http://www.momentum-mi.com/go/blog/ en info@momentum-mi.com Copyright 2012 2012-01-12T21:36:09+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup2/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup2/#When:21:36:09Z {image_1} By Nichole Smith “More often than not those who work in restaurants make excellent salesman (and women), but when the tables are turned do they also make excellent customers?” This question was just one of the many topics discussed at yesterday morning’s Wakeup & Startup. Other topics included how to find good people, advertising, and even preventing ideas from being stolen. Wakeup & Startup is a morning coffee group that targets entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial spirits who are interested in vetting ideas, discussing challenges, and connecting with their startup community. It is a free event hosted by Pomegranate Studios and Zipments. All are welcome. The next Wakeup & Startup is 7:30am January 25th at GRid70. General 2012-01-12T21:36:09+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup1/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup1/#When:15:45:55Z {image_1} By Nichole Smith Pomegranate Studios hosted the second Wakeup & Startup Wednesday morning at GRid70. Wakeup & Startup is a morning networking event that occurs bi-monthly and is completely free. The goal is to create an open network targeting startup conversation. The event looks a little something like this: 7:30-8:00am – Networking over coffee and treats. 8:00-9:00am – Small group discussions – topics change each week and are provided by those who attend. This week the groups focused on marketing, internships, and prototypes. All are welcome to join the conversation and at the very least, you might consider popping in for the free coffee. Be sure to add the next Wakeup & Startup to your calendar for December 14th. General 2011-11-23T15:45:55+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/wakeup-startup/#When:20:27:25Z {image_1} Pomegranate Studios hosted West Michigan’s first Wakeup & Startup at the GRid70 Café Wednesday. The group of 25 met from 7:30 to 9am and was led by Amanda Chocko, Program Director of Pomegranate Studios and Momentum, and Laura Pecherski, the Sales and Marketing Director of Zipments. Over coffee, entrepreneurs from all stages in the startup process gathered to discuss a variety of topics. The conversation covered everything from cash flow and commission to design and technology recruitment. Aside from the conversation and free coffee, Wakeup &Startup also provided networking. Attendees included past 5×5Night presenters, Momentum participants, local business owners, as well as many new faces. The next Wakeup &Startup is scheduled for November 23rd and is open to all who are interested. To RSVP for this event and others check out www.startupwmi.com. General 2011-11-09T20:27:25+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/momentum-2012/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/momentum-2012/#When:18:32:24Z By Nichole Smith Planning is in full swing for Momentum 2012. Applications will be open in the Spring. In the meantime, stay connected by checking out other startup focused events: The Michigan Lean Start Up Circle: This monthly meetup aims to encourage conversation about startups throughout our state. This month, the circle welcomes Tom DeVries & Seth Starner from Amway’s Business Innovation group who will share their experiences with Human Centered Design as an approach for understanding users and potential users. They will share case studies including the application of a few particular structured methods followed by discussion about how this approach can be translated to deliver value to lean startup activities. The next event at GRid70 takes place Thursday, November 10th at 5:50pm. RSVP here. Wakeup & Startup: This morning coffee targets founders and teams of scalable startups who are willing to contribute there advice and creative input to others in the group. Wakeup & Startup takes place every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of every month from 7:30am to 9am at GRid70. Each meetup will be over coffee and is meant to be conversational. Speakers may be elected on occasion but the format will mostly consist of informal dialogue between guests. The first Wakeup & Startup is scheduled for Wednesday, November 9th. RSVP here. 5×5Night: An event to stimulate idea sharing and connection building. Any type of idea can be submitted to www.5×5night.com . From art projects to new businesses to events, the evening is designed to promote idea sharing from many disciplines. Recently, 5×5Night announced an updated format and website that allows the public to vote on their top 5 ideas by registering their information on their homepage here. At the end of the month the 5 ideas with the most votes will be presented on stage where the 5 judges decide who wins $5,000. The next event takes place at the GRAM on November 29th at 5:30pm. Tickets are $5 at the door. RSVP on their facebook page here. These events and more are listed on the Startup West Michigan homepage. General 2011-11-02T18:32:24+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/a-chat-with-jason-pliml-founder-of-mock-draft-central/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/a-chat-with-jason-pliml-founder-of-mock-draft-central/#When:18:34:24Z