The weather here in eastern Iowa can be pretty tricky this time of year. No two winters are the same around here. Last year, I didn’t use the snowblower at all, because every heavy snow system bypassed us either to the north, through Cedar Rapids, or to the south, through Mount Pleasant. Here in Oasis, we may have had five or six inches of snow the entire winter. This year, all of our snow has come in two-inch burst over the course of one week. I ran the snowblower four times during the first week of February, removing close to a foot of snow over the length of the week. I probably could have shoveled most of the times, but I wanted to get the snow off of the driveway before someone drove on it and turned the snow into that packed down, impossible to remove stuff that forms under the weight of car tires, only to disappear when the snow completely melts.
When someone spends time doing tedious things like removing snow, it allows the mind to wander a bit. Before I had kids, most of my breakthroughs came to me in the shower. Now, the only occasions where I have enough time to put a couple of thoughts together occur when I’m either mowing the lawn or shoveling the snow. Nature has gifted me several occasions this month to clear my mind and think about things.
I’ve started to formulate the list of people I’d like to interview for the upcoming Freelance Media Podcast (Web site coming soon), which I’m planning to launch this summer. Over the next couple of months, I want to get about a dozen interviews done with various freelancers and creatives who work with different types of media – Web design, print design, video and audio production, three-dimensional media, and so on. Like most podcasts, it will probably be the easiest to start with friends and move on from there. There are a lot of podcasts that focus on entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses. In my searches, there are nearly no podcasts that focus on the people who work behind the scenes, one contract at a time, to power the economy. Freelancing and contract work are making up a larger portion of the economy each year, and it’s time to recognize the growing importance of this sector.
Do you know someone who would be a great interview for this project? Let me know! I’ll have more information on this project online in the next few weeks.
Startup Weekend Iowa City ticket sales are nearly ready to launch! I have access to all of the Techstars-related Web sites, and I’ve been in contact with Jordan at Techstars on a nearly-weekly basis over the last few weeks. Once I get all of the ticket prices in line with our plans (nothing over $20, and free access to the pitch event on Sunday evening), the event can be published and ticket sales will commence! We shouldn’t be in direct competition with any other Startup Weekends – Cedar Rapids is planning to run their event in June 8-10, and any other event nearby should be in the fall sometime.
This is our committee’s opportunity to make Startup Weekend Iowa City a summer destination for entrepreneurs across the state. It’s something we tried to do last fall, but failed miserably. We were competing against too many other events in the fall, including Iowa Startup Games and both high school and college sports. It’s a losing proposition to run something in the fall, and Cedar Rapids has dibs on events in the spring… although, they ran into an even more severe conflict with Iowa Startup Games in the spring this year than we did in the fall last year. Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids was planned for the same weekend as Iowa Startup Games; we were aiming for an adjacent weekend.
I wasn’t going to be able to attend Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids in that case, because I’ll be mentoring student teams during Iowa Startup Games this weekend. It will also be the first time in a decade that I won’t be attending Gamicon, and it’s for the better. I’ve happily run the video game room during that entire time, essentially functioning as a babysitter for a handful of 9-14 year olds who spend the entire convention in the video game room. However, last year should have been my sign that it was time to move on. The non-profit organization that manages Gamicon and a couple of other local conventions formed its own video game committee, and the two guys who run that committee wanted absolutely no input from me – the person who created the concept for Gamicon a decade ago.
To make things worse at last year’s convention, one of those committee members spent nearly the entire convention attempting to “co-manage” the room with me, completely unrequested and unwanted. I let this wash over me and ignored the meddling. However, with the draft of the program book released a couple of weeks ago and my name conspicuously missing, I promptly resigned. It’s a shame that people who I thought were friends would treat me this way. The convention committee is completely new this year, and I don’t really know them that well. They also wanted someone else to manage their Web site this year, and the convention committee seems determined to create accounts and manually wrangle event data themselves, rather than relying on the Webmaster to do it. They seem to be learning the hard way how much magic happened in the background when they had an integrated site, rather than relying on a series of non-connected services. I sincerely hope that the level of dysfunction in the video game room is kept to a minimum, but I don’t see that happening.
