I’m the co-founder of ThingShare, a peer to peer rental system where anyone can participate in the sharing economy by listing your things and then renting them out to strangers. It’s a form of Collaborative Consumption currently focused on the video gaming industry.
Since ThingShare is a new business which needs scale to succeed we’ve gone the route of pursuing funding for our idea. Part of that journey might take us to an accelerator. We’ve applied to a bunch and are still applying to more accelerators. TechStars is the biggest accelerator we’ve applied to and the one that we’d benefit the most from.
In preparation for applying to TechStars I did my research, and figured out that while some funds/accelerators give priority to the business model/idea, TechStars puts a large emphasis on the team. Essentially they believe in raising/supporting great entrepreneurs no matter what the current idea/business is that they’re working on.
We’ve applied to both Boston and now NYC TechStars. But I’ve learned something in the 4 weeks in-between each application. The lesson I learned came from the movie 21.
Lessons learned from “21″
In the [based on true facts] movie the main character Ben had denied himself the pleasures of this world to seek after one goal, getting into Harvard Medical, the only thing in Ben’s way is finances. He has all the perfect scores, has everything lined up, and even is accepted into Harvard Med, and now he’s competing in a full ride scholarship. The professor explains to him that Ben’s life and in turn Ben himself is boring. In Ben’s final essay he needs to “Jump off the page” and the professor needs to be dazzled.
Dazzling TechStars
Like Ben needed to explain to the professor why he was impressive, I needed to explain to TechStars how I and my teammate are incredible It’s like filling out a form on a dating website and needing to sound attractive, rich, etc. You shouldn’t lie. But you need to sexy up the stories a bit.
So what do I have that is impressive? What would make an indivitual going through hundreds or thousands of applications see our application and say, “Wow I want to meet these guys!” or “Holy cow, Bob did you read this application?” In short, How do I Jump off the page, or how do I dazzle the TechStars team?
The Basics
On the surface these details don’t make me jump off the page, but they should.
- I’m from the midwest
- I’m outside the Valley Echo, and I have the midwestern work ethic.
- I live in the woods, 40 miles away from the nearest city and that city isn’t very large either.
- While city life provides connections, life in the country is significantly more healthy – and I raise as much of my own food as possible
- I went to a small unheard of college, got a degree in youth ministry
- All the successes I’ve had in IT/Business have come from bootstrapping and being self taught.
- I have a wife and four kids
- While some assume that makes me tied down and less fundable, having a family makes me connected with our target audience
- I’ve worked for various small and medium businesses that TechStars has never heard of, and do not directly apply to ThingShare
- I know how to run small teams well and to work hard with nothing given to me.
- I’m 32, that’s 4 years older than Mark Zuckerberg
- LinkedIn found that 40% of founders are in their 30′s, and 65% are 30 or older at their first startup.
- We convinced a billionaire to invest $25,000 in ThingShare
- While that seems low, everyone has to start somewhere, and a $25k convertible note is a form of validation.
But I’m not bitter, I’m just trying to show you how on the surface I don’t dazzle, I’m not the Stanford educated former Google employee who is connected to every VC in the valley, instead I’m an average hard working midwesterner dad/husband who is pitbull-like in my pursuit of an idea that I get behind.
But let me try it again, what follows are the parts of my story that do jump off the page. And are all true.
Jumping off of the Page
In this list I am not trying to brag or promote myself, but I put it here to let you be the judge. The ultimate question is at the end of the the list.
- I traveled around the world when I was 13, without my parents or family.
- I hand wrote html in vi on a Sun UNIX box in 1994 (aka started “coding” at age 14)
- An insurance company gave me $5,000 for a car that wouldn’t run.
- My wife and I were deported from Kazakhstan, and we returned a week later.
- As an english-only speaker I taught algebra to a woman who only spoke korean.
- I walked away from an incredible job to pursue the Startup world two years ago.
- I’ve sung in a funeral processional for a South African AIDS victim, in South Africa.
- I built a training application… in Microsoft Access, prior to Visual Basic.
- I turned a 2 week temporary job into a 9 month long engagement which I then left.
- My wife and I delivered our son at home. Alone. Unassisted. Unplanned.
- I built a Facebook page fan base of 60k in 2008.
- I’ve built a digital marketing agency that has billed a quarter million. Annually. Every Year.
