For the first time in a while, I’m able to catch my breath and relax for a few minutes. Startup Weekend Iowa City is finally over, and it was an incredible success! But it wasn’t just Startup Weekend Iowa City occupying last week – I was either traveling, presenting, or on the phone with various people all throughout the week, getting only three or four hours of sleep each night. By the time I got home on Sunday evening, I crawled into bed and passed out almost immediately.
It was an invigorating type of exhausted. Ideas were turned into startups. New friends were made and partnerships were formed. More food and drink was consumed than is recommended. And, we’ve already started talking about Startup Weekend Iowa City 2019.
Since my last post, I was on the road to Des Moines to take part in the Freelancer Happy Hour at Gravitate in Valley Junction, and then to present both Cider Finder and Startup Weekend Iowa City at 1 Million Cups at the Science Center downtown. I hadn’t planned to be on the road at all the week leading up to Startup Weekend Iowa City, but the folks in Des Moines had heard about Cider Finder and wanted to learn more about the project, while giving me one last opportunity to plug Startup Weekend Iowa City to their attendees.
It was an intimate group at the Freelancer Happy Hour, which was nice. I made a couple of new connections and got to have a lengthy conversation with the group about what I do and the story behind my work as a freelancer. Our conversation over frosty beverages lasted well into the evening, and it was dark outside by the time we wrapped up. After a bit more work on my slide deck for the following morning, I decided to call it a night.
Great questions and great conversation from the folks in Des Moines. Picture taken by Ben McDougal.
The next morning, I arrived at the Science Center in downtown Des Moines and got all of my equipment set up before 8 am, when the coffee arrived and 1 Million Cups attendees began to file into the atrium outside the auditorium. I was able to make a couple of new connections among the 50 or so people who attended the presentation that morning. I joked a bit with the Des Moines 1MC organizers about the gaggle of students from the entrepreneurial program in Ames who traveled south for the presentation – was this some sort of trap for the guy from Iowa City? Overall, the group asked great questions about the Cider Finder business model and gave some excellent feedback on the concept I presented.
After a quick bite to eat, I was on the road again, on the way back to Iowa City to take care of Startup Weekend Iowa City tasks – getting the last few sponsors on board, keeping track of tickets that had just been sold, and making sure that food orders were being put in for the weekend. What I came to find about organizing an event like Startup Weekend is that most of the planning can be done months in advance, but most of the attention has to be paid to the details immediately before the event. I tried to do as much work ahead of time as I could, but there are certain things that you just can’t do too far ahead of time.
Thursday was booked out with Mandela Washington Fellows events with brief times in between to answer phone calls and e-mails related to the upcoming weekend. They split the fellows into three different rooms to give their final pitches, and what an amazing job they all did building their presentations between the first day and the final day! I was only able to meet with one of the fellows in between the two pitch days, but I’m scheduling some time with a few others before they leave the area. A good number of them were awarded cash prizes from an anonymous donor, which they will put to good use when they return home.
When Friday rolled around, it was “go time.” I arrived at MERGE at 3 pm with an SUV-load of beverages and supplies to kick off the weekend and began to set up the room. Our live streamers, GoLive Midwest also arrived to begin setting up their equipment to broadcast the Friday Idea Storm and the Sunday Pitch Competition. Most of the room was still set up from 1 Million Cups two days before, so most of the effort was getting name tags put together, the slide deck finished out on my laptop, and the prize packages assembled for the top three teams. We opened the doors at 5 pm and the pizza arrived shortly after.
MERGE was a packed house for the Startup Weekend Iowa City final pitches. Picture taken by Josh Krakauer.
We ended up with 22 participants for the weekend, and over 70% of them got up and pitched some sort of idea. 18 of the people attending were Startup Weekend first-timers – people who had put their trust in me, that this was the place to be for the weekend. We ended up picking 6 ideas to continue, and 5 of those 6 ideas had teams form around them. Both Friday and Saturday evening, teams stayed to work in the MERGE space until nearly 11 pm, when we said that we were closing for the night.