by Laura Pecherski Rounding out the 2011 Momentum Speaker Dinner series was Jason Pliml, founder and former owner of Mock Draft Central. Jason has seen it all – turning his passion (fantasy sports) into an idea, raising money, selling his product and eventually his company. While he could have told us about any of those events, he didn’t. Instead, he talked about processes and finances. I know…boring, right? Wrong. Managing finances and creating processes around startup chaos is the dirty work. It’s not sexy – but necessary to growth and success. Here are a few pointers from Jason: Finances, Finances, Finances Constantly keep track of your finances. In fact, as a founder you should be keeping track of your money – not someone else in your organization. Hire an accountant/bookkeeper but always be the one in charge of your expenses. This way, you can see what’s going in and out. Frequently compare your budget numbers and your actuals. Employees If you get someone that doesn’t fit in your organization, it’s a disaster. As a founder, you’re better off finding someone who adores your business than someone who has experience. Realize that good enough is never good enough – you can’t be afraid to let go of someone who isn’t working out. Also, never interview by yourself – if you tag team the interviews, the other person may catch something you didn’t. Get Creative to Get Cash As you’re waiting for more investment money or for breakeven, you might have to get a little creative to get some extra cash. Consider licensing your software, having others sponsor parts of your site (if it makes sense) or offering pre-payment discounts. Don’t assume that there is only one way for your company to make money. Reaching Breakeven Focus on sales – no matter what. Your entire job at your company is to sell your product and you need to do that. Aside from sales, public relations is another affordable way to get the word out. Jason’s company used message boards and partnerships with bloggers to spread the word about his company. Find out where your potential fans are and talk to them there. I really enjoyed hearing about Jason’s experience of being in the thick of a web startup. It was interesting, applicable and a great way to round out the speaker dinner series. Thanks, Jason! Who is coming to Demo Day? If you haven’t yet, you should register” here(http://momentumdemoday.eventbrite.com/)”:http://momentumdemoday.eventbrite.com/. See you there! General 2011-07-26T18:34:24+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/fundraising-and-finding-a-product-market-fit-sage-advice-from-brad-mac/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/fundraising-and-finding-a-product-market-fit-sage-advice-from-brad-mac/#When:15:32:16Z By Laura Pecherski Can anyone believe that Demo Day approaching? I know – me either. The event is on July 28th at GVSU’s Loosemore Auditorium and from what I hear, the guest list will include local entrepreneurs, investors and of course, the Momentum teams. I just registered last week so if you haven’t done that yet, you should. Last Wednesday, Momentum had Brad MacLean, CEO of Creative Byline (founded in 2008) in to share his experiences in fundraising, finding product-market fit and lessons learned over the years. Creative Byline is a site that connects book publishers with writers. This Grand Angels-backed company is Brad’s seventh venture that started like most great ideas – from experience. Brad’s wife wrote a children’s book and went through the process of finding a publisher for her book. Brad saw an opportunity for a better and easier way to do this. Brad has learned a lot along the way. Here are a few tips: Be careful with hiring service providers Interview service providers like you would for a job at your company. If you’re talking with an attorney ask them specific questions. Have they ever structured a seed round deal? The structure of your first deal paves the way for how future deals are put together – make sure you are working with someone who knows their stuff. Start-up funding is a big network – ask for introductions Is your company not a good fit for an investor you met with? Try asking if they know other investors who work in your space. You’d be surprised at how connected the startup funding industry is. At the end of the day – it’s all about growing your business Raising money takes a lot of time. A lot. But Brad cautions to remember why you are raising it. Keep your focus on your businesses and pushing it forward – throwing all of your resources at reaching your first goal. Don’t stop everything to raise money. After growing his company to a point, he realized that his product resonated with one customer segment but not as well with another. Brad shared his plans for ‘Creative Byline 2.0 that would address the changes he and his team saw and heard from his customers. I hope Brad keeps the startup community updated on this pivot and what he learns from it. General 2011-07-11T15:32:16+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/startups-always-changing-but-so-much-stays-the-same/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/startups-always-changing-but-so-much-stays-the-same/#When:12:47:14Z by Laura Pecherski Wednesday night, Momentum