I might be wrong about this, but when your children start uttering the phrase, “I’m bored,” summer has officially run its course and the countdown to the first day of school begins. Luckily, we made it all the way until the beginning of August before this happened. Coincidentally, it was the same day that I registered my older daughter for school and bought her school supplies.
The countdown is on, and it’s in the single digits. School starts August 23, but we have pre-start of school events the rest of the week. We’re still yet to go clothes shopping and shoe shopping – I was putting that one on my wife’s plate, but we’ll see if any progress is made on it this weekend. I’ve never been a big fan of shopping for my own clothes, let alone clothes for a stylish little girl starting first grade next week.
It will be nice to be back on a regular schedule again. Earlier bedtimes mean I get back my sanity and my quiet time in the evening. With one kid and school all week, and the other occupied at least a couple of days a week, it means that I can finally get some things done around the house. Our garage is in desperate need of a complete clean out, and the weeds are out of control in the backyard. Although, if my older kid ever says “I’m bored” again, she gets to clean out the garage. She hasn’t said it since.
Since I last wrote, I’ve had the chance to review what went well and what we can do better with Startup Weekend Iowa City in 2019. The major thing that went well is that we actually made money on the event! Granted, it was only like $50 in the black, but it’s about as close to breaking even as you can get and not lose money. I was completely floored when I finished the books, and that was the final total. Ian did an amazing job negotiating with food vendors to keep the price of each meal ridiculously low, and our monetary and in-kind sponsors were amazing. Had we been required to pay for the space at MERGE or had to buy prizes, our budget would have been destroyed.
Between the in-kind and monetary sponsors, we raised about $10,000. My goal for next year’s event is to double this – $20,000 in fundraising, with $5000 specifically in cash. I think this is going to be the biggest hurdle for next year’s event, but I believe that it’s doable. It’s just going to require advertising and pestering people much earlier than we did this year. Tickets will still go on sale at the beginning of January for the event in July, just as they did this year. The biggest change is going to be that fundraising will start in January alongside ticket sales, rather than late April, as we did for this year’s event. It will give more companies more runway to decide how they will support our event, and may lead to larger donations.
The other major challenge that we face in 2019 is figuring out how to dial into media coverage and deal with local economic development organizations. We had amazing coverage from Clay & Milk, with their editor Jake Slobe participating on one of the teams. The Des Moines Business Record wrote up a preview of our event, and the Corridor Business Journal begrudgingly added a couple of pictures from our event after we bugged them incessantly to cover a startup event in their readership area for the 2 weeks leading up to the event. None of the local TV or radio stations bothered to reply to our press release.
Dealing with the local economic development groups was even worse. The major lesson I took away from encounters with these quasi-governmental groups is that if it doesn’t fit in with their agenda – even if it would benefit their organization and the community they allegedly serve – they don’t care. This isn’t just an Iowa City problem – this is, in the very least, a regional problem.
Take, for instance, the drama surrounding NewBo Evolve. The ever-rebranding Convention and Visitor’s Bureau in Cedar Rapids essentially wanted to bring a South by Southwest type of event to town. Fair enough, even though a version of that exists in the Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City. They were determined to have everyone buy weekend passes and draw in all sorts of out-of-town visitors, so they spent all of their advertising and goodwill talking about the weekend passes. “Cedar Rapids needs this! We need to be bold and daring!” is all we heard from the powers-that-be in the neighborhood.
But, do they “need” it if very few want it? For people who allegedly buy into customer discovery and lean startups, it must have required an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to blindly support an event that had nearly no customer input. They were going to do it a certain way on this certain weekend, and nothing will change their plans. People will bypass other established music festivals happening that same weekend to come to Cedar Rapids specifically to see musical acts popular a decade ago and reality show hosts!
WE WILL DO ALL THE THINGS AND IT WILL BE AMAZING.
… but, it wasn’t.
