Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve accomplished so much but just barely scratched the surface of a project? That’s how I feel after one year building the EntrePartners Innovation Center. I look around at the coworking space I’ve cobbled together and see how much I’ve done, but at the same time, it feels like I’ve barely started. This is a completely different animal than building software and working through contracts with others – the type of work I’ve been doing for over a decade now. Being on the other end of the relationship has been a major learning process so far, and I still don’t know what I don’t know.
The first hurdle was just finding furniture for the place. I had a couple of tables and a couple of chairs in my garage that I wasn’t using, but it was going to take a few more tables and chairs to fully outfit 900 square feet of space plus a podcast studio. I looked through all of the usual places – consignment stores, thrift stores, and the like. I was able to find a couple of chairs and a couple more tables, but most of the furniture was way too expensive for the state it was in. I had to dig a bit deeper and delve into the world of Facebook Marketplace.
I’d never used Marketplace before, so just getting into that was an adventure. I didn’t want to travel too far to pick up furniture, but if the price was good enough, I’d drive an hour or so. The furthest away I ended up traveling was to a farm outside Norway, Iowa, where they had three folding tables from the mid-20th century for $10 each. I also found a couple of 6-foot tables near Hiawatha and three 8-foot tables from North Liberty. Luckily the weather was nice the day I drove to North Liberty, because those tables had to stick out of the back of my truck going down Dubuque Street. They nearly didn’t fit in the elevator and were a real pain to get up the last flight of stairs into the space, but they’ve since gotten the most use of any of the furniture I bought.
In order to get all of the chairs I needed, I ordered some new online, while I found the rest of the chairs on the UI Surplus auction. I was able to snag 15 chairs at a time for less than $100 total. The truck I rented to move them from Surplus to the Innovation Center almost cost more than the lot of chairs. I’m glad there was finally an auction lot that wasn’t either 2 chairs or 30 chairs – we had a chair deficit while I waited for an appropriately-sized auction to come up. The remaining pieces of furniture were all pretty easy to come by – shelves, a filing cabinet, a coffee maker, white boards, TV plus stand, and some garbage cans.
The final piece was a couple hundred foam squares to line the walls of the podcast studio. I now know that the podcast studio is 9 feet by 9 feet – each row has 9 foam squares each hung with a command strip. Between building out the podcast studio and retrieving and assembling furniture, it took a couple of weeks of work to physically assemble the space – way longer than I thought it would take. Folks were already clamoring to move in when I got the keys to the space on September 1, and I was building around them as they worked at the couple of tables I had to offer on opening day, usually coming in evenings and weekends to move things around and construct things while spending business hours on meetings and paperwork.
Everything was built out (except for the big load of chairs) by October, and I was able to start getting the word out there that we exist. Since we’re basically tucked into an attic, it’s a bit of a maze of find us, so I’ve put up plenty of signage whenever I’ve held events in the space. I haven’t spent any money on advertising the space yet beyond the cost of printing some posters for the local buses and coffee shops. Most of my current members have found us through personal referrals or by finding us on social media. (If you’re wondering, we’re on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, with LinkedIn as our main driver of traffic both to the center and to our online services.)
Even though I’ve had slow but steady growth in membership over the last few months, it’s been tough to get our message out there. I’m running into the same issues with legacy business media that I’ve run into trying to get them to run any kind of coverage of Startup Weekend Iowa City – I’m not a banker, real estate agent, or Fortune 500 CEO, so they’re not interested in what we’re doing. The large players have convinced legacy publications that they’re the only game in town, and I refuse to pay to play. The plan in the coming months is to leverage partnerships that I’ve been building to find a backdoor into these newsrooms, to plant the seeds needed to finally highlight the work that’s being done at the ground level.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the last years building economic development partnerships across the state. There are a handful of organizations doing similar work to EntrePartners, just targeting different audiences or offering slightly different resources. I joined the board of Main Street West Branch a few months ago not just to help improve the business district closest to my house, but to help create a link between rural and urban entrepreneurship. I’ve met so far with Dream City, South of 6, and Wright House to find out what their needs are and how we can cross-promote programming, as they all tend to serve people who may not feel included by programs like Open Coffee or 1 Million Cups, for whatever reason. Open invitations to the Innovation Center may not be enough to convince folks to participate, so creating programming for those entities is in the works.
Some people are starting to take notice of what we’re doing and want to partner with us due to shared interests. Curated Growth in Des Moines contacted me a few months ago in order to team up and offer the Kauffman FastTrac® course in both Iowa City and Des Moines in addition to tapping into our EntrePartners Braintrust for events in both cities. I’ve also traveled over to Chicago a couple of times in the past year to talk with movers and shakers who want to create spaces like the EntrePartners Innovation Center in other parts of the Midwest and beyond – hoping to start working on this in the coming months.
It’s been great to feel the support from our local community and beyond for what I’m building even if it hasn’t been easy. Believe it or not, it’s a bit tougher to build something from scratch than it is to fix a legacy program. As I’ve been building this thing, the people who really care about what I’m doing have shown up time and again and asked what they can do to help – the spirit of paying it forward is alive and well among most in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, and it makes me hopeful for the future. Friends have been lining up to join the Braintrust and have been recommending the space to their friends as a great place to spend time downtown.