Thankfully, it’s not my problem this year. I have a fun weekend of entrepreneurship ahead.
I always look forward to Iowa Startup Games. The students come up with some amazing ideas during the weekend, and it’s fun to pass on little tidbits that I’ve learned over the last few years. I’ve found that I’m best utilized on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, after the teams have formulated their ideas and have done some of their customer discovery. Last fall, I spent most of my time helping teams build their slide decks and coming up with their pitches for the competition on Sunday afternoon. I also love introducing the concept of a business landing page and helping the teams best utilize social media to gather more evidence for their pitches.
This time of year is usually when I cling to home base. There have been some mornings when I don’t want to go outside because it feels like my nose hairs are freezing together. When I last posted (way back at the end of December), I thought I’d set my travel schedule in stone. It turns out that I’m adding an extra trip to Des Moines on March 13 and 14 for a couple of very special events in the Iowa startup community. I’m planning to attend the newly created Freelancer Happy Hour at Gravitate’s new location in Valley Junction on Tuesday evening and stay overnight in Des Moines that night. Then, bright and early Wednesday morning, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds is planning to have an hour-long question and answer session at 1 Million Cups Des Moines. I’m drafting a few questions involving freelancing and entrepreneurship that I’d like to ask.
It will be a lot of fun to get back to Des Moines and reconnect with the crowd at 1 Million Cups there. I usually end up bumping into friends when I’m in town, and it’s great to see how fellow entrepreneurs and freelancers have been moving their projects and businesses forward. Before I return to eastern Iowa, I’ll be stopping at the Secretary of State’s office with paperwork to officially make Cider Finder a business and to move my freelancing concern under a parent LLC. I’m making this move from sole proprietor to an limited liability corporation due to other projects I’d like to run concurrently with the freelancing business, such as the podcast. It protects my personal assets in case someone decides to sue me for bad editing or something. I am also developing a couple of software packages that I might want to sell in the future, and the LLC will also be responsible for those.
Some friends from high school will chuckle at the name of the LLC I’ve picked for my freelancing business, but I don’t want to reveal it until I’ve actually been granted the name by the state. Stay tuned.
BondingBox is still moving along, with a few changes along the way. We didn’t get as much traction for Valentine’s Day as we thought we would, and some of the feedback we’ve received was telling us that we might need to adjust the pricing a bit. So, instead of the four options we had on the Web site, we’ve narrowed it down to a full monthly subscription with all of the perks, and a one-off box that gives people a taste of our offerings – one activity instead of the two that you get in the monthly box, and you get to choose the activity in the one-off, whereas we choose the two activities that we send in the subscription. Monthly subscriptions also come with bonus material that we are developing through a partnership with a relationship counselor in the area.
We’re now looking at Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as out next big milestones. Our ads should be coming out soon, so if you’re a parent with young kids, you might be seeing our ads on a Facebook app near you. Our one-off boxes are also going to be listed on Amazon, if you feel more comfortable purchasing things through that channel. We’re really interested in seeing if some of our changes pay off, and we’re able to convince more people to subscribe to the service.
Before I go, I’d like to invite all of you to subscribe to my new Freelance Media Newsletter. The newsletter will mostly involve updates, events, and successes from all of us on the list, while I plan to take this blog down the road of deeper analysis of happenings in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. After I sent the introductory e-mail to the list, I had several great conversations with folks I’ve met over the last three years. It was great to catch up with them, share what we’ve been doing, and exchange ideas and advice. I’m hoping this becomes a big part of the newsletter – the more interactive it can become, the better. Subscribe today!
Also, watch my Twitter feed for news on my trip to Des Moines in a couple of weeks. It should be a lot of fun, and I really hope that both events are incredibly productive. Until next time!