Final Recap of Startup Weekend

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been blogging about my experience at the Boulder Startup Weekend. You can read part 1 and part 2. Now I would like to talk about what we did and what we were able to accomplish. Here is the story of Helpmore.

After the initial pitches I found a guy named Lorne who was trying to help the homeless. While it would have been fun to be on a team that was trying to go viral and make tons of money this seemed like a hard problem to solve and a worthy one. His main pain point was that he wanted to give money to the homeless but he didn't trust that the money would go to a good cause. That has been a pain point for me as well. My other problem was that I have stopped carrying cash and so I was hoping to solve that as well.

Along with Lorne we had an guy named Satyah who joined the team as well. We set to work trying to come up with an idea. We spent all Friday night coming up with a plan on how to work with homeless shelters to provide goods for people and went to bed.

We had found an Airbnb in walking distance so while walking home I had an idea that we could use QR codes to create vouchers on the fly. Basically the user would scan a the code and it would give them a map of near by stores that accepted them. They could then pick items from a store and add it to the card. It would then . This would allow people to purchase specific items rather than giving cash. Also getting businesses on board would allow for a viral aspect since we could allow businesses to sign up on their own. Excited about the idea i got to our place and crashed.

I pitched the idea in the morning and Lorne liked it. We started going with it. Soon two more people, Trevor and Nick, joined the team and we were firing on all cylinders. We made a proof of concept app using Wordpress and paypal and hit the streets. The good news was that the homeless loved the idea! They felt the same pain we felt and were excited about something that would build trust between the homeless and others. We talked to two nice ladies who were down on their luck. They didn't want money for drugs or alcohol. In fact they were talking about how cool it would be to start a coffee shop when we walked up.

Getting businesses on board would be our hardest hurdle. It turns out they dont like homeless people hanging around. However much they want to help, it just ends up being bad for business. We had some who would be willing to use the service if it existed so we walked away confident that we could get them on board. I also thought if Helpmore could gain enough traction then businesses would flock to it to be seen as socially conscious. That is a pipe dream though because we hadn't got the first one.

We went back to base encouraged that we had an idea that people liked and began to talk to some coaches. All of the coaches liked our idea so we were feeling pretty good. After a good nights sleep it was time to get ready for the final pitch.

For the final pitch we had 10 minutes to present to some people who had created successful startups. They were very smart and had done this thing before. The winning team got $500 and some help getting their business off the ground, so there was something at stake. Lorne and I split up the presentation. I was very nervous. I am not usually that nervous talking in front of people but since we had such a strict time schedule we decided to script it out and go off a script. I don't do well with that so I feel like my pitch was a little stilted. We also ran out of time so we didn't get to all of our information. We were able to show our prototype in action and we got our idea across.

The judges rightly pointed out our most difficult hurdle. We had to get not one, not two but three parties on board at the same time to make this work. One audience is hard enough, two is really difficult, and three is darn near impossible. They said they gave us pretty high marks but  in the end we didn't win the event but I think we had a pretty good idea.

After the event we booked it back to Lawrence and arrived home at 5 AM. I crashed pretty hard and got up at noon to go to work. It was probably not my most productive day at work.

The big question still on the table is where do we go from here. To be honest, I am not really sure. We tried to get a google hang out together but our schedules were all off. I loved working on the team and we had a great group of guys. I think there is a key time period right after the event that can make or break a team and that time might be passed. Also there is something to be said about creating a business that can make money. I really loved the idea but startups are hard work and ones that don't make money are even harder. Like I said about the Lawrence Makerspace, sometimes money can be used as a motivator to do good things. Maybe a for profit business would have been able to get us going when a non-profit didn't.

-jb

What Has It Got in Its Pocketses? Mar 29

It's time for another edition of, What Has It Got in Its Pocketses! It has been a while but I wasn't scouring the web looking for great content when I was in Boulder. Now that I am back I am getting into the grove again.

1☆
IT Crowd Soundboard - If you havent seen the IT Crowd it is on Netflix. It is very quotable and this soundboard has some of the highlights.
Cat Shaming - Maybe you have to be a cat person but I found these really funny.
Dash Plus System - If you take notes by hand you will want to read this. Great for todo lists as well!
The Web Is Changing - This was pretty interesting. Especially if you are just getting into web marketing like I am.

2☆
Hanselman on Productivity - If you like my posts on being productive then this is a must read.
Why Candy Crush Made it Big - Interesting thoughts on mobile gaming pricing models.

3☆
Web Design Links - A toolbox of sorts for web designers.
E-Commerce Toolbox - More helpful links linked from my post full of links.

4☆
Google Will Eat Itself - Pretty nerdy concept. But it has made a lot of money so far.

5☆
The Toolbox - This guy had an idea and whipped it out in 10 hours. He explains the whole process. Pretty interesting if you are a web guy.