teams and guests were audience to an interview between Rick DeVos, ArtPrize founder and his grandfather, Rich DeVos. You probably know Rich as co-founder of Amway, a company with massive global success. You probably also know him as the owner of the Orlando Magic or for his family’s generous contributions throughout West Michigan. What you may not know is that Rich and his friend Jay Van Andel (Amway’s other co-founder) had many ventures before Amway. Throughout the course of his interview at Wednesday night’s speaker dinner, we heard about startups around health food, toys, broadcasting and even ping pong tables. Clearly, they were born to innovate. Rich shared stories from each venture and what he & Jay learned in the process. This was a huge contribution to Momentum. Why? Because founders never hear this part of the story in the startup world – the part that involves struggle or even (gasp) failure. It reminds me of Eric Ries’ description of tech companies in the movies (like The Social Network): Act One is a brilliant idea on a napkin and some coding, Act Two is a photo montage of activity (usually not more than 5 minutes of actual work) and Act Three shows the now massively successful company worth billions fighting over who owns what. Notice how all the hard work, daily questioning and emotional roller coaster is omitted. Rich shared Act 2 of his startups with us. Here are a just a few lessons Rich learned over the years. You’ll notice they translate to many startups today: You can’t give flying lessons in bad weather Rich & Jay were giving flying lessons for a while after the Air Force and quickly learned a couple of things. One of which was that their entire business was dependent upon the weather – something you can’t control. When your product or company is dependent on an uncontrollable variable, your success or failure is dependent upon chance and luck. This lesson is important for businesses reliant upon another company. Is your company 100% dependent on Twitter, Facebook or another platform to succeed? You might want to have a backup plan. Another related lesson in the flying business was… Don’t have one customer …especially when it’s the government. A business based on serving one customer is doomed for failure. The flying business proved to be based on too many contingent factors – the whim of their customer (the government) and the weather. Having one big company as a customer is partially comforting and partially terrifying. Diversify your client base. Build a business by getting business. Amway’s model is entirely built on sales. In the early days, they would buy a Nutri-Lite kit for $50 and would get out and sell it. Rich explained that selling was so critical to building a business that if you can’t sell, you shouldn’t be in business. I think this is a good reminder for the web entrepreneur. It gets really easy to focus on building your product with your team but unless you get out and find people to buy it, you will be unemployed. If you aren’t sales-minded and you work with a startup, find someone to join you who is. In the context of Customer Development, the lean startup methodology adopts the same ‘get out of the office’ mentality. Go out and talk with your customers, learn what your they want – provide it in a way that works for them and find more customers to sell it to. The world of business changes quickly. There are always new terms, concepts and methodologies to absorb and put into action. However, Rich’s talk was a great reminder that the fundamentals of business don’t change over time. General 2011-06-28T12:47:14+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/converati-Getting-Going/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/converati-Getting-Going/#When:18:21:39Z By cofounder, Seth Samuels Propping up a startup is no easy task. All too often it seems folks talk about going from idea to IPO, skipping over the trials and tribulations that make up a majority of the journey. Well I’m experience them first hand has I progress Converati – my love for the last year and a half that started as research and matured into a product that kept me up at night. Since being accepted into the Momentum seed accelerator program, I’ve learned and experienced so much on multiple fronts, from networking to biz dev to pitching+selling to team management to trust, and even the constant need for balance (probably the toughest to achieve of them all!). There have undoubtedly been a fair share of times where things seem just too difficult and too much adds up into what becomes a frustrating mass of insurmountable challenge, and yet one just keeps going, working (smarter) towards that light, that vision, that belief. Now that we’re half way through the Momentum program, I’m excited to see how things play out from here, and most importantly how Converati continues to take shape. Few things are more rewarding than hearing someone get excited about a product that call by its actual name, a name I came up with, likely in the shower or on the back of a napkin. This is quite an experience, and now my sights are set on delivering something for all of these people. So while folks on a stage often glaze over these very realities of starting a business, I have that much more respect for those folks, as I know they’ve experienced