The final cut of the year. Three weeks ago, this was dormant and frozen.
In true Midwestern fashion, we transitioned directly from deep winter into early summer, with about a 36 hour-long period of spring. This past weekend, I was finally able to put away the snowblower and start using the lawnmower. I spent almost the entire day Sunday picking up all of the sticks and branches that had blown off the trees in the past six months, moving the brush that had been left from removing trees last fall, and mowing the grass that was inexplicably long in places and super short in others. Parts of my body still ache from moving branches from my yard to the Oasis burn pile, roughly 2500 feet away from my house.
It feels like people have finally starting coming out of hiding now that the sun is out and temperatures are tolerable. I’ve been able to open up the windows at home, and I can hear activity throughout the countryside, as the farmers try to catch up and get their crops planted. Hearing the activity of civilization is a welcome part of spring, as opposed to the white noise of the furnace and computer fans running in the winter.
The change of weather means that entrepreneurial conference travel season is in full swing. To start things off, as in years past, was the Young Entrepreneur Convention in Des Moines. This year, the convention was downtown at the Marriott, rather than out at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. This was a welcome change, and led to a completely different vibe than in years past. Before the convention started, I decided to go into Des Moines early Friday morning and spend the day working at Gravitate, just a stone’s throw from both my hotel and the convention site. Over the last month, I’ve been working tirelessly trying to get the databases done for Cider Finder, and I made a huge dent in the project on that Friday.
Several of the members there also went out to lunch at El Bait Shop as a group, and they allowed me to tag along. It was a lot of fun getting to know some of the folks who work there, and to be able to share what I’m doing with a new audience. None of them had heard that we are doing Startup Weekend Iowa City, so I was able to spread the word about that. I was also able to reconnect with someone who had seen my BondingBox presentation at 1 Million Cups in Des Moines back in September and give a short update on that.
The Young Entrepreneur Convention starting with drinks and networking on Friday evening, and I ran into several friends from the Des Moines area who were attending. Unfortunately, Katie Wilson and the folks from TapOnIt weren’t there this year – it had become a tradition to meet up with that group each year at the convention and then head downtown for dinner and drinks before retiring for the evening. Nevertheless, it was great to see some folks I hadn’t seen for a while and get some updates on what they have been doing since our last encounter.
I’m pretty sure Ben McDougal keeps that fireplace in his car, just in case.
I appreciated the new venue, especially the vastly diminished noise level. Both venues at the fairgrounds were large and really echoey. Holding the convention in a series of ballrooms dampened the noise significantly and made it much easier to focus on the presenters. I also enjoyed the new two-track system, with the influencer presentations in one room and the startup and technology presentations in another. My time was spent on the startup/technology track, as I thought it would be, and the presentations were all quite interesting. The topics varied from how to keep and grow the startup scene here in the Midwest, to attracting capital to your startup, to blockchain and its potential uses.
Honestly, I haven’t fully bought into blockchain yet – I still feel like it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and more of a passion project for technology geeks who are interested in commodities and securities. Really, it’s more of a fun hobby for people with money to burn. I possibly see it being used in legal documentation and record keeping, because of the immutable aspect of the technology. I really don’t see cryptocurrency on the blockchain being the future of money in some distant dystopian nightmare, as some advocates believe. There have been ways of getting around government control of currency ever since currency was invented, and I don’t see the cryptocurrency as a better solution than either bartering or printing your own scrip. However, I do feel like I understand the technology better after the presentation by the Bad Crypto Podcast guys.
The pitch competition was also vastly improved over last year. I made my complaints known after last year’s competition, and it seems like the organizers really took everything to heart in planning this year’s competition. I really enjoyed giving my pitch for Cider Finder out in the open – the judges were positioned at a table right in front of me, but any of the attendees could enjoy their breakfast and watch the competition. I was the very first pitch of the morning, pitching about an hour before the first breakout session of the morning, so the crowd maybe numbered a dozen or so. They also gave us our feedback sheets from the judges, which was incredibly helpful.
I didn’t make it into the final six pitches this year, and for the most part, the final six pitches were incredibly polished and deserving of the time – much more than last year. I completely agreed with the choices for first and second, but I thought the pitch that won third place was the weakest of the final six. It raised a bit of a red flag that the third-place winner was also a sponsor of the convention. Do you really need to compete in a pitch competition if you have the ability to financially sponsor a convention? I won’t dwell on it further, because this was truly the only bad moment during an otherwise excellent event.
After returning to eastern Iowa, I’ve been hard at work on both BondingBox and Cider Finder. I finished the master list of ciders throughout the United States, and ended up with over 3000 entries on the spreadsheet. Lots of plain apple ciders, pear ciders (perry is the official name of this), and ciders mixed with just about every other fruit out there. From their descriptions, some of the ciders sound absolutely delicious. The next step of data collection is to take all of the cidery addresses and plot them on a map, along with following all of the cideries on social media through the Cider Finder accounts. Then, to start developing the actual interface for the app.
Maybe I will have a rough first version done before the end of the summer!
On the BondingBox front, we continue to grow our subscriber base. We’re getting orders from outside the Midwest, so the Facebook ads must have made some sort of dent. Our team has been running a social media campaign featuring Mother’s Day and how our product makes the lives of mothers more enjoyable. We are planning to run a similar Father’s Day campaign during the second half of May and leading into June. I’m also working to get our products listed on Amazon, and continue to look for ways to advertise what we are doing with the people who would benefit from our product the most.
A decent-sized crowd keeps turning out for Iowa City Open Coffee and 1 Million Cups Iowa City.
I had mentioned in my last post that Iowa City and Cedar Rapids were splitting into two separate 1 Million Cups chapters. We officially made the split at the end of April, and since then, we’ve been running an event every Wednesday morning at MERGE. I also made the decision to run Iowa City Open Coffee every Wednesday morning as well, to get as many people in the door as possible. Since I attend just about every week, I volunteered to be a backup MC if the usual suspects are unavailable. This week, the other organizers allowed me to give it a shot. I’ve attended 1 Million Cups forever, and have presented BondingBox in the past, but being the MC for the morning is a completely different experience. I feel like I did pretty well on my first try – a bit shaky at first, but I got into the groove completely after the first presentation was over.
It’s not too shabby going from merely facilitating the opening act to running the main event.
Next week is one of the biggest weeks in entrepreneurship in Iowa – EntreFEST returns for another year, and it should be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward not only to the different speakers and breakout sessions, but to see how things are going to function with the move to the NewBo district in Cedar Rapids. According to the schedule they’ve released to attendees, the organizers have also built in quite a bit more social activities and parties than it seemed like we on the schedule last year – so much so, that it looks like you can jump from one social event to another without any real down time in between.
Most of the presentations look as though they cover new material as compared to last year. There are only so many topics that can be covered in starting a business, but it looks like the organizers were trying to think outside of the box this year. I really am looking forward to finalizing my schedule for next week’s event, and I’m really hoping to bump into a fair number of friendly faces and make some great new connections.
There’s lots to do in the next week or so before EntreFEST consumes the second half of next week. I’m getting ready to start a major advertising blitz for Startup Weekend Iowa City, and I’m hoping to get the last of the databases done for Cider Finder. I have several images to edit and text to update on the BondingBox Web site and on our Amazon listings. On top of that, the latest edition of the Freelance Media Newsletter is due out at the beginning of next week.
Hopefully I can get a few of the above things done before it’s time to mow again. The grass is already starting to look a bit shaggy after the little bit of rain we’ve received this week. Oh, the perils of home ownership!
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