That's all folks. Enjoy! -jb

When all else fails, Pivot.

Tyler  Hansbrough, pivoting like a champ!

In case you didn't know I went to a startup weekend two weekends ago and I am slowly recapping some of my experiences, starting with the vocabulary of startup people. You can read part 1 about creating the MVP. Today is about pivoting. It seems that the startup world is just borrowing terminology from the sports world because when I was growing up, pivoting was something you did in basketball. When you picked up your dribble you could pivot on one foot. If you moved your pivot foot you traveled and turned the ball over. Once again I had to fake it till I learned the meaning of the word pivot in the startup world.

When starting a new business, failure is expected. Not only is it expected but in some ways it is encouraged. Obviously you want to hit on a good idea that will make money but it just so happens that the people who are good at failing are the people who hit on the good ideas. The real trick is to fail as fast as possible.

Here is how the starting a company in a weekend works. You start with a premise for a business. I'll use the one my brother came up with today:

Corporations have nasty fridges and need an impartial service to come clean them out and organize them once a month. 

Now you need to prove that this will make money as quickly as possible. So you send out polls to business owners and go door to door and see if someone will let you clean their fridge. You also need to see how scalable your models is if people liked it.

You come to the conclusion that, yes, this is a problem but not very many companies are willing to pay for your services. Not only that but if they did want to pay for your service it wouldn't scale very well since there is no element for exponential growth. If this took three weeks to realize, you failed too slow. If this took 4 hours, congratulations, you failed fast!

One important piece of information you found: dirty fridges are a problem in corporations. You now have validated that there is a business there to be had but you just failed to get it right. This is where you pivot meaning you tweak your solution a little to better solve the problem. Next you try to come up with a web camera system that displays on people's computer wallpaper. That doesn't go over too well, pivot. Fridge dishwasher combo? Pivot. Robots? Pivot. Public shaming? Pivot.

Finally you design a cubby style fridge with a glass door and a special squeegee that is the perfect size of a cubby so they can be cleaned with one swipe. Each cubby has a dry erase label for a name and a date. You get 100 companies that say they would buy it if it existed. It's production is easily scalable once you get the money to get it off the ground. So you kickstart it for 100,000 and tons of companies jump on board.

That's the gist of it. Failure is not bad unless you are not willing to part with your idea. If you can't adjust, it can be disastrous because you will spend hundreds of hours working on something that nobody wants. When you fail, learn what you can and move on. This idea is very central to developing a process over a goal. The process of pivoting allows you to move on where the goal of starting your business might have had you beating your head against the wall trying to make your idea work.

So remember when all else fails, pivot.

Baby steps... This is the last bus to Winnipesaukee Bob!

I am back from the Startup Weekend Boulder! Well I have been back for a week now. It took me a while to recover from the weekend since I got back at 5 am on Monday morning! I have seemed to be in a creative vacuum ever since. I think it is a combination of the intense creative marathon, some really hard workouts at Crossfit, and of course march madness. Whatever the reason I have been feeling lethargic and unmotivated this week. This brings me to a key concept I learned from the startup weekend and a lesson about getting things done in general. You need to focus on the MVP!

So I went to Startup Weekend knowing nothing about how startups work or the lingo that they use. Everybody was saying that we needed to have an MVP by the end of the weekend but nobody was saying whether or not they were willing to step up and be the MVP. I kept wondering what it took to be the MVP of a nerdy weekend like this. Maybe l33t hacker skills or something like that. About halfway through the weekend I started understand that what they meant by MVP isnt what I understood MVP to mean. I eventually had to ask since I couldn't quite figure it out from context. In the startup world MVP stands for "Minimum Viable Product". It is the simplest form of your product that somebody is willing to buy. There are big props to you if you can sell some of that product before the end of the weekend.

The concept of MVP is so important and I got it right away. You see I have a history of starting projects and working really hard on them for a week and then stopping. The idea of the MVP is: what are you able to make that is worth value today. Once you define that you need to stick to that and only that. My github is filled with the code of good ideas that got too big too soon. Programmers like to think big and while that is good it gets you into trouble because if you cant get people using it you will lose interest. And if an idea is too big you will become overwhelmed with the amount of work that is needed to be done to finish.

If the idea is too big I see two problems. First of all you wont be motivated to start and secondly you will lose interest before you finish.

What is the solution? Baby steps Bob, baby steps. I love this scene from What About Bob. It captures the very essence of what it means to break big tasks into the tiniest of steps. Keeping the steps small is so important. Lets deal with these two issues on their own.