what I have, and yet they made it to the stage to talk about it. Here’s to working towards that! Momentum Startups 2011-06-25T18:21:39+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/chext-blog/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/chext-blog/#When:18:14:02Z By cofounder, Jeff Bell The Chext is really proud and excited to be a part of the Momentum 2011 class of companies. Chext is a financial awareness platform for the text generation. With the popularity of debit cards and online banking, most of us have stopped tracking our spending and opted instead to just log in to our bank and check our balance. The problem is that since we aren’t proactively tracking our spending, we lose track of over $2300.00 a year from our accounts! With our busy lifestyles, checkbook registers just don’t cut it, are inconvenient, and they don’t give us the awareness that’s necessary today. With Ryan being a new father, we’re still trying to get into the swing of a new schedule. That being said, we did make quite a bit of head way this week. The first thing that’s exciting is that Josh Beebe of SEI Studios put together a rough cut of our intro video. Check it out here. It needs some work but we are VERY please with the quality and direction of this! We implemented daily reminders for those users who have a hard time remembering to Chext things in. We also have future low balance alerts that tell you when you’re going to be in trouble before you get there. And the last thing on the development end of things is that we’re very close on implementing recurring transactions – allowing quicker entry of those items. Next week we’ll be meeting with Founders Bank & Trust, Bank of Holland, and Mercantile Bank. We’re really excited to learn from these institutions and how Chext might be a great tool in their standard arsenal of products. Momentum Startups 2011-06-25T18:14:02+00:00 http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/momentum-aimwest-meetup-recap/ http://momentum-mi.com/blog/entry/momentum-aimwest-meetup-recap/#When:14:36:01Z By Laura Percherski One constant in Momentum over the past three years is the AimWest Pitch Night where each of the teams give their first pitch to a large audience since the program’s kickoff. This night serves as a near halfway point before Demo Day to show what they have learned about their business and perhaps more importantly, their customers. AimWest hosted these presentations at WMU’s downtown location last Wednesday. I wanted to give those who couldn’t attend a summary of each team’s presentation. If you haven’t had a chance to talk with the Momentum teams yet, you should check out their video introductions from Startup Stories. First Up was AJ Paschka from Weather Collage AJ wants us to reconnect with the weather. Weather Collage is a web application that will share not what the weather is but what the weather means. So, based on the weather, this app can tell you when you can anticipate a migraine, what hair products you should use or even what beer would suit your mood. In his conversations over the last several weeks, AJ is learning that many types of businesses would be interested in learning what the weather means to their customers. Next – Mel Bugai from Booker Booker asks this questions – Why can you do most things online, but when it comes to booking an appointment, you have to pick up the phone? Booker is an easy way for any appointment based business to put appointment booking online. Currently, their competitors don’t make it easy to move your calendar between jobs. For example, if you are a freelance ski instructor and you leave to work at another resort, you lose your booking ability. Booker allows you to keep that software with you. If your company is appointment based, you should contact Mel for information on beta testing. Then we had Seth Samuels from Converati Group conversations on the web are limited to email and social networks like Twitter. Those platforms aren’t ideal to have passionate group discussion. Converati enables group conversation around a specific topic on demand. Currently, this would be done through a plugin, bookmark, website and/or mobile application, based on where people want to use it. While they don’t have a working prototype yet, you can sign up on their website for updates. Finally, we heard from Jeff Bell from Chext So, Ryan Montgomery is typically the partner who pitches Chext, he and his wife just had their first baby! (Congratulations guys!) Jeff did a great job taking charge in Ryan’s absence. Chext addresses money management in a more immediate way than balancing your paper checkbook. By chexting (texting) your expenses as they occur, you have immediate balance updates sent back to your phone and to your partner’s phone. In addition, it generates monthly expense and income projections, so you can plan in the future. Chext has been interviewing marriage counselors who would love to offer this service to couples as a way of facilitating conversations around finances. I’ve heard each of the teams pitch before and there have been quite a few business model/product changes since even last week. Also, the audience was a great sounding board asking questions that the teams are busy trying to answer over the coming weeks. General 2011-06-20T14:36:01+00:00