One takeaway from the weekend is that I shouldn’t be in charge of the head count for the food. I had estimated that we would need about 40 servings of all of the food, based on the attendee count plus staff and other coaches and friends who would be joining us for each meal. I think that either people ate way less than they could have, or our vendors gave us way too much food for “40 people.” Either way, we had way more food than we knew what to do with – we even started running out of fridge space on Saturday evening. To put a positive spin on it, nobody walked away from the weekend hungry. Perhaps someone else should decide how much food to order next year…
Another takeaway from the weekend is that anyone can come up with a great idea, and that anyone can lead a team. Our winning team, Better HireS, was created and led by two high school students from Des Moines. Their mother was one of our coaches for the weekend, and was the reason they were participating in the event. Their teams, along with at least two of the other teams, were talking as though they were going to continue working on their Startup Weekend projects after the weekend was over. We’ll see what actually happens, but a continuation rate of 60% completely demolishes the worldwide average of 19% of teams who continue working on their projects after the completion of the weekend.
I really enjoyed working with all of the folks from Iowa City and Des Moines who supported our event. Unfortunately, we really didn’t get any support from the entrepreneurial community in Cedar Rapids. I’m going to continue digging to find out why this was the case. Only a couple of people from there participated in the event, and none of the usual suspects from that community attended the (free, open to the public) pitches on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t for a lack of advertising – I plastered messages on every single statewide entrepreneurial Facebook group and Slack channel I could think of during the weeks leading to the event, and I sent event flyers to all of the coworking spaces in Cedar Rapids.
Leading to next year’s event, we’re looking for planning committee members from across the state. Startup Weekend Iowa City 2019 is truly going to be a statewide event. We were halfway there this year – participants from Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, and Mason City. When I traveled to Des Moines last week, I had some great conversations about making Startup Weekend Iowa City THE statewide event for budding entrepreneurship, possibly dropping the “City” from the event name and having the event in multiple locations at the same time, along the lines of the 2015 event. We’re also reaching out to the Quad Cities and Cedar Falls as potential partners.
Cedar Rapids entrepreneurs, there’s still time to join the partnership.
If you’d like to see what we did in the idea storm Friday night, check out part 1 and part 2. If you’d like to watch the final presentations from Sunday, check out this video. I think I did a pretty good job facilitating the madness this past weekend. (Also, I now qualify as a facilitator for Startup Weekend, if you’re looking for someone to run your event in the future.) Also, check out the write up in Clay & Milk about the event. I strongly encouraged Jake, the editor of Clay & Milk, to join a team. He jumped right in and got the full Startup Weekend experience! We were also interviewed by reporters at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Des Moines Business Record, and the Corridor Business Journal. No TV coverage though… must have been too busy covering breaking eastern Iowa stories to cover our little event.
Now that Startup Weekend Iowa City is done for the year, I can focus on what’s ahead. September is going to be the next crazy month, with two launches and my yearly pilgrimage to Colorado for Denver Startup Week. The Cider Finder app, if all goes according to plan, should be beginning its beta testing on September 15, just days before I leave for Denver. In the same time frame, the Freelance Media Podcast will be releasing its first few episodes – the very first episode should be live the first week of September. In addition, Denver Startup Week just opened up registration and released the schedule of events for the week. I’m hoping to get into the Kick-Off Breakfast again this year, and the block party at the end of the day Monday should be a lot of fun and great networking. As more sessions are added, I’m going to have fun arranging and rearranging my schedule leading up to that week.
I’m also traveling to Kansas City in late October for the 1 Million Cups Organizers’ Summit. It was originally scheduled for the week before Denver Startup Week, but due to overlap with Yom Kippur, they decided to move the event to October instead. I’ve driven through Kansas City in the past, but I’ve never had a chance to actually spend any time there. It should be fun learning from other organizers and getting a chance to experience a new part of the Midwest. I’ll also be staying for their 1 Million Cups Wednesday event at the end of the conference. If I can bring anything useful back to our location in Iowa City, the trip will be well worth it.
The rest of the summer is pretty jam-packed. My older daughter starts 1st grade in about 6 weeks, and we have plenty of outdoor time planned up until school starts. The Johnson County Fair is next week, and the Iowa State Fair is only a month away – both mandatory events, according to my kids. We also have Hoover’s Hometown Days on the calendar at the beginning of August, complete with fireworks. We have something on the calendar nearly every weekend before school starts, and my older daughter has a ballet camp the first week of August.
I’m going to utilize the rest of this week to finish catching my breath. Because every time I look at my calendar, it takes my breath away how much there is to do.
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