It seems like these first two months of 2025 have flown past. Between meetings, trainings, conferences, and many school delays and cancelations, these weeks haven’t been the most productive. I think I’ve spent about as much time shuttling kids and running errands as I’ve spent in my downtown office in February, going in when it’s time every few days just to make sure everything is still stocked and reset the space on weekends for the coming week. As always, there are a lot of different things in motion right now between EntrePartners and Cider Finder – new programs, new connections, and new partnerships have been the theme this year.
The majority of January was spent forming partnerships between EntrePartners and similar organizations across the Midwest. For the past few months, various groups have reached out to me regarding potential partnerships, and I didn’t want to rush those as I continued to build out the EntrePartners Innovation Center. By the time the holidays rolled around, I was ready to start putting some preliminary wheels in motion. In mid-January, I signed up for the Kauffman FastTrac facilitator training in partnership with the Runway Venture Studio in Des Moines. From my experience facilitating Startup Weekends and teaching Venture School, it didn’t look like FastTrac was going to be much of a leap in difficulty.
The FastTrac program is going to be one of the “gap-fillers” that I plan to introduce in the coming months. Much of the material in FastTrac is beyond the scope of pre-revenue startups still in the ideation phase, and Venture School does a great job teaching the basics of Customer Discovery and the Business Model Canvas. FactTrac leans more into advanced business plans and financial projections, better suited to revenue-generating startups and small businesses. Most of the examples in the FastTrac curriculum highlight brick-and-mortar businesses rather than more tech-heavy startups which require more Customer Discovery due to the higher costs associated with those businesses.
We’re planning to start our first joint cohort between Des Moines and Iowa City in mid-April, with the course lasting until the end of June. More information will soon by added to the EntrePartners Web site in the coming days as we begin to promote the program across the state. This coincides with our member reciprocity program, as members of EntrePartners can drop in at Runway Venture Studio to work for the day or vice versa. The goal is to team up with coworking spaces in at least four other communities across Iowa and western Illinois to offer membership reciprocity, as our members take to the road to make deals and connections. Our educational programming (another “gap-filler”) will follow, becoming available both here in Iowa City and at our partners across the area. I’ve even filled out a grant application to make this happen – cross your fingers that we’re accepted!
I’m also in the preliminary stages of bringing AI-usage education to the EntrePartners Innovation Center through partnerships with an organization out of Chicago. These talks are still pretty early – no specifics to report just yet. They’ve wanted to put something like the center together for a while but hadn’t been able to find anyone to execute on the idea. There may also be an opportunity to replicate the center and all of its programming elsewhere in the Midwest, but that would definitely require bringing on partners in other communities to manage all of that. Unfortunately, I haven’t devised the technology to clone myself or to be in multiple places at once. As this partnership comes together, I can’t wait to share what we’re planning!
Invitations for the EntrePartners Braintrust continue to go out to entrepreneurs and creatives across the area and beyond. The grant application I mentioned earlier leans heavily into the Braintrust, so that program needs to be fully functional in the next couple of weeks. It also needs to be completely up and running before FastTrac kicks off in April and our big yearly events start happening – both Follow-Up Weekend at the beginning of April and Startup Weekend Iowa City in mid-July. Combine that with a bunch of partnerships in the pipeline right now, and this spring is shaping up to be one for the ages!
All attention shifted to Cider Finder when January turned to February, as CiderCon was back in Chicago. The app is slowly inching toward the app store finish line, and I have a special bottle of cider in my fridge ready for the moment everything is finally published on both the Apple and Android app stores. This has been a ridiculously long slog getting this thing ready for mass consumption, so it’s nice to see the excitement still there for the project by those in the cider industry and those who enjoy the products of the cider industry.
As CiderCon shifts between different parts of the country each year – west coast on leap years, Chicago on odd-numbered years, and the east coast on non-leap even-numbered years – there are different combinations of my cider friends who attend the event. More of them would have shown up to Portland last year if not for the ice and snow storms around the time of the convention. This year, there was a nice blend of folks from both coasts, Midwestern folks who weren’t able to make the trip last year, and international friends as well. The conference is a lot more fun with established friends, but that doesn’t stop me from connecting with others – it just makes it easier to find dinner companions and rides to different locations around the area when we ventured outside the hotel.
