It wasn’t exactly American Idol, but the crowd at the Clark County PubTalk on Wednesday evening was pumped anyway. Their task was to choose which local company delivered a pitch that showed the most promise of business success.
Would it be Bowserwear, which makes bandages for a pet’s sore paws?
How about Stark Foundations, pitching a foundation system for wind turbines and other towers that can be built without structural concrete?
Or would the audience go with GroEasy Inc., a company that makes gardening easy with its grow bags and soft-sided planters that attach to fences, trees or buildings?
The capacity crowd of 121 people, the largest in PubTalk’s 15-month history, voted in a business-card ballot. At evening’s end, Bowserwear came up as the winner. Its Healers brand products made sense to owners of pets with aching paws and also to one audience member who argued that the bandages would protect his hardwood floors from toenail damage.
Terri Entler, the company’s founder and CEO, said the paw bandages and orthopedic products just made sense to her as an entrepreneur trained in both business management and engineering. “My dog hurt himself and I couldn’t find a product that worked,” she said Thursday. “The engineer in me said there’s got to be something better.”
While the companies all pitched products developed based on an intuitive sense of need and market demand, the evening was structured to give the entrepreneurs a hard-headed critique of their ideas. Four panelists, with different areas of professional expertise in evaluating startups, offered questions and comments. A common theme: all were good ideas, but the companies lack in marketing expertise and are at risk of losing out to better-financed, more savvy competitors who might appear suddenly. Panelists also pressed the three presenters for details about how they would spend any investment funds and encouraged them to develop a focused strategy for launching their products.
Venture capitalist Michael A. Kaplan, managing principal of Portland-based GK Ventures LLC, took a philosophical approach by encouraging the entrepreneurs to establish personal credibility. “You are asking all kinds of people to trust you,” he said.
And, Kaplan added, businesses should expect the unexpected. “Apple didn’t start out as a music company or a phone company,” he said. “Companies almost always become something different than what they started out as.”
Bowserwear’s Entler, who said she was seeking $500,000 in startup finding, on Thursday said such comments were very valuable to her.
“The contacts I made last night are really going to add some momentum to the company,” she said.
