with excellent aerodynamic qualities and extreme agility. With SmartBird, Festo has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds – one of the oldest dreams of humankind.

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings not only beat up and down, but also twist at specific angles. This is made possible by an active articulated torsional drive unit, which in combination with a complex control system attains an unprecedented level of efficiency in flight operation. Festo has thus succeeded for the first time in creating an energy-efficient technical adaptation of this model from nature.

This video was shot by Flickr user ldrose two hours after the live demo of SmartBird inside the auditorium at TEDGlobal. Festo engineers brought the bird outside to Holyrood Park, in central Edinburgh, and sent it up into the sky. Eyewitnesses said that, almost immediately, out of an empty sky, SmartBird was swarmed by seagulls, dozens of them, each taking a turn to dive at the giant bird.

A project called The Startup Genome interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups and released the first Startup Genome Report— a 67 page in-depth analysis on what makes early-stage Internet startups successful.

This is a fascinating report. If you’re an entrepreneur, an internet startup founder or an investor I warmly recommend reading it.

They did not analyze and compare startups based on the traditional differentiation that is based on startups’ type of user and payer, which was essentially B2C vs. B2B. One reason is that the problem with that approach is that it doesn’t take into account that with the evolution of software as a service and cloud computing, many B2B startups can behave like B2C startups if their product is simple and cheap enough, given that employees have the autonomy to make purchase decisions without needing approval from decision makers or the IT department.

Instead The Startup Genome defines different types of internet startups:

Type 1

• The Automizer

Common characteristics: self-service customer acquisition, consumer focused,product centric, fast execution, often automize a manual process.

Examples: Google, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Slideshare, Mint, Groupon, Pandora,Kickstarter,Zynga, Playdom, Modcloth, Chegg, Powerset, Box.net, Basecamp,Hipmunk, OpenTable etc.

• Type 1N – The Social Transformer

Common characteristics: self service customer acquisition, critical mass,runaway user growth, winner take all markets, complex ux, network effects,typically create new ways for people to interact.

Examples: Ebay, OkCupid, Skype, Airbnb, Craigslist, Etsy, IMVU, Flickr, LinkedIn, Yelp, Aardvark, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Youtube, Dailybooth, Mechanical Turk, MyYearbook, Prosper, Paypal, Quora, Hunch, etc.

Type 2

• The Integrator

Common characteristics: lead generation with inside sales reps, high certainty,product centric, early monetization, SME focused, smaller markets, often takeinnovations from consumer Internet and rebuild it for smaller enterprises.

Examples: PBworks, Uservoice, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Dimdim, HubSpot, Marketo Xignite, Zendesk, GetSatisfaction, Flowtown, etc.

• Type 3 – The Challenger

Common characteristics: enterprise sales, high customer dependency, complex& rigid markets, repeatable sales process.

Examples: Oracle, Salesforce, MySQL, Redhat, Jive, Ariba, Rapleaf, Involver,BazaarVoice, Atlassian, BuddyMedia, Palantir, Netsuite, Passkey, WorkDay, Apptio,Zuora, Cloudera, Splunk, SuccessFactor, Yammer, Postini, etc.

Following are some of their key findings:

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

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Download the full Startup Genome report here.

Over the years, Amazon kept reinventing itself, rethink it’s business model and has has positioned itself as a pioneer in cloud computing services and as a leading online retailer.

Here’s an interesting presentation about the story of Amazon:

From PatientsLikeMe that proves that people are willing to compromise their privacy and share their medical records, through Groupon that reinvented the concept of group-buying, to KickStarter that uses a relatively new concept called ‘Crowd Funding’.

Usually when a startup is at this stage, the founders are struggling between spending time on developing the real product and spending time on creating the best looking Launching Soon page.  They want to have some online presence and they want to start collecting a list of potential customers, until the service will be launched.

So we gave LaunchRock a try on 3DPrintingModel and the results are amazing indeed. 15% of the visitors that come to the site, convert and register and the number of visitors grow rapidly.

It’s amazing to see how people actually react to a good looking Launching Soon, even if they don’t really understand what the product is, and it’s even more amazing to see that they are willing to share it in order to get promoted in the list of early invites.

LaunchRock, a recently launched startup allows creating a viral “Launching Soon” page in minutes. LaunchRock was created during StartupWeekend in Philadelphia and was built and launched in few hours. It generated over 25,000 visits to their website and over 2,200 mentions on Facebook and Twitter over the next four days, and then the story was picked up by TechCrunch.

The product aims to streamline the process of building a Launching Soon page, and making it go viral:

• Create a “coming soon” page in minutes (it’s hosted on their servers)
• Promise early access to the future website for anyone who signs up themselves and at least three friends and give them the tools to very easily promote it on Twitter, Facebook and email

LaunchRock was built on a very successful concept that was very well performed by Hipster. Hipster Got 10K Signups In Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does.

What’s your experience with the Launching Soon phase?