This is not helping productivity.
The time has finally come. After a long leave, my wife has finally returned to work at the Big Hospital. She’s been home since the end of August because this pregnancy was so rough on her, between the severe morning sickness and anemia. Even though she wasn’t able to do much while she was on leave, it was nice to have her there to pick up some of the slack around the house. With her back at work, I’m quickly trying to adapt to life with two little people by my side and less help around the house. Thankfully, summer is right around the corner, and the grandmas are ready and willing to help with the kids come June.
Before she went back to work, I was able to get to a couple more activities. Thursday last week, I attended the American Advertising Federation’s Education Day. I was able to talk with dozens of college students from the area about what they want to do after completing school and how things have worked for me as a freelancer. Several of the students presented some of their work during the portfolio session, and they definitely have some potential.
I left the event on Thursday a bit early because I wanted to spend some time with the family before Startup Weekend. With the 35-40 minute drive between Oasis and Cedar Rapids, I knew that I wasn’t going to see the wife and kids much during the weekend. However, it was my last weekend of freedom for a while, so I had to make it count. Startup Weekend always delivers a good time.
It was a packed house for Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids.
The room was already filling up when I arrived in Cedar Rapids on Friday evening. The folks at Vault have an event for coworkers called Whiskey Friday, where they bring out several different bottles of whiskey for everyone to try. This week, Cedar Ridge Distillery provided several of their whiskey offerings for tasting. I sampled some of the single malt whiskey, and it did not disappoint. I hope to try some of the other varieties in the future.
After dinner and a bit of catching up with some folks that I haven’t seen for a few months, Startup Weekend officially began. There were over 60 people attending the entire event, and roughly 75% of attendees got up and pitched some idea. So many great ideas were put out there that I had trouble deciding which ones deserved one of my three votes. Two of the three ideas that I voted for ended up as projects for the weekend in some form. Also, the idea I helped to develop over the course of the weekend was not even one of the ideas that I had picked in the round of voting!
One of our early Business Model Canvases. I helped walk the group through creating this, as all but one of the ASAP Venues team were new to Startup Weekends and the Business Model Canvas
“Rooms 4 Rent” was the original name of the team I joined. The idea for Rooms 4 Rent was to connect people that wanted to have events with venues around the area. Events could range from bridal and baby showers to large corporate events. Venues could be well-known, like hotels and large event spaces, to small meeting rooms and church basements. Customer discovery was critical in narrowing our focus, both by interviewing consumers who wanted to throw parties, to well-known and potential venue spaces.
Most of the team hard at work after a round of customer discovery.
We ended up going through two name changes over the course of the weekend. “Rooms 4 Rent” was changed to “FAST Venue” because the first name sounded too much like something that served the residential side rather than event spaces. We then changed the name to “ASAP Venues”, mostly because I spent an hour and a half trying to find a Web site address that would qualify for the free .co address that we were given during the Startup Weekend. Every variation of “fastvenue.co” was taken already (we found that GoDaddy was sitting on most of the variations.) So, I crowdsourced some ideas from the rest of the Startup Weekend attendees. I suggested “shindigspace.co” to our team, but that was a non-starter. Then, I suggested “availablevenues.co”, which got a much better reception. The FAST in FAST Venue was an acronym for Find A Space Today , so I suggested “ASAPvenues.co”. The team loved it, so we became “ASAP Venues”, ASAP standing for Available, Simple, Affordable, and Practical.
The entire ASAP Venues team. Also, we like sticky notes.
We worked until nearly midnight both Friday and Saturday, starting at 8 am both Saturday and Sunday. The long hours were worth it, because I thought we had an excellent product put together, based on over 50 customer discovery interviews. Our competition was incredibly solid – better than the competition that Sexy Life had during Startup Weekend Iowa City. I wasn’t surprised that we were up against such stiff competition, just due to the quantity of ideas pitched on Friday night. We did not place in the top 3 – the teams that did were well deserving. The experience was still great, and I think that we built something that could continue on if part or all of the team would like to continue. I told the rest of the group to take a couple of weeks off and think about whether or not they would like to continue with this idea. I am more than happy continuing with the group in some capacity if they will have me. Hopefully, I will have an update on this at some point in the future.
Probably the best thing to come out of Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids 2016.
If you ever have a chance to participate in a Startup Weekend event where you are, I highly recommend it. The experiences you will have and the friendships you will make are worth it, even if you pitch an idea on Friday and it goes nowhere, or you do not place in the top 3 at the end of the weekend. I lucked out with Sexy Life winning the competition at my first Startup Weekend. I didn’t plan to be on a winning team – I just attend Startup Weekends for the experience and being able to build something over the course of 54 hours. Plus, the food is always awesome.
Circling back to Sexy Life: part of Team Sexy Life attended the Venture School pre-workshop yesterday. This is the final step to determine whether or not our team will make it into this spring’s cohort. There are 10 spots available for the 13 teams that applied. We should find out this coming Monday or Tuesday whether or not we have made it into the cohort. I think we have a good chance of making it into the cohort, and if we do, it seems like the other teams should be fun to work with. The group seemed much older than the group I went through back in October and November, and the teams seemed larger this time around. There also seemed to be more of an organizational feel to this group – established organizations that are innovating from within rather than people starting up companies on their own, from scratch.
Team Sexy Life has one more meeting before Venture School kicks off a week from Tuesday. I have a great deal of work to complete before we embark on the next phase of our journey. I need to finish building out our new and improved landing page, work on our MailChimp account, and tie up some loose ends. This weekend is going to be critical in getting things done, because there won’t be much productivity next week while the older kid is on spring break. I’m going to be deploying plenty of art supplies, and if the weather holds out at all next week, we are going to spend some time outside. For now, I should probably get some sleep.
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