- I chose to parent another man’s child cause he wasn’t willing to do it.
So, did I dazzle you? Did I Jump off of the Page?
I find that I use my inbox as my todo list. I know I know I know… It’s not the greatest use of the inbox. I mean the inbox was not designed to be a todo list and using an inbox as a todo list doesn’t work with either inbox zero or the GTD methods. But no matter how many other todo list mangers I try I keep returning to the inbox-as-todo-list method.
Yet I have this dilemma, a war wages inside. I like inbox zero, or at least inbox <5. I also have anywhere from 20-50 things on my todo list at any given time.
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There are a lot of twitter list tools out there (see links below) but today’s post will focus on the basics of Twitter List Management, how to create, edit, and use twitter lists. For some of you who’ve already created a twitter list and know how to add/remove people skip down to the Advanced tools section.
Why Twitter List Management?
There is only so much data one can consume in a day. With twitter there are reasons you may need or want to follow accounts that you don’t actually want to read their content on a regular basis. You really have two options, ignore the content they are posting, or add everyone else to a list and just watch that list.
Yesterday Facebook announced some major changes to Facebook Pages. A Quick hit list of some of the things that changed:
- Page layouts now appear like the new profile layouts (pictures at top, “tabs” in the left column under pic)
- Admins can be publicly displayed
- Page Admins can comment on public users timeline and other pages’ walls
- Lighbox for Picture viewing
- FBML is going away March 11. Welcome iFrames
This post is aimed at the non developer (or dare I say the web developer not familiar with developing on Facebook) in an effort to give the bare minimum of what is needed to get your first custom “tab” via iframe deployed.
This is a tip or a technique I use everyday to monitor keywords about me and my clients. There are tools which do actual sentiment analysis and all kinds of other listening, but I just want to be reminded to read the conversations.
I also like to keep my inbox small. So I trick myself and have content by keywords delivered to my inbox, that way I’m forced to read it or make a conscious effort to ignore it. Not signing into a listening application can cause problems… unless it delivers emails of conversations.
This technique will focus on listening to twitter, however there are plenty of RSS feeds out there to use this method of “subscribing”
Gathering your RSS Feed
Simply head over to twitter search and type in a query, I’ll use “elephants” as mine… however I recommend you visit the Advanced Search page to develop a better query like “elephants -peanuts -from:Elleph” This will give you this page as a result http://search.twitter.com/search?q=elephants (or http://search.twitter.com/search?q=elephants+-peanuts+-from:Elleph) And in reality you can use these URLs in most RSS to Email tools, however I recommend going one step further and locating the actual RSS feed.
In the Twitter Search Results page you should see a link saying “Feed for this query” (as seen in the image below) right click on this link and choose copy link address or link URL. This is the actual RSS feed url that we’ll use in the next step.
Finding an RSS to Email tool
There are a few options, and some have come and gone over the years, so I’ll recommend two searches, and two currently functioning tools. First off, searches:
One of the current tools I use shows up in spot number one for both of those searches… Feed my Inbox. The next sections will explain what to do with each of these tools
Feed My Inbox
Arguably the best tool out there for taking an RSS feed and dumping the results to email, Feed my Inbox makes it quite simple, when you arrive it asks for a feed url (which we got from step one) and your email address, that’s all it needs to start emailing you the tweets you care about. (or blog postings youtube videos etc). You can also login to customize more settings, but the basics are here for you.
Notify.me
Taking the RSS to inbox one step further Notify.me allows you to have it send an SMS, IM or Email. Which is very handy for the more important keywords you want to pay attention to. Once signed in you can turn on and off notifications with a simple click and add feeds by pasting the URL (from above) to add new feeds.
Simple
These are two tools, and one technique that I use on a daily basis to keep me informed of conversations around my keywords… this is how I can appear to be online all day long while actually enjoying a life offline.
Remember, Automate the simple stuff, do the conversations and relationship manually.
What is On Page SEO?
On Page SEO is a term used to describe the work done to change Page content (Titles, Headings, Alt text, internal link text, keyword density, etc) in order to affect position (page rank) in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). We’ve been working with quite a few of our clients and copywriters training them to have an eye for optimizing on-page content in light of SEO and keyword positioning.
It brings good success. But we have learned not to stop there.
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