We had our last Thursday night Venture School meeting last night, and we are feeling good about where we are with our restaurant concept. I have been trying out and entering our data into Handrail, a customer discovery and user experience Web application created by ConnectFive in Coralville. Now that we have conducted 50 of the 100 customer discovery interviews, we are getting some great insights from entering our data into a centralized system. My partner Tom has been doing a great job summarizing the information when we give our presentations, but it’s also nice to have some graphics like this to work with:
Monday and Tuesday next week are the last sessions for Venture School. We work sun up to sun down on Monday and present our startups before actual investors Tuesday. We aren’t looking for any investment, but it will be great practice to go before some bigwigs (and some mediumwigs) and give an actual pitch outside of the safety and comfort of the classroom. Perhaps someday I will be pitching some great idea in front of the same people – the networking aspect is the best part of the Venture School experience and hanging with the startup crowd here in eastern Iowa.
I’m really looking forward to this Startup Weekend thing. I have talked with some of the organizers over the last couple of weeks, and it sounds like there are going to be over 60 people participating just here in Iowa City. There are several other sites throughout Iowa – Cedar Falls, Ames, Council Bluffs, and Sioux City are other sites that I’ve heard mentioned. There should be some great ideas bounced around if there are that many people attending, and it should be a blast trying to put together some kind of viable thing in just a couple of intensive days.
I’m looking at this almost the same way I looked at the big Hackathon I attended a few months ago, except this time, we all will coalesce into teams and something should be accomplished by the end of the weekend. During the hackathon, I started learning the ins and outs of Ubuntu and Linux – not really something that could be presented at the end of the weekend, but something that I’d wanted to do and something that has helped me increase my productivity since then. Even if nothing comes of this weekend, I’ll make some lasting connections with others in the community that I otherwise wouldn’t, had I not attended.
If I get a break during the weekend, I’m hoping to post another update on the progress of my team and about the Startup Weekend event in general. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed for pictures and retweets from the event.
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