Hey jseliger, I'm the director of marketing at mytriorings (been on hn since my last startup!). Are there any questions in particular you have about diamond buying? Happy to shed some light on any questions! We're a company started by young folks, I myself am only 25! We're disrupting the industry by making wholesale prices accessible for the everyday consumer who otherwise only has access to high end and big box retailers which overprice their products exorbitantly based on social "norms" (marketing funded by debeers in the past few decades) around diamonds. Hope you find some great feedback here, we also have a great deal of reviews on our website and on our amazon store!
This could very easily trim out months of debugging that we have to do with releases across platforms, Looking forward to giving it a run through our dev cycles
Was just asked that question on the original post, our response:
We applied to each of the conferences directly. At Disrupt, they liked what we were doing but weren't 100% sure about putting us on stage. We were persistent and they offered us a cocktail table. For Launch, Marc responded to Jason Calacanis' post on hacker news looking for innovative companies and we applied directly to the DEMO scholarship program. During our interview with DEMO we told them we were bootstrapped and couldn't pay for even a partial scholarship.
A big part of it this of course is selling your company's vision to them when they are evaluating you. If they get excited by the vision, they'll want you to come to their conference.
Thank god i never leave my private info in the comments of support tickets. Lets hope all this funding twitter has will help patch this stuff up quick!
Your first point hit home way too quickly! I made similar mistakes in my first 'business' which really made me appreciate the difficulties in starting a community oriented website. I found that I didn't truthfully answer the question about what value it provided and whether there was truly demand or whether it was a build it and they will come approach. When I left Co-opRatings the adage every end is a new beginning really came true though, good luck on the new endeavor!
He's actually a Northeastern alum whom I spoke with just a few weeks back! Great minds think alike and come out of NU! (disclaimer im one of the co-founders of Zazu)
Thanks and good luck! pun279