The Road to Entrepreneurship...

This week, I wanted to look into the different ways a business such as Sportycus could get funded. As I have said before, I believe that such a business does not really need outside funding to get off the ground. However, I found it to be an interesting exercise to look in what is out there.

First of all, I am always impressed by the amount of resources that are available for tech start ups. Just a simple google search on “funding your startup” of course returns a lot of entries. Interesting though is the amount of results that talk about tech startups. Most of these results returned the same amount of information that was already discussed in class. I did not pay much attention to these results because they were very high level and did not offer anything new. I guess this speaks to the value of the New Venture Lab course. In case you want to know what these generic funding options such are, here you go:

• Borrowing from Family, Friends, and Fools (3Fs)
• Angel funding
• and of course VC funding. 

Anyway,  I have identified three avenues that I could follow when the time for funding arises:

1. Apply for business incubators around the chicago land area. I have identified two of such incubators here in chicago. Most note-able is the Excelerate Labs. 
2. Tapping into my network of high net individuals. I am fortunate enough to know a couple of people that could be considered high net individuals. However, far as I know, none have ever made direct investments into startup ventures.
3. Approach seed fund companies such as Lightbank that specialize on providing seed funding for early stage tech startups. 

So this weeks milestone was more of an educational one rather than a customer value oriented one. Oh well, till next week. 

Its week 8 already…the New Venture Lab course is quickly coming to an end. This week was good. I was able to work on my milestone of completing a working prototype of Sportycus. I however was not able to get all the features and scenarios that I had initially planned on at the time of writing this milestone 8 weeks ago, but I made progress. Users can now login, create a team, and start recording game data stat. Really cool!. 

I think finally have a working prototype of the product concept will serve as extra motivation to finish out the project. I know over the past couple of weeks I have been wavering on whether I should even finish out this project. Well, I was lucky enough to get some help by reading the Do More Faster - TechStars lessons to accelerate your startup book (Thanks Mike Gardon for letting me borrow it). I spent sometime this week reading through this book and it was really insightful to see how other tech companies got their start. These companies all had one thing in common when starting off. That is, they were able to put out a simple version of their product and continue iterating as feedback from customers came in. I always thought that this move was a good first to market strategy but I think the reason why such companies made this move was to keep themselves motivated. Techies like myself do need to show something tangible in order to keep ourselves motivated. That is why I have been so motivated with the Geeks in Running Shoes podcast and it is also why having a simple prototype this week has revamped my excited about Sportycus.

I hope to grow on this weeks build and have a much better product over the next three weeks. However, I do realize that I did set a lofty milestone of having a beta product ready by the last week of class. A milestone that is most likely not going to happen. What is going to happen however, is a much better version of Sportycus. 

For this coming week, I set up the milestone that I will identify sources of funding for Sportycus. While I do think that I can start Sportycus without any outside funding, it will be an interesting exercise to identify where to get money for such a product. At the very least, it will be and educational experience. 

This was one of those weeks that define why it is sometimes hard to be a part-time entrepreneur. Balancing work, life, and Sportycus was tough this week. I guess, life happened, so I should not complain. I had to split a majority of my time between weird work hours and being held up by other life obligations. Both of which at this point take precedent over Sportycus. I wonder when (or if) Sportycus will actually begin taking precedence over these other two?

In any case, I was able to do very little towards my goal for the week. I had planned to get into some front end/marketing material design. This would have been a good next step after the last week I had - that is preparing the site to be more customer ready. But of course, I did not get very far with that. I did however, get some ideas on how I want the marketing materials to be laid out on the web page as well as flyers that I will passing out at local softball games - so it was not a complete loss. 

At this point, I am starting to become a bit worried. I went into the New Venture Lab course really ‘gong-ho’ about Sportycus and business opportunity that it presented, but as the weeks have passed by that enthusiasm is slowing fading - partially due to not just having weeks such as the one I just had. I have not got as far as I would like to be in terms of getting a prototype of Sportycus ready. Maybe deciding to self develop was a bad a idea after all. In any case, that decision has already been made, so I just need to remain focused and continue developing. I hope to have a solid prototype that I can actually show off (in class) sometime this week. 

Oh well.

It’s already been six weeks! This is going really fast. This week I set the milestone of signing up beta users for Sportycus. This was an exciting milestone because it was a truly customer related milestone. The question of course was how would I accomplish this. 

Well, I already had two individuals who already agreed to be beta users from the start. So I went into this week knowing that I had something to work with. Also, Russ Gottesman from Commuter Advertising had offered to introduce me to one of his contacts who had shown interesting beta testing the product.

I however wanted to sign up at least 5 more beta users. So I took a page out of my mentor’s (Corey) book towards building a web app. He creates a mailing list and invites users to sign up to be beta users. This way, he can update his beta users to changes and keep them engaged even before a single line of code has been written. So I created a mailing list through MailChimp. I am in the process of setting up a public form and Sportycus blog so potential beta users can sign up. 

So this will be another successful week of accomplishing milestones. Looking back though, I wish I set some more customer focused milestones such as this one. Next week, my milestone is building upon what I started this week. I plan on expanding the Sportycus blog and setting up the marketing/front end of the website. Excited!!

Earlier this week, I was faced with an interesting dilemma that provided some very good experience in prioritizing. 

As I mentioned in a post last week, my other project - the Geeks in Running Shoes podcast - is beginning to gain some level of success as I am STILL working through the prototype phase of Sportycus. So I was faced with an interesting dilemma - which of the two projects should I put more time and effort into? This was a tough one. For Sportycus I truly have an idea of where how the project could go as a business, while a clear business opportunity has not yet been defined for the podcast.

I reached out to my de facto advisors - Raman Chadha from the DePaul Coleman Entrepreneurship Center and Russ Gottesman from Commuter Advertising. I posed the question 

What’s a good way to judge the amount of time that I should spend on each?

As usual I got prompt and excellent responses from the two of them. Both responses centered towards value creation. That is, which of the two projects was posed to present the most value to its potential customers in the long run because that project will eventually be the most viable business opportunity. Also, both seemed to agree that focusing on one will provide the best chance of success in growing the project. 

So taking in their responses, I decided that I should remain focused on Sportycus. Sportycus is the project with the better business opportunity. I will continue to focus my  time on developing the prototype and selling the idea to potential users. However, I am still continue with the podcast. It began as a hobby, and I will continue to treat it as that. If it continues to grow into something larger, I will revisit this question then. 

Anyway, I hope this experience would be as helpful to you as it was for me.