To call the last three or four weeks a whirlwind would be an understatement. After playing the role of stay-at-home dad for the past four years, I had forgotten what it was like to work full time in an office environment, rather than working in my home office when the girls are napping, after dinner when everyone has fallen asleep, and on the weekends when the wife and the kids are out of town.
I had also forgotten how much I like the routine of just going to an office to work. Folks that have to go to a job site all the time don’t realize how isolating working from home can be, both when you live out in the country as I do, or even if you live in town and are completely surrounded by people every day, if you choose to leave your house or apartment. I know others that work primarily from home, and many of them feel the same way. I think that’s why coffee shops are thriving and coworking offices are doing so well – people want to work near other people, even if just occasionally.
A good chunk of the first week of the accelerator program was devoted to workshops and orientation. We spent the majority of Tuesday going over the concepts of Agile and Scrum. I had an incredibly basic knowledge of what went into the Agile Methodology and organizing teams using Scrum. It turned out that I was using bits and pieces of both in my own work, using a white board to keep track of my different clients in my home office. I learned that communication is key in Scrum, which is something I know I need to improve sometimes. It’s easy to have your face pressed up against your work all the time and difficult to step back and take note of the progress you’ve made at times. This is something I’m now making a better effort to address.
My team is working in a Scrum-esque way, since we’re usually distributed between several locations, and we don’t really have many items that can be done in a day. The half of the team responsible for developing QuickScore uses their own Scrum board and tries to replicate most of it on the full team board next to my desk in the Iowa Startup Accelerator. Our team usually checks in once or twice during the week rather than every day, and we have one big meeting every Friday to see where we’ve been, what went well and what didn’t, and what we need to get done the following week. I think it’s a great system and wish I’d learned about it sooner!
Wednesday also had a day-long workshop, this time focusing on customer discovery, marketing, and offer testing. As customer discovery is the main focus of my work on Team QuickScore, this was great to have this workshop so early on in the program. We spent the day working on different exercises with Justin Wilcox, an expert in customer discovery and offer testing who had flown in from the west coast to work with us. It was great to work on customer discovery material from a different angle than the one presented in Venture School. I felt like this workshop was much more practical – Venture School seemed much more theoretical at times.
By the end of the two workshop days, I was definitely ready to start getting my hands dirty and learning more about QuickScore itself. If you recall, I was only really given the job mere hours before the start of the accelerator program. I had minimal time to get my bearings with the product itself, and I needed to educate myself on both QuickScore and education technology before I could start talking with school administrators and teachers about their district-wide assessments and the problems they are having collecting and parsing the data. Most of the two weeks or so after the workshops was spent gathering names of contacts and learning the ins and outs of Canvas and QuickScore. Our team also had to create a cold e-mail script that I could use when contacting superintendents and principals on our list.
Cold e-mails are no fun. Getting rejections from cold e-mails is no fun. Trying to contact district administrators just before the start of classes is no fun. Getting your foot in the door through a trusted introduction and having a great interview once inside the door is much more fun and much more productive. We’ve just about sent the last of the cold e-mails that we are going to try, as we are starting to build a web of contacts from the few interviews our team has conducted already.
Now that QuickScore is fully developed and is being deployed to our beta district’s system, our team’s focus is completely on customer discovery. Our development folks are still part (and will always be part) of the team, but they won’t be doing as much direct work with us as they were at the beginning of the accelerator as they move on to other projects for NewBoCo. The development team has some great contacts that they’ve been sharing with us on the customer discovery side, and that has helped us actually have some success in getting our foot in the door.
The main thing that we’re fighting against now is that some second tier interviewees are so busy with the beginning of the school year that they are not able to schedule 20-30 minute interviews until well after our first project report needs to be in at the end of September. Our team is going to attempt to overcome this with gifts of large coffees and cinnamon rolls, because who could turn down a large coffee and a cinnamon roll?
Evil-doers and bad guys, that’s who.
Other than the weekly stakeholder newsletter and customer discovery interviews, my work has now turned to projects other than QuickScore and the Iowa Startup Accelerator. I’m still trying to get the last few Web pages done on a couple of rather large-scale Web site build-outs that I thought I’d have done at least a month ago. Luckily, there were some major changes on one of the projects that shouldn’t take too long to implement on my end. The engine and transmission work just fine – it’s just a matter of putting a new coat of paint and polishing the trim.
