I think I may have found the point where I can’t get any busier. I thought that my calendar was going to clear out as my wife and I await the arrival of our second child. Not so.
Sexy Life, my team from Startup Weekend Iowa City back in November, has fired up operations again since the beginning of the year with a Slack channel, bi-weekly meetings, and an e-mail thread. It’s an actual thing at this point! About half of the team from Startup Weekend has come back to work on this project, with a firm maybe from another member of the team and a “possibly some day in the future” from the other two. We definitely have enough people to attend Venture School from mid-March through the end of April. I’m on board for another round of Venture School, mostly because it’s going to be a completely different experience from my experience partnering with Tom. (One of the awesome differences will be that I won’t be the only Powerpoint person this time around.)
The Venture School team has not made any decisions on our admittance to the program just yet – they haven’t voted up or down on any of the applications yet, from what I understand. Our team has to go through some sort of in-person interview before we are considered for admission. I’m finding out much more about the application process than I did the last time around, because Tom had already applied and been accepted to the program before he brought me on as a technical consultant.
I’m going to enjoy doing more of the customer discovery than I did the last time around. It is much more fun to talk to people and collect the data than it is to sit for hours in front of a computer entering data and trying to get the computer to spit out the information you need. With three of us from Startup Weekend plus one new member on the team, we shouldn’t have any trouble gathering interviews. It would be pretty cool if we could actually hit that 100 interview benchmark during Venture School.
As a spin-off conversation with one of my partners from Sexy Life, we are in the midst of putting together a freelancers “support group” and possibly some sort of Web site that lists freelancers and their areas of expertise, so people that have project ideas can find someone with which to partner and grow their project or business idea. We have noticed that freelancers tend to be overshadowed by larger firms in the startup community, and together, we will have a louder and clearer voice. I’m getting together for lunch with some local freelancers on Thursday to help get this group off the ground. If you are in the Iowa City area on Thursday, we are meeting around 11 am at Forbidden Planet on the Ped Mall.
The Tomaso’s restaurant project is continuing, and has taken a bit of a pivot. Starting a new pizza restaurant is looking less and less likely, just because Tom does not want to cannibalize his current businesses on the north side of Cedar Rapids. So, he’s moving toward his other passion – barbecue! Back during the first week of Venture School, Tom and I had discussed his love for barbecue and the competitions in which he’s judged. Pizza is pretty easy to find here in eastern Iowa, while good barbecue places are few and far between. I can only think of two decent barbecue places within thirty minutes of my house.
We had also talked about doing some smaller plates or appetizers, and I think barbecue would be much more amenable to that than trying to do something like in a pizza restaurant. In addition, we can swing back to the original idea of awesome craft beer and great wine along with the higher-end food offerings, because the barbecue places I can think of in the area aren’t really known for paring their food with high quality beverages. I’m really glad that we are exploring this niche further and it will be interesting to see where this goes beyond just an idea and some writing on scratch paper.
I’m also in the middle of coding and updating three different Web sites that need to be done before the end of the month. Add to that the mad dash of cleaning and organizing my office before the new one gets here, and you can see how I’ve reached my floating point. However, if you don’t need a Web site or video project finished in the next month or so, I’d love to have you or a friend as a client. Take a look through my portfolio and see if there’s anything digital with which I can help you. I’m always on the lookout for fun or interesting new projects.
It’s about time to reapply my nose to the grindstone. Keep building, and wish me luck on getting as much done as I can before the baby gets here.