Do you love to travel? I do and have had the opportunity to set foot on four of the seven continents and will touch all seven before I leave this planet. Caroline Allison has a similar passion for travel, so much that she created Viscape to help people connect and become better educated about the places they are going.

Viscape is social marketplace for travelers, owners, and real estate professionals to come together to network, exchange ideas, conduct business, meet and organize trips around vacation properties and second homes.

I recently had a chance to interview her and discuss her lessons learned as a small business owner and the state of the travel industry. Here is a transcript of part two of our two-part interview:

Steve: Switching gears a bit, I would like to talk about entrepreneurship in general. What has been some of your biggest successes in building this company over the last few years?
Caroline: Viscape is growing exponentially.  We are growing our membership organically and we have had unbelievable growth in a very short time.

Viscape is my third company.  I’ve been working on it for more than two years, but we only went live 3 months ago.  We’re already generating revenue.  People love our concept.  I just have a hunch that Viscape is going to be a roaring success!

Steve: Since we all must fail in order succeed at our highest potential, what are mistakes you have made that you would impart on those entrepreneurs looking to start a business but afraid of failure?
Caroline: Fail forward fast.  I live by this daily.  We all make mistakes.  But its only by learning from our mistakes that we switch gears and make better decisions.

Steve: As we close the interview you have a great new way for people to become travelogues and global travelers. What is the program you are launching?
Caroline: What a great question, Steve!  Yes, we do!!!  On our site, people can be their own travel writers — share stories and post pictures about their trips!  It is such a cool way to share with your friends and with other Viscapers.  Plus, we have an extra added bonus where if you write an incredible review, you have a shot at winning our “Be a travel writer” contest.  First prize gets to go to Key West or Belize and second prize gets to go to an East Coast destination with the Viscape crew.  The details are on the “My Sweet Viscape” blog at http://blog.viscape.com.  You can get tips for how to write a great review.

Do you love to travel? I do and have had the opportunity to set foot on four of the seven continents and will touch all seven before I leave this planet. Caroline Allison has a similar passion for travel, so much that she created Viscape to help people connect and become better educated about the places they are going.

Viscape is social marketplace for travelers, owners, and real estate professionals to come together to network, exchange ideas, conduct business, meet and organize trips around vacation properties and second homes.

I recently had a chance to interview her and discuss her lessons learned as a small business owner and the state of the travel industry. Here is a transcript of part one of our two-part interview:

Steve: You have worked to help build many technology startups. What was the motivation to start Viscape?
Caroline: My own frustration with travel planning, especially when finding a vacation rental. I found that for each day I’d go on vacation, I would spend an equivalent day on the internet to plan the trip. It got so bad that I stopped planning completely. I just didn’t have the time to surf 100+ different sites (no joke) to piece together a trip. I just knew that a site had to exist where people could help each other.

Steve: You definitely are passionate about traveling and seeing the world. When you looked at the travel web site landscape and decided to start Viscape, what was most frustrating to you?
Caroline: Just my own frustration with trip planning. I can’t stand trip planning. I go on these travel sites and they are geared towards a business transaction. Many travel sites out there are boring, in my opinion. They have horrible photo-shopped pictures and marketing writing that is cheesy and unauthentic. Our site is about real people sharing their experiences by reviewing destinations and vacation homes. You can connect with the very people who have been to these destinations and get tips and additional information to help plan. This helps optimize your trip especially if you have friends coming.

Steve: How do you see the online travel marketplace now? What trends do you see evolving over the next 12-24 months?
Caroline: I think there will be more sites that allow people to connect with each other and share information. People will be more adventurous because they will learn about new places and want to recreate others’ experiences. More social travel sites will emerge to serve this.

Steve: When you created Viscape, was the motivation to bring social networking into the site something you wanted from the beginning or did the trends social media motivate this?
Caroline: Personal experience. Every time I planned a trip, I just wanted to talk to someone and get the “cliff notes” of what was good. After all, we only get 2 weeks off per year. It better be good!
Plus, I wanted a way to plan a trip with friends that I could feel good about, and not be embarrassed that I didn’t read enough reviews or talk to the right people. Check on my bio on the Viscape site, which tells the story (under “About us”).

Steve: How exactly does the site work for buyers?
Caroline: From my research, there are no sites that exist that focus exclusively on vacation property sales. There are several national sites, but they do not cater to the vacation property niche like we do.
On our site, search is super simple. All of the homes show up on a map, which is extremely helpful because you see if the house is on the beach, by the beach, or inland. All of this has a big impact on price. It saves you tons of time!

