Startup Weekend, Venture School Graduation, and a Long Weekend

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I finally have a few minutes to catch up with all of you on what has transpired the last couple of weeks. I was hoping to get something posted during the last stretch of Venture School or during Startup Weekend, but so much was going on during that period and I wanted a few days to let all of my thoughts congeal into something worth reading.

First, let’s discuss Startup Weekend Iowa City. As I have mentioned before, Startup Weekend was the culmination of Global Entrepreneurship Week. I had talked to several friends I’ve made in the startup community here in eastern Iowa about their experiences at previous Startup Weekends and what I should expect walking into this event. I had previously attending an all-weekend Hackathon, and I originally expected this event to be much like that, but that you actually had to produce something by the end of the weekend. During the Hackathon, I learned some of the inner workings of Linux and looked into the Ruby programming language. I didn’t produce anything by the end of the weekend, but there wasn’t a demand to do so at a Hackathon. I also worked alone most of the weekend during the Hackathon, which was also different than a Startup Weekend where you are very strongly encouraged to be part of a team.

At the start of the weekend, dozens of attendees got up in front of the crowd of over 60 people from Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and the Quad Cities and pitched their crazy ideas. The Quad Cities were supposed to have their own Startup Weekend, but they only had a handful of people sign up. It probably made more sense for them to join up with our much larger group. One of the main reasons that my wife and I bought a house between Iowa City and the Quad Cities was that I wanted to be closer to a more established startup community while giving my wife the freedom to work in either community. However, it seems as though the Quad Cities are starting to build an infrastructure similar to other communities in Iowa, with a coworking space just recently opening in Davenport.

The team on which I ended up originally started out as a subscription box designed to spice up relationships. The leader of the team and man with the original idea, Chris, and I had met before through different startup events in Iowa City. I had encouraged him to get up and pitch something after he showed me a list of at least 2 dozen ideas he had sitting on his computer. I signed on to help out with the Web presence for this product and possibly some of the design of the shipping materials. Several others joined our team over the course of the evening after voting by the attendees narrowed the number of teams down to 8.

Our subscription box name ended up being “Sexy Life,” named after one of the fake products created during the icebreaker at the beginning of the evening. Other fake products included “Large Ice Cream” and my personal favorite, “Soggy Boogers.” (I think that one could have some potential.) We still aren’t totally sold on that name, but we decided to run with it during the weekend, going so far as to start social media accounts with the name and register http://getsexylife.co as our domain name. We’ll see if the name changes as we move forward with the startup.

We spent the next 48 hours building out this idea, and we made a slight iteration from being a “spicy” subscription box for adults to more of a “relationship improvement” subscription service. Not only would we include things that adults can do together on an at-home date, but our service will also have relationship tips and advice as well as date ideas for people that are having trouble coming up with ideas for dates on their own. We ended up with four other people on our team, including other creatives and two people with business backgrounds that were instrumental in helping with the data we needed to present at the end of the weekend.

I thought that all of the pitches were excellent – we had some incredibly tough competition from the other teams, even the teams that almost fell apart over the course of the weekend. We even had a remote “ninth team” run by a developer who used to live in eastern Iowa and now lives in western South Dakota. We were the final team to present, and Chris had been practicing the pitch all day, getting feedback from some of the best pitch people in the area. All of our hard work paid off, because Sexy Life ended up taking first place! I felt amazing being part of the winning team at my first Startup Weekend. With the win, that means we need to make some serious decisions over the next few weeks. Do we want to continue with this idea? Based on the number of other subscription box services and the responses we were getting during a weekend of customer interviews, there is definitely a market for what we have created. We are also going to meet with the people that run the Venture School program to see if our idea should be run through there first, before we start selling our service.

Speaking of Venture School, my partner Tom and I successfully finished the program with his restaurant concept. Each of the teams gave their best presentations on the last day, and several of the teams had really taken the program seriously to not only improve their pitches, but to focus on where they could actually enter or disrupt the market and have some success. Tom and I are attending a seminar series in Des Moines tomorrow put on by the Venture School faculty in order to get more feedback on the concept. Soon, Tom is going to have to make the decision whether or not to go ahead with the Kickstarter campaign to fund this thing. I think that he has a solid concept, and he knows how to launch restaurants. I’m waiting for the go ahead to start working on the restaurant’s media presence and to set up the Kickstarter page. This will be my first experience running or helping to run a crowdfunding campaign, so it should be interesting.

After Startup Weekend and the final push in Venture School, it was nice to take a few days off around Thanksgiving and spend some time with my family. When I took a step back and thought about it, I had gone six days without eating at home, and I had only gone home long enough to sleep and take a shower each morning. The food that was catered in for all of these events was amazing, but there’s still something to be said for home-cooked food.

Luckily, my calendar is much emptier for the next month. I’m looking forward to being home a bit more, and there are plenty of things that need to be done around the house. My home office resembles an exploded filing cabinet at the moment, and there are Christmas cards to be written and sent. I don’t want to promise anything, but I’ll try to post at least once or twice more before the end of the year. Until then, stay warm!