To say the last few days have been incredibly productive would be an understatement, even though I haven’t spent much time in the office at all. EntreFest was the end of the pitch marathon of the last month. Flyover Fashion Fest was a fun, mind-opening experience. In addition, Team Cider Finder received an e-mail that might end up changing my schedule in the last third of the year.
Let’s go back to last Wednesday evening. EntreFest opened up the conference headquarters in the just-finished MERGE space in downtown Iowa City, at the very center of the Ped Mall. They did an amazing job transforming that space from a former restaurant and coffee shop into a fun, relaxing coworking space and meeting area – a definite improvement over the old IC Colab, which felt more like a bunker than anything else. I grabbed my badge and some convention swag and went over to Gabe’s for the kickoff party. Believe it or not, I’ve lived in or near Iowa City for 16 years and have never been inside Gabe’s on Washington Street until now, and in the past week, I’ve now been in there twice!
There was a decent turnout for the kickoff party. Most of the folks I talked to were people I knew already from the local startup and entrepreneurial community. However, I was able to connect with some new people and spread the word about Sexy Life and, to a lesser extent, Cider Finder. There were also some activities at the party, besides enjoying a beverage and networking. In the back of the venue, we were able to try beer floats – ice cream and beer of your choice – and leave some feedback. I’m not sure if it was customer discovery for someone, but it was quite delicious. I went with vanilla ice cream in a raspberry wheat beer, and it ended up tasting like raspberry sauce poured over the ice cream. At another table, a couple people had this card game with different scenarios that a startup team might face, and the player had to decide which of the 24 cards or so matched up with the player’s leadership style. It turned out that I am an empathetic leader, and I got a little sticker for my name badge.
During the festivities, I had a chance to check my phone and saw that I had received an e-mail from one of the staff members at the Boomtown Accelerator in Boulder, Colorado. They had found us through our Startup Weekend profile, and were inviting us to apply for their fall cohort. (Let this be a lesson to anyone starting a venture at Startup Weekend and wanting to continue the business after the conclusion of the weekend – people are actually looking at the F6S site! I filled out a decent amount of the site during Startup Weekend in Decatur. However, I didn’t realize that as time goes on, it seems like more programs are using that site for applications and accelerators are surfing through there looking for potential teams to fill out the ranks of programs.)
Lee, my partner in Cider Finder, is incredibly excited to get this application filled out. I saw the requirement to move to Colorado for the 3 months of the program, and I immediately started to weigh the pros and cons of participating. So much of the day-to-day operation of my household is tied to me being here – everything from shuttling the kids everywhere, to mowing the yard, to making sure we don’t completely run out of food or toilet paper each week. I started to make a list of all of the things that would have to be put on someone else’s plate during those three months, and it was eye-opening. (I’m not wrong when I say the whole system would collapse if I were to suddenly disappear.) I have also started a list of things that would need to be finished out before I would leave, and that list is starting to rival the length of the list of weekly chores.
However, this is a HUGE opportunity for Cider Finder if we were to get an interview and get accepted into the program. There is also a huge chance that we won’t make it past either the application process or the interview. I do want to plan for both scenarios, and it’s not bad to get a contingency plan down on paper and get these projects done – some of which have been sitting on my desk or on my various computers for years. I also don’t think it would be a bad idea to have a contingency plan in place, if years down the road, another company I’ve created goes through an accelerator program. It would be comforting to know that the household could continue to run and the kids, wife, and pets would be just fine, even if I’m not at the helm.
I had to refocus on Sexy Life on Thursday morning for the JPEC Pitch Competition. The two teams that were supposed to present before us didn’t show up for some reason, so like almost every pitch competition in which I’ve participated, I am the first up in a long line of solid ideas. This was the first competition where I’ve had to give the full pitch without any type of slides, handouts, or visuals for the judges. The 90-second elevator pitch at the Young Entrepreneur Convention was a close approximation, but didn’t totally prepare me for a full 5 minutes plus questions. I think that my pitch is getting better as time goes on. I’ve been working on perfecting the message as I give each pitch. The one thing that I think is killing us is that we haven’t sold anything yet. The judges seem to be looking for traction in our business, and we just don’t have that yet, since we haven’t opened up the Web site for subscription pre-orders just yet. It’s something we need to work on, and we need to work out more of the numbers and projections for future pitches.
We didn’t end up making it into the top 6 that received prizes. It would have been nice, but doing the pitch again and again is good practice for the future. Because we weren’t in the winner’s circle, we didn’t automatically advance to the Pappajohn Iowa Entrepreneurial Venture Competition. However, we are still eligible to apply to that competition and see if we make it into the judging round. Only some of the applicants make it through to pitch judging, and it might be interesting to see what kind of feedback we would get from this application and possible participation in the pitch competition, especially when we get our numbers squared away a bit more.
After the competition, I didn’t have anything scheduled until the first breakout session, so I went back to the EntreFest HQ space and sat down on the couch. For the next hour, people came over to the couch where I was sitting to have some awesome discussions. I must have come off as incredibly approachable, and I’m glad to have had the chance to talk with several people between the pitch and the breakout. (I also found out that people are actually reading this stuff I’m posting on this blog! Maybe I’ll keep it up…)
The focus of most of the sessions I attended during EntreFest was funding. I went to a session discussing government grants for funding new businesses – probably not applicable to either of my startups, but you never know. Later on Thursday afternoon, I attended a panel discussion on funding startups through more traditional methods, like working with local banks and angel investors, and when you need to bring in professionals to help craft deals between entrepreneurs and investors. On Friday, I attended a session on connecting the right people and the right resources, where they discussed all sorts of resources available here in Iowa on both the local and state levels. Between the government grant session and the right people/right resources session, I created a decent-sized Google Doc full of information that I’m filing away for use later.