There have only been two major hurdles so far in building out the Innovation Center – getting people to remember to pay their membership fee each month without a reminder or two and dealing with complaints from the therapy offices that surround our Innovation Center and Podcast Studio. I think I have the membership fee thing figured out through an automated platform where members can set their payment method and forget it. We’ll see if folks actually manage to pay on time coming up here in a few days.
The complaints from the therapy offices are more obnoxious than anything else. I’d be more concerned about their complaints if any of the therapists actually TALKED to me instead of posting passive-aggressive notes on the hallway walls and complaining to building management. It would be much easier to nip things in the bud if they said something to me in the moment or sent me an email directly. I was under the impression that therapists talk to people for a living – maybe I’m wrong.
I feel like these therapists would be the type of people who purchase a house one or two miles outside of a rapidly growing city and then complain when large warehouses and factories are then built around their house. If they wanted to guarantee silence around their offices, they should have either leased our space before we got to it or picked offices that aren’t directly underneath a 900 square foot room perfectly suited to meetings and large groups. Here’s hoping that they decide to vacate at the end of their lease and we can bring in some folks who better align with what we’re doing at the Innovation Center.
So, just nine months into the EntrePartners Innovation Center, we’re just getting started. There are a bunch of different projects in motion right now, completely dependent on funding from grants and from the community. I’m in fundraising mode right now, reaching out to friends in the community who have done well for themselves and might be looking to give back to the next generation of entrepreneurs. I’m also in Startup Weekend Iowa City mode, as always this time of year. I have mentors and judges lined up already, so most of my focus is getting participants through the door and recruiting meal sponsors and prize sponsors. If your company would like to donate $500 or more, you can be a meal sponsor – let me know if you’re interested!
In addition to all of the never-ending desk work, I’ll be on the road for a good part of June. I’m arranging a carpool and AirBnB for Iowans attending the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Indianapolis June 2-5. We’ll be driving to Indiana the afternoon of June 1 and coming back first thing in the morning on June 6 if you want to join us. The following week on Thursday and Friday, June 12 and 13, I’ll be driving up to Cedar Rapids for EntreFest. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with friends from years past and to make some new friends this year. The pitch competitions should be fun as well – looking forward to seeing who entered the Friday evening pitch competition that I mentioned in the Unfireable newsletter previously.
In July, I’ll be heading to Kansas City for the joint 1MC-FastTrac Summit at the Kauffman Foundation HQ. I haven’t been there since 2019, prior to the pandemic. I’ll be solely on the FastTrac side this year – I finally retired from the 1MC Iowa City organizing committee after seven years, four of which I was the lead organizer and most of the time served at emcee each Wednesday morning. The committee was finally at the point where I could step away without worrying about the project falling apart. I’m glad the summit is a joint meeting of both groups, so I’ll be able to see some folks on the 1MC side who I haven’t seen in person in several years while meeting a bunch of new people on the FastTrac side, learning how to better teach the curriculum in coming cohorts.
This summer is going to go quickly, between travel, events, and other commitments. I happened to glance at the calendar for the next few weeks, and I couldn’t believe how full it is already. I’m at the point where I have to start saying no to most new opportunities again. In a few weeks, I have three solid days blocked off to serve on a federal government grant panel – never done one of these before, and there’s a decent amount of pre-work I have to do before the panel, including reading through some thick stacks of paper and submitting a report on each one. It should be an interesting experience in a couple of weeks.
Cider Finder is also closing in on completion. More and more of the app is fully functional, and I should have the thing done in just a few weeks. I’m going to be extremely glad to get that thing out on the app stores and in front of as many people as possible in the months leading up to the next CiderCon in February. Once that’s fully up and running, I can turn my attention to some of the adjacent things I’d like to do with Cider Finder as a company, including adding cideries from other parts of the world and moving into cider sales through the app. Like everything else in which I’m involved, the paperwork is going to be intense if I want to start selling cider – not looking forward to this part of running the business.
There’s just so much in progress right now and so many things in the pipeline to come in the next few months. I wish there were a way to clone myself a couple of times and put them to work on some of this stuff. With enough funding, I’ll be expanding EntrePartners sooner rather than later. Once Cider Finder is generating revenue, hiring will begin there too. It’s going to be an exciting second half to 2025, and I’m glad you’re along for the ride.
I know I haven’t been contributing much to this blog lately – it’s not that there aren’t interesting things happening at the Innovation Center on a weekly basis. It’s mostly about finding the time in between everything else to condense my thoughts into a coherent post. If you’re looking for more regular posts, I’ve joined the Iowa Startup Collective as part of their writing group with a Substack called We Are All EntrePartners. If you’re on Substack, give that publication a follow! The book reviews will continue on this blog until my reading list runs out, which could be years from now.
If you’re going to be at any of the events I discussed above, please let me know! Summer is the season for connection and collaboration. If you’re in Iowa City and would like a tour of the Innovation Center or want to get more deeply involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, drop me a line. The EntrePartners Braintrust is still taking new applicants – if you’re involved in an industry that isn’t yet represented on our list, you should join the team. Also, you should join us for Startup Weeeknd Iowa City coming up July 11-13. As always, we’ll have great food and beverages, along with great conversation and interesting ideas pitched.
Would I do all of this again? Definitely. Building this stuff is both terrifying and exhilarating. The hours are long and the pay stinks, but I do it for the future payoff. If you feel the same way, entrepreneurship is for you.