Getting started is probably the biggest battle. It is for me, I know that. 9 times out of 10 I will finish a job if I can just get it started. I put off writing this post all week and now that I am doing it I am really enjoying it. I just had to start. Getting started is so important for big things like starting a business or doing something you don't normally do. You will be tempted to do tons of research before you start to make sure you don't fail (I will talk about the benefits of failure in another post). With the internet we can spend more time researching our tasks than we will actually spend on them.

I strongly disagree with the research heavy approach. You don't know any of the problems you are going to face until you face them so you may waste a lot of time researching something that in the end would not have been an issue for you.  Some research is ok but you have to start at some point. A popular saying is that you can't steer a ship that is not moving. Research should be done while you are in motion trying to do and not too much before you start. Is there something big you have been wanting to do? Take a baby step and just start it.

The second problem is scope. Here is how my ideas often go, "Oh I should write a little program to remind me to water my plants. Oh better yet I could write a program to water my plants. Then I could add a sensor that lets me tell if they have gotten enough enough sunlight. Oh then if they dont it could turn on a grow light and give them more light. I could then package this up and sell it to home gardeners. Wow that would take a long time. Ill just watch another episode of Archer." We all love to dream but when the scope grows too fast it can kill a dream. Keep your ideas super small. Something you could do in an afternoon.

It's ironic that we are told in school to dream big but the best way to be successful is to dream just a little bit bigger than where you are. I could write an app that could be sold to home gardeners that keeps track of their plants but it would start with the first step of just having it remind me and then build from there.

Focus on the MVP and get that done. That can be a launching point to keep going. Baby steps.

Crunch Time!

So this is a quick post from the Boulder Startup weekend. I am learning a ton. I will have a ton of posts after the event to unload what I have learned. We have 16 hrs to go and we are trying to validate if our idea is worth doing. I made an info graph basically explaining our problem and solution.

We have launched a site helpmore.co and we will be getting some more content up soon so be sure to check back on Sunday. We have a survey here and a poll here. The poll is to get quick responses and the survey is to get a more in depth response. Please fill these out as they will validate some assumptions we are making about how people interact with the homeless.

Startup Weekend!

I have decided to take a day off work this week and go to a Startup Weekend in Boulder Colorado. I am really excited and nervous at the same time. 

A startup weekend is an intense 54 hr block of time when you create a company from scratch and try to come up with a finished product or service by the end. It all starts with pitch night. Everybody has one minute to present their idea. All of the participants vote on which ideas they think will be the best. Everyone gets divided into teams and the weekend starts. Fueled by coffee and an impending deadline the teams work like mad to create a product. All day Saturday, teams are heads down working on the product. There is free coffee and meals are provided so there is not a lot of reason to stop and go anywhere. On Sunday night at the end of the weekend you demo your business to a couple of CEO's who judge the competition. Then if it feels like this was a good thing you can keep going and start a business. If it flopped? Well, everyone can go their separate ways and cry in their pillows. As part of my Make 2014 Initiative this event is right up my alley. 

Apart from the trill of just attending the event, I have been wanting to see if a startup company is for me. This will be an great way to try it without getting too committed. Even if my team keeps going with the idea I am free to walk away. I also really want to find the areas in my skill set that are lacking. There will be lots of coaches around who will be great people to bounce questions off and feel what I am lacking. Plus we never pass up an opportunity to go to Colorado.

Another benefit of  this trip is we are trying out Airbnb. We were going to couch surf but since I will be busy the whole weekend we thought it would be better to have a nice rented space so Kara doesn't have to sit in somebody's house all weekend by herself. Airbnb is also something we will probably use in our travels so it is good to figure out the process now. We ended up finding a place in walking distance so I can get to the event and back without needing the car.

I might not have time to blog during the event but expect a lengthy couple of posts afterwards. I will probably be tweeting so be sure to follow me on twitter @johnnybloom. -jb

What Has It Got in Its Pocketses? Mar 8

This issue of emptying my pockets has butter coffee, learning new languages and food from the matrix. Click the links precioussss.

1☆
Bullet Proof Coffee - Coffee with butter. The new high performance drink!
Soylent - Eating food is so inefficient. "all the protein, vitamins and carbs of your grandma's best turkey dinner" -Jayne Cobb
Frozen Skate Park - Pure Awesome!
Be More Magazine - Online magazine with beautiful pictures and interesting articles about being healthy!

2☆
Create Better Content - 5 ways to become a better blogger.
3D printed Board Game - That's right. Print your own games is coming!
The Art of Learning - Learn how to learn and you will learn faster.
Learn a New Language - I might try to pick up some French with Duo the owl. Bonjour, mon nom est John!

3☆
Human Task Switches Considered Harmful - Pomodoro to the rescue!

4☆
Jorge Regidor - Another developer trying to do the blogging thing. We will be friends. :)
Why Hard Developer Interviews are Good - Time to hit the books!

5☆
Animate.css -  Just add water.

There you have it! Less heavy on the tech articles this week. -jb