Sonru.com

The finale of iGAP took place yesterday in Enterprise Ireland’s HQ. The participants had to pitch to a tough judging panel, an audience of investors, other start ups and support agencies. We were delighted to be selected as one of the four winners along with Trezur.com, Eurolanguages.com and Getitkeepit.com. iGAP 2 was announced yesterday by Frank Ryan, CEO of Enterprise Ireland which is a great result for the founding team behind iGAP. Read on for more information on my experience of the programme and the final yesterday,

Overall iGAP was a phenomenal experience. iGAP was developed by Enterprise Ireland and the Internet Growth Alliance and is aimed exclusively at high potential internet start-ups. The participants are Ireland's cream of the crop in the Internet Space, it was a great honour for Sonru to be able to bang around ideas, get feedback and help from these guys. There was a mixture of participants who had previously launched internet businesses who had failed but were back again with a better idea and armed with a massive amount of knowledge and experience - it was great to learn from this.
The structure of the programme was excellent. At the beginning I think most of the participants wanted to get stuck into the fund raising section but this was last and I can see the logic behind this. The biggest reason for start-ups not raising funding is that their idea is not that good or is just not at that investor ready stage. I felt that iGAP brought a lot of the participants to that investor ready stage.

Brian Caulfield  gathered some major speakers and trainers to come and work with us, a lot of whom travelled from the US and the UK. Big names like Sean Ellis, Oren Michels, Ed Bussey  and Johnathan Dillon. These were not just consultants that worked in the space 10 years ago, they are close to the industry they are in the middle of it right now. They have launched and sold successful internet businesses, some are still doing so. That makes a big difference.
Justin Kneckht was excellent, we have really taken his advise on board and are currently undergoing a large body of usability work based on his feedback, we'll keep you posted.
Our Cohort group was great, I really enjoyed working with Joe Drumgoole and Eamon Leonard of Cloudsplit.com, Eamonn O’Brien, Alan Barrett and Amy Noonan from EventElephant.com and Ger Hartnett and Frank Hannigan of Goshido.com. Our Implementation coach was David Mac Donald who kept us calm and on the straight and narrow during the sessions.
I hope we can do the course justice, there was so much knowledge passed on that it is difficult to take it all in but over the next 6 months we hope to implement as much of it as we can.

Then the icing on the cake was to be named a 'Best of Breed' in yesterday's final where we had to pitch our proposition to a serious panel of judges such as Colm Lyon,   Ray Nolan, Colm Healy, Rob Corbet, Breon Corcoran and chaired by Enterprise Ireland's Ray Walsh.

The standard of the pitches at the finale was outstanding, If I was a VC in that room I'd be getting my cheque book out!
My top 3 were:
www.dbtwang.com, www.trezur.com and www.cloudsplit.com

iGAP 2 was announced by Frank Ryan, CEO of Enterprise Ireland on the day which is a great result for the founders of the programme. Well  done to all involved. Also a bit of a plug to our CEO Fergal who was involved in the founding team of iGAP in his days of the IIA. It was Fergal's last major project in the IIA and it was certainly well worth doing.

If you are an internet start-up in Ireland you would be mad not to apply for igap 2, get a move on!
Feel free to give me a call too if you want to find out more about the programme.

Well done to Enterprise Ireland too for pushing this, great work. 

Ed
Founder, Sonru.com