Steve: Does the site allow sellers to market or is this a strictly third party tool? Can they communicate with people looking at renting their properties?
Caroline: Yes. We have an open philosophy, meaning that we enable owners and real estate professionals to list their properties on our site. We know that we will not serve a complete marketplace if we only serve owners or only serve real estate professionals. So as a result, we do not charge listers to list their properties on our site. Many realtors do not have an advertising budget – so “free” is very compelling. Did I mention that it is FREE to list a vacation property on Viscape for rent, sale or swap? Many people don’t believe me when I say this.

When people join our community, they have many tools available to them to communicate with each other and communicate with others in destinations where they are considering either renting or buying. This is very powerful for renters, buyers, and sellers to confidently to transact with each other.

Next Time: In Part 2 of this interview we talk about entrepreneurship in general, failing to succeed and a cool new program that Viscape is launching that you can participate in! Be on the look out for the next part of the interview for details.

We recently attended a local event called Social Matchbox at the Teqcorner office in McLean, VA. On its eighth time around, the event is getting to be quite popular with around 150 people in a fairly large conference space. It was standing room only and with the A/C accidentally turned off at 5pm, it was a “hot event”.

The event is put on by Robert Neelbauer who runs JobMatchbox.com which is a job recruiting site and is based in the DC area. It is essentially “speed dating” for startups to present their idea, say what kind of talent they are looking for and network with those looking for jobs at a startup.

It is a nice change from the tech council networking events where startups are almost non-existent and government contracting is the topic of almost everything. It is part of the cutting edge startup/web 2.0 scene that makes up what the Washington Post calls a “Twin Tech Town” with the other half consisting of the big government contracting companies. Many familiar faces in the DC tech scene where there including our own Social Media Swami, Shashi Bellamkonda, who took some great pictures which are in a slide show below.

The list of who presented had some familiar faces but many were new and their demos/presentations were all over the place in terms of style and content. Here is the list of those who presented:

- Clearspring
- AddyMate
- 100 Dimensions
- emPivot
- Contribune
- folioFN
- Freewebs
- Hireworx
- Hotpads
- iBelong
- Innovative Query
- MixedInk
- OurCoupleSpace
- Positive Energy
- Razoo
- ScriptAct
- ShareMeme
- Ubernote
- Viscape

It reminded me of the time when I was raising money for a previous startup and my work on the venture pitch. It had to be honed and scripted and tight (usually with a time limit). This event had companies whose presentations where all over the place in terms of style, content and quality. So many people have great ideas but they sometimes have a hard time communicating to the public their concept to get people excited about joining or funding their company. This is on the heels of Jason Calacanis’ e-mail to his followers about getting ready for their TechCrunch50 conference which is a direct competitor to the DEMO conference.

Now I am not here to praise or bash particular companies that presented nor do I want to be the Simon Cowell of judging presentations, but I thought it would be good to give those small business readers out there a top 10 list of things you should know if you have to present your business to people. Let’s get started:

1.) Know your audience - Are you raising money? Attracting talent? Selling to potential customers? Tune the presentation accordingly

2.) Show your product in the first 60 seconds – This is from Jason’s list and it is critical you show people you actually have something. The best presentations of that event were where the team dove into the product to wow and amaze people.

3.) Take less that five minutes to demo – Again, from Jason and it is important because you don’t want to show them every single feature and have their eyes glaze over

4.) Leave them wanting more – This follows up Jason’s previous recommendation because if they like it, they will reach out to you and it will be up to you to reel them in.

5.) Use the 10-20-30 rule – This Guy Kawasaki’s rule from his book “Art of the Start” which should be required reading for any entrepreneur. It is essentially 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 point font. Easy to remember, hard to actually do.

6.) Don’t use just bullets! Mix it up! – Bullet presentations are weak and most people read the slide. Incorporate pictures, graphics and keyword text to get your point across.

7.) Know your market inside out – Don’t do the “It’s a $1 Billion market and we will get 1% of it”. People will throw you out. Investors will want to know that you understand how the market is comprised, what really you are a part of and how much you can reasonably acheive.

8.) Know your competition inside out – Investors and customers want to know it from different perspectives but in the end they want to know that you have done your homework and have a product that is better than anything out there on the market today and the foreseeable future.

9.) When you don’t know something, be honest – I have seen people make stuff up on the fly or say “we can do that” when there no way they can. If you don’t know something say “let me think about that for a minute” or “I don’t know at the moment but I can find out and get back to you”.

10.) Practice, practice, practice – You would think this last one would be obvious but many people spend so much time working on the presentation they never practice it and go in cold turkey. Their speech sounds studdered and their transitions are clumsy. People may think that if you can’t do this well, how good is your product and can you really do what you say you can do?

This list could probably grow to +100 tips but I recommend everyone to read sites like PresentationZen.com for tips on general presentation style. So get started. The only way you are going to get better is if you get out there and start doing it.