Speaking of funding, on Friday morning, I was lucky enough to secure a spot at the table with Paul Singh for what was supposed to be an hour-long discussion over coffee with other local entrepreneurs. I hadn’t had the chance to connect with him the last time he was in eastern Iowa, so I wanted to have the ability to find out more about what his firm looks for in company when they present the business to investors. Our small group of folks ended up sticking around for nearly 3 hours asking questions and gaining knowledge on venture capital, VC firms, investments, and other entrepreneurial tidbits. It was well worth the time, and I’m hoping Paul Singh could be a valuable resource in the future when some of my companies reach the point where we are seeking out investors.
Some other highlights of my experience at EntreFest include a panel of local craft brewers talking about the business of microbrewing, learning about connecting at a human-to-human level when launching marketing campaigns, and listening to the story of how a struggling group of graduate students started an online glasses business, bootstrapping it with only $100,000 of their own money, an inside connection at GQ, and a luxury apartment to show off merchandise to potential customers. (Seriously, that must have been tough.)
There were also a few sessions that I wish I’d had the chance to attend. It’s tough when they schedule so many good things opposite each other. There were some social events that I wasn’t able to attend as well, because there was only so much time to schedule things during the two days. I would have liked to make it to both Appy Hour on Thursday afternoon and the Friday morning Tech Brew networking meetup. I like going to these conventions to do a fair bit of networking, but there just wasn’t enough time built in to do that. I did attend the EntreFest finale party/Flyover kick-off party, but very few of the EntreFest participants actually showed up for that. It seemed like a good chunk of the participants actually left before the final keynote address on Friday afternoon, which seemed odd. Did they stack too much stuff on Thursday? The energy level was definitely more muted on Friday than it was on Thursday during the day. I’m not sure how they could fix this – perhaps move the pitch competition to Friday and have the winners for that announced at the very end of the conference instead of what basically was the middle, on Thursday afternoon.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Flyover Fashion Fest. I knew that there were going to be a few fashion shows and some speakers and exhibits. Beyond that, I was keeping my mind open to new ideas, and I hoped to possibly have some fashion skills rub off on me a bit. After the kickoff party, the crowd moved from the rooftop patio of the new MidWestOne bank building back down to the Ped Mall, where they had set up an entire catwalk in the middle of everything, right in front of the MERGE space. The second Friday fashion show and the show Saturday evening were on the roof of HotelVetro, up above the Ped Mall.
I wish that my phone battery hadn’t died both evenings so that I could have gotten more pictures of the action. The outfits displayed over the weekend ranged from the reasonable to the outlandish. Some of them I’m guessing were art for art’s sake. A few of them left very little to the imagination. However, it was great to see that people are creating all sorts of interesting and new things right here in Iowa, and not leaving to go to the coasts or to the larger cities overseas to make their dreams happen. That’s what we’re trying to build here, and you can see that it’s starting to take shape.
The twin events ended just as they began, with a party at Gabe’s. Since Flyover Fashion Fest was coming to a close, I was actually able to talk with Ian a little bit, and I told him about the invitation to apply to Boomtown. I wanted to tell him, since he was there for the birth of Cider Finder at Startup Weekend Decatur. He couldn’t believe that we were already seeing interest in what we are proposing with the Cider Finder app. It’s such a simple idea, but it’s something that fills a niche were nobody exists at the moment. It is because the craft cider craze is just beginning? Is it because the niche is too small a slice of the market? I’m looking forward to continuing research on this, just to see why there are no other players in this space.
We have until Friday to get our application into Boomtown for their consideration. If we move onto the next round, we would have an interview either in June or July, and find out in August whether or not we made it into the cohort. It’s a short timetable, but that’s part of the startup life. The nice thing about the application is that it’s forcing me to go back and re-examine our business model, since several of the application fields involve discussing parts of the Business Model Canvas. Taking feedback from the Startup Weekend pitch, I definitely need to look at the customer base, and figure out whether or not our pricing model would really be feasible for cider makers and bars.
I’m also in the middle of getting the landing pages up for our replacement names for Sexy Life, so that we can start testing those and pick a new name that possibly would give our clients a better idea of what we actually do. We’ve been stuck with Sexy Life as a name since the very beginning, but it really doesn’t do us justice. Sometimes I wonder whether the name is off-putting to some of the judges who have been scoring our pitches. I think we will do better with any of the new names (even though there’s a solid contingent locally who want us to keep Sexy Life as our primary name.)
I’ll definitely be nose to the grindstone the next couple of weeks, through Memorial Day. Hopefully by the next time I post, I’ll know whether or not we’re on the list of interviewees at the accelerator. I am planning to post something quickly before the Inside/Outside Innovation Summit in the middle of June. Sexy Life should have a new name after that convention, and we should have the Web site ready to take subscriptions in July. In addition, I’ll be heading down to Fairfield in a couple of weeks to check out the Fairfield Colab and possibly one of the cideries in that area along with the rest of Team Cider Finder. Between that and the plethora of things to do around the house, I know I’ll be busy.
In addition, the committee at Denver Startup Week just started the public voting process for presentations during the week. I submitted my topic, and it’s up against some pretty fierce competition for votes. Do me a favor and give my idea a vote – I’d love to get on stage and talk about my journey taking care of my girls while creating new businesses. If the accelerator thing works out, I’ll be out there anyway for the duration of Denver Startup Week. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to getting out there in September for my yearly trip.
To all the mothers out there, have a happy Mother’s Day. The girls and I will be celebrating with by taking my wife to brunch on Sunday, along with my mom and several of my brothers. We’re looking forward to that and to the end of the school year, with warm days ahead. Keep on working, and we’ll talk again soon.
You must be logged in to post a comment.