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(This is the second part of our comparison of two SeedStart BD speakers. See Part One here.)

What is business development? 

That depends on who you talk to. 

Meet Ben Luban, Director of BD at AOL and Florent Peyre, VP of Strategy and BD at GiltCity. They have similar titles, but Ben works at a big company, Florent at a fast growing startup. They definitely have similarities and differences in attitude. As an entrepreneur, you should know both perspectives of the deal.


WHO DO YOU TALK TO? 

Big Company says: Go to the BD guy.
Startup says: Go to the top. 

BEN: Start with the big company’s BD person instead of the CEO (the decision-making process will trickle down to BD person anyway). A lot of BD people have MBA/JD/Finance backgrounds, so they can do a lot of the negotiation and paperwork with you.

FLORENT: Think really big! Never feel like you should only talk to the BD guy – go straight to the top, because if you have a mandate from the top, it’s best. Once you finally get to the BD guy, he might not be that happy because it’s a forced relationship, so make him feel smart and loved; be super flexible. Remember, if you pitch the CEO, make sure you are pitching something substantial (don't pitch becoming a link on their site).
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What is business development? 

That depends on who you talk to. 

Meet Ben Luban, Director of BD at AOL and Florent Peyre, VP of Strategy and BD at GiltCity. They have similar titles, but Ben works at a big company, Florent at a fast growing startup. They definitely have similarities and differences in attitude. As an entrepreneur, you should know both perspectives of the deal. 


WHY DO DEALS?

Startup says: To grow fast (maybe, get bought).
Big Company says: To grow via calculated choices on whether to build, buy, or partner with a company.

FLORENT: As the BD guy in a startup, it’s easy to get into a mode of running from meeting to meeting. But movement is not necessarily progress. Don’t do deals just for deal’s sake, since every deal will take a lot of time (imagine all the effort it takes to get from pitch to first meeting to second meeting, etc. and multiply those tasks by X potential partners), so make sure the deal is right for you. Do deals:
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Charlie O'Donnell is a Principal at First Round Capital, working on very early stage investments in the New York City area. He founded nextNY and was Voted 100 Most Influential People in New York Tech. He was also co-founder & CEO of Path 101 which raised $500K and was a Business Insider Startup 2009 Finalist. Follow him on his blog or @ceonyc
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be your own super user
CLASS SPEAKER VINICIUS VACANTI Co-Founder & CEO of Yipit Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit, a service that finds and recommends the best daily deals in your city by learning your tastes. He left finance, with his co-founder Jim Moran, in the summer of 2007 with the ridiculous notion that he could build web products. It took him six months to realize he had no idea what he was doing. After a few days of soul searching, he decided to push forward spending the next 12 months learning to become an entrepreneur. Before working in finance, he graduated from Harvard College in 2003 with a degree in Applied Mathematics. Twitter: @vacanti Website: vacanti.me
OVERVIEW

Most startups spend way too much time perfecting a product. Vin Vacanti, CEO of Yipit, says: get your idea to product as soon as possible, test it for honest feedback (not chicken soup for the founder's ego) and become your own super user. 


BRINGING YOUR IDEA TO PRODUCT, ASAP

"You can sit here and spend nine months pontificating about what your customers might like and not like; but the truth is, the first day you have someone sit down and play with your product, you'll learn more than the last nine months you spent thinking about it." Vinicius Vacanti, Co-Founder & CEO of Yipit.

Rent the Runway knew girls wanted high fashion looks for glamorous nights out, but didn't want to deal with the anxiety of investing in piece after piece. What they didn't know was whether those girls would go so far as to rent luxury dresses and feel comfortable enough to talk about it.
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Yipit in 3 Days 06/14/2011
 
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CC: yipit
FACTS

Launched Feb 2010
Raised $1.3M in Series A (three months after launch)
Seven people currently on the team
Aggregates 500 daily deal services that can be customized according to preferred interests/locations
Co-Founder, CEO: Vinicius Vacanti
Co-Founder: Jim Moran


SIMPLE PRODUCT

Yipi's first version took one year to build. Their second version took three months. Their third version took three days.


PROVE OUT YOUR #1 RISK

Yipit’s biggest risk: “are we actually building something that will make people click and open their e-mail to see?"

Longer Read: The Shortcut We Took to Build Yipit in Three Days

Shorter Read: Yipit wanted to find out if their idea was good or bad by proving out their #1 risk - would people actually click and open their e-mails to get customized local daily deals The only people who could answer this question were potential users (not friends and family who praised their idea). In order to get potential users, they had to build a prototype that could take months to build. Yipit decided to take a shortcut by cutting their list of features to a bare minimum and creating a simple prototype as fast as possible. Realizing the crawler they needed to build to aggregate deals would take weeks to build poorly and months to build correctly, they decided to collect deals manually so they could immediately see if people liked the idea or not. Yipit ended up building their product in three days. Four days after that, they signed up 2,000 users. The idea was tested, put into market and received accurate feedback in just seven days. 
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