Unlike years on the coasts, the Chicago years usually don’t involve nearly as long as trip. I went in on Wednesday morning so I could check into the hotel and put myself together before the Cider Share, with my return trip scheduled first thing Sunday morning. They usually put on tours and have pre-parties prior to the Wednesday evening Cider Share, but Chicago is not even five hours by car from eastern Iowa, so it’s not difficult to visit those tour locations and watering holes when the weather is a bit warmer. When the conference is on the coasts, the trip can extend beyond a week, as was the case last year in the Pacific Northwest (and probably will next February when CiderCon takes place in Providence, Rhode Island.)
Even though the trip was short, I was able to squeeze in Cider Share on Wednesday evening; Cider Summit at Navy Pier on Saturday afternoon; two tastings – one involving keeved cider, a process that makes the most delicious and crystal-clear ciders you’ll ever taste and see, and one involving Chilean cider, as they were the featured country this year; the New York Cider Association tasting event; the Thursday night cider exchange that a bunch of my friends throw each year; and got into the big party on the top floor of the hotel to round out the conference. Like every year, I had a chance to taste some amazing beverages and spent time with some of the best people on the planet.
I didn’t have a chance to attend many of the breakout sessions this year, as my workload is much greater this year than before – I had to switch back into EntrePartners mode between tastings and sessions, which was a bit of a bummer. The hope is that I can better wall off conference time next year, depending on my itinerary both during and surrounding the actual conference. There shouldn’t be so many plates spinning next February – it’s still early days at the EntrePartners Innovation Center right now.
To be honest, time management is a bit of a struggle right now. There are so many things to be done, and never enough hours in which to do them. The numerous school delays and cancelations haven’t really helped, as I seemingly turn into a taxi service provider, trying to squeeze productivity in between odd start and end times. We’re also deep into my older daughter’s wrestling season, so I’m driving all over eastern Iowa to those meets – wouldn’t miss these for the world. We also just finished “birthday season” a couple of weeks ago which, while great for the kids, doesn’t help the time crunch. I’ve had to remove most of my public availability for meetings in the coming weeks until I’m able to dig out of the pile of work on my desk. I’ve even gone as far as dusting off the decades-old iTunes playlists I used in graduate school when I had to crank out 40 and 50-page papers and hour-long presentations over the course of a weekend.
I’m actually glad that this was a Chicago year so I could get back home sooner. I don’t have a ton of travel planned this year, so I should be able to slowly conquer everything on my desk as well as finally get around to cleaning out the garage once spring arrives for good. I’ve been able to stick my truck in the garage during this last snowstorm and the major cold snap that followed, but the rest of the building is a mess. I know I say every year that I’m going to get around to conquering the garage, but this time I truly mean it, sacrificing travel this year to get these things done.
There are only a couple of trips on the radar this year – the Global Entrepreneurship Conference in June and the 1MC and FastTrac Organizer Summit in July, in addition to (hopefully) a cider event out in New York later in the summer or early in the fall. Having no travel scheduled for at least the next two months gives me a golden opportunity to knock off most of the projects on my plate, both professionally and personally. I wish I had the time to make it to SXSW again this year, and GLINTCAP may not happen because my wife actually may need to travel to a conference that week, something that basically never happens!
Because I don’t have enough to do, I’m starting a new Substack called We Are All EntrePartners featuring tips, tricks, and lessons learned in my decade-plus adventure through the entrepreneurial ecosystem as part of the Iowa Startup Collective. A handful of us across the state are trying to pick up where Clay & Milk left off, providing interesting articles about our experiences and about entrepreneurship in the state of Iowa. The articles over on that feed are going to have a different tone than this blog – this blog will still document my adventures through the ecosystem, while We Are All EntrePartners hopes to be more inspirational and data-driven. My book reviews will also continue on this blog. Give the new Substack a read and let me know what you think!
For those of you who still haven’t dropped by the EntrePartners Innovation Center, I should be in the office significantly more than I have been due to travel and weather. Pick a morning and stop by for a cup of coffee and a chat. I’d be happy to give you a tour of the center and the podcast studio. Also, stay tuned to EntrePartners’ Facebook and LinkedIn pages as we drop more information about all of the things planned for the next few months. Like I’ve said before, it’s going to be incredibly busy around here, but we’re just getting started.