They haven’t released any numbers yet (and probably never will), but I’d bet actual money that more than 90% of evening concert-goers bought tickets for those specific concerts. They came, listened to their favorite artist, drank some cheap beer at stadium prices, and left. Just as you would expect when nearly everything else of interest is walled off for nearly $400 a pop.
At least after the fact, they seem to be slowly admitting that the weekend was a disaster. The lead organizer was fired just a week after they called it a “success,” and some of the people who wouldn’t hear anything but positive things regarding the event are starting to come around. Shortly after, all of the gushing, tone-deaf reviews of the weekend disappeared from Facebook as the congratulatory sycophantic circle-jerk abruptly ended. Meanwhile, local businesses are still reeling from lost sales due to closed roads and competition from similar pop-up stores run by vendors from outside Cedar Rapids. The only people left with much of anything positive to say about the experience held the largest megaphones already, and had very little to lose or gain from the weekend neighborhood takeover.
I think the takeaway from all of this is that you have to find a way to work around these quasi-governmental groups, utilizing them only when you need them and ignoring them at all other times. Essentially, give them the same level of disrespect they give the people funding their operations. The way to handle this is to resist buying into their elaborate, planned-behind-closed-doors schemes if you can, and just plan for the worst if you can’t escape the path of the storm.
The question remains for Startup Weekend Iowa City is how to perform this work around. First, it’s going to require a larger team than we had this year. Second, it’s going to require a lot more persistence than we produced this year. It’s going to involve hitting the ground running as early as January 2 promoting the event through social media and at in-person events. This is where we’re going to utilize these groups – send people to networking events throughout the state as early as January with stacks of quarter-sheet flyers. Plaster with flyers any event we can co-opt in the months leading up to the big event. Get people talking on social media and bug the heck out of local media outlets repeatedly until we get some coverage. Shame people into attending, only if necessary as the nuclear option. Most importantly, listen to people when they have constructive feedback and pivot when the signs are there. The great part is that we already have some infrastructure created this year, and we’re not starting the scratch the way we were before the canceled event last year.
Essentially, we’re going to do everything NewBo Evolve didn’t do in building goodwill and excitement for the event. It really can’t be that difficult.
Moving from things that frustrate to things that excite, I’m booking my room and travel for Denver Startup Week, happening just over a month from now. I’ve been scouring the agenda in an attempt to make it to as many sessions run by people I’ve met over the last couple of years of trips to that area. Like last year, there’s an enormous quantity of great sessions, but so many of them occur at the same time. It’s an unavoidable problem when a committee is planning an event on this scale – you can’t possibly get to everything you want. If you’d like to see an updated list of which sessions I will be attending, I’ve put together a public calendar that you can follow. I’m specifically leaving more space in between sessions this year, in an effort to not completely exhaust myself each day.
I’m also leaving a bit of buffer space in the schedule to pay visits to a couple of cideries in and near the city center, to talk with the owners about Cider Finder. Development of Cider Finder is slowly progressing, as I have time to build things. We’re still on track to have a relatively rough alpha version ready before I travel to Colorado. The full beta may not be ready by then, but at least a lucky few will get the opportunity to start messing around with the product. Even better, there will be something to start showing people as the weather starts to cool off and cider season gears up.
To round out travel for the year, I’ll be attending the 1 Million Cups Organizer Summit in Kansas City the last few days of October as Iowa City’s delegate, including attending 1MC in Kansas City on October 31. Each community was only allowed one attendee, and after a long discussion, the group chose me to attend. I feel like this is an incredible honor that the group feels like I’d be the best person to represent what we’re doing at our location. Overall, I’m most excited to meet organizers from other parts of the country and to learn what tactics are working for them to engage their communities and to recruit presenters, along with what they’re struggling to achieve. Summit organizers haven’t sent out any kind of agenda yet, so I’m not sure yet what to expect. Either way, it should be fun.
Until then, it’s face glued to a computer screen, alternating between building an app and building out a social media strategy for the various accounts under my care. Oh, and replying to people on Facebook through the use of GIFs. That’s probably my favorite activity right now.
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