I’m proud to announce Zigtag has qualified for the Dragon’s Den, thank you for everyone who voted for me.
It’s a super interesting concept in that I’ve got 30 minutes to convince them to invest in Zigtag at the end of the taping they either decide to invest individually, in a syndicate or not at all. We negotiate the investment and equity on the spot and if all the stars align, shake hands and have a done deal. THAT is a pretty pressure filled 30 minutes.
These investors have to have some serious instincts to be able to invest 5 or 6 figures in companies with about 30 minutes of due diligence. Pretty wild! Rumor has it they’ll see upwards of 100 deals in the next week. The show will air on CBC in Canada in October.
Tomorrow the five dragons I’ll be facing are:
* Kevin O’Leary, popular host of ROB TV’s SqueezePlay, he sold his educational software firm to Mattel for $3.2 billion dollars.
* Robert Herjavec, sold his IT security firm at the height of the dot.com boom for over a $100 million dollars.
* Lawerence Lewin, founder of La Senza, a chain of lingerie shops with more than 194 stores around the world.
* Jim Treliving, a former RCMP officer who now owns Boston Pizza. In 2005, his resturants generated well over $400 million in sales.
* Jennifer Wood, whose career in the cattle business started in 1990, and is now one of the most influential executives in the Canada’s beef industry.
The 5 dragons are all Canadian success stories. Self-made millionaires. I respect that!
Wish me luck! Hopefully I survive the attack of the dragons.
Okay loyal readers, friends, family, bloggers and Google searchers, Zigtag needs your help!
You’ve been reading this blog for months an not even clicked on an ad. Well I have something even better for you to click on!
Zigtag auditioned for a TV show last week called the Dragons Den. The CBC Canada show is based on the BBC version by the same name (and kicks ASS on the US edition American Inventor). In the show companies present a 10 minute pitch to the Dragons (5 angel/venture investors) and then negotiate live with the Dragons for their investment. Compress the entire process of pitching and negotiating into a single show – that’s my idea of efficient investing.
Let’s show them the power of the blogosphere. I need you to go vote and ideally spread the word to your friends, family and fellow blog readers. I need massive grassroots campaign to let the TV show producers know that cool Canadian software companies need a shot.
I’m sure there will be tons of cool widgets on the show, but getting a software company on TV won’t be quite as easy. Software isn’t nearly as visual as the latest solar beer chiller that keeps your beer cold in the sun (no that’s not on the show but you can steal the idea if you want to).
With enough votes and comments from people expressing they need a better way to search, save and share information, they won’t be able to deny me.
So go vote if you’re really excited about Zigtag, feel free to add some comments in the post expressing why the you need what Zigtag is offering.
As a bonus for your clickage, this is the first public information (other than our new 30 second ad.) on what Zigtag is up to. Go get a sneak peek into what Zigtag is going to be all about.
Another announcement I’ve been meaning to make is I’ve taken the leap and am now focusing full time on Zigtag as of July 1st. Prior to that I was working part time for the last company I created. Giving up a nice income stream is a small price to pay for the ability to put 100% focus on Zigtag.
We’re in the process of arranging a small angel round of financing (of which we’ve had our first piece close already. YAY!). The Dragon’s Den opportunity is not only a source of investment, but also an opportunity to get national TV exposure for Zigtag and it looks like it would be a ton of fun!
As a further update, Zigtag is currently in early alpha and in use by a select handful of adventurous users. We’ve got a few months of development remaining to get the right feature set in place that makes it easy for users to search, save and share their information. If you haven’t yet signed up to be one of the first users, please goto Zigtag and sign up now.
Scroll all the way to the bottom of that post for the voting box.
—
[SPONSOR] In the spirit of this post, our sponsor Domain Name Bakery has a new featured domain name up for sale Outvote.com clicking on the ad will save you $100. How’s that for product placement?
Podcasts are hot and getting hotter. But advertising on podcasts is just getting started. One reason? Lack of content. That’s right it’s a chicken and egg problem.
Well Zigtag is giving your a free chicken right now! (Or is it an egg?)
Here is a 30 second advertisement for Zigtag. Add it to your podcast where you think an ad would be a great sell. Sure I’m not a paying advertiser… but your listeners won’t know it. They’ll hear the ad and realize they too should be advertising but actually should pay you some money.
It will be a great way to start advertising on your podcast, and it would be a great service for Zigtag as well. It’s hard to sell ads if you don’t have any ads already, so I’d love to be your first ad just to get the ball rolling!
You can download it from http://web2.0central.com/zigtag30.mp3 and add it you your podcast.
This idea was inspired by Kevin Burton’s Adsense angel funding idea where he asked bloggers to add his Adsense ID to some or all of their advertisements as a way of community funding for TailRank.
I’m not quite as smart as Kevin as his concept actually generated some income, but if anyone takes me up on this, hopefully a few more people come sign up at Zigtag and maybe you even get a real paying advertiser.
So, if you decide to add this add to your podcast, comment on this post and I’ll keep a running list of anyone who decides to show us support.
Reg
P.S. This was my first cut at creating a podcast ad using Garageband. I think it’s okay but love any feedback on the content or presentation. Blast away!
Web 2.0 Central profiles companies and startups building web based applications using technologies like Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Flash, RSS, Open API's and assorted web based application development tools.
Zigtag in Toronto - Taking on the Dragon’s Den
