Long time no blog, but when you’re deep in development, not much to blog about other than ‘built more features and fixed more bugs.’  With that as our backdrop, I wanted to pass along a fun experience we were fortutnate enough to participate in.  

Last year, Nam and I were the charter members for Startup Weekend in Boulder, CO.  This project was featured on TechCrunch and we got a kick out of reading comments about what we were up to.  We met a lot of great people there and even the man who ended up being our lawyer, Ryan Howell.  Ryan is top notch and very tech savvy.  He sent us a this link to another TechCrunch article since it may help us with Walkspots.  Not only did the article interste me, but as I read the comments, one jumped out.  

It was from someone in the Denver area explaining she ran a youth program, Arts Street, to help get young people interested in media, GIS, Web 2.0 and technology in general.  I wrote back indicating we’re a startup company in Denver and are working on a few things that may be of interested and we’re looking for opportunities to give back to the community.  That began my correspondence with Stella Yu.  Stella is a wonderful person and let me know all about Arts Street and how she is working in the community to create opportunities for Denver’s young adults.  So, after a lot of emails, working on a grant with Stella, we were finally able to meet up with her last Monday.  

Nam and I have done a few presentations, mostly for graduate students, and have gathered data to show that the audience will have a much more favorable response when provided with pizza.  Not to question our theory, we offer to provide as much pizza as they could eat (partially hoping they’d think we were cool and not ask us any hard questions to make us look dumb!).  Pizza was a big hit, we did a live demo of Walkspots (still in development, so no working links yet) and answered a lot of questions.  Most of all, everyone seemed really interested and saw there was a opportunity for young entrepreneurs in Colorado  The presentation was a big success and we’re brainstorming with Stella about how we can grow our relationship and find other opportunities to work Arts Street!

What is the takeaway from this post?  

1. Even startup companies can do good work in the community
2. You never know how you’re network will be built
3. Take advantage of opportunities like this, you never know who you might inspire! 

This is our first time recruiting for Walkspots. While we’re not looking for full time employees, we do need some part time help. I wanted to take a minute about how we’re going about our recruiting process. We’re a small compnay, just Nam and I. One really important thing we learned from our corporate company is the value of ethics, integrity and honesty. Sounds odd those qualites to be assosciated with a large company, but they were were practiced. So we decided to put our a call for help, our request was pretty bare and lacking details. We posted (synopsis):

“Ideal candidate will have basic computer skills, basic ability to operate a digital a camera, and a strong desire to be an integral part of a growing business. Ability to conduct business in an ethical, honorable manner is required.”
I really wasn’t sure if anyone would apply for the position given that it was light on detail specific more about the character of the candidate than the work to be performed. Then, low and behold, I received about 30 inquiries the next day! judging by the resumes that were turned in and the email, our post really hit the spot. The candidates expressed how they embody our desired qualities and were ecstatic that there was a company that still valued these qualities. While we haven’t selected anyone yet, I’m sure we’ve found a great addition to the Walkspots team.

My advice, since one person can have such a huge impact on a startup’s success, sometimes personal character and quality are more valuable than technical skill. I’ll keep you posted on how this works out and share more about our process (and the rationale behind it) in future posts.

I wanted to take a minute to give everyone an update and provide my thoughts on competition. Competition is a good thing for consumers and startup companies. It forces you to work harder, faster, and better than the other ‘2 guys in the garage’ that want to take your market. In my corporate life, I’m in one of the most competitive industries where HUGE dollars are on the line and your opponents, are BIG, NASTY, FIERCE, RESOURCED, SMART, and out for blood. Yet, I’ve been relatively successful. Taking the success, we decided to submit Walkspots to TechStars this cycle. TechStars, as I describe to my friends, is like American Idol for startups. They receive ~400 applications and downselect to 30 companies, then cut to 10 for the final. The final 10 spend the summer in Boulder, CO at an intensive startup boot camp. We we just notified the other day that we did not make the initial downselect. I was surprised, between Nam and I, our resumes are pretty impressive, so I was confident we’d make the the downselect at least.

All in all, the application process taught us alot about ourselves and where we want to take the company. It gave us a set date when we needed to have our application done, which drove us to devote a massive amount of time toward getting a demo up and running. The amount of work we accomplished in this short time impressed us both. So, even though we didn’t make the downselect, the application proces was quite valuable. More importantly, we’re very interested to see who did get selected. Not because we’re jealous or angry, but now we have competition. Likely not going after the same customers or markets, but competitors in the ‘who can build the best company by August’ race. I’ve got a spot on my wall picked out and a great chart ready to measure our progress against theirs Of course it is in the friendliest sense, but this is competition. Gentleman, start your engines.