Sexy Life is moving along once again, now that David and I are able to sit down each week and flesh out different parts of the business. We’re still somewhat in research mode and in organizational mode. We’re re-building the rest of Team Sexy Life and putting together the advisory board. We’re trying to get a wide variety of people we know, like, and respect on the board, from business experts to relationship experts to user experience experts. Since David and I have gone through Venture School multiple times and attend a large number of networking events, we’ve been able to build up a rather impressive list of contacts to whom we are starting to reach out.
We also discovered while talking about the project that there are roughly a dozen different positions that need to be filled in the organization – something David and I can do alone right now but will need to be filled by other people as Sexy Life begins to expand. One of the people we are talking with interacts well with others and would be perfect as the head of member services – something that neither of us really want to do. We’re also looking for someone perfect as the head of finance. I’m planning to do it until we find that person, and it’s a great job right now. No money coming in and no money going out. That makes for an easy spreadsheet.
David and I also decided to just knock out all of the administrative stuff up front, like creating an operations manual. I’m not sure what goes into an operations manual – it’s the first one I have helped to put together. If any of you out there are operations experts and wouldn’t mind giving me a few pointers, please contact me. I haven’t started searching Google yet, but there are probably some examples floating around the Internet that could get us started. We also are going to get our ducks in a row legally and financially by incorporating before we sell anything and using the other resources that we won at Startup Weekend last November.
The final thing we discussed in our last meeting was to revisit our minimum viable product and create the prototype for our first box that we want to send out sometime between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. I think putting a solid date on when we ship our first box is going to help us get into gear and actually start turning this thing into a reality. We decided to have our prototype ready to test by the first week of October. We can get some solid feedback leading up to the holidays and have something ready to go for any pre-orders we receive by the first of the year or very soon thereafter… definitely in time for Valentine’s Day.
Now that my workload has taken off, entrepreneurial events are starting to pop up on the calendar. If I remember correctly from last year, autumn is the time for events. All of the kids are back in school and people have returned from any last-minute summer vacations. Of course, the biggest event coming up in the next few months is the Iowa Startup Accelerator Launch Day on November 3. The six startup teams will be presenting their products and businesses, and I’ll be there in some capacity, either presenting QuickScore if we find in the next few weeks that the product has legs, or cheering on my fellow entrepreneurs from the audience. Either way, it’s an event that you shouldn’t miss. (Plus, there’s usually a pretty awesome party after the party.)
The week before Launch Day is the Innovation Expo, another event where entrepreneurs in the area will be pitching their ideas in front of an interested audience. I’m not sure how many of the ISA teams are participating in the pitch competition. The event is in downtown Cedar Rapids this year; last year, it was at the Iowa River Landing in Coralville. (They go back and forth from one year to the next.) I really enjoyed the event last year, especially because it was the kickoff for my first trip through Venture School… the event that started it all.
At the beginning of October, a bunch of us from ISA are making the trip to Denver for the Global Accelerator Network’s 2016 Rally. Since the conference is in Denver, I’m combining it with my yearly “vacation” – the one weekend a year where I’m just responsible for myself. No kids, no pets, no house. An entire weekend of just me relaxing with beverages of my choice that I can’t find in Iowa. My friends in Denver also enjoy going completely meta when we watch the Iowa football game in Denver, which I took a train from Iowa to visit. Mind blown.
Also in mid-October, I’ll be helping out in some capacity with The University of Iowa’s Startup Games. I wasn’t able to make the spring games back in February because it was the same weekend as Gamicon. This time around, I’ll be there to pay back at least a bit of what I’ve learned as a entrepreneur over the past couple of years. From what I’ve been told, Startup Games functions much as a regular Startup Weekend does, just for college students. Plus, the other coaches and mentors that will be there are some of my friends from the local startup community. It definitely sounds like fun.
Add to all of that the weekly entrepreneurial stuff like 1 Million Cups and Open Coffee and everything associated with getting my older daughter back to preschool and dance class, and it makes for a jam-packed calendar. I suppose that I’ll get some sleep in there somewhere, but probably not until Thanksgiving or so. I’ve already promised myself that after everything dies down in November, I’ll take some time to relax and maybe read a novel or do some big projects with my girls. Pushing through and getting everything done will be worth it if I get to spend some time relaxing and enjoying the holidays with my kids and wife.
I’m hoping that I’ll have a chance to write another post before three more weeks have passed. It makes for a ridiculously long post, even just glossing over a lot of the details. October is going to be especially tough to keep up, with an event nearly every week. It doesn’t hurt to try, though.
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