Demo Day – Thursday 2 June

We are all finishing off final preparations.  It’s Demo Day this Thursday!

In preparation this week we had a ‘Dragon’s den’ session on Tuesday.  And another pitching session at Wednesday’s ‘Meet and Experience’.  On Friday we had a practice run with Cliff Bowden from the NZ Bookkeepers Association.  Cliff has very kindly offered to introduce us to the crowd on Demo Day.

Below: R9Accelerat0r teams check out the Embassy theater to get ready for pitching on demo day.

Inland Revenue Transformation – Workshop for Bookkeepers

2Shakes has had some great engagement with Inland Revenue on the R9 Accelerator.  This week Ata attended a workshop with Bookkeepers held at Inland Revenue in Wellington.

Above: Bookkeepers helping Inland Revenue staff to understand what they do and how they help Sole Traders, Small & Medium Businesses in NZ.

Early Adopters Survey 1

We have sent out our first survey to our Early Adopter bookkeepers. This starts our process of working with our early adopters to co-design our solution.  The survey is 10 quick questions to better understand what bookkeepers do when they sign up clients.  Stay tuned and we will share what we have learned.

Public Relations 101

We got some expert advice on PR via Skype from the amazing Josh Jones-Dilworth (twitter: @joshdilworth web: www.jones-dilworth.com/).

Earn your Media

Public Relations and earned media is something that we can all use to help influence change and to help us do our jobs better.  So we thought you might be interested in what we learnt too.  Public Relations is based on credibility and it influences what people think. It is different from Advertising, which is about visibility and influences what people do.  Start ups can earn media, earn an audience, by having value as an expert in a subject.

Have A VERY CLEAR Message

Start ups need to have a very clear message about what they do.  The best messaging – has the courage to be incomplete! If you tell someone everything then there is no desire to want to know more.  Messaging needs to focus on one of the 4 value propositions….

• Save me TIME!
• Give me (or make me) MONEY!
• Lets have FUN!
• Give me STATUS!

What’s our message? The first words on our website give away our thoughts on this, shaped  – get recognised! Our solution helps bookkeepers status as a professional, acting for their client, get recognised.

Provide EASY ACCESS to media resources

Following on from Josh’s advice we are now working on setting up a 2Shakes media page.  We want to make it easier to give a journalist material they can pick up and use.  We will provide our story, logo, quotes, and we will be looking at creating a video…. all so we can make it easier for others who want to tell our story too.

Accelerator finishes, due diligence begins

This is week twelve of the Accelerator.  What happens after Demo Day you may ask?

On Demo Day the panel will award ‘due dilligence‘ funding.  This funds teams until the end of July.  It gives time for teams to agree further funding from their agency sponsors or from other sources. 2Shakes has a strong pitch and we are hopeful that we will be awarded due diligence funding.  Stay tuned – we will tell you the outcome of the panels decision in next weeks update.

Below: Pictures of the cohort during our final week (it was King of the Jungle day). We’ll miss this!