Team Sexy Life had been struggling to keep up with the required number of customer discovery interviews that needed to be completed each week for Venture School. So, we came up with the idea of having some sort of event where we could collect interviews, show off our minimum viable product boxes, and maybe record some audio for a potential Sexy Life podcast. Our first installment of the Sexy Life Social Hour was a moderate success. We had the party on the rooftop of 30Hop at the Iowa River Landing in Coralville on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. We didn’t put much planning into the event, and it was not finalized until roughly 48 hours prior to the event, so we were surprised that anyone showed up at all.
Our second Sexy Life Social Hour was on the Wednesday evening before the end of Venture School, so we promoted it much more vigorously than we did the first, and had the planning done further out from the event. The turnout for this event was significantly stronger than it was for the first – perhaps because we held the event at the Clinton Street Social Club in downtown Iowa City, perhaps because we held the event at the end of a workday in the middle of week. We got a great deal of audio for the possible podcast, and we had a great time talking with some people that had some great insights on our product offerings.
It didn’t hurt that for our final week of customer discovery, I was able to conduct nearly ten interviews before our Social Hour party. It didn’t make up for the weeks where I only got a couple of interviews, but it definitely helped our final push at the very end of Venture School. Putting all of our interviews together, from Startup Weekend through last week, we have completed over 80 interviews out of the 100 that are recommended from the authorities on lean startups. We should be able to round up a few more people to talk about our product over the next few weeks to reach that 100 interview milestone, but now that the Venture School push is complete, we aren’t up against a strict deadline to get them completed.
Team Sexy Life and the $1000 Best Final Pitch award.
Speaking of the end of Venture School, each of the teams gave their final pitches to a panel of judges this past Friday. We were up against some pretty stiff competition, as we were throughout the entire six weeks of the program. However, Chris worked his pitch magic again, and we walked away with the award for Best Final Pitch and $1000 to start growing our business. Several other awards were given out to the other teams – no one team walked away with more than one award. The other teams did very well, and they were great to work with over the last two months. Much like my first time through Venture School, I hope that Team Sexy Life is able to stay connected with the other teams as we all either move forward with our ideas or move on to better ideas.
Next week, we are all planning to get together and talk about the future of Team Sexy Life. We still have an extraordinary amount of work to do to get this thing up and running. We even have 12 pre-orders from one interested party, as a great deal of interest from many of the people that I have talked to over the last six weeks during customer discovery. I don’t think that we will have that much trouble selling our idea to potential subscribers – it’s just a matter of getting it right (or as close to “right” as you can get with a new product launch.) We have a lot of content to create and we need to start firing up some of our hypothetical partnerships that we discussed both before and during Venture School.
That is, if we all agree that Team Sexy Life lives on.
Let’s network!
Another major event that happened in the past couple of weeks was the Young Entrepreneur Convention in Des Moines two weekends ago. The organizers said that there were over 500 tickets purchased for the event, but it seemed like there were about 300-400 attendees present over the course of Friday and Saturday. The main goal I had was to absorb as much information about entrepreneurship as I could from some experts in the field, and I feel as though I accomplished that.
I didn’t really know what to expect from the weekend before I got there. I knew that I’d have some time to do some networking with people outside the normal sta rtup community that I work with here in eastern Iowa. I knew that there would be a higher concentration of people from the Des Moines area, since the convention was taking place there. I was surprised that there were a fair number of people that had traveled to Des Moines from outside the immediate area in order to attend the convention. I met a couple of people from the Peoria area and got to know a bit more about the startup community there. Before the convention, I knew that Peoria had its own version of 1 Million Cups, which meant that there were at least a few people trying to make an entrepreneurial go of it. One of my goals for the summer is to try to make it to some 1 Million Cups locations outside of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, and I’ve added Peoria to the list, along with Des Moines and the Cedar Valley.
Fashion Show!
Most of the networking and socializing happened on Friday night during the kickoff party for the convention. There were plenty of refreshments, and after a couple of hours of meeting new people, the Iowa Fashion Project hosted a fashion show, complete with models walking down a makeshift runway. I’m glad that the Iowa Fashion Project is still as strong as ever, and I wish I could make it to their big Fly-Over Fashion Fest event happening in Iowa City this weekend. Alas, the wife is on call at The Big Hospital on Saturday evening, which means I’m on dad duty all night Saturday and into Sunday morning.
Just before the fashion show, I ran into Katie Wilson from JumpOnIt, who I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with in Des Moines previously, when her company was just launching its Des Moines branch and had a big shindig at an Iowa Cubs game. That party was a couple of months before I started to blog about my experiences in the startup community, and I was just starting to get the wheels turning on this freelancing thing, actively looking for clients, connections, and partnerships. As her company continues to grow, we are staying connected – the connection with others in the startup community throughout Iowa and the Midwest is one of my favorite things about being a part of the ecosystem, both as a freelancer and as a newly minted entrepreneur in Sexy Life.
Good times were had by all on Friday night.
I didn’t get back to my hotel room until after midnight, so I only had a few hours to get some sleep before a very full Saturday. Luckily, coffee was plentiful both at the hotel and at the convention, including Bulletproof Coffee, which I had heard about prior to the convention. Coffee with butter blended into it? How could you go wrong? After a couple of shot-glass-sized servings of that, I opted for the regular stuff for the rest of the morning. I had to get up to my usual level of caffeination before I could do much networking – I’ve been drinking close to a large pot a day of coffee, between staying up late working on client projects and things for Venture School, and getting up early to take care of the girls when the wife has to leave for work early in the morning.
World’s most dangerous picture.
Most of the talks were useful. Only a couple of the talks really felt like sales pitches, which I thought was a pretty good ratio for this type of convention. Most of the takeaways were definitely common sense stuff. “Cactus Jack” Barringer gave the most useful talk of the convention. His main takeaway was to “find a need and fill it, and find a problem and solve it.” That’s a basis of being an entrepreneur: what problems in your life bug you the most, and what can you do (or what are you doing) to solve them? Can you turn those solutions into something marketable? Some of the other talks seemed pretty lofty – one led by “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” Ken Shamrock and his business partner talked about getting celebrity clients, which seems somewhat out of my league. Perhaps in a few years, I’ll be at that point…
I wish that I’d been able to stick around after the elevator pitch finals, but I had a two-hour drive ahead of me that night. I haven’t heard how the band was that played the convention after I left, but I’m sure they were good. The Young Entrepreneur Convention and the end of Venture School were my last big startup ecosystem events until the end of this month or the beginning of June. With Venture School holding my full attention for the last few weeks, I have a significant backlog of things to do in the office and around the house. My reading pile alone is nearly overwhelming! Plus, the weather is actually starting to get nice around here, so I want to get outside with the kids and enjoy some of the sunshine (other than when I’m out mowing the lawn, of course.)
Summer is just around the corner. My older daughter’s school year is coming to an end, and her dance recital is only about a month away. This year’s recital is her first experience being on a professional stage. Hopefully, the dress rehearsal at the recital location should give her a bit of comfort about performing in such a large place, in front of so many people. The task for me now is to find some awesome activities for her to do over the summer. We are going to attempt a couple of weeks of swimming lessons, and possibly either T-ball or tennis. Of course, there will be plenty of time for her to just run around and be a kid as well.
If you managed to read through this entire lengthy and rambling post, thank you! It took me a while to deconstruct everything and turn my thoughts and experiences into a coherent post. The next couple of weeks should be pretty quiet, but I’m excited for what’s next with Sexy Life and getting back to 1 Million Cups in a couple of weeks. Until then, my nose will be to the grindstone!
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