What a week! Our new baby arrived early Tuesday morning last week. My older daughter has been on pins and needles waiting for the baby to get here, and they have been together nearly non-stop since Tuesday. Mother and baby are both healthy and happy. I, on the other hand, caught some sort of playground plague from the older kid. One advantage of working from home: nobody cares if you look like death or have a tissue shoved up each nostril.
Of course, the world doesn’t stop when you are away from the computer tending to a baby. I managed to make it to near inbox zero before the baby was born, but it is far from that now. If you want to contact me, please be patient. I’m still working on last week’s e-mails and phone calls.
This is an especially busy time of year while we ramp up for Gamicon, a game convention run in Iowa City every winter. I run the video game room and manage the ever-sprawling Web site. At the beginning of February each year, I am charged with uploading all of the events into our system so that people can preregister for seats at game tables. Events and registration are the two biggest parts of the Web site, and this is the time of year where they are overlapping. I am working to automate more of the Web site, so that other people can pick up some of this work… of course, it takes time to build and test any new feature of a Web site, and I just haven’t had that time yet.
The Cedar Rapids pizza-turned-barbecue project is still rolling along. My partner Tom has chosen a location and is working out the details to lease the building. Meanwhile, we are starting to put together some of the online aspects of the store – Web site, social media, videos, etc. Barbecue can be an incredibly visual form of cooking (think large animals, smoke, sauces in vibrant colors), and Tom wants to put this front and center in the marketing for this restaurant. I’m looking forward to posting some of the work from this project when it’s ready for prime time.
Team Sexy Life has a big day coming up on Wednesday. We are presenting at 1 Million Cups at FilmScene on the Ped Mall in downtown Iowa City at 9 am. I will also be at Open Coffee beforehand, but I’ll have to leave early to get all of the video equipment set up to record our pitch. If I had thought of it, I would have filmed the pitch that Chris gave at Startup Weekend Iowa City back in November. I had no idea that we would win first place, nor that we would continue the project after the conclusion of Startup Weekend. This time, I’m not missing the opportunity.
We also have the bi-weekly Sexy Life meeting on Wednesday evening. Judging by the number of times that my Basecamp phone app has sent me alerts, the team has been incredibly busy doing research and getting our ducks in a row for Venture School in mid-March. At the last meeting, we met with Justin from CedarGraphics to figure out everything from how our product should look, to fulfillment of our subscription boxes, and how we can improve our product workflow.
Several of us on the team were worried that we would be the ones stuffing the boxes and making the trip to the post office each month. I do have the ability to move boxes in my old, creaky SUV, but maybe only a few dozen boxes per trip. If we want to scale our business at any decent rate, we need someone to do fulfillment and shipping for us, and build the price of this into the final product. Also, I think the West Branch post office employees would shudder every time I walked in the door if we did our own fulfillment. On tap for the meeting this week: a relationship counselor based in the area who we may partner with for some of the advice and tips that we want to include with the subscription box and on the Web site.
Talking about Startup Weekend projects, I purchased my ticket for Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids on March 4-6. Startup Weekend in Iowa City was an absolute blast, and I’m really excited to see what ideas come out of Cedar Rapids this year. Team Sexy Life will be there in force, not just to participate with some of the teams and lend our expertise about the process, but to allow our tireless organizers a chance to actually participate on one of the teams rather than just sit on the sidelines. The other goal of Team Sexy Life is to get more people to participate in Startup Weekend that normally wouldn’t – people that don’t think of themselves as potential entrepreneurs. I encourage anyone reading to get involved with your local Startup Weekend event (most of them occur in November during Global Entrepreneurship Week.)
It looks like we are going to miss out on most of the heavy snow here in the Oasis – mostly a rain event for us with the heaviest snow staying 30-50 miles to the north and west. As long as that rain stays nearly all liquid, I’ll be happy. Unfortunately for the older daughter, she’s going to miss out on snow again. We’ve had such a mild winter so far, and she is itching to get outside and throw some snowballs. That’s hard to do when we get mostly sleet and freezing rain with days in between in the mid-40s. We still have a lot of winter left (regardless of a rodent’s opinion in Pennsylvania), so there’s still time for us to get some snow.
For now, back to the inbox!