We have received a great deal of positive feedback for our idea so far, but our sample size is still relatively low – 12 interviews out of the 100 we are to complete before the end of the course. Regardless, things are going well for Team Sexy Life. We’ve had a few instances of people outside the startup community in eastern Iowa already familiar with our startup – we haven’t even sold anything yet, and we’ve already been able to build excitement for what we are doing. As long as people’s opinion of our startup stays positive, I’m fine with people knowing about us already.
Team Sexy Life’s new world headquarters, under construction.
I am really enjoying going through the Venture School process again, because the experience is completely different from what I experienced the first time through. The teaching team has revamped the course, adding more interactive elements to each class meeting. For example, we did something called the “marshmallow challenge” during our last class meeting, where we had to build a tower out of uncooked spaghetti, tape, string, and a large marshmallow that had to go on the very top. The problem was that the weight of the marshmallow wanted to topple any tower that didn’t have a sturdy base. We didn’t build the tallest tower, but we had the only tower that kept standing through the rest of the class, after the judges had measured the towers. The point of the exercise was that you shouldn’t wait until the end of the 15 allocated minutes to try to put the marshmallow at the top of the tower, just like you should wait until after you have built your product to test whether or not it is a viable business.
Things are still plugging along outside of Sexy Life and Venture School. Tom and I are still moving forward with the barbecue hut, and we just posted an ad looking for workers. Tom purchased and moved the barbecue smoker to Cedar Rapids and is in the process of preparing it for use. I’m hoping to meet with Tom sometime in the next couple of weeks to talk about the barbecue hut, to see the smoker in action, and to start designing the branding for the restaurant. We purchased a Web domain a couple of months ago, and I’m looking forward to working on this project from branding all the way to finished products and social media advertising.
Other than working on some routine projects for a few other clients and working on some of my own projects around the office, there hasn’t been much too much excitement. There haven’t been too many entrepreneurial events in the past couple of weeks – it might just be related to the time of year. I haven’t been able to make it out to the few events that have happened, either because they conflicted with Venture School meeting times, because I had to stay with the kids, or because I have too many other projects going on that I couldn’t devote the time to attending an event. The calendar stays full through the end of the school year at the end of May, but then I look forward to getting back to attending 1 Million Cups each week and spending some time up at Vault in Cedar Rapids.
The only major event on the calendar coming up is the Young Entrepreneur Convention in Des Moines in a couple of weeks. I’m still not sure what to expect from this event, but it should be interesting to meet some other entrepreneurs and freelancers from other parts of the state and maybe other parts of the country. I’ve been putting out some feelers to see who else from eastern Iowa is planning on attending, because it would be nice to have some friendly faces in the crowd. I am hoping to get a lot out of this event, from the networking opportunities to the topics that the speakers present.
For now, it’s back to Sexy Life customer discovery. Those 100 people won’t interview themselves!
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