Dragons' Den BBC TV Footage

As I hoped would happen, YouTube has been furnished with the StoryCode pitch to the Dragons in the Dragons' Den, the BBC TV show for entrepreneurs. I also include the complete transcript of my initial three minute pitch, which was edited to around half its original duration, missing critical information. Richard Farleigh's closing comments about StoryCode being a competitor to Amazon are wide of the mark. We hope that Amazon will become a customer, not a competitor, of StoryCode at some point in the future. Enjoy:

StoryCode complete pitch to the Dragons:

Hello. I am Steve Johnston and I am the founder of StoryCode; I'm looking to raise £200,000 and am prepared to offer 20% of the business in return.

StoryCode is a business that depends on software and the web, which aren't easy to demonstrate in this environment, so I will tell its story in a more tangible way. The business problem we are solving is that too many visits to bookshops, both on the high street and on the web, simply don't result in sales. It is a big and recognised problem for the industry with two out of five people buying nothing because they can't decide what to buy. They struggle, as we all do, because they can't judge a book by its cover. StoryCode is here to help. 3 out of 5 people (points to three Dragons) do buy, so you are not an obvious part of the problem at this point. That leaves you two (points to the two Dragons) who typically won't buy. At least, not yet.

Richard (focuses on Richard Farleigh), imagine you have read all the books by that author, have run out of reliable recommendations and are flummoxed by the choice available. StoryCode is going to help you. "I've read all the Dan Brown books; What else have you got like The Da Vinci Code?" you say. In my role as shop assistant, with complete confidence, and despite knowing nothing about these books, I can answer with: "You should try State of Fear by Michael Crichton or Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson."

StoryCode can do this because we have condensed the narrative of these stories into a form of mathematical DNA that can be built into shop tills and web sites throughout the book world. And we collect these codes from the people whose opinions of these stories matter most; their readers. And this is a profoundly better way of doing things than is currently happening on Amazon's web site, which is based on what books people buy, nothing to do with the story itself.

If we are successful and influence 1 out of 2 people who weren't going to buy, to buy, we can create over £100m of extra revenue for the book trade, per year, in the UK alone. StoryCodes will make the difference in generating this extra revenue, and booksellers will pay for the privilege of using them. We estimate we will earn around £15m over three years, from them, across an initial six international territories, on a very profitable model.

And that's just the beginning. Our StoryCodes are valuable to authors and publishers as well – to the extent that we predict a further £6m of revenue from services to them.

We have recently signed our first contract, with the world's most famous bookshop, Foyles of London, and are talking to a number of other international retailers, such as Abebooks.

Early on we also recognised that there are similar problems with products such as movies and video games, and perhaps even wine and art, so have worked hard to make sure our technologies can accommodate them as we grow.

The StoryCode team is very solid and experienced and includes former senior executives such as the head of business development for Amazon UK, the CFO of Yahoo Europe and the MD of The Penguin Press. We have seeded the business to date and are now looking to raise £200,000 to invest in marketing and product development, and to allow the core team to devote their full energies to the business. We are prepared to offer 20% of the business in return. To realise the investment, we would expect the business to be acquired within three to five years.

Thank you for your attention.

After the Dragons' Den

I will post some more details from our experience of the Dragons' Den over the coming few days. For now, let me thank all of you who have emailed in with support following our unsuccessful attempt to raise investment capital from the investors on the TV show.

Like many who appear on the show, we have our disappointments about the way the footage was edited, paticularly in regards to my intial pitch, however I am satisfied that we left the show with some dignity.

The complete footage from episode 7 is now available on the BBC site, and I am the first entrepreneur on, so you won't have to wait long to see our bit. Visitors from outside the UK are unlikely to be able to view this, but we are still hopeful for a YouTube appearance at some point.

You may also be interested in the feedback of Doug Richards, a former Dragon, which can be viewed on the BBC site for the next week. Here is a transcript:

Steve Johnston's company, Story Code, should become a super-affiliate of the popular bookselling websites and drive traffic to the booksellers.

Richard Farleigh, who clearly has an intrinsic understanding of the opportunity is not completely correct though in saying that Steve needs to do a deal with Amazon. Steve merely needs to become a standard affiliate of Amazon. The affiliates have historically been the most likely acquisitions of the large web players and if Steve's product drives book sales then they become a good acquisition target.

Peter's assertion that "he could do it himself" is a bit silly since anyone could say that about any web start-up. Peter could have done eBay, but he didn't. And what he is overlooking is the knowledge that the developers accrue as they work through the building of the system and the site. It's the primary differentiator of web sites and services and holds true whether you are Story Code or MySpace.

Nevertheless, Steve has not clearly articulated why anyone would invest the time to answer 40 questions. That is a meaningful investment of time and attention and I suspect will prove to be the stumbling block of his business.

More soon.

Steve Johnston

StoryCode in the Dragons' Den

You are forgiven for not checking out our blog very often, really, you are. We have not proven to be very regular bloggers, which has made this a rather poor investment of your time to date, but then we are really, really, very busy trying to earn a crust whilst developing our StoryCode baby. Some of you may suggest that blogging about it would be a good way of attracting more interest, and indeed you are probably right - note to self.

Anyway, one of the things we have done recently is to pitch our StoryCode business to the Dragons (i.e. Angel Investors) of the BBC's entrepreneur TV show Dragons' Den. If you are from the UK, you are probably familiar with it already; if you are from the US then it is a bit like American Inventor; if you are from neither territory then these sites will give you a pretty good idea what we faced in an attempt to raise money (and profile, of course) to develop StoryCode.

For now, all my agreement with the BBC will allow me to do is to alert you to the broadcast date for our episode, which is Thursday 14th September 2006, at 8.00pm UK time on BBC2, which is tomorrow! The BBC is streaming the complete programmes from their web site and you can see the Episode 7 preview and Before the Den talking heads. If you are outside the UK, it is unlikely the BBC site will let you view these, so hopefully someone will put them on YouTube or Google Video!

Come back here on Friday, when I will post an update and some more feedback, and please bear in mind that we haven't seen the broadcast footage!

Steve Johnston